Show 6: Victoria Reis and Jessica Amodeo

Acil

by

Victoria Reis

today a gang of dogs gathered behind me violently as i cut through the park towards what i hoped was the k-block of bakirkoy ruh ve sinir, the best public psych ward in istanbul. i walked faster, i walked with all my power, but i kept my breath steady as the first dogs started barking and called their dog-friends out of the artificial forest my tatteredpath ran through. the dogs gathered close behind me, barking, barking. they started barking in unison. they wanted me out. they wanted to scare me. there was a pack mentality packed around me, this growing animal group, calculating my relative weakness. i clutched my bag of plums (and one sweet peach) and convinced myself to just keep walking, that running would make the swarm of feral dogs in my wake reach out and grab me with their teeth. i told myself that i could somehow possibly stay calm, that somehow the gang of dogs would stop and i would find my way out of the deserted turkish park and to the turkish hospital, to ben locked up again. i clutched his future fruit and my purse. I clutched until my knuckles hurt. i walked faster until my shins hurt. i avoided making eye contact with any of the dozens of hungry-looking dogs emerging from the scruffy turf on either side of me. the chorus of canine voices bearing their danger made me wonder. would they bite me? were they about to take me down and make me their collective dinner? i came to a fork in the battered asphalt path. i wanted to run, how badly i wanted to run! and as i used the force of my will, kept my breath and stayed steady, the dogs stopped keeping up with my powerwalk-trot, and dropped off as i kept on as casually fast as i could, turning towards the left-hand side of the path, towards the nearest building, out of their territory. i saw other dogs in front of me. i wanted out of the dogyard. there was a open gate and a soldier on top of a guardstation. i walked through the gate, past the boy with the automatic weapon in his soldier costume. i walked to the k-block. i thought ben would be asleep, i had fallen asleep on the bus, missed my stop, and so had had to walk the purposeful but uninformed trail through the danger zone to get to the hospital i had only been to from another direction. i was late. i watched the setting sun glow god’s favorite color, sweet neon tangerine, from behind the low yellow architecture. i made it through a concrete maze of pillars and buildings to the second floor of the second building of the k-block, bearing plums and one sweet peach, to see my boy locked up again, where i had locked him.

i walked up a dingily institutional flight of stairs. the floor and the bottom half of the walls were bitter-chocolate brown, the lid of the room was painted dull yellow. i pushed the doorbell that whistled like an electric courting oriole, just like my doorbell, just like all the doorbells in istanbul. i stood next to an ashtray that looked like a cake-pan on legs blackened at the inner corners. it had extinguished many cigarettes and housed their filters. but now it was empty, save the remnant black ashes that caked the bottom of the shallow silver box. the ward was quiet. the patients, ben said, went to bed at eight. i expected to deliver the fruit and be turned away. but the door opened, and a slight man with a mop ushered me in with a, ‘buyurun.’ i stepped across the threshold and we walked across the wet floor, the janitor and i. i stood politely as keys were twisted, more thresholds were crossed, and i was in the doctor’s room, waiting as they fetched my friend.

i sat in the office and watched through the open doorway. i heard footsteps from down the hall. the custodian led ben toward me, he shuffling behind. he looked out from behind weary eyes. i searched them. they were coated with seraquel, glossy. we reached out towards one another. i hugged him tightly. the ward was quiet. the janitor took his mop away, pushed it in circles along the floor of the dark hallway, where rooms of doped-up mental patients huddled in slumber behind every door. my friend, my foster brother, smiled down at me, doped-up, half-asleep. we sat in silence. i offered the fruit. after a sour plum crunched between his teeth, ben told me the story of his day, how he had stared at the sun until he saw the fire-angels flying forth in every direction, how he should stop staring at the sun, how he couldn’t see at the center of his vision. “i bit the heads off of some slugs today, too. they wanted me to,” he said, struggling to keep his eyes in contact with mine. i breathed deeply and nodded, wondering who this person was, and fighting to reconcile the manic man in front of me with the ideal ben in my imagination, the silly mystical individual image that had shattered again one week before, when ben had woken up with his switch flipped.

my mind swept over the amazing danger of ben’s self-explosion, the forty-eight hours of insane mayhem to which i had born witness. i remembered him kissing the feet of street people begging on istiklal, eating kernels of corn from discarded cobs in garbage piles. i remembered him hissing at cats and drinking from gutterpipes. i pictured he and i alone, all alone, in my apartment while he tore apart his toy guitar and threw the plastic pieces at me as hard as he could. he traced the edges of my face with lit insence and let the ember drop on the top of his hand until it burnt through his skin. i thought of how his tender brain reacted so drastically to every song that played from the radio, how his face twisted with tears when he heard master p’s, “i really miss my homies,” his anguished recollection of changing schools in eighth grade: “my parents took all my friends away from me! they ruined my life!” i had hugged him. he had pushed away and started dervish-dancing circles around me as the mournful ghetto melody faded out and krs-one’s “step into a world” started up. he gibberish-rapped. i was in shock, faded, a shadow witness only. we were alone in my apartment. there was a knock at the door.

it was vhairi, my friend and fellow teacher, coming to check in on me, bags of burger king by her sides. i was relieved to see her and smell the fake flame-broiled burgers. she and i sat and ate. ben kept whirling like a dervish. i told her how his plane left monday morning, thirty-six hours later, how i just wanted to keep him alive and out of jail till he could go back home, to his family and his routine, where he would be himself again. she, a former flight attendant, said with authority, (as much authority could be mustered in a Scottish lisp),”victoria, they will not let him on a plane like this. we have to get him to a hospital.” and my heart sank as i realized she was right, and i thought back to the other times ben had been forced to a mental ward, the police and the pepper spray. i thought it must end violently. but as our friend cem walked through the door, on the phone to his psychiatrist pal from university, vhairi looked at the burn on the back of ben’s hand, red with infection, and said, “look man, we have to go to a doctor to look at this. come on, we’ll go to the hospital and then we’ll go for a beer.” and ben, amazingly, agreed. “yeah, good idea. i need a beer to calm me down.” we put on our shoes and hailed a taxi, on our way to the emergency psychiatry clinic on the other side of town.

as we hustled ben into a padded room, he knew he had been duped. he tore all the sheets off of the bed and ripped them into strips, hissing at the doctor, screaming, “i’m the king cobra of america!” the security guard touched his gun in its holster, and ben relented, allowing a sedative to be injected into his hip. the doctor took me aside, and asked me to sign some papers, so that ben could be put into a straightjacket and taken to another hospital, where he would be given more injections, to prevent the possibility of rabies from the street-dog bite on his back. i sobbed and shook, frantic, finally. i hated the idea of a straightjacket more than anything right then. i called ben’s family and cried on the phone. i signed the papers. i commited him. ben wandered into the waiting room and sat on a bench. “thanks a lot, victoria. way to ruin a perfect vacation,” he slurred, as the sedative medicine coursed through his veins. he struggled to keep his eyes open. the doctors decided against physical constraints, kept my friend out of a straightjacket, and an ambulance pulled up. vhairi, ben and i got in the back, and we took off. we pulled onto a highway backed up with saturday-night traffic, and the driver turned on the siren. we drove down the tram-tracks on the median, ben bobbing in and out of consciousness as we bumped over the concrete. we got to the public hospital, queues of sick turks talking to nurses. they got out more needles and pushed them into my friend ben, and we wailed back to bakirkoy. it was after midnight.

at the emergency psych ward, we were met by a golf cart. ben and i got on the back and rode down concrete paths. It was quiet, almost calm. “turkey is weird,” i thought. “turkey is weird,” ben said. the golf cart stopped in front of a brown-and-yellow building. we climbed a flight of stairs. the doctor pushed a button, the door opened, and we were led through three doors. a young nurse smiled at us and led ben by the hand down a dark corridor. the doctor held my elbow and guided me out of the building, back onto the golf cart. he drove to the parking lot. i rode away from ben.

i had returned every day, to bear witness to his state of mind, to bring him fruit, to listen to his stories. and as we sat in the dark ward that saturday, after i had fallen asleep on the bus, exhausted, i thought of the hounds at my heels, the hungry entities that had chased me. i had escaped. ben had been brought down. his eyes were closed. i kissed his cheek. the janitor mopped his way back towards us, and opened the door. i walked back into the night.

in the parking lot, a yellow light glowed atop a yellow car, its driver leaning on the hood. i walked over and he opened the door. i slipped inside, said, “taksim meydani, lutfen,” and the taxi rolled toward home. we avoided the highway, again inevitably clogged with saturday-night traffic, and took the coast road. i held my cigarette out the window and felt wet sea air gusting against my face. the world was dark blue beyond me. oil tankers and cargo ships floated on the water, their decks lined with orange lights. the lights reflected off of the water, each boat calm and alone on the calm marmara sea, in its own individual world. i looked out at istanbul. i watched the boats glowing and rocking as they pushed towards the ocean, towards the future.

True Love Will Find You

by

Jessica Amodeo

Sometimes I’d step on Bob Hope when Dylan was renting on Wilcox, above Hollywood, where I recognized an unknown actress once from a casting call. I told her she’d have to read more spiritual if she wanted to land the part. That’s what the director told me to say to the agents calling from CAA, “We want someone bohemian. Stop sending me these divas.” When I saw her at this club, I told her it was in the bag because she was hot and she could sing and to just be free when she got the call back. I was drunk. On power and drink as I left her standing there at a roped off VIP area saying, thank you, thank you. You have no idea what this means to me.

That night we were out with some very young ones who carouselled the group of girls I was with and one of them kept telling me things, things I tried to ignore. Things you hear in clubs, repeated over and over. I ended up on a torn chair with him out in the hallway of Dylan’s apartment where he finger fucked me so hard that the next day I couldn’t walk. On this chair at the end of the hall, he talked about me as if I was not there, describing my contrasting features and how he thought they were so interesting. I kept turning away when he opened his mouth, looking out the caged window, out at the lights from the houses in the hills. Listening to the  elevator opening and the slow steps of neighbors.

This building Dylan lived in was disturbed with its revolving doors and empty coffin lobby. There was a gym at the bottom, in the basement that we had to take stairs to get to and the stairs were sealed with old hotel carpet. I took these stairs another time with Gabe, my friend who’s constantly trying to collect chips and key tags from NA, but always relapsing. Gabe, Dylan, and I were waiting for a dealer named Magic who dropped off bags, but never left the car or the apartment we asked him to meet us in and was always pouring lines out on a CD case and asking if we wanted Ecstasy, that he had great pills and did we want some, licking his lips.

Another time, Magic met me with the publicist, Ashley, who was unable to rescue her own reputation when she later became known as Crashley for rolling through a red light, unconscious. The Ford Explorer she hit was filled with illegals that fled the intersection of downtown Los Angeles only miles from Crashley’s loft, which she was later evicted from for throwing scores of late-night parties. In a big brown belt, short vintage dress over long legs, she would open the door and introduce me to someone named Nico or Steve and the Steve or Nico was usually a promoter, but one time I met a Rick who I smoked with on a deck built around a large Aloe plant piercing through the view of buildings downtown and I thought I could see the Watts Towers when he asked me what I did. I said, “You know, Entertainment. Like everyone.” And I asked the question back knowing that he would say he was the assistant to a very famous comedian and knowing that he would say that the A-list comedian was an asshole on set and actually very serious.

Brother was on tour with his band, Limbeck, which used to sound punk but was now described as alternative country. He was their manager and had decided that winter to go on the road, where he lived in a van, grew a beard, and kept the traveling band sober. Crashley was brother’s girlfriend and when he was gone we weakened together on weekends, supporting each other’s habits through days that were hours and the hours minutes.

That night we’d been in Venice at an art show where I didn’t care for the art and asked Crash to drive brother’s car because I’d drained too many plastic cups of red and that I did not want to be handcuffed again, did not want to be balancing on one foot, did not want to be touching my finger to nose, counting backwards, and that’s fine now blow into this tube here and you’ll be back on your way.

All These Things That I’ve Done was playing as we drove to the Falcon on Sunset from the 101. There was a rain of women pounding on the hood. The signs had no names. The window wipers chattered. The car responded. Crashley was singing I got soul but I’m not a soldier when I heard the metal sound against the car in the next lane. She pulled over to talk to them and from the passenger seat I could see her slipping and realized she was just as wasted as me. I was relieved. I would blame her for the damage when I had to tell my brother what happened. I covered for her with the insurance people. For some reason they sided with me. The woman over the phone said something about a deductable and I paid it with credit. The man at the rental handed over the keys and said I was lucky because I’d been upgraded to a luxury vehicle.

That time in the gym of Dylan’s building, we’d done too much and sat in there looking at ourselves in the mirrors pulling on the weights of the machines. Usually when we’d empty Magic’s bags, the conversations moved in arcade directions: bullets over toilet lids, reflections in vanities, death at coffee tables. That time in the gym I asked Dylan if she was looking for love, I asked Gabe the same and they both said yes, but that they didn’t think it was possible. Both their parents were divorced. I told them I thought it was possible because my parents were together. I said that true love will find us in the end, that’s what Daniel Johnston said, because true love is searching too and they looked at me confused. But back on that chair at the end of the hall with the dirty carpet, exposed brick wall; this kid pushed too hard and on the phone the next day when Dylan called to see how it went, she laughed and said that he had a thing for older women.

Show 5: James Gain and Richard Prins

The text for The Funeral Procession by James Gain will not be posted per author’s request.

The Lookout

by

Richard Prins

Lost my first job after a showdown with pig-tail Chelsea. She held up a sketch of a unicorn with a glittered star stuck on its face and asked how I liked it.

“Well, Chelsea, it ain’t getting you into the Whitney,” is what I told her. Because she didn’t have any talent and she’d better get used to it or else in ten years she’ll make her parents pay for art school and get hooked on coke and molested by professors who tell her she’s a genius and the real thing. She just went back to coloring her unicorn white. Must not have realized the goddamn paper was already white. Didn’t even look up when I smacked the hips of my footlong stool, shouted, “It’s useless!” and gusted out of the park. Strummed Georgina in the Astor station to make some scratch and some peace. Walked home eight bucks richer and my mom was already on my case. “Parks Department called. Transferred you up to Inwood! If you can’t hold a job more than two weeks—”

“I ain’t no popsicle artist; I ain’t no bullshit artist either,” I grumbled out to the bodega for a six-pack to kill by the East River. Next day I was received at Inwood Hill Park by a dude named Tino with a pierced eyebrow and skin so greasy you’d think he was about to wrestle in the Coliseum. The path curled a smoke ring uphill and I didn’t see a kid the entire time. Just a cliff, a shack, a rusted green signpost: LOOKOUT BOOTH.

The door screeched when Tino opened it with a flick of his wedding ring, then slurped to a close behind us. “My shift ends now, you go ’til two, then lock up. Got it?”

“Right. What do I do in the meantime?”

“Simple! You sit back, you watch. And only leave if ya gotta use the can, down the hill where I showed you.”

“So… what am I watching?”

“You mean they didn’t tell you? Ayayaye!” he smacked awry his bleached combover.

“Nope. They didn’t say nothing.”

“The fuckin’ eagles! You watch the eagles!”

“Eagles? Where?”

“Well, you can’t see them. Because they’re inside the nest.” He pointed at a plywood slab and contraption of sticks strung out there between the treetops. “So. Got any more of those questions on ya?”

A week into my second job I decided to give one of Tino’s gigolos a whirl. He’d just paid his lisping Dominican and rushed home to eat his wife’s cooking. As the guy stuffed disapproving faces of three different presidents in his ass pocket and bent down to tie his shoes, I saw that playground kickball bulging out the back of his insufficient pants. Begging me to strum it, pluck it, make it sing. “Say, is there more where that came from?”

He spanked himself and purred affirmatively, his eyes sparking along Georgina’s lustrous nape. “That’s a good guitar, no? You some kind of music man?”

“Yes. I am a music man,” I arched the centipedes above my eyes in a way that never looks anything less than debonair in the mirror. We marched single-file downhill to the public restroom, him first, me imagining the last time I kicked a homerun during recess. A ribby thug was leaning in the doorway, chanting “Maricón, maricón, maricón!” in a crisp falsetto. He was puffing on a glass stem and his released braids were puffing on the right half of his scalp.

My new friend rattled back at him in Spanish while I played mannequin. The guy offered us both a hit, which I passed up, and he galloped backwards out the door with both his thumbs smirking at me.

“Now we got some privacy,” he winked at me, dropping the toilet lid and his pants. I unraveled the latex suffocating perennially in my wallet and gave it a squirt of handsoap. The stall stank of piss, burnt plastic and marzipan the whole time I buggered him. He splashed sinkwater on himself and I rolled us two cease fires for the walk uphill. “We could have a smoke and listen to one of my songs if you like.”

He snatched it from my fingers. “I got to bounce. Cops can’t see me hanging around.”

My eyes tightened so I flipped them through the rolodex of singles in my wallet. “That’s three extra if Tino doesn’t find out.”

Back at my lookout shack, I collapsed into Tino’s shrinkwrapped couch. Reached down for Georgina to cradle her thighs in my arms and roar together at the purpling sky. But my fingertips clashed cold against the carpet. I flung the screen door open and shut to check she wasn’t just hiding. I knew those crackhead bastards were busy hocking the only woman I ever loved. I knew they didn’t even know she once belonged to Dave Van Ronk, who gave her half-price to my dad. Who I knew was gonna beat my ass.

And it came swooping. One of those bald eagles I’d killed hours watching but never even gotten a peek at. Its albino bust, its dance with gusts of air, vanishing between broccoli treetops and all the sky’s glitter. Had to wonder if Chelsea was still drawing unicorns. Already thinking whatever exists is ugly. I went back to my cigarette and muttering useless to myself, because I was smoking the only beautiful thing I had left.

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Show 4: Cliff Benston and Subrina Moorley

Original music by Robert Hann. Check out more of his music here: http://www.myspace.com/roberthann

Fat Camp

by

Cliff Benston

I am the second fattest.

Rhonda Byrnes is the fattest.

Her thigh is on me.  It’s on my face, the left side and up. She is above it smiling.  Leaning in.  She has to.

The thigh is firm and moist and rubbery.  It’s Rhonda’s: my right eye can see so.  Amazing.  My mouth spreads against her skin.  I am returning Rhonda’s smile.  And the other girls are snoring.

She was late on the first day.  I had arrived first.  Dad shook Tamara the counselor’s hand.  He asked her where she was from and what college she went to.  It turned out he’d known a teacher of hers.  Mom and I unpacked my things.  She unrolled the foam she’d bought at Walgreens and made my bed.  She sat on it and then was sure the foam was secure. It took a long time to fill up the small dressers they give us and the cubby on top for toiletries and pictures. When Rhonda got there, I’d met all the other girls.  Dinner was soon and we girls were on our beds.  I shook her hand, I said, “Pleased to meet you, I’m Betsy, where are you from?” and she said, “The South Bronx,” and I said, “Cool.”

She was so fat.

She said, “You ain’t never been there, have you?” and I said, “No, but I’m sure it’s fun,” and then  I said, “I’m from San Francisco.”

Nicole has the top bunk of my bunk.  Nicole was the first girl I met, the second girl to arrive to our bunk.  Nicole is a short, brown-haired girl.  She only wears pink and told me so.  I told her I would wear only purple if I could.  Purple or lime green.  Mom tapped my arm and grinned when I was telling Nicole this, and then Nicole’s mom came back with the last bag.  Mom and Dad hugged me and walked back to the car.  I offered to help Nicole settle in.  She had a lot of make-up to unpack.  She said she would unpack that but I could help her mom make the bed.  Her mom is blond and her eyes are blue, and Nicole is the same.  I said I would do the pillowcases only, and she had to do the sheets and the comforter, and I said I’d do so only if she made sure my mattress foam from Walgreens was on secure enough.  She asked Nicole if Nicole had everything she would need or should she, Nicole’s mom, run to the Wal-Mart up the street.  I would’ve made a joke about all the make-up but Nicole has a freckle on the curve of her nostril that looks like a snot.  Soon, all the rest of us were moved in.

After the dance, Nicole said, “Did you use my perfume?”  We were all talking about the dance but there was a lull when everyone stopped talking at once.  The dance was on the mainground.  Nicole said, “Just ask first next time,” and I said sorry again.  We had gone out and most of us had gotten boyfriends.  The boyfriends were like us, short and wide.  They wore cologne and gold chains, but they aren’t real gold.

I called Mom collect to tell her I had a boyfriend.  This was not the next day, but the day after.  “Is he kind?” she said.  He had a buzz cut and wore shirts with screaming wrestlers like all the other boys.  He also wore a gold chain, and he had a sweet but skeptical and worried smile.  “Is he kind?” she said.  He was.  He was nice to me.  Mom said, “Holding hands means so much.  Have you done that?”  Then she coughed.  “I’m glad you’re having fun.”

My grandfather had visited before I left for camp.  Mom pulled up with him in the driveway a few weeks before school ended.  “You look great, Granddad,” I said.  He looked at me, then turned to the trunk.  Dad got out Granddad’s suitcase.  Dad, smiling: “No, no, no, Dad.”  I got down the steps to give a hug.  I said, “Granddad, you look so young, you have no wrinkles.”  Mom put her hand on my shoulder.  Two days before, just after I got home from enrichment, Mom got off the phone, then she looked at me.  She turned to Dad.  “Is it okay if we get pizza?  I’m not much for cooking.”  I smiled.  Two days later, Granddad and I sat in the living room while Mom and Dad made coffee in the kitchen.  He wore a jean shirt, unbuttoned, and I could see his chest hair.  It was curly and sharp-looking like facial hair and his head hair was combed into a lowercase M over his face.  He looked at the fireplace so I did too.  I smiled and put back my arms to lean on them.  I said, “Granddad, put me in that blanket and take me over to Mom like the stork.”  I touched his knee with my pinky and laughed and sat myself up.  His lips were up at his nose.  I was in bed when Granddad and Mom and Dad were in the kitchen.  Dad went to bed.  Dad took me to McDonald’s after school.  That was the day after.  I could get ice-cream or whatever I wanted.  We talked on the stools at the window counter about summer.

It was the fourth night when there was a balloon on my bed filled with water.  No, it was a condom.  How did I not know what a condom is?  Nicole said, “Very funny, Rhonda,” and Rhonda said, “Wasn’t me,” so I said, “Is that water?  That isn’t”, and all of them laughed.  It was Tamara’s day off.  Rhonda said, “She thought it was”, while all of them laughed.  I picked up a magazine and looked at it.  “I want to read that when you’re done,” Nicole said.

On the second day, Nicole asked Rhonda what hobbies she likes.  I apologized for Nicole by rolling my eyes.  Rhonda took her big grey-T-shirt off.  Rhonda’s breasts are like plastic sandwich bags of pudding.  Rhonda put her shoe on my trunk then undid her lace.  Rhonda said, “I’m a singer.”  Nicole said, “Cool.”  I said, “Have you ever sung a concert?” and Rhonda said, “Every Sunday.  In fact, it was my church sent me here.”  I said, “Nice.”  Rhonda said, “Mm hmm, they did two collection plates for me,” then  I said, “Cool.  That is so cool.”  Rhonda said, “I sing tempo in the choir.  I got four solos last year.  I’m in the adult choir, too.”  But then Tamara said, “Hurry up girls.”  I turned back to Rhonda and said, “Rhonda, that is really cool.”  Tamara, our counselor, got back into her magazine sent from home the day before.  Two days and it’d be Tamara’s day off, Tamara said.  An hour later, we had boys versus girls bingo evening activity.

I like to sit outside my parents’ bedroom at late night. I can hear parts of what they say.   This is when I am at home.  They whisper even though my room is down the hall.  They talk about themselves and me.  They are intelligent and empathetic, like parents.  That night, Mom joined Dad in bed, and Granddad took the guestroom where we’d just bought a new mattress.  Mom whispered, “It’s like a bad sitcom.”  Dad whispered, “Plot twists.”  Mom whispered, “Right, a bad story, a bad joke you can’t even mull over.  Like it comes back for getting a bigger audience, contrived, inorganic to the story.”  Dad whispered, “Right, I know, it’s mean, and stupid and rude and unoriginal, and you’d expect it.”  Mom whispered, “And it’s so bad we become just as contrived, and poor Dad.”  Dad whispered, “Perhaps that’s what makes a bad sitcom: making a big deal out of something horrible that has been everyone’s big deal.”  The carpet was rough.  Mom whispered, “Right.”  Dad whispered, “The good sitcom is where something absolutely mind-numbingly awful happens and it’s treated with reservation and calm.”  Mom whispered, “The fools are the audience.”  My knees burned.  I was in the patch where my cat had vomited so the carpet was rougher than usual.  Dad whispered, “Right.  The audience has to be moved more than the characters.  Otherwise the characters are petulant, hate-worthy.”

In Week Two, my eighth day, I finally mustered to tell Tamara, “They are so terrible to me.”  They are.  It had become a game, like free-style figure skating. Unrelenting cruelty and its recipient harmonized so well, for so long a time, that we’d all forgot how it began or that there’d been a beginning.  I really don’t know how it happened.  I think it was Rhonda.  Her and Nicole but mostly her.  Tamara, on her bed, on her side, toward the wall, on her lower bunk, was a head shorter than me.  She was sleeping and it was her day off.  But she gave me some time.  She said, “I’m sorry,” and  I said, “Can you do anything?”  She said, “What do you suppose?” and then said, “I can’t tell people what or how to feel.  I can’t make people be friends.”  I was probably a little cranky, because earlier, Robby, my boyfriend, broke up with me, and it was making me suffer.  I said, “Can’t you tell them to be nicer?”  Tamara shook her head and said, “How do I make people be things they aren’t?”

Nicole’s mom, she told me, manages a Body Shop.  That is a store that sells soaps and cleansers.  Nicole’s mom worked her way up in the store.  She’s been an employee of the Body Shop for fifteen years, Nicole had said.  Nicole knows all the customers.  She can get whatever she wants.  It’s one of the top twenty Body Shops in the country.  Nicole sits on a stool near the register.  She maintains herself with the same regimen of the last four years: lip moisturizer, face scrub, face cream, body wash, and night cream.  She talks while she does it.  She’s a girly girl, self-professed.  Her mother sent her things and notes in packages, and has a discount at the store.  Nicole looks in the mirror and talks while she puts on the cream.

So on that line Nicole asked Rhonda what did her parents do.  This was early on.  We were all talking about what our parents did.  Nicole said, “What about your dad, Rhonda?”  She said, “My daddy ain’t no lawyer,” because Dad is a lawyer.  I knew not to ask what Rhonda’s dad was but Nicole asked so I rolled my eyes.  Then, Rhonda said, “I don’t know him.”  Nicole’s cheeks puffed out in a grave expression: “My dad isn’t in my life either.  It’s just me and Mom,” Nicole said.  “It’s like we’re sisters but I’m a daughter and she’s a mom.”

“Cool,” I said.  I looked at the trunk.

Rhonda gathered her comforter into a ball.  Nicole said, “Yeah.  We have a very special relationship.  But sometimes I wish it was more.  Sometimes I wish it was normal.”  I said, “Your mom seemed cool when I met her.  She is a cool woman.”  So I smiled at Rhonda.  Nicole said, “Yeah, she’s great.  She is great.”  Rhonda took the comforter from at her back and put it in front of her to pat on it.

The night before we drove up, I listened to Mom and Dad in bed.  Granddad was back, two weeks or so ago, before I went to camp.  Then, like what they talked about before, about bad stories, Mom and Dad also were on to me, then, when I was on my knees outside their door, when it was the night before camp.  Mom whispered, “So she’s all right with camp?  I’m nervous.”  Dad whispered, “Yes.  I explained that we needed the time with Dad.  She understands.  She says she hopes you’re okay.”  Mom whispered, “She’s a good girl.  Empathetic,” then paused.  Then something quieter than a whisper came from Dad, coming from his voice box.  A grunt, a wheeze?  A word not swallowed but pushed down from your head?  I tucked myself into a cannonball.  My knees smelled like the vomit.  “No,” Mom whispered to Dad.  I ran in there.  “Of course I understand,” I said, then, “It’s your father, Mom.”  Mom whispered, “Your grandfather”, and I said, I whispered, “I’m happy to go to camp.  Don’t worry, he’s asleep, I checked, he’s even snoring”, and she said, “Go to sleep!” and Dad said, “Go, Betsy,” so I still went to my room alone even though I cried.

At the slightest urging the girls at camp took to hating me, coaxed by someone we cannot hate because of what she is: ugly, stupid, obese, but still shameless.  I am the second fattest but they all said I am the fattest.  I am delicate but not cruel, and cruel and delicate are a lethal combination according to Tamara’s mother.  Their cruelty is frightening and captivating, remarkable, the things you’d expect from them.  It is absolute and came to us despite our inexperience and youth.  It is an experiment.  It is malleable because its hypothesis is malleable and it is an experiment that maintains at any time by us or without us.  Rhonda said, “Why do you let us?”  This was right before I tried to hit her earlier tonight, right after dinner, before the Saturday night dance.  “Little bitch.  Why?”  This was when she pinned me under her arms and shoulders and she was on me.  The other girls were mashing their chins into their beds and trying not to look at each other.  Tamara: “Huh?”  Then Tamara: “Girls, stop it.”

So I called collect to Mom before bed.  When I connected, Granddad fumbled with the phone and it sounded like a drinking neck.  I said, “Granddad?  Hey, Granddad, is that you, how are you doing?”  He said, “What, what?”  I said, “Hey, Granddad, it’s me, Betsy, your granddaughter, how are you doing, I miss you, I’m thinking of you.  Are you doing okay?”  Then an echo.  “Betsy,” Mom said, “why are you calling?” so I said, “I was just talking to Granddad.”  She said, “What is wrong with you?  He needs his sleep.  We need to sleep.”  I told her I have to come home.  She said, “He’s dying.  How can you do this right now?” and I said, “I hate it here.  I hate it here.  They’re so mean to me.  So mean.”  She said, “You’re screaming,” and I said, “No I’m not.  No one’s around.  I don’t care.  I hate it.”  She said, “You can’t do this,” and, “Your grandfather is dying.  You can’t do this.  My father is dying.  Fine, here.”  Dad said, “Honey,” and then I cried.  Dad said, “Honey?  Honey, are you going to do this?  Are you, honey?”  I cried and looked at the boy waiting in line.  We had five minutes each for the phone.  He had his hand out.  “Honey?” Dad said.  “Honey.  Cool down.  It’s okay, honeybun.  I know.”  I didn’t say anything.  We were silent.  Then it was the sound of old bones pouring out, the sound of dry sticks or porcelain shards, them rustling.

Before dinner was shower hour.  I painted my nails with some of Nicole’s polish.  Tamara looked at a magazine about men that sneer for smiles.  Rhonda said, “You shower?  You ever shower?  You stink.”  It was Saturday dance night.  Yesterday was Friday movie night.  We watched a movie on the lawn everyone but me had seen.  The dusk made the images onscreen smooth and bland like a skipping stone.  We lay on our towels, but I couldn’t hear the movie with all the talking going on.

So I snuck to the phone and talked to Mom.  This was yesterday, Friday, when I gave her my litany of what was going on.  She chuckled and then said, “Read that copy of Jane Eyre I gave you.”  She also told me about my cousin Sarah who just got into Notre Dame.  Mom thinks it’s probably because Sarah played the tuba.  Universities actively recruit for marching bands and Sarah’s played in the state finals three times.  We’re all thrilled for Sarah.  I asked Nicole for some paper to write Sarah a letter.  “Don’t you have your own?” she said.  I said, “Yeah but you have pretty stationary.”  Mom had sounded happy for Sarah and Notre Dame.  That’s what my cousin’s up to.  I haven’t seen Sarah in years.

Tonight, before I punched Rhonda, the girls went to the maingrounds for the dance.  I sat on a bench with Tamara.  Tamara is weepy-looking.  Her bottom face is a five-o’clock shadow of scars from zits.  Nicole has tried to find a way to suggest something to her.  Me and Tamara talked.  She was named for her grandmother.  There is no light in which the scars don’t show, not even candlelight.  She talked about her days off.  Her mom will send her a package for her birthday.  She will get a car when she graduates.  She is majoring in acting.  She wants to go to Yale Drama School, which is the best in the country.  Jodie Foster and Meryl Streep went there.  Jodie Foster dated Timothy Hutton.  Jodie Foster remembers dating Timothy Hutton fondly.  It was a long time ago.  They’re still friends.  Tamara gives us her magazines when she’s done with them.  “Why are you here?” we’ve asked her.  Tamara is thin and most of the counselors are fat.  Tamara has orange hair and is tall but is gangly, hunching her shoulders and looking around to make sure nobody is looking, as if she’s an overgrown eighth-grader.  “I’ll bet Tamara’s a virgin,” Rhonda has said in private when Tamara is asleep, “and never seen a real dick.”  Only on the third day she said this stuff.  “You have a boyfriend?” we asked Tamara on the fourth day.  “Of course you have a boyfriend,” we said, a couple days ago, after she slept on her day off under new magazines.  “You’re so pretty.  Have you ever been fucked on a first date?  Blown him?”  Yesterday, in private, Rhonda said, “Tamara’s a silly old virgin,” and, “probably will be forever,” and we laughed, but tonight Rhonda said, “Tamara’s no slutty tuba band geek,” and that was it.

And later tonight, right now, she puts her thigh on me and has to lean because she is heavy, she’s the fattest one here, and it, her thigh, makes my nose run and all the left half of my face greasy.  And tomorrow, tomorrow I will get a call from Mom and Mom will sound tired.  Granddad will be dead.  He will die tonight.  He will be dead in the morning.  He might already be dead.  Rhonda’s thigh is on me and I’m smiling right up to her.  She can see it.

She says, “Ssshhhhhhh…”

And the girls snore and I forget the whole thing like you forget things your family did that are incongruous but aren’t worth resenting.  Things said at the kitchen table or in the hallway when you’re going to different rooms, mumblings in afternoon conversations that are like the answers you might accept of someone who is just falling asleep but right now they’re awake for hours.  You don’t mull over what they say.  You don’t even think about it.  You might have to laugh.

And so tomorrow at kickball Tamara says, “Phone call at the main office,” to me, and I say, “It’s probably my mom about my granddad,” to the girls, and I explain, “He probably died.  He’s been very sick.  He’s been very sick this whole time.”  And it is Mom.  Granddad died.  I say to her, “I’m sorry.”  I ask, “Was it in his sleep?”  She tells me, “Yes.”  I say, “In his sleep is the best, they say.  They say it’s almost painless.”  Mom says, “He was in his sleep.”

“He’s room temperature now,” I say, remembering enrichment science unit where I got an A-.  She tells me she will be here tomorrow at eleven.  I go back to the bunk, alone, and wash my hair with Nicole’s fruit shampoo.  I haven’t washed it in days and it smells smoky.  At the funeral, Mom plays a tape of a message Granddad left on our answering machine.  I put my hand on her shoulder and she shakes and slumps forward and sobs.  Next to me is Cousin Sarah.  I shrug toward my cousin.  Dad’s hand is on Mom’s head.  My cousin next to me who has been staying with Mom and Dad for two weeks is the one that just got into Notre Dame.  At the lunch after, the funeral men put out grapes, and bread separate from meat coldcuts and cheese, and there are plates already stacked up.  Dad offers me a water.  We are in a bright room without windows.  While we wait, Uncle David gets up and tells us a joke that was one of Granddad’s favorites.

Uncle David says, “Dad used to always tell this joke and if I remember it correctly it is Hitler and Goebbels sitting in the main room of the Reichstag coming up with campaign slogans.  So in they call a focus group for which Goebbels is to make his pitch.”  Uncle David is Sarah’s father.  He is a doctor and Mom talks to him once a month or so.  “‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Goebbels says to the group, ‘Our great fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, wants to save our country.’  Jeez, I’m mangling this story.”  But it’s okay.  We’re all chuckling.  Uncle David is doing great.  “‘And to do so,’” my uncle continues, “‘he plans to save our country from economic depression and from the twofold blights of the Jews and the electricians.’  The focus group, now totally confused, says, ‘Herr Goebbels, but why the electricians?’ to which Goebbels turns to Adolf Hitler and says, ‘See, mein fuhrer,’” which my uncle David says in quite a thick German accent, “‘did I not tell you no one cares about the Jews?”"

One Thursday

by

Subrina Moorley

She’d seen him as he was disappearing through the staircase doors. It was her birthday, and thefirst day of such an affair. It was a new beginning. She’d see him later that day, strumming aguitar, and other days to come. She’d never, ever see him enough.

The morning air carried a sweet residue, refreshing after perhaps four hours’ sleep. Their many-a-hour long conversation, courtesy of the phone, seeped into dawn, and everything to come, replete in her memory. Her stomach felt queasy, occupied by coffee and scrambled eggs, reactions that remind us of butterflies, their frenzy. It is all very familiar, even the very date.

The train rides seemed to never end, and when they did, they did so far too quick. She walked the busy streets studying the signs, the storefronts, the cars and the green lights until they changed to amber or red. Time, nothing seem to exist, unless she checked. And she checked often.

Standing at the corner, she was aware of the too many buildings, her cold sweat. So while she waited, she attempted unsuccessfully to guess which was his. When he finally called, she was suddenly relieved; she continued eagerly in his direction, forgetful of her wrong. She was rather forgetful when she wanted, for she never forgot him.

She might have lingered in his living room, absorbing family photographs (if any), or tiny, dusty decorative glass ornaments. The constant smell of smoke. She might have ventured to the kitchen or taken her time in the depressing pink-painted hallway, like a seniors’ home corridor.

He hurried her to the room and then put her near the wall, him on the other side; they lay in his bed like this. She did not want to look too much, although she did: she stared from one wall to the next until all four simply became a unified, tremendous parallel of blue and graffiti. Her back to his face, he was breathing hard.

He said, “Give me space” but she could not, she could not push her body into the wall. He moved into her, she moved into him. He said, “That’s better.”

They talked in lazy, sleepy voices. Rolling around with one another, tossing this way or that way, fairly content.

She said, “There’s too many Josephs and Davids and Anthonys” and he smoothly replied, “There’s not a lot of Rachels with nice asses.” She laughed at this, because she knew there were many, many Rachels with nice asses. He laughed too.

And as they tumbled, with brief intermissions of still and silence, the television at zenith volume advertised acne solutions and repeats of old, timeless cartoons. In such a state of entangled joints and limbs, awake one minute or not so much the next, beneath the warmth of two shabby blankets, him groping through her jeans and the cut in her shirt where her back was exposed, she could barely speak. But she did. All the while she noted his restless mouth and hands, in all the right places. Her own mouth and hands, stunned.

Later, he sat by the window smoking and she, there on the bed, comfortably curled up in the mess of sheets and pillows. They smiled at one another, then laughed. He asked, “What now?” and went for his guitar.

She watched him play, and enjoyed it; the way his fingers moved over the strings. She was delighted, and delighted she reached for his hand, pried his fist open. He sat, very little resistance. Surprising her he held his palm out, and so she discovered a dime.

He was rummaging and then he offered her a guitar pick, it’s shape a zombies’ head, whose gaping mouth and bloody white eye sockets she pushed into the pocket of her pants.

When there was no more to play, he stopped and returned to the mattress, smoked another cigarette. They watched a Tom and Jerry episode; their faces turned completely to the screen flashing yellow, only yellow she remembered. And the fit of laughter, when it were announced, “Tom fell into a sea of ‘pussy-cat eating piranhas.’” And they joked at the accuracy of their prediction, for they predicted neither would win the race.

He said it, and she knew he would the minute they lay down on the bed, albeit their previous phone conversation. Even present she heard herself saying, “Don’t expect anything.”

It was the sheer firmness of his body underneath her weight; his arms, flexed into big round steel balls. His legs. She prodded with her index, with her knuckles, until she was squeezing with all her might, punching and huffing and puffing. He felt so, so solid.

But it wasn’t just his body, that security. She laid there in absolute awe of his hair, unkempt, fingering his curls and marveling how it shown gold in the sunlight as it reflected off the window above the bed. His hair was naturally brunette. It was like a kaleidoscope, that apparatus which changes from blue, yellow, to red at the shift of an angle. And she could’ve sworn his eyes were brown; instead they were green.

He must’ve known what to expect, he was very well prepared. She said at one sorry point, “Did you know this would happen?” and before he answered, she answered for him. “Yes.”

She understood, like everyone else, that with the winter season came shorter days, that their time was limited. When he asked again, she did not delay. He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll teach you” very sure and willing.

And she was a slow learner, neither he, a good teacher. Together they spread a white towel over the floral bed sheets.

There was music playing now. And the television, with that, made a noisy clash. Abruptly she was apprehensive of the room, that mess. The scent and the blue, graffiti wall with her face fixed inches away; his figure positioned behind her. And time. She was taken aback.

The phone rang; he stopped. Everything before seemed a kind of misleading foreplay. She remained stuck in that paradox.

He was obliged to ask her if she was okay, and she felt obliged to say yes. They stepped outside and she was conscious again; of the day, the busy streets with the signs, the storefronts, the cars and the green lights until they changed to amber or red. Most of all, she was conscious of him.

Then they departed, standing at the steps of another apartment building, for there was too many. He was to go in and she was to leave. He leaned forward to hug her and they kissed on the cheeks like old friends.

She walked away while he pounced up the stairs. And she was implied to remark, to herself, that that was the end. It was something to maul over, and she did so trotting down the hill he’d referred to in his directions but she’d missed. The train rides seemed to never end, and when they did, they did so far too quick.

Show 3: Robert Zander Norman and Joseph Oslund

Robin is Not a Boy’s Name

by

Robert Zander Norman

Robin was a boy and his name was Robin.  That wasn’t the worst part of his life, but it was close.  His mother told him that robins are beautiful red birds and that red can be a very masculine color.  Robin told her if that was truth then they wouldn’t have such girly names.  His father told him that Robin was the name of a superhero.  Robin said “No, Dad, it’s the name of a sidekick, and I don’t have a utility belt.”  There was only one other kid named Robin in his class, and she was a girl who spelled it with a Y.

Robin’s life was basically terrible if you looked at it from his perspective.  He’d made an incomplete list of horrible things that had occurred in his life up to today.  It read:

Bad Things That Have Happened So Far To Me

1. Born
2. Named Robin
3. A bunch of stuff that I can’t remember because I was too little, but I can tell from the way my parents look at me they were bad
4. Given a soggy peanut butter and jelly every day of ever
5. Girl Robyn beat me in the 100-yard dash
6. Everybody laughed

There were lots of others, but they were very painful to remember so he stopped writing them down.

Robin’s mom had made him put on the green Austrian ski sweater that his grandmother had knit for him using real expensive and exotic alpaca wool.  In the case of sweaters, expensive and exotic meant itchy and ugly.  It scratched at his neck and squeezed his ribs too tight, the buttons were impossible to do up and it ballooned out at the bottom in a way that made his mother giggle and say that it looked like he had love handles.  Robin did not know what love handles were, but he knew that they were terrible if you got them from Austrian ski sweaters.  Also it was warm.  Hot.  He was sweating before he got on the school bus.  By the time he got to class it was pouring down his forehead and stinging his eyes and down his neck into the scratchy collar.  The sweater wasn’t the worst part of his day, but it was close.

The real worst part was that it was picture day, which is the worst day of the year besides the day they do the standardized testing, which is just so dumb and boring that you’ll fall asleep just thinking about it.  Picture days are bad enough on their own, but you don’t know how terrible they can really be if you’ve never had to go to one in an Austrian ski sweater.  Robin surveyed the kids in line.  No one else’s mother had made them wear an Austrian ski sweater, just like nobody else’s parents had named them Robin.

When it was his turn, he mopped the sweat off his face and tried to smile as genuinely as he could for the photographer, who was making him turn his neck at an unnatural and painful angle just like the school photographer always did, because if he didn’t his mother would kill him for sure.  He held his breath and his smile until his lungs and cheeks ached and his face turned bright red.  Then, finally the camera flashed and he was released.

Robin ran to the bathroom to change and be free of the Austrian ski sweater.  As he tore it off, cold air surged over his sweaty torso and made him shiver.  Everybody knows the torture of being forced to wear uncomfortable knit products against one’s will, and the relief that comes with stripping them off is wonderful.  When that relief had just begun to seep into him, Robin looked at the mirror and smiled wide, sincerely this time, because on his chin was a plump pink and white pimple.  It was huge, gargantuan, at least half the size of a nostril, and it would be in his school picture and the yearbook and get sent out to grandparents and aunts and uncles and make his mother scream for sure.  The thought made up for almost anything bad that ever happened except for maybe the girl Robyn situation.  After admiring it for a little while, Robin took two fingers and squeezed hard.  Hitting the mirror when you pop a zit isn’t the best part of life, but it’s close.

I Want a Mustache but Mom Won’t Let Me Get One

by

Robert Zander Norman

Will power.  Keith sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed his chin, contemplating the consequences of disobedience.  He knew from school and being sat down and spoken to by his grandfather that he could achieve anything at all that he put his mind to.  The mind is a very powerful organ.  Aside from the tongue, it is the most powerful organ in the body, more than the brain even.  Science was not Keith’s strongest suit, but he understood this.

The mind has unlimited potential.  The mind can transform the most mundane and boring life into something special.  Will power lies in the mind and that is what makes magic happen.  The mind brought man to the moon.  The mind brought pioneers across the frontier.  The mind made Albert Einstein Albert Einstein, and all the other great people in the world who they were, like Theodore Roosevelt or Pablo Picasso.  Those people did those things that everybody knows about, that everyone’s seen.  You can’t see the mind, but the mind was behind it all.  Keith knew this, and you can trust Keith, he’s thought a lot about it.

Obedience was another issue that Keith wrestled with.  A guilty conscience gripped his heart tight, as he considered breaking the rules his mother had laid down.  If he had the ability to do whatever he wanted, then why shouldn’t he just do it?  Obedience.  His mother had forbidden his heart’s deepest and most recent desire.  Loyalty to the woman who raised him and the burning want to pursue the power of his will to its fullest potential pulled his soul in two different, painful directions.

He looked to the poster above his bed for guidance, but the sight only led to deeper anguish.  The poster read: BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST SHOW in big red letters and showed a cowboy riding a bucking bronco.  His hat had flown off into the air, one hand grasping at it and the other clasped tight to the reins.  His bright red bandana and his plaid shirt shone in the sun.  A crowd on bleachers in the back gasped and applauded in awe, amazed at his Herculean ability and bravery.

It made Keith’s heart turn.  His favorite detail, the one that tortured him so, was on that proud cowboy’s upper lip.  His mustache:  The mark of a man.  He wanted one so badly.  Every night he stared at that poster before he fell asleep, imagining a mustache of his own.  Dark and full, instilling fear into the hearts of evil men and punctuating his smiles to kind friends and passersby.  The power and possibility in that.  It’s like a hat for your face, but instead of buying it and putting it on you grow it, so it’s not a hat, it’s really you.  It’s a sincere extension of your youness, saying, “This mustache is me.”

Why couldn’t Keith’s mom understand that?

Last week he had drawn one onto his bathroom mirror with a marker to see how it would look.  The feeling was incredible.  It looked perfect and fit between his nose and mouth like a hand in a glove.  Adrenaline pulsed through his veins.  When the mustache was on his face, the wild, boundless spirit of the untamed bronco and the quiet strength of the cowboy who rides it were in his heart.

Keith’s mom was obviously unfamiliar with this feeling.  She screamed when she saw it on the mirror and found that it wouldn’t come off, although she did succeed in smudging it, which ruined it for Keith’s purpose.  She dragged him by the ear to the bathroom and yelled about how he’d defaced her bathroom.  She must have been confused, he thought, because it was his bathroom, and he hadn’t defaced it, he’d given it a piece of one.  But when he told her that, she twisted his ear again and got even more hysterical.  She called him disrespectful when he was the one who felt disrespected.

It was a confusing experience for Keith.  He tried to explain that he was just doing it as a test and that he didn’t mean to ruin the mirror and that he didn’t think that mirror was actually ruined anyway and the feeling of the bronco running wild across his heart, but she couldn’t understand.  The mustache did not mean as much to her as it did to him.

She continued to yell, this time about the real mustache he wanted, not the marker one on the mirror.  Her reasons were ridiculous and invalid in his eyes.

“What are you even talking about?  What are you thinking?” she wailed.  “You’re twelve.  You’re in middle school.  You’ve never even ridden a horse.  You’re not a cowboy!”

What did his age matter? Twelve was his favorite number.  His year in school didn’t seem particularly important either.  For all she knew, the guy in his poster never even went to kindergarten.  And if she was worried about him being the only one at school with facial hair and not fitting in, she didn’t get it at all, because that was the entire point!

At last she let go of his ear and told him to go to his room.  And every day since he had thought over and over about this dilemma, stroking his chin to encourage the flow of thoughts and kicking the door jam to express his inner frustration when he ran into gaps in logic or other mental hurdles.

Could his mom have a point?  He can do anything if he sets his mind to it, but were there things that maybe he shouldn’t set his mind to?  Will power.  He could sprout a mustache in a second if he really decided to, but that meant disobeying his mother, which was something he knew he shouldn’t do.  She had never led him astray before, but what harm could a mustache possibly do?  The power of the bronco was a good thing, wasn’t it?  Could it be too much for him to handle?  Did she know something that he didn’t?

Was this like the time she had pushed him out of the way of traffic?  At first it was annoying, but then he realized he would have died if she didn’t, so it ended up being okay.  This was sort of like that, but she was yelling at him instead of pushing.  Would a mustache kill him?  Probably not.  The man in the poster looked very much alive.  Indecision.  Pain and desire.  Which would crush him first, the need for his mustache or the shame of disobeying his mother?

At long last, he gave up.  Fear of some unknown consequence and respect for mom made up his mind.  He would stay clean-shaven for now.

As soon as the decision was made in his mind, a strange feeling rushed through him.  Excitement.  His heart beat faster.  A smile hit his lips.  A moment passed before he recognized the feeling.  It was the bronco.  Power still lived inside him, even without the mustache.  It may not have shown on his lip, but it was in his heart.  This was will power.  This is what astronauts and Albert Einstein felt.

He would not grow a mustache right now, but that didn’t mean that he could not.  Making a decision at all is what gave it to him.  He had chosen to respect his mother’s wishes, and what an honorable decision it had been.  Keith’s chest swelled with pride and he knew that although his face did not yet wear a mustache, his spirit certainly did.

Please Pass This to Aimee Otterson

by

Robert Zander Norman

Dear Aimee,

Hello. This is Derek. Do you remember the time that you saw me with my notebook open and it had your name written a lot of times and only your name and you came over and asked me why your name was written all those times and Ray came over and said it was a people who suck list and you made it on a million times? That was not true. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away. I don’t want to tell you what it actually meant, but it is not that you suck. Okay?

Sincerely,

Derek  Peterson

P.S. I really mean it.

P.P.S. Your hair smells really good today. I don’t go around sniffing everybody’s hair, it’s just that I happened to walk by you in the lunch line when you were picking up your chimichanga and you flipped it over your shoulder, your hair, not your chimichanga, and I just couldn’t help but smell it, and it was good.

P.P.P.S. Like cranberries and kiwis and the sunshine is what it was like.

P.P.P.P.S. This one time my sister Frances was telling me about her dream wedding because she’s lame and dumb and thinks about that sort of thing a lot.  And it was way lame. I could come up with a way better dream wedding. Like we’re in the forest surrounded by redwood trees and only our closest family and friends in a little clearing deep way away in the mountains and we wrote our own vows and there’s a veil and a tuxedo and it smells like cranberries and kiwis and the sunshine and the whole place is literally glowing like there are fairies around and there’s not a dry eye, which means that everybody is crying, because no one can imagine anything better.

P.P.P.P.P.S. I’m not a pussy or anything.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Or a baby.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. One time I broke my arm. It was because my dad got the pool emptied because there was a leak and I skateboarded in it with my best friend Ray, who you know, and I fell from the top of the deep end straight on it and it broke basically in half and I only cried a little tiny bit, like the absolute minimum.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. I love you I think.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Sorry.

PLACES YOU CAN GO:

A Walk to the Statue of Liberty in Seven Parts

by

Joseph Oslund

I.

I walk from my room on 10^th Street down Broadway to Battery Park, that little sprout of open space where the ramparts of Manhattan fall away into the water. I don’t want to pay for the subway and I enjoy walking, especially in New York—the streets go on forever and you never run out of somewhere to walk. It’s cold, though, and the sidewalk is crowded with people darting about, enjoying the holiday—George Washington’s birthday—by shopping, fawning over designer label clothing and accessories.

Everybody, it seems, shops in SoHo. Rich people, poor people, people from New Jersey and the boroughs, Europeans, Asians, blacks, whites—they all shop, dodging from storefront to storefront in little leaps and bounds, making tiny arcs up and down streets and avenues. They walk farther shopping than I think they’d ever admit to being able to under non-shopping circumstances—that is,  they would give up almost immediately if they were ever to be challenged to walk continuously in a straight line for as far as they walked while shopping. Having incentive—and the right frame of mind—is everything in this life. They have it, and you don’t.

II.

For some reason, everybody walks north on the east side of Broadway. I walk south on the west side of Broadway, defying the heard and escaping into Tribeca. Soon there are courthouses and federal buildings and dirty little bodegas, all empty due to the holiday. Hot dog vendors pack up their carts, calling it a day. Little Asian men hawk scarves and jewelry out of tiny shops carved into the bottom of neglected walk-ups.

I turn into Park Place, near the World Trade Center site, and try to guess which of the buildings is destined to be demolished and turned into the Islamic cultural center. I can’t tell which of the buildings it is and it doesn’t make a difference. A jewelry store, a pizza place, an anonymous office building—they’re all unworthy, in a way, to be so close to the great big hole in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be. Why should the grimy pizza joint and the second-hand diamond wholesaler be allowed to stand while the towers burn to the ground just down the street?

There is a church, St. Peters, which is closer to the World Trade Center than any Islamic cultural center could ever hope to be. It is a Catholic church, and this is okay—it is sanctified. Why do we define our suffering by the different ways in which we worship God? Human suffering is secular, a universal curse on all of God’s creation. The people buried in the rubble next to St. Peters did not die thinking of the different ways in which we worship God—they had no way of knowing what religion Mohammed Atta claimed as his own. I’d like to think we all die with a kind of equality—that we each become entirely the property of an anonymous and almighty God, transcending all else.

III.

Nobody is at Battery Park. Little groups of tourists, mostly Europeans and unimpressed by the cold, wander about, taking pictures of themselves in front of the Statue of Liberty. I imagine all the pictures they show to the relatives back home, all crowded around a little computer screen in an apartment somewhere in Eastern Europe. They fawn and gawk and laugh. Then they look at the jackets and the pants and the other little things from the shops in SoHo. They forget the photographs, the stories—they concentrate only the discounts, on the quality of the merchandise. This part is secular, as secular as anything can be—unconcerned with cultural centers and religious intolerance, ignorant of monuments and experiences. Thoughtless and direct, beating onward and ever forward, unconcerned—liberated.

IV.

While it is free for any red-blooded American to stand and be physically present on Liberty Island, it costs twelve dollars to ride the ferry—and three to climb to the crown of the monument. Fifteen dollars is too expensive and I ride the Staten Island ferry instead, choosing to experience the monument as an immigrant might, sliding by the thing without actually touching it, watching it from afar, wondering about the little people who wander along the island’s edge. The ferry is big, orange, and fast—with several sparse decks overwhelmed by a howling wind. I notch myself against a pillar on the promenade deck and watch the briny green water slip by along the ship’s side. Promenade is a verb—a strange verb, a verb that suggests an act of luxury and excess quite ill-fitting to the ferry’s sparse benches and vomit stained decks. This is no ocean liner, but rather a blunt instrument of mass transit, a lifeline for working people.

V.

Apparently there are no open-container laws aboard the Staten Island ferry. Tattooed men drink from big tubs of imported beer bought at the snack bar. A cop walks right by and doesn’t glance twice, his eyes searching instead for suspicious looking Middle Eastern men with explosives tucked inside their underwear. This is liberty—beer on a boat, Manhattan rising in the foreground, the setting sun reflecting off the mirrored faces of downtown financial buildings, burning the face of the ferry like a child might burn an ant with a magnifying glass. These men who drink and watch Manhattan rise live in little places, rented rooms on Staten Island with dirty little windows looking out on a dirty little world. And here, front and center, Manhattan rises, sleek and modern and full of glass—buildings built on top of lobbies with gates and turnstiles and security guards with cloth badges sewn onto the front of polyester windbreakers. These are the places in Lower Manhattan that these men cannot go, places forbidden to tattooed people from Staten Island. This is liberty—beer on a boat.

VI.

I do not leave the Staten Island ferry terminal. Perhaps I should, but I don’t. There are twin fish tanks in the lobby, filled with tropical fish provided by the Staten Island Zoo and sponsored by a bank or a credit union or something. A man comes along with a ladder, casual and unassuming and carrying a bucket. He climbs up on top of each tank and dumps handfuls of little dead fish parts into the water. Feeding time. People gather to watch. The fish know right where to go—and the people do too, transfixed by the wonder of it all, mesmerized by the beauty of another species eating dinner. I am not awestruck, but rather repulsed—fish are eating fish, belly-down fish snatching belly-up fish and darting away, protecting their meal for themselves, their eyes glinting with a brutal decisiveness. This is routine, but horrible, certain, dumb, deaf, and mute. The fish feeding man is not consumed by any of it—he ignores the feeding the frenzy and the frenzy of people who watch it. Rather, he packs up his ladder and his bucket and darts away to an anonymous corner of the terminal, becoming invisible again.

VII.

Lower Manhattan has all the best stuff—basketball courts with smooth new pavement and community gardens with carefully organized beds of plants dead for the winter. The oldest part of Manhattan is also the newest, its steady bedrock enticing to rich white men with schemes to build big towering pillars of offices and luxury apartments. In the older neighborhoods, those built on swamps and little hollows filled with sand, the old buildings still stand, their dirty faces left to stare blankly down upon the streets by people too busy to wipe the age away. But this is not one of those neighborhoods—rather, Lower Manhattan is great big hotel lobby, a sprawling web of big comfortable places to be. Apartments are given anonymous doors and the people float back and forth along the manicured waterfront, their legs not appearing to be attached to anything in particular. Carefully arranged delis and convenience stores display snacks and other sundries, like glossy magazines and toothbrushes in little wrappers. It is indeed comfortable to live in Lower Manhattan, all glass and steel and a shining mirrors to reflect the beauty of the place back upon itself. The Statue of Liberty, an old thing, can be seen—but just barely. The city, like the ferries, seem to be forever in the act of pulling away, adrift, cast away by the springing growth of snug modernity.

Show 2: Going South by Maura Roosevelt

A sign was stuck into the burnt grass of a sloping hill, in front of a small white chapel.  It read: GOD HATES THE BUSINESS OF THE GREEDY.

Violet was gawking at the scenery through the passenger side window.  “But what about the Not-for-Prophets?”  She threw her head backwards with a chortle.

She glared at Kurt when he didn’t laugh too, but he just made a grunty growl and kept his eyes fixed on the highway ahead.  Kurt was terrified of driving, but he had heard her.  She sighed.  He had never gotten her sense of humor.

They must have been in Georgia already.  Mile-high pine trees loomed just above titanium light poles.  Rain was coming down at the car in a funny, sideways sheet.  Misting over the windshield.   The news was always saying they lived in a post-rain era, but that wasn’t true.  The sky still drizzled and spat at the world, it just never came down in buckets, with confidence.  They were in the clunker; the Chevy Malibu that smelled of cigarettes smoked years ago and had stains below their feet from coffee spilled on the mats that was never mopped up.   The car belonged to Violet’s Mom but they had taken it with them on this adventure.

Violet looked at the newly fragile state of her husband as he hunched over the steering wheel.  He had been eating less and less and had lost so much weight recently.  When she met Kurt he was one of those fumbling boys with shoulders too broad and legs too thick for the rest of his childlike physique.  His head hung as he lumbered through the crowded streets surrounding Manhattan College, seeming surprised by his own largeness.  He had a shock of loopy blond hair, and that—in addition to standing a good eight inches over the crowd at all times—differentiated him from the herd, and drew a person’s eyes upward to him, the skyscrapers, the clouds, and the afternoon sun that rippled above his head.  From the first moment Violet saw Kurt standing on the corner of Mercer and East 4^th Street handing out flyers for an Antediluvialist rally, she was literally looking up to him.

Kurt hadn’t driven since he got accepted to college and declared himself a New Yorker.  Now double-barreled oil trucks sped by them at ninety miles-an-hour while their Chevy was ticking along at fifty-five.  He was breathing deeply, his eyes fixed through the windshield.  The rain was beginning to separate into drops but the sun still shined through them.  It was nothing the two of them hadn’t seen before, this type of rain.  Kurt turned the chugging vehicle into a highway gas station and pulled it halfway into a spot on the edge of the pavement.  He cut the engine and swung open his door, pitching his body out through the air until he hit the browned grass, smiling and shrieking.  He rolled all the way down the burnt grass parking lot hill.

“We’re alive!”  He yelled through the well-spaced raindrops.  “I didn’t kill us in the car; we’re alive!”  The goofball.  “We made it!”

He jumped to his feet and bounded over to Violet who was shoeless now, leaning against the passenger side of the car, puffing her black bangs and rolling her eyes.  He grabbed her and attempted to pick her up and press her whole body against the car, wrapping her two legs around him.  But he couldn’t do it.  He struggled for nearly a minute before his arms went limp and he headed to the gas pump.

*

When he was finished filling up the tank Kurt wandered down the hill to take a piss in a thicket of Sycamore and Birch trees.  Minutes later he called up to Violet: “Vi, you gotta see this!”  Kurt was zipping up his fly when she found him, and they walked together to the other side of the trees.  A space the size of a football field opened up before them, and they stood in front of what looked like a ghost town from the Wild Wild West.  There was an oblong abandoned building, divided into various numbered rooms and covered in grey and rotting shingles.  Most of the front doors were off their hinges or missing entirely.

“What do you think this place is?”  Violet asked, while leading the way down the line of empty rooms.

“It was a motel, once upon a time.”  Kurt answered, surveying the site.

“But can you imagine it being full of customers?  Way out here in the middle of nowhere, just burned up fields and highways on both sides.”

At the end of the row of rooms stood a partially demolished stand-alone house.  It was as if someone had dropped a giant sledgehammer on it, making half of it crumble down to the dirt.  Wood and bricks and nails and insulation had been blasted every-which-way and then forgotten about.

The two of them crawled inside the collapsed house frame.  Kurt kicked straight through the rubble and picked up what looked like a concrete block, but was actually made of Styrofoam.  He threw it out of the house-shell with ease, smiling like a bad child.

“What’s on your mind there, Kurtis Harte?”  Violet asked him.

“We should move here!  We should move here, Vi.”

He had found his way to a doorframe with no walls or ceilings above it, and was lifting himself up on it, his thin arms pumping through pull-ups.

She smiled at him.  He was still a beautiful man.  “There was a ‘For Sale’ sign back there in middle of the corn field.  I’ll bet this is what’s selling.”

“Imagine it!  Just imagine it.  We could get all of our friends out here, and everyone would have their own little room.”

Violet was nodding and climbing through the rubble in her bare feet.  The rain had stopped since they got out of the car and the sun was out in full again.  Through the sparse tree branches they could see that the traffic on the other side of the highway had stopped.  Although there were people in the backed-up cars there wasn’t a sound to be heard.  It was perfectly quiet.  Those Georgia rays were out for sure then, spanking down on Violet’s bare shoulders and the bridge of her nose.

“This is how everyone was meant to live.  There’s so much space out here, everyone would be at peace.  We could grow things.  We’d want to work together.”  Kurt said, locking his gaze into hers.  He put his arms around her waist and was able to pick her up just for a second until she put her toes on the tops of his sneakers.

“Me and you, we could rebuild this house.  We could build it back up, all ramshackle, and build a bedroom for us and a kitchen that everyone would use.  You and me in the big house.”

She kissed him and it smelled like sweat, both stale and new.  The white clouds started to part above them.  Violet investigated the sky and noticed black clouds to the east, rising upward like some kind of second coming from the dark side.  They were far off in the distance, but black like she’d never seen.

“We should get going, maybe,” she whispered.

Kurt looked up at the sky, perplexed.  “I guess it’s gonna rain again.”

And sure enough, the raindrops started.  Though it was warm outside still, these drops were falling with urgency: they weren’t big, take-your-time, juicy raindrops.  They fell like bullets from the sky.

The young couple stomped through the thicket back to the car.  Violet took the drivers’ seat this time; she was more comfortable with it.  As they pulled away from the rubble motel, she glimpsed a hole in the tree growth, in her rearview mirror.  She could see a corner of the half-destroyed house and behind it a dock leading out into a river they hadn’t noticed before.  As she pulled the car in reverse she could see that the dock was broken, and most of its right side was submerged in water.  She imagined her and Kurt sitting at the end of the waterlogged pier at the bottom of a sunny afternoon.  The night would be rising around them, buzzing with fireflies.  There would be a heaviness in the air and their legs would dangle off the edge like Spanish Moss.  The two of them would sit there on the dock in silence with the sun falling above, the river would have flecks of shimmering gold swimming through it.

*

Violet drove through the rain and thought about how things could get better.  Maybe they really would move down here, away from the North and all that came with it.  Recently she and the other Antediluvialists in New York spent the majority of their days recycling the bottles they had drunk at whatever party they’d been to night before.  To Antediluvialists Southerners were the last remaining remnants of the olden days, when everything was right and natural.  Southerners were people of the earth, the brine of the past, the roué for a new beginning.

Kurt was already in charge of the college chapter of the Antediluvialists when she’d met him.  Of course there was technically no leader, and the doctrines forbade having an authority figure in charge.  But then, there was Kurt.  It was artless and easy; people wanted to listen to him.

Violet had opened the door to her first meeting in the attic room of Judson Church just as the incantation was being repeated.  “We believe in a time before the flood.  We believe in the natural order of the agrarian world.  We believe in the wild and unbridled nature of love.  We believe the flood will come again, and nature shall be returned to right and earthly order.”

Kurt was addicted to The Cause.  Soon enough Violet was too.  After a mere few weeks of meetings she began to realize: she had always been an Antediluvialist.  She was anti-modernity, morally opposed to a society that belonged to them and not her.  She had always just thought she was cynical; she had never known why before.  Oh to find herself!

She married Kurt just over a year before they decided to take this trip, right after he’d graduated from college.  Antediluvialists preach the uselessness and petty bourgeois reasonableness of higher education, and so she had dropped out when Kurt graduated.  Violet’s mother had cried while Kurt’s mother framed the certificate he got from the President of the University that said his GPA was among the highest in school history.  On the night of his graduation Kurt had treated Violet to a candle-lit dinner on the rooftop of their collective house.  Stars hung low over the Brooklyn Bridge, twinkling above the cursive graffiti on the tops of buildings.  The graffiti read: You Go Girl! And: I Still Love You. Kurt told her he was proud of her for, “Doing what she did and getting free.”  She called him a cheese-puff.  A sweet-corny fritter.  It was a beautiful night.

Now Violet knew all of the spoken and unspoken tenets of the movement.  The way to be the perfect Antediluvialist wife is to learn to share.  Have your own bed in his house and when a new girl is traveling through: “Hello, my name is Potassium,” let her sleep in his bed and you go to yours, and never admit that it bothers you.  You are cooler than that.  Stay composed; you are a woman.  You want to do extraordinary things.  Like keep this guy.  Two weeks later Calcium comes to town and you’re on your own again, and you can hear them through the wall, pounding.  You put a pillow over your head and think about Antediluvialism.  No body is nobody’s private property.  Calcium giggles and whispers to him:  “Are you close?”  And you hear it.  You cry in front of him and he tells you that your face looks bloated when you’re sad.  He thought you were cooler than that.  A month passes and then Vitamin C sidles up beside him, and it occurs to you that he is a nourished man.

While making good time on I-75 Violet finally heard an earnest man’s voice speaking clearly out of the car radio.  “Severe storm warning” the voice reported, as Kurt dozed evenly beside her.  “From Western Mississippi to Northern Georgia, tropical storms threaten the regions.  Stay tuned for more in-depth reporting on this emerging weather.”

Tropical storms?  They had planned on camping out in a place called Tallulah Gorge.  A tent and pegs and one sleeping bag were all in the trunk, courtesy of Violet’s parents’ basement.  She punched Kurt in the shoulder to wake him, and he opened his eyes in mock anger.

“WOMAN!” He blundered.  “What did I tell you bout wakin’ me?”  He was still in his high-spirited mood.

“Supposedly this storm is going to keep coming.  I think it’s going to screw up our camping plans.  Maybe even slow us down.  You think we’ll get to Georgia in time to go swimming?”

“Ain’t no little storm gonna slow us down, baby.”

“I think it’s a big storm.  We’ve never seen anything like a tropical storm, Kurt.”

The rain was more than steady: it came down in blankets, making it hard to see the road.  The double-barreled trucks were wavering in and out of the lane beside the Chevy.  Violet kept time with the trucks because they were losing daylight hours.  Their car pointed south while the lanes going north on I-75 began to fill so full of cars that traffic was slowing to a stop again.

Kurt was wide awake and playing with the radio dial now.  He settled on a barely audible woman’s voice.  “Hurricane,” the voice was saying.  That was one of two words they could make out.  The other was: “Evacuate.”

It was four in the afternoon but most of the light had gone out of the sky.

“I think I want to stay in a regular hotel tonight,” Violet told Kurt.

“We can’t do that.”  Kurt said.  “We’re adventurers!  Antediluvialists! If it wasn’t raining I’d make you sleep next to me right on the shoulder of the road over there.  And I’d make you do it naked!”

“Now you’re a comedian.  Seriously.  We need to be inside, I don’t think that what happening outside is just a little storm”

“I’m not staying in a damn hotel.  I don’t do stuff like that.  But you can have a great time on your own.”

“Come on.  I’m not going anywhere without you.  I’ll pay for it.  I’ll pay for the whole thing,” Violet said.

“What are you, a bourgeois asshole?”  Kurt answered.

“I just want to be safe, is all.”

“What, you believe the things they say now?”

They were silent for the next hour and a half that it took them to get to Tallulah Gorge.

*

Violet found signs off the highway pointing them to the campground.  The car grumbled over the stones in the dirt road, making its way down the hill.  The rain was falling fast and the wheels skidded twice; the road was turning to mud.  Down at the base of the hill there was a wooden house with striated white paint peeling off of it.  Main Office was spray painted over a screen door.  She parked the car beside it.

“Should we really be camping now, Kurt?  It’s worse out there than it has been in years.”

Kurt uttered “c’mon,” under his breath, and slammed the passenger’s side door.

The inside of the office smelled damp and moulding and there was a draught running through it.  It was not a new structure.  A guy perched behind the counter.  He had long stringy brown hair and teeth that were matching in color.  The front right one was missing.  He looked at them sidelong.

“Well, by God.  I didn’t think there’d be anybody coming in to see me today.”

“Oh we’re here to see you alright,” Kurt answered.  “You got campsites available?”

Kurt’s voice had acquired a twang since they left New York.  Violet didn’t think it was on purpose— just an involuntary tick.  But the man still guffawed.

“Northerners!  Well I never.  Northerners, here on the rainiest of Sundees.  Y’all even know how to camp?  They ever even teach you how to feed yourself up there?”

Violet smiled.  “Sure thing hon.  We know how to do all of that.”  Might as well join in on the accent, since Kurt had got it started.

The guy whistled through the space in his teeth.  “Jesus you sure got the purdiest wife I ever seen,” he said to Kurt, while looking Violet up and down.

“She sure is, idn’t she,” Kurt replied.

The man smiled.  “Well alright kids.  I recommend you take the best campsite we got going for us, seeing as there’s nobody else around here today.  An’ I tell ya what, I’m gonna give y’all a discount.  Just hold on a second there an I’ll git my clipboard.”

The man turned and disappeared through a doorway that led to a back room.  When he moved he revealed a poster hanging on the wood-paneled wall behind him.  It was three feet by four feet, glossy and curling up at the edges.  The picture on the poster was of a tiny skeletal body: it had a miniature arm, a leg, and an open rib cage.  All were coated in a mucus-sheen layer of blood and gore.  A foetus.  There was the bulbous shape of a miniature head lolling forward, with unformed covered eyes and more carnage clotted at the base of it.  At the bottom of it white block letters spelled out: AN EYE FOR AN EYE.

Violet examined the sign and nausea rang up inside her.  She turned and scrambled outside, letting the screen door snap before vomiting onto the wet mulch.  Kurt followed her out.  Now their clothes were soaking.

She coughed and wiped her mouth.  “Get in the car Kurt!  We’re leaving.”

“I don’t want to leave.  What’s your problem?”

She was dizzy but she went straight to the driver’s seat.  Exasperated, Kurt went to the passenger seat and closed the door with a wham.

“What is my problem?”  Violet hollered.  “Did you not see that picture?  My problem?  I’m not going to give a cent to someone like that.  Never.”

They were halfway back to the motel they had passed at the highway exit, Butch’s Roadside Inn, when Kurt replied.  “You are a goddamn product of where you come from.”

*

Inside their room at Butch’s the television showed footage of New Orleans under water.  Levees had broken and the streets and cars were submerged.  People were riding through neighbourhoods on motorboats.  Water had engulfed houses up to their second story windows and whole families were screaming at the news helicopters from their roofs.  Infants in diapers, grandmothers in robes; everyone was crying.  Kurt and Violet sat on the synthetic bedspread and watched the horrific images without a word.  Newscasters were tallying up projected deaths and turning to one another, asking: “How could this happen?”

Outside their motel room rain was coming down artillery fire, pelting the ground and bouncing back up with force.  Sycamore trees were swaying in unreal movements, trunks bending at the waist, leaves and branches sweeping the ground, grasping.  A limb broke off at the shoulder and crashed against the highway pavement.

The boom of the crash made Kurt get up and push the door open.  He walked outside and stood on the green grass of the road bank.  He put his arms up to the sky, and then his face.  Violet went to the open doorway and watched him.  He looked like a reed being blown back and forth, thin, with intermittent blond hair clumping upwards.  There was a sound, like a bird squawking rhythmically, mechanically.  It took her a moment to realize it was coming from Kurt.  Laughter?  And then he lowered his head and faced her:  tears.  He was sobbing, although there was a fixed tension in his face.  A smile.  Rain ran over his face and down his cheeks, and his tears mixed into it.  He swung his arms around his body in a circle.

“The flood!”  He yelled to her.  “The flood!  It’s here.” His squawking sob was interrupted by victory yells now.

“The time is now Violet.  I’m going further south— this is it!  The revolution will begin!  The flood came back.  I’ve got to go down south and claim it.”

He ran to where she was standing in the doorway and put his arms on her shoulders.  “Are you coming with me?  Are you going to follow me down?”

He dipped his head backward into the stream of water coming off the eave of the inn.  It poured over his face and he smiled, drinking some of it in and shaking his head like a dog.

Violet articulated slowly: “You cannot go anywhere Kurt.  There’s nowhere to go.  You will die.”

She watched her words reach Kurt and boomerang back to her without being heard.  He looked peculiar; this was not the same person she had met on Mercer and East 4^th Street.  Kurt laughed and dropped his arms, stepping back into the rain.

“I’m going,” he shouted.  “I’m going right now!”

He took another step backwards into the parking lot and looked up at the shadowy sky and then across the four lanes of empty roadway to a billboard swaying back and forth.

“I did this!”  He screamed a rebel yell.  His right hand beat his chest violently and then shot into the air.  “I did all of this!”  He laughed with his whole body and looked at Violet with yellow eyes, before turning and running down the highway.  She could only see him for a minute or two, a fuzzy grey figure moving away from the motel at a rabbit’s pace.  The last thing she heard from him, through the whirring and clattering noise all around her was his fervent, guttural cry: “I made it rain!”

 

Show 1: One Half A Love Story by Christina Drill

Original music by Pedro Caignet. You can hear more of his tunes here:

http://www.myspace.com/pedrocaignet

1

We met at that concert in early October, during the one month of the year where he is three years older than me instead of two. He bought me whiskey shots inside of Blarney Cove. Outside of Blarney Cove, he kissed me. He was gentle. I half expected that. There was something warm about him; it was like touching the underbelly of a vicious cat.  He insisted I make a purchase from Kennedy Fried Chicken. I did, and he ate most of it. In return, I smoked all of his cigarettes. For whatever reason, I kept saying “Nah, son.”  He accused me relentlessly of perming my hair. We shat on everybody in our writing class. I told him he was showy, and let him kiss me in front of the people passing by.

We went back to his apartment, where there was a pasta strainer sitting on top of the television. I asked about it and got, “Well, we make pasta sometimes.” I used his bathroom because I wanted to brush my teeth. He walked in on me for no reason, and made fun of me for using my finger. I said didn’t your mom teach you that when you were little? What kind of mom do you have? He said, one who loves me and gives me a toothbrush. I spit toothpaste on his front teeth. I brought up that Joan Didion book and pretended not to know when he told me that his friend Cassidy died in a car accident last summer and that’s why he couldn’t read a book about a dead husband and a dying daughter. I said I was sorry about it, and what was her name? Her name is Cassidy, he said. I said I was sorry about Cassidy. I was sorry I was jealous.

I woke up with my tights still on.  When I got back home, Jeanette asked, “How did you know that kid was going to be at that concert?” I said, “No– I didn’t.” And I smiled, and I hung up my dress in the back of the closet.

2

I walked out of class early after we read his train exercise. We had to fit three objects into a five page scene: a glass eye, a bible, and a pair of sunglasses. In his train exercise, a tourist was fucking a school girl’s eye socket in the bathroom. When the nun in the other train car went to pee, she walked in on them, and the school girl’s glass eye rolled, stopping at the nun’s holy feet. Our professor wouldn’t shut up about it. He insisted it was “surprisingly well written”. I dry heaved over the water fountain.

His screenplay adaptation of a Borges story went up for workshop. Outside of Tisch I smoked three cigarettes that all tasted like envy. I made myself find four things I didn’t like about his writing but could only think of one. That it wasn’t mine. Blind with inane rage, I decided I hated screenplays.

3

In the winter our whole class went out to Scratcher’s for drinks. I used my fake ID from Michigan to buy shots for everybody but him. Lazily, I drank Blue Moons on one side of the table and stared at the way his eyes flickered, at the way he knew things. He knew a  lot of things; a lot of useless, pointless, things– mostly about movies, and books, and rap music, and America. Talking to him made me feel like I was consistently losing at Pop Culture Trivial Pursuit. Chloe brought her friend named Taryn and all of a sudden he had tears in his eyes. Taryn was Cassidy’s middle name. I had seen pictures of Cassidy and Cassidy was very pretty. Cassidy was very rich. I had read articles about her online. Driving home from work, she’d swerved to avoid a deer, crashed into a tree. Was killed instantly. She was driving her BMW. She had been going fast.

He walked with me to the ATM and we talked loudly about things, like how fucking crazy was it that Holden’s dad was Denis Miller?! I considered whether or not he had a good laugh, good teeth. I considered how he did. We got into a cab. He broke my favorite bra, but only after I taunted him about not being able to flick it open correctly. He threw up in my toilet. He was nasty to me. He left his flannel and his hat at the foot of my bed. The hat smelled like scalp and the flannel smelled like he did. I tracked his Facebook statuses. One was about David Foster Wallace killing himself and about David Foster Wallace being better than most people. The other was something like “Hot sauce, mother fucker. Hot sauce on everything.” I wondered why his internet presence had to be so loud, and like that.

4

Coming out of class he told me my sequence was good and that he thought he had AIDS. He said “AIDS” like it was cool to have AIDS. I said, that’s good. He had a good television-person’s voice that didn’t fit with the rest of him. Until now blue eyes had reminded me of the toy boys in dollhouses and fishy game show hosts; I’d always preferred the honesty in brown ones. But his eyes really were very blue. I tripped in the doorway. I wondered what his penis looked like. I made a private bet with myself about it.

5

Coming out of class he tried to get away and I told him not to fucking move. I tugged on his hoodie. You’re not going anywhere. We walked up to 14th street and he spit out a story, a true story and a sad story, about how in fourth grade his best friend threw a rock at his head. I was furious at his timing. I classified this as a deliberate avoidance tactic. I told him I’m sorry that your friend threw a rock at your face, when you were in fourth grade, and I didn’t like doing this and I didn’t want to do this, but honestly, what the fuck is going on? I’d just like to ask you. When he saw I was serious he kept eye contact with me. He shrugged sadly. He said he wasn’t good at having a girlfriend. That he’d never been good at it. I wasn’t expecting the word “girlfriend” to be uttered. But I said, yeah, that’s fine. You always just avoid things, so I had to ask. He said okay. He walked me home. As if to finalize things. I wish he hadn’t. I still hadn’t seen his penis, except for that time in the dark. I reasoned that maybe it was probably very small. And so maybe he was very insecure. I felt better already. That night I smoked some other guy’s cigarettes, making it a point to look very bored.

6

He offered me his apartment to sublet for the summer when mine and Cara’s lease was pushed back. He was going home to St. Louis to make a movie. Wherever that was. It was nice of him. I liked the idea of taking over his bed. I lived there with Scott for two months. That summer we talked on the phone every day, while I swept around the kitchen in rollerblades and hot pants I’d made from pajamas. When my internship finished, I had been working for a small publishing company on Union Square, I went to California to see the Bay. I went to Mexico, with my parents. I came back to New York, alone and tan, and I started to work part-time. And when I wasn’t at work I would rollerblade around, and listen to Tragic Kingdom, and nervously wait.

7

He came back. Over one week early, without so much as a warning! So we were forced to share a bed, and that ruined everything. Scott wasn’t even around, he might have been in Florida, so it was just me and him like we were all of a sudden married, and everything about it was terrible. Maybe this is why. It was getting late in August but it still wasn’t late enough, and nobody was around, and it was just me and him, all alone in New York. I had been in New York all summer and that one week was the most unbearable. In the summertime the city, from the heat, if it wants to, can transform itself into a garbage grid of death.

All week it was hard for me to breathe. We were always sleeping in, staying in, ordering food. I would write poems about how all we did was order food. We made tents with his comforter—we had fairly okay sex, fairly okay conversation. He introduced me to a lot of authors and a lot of YouTube videos. I took his 92 Degrees in the Shade to work and underlined sentences I liked, hoping he’d find them later. When I asked about his movie, he waved his hand and said, “I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t make a movie.” I felt antsy about not having my own place at times, but overall, I was just happy to be with him.  When he let me call him “Sternum Boy” after I pointed out that his sternum took up an unusually large amount of space on his chest, I celebrated because it felt like I had broken down some wall. Maybe he had forgotten about Cassidy– he never really brought her up. The picture he’d framed of the two of them hugging had not surfaced yet. And when I shortened Sternum Boy to “S.B.” because I soon after made the discovery that he had a very Soft Butt, I saw it as a victory. He was giggling more. He was maybe letting me in. I was maybe prying him open, gently, along the side. I began to notice, for the first time, that I could be smarter than him.

At the end of that week of living together, he got homeless-man drunk and tried to step on a Chihuahua. After the chihuahua, there was no need for anybody to go to The Mars Bar, but we did anyway, with Will, before he’d met Yvonne. At The Mars Bar the bathrooms are fly nests and the Bud Lite is warm and hangs in crates behind the counter. It is worse than a dive bar should be– real dive bars are required to maintain at least a little bit of charm. On the way back from Mars Bar, he could barely stay up so I had to hold him, all the way up from 1st street to 14th. He asked me why I was being so nice to him. He asked me why I was even there. He spat at a yellow Hummer parked in the red. He seemed to have transformed into some sort of dying slug. When he accused me of not knowing what avenue we were on (“I betchadon’t ehhhvn-know whurr Vampire Freaksss is,” he slurred,) I thought about how I’d never met anybody who held so stubbornly against love. I realized I loved him right about then, on A, between 6^th and 7^th.  I realized I couldn’t just leave him here, being a disaster. So I pulled a pinwheel off a bicycle and gave it to him. In the morning, he thanked me, and put the pinwheel in a crystal skull that used to be filled with vodka, a prop from his movie. In the morning he also unpacked the picture of him and Cassidy, and set that on the same windowsill.

I got the keys to my new apartment on St. Marks four days later. My apartment looked so much bigger back then, before I had a mattress. So I laid out my Slanket and we banged on the floor in Cara’s room. He told me we should stop, because it was difficult down here on the floor and he was tired, and so we dressed and ate sushi at Shabu Shabu next door. My yellowtail handroll was slimy and at room temperature; my spicy tuna felt to me like fishy baby food. It all reminded me of how, on the morning my high school boyfriend left for college, the guy at Hot Bagels had put walnut raisin cream cheese on my Everything bagel, instead of vegetable. It was like a slap nobody needed, the spoiled food. As we sat there in this strange monstrous silence we had been able to hold all week, he asked me to borrow my keys. He said he needed to throw up in my bathroom, that he felt sick and that it wasn’t the fish. Thirty minutes later I got on a train to Long Island, knowing but not really knowing that whatever his reason was for throwing up, it had to do with me.

8

When he broke things off this time around, well. I couldn’t say I was entirely surprised. The conversation, if I were to transcribe it from memory, went something like this–

- Look, I don’t know if I like…. having a girlfriend.

(Mmhmm.)

- I like having my bed to myself.

(Ok. So this must be why you came back nine days early and didn’t tell me.)

- I know, I know. I just don’t know.

(You might be a funny looking piece of shit.)

- I haven’t been this close with anybody since… in two years, and… I just don’t know.

(I’ll bet you Cassidy thought you had love handles, too.)

- Do you want a cigarette?

(You don’t have love handles, I just thought you might, because of your shirts. Yeah I’ll take one of your fucking cigarettes. So I can stab you in the eye with it.)

- It’s kind of cold out. I wish I had a jacket for you to wear.

(                  Kill yourself         faggot            )

- Well, call me if you can think of anything else you want to talk about, and uh, vice versa.

(Right-o. Soft Butt.)

No, I wasn’t surprised. But I did try to tie my intestines in half, so I didn’t have to feel anything. It was hard to not feel anything. After I found out he’d slept with Katie Schafer, the human equivalent of a stale cupcake, I wrote him a scathing, visceral e-mail. The e-mail touched upon 1) him being a pussy, 2) him being an asshole, 3) him being lost, 4) him thinking his life was a movie, 5) or a Young Adult book, 6) letting him know I knew that he hated himself even if nobody else could tell, and 7) something about how I loved the shit out of him and respected the shit out of him and wasn’t only doing this for my own good, but for his, too. I wrote at the end that he could write back if he wanted to, but if not, no worries! It’d be fine!

I signed it TTYL S.B., XOXO, Allie.

This was a masterpiece of an e-mail, and it went unanswered, because it was unanswerable, like many masterpieces are.

9

At my birthday party in October I hooked up with his friend Ethan in the room adjacent to the one where he was hooking up with The French Girl. Ethan and him had gone to high school together in St. Louis. I knew all about that. Although Ethan was a moaner, the French Girl did not shave her armpits. I was drunk, yakked out on cocaine, and had just accepted some MDMA from a girl in a prom dress, so I allowed myself a tiny little fist pump and asked Ethan to give me a high five. When he asked me why, I kissed his shoulder and said, “I dunno, I feel like I’m winning.”

10

I came down hard from the celebration drugs and he was still seeing The French Girl. I had no intention of seeing Ethan ever again– in fact, the thought of kissing Ethan again made my guts rattle around in regretful, claustrophobic terror. I don’t like moaners, or people from St. Louis, I told myself.

I sat in bed watching Friday Night Lights for a month. I forgot what my major was. I sulked, but never cried. Don’t think I ever cried. All I ate was Raisinettes. Halfway through season two, Landry the acne-ridden nerd was finally starting to recover from a short stint with Tyra the hot chick. In the “Powder Puff” episode, Landry receives some advice from Coach Taylor’s daughter Julie, who recently broke up with Matt Saracen, the up-and-coming quarterback who she recently decided she couldn’t really trust because of how popular he was getting. Julie, the only child of the two smartest characters on the show, said to Landry and I, two hopeless romantics in a real dirty world: “You just gotta let it go sometimes. You just gotta let people be who they wanna be, and just let em go make out with whoever they wanna make out with, in front of whoever they feel like.”

In my malaise, I pressed pause and rewound this scene three times before scribbling it into my notebook. I allowed myself to smoke a bowl of Cara’s weed. I instantly felt better, I instantly felt far away from him; from Ethan, from this French Girl who seemed to be intent on existing. I imagined I lived in Dillon, Texas. I imagined their grass. I imagined being Julie Taylor, I imagined being a high school badass instead of a boring, deliberate, college-aged one. And that, of course!, is when my phone went off.

Of course! He was at Beth Israel with a head injury. And but of course!– he wanted me there.

And so I chugged a cup of coffee! And I flung on sweatpants, and I left with two different shoes on. And I cursed myself, and I cursed him, and I wondered when, when, when, he would just give up and die.

11

Apparently French girls take people like him very seriously. When he’d broken things off with Aubrey, I think her name was, her brother had driven up from Delaware (Delaware!!!) to bash his head into the ground. At the time that is what I could gather. Aubrey was there when I arrived at the Emergency room wing, stoned out of my mind. Aubrey was smiling this insane dental work-free smile. She was alone, and I think she was playing jacks. In my giving state I allowed her to look me up and down. I gave her a small, polite wave. I wondered what would happen if I went up to her and pulled her hair right up out of her skull.

I was ushered into the tiny room they were keeping him in, where I couldn’t help but laugh uncontrollably, at him flinching in pain on this half-hospital bed. He looked so small; his head was red and round and swollen. I could have sworn there was an antennae sticking out of it. There was also Green Jello in the room, and it was distracting me. Our conversation, well, if I were to transcribe this one from memory, went something like this:

- I am an idiot.

(         )

- You’re an idiot, too. Why are you even here?

(     ???!!!!!     )

- Thank you, Allie.

- I mean it, thank you.

- Allie, Aubrey is insane. Her brother, he’s on some mafia shit. Can you tell her to leave?

(      Oh my god,   French people     )

- I can’t believe you actually came.

( Green jello     Of  course I came    Why do you look like an alien )

- We’re going to clear some things up when I get out of here.

( Oh my god you look like a Jetson )

- Allie, I think I love you.

( Oh        fucking   )

At the word “love” my paranoia skyrocketed. He really was an alien. I ran out of the emergency wing to chain smoke outside the handicapped entrance.

12

If this was going to work I was going to have to forgive him. And I had never forgiven anybody before.

I invited him to Christmas Eve dinner on Long Island.  I told everyone he was “my friend who was Jewish”. The wind was blowing off the sea, throwing buckets of freeze onto us. Our knees shivered as we smoked his cigarettes on the porch. The few times they clacked together, neither of us moved them away. He was wearing a Santa hat. I had on somebody’s trenchcoat. When we ran out of things to say about the way my parents danced around I kissed the bruise on his head that hadn’t healed yet.

And there were things in the air at that moment that I couldn’t try to explain if I tried. And then he looked at me, fully intent. And then it happened, a new kiss, mostly my doing, slowly, inching, like a first one, like a blanket, not soothing everything between us, but sanding it– and then another, and another, until we pulled away at the same time,  to speak, or to not speak:

“Do you wanna go steady?”                                                                            “You’re stuck now.”

13

This is the epilogue, because I have nothing else after that. He got boring after that. He got earnest, he got honest, he stopped fucking fat girls. He stuck doodles in the pockets of my pants, and I found I could hold them all the way home, smiling. I started to find mini hamburgers on my desk at work, and never again was I late coming back from lunch.

And all things, everything, got good.  He fell in love with me. I no longer had anything to complain about, or fight against. And once everything gets good in a love story, the love story turns on its axis. This is the story part of the love story, turning itself flat.

This is the love part separating. This is where it steeps, and becomes better. And by the time things get to be this good, the love story has become less great. The love story becomes less of a story, and more of a lovely circumstance. It becomes something neat and standard; something for a wedding speech. Something hopelessly reliable, like a moral. Or like nice beaches. Like a pair of deer courting in a big green garden.