Volume 2, Issue 3
Fall from Grace
Letter from the Editor
The conceptual derivation of a “fall from grace” can be found in the biblical account of the Fall, Adam and Eve’s first sinful (freeing?) act. An exploration of the narrative implications of that Fall, and any other since, asks four questions regarding origin, motivation, the nature of the act, and the result. What is the nature of grace from which one has fallen? What is the motivation for the fall? How does the fall occur? And what is the result: one falls from grace, to what?
The writers in this issue explore contemporary redefinitions of the Fall, free from their biblical origins. In a literary world grown tired of redemptive texts, the Fall template becomes ever more appealing and gets interpreted in ever ampler terms. Writers and their characters are driven to fall by their search for knowledge, self-awareness, freedom, and the arrogance that makes them attempt to approach the divine as the aesthetic or the self while simultaneously severing the prelapsarian connection.
The Fall causes a fundamental transformation in the person. It is from the narrative act of the fall that we derive our aesthetic pleasure. It is the descent that compels us, whether through familiarity or fascination or a sort of temptation to know the other side. A well-executed Fall leaves us wondering whether it is redeemable, and whether it is something that even needs to be redeemed.
The Virgin Who Wanted to Be an Artist
Stazh Zamkinos
His hand trembles, fingertips buzzing, as he reaches for a pencil. She is still freshly pressed into his mind and he must write her.
“Make me into art,” she had said, stripping and then lying stretched long and naked on his bed. The blue light from the security pole outside shining through the dorm window made her breasts glow sky.
He sputtered and coughed up his tongue, which he had swallowed when she had dropped her shirt on top of her discarded jacket, hat, and shoes. First her bra, then her belt, jeans and panties, then her sock, and then her other sock had each dropped, fabric thud after fabric thud, to the carpet. He was still fully clothed. His eyelashes quaked as his eyes tried to settle comfortably. He tried to find a way to swallow this almost-stranger whole and ensure that he could remember this the next day in more than just fragmented pieces because this was the First Naked Woman He Had Ever Seen. This was important: he had to name the shade of dirty milky brown she wore slicked over her muscles, against which the blue light deepened haunting shadows and grooves. Deep camel? Strong olive? Light, slippery cacao? No, not details. Details were negligible-- he could fill them in later. Feelings. He needed to remember feelings, capture feelings. This was something he could write poems about; his scenes could possess a greater depth of emotion when he tapped this experience; he could spout songs about this, his First Time. God, he wished he could just take a picture of this pierced-tongued and dreaded figure! If only he could capture the image, preserve it forever, pin it down on his cork board.
She breathed out thickly, “Paint me. Draw me. Sculpt me. Play me like a saxophone, hum against my neck bone, build up a buzz or a brightening.” As she said this she posed, slightly bending her right knee, and slowly traced her bone white-painted fingernails up and down her left arm, making the little hairs on her forearm dance.
“What do you mean?”
She sat up, breaking the delicate grace of light harmoniously casting shadow on flesh, folded her legs, and draped her hands over her stacked shins. He kept his eyes as best he could on her eyes, her nose, her ears, her anythingbuttheres. She looked at the various photos, playbills, and news clippings pinned onto his cork board in a bizarre collage of his outer inner life, searching for a clue as to how she might inspire him into creation. He had spoken of little else when they had met that night.
There was a picture of his high school graduation and another with his first car. Another showed him on his first day of school. There were printed images of famous authors. Joyce. Chaucer. There was a picture of Jack Kerouac, cigarette dangling as he had dangled so many cigarettes from the corner of his mouth. She cocked her head in such a way that she knew her dread locks would drip artfully down her back and scratch the tops of her dimples. Her fingers ran across a crinkled paper print-out of a clip art image of classically shaded dramatic masks. Her tooth-like white nails traced the curves of the theatre masks' frown and smile.
She cast her voice over her shoulder, eyes still fixed on the cork board. “You know those lists that people make of things they want to do before they die?” Nod. “Well, I'm in the market to inspire somebody. And in the cafe you talked about how you wanted to be an artist. So it's perfect.”
“But I don't really draw or anything.” She threw the glow of her pale green eyes back toward him; his breath bent under the pressure of her look. Our actor shook his head. “I'm not a very visual person.”
She suddenly leaned to him and grasped his hands and said, “You mentioned that you were an English major in college. Know what you could do?”
“What?” His nervous hands pressed back, thumbs bumping across and re-across the ridges of her knuckles. He wanted to be good at this; he wanted to keep her hands right where they were.
She grinned and her bright white teeth glistened slick in the blue glow. The bright silver barbell in her tongue jumped excitedly when she said, “Write me. No, just speak me. Speak me a poem. Make it up as you go, just anything.”
He opened his mouth and waited for a word to fly from the tip of his tongue and catch her hungry, waiting ear like a fish hook. He was a writer; he'd analyzed Marquez, Maupassant, Milton, Murakami. He was an actor in the community theatre; his delivery was reputable among his fellow playwrights. His tongue was the organ that was most himself; a word would come that sang and rippled and held her tight and pulled her in, but he had to cast it right.
“Really, just anything,” she urged, leaning toward him.
He blushed; he was taking too long! And he was supposed to be an Artist! He tried details, images. Her eyes, no, he couldn't even really see them in this lighting; they were glinting in shadow. Wrists? It had been done before. How did authors do it? Real authors, or at least not fumbling beginners writing comfortably in dorms. How did all those real authors, the tight collared garden strolling poets and the stream-of-consciousness novelists that tripped through Mexico on nothing but herbs and pheromones, take minute details and turn them into snapshots that translated into intoxicating literary multitudes? He cast wildly: perhaps he could speak of the light that played across her curves, so deftly sculpted by shadow in the blue light. He yearned for such effortless grace but all he could think of under this pressure were unsatisfactory clichés. Think man, think! Improvise, for god's sake! She fidgeted impatiently and pulled her tongue barbell back and forth with her teeth.
“Honestly, I... It's hard to write on command like this.” She shifted her weight, drawing her legs back together. “When I write I usually draft and plan and rewrite... and...”
Oh!
“Oh. Well, that's alright.” She leaned back, pushed her hair roughly back behind her ears, and crossed her arms over her stomach, hands resting slack by her sides.
Silence.
“So I found out that I'll be directing some Shakespeare next season.” He cast out a line trying to recover comfortable conversation that had sparked between them at the café that night when they had met, but he missed. Her drifting gaze passed his mouth, which had so failed him, passed the worn knees of his corduroys, passed the fragility of his ankles, and settled instead on fixedly looking at the dainty blue light beyond the window. Her pupils reflected doubled burning blue pinpoints. “It's a pretty extraordinary opportunity,” he continued. “I'm thinking of aiming for the moon and taking on one of the tragedies. I'm so looking forward to it. He's just brilliant, particularly with the way he plays with words and puns.”
Beat.
Blue.
Idea! “You know, when I saw you I thought you'd make a great Cleopatra.”
There! She blushed. It was almost indetectible, but he could swear that he saw it: a very faint rose creeping into her cheeks, a blooded, humanly red tinge shining under the blue light, and she was letting her dreads drape over her face like a heavy theatre curtain as she smiled, blushing!, and her eyes sparked at him.
“Really. I mean, you're tanned and tall, you're gorgeous and commanding.”
She looked straight at him. “So direct me,” she urged. She pulled the heavy burgundy complete works of Shakespeare off of his bookshelf and hefted it onto her outstretched legs, crossed at the ankle, letting the binding rest over her justthere. The crackly pages snapped at her as she flipped them and he pointed with a shaking hand to the monologue he had in mind.
“You've been shaking a lot.” She smiled, wanted to soothe him so that he might...
He clenched his hand and pulled it back to rest on the bed covers. “Oh, it's, it's nothing. I always shake.”
Then he gulped and he directed her.
She was alright. Not what she might have been, but not awful. It wasn't that she didn't listen, but he hadn't been able to really convey what he was envisioning. Our actor couldn't find the right way to layer his old concept of Cleopatra over this woman before him. At first she'd tried to meet him on his theatrical level, but she started to seem uninterested because his vision wasn't something she innately fit into and it wasn't something he could explain. When his direction had failed to shape her performance into what he envisioned for the last three reads of the monologue she began instead to look at his mouth and at his shaking hand's gesticulations, watching the slender points of his thin artistic fingers. She was trying to think of something that would better engage him and better flatter herself. She wanted creation. She could give him a first line? An image? She shifted so that the light would play more attractively upon her. This was absurd, she thought. Here she was, here she was, naked on the bed of this man who claimed he wanted to be an artist, and nothing was being made. Nothing. She shifted so that the light would fall more inspirationally across her body. How did he see her? Why didn't he take her, shape her, want her? He noticed her eyes drifting away and around the room and he panicked; he was losing her!
But then. Her hand. Onhisthigh! And then it was movinguptoward: There. He closed his eyes and tried to still the tremors that raked through him.
Her icy eyes lit up and she moved over him, shutting the Shakespeare with her thighs and letting it fall to the bed then nudging it with her knee off onto ground. He thought fleetingly of the damage to the book, but what did it matter when here was this Woman, this Character, this Fleshy Light with Ideas that Listened and thought that he could make her into Art and she was Touching Him There! She glided over him like a new moon eclipsing a white hot sun.
Though the moon passed over the sun again and again, butting against him and moaning harder each time, pulling and tugging, beckoning, his tongue still failed him. His tongue faltered and he slung out sighs and gasps to punctuate moments that begged for intoxicant, climactic words that somehow seemed that night so starkly unreachable. The more tightly he held her, the further she felt.
She pushed her white tipped fingernails through his thin hair and pressed her fingertips hard against his skull, trying to pull something out of him.
They spent well over two hours fumbling with each other, throwing aside pillows and sheets and unsettling the mattress, upturning the bed in a desperate effort to find his expression, but it didn't come. Though she twisted around him, slipping over him and bumping against him, and groaned loud enough for the neighbors in the next dorm to hear and arched hard like the proudest Egyptian cat and thrust back up and lavished the light with rich caramel exclamations, it didn't come.
He shakes his head and refocuses on the paper in front of him.
He must find a way to write this, to make art. He has to find a way to elicit a return but he is fishing in the dark.
He begins, “My tongue, the organ which is most myself, was at a loss.” He admonishes this phrase but sighs that it will have to do and fumbles on, pleading for his pen to form some kind of climactic effect from the jumble of blue breasts, white-nailed fingers pushing against the curve of his pale thigh, her hand grasping at his hands which shook too hard, and the sight of Shakespeare crumpled on the ground.
Decaf
Katie Presley
Only the truly self-destructive drink coffee. Or sodas or smoke cigarettes. This is the best way to rebel. Artists and students, of course, do all these because life is one big rebellion. (until of course one sees one’s first picket fence and then soda is just sugar.) (and also cigarettes keep getting more and more expensive.) But coffee. Coffee is for those who really just want to fuck shit up. Starting the day in a subversive way don’t let anyone tell you it’s not a drug. Coffee causes riots and keeps writers writing and drivers driving and farmers farming. There is probably coffee in every painting you have ever seen.
Coffee, or else heroin. The freedom to pick a poison and paint a painting. stay in bed all day and choose another way to wreck things. while petting a cat. This is most likely to take place on a Saturday. Maybe a Thursday? But those are big days for coffee consumption. (self-destruction might be more potent under covers. especially if there’s a mug.) Cats while petted have probably witnessed more self-destruction than any other creatures. So many people put so much thinking about hope and death and life alive into their early morning under covers brown drinking cups. Somewhere a truck grounds to a halt and a writer puts down her pen.
The Night of Many Flushings
Leslie Beach
Twenty-five goldfish interlock
in a bag
of water suspended
three inches over the door.
It opens.
Water snaps down, columnar, spattering
the curls of the head of a girl not quite their target, terminating
in shattered splash. Among their divots swim the fish
mouths chewing
their first encounter with gravity.
One plated eye might register green
blur, round smear, flurried motion,
another fin might flap
in fluid air
unsure how to paddle this flickering substance.
But most, obeying
Galileo’s Law of Uniformly
Accelerated Motion, flutter gills
through their habitual element
and only stutter
when fragile bodies made for the mouths of turtles,
catfish, cichlids, (undesigned for a life
longer than a day)
smack
against alien-grained wood. Fingers (what odd
pink pinchers
squishing against fine
lined dorsal fins, delicate
forktined spines) pluck
the strewn morsels from the boards,
and plop them into
a metal mixing bowl salted
with vegan tears.
The first dies then.
Others follow, presenting
Soft bellies to the ceiling.
They twirl their danse macabre through soiled waters,
souls hovering in the U-bend
hesitant. Suspended.
Algae to Algae. Bag to Bowl to bowl.
November
Ben Kegan
It was late November and this particular afternoon brought with it the sharp hint of the approaching winter. Diane’s voice was shrill and hard to understand over the phone. She said Danny had stormed out of their house, and that she was afraid this time he might not come back. Except for a young girl with two children and a stroller, Jeff was alone on the train. The evening rush of lawyers and stockbrokers had yet to arrive, and Jeff felt out of place. In his mind he rehearsed what he would say to Diane, words of sympathy and gentle understanding. His own divorce was not so long ago, and Jeff felt that this gave him a privilege of understanding earned through experience.
In the four short blocks from the train station to Diane’s front door, Jeff’s mind caught itself on the thought of the changing seasons. It would not be autumn much longer. Although brittle leaves still stretched across the pavement, it was apparent the season’s coy winds were losing their patience. The air was stiff and the pending dusk bit at Jeff’s fingertips.
Jeff stood hesitantly at Diane’s front door. He was unsure whether to ring the doorbell or just enter. Although he and Diane talked frequently, he had not been to her and Danny’s house since a New Year’s Eve party almost two years ago. The house, a sturdy suburban estate with a manicured lawn and arching doorway, felt smaller now, less significant. That New Year’s he and Diane stood at her doorway sharing his cigarettes while the gentle sounds of clinking glasses, bursts of laughter, and the patterning of footsteps seeped outside to accompany their conversation. Diane did not smoke, but Jeff did, and she took deep drags of his cigarettes. In between his breaths she talked about the increasing frequency of her arguments with Danny. Adam, their youngest son, was a senior in high school at the time and Danny wanted to sell their house and move into a loft in the city after Adam left for college. Diane wanted to stay. Jeff considered himself a thoughtful talker. When Diane asked Jeff about his divorce, finalized only a few weeks prior, he was careful to appear collected instead of resentful. There was a hesitance in the way Diane approached Jeff’s failed marriage, not because the subject felt overtly personal, but because the reality of divorce was something Diane feared. The two of them stood outside for close to an hour, passing Jeff’s cigarettes between them. They missed the Times Square ball dropping on the television set and were only reminded of midnight by the cacophony of counting voices that spilled past Diane’s mahogany door. When she stopped talking about Danny, when her guests finished counting, and when they smoked Jeff’s last cigarette, they kissed. Their lips were cold and their breath held the sting of tobacco, but it was not without passion. Even then, so many years after dating in college, it was familiar.
Diane sat on the couch with the television on. Except for the gentle glow of a tabletop lamp most of the lights in the house were off.
“Jeff, you came,” Diane said.
“I knocked but you must not have heard me, so I let myself in.”
“Of course, you don’t need to be a stranger,” Diane sighed.
Diane had a comfortable elegance about her, a quality that seemed to reveal itself more as she matured. She wore a loose sweater with a draping neckline. Diane had a habit of wearing delicate cottons that instantly brought a touch of warmth when brushed against another’s skin and left him feeling a chill when the soft threads left.
Jeff removed his jacket and placed it across the back of an overstuffed armchair. He took a seat for a moment on the chair before getting up again and settling on the sofa next to Diane. The couch was large, with three leather cushions that dipped where the seams met. The leather was cool at first, but quickly warmed as Jeff sank into the corner. A cashmere throw lay upon Diane’s knees. Jeff slid towards her, the leather making a loud creak, and placed his hand on the warm blanket, just above Diane’s knee.
After a pause Jeff asked, “Danny isn’t back? He hasn’t called?” Jeff knew Danny was gone. There was no car in the driveway, and he knew Danny probably had not called. He knew this because he had refused to call his ex-wife when he stormed out of their house during one of their many arguments leading up to their separation, and then their divorce. But he felt he had to mention Danny, if only once so he would not have to again.
Diane reached for the remote, and silenced the television, but did not turn it off. Her eyes held a sullen gaze, exaggerated by recent tears. Jeff remembered the only time he had seen Diane cry. They had sat across from each other at a local café their sophomore year of college. Diane had asked Jeff to meet him there. It was mid December, a few days before Christmas break, and although the New England snow dampened the bottoms of his jeans, Jeff walked from his dorm to meet her. Diane was waiting for him at a table outside, buried beneath a navy wool coat, knitted cap, and lavender scarf. A coffee mug sat in front of her, untouched, steam rising to meet the exhale of her breath.
“You didn’t have to wait outside; let’s go in,” Jeff said.
“No, I want to talk to you here, in private.” Diane pulled the coffee mug towards her, nestling the warmth between her hands. “Jeff, my father died.”
That break Jeff went home with Diane, and met her family for the first time. Although he had never met her father, Diane’s grief touched Jeff as well. He stayed in a guest bedroom, but did not sleep there. Diane enjoyed watching Jeff as he walked into her childhood home. She took comfort in the way he stepped delicately, as if in a museum and unsure of what he was allowed to touch. She liked the way he paused in front of her bureau to pick up a photograph of her as a young girl sitting on a hay bale, her hands stuffed snugly into a pair of purple mittens, arms securely wrapped around a brilliant pumpkin. Jeff held the glass of the frame close to his face, and then, before returning the picture to the bureau, turned to look at Diane. Jeff could remember what he thought in that moment. He remembered the feeling of longing to be in that photograph.
Diane placed her hand on her thigh and then on Jeff’s hand. Jeff did not care about Danny. He did not care where he was or what he was doing or what he and Diane were arguing about, but he was curious about Diane. Diane had always been cryptic and guarded her moments of vulnerability fiercely. Jeff worried that perhaps Diane had called him in an impulsive desire for companionship. Perhaps he was not the first person she called. Perhaps she talked to others first, or perhaps she called Jeff only after the phones of her closer, more immediate friends rang, but did not answer. Jeff glanced at his watch; the light outside was diminishing, causing their reflection to sharpen in the window.
Jeff shifted in his seat, uncomfortable.
Jeff saw Diane’s eyes linger about her home, avoiding his gaze. She looked at her living room, well furnished and comfortable. She admired the decoration, the warm earth tones of the rusty reds and muted oranges. Each piece of furniture, from the cashmere throw to the delicate pillows, created an atmosphere distinct to her home. Diane remembered when she and Danny bought their couch. They found it after a tiresome afternoon of shopping. Weary from walking a marathon of showroom floors they sat on this couch because they were tired and the arches of their feet ached with strain. It was the first time that afternoon they did not gasp in excitement over how perfect a couch would look, or wince with a look of distaste. They sat down because they were weary. Diane had slipped off her shoes, dug her feet into the crevasse between the arm and the cushion, and slid her head down Danny’s chest until the back of her neck rested on his thigh. They sat like that, exhausted, until the showroom closed. The next day a truck arrived and two thick men carried the couch into their living room.
“I’m going to make some tea. Do you want any?” Diane asked.
Diane walked past the couch, her hand grazing the dark leather, and into the kitchen. Jeff stood up and moved towards her, but then stopped. He watched Diane step into the dim glare of the kitchen light. She lifted a pale blue teapot from the stove and brought it to the sink. The burner clicked before igniting with an audible hiss. Diane opened another cupboard and brought forth two large mugs, one with a floral-cream print, and the other a souvenir mug with a picture of the Grand Canyon wrapped around the base. Diane placed the mugs on the countertop next to the stove. The familiarity with which Diane moved about her kitchen, shuffling the contents of an open drawer to reach a box of herbal teas, made it clear to Jeff that this house was her own and not his. She placed a tea bag in each mug and then left them sitting there, perfectly ready, waiting for the kettle to steam.
“A fire would be nice,” Jeff called from the darkness of the living room.
“That sounds perfect,” Diane responded. “I think there’s some wood in the garage. It’s left over from last winter, but if there’s any that is where it would be.”
Jeff had to move Danny’s bike aside to get to the pile of firewood. He placed a bundle under his arm, the cool grit rough against his palms. Back outside, Jeff drew the garage door closed with his free arm. He stepped inside; the back door closed with a metallic clang, and the warmth of the room greeted his exposed skin. Jeff knelt in front of the fireplace, his knees sinking into the thick carpet and hands pressed against the cold stone of the hearth.
Diane brought the two mugs from the kitchen and placed them on the coffee table atop the Monday New York Times. Jeff reached for the Arts section.
“Wait. Use this.” Diane handed Jeff the sports section.
Jeff crumbled the paper and stuffed it beneath the logs. He patted his pants and glanced over at his jacket before asking Diane to pass him his lighter from the inside pocket.
“You’re still smoking?” Diane asked.
“I told myself I’d quit as soon as I remarried.”
Diane laughed and a thankful smile broke on Jeff’s cheek. Stretching out his arm, Jeff positioned his hand upwards so Diane would be forced to brush his palm when passing him the lighter. Diane placed the lighter in his hand and Jeff closed his fist around hers, the lighter pressed between their fingers. Jeff focused his eyes on the back of Diane’s fingers. They were long and elegant, gently tapering towards her slender wrist. Jeff traced the blue veins that ran across her hand with his eyes as if they were the map of a neighborhood he once knew well, but had long since visited. Diane started to pull her hand away and Jeff tightened his grip. Jeff tried to look at Diane’s eyes, but her head was tilted to the side, watching the reflection in the window.
“Jeff.” Diane turned her head towards him.
Jeff squeezed harder. His eyes met Diane’s. He could see that she was scared. But he would not let go.
“You and Danny fight so much,” Jeff said. “We never fought like that.”
“That was a long time ago,” answered Diane. She said this lightly, with a self-conscious tone of dismissal.
“But we didn’t fight. Sure we had some arguments, but nothing like this. I never left for days at a time,” said Jeff. “We never even broke up, we just sort of, well, I suppose we just graduated.”
“Was that how it happened?”
Her refusal to remember their past, or the ease with which she had forgotten it, hurt Jeff. It attacked him with a dull jealous pain that swelled in his stomach and crept through his limbs.
Jeff tightened his grasp on Diane. He could tell she was uneasy, practically scared. Jeff had to push further and press harder. He saw her unease as an irritation, and like a scab he knew he should leave untouched, he could not fight the urge to scrape. He tightened his grip, Diane’s red fingertips dissolved into a pale white.
Jeff thought about leaving, releasing her hand and walking away. But he did not want to leave. He did not want to walk outside where it was cold and already dark. He did not want to imagine her, while he walked the four blocks back to the train station, tucking herself back under that blanket, turning the volume up on the television. He did not want to imagine Danny opening the heavy door and finding her there, as he did, sitting on her couch, snug and longing for company.
“Why did you call me?” asked Jeff.
“I wanted you here.” Diane paused. “But as a friend. I just really need a friend right now.”
She spoke the word “friend” easily, repeating it, enunciating it crisply as she emphasized and elongated the word. It angered Jeff the way she used the word, as a compromise, an offering, and an escape. He knew Diane took pleasure in speaking it. The word sank heavily inside him; he resented the protection it granted her.
He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to dismiss her feelings the way her friendship patronized his desire. He wanted to tell her stories that dug into her life and scarred her nostalgia. He wanted disfigure her past and char her most sacred memories. He wanted to tell her how he slept with her roommate, or lied when he said, “I love you Diane,” for the first time. But he could not, because when he spoke these thoughts in his mind, even to himself, they sounded trite and untrue, which they were. He knew too clearly that he’d never desired Diane’s roommate, and was too aware of the candor with which he spoke those words to her. He could only ask a simple question. His voice deep and words sincere.
“Was it so long ago?” Jeff asked.
“Yes, very long ago,” Diane whispered.
Quickly, Jeff drew Diane’s hand to his hip. The lighter, no longer held in place between their palms, dropped silently to the thick white carpet below. Jeff took Diane’s jaw between his forefinger and thumb, pressing her cheeks inwards. Her flesh was taught between his fingertips, causing the faint lines in her cheeks dissipate under the pressure of his grasp. Quickly, he pulled her neck towards him until her lips were firmly against his own. Diane looked at him, her eyes narrow and afraid. Diane knew that it was too late, too much had happened, and Jeff, looking at Diane, her hand shaking in his, realized this too. He understood that now, because of the way he held her and the way she resisted his embrace, she could not call him again.
Jeff pressed his lips against Diane’s in what resembled a kiss; only it was not a kiss. Diane would not grant him that, she would not let him kiss her. Jeff continued to depress his lips against hers. He wanted her to feel his desire, but she forbade him.
Jeff parted Diane’s mouth, taking her lower lip between his. He held her there, between the folds of his mouth, feeling her tremble. Then, to stop her lip from quivering, Jeff pressed his teeth into her lip. Her lip was soft, and gave way. Jeff felt as though there was nothing between his teeth but air. Sharply he clenched his jaw. A shrill gasp escaped from Diane’s mouth. Diane pulled away from Jeff and brought her hand to her lip, retreating until the back of her head met its reflection in the windowpane. She stood there, her eyes fixed upon Jeff. Now Jeff’s lip quivered too because he could taste the warm crimson and iron of her blood. Diane lowered her eyes to the floor and Jeff collected his jacket before leaving. No words were said.
Outside, the air was no longer crisp, but cold. Stepping off Diane’s lawn and onto the sidewalk, Jeff placed a cigarette between his lips. He patted his jacket in search of his lighter, and there, as he pressed his palms against his empty pocket, Jeff felt the pain of a longing, sharp and immediate, unfulfilled, but familiar.
In the Careful Glow
Lauren Beebe
with the last thin well-wishes of the sun
our eyes are glazed and our mouths are wet
in anticipation of fruitful boughs
and the satin-soft earth keeping the warmth of day
all the beasts named in this fenceless paradise, save one:
the dark creature coiled in leafy ideas,
tight as a tourniquet around its nest of cool knowledge
so, inviting it into our arms, we ask of its skin
“What is your name?” and ask of its whispers,
“What is your purpose?” but it slips away like a flower’s face
through the night’s frozen teeth
we know with each day the plentiful gifts of this love are gathering dust,
are in need of repair, and are groaning of our misuse and neglect,
but we are running barefoot through this shallow dream
and now that the fire we lit to protect us
from the darkening world has died down to a glow
we are careful to be silent
so as not to disturb the flock of leaves in their roosts,
the sighing pack of stones huddled together for warmth,
or wake the slowly rocking herd of hills
all slumbering under the same roof of stars
Shylock, why aren't they listening? or, To-more-oh belongs to we
Mark Kennedy
Hey look! Dude!
I lift my head up from my lunch to see my best friend, JGo we'll call him, eating a burrito. A splotch of refried beans has fallen on his tan brown skin.
Look at this, dude. I’m bleeding.
I remember learning American history in seventh grade, and being absolutely appalled that a nation of people that did such horrendous things to others could be associated with me simply by how I look. I remember being proud that I was from Canada, where the slaves went to be freed, where the only good white people were left. I don’t remember when I finally read that discrimination happened just as much in Canada as it did in the United States, but I remember feeling kind of sick about it. Had I really been that... pathetic?
I mean, I might as well be a member of the Aryan race. I am
blonde hair no denying that;
blue eyes no actually I have green eyes, and sometime hazel eyes, I mean it depends on the shirt I wear, so really it doesn’t count;
heterosexual but I’m sensitive to everyone, I can totally empathize with homosexuality, I told JGo I loved him once and he thought I meant in a romantic way, in a sexual way, and that was the downfall of our friendship, so really I understand, see? I understand how it feels to be misunderstood;
Protestant though I no longer consider myself any one denomination of Christianity and am sick of church politics;
a quarter German, a half Dutch, and another quarter Scottish-English-French, etc– Look, I am a cocktail of Caucasian conquest, the dominatrix of the world, the writer of history, the great Pater, the parternalistic oppressor. Tomorrow belongs to me.
But I’m from Canada. No one takes us seriously, not in the United States. I’m just a joke, to everyone. How can I be a part of this evil dominating force when no one takes me seriously?
JGo, I think I’ve figured out something about myself. I am fifteen.
“Yeah?”
I think I’ve got an Asian girl fetish.
Laugh. “What?”
I think I just really like Asian girls. They are the sexiest thing in the world to me.
“Dude, I like ‘em creamy white and chubby. Nothing like a guilty fuck from a white girl.”
That’s a terrible thing to say.
“What? Hispanics can’t mix with white girls, is that what you’re saying?”
Oh shut up. No. But you can’t think that all chubby white girls would feel guilty about having sex. That just seems wrong to think, doesn’t it? You don’t believe that, eh?
In dopey Canadian voice, "Oh, I dunno, eh? Yuh think all Asian girls are pretty, dontchya know eh? Isn’t that just as racist, eh?”
Okay first off, not all Canadians say “eh” all the time, or even say it like that, and Canadians don’t talk like Minnesotans, and I don’t think all Asian girls are pretty, I just find myself more than often attracted physically to Asian girls. And what is it with you anyway, JGo? You’re whiter than me, ya coconut. You fucking a white girl wouldn’t be anything special at all.
“Heh, that’s what you think.”
When I am cut open, I bleed maple syrup. I am also fantastic at hockey, and watch it as rabidly as my American friends watch football. I am extremely polite, incredibly provincial, and leave my doors unlocked because no one in Canada ever steals anything. I also have seven thousand guns, but I’ve never shot anyone before. I say “bore-oh,” and “oat,” not “oot,” and “to-more-oh.” To-more-oh belongs to me?
You know one day JGo and I were walking to school from our bus stop with this very attractive, exceedingly stupid Californian blonde girl, and I actually convinced her that Canada’s electricity was run by penguins sliding around on icy turnstiles. We had her going the whole way from the stop to the entrance into school before she realized we were joking. Canadians have TV too, you know.
JGo tells me one day that he really hates his race. He really hates how they’re all trying to get into his country illegally, making a bad name for all Hispanics, especially his family, who did it right, who did it legally. He hates how they’re all fruit pickers and house cleaners. He thinks it’s demeaning. The fucking wetbacks. He calls himself a coconut, brown on the outside, white on the inside, and lets everyone else call him that too. Funny, I thought everyone’s insides were red.
I am Ernst Ludwig, ze Cherman Nazi in Cabaret, set in 1930’s Berlin, who at the beginning of the play is insidiously charming, a real nice guy, giving Cliff, the American, played by JGo, a place to stay and a way of making money until suddenly, at the end of Act I, he reveals himself to be violently prejudiced against Cliff’s Jewish friend who is supposed to be getting married. Drama invariably ensues.
My girlfriend at the time, a Japanese/Italian/entirely American named Courtney, is a Kit Kat Club dancer, clad in sexy clothing and dancing in the so-called club when Sally Bowles, Cliff’s love interest, decides to sing. Backstage we’d always flirt, and kiss, and I’d wrap her up in my badass trench coat and tell her what a great job she was doing out there, dancing her heart out.
I’d sometimes joke backstage too with our stage manager, Daniel, a big guy, really into his religion, head of his Jewish youth group. I had co-stage-managed the previous show with him, and we both had helped build the set, like we always do.
So we’re doing our tech rehearsal, and emotions are running high. Nothing is going right, as it never does during tech. Daniel is going crazy trying to coordinate all the set changes, with half of his crew always missing, half of his crew not knowing what they’re doing. It was quite a mess, and everyone was getting pissed off because we had been rehearsing for nearly four hours and were just now getting to the Act I Finale. So finally, at the end of Act One, an Aryan prostitute and I sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in protest of the Jewish man’s wedding, and acting as Ernst I do my best to fill my heart with the purest hatred possible, funneling it into this shuddering rage that bursts at the last part of the song,
the morning will come when the world IS MINE
Tomorrow belongs to me (zig heil!)
I don’t remember why I went straight to Courtney after the song, but I wrapped her up again in my big costume coat, very happy to see her after the emotional drain of that scene, and then Sher comes whipping by, bumping the scenery into us as he rushes past to deal with something else. “Hey, easy Dan! Watch where you move that thing, you almost hit Courtney!”
“Not now, you fuckhead.” Daniel stops, and turns toward me. “Not now, okay? You just go back to your sick little mixed race relationship and go fuck each other. Do not fuck with me. Not today. Not today.”
“Excuse me?! EXCUSE ME?!” All pretenses of backstage whispering are cast aside. All separation between character and actor for one horrifying moment disappears. “What the fuck are you talking about you—”
“It’s okay, leave it alone,” Courtney grabs me, pushing me back, smothering the words “fucking Jew” that were teetering on the tip of my tongue.
“No, it’s not okay,” I push her aside. “Sher, don’t you ever talk about me and Courtney that way, you hear me? Don’t you ever fucking talk about her like that, you get me?”
“Don’t fucking do this man. Not today.” We are inches from each other’s face.
Apparently Daniel's particular flavour of Jewish faith does not agree with interracial couples. My dad tells me this at home that night. It’s a cultural thing. Just one specific minority group thinking one specific minority thing. He didn’t mean it, my dad seems to say.
“Take it easy, man,” JGo places a hand on my shoulder backstage. “Let’s go into the green room. We’ve got to go change anyway.”
I am in the front seat of a van filled with fifteen kids, driving back from Mexico where we had spent a week building houses, and we are now approaching the border. JGo is a few seats behind me. The border patrol man is a large, intimidating, clean-cut red-blooded American. He asks for all of our IDs. I pass along my Alien Registration Card (yes, I am an alien, beware!!!), which proves that I have a green card and am a legal resident of the United States. “Everyone American in there?” He peers over at JGo.
“Yep,” my pastor answers. The agent hands me all our IDs. “All American. Oh, and one Canadian.”
The border patrol agent laughs out loud, and with a final wave passes us through the border. I think he thought my pastor was joking, to help lighten up the mood. Must’ve been the funniest thing he’d heard all day.
If you prick us, do we not bleed? Shylock, can I hear that bit again? I don’t think everyone was listening. And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?! Wait a minute, Shylock, just hold on a sec, no, no!–
One Foot in Front of the Other
Grace Harnois
Eve had everything she could ever want in her left shoe. The charismatic, conversation-starter socks with frisky seals on the soles, worn toe-holes for added spunk and visible determination, ironic gold glitter nail polish, and a $10 bill. Her little toe was very cynical, as it had never been caressed, and gave her limb a gruff (if somewhat lonely) air. The other toes were clearly affected and swore they’d never find love. Her heel was stained dark brown from summertimes and it liked its space.
Sometimes Eve slipped a wrapped condom into her sock and pretended she was a prostitute, stomach empty (except for bodily occupational beverages) and eyes ringed with blue eyeliner and sleeplessness. Then the neon lights of the night streets cut through her eyelids and, frightened, she would press the condom on a couple so that they’d have an additional amusing reminiscence to share when the silence grew discontented. She hoped none of the couples would use her gifts because they’d probably think of her during sex and that was more than her toes could handle. They curled in disgusted imaginings of the possibilities. They were better than that.
When going home from the city, she always chose a second-floor one-seater on the train to avoid the boozy baseball fans and overextended businessmen. Carefully, delicately, she arranged her water bottle, Walkman, and uneaten apple around her until they were in perfect harmony with her lightly crossed ankles and musical thoughts. Everything needed a home at all times, every possession and moment of posturing, or the loneliness of the late night train ride would suffocate her. She didn’t have it quite right this evening, and the bottom of her foot itched defiantly, deep beneath layers of plasticized, traveled-upon skin, inside her bone. Frustrated, Eve rearranged her belongings and shuffled her feet against the sticky seatback.
The itch refused to cease. Her headphones howled unfeeling loverly words Eve couldn’t understand. She was dancing her Metra ten-ride in and out of its walleted bed, people-guard down and forced unfriendly scowl at half-mast, when she made eye contact with a man across the aisle. Accidental eye contact was Eve’s least favorite traintime interaction. When the giggly prepubescents of that middle school psyche played uncomfortable boy-girl-sexual-activity games of connecting lines drawn between columns of names and sex acts on notebook paper (MASH, Destiny, the whole gawky parade), she always insisted that “eye contact” be one of the actions. This drew typical sneers and unmasked snotty eye rolls, but while other girls wandered the halls pondering BJs and HJs and other mysterious fleshy acronyms, Eve kept her eyes to the peeling ceiling. To lock eyes with a stranger was to slice an unexpected and violating cut into his or her soul. Besides, it made her toes itch.
Trapped in the greased glass tunnel called politeness, Eve smiled unfeelingly, the corners of her mouth rising for an unnoticeable instant of grimace. The man disobeyed her clear wishes and answered with an intimate grin. His eyes fucking sparkled. (How did people do that? She never knew.) Eve’s leg spasmed visibly from the discomfort, knocking her apple to the floor, where it burst into a hundred unexpected grainy blobs. She ripped her gaze to the window and wiped the juice off her shoes, feeling violated. He was one of Those Men and the quasi-fear drew him to her side. Disbelieving, she watched in horror as he shoved through the crowded aisle and approached the seat.
He was still smiling. “Hi.”
Politeness was dead. She glared at his patterned collar, avoiding the eyes now. He chuckled, somewhat patronizingly. Unresponsive, she cleaned appley mush from her jeans with a forgotten newspaper.
Silence. Her toes burned with unexpected shame.
“…Would you like a new apple?” He held out a dusty-looking Braeburn, the sticker still on.
This was too much. “I don’t even know you. Do you really think I’d eat food you gave me?” He shrugged and replaced the apple in his bag. They were quiet again. He sat on the floor next to her, somehow missing the sludgy puddle expanding across the car. He rested his head on the metal railing and sighed contentedly. Unannounced, a Much Improved Smile suddenly pounced as he simultaneously swooped for secondary eye contact. He caught her. Suddenly this man was scruffily, understatedly attractive – the most dangerous type of good-looking – and goddamnit her toes were curling with something approaching delight. She stared at their four feet, his covered in depressed-looking sandals stained with the oily sidewalk cracks of the city.
“Aren’t you cold?” His eyes were roundly caring, embracing, unfolding a blanket of attention over her shivery shoulders. She gripped it tightly as she noticed how his toes curled at her question.
“My toes need their freedom.” To anyone else on the planet except Eve: flippancy, silliness, meaningless jest.
But it wasn’t to anyone else.
This was so foreign that she was sure she had never touched another human being. He turned off the light in his dingy apartment living room as he squeezed her left foot. “I don’t want to be your friend, I just want to be your lover.” Her mouth opened wide to laugh because Radiohead lyrics as romance were misguided in most ways, but he covered it with his own. Eve reached down and pulled off her socks; it was the only thing left to do. There were dragonflies in the dark air surrounding them and she closed her eyes, digging her heels into the couch to silence their protests.
But the touching ended quickly. She opened her eyes as he pushed her clothes towards her, urging her to get dressed. There were no more musical words or smiles dripping from his lips. She pulled denim pantlegs up over her quizzical ankles, yearning for something more. She received a shove into the hallway and a door slam, without even a Sub Par Smile for comfort, without tenderness or even thinly veiled lust. The door opened and a hand, accompanied by a sliver of face and tousled hair, extended, holding the same reddish-green apple.
“Sorry.” He placed the apple in the crook of her tightly folded arms and withdrew, disappearing back into the mothy dark.
She had stumbled all the way to the street corner below his window when she noticed that her socks were gone. Divested of everything, she didn’t know what to do but wait. Her toes icicled quickly, lying beside each other like albino baby carrots. As a drizzly sleet fell beneath the streetlight, a hole opened in the side of the apartment building and two scraps of sad blue fabric fluttered down. Eve slid the socks slowly back onto her feet, massaging them back towards sensation. Her toes were unresponsive, resentful of the night. While she was kneeling in the gutter, half-barefoot and disheveled, a red-faced man came bumbling around the corner. “Hey babe, how much?” He leered down at her uncontained long hair and smeared eyeliner, weaving drunkenly towards her huddled form. Eve stood quietly and pushed the apple against his mouth. Surprised, he bit down, and she walked away, leaving the Braeburn hanging in the center of his wide, stupid face, gaping and slick with rain.
Back on the train, her ankle announced that the $10 bill was gone.
Masthead
| editor-in-chief | Kim Hooyboer | |
| assistant editor | Leslie Beach | |
| layout editor | Deirdre Gorman | |
| copy editors | Leslie Beach Stazh Zamkinos | |
| staff | Jullianne Ballou Meghan Carlson Avi Conant Ben Kegan Robin Lewis Dena Popova | |
| staff artist | Tyler Caulkin |
