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Yearly Archives: 2013

Dec 31 2013
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Fiction

Night Watch

by Roland Goity

This is Rockhaven, a half-day’s drive to civilization, where the heart of town – post office, gas station, general store slash deli, and First Presbyterian Church – revolves around a 4-way stop. The quadrant on the hilly side stands out. It’s the church that’s Rockhaven’s centerpiece. Reverend Thomas led the effort behind its shiny new paint job, which emits a sparkling halo on extraordinarily sunny days, ‘otherworldly’ some call it. The church bell rings not only Sunday. Events take place throughout the week, once the public school kids and quasi-professional, non-farmer types have returned from studying and working in Summertown, or from as far away as Adams Valley. There’s no industry in Rockhaven. Hasn’t been since the psychiatric hospital in the distance shuttered decades ago. Evidently there were some serious problems at the facility so it had to close. Now all that’s left are brick barriers, concrete walkways, and jutting rebar in a skeleton maze of what once must have been a formidable structure. Although First Presbyterian is the town’s official place of worship, every year more and more teenagers try to summon spirits while partying down at the hospital ruins. They ignore the Danger and No Trespassing signs and slip through a bolt-cut wedge of a chain-link, barbed-wire fence in the dead of night, their cars parked off in a stand of woods nearly a half-mile away. The dilapidated site fascinates them with its history, its morbidity. Without fail someone will spout: ‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,‘ before taking a swig of wine or liquor. The old joke takes on a special meaning here: frontal lobotomies and electroshock therapy treatments were performed as routinely as oil changes, the hospital’s patients like vehicles in need of a tune-up or lube job, required repair if they wanted to safely navigate the road back home. Such a legacy, when combined with a brisk wind or snapping branch under foot, sends chills across the arms and shoulders of kids, many of whom are drunk, high, tweaked, or maybe tripped out. There’s always a hint of uncertainty. They gaze at the night’s shadows figuring ghoulish figures might suddenly appear and reclaim their right minds, and the right to think for themselves. It’s a source of entertainment that can’t be found in Summertown, or even Adams Valley. It’s a Rockhaven thing. 

  

– Roland Goity lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he writes in the shadows of planes coming and going from SFO. His stories can be found in Fiction International, The Raleigh Review, Word Riot, Compass Rose, PANK, and more recently in The MacGuffin, Menacing Hedge, Defenestration, and Bluestem. He edits WIPs: Works (of Fiction) in Progress.

 

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Dec 12 2013
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Fiction

Q: What Makes Our Quinceañera Supply Store A Cut Above The Rest? A: Customer-Fucking-Service.

by Thomas Mundt

The Internet Age is one of options, of devastating alternatives that can cripple a man or his small business quicker and more efficiently than any oxidized piece of rebar could ever dream. Seems like you can’t walk down the street or commandeer an ’81 Hatteras Wide-Body Power Yacht without having your eardrums assaulted by the din of the newest, brashest kids on the quinceañera block, all promising the moon and its vast oil reserves to gain not only your business but your trust.

Pardon me while I make the air-jerk-off motion, but only because it’s just the two of us and I feel like we already have a rapport and you’re not going to interpret the gesture as my tacit condonation of the patriarchal construction of language.

If you want to survive, nay, thrive in this business, you need a plan that puts people first, and ahead of trendy buzzwords like sustainability and OSHA compliance. That’s why, at Quince Sustanivos, we’ve been servicing Southwest Michigan and select Central American mining communities with a singular focus:

Customer-Fucking-Service.

No, we don’t have a staring problem, but thanks for asking! It’s just that, when you’ve been in business for as many months as we have (two), you learn a thing or three about delivering to your customers the high-quality balloons, tablerunners, and, our favorite, the ‘Mis Quince’ Venetian Half-Mask and Gloves Combo Paks, they deserve. You discover that moving units has less to do with slick circulars and appropriate Cuidado: Piso Mojado signage in the washrooms than it does Mrs. Alvarez’ gardenias, or La Familia Calderon’s recent exploration of Carlsbad Caverns.

It’s the little things, like never, ever mentioning Luís around Rosa Hermosillo because she still hasn’t forgotten about the tire fire and often forgets to re-up on her Celexa, that make all the difference.

Sure, you could go to The Other Guys (insert the sound of me puking all over your face) and save a buck, but do you really want long lines, pushy commissioned salespeople, and feeling like It’s never the right time, Gary! It’s fucking never the right time because everything’s about fucking you!*

I mean, do you?

No way, José!

So, remember:

The need of a constantly-expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.** And, when it comes to one-stop shopping for all of your quinceañera needs, make it Quince Sustanivos today. You and Your Little Lady will be glad you did!***

*The competitors of Quince Sustanivos and their affiliates may not be responsible for your generalized feelings of remorse and resentment. The same may be directly attributable to Gary, who is not a Registered Agent of Quince Sustanivos or its subsidiaries.

**Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. 

***Your Little Lady has entered an awkward phase of indefinite length. During this stage, nothing you do or say will be right and her hatred for you will be palpable at the dinner table, including but not limited to gatherings for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, supper (a Midwest variant of dinner), and dessert.

 

– Thomas Mundt is the author of one short story collection, You Have Until Noon to Unlock The Secrets Of The Universe (Lady Lazarus Press, 2011) and the father of one human boy, Henry (2011). Teambuilding opportunities and risk management advice can be found at http://www.jonathantaylorthomasnathanmundtdds.com.

 

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Nov 20 2013
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Fiction

The Cloud

by Burt Swan

The man was thirty-three when he found his cloud. He was staring from a train window when he noticed it hung familiarly in the sky; white, fluffed and proud to be his. As soon as he saw it, he said to himself, ‘That’s my cloud.’

His eyes followed as it peeped out from behind embanked trees and the chimney stacks of the houses beyond, and he felt both happy and not a little smug that the other people around didn’t recognise the cloud as he did. They would look and see it there clearly against the blue turning pink turning indigo, and yet not one of them thought it might be their cloud. His heartbeat quickened in alarm as he watched it chase towards a larger cloud that had nothing to do with him; he bit his lip as its edges unfurled into the underbelly of its bloated cousin. He looked away, sad and jealous, but turned back a moment later to feel his heart squeeze warm and full as the cloud dragged itself away, and he said again with all the love he felt, ‘That’s my cloud.’ And he knew it was.

The man’s wife wasn’t listening to him when he described what had happened; either that or he wasn’t explaining properly. Now he’d found his cloud, he knew everything would be alright from now on, but she wasn’t impressed.

Each morning he’d step out on his way to the office, and smile up as he saw his cloud there waiting to accompany him. He swapped his old desk for one by the window. On the twenty-third floor he was closer than ever before to the cloud, and every chance he got, he snuck a look to see it there, waiting so they could go home together.

Usually his cloud was a tightly puffed blob, a piece of balled-up paper tossed high into the air. Sometimes when he or the cloud were uncertain, it would hide, sheltering amongst its brothers and sisters, but he’d always know it was still nearby. And sometimes, on certain special days decided between themselves, it spread into beautiful feathers across the setting sky.

His wife said awful things about the cloud, at first, and then about the man. The things she said brought tears to his eyes, though not for himself. He was only sad that his wife had no cloud of her own, and though he’d tried, she wouldn’t share his. One day he woke and the bed beside him was cold, and through the blinds his cloud was dark, and swollen with anger, and the man understood how upset it was with what his wife had done.

Even years later, the man and the cloud were still best of friends. His children had grown up with their mother, then moved away to hot, terrifying, cloudless places. His wife had gone north, where there were so many clouds the man could never visit for fear of permanently losing his own.

Still, he was never lonely, and he was happy, because no matter what, his cloud was faithful but for the occasional summer holiday which the man didn’t mind, because he could rely on his cloud to return at an appropriate moment; and they probably needed some time apart anyway, even if beneath these reasons lay a dull leaden ache. He had the sense of being lost no matter where he went on those sunny days everyone else called unspoilt.

Eventually, when he was rather older, the man died. They said he must have been alone when his heart gave out. The doctors had been saying his entire cardiovascular system would have been under strain for years with the divorce, the redundancy, the separation from his children. They’d tried to tell him living alone wasn’t good for the body nor the soul, and they’d sighed and glanced at one another when he’d told them he wasn’t alone at all. And whilst they went ahead and said that was why his heart was weak, he had known all along that really, it had been overworked by the little jumps and flurries he’d felt every morning when he woke and found his cloud outside, still watching.

Nobody came to the man’s funeral in the end, aside from the sheltered accommodation manager, who’d warmed to the ‘…funny old coot, really.’

But the cloud did come along, and cried hard whilst they buried him, and stayed after they’d covered him over. For three days and three nights, the cloud rained down every part of itself onto the cold ground until it was sodden. By then there was nothing left of the cloud but its last tears trickling between the blades of grass and sinking into the earth, and the two of them lay there together, touching at last.

– Burt Swan is a writer and musician who confuses the disciplines as often as possible. He grew up in suburban Kent, and now lives just south of the River Thames with two extremely personable rats whose conversational English improves daily. He is currently working on his first novel.

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Oct 31 2013
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Fiction

The Beanstalk

by Joe Baumann

Zoe was the only one brave enough to climb the Very Tall Tree. It was in the deepest part of the park, the area cordoned off by the rusting chain link fence covered in vines where the grass had grown tall and tangled in the metal webbing. When the sun would set, even the blazing lights from the baseball diamond and running paths didn’t cut through, and the tree’s massive fronds, the size of chairs, were swallowed in the darkness.

But Zoe climbed the tree in the afternoon, when twinkling, glittery light still shone through the higher branches and a swampy mist from the humidity had settled on the slick greens of the trees. We all watched her from the other side of the fence, our heads tilting back as she climbed higher and higher. A few of the girls squealed, one begging Zoe to come back down, but she wouldn’t. When she was very far up, so far we could hardly see her any more, someone said they saw her stop, but she must have only been taking a short rest, because then she kept climbing and disappeared from view.

We waited for hours, it seemed, everyone scanning the Very Tall Tree, with its wide base and bark thick as the wall of a bank vault. The sun started to set and we heard our parents calling for us as they thrashed through the thick bushes to find us. We bit our lips and our legs shook. Just as they found us, the first adult yelling that we were near the Very Tall Tree, Zoe came falling down out of nowhere, rocketing through the sky like an asteroid. She kept flopping on branches, which caught her like careful, rocking arms, and slowed her descent. She landed in a pile of dead leaves that poofed up around her like a down comforter.

Someone’s mother screamed, and another kid’s father hopped the fence in a silky leap and ran to her. He yelled that she was breathing, but something was wrong with her skin. When they finally managed to get her across the fence, unconscious and heavy, we saw: she was red like cherry bubble gum. Her cheeks looked like they’d been slapped forever or doused with hot water. Blisters covered her forehead.

They took her to the hospital, and everyone followed, waiting in a congested clump in the waiting room. It smelled like antiseptic and helium. When she woke up the hall was filled with exhaled relief. The doctors said she was in a full-body cast for her burns, which were all over, even the parts where she’d been covered in clothes. She wouldn’t say what happened to her, they told her parents, but the whispers waved across everyone, and soon we all knew of Zoe’s silence.

Those of us who had watched her climb the tree sat in her room nervously when they finally let us in, our legs bouncing on the floor, some of the girls braiding their fingers together over and over. We waited for Zoe’s mother to leave the room to go to the bathroom, and when she did we all stood and crowded around her. She was a frozen white blob. Three little holes were poked in the bandages wrapped tight around her head, one for her mouth and two for her eyes.

‘What happened, Zoe?’ someone whispered. Someone else shouted for someone to watch the door, but no one wanted to, because Zoe’s voice was tiny, like a squeaky hinge.

She had found the clouds, she said. They were hot, steamy, and that she’d ignored the warmth as long as she could. She’d seen an owl perched on one of the Very Tall Tree’s branches – she still couldn’t see its top – that was nothing but a skeleton, all of its skin and muscle and organs and blood evaporated away by the scalding heat of the clouds that flashed, she said, with bright orange radiance. When it flew away, it sounded like bowling pins smacking together.

‘Then how’d you know it was an owl?’ someone said.

Zoe blinked through her gauze and said she just knew.

‘And then?’

And then she’d felt the pain, she said, the heat in her skin bubbling her flesh, and she’d passed out, and now here we were.

We looked at one another. Everyone had their hands tight on the cold metal rail on either side of Zoe’s bed. For some reason she had a thin blanket over her legs, as though she needed that with the bandages wrapping her up tight like some bland Christmas gift.

‘I thought I heard something,’ she said. ‘Right before I passed out.’

We all leaned forward. Someone hissed that Zoe’s mom was coming.

‘Like laughter. Or footsteps. It might have been thunder.’ Her lips were chapped, and she let out a wheeze. We all stepped back and sat down where we’d been.

Zoe’s mother came back in the room.

‘I think we need to let Zoe rest,’ she said. Her voice was tight as a zipper.

We marched out, each of us casting one last look at Zoe, imagining her skin pink and bloated and rotten, and we wondered what kinds of voices she’d heard up there, and what it must have been like to fall into that heavenly slumber.

– Joe Baumann is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he serves as the editor-in-chief of the Southwestern Review. His work has appeared in the Hawai’i Review, flashquake, The Coachella Review, and several others, and is forthcoming from Cactus Heart.

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Sep 12 2013
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Fiction

Mr Morden’s Tree

by Joshua Mostafa

The soil had to be perfectly moist – if it were too dry, the first tendril of root would curl back on itself and the seed would wither, but if sodden, the seed would have no purchase, and might be washed away; and on that Saturday, when Mr Morden stepped out of his back door and inhaled the morning air – fresh with the scents of pine, cut grass and dew – he knew at once it was the right day to plant the seed, and went back inside to retrieve it from the envelope in which it had lain for almost a fortnight, leaving a rectangular clean patch on the window-sill when he picked it up, tore the paper open with a blunt freckled forefinger, tipping it carefully so that the seed, large and nut-like, rolled out onto his palm, while with the other hand he picked up his cup of black tea, not so much for drinking as for habit, to warm his hands, and the sight of its steam rising in the chill of dawn, pleasantly reminiscent of smoke from a burning oil tanker, trailing over his shoulder as he walked one careful step after another on rheumatic legs with joints that creaked (a long time had passed since they had sprinted, one-two like pistons, while radio static crackled close behind), down the stone slabs of the path to the foot of the garden; this was the place, the equilibrial sweet spot where sunlight was tempered by the dappled shadow of a yew’s branches, enough shade to protect the sapling’s first pale shoots in their fragility; where the garden’s peaty soil began to give way to firmer ground, clayish, thickened by the pressure of rain-scored paths running to the creek below, something for the roots to get their teeth into, and that pleased him, because this was what he did, plant trees, though there was no point, really: trees grew of their own accord, as they had done before the first bald, bickering apes descended from their branches, and they would do so long after the extinction of this interloping species, a thought that gave him some satisfaction in those moments when he accidentally read the headlines, or someone tried to speak to him, as the man next door almost did at that moment, catching a glimpse of Mr Morden’s hat dipping as he pushed and twisted at the ground, desiccating it and slicing through fat earthworms with the point of his shovel, which brought a comment to the lips of the neighbour, something about his own rose-beds and the intransigence of the earth giving him blisters, stillborn words turned to a cough, because he remembered in time that Mr Morden was not one for a chat, surly old bastard, and he was correct both not to speak and not to take it personally, for Mr Morden’s solitude was profound, extending beyond misanthropy into something deeper and more expansive; old friends, fellow activists of the 1970s, hearing he had bought this house, tucked away in a village where the only open shop-counter was the post office’s every other day, supposed that he had mellowed with the greying of his hair, and that like theirs, his outrage at the world (that had once propelled him to confrontations with mining companies, industrial loggers, bureaucrats, police, every functionary and appeaser of cruel and rapacious human society that crossed his path) had waned, that time had brought accommodation and a measure of peace, but if any of them persisted past the unreturned emails and disconnected phone, and visited in person, at most they would have mourned the loss of a friendship, or assumed from his hostility that something had become unhinged – if only – they would not have grasped it, the disgust, not the cloudy melancholy that touches everyone from time to time, but a rage in the marrow of his bones, inflecting every breath and gesture, the flip of his shovel that sent a stone bouncing across the grass, the hiss he made when he saw a squirrel watching him, which sent it scampering into higher branches, because not just human but all animal life was parasitic, a stain, a mutant aberration, while honesty and virtue resided only in the green flesh and sightless being-there of shrub and tree, the grace of photosynthesis; on the rare times he voted, it was always for the most disingenuous wishful thinkers on the ballot paper, climate deniers and corporate puppets, precisely for the danger they represented, to hasten the end, for the poison was its own remedy, and until the last cursed and poisonous creature – two-legged, winged, or scuttling millipede – choked on effluent or drowned in a sea returned to pre-Cambrian savagery, and until nature, having reversed its mistake, could create from this tabula rasa a new green world of unseen beauty, everything was a pastime, a way of counting down the minutes: the seed Mr Morden pressed into the ground with loving care was a dot in the long ellipsis of the decline of man; he patted down the earth with the flat of his shovel, closed his eyes, the sun on the nape of his neck, and exhaled slowly, a wordless prayer that asked not for forgiveness but for oblivion, and in the ground, the seed felt the weighty embrace of soft earth, and gradually, in its unhurried way, a week like a blink, began to reach out with the first threads of its roots.

– Josh studied in London and Sydney. Bookworm and sub bass addict, he co-founded Inna Riddim Records, and is currently working on a novel and on a poetry magazine due to launch in late 2013, the New Trad Journal. He can be found online at joshuamostafa.info or @JoshuaMostafa.

 

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Aug 18 2013
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Fiction

Telescopia

by Kevin O’Cuinn

In this one, a grainy black and white, you look a lot like Anne Frank, and I remember you saying how much you enjoyed her diary, insofar-all-considered. Consider: That time I came home and found you in a closet, how you scrunched your face and shushed me, then tiptoed west, from A to B – B being the farthest point away, within the confines of these walls. Later, tearing downstairs, shrieking ‘Do you see that I am your friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?’ Dances With Wolves – I mean, who didn’t see it? Your brother (‘Shame I don’t get to give you a kicking’) dropped by for your stuff. It took him six hours to tick everything off the list and drink my beer. I’ll never believe you forgot the album – you left it – and even now, sometimes, I’ll squeeze into the closet and browse. The one where you look like a spinning top; the one with the cracked grey eyes; the one in the snow – how you said snow was boring and disgusting. My favourites, though, are of your shadow, but then like now I think of him, holding the camera, then later holding you.

– Kevin O’Cuinn lives and loves in Frankfurt, Germany. He comes from Dublin, Ireland, and is Fiction Editor at Word Riot.

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Jul 21 2013
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Fiction

Paper Wasps

by Hall Jameson

The dewy air clung to Hannah as she rolled onto her stomach, mattress crinkling under her weight. A persistent drone hung in the air, not quite mechanical, almost musical.

What is that damn noise?

Was it the air conditioner? Was it broken again? The sound did not hesitate like something broken – it churned with intention.

Hannah sat up and blinked, her rump sinking into the mattress. The top of her head brushed the ceiling, warm beneath her palm, the texture, like newsprint. Her legs dangled through a hexagonal opening, her backside nested in another. A neat pattern of geometric sections fanned out from her resting place, some vacant, some housing plump, pulsing larvae.

Hannah shuddered and looked into the empty compartment on her right. It faced downward, providing her with a startling view: a cascading series of horizontal combs filled the interior of a large chamber.

She crawled, wary of slipping through one of the hollows, or worse, into an occupied space. As she descended, the hum increased. Dark forms weaved in and out of the hollows around her.

The first of the workers crawled toward Hannah on sunny yellow legs, its slender petiole trailed by a sturdy black-and-yellow-striped abdomen. Its antennae twitched and its jaw worked. Semitransparent, tawny wings rested over its back and sides like a cape.

She opened her mouth to say hello, or perhaps to scream, but all that came out was a choppy buzz. The worker passed by, its left wing brushing her thigh.

Hannah descended the comb, hands and feet becoming tacky with wax. She reached the bottom comb, precise in its circumference, and looked through the weave toward the exit. The walls surrounding the opening glowed amber and were hot to the touch; her eyes stung as she navigated the last few inches and poked her head into the daylight.

A batting of smoke hung in the air. She crawled to the exterior of the hive, her limbs the jointed yellow legs of a wasp. The spring leaves of the oak tree at the back of her yard surrounded her. The wasp’s nest, her new home, constructed from curls of bark, saliva, and woody strips of vegetation, hung from a thick arm of the oak.

Hannah crawled back into the heart of the hive. A worker approached and guided her gently into one of the empty compartments. It covered her with wax, sealing her in, protecting her from the smoke, but she was not afraid. The other workers joined in.

Thank you! Thank you! She tried to whisper. Once again, it came out as a buzz, but they seemed to understand. The voice of the hive swelled.

Hannah woke with a start. She was in a cot in the high school auditorium, the room filled with buzzy snores, raspy breathing, and soft crying. Cots lined the room in tight neat rows. Bundles of personal belongings clogged the aisles.

She recalled her dream and shivered, and wondered about the massive wasp nest at the edge of her property. She chose to leave it there, because paper wasps kept them themselves unless threatened. She wondered how they would react to the smoke and fire. Surely, they would not abandon their home as she had done, they would stay behind and fight. She wished she could help them; take them in, as they had taken her in.

Hannah rounded the final curve and her mailbox popped into view, untouched, the red flag still in the upright position. The drive had revealed a checkerboard of burnt properties, the husks of houses eaten by the flames, and perfect green lawns and shingled structures the fire had spared. She was sure her own home would be gone as she pulled into the driveway, but it was still there, untouched. The surrounding woods, however, were charred and skeletal.

Hannah rushed behind the house, to the corner of the lot. The fire had stopped there, at the hem of her back lawn, her deck still intact.

‘No!’ she cried, when she saw the blackened stump of the oak tree, its precious leaves devoured by fire, the wasp’s nest evaporated.

Hannah dropped to her knees, fingers sifting through the ash, the curled, charred bodies of wasps falling from her fingertips. She discovered a small chunk of comb in the ash, the only thing that remained of their home. She cradled it tenderly and took it inside.

– Hall Jameson is a writer and fine art photographer who lives in Helena, Montana. Her writing and artwork has recently appeared, or is forthcoming in Crossed Out Magazine, Post-Experimentalism, Redivider, and Eric’s Hysterics. When she’s not writing or taking photographs, Hall enjoys hiking, playing the piano, and cat wrangling.

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Jun 26 2013
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Fiction

Recommendation Letter

by Rob McClure Smith

Dear Graduate Director:

I am delighted beyond human ken to write a letter on behalf of Ms. Lauren Appleton for entry to your prestigious M.F.A. program. The transcript of her academic record in my own department hopefully speaks for itself, as I seem to have misplaced my copy, but I can think of no recent undergraduate more superbly equipped for the cutting-edge, genre-defying creative work your program elicits from the current generation of digital natives.

I will first observe that Lauren’s creative writing fully embraces the reality hunger (©Shields) of our post-postmodern episteme, embracing the manipulation of found text, flarf, randomly generated Google searches, exquisite corpse reveries, Eno-esque oblique strategies, I Ching stick-tossing, thrown dice, spilled beer Rorschach etc. For her Senior Portfolio she submitted a complete novel, Onno Korenino (a found text rewritten with a key vowel change and transposed to contemporary Nigerio), a stunning work whose climactic episode in a Logos (yes!) train station was brilliantly conceived and utterly heartbreaking in its meta-textual narrative surprise. Memorable also was her Writer’s Forum oral presentation ‘SDSS1416+3b And Other Galactic Phenomena I Like,’ for which she arranged an accompaniment by our local regional symphony, indigenous Moroccan Qraqeb, intermittent tubax honking, an overlay of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry dub, seagull squalls and a series of visceral recordings made by herself at the local Farmland Foods slaughterhouse while surreptitiously garbed as an FSIS poultry inspector. Her intense reading with musical augmentation that night evokes still, in my mind’s eye (sic), images of some horrifying industrial accident or perhaps a Scott Walker recording. ‘She’s something,’ the director of creative writing told me afterwards, still trembling uncontrollably. ‘But it’s sure as hell not a creative writer, have a word?’

The word I had was ‘conceptual,’ and it proved inspirational. Newly immersed in Dada and Fluxus, Lauren subsequently developed a series of impactful performance pieces including Walk (3), the video of which is part of her portfolio. On day one, she filmed herself walking naked across campus wearing only a backpack. On day two, she was filmed (by an accomplice) walking across campus in an empty (‘naked’) backpack. On day three she walked back and forth across her backpack for 3 hours 3 yards from Old Main, while being filmed filming her own filming, this last nude walkabout drawing a large crowd of onlookers including prominent members of the local art community, picketers from the nearby Church of the Immaculate Conception and, latterly, a cease and desist order from our college President.

Sadly, Lauren did not complete her Honors Project. By her senior year, she was already moving beyond language into a space of Beckettian conceptual silence.1 The intended thesis, a wordless performance inspired by Carolee Schneemann titled whippedcreamchocolateyumkinkypillows designed to be performed to select paying viewers in local motel rooms, had to be postponed due to an injunction brought by our philistine mayor under our small college town’s antiquated gross indecency regulation and then by her subsequent expulsion.

My own acquaintance with this student is longstanding and intimate [as her portfolio photographic sequence intercoursepro(o)f evidences]. I got to know her especially well in my ‘Intro to the Contemporary IPhone Filmic Experience course’ and I well remember the first time we spoke, some six weeks in. ‘Who are you?’ I asked, intrigued by her presence and Sherman-esque costuming. ‘I am Lauren,’ said Lauren, ‘My name is Lauren. This is my first time here cause I’ve been going to the class next door on accident.’ ‘How can that be,’ I asked, querulously. ‘Isn’t that Economics 101?’ ‘I know,’ Lauren said, smiling winsomely, ‘I was, like, micro this, macro that, how’s about you just show us some movies, dude?’ Suffice it to say she made an immediate impression upon me and I especially recall her astute remarks about Art.2 To speak further to this young woman’s wellspring of unfathomable creativity, I would observe that maugre writing a final paper, she chose to do an elaborate presentation in which she modeled all Hitchcock’s leading ladies, from Madeleine Elster to Norman Bates, appropriating Edith Head’s original costume designs, and if not for an inopportune interruption by campus police during her recreation of the necktie strangulation scene from Frenzy, would have received an A rather than the somewhat misleading Incomplete.

In summation, I can only reiterate that her exceptional artistic talent3 and grotesque creative propulsiveness make Lauren a superb candidate for entry to your distinguished graduate program. It is rare you will find a candidate so of our cultural moment, effortlessly limning as she does the flimsy osmotic boundaries between Sheila Heti, Frank Ocean and Johnny Manziel. Please God take her off our hands.

Sincerely,

Per Tosk-Bedra

Department of Creativity

Sanguisuga College

 

1 Lauren did not ‘tell’ me this having, as noted, moved beyond the prison house of language, instead miming it for me using a combination of an inflatable Bozo the clown doll and a sock puppet representing Marina Abramovic.

2 Art Cassidy, the TA for my course, a young man who sadly lost the lower portion of his left leg in a childhood tricycle collision and who Lauren, although usually sensitive to the differently-abled, affectionately dubbed Hopalong.

3 She also is lead bassist for the noted death metal combo Bataan Death Tango.

  

– Rob McClure Smith is an expatriate currently living and teaching film studies in Galesburg, Illinois. His fiction has appeared in many literary magazines and he is a previous winner of the Scotsman Orange Short Story Award.

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May 08 2013
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Fiction

An extract from ‘Far From Standard: A Life in Jazz’ by Jollymont J. Arnold

by Esteban Stanwo

Willow weep for me; so sang the aching heart of Ann Ronell in nineteen thirty-two, a time when the music was so popular that songwriters could reasonably expect their audience to include quite distantly related species. Always a favourite tune of mine, leafing through the working book of any of the bands of my career, one would no doubt have found there pressed into the pages of musical history its skeletal catkin. But let me ask you, have you ever heard a willow weep? Well I have, and believe me you might question the sentiment if you had actually heard the thing.

Nineteen sixty-two brought a freak estivation for me, a riverside burrow beneath our titular trees providing a home for two young lovers snugly wrapped in those lyrical lovely summer dreams. Though an affair of some biographical import after years attempting to erase the grubby finger marks she left all over the personal version of my life story, I shalln’t now confound matters by writing her, from the flitting, careless hands outwards, bodily, whole, into the hard, public copy. Let the narrative skip like a stone over the water: love cools with the earth and come fall I awake to find that those lovely dreams have indeed gone and left me weeping along the stream.

If I may be forgiven a clichéd phrase to navigate this difficult change, let me note that in times of strife both the devout and the damned are apt to turn their worried heads to the heavens. Well, I have always been a true worshipper of Apollo and after a lifetime of offerings my supplications did not go unanswered. With the bursting of an empathetic gathering of clouds he makes a carnival mirror of the water, placing my sorrowful expression as one illusion amongst many. For dramatic effect he calls on Aeolus, a minor deity, who sends gusts through the reeds. Then because those clouds, keeping to the order of being, have to attend to the lower fields, they shake a last few drops and part: and there is my golden lord beaming down upon me as I lift up my hands in which he has placed a golden trumpet; and I blow.

    Willow weep for me

    Willow weep for me

Running it through once for the remembering stirred a low round of applause from the leaves; once more with feeling garnered a chirped encore from an ascending starling; so I decided to join her, taking flight upon another chorus. I do not know to where. I have played Pied-Piper in university towns and I have inscribed love spells upon manuscript paper but only once has my playing rent a tear in the sad silk of Maya’s veil. Too bad there wasn’t a tape recorder running.

    Bend your branches green along the stream that runs to sea

    Listen to my plea

    Listen willow and weep for me

I blew and I tell you the tree wept.

    I loathe the loam that keeps me growing

    To ring in each new year

    And woe the wind that keeps me flowing

    The psithurism in my hair

The voice was at once a rich baritone, the grumbling of raw earth and the rustling of leaves, and quite melancholy too, oh yes. Naturally I looked around me but Apollo had drawn no prankster into the picture book scene. The only signs of life were those being made by the swaying willows, the billowiest of which was looking particularly pained in a mild breeze.

The weir runs on below us but I do not forget my training. This is clearly call and response; but is he really listening?

    Gone my summer dream

    Lovely summer dream

    The sun and sea which spring showers

    Tell to me their budding grieves

    Gone and left me here

    To weep my tears along the stream

    Which effloresce as summer flowers

    And are shed as autumn leaves

    Sad as I can be

    Here me willow and weep for me

But he did not, and I, having received this vision, the unfulfilled promise of communion, felt the more hopelessly alone and could only weep for myself. What trick is this Apollo?

In contemplation of this extraordinary experience I have found mystical and metaphysical angles frustratingly obtuse, but then perhaps truth is not a matter of reflection but rather refraction and I fancy that I can at least make out recognisable forms as I place over here and peer through the lens of the aesthetic.

In purely musical terms the exchange had proven rather poor. The tree had responded neither to the rhythmic, harmonic nor melodic implications of my lines. The iambic plod of his delivery though allowing certain subtleties of phrasing and probably indicative of his ancient nature had certainly swayed rather than swung. Perhaps he was playing ‘out’ or speaking ‘across’ me; if this is the case, then although I am no traditionalist, all I can say is that I was not moved. As an artist I believe that the tree failed to perform.

Anyhow, I present this episode to you as one of the more anomalous events of a life in jazz. I have returned to that tear-strewn stream many times since on the bandstand and perhaps after all when approaching that place I have been listening for, somewhere in the music, the voice of the willow. One cannot so easily forget. But let us move on to nineteen sixty-three, to city life bright through a haze, where voices sing a thousand different songs and where sorrows are drowned in less ostensibly limpid fluids. Let us follow the course upstream and don’t ask Old Man River for answers because he really don’t say nothing.

– Esteban Stanwo was born in the industrial garden town of Scunthorpe, studied Philosophy at the University of York, and currently resides in Bristol. He has authored several erotic short stories and is a winner of Poem of the Month in the Official Nintendo magazine. He writes with a Pentel Ultra Fine S570 pen.

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Apr 15 2013
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Fiction

The Sexton-Lily Intersection

by Tyler J. Petty

At 5:07 PM, an Impala’s brake line ruptured as it approached the Sexton-Lily intersection. The Impala was headed west on Sexton and had the right-of-way, but was forced to slam its brakes when the Camry approaching the intersection from the south failed to stop; the driver of the Camry was blotting a spilled fountain drink and did not notice the red light. The Impala and its failed brakes clipped the Camry’s rear bumper, sending it skidding into a parked Durango. The Impala’s driver maintained control of the car until its momentum petered out a quarter of a mile down the road. Neither driver sustained any injuries. This was the third accident the Sexton-Lily intersection had hosted in two weeks, and the ninth in the previous two months. Todd Morton arrived at the intersection at 5:10 PM, a few minutes late because of a customer service call from an entitled teenager.

Morton could only watch as the Camry’s driver, a dark-haired young woman, fought with her door, and Geronimo, the owner of the corner’s soup cart, heroically rushed in to help her escape. One cigarette could have ignited the smoking engine. When officials arrived to pry apart the Camry and Durango with a wrecker’s winch, the metal groaned like an elephant in labor. The police closed the block to traffic and distributed placards warning pedestrians of broken glass. Morton snatched a shard as he walked past the accident site, coaxing a bead of blood from under his fingernail with the jagged point, and entered the church on the next block.

Inside, Morton lit a candle on the altar and blew out the tapered lighter. Then, after a brief pause, he reignited the device and lit two more candles before taking a seat in the third-row pew. The sanctuary was empty save for a couple kneeling in the front row. Morton knew they were praying for their son, a troubled young man. The three of them occasionally discussed the absent members of one another’s families. Morton leaned forward and inclined his ear toward them, trying to catch a snippet of prayer, but all he heard was the whoosh of the building’s air conditioning system as it sucked their words into the ventilation ducts.

The couple concluded their supplications, stretched protesting knees, and left. Morton nodded to them on their way up the aisle. Alone in the sanctuary, he considered the stained-glass scenes on the wall. One depicted Jesus carrying the cross along the Via Dolorosa, and another showed Daniel and his friends emerging unbroiled from the fiery furnace. Both images were on the east wall and looked more impressive in the morning sunlight, with dancing flames and glittering haloes. In the afternoon, they still appeared holy, but not magical. A scene on the west wall, toward the back, revealed the spectacle of Samson’s death after God gave him the strength to tear down the temple of Dagon. No one called Samson a suicide.

The driver of the Camry wobbled down the sanctuary aisle. She steadied herself on the arm of Morton’s pew.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, I’m good. Great, I mean.’ She nodded toward the street.

‘I was just in an accident, but I’m okay. Just a little woozy. I saw this place while I was talking to the police and I figured, give credit where it’s due, you know?’

‘Sounds like a plan.’

‘This is a cool building. I’ve never been inside before.’

‘I come here every day,’ Morton said. ‘But I’m on my way out now. If you’ll excuse me.’

Three days later, Morton arrived on time. A Prius driver talking on his cell phone throttled west on Sexton, accelerating as he neared the Lily intersection. Geronimo dragged his soup cart across the street, oblivious to the humming oncoming vehicle.

A second before the Prius would have hit Geronimo, Morton slammed into the man’s shoulder. Knocked off his balance, Geronimo’s palms scraped across the sidewalk, but otherwise he was unhurt. His cart rolled to the curb. Flipping over, he saw Morton squealing in the street. The unfortunate man’s hands crept down his right leg, feeling for the source of his agony. He stopped at the knee. Everything below it was unrecognizable.

‘My God! Are you okay?’ Geronimo asked.

‘I’ll live,’ Morton said. Another wave of pain seized him. ‘Probably forever.’

 

– Tyler J. Petty graduated from Ball State University in May 2012 with an MA in Creative Writing. His work has previously appeared in The Broken Plate, and he once gave a presentation about a British alien invasion movie at a literature conference in Canada.

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