Death and His Wife

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Laura Barker

                      Egon Shiele/ Bridgeman Art Library/ Universal Images Group

                      Egon Shiele/ Bridgeman Art Library/ Universal Images Group

Death couldn’t find any toothpaste. He opened the cabinets above the rust-rimmed sink. All he could find were little plastic packets of floss, his wife’s antidepressants, and the candy-colored bottles of Bubble Fun that his son used to love. Death swept a finger along the metal shelves and frowned at the grime that coated his nail. Their apartment was falling apart, with them still inside.

Death popped his head out the bathroom door, “Honey, do we have any toothpaste?”

Death’s wife, Lisa Mercy, stood at the kitchen sink. She was three pills into her daily nine-pill routine. There were so many different ones, some squat, some oily, some square, some teal. They all came in acid-orange containers, each one promising to be the miracle drug to bring back the sunny-smiled bride Death had married ten years ago. She took two more pills before answering her husband, “In the top drawer.”

Death pulled open the drawer. Nothing but a stick of deodorant and random Lego pieces, “Nope, nothing here. I think we’re out.”

“How can we be out, I just bought like twelve at Costco.” Lisa started towards the bathroom, but stopped herself. She turned back towards the kitchen sink and grabbed her water glass. “Check the lower cabinet,” she called.

Death sighed. Looks like it was going to be a mouthwash day. He closed the mirrored cabinets and blinked at his reflection. People always pictured Death as cloaked in a threadbare black robe with a gleaming white skull and skeletal fingers that beckoned people to their graves. In reality, Death looked much less gaunt. He was a tall, bespectacled man with thinning brown hair and teeth that badly needed braces. He wore college sweatpants and a t-shirt instead of the medieval robe, and carried an iPhone instead of scythe. It was an average phone, with a chipped glass cover, but it had an app to inform him of the latest death. It buzzed, and Death would have to put on real pants and escort the deceased to the Other Side. Not a glamorous job, but it paid the bills.

Death unscrewed the bottle of mouthwash “Oh, before I forget,” he called out the bathroom door, “Guess who I met yesterday?”

Lisa dug her nails into the glass at the sound of his chipper voice.

“Remember that singer you used to really like? Peaches?” Death threaded a waxy string of floss between his fingers, “Yeah, she died yesterday. Man, she did not want to cross. Kept whining and complaining about how she deserved a second chance, and how she didn’t do that much cocaine.” He rolled his eyes, “Divas.”

He listened for her to gasp or give him that little chuckle where he could hear her smiling, but he was greeted with hollow silence. Death went back to flossing. He should be used to it by now. Lisa had been sulking ever since Death carried their son across to the Other Side. For some reason, she blamed it on him. It wasn’t his fault that David fell off the swing set and broke his little neck. Death didn’t force him to pump his legs higher and higher, sending the swing so high that for a second it seemed to defy gravity. Death didn’t tell him to jump off to see if he, too, could hover in the air for that magical moment. The only thing he did was hold his son’s hand as he passed onto the Other Side.

Lisa had begged Death not to let David go. She begged, she bargained, she cried, she even threatened to divorce him. But Death would not compromise his responsibility. He had made no exceptions for his own father or best friend. He’d carried the best man at his wedding over after he was hit by a group of joy-riding teenagers. Sure, it was sad, but it had to be. Mortality was as much of the life cycle as birth was. Death only wished Lisa could see it this way.

Death’s phone buzzed again. With his free hand, he swiped to the home screen, “This might interest you,” he said.

Unbeknownst to Death, Lisa was lying face down on their collapsed couch. She rolled onto her side and saw the little toy duck David used to love that had slipped under the TV cabinet. Shortly after his son’s parting, Death had quietly donated all of David’s toys and clothes to charity, but every now and again, Lisa would find a stray sock under the sofa, or Goodnight Moon wedged under their bed. When she found them, she started towards her son’s room, and then when she remembered, a horrible sound would catch in her throat, and she’d lock herself in the bathroom with a bottle of vodka and a trembling handful of aspirin until Death came home.

Death laced floss between his fingers, “Oh, and guess who was my last delivery of the day? Mrs. Doris!” Death chuckled, “Oh, Mrs. Doris. Such a trouper. She didn’t complain the whole way down there. She even said–you’ll love this–she said ‘That damn head ache’s finally gone!’”

Lisa remained on the couch, eyes fixed on the toy duck under the couch. She rolled her sixth pill between her fingers. Lisa had been to a slew of psychopharmacologists, who also listened to her worn story and prescribed a rainbow of pills: Zoloft, Celexa, Sarafem, Xanax, Prozac. The drugs made her brain feel hollow and numbed the ache in the center of her chest, but nothing could get rid of the pain of being too busy on the phone to take a good last look at her David’s sweet gap-toothed grin as she sent him to his last day of school.

The phone perched on the edge of the sink buzzed. “Huh. Danielle Brooks. Isn’t she the nice little sixteen-year old from down the street?”

Silence.

Death shrugged, “Hope it wasn’t anything too bad. She was a sweet kid.” He pulled back his lips to check his teeth, “Looks like we need to book a new cat sitter pronto.”

Lisa covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t stand the way that Death talked about it. Like dying was nothing more than a spilled glass of apple juice. It didn’t bother her when she was young, and the only people dying were friends’ grandpas and aging rock stars. But as she grew older, the people who were dying became closer and closer to her. First it was her college roommate, who died in a plane crash. Then her best friend from high school, when cancer came roaring back to fight a third time and won. Then her sister, who was crushed under the wheel of a truck after she pushed her son to safety.

The deaths kept growing, a horrible weight building between Lisa’s shoulders. She’d beg Death to overlook one death, and even held onto his legs to prevent him from collecting her father. But years of screaming, pleading, and threatening didn’t even put a dent in Death’s dedication to his job. Then David’s death came. What killed Lisa was that Death didn’t even let her have a few seconds for a goodbye, a final hair smoothing, a few words of love that he could carry with him into eternity. No, he just helped his son off the ground and delivered him before picking up the phone. That destroyed her.

Death peeked his head out of the bathroom door, “Hon? You okay?”

Pretending not to hear him, Lisa stood up and walked back over to the stove. She stirred the eggs half-heartedly.

“Well, T.G.I. Wednesday, am I right?” he laughed to himself. Lisa didn’t even move, “Hey, know what’s getting me through this week? Our date this Friday.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair as he walked out of the bathroom, “You know, we haven’t gone out in forever. But this Friday is gonna be great. A fireside table in the Oak + Fig, a piano concert downtown, maybe a few cocktails afterwards….” He walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. Lisa startled so suddenly that Death drew back, “Hey, take it easy, tiger. You act like you’ve just seen the Grim Reaper!” The joke was almost as old as he was, but it never failed to bring a smile to Lisa’s lips. But with her back turned to him, Death couldn’t be certain.

Death started back towards the bathroom, but stopped just before turning the corner. “Hey,” he said quietly.

Lisa turned around. Her eyes were glassy. Her face still looked young, but was creased around the eyes from years of crying.

“Just wanted to say you look beautiful today.”

Lisa smiled, but her eyes looked even glassier. She turned back to the eggs. “Scrambled?”

“That’d be perfect. Thanks, hon.” Spirits lifted, he went back to flossing. He always knew just the right thing to cheer his wife up.

Once her husband left, Lisa opened the sliding door to the balcony. She took a step outside, the cool cement chilling her bare feet. Her bathrobe caught in the late September wind and billowed around her. Lisa took another cautious step forward. She gripped the metal bar and looked over the edge. The city was spread below her like a child’s drawing. The tiny cars looked like beetles scurrying along thin strips of grey, and the trees looked like drops of lime candy. The playground just below them was empty, making all the army-green play equipment look lonely in the middle of the urban jungle. It was too much like the little worlds she’d make with David in their playroom out of Tinkertoys and Legos. She could still see his small hands interlocking the wooden toys together, carefully outlining a world that would be destroyed seconds later.

Lisa clutched her bathrobe closer to her, closing the gap between her breast and her robe. The smell of exhaust made her head feel light. Wordlessly, she lifted herself over the balcony’s railing and rested her feet between the metal bars. Her stomach pitched as the wind gently pushed her forwards and backwards over forty stories of nothingness. The wind howled in her ears and blew her untidy strawberry blonde curls around her like she was underwater. She leaned forward, fingers still hooked under the railing, and looked down. Her grip loosened.

Death’s phone buzzed.

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Laura Barker was born in Chicago and is a junior at Clark University, pursuing an English Major with a concentration in Journalism and Creative Writing. She enjoys reading, is working on a novel (The Brycean Files), and is active in musical theatre and student government.

Photo credit: Death and the Maiden . Schiele. Encyclopedia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 June 2015 from

http://quest.eb.com/search/108_310816/1/108_310816/cite

Bothered and Bewhiskered

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

 

by Thomas Anania

 

Moustache, mustache, or ’stache–the word stirs a powerful feeling of pride in those brave enough to affect them. Many a man, (and perhaps some women) have sported mustaches: Tom Selleck, Mahatma Ghandi, Mr. Moneybags. The community has been swelling in numbers recently, perhaps due to the shaggy romanticism sweeping the nation. With television programs like IFC’s Whisker Wars, we’re undoubtedly entering a renaissance of facial hair as self-expression.

Braided beards and waxed ’staches aren’t over the hump of stigma yet, however. The American Mustache Institute released a report in 2013 pertaining to the lack of workplace advancement for hairy-lipped employees. The AMI claimed that the “mustache ceiling,” or the lack of whiskers at the upper echelons of the corporate world, was due to the “ESPN factor.” ESPN, a network largely consumed by males aged 21-45, features many correspondents, most of whom have smooth faces. Constantly being subjected to these correspondents sends the message to guys everywhere that to be professional one must be clean-shaven, wear a suit, and have a terminally vanilla sense of humor.    

THE AUTHOR/CELINE MANNVILLE

THE AUTHOR/CELINE MANNVILLE

While society has slowly started to accept beards and even  man buns, resistance on the upper lip front has been stiff. For the longest time facial hair was considered taboo in the workplace. Whiskers just weren’t professional; there was no room for them between luncheon whiskeys and grabbing the secretary’s ass. Disney only started allowing employees to wear beards in 2012.

In addition to the baby-faced workplace, mustaches have come to be associated with “that creepy guy down the street who watches everyone through his blinds.” The entertainment industry reinforces this ridiculous notion by portraying many sleazy antagonists with mustaches. Think Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones or “Pornstache” in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black.

I myself was recently subjected to mustache prejudice. When meeting someone for the first time there is a script that almost everyone observes. “Hello, I’m… It’s nice to meet you…yada yada.” Well, what do you say when the first thing out of someone’s mouth is: “Nice mustache, you look a lot like a pedophile.” You can respond in two ways. Lower yourself similarly and offer, “Nice forehead. You look like a billboard.” Or you can ignore it: “Yeah, nice to meet you too.” I chose the latter because, let’s face it, there is a double standard. It is perfectly acceptable to deride people based on their facial hair but not on any other facet of their outward appearance.

As a society we may like to believe that we have moved past the notion of judging by outward appearance, but I say: nonsense. Electing the first black man to the Oval Office has not made this a post-racial country, so why would a television show about facial hair change everyone’s attitudes toward the mustache? A lot of work has yet to be done with the attitudes of the general public, which is wary of any change, unless, of course, it’s been repackaged with “20 percent more” and smothered in barbeque sauce. Whether we acknowledge our prejudices or not, they have to come to an end. I invite everyone to put down your razors, join the hairy horde, and stand for bewhiskered equality.

 

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Thomas Anania studies Economics at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Spokane

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Samuel Simas

 

The pasta simmers, and steam floats up into the stove light. The glow turns the kitchen walls yellow like cigarette-stained teeth. Mac curls and uncurls his toes in his rocking chair, the wood creaking. I take a blue dish towel to wipe away the silvery thread of drool from Mac’s face. He smiles at me, toothless, happy. When I pull the towel away, he says: The first star landed somewhere in the two-hundred mile stretch between Missoula and Spokane.

The night it fell, he says, people in Spokane had salted their driveways and strapped chains onto their tires for the winter storm. Channel 7’s Phil Arlee predicted snow high enough to lose your knees in, snow we weren’t ready for so early in December. When it fell, he says, you could see a pastel purple smudge of light chasing a clear moon-sized orb from every window in Spokane.

 

The heating element glows red and then blackens like a slow-motion stoplight across from the fire station. Water bubbles up and over, sizzling on the stove-top. I nab it and bring it to the steel colander in the sink. I turn on the faucet, and water gushes noisily out. Mac raises his voice.

Everyone went to find it, he says. Spokane, Missoula. Everyone. They loaded up their trucks and took off on I-90, chasing the orb to where they thought it landed somewhere between trees and snow.

Busker went by himself, Mac says. Took your red Chevy and drove an hour and a half, watching the trees of the Lolo Forest pass underneath falling snow. He wanted to drive until the Lolo kissed the Cœur D’Alene Forest. Once you passed the mid-point, you were on your way to the other city, through Montana. Busker didn’t want to go so far. He worried if he did, then he wouldn’t be able to make his way back.

 

MICHAEL DUNNING / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Universal Images Group

MICHAEL DUNNING / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Universal Images Group

Busker and I still shared the beat-up Chevy. It’s a good, sturdy truck that served us through more than one glacial winter. The bed is rotted out now, but it’s still good for a haul or two of wood during the fall as long as we don’t take too much. We’re holding onto it because the cars in Sandusky Automotive are too expensive for my income. We probably could have afforded the newer model, navy blue, if Busker were able to keep a job.

Mac continues: People went missing, he says. Most made it out of the woods after a day or two, he says, and the ones who could tell the trees apart by the scars on their trunks came out soonest. Busker made it out just fine, but somehow he lost his pants along the way.

 

I take off my wedding ring and wash my hands for the third time, but the smell of dead fish and deli-meat still overpower citrus-scented soap.

It was never a particularly beautiful ring. Busker picked out something the color of coal instead of a diamond. When he gave it to me, he explained it was a special stone. Worth more than a diamond, but it never shined. That was fine though. I didn’t need it to shine. . I loved it because Busker gave it to me, and it was all he had to give.

I look toward Mac, who slurps back saliva and looks at the shadows dancing on the wall from the soft glow of the television. He likes to watch it on mute and read the subtitles. He thinks it will keep his mind sharp.

 

When Busker knocked on the door, Mac says, his mother and I thought it was bad news. No one ever comes around late at night with anything good to say. Unless they’re expected.

His nose was bright red, the color of a cooked lobster, Mac says. And he wasn’t wearing pants! His hands and legs were turning dark purple from the cold. We brought him in, put him next to the fire with a glass of whiskey, and asked what happened.

He told us the long line of brake-lights leading from Spokane out towards Missoula looked like hunting season — the way trucks parked along the road towing carts behind. People crawled in and out of the trees searching for the bit of star they swore they’d seen fall. Some people let their children tag along in snow gear like tiny Michelin-men.

But he didn’t tell us if he found what he was looking for. He shook his head, eyes wide like a doe, and sipped away until the whiskey put him to sleep. He didn’t seem right. That’s what his mother thought. But he hasn’t seemed right since, has he?

No, he hasn’t, I say, And the purple never left his hands.

 

The man who had come back that night was sadder than I’d ever seen him. He looked like a boy who had lost his favorite pet to a truck charging down the road. A little hollow, a little scared.

I strain the pasta in the sink. When the steam fogs my glasses, I see the outline of Mac in his chair, the kitchen, and the low glow of the yellow light for a minute before it clears. My eyebrows pull together out of frustration, and I work as fast as I can to spoon the pasta onto paper plates. My hands don’t want to cooperate, and I drop some noodles onto the floor. Mac fidgets his arms and pushes himself up in the chair.

Stay there, I say. I’ll bring it to you,

What a good girl you are. What Busker did to get one as good as you, I’ll never know.

I set up the tray next to Mac’s chair and place the steaming plate of pasta on it. I sit down across from him to eat. It needs salt. I go into the kitchen. Busker is sleeping in the next room, his snoring like the low rumble of an engine. Called in sick again. I grab the salt and bring it with me to the sofa. Mac starts talking again.

Anyway, he says settling back into his chair, Busker took off after the thing. He thought if he found it you wouldn’t have to work another day in your life. He wanted to get you that car you two had talked about down at Sandusky’s.

 

Busker had been gliding from one job to another since a month after the star fell, never getting fired, never finding anything that made him happy. He started as a mechanic in the town over working on BMWs. Now, he was working as a third-shift security guard at the hospital.

I make enough money at Rock’s to keep the apartment and take care of us, but I wonder how long I’ll be able to do it before bludgeoning some high-maintenance customer.  

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t have to take care of Mac, too. He isn’t too needy, but he is there everyday when I get home from work, rocking away and reading the television subtitles, holding his bladder to the point of bursting because he can’t make it to the toilet.

He gets his social security check and spends it on licorice, ice-cream sandwiches, and those spongy orange circus peanut candies that no one eats besides the old and the batty.

 

When Busker stepped out of the truck, Mac says, it was quiet except for the voices in the woods. Snow up to his knees. He went on like that for an hour and didn’t make it more than half-a-mile into the thick.

Mac pauses to eat. He gums the pasta for a while, his lips stretching out like a duck bill, uninhibited by teeth. The television is muted, so I have no choice but to listen to him. I check my watch. 8:43. Almost time for Mac to doze off in his chair after his pill. I know how the story ends, how Busker finds nothing but somehow loses his pants.

Mac swallows hard and coughs. Busker searched for four hours, he says. He was convinced he’d find it. But then the sun started to turn the sky pink, and Busker thought about turning around and giving up.

Silence except for Mac’s labored breathing as he spoons in the last bit of pasta.

But he kept going,. He kept searching until the sun’s glare on the snow blinded him. He finally headed back to the truck. Four hours out and four hours back. He walked the entire time with you on his mind.  And just before he got back to the road, Mac says, he found it.  

 

As far as I knew, Busker hadn’t even come close to the fallen chunk of moon-rock. He had come back that night, face contorted with sadness, and hadn’t smiled since. I set the spoon down onto my plate, thinking Mac may have dozed off and started dream-talking.

Yup, he says, He never told you.

I watch Mac rock to the beat of music I can’t hear. His eyes are closed, and his voice is barely louder than a whisper.

He found it?

Sure did.

He found it less than one-hundred feet away from the Chevy, he says. Hadn’t noticed it when he set out into the woods. Must’ve been too dark. The impact had hollowed out a hole in the snow so deep he thought it was a foxhole at first. Then he saw the steam coming from it. Bent down, thinking someone must’ve torched a fox. But then he saw it, glittering in the snow like a diamond. Then, when he picked it up, the
rock turned coal-black,. The rock came off purple on his hands, like chalk.

He came back to town and waited two days. He hid the star wrapped-up and stowed away in the dash of his car. He brought it to the jeweler’s in town. They said every Tom, Dick, and Harry had come into their store the past week with their versions of the space rock.

Busker handed it over and said if he couldn’t sell it, then he wanted to turn it into a ring for you. The jeweler took the rock and looked at it through his magnifying glass. Looked up at Busker and then got to work. Busker didn’t have to convince him he found the real one. I think the jeweler knew.

Mac nods his head to let me know he is falling asleep.

Well, why didn’t he tell me? I ask.

I don’t know, Mac says. For the same reason he never told us how he lost his pants, I suppose.

 

I collect the plate from Mac’s tray and set everything into the kitchen sink. I look at the wedding ring. I’d never thought it was anything special, just an odd colored stone on a silver band. It is always cold to the touch, no matter how long I wear it.

Mac snores in harmony with Busker in the next room.

Why hadn’t Busker told me he found it that night?

I walk to our bedroom, leaving Mac to the muted flashings of the television. The doors usually creak when pushed open, but it was so cold the wood had shrunk. It opens soundlessly.

Busker sleeps restlessly. He scrunches his nose and turns to the side.

I pull the door shut behind me, afraid I’ll wake him.

I sit by his side. The curtains are open, and the night sky is still.

Busker rolls over and stops snoring. He reaches his hand out and grabs for mine. He holds it in his and strokes his thumb over my dry skin, my fingernails, my thumb. He finds the ring and presses it.

I squeeze his hand.

I know, Busker. I know.  

 

Sam Simas is a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island’s Library and Information Science program. He has served as an Intern for GrubStreet, Barrow Street Press, and as a reader for The Ocean State Review. His fiction has appeared in The Corner Club Press, Steam Ticket, and others. Sam is currently the editor-in-chief at The Rocky Point Review. As a Journal featured writer, he welcomes correspondence, and can be reached at simassamuel@gmail.com.

 

Photo credit: Meteor. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from

http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1300413/1/132_1300413/cite

These Are Dark Times For Robots

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Cara Yacino

 

Victor Habbick Visions / Science Photo Library / universal Images Group

Victor Habbick Visions / Science Photo Library / universal Images Group

I was born into an iron world
assembled in the winter of ’93 and proudly
Made In America.
My wind-up heart has more horsepower than a Mustang
and it’s twice as reliable.

I’m not the only one.
At any given moment there are seven billion
glazed glass eyes and stretched iron smiles
on any given street–
manufactured sleepwalkers.

We pretend we’re flesh.
“Social justice” “Family values” “Empowerment”
prevent mass mechanical malfunction and
distract us from the rust.

We tell our iron children stories of the past
a distant time when human meant more
and upgrades meant less
as we bask in a monitor’s pale blue glow.

Hearts have fragile gears and many cogs
that whirr and spin and sometimes
jam.
We search for thrills
yet we fear the junkyard.

Yesterday,
I slipped on a patch of ice
that my ocular module missed.
Wires frayed and sparked under silicone skin
and there it was, a drop of red.

Sometimes I wonder who wired my circuits.
I was born into an iron world
without an iron care to give
and yet I bleed.

 

 

Photo credit: Humanoid robot, artwork. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from

http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1212265/1/132_1212265/cite

Port. Man. Teau.

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Nick Porcella

 

  1. PORT

WILKS'S AIRTIGHT PORTMANTEAU

WILKS’S AIRTIGHT PORTMANTEAU

The world’s been portmanteau’d
By phones with eyes and fruit;
Not to mention androids, who were
Supposed to take a different form.
And the corners of rooms now
Read to you, flamed and kindled.
Padded rooms and glaring dooms.
So many numbers replacing numbers
Bar codes bearing heavy loads—
Never ending, never bending,
Always trending, forever sending,
Generations generations generations.
The world’s been portmanteau’d
By silver screens and things called memes,
By applications, Abbrev.s, sugar and spice—
Technology’s nice.
The world’s been portmanteau’d
And no longer has a face.
 

  1. MAN

We’ve reached port, Man, too!
Screams the captain, O Captain, mine.
No names on a ship, only faces.
Ghoulish faces, grotesque faces—grotesque
Faces front and says to us
We have reached port, Men!
Calling to us, zombies of the boat.
Months-long journey done and
We have reached port.
O my Captain, I wish you knew our names!
There is a man with a name,
John Proctor’d and calling for John Proctor.
All you can say is that we have reached
Port, Man. We have reached Port, Man.
We have reached port having been together
For long months, wrought with scurvy
Fraternity and bleeding from orifices.
You rats! We’ve reached port! Leave, Man, too!
Go away! Why do you stare at me so?
“Because it is my name!”

 

  1. TEAU

Natalie Portman, too.
Why, she’s pretty and she knows things.
She has a face and she has a name,
She has a soul—
Named Natalie, Natalie Portman,
Natalie Portman does not deserve pronouns.
So from now on, she, er, Natalie Portman
Gets no pronouns!
Natalie Portman was walking one day
Down the block, it was Wednesday, when
Natalie Portman saw Natalie Portman’s reflection
In a cold mirror.
So Natalie Portman, looking at Natalie Portman,
Too, saw Natalie Portman’s image and
Smashed the window into a million small bits.
Natalie Portman worried that Natalie Portman
Was now cursed, forever cursed. Natalie Portman
Cried and cried and cried and cried and cried
For Natalie Portman.
Natalie Portman has a name! Natalie Portman
Has a name!
Natalie Portman is not a portman, nor a portwoman.
But Natalie Portman does have a name.
Natalie Portman does have a name.
And that is more than I can say for the rest of us.

 

Nick Porcella studies English at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and intends to teach high school. His passions include Herman Melville, rap music, photography, and writing. He is completing a memoir, Getting to Say Goodbye. See more of his work here.

Photo credit: WILKS’S AIRTIGHT PORTMANTEAU, OPEN, 1867. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from http://quest.eb.com/search/300_660054/1/300_660054/cite

Visions of Foster Excerpt

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Jeremy Levine

 

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       “I’m just saying,” Evan was saying, wielding the diner’s glass ketchup bottle, “if Dunkin’ sells doughnut holes, someone should be selling bagel holes. Little rolled-up balls of dough, stuffed with various kinds of spreads. Cream cheese, butter, jam.”

        “How is this about my story about Cheryl’s breakfast?” Clint asked.

        “It’s not. It’s about my bagel project.”

        “Fine. How would you get the fillings in there?”

        “How do they get the jelly in the Munchkins?”

        “How would I know?” He gestured for the ketchup bottle. Evan handed it to Clint, who began shaking it over his burger with little regard for how the high volume of condiment would soggify his sandwich. “But maybe there’s something different about bagels that makes it not possible.”

        “Or, I’m the only person who’s had this idea so far. Oh Jesus.” He dropped his grilled cheese sandwich back onto his plate and drained his film canister-sized water glass. “That was so hot.”

        “I’m pretty sure everyone’s had this idea before,” Clint said, watching Evan fish into the bottom of his glass for an ice cube.

        “Why haven’t you done it, then?” Evan popped the ice into his mouth.

        “I figure everyone else had tried and failed.”

        “This is why nobody votes.” Evan pointed an accusatory french fry across the table at him, ketchup dripping onto the table in prodigious splotches.

        “Is that why?” Clint asked, mopping up the wayward condiment.

        “It is.” Evan didn’t help Clint out with the ketchup absorption effort. “It’s called the collective action problem. I read about it.”

        “Where?”

        “I don’t know, wherever you read about this stuff.”

        “That’s not really what the collective action problem is.”

        “Regardless. When a bunch of people have the ability to do something, the incentive to actually do it yourself is incredibly small.”

        “I guess that’s true.”

        An intermission of munching followed. Evan had finished half of his sandwich (apart from the crusts, which he never ate) when he broke the silence with “You and Cheryl are pretty serious, huh?”

        Clint finished chewing. “We’ve only been together a few months.”

        “Yeah but you’re living like you’re pretty serious.”

        “Whaddaya mean?”

        “The story you told me about making her breakfast and meeting your editor.”

        “What about it? Girls sleep over at your house and you make them breakfast, are you serious with any of them?”

        “No, but the fact that you thought that swinging the ever-so-perilous run-out-of-the-house-and-cook-her-breakfast maneuver even qualified as a story that I would be interested in alerts me of something serious.”

        “But the two of us,” Clint made a little pointing gesture so that Evan knew that he was the one being referred to, “have been friends for so long, this is the kind of stuff we talk about. I’m out of really good stories.”

        “Well, we could be talking about more interesting things than a breakfast you made three weeks ago, but you shot down my bagel idea.”

        “Hey—”

        “Look, all I’m saying is that your readers better not get shafted by your new definition of a good story. Because they don’t want to read three hundred pages of you making breakfast.”

        “Well—“

        “And that, when you two do settle down and have your 2.5 kids, don’t forget about me and all the bullshit you put me through over the years.”

        The patty on Clint’s burger nearly slipped off the bun. “Have I made it seem like that that’s what’s going to happen?” he asked.

        “I don’t know. The breakfast thing seemed like a bad sign.”

        “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.” Clint raised his teeny diner glass. They clinked and Evan tossed his back so one or two ice chips unstuck themselves from the bottom and fell into his mouth. He crunched on them for a little while, then said “So, once you saved the world by preparing breakfast, how’d your meeting with your editor go?”

        “Fine. This book is weirder.”

        “How so?”         

        “Like, it’s kind of fucked up, structurally speaking.”

        “Why’d you write it like that?”

        “It just felt like it needed to be that way. The narrator’s life is totally collapsed—“

        “Spoilers.”

        “And so it didn’t feel psychologically right for the story to be told in a normal way. It needed to be more haphazard because, as she remembers it, that’s how she sees it. Trauma isn’t chronological, it just all hits you at once. Like if you were sentenced to twenty years in prison, the effect of that dread would happen to you all at once, as a unit. You wouldn’t think about the fifteenth year and then the sixteenth year.”

        “Ok.”

        “Did that make sense? I’m going to have to explain it a lot and I don’t want it to not make sense.”

        “No I think it makes sense. I mean, I haven’t read it, so I can’t really put it in context, but that didn’t sound too out in left field.”

        “Thanks.” Clint picked at his coleslaw and spent a minute or so ogling a particularly Kramer-esque gentleman across the diner. “Besides, I would never ask Cheryl that kind of question.”

        “About your writing?”

        Clint nodded.

        “Why not?”

        “She hasn’t really gotten over the fact that I’m a famous novelist.”

        “Hey, Mr. Modesty.”

        “I mean, it’s true. And sometimes, you know, it’s great. Like, I’m sure it helped me get that first date—”

        “Helped?”

        “Shut up. But I can’t run an idea by her because she still has too romantic a view of
the whole process. You’re jaded enough to give me a real opinion.”

        “Plus I’m not wooed by your incredible breakfast-making skills.”

        “That too.”

Jeremy Levine is a recent graduate of Clark University, where he now works. He likes to read, write, and write about weird novels. 

 

Mad Men and the Poetry of Television

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Sasha Kohan

 

The older I get, the more I see how watching TV can be like reading a poem. Only a few shows have struck me in this way – despite my deep affection for Gilmore Girls, Parks and Recreation, and other shows, their poetry is not as resonant as that of, say, Lost or Breaking Bad, or even The Office (for a little while). Of course, not every sitcom will be a “Road Not Taken,” and not every drama can be a “Howl,” but when each episode rings so truly to the humanity of its characters and is equally if not more potently beautiful when perceived as part of a larger story, the poem becomes more visible. When each rewatch further embeds into your subconscious how we are it and they are us, and with each revisit, these realizations slowly guide you towards something like an answer to a question you hadn’t yet asked, the poetry becomes clear. Maybe nothing strikes you at first, but maybe when it’s over the sheer richness of what you come away with overcomes any sense of an ending, the fullness of the story somehow leaving just enough blank space for you to look forward to one more careful reading.

Some shows are like this for me; now, I’m thinking of Mad Men.

  JON HAMM

  JON HAMM

“It’s the real thing!” The final statement of the series looms over its ninety-two episode arc in retrospect, casting the light of a question over everything we’ve seen before; what is The Real Thing? The dichotomy between real life and the life advertisements would have us believe is attainable has always been one of the leading forces of Mad Men; Sterling Cooper, as a glamorized beacon of the in-between state, where its troubled employees inspire manufactured ideas of happiness for the rest of us to consume, is a purgatory for Don Draper and the others, who come face to face with their ideals every workday (and sometimes weekends) and yet find themselves unable to produce such fulfillment in their own lives.

This fundamental failure to connect the dots between the flaws of reality – sexism, racism, rape, and cancer, to name a few – and the impossible dream of perfection pervades the life of every character. When modest co-heroine Peggy, whom we’ve seen climb from secretary to copy chief, deems Stan a “failure” for being content with his work instead of trying to find something better, we – particularly my generation, I believe – are uneasily reminded of ourselves, of the need to try harder, score higher, and make more, which unconsciously determines perhaps one too many so-called “life-changing decisions,” even when we are convinced we make such choices ourselves. Her realization that there’s more to life than her job reminds overachievers everywhere that sometimes good is good enough.

The impossible quest for perfection, however, is far from the pursuit of happiness – it’s being able to tell the difference that finally releases most characters from their self-imposed suffering. Betty, for instance, was quite the opposite of Peggy in this regard: whereas Peggy valued her work above any expectations of her gender, letting opportunities for marriage and motherhood fall behind the prospect of a career, Betty tried and failed for most of her life to believe that marriage and motherhood was enough. When an old friend forces her to question how satisfied she is with everything she once wanted –“I thought they were the reward”– she starts thinking more like Peggy (who, incidentally, starts thinking more like the unexpected workplace feminist Joan, who has always been capable of thinking for herself but is now free to think only for herself). The attraction to an ad man like Don is obvious, for Betty is nothing if not the ideal consumer, always living just the life ads said she should – she married a handsome man, mothered three kids (when the housekeeper went home, of course), wore the right clothes, smoked the right cigarettes, and maintained the image of charm and grace she thought every woman should.

But there’s a danger to “shoulds” – as Don learns in the final episode – and this is ultimately what the show teaches us; there is no right way. Even the folks at Sterling Cooper know it, they’re just doing their job by trying to sell it to us under the guise of what it is we really want – which the finale title, “Person to Person,” articulates in its most basic terms. In the significant mid-season-seven pitch to Burger Chef, Peggy recalls the remarkable feeling of knowing that, during the moon landing, while she and Don and the rest of the team were watching on TV in their hotel room, everyone else she knew and didn’t know was watching their TV too, sharing the experience and “doing the same thing at the same time.” She notes the “pleasure of that connection,” and that they were starved for it.

This rivals only one other pitch on Mad Men for its potent authenticity; as with Don’s nostalgic approach to selling “The Wheel” in season one’s finale, Peggy here taps into an undeniable truth and a basic human anxiety — to sit down to dinner, for example, away from television or music or anything that isn’t the people sitting right in front of you, then look them in the eye and share a meal and conversation – Peggy herself wonders, “Does this family exist anymore?” The question is still relevant, and the connection is one we still starve for. When the IBM supercomputer suddenly becomes part of the Sterling Cooper company in “The Monolith,” it is this connection that is threatened, and this threat which eventually drives some of its employees insane; when a father first sees his child do something that makes him mean the love he thinks he is supposed to have, as Don realizes with his young son Bobby, it is this connection being formed; and with every phone call made to daughters, lovers, and friends (brothers, clients, and nieces), it is this connection we are aching to imitate – but it’s not The Real Thing.  

Don Draper ought to know this more than anyone, but he’s the last to figure it out. His crucial struggle to relate to those around him has never been more clear than when, in a group exercise during his climactic retreat to California, he is instructed to simply express how he feels towards another human being. Looking around the room with utter blankness, his partner finally pushes him out of frustration which leaves Don only more bewildered. Taking cues from a number of similarly confused and isolated protagonists from major Italian directors of the 1960s – it’s no coincidence that Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961) is mentioned at one point as Don’s favorite foreign film – Don grapples with his inability to accept himself throughout the series, as his Dick Whitman past continues to haunt him in spite of his apparently tried-and-true “move forward” strategy. (Indeed, Don looks more and more like the man he might have been as his season seven road trip goes on, until he’s finally seen in a flannel and jeans, having shed everything external that made him Don Draper.) In the same vein as Red Desert’s Giuliana (Antonioni, 1964) and 8 ½’s Guido (Fellini, 1963), Don’s emotional moment of epiphany centers around his ability (or rather, inability) to love and receive love.

Although the finale makes this clearer than ever, Don’s fundamental sense of detachment is foreshadowed as early as the very first episode, in a remarkably revealing conversation with client-to-lover Rachel Menken. “Mr. Draper,” she says during one of their earliest exchanges, “I don’t know what it is you really believe in but I do know what it feels like to be out of place, to be disconnected, to see the whole world laid out in front of you the way other people live it. There’s something about you that tells me you know it too.” While Don manages to brush the moment away and their relationship (both business and personal) is short-lived, it is obvious why Rachel, of all the many, many women in his life, is the one who reappears to him during one of Mad Men’s signature surrealist moments in the final season’s opening scene. Rachel isn’t the only woman to have Don figured out over time, but
she is arguably the one who is both most and least like him. Her ability to empathize is striking to Don, but not something he can name or learn himself until much later, for although most of Don’s life has been spent “in another man’s shoes,” so to speak,
he has never put himself there for the sake of understanding someone else, only to hide further from himself.

“I don’t think I realized it until this moment,” Rachel tells him in the same conversation, “but it must be hard being a man, too.” Bringing gender into the exchange – another one of the most important facets of the show – Rachel also presages the arrival of Leonard, a stranger and crucial character seen only in the finale. Leonard is a foil to Don in many ways (invisible, whereas Don is used to turning heads) yet both face the same essential struggle – the one Rachel articulated ninety-one episodes before. Though much of the series rightly focuses on the realistic sexism and mistreatment of women at the time, Don and Leonard’s group therapy session proves how right Rachel was; for all the shortcomings of the privileged (and probably white) male, there are arguably few demographics who are more emotionally repressed. We see this in Don’s gradual decline, and Don sees it, and himself, in Leonard. No longer forcing the belief in his individualism or trying too hard to project or create the connection he craves (as he did with the enigmatic waitress Diana), Don genuinely relates to this stranger and finds himself uninhibited, for the first time, in his physicality; hugging Leonard in a moment of sincere empathy, Don finally sees The Real Thing.

Perhaps your twenties are supposed to feel this way, or perhaps it’s because my generation is among the most lonely and confused there has ever been, that I felt I understood Don Draper so much – for he, of all tragic and redeemed anti-heroes, is most certainly lonely and confused. These are some of the most significant feelings of Mad Men, explored kaleidoscopically through the nuances of each character as he or she struggles through separate and intertwined journeys. Through each of the show’s seven seasons, these perpetually shifting impressions of the cycle of isolation and reconnection take many forms, and existential notions of identity and purpose are subtly woven throughout the narrative more and more until the finale’s spiritual peak. Fans like me who initially took interest in the show for its notable 1960s setting will be satisfied to see evidence of the era’s counterculture (an infrequent but always welcome visitor for viewers as it enters, interrupts, and edifies the lives of Sterling Cooper’s staff) in full bloom at last as we get a final glimpse of our anti-hero in the company of his fellow human beings. “People just come and go, and no one says goodbye,” he laments in frustration near the end of his journey – an obscene hypocrisy, considering the vast number of people and places Don himself has left behind – but he knows this already, that “people can come and go as they please,” that they will and they do. With nothing left but the possibility of a new day and new ideas, the poem of Mad Men closes out its final stanza, and leaves us to turn off the TV and sign out of Netflix, to see ourselves and those around us – face to face, person to person.

Contributing editor Sasha Kohan is a student at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, pursuing a degree in English and Screen Studies.

Photo credit: MAD MEN (2007) – JON HAMM.. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 29 Jun 2015, from 
http://quest.eb.com/search/144_1471287/1/144_1471287/cite

Jimi

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Tim Farrell
 

HENDRIX PLAYS AT ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL, 1970

HENDRIX PLAYS AT ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL, 1970

And the rocket’s red glare–
his rifle of peace
captured the distortion of
bombs bursting in air.

Brow creased and jaw clenched,
arm locked around the stock,
he triggered the explosive notes
behind the Star Spangled Banner.

Woodstock, where
Jimi’s battle took place.
On stage he played
For the land of the free,
and the home of the brave.

 

 

 

Tim Farrell is a poet and an artist in various media. He currently is exploring the medium of glass at the Worcester Glass Studios in Worcester, Massachusetts.

 

Photo Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 17 Jun 2015, from http://quest.eb.com/search/158_2445670/1/158_2445670/cite

Drowning in Poetry

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

Drowning in Poetry

by A.J. Huffman

 

Superstock/universal images group

Superstock/universal images group

Pages crest like waves, crash
against my feet.
The tide is rising, swallowing my conscious
thoughts.
The words run
together, pack tight, soggy grains
in child’s pail
I hope to flip them over, build
a castle or fort
to crawl inside.  Instead the moat grows
fins, teeth.  I am
trapped inside my own creation,
searching
for remnants of letters that might fit
to frame a bridge.

 

 A.J. Huffman is a widely published poet. Her new collection, Another Blood Jet, is available from Eldritch Press.  She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and is the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. Her email is poetess222@live.com and her press site is at www.kindofahurricanepress.com. As a featured poet, she welcomes correspondence from other Journal writers.

Photo credit: Small Bridge and Beach. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 22 Jun 2015, from http://quest.eb.com/search/107_293793/1/107_293793/cite

Getting Familiar

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel, House of Leaves (2000), is an arrogant book. It asks readers to not only surrender their understanding of physical space, or even their understanding of the horror genre, but their understanding of narrative, narrators, and text (a word which here means both “the contents of the story” and “ink on a page”). There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the book, but one always has the impression that it’s happening for a reason. To read and finish House of Leaves is to trust Danielewski to be intentional about his experimentation. 

The likely reason people endure (and even enjoy) House of Leaves is that, despite its zany methods, it delivers a very clearly-cut story.

Danielewski’s fourth novel, The Familiar, is less easy to grasp. It will be released over the course of 27 volumes, the first of which came out this May. So far, it is about a little girl named Xanther, her parents, and a kitten she finds. Easy enough. But then there’s the Mexican gang, the drug addict in Singapore, the Armenian cab driver, the cartoon character from Venice who appears for only two pages, and two mad scientists in Texas whose roles in this sprawling work are exceptionally vague as of now. One might even argue that barely anything has happened so far.

A page from House of Leaves, which illustrate Danielewski’s visual writing style.

A page from House of Leaves, which illustrate Danielewski’s visual writing style.

Despite the unwieldiness that comes at the beginning of any 27-volume series, The Familiar is still interesting for a reader who is already familiar with Danielewski’s work. His style (excluding, for now, typographical experimentation) is at its strongest here: he marshalls independent voices for each of the ten narrative perspectives, each of which would be completely distinct from all the others even without their distinct formattings. Still more impressively, each of those voices perfectly reflects each of the characters’ psychologies, which are also exceptionally thick for the beginning of such a long series. All of this:, the syntax, the characters, and the book’s governing psychology, come together to create some frightening themes which creep into focus by the volume’s end.

Still, the first part of The Familiar is fighting an uphill battle in terms of getting its readers to commit to these various storylines. Some of them are readable and hilarious (Shnork) and some of them are well-developed and so psychologically poignant that we stop caring about some of their more annoying tics (Xanther and her family), but others are very hard to follow because of their broken English (Jingjing), and still others are just not very interesting as of yet (Luther). The temptation to skip passages is hard to resist, and the only thing that kept me from doing so was my trust that Danielewski was doing something important with these sections, and that skipping them would bite me in the ass come volume fourteen.

A page from The Familiar, which also reflects danielewski's signature style.

A page from The Familiar, which also reflects danielewski’s signature style.

Danielewski’s trademark is his typographical experimentation, which more or less succeeds here. Some of the tomfoolery is understandable: each narrator has a different typeface as well as a designated color in the corner of the page. Some of the techniques from his earlier work, like placing just a few words on a page in order to encourage faster page turning, thereby increasing the sense of urgency, feel completely at home here. The purpose of some of the other components of the experimentation are still incomprehensible, though, such as the entire first forty-three pages, some of which is  very pretentious prose about death and war and such. Some narrators only use very small parts of the page for their writing, and the few full-color two-page spreads which seem to lack any context are also indecipherable as of yet. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that may become tiring.

The first volume of the familiar, subtitled “one rainy day in may,” was released this may. volume two, “into the forest,” is due out october 24, 2015.

A reader’s willingness to A) take this book out of the library; B) finish it (which, despite its size, won’t take too long, because of the formatting); and C) wait eagerly for Volume 2, says much more about the reader than it does about the book itself. It’s a question of trust–whether you expect that Danielewski will successfully pull all that is unclear into focus and whether you think that all of his whackiness does have purpose. The Familiar promises to be an incredible novel, but only a reader who believes in Danielewski (and, to a certain degree, believes in experimental literature’s ability to deliver effective stories by virtue of their jazzing around, rather than in spite of it) will ever think so. 

If this is a field that is completely unfamiliar to you, read some other experimental literature first, then read House of Leaves, then The Familiar. This recommendation carries with it the frustrating (and unoriginal) undertone that some people are not smart or experienced enough to read certain books. This is not necessarily the case. In all cases, trust is something which must be earned. You would not lend your car to a complete stranger. You would, however, lend your car to someone you have known for several years. Don’t let Mark Danielewski drive your car until you know he’s a good driver–he’s planning on borrowing it for quite some time.

Jeremy Levine is a recent graduate of Clark University, where he now works. He enjoys folk music and burritos.