INTRODUCING VAPID IN A DAY Hola! I’m writing this at 15.11, five hours and ten minutes into Vapid In A Day, and with only an hour and forty-nine minutes to go before our 5pm deadline. The idea was really simple, at Victoria Baths Zine Fair on 19th May, we would create Issue 8 of Vapid Kitten, ‘Collaboration’, from scratch, using only submissions we received between 10am and 5pm. We’ve set up a workshop-table and encouraged people to sit down and create something for the ‘zine; we also allowed for digital submissions via email and the #vapidinadayhashtag on twitter…and we’ve been awfully busy! Since this issue isn’t really about us, I’m not going to say anything else, just a massive thank you to everyone who contributed, and we hope you’ve enjoyed it! Tonnes of love, Anna&Betsy XOXO
www.vapidmedia.co.uk wearevapid@gmail.com @vapidmedia
So this edition is about collaboration. Women have collaborated since time began. Whether it be... Informal family collaboration to aid childcare; a mother taking care of her daughter’s children to give her a well-earned break for example. Or women collaborating with their girlfriends to support a sista in need; even just getting together with wine and DVDs to cheer their friend up. More significantly the beautiful Suffrage Movement; women standing side-byside, working as one for their (and our rights), to be heard. And in this recent viral campaign, more women supporting women, collaborating to choreograph an all singing, all dancing, in your face symbol of what’s wrong in the world. (See: http:// www.upworthy.com/sometimes-thingsare-not-what-they-seem?g=3&c=mrp1) What I’m saying is we’re good at this collaboration thing! Nothing makes me happier than to see sistas working with and supporting each other. After all Madeleine Albright once said, “There is a special place in hell for women that don’t help other women”. Bobbie Glynn
COMMUTER When I hear a great ship cry its ghost-cry in the night, masters of the rich world, I want to ride your waterways, until the sun sets on harpies, lying on Miami beaches. Gary Beck
CINDERELLA I sat on the chair and tried on the glass slipper. At first it was a chair, but then it multiplied into a series of chairs suspended from a motor-driven endless cable for conveying shoppers up to the the top floor of the department store, to the foot-binding section. I asked the salesman for a chaise longue, a seat long enough to form a complete leg rest. There was the sound of a rapid succession of stepmothers who were noisy breathers, or the slow sound of boiling meat. I turned my ankle inside out and almost collided with a clear blue window. The sky was a big glass factory. As I sat unchanged for a thousand years, a white bird came to the tree every time. Why had my father married a woman who could destroy him in a single wavelength. He was such a Macbeth, or a hollow-horned ruminant closely related to sheep. I let it be known that the sensation of dryness in the mouth and throat was caused by the number thirteen. "You could say
the daguerreotype is obsolete," I offered. I asked the salesman to show me an aspect that heightened reality, a toe shoe or a ballistic missile, still in the original box. The sole of a French designer, a heart that opens in the front. And then, for the third time, he brought a sock in the color of blood of sleeping persons at night. "Silver surface," he said. "Mercury vapor." The glass thong responded to this thievery by passing between the first two toes.
Suri Phillips
DEPENDENT ON THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS Whoever you are I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers utters Blanche in a drawl absent any hint of the wall she’d hit in the depths in which no smile burgeoned genuine and no ray of sunshine could move her quite like her old friends bourbon and wine
and this very moment an aging northerner is nursing her dear friend vodka martini and musing she too may be dependent on strangers — that her children estranged from her now might one day come to put her in a nursing home where she likely wearing Depends will live out her days well cared for or not…
and while this aging southern belle destitute and taking refuge in her sister’s home whiled away days into night losing sight of reality in dreams that scream of her a wretch with no chance left to make do or make right the Kowalski family and friends gather as she offers a smile to the stranger who offers his arm to lead her away
Ruth Sabath Rosenthal
AFTER THE RAIN Ebony skies obscure wooly clouds and swallow stars, gurgling gutters gargle, blurry moony-eyed lights stagger along wet pavement below each streetlamp. The night is drunk with ozone – saturated, exhilarated, out of focus; headlights scan the darkness as homeward-bound cars swoosh through puddles on slick streets unaware of the hedonistic delights the night has to offer. Fern G. Z. Carr
SUDDEN NEWS I heard and just as soon connected a reach through ether to ask not of her but of you given that surviving is often the greater nightmare. You did answer. You did not do it well. But there are no performance standards. I heard through the hesitancy the vacated squares of the chessboard but all the same that cobalt core that allows what is left of you (in rags, I know) to hold. Maude Larke
IN A NUTSHELL Old friends are odd things, Bound tight, but always beneath: The plates are shifting. DIALOGUE (UNSPOKEN) If we joined, what then? We’d fall; somehow or other. Satellites, circling. Crystal Spencer
CONTRIBUTORS Haimer Atkins Tom Balderstore Marcus Barnett Ben & Steph Cath Barton Tom Beeton Gary Becks Tia Chapman Alice Cole Ollie Coninage Joe Cooke Crow vs Crow Lola & Sofia D. Silvia D’Aubra Helen Felcey Taira Fiaz Paul Gallagher Bobbie Glynn Tom Grant Ami Guest Lydia Harper Jessica Harris Isobel Harrop Evie Husbands Rob Jones Joseph Knight Paul Loudon Jess Marshall Lucy Martindale Abigail & Ethan Ossaway Hebe Phillips Suri Philips Jim Ralley Alice Rowbottom Minka Stoyandua Jon (@Stawbleu) Ellie Westbrook Eve Woolard