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ISSUE #45: Josh Luft, Sean Lotman, Day Joy

2012-02-20T08:53:00.003-05:00

Photograph by Sean Lotman

POTIONS
by Josh Luft

It was one of those summer days that desired amusement. One of those days when the sun sweeps the clouds from its view, takes a seat in the center of the sky, and watches the neighborhood matinee.

One of the neighborhood kids burst from the garage, his shock of red hair a lit wick. He rushed through the backyard to the small park on the west end of the block, hugging to his chest a large plastic bucket, its metal handle drumming the side in a rhythm that couldn’t quite keep up with the beat of his feet.

“Got it!” The boy held the bucket up above his head, grinning.

Issue #45 soundtrack: Day Joy "New Ordinary"

“Shut up,” said the oldest one, the leader.

The rest of the kids stood around the park’s middle bench. Like the other two, the bench was metal and had been painted numerous times over the years. In the chips and cracks from nicknames and cryptic messages scratched into the paint, you could see the layers of vibrant primary colors beneath the latest coat of brown, like flowers buried in a mudslide.

The boy reached the bench and dropped the bucket. It struck the seat with a resounding KHLUNG.

“Shut up!”

“What?”

The leader turned his head from side to side, scanning the area. “He could hear that.”

The neighborhood was tucked away from the main roads and naturally quiet. The others scanned along with the leader. With the trees sparse in the park, any sound, like their voices, carried through the yards.

“We’re clear.” Luckily, nothing had been carried to who they were looking for.

They huddled around the bucket on the bench. It was a dingy white with dried mud splatter ringing the bottom. A crack extended an inch past the lip, closing in on one of the handle sockets. The handle was rusted, flaking.

The second-in-command looked inside the bucket and asked, “Where’s the ingredients?”

“Down here,” said one of the young ones, bending down to remove clusters of green berries and crabapples, a pile of blue-veined leaves, and sugar packets from below the bench.

“Sugar? It ain’t s’posed to be sweet.”

“How else’ll we get ’em to drink it?”

“Yeah. ’Member that time he asked for a pop when we were havin’ some outside my house?"

“Oh yeah.”

“Go get the rest.”

The bucket boy made another trip to the garage, this time returning with a jug of water and a lemonade-yellow sandbox shovel. He took a pull from the jug.

“That’s for The Potion, turd.”

“I’m thirsty.”

Some of the kids stood as lookouts while others dumped the ingredients into the bucket. When all the ingredients were in, the leader picked up the shovel and stirred up the sludge, “The Potion.”

The Potion was being brewed for a boy named Leonard, the neighborhood villain. Leonard had become the villain for reasons typical to kids that age: 1.) he lived nearby, but just outside of the zone where they all lived; 2.) he came off a little slow; 3.) he may have pooped in his pants while walking past one of the kids’ houses one afternoon two years ago; 4.) he had a huge head. Though the pooped-in-his-pants story always brought tons of laughter and disgust with each retelling, it was really the huge head, a cinder block of a noggin, square as that of Frankenstein’s Monster, which made Leonard infamous. Even some of the kids’ parents knew of it, and, like their kids, referred to Leonard as “The Head.”

The kids sat around a faded-teal picnic table next to the garage. Bikes littered a patch of driveway beside them. They pretended to trade baseball cards, but, really, they were watching the park’s middle bench. On the bench was a Styrofoam cup filled with The Potion, waiting to work its magic on The Head. How exactly that magic would work was left unsaid, more fun as a mystery soon to be revealed.

“Where is he? I’m sicka sittin’ here.” They’d been perched at the table for awhile.

“No shit.”

“Let’s play baseball or somethin’.”

“We can’t ’cause we’ll be in the park and then he won’t come by.”

“Why don’t we just drop it off at his house?”

“Yeah!”

“What if his parents are home?”

“Oh.”

“Then they’ll drink it!”

“Yeah!”

“Or they’ll smash us with their fat heads!”

The kids leapt from the table and reenacted a battle between themselves and Leonard’s parents, who they gave gigantic heads. It was pure slapstick. The littlest ones were the parents, holding their arms out as far as they could, hands level with their ears, pretending to carry the massive domes, waddling in the grass beneath the weight. A couple of the others made like they’d been caught, falling to the ground, the little ones dipping their heads down ever so slightly to crush the captives. The leader and second-in-command could barely breathe from laughing so hard.

After the battle, they got antsy, wandering from the table in and around the garage, tossing out suggestions.

“What if we Ding Dong Ditch ’em?”

“It’s daytime.”

One came out of the garage dribbling a basketball. “I wanna play some b-ball.”

“Hmm,” said the leader.

“We can watch while we play.”

“Yeah, alright.”

“Captain!”

“Captain!”

“Cap—Crap!”

“Craptain! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

* * * * *
The kids were in the house now, the wind rolling the basketball back and forth in a groove at the edge of the driveway. I’d waited fifteen minutes before going out. I knew I wouldn’t have long.

I let out a quick cackle as I made my way from the park back to my house. The monitor slipped out of my back pocket in the front lawn, but I had to keep moving. I couldn’t let them come out and see me clutching The Potion.

The neighborhood kids were always up to something during the summer. Today it was The Potion. Last week, it was the Fourth of July early: musty stuffed animals slashed open, filled with packs of firecrackers, and then executed; bottle rockets on flights through storm drains, their explosions causing a subterranean rumble; dynamite-sized smoke bombs going off for five minutes, layering the streets with an acrid fog. The week after school ended, it was this gum that made their spit as thick and red as blood, leading to bouts of faux boxing.

I worked nights so I’d see it all—the freedom that kids know, the liberty of June, July, and August days where a good jump on the BMX trail was everything. My baby daughter, Mia, would see much of it with me. I’d hold her up by the screen window and let her check out that freedom through her curious hazel eyes. I’d whisper in her ear, “You’ll know.” It made her feet twitch.

I had a couple of hours before my wife came home and I went off to work. I had taken a job at a call center for an athletic apparel company, working from four to midnight. It was something my wife and I had worked out before Mia was born. We didn’t live near our parents, and couldn’t afford a sitter, so we decided to split our schedules and share coverage. I didn’t mind the hours—I was always up late anyway—but I dreaded the work, which was repetitive, tedious.

I was trying to get some work done around the house while my daughter slept, but couldn’t stay focused. I kept looking out the living room window at The Potion, wondering if poor Leonard was going to show up. The whole scheme reminded me of something my friends and I had done twenty years ago.

My three best friends and I were on an entrepreneurial kick one summer. We had reached that age where we wanted things—skateboards, CDs, burgers—and realized we could make our own cash to get them. We started up a lemonade stand. We were all ten or eleven, and mischievous little bastards, so naturally we had to put a twist on it. I’d had a birthday a week before. At my party, a bunch of my family loved drinking the Jack Daniel’s Lynchburg Lemonade. I asked if I could have some—it was only right for the birthday boy to have something so loved. But I was shut down, of course, because there was booze in it. While we were planning the stand, I was thinking about this. I figured kids like us wouldn’t have money for lemonade, so we should be selling to adults. And not some ordinary lemonade, but an adult lemonade—our very own Lynchburg Lemonade. We set up the stand outside of my friend Paul’s house—his parents were at work and wouldn’t notice any missing liquor. The stand wasn’t the goldmine we’d hoped for—the street turned out to be way too quiet for business. However, we did have one customer: one of Paul’s neighbors, who, after finishing mowing his lawn, bought fifteen bucks worth of lemonade. “Nice work, fellas,” he said. We took our earnings and bought an N.W.A. album, which we’d all been warned against by our parents, and listened to in secret for the rest of the summer.

After their fourth or fifth game of basketball, I could tell the kids weren’t paying attention to The Potion. When they went inside the house, it was proven. I saw the cup sitting there and thought about Paul’s neighbor. I understood something then. There existed an unspoken rule that perpetuated adolescent hi jinx. That’s really what Paul’s neighbor was doing that day when he saw us standing haplessly around our dinky stand. He wasn’t just a 30 year-old man mowing a crisscross, baseball-outfield pattern into his lawn, but a former prankster, as well. He understood then that it was his duty to intervene in a case of the current generation stalling out. Now I was in his role. It was my turn to help these kids. I turned a baby monitor on in Mia’s crib, put the other in my back pocket, and went outside.

I came in through the backdoor of my house, set The Potion on the kitchen counter, and got back to the living room window. Mia was still napping, the musical mobile spinning its sleepy melody softly above her chubby little face.

The kids motored out of the house, their courses curling and looping around one another like Matchbox cars on a neon-orange track. They came to a stop by the garage and peeked over at the park bench.

“Lookit, you guys. The Potion’s gone.”

“No way.”

“Holy shit, Leonard drank it!”

“Chill out, dork, we don’t—”

“I ain’t a dork, you big—”

“Everybody shut up. We gotta go check it out.”

I clapped my hands as the pack cautiously descended upon the park. Mia awoke roaring.

“Oh no. I’m sorry, honey.”

I picked her up and brought her over to the window. “Look what Daddy did.”

The boys arrived at the bench, looking all around, expecting to see The Head swigging from the cup, its muddy contents dripping slowly as sap down his throat, the magic beginning to take effect.

“Daddy’s got The Potion,” I said to Mia.

I was pleased with my handiwork. Mia was looking out at the park, wide-eyed, the tears drying on her cheeks. I took that as a sign of approval.

The story they’d all be able to tell! The Day The Head Drank The Potion. It was going to make their day, make their summer. And it wouldn’t stop there. Once they went back to school, they’d gather up all of their other friends around the monkey bars and tell it there. Next summer, they’d retell it to one another, reenacting the making of The Potion, The Head’s sneaky, Gollum-like capture of the cup, and, of course, his fateful gulp. Then, older, like me, they’d look out at the neighborhood kids, or their own, and remember the tale all over again.

The kids were in a powwow, breaking away from time to time to look at something across the park. I had to put Mia down so I could get in the corner of the room, peek out the edge of the window, and see what they were looking at. It was Don, the next door neighbor. Don was a retired pilot with an impeccable crew cut and a permanent sock tan—despite never seeming to wear any shoes or socks. He was watering the rose bushes on the side of his house. The kids deliberated for thirty seconds more before walking over to Don.

“What the hell are they up to, honey?”

Don turned off the hose and greeted them warmly. One of them spoke to Don. I had my ear pressed to the screen, but, for once, when they were trying to speak quietly, they actually spoke quietly. Don shook his head in response. The kids were about to leave when Don said what sounded like my name, before he lifted his arm, and pointed a bronze finger right at my living room window.

“Shit.”

I backed away from the window, hoping the reflection of blue skies and shadow from the white birch tree on the glass would cover me. I let a few seconds pass before I dropped to the floor and crawled over to the bottom-right corner of the window. The kids were marching across the street to my house.

“Shit.”

I rolled away from the window into the corner of Mia’s crib. She looked at me through the bars, smiling.

Did Don just give me up? I thought. What about the Perpetuation of Hi Jinx? With the stories he and his wife shared, there was no way he was an angel at that age.

The doorbell rang.

What in the hell am I going to do? They cannot know I took The Potion. I remember what happened to the adults that messed with my friends and me when we were kids: we made their lives a living hell. We’d shoot bottle rockets at their windows, toilet paper their trees, and egg their houses. We were sly about it, so they could never pin it on us, but they knew. They knew they were our villain. That’s what I was going to be to these kids: the new villain. The Head would be forgotten, all of their schemes directed at me, my wife, my daughter.

My daughter!

I picked up Mia to answer the door. Even mischievous kids can’t help but trust a man with a baby. Don’s a sweet guy who gives away root beer, but I am a man with a baby.

I opened the front door, looking innocent as could be with Mia.

“What’s up, guys?”

They stood on the steps like a miniature version of Young Guns. I looked them over, wondering which one was going to be the one to speak. That was always my job. I was the youngest and smallest, and, therefore, innocent and trustworthy. I got my friends and me out of a lot of jams with my sweet little mug. It worked until I was about thirteen. Then I looked too keen and crafty, had to switch from looks to wits. Because of that, I figured it wouldn’t be the oldest, the leader.

“Hi,” said the leader.

Have the leader speak, go against expectations, show you’re not up to anything. Well played, I thought.

“Can we ask you a question?”

“Uh… Yeah, sure.”

“We had a, um, cup out in the park?”

We’re gonna go this route, are we? Draw it out? I felt my face becoming flush. I was trying to provide them with a lifelong memory. Now I was about to become an idiot, a villain.

“Okay.”

“It’s, um, gone now and Don said that he thought he saw you outside a little while ago?”

The passive-aggressive little bastards! How about a stare-down?

“So we were wondering if maybe you saw somebody take it?”

Ha!

“Yeah,” a little one chimed in, “maybe by a kid with a really big head?”

“A kid with a big head?” I asked, doing my damnedest to hold back my triumphant grin.

“Yeah.”

“Why would a kid with a big head take your cup?”

I could see they wanted to answer my question. That they were thinking of a response, but that nothing they could come up with would be appropriate in front of an adult and a baby.

“Okay, thanks.”

“Sure, guys.”

They headed back across the street towards the park. I stood in the doorway for a moment listening.

“It was The Head, guys,” one of them said. “The Head!”

The tale had begun.

“We did it, honey!” I was back inside doing a celebratory dance with my daughter. I was feeling so confident that I thought about continuing the hi jinx. I had an idea to recruit Leonard, have him painted up like a zombie, and then send him groaning into the park.

“Ha!”

Mia looked up at me and let out a little whimper.

“Uh-oh. I know that sound. Let’s get you something to eat.”

I put her in the crib and went into the kitchen. The Potion was hardening inside of the Styrofoam cup. The zombie idea was crazy, of course. But that was fine. There was something better, simpler: wait until they went back inside and then put the empty cup back on the bench. It was genius, I thought, as I put banana, blueberries, and milk into the blender for Mia’s snack.

My wife came home from work, waving something at me.

“Why was this baby monitor sitting in the front yard?”

I’d been working so hard around the house the rest of the afternoon that I’d actually forgotten about The Potion. I quickly went to the kitchen and threw the cup in the trash.

“Uh… Oh,” I said, returning to the living room, “Mia was using it to yell at the neighbors.”

“Why didn’t she yell at those kids to get out of the street? I almost hit one of them with the car.”

I looked at Mia wiggling on the carpet and smiled. The Potion was gone but we had something else: the baby monitor. We could get into some hi jinx with that tomorrow.

Josh Luft was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. He's the author of the blog What a Fool Believes and has contributed work to The Awl, Black Table, and Dark Sky Magazine.

Sean Lotman has been featured in WOOF!, Fogged Clarity, Grey Sparrow, Ragazine and elsewhere. He recently collaborated with his girlfriend (aarriikkoo.com) and a Taiwanese publisher on a photo book called 'Wanderlust.' Visit Sean's online portfolio at seanlotman.com.

Day Joy is Orlando-based Michael Serrin and Peter Michael Perceval (also of thedropp.com). Though the duo's songs have developed into lush and layered recordings, they all started with just the two band mates on a porch writing together. Day Joy plans to release a full album later in 2012. In the meantime, stream or download their 7" release at dayjoy.bandcamp.com.

ISSUE #44: Scott Daughtridge, Patricia Miller, Pearl and the Beard

2012-02-06T09:30:00.001-05:00

Photograph by Patricia Miller

RACHEL AND RUPHUS
by Scott Daughtridge

Rachel let herself into the apartment and removed her hat and gloves, hung up her coat and placed her bag and boots on the floor. She walked passed the stair case, through the living room and kitchen, down the hall toward the laundry room, where she assumed Ruphus would be sleeping. The gray hair around his face made him look like an old war veteran. Rachel stepped lightly up to him and whistled quietly. His head jerked up and he rolled over on his side to expose his stomach. After some deep rubs from Rachel, Ruphus wagged his tail and stood up on his shaky knees. His toe nails click-clacked on the hardwood floor of the hallway as he walked into the kitchen.

Issue #44 soundtrack: Pearl and the Beard "Prodigal Daughter"

Mrs. Wright had sent Rachel an email which detailed her responsibilities. On the top of the list was the schedule and procedure for giving Ruphus his various pills: Pill one should be wrapped in a slice of American cheese and fed to him at 9:30 in the morning; pill two should be dipped in peanut butter and fed to him at 2:30 in the afternoon; pill three was to be mixed into one of the refrigerated, homemade dog dinners and fed to him at 8:30 at night. This routine would have to be followed until the Wrights returned from their ski trip the following week.

At 2:30, Rachel got the medication from the cabinet above the stove and slathered one of the pills in the creamy peanut butter. She teased him with the treat, bringing it close to his nose, then lifting it high, then back down to his mouth and pulling it away. He followed her hand with great focus. After arousing his appetite she let him lick the sticky treat off of her palm. He swallowed and looked up to her for another one, then smelled the ground around him, seeking any bits that might have dropped, but there were none, so, with a thud, he laid down.

After a month of being in New York Rachel’s savings had run out. Since then she had helped people move, temped for a chemical supply company, walked dogs and house sat. House sitting was her favorite because she was paid to live other people’s lives for a short time in apartments and houses that were nicer than anything she ever hoped to live in. She especially liked working for the Wrights. They overpaid her and their brownstone in Park Slope had been featured in various Brooklyn real estate blogs and magazines. One of those places people walk by and wonder who owns it and guess what they do to afford such a nice house. The quasi-celebrity status of the building gave Rachel a lukewarm feeling of importance, like she was part of the house sitting elite, if that was actually something to be proud of.

She walked into the living room and fell into the large leather couch. She had fallen into a routine of staying awake until six in the morning, reading, writing, painting, watching movies, anything but sleeping, knowing that she could rest during the day. It was the time that she normally took a nap, so she brought her legs up and stretched out. A weight left her body as she sunk into the couch and closed her eyes.

Right when she fell asleep a gagging sound penetrated the silence in the apartment. She sat up with a jolt. In the kitchen she saw Ruphus licking a puddle of yellow vomit, in the middle of which lay the brown, jellybean-sized pill. She got close to Ruphus, but was repelled by the vitriolic smell of stomach acid.

“Stop licking that!” she yelled, but he only responded by slightly wagging his tail. She yanked him away by his collar and grabbed a roll of paper towels from the counter. After it was cleaned up Rachel could smell the sting on her hands. She washed them until she could only smell lilac soap.

It reminded her of the time in college she worked at a retirement home, where there was always someone’s body fluid mess to clean up. During her third week she had to clean up Mrs. Gronke’s bloody diarrhea. It was a task she could not bring herself to do again, so she never returned. Now, however, if she wanted to continue to get work and get good references she could not leave when things got difficult. The Wrights, with their well-to-do friends, were good references. After stringing together odd jobs for two months she knew she needed consistent pay, so she could chip away at the oppressive mountain of student loan debt that would loom on her horizon for a long time.

Instead of using peanut butter again, she folded the pill in a piece of cheese. Ruphus, showing no interest, stared at her blankly from the floor.

“Eat it!” she snarled, as if he could understand her. She grabbed his snout and pried opened his mouth. He tried to fight against it, but was too weak. His warm saliva covered Rachel’s fingers as she pushed the pill onto his tongue. Mrs. Wright had told her to do this if he refused to take the medication, though it felt like a violation of her unripe relationship with the dog.

Rachel returned to the couch, light headed, in need of sleep.

More than three hours passed and the earth spun just as it always had. Rachel, having just woken up, came to the window and watched the snow fall, covering the footprints below. The waxed hardwood floor reflected the gray afternoon light.

She called out to Ruphus, expecting to hear his tags jingle as he lifted his head. There was no sound. She called a second time. Again, no movement. The room was as silent and calm as the fallen snow.

“Ruphus,” she said in a tone that would get her in trouble in a library, and walked into the kitchen, where saw him lying on the floor.

Slowly, she reached down to pet him. His fur was soft like human hair between her fingers. He did not move. Holding her breath, she peered over to see his face. A lightning bolt of terror flashed in her veins. With a gasp she stood all the way to her toes. Her vision blurred and her knees weakened, she reached for the counter to help her stay balanced. The dead dog’s face was all she could see.

She retreated to the hallway and waited for the shock to subside. With her hands still shaking, she returned and felt for his heartbeat to confirm that he was really dead. He was.

On the other side of the door, she thought, was the sidewalk. In no time she could be on it, going the opposite direction, not having to worry about the Wright’s, their apartment or Ruphus.

A heavy feeling of sickness weighed down in her gut.

She picked up her phone and called Mrs. Wright. After five rings, to Rachel’s relief, the voicemail picked up. “Hi Mrs. Wright this is Rachel. Please call me as soon as you can.”

She wondered how the Wrights would react when they found out. Would they blame her? Would they refuse to pay her? Would they tell people that she had killed their pet?

“Fuck!”

She wanted to kick Ruphus -- kick him hard -- but she didn’t.

When she was growing up, her dad buried the family dog in the woods behind her house; the fur, skin and bones were absorbed into the earth. In the city, all concrete and witnesses, this was not an option. She realized that she would have to take the body somewhere to be taken care of. If she waited any longer, she feared, he would begin to smell, making it impossible to take him into public.

She picked up her smartphone and Googled "veterinarian dead pet Brooklyn." A list of veterinarian clinics came up. Rachel chose the third one and pressed on the hyperlinked phone number. The phone rang two times. “Man’s Best Veterinary Clinic,” the female receptionist answered in an even, dull tone.

“Hi. I’m house sitting for a family and their dog just died,” Rachel said. “I’m not sure what to do, and I need some help.”

“How did the dog die?” asked the woman.

“Uhh... I don’t know. He was asleep and now he’s dead. He was an old dog.”

“Okay, It sounds like natural causes. It wasn’t hit by a car or anything?”

“No,” said Rachel, taken aback by her question. “What should I do?”

“Well, you have a couple of options,” said the woman. “Depending on when your trash gets picked up you can put him in a marked bag on the curb for the garbage men to collect. How big is the dog?”

The image of Ruphus decomposing in a bag on the curb flashed in Rachel’s mind.

“He’s pretty big. I don’t want to do that. Anyway, the trash doesn’t get picked up until Friday.”

“The other option is bring him into our office to be cremated, but we don’t have a pick-up service, so you’ll have to bring him in.”

“Are there veterinarians that do have a pick-up service?” Rachel asked.

“Umm... ” The woman tried to think through her afternoon daze. “None that I can think of.”

“Is that a pretty common thing?”

“You mean cremation? Yes, it’s pretty common. There’s really nothing else to do when a pet dies in the city. Some people leave them to be collected with the garbage, but most people bring them in to be cremated.” The woman spoke with a ‘seen it all before’ casualness that made Rachel more comfortable.

Another image of a garbage bag filled with the lifeless dog, his mouth open and tongue hanging out, struck Rachel. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“Okay,” Rachel said with conviction, “I’ll bring him in to your office. How should I get him there?”

“However you normally travel,” said the woman with a hint of irritation.

“Oh...” Rachel said.

“You can take a cab if you don’t have a car.”

Rachel tried to quickly think of alternative options, but could only imagine the dog’s body spilling out onto the subway floor.

“What’s your name hon’?” asked the woman, feeling some pity for Rachel. “I’ll write you into the schedule.”

“Rachel West,” she replied, recognizing and disliking the patheticism in her own voice.

“Okay, Rachel. Do you know how to get here?”

“Yes, I have the directions right here,” she said assuredly, confident that she could get the directions on her phone.

“We’ll be open until seven tonight. Will you be able to make it here by then?”

The clock on the stove showed it was 6:15. “Yes, I’ll be there,” Rachel said.

“The cost is 200 dollars. Is that okay?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, we’ll see you soon.”

“Thanks for your help.”

She hung up and set her phone on the counter. Throughout the conversation she had been looking at Ruphus’s inert face, eyes and paws; he looked more dead then before.

She clicked on the Directions tab on the website and saw the directions for car, bus and subway, noticing the bold number forty-nine for the bus and a green circle for the G train. She decided it would be best to take a cab.

Rachel searched inside every closet and under every bed for something to carry Ruphus in. There were gym bags, handbags, backpacks and totes, but nothing useful. Behind the creaking door of the hallway closet, she found shelves of towels, blankets, sheets and, on the floor, two suitcases, one small and one large. She pulled out the large suitcase and laid it on the floor. After analyzing it for a minute she crawled in, knelt and slowly turned to lie down. With some squeezing and shifting she was able to fit into the suitcase. Everything except her head. There was only one way to know if the bag was big enough for the German Shepherd.

When she entered the kitchen she hoped that he would awaken. A miracle of sorts, a false alarm, but he was still lying there. She unzipped the bag and became paranoid that the Wright’s would walk through the door and find her folding their beloved pet into their Samsonite luggage.

Like a boxer, she circled him, picking the best way to approach. She wedged her right hand underneath his shoulder and wrapped her left arm around his back. Straddling his hind legs, she lifted the dog’s front half off the floor and shuffled two tiny steps to lift him into the silk lining of the suitcase. She moved around to the side and readjusted her grip on the limp body. His legs were still hanging out, but he had already filled the available space.

“Damn,” she said, kneeling on the white tile. She gently pushed his head down to his chest and folded his arms and legs as close to his body as possible so that he was, to Rachel’s surprise, snugly curled up inside the bag.

Mrs. Wright had once told her how they used to take Ruphus to a farm upstate and that he would instinctively herd the sheep that grazed in the fields. He would disappear into the woods and return covered in mud and smelling of manure. Rachel wondered if he would have preferred to live and die in the dirt on the farm instead of the orderly, sterile apartment.

She went to the closet and put her winter clothes back on. A shudder ran through her as she looked at Ruphus. She knelt down and zipped up the suitcase, returning it to its status of an innocuous piece of luggage. After a strained effort she stood it up on end. All of the weight sank to the floor. Rachel reached back with both hands, lunged forward and pulled her cargo behind her like a chariot horse. She put the keys in her pocket, turned the lights off, swung the door open and walked outside. The sound of the slamming door was dulled by the wind. The cold cut through her jeans and the hair sticking out from under her hat was blown into a frenzy. She went quickly to the street, expecting to see a cab.

Cabs drove around all day looking for passengers; surely one would drive passed her, she thought. Her insides tightened as she looked up and down Ninth Street and saw nothing but glowing street lights.

“Where are the cabs?” she wondered aloud. She headed north on Fourth Avenue, but then stopped and turned, thinking she heard a car engine. Still nothing. Not a car on the road.

Then, three blocks away, she heard squealing breaks and saw bright headlights come around the corner. The engine of the forty-nine bus roared as it headed straight toward her. Rachel remembered seeing the bus number on the vet’s directions page. About fifty feet away she saw the sign for the bus stop. She cautiously walked over ice and salt covered sidewalk and waited.

The driver pulled up and opened the door.

“Does this go to... ” she said, trying to remember the vet’s address. In a panic, she pulled off her glove and reached into her pocket for the piece of paper she had written the address on. “To... to...” the driver shifted in his seat and frowned, “Carroll Street!”

He nodded with a blank expression.

“Ah, thank God,” Rachel exclaimed. She grabbed the bag and, with much exertion, climbed to the top step. The driver closed the door and the bus leaped forward, making her stumble slightly. She quickly widened her stance to regain her balance, pulled out her wallet and dipped her transit card into the slot.

Rachel sat in the first seat to her left and pulled the suitcase close to her leg. The anonymity she had on the bus calmed her and she settled into the passengers’ quiet indifference.

Still unclear where Carroll Street was, Rachel leaned over and got the attention of the man sitting across from her.

“Excuse me,” she said with wide, anxious eyes.

The man looked up. In his eyes, which had seen too many battles lost, a distant strength glimmered. The interior bus lights reflected off his scalp through his thin white hair and emphasized the shadows under his recessed eyes and pasty, white cheeks.

“Do you know how many stops it is until Carroll Street?”

“Uh, yeah... ” the man looked out the front window of the bus. “Two stops.”

She looked out the front window also. “Thanks,” she replied with an obligatory smile.

“Are you going on a trip?” he asked, leaning forward, looking at the suitcase.

She sat looking at him silently, trying to think of a satisfactory response.

“No,” she finally said, “I’m just moving some things to another place.”

This answer appeased them both and they nodded pleasantly.

The bus pulled to the side of the street and a black woman with rounded features and braided hair, holding the hand of a little girl who resembled her in every way, boarded. They walked carefully down the aisle as the bus resumed its route.

Rachel imagined Ruphus turned, twisted and balled up in the bottom of the suitcase.

The man watched Rachel as she gazed at the floor and wondered what she was thinking about.

His attention then shifted to the piece of luggage. He wanted to ask her what she was carrying.

Rachel looked out the front window as they began to slow and pull to the curb, making all of the passengers sway in a synchronized motion. Before the bus stopped Rachel stood and tried to turn the suitcase around. She walked around it and pulled, but struggled to gain any headway.

It was not the man’s stop, but he stood abruptly to help her. He bent down and gave the bag a slight push to move it forward. Rachel turned and saw him assisting her and was instantly fearful. He gave her a reassuring smile.

“Oh, I’ve got it!” she said loudly.

“It’s okay, I can help.”

They came to the top stair and he took the leather handle from her hand.

“Oh, no. You really don’t have to help me,” Rachel said in a distressed tone.

“I’ve got it,” said the man, pulling the bag away from her, encouraging her to proceed down the steps. With both hands, he lifted the heavy suitcase.

Once the bag was on the ground the bus driver closed the door and pulled away. A speeding cab swerved around the bus and entered the other lane, honking its horn loudly.

“Wow,” said the man. “This bag is really heavy. What do you have in here?”

Rachel’s thoughts began to topple over one another, and again she stayed silent. A traffic jam of answers piled up as she tried to think of something heavy that she would be carrying. She looked at the streetlight above, hoping for an answer until she blurted, “stereo equipment.”

The man nodded his head, his grey-blue eyes widened.

Rachel became frustrated with the stranger’s questions and reached in her pocket for her phone so she could call the vet’s office. It was 6:55.

As she pulled her phone from her coat pocket, the man made a fast jerking motion. Before she could process the movement, his hand, balled up into a fist, was all she could see. A violent light flashed as his fist made contact just above her left eye brow. She became disoriented and stumbled backwards in the snow. He made another motion and hit her again, making her fall down in a daze, unable to get up.

He briskly walked down the street, pulling the suitcase behind him with his eyes narrowed and focused on the corner where he could disappear into the concrete oblivion. I will have to pray tonight, he thought to himself. I will have to be forgiven. Someone, something will have to forgive me.

Behind him, Rachel faded into the falling snow, which blurred the street like television static. Beside her lay her cellphone, ready to call the vet’s office, where the receptionist wrote a question mark in the margin next to Rachel’s name. The woman was ready to leave, so she turned off the lights, locked the doors and left the office for the cold New York street.

After a few minutes, Rachel sat up, still dazed, only slightly aware of what happened. Her vision was hazy and colored with spots. Her head spun as though she were waking up with an intense hangover. She realized the suitcase was gone. Dripping blood, she laid back and let the snow turn red around her. Her phone began to ring. Mrs. Wright glowed on the screen.

Scott Daughtridge is a Georgia native living in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently working on a short story collection to be released later this year. He can be reached at scottdaughtridge@gmail.com.

Patricia Miller was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. She first discovered her love for photography while in college, and hasn't stopped taking pictures since. View her online porfolio at photosbypati.carbonmade.com.

Pearl and the Beard is three voices, one cello, one guitar, one glockenspiel, one melodica, several drums, one accordion, ninety-six teeth, and one soul. The band's three members, Jocelyn Mackenzie, Emily Hope Price, and Jeremy Styles, met and live in New York City. "Prodigal Daughter" is the newest single from the band's 2011 release Killing the Darlings. For more, visit the band online at pearlandthebeard.com.

ISSUE #43: Corey Eastwood, David Phillips, Christopher Paul Stelling

2012-01-23T08:30:00.000-05:00

Painting by David Phillips

HAPPY FOR OUR CHANGE
by Corey Eastwood

We have an anti-fatigue mat to cure your weariness and make you happy for our change.

Kyle crumpled the wrapping paper and looked at the so-called mat then at Peter whose cheeks were still flushed from the cold. He could tell by the expectant smile on Peter’s face that there was a punch line in the Japanese characters printed on the flimsy piece of fabric that called itself an anti-fatigue mat, but looked, to Kyle, suspiciously like a hand towel. Peter was waiting for his cue to translate, but Kyle didn’t ask, because he didn’t care. He was still brooding over a negative review of the poems he’d recently published on a friend’s blog, in particular over a line which called his work affected and phony. The criticism had shaken him and he’d decided that the best way to combat it was with sincerity in both his life and writing. This prevented him from asking for a translation but not from thanking Peter and apologizing for not getting him anything.

Issue #43 soundtrack: Christopher Paul Stelling "Ghost Ship"

“Don’t worry about it.” Peter said, “Merry Christmas. It’s my pleasure.”

“Yes,” Kyle thought, as he took the anti-fatigue mat out of its packaging, “All yours.” In the three years that Peter had been away teaching English in Japan, he’d always returned bearing useless trinkets. One year it was a notebook that said, Our writing pad for your intelligent thoughts, another, a key chain that read, Do Good At Life; objects that were born loveless and died that way, but were momentarily bestowed with affection while Peter carried them across the world.

“This character means admiration!” Peter began without invitation, “And this one, ‘Respect!’ I love it!” he said, beaming. “125 million people live in that US-obsessed country, and these kinds of mistakes are a dime a dozen. Their best efforts always end up sounding childish and laughable.”

“It’s nice of you,” said Kyle, “I’ll use it as a handkerchief for my suit tonight.”

They were in Kyle’s apartment, drinking wine and listening to records while they got ready for their friend Helen’s holiday party. The party was themed and the e-flyer read: Holiday party 1941 Style. Brooklyn-specific period costume mandatory. Old-Tyme drinks (including coquito and mulled wine) and snacks will be served. Live swing band at 10:30 bookended by DJ Beste Freundin spinning nouveau-cabaret.

Kyle, who’d always had an affinity for the uncomplicated fashion of old, and who’d worked for years as a manager at a vintage clothing store, had a closet full of classic suits. He’d invited Peter over to catch up and get dressed before going to the party. For himself he chose a double-breasted suit with a matching felt fedora. For Peter he had a red zoot suit he’d taken home years ago but never had the heart to wear. When told about the zoot suit, Peter, who was part Italian-American and had grown up in Connecticut, agreed enthusiastically, saying he’d go for the Italian immigrant aesthetic.

“I’ll be my nonno,” he said in a bad Italian accent.

They tried on ties as Peter told stories about his time in Japan (which mostly centered around the love-making skills and fidelity of Japanese women) and speculated about the party; who would be there and what would be served.

“I don’t know about coquito,” Peter said. “I don’t think there were many Puerto Ricans here until after the war effort really got rolling. And the Jews, sure there were plenty in ‘41, but if Helen’s thinking Hasidim, she’s wrong. The Satmars didn’t arrive here until after the war and the Lubavitch have always been in Crown Heights. I am excited for some latkes though, and those jelly donuts they make—ah, you have to try them.

“Speaking of Latkes, did I mention that I’m in love?” Peter asked as he spooned a wad of pomade from the jar. With his slicked hair and pointy mustache, Peter looked like a pudgy Dali. Behind him Kyle stood fixing his tweed tie and looking at himself in the mirror. Again, he understood his role in the conversation, and again, more out of a desire to be true to himself then to slight his friend, he said nothing.

“Her name’s Ania,” Peter went on undeterred, “and she’s gorgeous. Big in the Warsaw art scene, and just visiting for a week. Have you ever been with a Polish woman? Really? Ah, you must.”

Kyle didn’t respond. He put his hat on and asked Peter if he was ready.

* * * * *
The season’s first snow had spent the day melting but was beginning to freeze again. Despite the cold, Peter insisted they walk in order to work up an appetite. They headed east on Broadway underneath the elevated tracks. Headlights glided off the slick pavement, murky water leaked from the platform above. As they walked, Peter commented on how much he loved the tracks.

“They make New York feel like Chicago,” he said. “Like old Chicago, or my image of it, at least. Or, I know it’s ridiculous, but even more than old Chicago, it feels like real New York.” The subway rumbled overhead allowing for a contemplative pause in conversation and Kyle agreed silently. He was pleased by the authenticity of his surroundings.

As they approached the bodega that sold fancy beer, a few kids—two black and one Hispanic, none any older than 14—stopped them and asked if they wanted to buy a USB cable.

“What is thisa forra?” Peter said examining the cable. “It is too much thicka for catching the fishes. No bene, no bene.” He laughed, handed them back the cable, then joined Kyle who’d hurried inside when he heard Peter talking in character.

After some debate in which Peter argued for an Italian import while Kyle suggested something darker, they remembered that neither of them was planning on drinking beer and, pleasantly unburdened, chose a German bock.

They’d turned off Broadway and had walked two blocks when Kyle was hit. The blow landed on his back and his first thought was that it was a fist attached to an arm attached to a man who wanted to hurt him. He spun around and was greeted by two snowballs—one whizzed by his head and the other exploded on his shoulder. He looked at Peter, who was doubled over holding his face, then the attackers: the kids with the USB cable plus more, maybe—the number, along with their ages, grew with each retelling. He grabbed Peter by the shoulder and they took off running, followed by the kids, who abandoned their pursuit when they reached the fallen 6-pack.

After three long blocks, Peter and Kyle stopped to get their bearings. There was a gooey substance on Kyle’s arm and thinking it blood he began to search for the wound. But Peter’s jacket, covered in white flecks of eggshell, explained the hardballs and the goo. Evidently they weren’t the only ones celebrating Halloween on Christmas.

Peter’s face was red from the snow and a small but bloody cut above his right eye. His zoot suit was wet and yolk melded with the gel in his mustache. Fighting back tears, Peter said he was going home to clean up, and before Kyle could respond, he dashed into the street and hailed a livery cab. To avoid looking each other in the eye, they hugged goodbye.

Kyle watched the cab drive away then cleaned himself off with the anti-fatique mat and continued walking to the party.

* * * * *
Waiting in the coquito line, Kyle thought about how easily children can make adults feel like children. He felt out of place there, amongst the unsoiled party goers in their suspenders, berets and trousseau dresses. With walls papered in lime-green paisley, restored tin ceilings and ornate lamps in place of overhead lighting, the apartment’s aesthetic was as old as the fashion. Normally Kyle liked Helen’s place, but tonight it horrified him. He wanted to go find the kids and a stoop where he could drink his German beer with them; or better yet, invite them here to show them how they’d misunderstood him. He was only dressed up for a costume party.

He got his drink then went looking for food. The DJ was finishing her opening set as the swing band set up their instruments. At the Hanukkah table a couple he didn’t know was in line in front of him adding Kosher goodies to their plates of treif and discussing the neighborhood back then.

“Can you imagine,” asked the guy whose pince nez were threatening to fall off, “how much tension there must have been with the Italians and Germans living side by side with the Hasids?” Kyle considered explaining that the Satmar hadn’t yet arrived, but said nothing. He wasn’t in the mood to defend history.

Along with dirtying his suit, the snowballs and eggs had broken Kyle’s confidence. Self-doubt, self-awareness and the criticism—that word, phony—ate at him. The slanderer had posted the comments anonymously, and Kyle suspected, given the small, insular readership of the blog, that he or she was in the room. Returning for a refill he wandered into a conversation with a skinny woman dressed as Rosie the Riveter. She talked about the movie she was making while Kyle failed to pretend to listen. It could have been Rosie, that guy with the candy cane-colored cane, the woman with the netted veil covering her eyes, his friend Jean, Roslow, Mark. Any of them.

The difference, Kyle thought, while sipping his coquito and completely ignoring Rosie, was motivation. It’s what separated him from them. They dressed like it was 1941 because irony was a distraction from their emptiness. Kyle dressed that way because he identified with a time when painters painted, filmmakers made films and writers wrote books. He had no use for tweet art, music made on ibooks and novels about Gchat and soy smoothies—he desired real art born from the struggle of living real lives. Yes, he published his poetry on a blog, wasted time on You Tube and checked Facebook more than he cared to admit, but unlike the rest of them, he didn’t like it that way. Unlike them, he thought proudly scanning the room, I am unhappy here.

Rosie eventually stopped talking and Kyle excused himself for a refill. He was tired and decided he’d have only one more before leaving. At the coquito bowl he bumped into Helen, whom he’d yet to speak to, and a blond friend she introduced as Ania.

They shook hands as Helen asked about Peter. Kyle had decided to explain the events as they happened without leaving out a single humiliating detail. But as he began talking the story told itself differently, and he realized that he didn’t want to stop it. Now it was an attempted mugging; a fight; a street battle from which Kyle had valiantly escaped unharmed. The story was as good a defense against phoniness as any he could imagine.

Near the end of his account Helen was called away to clean up a spill and he was left alone with Ania. She wasn’t nearly as pretty as Peter had described, but that wasn’t the point. She looked him in the eye and asked brokenly, “Do you feel that there is a comfort of an old time in this place?” Kyle smiled at her—removing himself from the last shackles of sincerity—and said, “Yes. Actually, I do.”

After a big swig of coquito he wiped his mouth with the anti-fatigue mat then asked Ania if she’d like to dance.

Corey Eastwood is a writer and Book Thug Nation bookseller from Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in a number of journals including Metazen, Dark Sky Magazine, Pear Noir and Shelf-Life Magazine.

David Phillips moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles in search of an audience for his abstract paintings, and now works from his studio in Venice. He is represented by the Downtown Art Center Gallery of Los Angeles, and has been featured on CBS, The LA Times, and Seventeen Magazine. Visit his online portfolio at wino-strut.com.

Christopher Paul Stelling is a NYC-based songwriter. His debut record Songs of Praise & Scorn is available for preorder and will be released on 2/21/12. Typically, he lives in an apartment above a liquor store with his girlfriend and their cat Stinky La La, but will be spending the majority of 2012 on tour. Visit him online at christopherpaulstelling.com.

ISSUE #42: Aneesa Davenport, Amy Sly, Unquiet Nights

2012-01-09T08:30:00.003-05:00

Photograph by Amy Sly

HAVE COURAGE
by Aneesa Davenport

You do not always have to be yourself. When you slosh down the sidewalk from the comic book shop to the café for the second time today, shredding your soles, wind-jostled, and momentum keeping you on—when the tips of your hair stick to the corners of your mouth and you think eight months now you’ve lived out here and you still can’t get a grip on the weather—don’t let go. The melancholy doesn’t have to settle in your lungs like a damp spot. Remember that you don’t duck away from pigeons anymore; you don’t avoid sagging El overpasses as if they were ladders. Marvel at the icy patches of snowcone snow, the salty gutters, the crisp brightness of the city. It’s Valentine’s Day.

Issue #42 soundtrack: Unquiet Nights "If I Could and You Ever Would"

Your lenses will fog up when you gracelessly swing open the door to the café, banging the handle against the wall, the wind making a fiasco out of the movement and shoving you inside. Your nose will run. Unwind your scarf.

You may not notice the server-girl with blue dreads smirk at the barista as he steps up to meet you at the register, wiping his large hands on a stained rag. This is for the best.

Be prepared for him to say, “Hey you,” and spread his lips disarmingly. Just smile tightly and swat your hair away from your face. “What can I get you?” he’ll ask.

Say, “Just a decaf. I can’t drink coffee past noon anymore.” Don’t let yourself think that even this small confession is too much. Don’t worry now that you don’t know anyone in the city, about finding someone else to talk to besides people who are paid to be friendly. Don’t dwell. The barista will act like he remembers you -- you spend half your days at the corner table, after all -- and this will make you feel as though you’ve made progress. You’re not allowed to be so reclusive anymore. But he won’t seem to remember your conversation early this morning, when you nonchalantly confided in him that you’ve stopped sleeping at night. You also don’t eat any longer.

* * * * *
Your mother has taken to calling at eight a.m. (along with the landlord and the temp agencies, but they don’t keep calling back when you don’t answer). It’s two hours earlier for her in San Francisco, but she’s consistently chipper and she always asks, “Have you eaten anything?”

To which you respond, “I just woke up,” even though you never went to bed.

“What are you going to have for breakfast?” she asks.

“I’m not hungry anymore. I have a headache.”

“At least have some coffee. Caffeine is the only thing for it.”

“I’ve given it up.”

“Do you have any yerba mate?”

Even as you re-explain that you can’t sleep, that caffeine is not a catch-all, mate’s not a miracle, she offers to stay on the phone with you while you make it. She succeeds in helping you feel a little less alone, less far away, and your nose starts to tingle with gratitude that she won’t give up. She puts you on speakerphone as she puts her own water on to boil.

But today didn’t follow the script. Early this morning she said, “Well, I’ve discovered why things are going so badly for you.”

“Why?”

“Saturn’s in Mercury. And it has been for two years.”

“It hasn’t been bad for two years.” You remember the beginning of this big adventure, this leaving home with someone you pretty much loved. Your ex had always felt the need to put distance between him and where he’d always lived, what he’d always known. You didn’t share the feeling, but who wouldn’t understand it? You didn’t take much convincing. You can even shut your eyes and re-experience the moment when he asked you to come with him, your shock at his sureness about you, how right it felt to believe in his belief.

Your mom said, “You know, you really shouldn’t have made any life-changing decisions before you were twenty-five.”

At this point a garbage truck outside your window started backing up. You got off the phone and headed down to the café.

* * * * *
“No prob,” the barista will say.

Tip big and slide your mug to the other end of the counter to watch him over the frames of your glasses while you fill in the Reader crossword with fake answers. For an eight-letter primate, put ROCKSTAR, noticing his rhinestoned belt buckle. Maybe he has a sense of humor. Have hope. With his ski-slope nose and bright pink polo, it’s hard to say if he’s gay or not—he seems to flirt with everybody, including the young homeless guys who shave in the restroom, the I Have A Foot Fetish man who leaves flyers everywhere, and the sexy tattooed waitresses. This lack of discretion would not normally appeal to you -- you have been known to overly cherish your discerning taste -- but now it makes you feel safe, like you could take a risk without taking a risk.

He will surely refill you with regular at no charge without being asked, leaning on one elbow so the cuff of his short sleeve stretches across his bicep near your breasts. This will make you alert in more than two ways.

“So you must live around here,” will be his line.

“Over on Beach and Ashland,” you’ll tell him. Then you’ll add: “Though as a Californian I don’t consider the lakeside a beach.” This will not be amusing. Just return his inquiry politely.

“Chicago Avenue, across the park.”

“Tough commute,” you’ll say dryly, watching yourself start to shrink back into sarcasm. Knock that off.

“Not as tough as yours.”

Now you must let yourself open: imagine your shirt is sheer, your pockets empty, your canvas primed. Be available. Why not? You lost your job downtown the day after your boyfriend left and you haven’t bothered to get a new one. A month already. He stuck you with the rent, but who are you kidding, you’d been supporting him anyway. Now you live off graduate student loans -- the paycheck of the career student -- but have quit going to class. You schedule your days around trips to the library, read art theory off the syllabi in the café. You try to save energy. The artists say: “We are who we pretend to be” (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.). You read earlier today: “Begin anywhere” (John Cage). Repeat this to yourself silently.

The barista has very white teeth.

You’ll have to admit, “Yeah, it’s rough.” This kind of sarcasm is okay. Laugh lightheartedly.

After another cup you can start to get up to go, because he’ll be sure to ask,

“Leaving already?”

If you have one more sip of this stuff you’ll never sleep. Say this to him. Have courage. Let your eyes well a little with sincerity. Or maybe that’s malnutrition. Say this too: You’ve been taking these expired sleeping pills (you don’t have health insurance) but tonight you’ll have to combine them with shots down at The Beachwood. This will do the trick:

“No fair. I don’t get off till eleven.”

Twist your lips cutely. “I could wait till then.”

* * * * *
At home, do not take the front steps past the neighbor’s door; do not check the mail. It will be Valentine’s cards addressed to the both of you, mostly from college friends far away. Your old dormmate sent one covered with coarse glitter that brimmed with her bubbly handwriting. She was on Ambien at the time and three-quarters through she writes, “I’m seeing double now so I guess I’ll go to bed,” but keeps on for another page. If you read this now, it would only remind you of being in school: how she’d skip down the hall to brush her teeth and come back moments later tripping on the legs of her pajamas, listing in door frames and slurring her words. This image, in turn, might make you laugh aloud, but the apartment’s bare so the sound would seep straight through the floor. You feel too private now -- sensitive like a newly shaved dog -- you don’t want the downstairs neighbor to hear when you’re home.

The note another friend mailed two days ago is pink and homemade, sending love and imploring you to stick together in this time of war, to get out and protest. It blends the saccharine with the revolutionary in a way you would look forward to telling your ex-boyfriend about, which is dangerous, but not in a way he would find attractive. Almost immediately after he left, you started making lists of things to talk to him about on the off-chance he called. Things he would find amusing: the Valentine’s cards, the I Have A Foot Fetish man, the form letter you finally received from the president in response to your own, which the two of you composed together back when you cared about those things. Back before you noticed you hadn’t made any friends, that your boyfriend always walked two steps ahead of you even when you sped up to meet him, that your birth control pills were making you distant and feel outside yourself and cry all the time. Remember, there are plenty of topics of conversation which lead away from the point at which you start crying. From now on you will not start crying.

The mail will also contain: his phone bill, his own student loan forms, an issue of The Economist which he subscribed to by accident. The stack of his belongings on the floor by the door piles up with things which in the end he’ll just tell you to keep: a winter cap you crocheted for him, his favorite boxers, the books you both own copies of. The watch his father gave him, its long-dead battery, a can of chicken noodle soup.

* * * * *
If you must busy yourself, shower and change into an obvious skirt, overdo it with accessories and then peel them all off. In heels, the flat walk to the pub will be wobbly. Your legs will first rush with chill, then spread with warmth, then go numb. You miss the temperate fog you left, the concrete hills you used to hate. Everything’s level here. Everything’s square one. How easy this could be! You don’t have confidence, but you don’t have expectations either. When it begins to mist, each molecule will twirl in the currents before you. You could grow accustomed to it. The wind will whip you onward. Contain the door as you open it.

The barista will be waiting at the bar, still in his pink shirt, his distressed jeans, his dark oiled hair. Some would consider him handsome. “What’re you having?” he’ll ask as you take up a stool.

“Shot of whiskey and an Old Style.”

That will give him pause.

“I’m not taking any chances.”

Expect to be self-conscious in front of the bartender, who’s only seen you in here with your ex. When you moved to this neighborhood -- to this inland state -- you’d made a point to come in here every day for two weeks, until you could stop by just twice a month and still be regulars. The place is woody and taxidermied, has a stained glass chandelier swinging low over the pool table and a swoony jukebox. Your ex would select “Centerfield” or “Brown Eyed Girl” or “My Way”; he’d lip-sync the lyrics to you dreamily until you danced. Gin and tonics in the cool reprieve of the dark pub got you through the summer heat.

Snap out of it. The barista is talking to you -- you’ll have missed every word he’s said. Finally think to ask him, “So, what’s your name?”

“Mark.”

There’s nothing to say to that, so order another round.

Try: “What’s your sign?”

“Hmm… I’m not sure.”

Keep trying. “I think I have SAD.”

“What?”

“Seasonal Affective Disorder.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you get depressed in the winter. Because of the latitude.”

“Oh.”

Yes, you’re going to have to entertain yourself.

“I priced light therapy machines, but they’re pretty expensive.”

“I bet.”

In a moment of desperation, you can always grab your purse from the hook at your knees and pull out a stick of wintermint gum. The barista will ask for one too. Luckily, you’ll be drunk enough to say without even planning to say it: “What, are you going to kiss me?” By now it will be clear that he’s getting a completely inaccurate impression of you. “We are who we pretend to be.” Good job.

He will kiss you even before chewing the gum. Place your hand near his crotch. Tight. After the kiss, you can be sure he’ll carry your bag and wrap his arm around your shoulders like an aristocrat and escort you safely home with him.

The five blocks to his apartment are so dark you’ll feel like you aren’t wearing your glasses. He’ll guide you, though, babbling. He’s tall. He probably works out. You’ll only be able to spot brightly colored moonlit objects like the new daffodils circling the saplings the city just put in. “How spooky,” you’ll murmur, and he’ll tug a whole clump out of the ground to present to you, bulbs and dirt and bony little roots and all. Don’t be embarrassed. You do not always have to be yourself. “Awww.” Shut your eyes the rest of the way.

Stoop with him into an underground garden apartment where someone is watching TV. His bedroom has blackout curtains over the windows but no door. There you’ll fall into a king-size waterbed which takes up the whole room. Any moment you will be seasick, meditating on wind-ripped cliffs and cold rain and waves warm over shock-numb legs as you float on your back and let him move you about. When he snatches a condom out of your purse, nevermind the unhung door frame and let your last lick of concern drift off just below the surface of the water. You’ve never had sex this unfathomably drunk before, never with a near-stranger, never with such intent. You’ll feel you have accomplished something outside yourself. You will sink into it; do leisurely, luxuriously little.

* * * * *
Wake late in the blackout room. You will have finally slept -- not even a hangover. Breathe deeply. You’re liable to be disoriented; search the ceiling first for some sign, like a mariner. Press your fingertips against your eyelids until they glow, like "Orange and Yellow" in the Mark Rothko room at the Art Institute. Your favorite place for a midwinter’s nap, the room is tiny and the field of color a whole wall tall. It throbs like the pulse of the sun, hot as a windowpane bursting with lava, a rubber start button, go go go go go. Now you keep it with your eyes closed.

Open your eyes. The barista will have left for work. Does it matter? What more do you want now that you know you can do it? You are not the you of the past four weeks; you are not the you of the sad, angry three months before that. You are certainly not the you your ex-boyfriend knows, maybe not the you your mother remembers. The world is new.

Forget the café. Forget the library. Your legs a bit shaky, as though unused. Take the way home through the park. Stepping over crumpled safety glass on the sidewalk, glance into a rifled glove box. Something has happened here. A guy in a ball cap will be doing the same on the other side of the car, hunching over to get a better look, but will stop short when he notices you. He has light eyes. Feel a slight shock of connection.

Pass a courtful of disorganized after-care kids playing basketball; one with white wings silk-screened to the back of his sky blue T-shirt. Circle the fountain, hover at the edge of the field deciphering the limits and variety of the dog park. Turn back to the fountain and settle on a bench next to a middle-aged man with gray hair and a gray beard. It will be warm -- unseasonably warm -- and humid, overcast but vibrating with light. Is it still February? Strollers will park and children run up to the fountain, poke their index fingers into the water, then run away. Stay-at-home moms will gape at the weather, their luck that they’re not stuck inside again today.

The man next to you will be tall, his legs extending far past yours, crossed at the ankles. He’ll wear well-worn, flattened moccasins, his dark heels cracked and ashy. He’ll be reading; pull a paperback from your purse to avoid seeming creepy.

This book would be too dense for the breezy outdoors any day but especially today, now that you’re alive. It’s the type of thing you should be underlining in pencil or mouthing to yourself. It’ll say: “……………….” And without sunglasses, you won’t even be able to look at the page, the clouds, the rilling water. Your skirt will cling as you cross, uncross, cross your thighs; oval spots on your knees warm pink.

Watch as girls dip the tips of their braids into the dappled pool and slap each other with them. Before you can think, step out of both shoes at once, dash up and into the fountain, and splash. It is like ice. Slump back into your place on the metal slats. Reopen your book.

“Refreshing?” the man will ask, turning toward you, still holding up his hardback. He looks kind. You’ll remind yourself that that means nothing, then forget.

“You gotta do what you gotta do.” Smile friendlily.

“Can you believe this weather?”

“No. I cannot believe it.” Don’t be afraid to hold his gaze.

He’ll nod toward the worn cover of your book. “Any good?”

“Who can concentrate out here?”

“Guess not.”

Then he’ll rest his book in his lap, revealing a hand-drawn announcement on his white sweatshirt.

What the hell? Ask him: “You’re the I Have A Foot Fetish man?”

“The very one.”

“You have a foot fetish?”

“I do indeed.”

“And you’re proud of it.”

“You could say that. Certainly not ashamed.”

Consider this, taking in the rest of the park. The strollers, the children, the pets, the daffodils. The businesswoman crossing briskly past the fountain in her wool suit, just off work. She didn’t know what the weather would be like. She must be burning up.

And then you’ll blink and won’t catch the stranger as he grabs the woman’s purse. You won’t know if her grip was tight or if he hit her or if she lost her balance, but she’ll be flat on her back; he’ll be jogging away. Running so slowly, how did he get so far so fast? You’ll wonder this.

Your fingers will wrap themselves around the strap of your bag. You will eventually think: You have a cell phone; call the police. Dig for it. This sort of thing has never happened to you before. You’ll suddenly feel very lightheaded and hungry. Where is your phone?

As you stare curiously at the silent scene, muted by the humidity, the man will slow and circle back, joining the woman—now upright—and two other people around a video camera. They’ll huddle, discuss, replay the take. The sun will brighten, the drops of water in the fountain fall discretely.

Turn to the I Have A Foot Fetish man. “Did you just see that?”

“Yeah, I saw that.”

“That was weird.”

“I share your sentiment.”

Think to yourself: yes. Yes, you do. Yes, we share a sentiment.

Aneesa Davenport is a Pushcart-Prize-nominated poet living in San Francisco, where she toils away for a book publisher by day and scavenges the landscape for material by night. Her work has appeared in Fringe, Fanzine, The Santa Barbara Independent, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. Find her at paragraphed.wordpress.com.

Amy Sly lives in Brooklyn, and works for BuzzFeed as their Visual Designer. She moonlights as a book designer, photographer, and co-creator of CoverSpy. She keeps the daily cellphone photo blog for you, not them (which the above photo is from), art directs Slice literary magazine, rides a motorcycle and vrooms her engine for little kids. Visit Amy online at amysly.com.

Unquiet Nights is Belfast-based singer/guitarist Luke Mathers, drummer Rodger Firmin, and the bassist John Rossi. The band has been featured in Under The Radar magazine's Best of 2010 edition and played venues including Scala London with Bloc Party. Their new album 21st Century Redemption Songs is the band’s maiden release, and is the result of 18 months of intensive recording and self-production. For more, click to unquietnights.com.

ISSUE #41: Nadine Vassallo, Eleanor Leonne Bennett, Steffaloo

2011-12-26T08:45:00.002-05:00

Photograph by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

I WISH THEY ALL COULD BE CALIFORNIA GIRLS
by Nadine Vassallo

There was hardly anything left that she knew for sure, but one thing was that she didn’t want to live in the same city where Ray lived, and where-- for as long as she stayed-- she’d have no better option than to hang out with him or people like him.

It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to live someplace else. Given the lack of appeal the possibilities presented, she decided to leave it up entirely to chance. She was willing to move anywhere: a mansion, apartment, shack, house, doghouse, houseboat, Hell. She would exert a minimal amount of effort and whichever possibility came through first, that’s where she would live for at least the next year and that settled it. Whatever, you know?

Issue #41 soundtrack: Steffaloo "The Whale and Me"

So she jetted off to Los Angeles and to her old friend, Eli Adams, who said he might have a room to spare in his new condo in the Valley.

Eli had been her boyfriend once, when they were both fourteen years old. At twenty-seven, they shared the cozy closeness of two people who had kissed each other once, were ashamed of it, and knew they never would again.

“Stay as long as you like,” he said, “and then you can decide if you want to stay forever.”

She’d saved up a pile of money and quit her job at the start of the summer. She got a kick out of being a quitter. On the plane, she read Us Weekly, which was the sort of thing she never did. She felt like she was playing hooky. Or maybe it was more like starting a love affair: she was cheating on everyone who’d ever told her that things were supposed to matter, decisions were supposed to be made with care.

Behind LAX, underneath an outdoor parking garage, she looked up at a sliver of sky peeking through the concrete and was surprised to see palm trees stretching their necks toward the sun. She knew she would see palm trees; it’s not like she’d never seen a picture of LA before. But she didn’t quite expect to see so many or so soon. They looked like confused birds.

Eli pulled up to the curb. He honked the horn three times even though she was obviously standing right there. She tossed her suitcase in the back and hopped in.

Eli had curly ginger hair and too many freckles. He drove a red Pontiac, one-handed; his right arm was in a sling. It surprised her, how effortless it was for him.

Los Angeles was strange and at first she expected to hate it. People always said she would. She was accustomed to the compact cities of the East coast, red brick houses lined up so tight they almost strangled each other. Where she came from, people got around on subways or buses or bicycles; they never drove. She didn’t understand freeways cutting through desert canyons, or streets without sidewalks, or the complex landscape of weird Southern California nature. It spoke a foreign language to her.

One of her favorite LA activities became listing all the reasons she shouldn’t move to LA.

“I don’t own a bathing suit, for starters,” she said. “I can’t tan.”

“You don’t even know how to drive.”

“Right. If I lived here, I’d be that weirdo who takes public transportation everywhere,” she said. She wasn’t sure it was actually possible to take public transportation everywhere, but was trying to ignore that.

“I don’t think that’s actually possible,” said Eli.

She settled into a routine. In the mornings, they rode through the Valley in search of breakfast. She ate a lot of avocados. The phrase ‘June gloom’ found its way into her vocabulary, explaining the distinctly unsummery feel of this city where she thought it’d be eternally summer. Over the course of each day, the gloom dissipated. It even got hot. The desert heat was dry and made her hair look good at least, so that was a plus.

Each day, they’d try to visit one tourist attraction or neighborhood she hadn’t been to before. They spent a lot of time in the car.

One day, at sunset, Eli pulled over by the side of Victory Boulevard and hopped out to take her picture in front of the sign that had her name on it. Her name was not common, so she still permitted herself to get childishly excited about those sorts of things.

“Do you think this is a sign,” she said, “or is it a sign? Like, the kind from the universe?”

“The second kind, definitely,” said Eli.

In every picture he took of her, she threw her arms open wide in an expression of joy. Or was it defiance? Or was it just an ambivalent shrug? They didn’t even notice until later, when they put the photos onto Eli’s laptop.

“Look,” he said, “in this one, you’re throwing up a peace sign.”

“I think that’s a V.”

* * * * *
It occurred to her that they hadn’t gotten really, truly, properly drunk even once since she’d been in town, and it’d been three weeks already.

“Take me on a bender,” she said. “Pretty please?”

They went to a dive bar in the Valley, where she chugged Tecate out of a warm can and watched the Dodgers lose to the Cubs. They went to the oldest bar in Hollywood, where all the bartenders wore tuxedos and she drank a dirty martini and hated it. They went to a trendy, Mexican-ish club where she drank a margarita out of a pineapple.

“Will we see any celebrities here?” she asked. Immediately after the words were out of her mouth she regretted admitting that she cared. She sat between a gossip reporter and a one-time mail-order bride (they were brother and sister, Russians) and wondered how this had become her life. More to the point: how had it become Eli’s?

Eli Adams, her oldest and quite possibly truest friend. Her favorite thing about him had always been his awkwardness. Eli at fourteen was all gangly limbs, oversized teeth, and curly red hair tucked into an ugly bucket hat. He used to get teased for riding a skateboard to school; now he did it professionally. She used to be his only friend; now he had friends like these. He’d become so comfortable in his skin that she almost couldn’t recognize him.

She didn’t believe that her own life was something Los Angeles could hold. It felt like the entire city could drift away at any moment.

“People in California are so laid back,” she said.

“Not really, darling,” said the gossip reporter, “they’re just stoned.” And he winked at her across the pseudo-Mexican print tablecloth.

On the East Coast, people get drunk; on the West Coast, they get stoned, she thought. How perfect! After much internal deliberation, she decided that she was definitely a ‘getting drunk’ type of person. She ordered another margarita and let the gossip reporter pay for it.

The gossip reporter’s name was Boris and he dressed in a style that could only be described as ‘Turn of the Century Newspaperman.’ Ironic, she thought, since none of his writing appears in an actual newspaper. She wondered if she meant ‘ironic’ in the high school English teacher sense or the Alanis Morissette sense. She didn’t really know the difference between the two, just that one was right and one was wrong. It occurred to her that no one in Los Angeles had a sense of irony, which made her respect it more.

The drinks kept flowing and the rest of the night devolved into a thick haze. It was the first night, out of many that summer, when she would black out.

Just after six o’clock in the morning, she awoke to the sound of her cell phone ringing. It was Ray and, feeling the pinch of inevitable regret, she answered.

Since they broke up, Ray called only during business hours and spoke to her like a real estate agent: overly formal, but with a disturbingly cheerful tone. It didn’t help, either, that the only thing they had left to talk about was their apartment. “I apologize,” he said, “You said you were staying with your parents. I had no way of knowing you were out of town, or about the time difference.” But she could tell he was pleased that she’d been sleeping.

“I just thought I should inform you that I spoke with the landlord this morning. I’m keeping the apartment,” he said. She’d expected nothing less. He sure did love that apartment. He considered himself something of a hero for his ability to find sleek, ultra-modern furniture for free on Craigslist and criticized the way she swept the floors.

“I think Jackson should stay, too,” he said. Jackson was a three-year-old Shiba Inu. She and Ray had taught him how to ‘sit’ and ‘stay’ together the summer before.

She cried a little after that.

“Jackson is the only thing I’ll miss about that whole shit city,” she told Eli over an avocado omelet.

“We could kidnap him,” he said.

“No, Ray’s right. I’m not responsible enough for a dog really.”

“And he is?”

“Of course! His whole thing is being responsible.” She stared down into her empty coffee cup. “He’ll never let me see Jackson again,” she said. Silence settled over the table uncomfortably, as they mourned for Jackson. He was as good as dead to them.

Eli drew his breath. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell you. There is no extra room. My parents paid for the condo. It’s theirs. And they want to spend the rest of the summer out here, you know, living in it.”

She told herself she wasn’t allowed to get upset. When you leave your choices up to fate, you can’t let something like that break your heart.

* * * * *
Better get what I can out of LA while I can, she thought.

She made Eli take her to try on bathing suits at Abercrombie & Fitch, the one with the real live models modeling minimal amounts of clothing on the sidewalk out front. She tried on bikinis with names like the Mackensie, and the Clarissa, and the Blair. They made her feel like she was putting on someone else’s skin. Eventually, she settled on something called the Abra, which meant it was navy blue with a white moose-print on it. The least summery of all possible bathing suits.

They spent the rest of that day floating on inflatable rafts in Eli’s swimming pool. She ignored the feeling of her skin burning in the sun.

Could this be what I’ve been looking for? she wondered.

At that moment, her phone rang again and she cursed herself for forgetting to turn off the ringer. It was her mother—who had apologetically opened her bank account statement—calling to bitch her out about her lack of fiscal responsibility. And what was she doing just gallivanting around Los Angeles in the middle of the biggest Southern California wildfire in half a century?

For the first time in a month, they turned on the news. And there it was. The Biggest Southern California Wildfire in Half a Century. Not threatening the Valley yet, but it looked like it could head that way.

Eli shrugged. “No biggie. Happens every year.”

But her mother was right: the money was starting to run out. She accepted that the extra room in Eli’s condo was nonexistent, and that she would never learn how to drive. She took what was left of her savings and bought herself a plane ticket.

On the last day, Eli suggested they drive to Venice. “You have to see Muscle Beach,” he said, “it’s totally ridiculous.”

While he wasn’t looking, she stashed her suitcase in the backseat of the car.

They pulled over on Venice Boulevard. “I’ll just catch a cab to the airport from here,” she told Eli, hopping out before he had a chance to protest. She wanted to avoid that uncomfortable moment of goodbye, as well as the questions about where she would go next, and how, and why. He knew better than to stop her.

She walked alone past the tattoo parlors, skate shops, and sunglasses stores. The palm trees and the people, their skin baking under the sun.

The tacky souvenir shop smelled like patchouli oil and played reggaeton so loud she could feel her heart pounding in her ears, but still, something about it drew her in. She could never resist a good tacky souvenir shop. Inside, she searched every last mini California license plate for one that had her name printed on it, but she never found one. She picked one that said MARGARITA instead. She clutched it tightly in her palm all the way to the counter and out the door, like she was afraid someone would steal it from her.

Suddenly, it seemed vital that she not leave the West Coast without touching the Pacific Ocean.

She walked directly toward the beach, stopping at the edge of the sand, under the shade of a palm tree. She shed her sandals and red mini-dress, revealing the Abra bikini underneath. Abandoning her suitcase and clothes in the sand, she charged down to the water.

Up to her knees in the Pacific, she looked at the mini California license plate in her hand. It was such a stupid thing to buy.

* * * * *
Safe inside the plane that would carry her back east, she gazed out over the vast Southern California landscape. She thought she could see the wildfire shaking its fists in the distance. It’s like the city just borrowed this land, she thought, and any day now the wild is going to take it back.

“We are now cruising at a speed of 525 miles per hour,” the pilot said.

She thought of all the ‘getting stoned’ types down there, driving their cars through the canyons. She wished she’d gotten to stick her feet out the car window at least once.

“Our altitude is 33,000 feet, give or take,” said the pilot.

The country seemed so huge, suddenly, spread out like that below her. It was crazy that it could hold so much.

“Our estimated time of arrival at JFK International is 10:30pm.”

She listened to “California Girls” by the Beach Boys on her headphones, paying attention to the lyrics for probably the first time ever. Does he mean he wishes that all the girls were ‘California girls’ instead of the types of girls they actually are, or does he wish that all the different types of girls lived in California?, she wondered.

She never really liked that song.

Nadine Vassallo was born and raised in Philadelphia and currently lives in New York City. Along with working in publishing and occasionally writing fiction, she is collaborating on a series of short films with her twin brother. You can follow her on Twitter @tinygem.

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year-old artist who has won contests with National Geographic, The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winstons Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham science, Fennel and Fern, and Nature's Best Photography. Her photographs have been published in exhibitions and magazines across the world including in the Guardian, RSPB Birds, RSPB Bird Life, Dot Dot Dash, Alabama Coast, Alabama Seaport, and NG Kids Magazine. She was the only UK artist to have work displayed in the "See The Bigger Picture" global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010, and the only visual artist published in the Taj Mahal Review June 2011. Also, Bennett was the youngest artist to be displayed in Charnwood Art's Vision 09 Exhibition and New Mill's Artlounge Dark Colours Exhibition. To view her online portfolio, click to eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com.

Steffaloo, a.k.a. Steph Thomspon, is a singer songwriter based in Los Angeles. She’s worked on collaborations with other notable artists such as Blackbird Blackbird, Sun Glitters, Chrome Sparks, Billy Comfort, and Germany Germany. Her own original releases include debut 7" "On fire," released thru JAXART and first full album "Meet Me in Montauk." For more, visit Steffaloo on Bandcamp.

ISSUE #40: Brian Conlon, Edusá, Saint Motel

2011-12-12T09:20:00.001-05:00

Illustration by Edusá

THE BASEST CLEF
by Brian Conlon

“Sweetness in sound is not something to be desired, people will vomit,” said Mr. Clorne to the alto sax section.

He was not one to mince words, or speak frankly; instead, he spoke principally to undermine the confidence of his students. But, he had tenure.

Issue #40 soundtrack: Saint Motel "At Least I Have Nothing"

“If you play an F sharp again, when you’re supposed to play an F natural, I will have the trombone section throttle you. You know how they hate F sharps,” he said to a particularly petite flautist. The trombonists smiled, pumping their slides malevolently. One trombonist sprayed water, meant to keep his slide lubricated, in his own eye to prove his allegiance. It burned slightly and he squinted through the rest of rehearsal, sliding his slide, but not actually playing.

“Mud called, it wants its definition back,” he told the tuba section, after one particularly inarticulate version of the 1812 Overture. Say what you will to the flutes, harass the trumpets, berate the saxophones, hell, strip naked and march the percussion section up and down the hallway, but do not, under any circumstances, insult the tubas. Tubists don’t care about being popular. They don’t care about having a marketable skill. They only wish to be left alone. They sit in the back, they play low notes and they get left alone; that’s the deal.

The next day the tuba section, namely Duke and Sara, stole Mr. Clorne’s baton, broke it in half, and stapled it to the bulletin board. Mr. Clorne spent the first twenty minutes of the period shouting, “Who did this? Who did this?” He then tore the bottom half of his baton out from under the staple and waved it hysterically. The tubas started playing some low rhythmic thing which almost coincided with his waving motion and the entire band followed, creating a gross cacophony that reduced Mr. Clorne to tears. When it stopped, he was curled up in a ball in the corner of the band room humming a Sousa march (Semper Fidelis?). It was at that moment, after everyone else had left, that I decided to ask Mr. Clorne to sign my athletic eligibility sheet. He smiled, said absolutely, and then stabbed at the sheet with his broken baton.

“That’s not a pen,” I said.

“It’s not a baton either,” he said.

“I have a pen,” I said.

“So do I,” he said.

“Coach won’t accept this,” I said.

“Shame,” he said.

“Coach will make me run,” I said.

“Who did this?” he asked.

“Guess.”

“The clarinets are morons, so they’re out. Flutes are too timid. Saxes, too arrogant. Trumpets, far too arrogant. Trombones, too loyal . . . and stupid. French horns too vain. Percussion, well they do know how to break sticks. I don’t think they know I have a baton though. . . . Gotta be those goddamn tubas! Why didn’t I see this coming? So touchy, can’t insult the precious tubas . . . give me a B flat, that’s all I ever ask of them and half the time they can’t do that right.”

“Will you sign it now?” I asked.

“Blame the tubas will you, just to get out of a bit of running, huh, tubby? Sell your friends down the scale, just to avoid a couple of laps. Is that what this band is coming to?” he said.

“I weigh one hundred and forty-seven pounds,” I said.

“So do I,” he said, rubbing his gigantic belly.

“I never said it was the tubas.”

“So, it wasn’t the tubas? Are you gonna lie to my face? Like I’m some sort of ignorant art teacher, passing kids through. Oh that’s a lovely duck painting Nigel, I think the black and dark purple really contrast well, and that giant spoon in the middle, well done, B-, on you go to the next grade. Is that who you think I am? Is that how you think of me?”

“No, Mr. Clorne,” I said.

“Am I some sort of carnival slideshow? Oh that Mr. Clorne, he’s lost it, he’s really lost it, sad day, sad day, sad day…”

“Uh,” I said.

“Old man Clorne, with his pot belly and his thinning hair, his firm lips, you can’t tell under the moustache but they’re firm, his firm lips, that pouty smile, those gleaming eyes, that strong right forearm muscle that always twitches and nearly glistens when we reach fortissimo, that Clorne, he’s a mean one, he is. Like my uncle after a few drinks.”

“We don’t think that,” I said.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked.

“I can’t tell, or speak . . . for the rest of the band,” I said.

“Yes you can. I grant you permission,” he said.

“Oh, I can? Well then, I won’t.”

“Yes, you will,” he said.

“Will you sign the sheet?” I asked.

“I’ll run the lap for you tubby, now out with it.”

“I weigh one-hundred and forty-seven pounds,” I said.

“Out with it!”

“We think, not me, remember, but we . . . think you’ve insulted the tubas and . . . that’s a bad idea. Best just leave them alone,” I said.

“They made me learn tuba in music school. Do you know how awful it is? Do you have a sense of how awful it is?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Good, then you’ll be happy to be our new principle tubist.”

“I will?”

“You will, and what’s more, you’ll be good. You’ll be better than good, you’ll be competent, you’ll be in tune, and you’ll breathe only when absolutely necessary,” he said.

“My parents just bought me a new trumpet,” I said.

“Excellent to hear, I’ve always said rich people should buy their children trumpets,” he said.

“It was my birthday and Christmas gift . . . combined.”

“So, you missed out on some chocolates and shoulder pads . . . What sport is this for?” he asked.

“General sports,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“My parents just bought a trumpet, they’re not going to be happy about this,” I said.

“Valves are valves, they’ll get over it,” he said. He then went to the band storage closet, pulled out a tuba and pointed to the valves. I have to admit they looked much the same as my trumpet valves, only there was one more and they were about three times the size.

“My hands aren’t that big,” I said.

“They’re bigger than Sara’s,” he said

“I have asthma,” I said.

“Then quit the team. What is general sports anyway?” he asked.

“To play tuba, you need healthy lungs.”

“How do you play general sports then? What is general sports?” he asked.

“I have nightmares about sousaphones, have ever since I was a kid.”

“That’s symbolic, you’re not actually worried about sousaphones,” he said.

“Oh no, I am,” I said.

“This general sports thing, is it some sort of a joke? Are you putting me on with this? I could have you kicked off the team.”

“My parents read me a book when I was little about not doing drugs and the drug dealers in the book used sousaphones to advertise,” I said.

“Are you some sort of mental case, son? This tuba thing might be just right for you,” he said.

“General Sports is when you get cut from the team you try out for and you just practice all the sports, until someone gets hurt, and then they call you up,” I said.

“So you’re like the 16th guy on the basketball team, the 5th leg on the swim relay and the 9th best discus thrower all rolled up into one convenient unathletic package,” he said.

“Something like that,” I said.

“I’ve gotta tell you kid, that sounds awful, like worse than playing tuba awful.”

“No . . . see, you get to just play random stuff until they need you and you still feel like part of a team . . .” I said.

“Even though you’re not,” he said.

“I am,” I said.

“So this academic sheet is for me to verify that you’re eligible to play, in case everyone who is any good gets hurt or decides to quit?”

“Just sign it,” I said.

“You don’t tell me what to do. I don’t care if you’re the best tuba player I’ve ever had, no student tells Mr. Clorne what to do.”

I silently looked down at my sheet and then started to walk away.

“I’ll sign it, I’ll sign it.” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“And you’ll play tuba?”

“I’ll play tuba.”

Brian Conlon graduated from Harvard Law School this past May, and with a degree in Comparative Literature and History from the University of Rochester in 2008. He has studied creative writing with Joanna Scott, Amy Hempel, and Rose Moss. Brian won a short story writing competition at the University of Rochester and has had two of his stories published in EST, a small literary magazine out of Burlington, Vermont. He has given readings at the University of Rochester, Harvard Law School and at multiple release parties for EST.

Edusá "used to be a normal kid until the day he put his finger into socket and suffered an electric shock. Since then he draws compulsively." He now lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he creates illustrations, storyboards, animations, and character/environment designs for games. He graduated from Visual Arts at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and also holds a technical degree in Design and Graphic Communication from SENAI(Design and Graphic Communication Center). Visit Edusá online at edusastudio.com.br.

"At Least I Have Nothing" is the lead track from Saint Motel's new vinyl 7", which released this month and can be ordered online. For more, visit the band's website at saintmotel.com.

SPECIAL ISSUE #39: Damon & Naomi

2011-11-28T08:30:00.006-05:00

Photograph by Naomi Yang

VISIT TO THE LA JETEE BAR
by Damon Krukowski

At the Museum of the Moving Image, an exhibit on nineteenth-century motion-picture games explains this principle: when vision is interrupted, the mind retains an afterimage of what the eye had seen. If a light illuminating successive images flashes, the darkness between causes us to merge this afterimage with the next, which we sum to one in flux rather than two in succession. If a light is constantly shown on successive images, we see only a blur. That is: interruption is necessary to the illusion of continuity.

In the car driving home, I think this must also be the structure of memory -- images that we retain in isolation, but sum together as they flash in our minds. Perhaps this is also the structure of dreams. Dream logic emerges as we work to make sense of the succession of images, separated by blackness.

Issue #39 soundtrack: Damon & Naomi "Judah and the Maccabees"

Thus Chris Marker’s La Jetée: memory presented as discrete images (stills). If we cannot recall the image immediately before or after, we cannot recall motion. Nevertheless we work to sum these images together, and make sense of them in time. The logic of memory is the logic of trauma.

* * * * *
Visit to the La Jetée bar: C. has given us directions out of a dream -- “Take the only street with trees.” The area is not far from our Shinjuku hotel, but in a direction we never walk. (I remember friends saying on our first visit, “Don’t go that way.”) We keep to the main streets, to avoid getting lost, but see no sign of the old drinking district he had described. And then: a street with trees. We take it away from the neon, into the darkness. There are blue tents in the bushes, shelters constructed by the homeless. It is a weeknight, the street is otherwise empty. We come to a crossroads -- in one direction, more blackness -- in another, the old ramshackle district of bars. C.’s directions worked.

Wandering among the bars, La Jetée is still hidden. We ask another “mama-san.” She graciously leads us there. It is up a flight of stairs. No way to look inside before opening the door…

* * * * *
At the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side -- interior rooms, banned from use by building codes, were walled up rather than changed. Some later reopened, with interior windows added to satisfy requirements for light and air…

When I sang about this, I imagined someone still living inside when those interior rooms were re-opened. I associated the darkness of these spaces with a lost language.

Hide my eyes from the light
And say the words that I can’t understand

Adapted to the singer’s point of view for a later chorus, this becomes:

Hide the light from me
And say the prayers that I should understand

* * * * *
Sitting with my mother at the kitchen table, I ask about the jacket I saw in It Happened One Night -- both Clark Gable and the sleazy character on the bus wear the same cut, they are only tailored differently. She knows the name of the jacket: Norfolk. How did her father buy his clothes? Were they on a rack? Thinking about it, she recalls the view from their apartment on Riverside Drive, windows facing upriver -- warships at anchor. They moved to 86th Street when? It must have been very soon after the war began, because she remembers being on 72nd Street when she heard about Pearl Harbor, and what would she be doing on 72nd Street when they lived on 86th Street? The wind off the river was so strong she had to walk home backwards from the subway on Broadway. Suddenly she remembers: a tailor used to come to the house, and fit her father for clothes. “A Jewish tailor,” she says. “Where did he find one of those?” I say, and make her laugh.

* * * * *
Show at the New York Public Library of 1960s mimeo books and magazines -- this thought: that a “poetics” should enable one to identify poetry in new places, not just in other poems.

This is the test of a useful poetics, because arguing about poetry itself is circular and pointless -- we already know all those things are poems, from someone’s point of view. No need to establish the hierarchy from our perspective.

So poetics does have a function -- it is poems that do not.

Wasn’t this Cage’s insight into music?

* * * * *
On Beacon Hill to see an early music performance of Sephardic songs -- the venue is a building I’d never noticed before, an abandoned synagogue on the north side of the hill.

The musicians are in the center, on the bima. There are two galleries for the audience, at right angles to one another -- these must have once separated men and women. The space has the haphazard dimensions of the interior of a city block, but covered over with a skylight. There are several layers of painted decorations on the crumbling walls. Palm trees.

During the performance, the singer chooses to face one gallery, and then the other, in turn.

* * * * *
At a restaurant, Dad says to me, “Since we see you so rarely, you should order the caviar.” I suggest we split it -- I think maybe he wants the caviar, which is why he’s urging it on me? -- and that way it will cost no more than two other dishes at the table. No, no, he says, he doesn’t like caviar the way I like caviar. Anyway, it always makes him uncomfortable. Uncomfortable? Yes it reminds him of the trans-Siberian railroad. “You know the story,” he says, as he always does when introducing a story he has kept to himself. It seems that on the trans-Siberian railroad, if a train was coming from the other direction, the one he and his family were on would be diverted to a sidetrack, where it would wait for hours, even days. While there the conductors would lock all the doors and windows -- because wherever they were, however remote, people would eventually arrive, with plates and cups, begging for food.

Once, my father and his family were in the dining car as the train sat like this. They were served caviar. Caviar? Apparently the meals came with the tickets. “It wasn’t luxurious, by any means, although after prison camp it was certainly a shock.” And while they had the caviar before them, people were banging on the window glass, hungry.

I say I’ll have something else. He insists. So I insist we split it. We do. He has the tiniest taste. (I eat the rest.)

* * * * *
Saw Sunny Murray with Sabir Mateen, at the Unitarian Church in Amherst: Sunny Murray played as light and free as his records -- that skittery, constant, calming sound. But seeing his body language, I felt he was simultaneously playing traditional tunes in his head: ballads with breaks, turnarounds, solos. When he started a song on the brushes, alone, I was sure he was waiting for Ben Webster or Lester Young to join in. And he hummed -- atonal humming, like the memory of a beautiful song without the melody or the changes. Just the space for its feeling.

* * * * *
As I leave my parents’ house, my father looks away. Is he hurt? Depressed? There is so much he wants from me, I think. Or so much he thinks he wants from me. The guilt I take away is like cases in my hands.

* * * * *
Takuboku Ishikawa’s Romaji Diary -- like Campana’s Orphic Songs -- Boethius’s Consolation -- the dream of a writing so complete that prose and poetry are equally needed. Also Pascal’s Pensées -- these are thoughts, events, that must be recorded, and the form they take is a mirror of that necessity.

And if I wrote in a language no one could read, like Takuboku, could I include it all? Takuboku gave his diaries to a friend and his wife, and therefore to an audience. So from whom was the romaji shielding him? His family -- his rivals -- but not from those closest. Circles widening out.

* * * * *
Dream: with Dad in some kind of basement cafeteria, I am questioning him about something and his face clouds over. He says there are family secrets I don’t know. Like what? I am pressing. Like his middle name, he says. Face becoming completely closed and dark, shrinking away from me behind glasses. “The middle name is Magarshack. Like the writer,” he says. Like the translator, I ask? “The writer,” he says. The distinction is lost on me. Out in the street, 86th Street walking west with Mom, I say Dad told me his real middle name. “Don’t do that!” she yells at Dad, who is suddenly there too. Why not? I say. “Now you know he is born under a blue sign star,” she says. It is a frightening idea. Then in a highway restaurant with Dad, in Vermont -- it is divided over two stories (!), with multiple dining rooms, antiseptic. He tells me how he once worked there -- it was a fine restaurant then -- while commuting to Lincoln, Nebraska. This is somehow connected to the secret of the middle name. He shows me how far it is on a map. Then, he says, he stopped (commuting? working? writing?).

* * * * *
John Wieners walks into the Poetry Room at Lamont Library to give a reading. He opens a book (his own) and begins. But then he stops, and looks at the page like he has never seen it before.

I recognize something in that gesture: looking at one’s work, and finding it at times intimately familiar and at other times foreign and strange.

If Wieners’s work weren’t true, it would never be familiar to him. And if it were always familiar, it wouldn’t be so true.

* * * * *
My own reading at Lamont Library. N. is there. K., who has been staying with us, is also there. A few students.

I spent so many hours in this room, years ago, listening to recordings of poets reading. Stein. Stevens. Ashbery.

The sunlight is low, and the room is overheated, as always.

I am overcome with feeling. Something other than pride. It is hard to read clearly, because for a moment I am near tears. There is a recording being made.

* * * * *
Do we only tell each other’s stories? Ask others to tell our own? Can we tell our own? Or is that what stories are for -- to tell someone else’s, and allow another to tell yours?

Damon Krukowski is the author of The Memory Theater Burned (Turtle Point) and 5000 Musical Terms (Burning Deck). Naomi Yang is a photographer and graphic designer. Together they are musicians (Damon & Naomi, Galaxie 500), and publishers (Exact Change).

"Visit to the La Jetée bar" and the accompanying photograph are excerpted from the new book Afterimage, by Damon Krukowski with photos by Naomi Yang, which released this month from Ugly Duckling Press. "Judah and the Maccabees" by Damon & Naomi with Ghost (2000) will be reissued in January 2012 from Drag City. Yang's work is currently on view at Aviary Gallery in Jamaica Plain, Mass.

For more of their work, visit damonandnaomi.com and naomivision.com.

ISSUE #38: Danielle Villano, Ilana Panich-Linsman, RIVKA

2011-11-14T08:30:00.012-05:00

Photograph by Ilana Panich-Linsman

ANOTHER WAR YEAR
by Danielle Villano

It’s mid-February and it seems like everything has pretty much fallen into place and the Oscar nominations haven’t even come out yet. My therapist, who generally seems to go by “Call me Linda,” asks me if I think putting so much importance on the Academy Awards is healthy. She seems overly-curious about my need to base my life around the anticipation, arrival, and gory aftermath of the “Who Wore it Best” segment on E!, but I just shrug it off.

Issue #38 soundtrack: RIVKA "Kid Animal"

The way I see it, some people base their whole lives around getting to the Academy Awards. Living in Los Angeles, I’ve seen tons of people drop out of school and starve themselves and fuck movie people: people who “know a guy” that can get them a walk-on in the next Scorcese flick. I’ve known scores of girls who have emailed nude pictures to producers in hopes of getting an audition; these same girls had pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn hanging in their lockers in middle school, because they looked up to them and wanted to be them, and now they were trying and trying and couldn’t make the cut. So I pretty much grew up with the whole affair against my will, like someone who has to grow up with a mental older brother or something. So blame it on my parents, I guess.

Blame it on my parents. I think this happens in therapy a lot. You bring up one vague recollection of a childhood memory and all of a sudden all of your life problems can be traced back to that moment. I make one mention of a birthday party Daddy couldn’t make it to in second grade and suddenly, BAM, my therapist is scribbling on her little notepad like her life depended on it.

* * * * *
“I want you to write down everything you’re feeling,” Call Me Linda tells me after one particularly dull session.

“Introduce me to your life and the people in it. Talk about your interactions with others. Write about what you ate for lunch.”

She wants me to keep a journal? I’m thinking. What a waste of time. But here I am, sitting on my bed, writing in a composition notebook that I’ve scrounged up from the recesses of my desk drawer. I tell myself it’s because I have nothing better to do, that the episode of Friends tonight is a re-run and not worth the watch. I record this thought, along with some more vague, mope-y sentiments about adult authority, because maybe then Call Me Linda will suggest upping my dosage of Fluoxetine.

I do not write I am doing this because I want someone to read about my life and think it’s important enough to make a movie about it, and I or maybe Winona Ryder can star in it.

* * * * *
So yeah, I kind of mentioned it before, but the nominations haven’t even come out yet and everything about my senior year of high school is already awesome. Last year during this time, when the world waited with baited breath to see just how many nominations Titanic would get, I’d even say my life sucked a little bit. I was on a different antidepressant at the time, which made me gain twenty pounds and my mother became super into Buddhism and we had a Shaolin monk living in our guesthouse.

But life has turned around now. I remember seeing the trailer for Shakespeare in Love earlier on and I just knew: a year with a Shakespearean romance could hardly be a bad year. And so far I’ve been right. A quick switch to Fluoxetine and a few weeks of eating nothing but celery and I lost all of the weight I had put on. And Mom decided that she was so not into the whole Buddha gig anymore and has taken up spin class, instead. It’s my senior year of high school and everyone is exactly as they should be.

I’d say: yes, the class of ’98 certainly has it going on. I’m a drama club star with a promising scholarship to an east-coast film school that a lot of kids would kill to go to. I always get picked to read monologues in English class and make it a point to be seen smoking a cigarette in the courtyard every afternoon during lunch. And yes, that sounds fucking stereotypical, but hello, we’re living in the land where stereotypes are born. The Brat Pack? Yeah, we made that shit up. It’s expected.

* * * * *
Things that are expected of me that I get away with on account of my artistic temperament: Cry when I think of Sylvia Plath. Hack my hair into an uneven mess. Draw on my eyebrows. Storm out of classrooms. Eat only white rice and Sour Patch Kids. Shoplift things that I could easily afford. Take hallucinogenics on the days we’re supposed to dissect baby animals in lab. Know all of the lyrics to Patti Smith’s Horses album. Sell my Adderall.

Things that are not expected of me based on the role I’ve been given but I do them anyway to shake up the system: Excel at math. Date the son of a doctor, and not some thirty year-old folk musician.

* * * * *
Some days it gets dull because there’s only so much sexy, slimming black a girl can wear before she gets bored out of her fucking mind, but I don’t mind keeping my dark cherry lipstick (the same shade Drew Barrymore wore on the cover of Vogue) close at hand. I especially love seeing the color on the collar of Paul’s white lab coat after an intense makeout session in the midway break of organic chemistry lab.

Paul is my boyfriend of a few months and aside from being totally smart and funny, he is ridiculously attractive. He could easily be an actor, for certain, only that he stutters the “t” sound sometimes when things get t-t-t-tense.

Paul’s the son of a famous plastic surgeon (everyone in LA goes to him – my mother included) and is quick to let everyone know that fact. I think he’ll probably take over the family business one day, and he doesn’t seem to mind that idea, although he really, really loves NASA and space exploration but no one ever goes into that for money, I don’t think, and his dad would probably freak out if his son came up to him and said, “Dad, I want to be an astronaut.”

But Paul is sweet and puts up with my bullshit and doesn’t think I’m crazy when I prattle on about Elizabeth Taylor’s wardrobe in Cleopatra. He knows lots of really interesting things and he smells really nice and sometimes I think I love him.

The first time we had sex, we were sitting on his bed in his room and he was telling me about the different type of sedatives they use during plastic surgery, and his voice was kind of lulling me to sleep.

“I kind of like the idea of slipping away,” I said, and leaned back against his chest with a yawn.

“There’s a quote by someone,” he spoke into my neck, “that goes something like: She fought her enemy, consciousness, with sedatives.”

I smiled, because at that moment I figured that Paul totally got it; he totally understood the importance of fighting against the bullshit of daily routine. I turned around and kissed him hard on the mouth.

He started unbuttoning my shirt with doctor-like precision and kissed my neck, still murmuring about barbiturates and benzodiazepines, and I fell back onto the bed thinking: Maybe this is what closeness feels like.

* * * * *
What makes me sad is the fact that I know if Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan wins Best Picture (it will get a nomination of course; the Academy knows what it’s doing), then I’ll have to break up with Paul. This imminent breakup is especially sad because I’ve already bought him his birthday present: a pair of Swarovski crystal cufflinks that would look delicious paired with his prom tuxedo.

When Call Me Linda asks me why I feel I’ll have to break up with my boyfriend if Saving Private Ryan wins, I calmly explain to her that in the years war movies win Best Picture, bad things happen and everything goes to shit. This can be seen in 1986 when Platoon won and I fell off my bicycle and broke my ankle, or in 1978 when The Deer Hunter won and my parents decided the best thing that could possibly happen would be for the two of them to get married.

* * * * *
My parents sometimes like to pretend that they’re supportive. Once a week my mother guilts me into having dinner with her and my dad. I don’t think she actually enjoys sitting down to eat with us (she normally leaves the table before she even finishes her salad and grilled chicken, complaining about a headache), but I think she feels that she needs to force the whole family bonding thing on us all so she can feel like she’s telling the truth when she confirms for her own therapist, “Yes, I am trying.”

My older sister is lucky because she’s away at school and only has to deal with my parents during Christmas and summer vacation. In her absence, I have to bear the brunt of the incessant prodding and analyzing.

“Linda says you’re very fascinated with the Academy Awards, still,” Mom says during one excruciating dinner. “Do you think you want to go into the film industry?”

I shrug over my glass of water.

“It’s a very hard industry to get into, you know,” my father says.

My mother nods. “They’re always asking something different of you. New hair, new cup size.”

Dad starts to push the food around on his plate. He’s become increasingly interested in making his pile of green beans into a miniature log cabin.

“Linda says you’ve been showing resentment towards us in therapy. Do you resent us?” My mother reaches around her wine glass to grasp my hand. “Because, dear, it’s just that we love you. You know we love you, right?”

I almost say, “I know you do,” but Mom has launched into a story about some woman in her book club, and in a moment Dad has finished his chicken and gets up from the table without a word.

* * * * *
Having to deal with all of this bullshit, I think I’d be lost without Alaina. Alaina is my best friend right now mainly because she doesn’t seem to care if sometimes I cry when I think about the ending of Citizen Kane, and she’s also the same shoe size as me, and she has a collection of beautiful patent-leather pumps by knockoff designer brands. She has honey-blonde hair cut into the best “Rachel” I have ever seen; I think even Jennifer Aniston would like the cut on her, and Jennifer Aniston has never liked her Friends haircut, as she told People magazine.

Alaina’s always chewing Vitamin C tablets because she’s afraid of getting sick, and the slightest complaint of a headache or backache has her overly-cautious psychiatrist mother refilling her prescription for Vicodin, which I gobble up greedily despite the annoying itching it causes in my arms and legs, like little pinpricks.

“I’m going to stick with holistic medicine, rather than put all of my faith in some little white super-pills,” Alaina chirps. She’s started hanging out at the organic food co-op and is totally into herbal remedies. I think she’s decided she likes weed, too, even though she complains about only ever getting bad highs.

* * * * *
Alaina never really has much to say about boys aside from expressing appreciation over Leonardo DiCaprio’s charm (we all want to be Kate Winslet, which is the reason I had hennaed my hair this winter in a desperate attempt to reach the same red shade as her Titanic character). She remains close-lipped whenever I mention the phrase “double date.” Most people assume she’s some kind of modish, high-fashion lesbian, but I have my doubts about that kind of chick existing. The only lesbians I’ve ever met brew beer from scratch in their garage and keep pitbulls they rescued from the pound. Blonde, sun-tanned Alaina does neither of those things, and so I assume that she’s just laying low until Prince Charming blips on her radar.

“I don’t know why you insist on letting yourself be tied down,” she said to me one morning as we stood on line for coffee before school.

I poured a packet of sugar into my palm and pushed the crystals into a diamond shape.

“Paul’s hot,” I responded. “He’s fun to hang out with. I get to have sex regularly. And he totally has the hookup when it comes to pharmaceuticals.”

Alaina was quiet for a little bit. We got our coffee and were heading down the sidewalk towards school before she said, “I just think you might be missing out.”

* * * * *
Alaina certainly has a lot going for her, what with her scholarship to UC Berkley (she has the bumper sticker with their motto, Fiat Lux, slapped on the inside of her locker) to study business and all, and some days I feel jealous of the fact that she has a beauty mark on her cheek and doesn’t have eczema on her stomach like I do. My older sister’s always told me I must have been adopted, seeing as how my skin doesn’t seem to be made for the California climate. Some days I’m jealous of the fact that Alaina can use that lotion that smells like raspberries, the kind of lotion that would make my own temperamental skin irritated and inflamed - but then my jealousy kind of floats away, because that’s Alaina. She’s just sweet and perfect and if she could be anything on this planet beside a human, she would probably be a summer fruit.

She’s the only girl I know who doesn’t let her Los Angeles upbringing go to her head (this conclusion was reached based on the fact that she always says “thank you” to cashiers and isn’t opposed to shopping the clearance racks). I think one day if I ever get famous I want her to star in my first film; even though she says she doesn’t “give a shit about Hollywood,” I’m pretty sure she’d be gorgeous on the screen.

* * * * *
And it all starts happening: The nominations came out today and I get that familiar warm feeling behind my eyes. My fingers tingle and it may be from Alaina’s Vicodin, but I think it’s just excitement over the names of films printed in shiny black newspaper ink:

Best Picture:
• Elizabeth
• Life Is Beautiful
• Saving Private Ryan
• The Thin Red Line
• Shakespeare in Love

Best Director:
• Steven Spielberg – Saving Private Ryan
• Roberto Benigni – Life Is Beautiful
• John Madden – Shakespeare in Love
• Terrence Malick – The Thin Red Line
• Peter Weir – The Truman Show

This list of nominations goes on to the next page and I’m satisfied and already circling my predictions in my head. I’m already envisioning the perfect Oscar ensembles for Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep. I’m already wondering who Edward Norton will have draped on his arm as he strolls down the red carpet.

I hope it’s me.

(I don’t write that last bit in the journal, about Edward Norton, because during my last session Call Me Linda read the summary of my dream involving Billy Bob Thorton drinking a vial of my blood and she asked me if I had ever felt sexually attracted to an older relative.)

* * * * *
Alaina and I have been having all kinds of fun adventures together over the past few weeks, usually with the aid of the credit card my workaholic father has decided to give me out of the guilt of never having been there for me as a child (his own therapy is paying off for him and me, I guess). Like last weekend we met some dark Italian or Hispanic guys on the strip who told us they would rent us a boat for the afternoon for a few hundred dollars. So maybe this sounded a little sketchy but I was feeling rebellious and the men were kind of fawning over Alaina even though she didn’t give them a passing glance. She shrugged and said, “Why not,” so I went to the ATM. We laid out on the deck of the boat in the sun and got tan and one of the guys brought out a Polaroid camera and asked us if he could take our picture. He said he knew “movie people,” and although that’s the oldest trick in the book we let him take our picture because we were bored and it was kind of thrilling, too.

But we’re just as happy to spend weekends barricaded in my room with a stack of Elle magazines and the television perpetually blaring MTV. It sounds like a Valley Girl life, and maybe it is, except we look nothing like that Clueless bunch, and certainly we dress better. We hotbox the room, stuffing old t-shirts underneath the door and around the window. We sit on the floor with the multicolored bubbler between us and I fawn over the idea of starting a pop-rock girl band, something like The Runaways in the 70s, but much cooler, and Alaina presses her perfectly manicured fingers to her eyelids and says, “I wish things would stop fucking happening.”

* * * * *
And it’s finally here: the night my fate is decided. You can find us in my room now, on Oscar night, high and buzzed on a bottle of expensive rice wine. MTV is certainly not playing, though; the television is turned to ABC because everything’s getting serious.

“Seventy-one years,” Alaina whistles. “This show is older than my grandma.”

Alaina, it’s safe to say, could care less about the Academy Awards. She may be the only person in Los Angeles to feel this way. But she’s content to nurse her chipped highball glass filled with wine and sigh in a kind of dreamy way when Aerosmith sings “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” from Armageddon, so maybe there’s hope for her, still.

Saving Private Ryan has already won Best Film Editing and Best Cinematography and Best Sound Mixing and Sound Editing, too, so I’m quiet and tearing at the skin around my fingernails. Even the sight of Kim Basinger in her beautiful, pale green vintage Escada gown cannot lift my spirits.

I can’t have this be another war year.

You’re already born half-dead in this town, because when you’re born they suck most of the childhood out of you and throw it to the paparazzi and the gawkers and the aging divas who thrive on youth potions, so by the time you reach age ten you may as well already be thirty, for all you’ve seen and heard and experienced. And if this is another year for war movies, they may as well just ship me off to The Betty Ford Center now because that’s sure as hell where I’ll end up, after all of this bullshit.

I’ve resigned myself to my miserable fate and motion for Alaina to pass the joint my way.

She hesitates before handing it to me. “I worry about you sometimes, you know?” she sighs. “I know that sounds stupid.”

I inhale, letting the smoke fill my lungs. It burns the back of my throat and I don’t say anything.

“You have so much fucking potential. I just feel like sometimes you’re just kind of floating there in limbo, and no one can help you because you won’t let anyone in.”

I exhale and shrug, my eyes still glued to the television screen.

“How’re we supposed to know exactly what we want?” I ask her. I turn to glance at her, and she stares back at me with big brown eyes that remind me of warm syrup.

“I mean, God. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told my parents I want to be a movie director,” I say. “For some reason they can’t seem to get that through their minds. They talk to me about acting. And then, after hearing about it so much, I start to think: Should I want to be an actor?”

Alaina tucks a stray blonde hair behind her ear. I continue, “And at school. I have people from the drama department up my ass about what I want for the next production. I have my guidance counselor asking me what I want out of my high school career. And on top of everything else, I have my therapist sitting there and flat-out asking me: What do you want?”

Maybe it’s the alcohol, but I can’t stop myself. “And everyone’s pestering me about this fucking awards show. They keep asking, ‘What makes this so great?’ But you know what it is? I just love it so much because everyone goes into the awards knowing exactly what they want out of it. And unfortunately that’s not how life works. So please tell me you have an answer for me. How’re we supposed to know exactly what we want?”

* * * * *
She doesn’t have time to answer because the tables have turned: The Best Original Musical or Comedy Score goes to: Shakespeare in Love! Best Original Screenplay: Shakespeare in Love! Best Supporting Actress: Judi Dench for Shakespeare in Love!

I think I may have started crying, and at the same time smoke is pouring out of my nostrils thick and hot, and Alaina doesn’t quite know what to do so she kind of places a hand on my knee and squeezes.

Best Actress: Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love! I’ve fallen onto my back and I’m suddenly struck by how solid the floor is beneath my palms, and I can feel the pain biting at my fingertips where I’ve peeled away the skin out of nervousness, and I vow that if this good luck keeps up I won’t ever bite at them again, and maybe I’ll even calm it down with my artistic antics for a little while. And maybe it’s the weed that’s making me feel this way, but I suddenly have this idea like I have been let in on some perfect Hollywood secret but I can’t quite pin it down yet.

It hardly even registers that Spielberg wins Best Director (because I am now operating on a higher plane), but when Harrison Ford steps onto the stage holding the envelope with the winner of Best Picture I am brought crashing back down to earth. I sit up quickly and the stale air in the room is choking me but I try to hold my breath, anyway.

And suddenly I am jumping up and down like Roberto Benigni, hollering and waving my arms, because it’s all Shakespeare in Love, and Alaina with those big brown eyes grabs my face in between her hands and kisses me hard on the mouth. And it’s kind of scary but I find myself melting into the softness of her lips and she’s saying, “You just know!”

I break away because I realize that I actually just kissed my best friend, but I don’t feel horrified or nauseated or anything like that; more than anything I feel kind of pleasantly surprised, like I just witnessed some underdog independent film sweep all the categories, and maybe I kind of knew it would all along. And I feel so grounded in the moment, with Alaina smiling at me in this really goofy way, and the pot and alcohol thrumming through my system. She reaches over and squeezes my hand and at least for a moment I can easily say that is all that I want.

Danielle Villano is from Northern New Jersey and attends SUNY Purchase, where she majors in Creative Writing. She was featured in the 2011 Poetry Ark Anthology and Italics Mine, and was the 2011 Ginny Wray Prize recipient in Fiction from SUNY Purchase. When not writing, Danielle enjoys photography, movies, and attending theme parties. Visit her fashion and lifestyle blog at loveandlookpretty.blogspot.com.

Ilana Panich-Linsman is a photojournalist and multimedia producer in Western Massachusetts. She is a graduate of the Platypus Workshop (2005); Eddie Adams Workshop, Barnstorm XXII (2009); and the International Center of Photography’s Documentary Photography and Photojournalism full-time program (2009), where she was awarded the Director’s Fellowship. In 2009, she was a finalist at the New York Photo Awards and was nominated for the World Press Photo Joop Suart Masterclass. Her work was on display in July 2010 at the Foto8 Summer Show in London. In June, 2010, Ilana was awarded the Lumix Multimedia Award at the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalists in Hannover, Germany. Visit her online portfolio at ilanapl.com.

RIVKA is a Pittsburgh-based electronic band comprised of Reggie Wilkins and Rivka Rose. "Kid Animal" is the opening track from their 2011 self-titled release. Stream or download more of their songs on Bandcamp, or visit the band on Facebook.

P.S. Did you miss Storychord's "Around the Campfire" CMJ event? Artist Andrea Sparacio (Issue 36 and event backdrop creator) has posted a full write up that includes photos plus streaming audio of that night's spooky story readers and musical sets from Will Stratton & Katie Mullins!

ISSUE #37: Brandon Bell, Jessica Brookes-Parkhill, Cloud Seeding (feat. Marissa Nadler)

2011-10-31T09:31:00.000-04:00

Photograph by Jessica Brookes-Parkhill

IT SCRAPES THE LONELY
by Brandon Bell

Anzel leaned face-first into the chain-link backstop and watched the Little Brewers warm up their arms, bobble balls, lose pop-ups in the afternoon sun. Store-bought fireworks sprayed dim colors in the parking lot. Clarence, playing first, loped to fetch a ball overthrown from third. “Smart gloves,” Anzel hollered. Clarence waved as if swatting a mosquito. Anzel pulled the leash. Moe rose stiffly from her dirt bed and followed along the bleachers.

“What kind of dog’s that?” asked a man from the front row.

Issue #37 soundtrack: Cloud Seeding (feat. Marissa Nadler) "Ink Jar/Unquestioning"

“Bernese mountain,” Anzel said.

“Look at that long black fur. What a big old beaut.”

Anzel led Moe onto the field and told her to sit in the coach’s box behind first base. “You look like Frank Thomas,” he told Clarence.

“You’re cleaning it up when she shits on the field,” Clarence said. “Fireworks tonight.”

“That’s tonight?” Anzel said.

“July Fourth, dummy. I need a ride home.”

“Well yeah, man. So your coach can’t do it.”

The kid at third bounced a ball to Clarence. It clanged off the fence, a foot from Moe.

“So where’s LeBron going?” Anzel said. “I bet New Jersey.”

“Only LBJ knows for sure,” Clarence said. “Why you worrying about him? You need to think about you instead of what some millionaire’s gonna do.”

“You know what? I don’t care what LeBron’s gonna do. I just ain’t got nothing else to talk to you—”

A ball shot through Anzel’s line of sight, knuckled down and crushed Moe’s face. She capsized, legs straight like a stuffed horse, yelping after a second of death. “You’re okay,” Anzel said, holding her head. Onlookers squealed or didn’t breathe. Anzel swathed the blood streaming from Moe’s nose. Her cry cooled to rattled breathing. The coach of the Brewers squeezed Anzel’s shoulder.

“Let me see,” the coach said.

“I’m doing this,” Anzel said.

“You’re smothering her.”

“I said I can fix it.”

“This is scaring the kids.”

Anzel pushed him, inadvertently tugging the leash and dragging Moe to her feet. “Little dumb bastard,” Anzel said to the coach, backing away. He wiped his bloody hands on the butt of his jeans and dragged Moe off the field, the crowd cheering like for hobbled athlete. When he reached the bleachers, a woman pressed a bandana to Moe’s nose.

“You’re lucky. She could’ve been killed,” the woman said.

Anzel shrank into Moe’s neck fur and scratched her pulsing stomach. The Brewers lined up behind the backstop for a pre-game pep talk. One of the kids asked, “Who hit the dog?”

“It doesn’t matter who threw it,” the coach said.

“He shouldn’t have had the dog on the field in the first place,” a parent said.

Anzel kept his head against Moe’s neck. The Little Reds scored six quick runs. Brewer parents muttered about Clarence’s shaky play at first base. After the Brewers lucked into out three and Clarence disappeared to the dugout, Anzel dragged Moe to the parking lot. He didn’t feel bad. Clarence could find another ride home.

* * * * *
Lit by the computer screen, Anzel waded through job websites—Monster, Career Builder, Louisville Works. Hope was soured by pyramid schemes disguised as employment. Moe lied on the bed, eyes scattered, unstirred by the amateur fireworks cracking through the neighborhood. Anzel tipped back the brandy, getting horny, incoming thoughts of Henny. Moe sighed through her nose. “You’re alive,” Anzel said. He stood, planning to pet the dog, suddenly feeling Henny’s pull. He had to see her.

He crept through the dark house, passing his mom’s television tomb.

“Where you going?” his mom asked.

“For a walk,” Anzel said, continuing to the back door.

“Take Moe with you.”

“She’s still all goofed up.”

“Better watch her. Dogs can turn depressive when they suffer brain trauma.”

“You got brain trauma,” Anzel muttered, stepping outside. He swished through the dewy backyard to the alley. Miniature pink explosions popped across the sky. Anzel traced a firework tail, wondering where poor people get money to burn.

He came to a shack tucked in the alley and knocked on the back window. Seconds later, Henny flipped aside the blanket covering the window. Despite the heat, she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. The smell of Funyuns seeped outside.

“Your parents awake?” Anzel asked.

“Wish they wasn’t,” Henny said. “I stole some stuff from daddy. But he’d smell it if I light up.” She rolled up her sleeves. Cuts on her arms, beads of blood.

“God,” Anzel said.

“What?”

“Why'd you cut yourself like that?”

“I like the way it hurts. Daddy told mom about you coming around.”

Standing outside, Anzel pulled her against him. “Well, what’s it matter to her?”

“Because, Annie. We need to talk about this.”

“You ain’t pregnant.” He kissed her. She responded with a peck, talking into his mouth.

“I told you I was. I am, Annie. Stop it.”

“That thing could be anybody’s.”

“Now, listen—”

“We can’t have no baby.”

“Well we’re gonna.”

Anzel had never asked her age. He kept hold with one arm and brushed a finger against her lips. “It ain’t mine.” Wide eyed, she took the finger in her mouth. The door swung open. Anzel unplugged her mouth and ran. A man yelled, “Damn you, get back here.” Anzel didn’t look back.

When he got home, he carried Moe to the car and drove to the interstate. “I didn’t screw her,” he whispered, the rear view angled to see Moe. “I never once screwed her. That was the alcohol. Don’t it effect everyone like that? Ain’t everyone got these secrets?”

Driving across the bridge to Indiana, fireworks reflected as pompoms in the Ohio River. Anzel kept the wheel steady and, like a good drunk, abided speed limits all the way to the casino. The alcohol on his breath kept him from using the courtesy valet service. He parked deep in the parking lot, left Moe asleep in the backseat, and hurried into the mall-like casino entry.

When he reached the giant gambling room, slot machines blurted like greeters to hell for horrible noises. His sinuses opened to the chlorine potpourri used to mask the cigarette smoke. He ordered a beer at the bar and took a lap through the casino, breezing by old people wearing oxygen masks and pushing walkers that had tennis ball feet. He entered a row of slots in which a blonde girl sat alone, transfixed by the spinning sherbet glow of the screen. A lanyard around her neck stretched to a card stuck in the machine. Taking a seat, Anzel peeked down the open collar of her American striped shirt.

“What’s this game?” he asked.

Watching the screen, she exhaled a smoke cloud and said, “Green Eden.”

“Good a game to go broke on as any. I like your laugh. Let’s get a drink.”

“I’m rolling here.” She pushed a button on the machine, spinning wheels. He put his face by hers. The formless pixels blotted his eyes and reflected green on her brow.

“You can’t see nothing sitting this close,” he said. “Come on. Just one drink.”

“The doctor really did say I could have one,” she said.

“Doctor knows best.”

“Hope so.” She scooted back to reveal a watermelon belly.

“Ho.”

“Baby’s making me fat,” she said.

“You here alone?”

“Mom’s here. So’s my dumb ass brother.”

He put his arm around her shoulder. “I’m Anzel.”

“My name’s Brittany.” She stubbed out her cigarette and then took a new one from the pack. Lost again in the screen, she mis-aimed with the lighter. Anzel stole it and lit the cigarette for her.

“I might go get that drink,” he said, pocketing the lighter.

“I’m jealous. I really do want one.”

“Then let’s go.”

Biting her lip, she yanked the member card out of the machine. The card hung from a lanyard and balanced on her bulbous stomach, shaking as she followed.

“We should go up to the roof,” Anzel said.

“Up there’s boring. You promised me a drink.”

“I’ll get you one, jeez. I’ve just never been up there.”

Going upstairs, Anzel talked her ear off: “These people assume I’m the daddy. Should you be smoking? Nah, playing. Well ain’t this roof nice and private. The casino, big as it is, can’t spring for fireworks? Eh, cloudy now anyway. Let’s check out the river.”

From the railing, they watched the smooth water made visible by moth-fluttered floodlights. Anzel spit into the stream. “So this really is a boat,” he said.

Brittany laughed. “Why you think they call it the boat?”

“It can’t actually pull away. It’s stuck here.”

“Sure it can. It’s got all the rudders and whatever.”

He didn’t mention the mountings holding the casino in place. “I wonder how many people come up here to make out.”

She hiccuped, holding the cigarette inches from her lips, watching the water.

“I bet everyone comes up here,” he said.

“I’m cold.”

“They come up here and do it.”

“They got cameras.”

“You’re beautiful.”

She pushed off the railing. “I want a Tom Collins. I can have one.”

“Come home with me. I’ll fix you a steak.”

“I need to go back down.”

She started across the roof. He paced in her wake, hoping to slow her down. “Stop.” He darted around and blocked the door, her belly inches from his. “So you win big?”

“That was my lucky slot. What you do for work?”

“I’m between ‘em.”

“Everybody is. My brother might injure himself to get the social security.”

“That works?”

She shrugged. He held up his hand and studied it, as if appraising its worth. She watched the hand hover forth and rake her breasts. She leaked out a laugh that cut short when he leaned in for a kiss.

“Stop,” she said.

“Hey. I’m sorry. You wanted a drink.”

He held open the door; she passed through timid, frightened. He slammed the door and ran toward an Emergency Exit sign across the roof, cussed himself down the fire stairs and through the parking lot. As Anzel approached his car, he saw a man peeing on it. When the man saw Anzel, he jumped into a jeep. As the jeep sped away, a woman laughed out the open driver-side window.

Anzel charged to his car and looked in at Moe. She hadn’t moved, never barked at the man, locked eyes with Anzel. The door shined with urine that dripped into a pond on the concrete. Anzel swung the door open and put Moe’s head in a claw grip.

“You let that asshole mark you as his territory,” Anzel said. “Don’t you got no pride?”

* * * * *
The phone woke Anzel at noon. His mom hollered, “It’s for you, damn it.” He didn’t answer, so she brought the cordless phone to his room and chucked at his back.

“It’s Clarence and he sounds pissed,” she said.

“Will you get out,” Anzel said. She did, and Anzel patted the sheets for the phone and then beeped it off. Heat and sun rolled in through the open window. He twisted out of the sheets, head throbbing. “Where’s Moe?”

“Well I don’t know,” his mom yelled.

“Well who opened the window?” Dressed in last night’s clothes, he went to the window and called for Moe. A fly crawled across the sill and flew inside as Anzel climbed out.

“What to do,” he sang. “No dog, no job, economic, economic, economic.”

He cut through the side yard and started down the sidewalk. In ten steps he was sweaty and breathing tough in the stuffy heat. Store-bought fireworks littered the concrete. He kicked a firework that resembled a blown-up party hat. An old woman was watering plants on her porch. She waved at Anzel, pitcher in hand.

“Too hot for that baby of yours,” she hollered.

“Have you seen her?” Anzel called back.

“Well, no. Is she lost?”

“Yeah. Or no. Probably not.”

“Should I keep an eye out?”

“Sure, but she’ll turn up.”

On he went. He passed the alley leading to Henny’s house and continued toward the shopping district. He stared at the sun. He didn’t yell for Moe. Eyes spotty, he cut through a church parking lot. Exploded firecrackers muffled underfoot. Bottle rocket tails and dead sparklers. He spotted an intact Black Cat among the firework remains. He picked up the two-inch dynamite and twisted the short wick and dug Brittany’s lighter out of his pocket. His first swipe at the starter failed, but the second worked and the wick lit. Holding the Black Cat in his open palm, he positioned his lips to blow, but his mouth O just stared at the sizzle.

“Make fist, lose hand,” Anzel said. “Hand flat, all’s okay.”

He shook his head. Subtle differences mean the world.

“What the hell you doing?” Clarence yelled. He was straddling his bike on the other side of the parking lot. “Useless,” the child said and pedaled toward Anzel.

“I gave you that bike,” Anzel said, running away. “What more you want?”

As he ran, the lit firecracker bounced in his palm, the wick burned to millimeters. Clarence stood to pedal faster and closed the gap twenty feet. Anzel studied his hand as if questioning its use. He staggered to a stop and took aim at Clarence.

“Nothing but net,” Anzel said, balling his fist around the firecracker and reeling back to throw. A tick too slow.

Brandon Bell lives in Louisville, Ky. His work has appeared in Apiary, Leaf Garden, Cricket Online Review, and Inkspill Magazine (United Kingdom). He is writing a story collection called Unending that will feature characters from "It Scrapes The Lonely."

Jessica Brookes-Parkhill is a photographer based in New York. In 2010 Jessica was the Chief Photographer for BreakerNYC.com, New York’s primary online resource for Bboys and Bgirls. She is also available for weddings, birthday parties, events, and candid portrait sessions. Visit her online portfolio at jessibrookes.com.

Cloud Seeding is a music project by guitarist Kevin Serra (This Ascension, Lot 49). The project was conceived as a space for improvisational collaboration to showcase vocalists he admires. For the first single, "Ink Jar/Unquestioning," Serra worked with Boston-based singer Marissa Nadler while she was briefly living in Brooklyn. For more, visit Cloud Seeding on Bandcamp.

ISSUE #36: Emily Lyon, Andrea Sparacio, Graham Patzner

2011-10-17T09:37:00.000-04:00

Illustration by Andrea Sparacio

BORN FROM JETS
by Emily Lyon

“Here comes that motherfucker Tom,” Omar said, motioning with a jerk of his head towards the figure advancing across the lawn from the house. Jillian wanted to ask Omar why he called Tom a motherfucker but she didn’t.

Tom sat down across from them, crossing his legs under himself. “Hi,” he said to Omar. “Hi?” he said to Jillian. He took a package of Camels out of his pants pocket and began to pack it absently against his palm.

Issue #36 soundtrack: Graham Patzner "Brother Jim"

“Tom is my housemate,” Omar said. This was Jillian’s third or fourth time hanging out with Omar. She bought her cigarettes at the gas station where he worked, and she was smoking a half-pack a day, so she went there several times a week. He was tutoring people at the University of Connecticut in Arabic and she was teaching Adult Ed classes in beginning to read Hebrew. Somehow this came up as he gave Jill her smokes one day, and they made plans to meet and try to learn each other’s tongues, each very near branches to the other on the Semitic language tree.

“Yup,” Tom said. He took a drag off the Camel, its end glowing like a tiny neon poppy. Jillian studied him and tried not to be obvious about it.

Omar and Tom lived in a house they called Harvey’s Blue House. They shared a common kitchen and bathroom. The first time she came over, Jillian had made kasha and macaroni for Omar on the lone, single-burner hotplate that Harvey supplied on the counter. “It’s a typical Jewish-American food,” she told him.

“And so I have something Egyptian to show you,” he said. There was a small plastic tape deck on the kitchen table, and Omar put a cassette in, shutting the deck’s door with a click.

“A-la-la-la… habibi tiiiii,” a plaintive voice sang to them as they ate the kasha. Cars sped past the window. The house was near to the road in the front, so its backyard was a better place to spend time—it sloped down from the house’s back door, away from the road, and twenty yards back or so, there was a little glade of forest that separated Harvey’s Blue House from the neighboring house.

* * * * *
Whenever Omar and Jillian were in the yard, Tom would appear and sit down with them, packing his Camels in his hand. He’d quietly listen to Jillian and Omar stutter across and over the sentences they were teaching each other. Their lessons devolved quickly into explaining idioms and translating questions about weed and cigarettes. Tom just sat there, listening.

“What do you do, Tom?” Jillian asked him one day.

“I work on a tobacco farm. I used to do something else but I was injured in the Navy.” The sound of the plastic hitting his palm sounded larger than the space between the three friends’ heads, larger than the whole backyard.

* * * * *
Jillian knocked on the back door of the Blue House. “Habibi tiiiii,” she sang into the open kitchen window. She heard feet coming down the stairs. “Omar told me to let you in,” Tom said as he opened the door. “He’s cutting his hair.”

“He is?” Jillian asked, looking around the empty kitchen. “Who else is here?”

“Just he is,” Tom said. “You should see it. He does it himself.”

Tom led Jillian up the stairs, where, in the bathroom at the top, Omar had his head bent down, his chin tucked into his neck. He was running an electric clipper over his hair. Chunks of hair fell like black snow into the trashcan perched in the pedestal sink.

“I didn’t know you did this,” Jillian gushed.

“This is what I really want to do,” Omar said, unfolding himself and running his hands over his head. “If I can’t teach English, I would like to cut hair. Or teach people how to cut hair.”

“I am impressed! Your haircut looks so professional,” Jillian said. She and Tom smiled at each other.

* * * * *
They’d made out awkwardly on Omar’s little mattress after the haircut and Jillian gave him a handjob. “I’m a virgin,” Omar told her, as she handed him the nearby box of tissue. “I want to be married.”

Jillian looked at him, suddenly feeling naked without her shirt on, and with her skirt tangled around her waist. “You shouldn’t do this, then,” she said. “You should find a wife.”

“We could get married,” Omar said, as a question. He laughed strangely as soon as the d popped off his palate.

Jillian recoiled, grabbing the hem of her skirt and rolling her hips around as she tried to align it with the tops of her knees. “Omar, you don’t make any sense,” she said. She wanted to tell him that he was crazy and that she knew he was fucking with her, but he was hard for her to read. He just laughed in the way he did, and she got up off the bed, pulling her shirt over her shoulders and opening the door. Tom was in the kitchen, staring at a coffee pot. “Hey,” Tom said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

Jillian could tell, from Tom’s total focus on the carafe, that he hadn’t heard anything. The coffee brewer made its t-t-t-t-t sound and Omar came out of his room.

“Coffee break!” Omar said.

Tom reached up to the cupboard and took two more mugs down, placing them next to his on the counter. “How do you guys take it?”

* * * * *
They still met after that, writing vocab on index cards Jillian had cut in half. Omar had begun to say things in vague, frustrated reference to the event:

“What is the Hebrew word for brassiere?”

“Your body was like cake.”

“Cake, that’s a good word to know,” Jillian replied. “I’ll write it down. That’ll be a fun picture to draw.”

* * * * *
“I know you love orange juice,” Omar said, “and I bought you a bottle of it.” This seemed out of character for Omar: to buy a gallon jug of the most expensive juice, with pulp, and least of all, to share it with her. They behaved now solely as study buddies, almost competitive in mastering the other’s language. Neither had since mentioned the day they drank Tom’s coffee.

Jillian was happy to drink the juice, but there was something strange in its sweetness—a viscosity and tang that hit the back of her throat, making her gag. She went over to the sink and turned on the kitchen faucet, testing its coolness with her index finger, and then filled the glass with water, thinning the juice. Shards of pulp floated to the top. She looked at them there, then stirred the water into the juice with her newly cleaned finger, watching them eddy around.

“I like water in the juice,” she said to Omar in Arabic. “And now you?” she asked him in Hebrew. “What could you say now?”

“This is not mine,” Omar said in Hebrew.

Then he said, “This juice was here. Someone else bought it.” Jillian looked at him with puzzlement. He laughed carelessly.

* * * * *
“I have a girlfriend now,” Omar told Jillian, “and I am in love with her.”

“Mazal tov,” Jillian said. “You remember this phrase?”

“Yes, of course,” Omar said. “I am also tutoring others in Arabic, and she is my most diligent student. I don’t feel it is appropriate to be with two women. She would not like that I continue to see you.”

“Whoa,” Jillian said. She didn’t feel hurt by this. Since Omar had called Tom a motherfucker, and she could never see why, laughed at his own sentences to frost them with an additional layer of code, and then passed off Tom’s unopened bottle of juice as a thoughtful gift, she had soured on the idea of Omar as anything other than a tutor or vague professional ally. The three still smoked in Tom’s room at the top of the stairs or out in the yard, in a purely academic relationship, she told herself.

* * * * *
Tom had begun to talk more around Jillian, and when they smoked together, Omar would invariably fall asleep on Tom’s bed, leaving Jillian and Tom alone to talk in pure English, without any lessons.

Tom drove an olive green Saab 96, which he described his affection for only anecdotally. “There was one time I was workin’ on it and I took out all the seats and I flipped a pickle bucket over and bungeed it to the floor by its handle and the door frame,” he said, smiling thinly, “and I drove by a bunch of cops and none of ‘em noticed anything because the bucket was the perfect height!”

Jillian laughed.

* * * * *
Tom, Jillian, and Omar sat on the floor around a small table and passed a joint around. “You know that you can make a smoking device out of a toilet paper tube?” Tom said.

“You waste very much time with these things,” Omar griped, taking two successive drags.

“You’re wasting my time, bogarting that joint,” Jillian said, extending her hand. Omar passed the joint, got up and lay on the bed. He didn’t sulk, but grumbled in unintelligible quick Arabic before beginning to snore.

“You know how Omar and me punch each others’ knuckles when we see each other?” Tom asked Jillian, looking out the side of his glasses at Omar’s bare feet, dangled limply over edge of the mattress.

“Yeah.”

“Yesterday he held his fist out and kept saying ‘Respect, brutha, respect,’ and there was a cigarette between his fingers and he fist-jabbed me with the cigarette.” Tom had a welt the size of a dime and the color of salmon roe on his middle knuckle.

“It was lit?” Jillian asked.

“Yeah,” Tom said.

Jillian felt at that moment a tiny facet of surety that she wanted to help Tom in his life. Tom was gentle and quiet. He didn’t seem like a motherfucker. She never understood why Omar was unkind to him, and the way Tom stared down at his hand now made her angry for him.

She stood up, feeling her feet and hands tingle, and the bubble of highness between her brain and skull. She kicked the corner of the mattress where Omar slept. “We exit the room,” she hissed down at him in Arabic, as he opened his eyes. “We are going downstairs, and your girlfriend wouldn’t want you getting stoned up here anyway.”

* * * * *
“Omar got engaged,” Tom told Jillian. “He’s gonna move out.”

As they rolled downhill, she watched Tom’s left foot as it pressed the clutch flat and he pulled the lever under the dash. “This is for freewheel mode, and you can shift without the clutch,” Tom said, not waiting for Jillian’s reply. “You know Saab’s slogan? You know what they say?”

“No,” Jillian said.

“Born From Jets,” Tom said.

“Because of their design?”

“No, ‘cause they were really born from fighter jets. The company made airplane engines. Freewheel is like a coast, like a glide.”

* * * * *
On the mattress upstairs where Omar had always passed out, Jillian and Tom stared at each other. “The way you have sex is so funny and slow,” she said. “You really take time and make it sloooooooow. I’ve never been with anyone who did it like that before.”

“I try to make it like a massage,” he explained. “I try to make my movements aerodynamic.”

“Born from jets,” Jillian said, laughing.

“I wish I was.” Tom looked absently beyond Jillian’s head and bare shoulder to the pointed tops of the spruces in the back yard and the puffy clouds above them. Jillian knew what was behind her, out the window. She imagined he could only see pale fields of green and blue without his glasses.

* * * * *
“I want you to have the Saab. I’m going to give it to you,” Tom told Jillian.

“Why? Are you going to buy a different car? Why don’t you just sell it to someone for what it’s worth?”

“No, no. I want you to learn how to fix it, and I want you to have it.”

After Omar moved out, Tom got the garage spot. Jillian had held a timing light over the radiator’s fan as Tom tried to pull a belt over its pulley, stretching it taut with a screwdriver. “How do you know all this stuff?” she asked him.

“Before I worked on the farm, I was in the Navy. I was gonna be a jet engine mechanic. Then I got hurt. I hit my head. Then I moved to Oregon and bought a Saab out there.”

Tom kept his answers short and vague to almost any question. He took time to draw up sentences.

“Omar told me that you’re a philosopher,” Tom said quickly after this.

“Aren’t we all?” Jillian asked.

“I have this Wittgenstein book that was my mother’s in school, and I want to read it,” he said. “I told Omar that and he said that you were a good teacher, and that you were a philosopher and could do it.”

Jillian realized that something had been lost in translation. “I majored in philosophy, if that’s what you mean,” she said, “but OK. We can read it together.”

* * * * *
Tom brought the book down to the kitchen table. “OK,” Jillian said. “Look. We’ll just read a part, and then you can tell me what you think the theme or crux of that paragraph is, and we can go through the text slowly together that way. He isn’t so easy to understand.” She began to read. Tom looked at her, nodding. “OK, so what do you think he was saying?”

“Everyone goes his own way,” Tom said. He said it bluntly, with a quick snap of his chin, as if it were fact.

“Well, I’m not sure that’s what he said, but maybe we need some more context to find the motif.” She read the next paragraph, much more slowly than the first. “OK, so what did you get from that? He’s talking about some of the same things as in the last section. Do you see any patterns?”

“Everyone’s goin’ his own way?” Tom said, a little bit more tentatively.

Jillian exhaled loudly. “I’m not sure where you’re getting that. What do you mean?”

“Just read some more, let me see what I can get,” Tom said.

Jillian read the next paragraph, but she felt nervous now. She knew from the way Tom looked at her hands on the book that he wasn’t understanding anything she said. She wanted out of this exercise, but she kept reading. She came to a break in the text, and widened her eyes at Tom. “Well?”

“Everyone’s going his own way.”

Jillian shook her head in frustration. “I think you need to start with some more basic philosophy, even just logic patterns and stuff, because he’s not saying that at all. I don’t know why you think that. Which words make you think that everyone’s going his own way?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I wish that I could read it and understand it. “

“I’m not sure what you expect from yourself. Why do you pick the hardest guy to begin analyzing?”

“I feel stupid. I feel like I don’t understand anything and that I’m stupid. I wish that I had skills like you do that make it easier for you to talk. I just can’t get abstract things. “

Jillian suddenly felt sick. Tom’s face didn’t change as he’d spoken, or as he looked at her. “You do get abstract things,” she countered. “How can you just pop the hood and know what’s wrong? You hear a noise and you know what it is, the engine gets too hot and you know why, it’s running weird and you know why. That’s abstract.”

“It’s not abstract, Jill. It’s just not. The engine either goes or it doesn’t. There’s only one answer for every mechanical problem. There’s nothing abstract about it at all. “

“It seems abstract to me. I couldn’t do it. You have this huge gift and you want to write it off and waste your time fucking around with books about theory.”

“You changed the spark plugs last week. You replaced the distributor cap.”

“You taught me how to do it.”

“And if you can’t teach me how to read this, then why not?”

* * * * *
Tom’s headaches were getting worse. Jillian had brought him to the VA hospital a few times. Now she was tired of bringing him, mostly because of the desk staff. She wasn’t sure why the doctors there couldn’t just fix him, why they always seemed to avoid his questions. “Shouldn’t you get another MRI? Can’t anyone do anything? Can’t anyone give you something to help you?”

“Jill,” he’d said into her answering machine, “I have to go to the hospital, but not for my regular appointment. Can you bring me? Or they’ll charge me for parking?”

Tom sounded empty, searching, and Jillian could picture his eyes, squinted up with pain, and the wrinkles running across his forehead. She hit the stop button and went right back outside, driving to the Blue House to pick Tom up.

On this night, Tom was admitted.

They told him to sit in a wheelchair. “I know you can drive the Saab, but don’t,” he said, as a nurse put a plastic bracelet on his wrist. “I think you need to practice more.”

Jillian left Tom at the hospital. She got into her Honda and drove back to Harvey’s. She knew Omar still worked at the Citgo on Tuesdays. She had the key to the Saab, and she got inside it and drove it to the station.

Omar was behind the counter, reading USA Today. “Long time, no see,” Omar said. He smiled at Jillian. Jillian remembered the way they’d sang along with the tape, the way Omar put his face through an oatmeal can and said “Smoke meeee,” the funny fake American accent he used when he was trying to teach her new words. She and Tom had just said to each other that the Blue House seemed quiet without him. Then she remembered the juice and Tom’s blistered knuckle.

“I just brought Tom to the hospital,” she said. “He told them something and they admitted him and now he’s inside there.” She felt her throat tighten and the sweetness of mucus, like she had to keep herself from crying.

“I want to know why you called him a “mooderfoocker,” she choked, imitating his accent and narrowing her eyes. “I want to know why you would be mean to him.”

“Look. He’s going to make trouble for you, Jillian. None of us are perfect. He’s not such a bad guy, but he certainly annoyed me. He always wanted to be in my space.”

Jillian stared at him. “Give me some Shermans,” she said, pulling a crumpled ten out of her wallet and flattening it against her thigh.

“We are never all good or nice,” Omar said.

Jillian thought to ask him about his fiancee and his new place and if he was getting his cosmetology license, but instead took the cellophane wrapper off the cigarettes by its gold ribbon and crushed it in her hand, then pressed it into the counter in front of Omar, where it unfurled, crackling and blooming. “See you,” she said.

* * * * *
Jillian felt sure that Tom would be glad to see the Saab in the VA parking lot, if she could find a space he could see from the window. Visiting hours ended at 8, and she was out at 6. She had begun to always take back roads, so that she could take the corners on the freewheel. She could picture Tom’s wan half-smile when he’d see the car. As she drove, she felt the clutch slipping. It wasn’t grabbing. She upshifted to fourth, gunning it, and heard a grinding sound.

“If you can’t find it, grind it,” Tom had joked when she was just learning to drive it. “You’ll know it’s in the wrong spot if it squeals like that, and then you go back into neutral and try again.” She shifted back into neutral, feeling the shift loosen, and tried this time to third, then to second, as the car slowed. She heard the grinding again, shifted to neutral, and pulled over to the side of the road. She pressed on the hazard lights. A yellow > sign reflected them back at her. She opened her box of cigarettes and pulled her sweater close to her body. She stood next to the car, smelling something vaguely rubbery. She lit her cigarette and dragged on it, waiting. She waited there for someone to help her.

Emily Lyon published 20 issues of her zine, Daffodil, from 1993-2003, has been published in The Long River Review and Noctua Review, and is an MFA student at Southern Connecticut State University.

Andrea Sparacio is a graphic designer, artist, and illustrator based in Brooklyn. Her artwork has appeared in magazines such as Vogue Patterns, Life In Action, Slice, and Hue, as well as on giftware, wall décor, greeting cards, and commissioned illustrations for a variety of clients. Andrea’s first illustrated novel, The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse (author Steven C. Schlozman, MD), released this past March from The Hachette Book Group, Grand Central Publishing. Visit her online portfolio at artsparrow.com

Graham Patzner is a musician based in Oakland, California. Stream more of his work on Myspace and Bandcamp.

P.S. NYC! Don't miss Storychord's FREE event tonight!

Kick off CMJ, your Halloween holiday, and Storychord.com's next batch of issues TONIGHT from 7-9pm at Housingworks Bookstore Cafe in New York City.

The campfire-themed event is FREE and will feature performances from past musical contributors WILL STRATTON (Issue #10) and KATIE MULLINS (Issue #1); spooky story readings from fiction writers MILES KLEE (Issue #7), TIM MUCCI, and MICHELLE AUGELLO-PAGE; art by ANDREA SPARACIO (Issue #36); plus freshly-made S'MORES from the Cafe!

Storychord.com presents "Around the Campfire" Oct. 17 at HousingWorks

2011-10-03T09:30:00.008-04:00

Kick off CMJ, your Halloween holiday, and Storychord.com's next batch of issues on Monday, October 17, from 7-9pm at Housingworks Bookstore Cafe in New York City.

The campfire-themed event is FREE and will feature performances from past musical contributors WILL STRATTON (Issue #10) and KATIE MULLINS (Issue #1); spooky story readings from fiction writers MILES KLEE (Issue #7), TIM MUCCI, and MICHELLE AUGELLO-PAGE; art by ANDREA SPARACIO; plus freshly-made S'MORES from the Cafe!

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Now reading for Issues 36-40!

2011-08-15T10:15:00.003-04:00

Storychord is entering a couple-issue hiatus this week -- fittingly, at the site's 1.5 year anniversary -- for a formal reading period. Please feel free to forward this Call For Submissions to all the talented fiction writers, musicians, and visual writers in your social circles!

ABOUT THE SITE

Every other Monday, collaborative online journal Storychord.com features one short story, one image, and a one-song "soundtrack" -- each by a different underexposed, talented up-and-comer. All issues are thoughtfully curated by Sarah Lynn Knowles (SARAHSPY, The Furnace Review, and the soon-to-debut Prizefight Press).

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

To submit work, carefully follow all guidelines below. Submissions are held in consideration for up to 6 months. Please note, you will hear back only if your work has been selected for publication, and Storychord is currently unable to offer financial compensation to contributors.

Writers may submit short fiction (4,000 words maximum) either in the body of an email or as an .rtf attachment to storychord@yahoo.com. Be sure to send a short bio, including any recent or upcoming publication credits and your website link.

Photographers & other visual artists may submit links to images/portfolios (no attachments, please) to storychord@yahoo.com. Be sure to send a short bio, including any recent or upcoming gallery/publication credits and your website link.

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ISSUE #35: Jacob Silverman, John Paul Kesling, Yes Know

2011-08-01T09:14:00.003-04:00

Painting by John Paul Kesling

ROSE GARDEN
by Jacob Silverman

I drive over to Ivan's house, where he tells me about a feature he discovered on the Los Angeles Times' website. It's called the Homicide Report, he says, and it catalogs every killing in the city and offers the exact location, using Google Maps, the type of weapon used, the name of the victim, and other information. It's amazing, he tells me.

That sounds awful, I say.

Why?

Why would you want to track murders in the city? Isn't that a police thing?

I can search by fucking gender.

Issue #35 soundtrack: Yes Know "In Balance"

He clicks on a rectangular graphic advertising an "interactive map."

See these dots?

He waves his hand at the map on his screen, which is strewn with red circles.

Yeah. Why are some of them bigger than others?

That means that more than one person was murdered in that area.

He hovers over one of the large circles and a column on the right highlights several rows listing murder victims' names, ages, and dates of death.

Yup, four murders there this year.

This is brutal stuff, Ivan.

It's incredible. I can go back to 2007. More than 2,730 murders to sort through. Spectacular. It's like a yearbook of murder. An anthology of murder.

Why do you keep saying that word?

Murder?

I nod.

It's sort of a self-actualizing, Buddhist thing. The Homicide Report, the map, saying the word -- murder; murder; murder -- makes it more real to me. There are linkages, connections.

Makes no sense to me.

I mean, look at this. All these people connected by this. People dead, murdered [the word comes from deep in his throat] all around us. They should put up plaques. Or make marks in the street, like in Sarajevo.

Sarajevo?

Yeah. They call 'em Sarajevo Roses. People filled in small mortar craters with red resin. After the war there. Looks like a rose -- or a waxy blood splatter.

Suddenly a photo of one of these is on his screen. It looks as he said.

I lean back from the rose on the screen, taking him in. His black hair is oily and matted on his head, revealing slivers of white scalp. Small dark red lines run across his lips where they've dried and cracked and bled.

He swings a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue out of somewhere beneath his desk and takes a pull. He gestures toward me with it, his eyes wide and questioning.

I shake my head. It's eleven in the morning.

* * * * *
On my way out I stumble into Ivan's mom, Cecelia.

And how's Ivan? she asks.

How is he?

Yes, she says. Her murky grey eyes blink at an unreasonable speed. They bulge gruesomely, as if she recently upgraded to a larger model and has shoehorned them into her sockets.

He's obsessing over a website that tracks murders in the city. He talks about Sarajevo.

Yes, well, we think he may turn out to be a journalist after all.

Ivan's twenty-five and has had an equal number of jobs. I don't think he'll turn out to be anything, but I don't tell her that.

She's probably had a facelift (not her first). Her skin looks stretched like an elastic mask; the tension emerges near her cheekbones, below those massive eyes, and I begin to think that one day her skin will split open, perforated by the same cheekbones asked to buttress it.

Yes, well, I have to be going, I say.

So do we, she says, and I realize that her husband, Morris, has appeared next to her, as if a phantom. We have a party to attend!

The theme's In the Jungle! Morris shouts, offering a stiff-waisted shimmying dance before exhaling with a chesty huff.

Morris wears a leopard-spotted shirt that's an affront to jungle camouflage. In one hand he grips a shofar, a prop somehow chosen for the evening. He toots lamely on it, covering up his sound with exaggerated coughs and rubbing a hand over his head, which, save an encircling crown of spiky grey-black hair, is bald and liver-spotted -- the result of long days spent golfing his way through an early, lucrative retirement. (His mantra: Dotcom boom: got out when a lot of nothing was worth a lot of something.) He looks like a sick man trying to put on a brave face. To steel himself and his family he summons an overabundance of enthusiasm for every activity, which only reminds them that something is wrong.

Onward, my African Queen! Morris says, latching a hand around Cecelia's waist. She waves goodbye. As he tugs her out the door, her eyebrows perk up into faceless birds -- or perhaps that's how they always are, ever signaling a surprise that may never come.

* * * * *
After receiving a couple feverish e-mails, I drop by Ivan's house later in the week, but he's still in his room, parsing the Homicide Report.

We've had eight murders in the last ten days, he says. A major spike!

What's causing it?

Unknown. Must be something out there, he says, almost mystically. Here's a four-year-old bludgeoned to death by a relative, a brother-in-law who argued with the father. The rest are gunshots. A few gangbangers, some stray bullets, a guy at an ATM. Looks like typical stuff.

Ivan, want to go out?

Where?

Anywhere.

Not really.

He's printed out a half-dozen photos of Sarajevo Roses and taped them to the wall behind his desk.

Nice photos, I say.

He grunts.

Where'd you get them?

He's quiet for a minute, then says, Uhh, Wikipedia. Also found a dude in Bosnia and e-mailed him. Named Alec. Nice guy. Turned me on to a geotagged set of photos online. Maps and photos together. Can see where they all are. Precise shit.

* * * * *
I run into his parents again as I'm leaving. They're lugging bags out the door, two to a hand.

Where are you going?

Oh yes, hi, Sam, his mother says. We're going on a little vacation. Australia. Did you know the seasons are reversed there?

The grey eyes blink at humming-bird speed.

I have heard.

But not the water in the toilet, Morris says. That's a myth!

She looks at him as if this is a family secret he's spilled. His face collapses into a confused expression that seems to predate this conversation.

Well, we're off, she says. Please check on Ivan if you don't mind. Thanks, you're a doll. She leans forward and kisses my cheek, leaving a slick trail running close to my mouth. She smells pungent, some citrus-vanilla perfume. For a moment a gossamer filament of saliva hangs in the air, connecting us.

* * * * *
I don't visit Ivan for two weeks. I've taken on a few more shifts at the restaurant, trying to make some more money, and I don't have the stomach for the Homicide Report, which is all he wants to talk about when I call.

Three murders last week, Sam. All blacks, all gunshots: what do you make of that?

Why're you asking me this? Why do you talk like that?

What, it's not racist. That's who they are. Were.

* * * * *
He sends me e-mails, mostly about the Homicide Report. Some drift into talk of the Sarajevo Roses, which he sees as connected, if only through ceremony, like sister cities. He's been corresponding more with Alec, the Bosnian. Alec is a photographer, Ivan says. He's also trying to get to America. Thinks he can do some good work here, photographing ruined American industrial sites. It'd be an interesting change, he said. Or some kind of counterpoint. I don't fully understand it yet.

Not wanting to indulge him too much, I e-mail back, asking how Ivan can help an amateur Bosnian photographer get to the United States. Ivan responds indignantly, thinking I've challenged him somehow.

We've already started the process, he writes. Alec is shipping me boxes now. Stuff he wants me to hold onto before he gets here.

This seems like an awful idea, but I don't want to take it any further. I Google images of Sarajevo Roses. One website calls them concrete scars, a phrase that seems to gesture at something bigger, like all good euphemisms. I lie in bed and think about potholes, our concrete scars, and what color resin they deserve.

A few days later, another Ivan e-mail arrives: Alec will be here in a month. I hope you'll make room for him in our circle.

* * * * *
After a time, I give in, maybe to some sense of guilt, and visit Ivan. He buzzes me through the front gate and I enter through a side door that he's left unlocked while his parents are gone. Lets the deliverymen come straight to me, he said.

He looks thin and a bit dirty -- a few whiteheads on his neck beg to be popped -- though some light stubble and an electric razor plugged in near his desk tell me that he hasn't forsaken shaving. On the right side of his face is a candy-bar-sized white bandage stretching from temple to mid-cheek.

What happened to your face?

Ach, well, -- he taps his temple with a finger; the gesture resembles someone pointing a gun -- a spider laid eggs in my face. Can you believe that? Little baby spiders -- in my fucking face. Or at least, that was the fear. Doctor said that the bite and swelling were suspicious, alarming. Guy had to make a cut, drain, clean, sew it up. That kind of thing. But he says that all shall be well now. It'll heal up in a week or so. All shall be well, Sammy.

I shake my head. No longer retreating towards disbelief, only wonderment.

Doctor's appointment aside, there's no sign that he's left his room in days. His hair has grown shaggy and tangled, wavy strands looping over his ears like a religious man's side locks. A few more Sarajevo Roses cover the wall in front of him.

Sitting in a chair next to him, amidst the refuse of takeout food and used tissues, the rest of the house begins to feel like a continent that we've broken off from. We're now marooned on the landmass known as the Isle of Ivan. Looking toward the open door, the place begins expanding, the house floating away from us, becoming more remote. Soon we'll pass on stories about a lawless place only our ancestors truly remember.

Come on, Ivan. Let's go out. Burgers, beers, baseball game on a big screen: the whole deal. My treat.

Nope. No can do. See, I just discovered The Homicide Report's reader comments. For some of these murders, on the blog posts you know, people submit comments. Insane, crazy things, Sam. Like bleeding heart shit. Remembrances, angry letters, vows of revenge, silly half-assed philosophies about the meaning of life and death. Some people even post the names of who they think the killers are! It's like the virtual equivalent of one of those makeshift memorials -- except the flowers never wilt and no one steals the football that someone left there because the dead guy loved to watch the Redskins on Sunday.

Speaking of which: some big games tonight. Twins-Yankees. Dodgers-Giants. What'd'ya say?

I stand up and touch his shoulder. It feels bizarrely soft underneath his shirt, as if I could compress it like a chunk of foam. Ivan snaps around and slaps my hand away.

Enough, man! His chest heaves. His eyes, dark beads of wood, stare at me. I don't feel like going out, Sam.

I look away, towards the screen. He follows my gaze and somehow he relaxes, settling deeper into the chair.

I'm busy, he says. He waves at a stack of several boxes in the corner. Preparing for Alec.

What's in those?

The boxes are jeweled with various stamps and labels of international commerce.

Are you nuts? I can't open them. Wouldn't be right. He's trusting me.

I leave without saying anything more, picking up a few grease-stained bags on my way out.

* * * * *
I decide to take the next month off from visiting Ivan. I don't call or text. The e-mails continue, but they're all blank: maybe Ivan's idea of a joke. I try to highlight swathes of the messages' vast whiteness, thinking that he might have written notes in corresponding white font, but there's nothing, no invisible messages.

I work at the restaurant, a decent Caribbean chicken place where half the customers come in high and speak in bad Jamaican accents, and I try not to think about the Homicide Report, about children stabbed by their fathers or Ivan saying, I know there's a triple murder here somewhere. I wanted to show it to you. One of the vics [he's picked up some slang] is named Ivan. But the dude was Hispanic, if you'd believe it. Give me a second to find it.

One night after work I meet for drinks a girl who left her number on her receipt. Her name's Mandy (don't know the last name; she paid in cash). She likes tequila shots and we end up in her bed. The sex is perfunctory, and the next morning, a Wednesday, we make plans to see each other that Saturday. The day comes, I call her a couple times and she doesn't call back. I throw away the number and make an appointment to get tested.

I add more shifts and smoke joints in the alley with one of the other waiters, Emilio, who's trying to get his papers in order. He tells me stories about hiding from militias in El Salvador's jungles, and I look over his medical bills (nerve problem in his back), as if I'm equipped to advise him. We sneak pitchers of mint lemonade, fresh and delicious and cold, spiked with rum. We take turns spitting out the lemon seeds, seeing who is the distance king. Each night I go home to my apartment and fist a bundle of damp bills onto the dresser. Usually from the other room I hear my roommate, Lewis, a financial analyst but a nice guy, fucking his girlfriend, Jess, a lean, over-tanned brunette, with freckles arranged like galaxies colliding across the nebula of her nose, who cries out, shouting, "Lewis, oh God oh God oh God oh Gaaawwwddd," and I find myself lying in bed and jerking off to them, but once, instead of Jess, Mandy, or ghosts of conquests past, Ivan's mom, Cecelia, comes to mind, with those huge dark owl eyes blinking in time to my stroke, and before I can figure out how to feel about this, to what degree to hate myself, I've come and am thinking about Ivan again as I clean up my mess.

The next day I call him and no one answers; no response from the house phone either. I decide to go over there. Walking to my car, parked at the curb, I see something in the street. Moving closer, it becomes a squirrel, gently laid out in the road, its fur a faint tortoiseshell pattern and appearing varnished in the afternoon light. Around its head is a puddle of rich pink blood, like melted lipstick, and the squirrel's small tongue extends out of its mouth as if reaching for a taste. The creature doesn't have the flattened aspect of roadkill; it looks like the victim of something precise: a miniature person has taken his bat to the animal's head, mugged it and run off with its wallet. It's some kind of crime, and I stand there for a few minutes, swaying, daydreaming about calling 911 and waiting for the sirens, for people to leave their houses and come into the streets to leer and gossip.

A honking noise indicates that the police might be here, and I turn around to find a black Pontiac growling at me. Its driver waves at me to get out of the road. I oblige him and move, shouting for him to watch out for the squirrel. A middle finger juts out of the driver's side window as the car passes.

* * * * *
At Ivan's house, I ring the doorbell, but there's no answer. The sun is still out, but I can see some lights on in the house and the two cars, caked with dust and grime, in the driveway. On the cars' rear windshields, someone's finger has traced CREATE GOD on one, WASH ME! on the other. I hop the metal fence, catching one pant leg on the way down, slashing the denim open, up to mid-calf. My groin begins to ache. I may have pulled a muscle.

The side door is unlocked, as usual, but the handle is loose and jittery, barely able to make a full turn in my grip. No one answers when I call out. It's been at least six weeks, maybe far longer, since his parents left, but there's no sign of them. I sneeze; the air is stagnant, heavy with dust and a light smell of something rotten. I stick out my tongue and can taste it, bitter as old lettuce. I can't remember how long exactly it's been since I saw Ivan, and I wonder if we've become old in the way we once feared, and if our relationship will always follow the same pattern, sealed in this form. Everyone must have an Ivan.

Walking into his room, the smell becomes rank as I see the floor covered with paper and plastic bags, styrofoam containers, plastic cutlery, a few t-shirts and foreign-language movie posters that once hung on the room's walls. From underneath an Italian "Chinatown" comes a faint scratching noise, a shifting, like insects are scuttling around beneath, engaging in their own kind of commerce. The walls are covered with Sarajevo Roses. They've faded to a pink-brown, the paper yellowed and curling away from the blue putty he used to post them. I tramp through the mess to Ivan's chair, which I briefly think is empty, only to find sitting there, as if holding court, an ovular black bug, maybe a small beetle. I lean forward and look for its eyes and ask, Ivan? -- but my breath disturbs it and the creature produces wings and flies away, buzzing my ear as it flees.

Ivan had once pleaded to me that insects, in all their thousands of trillions, their presence in every pocket of Earth's air and land, even its waters, were the world's most dominant animal. Forget humans, he said. We're just interlopers, false kings and falser prophets. It's the bugs, man. They're the ones who'll be here long after we're gone. I asked, What about bacteria? Aren't they even more abundant, more invisible? He sat there in a stupor, until he shook his head resignedly, his gesture saying, You win. He was wrong, somehow he always is, but this conversation comes back to me, ringing in my head, because here they are, marshaling on his floor, planting flags in his wake.

* * * * *
On the computer monitor I expect to see the Homicide Report. I find myself wanting, needing to read it, but there is nothing -- just a gaping hole where someone or something has punched through it, leaving a jagged black gap in the glass, the inverse of a snowflake.

Looking toward the floor, I notice that the computer tower is gone. A few cables lie there, massive worms baked in the sun. Alec's boxes are also gone.

The printer sits on the desk. I slide open the paper tray. The plastic pieces throw up dust and squeal against each other, making me shiver.

I fish my phone out and dial him. The line rings a dozen times before someone answers -- a child, her voice a burst of tinny laughter.

Who is this?

She hangs up.

Sitting in his chair, in the shadow of the Sarajevo Roses, a low buzzing rising from the mess beneath me, I decide to wait until he comes home.

Jacob Silverman is a freelance writer, book critic, and contributing editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The National, Tablet, and many other publications. His website is jacobsilverman.com and he tweets as @silvermanjacob. "Rose Garden" is his first published short story.

John Paul Kesling was born and raised in Northeast Kentucky. He received his BA in Art (emphasis in painting) from Morehead State University, and is an MFA Painting candidate at Savannah College of Art and Design. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Visit John's online portfolio at johnpaulkesling.com.

Yes Know is the project of L.A. bedroom musician Sandy Gilfillan. His debut album, "Place," was self-released in June. Visit Yes Know on Bandcamp or Facebook for more.

ISSUE #34: Moshe Schulman, Claudia Smalley, Black Books

2011-07-18T09:40:00.002-04:00

Painting by Claudia Smalley

NOT NOW
by Moshe Schulman

Eli and Rachel sit in the back seat of a taxi cab. Eli by the window, Rachel the other. The cab driver looks at them through the rear-view mirror. What is wrong with these two? he wonders. This is what is wrong with these two: It's their wedding night and they're taking a cab home. The fare paid by Rachel's father. The two of them sitting separate from each other, not talking.

This is going to be a long marriage.

Issue #34 soundtrack: Black Books "The Big Idea"

Eli is scared. He knows tonight is the night he has to lay with his wife, Rachel, who's a virgin. It's not just the fact that she's a virgin that scares him. It's also because she's a girl, a woman! Even after all the marriage classes with Rabbi Feld and all the tutorials, Eli still believes, Hashem, God will strike him down for touching a woman (having sex!) even though he was taught the commandment his whole life to be fruitful and multiply.

But what Eli didn't know until the night before the wedding was that he'd have to put himself inside of Rachel. Eli didn't know what inside of Rachel meant, and when Rabbi Feld explained it to him, he ran to the bathroom, threw up, and fainted.

* * * * *
Eli unbuttons the top button on his brand new silver-striped suit and tips his black fedora hat to the back of his head. He's uncomfortable, hot, and sweating from the summer heat coming through the taxi's open windows. You were lucky if you ever got a taxi with a working air conditioner in that town. That morning Eli shaved and trimmed his beard carefully with the new shaver he got as a wedding present from his father. He also cleaned his black-rimmed glasses extra diligently with a tissue. He wanted to look his best for his wife to be.

Rachel sits still in her wedding dress, thinking about the new wig she'll have to wear, now that she's a married woman. A wig customized just for her. Days before the wedding, Rachel went to the mikvah, the ritual bath, to purify herself, as is the custom among the Ultra Orthodox. Naked, in the mikvah dressing room, Rachel cut her finger and toe nails. Any intrusion between her, the rain water, and God is prohibited. A witness, Mrs. Rosen, an old teacher from school, watched as she dunked her body in and drifted under, completely covered by the water. When Rachel emerged, Mrs. Rosen inspected her body. “Kosher!,” she yelled, satisfied by what she saw.

Rachel was definitely ready.

* * * * *
The taxi cab stops in front of a ranch-styled house on Homestead Lane. There's a short pathway leading to the front door, but it's not the pathway that Eli and Rachel will walk. Their path is on the side of the house which leads to another door. That door leads to a renovated staircase to Rachel and Eli's home: an attic. An attic just big enough for the essentials: A bedroom, small kitchen and enough wall space for a bookshelf in a tiny living area where Eli will put all of his seforim, Hebrew books from yeshiva and wedding presents. They'll have to share the bathroom with their neighbor, the Selinger's, another newlywed couple who also live in the attic, but on the other side of the house. Below them lives their Hasidic landlord Mr. Halpern who has eleven children.

* * * * *
In the bedroom, Eli paces while Rachel sits on the bed watching Eli walk back and forth, twirling his peyos, side-curls, with his fingers. Then Eli leaves the room and heads straight to the bookshelf.

“What's wrong?” Rachel asks a moment later, standing in the bedroom doorway.

“Not now, Rachel, not now," Eli answers, sitting on the floor against the bookshelf, his head buried in a book, studying.

This is going to be a long marriage.

* * * * *
Eli and Rachel have only known each other for three weeks. Well, really, only three days out of those three weeks. They went on three dates. They were set up by a shadchin, a matchmaker from their community. They were both eighteen. Their parents knew it was time.

On the first date, Eli and Rachel walked around a lake at a local park for two hours without looking at each other. Looks don't matter, their teachers taught them. It's what is on the inside that will make a good chasan, groom, and kallah, bride. They talked about their families and what schools they studied in. On their second date they met in the lobby of a hotel. This time they faced each other with the coffee table separating them. They discussed what was most important in a marriage according to their teachers and parents: How much Torah Eli would study and how many children Rachel would have. Things were going well. At least Rachel and Eli both made it seem that way when their parents questioned them after getting home. They both knew they didn't have much of a choice. This was the path set out for them. This was tradition. On the third date they met at a local kosher cafe, ate marble cake and sipped on chocolate milk. They even shared a laugh. Things were going really well. Their parents thought so, too. And the next day they were engaged to be married the following month.

Tradition is a quick process.

* * * * *
It was never supposed to be like this, Rachel thought, as she lay under the covers in her nightgown. It would never happen to her. Get set up and be forced to marry a guy she would barely know. She thought she would be one of those who got away. One of those who would begin a new life outside of the community. When her mother told her there was a boy interested, she wanted to say no, argue back. But when she opened her mouth, nothing came out. All that came to mind was what she was taught at a young age–– to respect and obey your parents. Rachel knew if she didn't she'd be ex-communicated and mourned for. She would be homeless and not have any resources for support on the outside. So she gave in. The only hope in the back of her mind was that the boy would be the right one. Maybe he wanted to get away too.

* * * * *
In the morning, Rachel finds Eli asleep on the floor near the bookshelf, with his thumb in his mouth. Rachel feels bad. She doesn't want Eli to feel so scared. So cautious of everything in life, but most importantly, her. She is his wife. He is supposed to be comfortable with her. Is she even comfortable with him? She thinks.

Rachel puts up four pieces of toast in their new toaster they got as a gift from Eli's Aunt, hard boils two eggs, and pours two cups of orange juice.

The noise wakes Eli.

“I'm making breakfast,” Rachel says.

“Thank you, Rachel, but not now. I need to daven, pray first," and Eli gets up, grabs his morning bag, which contains his tefillin, phylacteries, and prayer shawl and rushes out of the apartment.

Rachel eats alone at the small kitchen table. She wonders if Eli will ever come around. If she even wants him to. A baby from the first floor starts crying as a couple of the older children run around yelling. Rachel can hear the mother trying to calm everyone down. Rachel knows she's expected to have children. She knows she's expected to be a model orthodox Jewish wife. A good example for the community. But as she sits at that kitchen table, in that attic, married to a husband who's scared to look at her, talk to her, or touch her, she begins to wonder if she made a mistake. If being ex-communicated would have been better.

* * * * *
Weeks turn into months and nothing changes with Eli, between them. The distant relationship. The lonely breakfasts. The landlord's children crying and their mother trying to quiet them down. The pressure to be a model wife and portray an image Rachel is not sure if she's capable of doing honestly. It's all the same.

One afternoon, while Eli is out studying again, Rachel paces the bedroom, crying, contemplating what to do next. This is what she'll do next: pack a suitcase of clothing that will last a week, basic toiletries, a bag of pretzels, a box of animal crackers, some cash that she got as wedding gifts, and she'll leave.

That afternoon Rachel walks down the street, pulling her rolling suitcase behind her, not knowing where she'll go but wherever it is, she knows it will be different. It has to be, she convinces herself. And as she nears the end of the street, Rachel sees Eli walking toward her, confused.

"Where you going?" Eli asks.

"Not now, Eli, not now," Rachel answers, and continues walking.

This is going to be a short marriage.

Moshe Schulman was raised in the Ultra Orthodox Jewish town of Monsey, New York, and when he was eight days old, was given a blessing at his bris to become the next great rabbi of his generation. But at the age of 16, Moshe decided to leave his community and blessing behind to create a new life in the secular world. His non-fiction work has been published in WORDS and at The Rumpus. His essay “The Wise One” was featured at Sweet: Actors Read Writers in New York City. He’s been a featured reader at In The Flesh, Mixer, and the Franklin Park Reading Series in New York City. He’s been a participant at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Tin House Writers Workshop, and was the recipient of scholarships in non-fiction to the Bear River Writers Conference and to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He lives in New York City and is at work on his first book, a memoir, about leaving his community. Visit Moshe online at mosheschulman.com.

Claudia Smalley has shown work at the Polish Museum of America and been mentioned in publications such as the Chicago Reader, CBS Chicago, Business News Daily, and La Republica (L’Espresso), an Italian newspaper. She earned a bachelor's degree in Industrial Design and Art History as well as a dual-MBA degree in Marketing and General Management from the University of Illinois Champaign. View more of her work online at HOBO Art Lab and claudiasmalley.com.

Black Books is a five-piece unsigned band from Austin, TX, named one of "Ten Locals To Watch in 2011" by the Austin Chronicle. Band members Ross Gilfillan (drums/vocals), Meg Gilfillan (keyboards), Kevin Butler (guitar/producer), Mike Parker (bass), and Clarke Curtis (synth/artwork) grew up together, but only started making music their moody mix of dream pop and southern rock last year. Look for Black Books' debut full-length this Fall, and visit them online at blackbooksmusic.com or blackbooksband.blogspot.com.

ISSUE #33: Surita Parmar, Louise Chen, The Georgian Company

2011-07-04T11:47:00.001-04:00

Illustration by Louise Chen

HEREDITY
by Surita Parmar

Aunt Euphrasia had two loves: her pink marble mantelpiece, and Patty Hearst.

She was Mother’s older sister and lived down the street from my family in an ugly, spilt-level stucco house with white shutters. It looked like any other house when she bought it. Over time she added cupolas and stained glass windows (which Mother referred to as "junk") so that the house ended up looking like a big wedding cake. Aunt Asia looked like a cake, too. She wore pastel sweater sets trimmed with satin ribbons. At night she put curlers in her hair and wore it in long ringlets during the day. On her collarbone was a small birthmark the exact shape and colour of a cinnamon heart candy. I thought it was pretty. When I was in grade school I’d steal Mother’s lip-liner to draw one on my own chest. I quit when my older brother started teasing me about it. He said it looked gross, like a hickey.

Issue #33 soundtrack: The Georgian Company "If You Love A Ghost"

The mantelpiece — purchased from a House and Home catalogue — was mounted in her parlour, over the fireplace. Mother said that normal people called “parlours” living rooms, and that the mantelpiece was obviously a painted fake. But one afternoon when we were over for tea I licked a finger and scrubbed at it. The rosy veins didn’t smear. They threaded through the slab, strong and clear.

The mantel held a few porcelain knickknacks and a black and white picture of Patty. Aunt Asia had watched Citizen Kane a thousand times after someone from church told her it was about Randolph Hearst, Patty’s grandfather. I knew he was some big shot newspaper guy but I didn’t understand Aunt Asia’s fascination with the Hearst family. Not long after the fifty-seventh viewing Aunt came across Patty’s picture in Life magazine. It was a famous photo that was taken when she was kidnapped. She was clutching a rifle and wearing a beret tilted on her hair. I laughed at the picture and said her hat looked stupid. But deep down Patty scared me. Her eyes looked empty and crazy. Years later I learned about World War One in history class. When I saw pictures of shell-shocked soldiers in my school textbooks I remembered the photo of Patty.

Aunt Asia had the picture of Patty framed. When I asked why, she lowered her voice and said the elder Hearst was her grandfather, and that she and Patty were twins separated at birth. Her mother (her real mother, not Grams) had secretly arranged it. At least one of her birth family should live a normal life. Nobody had told Aunt Asia but she always knew. The knowing was part of being a Hearst.

Mother looked troubled when I relayed the story. Afterwards she mentioned to Grams that Aunt Asia seemed out of sorts. It wouldn’t hurt for her to spend a few weeks at the hospital or local sanitarium. I felt bad for ratting and said I lied about the whole thing. The matter was dropped after Mother bawled me out for "trouble making."

* * * * *
Aunt Asia died quietly in her sleep when I was sixteen. She had seemed ancient but Mother said fifty-four was too young to die, even if Aunt Asia was kind of crazy. Mother and I spent an afternoon at Grams’ debating an open or closed casket and whether to serve asparagus rolls or canapés at the wake. Late in the day a young lawyer with an expressionless face appeared at Grams’ door. I was reminded of my brother’s G.I. Joe action figures that we played with when we were kids. As Grams ushered him inside, I excused myself and went outside to take a look at his car. It was a bright red beamer worth a quarter million – at the very least. I couldn’t wait to tell my brother about it.

When I went back inside, the lawyer was arguing with Mother and Grams. He said we weren’t to worry about Aunt Asia’s viewing or burial. All arrangements had been taken care of by an anonymous benefactor. Of course Mother and Grams wanted to know who paid for everything. He refused to say. In his briefcase was Aunt Asia’s will. She had left her entire estate to the Salvation Army. Except the marble mantelpiece, which was for me. Before we knew what to think he had quietly vanished, leaving behind a pile of engraved invitations on heavy, cream-coloured paper.

* * * * *
The service was an hour away out of town, in a chapel that nobody had heard of before. I gaped as we entered the room. The scent from a mass of orchid wreaths trickled through the chapel. It made me gag. As confused relatives stammered through eulogies I hunted for a card and found one tucked in a spray of vines, with a short message offering condolences and prayers to Euphrasia’s loved ones. No signature. In the upper left corner I noticed a faint watermark pressed into the paper. I grabbed a stubby pencil from the nearby guestbook and scribbled over the card marking until a looping, scrawled letter appeared. An "H."

I showed it to Mother, who waved me away and said the marking was just a flaw in the card. A paper clip indentation or something. After the service she told the minister to do what he liked with the flowers. I snuck the card and a stray orchid home.

I thought about pressing the flower in an encyclopedia or dictionary, but I wanted to keep it someplace special. Maybe inside a souvenir from Aunt Asia’s house. Mother and Grams were in the process of sorting and boxing Aunt Asia’s belongings for the Salvation Army. I remembered the framed clipping of Patty on her – my – mantelpiece and hoped they hadn’t gotten rid of it yet.

The morning after the service I went with Mother and Grams to Aunt Asia’s house to finish packing up her things. Lucky for me the picture was still there, sitting on the mantel in the parlour as it always had. Mother and Grams were tackling the kitchen that day. It was easy to slip the picture into my carry-on bag without provoking any questions form Mother and Grams. At home, I pressed the stray orchid and card between the glass frame and photo. I was about to put it somewhere safe when I noticed a faint speck on Patty’s right collarbone. Dirt? A bruise?

No way, I thought. Not a chance.

I knew I should hide the picture in my bookcase and forget I saw anything. But I needed a closer look. We didn’t have a magnifying glass, so I ran to Mother’s room and grabbed her reading glasses from the night table – the kind you get at the drugstore for twenty dollars – and held it over the picture. Enlarged, the blotch on Patty’s collarbone appeared heart shaped.

* * * * *
The mantelpiece was sold to a local antique dealer. It fetched an okay price, the bulk of which was dumped into my savings account for college. It was just as well. The sight of it made my family uneasy, and the pink shade of the marble was really tacky.

Mom wanted me to throw the picture away. I didn’t – I kept it on my desk and took it with me when I left home for college. I decided to stay quiet about the matching birthmarks. Partly because I knew my family wouldn’t believe me. Even DNA evidence that linked Aunt Asia to Patty wouldn’t have been able to convince them that she was a Hearst. They didn’t want to believe it. I can’t say I blamed them, and I liked the idea of my own secret.

Surita Parmar graduated from Ryerson University with a degree in Architectural Sciences. In 2008, Surita abandoned her career in construction management and corporate design to explore creative writing and film; she has not looked back since. Her short and feature-length screenplays have received accolades at the Yorkton, Slamdance, and Austin Film Festivals. Additional credits include penning the BravoFACT! TV short Minus Lara, and writing and directing the short films LIFE DEBT and NEVER MIND THE BOLSHEVIKS. In 2011 she completed a writing mentorship with author Susan Swan, and was accepted to the Canadian Film Centre Writers’ Lab program.

Louise Chen is based in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in galleries across the United States, including Giant Robot Galleries in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Her artwork is inspired by botanical and scientific drawings, vintage floral patterns, antiques, the universe, animals, and the people and artists that move around her. View her online portfolio at louisechen.com.

The Georgian Company is an Austin, Texas-based modern folk-rock outfit, made up of singer/songwriter George Irwin on acoustic guitar and banjo; Chris Nine on keys and back-up vocals; her husband Phil McJunkins on pedal steel; Topher Hyink on bass and Travis Hyink on electric guitar; Adam Shallenberg on drums; and back-up vocalists Jenny Kroening and Dixie Riddle Irwin. Their 2010 album "Side B" was released as a follow-up to 2009's "Side A.". Visit the band online at thegeorgiancompany.com.

ISSUE #32: Tobias Carroll, Meghan Ellie Smith, Merrady and Gene

2011-06-20T11:16:00.001-04:00

Drawing by Meghan Ellie Smith

WINTER MONTAGE, HOBOKEN STATION
by Tobias Carroll

Nathan’s talking to me about melancholy songs. Nathan’s talking to me about this band from Seattle, and how he’s getting obsessed with them. His kid brother’s girlfriend turned him on to their music when they’d gathered last Christmas, where long drives down crisp winter highways were the rule. “I like it, mostly,” he says. “When I’ve got it on, it makes everything in my life seem like a montage.” And suddenly I’m seeing it too: those moments of revelation and realization at the end of television shows and sentimental movies, wordless or with words obviated by a pop song’s rise and fall. The people in those movies and those television shows are about fifteen years younger than Nathan and me. They’ve got good skin and good hair and never have odd bits looking unkempt. They walk wide-eyed in daylight, never squinting because of brightness, eyes never tearing up from the sheer strength of the sun. They have epiphanies and those epiphanies coalesce into something that matters. Montages don’t belong to folks in their thirties sitting in a train station bar in Hoboken.

Issue #32 soundtrack: Merrady and Gene "When You Came Home"

I rode the light rail in from Jersey City at two. Clumps of snow were falling in an unhinged slurry, and had been since the night before. I had some downtime; I was waiting for word back on two freelance projects, and those whose word I awaited had told me they had no desire to stagger through snowbanks and slushpiles. Which was good: it left me feeling less apprehensive about seeing Nathan. Suggested I could arrive early and have a first afternoon beer alone before I knew what awaited me.

Transit always reminds me of transit. The light rail that runs along the Hudson calls back every trip I’ve ever taken to the Twin Cities -- if the cars used on each line aren’t the same make, they have to be siblings or kissing cousins or flat-out doppelgängers. Minneapolis makes me think of winter, makes me think of long walks through the same snowbanks that petrify my clients out here. I spent four years there, punctuated by repetition: every six to eight weeks, I would take the light rail from riverside neighborhoods to the airport, would step out into the airport’s cavernous station, and would take flight. I almost always returned at night, and sitting at that station, half a dozen standing in random concentrations along the platform, might as well have been heraldry for that time in my life. An inexact isolation, punctuated by a Whitman’s Sampler of transportation.

Then I moved back here. I’d hear from Nathan periodically. We’d matriculated at opposite ends of the country; he’d headed east when I went midwest, and he went north when it was my turn to make a return pilgrimage to old haunts. The slender times we saw one another after high school remained close at hand, those moments when shifting and dwindling groups would gather at chain restaurants to update life stories and anecdotal evidence. Nathan generally had a sibling in tow. Having none myself, I stood as my family’s lone representative at such functions.

Jokes would be made about the inevitability of things the one time we talked about our plans for the world when we were twenty-two: the city he chose and the city I chose. The dog-eared rib-jab: you go to the city, you meet someone, you get married, buy the house, move to the suburbs. Have the kids. The inevitability we joked about became reality, and in the years that followed, we realized you could keep tabs on that, fiber-optics bringing us news of last names changed and faces altered, of bright-faced children, of moves and divorces and an evolution I never quite caught.

Nathan had tried his best at these steps, but had gone at them in a grab-bag style. He’d moved north of the city, bought a house there. Some time later, there was a wedding. Two months after that, the marriage dwindled. I tried to imagine Nathan’s house, but could never manage it properly: part of a postwar subdivision or something much older; a townhouse of right angles and judgmental points; something older, worn down and in need of restoration. The only time Nathan ever spoke of houses was once, one of the few times in our twenties when visits to our hometown had overlapped. Nathan was drinking well whiskey, no ice, and seemed obsessed with certain makes and models of shelter. Childhood’s glow in his eyes, he spoke of geodesic domes, modular houses, minimalist residences six hundred square feet total. He spoke of unnamed places hidden away off a mountain road. The whiskey in him prompted an unusual evangelism, and he began to scrawl figures on a series of napkins, his pen inevitably tearing through each in turn and prompting him to start again.

We kept in fractured touch, missives sent in clusters, periods of exchange in a rapid-fire queue followed by long gaps, a dub rhythm if charted on paper and viewed from a distance. He mentioned that he would be in Hoboken on that particular day, that he would be taking meetings with a lawyer. Later, he suggested we get a drink in the afternoon. Morning of, I heard from him that nothing had changed, that he was still boarding a train near the state border and taking it down. And so the place was set, and as I walk towards it, a bar in a space hidden away, I realize there’s no way of knowing what’s to come.

I walk from the light rail tracks towards the trains -- the bar’s beyond -- and I look around, look to see if there’s a sign of Nathan, if he’s had the same idea as me. The schedule looks down at me as I pass, and a few people stand, waiting to become passengers. The waiting room is similarly piebald. I look over at the engines and see cloudlight shining through. Through a gap above, a small rectangle of snow is coming to rest just past the edge of a dormant train. A hundred feet down the line is the bar. There’s a dim light inside, sparse grey shapes at a few tables, two at the bar. My hand is pushing on the door, my reflection’s briefly seen in the glass, and I’m through. There is no sign of Nathan, and after a momentary monetary exchange, a pint of beer is before me. Through the glass, I see a short parade to one of the tracks; a few minutes later, I see a short exodus from a different space.

The second thing Nathan says to me, after the obligatory hello, is to comment on my head and its lack of hair. Whatever the widow and the monk left over isn’t particularly verdant, and after a while I stopped trying to adjust the remnants and opted for the filing down. (My actual explanation of this to Nathan is much more concise.) I offer to buy him a drink and he scans the bourbon behind the bar and cites a name I don’t know. It sets me back nine dollars. It is three-fifteen and I am on the day’s second beer; we have a corner of the bar to ourselves, and I think it’s only fair to follow Nathan’s comment about my hair with a question about his lawyer.

He winces. “It’s an intellectual property thing,” he tells me, “but I probably shouldn’t talk about it.” The sip he takes of his bourbon is of a scale I’d associate with slide-making in our high school biology class.

“How’s upstate?” is greeted with another grimace. I’ve always thought it strange that New York towns like Nathan’s get service from this state’s transit. I had a weekend once when I did little but study maps: eyeing bus and train lines, routing them, trying to bring them all together, trying to find the odd spots around me that were inaccessible to all but drivers. Nathan clears his throat.

“When did we first meet?” he asks. “I don’t think I can remember a time when I didn’t know you.” And that’s true for me as well. I’m pretty sure I could narrow it down if I tried, think of memories of elementary school classes where Nathan was there and ones where he wasn’t, but that starts to back up on the years when memory collapses into a grayness, a sense of a time when I was alive but lacked awareness. Through the doors comes another boarding call and my eyes start to drift. I focus back on Nathan, look at him, envy him just a little for the fact that, for all he’s been through, he still looks good, looks five years less than his age.

It starts coming to me, then, this phrase: Boy with triangle head. Kindergarten or the first grade. We were told to draw ourselves. I don’t remember my own scrawls, though I doubt that my skills with pen and paper have improved much since then. But I remember Nathan’s: a figure with a triangle for a head, distinct in a series of figures with round and block-shaped heads.

I tell Nathan this and his face sours even more. “Christ, I did that, didn’t I?” He takes another wisp of whiskey and lowers the glass and then raises it back to his mouth and takes a normal drink. “Yeah, I did. God, I remember doing that more than I remember most of 1996.” This whole time we’ve been facing the liquor rack, our heads angled in one another’s direction rather than looking at each other head-on. Now he turns to face me. “I don’t remember shit else from that time, but I remember why I did that. I kept thinking, this has to be different. This one can’t be round, this one can’t be square. And that left me with a triangle. I had three hairs jutting off the top of it, and I think I colored the face in blue.”

Here I start to wonder whether Nathan’s legal meeting perhaps involved a spot of drinking. I don’t tend to talk childhood unless there’s beer in me, and generally a lot of it. And when I do, it’s to wake the next morning with needles in my skull and a hard-rain regret, uttering self-directed curses as I maneuver down sidewalks towards food, towards client meetings, towards travel and exercise and passage. I wonder whether this is condescending, whether Nathan will pick up on it. Terseness aside, it’s good to see him, but I’ve given up all hope of directing this conversation, and I’ve given up on my expectation that it might last more than a drink. These silences are stretching longer than I’d like, and we’re disrupting them with the briefest of utterances: gossip we’ve heard, news of classmates’ childbirths, deconstruction of our old hometown.

After the longest of these silences, Nathan finally says, “I miss the weird.” His whiskey is down to something barely perceptible, but when the bartender moves to take it, Nathan snaps that he isn’t finished yet. He looks back over at me. “I’m trying to get the weird back.” And that’s when he ushers in the yarns about his family, about his brother, his brother’s girlfriend, the montage rock and a range of familial discontent. He names a bus route and starts to explain it and I wave him off. “I know that one,” I say. He gives me this weird look through one squinted eye and I try to think of ways to explain it and realize I really can’t phrase it in a way that’ll make anything resembling sense. It’s my own weird, and I suspect inspiring envy is not what I want to do just now.

I can remember how we’d see bus stops when driving around our old roads. Not the ones I’ve grown used to here and elsewhere in the country, with shelters and seats and posted schedules, but ones that were mounted on steel frames and left at random by the sides of well-trafficked avenues. Sometimes you’d see them walking your dogs or out for a run, transit logos emblazoned on the top with a route number. Sometimes the ground would have a worn patch of dirt left there; sometimes the grass would sit undisturbed like a graveyard or memorial.

I ask Nathan whether he wants another whiskey. It’s his turn but I suspect he’s fence-sitting on the question of the second round. As I wait for him to come up with an answer I rub the top of my head and catch a sliver that isn’t exclusively scalp. I’ve been sloppy with the morning’s routine, and I vow to touch it up when I get home lest some previously unrevealed engagement take shape for the evening. I momentarily think that I should say something to Nathan, invite him for dinner, suggest we go on the town, we two bachelors; that we seek out bars and charm our way through the city. But as the words are beginning to accumulate and configure themselves, Nathan taps the top of his glass and says, “Yeah, the one more. But after that, I ought to go.” And he looks at me and meets my eyes and says, “I appreciate it.”

I fish in my pocket and find a twenty and hail the bartender, beckoning another round. Nathan taps me on the shoulder and says he needs a bathroom and I tell him his best bet is in the waiting room, two sets of doors to cross. He nods and sets out and I hand the bartender the twenty and wait for change. When he walks back five minutes later, he’s humming a song I can’t place. I ask him what it is and he stops. “Something that’s been on my mind,” he says.

He sits me down and explains to me how his brother’s girlfriend -- Deb, let’s say -- has left him full-on beguiled. Those long drives shared with the two of them, the conversations that left him satisfied in a way no other interaction had for years on years. This bond he felt he saw between them, and his growing resentment for his younger brother, his growing resentment over some kind of power games and a penchant for putdowns and laughingly delivered denunciations of the See, this is why you’re wrong variety. The moments of joy Nathan took from his time in Deb’s company and the moments of abrasive horror he was handed when socializing with the two of them.

He says to me, “I think I should tell her something.” He looks up at me; his whiskey is half-done and my beer’s barely been touched. He says to me, “I’d go just about anywhere for her. Burn any bridge that needed it.” He pauses and nods his head and I’d swear it’s to the same rhythm he was humming before. And even if I didn’t swear, that ten-foot smile he gives to no-one in particular seals it.

And so he looks back up at me. “But it’s my brother,” he says. “I don’t know that I can fuck that up.” And here’s where I know I’m bound to fall short: I’ve got no practice where siblings are concerned, no direct knowledge of the genre. Nathan might as well be asking me to do up his tax return or build him a water engine for all that I know of the relations between brothers and brothers. I know in that moment that Nathan’s got the pull, that he could do anything right now, that he could reach his hand into the maw of his family and see what comes loose or be swallowed by it, or he could return home to his unlikely home and blanket himself in isolation.

“What would you do?” he asks me, and all I can say -- all I know I can say with any kind of honesty -- is that I’m out of my depth, that I was the wrong person to go to for this, that I can’t give him any kind of answer he wants. And his eyes shift from earnest to defeat, and he looks back at his whiskey and gets back to the eyedropper sips.

Twenty minutes later, we’re both done. We walk through the wood-framed doors and out into the awning. He looks up at the times and says that his train’s boarding in four minutes. He gestures over to the machine and says that he needs to get a ticket. Like a parent or a guidance counselor I say, “You know round trip’s cheaper,” and for a moment he looks at me with hatred and for two more he looks at me with sadness, and I can’t meet his eyes.

I cough something out about seeing him around and he swallows something back at me and each of us gives something that’s barely a nod. I start to walk towards the light rail to carry me home and I look out at the water. The snow’s still falling, hitting the Hudson and turning anonymous. I get the sudden abstract sense that going by train in this weather isn’t safe and I turn back around to see if Nathan’s still at the machine, if there’s time to go back to him and say something better than what I’ve given so far. When I look back, there’s no one left to stand at the machines. There’s a blur between train cars, someone stepping on board a train on the far side of the train facing me. Then there’s nothing: the snow falling, the trains stilled, the clock tower looming, its face beckoning us all towards home.

Tobias Carroll's fiction has appeared in THE2NDHAND, Metazen, Word Riot, 3:AM, and as part of featherproof books' "Light Reading" minibook series. He is a contributor and editor to Vol.1, and his criticism has appeared in Dusted, Yeti, Flavorwire, and elsewhere. He makes his home online at thescowl.org.

Meghan Ellie Smith is a 23 year-old South Carolinian turned Brooklynite lady of chaos and artist of many mediums. She is currently working on a sketchbook series of soldiers and sailors from WWI and WWII which you can view a few of here. For more, view her online portfolio at meghanellie.com.

Merrady and Gene is the debut effort of recent LA transplant Merrady in collaboration with Brooklyn-based Gene Back. Their 5-song EP was self-released in May. Visit merrady.com or facebook.com/merradymusic for more.

ISSUE #31: Clarke Clayton, Olivia Bransom, Two Bicycles

2011-06-06T09:28:00.002-04:00

Painting by Olivia Bransom

PICCOLO
by Clarke Clayton

Heroin addicts used to whisper and paw at our front door at night. In the morning their syringes glinted on the stoop. “Are they breaking in?” Helen had gasped the first night that it happened, cowering from her bed. In seconds she was hyperventilating. My sister was nervous about most things; she inhaled anxiety from the oxygen in any room. “No,” I told her, peeking through the glass. “They’re just leaning against the door. I don’t think they know anybody lives here.”

Issue #31 soundtrack: Two Bicycles "Alone At Sea"

There were only two of them, and they seemed to be no more than teenagers. Their mischief wasn’t especially obtrusive, but the glass vials and needles they left behind made us uneasy. In the mornings, I swept the stoop and told Helen not to worry. It was different here, after all. The addicts were all bored rich kids and the drug was regulated. In Zurich, a coworker had informed me, they treated drug addicts like kings. If you were a user, you could get free lodging and all the needles you wanted.

Despite understanding that the addicts were commonplace, my sister was unhinged by their presence and could not be consoled. A childhood trauma had left her incapable of enduring the world’s anxieties. She combed each day for knots of sadness and danger, and it was unfortunate that she should perpetually encounter that which reinforced her fears. The night people, as we began to call them, stirred her deepest terror about the capacity of the outside world to wriggle its way into even the most secure places.

To Helen, our house was inadequate protection. It was a small cottage of two rooms separated only by a curtain. In the front one, we cooked and ate and watched television. In the back, we slept in twin beds flanking each other and separated by a nightstand. Like all the houses on our street, the cottage had been built in the twelfth century. The rent was enormously expensive, and we planned on ultimately moving to a more spacious apartment in the suburbs, but for the present we agreed that sharing the small space and living in a central location was the best way to acquaint ourselves with our new city.

There were certain things about the cottage that had bothered Helen from the beginning. She disliked that we were on the ground floor, making us more vulnerable to burglars and troublemakers and noise. Even though we lived on a quiet alley in a good neighborhood boisterous drunks routinely passed by, crowing and hollering in the middle of the night. In the afternoons, teenagers from a nearby school used the alley for their daily misbehaviors, indiscreetly smoking, groping each other and occasionally fist-fighting. And then, a few weeks into our lease of the cottage, the prowling outside began to stir us at night, the night people’s ritual on our stoop.

Though not exactly loud, their sounds were various and disturbing. They had voices that were sometimes urgent and sometimes giddy, and they tapped absently at the ground and the frame of the door. Sometimes it sounded like ghosts or lost children trying to get our attention. Other times it sounded like an intimate cocktail party to which we’d not been invited: the low voices, the smell of smoke. When I peeked out the window, I could see them leisurely passing around the accoutrement of the drug and loitering a while before carelessly rising, the tinkle of glass echoing on the ground as they wandered away. They were quieter than the drunks, but in their whispering and rustling, much eerier.

“Let’s turn on some music,” I would tell Helen, when their nightly creeping would rouse us. “Or I’ll bang on the door and tell them to go away.”

“No,” she’d inevitably say, jerking her head back and forth stubbornly, “no, no, no. I don’t want them to know that we know that they’re here.”

Then she would lie with a pillow over her head until she slept.

* * * * *
I worked every day just over the German border, in a chemical engineering facility. My job was not a high-ranking one, but because I had been willing to move from the United States, which none of my colleagues had been eager to do, I had been granted a somewhat unearned promotion and was being very well-compensated for my work.

Helen worked at home, teaching the piccolo to schoolchildren. She’d played the instrument for years, and it was a coincidence that the skill was relevant at all in the city we’d moved to.

All the residents of the city played the piccolo. Instruction typically began at a very young age, four or five years old. The reason why everyone played the piccolo was because the instrument had a special role in a traditional Swiss winter festival, similar to Mardi Gras and comprised of three days of parades and public drinking. There were professional marching bands during the festivities, but also scores of citizen-performers who took to the streets as well with their piccolos. These bands of children and adults played around the clock for three days straight. The festival had enormous significance to the people, who spent all year looking forward to and planning the events.

We had not been present for that year’s festivity, having moved just after it. But when we arrived the confetti was still in the streets, and the city’s anticipation still swelled, even though the festival was already over. And as a continuation of the festival, at dusk each Sunday for the rest of the winter and spring, residual marching and playing of the piccolos occurred, and that is how my sister discovered that her mastery of the instrument was highly regarded among the Swiss and a possible source of income for her.

She gave six children private lessons several afternoons a week. It was a leisurely schedule that left her with plenty of free time. Her main pastimes were buying pastries, amusing herself at the English bookstore, and shopping for little knickknacks to improve the coziness of our house. I paid the brunt of the rent and the bills, but the things that she bought dressed our lives in a pleasant way. She bought quilts and pillows and teacups and bouquets of flowers, bathrobes and bottles of wine and boxes of sweets. In one month’s time she had determined the finest linzer torte in the city, and the best confiserie for cheese tarts and chocolates. She determined which of the three cathedrals was the nicest place to sit and she would often visit it, marveling in the vast security and absence of chaos in such a place.

I was envious of Helen’s pleasant days, since mine were spent in a windowless office working in solitude. But I was also happy for her, because she was not as strong as I was. And because nights caused her such anguish, I was glad for her peaceful days.

Sometimes it would seem that the night people had abandoned our stoop. A few evenings might pass in silence, and we would both become filled with warm, false hope that we didn’t speak of out loud. The possibility that they would not bother us anymore transformed Helen. A rare confidence would settle over her. “I think I’ll take the tram to France today,” she might say over breakfast, full of the sort of ambitious energy that usually escaped her. “I’ll get good bread to have for supper tonight.” She would bring back delicacies from France, baguettes and slabs of salty Beaufort and butter cookies for the children she taught. On such days, when I returned from work, she would be animated and full of stories, spreading the day’s anecdotes before me like a hand of cards. Those times, the days when she was confident in herself and the world, were happy ones.

But inevitably, the night people would return again. As time passed and the weather warmed, their visits became more bothersome. The cottage became uncomfortable at night because we kept the windows closed, at Helen’s insistence, and the room’s air would grow hot and stuffy. I tried to sleep on top of the covers, and was always amazed that she in the bed opposite me was still curled up beneath a pile of quilts and blankets. No matter how hot it grew as the night passed, she never budged from beneath the protective shield of bedclothes so long as the noise from outside persisted, the muffled, close laughter and the mumbles and the rustles.

The only trait of Helen’s that rivaled her nervousness was how superstitious she was. She respected the omens of even the most amateur psychics, she prayed to various deities effortlessly and in full belief. For her myriad fears, she prescribed herself cures that were to me nonsensical: checking the locks five times each night, never climbing into a bed that had not been properly made, entering rooms with her right foot first. On these rules her fragile sanity rested, and although I thought such habits silly, they set her at ease.

Silence during the prowls outside had been one such habit that I respected even though I had long guessed that if we made any sort of racket from within, we’d scare them away. But this rule, of absolute silence, changed one especially hot night in May. As usual, Helen refused to open the windows and we were stiflingly hot. I gave up attempting sleep and stared at the ceiling drowsily for hours. Around two in the morning, I sat up in bed having been roused by a new sound, a whining loop of music that dredged me awake.

Helen sat at the foot of her bed playing her piccolo, the high-pitched sound streaming out weakly. I recognized it as a children’s song and she played it again and again.

“Helen,” I whispered. But she ignored me.

Finally she paused and looked at me. “If I play this,” she said clearly. “They stop doing what they’re doing and they listen.” She began playing again.

I wanted to see for myself. When I peeked out the window, I saw the figures crouched on our stoop, silent and still. Helen kept playing the tune. To me, it was unremarkable but it must have signaled something to the night people: perhaps summoned a childhood memory, or distracted them into pausing and looking at the things in their hands, wondering how they had ended up here.

In the morning, Helen woke early. She made pancakes and watched me eat them, too content to have much of an appetite herself. At the table she began drafting a list of elaborate chores to complete, errands that required roaming the city. I smiled at her new robustness. Finally, it seemed she had found a way of coming to peace with the night people, even though to me it was as impractical as the other compulsions she thought warded off danger and chaos.

That evening, she let us crack the windows open before bed. With the room comfortable, I immediately fell into a deep sleep. I only woke up when I heard Helen and her piccolo some hours later. It was dark out, perhaps two in the morning. Hearing me roused, she turned and said excitedly, “They brought their friends.” I peered out the window. There were five or six darkened figures sitting outside the door, listening to her playing. I myself was unnerved by the increase in visitors and could not understand why Helen wasn’t as well. But she seemed flattered by the attention. She played for an hour.

As the weeks went by, this became routine. We began to go to bed earlier and earlier in anticipation of Helen’s nightly concerts. By June we’d taught ourselves to fall asleep at eight o’clock, and then just after midnight, Helen would wake up to play for several hours. Around five, we would fall back asleep and the addicts would traipse back to whatever corners sheltered them by day. Sometimes only the original duo came to listen and other times as many as eight or ten materialized from the darkness. Whoever they were, they left things in their wake: the vials, the needles, and now also empty bottles and blankets and once even a shoe. I was glad for these things because they proved that the people outside were real, and not some joint conjuring of our imaginations.

Helen thrived under the new routine. With relish she spent her days absorbed in chores and tutoring the children, and at night she mollified the addicts at the door.

There was an evening in late June that must have had special significance to the night people, because they came in droves. After darkness fell, the rustling outside began. We napped lightly until around midnight when they clawed for Helen at the door. The murmurs outside seemed to add up to a crowd and a covert look out the window confirmed there were about two dozen gathered around our stoop. They fell silent as she began to play.

I had never thought of Helen as a natural performer before. But suddenly I was struck by her confidence, how calmly she seated herself on a stool in front of the door to begin her concert, how she seemed to inhale the night people’s anticipation and curiosity into her lungs, and exhale it into the instrument in the form of the plain, playful children’s songs that they so liked. It occurred to me more than once how tinny and silly the music sounded; and how, had she played a more substantial instrument, that the response outside might be somehow more justified. But it was undeniable that her flimsy little piccolo conjured something of more meaning to the night people than a cello or a harp might have. Or maybe it was the source of the music that fascinated them, for we had long supposed that they thought our cottage was abandoned, and that was why they’d congregated outside at nights to begin with. Either way, they were transfixed, and Helen played for them until her hands trembled and her lips were bruised.

Around four in the morning, she stopped. By then, I was sprawled across my bed, exhausted and eager to rest until I had to wake for work in a few hours. Helen set down the piccolo and went to watch out the window, as she always did after she played, to see them gather themselves up and scatter away. She looked out the window and watched for a moment before murmuring something.

“What?” I propped myself on an elbow sleepily.

“They aren’t leaving.” She sounded curious but not quite frightened.

Then a gathering of sound began outside the door. It rose steadily and enveloped the room: applause. Helen’s eyes were enormous. “What should I do?”

I shrugged, not entirely comprehending her and feeling myself tumbling backward into the irresistible softness of sleep. The clapping continued, its rhythm compounding my exhaustion, and I lay back against the pillow. Dreamily, I watched her smooth her nightgown and with a single finger unlatch the door chain. I watched her grasp the handle and, shoulders set, fling open the door.

Then Helen stepped outside, into the darkness and into the applause of the night people.

Clarke Clayton studied writing at Barnard College, where she was a recipient of the Peter S. Prescott Prize for Prose Writing. Her short fiction has been published in Knee Jerk and Untoward magazines, and she was recently a finalist in the Summer Literary Seminars Unified Literary Contest.

Olivia Bransom is a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, pursuing a BFA in Studio Art. The Rialto Theatre in Aransas Pass, Texas, exhibited a solo show of her work from June through September 2010. She also placed first in the Rising Eyes of Texas art competition in 2007, and was featured in it from 2007-2010. View Olivia's online portfolio at olivart.org.

Two Bicycles is the side project of British Columbia-based Teen Daze. His new LP "The Ocean" released in April through Crash Symbols. For more, visit the band on Facebook and Bandcamp.

ISSUE #30: Laura Jane Faulds, Emily Wolfer, Easy Lover

2011-05-23T09:00:00.002-04:00

Photograph by Emily Wolfer

JEREMY AND BARBARA KINCAID'S HOUSE
by Laura Jane Faulds

They’re mediocre people, and you can smell they own a cat. The cat’s their baby. They’re married.

I had an affair with Jeremy two months ago. I liked him a lot, he was cool and a technically-skilled guitar player and really seemed to “get” me, but, you know, he was married, and you have to have more self-respect than that because you have to. You just have to.

Issue #30 soundtrack: Easy Lover "End of the Season"

I hated not being a famous writer because it made it seem like I didn’t care about my life. I hated being twenty-five because I knew I wasn’t as good of a writer as I’d be when I was fifty, and I didn’t care about my job-job -- which was dressing baby mannequins at a BabyGap -- and I smoked a lot of pot all the time. Before I left for walks around the city, I’d tell my roommate that I was gonna go figure my whole life out, and when I came home he’d ask, “Did you figure your whole life out?” and I’d say “Yes.” I’d smoke a joint and make my entire iPod shuffle the Beatles, and as soon as I got high I became completely disengaged from the language surrounding the problems I’d meant to solve, so I guess that was a “sign.” Maybe everything was in perfect order after all. I bought a fountain Diet Coke at the 7-11, and I got scared that maybe the 7-11 employee was lazy or mean-spirited and instead of Diet Coke syrup he’d used regular, and I was drinking all these empty calories for nothing. They didn’t even get me drunk.

At the foot of the staircase are three pairs of Adidas Gazelles decaying incrementally. Two pairs have green piping, and one is all in white. Barbara wears kitten-heeled Mary Janes, Aerosoles Mary Janes with tacky faux wing-tip details in colours like “merlot.” Barbara has agoraphobia. Her “Activities” on Facebook is:

God understands our prayers even when we can’t find the words to say them. Press like if you agree =)

And I wonder what she prayed about. I wonder if she prayed that her husband might stop fucking a sexy twenty-five year old behind her back. Being the sexy twenty-five year old, all I could think of was how sad it was that she didn’t understand how Facebook worked. And I thought it was lame that she pressed “Like” because she agreed, to think of her sitting there that day and thinking, “Yes. I do agree with that,” and I wished she could know what a terrible idea it was to add me as a Facebook friend; I wished she could know that I gallivanted around the city popping into all my cool friends’ stores and apartments, announcing that the dude I’m fucking’s wife added me as a Facebook friend, let’s look at her Facebook profile, and we’d make fun of it. Greta and I had a joke where she’d say, “Jeremy and Barbara Kincaid! My parents’ friends, The Kincaids! Jeremy and Barbara,” and I’d say, “She just haaaaad to be named Barbara, didn’t she?” and everyone understood. She just had to be named Barbara, didn’t she?

They make you take your shoes off in the hallway because they’re super-Canadian and they care about it. They’re from Manitoba, which reminds me of a Klondike bar: brown on top of white, dirt on top of snow. Barbara went home to Manitoba at the beginning of Februrary, and Jeremy invited me out to see his band play. There was supposed to be a blizzard that night, but it only snowed the regular way. On Twitter, everybody tried to think up clever names for the blizzard; the clear favourite was #SnowtoriousBIG. I joked that we should call it #Snowpy, like Snoopy. I liked the word Snowpy; it reminded me of “snow pea.” And Snoopy! God, I fucking love Snoopy. He’s so cute and chill.

Jeremy said: “It’s nice to actually see you, like, not on Facebook!” and I hugged him in a way you’re not supposed to hug a married man. I said “Yeah...” “This is what it’s like” as I grazed my hand up and down his back, because that’s just the kind of woman I grew up to be! We got so drunk he couldn’t stand, he was leaning against the ATM machine and I said “It’s funny how you’re just, like, leaning against the ATM machine. Cool posish,” like, short for position, and then I corrected myself and said “Oh, sorry, ATM. Just ATM. The M in ATM is for machine. The word “machine” in that sentence was redundant.”

He put his arm around the ATM like they were buddy-old-pals who went fishing together and this was a picture of Jeremy and ATM bro-ing out, ATM holding up the hugest trout they ever caught, Jem is grinning his big crow’s feet grin, and you pretend that the sun is a hole in the sky. It’s that clear of a day. The photograph would’ve been taken by Barbara, and Barbara would’ve posted it to Facebook under “Mobile Uploads” from iPhone immediately, and I would’ve looked at it at nine in the morning after coming home from working an overnight shift of dressing baby mannequins, coming down from caffeine pills, and it would have made me sad. But instead my life worked out for once, and that picture was only a digressive fantasy. He said “Yeah, it’s my.... you know, kidney buddy,” and I said I didn’t know, and he smiled and said “My dialysis buddy!” and I leaned in and kissed him because nobody in the ballroom knew us both, and we were safe. We both wore ugly red parkas.

“I feel so misrepresented by my ugly red parka!” I lamented, as he walked me home in Snowpy.

* * * * *
At the top of the staircase you turn left into the kitchen. The kitchen smells like the food they eat. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Barbara, a blonde fat angel, twirls around so fast that when Jeremy takes her picture, she looks like a conical shape, but everything behind her is in perfect focus. An orange-capped bottle of a generic brand seasoning called “Garlic Plus,” which he shook onto the eggs he made. I was looking through the freezer for ice, and I asked him, “Butter Tart Ice Cream?” and he said “Best new product of the year,” and offered me a bowl of it, but I wouldn’t eat it because I’m getting skinny again.

I know, maybe, my body is perfect. He said my eyes are fascinating and my breasts are “compelling” and he “adores” my “brain.” I posted my Facebook status as In the hazy malaise of these days it pays to get blazed while you laze so that both Jeremy and Barbara would know what a good writer I am and I started dreaming about smoking every night, picturing myself smoking, and rubbernecking the smell of cigarette smoke whenever I caught it. We’d lie in bed and talk about how bad we wanted cigarettes. He’d say “Other people are allowed to have them, but we aren’t,” and he kept me not smoking because I wanted to be with him.

I bought a pack of cigarettes on the day I binge-ate two bags of baby carrots and a jar of poppy seed dressing while looking at their wedding photos and made myself throw up and all my barf was black tiny polka-dotted orange, and when my Dad came home the whole apartment reeked of vomit. I was crying and told him I just broke up with my married boyfriend, and the cigarette was glorious, and I thought I’m never gonna be the type of person who plays my violin while the ship sinks, waiting to die.

* * * * *
Arthur Cohen and I have this in-joke that he’s Charlie Watts and I’m Keith Richards. The drawstring of my jacket was hanging into his wine glass and I said if it were real Keith, it would have been a scarf. Arthur went to the bathroom, and Jade touched my skin. “How do you get your skin to look like that?” she asked, “What do you do?” and I felt ashamed to admit I do nothing.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Like, literally, nothing?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I told her, “I don’t wash my face.”

She touched my face and it felt good to have my face touched. “It’s remarkable,” she remarked, “A completely smooth surface,” and I felt like saying, “But on the other hand, I do forty-five minutes of cardio every day and I’m still only average,” but instead I noticed Arthur Cohen walking back from the bathroom and I said, “Arthur Cohen’s the only person in the world who’s skin is better than mine is,” and we touched his face, and there were no bumps. There were zero bumps at all.

I said, “They made Arthur Cohen’s skin, and then they broke the skin mold,” and by the time Jeremy’s band was done playing, I was drunk enough to say the words, “Let’s be straight-up about this: you live with your wife, and I live with my father,” and he was drinking ginger ale. Nothing cool ever happens if I don’t do all the work myself and no one’s drinking beer, so I bought him a beer, and once he got drunk enough to buy it I informed him that “We’re not, like, the first people in all of human history to, like, get a hotel room,” and I passed him his beer, which he hadn’t been drinking, to make sure that he was drunk.

“Oh, my wife’s still in Manitoba,” he shrugged, swigging his backwash, and we walked back to Jeremy and Barbara Kincaid’s house in the second great snowstorm of that February, which nobody named anything because none of us saw it coming.

* * * * *
I stared at my blackish lips in their bathroom mirror and thought, “I am someone’s dream girl” as I rested my elbows on the peach marble and thought that if orange really is the colour of music, then the music they play must be dull here. There was a seashell-shaped soap and I rifled through their medicine cabinet. “She’s maybe not on birth control,” I noticed, or maybe she took her birth control to Manitoba, or maybe she was barren. I would eventually regain feeling in my lower left leg.

“Let’s just do it the regular way,” I’d whispered, and we made love while holding each other’s faces in our hands and staring. My head fit into his shoulder with no weird bones sticking out, and afterward I stared at my blackish lips in their bathroom mirror and walked back to their pale teal bedroom, the same milky yogurt aqua as your average mold or can of Lowenbrau, and I asked him, “Are you into any fucked up shit?” and he giggled.

* * * * *
“Where’s your computer?” I asked, and he said it was in the basement, and I asked him if I could see the basement. I wanted to picture where he was sitting while he wrote me, and he led me downstairs. The basement was unfinished. I guess it counted as a “den.” He made some boring point about how the basement was the only place where he could get away from it all and I thought, “What about when you play your guitar, you stupid idiot. Shouldn’t that work too?" There was a washer and dryer and brown smoke light, and beneath the brown smoke light I imagined he heard the dull thump of laundry laundering as he typed out all eight reasons why Paul McCartney is his favourite Beatle and sent it proudly to the sexy twenty-five year old he was fucking behind his wife’s back. I remembered back to the first night I met him, when I knew his name was Jeremy but everyone called him “Jem,” like To Kill A Mockingbird, I said! But nobody remembered To Kill A Mockingbird well enough to remember Scout’s brother’s name and it wasn’t magical, and when I went to the bathroom he asked Helen if her friend Sam played music.

“No, Sam’s a writer,” she said, and he pretended to twist his wedding ring off his wedding ring finger and then he feigned throwing it over his shoulder, and he begged, “No! No! Don’t tell her!” but of course she told me because girls tell other girls everything.

And I wondered if it was a prophecy when he started signing his emails “Jem.” I figured I’d start calling him Jem once he left his wife for me, but for now I’d call him Jeremy.

“This table is disgusting!” I shrieked, and I knelt in front of the table. Jeremy knelt behind me; it had been no surprise to find out he was a “boxers man.” I hate boxers men. I hated everything about him, and his hair was so dirty, way too dirty for his age. It made me sad to think of how the only way he could ever get his rocks off was by procrastinating showering. "I can kill an entire day procrastinating showering," he told me, straight from the horse’s mouth, and I said “Yeah!” like I agreed because I didn’t want to make him feel gross or anything. I wondered what you’d have to do, or what you wouldn’t do, to make your mouth taste so awful. I have a pair of ripped-up Vans slip-ons that smell like a thousand summers, but otherwise my hair smells like strawberries and my mouth tastes like mouth. His mouth tasted a little bit Garlic Plus, and I arranged all the junk on the table into perfect piles of taxes and music and mail, threw all the trash in the trashcan, and he said, “Let’s get rid of this fucker!” and I said, “But you have to put a coat on!” and we zipped up our ugly red parkas and threw the table out into the snow and we broke all its legs off and we killed her.

“This is the most comfortable pillow ever,” I sighed, so he drew the drawstring on the laundry bag and sent me home the next morning with the pillow, a prize which smelled like the cat, his body, and how he’d gone down on me. I slept on that disgusting pillow every night for a week and every morning I woke up with my hair reeking of sex and I’d catch a whiff of it on the elliptical and catch a thrill. We had phone sex about the summer and on the next night, a Friday, Barbara added me as a Facebook friend. I started freaking out about it so I broke up with him via Facebook the following Monday. He called me nine times that night, which is when we started calling him Jeremy “Nine Missed Calls” Kincaid. He called me sixteen times the next night, and I sent him a text message saying Everything is fine! I’ll call you tomorrow, and when I called him tomorrow I said the words “Playing with fire” over and over until finally he said, “I hear you, Sam. I hear you loud and clear,” and I yelled, “Really? What did you hear, then?” and he said “That I shouldn’t... play with fire,” and we said maybe we’d run into each other on the street as he’s riding a bicycle and I was walking down it, like we used to, when our smiles were the purest any married man has ever smiled at a sexy twenty-five year old and back before we wrecked it. I said, “I know that will happen,” and I can’t wait until it does, and I hope I’m smoking a cigarette so he knows that I smoke again.

Jeremy was my “quitting smoking buddy.”

We don’t talk anymore. He liked a link I posted and I liked a joke he made, and I quit my job and moved out of my Dad’s apartment so easy, like that, an entire month of my life disappeared into one sentence. And as I walked to Helen’s on the dark and grim night after the dark and grim night her grandmother died, I looked at all the restaurants I’d never eat at, and when I got home that night, I listened to the Rolling Stones in the jacuzzi. I listened to Aftermath, by the Rolling Stones.

Laura Jane Faulds is a Toronto-based writer of French-Moroccan descent. Her writing has been published in Shelf Life, Maximum Rockandroll, N.E.E.T, and Chelsea magazines. Laura Jane is inspired by John Lennon, Brian Eno, sangria, apple bongs and the sky, and can be found online at laurajanefaulds.tumblr.com.

Emily Wolfer is a photographer and mixed-media artist living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, always on the lookout to collaborate with artists, musicians, writers and publications. She shoots obscure portraits, snoops inside others' homes, wanders through wild urban landscapes, and breaks out the video camera to create humor-infused stop-motion video shorts. Visit her online at emily-wolfer.com.

Easy Lover is Kali Holloway and Jeremy Wimmer, a two-piece, unsigned band from Brooklyn, New York. Their eponymously titled, self-released debut is due to come out in August 2011. Visit the band on Tumblr or Facebook.

ISSUE #29: Michael Henson, Emily-Jane Robinson, Está Vivo

2011-05-09T08:30:00.006-04:00

Photograph by Emily-Jane Robinson

SWEET
by Michael Henson

“Check this out, Sweet. I’m gonna show you how it’s done.”

The boy called Sweet winced at the nickname, but not enough to let it show. He was small for fifteen, but he did not seem small, for he carried himself gun barrel straight and his jaw was clenched and his eye was very somber. Like the other boys with their skateboards, he was compact and lean of build. His hair fell down across his face and, every few minutes, he flicked the hair out of his eye. Like the others, he wore loose blue jeans gone ragged at the cuffs, shoes worn down at the toes and blackened with asphalt along the soles, and a big, loose shirt that framed him like a cloak.

Issue #29 soundtrack: Está Vivo "Natural Blossom"

The boys were gathered under the floodlights of the parking lot of a bank. One by one, the boys took turns. One by one, they tried to leap a curb, coast across the sloping asphalt parking lot, leap again at a second curb, and grind down the concrete side of a set of stairs to the sidewalk below.

One by one, they failed. Either at the curb, or on a bit of gravel in the lot, or at the moment of the leap onto the side of the steps. Or, if the boy had made it so far, when a wheel caught on the edge of a step. So there was a great deal of laughing and cursing and bragging and high-fiving and punching at the shoulders.

The boy with the nickname Sweet stood apart from the others who joked and cursed and hooted and elbowed each other on the edge of the lot. He held his skateboard upright with the tail of it in the grass and the head of it in his hand and he leaned against it and he watched.

“Check this out,” the first boy called again. He was a tall boy with a white cast on his left arm. He kicked off, made the leap over the first curb, and cruised down the slope of the parking lot toward the steps. He grinned with confidence as he glided down the grade toward the second curb. But he lost his footing as he leaped and he pitched and scrambled to keep from falling. He did fall, with a curse; he landed on the uncasted hand, and rose, painfully, still cursing, to examine the red abrasions on his arm.

The boy with the nickname Sweet watched until it came his turn. He watched very carefully, for he was determined to master this track. He was determined that the other boys should see him nail this course. He watched each boy fail as he had failed minutes ago in his first try, and he learned from watching the others the site of each dip and patch of gravel that could upset his balance.

His turn came round and the other boys stepped aside for him.

“Do it, Sweet Pea,” called the boy with the cast.

The boy named Sweet flinched again at the nickname, but no one could have told for his face was somber as a stone. Without a word, he stepped to the sidewalk, dropped his board, toed it into line, then kicked off. He kicked three times for speed, then crouched for the leap across the first curb.

He made that easily and leveled himself to coast across the lot. He knew, by watching the others, and because his eye was good, that though the lot looked smooth as water on a pond, it was pocked with small craters and he knew that bits of pea gravel were strewn here and there. He knew that the lot ran downhill toward the steps in a slope that looked smooth as glass, but there were dips and warps and swerves that hid among the shadows and waited to overturn him.

And so, he kept his crouch and he kept his arms extended for balance so that he could handle the gravel and the potholes and the variations in the asphalt and he could feel them through he soles of his shoes and he could adjust in his ankles and his knees. He kept his torso low and his arms extended and made subtle alignments in his hips and knees and in the placement of his feet so he could master each impediment where he and the others had stumbled.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Yesss.”

He made a wide, sweeping S of his course through the lot, partly to miss the worst of the warps in the pavement, partly just to show he could do it, partly for the sheer joy of it, he felt so free and unbound in those moments when the board did not seem to be held to the earth at all and the sound of the wheels and the bearings vibrated up through the wood of the skateboard deck and into the soles of his shoes.

The boy finished the last sweep of his S, then lined up for the grind down the steps. He knew the others watched and he knew they silently admired the way he took the board aloft, turned his hips and torso and his legs and feet. He felt the board rise up with him as if it were a thing alive, so that, for that moment, he was weightless and in such perfect command that he forgot the other boys watching him and crouched into the grind.

Perfect, he thought. Perfect! He shifted for balance down the slide, careful not to tilt toward the point of the steps, and was on his way down to the bottom of the steps, where he would leap upward with the living board one more time and turn with the board in the air to land on the lower sidewalk. And it was in just that moment, just that hemi-second that called for all his concentration, that he was distracted by lights: Red and blue light. And sound: the electronic squawk of a police car bullhorn and a cop’s voice. And curses in the voices of his friends.

That was enough to tip his balance and bring him down all wrong. He came down hard with his knees on the sidewalk and his hands in the gutter. His board lay on its back with the wheels still spinning.

“Take it somewhere else, boys,” the bullhorn called.

Some of his friends ran and some of his friends cursed and walked. The hair had fallen down in his eyes and, for a moment, he could see nothing for the hair in his eyes but the blur of red and blue and white lights of the squad car.

“Fuck,” he cursed in a whisper. Then, “Fuck, it hurts.”

“Beat it, boys,” the bullhorn sounded again.

“All right. All right,” some boy called, though most had already taken off.

The bullhorn went off with a click and the red and blue lights went dark and the squad car pulled around in the lot and left.

* * * * *
His mother still called him Sweet Pea, her pet name for him when he was small. Sweet Pea, Sweetie. Sweet Thing. My Sweet. For years no other person called him such a name for she kept it very private and for years he thought nothing of it, for that was simply what his mother called him and she only called him these sweet names in private with no one else around and they remained her private names for him and belonged to no one else.

But then one day she was careless; she shared it with the world and then the world, it seemed, knew him only by the names that had once been secret.

Did she even know what she had done?

* * * * *
“What did she call you?”

“Nothin, man. She didn’t call me nothing.”

“I heard her, man. She called you Sweet something.”

“She called me by my name.”

“Sweet Pea! That’s what it was. Sweet Pea. She called you Sweet Pea.”

“She called me by my name.”

“Then your name is Sweet Pea. Cause I heard it. I was standin right here by the door.”

“Fuck you, man.”

“Sweet Pea! She called you Sweet Pea.”

“Fuck you.”

“She called you Sweet Pea? Man, wait til I tell Sean.”

“Fuck you and fuck Sean.”

“Awww, you’re my Sweet Pea.” He reached to pat the other boy on the head.

“And you’re a damn potato.”

“That’s okay, Sweet Pea. Don’t be mad.”

“Fuck yourself.”

He swore he would never answer to the name, but that was the name he became to the other boys.

Sweet. Sweet Pea. Sweetie Pie. Sweet.

* * * * *
He waited for nearly a full minute before he tried to move. Nothing broken, nothing sprained, but everything sore, so he pulled himself up to sit on the step.

“Hey, man, wassup?” The boy with the cast came down to the sidewalk. “You all right, man?”

“I’m all right.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m all right,”

“Cause you laid there for, like, a long time, man.”

“I said, I’m all right.”

“And I’m, like, thinking, man he’s done cashed in. I’m like, he’s all fucked up now. I’m, like, ready to dial up 9-1-1.”

“I’m all right.” He examined his hands. A bit of gravel had embedded itself in the meat of his right palm. He flicked it out, but it did not bleed. “What about you?”

“Now my right arm’s fucked up.” He raised it to show the red stripes.

“Did you break it?”

“No, I know what broke feels like.” He raised his cast. “This don’t feel broke. But it feels like it’s on fire. And I got blood all down it.”

“You better get it looked at, man.”

“It’s all right.”

“Looks all cut up to me.”

“I seen worse.”

“Yeah, you’re gonna see a whole lot worse when you get home.”

“They aint gonna say nothin.”

“I heard your mom say, no skating for six weeks. And that was, what, two days ago?”

“They aint gonna say nothin.”

“They’re gonna look at that raggedy arm and they’re gonna say something.”

“They aint gonna say nothing.”

“Whatever.” He looked again at his palms and the scrapes on his palms and said nothing until the other boy dropped his board into place and said, “Come on, Sweet.

Let’s go.”

“That’s not my name.”

“What?”

“That’s not my name.”

“What? Sweet? Man, that’s what everybody calls you.”

“It’s not my name.”

“You want me to call you Wilbert or something?”

“Call me by my name.”

“Man, don’t be all like that.”

“Be like what?”

“It’s just a joke, man.”

“It’s not funny to me.”

“Man, don’t be all like that.”

“Just call me by my name.”

“All right, I will.” He turned his board into position. “It’s just a joke, man.” He planted his foot on the deck. “It’s late, man. We better go.”

“It’s not so late.”

The boy with the cast pulled a cell phone out of his pocket to check the time. “Man, it’s late. We gotta go.”

“That’s all right. You go on.”

“My old man’s gonna be all up in my grill.”

“So go on, man. I’m gonna hang out.”

“But didn’t your mom . . . ”

“I’m all right.”

“But she said . . . ”

“I’m all right.”

“Yeah, well I gotta go.”

“All right, man. I’m gonna hang out.”

“I’m already sort of halfways grounded.”

“So go on, man.”

“All right, man. Later on.”

The boy with the cast skated away. The boy on the step could have asked him for the time, but he had not. He could have checked the time by the clock on the front of the bank, but he did not. He sat in place and examined the scrapes in his palms and the rips in the knees of his jeans and touched the damp, abraded places on his knees, and winced a little at the touch. Then slowly, stiff like an old man, he rose. He looked around for his board, found it, and examined the nicks and scars on the nose and tail, the peeling at the edges of the grip tape on the deck, the scars on the axles, the tightness of the screws that held the axles to the deck, and the condition of the wheels. He spun each wheel and listened for any click or hesitation in the bearings. They hummed perfectly and he was satisfied.

The hair fell down in his eyes once more; once more he flicked it out with a toss of his head. He pulled himself taller.

He knew he risked being grounded himself. He knew it was almost certain. He knew almost exactly what he would hear, for his mother would tell him how she had fretted over him and didn’t know if he was hurt or arrested or what terrible thing could have happened and how she had called the mothers of the other boys and didn’t he know he had school tomorrow and hadn’t he promised, promised to be in at a decent hour? And she would look him in his eyes and smell his breath and smell his clothes to see did he get high, get drunk, or smoke cigarettes. And she would remind him she had enough to do with work and looking after his younger brother and sister and couldn’t he be a man and do the right thing for once in his life?

He knew all of that and he knew it all was true and he knew what he ought to do. He knew his mother had it hard and he did want to do what was right. He knew that if he left right now he could just barely make it home on time and that was what he ought to do. But he was not ready to head home. He bristled at the thought of going home. He had a desire, strong as the taste of salt on his tongue, to claim the hour for his own. He put his board under his arm and trekked up the steps and across the lot to the start of the course he and the other boys had been running. He wanted to beat that course. It would not take long. Just a few more minutes. Then he could head home. But he wanted to nail it, to have that moment, that half-heartbeat of a moment when everything was perfect, when everything pulled together, when everything was yes, when the board was alive and he was all concentration and everything was sweet.

Michael Henson is author of Ransack, a novel, and A Small Room With Trouble on My Mind, stories. He is a also author of three collections of poetry. He lives in Cincinnati.

Emily-Jane Robinson is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in London. She received her BA in Design & Media Arts from UCLA in 2009 and is currently an MFA candidate at The Slade School of Fine Art. View more of her work at emmyland.com and emmyland.tumblr.com.

Está Vivo is essentially a one-man project by 19 year-old Chicagoan Ryan McMahon, who melds folk and tropical styles into pop tunes. For more information visit Está Vivo on Bandcamp or Facebook.

ISSUE #28: Meggy Wang, Justin Wood, Cassowaries

2011-04-25T11:38:00.001-04:00

Drawing by Justin Wood

THE ARRANGEMENT
by Meggy Wang

Our father, David, was in the psychiatric institution known as Wellbrook from 1964 to 1965. Because I’d never seen Yale — my father’s college, though from what little I know he never graduated — I knit the two together in my imagination. Whether this means that I considered Yale a terrifying place or believed Wellbrook to be a place of refinement, I’m not quite sure, though the answer probably lies somewhere in between. Wellbrook had a brick facade, crawling with patches of dried-up, psoriatic ivy; wooden white front doors; and finally, over the entrance, an enormous half-moon of a stained glass window that read HYGIENE OF THE MIND in black across an autumnal mosaic. This is where the bristly doctors attempted to scrub my dear Daddy’s psyche clean, and this is where he lived for seven months, upstairs, off of one hallway-spoke from the nurses’ fishbowl station. Every room had a sad little bed screwed to the floor, green-gray walls, and a wardrobe, which is where my sister Gillian hid the first time we heard the far-off sound of shrieking. Back then, I put on a brave face while Ma coaxed her out.

Issue #28 soundtrack: Cassowaries "Mère Adorée"

The fact that he was there, and the fact that David’s mother had organized the whole thing in some sort of intervention, drove Ma crazy. “Those damn doctors,” she’d say in Mandarin, “don’t know a thing about your Daddy.” (Gillian and I converse almost exclusively in Mandarin or Taiwanese with Ma, especially in public, but we are primarily English-speakers when together.) But Gillian and I knew much of the devilry that David had pulled in his throes -- the incident with the orange, for example -- and didn’t understand how she seemed so capable of ignoring them, let alone appealing to have him released. The doctors said that David Nowak was there voluntarily, a manic-depressive with psychotic tendencies, and that his mother, Mrs. Peter Nowak, was paying for his treatment. He was sick, and didn’t everyone want the best for him? Of course they did. Of course we did, if we were sensible. There was nothing Ma could do but smoke her skinny cigarettes with a moony face and pace around the house and cook more food than we could possibly eat, all in an effort to distract herself from the fact that David had, more than once, wandered in the woods in his underwear all night, and once returned claiming to have seen Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior cooking hot dogs by His very own holy fire pit.

There was one particular Friday visit, for which Gillian had prepared a self-choreographed song-and-dance routine, and she was so excited. Ma did her hair in French braids -- Gillian, for as long as she’s been old enough, has had her long blond hair in all manner of configurations -- and that day her twin tails were tied with red ribbons, secured by elastics beneath awkward bows. She wore a red-and-white dress with a collar and cuffs, and the skirt of her dress flared out like a bloody swan’s tail as she twirled (a little too manically, I thought) to the Buick.

I wore a button-down shirt and trousers, though I had a morbid and aesthetic distaste for buttons. Ma said that David liked to see me in a button-down shirt -- he’d left a life of East Coast privilege, but signifiers of that privilege lingered -- in his lucid spells, my father even wanted me to wear collar stays. So I dressed ten times my age to go see my father, who probably didn't give a whit about what I was wearing. I could've doffed a top hat or donned a trash bag for all he cared, but I still ironed my own damn shirts, and I got every last wrinkle out. I also tied my own ties. So we were a sartorially excellent threesome standing in a row in front of the first-floor nurse’s counter: two handmade dresses and a small, neatly knotted tie.

“David Nowak,” Ma said, and took out her purse, preparing to show her driver’s license. Beside me, Gillian hopped on one leg. But before Ma could say or do anything more, the bespectacled woman wearing a name tag that read “Rita” told Ma, apologetically, that David Nowak would be having no visitors that day.

It was rare that I saw Ma encounter conflict with a stranger. Strangers were dangerous, she’d always said; they didn’t understand us, and so I nervously watched as she drew herself up before this Rita character like some puffed-up, Oriental bird.

“No visitors?” she asked.

“That’s right."

“But I am his wife. I brought our children to see him."

To her credit, Rita appeared nonplussed by the little blond girl and the black-haired boy before her. She sighed, touched her finger to something behind the counter, and said, “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a good day for a visit, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel… comfortable discussing such matters, under these circumstances.” Rita looked down at Gillian and me. “You understand, ma’am.” Then she crooked her finger towards herself and cupped her hand to the side of her mouth; and Ma leaned in, reluctantly, to listen.

The day that Rita turned us away from Wellbrook was the day Ma assembled us in the master bedroom. She’d been tense the whole drive home, chain-smoking and periodically rolling down the window to throw her cigarette butts out before rolling them back up again, clouding the Buick interior with suffocating smoke, and neither Gillian nor I said a word or coughed for fear of setting her off. At home, in that sparse room of theirs, she told us that Daddy was very sick, and that Daddy would want her to tell us that she and Daddy had plans for us, big plans. She told us that Gillian was my tong yang xi. What does that mean, Gillian asked. It has to do with the adopted daughter and the biological son, Ma said, and she propped her cigarette up on her bedside ashtray. It has to do with the fact that you will be happy together, so happy together, for the rest of your lives. She said this with great enthusiasm, grabbing both of our hands with hers, the way that she did when she praised us for memorizing a difficult piece. In Taiwan this would mean that Gillian and I would be married, but we were in America now and therefore would not be married, though we would be in a very special relationship when the time came. You love one another now as brother and sister, she said, so think of this as an even more special love, a love that will bind the two of you together forever, the kind of love that Ma and Daddy have. (I did not know what this meant, nor did I ask. I assumed it had something to do with the way they touched and kissed one another, which was simultaneously fascinating and disgusting.) We were not to mention this to Daddy. We could not comprehend the complexities of why just yet, because we were children. Daddy might have to stay in Wellbrook for a very long time. How long, Gillian wanted to know. Ma shrugged. Will it be much longer, Gillian asked. I don’t know, Ma said, but I can’t get him out. She picked up the burning cigarette and ashed it in a coffee mug with a big orange flower printed on the side. The coffee mug was half-full of cold coffee and a bluebottle fly, floating.

"The Arrangement" is an excerpt from an Immigrant Gothic work-in-progress by Meggy Wang. This work-in-progress has been awarded a number of prizes, including an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, as well as a Hopwood Award for Novel-in-Progress. Wang is a 2010 graduate from the MFA Fiction program at the University of Michigan. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she maintains a blog at meggywang.com called The Novelist's Hubris, which is about writing, compassion and care, and living well with mental illness.

Justin Wood lives in New York City, and graduated from the city's School of Visual Arts. He has shown work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Blank Space Gallery, Lana Santorelli Gallery, the New Art Center, Orchard Windows Gallery, and the Lex Leonard Gallery. His recent "Hyper-Presence" work experiments with interactivity between video, paintings, and live objects. View his online portfolio at justinwood.us.

Cassowaries is the bedroom pop project of Ryan Carter, currently based in Portland, OR. More often than not, the songs are about plants, weather, childhood, unexplained phenomenon, the dark arts, or any combination of the aforementioned. For more, visit label site I Know Alot About Magic or Cassowaries on Bandcamp or Facebook.

ISSUE #27: Kimberly Bunker, Eric Reichbaum, Overlord

2011-04-11T12:32:00.001-04:00

Photograph by Eric Reichbaum

PIANO LESSONS
by Kimberly Bunker

I wear my sandals with the one-and-a-quarter-inch heels because they’re the prettiest ones I have, and I think Jennifer will compliment me on them when she sees me. “Oh my goodness, those are so pretty!” she might say, “and it turns out that they’re perfect for using the pedal. In fact, I think today we should learn how to use the pedal,” and then I’ll show her how I already know how to use the pedal, all three in fact.

Mom makes sure we have our books before she starts the car like she always does. Actually it’s a van. Once I forgot them and Jennifer had to find some other ones for me to use, but they were old and too babyish for me anyway, and Mom was mad.

“Books, girls?” she says, turning over her right shoulder.

Issue #27 soundtrack: Overlord "Nothing Is Wrong"

I hold mine up for her to see. Tory, who gets the front seat because she’s two years older and always gets the best of everything, says “Right here” and looks out the window. Tory is weird.

I look out the window too, the left one. Mom turns on the car and we start to drive. Jennifer lives a half an hour away and I usually ask Mom to turn on the radio after seven minutes, when there are twenty three minutes left, because she doesn’t like to turn it on right away.

Until then I’m bored so I look down and remember that I’m wearing my prettiest sandals. “Look at those!” Jennifer might say. “How tall are those heels?” and I’ll say “One and a quarter inch,” and she’ll say something like “Wow, you’re getting so old that maybe you can start teaching me lessons soon.”

I don’t know how that would go, me teaching Jennifer lessons, because she knows how to play a lot of things I don’t. And, she uses both hands at the same time. And, she’s engaged.

When I’m a piano teacher I’ll tell all my students that one day they’ll be as good as me so that they won’t think they’re bad at piano or babyish. “Wow, boys and girls,” I’ll say. “You are all really something. Reeeally something!”

And I’ll make sure to tell their parents how good they are too so their parents will know and maybe say “You were very good today, sweethearts. Thank you” when they tuck them in at night.

It’s only been two minutes so I sit on my hands. My feet stick out in front of me. My shoes are prettier than Tory’s. Tory knows how to use the pedal and both hands but she also has bangs. I don’t think Jennifer likes her as much.

“Who’s going first today, girls?” asks Mom.

“Me,” I say right away. Tory went first last week.

“I don’t care,” says Tory. I can see her reflection in the mirror. She’s looking at her braces. And maybe her bangs.

Of course she doesn’t care but I do because I’m going to be the best pianist in the world and maybe someday I’ll write a song and I’ll play along with a singer or something and I can sing along too. And I’ll be engaged and wear a big diamond ring and I won’t have to practice anymore because I’ll already be so good.

Four minutes! “Mom?”

“Yes, hon?”

“Can you please turn on the radio?”

She does. She picks a station I like. A song I know is on. I sing loud so they’ll both know what a good singer I am, and that I know all the words.

“Mom, would you tell Kimmy to be quiet?” says Tory after the first verse, which I knew.

“Kimmy, would you mind singing to yourself, please?”

I don’t sing to myself because it isn’t as fun. Instead I flip through my piano books because I want to be able to open them right away when Jennifer says “What page number are we on?”

Sometimes she asks how the week went and sometimes she asks how school’s going. I hope she asks how school’s going so I can tell her about music class today. I knew what the whole note meant and I said so and the teacher said I must be taking lessons somewhere, and I said yes, in fact I am, I’m taking piano lessons, and she said wow that’s really something she can tell she thinks I’m going to be a great musician. And she said I have an ear for music. Which I do even though the stupid recorder doesn’t make a very good sound when I play it, only a weird ugly sound. I have an ear enough to know that I don’t like recorders so it doesn’t matter that I’m not good at them.

When we finally get to Jennifer’s house exactly twenty-six minutes later I jump out of the car and run up the driveway, which is on a big hill like a castle. I’m the first to the doorstep and I ring the doorbell, just once, because it’s polite.

By the time Jennifer comes to the door Mom and Tory are waiting with me so she doesn’t know I was there first. So I tell her “I’m going first today!” just in case Tory changed her mind.

She looks so excited to see us and she lets us in and says “Hello! It is your turn to go first, isn’t it? How are you girls doing?”

Tory says “Fine” and walks past her down the hall into the other living room where we wait when we aren’t getting a lesson. Mom talks to Jennifer for a minute about something boring and I take my shoes off slow so she’ll see. When she doesn’t I put them back on again so I can take them off again even slower this time. She’s still talking so I wait awhile and then when Mom leaves I take off my sandals again, but now Jennifer has already turned around and is laying out papers on the coffee table which is in front of the couch where she sits while I play the piano, which is white and not very soft, like sand. The couch, not the piano.

No time to waste! I leave the shoes by the door and run over to the piano with my books. I put them up very nicely on the wooden part above the keys, where music goes.

“How was practicing this week, Kimmy?” she asks, writing today’s date at the top of a piece of paper. She has nice handwriting.

“Good,” I say. I sit on my hands again.

“Yeah? Did you have any problems?”

“No,” I say.

“All right. Let’s start with the one from the purple book, then. ‘Upstairs, Downstairs.’”

She didn’t ask about school! When am I going to tell her about music class? I look in the wrong book by accident and she has to say “Page fourteen” like I don’t know while I drop it and have to pick it up first and then find it in the other one.

“I know,” I tell her.

“Okay. Let’s hear it.” She says and sits on the edge of the sand-couch so she can see my fingers from there.

I nod my head and hope I play it right.

But first I have to move my butt so it’s right on the edge, but that doesn’t feel right so I move it back, and then move the book so its middle is right over the word YAMAHA and then I brush my hair away and look at the little gold clock on the piano and then I move to the edge again. And then I put my fingers on the keys and put my foot on the pedal, just in case. I stare at the notes. “Upstairs, Downstairs.” Where do I start? This-does-not-compute. I start to tell her I’m a robot but she’s already saying “Whenever you’re ready” which means start. She’s too serious to pretend right now so I laugh to myself a little before I start to play.

I know this song kind of but for some reason I can’t see the notes and my fingers bend at all the wrong times! I lean forward and squint at the page but I can’t think of what each note means. This-does-not-compute. Ha ha! I cough and wiggle again. She knows it’s just because I can’t get comfortable. Stupid hard bench.

Jennifer stands and comes to stand behind me. She smells pretty. “One note at a time, remember. You know these.” She waits. I stare at the note. “What does this say?” and she points to the first one which has a little white “C” inside it.

“C,” I say.

“Okay,” she says nicely, “Where’s the C?”

I find the C.

“Good. The next one?” She points again.

“D.”

This is stupid because I practiced. I don’t know why I don’t know the notes and I hate this. Why did I have to wear the pretty sandals today?

“E.”

“Good.”

“F…G.” Oops.

“Don’t rush. This isn’t about playing it fast, but playing it right, okay?”

“Okay.”

“What’s the matter, sweetie?”

“Noth— there’s something in my eye. Wait a minute.”

She puts her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, just take it one note at a time. I know you know this because we did it last week, remember? You played it without my help at all! Were you able to play it okay this week?”

No. I want to tell her I tried but I couldn’t find it or my fingers wouldn’t play it. I did try but it didn’t work.

“Did you ask your sister if she could help you?”

I shake my head again. Tory! Of course not. I didn’t want to anyway. I could only do it when Jennifer was around. I rub my eye like there’s something in it.

“I know this is getting hard, Kimmy, but it’s because you’re learning new things every week. I need you to keep practicing, everyday, if you want to get better, okay? Do you understand?”

I nod yes. But practicing is hard, and a big hot tear comes out of my eye. I hope she can’t see it and then another one comes out after it. I stare at the picture she has of her and her boyfriend on the piano. I bet he could play it if he wanted to, or he doesn’t have to because he’s grown up. I wish I were older so I didn’t have to play “Upstairs, Downstairs.” Everybody would think I could play it if I wanted to, and I just wouldn’t ever play it because I’d never want to.

“Okay. Let’s start over. Let’s pretend you just got here and you’re just sitting down. That was our warm-up, so here’s the real start. Sound good?”

“Yes!” I jump up and run to the tiles that are around the door where I left my shoes under the coat rack. I put my shoes on quickly and turn around like I just walked in. “Oh hello there! Am I late for my lesson?” I say, pretending I just got here.

“What— oh, hi there, Kimmy! Time for your lesson! How are you doing today?”

“Good.” I walk around in my shoes for a minute before I take them off, but she still doesn’t notice them.

“Are you ready to start your lesson?”

“Yes!” I put them by the door and run back to my seat. Now I can play it. I don’t care if she doesn’t see the shoes because they’re just shoes anyway. If she starts to talk about the pedal I’ll put them back on. I’ll say “Oh wait I’d like that very much but I can’t unless I have something tall on my feet like these shoes, oh good thing I wore them today!”

Okay. I sit farther back on the piano bench and take a deep breath. Some people say deep breaths help you relax but they don’t really help me but I sometimes do it anyway. I already know that we start on C because I already played this song but since I’m starting over I get another chance.

“Good,” she says when I play all the first line right.

The second part is slower. “F,” I say out loud so she knows. “E. D. C.”

“All right. And is that a repeat sign I see?”

I nod yes. When she says it like that, duh. I play it again but this time my fingers get all mixed up and I have to start over.

“Okay,” says Jennifer. “Good. I like how you took your time that time, so you knew each note before you played it. That’s very important.”

I nod yes again. I know. She picks up a pencil and starts writing again.

“I think I’ll need to hear that again next week, though.”

I wonder if I’m getting sick. My eyes are hot again.

“But you know what? No matter how well you played that today, Kimmy, and you did fine, I would have asked you to take it another week. Do you know why?”

No. She waits for me to look up at her. She looks all excited and she’s leaning forward on the sandy couch.

“Because that’s your C scale.”

I pretend to look surprised because it looks like that’s what she’s waiting for to start talking again. She smiles because I look surprised.

“What we just played is an extremely important part of almost all piano music. I use the C scale when I play Beethoven. I still practice my C scale, it’s that important. So now that you know it, you’re going to have to play it everyday from now on. Do you see? Even the best pianist in the world still plays their C scale.”

My jaw drops like I’m on a TV show and I tell her that’s really something. I know she’ll like that.

She does because she smiles some more. “See? It’s very important, so let’s aim to have it perfect for next week, okay? Don’t be afraid to ask Tory for help. She learned her C scale when she was your age and I still ask her to play it for me. Sometimes by surprise.” And she winks.

Like I’d ever ask Tory for help. She’d just say no and call me weird.

“Okay. What else do we have?” She tucks her hair behind her ear like I sometimes do. Her hair is straight and prettier than mine though.

I start flipping through my book for a second before I decide to just say it right now: “I had music class today.”

She looks up from writing on the piece of paper. “Oh yeah? How’d it go?”

“Good,” I say. “I mean, really good. We’re learning the recorder. And I knew what a whole note was.” I don’t tell her I forgot the name when Ms. Witzenstein called on me. I did know what it was, though.

“You did! That’s great!”

“Yeah. And I have an ear for music.”

“Well that’s for sure.”

“I mean Ms. W. told me that. In front of the class.”

“Congratulations, Kimmy! What a compliment. Of course it’s true.”

“Yeah.” I was hoping she’d say something about the pedal now. I waited to give her time.

She keeps looking at me but doesn’t say anything. I give her another second.

“Are you ready? What’s the next piece?” she says. “‘Alligator.’ How’s this one coming?”

I turn back to the piano. “Good. I don’t really like this one as much.” I flip through some pages.

“Aw. Well, hopefully we can get rid of it today. Why don’t you warm up while I write instructions for next week, and I’ll ask you to play it for real in just a minute?”

“K.” I look at the clock. There are still fifteen minutes left. I wish I’d practiced more or was better at piano. Or I wish I was an alligator because they don’t take piano lessons and have to learn C scales.

I stare at the picture of the alligator in a pond on page twelve. Whoever drew it can’t draw. It only has three teeth.

“This one’s really hard,” I tell her.

“Do your best,” she says.

I take another deep breath and try to play it. It’s in the left hand. I know the first note but the second one is too far away so I guess.

“Whoops,” she says.

I guess again. “Whoops,” she says again.

I squint at it so she knows I’m thinking hard. This song really is hard.

“What letter name does it say?”

“G.”

“Good. And we’re in bass clef now, left hand. Where’s the G?” There. “Good. And the next note?”

“E.”

“Which is…”

“Good.”

Finally I play all the notes right and she didn’t even help me through all of them. “Great job, let’s get rid of that one” I hope she’ll say.

“Oh look, another repeat sign!” is what she does say.

I almost start crying again. I wish she wouldn’t give me these hard pieces! How am I supposed to learn a song that jumps around like that? I can feel my eyes again and that makes me feel worse so I lean forward so she won’t see. I have to do it all again.

“Slowly,” she says.

I say them out loud again so maybe she won’t notice how slow it is.

“G…E…F…”

“Whoops.”

After a minute I can’t even see the notes anymore because now everything is fuzzy and hot. I rub my eyes again so she thinks there’s something in them. My hands get wet.

“It’s okay, sweetie. You can do this.”

Thirteen minutes left but by then I’ll have to stop crying because I don’t want Mom to see me.

“Here, let me play it first,” Jennifer says, and sits next to me on the bench. She thinks she’s being nice and I guess she is but that won’t help me at all. She feels warm and I wish I could snuggle up to her but then I’d feel babyish.

“Listen. G, E, F, F, E, F, C. C, C, D, D, E, F, G. And, repeat.” She plays it again. It sounds good when she plays it.

“Okay? Now let’s do it together. I’ll play it up here. Ready?”

I nod yes and put my hand in the right place, I hope.

“One, two, three, go. G…G…there you go. E—no, we’re in bass clef, remember? Good. E, ef—what’s that note? F, whoops.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Where’s the F? …There. G. You know G. Good. Okay, let’s do that line again. This time you say the notes.”

“G…E…F…”

“Mm-hm…mm-hm…see, you can do it. That was good. Second line.”

I say the notes out loud and only mess up once. She has to let this one go now so we can move onto “Starry Starry Night” on page thirteen, which is halfway through the book.

She gets up and moves back to the couch saying “All right, let’s hear that one again next week too, okay? I want to hear every note right the first time.”

Not listening! I turn on the bench and stretch my back by leaning really far over one side, like a cat. Cats don’t have to take piano lessons.

“Are you feeling okay, Kimmy?”

I don’t look at her but I keep stretching and nod yes. I would’ve played them all right the first time but I’m too tired. I hope we’re done soon.

“Are you sure?”

I nod yes again. I wish she’d stop asking. I stretch to the other side like a cat again.

“Okay…okay, well let’s pick one more song for next week, okay? And then we’ll do our quiz and we’ll be all done. How’s that sound?”

I nod yes again.

She plays “Starry Starry Night” for me and says the same thing she always says, to play it slow, but I’m not excited because I’m still on stupid “Alligator” so I’m not really halfway through the book yet.

“Okay. I want you to practice every day, got it?”

I nod yes again. I can’t say anything because I might start crying.

“All right, five more minutes. Here’s a pencil and paper for you, so come sit by me.” I do. “Ready?...K, number one. Draw a treble clef.”

I stick my tongue out like an artist while I draw.

“Two, draw a quarter note.”

Easy. I do it really fast.

“Three, how many beats does a whole note get?” Duh.

“Four, what is my middle name?”

I giggle. She always does a funny one at the end and this time I know it because it’s my middle name too which means that we’re a lot alike like sisters.

“All right, are you all done? Are you sure? Are you posolutely, absotively sure?”

I can’t stop giggling because she knows I’m sure and I keep telling her I am but she won’t take my paper.

“Okay, I guess you’re sure. Oh, hi, Tory! One more second, sweetie. Beautiful treble clef. Remember to keep the curly-Q on the G-line. Quarter note, very nice, whole note gets…uh-oh. How many beats does a whole note get?”

“Four,” says Tory the Snob from the door.

“Tory, that was for Kimmy. Kimmy, do you remember how we talked about the whole note being the heaviest, because it has the most beats?”

Duh. “Yes.”

“So how many beats is a whole note?”

“Four.”

“Good. And, Lynn. Bonus points. Nice drawing, sweetie! Okay, thanks for all your hard work today. See you after my next victim…” And she makes a cackling sound like a witch. Tory and I laugh.

I take my books and walk past my shoes down the hallway and into the second living room where we wait. Mom is reading a book on the couch.

“Hi, hon. I heard you playing—that sounded great! Did you play the whole song at the end there?”

I sit down next to her. “No, that was Jennifer.”

“Oh. Well, how’d the rest of the lesson go?”

“Good.” I don’t tell her how I got in trouble for not practicing.

“New songs?’

“One.”

“Very good. Let’s make sure we practice a lot this week, okay?” She goes back to her book. She keeps reading but she lets me snuggle next to her and doesn’t notice when her shirt gets wet where my face is.

Kimberly Bunker recently graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in Music and English. She currently lives and works in Rochester, NY, at a nonprofit that seeks to empower women who are incarcerated. She is also working on a novel and plays keyboards in the Brooklyn-based band Highways, whose first LP will be released in June 2011. Visit Kimberly online at feathercircles.blogspot.com.

Eric Reichbaum is a self-taught photographer originally from Pittsburgh. He now splits his time between New York City and Seoul, South Korea. His photos have been featured on many websites and in many magazines including The Waster, Groove, Busan Haps, Eloquence, and Ultimate Athlete magazines. View more of his work at ericreichbaum.com.

Overlord is a Brooklyn-based indie-pop band headed by George Pasles. Their new album In Soviet Russia, My Heart Breaks You released on April 1st from Storm Tower Records. Visit the band online at overlordusa.com.

ISSUE #26: Katherine Myers, Katie Rose Pipkin, Soft Black

2011-03-28T11:29:00.001-04:00

Painting by Katie Rose Pipkin

BULLETS IN THE WIND
by Katherine Myers

The shape of the Oklahoma panhandle made it unusually susceptible to roving weather. The tail ends of the ovoid county were nearly five hundred miles apart, and it was very hard for either a Southern Kansan or Northern Texan storm to miss entirely. The rain knew exactly what it was doing when it crossed over this line. It took deep breaths in adjacent states and exhaled all over the panhandle.

Here, there are a few seconds before it gets too dark to tell the difference in the sky between water and glass. A few seconds before your face will find out.

Issue #26 soundtrack: Soft Black "Heaven Is A Place You Go"

The narrow rectangle of atmosphere that sat on top of this place contained layer after layer of ferocious. From the air at face level right up to the fine line between ourselves and outer space, the vertical air shaft of Freedom county did not merely accept the weather as it came but wrangled with it, and through this tampering taught it violence. Benign breezes became possessed by whatever it was that hovered here. Tonight, for example, the sky was not itself.

Build-up would be nice, a crescendo of action, clouds graying, rain thickening, or anything like that. But that was rare and inevitably anti-climactic. In reality, supercells formed so fast they jumped out from behind the curtain of sun and breeze. You never even knew they were there, you never knew to be terrified all along. The surprise was the terror in the grotesque rush remapping of what you very mistakenly thought was a beautiful day.

That night, God took one storm in each hand and snapped the Oklahoma panhandle in half.

There were two low-pressure systems cupping the sides of the long County like parentheses. The middle sky looked harmlessly oblivious to its inclusion. From left to right to black to grey to white to grey to black. Suddenly two hands in the sand pulled at either side like digging at the beach and slipping down in the deep center, water. It began to rain.

On the side of the road there are multipurpose indentations. They are first and foremost meant to collect the rain that slides off the highway to avoid flooding. And yet they also exist for people to lie down in. The idea is to maximize surface area. A car is very heavy but only has four tiny points of contact with the ground. A person on the other hand is very light, but if they lie on the ground and spread all four limbs they become less extricable from the earth. It can rain a foot in less than an hour. Humans float down the side of the road with their bodies exposed to the storm sharp sky like a pendulum.

The tornado is a weapon. The tornado is a distraction. The tornado is a mailbox killing a horse.

Everyone had to split up. The meteorologist and the Sheriff and the bad guys and the good guys and the wives and the daughters all went down into separate basements when the siren went off. Everyone but Gus.

Wind is nothing if not persuasive and the air is so empty, so vulnerable, ready and waiting to be given a job like this. A messenger job, traceless. Wind will take care of all the legwork. Here, take this telephone pole, that’s it. I will show you the difference between hitting your head on a telephone pole and a telephone pole hitting you in the head. It’s not so fine a line. Storms use the earth to accelerate its own self-destruction. The earth cannibalizes itself at the wind’s behest.

The tornado is a dream. The tornado is a heart. The tornado is a pitchfork falling through a bedroom skylight at midnight.

Gus flattened his neck forward and hovered his head just above the steering wheel. He looked at the black whirlpool in the sky, twisting itself wicked and rotten. And yet incorrect was the thought that this wasn’t what the sky was made for. He kept the windows down until the last possible moment, until the wedding ring was nearly sucked off his finger into the air. Mud frisbees sailed into the car. They nicked the bridge of his nose, camouflaging his cheekbones with war paint for the fight.

The tornado is a mistake. The tornado is a cloak. The tornado is blood inside a chimney.

* * * * *
This was part of Gus’ job, part of his job as a chaser was to do just this, stay to the northeast of a tornado so he could watch it through his passenger window. And thus he approached it, head down to everything that was at hand. This time he meant to catch it.

He drove faster and got ahead of it, on the safe side, if you can say that. A thin stream of cars drove past him in the sane direction.

In a flash, a yellow antlered bolt of lightning streaked to the ground and pulled the funnel behind it. The sky, face down to the earth, stuck out its black tongue to lick the land clean.

His heart slammed back into his chest, pulling him into his seat. To his left, a red rancher, to his right an unmerciful F3. His radio crackled with a sighting. Of which storm? And to whom precisely did it matter? He didn’t know how he made the choice himself.

He couldn’t see anything for the rain, the windshield wipers embarrassed themselves, and he didn’t know if he was driving on a road.

Then, the least inconspicuous sidekick of all time roared across a yellow field toward the only house for miles. In a minute he was there.

The house shared its lawn with a big blue pool and plastic rock waterfall. The backyards have no end here, they are seamless to the plains. Put up a fence and see how long that lasts. It’s easier for dogs to jump over than you think if they can fly. It’s a neighborhood of six or seven that trick or treat over thirty miles for a handful of milk duds that at the right speeds could themselves dole out concussions.

There are things decided inside you before you realize the pieces exist for combination. Gus turned into the home’s gravel driveway and rear-ended the family sedan.

He couldn’t open the door to his car and screamed into the freight train soundtrack. The wind pushed both vehicles hard back down the driveway. He looked wildly around. Tulips and daffodils rocketed up through the black air. A stray pebble pelted his windshield and cracked it down the middle. The family’s driveway composition was homicidal.

Then, at that moment, a pant leg whisked past the front door. Eyelashes touched eyebrows.

Gus threw the left side of his body against the car door as hard as he could. The gun jammed into his hip. The door opened about a foot and he slid out. As soon as he left the car he was whip lashed. But he stood firm on the gravel and took not flying into the air as a positive omen. His breathing was out of control and he was glad he was alone. Which, he was not.

“HEY!” he screamed and scorched around the corner of the house and slid onto his left side in the mud. He got up and held hands over his face to screen the debris. Things small enough to get through did and the whites of his eyes brightened against his quickly soiling skin. He entered the back yard and was twenty feet in front of the pool now, on the other side of which rapidly approached the funnel. No sign of pant legs.

Just like the first, the second “HEY!” was completely inaudible. Gus only knew he’d even said it aloud because he felt his lungs were bleeding. The earth was breaking in half and every scream from the buried dead rose through the cracks at once. A billion swarming bees, a billion screaming babies, a billion swallowing breaths.

The tornado was thin, only about seventeen feet wide. Churning grey and black and brown and somehow whole splotches of white as if clouds in their entirety were caught in the vertical dry spin like exploding pillows. Ripping the grass out in giant clumps, it threw monstrous handfuls of mud and pool supplies into the air, tickling the nose of God, and maybe it all read like a violent sneeze. It smelled like a swamp scrubbed within an inch of its life.

The earth here is so big it makes weather a spectator sport that the sun can watch from a hundred miles somewhere else. And it did, the green lawn shined electric lime in the cloud-kaleidoscoped light beside the chlorine lake. The brown latch of the diagonal storm door rattled wildly. He hoped to God people were down there listening.

Gus ran toward the pool and swung his head side to side, eyes wide. Across the pool, he looked at the brown rectangular cleaning supply and storage house that stood exactly like a portable toilet. He began toward when it started to wobble. Suddenly, it fell over and rolled away like tumbleweed.

And there he was.

Someone of interest. A tall man in rolled up khakis and white t-shirt. Good God, it’s him. He bent his knees at the sight of Gus and aimed his pearl-handled pistol.

The men stood face to face, but for thirty feet and a pool between them. Gus steadied his own gun. He ripped the walkie-talkie off his belt and at once it blew away. He didn’t look after it. A thousand flying lions roaring and the ground shaking so violently beneath it could break your ankle. Soaked through the skin with every kind of water and shivering in the hot wind. Millions and millions and millions of empty feet and here, now, something touches down. It was the grateful history of life.

Why his pants are rolled up is hard to say but not impossible. Due to circumstance, the face becomes highly memorable. Height, weight, hair color, lack of shoes, contact lenses, open mouth, scars on his forearms and shins from several urban bicycle accidents but never a broken bone or cavity.

Fast the funnel thinned and moved directly across the pool and in a visible instant inhaled all of the water.

No one knows a damn thing about you any more.

Gus knows this debate to be the crux of his existence. Two men stand on the edge of the funnel and the question is this: if you shoot someone inside a tornado, does the bullet hit them or does the wind blow it away?

This is the somewhere someday that called your bluff. This is the now where you wish you’d remembered to empty your bank account in denominations of one and wheelbarrow it here in your place.

Compared to humans, tornadoes are only the second most destructive force on the planet.

This is the house a second lives in. The burgeoning brown chaos occupied every inch of airspace between them. Impossible to see each other. Flashes of legs and arms through the swirling strands of charcoal debris. Ten ways to die in as many square feet. Ears of corn swarmed above the empty cement hole. And what if inside the house they are already dead?

He fires.

Katherine Myers is a writer living in New York City. She originally hails from Annapolis, Maryland and has spent time on an archaeological dig in Greece and storm chasing in the Midwest. Her debut novel is currently on submission to publishers.

Katie Rose Pipkin lives and paints in Austin, Texas. She has been showing art professionally since age 15, and has studied and worked in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Paris. She is currently working on her BFA in studio art at the University of Texas. View more of her work at katierosepipkin.com.

Soft Black is a Brooklyn-based band led by Vincent Cacchione. Many songs on their 2009 release The Earth Is Black were influenced by dreams. Old Flame Records recently released their most recent EP "We Scatter Light," and the band's new full-length "The Witching Hour" is due to drop later this year. For more info, visit the band online at softblack.net.

Celebrate 1 year + 25 issues of Storychord at SXSW!

2011-03-14T08:40:00.003-04:00

Regular posts will resume Monday, March 28 with Issue #26.

This week, Storychord celebrates one full year + 25 issues with a free, unofficial day party at SXSW in Austin, presented by hungryhearted.com and sarahspy.com.

Join us Wednesday, March 16th, from noon-5:30pm at Cheer Up Charlies on 1104 East 6th Street.

All are welcome -- no badges, admission fee, or RSVP required -- to catch 11 bands on 2 stages, most of which previously appeared in an issue of Storychord.

SET TIMES
5:00 Twin Tigers
4:30 Emperor X
4:00 Night Manager
3:30 Mission to the Sea
3:00 MillionYoung
2:30 Reggie O’Farrell (of Western Civilization)
2:00 Holy Spirits
1:30 Keegan DeWitt
1:00 Steffaloo + friends
12:30 Shapes
12:00 Tenements

Arrive early for free Third Coast coffee and photobooth fun thanks to Kate Rousset Photography.

Click to our Facebook event page for event updates, and view our full flyer, which features an illustration by Issue #19 artist Graham Franciose.

Many thanks to all the writers, artists, musicians, and site visitors who have made Storychord's biweekly collaborations possible over the past year. I look forward to perusing more of your submissions for 25 more exciting installments in year two!

-Sarah

ISSUE #25: Leesa Cross-Smith, Jeromy J. Furguiele, Keegan DeWitt

2011-02-28T11:50:00.001-05:00

Painting by Jeromy J. Furguiele

AND IT CAN NEVER BE TOO DARK OR TOO BRIGHT
by Leesa Cross-Smith

He tells you that you remind him of a gypsy so you start wearing even more red, more bracelets that tinker together making that bright sound that you've since gotten so used to. You tell him that he looks French and he says he's not and he's not the only man you're dating and you don't know if he knows that. The two of you never talk about it. You talk about almost everything, but not that. And you only go to the artsy movie theatre together, never the regular one.

Issue #25 soundtrack: Keegan DeWitt (feat. Isaaca Byrd) "Reluctance"

But the other man carries your lipgloss in his pocket so you don't have to take your purse inside. He puts it in the same pocket as his little black tube of chapstick and you like thinking about the plastic tubes tapping together in his dark jeans as he walks beside you. His legs are a lot longer and you take two steps for his one. And something about him smells like cinnamon but you know it's not anything he wears on purpose. It's a memory of something you cannot place, but it's a dark and smart smell that makes him your favorite of the two. Sometimes. Sometimes, it does. He's more affectionate in public. He throws his arm around you and says your name more often. He kisses with urgency. He kisses like a dying man. He kisses like he worships women. Your mouth is his church.

You call him Tennessee when you talk about him with your sister and friends. He's from Nashville. You call the other one Kentucky because he grew up here too. You heard something like that in a country song once and always remembered it. Women calling men not by their real names, but by where they're from. You call Kentucky, James, when you're talking to him. But that's his last name and not his first. You don't know why you do that but it keeps your relationship more casual than it should be. It keeps the both of you forever on the edges of whatever it is; as if neither one of you wants to come into the middle of this room you've made with each other. But the shades are drawn in this room. It's so dark and it's warm in there and you like his breath on the back of your neck. It's as warm as the air in the room.

Tennessee wears glasses and you're glad he doesn't take them off when you make out. You like to decide when it's time to take them off. You dated a guy once who used to take his glasses off and it always seemed too forward. Like he anticipated too much. You thought of telling him that once but didn't want to hurt his feelings. He never hurt yours. He was too kind and too quiet.

Tennessee listens to Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan in his car. Sometimes, Johnny Cash. He asks you to help him go to the grocery and he says it's because he never has anything good to eat. He compliments your pantry and asks what gluten flour is. He asks what textured vegetable protein is. He never tasted natural peanut butter until he put one of your spoons into the cold jar. You made tempeh ruebens with Russian dressing for dinner one night and after he ate the last bite he leaned back in his chair and told you he would always remember that sandwich. He asked you to make them again the next week. He says I learn something new every time I come over here. You are suspicious that he says things like that only to flatter you. He doesn't seem to have that falseness in him but it's hard to accept things as they actually are when they're that pretty and good. And that's part of the reason you keep Kentucky around.

Kentucky puts “Crimson and Clover” on the record player because he actually still listens to records and the two of you share a joint and lie down on the rug in his living room and lie there and lie there and barely move, like you're two long, thick magnets stuck to metal. He reaches up to touch your hair and tells you it's beautiful. He talks about his ex-girlfriends like he misses them. It makes you jealous and you tell him that and immediately feel guilty because you've never told him about Tennessee. He mentioned Nashville the other day and your tummy made a quick, deep drop. You thought of Tennessee growing up on a horse farm there. You thought about him sticking his cowboy boots in between wooden fence rails and hoisting himself over. You thought about how he'd be a good father and teach your sons to ride bareback. And then you let Kentucky go down on you right there on his rug while the song plays over and over again and he stays down there forever like you are impossibly delicious. He kisses you afterwards and his mouth tastes like salty, spiced exotic earth.

But why don't you get rid of Kentucky and keep Tennessee? He's far more husbandy. He's far more loyal. You actually feel guilty after you've been with Kentucky because you know that Tennessee will look at you with his wide brown eyes and wonder why you are the way you are. And somehow you know Kentucky would understand. You start calling Tennessee by his real name and see if that works.

Ben, do you want to go for a walk in the forest? What's the difference between a walk and a hike anyway he asks. You both agree that it just depends on where you are. You can't go for a hike in the city you say. Maybe it depends on how far you go he says. Maybe it's a hike if there are hills you say. Maybe it's a hike if we take a lunch he says. Let's definitely take a lunch you say. And you stop and get two big salads in styrofoam boxes, a loaf of crusty bread and two icy bottles of water. He puts the salads and the water in his backpack and you have a long loaf of bread sticking out of the top of yours. And you walk and maybe hike to a little clearing where there's a big rock and a small stream and you sit down and are pleasantly surprised to see that there are purple flower petals and red slips of strawberries in the salad. This is special you say. And you mean the salad and you mean being with him like this in the middle of the afternoon on a summer Saturday with the sun warming your shoulders and your face and the top of your head.

So you eventually do tell Kentucky about Ben and Kentucky shrugs. You've just had sex and you're still a little stoned and guess that he is too. He's propped himself up on his elbow with one hand and he's tracing little invisible lines on your bare stomach with the other one. You're self-conscious because your stomach isn't perfectly flat. Maybe he has a girlfriend with a perfectly flat stomach. You ask him that. And he tells you that her stomach isn't perfectly flat either. And he asks you why women believe that bullshit. He asks you why women hate themselves so much. He tells you that men don't hate themselves like women do. And when he says it, it's mean and not encouraging. It makes you feel like you've given up on something. But then he rubs his eyes and tells you he thinks he's falling in love with you and he doesn't know how he's supposed to feel about that. And you don't say anything because you don't know how you feel about it either. And when he said it, it sounded like he thought it was a mistake but he couldn't help it. Like he was falling into a hole instead of love. Like he took a wrong step. Like he was pushed.

Ben asks you to ride with him to Nashville because he needs to go down there to take something back to his parents and there's a guitar case in the backseat of his car so you assume it's that. You just want to put on your yellow sundress and ride and ride with the windows down and stop at a little gas station with a sign that squeaks when it blows back and forth in the sweet and southern wind. You want to stop for greasy beef jerky and orange soda. A candy bar and a newspaper from another city. You put your bare feet up on the dash and share bites of the candy bar. Your mouth and his. His mouth and yours. He's wearing a small white t-shirt and the same dark jeans he always wears. You reach over to touch the warm skin of his upper arm before giving him the last bite. You shove the wrapper into the plastic bag you've been using for garbage. And the sound of that plastic and the wind blowing through the car gives you déjà vu.

Once you're in his parents' driveway he turns to you and tells you that you were the something he wanted to take back to his parents. Sure, he was dropping off one of his guitars for his little brother, but really it was you that he wanted to bring. And you say Thank You before you tell him about Kentucky. And you don't tell Ben his real name because you never even say it yourself and besides, you don't really even like it. You tell Ben that you're sorry and you tell Ben that if he wants you to choose, you will choose him because you're almost positive that it's him and everything is him and it should always be him because he's the one and Kentucky is not and if you had a Georgia he wouldn't be the one and if you had a New York or a California they wouldn't be the ones either.

You tell him that you call him Tennessee. And his wide brown eyes are searching yours and they look so sad and he wants to be sure that you're going to stop seeing Kentucky and you promise him you will. You promise. And his parents and little brother are great and you spend the night in the guest room and he sleeps down the hall in his old bedroom and in the middle of the night you hear a slow creak and he's standing there leaning against the door and you ask if everything is okay and softly, so softly, he tells you he loves you and doesn't want you to be with anyone else. His voice is deep and sleepy. His hair is messy and it looks like he's been tugging at it. And your hands are tucked into the long sleeves of one of his high school shirts and he reaches in and pulls them out and holds them and you tell him you love him. And it must be a full moon because the moonlight is shining underneath the pulled shade of the bedroom window and it's so bright. It's just so bright.

Leesa Cross-Smith is a writer and homemaker with a BA in English from the University of Louisville. She lives in Kentucky with her bearded husband, Loran, and their two children. She is currently working on a short story zine called Whiskey & Ribbons and a novel too. She blogs at brightlywound.tumblr.com.

Jeromy J. Furguiele works mostly in acrylic paint. View more of his work online at artbyjeromy.com.

Keegan DeWitt is a songwriter and Independent Spirit Award-nominated film composer, originally from Portland, OR, and currently based in Nashville. He most recently released an EP, Nothing Shows, via Daytrotter as its first-ever original release, and a limited edition 7", Two Hearts/Reluctance, via Theory 8 Records. For more, click to keegandewitt.com.

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ISSUE #24: Anthony Jones, Diana Blackwell, Bridges and Powerlines

2011-02-14T12:14:00.002-05:00

Painting by Diana Blackwell

GO FOR IT, ALFONSO!
by Anthony Jones

On this day in Granada, a gray haze spread across the sky and everything was dark and very hot. The people stayed out of the streets, and many crowded into bars to drink beer and complain about the heat, from which there was no relief.

In one such bar a group of men had gathered, and they sat at a table crowded with empty glasses and half-smoked packs of cigarettes. One of these men stood out in particular. He was a short man with a very high pitched voice and his body was strangely proportioned; his neck was thick and stout but his limbs were very thin and his torso almost seemed minuscule in comparison with the other men at the table. He was not quite a midget, this man, but it was fair to say that he looked very, very odd.

Issue #24 soundtrack: Bridges and Powerlines "I Remember A Blue Sky"

“Another,” the strange short man said. “Another drink for these, my greatest of friends.”

The bartender brought them several glasses with ice and rum and also many small glass bottles of Coca-Cola. The men roared with laughter and drank, and a fat man with a gold watch put his arm around the strange short man and squeezed him the same way he might cuddle a teddy bear.

“Let’s drink to Alfonso,” the fat man said. “On this the day of his rebirth.”

Alfonso grinned, and he raised his glass and then drank half the liquor in a single gulp. He stood up and quavered on his feet and then wobbled a bit more until he staggered chest first into a construction worker sitting at the bar. The men at the table laughed so hard at the spectacle that tears came to their eyes.

On the television behind the bar there were highlights of the week’s best bullfights, and a patriotic, sentimental song played while they showed the best kills. Alfonso apologized to the worker and then stopped to watch the bullfights. The music suddenly filled him with such emotion that he had to bite his tongue for fear he might cry.

The man with the gold watch sauntered over to Alfonso and smacked him playfully on his backside. “Alfonso,” he said. “Go over there and speak with that beautiful young woman.”

He motioned toward a dark girl in a white dress sitting at the opposite end of the bar. This girl’s hair was long and black and flowed down onto her bare, brown shoulders. Alfonso stared for a moment and she looked at him. Her eyes were piercing and green and Alfonso lost his breath when he saw them. He finished his drink and stumbled to the side. The fat man steadied him while the other men from the table came over to offer their encouragement.

“Look here, Alfonso,” one of the others said. He had a gray moustache and his hair was dyed a light shade of blond. “You must go and talk to that woman. It’s clear to me that she desires you.”

Alfonso eyed the man with moustache and giggled his high-pitched giggle. He was very drunk. “She has a lover,” he said. “He’s sitting right there next to her.”

“Nonsense,” the man with the moustache said. “It’s obvious that this man is only her brother.”

Another man stepped forward. He wore sunglasses that had a light orange tint and a gold chain around his neck, which placed the lord Jesus crucified within his chest hair.

“Alfonso,” he said. “Come and have another drink.”

Alfonso grinned at the man and then giggled. “But Rafa,” he said. “I am already very drunk.”

“Nonsense,” the man with the moustache said. “It’s evident that you are only a little tipsy.”

“Yes,” the fat man said. “This clearly is the truth.”

Rafa got the attention of the bartender and then ordered two shots of American whiskey. Alfonso held his shot and wavered a little from side to side, and Rafa steadied him so that he could drink the whiskey in a single gulp. After, Alfonso coughed until his face turned bright red and then looked up bleary eyed.

“Rafa,” he said. “Truly, you are my most loyal friend.”

Rafa smiled and handed Alfonso the second shot, and Alfonso giggled in that strange high-pitched way and then drank the whiskey in a single gulp. Above, on the television, they were now playing American music videos, and the songs were much more lively than what had been playing during the bullfights.

Rafa slapped Alfonso on the back. “Now is the time for you to speak with that princess over there.”

Alfonso looked again at the girl. She was laughing and there was a glass of sangria in her hand. The man that was supposed to be her brother had his hand on her brown and supple thigh and when he whispered in her ear she smiled in such a way that made Alfonso shiver.

“Don’t be a coward,” Rafa said. “Or you will bring shame to us your most loyal friends.”

Alfonso nodded and became serious all of a sudden. He steadied himself and clenched his jaw and then began to make his way though the crowd of people so that he could speak with the beautiful girl at the end of the bar.

Rafa returned to his friends and the men there watched the scene with smiles on their faces -- giddy as schoolchildren -- watching Alfonso attempt the impossible.

Anthony Jones is a writer and basketball coach living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Westwind, The Furnace Review, PANK Magazine, The Montreal Review, Poetry Quarterly, The Write Room, Orion Headless and Phantom Kangaroo. He was also the 2007 recipient of UCLA's Ruth Brill Scholarship, awarded for outstanding achievement in creative writing. Check out his collaboration with the Noah Garabedian Sextet, a story about the danger of falling in love with robots, on Vimeo.

Diana Blackwell is a self-taught artist in Berkeley. She works in many media, including charcoal, acrylics, papier mache, collage, block printing, monoprinting, and digital photography. Blackwell’s colorful monoprints are a regular feature at Mignonne Décor in Berkeley. She has shown work in California, Massachussetts, Missouri, and Nebraska. Visit her online portfolio at zhibit.org/diana_blackwell.

Bridges and Powerlines is an indie pop band from Brooklyn. Their new record "Eve" was recorded in the same room as Sufjan Stevens's "Illinoise" album, with many of the same players. Visit them online at bridgesandpowerlines.com or on Myspace.