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BABY EARTH SHIVERS IN BLANKETS OF SNOW. TEEN EARTH RAGES WITH VOLCANOES. MIDDLE-AGED EARTH DIVORCES HUMANITY. OLD EARTH HOBBLES AROUND THE SUN.
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20 08 SPRING 2008
U.S. $10.00 Issue #6 ©2008 Opium Magazine
www. OpiumMagazine .com
Cover and book design by
David Barringer
6
Opium6
GO GREEN! (BUT SAVE ME FIRST)
ISSUE SIX SPRING ���� PAGE ONE WELCOME TO OUR GO GREEN� ISSUE. OUR CIVILIZATION IS IN YOUR HANDS.
OPIUM MAGAZINE.PRINT6 | COPYRIGHT 2008 | Opium Magazine PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER . DAMN, RIGHT. �IT’S THE GREEN ISSUE. WE HAD TO.� All rights reserved. No part of this book may be recycled or composted by any means, manual or by hand, including shredding, tearing, folding into paper airplanes, or stuffed into mouths or flower pots without permission in writing from the copyright owner, except for a small child who may plant the book in the backyard.
Book design & Go Green! Guidebook by David Barringer (www..com). Printed in USA. Opium Magazine is also an online magazine of fiction, poetry, reviews, interviews, art and miscellany. Visit www. .com. Direct all inquiries to Editor Todd Zuniga at todd@opiummagazine.com.
IT’S NOT EASY GOING GREEN. IT’S NOT EASY GOING STRONG. BUT OPIUM IS DOING BOTH, LIKE THE HULK.
OPIUM MAGAZINE | CONTENTS UNSUDDEN DOOM A STATE OF VARIANCE BLINK ���� SWEET LASER POINTER TUESDAYS WITH FINK METAMORPHOSIS THE WEATHER FACTORY MANSFIELD ���� WEIGHT GAINER POP STAR TO PAINT BRUSH JAILHOUSE ROCK SWEET FANCY MOSES
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10 16 19 22 30 �� 31 35 36 41 48 � 54 � � � � �
GO GREEN! 4, 8, 20, 32, 52, 78, GUIDEBOOK 94, 108, 116, 142
72 BOOKMARK CONTEST 80 THE WINNER 96 100-WORD STORIES 100 A KIND OF DARK PLEASURE 110 THE 118 MAN AT WORK 131 APHELION 134 NATURE LOVERS 136 A TURTLE WEIGHS IN ON THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION ���� 138 THE BUNK TEST ���� 140 HOW WE REMEMBER COACH FONTAINE 29, 34, 115 CARTOONS 18, 132-133, 139 CARTOONS
WANT TO WORK WITH OPIUM OR THE LITERARY DEATH MATCH� THE PAY IS GREAT, THE HOURS ARE SHORT� STILL INTERESTED� CONTACT US HERE� TODD�OPIUMMAGAZINE.COM. SPECIAL THANKS TO ELIZABETH KOCH FOR COVER CONSULTATION, MONIKA KUCEL FOR PATIENCE, AND NICKY STRINGFELLOW FOR BEING A CUPCAKE. NOTE ON THE COVER ART, THE INTERIOR DESIGN, AND JUST A GENERAL RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION, “WHAT IN GREAT GREEN HELL IS OPIUM UP TO?”
Yeah, about that. The cover shows ancient Egyptians building a rocket to escape the already-doomed planet Earth. We wanted to take the environmental issue as far as we could, which is the ruination of the planet and humanity’s need to escape to other planets, and then pull the comedy camera back to a panorama of human history. So it’s funny, right, that ancient civilizations were already, like, “Been there, ruined that, couldn’t get the damn rocket to work.” And we here now are still pretty much spinning our wheels in the mud of that problem. Inevitable species extinction is just funny, funny stuff. Inside the book, the title designs take inspiration from product labels on which is written our culture’s incantations against our fear of an un-green planet. Consume correct, and you shall be saved. See also Opium’s Go Green! Guidebook of Restraint & Responsibility featured in these hallowed pages. Opium is Green. Tag, you’re Green. Green is love.
EDITOR’S LETTER
T
o be honest, Opium’s Green issue didn’t sprout from the soil of good will or even the landfill of eco-guilt, at least not at first. While concepting Opium5: Bad Company in January of 2007, I thought it would be fun to do a “green” issue next. Everyone else was going green, blindly, so I figured, blindly, why not? Later that month, I came across a New Yorker profile of Amory Lovins entitled “Mr. Green.” Lovins is an energy legend. Google him and see. I loved how he didn’t wave his arms, ranting and complaining. He’s brilliant—business savvy and market-minded—about showcasing solution on a large scale. The way An Inconvenient Truth served as a wakeup call for many, that Lovins profile motivated me. But it’s not so simple. Like many, I’ve drowned in a sea of complications. How do I lessen my carbon footprint, exactly? What are the dour doubters and churlish champions of the green movement saying, exactly? It’s confusing enough decoding all the jargon and slogans. Everyone
also has to be so serious and full of doom. So how can we make any of this funny, exactly? While I’ve never thought of Opium as being on the bleeding edge of satire—we aim for constancy in our comedy—I thought greenwashing was an opening for us to contribute to the conversation. Plus, I knew our resident hybrid writer/designer David Barringer would sharply lampoon the situation in a way that would impress, fluster and amuse— much in the same way he expertly chopped self-help at the knees in Opium4: Live Well Now (No Matter What). All that being said, I couldn’t be happier about Opium6: Go Green! (But Save Me First). It’s printed on recycled paper, with none of the issues delivered by air, setting the tone for all future print Opiums. It’s also jam-packed with our rare blend of twist-until-titillated storytelling, a made-you-look! design, and ten bold pokes at “greenery.” Todd Zuniga Founding Editor
MASTHEAD FOUNDING EDITOR TODD ZUNIGA ��
SOLICITING EDITOR TRAVIS KUROWSKI ��
LITTLE BIG DESIGN CHIEF & SENIOR EDITOR DAVID BARRINGER ��
LITERARY DEATH MATCH, WEST COAST PRODUCER SKILES HORNIG ��
MANAGING EDITOR SHELLY CRISWELL �� ASSOCIATE EDITORS �PRINT & .COM� SARAH DZIDA, NIKKI DARLING ASSISTANT EDITORS �PRINT & .COM� ERIC FEEZELL, JENNIFER FAYLOR (Poetry), EMILY NONKO, NANA TWAMASI, MILES CLARK, LUCY COOPER
FOUNDING EDITORS �OPIUMDEN.ORG� TODD ZUNIGA & ELIZABETH KOCH ART DIRECTOR �OPIUMSTUDIO.COM� JESSICA WALLEN �� CARTOON EDITOR �OPIUMSTUDIO.COM� CM EVANS �� DIRECTOR OF WEIRD ARTISTIC PROJECTS JAMES J. WILLIAMS, III
SUBMIT WRITING, FICTION, ESSAYS, POETRY, INTERVIEWS, CARTOONS, AND ART TO OPIUM MAGAZINE ONLINE AT WWW. OPIUMMAGAZINE .COM. OPIUM ALSO RUNS WRITING CONTESTS. WINNERS RECEIVE PRINT PUBLICATION AND CASH. VISIT THE WEBSITE.
CONTROL YOURSELF NOW I go green! guidebook of restraint & responsibility
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ou are bad tempered. You are far outside of control. Do not ask why you should control your bad temper. Go green. This is simple. Control yourself before you speak one word that shows bad temper. Substitute a green thought for a bad thought. Admire the example of green people. One bad-tempered person in the house upsets and contaminates others. Children imitate their companions. Do not pout or cause to make yourself an archetype of pouting. Do not give vent to uncontrolled temper against green. The world will estimate your example against right thinking and timely green behavior. Your inability to cope with circumstances beyond your control should give rise to green acquiescence and not violent insane outbursts of digging in your heels against going green. Many fellows are already green.
They are more attractive in appearance and disposition than ignorant and stubborn people who are not green in outfit and outlook and prefer to throw tantrums in lieu of democratic tolerance and acceptance of green. Others dislike the company of restless and negative goagainsters who live in a past that did not know its sins of existence. For you to just go and live and love and work and make a mess is for you to know such a rollicking heapful of shame. Knowledge is green. Invigorate your brain with issues of vital importance and embody these issues with green dynamism. Replace sick unhealthy habits with green appetites for abstention, diversion, and leadership. Where are you going? You are going green. Get used to it. Follow closely the lessons on “Biting,” “Striking,” and “Hair-pulling.” Green forgives with love.•
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SHYA SCANLON ESTIMATED READING TIME: 1:04
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ragically chasing cheap eats in the Meat Packing District I can’t help notice polish has been abolished. When did decrepitude turn cutting edge? Tall models walk tiny dogs on long leashes by dirty walls and I think This must say something interesting about the fall of the Roman Empire.
Don’t laugh. We all do it. Power undone endlessly fascinates, spurs introspection about what circumstances foreshadow our own expiration date. Am I, in buying this exquisite pear/apple hybrid, contributing to some sudden doom awaiting me outside Dean & DeLuca?
I scurry down Hudson munching fruit and pause to watch two black men haul red beef shanks between building and truck, these blunt and bloody cobblestone streets might seem a site unlikely for mixing fashion elite with Wall St. but upon reflection I realize they’re equally consumed by appearances. And in times when high gloss can be gotten by the poor, isn’t it just rich to dabble in dereliction? Of course, it can become an addiction. In fact, it’s hard to tell many of
these five-star bistros from abandoned buildings and if those Romans were anything like us, perhaps their empire didn’t fall after all but simply grew too sophisticated for coarse displays of wealth, and slowly became indistinguishable from the rubble around it. I toss my core to the curb and head east. The sun is at my back and my shadow gropes the ground before me, skimming indiscriminately over the cracked and gumblue street that cuts through the center of the center of the city.
SHYA SCANLON’S prose and poetry can be found in many fine online and print journals including Mississippi Review, New York Quarterly, Caketrain and of course Opium Magazine, issues 2, 3, 5 and the one smoldering in your hot little hands this very minute.
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[VA R I A N C E{ A S TAT E A GREEN STORY BY
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n her fortieth birthday, the woman lost the ability to sleep for more than a single hour. She did not accumulate a tired feeling; in fact, that one hour served the purpose of eight, and she awoke refreshed. But because that hour was full of only the most intense, involving sleep, the sleep beyond rapid eye movement, the only consequence was that she had no time in her sleep hours for dreams. So, during the day, she would experience moments when the rules of the world would shift and she would see, inside her teakettle, a frog floating, dead. And then blink and it would be gone. Or she would greet the mailman and he would hand her a basket of sea water, dripping, with stamps floating wetly on top. And then she would smile and bring in the mail. These moments sprinkled throughout every day; she still had a driver’s license and wondered if she should revoke it herself, as the zombies who passed through the crosswalk and disappeared into the lamppost were confusing. She assumed she would die at eighty. She figured this because the sleep shift began on her fortieth birthday, and all her life, things had happened symmetrically like that. Her birthdate was 11.25.52, and that was not notable
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� � �� until she realized that she had been born in Amsterdam and there the day comes first: 25.11.52. The address of the only house she could afford for miles and miles was 1441, on a street named Circle Road on the edges of Berkeley. She had a son the day her father died. Her son’s face was almost a perfect mirror of itself, in such a way that one realized how imperfections created trust because no one trusted her son, with that perfect symmetry in his face. Contrary to the magazine articles that stated that women would orgasm easily above him, beneath him, due to that symmetry, no—his symmetry was too much, and women shyed away, certain he was a player. Certain he would dump them. And because no one approached him, when he did have a girlfriend every now and again he would dump them, because he found he did not trust them either, because they were always looking at him so furtively— making, with their faces, the action of holding up your hands in front of your chest to block a blow. He told his mother he could not seem to meet a woman who had a core strength to her, and his mother, studying geometry at the kitchen table with cut-outs of triangles and squares, said she was sorry for what her pregnancy had done. “What did it do?” he asked. She held a mirror up to his nose. He saw his face in the hinged reflection. “What?” he said. Then she did it to herself, and the sight of his mother in perfect matched halves so disturbed him that he went and made himself a huge ham sandwich. “So what are you saying?” he asked, mouth full of meat. “I am saying that your face repels trust,” she said. “Because it is too exact. I am saying,” she told him, “that I will die on my eightieth birthday, because I stopped sleeping at forty.” He knew, in a vague way, about the sleeping. The shapes on the table danced in front of her and slipped into her mouth, large mints. Then they were regular again. The mirror on the table was a mouth. She put a finger in and it bit her, wet. She’d finally told her son about the sleeping when he complained that she had made him too many colorful crocheted blankets and he had no more room for them in his apartment. “Take them to the shelter,” he’d pleaded, and then asked, “How are you making all these anyway? Are you taking drugs?” (He himself had been taking overdoses of B vitamins to relieve stress to take the edge off how he felt when he smiled at another person who seemed to have an inordinately tough time smiling back.) His mother had laughed. She told him not about the dreaming aspect but about the one hour, the way she didn’t feel tired, and how it began promptly on her fortieth birthday. He finished his sandwich and touched the blob of mustard left on the plate with the tip of his finger.
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OPIUM PAGE 16 ESTIMATED READING TIME: 2:31 THIS MEMOIR HAS BEEN MADE WITH RECOVERED COAL ASH, UNSTUFFED ANIMALS, YESTERDAY ’S LOST RAY OF HOPE, AND THE RECYCLED WISDOM TEETH OF TEENAGE GIRLS.
II
went west that summer and fell in love. Zane was a rafting guide, Australian, tan and creased; he looked like he’d been born laughing. For those last two months, making beds at the dude ranch, I thought of little else. It was a fling, I supposed, but a fling with promise, like a lottery ticket bought on a whim.
Airports were closed and I needed to get back to Chicago. I’ll give you a lift, Zane said, like I was heading to the bank. That was him: undaunted. He’d shown up at the bunkhouse an hour late for our first date, dripping and shirtless, and explained that his truck didn’t have wipers. He’d stopped every few minutes to dry the glass with his T-shirt. I departed the ranch sniffling, clutching a bottle of Jameson. I suppose that was the summer I began perfecting my ability to leave things behind. It seemed a useful skill. Somewhere in Iowa, Zane pulled over and jumped out of the truck, running, clutching at air: “Fireflies!” “You’ll never catch one that way,” I yelled. I cupped my hands and made my move, slowly. He followed. He took so much pleasure peering into his palms—their blinks, “the buggers bloody synchronize”—that I could not tell him how, as kids, we’d smoosh these creatures and paint ourselves with the phosphorescence. I loved that about him, his ability to appreciate whatever was in front of him; he was the only lover I’ve ever had who declared me beautiful on a regular basis, as if I were a discovery he made daily. Somehow, though, seeing him running into that field made me sure I would be left behind. And I was, along with a cheap bottle of Australian wine. We would drink it, he promised, when he returned. I placed the bottle on my desk like a bouquet of flowers. That he broke our plans was natural, inevitable, I suppose; a consequence of who he was. But that didn’t make it hurt any less. Knowledge fights fear, the newscasters reminded us daily. But sorrow—well, knowledge has nothing to do with it. Years later, in an email forwarded by someone I didn’t know, I read that Zane had died, surfing in Mexico. I think of him, sometimes, chasing those fireflies, the way I knew then that we were fleeting, and the wine still boxed with old things in the basement of my mother’s house. I think of where he would be now, and a photo he took of me our last day in Wyoming. I am perched in an oak tree and the camera points upward. My eyes are closed tight and my hair, still long, floats around my head like I’m swimming to the bottom of something. It’s impossible to tell whether my expression is pain or bliss—but I’m grateful for the way meaning can only come after; the way our hands, when cupped, are slowly filled.
KELLY LUCE works as a nanny in Silicon Valley. She recently received the Danahy Fiction Prize from the Tampa Review; other work of hers appears in Fourteen Hills, Gettysburg Review, /nor, and Nimrod. Check out her blog, Crazy Pete’s Blotter: www.�.com. Like a good little writer, she lives in a cottage in the woods.
CM EVANS is a writer, illustrator, and cartoonist living in Chicago. He has appeared in every print issue of Opium Magazine, along with many publications online and off, including Unpleasant Event Schedule, Milk Magazine, and How I Hit My Mom: A Semi-Annual Non-Violent Literary Journal. Shoot him an email at ornithomimida@yahoo.com.
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GREEN POETRY BY
SETH PERLOW ESTIMATED READING TIME: 1:01
THIS POEM WILL XERISCAPE THE FRONT YARD OF YOUR ATTITUDE. have a totally sweet laser pointer. OPIUM, PAGE 19. My dad gave it to me and I just put new batteries in so the red dot is really strong. I can go on the fire escape and point it at buildings almost a block away and still see it. Also I point it a little bit in front of people walking along and it surprises them and confuses them and they start looking around trying to see where it is coming from. Especially little kids. They chase it and try to show their parents it. One time a guy with a tambourine went by and I pointed it at his tambourine and he freaked out and stopped playing and looked all around. Except I don’t point it on people since they might freak out and think it’s a totally sweet laser scope or a laser that cuts people in half or something. It can reach to the top of the tallest building I can see from my fire escape. One time I tried to point it at a cloud but that didn’t work. But it might with a really low cloud.
SETH PERLOW lives in Ithaca, NY, and is pursuing a PhD in English at Cornell. His poetry has appeared in Horse Less Review, elimae, and elsewhere. His first chapbook, Robot Portrait of Homo Futurus, is forthcoming from P.S. Books in spring 2008. He can be reached at smp���@cornell.edu.
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laudine and Florence hate their mothers. They are fourteen-years old. On Tuesday nights, they meet in a classroom at Little Haven Elementary with a support group of twenty women (and one man, Mr. Mervin Goonberger, who comes to the meetings when he can find a suitable babysitter for his three-year-old daughter) who all indict their mothers for their dismembered egos and come to chew the fat and cling to the latest developments in penis-envy support. Nancy Fink leads the meetings. Her views concerning the penis-envy support process emphasize admitting one’s desire for a penis and then eradicating it. At one point during every meeting, she breaks up discussion and goes to the chalkboard to draw the outline of a large, asymmetrical penis. Each member of the group is then to take turns, one by one, swiping at the board with an eraser before passing it along to the next person until the outline of the penis is gone.
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Sometimes this seems a bit over the top to Claudine, whose mother keeps Claudine jailed away from boys every night in her tiny pink bedroom with bright yellow rose-petal furniture she is not allowed to repaint. Her mother slides lists of Claudine’s offenses under the door while Claudine is in the bathroom brushing her teeth. Claudine takes these lists and rips them up and flushes them down the toilet. Getting to these meetings alone requires great bursts of desperation on Claudine’s part. Lately, she’s pretended to take long showers on Tuesday nights, steaming up the bathroom, and then sneaking out the bathroom window while her mother is on the phone. Her mother is known to stay on the phone with Claudine’s grandmother for over two hours complaining about Claudine’s onerous behavior. Claudine has never seen a real live penis before, unlike her best bud, Florence, who will turn fifteen on the first of the month and is already planning a party at the bowling alley.
� and green eyes, and her skin is as clear as a bar of soap. Florence’s mother cannot stand that Florence hides things from her, like whether or not she has touched a penis. She tries to coax Florence into heart-to-heart confrontations about boys and such things. She barges right into Florence’s bedroom while Florence is in the middle of making up catchy labels for her multi-compartmental filing folders and plops herself down on her purple canopy bed to proclaim her undying concern for Florence’s clandestine foolishness: “Florence, Sweetie, why don’t you tell me things? Don’t you trust me? Florence, are you on drugs? Is there something the matter with you? I love you, Honey. Is there a boy? Are you seeing someone, Florence? There must be a boy. Is there something you’re not telling me? Florence?” Sometimes, Florence comes home from school to find her books rearranged and no longer properly alphabetized on her shelves. Her notebooks are spread open. Sometimes, her tank tops are missing. There are empty hangers swaying in her closet. Missing shoes. Lone and mismatched socks. Her bed sheets: in disarray. Cracker crumbs inside and underneath her pillow. Florence suspects her mother of meeting strange men in the grocerystore check out lines (where else would her mother meet them?) and bringing them up to Florence’s bedroom with a plate of Triscuits and a plastic knife and a bowl of brie cheese and making love to them on the purple, canopy bed while Florence is in the middle of fifth-period science class—stumped yet undeniably driven—taking her chemistry exams.
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ur backbones compress. No matter where the bullets are, our ulnas knot. Each friend taken in an unruly tangle of breath brings our feet closer. Small coffins scatter the dust motes of our voices until our sighing ribcages are mere homonyms for movement. Even revelry that sounds like violence hollows our bones. The coughs of lovers constrict skin, strip slow muscle until our legs sinew. Boys dead in the wisdom of war leave us. Eventually, we are birds. We fly over the ocean and thermals hold tight as the fathers who once swung us by the wrists and left us dizzy.
Metamorphosis a green Poem by
C.j.
evans
estimated reading time: 0:30 opium, page 30
this poem is low impact, formaldahyde-free, and will recycle your ass into the dirt.
CJ EVANS’ poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in AGNI online, American Letters & Commentary, Chelsea, CutBank, LIT, and elsewhere. He lives in New York where he works at the Academy of American Poets. Contact him: cj@tinhouse.com.
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Opium, p. 31
Weatheacrtory F
a green story by
jensen whelan estimated reading time: 1:11 This story will hit your carbon-emissions target with one line tied behind its back.
F F
rom my son’s bedroom window I can see the factory on the horizon. I do not know what kind of factory it is, but it has large stacks that release smoke into the air. Because I think it is a nice idea, I tell my son that this is the weather factory. He’s five and, as far as I can tell, still believes everything I say. I tell him that the factory is where rain is made. Those two large towers, just there above the trees, push the clouds into the sky. There is a man, I tell him, the weather-factory foreman, who decides when it is going to rain and when it will snow. I describe this man. My son laughs. He wants to know why the man works at the weather factory. I tell him it is because of love. This confuses my son, so I tell him that love is a giant heart that makes people do things. He wants to know is the heart inside the weather factory? And I tell him the heart is there in a room just down the hall from where the weather is made. Together we think about this as we watch as smoke rises from both stacks. My son says he cannot wait for it to rain again. I say, Neither can I.
JENSEN WHELAN’s work has previously appeared in Hobart, Bateau, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae and Quick Fiction, among others. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and son. His website is: �.com.
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ophia’s father smells of sandalwood, he sounds like warm silk when he says her name. Sooo-fee-ahh. The bass smoothes the kinks in her coiled flaxen hair. She is lighter than him, pointier, smaller in presence. He’s broad and muscular, always returning from places glowing and damp. He looks like the Greeks in movies, with dark curls trimmed close to his head and face, leaving daily doses of tiny pared whiskers clinging to the edge of the sink. He lives alone, a studio in Marin filled with idols from India and incense holders. It is nestled in a valley between green hills that we explore and large wood houses that almost seem natural there. He tells us stories that we don’t understand about the Buddha and the beauty of women, which we like because we hope someday that men will say things like that about us in a voice that makes everything beautiful. He is writing a book about Jesus’ lost years. He tells us that Jesus did ecstasy, and we don’t know if this was a bad thing for Jesus to do but he says it was not. We listen to Middle-Eastern music and play gin rummy on days when it rains, and on sunny days we walk to the ocean on a trail named Tennessee Valley Road that is a road but you can’t drive on it. We are small with long legs for our age. We decide we need a break when we see a tree whose limbs look like hammocks. He lifts us, Sophia first, then me, into the tree. It is shady and cool sitting in the tree, and he tells us jokes that we think are gross that involve sailors with only five dollars, but we will tell everyone at school because they will be jealous that we are so grown up. He says it’s amazing how soon we will be women and we think he is right. Then Sophia’s mom picks us up and the day is over. He says to us, Your mothers are beautiful ladies, and Sally smiles. She takes me home where my mother smokes cigarettes. I call my father to ask him when he can come to take me and Sophia to the beach. He sighs and says, I wish I could but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. You are right, I say. Today went too fast.
LARA COLEY lives in San Francisco, writes poetry, and cannot name all fifty states. She is awaiting fall semester to finish her degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University. She says lovely too much. She knocks on wood and thinks she’s French. Email: laracoley@yahoo.com.
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hen Paul got back from powerlifting, he found his wife in the hall closet. She’d
been knitting a Christmas scarf for their son, Juan, for more than a month now, well beyond the needed length, beyond the need itself. The scarf was twenty feet and counting. He’d tried to make a joke—what, was she dressing a giraffe?—but Marcy didn’t grin. She never grinned. When she wasn’t knitting, she wore the scarf everywhere—to bed, in the shower. It had begun to stink of mildew. Worst was she still talked about giving it to the boy.
B B WEIGHT GAINER
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pageOPIUM thirty-six ESTIMATED READING TIME: twelve minutes and forty-eight seconds
a green story by
utler
THIS STORY’S TIMBERLANDS LEFT LOW-CARBON FOOTPRINTS ALL OVER THE BRAND-NEW PVC-FREE THERMOPLASTIC RUG IN YOUR FOYER.
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Since Paul had found the baby blinkless on their bed, he’d been exercising three times a day for twenty-eight days in a row. He’d joined a 24-hour gym and bought a small weight set for when he felt unsure about leaving Marcy alone in the apartment. He didn’t care that his muscles had begun to overstress. He clean-and-jerked until his back seemed about to snap. He liked seeing his head red in the mirror, straining. Twice he’d fallen down. Marcy’s shirt was soaked. In her free hand she had her breast pump, with her left breast mashed into it. She insisted on pumping at least twice a day, even though nothing much came out, and when it did the milk was blue or yellow. They had almost two dozen partially filled bottles in the fridge, which left little room for anything else. In the mirror on the backside of the closet door he could see an extra copy of Marcy’s face. “What are you doing in there?” he said. “Come on now and get out.” She shook. “I can’t. He told me. He said come in here and stay.” She looked at Paul twice, her and her copy, both now nearly bald. “Well, I said get out.” “He said it itches. He said thanks a lot.” She used her idea of what the baby’s voice would have been, had it lived long enough to speak. Juan had only made bubble noises, squished and cried. Since the accident, the wallpaper in the living room kept peeling, and there was the melon smell. At night they felt things move inside the mattress. They couldn’t keep ants from congregating in the hall. The other night on Wheel of Fortune, the guy was about to solve the puzzle when the channel blipped out—the strange humming along with the static made Paul feel hypnotized. The next morning he’d woken up to Marcy painting the bedroom, purple pigment dripping down her arms. She’d even painted his face. He couldn’t remember buying purple paint. Always in his head now, the color purple. Purple brain cells. Purple life. Marcy blamed any bad behavior on Juan. Juan told her to break all their nice heirloom dishes. He told her to pump the breast milk and knit the scarf and cut her hair and eat it. She did whatever she said the baby said. Paul had never heard the voice himself. They’d waited on a list for a year to adopt Juan. They wanted a Spanish baby with beautiful skin, someone young, who wouldn’t remember a time before them. They’d been told they’d never conceive their own child. Paul’s sperm count had been exterminated. At first Marcy had been hesitant about adoptingabout the whole idea in general, reallybut Paul wanted an heir to pass his name to, someone who’d keep them when they got too old. Too, he
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open. His skin was purple. They’d had him maybe three weeks. No amount of wrangling—kissing, wanting, squeezing, pumping his fragile chest—changed the fact. Nothing helped at all. Paul had found Marcy in the bathroom, wrapped up in the shower curtain, mascara puddled on her cheeks. He’d had to shake her to make her blink. He’d had to shake harder to dislodge an answer, but what came even then was babble. Now, weeks later, if he asked again what happened, she put the same look on her face. She spent most days curled in the brass crib going ga-ga. She drank rubbing alcohol and poked herself in the eyes. Sometimes, during brighter hours, she started talking about another chance, how she’d do right, she promised. The phantom Juan swore she could. She had it in her. She felt it in her thighs. Though the State, of course, had refused a new adoption, and they couldn’t make their own. So Marcy threatened to go out and find someone who could. He thought about it at all times, except when lifting. His muscles muted. He needed bigger ones. Usually he could smell the nosebleeds before they came. With Marcy following beside him, still talking in the child’s voice, her wrist now wrapped up and bulging in the scarf, Paul went into the kitchen and took the triple-gallon container of shake mix from the pantry. He went to the fridge and found no whole milk. Only Marcy’s pump juice, in the cold light gleaming. Breast milk, meant for building babies. Hormones. Enzymes. A mother’s fervor. It took six different servings to fill his mug. Marcy didn’t try to stop him. She watched him stir the powder in and drink the whole thing in one slug, his Adam’s apple bobbing, metronomic. She often called him Juan. Tonight he’d weigh 248. Tomorrow 250 on the nose. When he was finished, she followed him into the bathroom and watched him curl a barbell. She kept talking on and on and on. Her voice seemed to dissipate as he stood before the mirror, locking eyes with his reflection. His mass obscured the glass. If he tried hard enough, he thought, perhaps his face flesh could expand so big it’d cover over even those cruddy pupils. Those pupils Juan had or had not had. Also his ear holes. His mouth. His nostrils. No more input. Nothing. Never. He’d be one huge mass that kept on growing. He would grow to fill all air. He curled the barbell, again, again, again. When he lost track counting, he started over.
BLAKE BUTLER is the author of Scorch Atlas, a novel in stories about an apocalypse. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Fence, and others. He lives in Atlanta where he blogs at ��com.
POPPOP STAR PAINTBRUSH BRUSH STARTO TOPAINT
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While she’s widely known in Europe as a model, novelist, actress, media personality, singer—and is still chased by age-old rumors that she’s a transsexual—I had the chance to sit with Ms. Lear on a rainy Saturday afternoon in New York City to discuss her painting, as she
had showed a series of paintings at the Envoy Gallery just days before. We chatted about her life as a painter and a storyteller, and about her relationship with surrealist Salvador Dali. The interview took place in April 2006, but until a few weeks ago, I thought our recorded exchange had been lost. I was devastated: I wanted so badly to showcase Lear’s musings about fame, her stories about Dali, the glow of stardom that crackled around her mixed with a haze of longing to succeed as an artist. When the file was recovered—a miracle of tech—I raced to transcribe it. The highlights of our conversation (at least her half; I’ve cut my questions so it stands as a series of soliloquies) follow.
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� � �� “Van Gogh lived where I live, and he was locked into this lunatic asylum and was thought of as mad. Still, today, this establishment is open. I’m sort of the godmother of all the patients there. There they ask patients to paint, because painting is a therapy. And I go there all the time to see what they’re painting, and the paintings of these crazy people are unbelievable. Because
they’ve not been to art school. They don’t know that you can’t mix a red and blue. And what they paint is remarkable, it’s brilliant. I realized by following these people that painting to me is an absolute vital necessity. I need painting or I would probably take drugs like everyone else, or go crazy, have sex parties, be in showbiz full-time. To me, painting is the solution.”
“To me, yesterday is yesterday. I don’t own one of my records. It’s gone, that’s yesterday. I’m looking forward to tomorrow. What am I going to do, what am I going to paint, what am I going to sing, who am I going to meet? I’m very much looking forward. In France people criticize, ‘You sing, you paint, you’re an actress.…’ And I say, ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ And the response is, ‘You do everything on the surface.’ I said, ‘What about Jean Cocteau, he was directing movies, writing poetry’—and they say, ‘Jean Cocteau is a genius.’ Whoops, sorry! So he could do it because he was a genius, now I am not allowed to do it? I always like telling stories—everytime I wrote a song, I was trying to
tell a story. Then I realized using the medium of disco music was useless, since no one was listening. They would just dance, but not listen to the music. So I was frustrated, just like the Beatles’ songs, I thought every song should carry something. So I do the same thing with my painting. If I paint a landscape, it’s not just going to be some mountain and an olive tree. I would like to put something in it.”
“Dali said women have no talent, because painting is a masculine thing. The talent is in the bones. I told him, ‘You can’t say that, please.’ The talent is in in the thebones, bones,goes goes up up to to your your brain, brain, and and itit comes comes out out of of your your heart heart like like He said, ‘The talent is an Women can’t can’t do do that.’ that.’ I said, an orgasm orgasm onto onto the the canvas…poof! canvas…poof! Women ‘ W ‘Why?’ h y ? ’He said, ‘Name one woman painter.’ I said, ‘Come on, what about Mary Cassat, Frida Khalo?’ He said, ‘No, they paint women things, wishy-washy. Daisies. Flowers. Babies.’ And that made me think that me, as a woman painter, must avoid pretty paintings.” “When I was in art school, you have to learn all the rules, then Salvador Dali told me, ‘You’ve learned it, you have it somewhere deep down in your brain, now forget it. See everything with new eyes, and start fresh.’ And I think that was right. Then started my Dali teaching, which was 15 years. And obviously everything he told me was the Bible for me. Dali says this, Dali says that. Cezanne paints like shit, that there are only three painters in the world: Vermeer, Velázquez, Rembrandt. So I listened to this and I started to paint a la Dali. Really Dali-esque, very flat and pretty, and perspective landscapes, and beautiful sky. Then I thought, why am I painting
a la Dali? I’m not in the 30s or 40s, not a surrealist, I’m not friendly with Buñuel and Max Ernst, so there’s no reason. So, again, same thing: I cancelled everything I learned from Dali, and started fresh, and moved to Provence about 25 years ago. Then I thought, okay, when I was at art school, who was my favorite painter of them all? Well, it was Gauguin, it was Josè Bernal, Henri Rousseau, it was Van Gogh. So if those were my favorite painters, why the hell did I spend 15 years trying to paint like Salvador Dali? So, my approach to painting changed completely.”
A NOTE In the next few issues of Opium, we are paying homage to the groundbreaking witlit ezines of the past. They popped up online in the late Nineties and grew to gigantosaurus proportions in the early 2000s and then suddenly died off, leaving evolution to do its thing. In this issue, we recognize Sweet Fancy Moses.--Eds.
During its short but jocular life, Sweet Fancy Moses amused and enlightened thousands as the selfappointed “Journal of Wit.” Through the generosity of the good people of Opium, we now have the chance to relive a few of SFM’s greatest hits within these hallowed pages. The following selections are fine examples of what the late, great journal did best. Combining astute senses of pacing, language and pith, the writers represented here kept their brains on full throttle, and their tongues planted firmly in cheek. I remain proud of what we accomplished in those first halcyon days of our new century. May you cherish these writers and their work, as I do. Be well. Matt Herlihy Chicago, Illinois
OPIUM PAGE 55 PRESENTS: CONTAINS BAY RUM, INSECT POWDER, GLYCERIN, PAREGORIC, ALLEGORIC, OXYMORON ACID, MILK OF AMNESIA, SWEET TOIL, ARTENIC, AND TINCTURE OF GOD LIVER OIL.
MINUTEMAN
KA P O STEPHEN K A GREEN STORY BY
AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, THE WORLD’S FIRST WIT-LIT EZINES WERE TYPED BY FINGERS! POSTED “ONLINE” USING “HTML”! AND POWERED SOLELY BY THE NON-TOXIC RENEWABLE FUEL OF DESPERATION! SWEET FANCY MOSES
ESTIMATED READING TIME: 8:18
GOING, GOING, GREEN!
OVER A DOZEN OF THEM
were waiting for me. It was a classic trap, and any full-fledged superhero would’ve arrived ready for it. I, on the other hand, was a no-name crime-fighter trainee. Who would want to target me? I was two years into my residency, and although I did have a name, no one actually knew it. My costume just confused people: a skin-tight short-sleeved unitard with a don’t-tread-on-me snake across the chest paired with a tri-corner cap. Criminals had been known to laugh at the sight of me. It was worse after I told them my name. Minuteman. I thought the jokes about my sexual stamina would end after school, but even lowlife street scum cracked wise at my expense.
Case in point: I had followed this purse-snatcher around a corner and into a dead-end alley. Instead of recognizing this as a bad situation, I had smiled. “Nowhere to run to, Baby,” I said. During residency, we are encouraged to practice witty quips for two reasons: first, a superhero must be able to banter lightly in high-pressure situations; and, second, we might stumble across that perfect catchphrase that endears us to the public—something school kids can say while pretending to be us, something reporters can use in headline puns.
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of objects to herself by adjusting the strength, size, and shape of the vacuum. In the diner that first night, she floated the sugar over to our table. She could trap an air supply for herself, swim for long distances underwater, then come up with hair and costume perfectly dry. Same in the rain. She always looked good, which was important to being a successful superhero. A flexible, powerful talent, something for which she could keep discovering new uses, a good costume, a good name—she was a real superhero. And I fell in love with her.
WE DATED FOR THE BETTER PART of a year. And then my residency was coming to an end. Soon I’d start sending out letters to mayors, looking for a home city in which to open my own crime-fighting practice. Dee and I spent more and more time together, on the job and off. After one particularly rewarding night of crime-fighting—we’d busted up a big jewel heist—we lay in her bed sipping red wine, she wearing only her mask, I just my hat. “Minute?” “Yeah, Dee?” “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “We’ve been working well together, and I don’t want you to go.” I knew what she was going to say. I’d heard it ten seconds ago. “Let’s partner up,” she said. Suddenly it all became clear. We worked well together because my power wasn’t strong enough to disturb hers. We both knew who had the big guns in this family. She didn’t really mean partner
up. This wasn’t going to be a team of equals. I hadn’t seen it before because I hadn’t wanted to see it, but now it all made sense. “Finesse” talent meant lesser talent. All those quips I’d been practicing didn’t make me a bigger superhero; it made me comic relief. And short sleeves! How could I wear short sleeves? All the sidekicks had short sleeves—everyone knew that. So this was how it happens. In school, no one planned to become a sidekick. We all wondered where they came from. She pulled my lips toward hers with a vacuum kiss, literally taking my breath away. “Well,” she said, “do you think it’s a good idea?” I took a deep breath, looked into her eyes, and, with a vision of more than just ten seconds of my future swimming in my head, I said, “I do.”
STEPHEN KOPKA toils in obscurity in Chicago, writing mainly fiction. He also grows offspring and sells drinks. On the day Matt Herlihy called to see about reprinting this piece, Mr. Kopka was about to finish writing the last few paragraphs of a novel that had taken years to complete. He, like all writers, was thankful for the interruption.
FOLLOWING HIS MANNERS DIRECTIONS: INSTALL LOW-FLOW BEER FRIDGE A GREEN STORY BY IN TREEHOUSE, RUN ENERGY MODEL BEFORE CH WINGING IT ANYWAY, TAKE YOUR CAP OFF N C O Y NOR L AND GO SOLAR, DESIGN A NET-ZERO SHVITZ. OPIUM PAGE 59 PRESENTS:
AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, THE WORLD’S FIRST WIT-LIT EZINES WERE PUTTING WORDS ONE RIGHT AFTER THE OTHER! PEOPLE LAUGHED SO HARD THEY HATED THEIR JOBS EVEN MORE! THERE WAS NO WI-FI! SWEET FANCY MOSES
ESTIMATED READING TIME: 8:22
GO GREEN OR GO LIGHT GREEN!
MY NAME IS NOT IMPORTANT. You only need to know two things about me: that I exercise five days a week, and that I am a significant fan of the WB Network’s Roswell. Do I believe in aliens? Don’t be absurd. Do I believe that today’s teenagers can accomplish more than turning a toaster into an elaborate contraption for smoking marijuana cigarettes? No, sir. I do not. My reasons are simple: Katherine Heigl. Don’t know her, you say. Just an actress? Yes, I suppose—in the same way that John Cheever was “just” a social drinker. Miss Heigl is luminous: hair the color of Alsatian flax, skin finer than beach glass. I’ve written her a number of letters, but she is very busy, of course. Very busy.
The exercise room in my building has a table of community magazines, for those who wish to read as they work out. The rules state clearly that the magazines are not to leave the room. This is not a lending library. Then one morning, this February last, I came down to the room armed with some reading and my Mullen & Fitzmaurice towel. I was about to mount the stepper when I saw her, Miss Heigl, staring back at me from the magazine table! Her visage graced some trade magazine entitled FHM (pronounced “Eff-Hayche-Em”—to this day, I don’t know for what those initials stand).
OPIUM PAGE 66 PRESENTS:
DIARY OF A 1920S IRISH BOXER IN CHICAGO
ADVISORIES: BUILD A SCHOOL ON A BROWNFIELD SITE, ONLY CROSS SUSTAINABLE BRIDGES WHEN YOU COME TO THEM, RECYCLE YOUR SPOUSE, SPREAD A CHEERFUL LIE.
A GREEN STORY BY
AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, THE WORLD’S FIRST WIT-LIT EZINES WERE READ BY HUMAN BEINGS! THERE WAS NO SPIDERBOT SPAM BULLSHIT, ALTHOUGH READERS WERE STILL EAGER TO ENLARGE THEIR PENISES! SWEET FANCY MOSES
KEVIN LEAHY ESTIMATED READING TIME: 6:10
GREEN A NURSING HOME!
JANUARY 13, 1920
Oh, my, but the old brain-pan took a pummeling last night, and at the hands of that Italian monstrosity Vigo D’Angelo, no less. Fortunately for me, the local constabulary raided our illegal arena and scattered us all before the brute could render me too senseless to continue. Unfortunately, this means the damned Orangeman promoter shall pay me only half of my promised wages. Whilst I convalesce, Doc McGillicuddy has been kind enough to supply me with his newest medicinal concoction free of charge, the only provision being that I heartily “endorse” his mixture when speaking to my friends or coworkers at the slaughterhouse. A curious request, but one that I shall honor all the same.
FEBRUARY 16 A great happening at the stockyards today: myself and six other stout men were attending to our cattle-beating duties out back behind the main slaughterhouse when a rather ostentatious Ford happened to appear, dispensing three dapper gentlemen of Italian descent. They had come to offer us a free supply of freshly killed beef that they could not utilize at the moment and had to get rid of quickly. Spying a rare opportunity, I ceased my bovine pummeling and came over to inspect the cargo. What should I find in their automobile’s trunk but two hundred pounds of fresh, ground chuck! Though I was mildly troubled by the presence of a frayed necktie amidst the meat, the lead Italian assured me that it was merely a decorative binding for the
PRETTY DAMN GOOD SIDE EFFECTS: GOING GREEN MAY CAUSE DREAM ANALYSIS JARGON MOUTH, RIGHTEOUS SCOWL, A GREEN LEY AL GOREDOM, NON SEQUITUR ADDICTION, STORY BY BRIA W N CR O & USING NOUNS AS VERBS. OPIUM PAGE 69 PRESENTS:
SWEET FANCY MOSES
AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, THE WORLD’S FIRST WIT-LIT EZINES WERE NOT EVEN THINKING ABOUT PUBLISHING PRINT JOURNALS! THERE WERE NO AFFORDABLE DIGITAL PRESSES! NO ONE HAD FUTURES!
ESTIMATED READING TIME: 3:46
GREEN HIGHLIGHTERS!
DREAM
“I’m having dinner at an upscale French restaurant with my girlfriend when I realize that I can only speak in incomprehensible gibberish. My girlfriend tries her best to understand me, but I am unable to pronounce even the simplest words. She grows increasingly frustrated with my inability to speak, and eventually storms out of the restaurant in disgust.” ANALYSIS The dreamer doesn’t like French food.
DREAM “I am in my childhood home standing in front of the door to my bedroom, which is closed. I reach out to pull the door open, but someone inside the bedroom is holding it shut. I pull harder and harder, but the person is too strong,
almost inhumanly so. After struggling with the door for many moments, I slump to the floor and catch my breath. ‘Why won’t you let me in?’ I whisper into the door. A voice from inside the room answers, ‘Because you are not ready.’ I immediately recognize the other voice as my own.” ANALYSIS The dreamer is most likely troubled by pressures at work—an upcoming financial report for stockholders, perhaps. The dreamer’s inability to open the door signifies his real-life failure to make third-quarter earnings reflect a significant growth to stockholder market shares. His ass is really on the line this time.
N CONTEST R EE BY G A O PIUM, PAGE 72
BOOKMARKS! TH
ESTIMATED READING TIME: 5:38
E SE O E HIC ROCK. PIU STO N I RIES M MAG A Z ETAMORP WERE M H
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elcome to another of Opium’s famous, if not infamous, contests. The challenge for contestants was to write a short story of 250 words or less that would fit on a bookmark. Judge Aimee Bender awarded first place (and $1,000!) to Rachel Khong for her story, “Two Eggs, Any Style”; first runner up to Lisa K. Buchanan for “Hiss”; and second runner up to Nina MacLaughlin for “What Follows Us.” We also printed the stories of seven more finalists. Those handy with a pair of scissors, razor blade, or paper cutter will find it a snap to snip out the bookmarks of their choice. Those who wish to collect all issues of Opium in pristine condition will do no such thing. That’s why we printed the winning story on a separate actual bookmark. It should be tucked snugly within these pages. If it’s not, your roommate took it, guaranteed. AIMEE BENDER is the author of Willful Creatures, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. See her story, “A State of Variance,” on page 10 of this magazine.
FIRST PLACE WINNER!
1ST RUNNER UP!
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Two Eggs, Any Style
H
ow she began seeing her sixteenyear-old son’s biology teacher was at the high school’s open house, by posing questions prompted by a poster on his wall: why flightless birds have wings; why ancient whales had small hind feet; why blind mole rats have tiny eyes, covered completely by a layer of skin. I had appendicitis when I was eight, she said. A tonsillectomy when I was seventeen. My wisdom teeth were taken from me at age nineteen and, sometimes, I feel as though I miss them. Goosebumps, he said, catching sight of her arm. A vestigial response to stress, meant to raise the hair of our evolutionary brothers. What makes you think I’m nervous? she said, and he shrugged. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just—we used to have fur. This was the same day her son announced that he would be playing bass in a band called Two Eggs, Any Style. Over dinner at her place, the biology teacher thought it appropriate to return to that first topic of conversation. There were times, he explained, when he regretted his lack of cloven feet. Deer play tag with their hooves, and cows have a special relationship with the grass: their hooves spread the seed. She remembered how, once, she’d caught her ex-husband weeping, having heard news of conjoined twins who did not survive their surgery. In the basement, the band was practicing. Somebody sang about misplacing your glasses and feeling for them—the loneliness. Someone else shook an egg.
RACHEL KHONG is a writer living in San Francisco. She is also an amateur bread baker and passionate pickler. Questions about fermentation? Want to talk yeast? Email: rachel.khong@gmail.com.
Hiss �
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ear Eve: Got your note. Yes, “heroine” is the preferred moniker. (Thanks for asking.) And I do remember Adam—always had to be on top during sex, bossy about the garden (pick this, peel that) and hopelessly xenophobic—but he is just one of many reasons you ought to eat from that tree you mentioned. Like some of your more tedious descendants, the man is bound to interpret the rib story literally and adopt it as a pointed weapon; ruthless vegetarians will do same regarding “every green herb for meat,” and the fig-leaf fetishists will be the most tyrannical of all. If you don’t eat from the tree in the middle of the garden, Eve, nobody will have their eyes sufficiently opened to read the other creation story, much less the verses about omnivorism and hot sex in the king’s bed. Further, eating that particular fruit will both liberate humanity from the illusion of immortality and make you immortal, as in remembered forever for something even more charming than having your name stamped on floral-patterned cigarettes. (Twentieth Century, I’m afraid.) Lastly, hate to push, but we of infinity are counting on you to advance the human neocortex; that is, to sink your archetypal incisors into that crisp, luscious fruit and uphold curiosity, which, according to my friend Pandora, is the enduring hope of the species. Pop down sometime for Pomegranate Lamb Kabobs? Bet you didn’t know you could.—Lilith
LISA K. BUCHANAN’s work has appeared in The Missouri Review, MidAmerican Review, Natural Bridge and Quick Fiction. She lives in San Francisco. www..com
THE WELLSPRING OF GREEN AWE VI go green! guidebook of restraint & responsibility
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oney liberates human tribes from prejudice and religious squabbling. By contract, two parties agree to the value of a coin, and they agree to more. They agree that within this object, this coin, there inheres no spiritual residue. God need not be party to this transaction, they agree. They may exchange value between them in a purely social sphere, outside the church fence and the temple wall. Let there be commerce. And money makes it so. This is not a light invention, this agreement to transact value without spirit. It liberates the exchange of value from intractable battles of faith. You may exchange a coin for a boot, and you need not jeopardize a faith in the process. This is a hallmark of civilization. This hallmark, by liberating
people from the pharoah of blind prejudice to wander in the desert of money, has in disadvantage severed a tie to the spiritual basis of respect for the created world. We transact without awe for nature, without reverence for beasts, without humility before the hurricane gathering force at sea. We transact in a hurry, our thoughts in our heads as cold and lifeless as lunar winds. The moon is the natural-history museum of the universe. Our brains are the natural-history museum of humanity. Affinities like love and gravity move the tides of men and matter. And so there rises today a green reminder, a green reproach, a green zealotry. And can you not appreciate this rise, this upflowing of neglected spirit, this flowering, spawning, and burgeoning green coming?•
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week before Christmas, my daughter Jenny and I were hurrying over a dark footpath at the southern end of Central Park. We could already hear the music from Wollman Rink, and Jenny raised her voice at me. “I told you we were going to be late.” “It’s not even seven o’clock yet,” I told her. “It was supposed to start at six!” she yelled. She carried a gift box under her right arm, and she shifted it to her left.
� � �� “I’m sure you haven’t missed anything. No one ever shows up on time to these things.” We came out of the trees and stopped suddenly once we topped the hill above the skating rink. I had expected something lavish, even ostentatious, but the scene before us was beyond anything I would have dared imagine. Beneath thousands of pink balloons and flashing lights, a hundred or so twelve-year-old girls skated en masse over cotton-candy-colored ice. They shared the rink with eight gigantic, elaborately carved ice sculptures, and weaving in between them all––at break-neck speed—were half a dozen hired professionals leaping and spinning around each other, wearing feathery costumes and African masks, throwing fiery batons high into the air and catching them again. From where we stood, it didn’t look like a birthday party, or even a circus––it looked like a Matthew Barney film. It had the feel of ritual pageantry, with everyone bent to the performance of their own dramatic and well rehearsed roles. Even Jenny and I had our parts to play: as the ingénue and the gape-mouthed yokel, we crossed the rest of the distance in silence. At the entrance to the rink, two hulking bouncers in goose-down jackets asked for Jenny’s invitation. After she handed it to them, they held it under a blue light to establish authenticity, then waved us inside, beneath a cavernous arch of balloons and a large banner advertising Missy Silver’s 13th Birthday Party. Just inside on the right was the single ice sculpture not standing on the rink: a statue of Missy’s father sitting high on a horse. Directly next to it was a stand of bleachers, and I started for them. “I’ll be over here,” I told Jenny. “Just come and get me when you’re ready to go.” “You’re not going to say hi to Mr. Silver?” “No.” “Want me to tell him you’re here?” “Please don’t,” I said. “Have fun.” And with that she sprinted to add her present to a precarious mountain of gifts, and joined the rest of the girls tying on ice skates and stuffing their mouths with the cakes and candies being carried around by a team of waiters in dinner jackets. Missy Silver’s father was Charles Silver, the businessman and billionaire who was, at the time, three weeks from standing before a grand jury for fraud, insider trading, tax evasion, and being an all-around son of a bitch. And if Jenny, however naively, thought I might want to rub elbows with the guy, it was only because, long before she’d ever met Missy (at Juilliard’s junior theater camp, which Jenny got into for free because I occasionally work there), I used to joke about how Mr. Silver and I had gone to school together. I even claimed to have been friends with him at one time. And though this wasn’t remotely true, I did spend a long weekend with him once at his parents’ ski lodge in Vail. It was my first real taste of privilege, and I was only afforded the opportunity because a girl I was dating happened to be roommates with a girl Charles Silver was dating. He and I got along pretty well, but when my date broke up with me, I never saw him again—except on TV, of course, and in
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oleskine. You might want to scribble its name down somewhere—a slip of paper, the back of your hand—because it’s one of those words people can’t seem to recall, its letters slowly coming apart and fading, like something written in sand. It sits on the shore of Loch Ness. It has a slate roof and stucco walls. The windows, during the day, appear as black as the recesses of a cave. There is a stonework pentagram in the foyer. Everyone who enters must step across it. Some have tried to cover it up with rugs, but the design eventually creeps its way through the fibers, like blood through snow. The house was built by Aleister Crowley. If you listen to a lot of Ozzy Osborne or drink goat blood when the moon is full, maybe you’ve heard of him. He was a poet, a novelist, a mountaineer, an artist, a black magician, a Satanist, the self-proclaimed Wickedest Man in the World.
� � ��� It was the Spring of 2003, while backpacking through Scotland, that I decided to visit Boleskine House. And this is what happened, more or less. The Weary Traveler is a dark-wooded pub in Glencoe. Reading the sign, I figured this was the place. I was wet from the rain and sore from sleeping on cardboardthin hostel mattresses and lonely after two weeks on the road. Inside I could hear the rain bang against the roof and I could smell the peat burning in the fireplace. The pub was empty, except for the bartender, a thin old man with gray mutton-chop sideburns. He walked with a pronounced limp. I imagined his hip a piece of rotten wood. Before I could sling off my pack and take a stool at the bar, he had drawn a Guinness. “A blonde,” he said, setting the pint on a napkin, “in a long black skirt.” I thanked him and drank a long drink, the coldness of the beer bringing warmth to my chest. A TV hung behind the bar. In companionable silence we watched a football match between England and France—“Pussy versus Pussy,” as he referred to it—and when the scoreless game cut to commercial, I said, trying to fill the air between us, “I imagine you see a lot, from behind this counter?” “A lot and a little.” He smiled in a way that brought out every wrinkle in his face. “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?” He gave me a long searching look, drew a pint, and after taking a sip and wiping the foam from his upper lip, told me a story. One afternoon, maybe ten years ago, the McGregor brothers brought to The Weary Traveler a dead body. They had unearthed it with their backhoe. “They farm a peat bog, you see. And down there in the damp, they found the corpse.” Its clothes had rotted off, along with its ears and nose and lips and genitals, but the rest of it remained, its skin clinging to its bones like a damp gray parchment. They thought it a woman, from the long black hairs hanging off its skull, but really, it was impossible to tell. Its body was hunched over, like a question mark. The bartender paused then, pinching his lips together as if around a sour taste. It wasn’t the sort of expression you would take on when telling a joke. I didn’t doubt what he told me, not for a second, but you weren’t there. So the best I can do is this: a few weeks ago, in a peat bog north of Dublin, a backhoe peeled back the earth and discovered a book of psalms dated to the year 800. Look it up, if you don’t believe me. This stuff happens, in other words. The McGregor brothers drew a chair and sat the corpse down in it and everyone gathered around and listened to them tell their story. They pointed out where the backhoe had scraped it—along its spine—exposing the buttons of vertebrae. “Let me tell you, it stunk,” the bartender said. “Like a cellar. Worms and mold and earth.” He thought about asking the McGregors to take the corpse elsewhere, but then people, dozens of them, started pushing through the door, eager to see, and before long it was a big party.
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mélie Prouveaux, who single-handedly turned the literary world on its head with her abstract novels that jettisoned all narrative conventions, has died. She was 39. Born Gladys Mae Pawtuckett in Charlotte, North Carolina, Prouveaux would often describe her childhood as “wretched,” “a crash course in bourgeois subjugation,” and “always involving food doused in syrup.” In a memoir written for a college English course, titled “The Rape of Gladys Mae Pawtuckett: Early Years of a Genius,” Prouveaux stated that, “My parents did everything they could to suffocate me, to deliver unto me the early death they had already succumbed to with their ignorance and conformity.”
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Responding to these charges in an interview with Vanity Fair, Prouveaux’s father—William “Ruffles” Pawtuckett—responded by saying, “She’s still ticked off about that damn game of Scrabble.” He added, “I tried to use ‘ain’t,’ and she went ballistic, screaming, ‘Ain’t ain’t in the dictionary, you hayseed!’ What’s the big deal? It’s only four measly points; I had no good letters. Hell, I didn’t even get a double-word score. Christ, it was just a game.” Prouveaux fired back at her father’s comments in a London Times interview: “His entire, miserable life has been ‘just a game.’” The future literary star was a loner in high school. Schoolmates at E.E. Waddell High School recalled her being “aloof,” “distant,” and “strange in that way where she would just stare at people and write stuff in a journal all day, like Sylvia Plath at a speed-dating seminar.” Despite being a social outcast, Pawtuckett showed promise as a writer by being the first reporter on the Waddell Spirit to break the woodshop-sprayroom-inhalant scandal, which resulted in the expulsion of several students and James “Woody” Reiflin, the teacher in charge. This helped Pawtuckett win a full scholarship to New York University where she enrolled in the Misanthropy program with a double minor in English and Psychology. At NYU, Pawtuckett met her future husband, Grant Lapham. Lapham, a child of a blue-blood Connecticut family who spent his afternoons working on a rock opera based on the life of Strom Thurmond titled “The Blacks and the Blues,” introduced Pawtuckett to modern art by repeatedly making her watch sex scenes from Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys. But it was in the world of abstract painting that Pawtuckett found her muse. With the museums and galleries of New York City as her cathedrals, Pawtuckett became an apostle for abstract art. Over time, she would start to apply the tenets of avant-garde painting to her own writing. In the winter of 1998, while buying a latte at Starbucks, Pawtuckett became embroiled in an argument over the works of Duchamp. For the record, Pawtuckett started the argument with herself and then forced it upon several other people. In the midst of the debate, she declared, “I’ve had it with socalled literature. Literature is dead!” The cashier to whom she had directed her comments responded, “Here is your caffé latte. Would you like to buy our new Sonic Youth compilation CD?” Pawtuckett, undeterred by the lack of interest from an underpaid Starbucks employee, put her nose to the grindstone, experimenting with various forms designed solely to “destroy literature and teach everyone at the Burritoville Literary Café on �st Avenue a lesson!” She cranked out a thousand words per week, neglecting her studies altogether, and eventually dropped
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he first one got in through my ear. I thought maybe it was a bug, one of those carpenter ants that sneak in our bathroom window and creep across the walls into every room in the condo. I hate those bastards. Whatever it was tickled, so I jerked my head and clamped a hand over the ear so hard it hurt. “What was that?” my wife, Mona, mumbled. She had her back to me like she always does. “I think something crawled in my ear.”
�p�e��o� a green poem by
ROBIN BETH SCHAER estimated reading time: 28 seconds opium, p. 131 the farthest distance on the earth’s orbit from the sun. that’s the aphelion. the closest oasis of eco-love to your elliptical trainer. that’s this poem.
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eave your country and all its weather behind; forget the sun, the tent of sky, the wind in vast cotillions. Choose me instead, in this dim place under a shelter of speculation and tin. Here we speak the argot of twins and I know there are creatures only you see and answers I am not ashamed of. Cast beyond the planets, even Pluto has a moon. They spin with locked tides, always faced together, married to darkness; so stay, my consort, my lovely disturbance.
ROBIN BETH SCHAER lives in NYC, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Spinning Jenny, Barrow Street and others. Recordings of her poems are featured on From the Fishouse. Kindly say hello: robinbeth@gmail.com.
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sit on the floor at Pop’s feet. He smokes Half and Half in a brown pipe, pours martini from a silver shaker into his onion-pickled glass, levers his recliner until his head nearly touches the piano. Marjorie sits on the couch, under the woolen afghan, which I call an African. It looks like Africa should—colors in crocheted squares, loud as drum music. Marjorie laughs at my misnomer, offers me a peanut from a tiny blue dish. She nurses a nightcap, brown and icy, on a pearly coaster by her wrist. A nightcap. Makes me think of a ruffled hat, but she isn’t wearing one. We usually watch Lawrence Welk. Marjorie gets a look sometimes when the couples dance. Like maybe she has danced like
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pressed my head deeper into the mattress. Just a little more, I thought.
I winced. It was starting to hurt. I’ll get there, I gasped in a whisper. I just have to push harder. So I pushed, and worried that my skull might crack. I stopped to breathe, but could barely inhale: my chest was pressed so deeply into the mattress, I could feel its coils interlock with my ribcage. A rising sweat formed a sticky film on my limbs, and trickled over my face. I tried to use my fingers to inch farther, but their sorry, slight lengths offered no thrust to my crushed, nearly immobile body. I thought about my hamster, Fluffy. How he appeared wide, but really could get as flat as a file. A few times I’d experimented on him using my hand. I’d press down on the length of his body, and instantly he’d start squirming from under my palm, his black eyes bulging out from his milk-pod fur. And then he’d skillfully collapse his skeleton … and get away. Okay, I thought, Go. Force just a little more. I was nervous and could feel my lungs surging for more oxygen, but confined as they were, they got only scant, clipped sips of air. My dad walked by the bedroom, and stopped. It was Saturday afternoon, and the sun lit the room white. I viewed him with one, compressed, halfopen eye. My dad observed my body squeezed between the bunk bed’s top safety-rail and the mattress. He asked me: “Trying to beat the system?”
CHESLEY HICKS lives in Manhattan and has, for over a decade, written for national and Web publications on music, civil rights, eco issues, culture, and humanity. She’s recently turned toward fiction and travel writing, and just finished a memoir/travel story tentatively titled It Was Not a Dream.
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n the afternoon Coach Fontaine gave the speech for which he’d be remembered, the Wolverines stood in formation beside our bus outside the high school stadium, already running late for the last soccer game of the season. Still, we waited under the Florida sun, sweat dripping from our buzzcuts and stinging our eyes, as in front of us Coach blew his whistle, crossed his arms over his chest, and tipped his chin high. “At ease, Gentlemen,” he said. “There’s something I want, I need, to say.” The long silence that followed seemed charged because Coach never started his speeches this way. Overhead, the sky was a serene spring blue, almost perfect except for the crisscrossed contrails of jets. Some of the Wolverines noticed a shaving nick above Coach’s jawline. Others noted one of his sneaker tongues hanging out askew, as if razzing us. And, an hour earlier, all of us had seen Coach Fontaine drink a full pitcher of beer over lunch at the nearby Pizza Hut, then lurch to the back of the restaurant, where he spent
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