Category Archives: Prose

Benjamin Hollander

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Louise Victor, "White Lies"

Louise Victor, “White Lies”

Woman in Kimono

 

Except for unearthing the memory, nothing about the story they heard at dinner resembled De Kooning’s Excavation. After dessert, Louise, whose densely subterranean brushwork of figures and faces could be seen in a piece she called White Lies and which was hanging on loan in Eve and Benny B.’s apartment, turned to Eve and said: “you must see this painting at the Art Institute.” Since she could not be trusted with them, Eve told Benny B. to remember the painter and the painting. Two weeks later, walking through the Modern American Art Room in Chicago, she turned to Benny B. and asked: “what was the name of that painter and his painting?” Benny B. forgot but had a big thought instead, which he articulated like this to the security guard: “Excuse me, we were told there’s a painting here we must remember to see — can you help us?”

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Toshiro had come from Japan to study portrait painting in Paris in 1971, when Eve met him through her friend Eiko — at least this is how everyone at dinner heard Eve tell it. At the same time, Benny B. learned later, Willem De Kooning had returned from Japan under the influence of Sumi brush painting and calligraphy — which surfaced in his inks on stone and in a sequence of lithographs the genesis of which took place in Hollander’s Workshops in New York: washed ink prints named Love to Wakako and Japanese Village. This was, Benny B. thought, no coincidence, more like frames from parallel film strips unrolling backwards through time, momentarily frozen in order to have the chance of meeting.

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The way Eve told it, she was only twenty when he had come up to her at the entrance to the Hotel Henri IV and politely asked to paint her in a kimono. She nodded, both of them trying to not look shy and helpless sans the other’s language. Months later, after the painting was finished and she left Paris to return to New York, Eve started receiving what she thought were love letters from him, which she imagined, so she remembered, in a childlike miniature calligraphic French. She never answered them, though the thought occurred to her more than once over the years, and now at dinner she articulated it: “I’ve always wondered if I could be hanging in some museum in Paris?”

As they walked outside, Benny B. turned to his friend, Nick, a photographer and film editor: “Listen, Eve’s 60th is in a month and I’m stumped on what to get her.”

“Easy,” Nick said in a moment of inspiration, “give her the picture.”

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“A wild gesture,” Benny B. thought on the ride home with Nick, but which painting: the one he did not know the name of or the picture in her memory which had been lingering there somewhere over time? They seemed almost the same, with Time the subject of both. Two lost works — fallen into a universal Art wormhole. If the second one, then how to find it, how to realize the gesture, how to uncover a 40 year old painting that could be hanging anywhere from an hotel lobby on the Place Dauphine to a show of Contemporary Japanese artists in Paris, at least this is how Eve felt it could be, when she remembered it.

If only she had been Japanese, Benny B. thought years later, he could have easily imagined finding her image under the name, Love to Wakako, which was, as both paintings were, invisible to him.

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Benny B.’s first thought was: how could the French make this easy for him? He wondered: if it was possible over 40 years for the enlightened among them to undress “the stranger” among them by making it a crime to wear the Islamic veil in public, as they had done not so ironically during the so-called Arab Spring, why couldn’t they take a moment in the next month for the government to prohibit the public exhibition of white women in kimonos only to more clearly reveal their unwanted presence milling around in the spaces of the Liberal State?

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No such luck. So Benny B. went online, the de rigueur of the day, July, 2011, a month from her birthday, and started sleuthing.

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On the virtual highway, people, unlike objects in the rear view mirror, seem closer than they are. This is what Benny B. had no clue of when he immediately found Toshiro online, just as he had anticipated. Of course, he had to read the small print in his bio to see how far he had come from the young man he had heard of at dinner. His career, it turned out, had a taken a graceful yet forceful turn. He had made a name for himself as a dan in the Aikido racket: a foreign art student transformed into a Master Aikido instructor who once took on a cameo in James Bond’s Moonraker before going on to train a random host of Canadian militias in hand to hand combat. Instead of unveiling a romantic saga of auctioned canvasses and signature brushes from a suicided Japanese Bohemian in Paris who had fallen on a ceremonial sword and then lingered for 24 hours, Benny B. had to settle for you-tube videos in which the man he was looking for was flipping people half his age with sticks.

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Benny B. latched onto the first email address he could find online, an Aikido club in France:

To Whom It May Concern,

I hope you understand a bit of English. I am trying to contact a man you would know of as Toshiro. I am the husband of an American woman, Eve, whom he knew many years ago in France, where he was an art student. In 1971, he painted a picture of her. I was wondering where the painting is located today, since I would like to surprise her for her 60th birthday with, if not the canvas itself, then at least a photograph or slide of the painting. I can’t describe it in detail, since I’ve never seen it, but he could have named it, “Caucasian Woman in Kimono.” There can’t be too many of them around.

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That evening, he sent the email. The next morning it bounced back.

He thought of writing another, more local and forceful:

To Whom it Must Concern,

I imagine you understand more than a bit of English. I am trying to contact a man you know as Toshiro. I am the husband of a young American woman whom he knew in Paris and drew in a kimono when he was a student studying portrait painting before he became a Master Aikido instructor and appeared in James Bond’s Moonraker. People like this just don’t disappear. If it were me, I would have called the painting, Love to Wakako.

It bounced back again.

When he was about to surrender, Benny B. enlisted the Sisters of Eve in his search.

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“Artists like this don’t discard their paintings,” the Sisters wrote Benny B. “We found a club in France whose President is Mr. Tong. Write Mr Tong.”

He did —

At the same moment, Benny B.’s brother Solo wrote: “Little American brother, if you could read a bit of French, it would help,” as he attached an image of Toshiro and some information in the other language he had found online. “If this is your guy, he’s in Quebec, in a studio. Try their email and phone number.”

He did —

The woman who answered was bilingual. So Benny B. thought, “I’ll try English.”

“Hi, do you receive the studio emails for Master Toshiro?” Benny B. asked. “I’ve sent him several.”

“No, that would be Nicholas, his assistant, but he’s not in.”

“Is there a way I can reach Nicholas?”

“Yes,” she said with a trace of a French accent, “I give you his number.”

In the meantime, Benny B. covered his bases, imagined what could happen, and wrote the Sisters again. They started worrying about him, since they couldn’t tell if his email typos and omissions and repetitions were appearing naturally out of his birthday gift obsession or if he was letting the occasional alien tone of the people he was dealing with get inside of his voice:

Sisters:

I may need some help tracking down Japanese guy. I give you his name and you can find him on the internet. His name: Toshiro. You can find him on the internet. What I know is he’s Master Aikido instructor who was in a james bond film and studied art in paris in 1971, when Eve was there. (I have his last name, but I don’t know how much of this I should keep in confidence, and whether — should I be scared for my life. Should I not be confident? As I remember it now, I am married to Eve and she never answered his love letters, so what if he gets curious and asks for our address when I ask for the painting and he says, “yes, I will send it, but where do you want me to send it?” Am I getting ahead of myself?)

Warnings appeared like pop-ups in his head, as he wrote the Sisters:

The man has trained Canadian militias.
The man has worn an iron mask while thrusting at James Bond with otherworldly cries.
The man’s panting black shepherds have chased beautiful women in transparent pink dresses through the Amazon rain forest. The killing always occurs off-screen.
His love letters unrequited, the man has every reason for revenge.
The man has an assistant.
The man flips people with sticks for a living.

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After hearing Nicholas’ phone go unanswered, but before writing him, Benny B. imagined he could be more forceful, maybe about the nature of art itself, to make the point about the importance of recovering this painting as a gift, like a memory print. “De Kooning once said,” Benny B. was prepared to drop the quote, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” Or, to press De Kooning’s point even more forcefully for this Québécois, “its raison d’être.”

Dear Nicholas,

I’m after the Japanese Aikido Moonraker guy in Paris who got my wife into a kimono in order to paint her, so he said. I have no French, as she had no Japanese, as he had no English at the time he wrote her love letters she never answered, it was 1971, so I am wondering if you have a bit English and if you have it can you make a French translation for Toshiro do me justice for this birthday gift for her. Do you believe in justice? Do you believe in making justice visible? Do you know that Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented?

He trashed it before it had a chance to bounce back.

He tried again the next morning:

Dear Nicholas,

I was told you could get in touch with Toshiro, who was an Art Student in 1971 in Paris and who painted a picture of a young American woman, Eve, who is now my wife. I have been trying for weeks to contact Toshiro to see if he still has the painting, because I would like to give it or a semblance of it to her for a 60th birthday present. Can you help make it visible?

The reply was instant:

Hello again,

I can help you. You can reach him at this email_______. If this does not work, I can reach him by other means.

It was one of the emails which had bounced back weeks ago, so Benny asked for other means, and surprisingly, this Man from Quebec came through in the American way, what Benny B. had always been perplexed by and called out as “American exclamatory friendly,” evident when grownups like their teenage children could not help but see this that or the other as “sooo cute” or “soooo amazing,” or when a young woman dropped a cell phone right underneath her seat on the train and a bystander picked it up and the woman, not missing a beat, said: “Thank you sooo much,” or when a waitress who in any other country would just be doing her job brought a diner a napkin and heard in return “Thank you sooooo much!” and so Nicholas began:

Hi there again!

How are you? I am good!
Toshiro is out for now, but he will be back next Monday. I will talk to him then. This is a very nice story. I hope he still has a painting!

The Sisters could not resist:

“Oh, we’re loving Nicholas. Toshiro must still have the painting — artists do not discard their paintings — they put them in storage. It must be around somewhere.”

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And so everyone waited. Weeks passed — Toshiro was still out of town. Benny B. sent reminders. Nicholas wrote back: “I spoke to Toshiro’s wife, who said he is still out of town, but she will tell him what you are looking for. Yes, this is a very nice story.” And Benny B. wondered: why does his wife have to find out? The warnings in his head re-appeared. He waited.

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To remind him of what was at stake, one day, back at the Art Institute in Chicago, he overheard Eve and her friend Sasha, who had roomed with her in the Hotel Henri IV in 1971, talking in one of the museum rooms about the past: “Do you remember,” Eve said, as they approached a De Kooning, “Eiko’s friend Toshiro and that painting he drew of me in a kimono? I wonder whatever happened to it.”

Sasha, who Benny B. had earlier clued in on the birthday search, looked back at him with a quizzical smile, not knowing how to answer Eve as they approached the painting. “Is this it?”

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“Is Toshiro back yet?” Benny B. asked Nicholas towards the end of their correspondence.

“I believe he is. I will speak to him tomorrow, and I hope for a good outcome!”

The news was not “a good outcome.”

“Unfortunately,” Nicholas wrote, “Toshiro does not have the painting anymore. He remembers it quite well and sends his regard to Eve. I am really sorry of this outcome. I would have like to be part in this really good birthday present!”

Benny B. did not want to let go of this really good birthday present, but the guy did not have the painting — he tossed it, he burned it, he sold it, it didn’t matter. Pressing the point by repeating things he knew he had mentioned in prior emails, but hoping for a different outcome, he wrote back, sounding like a child trying out magical thinking:

Hello Nicholas,

This is too bad. I was wondering: did he ever take a photograph or slide of the painting? Perhaps he still has a photograph or slide of the painting? Or does he know what happened to the painting? If he lost it, or does not know where it is, then let me know, please.

Benny B. wanted to be sure his questions were covering all bases, and that the possibility of a birthday painting could be found out of an answer to one of them. He got his wish:

Hello again,

I also asked him if he has any photos and he does not have one. He did take note of the request and should the painting come up he will let me know and I will send you the information via email.

Benny B. latched onto the discrepancy between the two emails. How could a painting which at first “he did not have” suddenly “come up” in the future? And the fact that “he did take note of the request,” meant that the request could be met, otherwise why take note. For sure, all this meant was that the painting had not been burned. Or it could still be buried in storage. Or it could have been sold for gold to some enemy combatant of Toshiro who had discovered it and promised for the right price not to tell Toshiro’s wife, which would have been a moot point at this moment, at least since Nicholas had told her, which meant it could be returned without risk, at some point if, that is, if it was not hanging somewhere, just like Eve had imagined when she remembered the story.

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Benny B. was depressed by the veiled possibilities. A month’s search, he thought, and he was back to where he started, or rather, to where Eve started, with the difference that now everyone knew the search had gone nowhere in public — the unrealized present of a painting which was only, in the end, a wild gesture. He called his friend, Billy, a poet, and told him the story:

“I’ll tell you,” Billy said, “that’s inspiring to hear.”

“No way,” Benny B. exclaimed.

“Think of it,” Billy reflected, “Nicholas never ruled out the possibility that the painting could still be hanging somewhere.”

“Well,” Benny B. replied without confidence, “that was only after my persistence put him in an untenable position. I have no idea if what Nicholas said is what Toshiro actually meant, or if Toshiro blew him off sensing a stalker in the Americas, or if it was a bad translation, or if it was just Nicholas sensing my desperation, wanting to be friendly and accommodating, and adding on whatever hope he thought I could latch onto. After all, he wanted to be a part of this birthday present from the start, right, so maybe It’s his way of wishing it still may arrive. Anyway — it doesn’t matter — I’m coming to her 60th empty handed. I’m stumped. What do I give her now?”

“Give her the story,” Billy said, “tell her what happened. Write it down. She’d love to hear it.”

“You must be joking,” Benny B. blurted. “Not only is there is no point in that, but there’s no justice in it, since half the story is speculation, invisible, maybe even untrue. I’ve got nothing to give her, just a month’s worth of detective work to surprise her with, innocent enough, to be sure, the way some lies can be, but no gift of a painting to show for it.”

“A Surprise of White Lies…”

“Kind of…”

“Don’t worry, she’ll never see through them,” Billy spoke with confidence, “and she’d love to hear what happened.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I think,” he insisted. “This is the reason storytelling was invented.”

—for Rosemary

Benjamin Hollander (1952-2016) was born in Haifa, Israel and as a boy immigrated to New York City. He taught English, writing, and critical thinking in the San Francisco Bay Area. His books include: In the House Un-American (Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing, 2013); Memoir American (Punctum Books, 2013); Vigilance (Beyond Baroque Books, 2005); Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli (Parrhesia Press, 2004); The Book Of Who Are Was (Sun & Moon Press, 1997); How to Read, too (Leech Books, 1992); and, as editor, Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France (ACTS, 1988). With David Levi Strauss, he co-edited the last several issues of Acts (including A Book of Correspondences for Jack Spicer), the literary magazine associated with New College of California and its Poetics Program of the 1980s. A tribute to his life and work by Joshua Schuster and Steve Dickison can be found in Jacket 2. An excerpt from In The House Un-American can be found in The Brooklyn Rail.

Louise Victor has worked in painting, printmaking, photography, installation, encaustic, and sculpture for over 35 years. She received her BFA from Northern Illinois University and pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota. Her work can be found in many public and private collections, and has been shown across the United States. Also a pilot, Louise was one of the first women to fly for a major commercial airline and the second woman in the world to become a Captain on the Boeing 767.

Laton Carter

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Two Prose Poems

All the sailors are pigeon-toed. Their black shoes are the same size, and they climb the mast to save the ballerina who does not need saving. Hers is a dance of sails, and the salt air lifts her higher into the tradewinds.

Below, the cook is in love with the galley mate. He wants to dance too, and his ladle becomes the young man he dreams of before falling to sleep in his windowless quarters.

The chief’s mate is excellent at trumpeting warnings through a whistle. Everything deserves a warning, so the whistle blows often, and the crew scramble to their proper place, tripping over their toes and throwing glances. If the ballerina is proper in appearance, she is the least in person. Ignoring the straight lines of the boat and the physics of its ways, her passage serves to uncontain what, in the space of the vessel, is contained.

A heart does not contain love. But heaven is in the sky, and the ladle scoops away the clouds. Now the day is calm, and the chief’s mate takes to his afternoon biscuit. The cook has made them with bits of dried apricot, and he watches the crew, galley mate included, line up to try their first bite. He will never have him, the sailors will never have the ballerina, and the contained heart finds its way to break.

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Maybe she looks like Lyndon Johnson, but the hair doesn’t correspond. Her gaze on him is not really on, but through him — she’s thinking of something else. Still, the arm lays across both his shoulders, and the hand makes a claw of its work-blackened fingers around his arm. His breasts are larger than hers, and were it not for his suspenders, their nipples, through her polyester and through his cotton, might meet. This is their proximity, the half-embrace.

How long can two people live with each other? They swallow the would-be response, grin to an absentee audience, and forgive. Their roles have been pressed out as if into the fine veins of a map. This path takes you here. This one goes off course. One of us will die first.

The theater is of faces, the one again trying to read the other. The mind wanders. The secret life of daydreams rushes in.

 

Laton Carter has had work published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, The Fourth River, Narrative Magazine, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, and Ploughshares.

Eric G. Wilson

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Bowl

W.’s wife stole his bowl. She hated the way he chewed his food, so thoroughly it turned liquid. He fled the small wooden house into the middle of a road.

W. saw that no car was going to kill him. The drivers were too skilled. They swerved away from him or stopped before they reached him.

W. took to the forest.

He wandered without food or water for many days, imagining this would be an easier way to go.
He still was not dead when he looked at his hands. An eyeball was embedded in each palm. He found he could see out of these eyes. With them, he studied his face.

He was no longer a man that he knew.

He was something quite different.

Was this how death was?

Maybe the hunger and thirst had worked. He closed his palms and willed his attention to the eyes in his head. If this was the land of the dead, he wanted to look through his old eyes. He noticed nothing different. There were trees, and on the ground, brown leaves. Stones large and small were about.

W. saw a stone the size of a head and remembered, I have a young daughter, and then he thought, I’ve got to go back.

She had lost her bowl.

W. had walked so long, he was lost. He looked at the sky. The sky was gray.

He lowered his head, and there was a small wooden house.

W. fled from the house into a road. He stood in the middle. Cars sped toward him. None touched him.
He rushed into the forest near the road. He walked. Hunger weakened him, and thirst.

W. tripped over a head-sized stone. With his hands, he broke his fall.

There was pain in his hands. His palms were gashed.

W. studied the cuts. Inside each, he glimpsed white. He recalled bones and eyeballs. He imagined seeing his head from his hands.

The head he saw was not the one he remembered.

Pain was in his hands.

He imagined seeing his hands from his head. The gashes were red.

The head W. had felt bigger than the stone he stumbled over.

He had a young daughter, a child, and she had nothing to eat.

He would save her.

How to reach her?

A house appeared, small and wooden.

Through a window W. saw a woman. She was holding a spoon before the face of a girl.

W. rushed onto the porch. He grabbed the door knob. The metal scalded his hand. He jerked it away. He stared at the palm. The shape of a spoon’s oval bowl reddened its center. There was pain there.

W. touched the shape to his lips.

Pain. Tongue, teeth, throat.

W. imagined living inside of the pain, seeing the world from there.

He saw three people before an oven, a man to the left, and a woman to the right, and in the middle, a small girl, who was holding the hand of the man and the hand of the woman. The girl was looking up at the woman. The woman was plump. The man was gaunt.

W. was seeing from the pain. He was starving. He was falling down. A small hand was holding the hand not burned. The hand slipped away and he fell.

From the leafy ground, he saw near his head the head of a woman. Where the woman’s eyes once were, was blood.

W. could drink the blood. He had no bowl.

He struggled to raise himself and flee to this vessel.

Eric G. Wilson has published three books of creative nonfiction, all with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: Keep it Fake, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, and Against Happiness. He has also published a memoir, The Mercy of Eternity (Northwestern University Press). He has recently published fiction in The Collagist, Café Irreal, and Eclectica. His essays have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, The Oxford American, The Chronicle Review, and Salon. He teaches at Wake Forest University.

Marvin Shackelford

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Your Lifeboat, Your Friend

You plainly see the lifeboat, and you’re damp, but the ocean remains out of sight. You’re neither woman nor child, but your friend, beside you on the disappearing deck, was an only child, a mistake with which his parents could not part. All in this world, he likes to say, bows to the random rope and chain of blood. He’s unconcerned, but you believe the line cannot end here. There’s meaning in the knots that link him all together.

In the water, black and foggy, rolls a joke a hundred years old. One produced again and again on film, struck into books and whispered through genealogies, but not a part of life in this age. You see the point of your murderer in the distance. You expected, at worst, pirates, their machine guns and pillage. Even that was far off this course. You were afraid to fly and quickly have learned to feel silly, God bless you. You’d imagined a Puritan’s vacation, a reversed exploration.

“Filling fast,” your friend says. “Everything. And these were assigned. We’ll be swimming, soon.”

“You should get in.”

“What about another one? Later?”

You have no answer. But only so much is about you, about your lifeboat, your friend. You force him into escape, shove him into the mix. His balding head peaks up from a gaggle of women. He’s surprised when they lower, patient and steady, into the water. He goes on without you. Your last glimpse of him is a future long delayed, fruit of the line secured. You know you’ve done the right thing.

Later, a small man in a sailor’s cap says it’s surprising how dressing the part has made him feel. He asks if you’re holding up well. He offers you a cigarette. Overhead a flare rises, and you think of your friend shepherding, shepherded by, his new little seaborne flock to safety. Where they land is the last surprise. You imagine something vastly more Pacific, leis and luaus and a woman on each arm. The finest wish you have for him is, finally, tropical.

There’s little of the ship left above water. You feel the tilt and slide. Your lifeboat, the dressed sailor informs you, is being prepared as you speak, at last, and for the first time you doubt his authority. You ratchet up some faith. Around you men begin songs of children gone, children yet born. They speak with their fists of climbing higher. Across the water you see the circling specks of other lifeboats, the fortunate and timely. You think of all preserved there, and you prepare to dive.

Marvin Shackelford is the author of a poetry collection, Endless Building (Urban Farmhouse Press). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Epiphany, NANO Fiction, Southern Humanities Review, FiveChapters, Folio, and elsewhere. He resides in the Texas Panhandle with his wife, Shea, and earns a living in agriculture.

Randee Silv

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Zero

There are not enough incidents of stopping. Knocking door after door is obscene. Restraint starts at the bottom and rises up if not ignored. I guess you could say it’s like living two contrasting levels of engagement, never parallel and always switching. Gaps forever prevalent. Wording trimmed too soon can be deleted more easily than redoing circuits of cascading autumn clouds. Pigeons coo. Owls hoot. She saw herself as a doorknob and retreated into her quietude to a location of being imperfect. Interruptions unwanted. Misunderstandings weren’t able to halt elongated lines from reaching the landfill. The electricity will return when the throbbing ends. Her hair is already white. Occurrences. Excerpts reduced and others prized. If she goes down the stairs, she has to come up. To see what has not yet happened could happen again. The ecstatic moment comes after the fact.

Efficiency

Never enough to reuse. Never enough dry blue tips or burnt ambers or peeled bark. Never enough words echoing on wet rocks reciting tales. Fallen groves divide what’s at stake. Vacancy creeps in and out whether you ask for it or not. What can’t be saved is crumbled. What can is re-straightened. He said he had previous aims for that night. He was not confused as they claimed. They too were decomposing. Long legs navigate no hurdles. Short legs do the same. Joining(s) and returning(s). He said what startled her had approached from the shooting range and that shipping costs will be five hundred. If you catch it, it is yours. Less motion can stifle if winter is late. Rusty metal was indeed misread. He crouches and does it again. She crouches to collect what someone else hadn’t. Neither budge. I have to get up from where I’m sitting.

Blending

A chill. A marbled alcove. A slight rotating exchange floats and evaporates as they enter before exiting. Thin folds pinned behind glass. A lull settles into an unevenness of crisp grays, draped and veiled with inverted orchestration. Breaks in notations never hurried. Inward attentions inexhaustible. I do not argue. Someone is sinking but I don’t see them. Left edge. In. Right. Out. I re-walk with brief winding nonchalantly. Lengthiness concise with recorded widths. A hand lifts. A hand falls. Counting segments useless. A long cloth is tearing inside 1000 boxes. His. Mine. Pile up. Flash, mirror. Topple. Falter. Unceremonious blue streaks cross. I reach the end not finished. I re-walk between second growth and open meadow. Eight dead birds rotting in sand surrounded by sticks to bury deeper. You can’t erase turning too soon by walking in front. Lost once. Twice. A blinding glare bellowed before reclining. Outpourings, silhouettes, loop.

Abstract painter Randee Silv writes likes she paints. Her wordslabs have appeared in Urban Graffiti, Revolt, Maudlin House and Swineherder. She’s editor of Arteidolia, a platform to re-approach and re-consider: visual, sound, word.

Anthony Schneider

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She Was Not

She was not to stare, not even at helicopters or albinos. She was not to yawn in public or cough loudly or chew a chicken bone or break a pencil with her teeth.

She saw a car on fire at the side of the road. She could tell it had not been burning long. There was no smell. A few people watched the blaze. She rode away on her bicycle, and the explosion that she expected did not come.

She was not to smile with any teeth showing. She was not to drop anything, she was not to turn on a light switch without holding her breath to the count of three. She was not to turn off a light switch without first untying a shoe, then immediately afterwards stepping through a doorway and retying the same shoe, or if she was wearing a slip-on, taking the shoe off and then putting it back on. She was not to wear miniskirts or plunging necklines or flip-flops. She was not to show her toes.

She was not to use the word nice. Or hate. She was not to eat rice and broccoli, not even rice pudding, in the same seating.

She was not to cry in public, or remember things that might make her cry, not in the company of others. She was not to talk about the mess we’re in or how bad things had gotten, or divulge when last she spoke to her father. She wondered what she had to learn from whales, trees, small children. She wondered what she wanted. And whether she would recognize change.

She was not to be the loudest, or the last to leave, or the first to speak. She was not to point, she was not to linger, she was not to eat with her mouth open, or burp or fart audibly or sneeze more than twice in a row. She was not to drive over railroad tracks without both feet raised, even when she was driving. She was not to be visibly sweaty, she was not to be dirty or have newspaper ink on her fingers.

She kissed a boy. He bit her tongue. She made an excuse the next time he asked her out.

She spoke to her father on the phone. But when he came to town she said she hadn’t been feeling well and suggested she visit him instead, the next month maybe, or the month after that.

She was not to ask too many questions. She was not to look at anyone askance, especially not men. She was not to braid her hair. Or sing in the shower. There were no roads leading home. There would be no Armageddon.

She was to talk to him, to be civil. She was to comport herself if she saw him. She was not to set fire to anything, no matter how small. She was not to let herself wonder, even for an instant, if she might be better off if she had stabbed him with a steak knife, rather than let those things happen. She was not to bite her fingernails until they bled.

Anthony Schneider has been published in McSweeney’s, BoldType, Driftwood Press, Details, The Believer and other magazines as well as several fiction anthologies. His novel, Repercussions, is published by Penguin South Africa and Permanent Press in the US. He divides his time between New York and London.

Thomas Cook and Tyler Flynn Dorholt

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from Decade Mode

The forms of advance are widening and it is lunch, the crux of any medium, at least for the time being, which is the middle of the day.

I stave off hunger by existing right here in the logs. Night brings other cruxes. Night cancels the past. Night brings the land to the reaching meadow and lies down in the flowers until meeting expectations.

Where is the stem? When it happens, and occasionally when it does not, I fill a salt dish with octopus meat and wait for all the mothers to peter out. This is how to create a little more ocean for those of us who cannot touch it freely within an hour, or at least I feel this feeling, and even to touch would not mean the salt is the right proportion.

They are so busy heaving, I don’t know what to make of them.

One of them over the sofa, the other in the traces of my old Honda. They are in cars and moving objects with feet. Without any sense of time, I watch them until the steam cooks my arm to the leather. A 90-second pouch of brown rice. I bought a set of cards made nearby by a family who has been making cards for hundreds of years, I think, or else another family owns the company now, or it is always a family that owns everything, really. I taught myself three solo games, gave up, and hope to introduce my closer friend to the long game that involves more thinking than most.

So many words are missing. They blip on catching up. Too long without a custard cup, I gripped my earlobe and listened for the train. I stripped my beer globe and glistened in the rain. I ran to the jacket and found a man panning my pockets for stamps. Please forgive my breath. I came up for air and made the conscious sentence my own.

Two of us, that’s all.

All the world is a bitten clover in the mouth of a good creature, fuel for the rudimentary belly. Dust of rings and static electricity continue to make the gas station an interesting place for self-reflection and nearer to oil than we can be at rest. I can think about closing my eyes on the topic of all the sweet fine crude while dreaming of what is stored in the thick hollow earth.

    *

No matter what, what is always the thing mattering, and this is not news nor is news not us. We print and fax, click and send, the mediums changing and not changing, the signatures blurring, each generation diminishing, on the whole, with respect to the last. Double negatives and agendas fixed by small outrages not originally in the speak. One could float the speaks in a dish of cold plums and numb your dangling ninny, of course, if it got to one.

May I give you more information regarding our performance-based pop culture generation?

First, I complete the majority of my incongruences and emotional derailments by recommending you listen to the mix I made, a culmination of many songs introduced to me by a man on the radio, none of which I’ve listened very hard to, but all of which are supposed to be both generational and risky and returning to some fumbled nostalgia of mine that I dare not repeat if I want to be accepted to friendship groups founded on art school politics.

I use tempera paint.

Secondly, a phone call might suffice but I can tell you now that we will be sending you updates and comments on a daily basis regarding how you look between genres and what fashion grows around but never within you. I keep leaving feelings in the clime, asking for an ice, and all the while my teeth are in need of a scrub. I remember when you chose khakis and a pink shirt. I remember passionfruit.

Now, what about the contemporary city sounds you drive around when you try and publish a sonnet? They are crispy noodles.

We steam because it forces the other minutes to recall how when we don’t we are just simple flotillas. These were just shelters on the long path. Now they are stopping points for the historical conundrum which blooms from the restless orchard ahead.

 *

I am made to mention myself by avoiding what I have become, like a light shadow on a dark shadow on the screen of a tube television stacked on a ping pong table. I cannot have blinking in the top bar.

One shouldn’t just come into the living arrangement and barrage someone that lives there with precise forehand, not in the first instance or moment of passing through, anyway.

They’re going to pay you: that is the newsflash. I am trying to make sense of the things that have happened, is really the whole reason I am saying anything at this point. I keep breaking perfectly with commas into slight unknowns. In other words, I am trying to point to instances where I learned of circumference and understood abundance in the context of where I was sitting and standing and what I was wearing, but also in the context of what other people were doing, and then more generally in the context of everything that was happening.

Trampolines and pinball and stickball and intravenous mileage. I am not a sentimentalist, however, even if I do want to repeat 1993. The days pass like rats in a maze. The walls are scraping the months back. The passing feels like I am part of a great leg lurching forward from days from which I will say a great word and then topple over, contained by the way people have understood the things that I have said.

What were those, anyway? I could be in some ways solipsistic like everyone else. At night I think about how in sleeping I am not in control.

Most psychological disorders were discovered to explain everyone in the world as inert, bleak, troubled by the larger intentions. Most of the things that I can determine have gone something like that. I’m at a laptop on a table now. It’s the afternoon. In time, it will be less important to know the year.

 *

How long will the voices which run on a fake line of care go on without being discovered?

They will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of a movie, the augmentation of style into substance, skateboards and pop chords. I hear them everywhere and I follow their echoes to a place where seriously distraught grumbles fold over into admonishment for any and everything. These people do not want you to receive full and intimately packaged days of importance. The concept of others is growing in the handhold, the manifold, the tablecloth.

I’m looking at the things stacked around me with greater concern, is the thing.

This brings me to biographies and then to straight facts. A biography is a list of items across days, mostly, but one that is given the shape of wind.

That is the space that we share, at least at certain points that we send between. You can make of any disappearance an intrusion or vast appearance of spirits. I will add a few words.

 *

Yet in other ways the single day is not over. Until I came here it was. I’m always returning to the site of myself like the man in the box. Four years like a clawing infant.

Whisked through the park, pulled from the back of the bike, the tethered rollerblader is the sign of a time, shirt reaching down to knees and everything rumpled. Everything stumped. Diving into the spirit that inspired the memory is skipping a stone across the part of it that still defines you. We tried to skip the long thin one and it went over the water without ever dipping.

Knowing that today is difficult, but that’s why we are always trying to find a place in which we are comfortable, in which we can watch the old movie in the new way, I reflect.

The favored scene of snowballs or impostors.

The mind takes up quite a bit of space, which is why I am a terrible empiricist and a wonderful scientist. I can believe in more from gaps than from old facts. The word is the relief of itself, and putting them over on themselves is the deep fidget.

The other day, someone spoke to me about the good and the great of words and the mind and I opened my pockets. The tree outside is catching early flickers of sun. I was emailed about emailing someone, asked, over a connection, whether a connection could be made. I lost my own connections in this transfer.

This is the world in which I live, a world of olive toes and bath salts. When I wake up, I take fifty slowed breaths into meditation, but after three I am not counting at all. After three, I have become myself in the moment I am aware that I will never remember but for the way that it is repeated across a series of unknown days.

 

Thomas Cook and Tyler Flynn Dorholt live in Los Angeles, CA and Syracuse, NY. Their chapbook, Monster: A Glottochronology, was published by Alice Blue, and other collaborative writings have appeared in Spinning Jenny, Horse Less Review, and elsewhere. With JoAnna Novak, they edit Tammy. ​

Robert Garner McBrearty

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The Story of Your Life

The fellow sitting next to me at the bar said, “I went through some rough times. You ought to write the story of my life.”

“I will, John,” I said, ‘I’ll do it right now.”

In those days, I always carried pen and paper with me, and as John told me his story, I wrote: John Springer was born in a small town in Ohio. His father passed away when he was fifteen, and his mother shortly after, and nobody figured out that John was living in the old house alone. He ate what was left in the fridge, and then he turned to cannibalism. He first took down his neighbor, Joe, across the street…

John leaned in. “What do you got so far?”

I read what I’d written and his eyes widened. “This is all wrong. I wasn’t born in Ohio. A cannibal!”

“It’s interpretive, John. This is the descent part. You need the descent before the redemption.”

“You son of a bitch! You’ve made a mockery of my life!” He threw his drink in my face and struck me. We grappled at the bar as I tried to ward him off. The bartenders forced us out on the street. He went off howling down the block. “You’ve ruined my life!” he shouted.

“Come back, John,” I cried. “I love you. I love your life!”

But he went on, bellowing in outrage. Since then, I can’t stand to be alone. I want to tell your story.

Robert Garner McBrearty’s short stories have been published in The Pushcart Prize, Missouri Review, North American Review, New England Review, and many other places, including flash fictions in Opium, Eclectica, Flashfiction.net, and Lowestoft Chronicle. As well, Robert has published three collections of short stories and most recently a novel, The Western Lonesome Society. He’s worked at many different jobs, from dishwasher to college teacher. For more information about Robert’s writing, please see www.robertgamermcbrearty.com.

Derek Updegraff

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Café

They are sitting at a café. This is a story about him and her. That’s all you need. Him and her. But what can happen to him and her? They are not sitting at just any café. They are sitting in a Denny’s on 7th Street. It is 4am. Did they arrive together? They did, yes. Are they early risers, or did they come to the Denny’s after a late night out together? The latter’s expected, so these two—this pair sitting in the glow of Denny’s 4am light, this pair divided on two slick booth seats—got out of bed together, dressed near each other, drove there together, and now they are here, Denny’s cream colored mugs with brown rims on the tabletop, different shades of coffee in each mug, a similar steam from the fresh pour rising, his hands encircling one mug, her hands out of view, and from this side view their faces are not quite visible. Only they can see their faces. We will not see them this time, and when the pair first came into side focus and when the tabletop that must link or separate took shape between them, I was going to tell you that we don’t know why they got up so early, and I was going to tell you that all we know is that one of them will leave the other. Him or her. I was going to say that I would like to tell you otherwise. I was going to say that the only thing I’ve known since They are sitting is that one is going to leave the other while the air stays crisp outside and can be nothing other than crisp outside while they are inside, in some café. And I am wanting to write But look now, sweet reader, but instead I write, But look now, sweet writer, and so I look, and her hands rise from beneath the tabletop, brought forth from her lap, and they settle on the clean surface between them.

Derek Updegraff’s short stories, poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Bayou Magazine, Chiron Review, Rosebud, Sierra Nevada Review, Natural Bridge, The Classical Outlook, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and other places. He is an Assistant Professor of English at California Baptist University, where he started a BFA program in Creative Writing. A recent interview with him can be read at http://blog.sierranevada.edu/sierranevadareview/2015/10/22/an-artist-in-translation-an-interview-with-derek-updegraff/.

Zeke Jarvis

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Las Vegas

The bum approaching the businessman is covered with grime. He’s wearing an awful lot of clothes for this heat, but everyone knows that bums like to layer. The bum smells terrible. It could be sweat or puke or garbage, knowing the bums here. The businessman that the bum’s approaching looks towards this wretch with his eyes only, keeping his face turned towards the other side of the intersection. The bum mumbles something about spare change, and the businessman shoots back, “Get a job!”

The bum straightens himself. “Look Buddy, I’m a Viet Nam vet. I fought for my country and now they fucking spit on me. You all fucking spit on me! Spit on me and shit on me and leave me to die.” The bum whirls around, pointing at nobody in particular. “I can’t get a job, they won’t let me get myself together. What am I supposed to do?” His voice breaks and he falls to the ground.

There’s silence. Then the businessman laughs and a family a little way down the sidewalk applauds. “Shit is a word you shouldn’t say,” the mother says to her son, but she smiles and gives his shoulder a little squeeze.

The bum rises, smiling, and bows to the family. The businessman hands the bum some money and the family sends their child over with a dollar for him. The bum thanks them both and wobbles a little bit for the child. He belches, softly, and the boy laughs.

“That was good,” says the businessman. “Were you really in Viet Nam?”

The bum folds up the money and stuffs it into a pocket of his innermost shirt. “Nah, it was a little before my time, but I did have an uncle who fought there. Terrible business.”

The businessman nods. “You pulled it off well. Do you have any cards?”

“Cards?”

Just then, the mother from the family interrupts. “Excuse me. Do you think our son could get his picture taken with you?”

“Sure,” the bum says, smiling. “Do you want me to look defeated or menacing?”

“I have to go,” says the businessman, “but I enjoyed your work. If you had a card… or a website, even, I could hook you up with some clients or coworkers who are in town at conventions.”

The man smiles again. “Vegas is a wonderful town for that. I don’t have a card, but I generally work around this casino.”

The businessman nods. “Good luck.”

“Thank you, Sir. Now was that menacing or defeated?”

“Oh,” says the mother, “menacing, please.”

The bum leans in over the child and glowers. The child begins to moan and whimper. The bum relaxes a bit. He points to his shoes, from which his big toes stick out. He wiggles the toes and the child smiles. “Sorry,” says the mother, “We’re from Wisconsin; he’s not used to this.”

“That’s fine,” says the bum, looking now only slightly threatening as the mother takes the picture. “That’s just fine.”

Zeke Jarvis is an Associate Professor at Eureka College. His work has appeared in 4 Chambers, Petrichor Machine and Moon City Review, among other places. His books, So Anyway… and In A Family Way were published by Robocup Press and Fomite Press.