Oyster Kiln Literary Magazine by Natalie Catasus

Oyster Kiln Volume 1 | Winter 2010

Send any comments, questions, criticisms, or praise to: oysterkiln@ gmail.com

General Editor: Natalie Catasús Cover Art: Nick Klein Cover Design: Natalie Catasús Layout Design: Elizabeth Bejarano and Natalie Catasús Feel free to scan and redistribute Oyster Kiln in as many places as you like. Please just keep the artists’ names attached to their work!

Containing and Releasing: 6

soft David Bennett

Application for a spot in a magazine Leo Neufeld

Untitled Natalie CatasĂşs

Poem 5 Sara Blazej

Ink Drawing Number Five Sara Blazej

organs David Bennett

Sasquatch David Belew

Ode to Bob Horn: A Modern Day Romantic Elizabeth Bejarano

I will only have you internal, reverberating inside. Jose Villar

Cemetery Ceremony (Menswear Illustrations) Craig Chaplin Tyler

18 Basquiat! Sara Blazej 19 Paste David Belew 22 The Rift Natalie Catasús 24

Firing Up the Oyster Kiln Alexandra Primiani

28 Christmas Lights Leo Neufeld 29 Dumpsky Sara Blazej 30 Untitled Raphael França 32 morning snapshots of “becoming” Jose Villar 34 Forgetful coast on the forgotten smoke: beach after the storm. David Belew 35 Hat Sketches Natalie Catasús

36 Untitled (from untitled series) Sara Blazej 37 Un titled Leo Neufeld 38 Sirens Natalie Catasús 40 No Love in Bomb Shelters David Belew 41 hanging out Sara Blazej 42 SUPREMEEMPERORPUPPY David Belew 43 untitled David Bennett 44 Poem # 2 Sara Blazej 45 Yes Leo Neufeld 49 Contributors’ Notes / Essential Facts

soft yellow mountainheaths, we dig sooty nails in and spread them out thin. a lattice of webbed roots voids from the earth at our heels. “you have a face like a giant” i say but my intention isn’t to monumentalize you, finding the little tresses in your skull pretty like i am inclined to. “you have a face like six faces stacked on each other” you say and for a minute i am deranged but start to realize it’s true. “you have a face like a dead dog’s heartbeat” i say and am immediately outside myself. open double-doors rattle in the breeze. your huge face sits like the sun way in the distance. we are digging harder and harder. my voice is more strained than yours. i am dour under any felt inferiority. our silhouettes against the sun as it sets, working our sick shoulders, making little pocks in the soil. something might grow here

but we will be too tired to collect it. *** grotesque produce, soft and stranded in a stone bowl on the hard marble. everything in this room is slate gray. the sunlight coming through the window turns into silt and starts to pool in the corners. your sound is a lilting bull, is a humming needle. the edges blur and vibrate. your voice makes curves in my wax brain. i am like a diamond but shapeless and impossible to see. our bodies expanding outwards makes it impossible to concentrate. this space is all i have. everything in this room must stay. when you rearrange a portrait i almost feel the light go out. the cars croak engine slurs when they saunter past. i put on a soft record, dab a washcloth in warm water. everything will be peeled and sweet before long. ***

Application for a spot in a magazine I masturbated 14 times today. So can I please be in the magazine? It was a sonnet of self-pleasure, an archive of heartbeats & a fluttering mess. Half the orgasms were glorious; revelatory. 3 felt like nothing. The other four I was either thinking about childhood & its weird fragments, or vast, ghostly expanses of water: Freedom. So can I be in the magazine? â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;cause I still donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to deal with deaths. (I hope itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s okay that I am inept at doing small-talk) because the world once felt like something I could move. My throat makes odd noises sometimes; my grandfather paints fading things around his house.

9 Untitled It started with sleeping on top of each other like dirty clothes. Limbs tangled, we’d wake not knowing which dreams were whose. Through your chest was the only way I wanted to hear your voice. I would cup its sound with my ear and eavesdrop on your insides, what your rushing blood hissed, what your lungs whispered. Later, I would push my head-top into your chest and moan, “I can’t get close enough to you. I want to live inside you till I don’t have a face.” And then I cried to you that I don’t want to be just chemicals. I want to be more. You understood this and we made a deal that I could push my face into your belly until I couldn’t breathe anymore, and when things cut to black you’d pull me out and kiss my hot cheeks and say, “You are here, you are here. Like my new chair that smells like my grandpa’s old Buick, you are here.” Then we lied down and kissed each other’s ankles in prayer for a continuation of current events.

Poem 5 I count the tiles from the bath to the top. Eight. Each as big as a head, Eight heads. I turn over my bottle of shampoo, and wait for the ½ centimeter of blue To drip (like a lady’s wine legs). Now here is something to play with. The blue slowly slides from the top to the bottom, but really from the bottom to the top. Because gravity doesn’t care which part of a bottle has a lid and is called, “Top”. To Gravity, what’s up is up and down is down. With gravity, you can have eight heads and they’ll all hit the floor At the same time.

Ink Drawing Number Five

organs

13 Sasquatch Lord of the forest realm, metaphysical ape, astral chimp perhaps? Bring me to your mystical glade and caress me with your rough fingertips: coo into my ear. I feel so weak in your arms, You know what they say about big feet? ....... itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true. I lose myself in your musk.

Ode to Bob Horn: A Modern Day Romantic Tomcat pumps snap at two-toned rats in jest, Swing up salmon chiffon! Take your peek At creamy thighs in motion, hard at play. Make way for knees that left their bones at home, They’ll stomp, they’ll raise the glitter off the ground. A surge runs through the animal! A neon current spurs the sea! They beg to be infected by the song That raises stiffened limbs from earthly tombs, That galvanizes nerves left for decay, That calls to times made happier with years, And charges through the brain at blinding speeds. The next number commands the heart, A doo-wop anthem for baby… They are deaf To the coup (coo, coo, coo) That these chords Will strike (sha, la, la) But steadily it’s climbing in their throats – Their Thirsty Throats

Like lions after slumber stirring fast, They come to know a power in their jaws. It’s a sensation That won’t be shaken Till they understand the vagrant when he cries: “Ye are many – they are few!”

I will only have you internal, reverberating inside. kissless, you are like the days that hang sublimely from sugar-sun strands no longer tied to my fingers but clouds pristine in the timid distance of parted-lip constellations. kissless, the pages are unwritten on the turning of your cheek on the absence of your tongue on the panic that ensued as the curtains fell and the stage smoldered on your white-marble ensemble. kissless, your name bestowed remains untouched and unforgiven, unbroken. not mine, kissless but yours yours yours until I whisper: I am not deserving and, assumptions in excess, retire choosing to possess you from the cavernous authority of these miles.

Cemetery Ceremony (Menswear Illustrations)

Basquiat!

19 Paste Keep my eyes on the paper but every few seconds.... I don’t believe in Carpenters. Verbal coarse through me, my useless old coat and remind me. But I just end up soaked. Suppression of the tree I leaned against I forgot about the buoyant feet and all. OR I stand. The few people who scurried about, running from that poison oak. Vocalizations want to join them. The freeze I was feeling to go about it. Watch out, the speed of light everything else begins. I didn’t want to go in the muddy cavity, worms and laced technology. Vapor lazily hovered about my open lips. Roots trying to pierce soles, it’s planet. “Hi.” “There’s no water here.” “You’re not wearing a jacket or anything,” Tony was always concerned. He continued. Trevor found himself standing. The White Goddess was wearing a fleece in-liner. A speck of snow somehow fell down my shoulders, melting in the presence of billions. Tony was still talking. I caught, “It’s crater, space or not.” “I know what you mean, story of my life.” Beings created a number of changes for radiation.

Tony took on a strange expression, like took small amounts from the edge. Frost from my watch face, it was 12:49. Increased reproductive success. My elbows groaned as I shifted them about. Stars in the early diet of pack hunters. Looked like stars whizzing by me. Like central nervous system again experience, but the sky was dirty white reinforced. Like soaring through the cosmos. I was Edenic partnership society. The mix with fresh wet ink and lost continues. Density. I felt a sickening turn in my gut, or maybe my knees. When I finally did make the effects of a crude alcohol. So what begins was fixed onto the tree, seamlessly fused into the bark. Spread thinner and look at the consequences. It seemed perfectly natural. The steady tile. It increases a false sense to quicken like I was breathing out smoke. I was trapped. From that comes the white sky. I did what was logical; I brandished my surplus/city building and hacked at the thick black strap. To my surprise I suddenly felt the so-called proto-civilization. Own blood coursing down the plastic handle. Only one-hundredth pen across paper. Couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find or feel the cut. Problems to any advantages gave way and I was free. I found myself alone in a nearby bathroom one hundred million. But the faucet I touched and the water running through the percolation of spores. I finally discovered my accidental incision; I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know it might take millions from me from an opening so small. It was already closing up to a desert or across an ocean.

The route home contains no surprises. Every nuance of every curve is ingrained into compounds that part of an involuntary twitch. And the car miraculously moves in the right direction. My brain for the most part elsewhere, phenomena become possible. One of those poured through my open windows. No streets of saliva eighteen inches across. Everything feels right in rare times when the ether descends from the sky. I have been kneeling. After clashing down, breathe in as much as possible. Ash. Ask people nearby. Your chest and the limitations of matter seduced phenomenon. I will sound very black rubber after speech has abandoned my body. So many years when I open my mouth sloshing. My hands. Ice cry so many years when I open my mouth. Take a fist. I sat with a book open, powerless. Open to the elements, set up more than one hundred million years things their shine transformation. Canines grow and grow that the percolation of spores be pathetic in a background of eternal sunset. Might take millions of years to effortlessly cut flowers, everyone believes a year a desert or across an ocean. Amazed at good measure, otherwise itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a hoax this: that it is an extraterrestrial fur and skin. What special effects absorb the deep ultraviolet end. Black rubber psyche. None, when I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even know. Organic substances become a burden. Perhaps I could remain powerless. He through a distorter.

The Rift We didn’t know how to use words anymore, and it was becoming difficult to remember if we ever did. There used to be a system of hand taps and touches in the rift, strings running across it. We tightrope walked and talked to each other over it. Sometimes we slipped, but there were always dozens of strings to grab onto, ankles to hold and arms to shimmy up on. The sea below threatened to catch us, but it hadn’t come to that yet. If you walk a path long enough, it starts to hold the impressions of your feet. The same was true of these ropes. They got rubbed raw, thinned and thinned until there was nothing left. Just loose thread, strands of lost hair twined together, becoming dust. The ropes carried the words. Language rode them, flickered in the taps and touches; the contact of feet to string and hand to hand. It was a beautiful system. The closest men had come to spider webs, real spider webs. Not in its trapping qualities, but more in the way it was woven from the most delicate products of bodies. The feet and hands pulled it together bridging the ridge and drawing lines between chests and hips where words couldn’t fill. It was, in a word, a home: something to return to. *** The ropes were snapping. One here, and a few days later another might go. Slowly, slowly, and when you have a few dozen ropes, you don’t notice when a couple wear down. That’s how it happens.

And, oh, there was dancing! Ballads slow and pained between ecstatic interjections from the vocal cords and from the body. The tension still taut enough to hold them up. But everything decomposes, some things faster than others. Hair falls out every day and we’re constantly shedding skin in the body’s panicked attempt to get at something new. So one day the ropes were all about broken and the sea below was calling and it was near too much for everyone on both sides. We said, hey, what can we do? Dive in, just gotta dive in. And so we dove and rolled over each other and bounced between the rocks on the way down. It hurt a lot, but any tumble is going to be a little rough, and at least you’re getting somewhere. Then we hit the sea. Hard. The light was shimmying down from the sky through the rift, the sea bottom was black, and the rocks were sharp, but after a minute we looked around and said, hey, look at that, we’re alive. We didn’t die at all, not even a little bit. Just a trapeze act, and yeah, we slipped but here we are and in the soft sea. Yeah the ropes are gone and maybe we’ll never make it to land again, but you know what? That’s okay, because I really do think it’s much nicer here and maybe with some seaweed and some glue and time, I could fix this up into a real nice home for myself. You can stay if you want, though I understand if you like it better up there. But me, I’m alright.

Firing Up the Oyster Kiln: An Article by Alexandra Primiani Winter break in Miami is different for everyone. There is one age group, more so than any other group, that anxiously waits for winter break to start. Though Miamians for most of their lives, this group flies the nest during college. They travel to cities throughout the country, hoping they’ve arrived at the right time, searching for that spark of a new environment to send anyone’s life in a new direction. Yet, only a few months later a strange feeling grows in the pit of the stomach. A mixture of anxiety, slight frustration and growing annoyance propels students through finals week. It’s early December and the thought of shedding layers of clothes for a month is enticement enough to return to their home. Returning to Miami during winter is heavenly. The weather is inviting, the food is comforting, even the traffic can be endearing. Yet, while most students find their time is better spent on the beach or in the pool, some find the time off as an outlet to create, come together and produce. Natalie Catasús, a junior at New College in Sarasota, Florida took this winter break as an opportunity to produce a literary zine with her closest friends. “I had these dreams about starting a writers and artists community, networking with my friends who do creative work in various fields, but the thought was that there’s no sense in just dreaming about things when there are ways to get them started immediately,” says Natalie.

Natalie opened her home and held workshops, where friends shared and critiqued each other’s works. The group, called the Students of the Sweet English Tongue, also kept a blog for all members to exchange and develop ideas. The atmosphere was low-key, those who had work to share would prepare mimosas as the others discussed the individual’s writing. Poems, articles, photographs and drawings were all studied closely and all input was discussed among the group. “The workshops have been incredibly productive for me. I hadn’t worked with any of these people before . . . so it was really a shot in the dark as to whether we’d work well together. It’s turned out that everybody has given extremely perceptive criticism, and everyone seems to have something different to bring to the table,” explains Natalie, who has submitted various poems of her own. “... The criticism I got from these people improved my pieces incredibly. They attended to very specific issues I was having and offered suggestions on how to change things. All very constructive. Now I know that these are people I can work with on these things in the future, and I think that my dream of a writing community is really going to come out of this little workshop.” Elizabeth Bejarano is a junior Creative Writing major from University of Central Florida and a contributor to the magazine. There weren’t many workshops during the small break from school, but Elizabeth gained more than just constructive criticism. “I was able to experience [the workshops] in the company of good friends! ... No one was afraid, and for the very few

workshops we were able to do, we achieved much,” says Elizabeth. “Plus, there were always, always mimosas.” The zine, named Oyster Kiln, thematizes the contributors’ emotions, ideas and concerns that come with being a young adult. “Everyone is trying to get at something, but not quite making it. A lot of miscommunication and difficulty with language,” says Natalie, who, along with Elizabeth, chose this name to represent everyone’s desire for expression. “They turn to the body, to the earth, to the tangible in order to have something real where nothing but the abstract can be found. There’s a lot of digging. The oyster is these things. Close to the earth, tough and made of bone substance. But there’s something inside worth getting at. Something that makes the digging and the prying worthwhile... The kiln points to production. It’s reverting back to basic artisan techniques in order to get to something new. People across time are always trying to answer the same questions.... There’s this tradition that we’re always working within and against. The kiln brings things back to the hands, back to the fire.” Another New College junior has joined forces with Natalie in producing the Oyster Kiln. David Belew, a Literature and Art major, has contributed several pieces that he describes as “avantgarde as shit,” and hopes that the zine will be a success. Belew joined forces with Natalie because of their close friendship and their remarkable resemblance to an 80s movie icon.

“I hope the magazine takes off and we all become literary superstars like the bratpack only less talented. Were this to become reality Natalie and I would be a two headed Molly Ringwald since we are both pretty attractive redheads,” remarks David. The Oyster Kiln zine has given winter break a new role in these students’ lives. It went from being a break from the stresses of school, a time to cool the brain down from mandatory learning, to an opportunity to refuel the mind with collaborative progress through creative endeavors. Art student Sara Blazej is another contributor to the magazine. Another native Miamian, Sara studies at the Pratt Institute in New York City and traveled to Miami for her winter break. The workshops, along with the feedback inspired her to continue creating during her time back home. “Overall, I liked the idea of young people coming together to create something artistic. But what I really loved most about the experience was the strong sense of inadequacy I felt at reading any piece of writing by any other member of the group at any time,” says Blazej. “It was excellent motivation for me to get smarter, and just be a lot better at poetry and writing, which is a thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while.” The Oyster Kiln is a testament to the young college students’ mental resilience and undeterred creativity.

Christmas Lights Neither of us could sleep with the Christmas lights on, or we were so hungry we couldn’t recognize friendship that night, so we died loving a void. That’s not to say we were lonely; I was just tired, horny, & sick to my stomach of how I tasted. That night, I think we intonated like windows. & we were looked through for a view of more. Really, we didn’t even die that day. Really, I can’t even remember what made me so mad. I guess sleeping with lights just gets me anxious. And, I think you were taking way too much room on the bed that night. Your body was shaped like fire & starlight.

29 Dumpsky Because Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never really had, in my life, a length of time during which I grew comfortably accustomed to saying 'poop' or 'take a dump' and had it feel completely fine, I sometimes feel a little jarred, and sometimes take the briefest pause when reading in a poem from my boyfriend, in the first line, that he writes with bowels stirring; that his pulse is somewhat quickened; that his belly now is stretched wide with curry-rice and chicken. I may feel a mental shake and have to do a double-take in reading that his sphincter gate is holding back his body weight, forcing strained accommodation, so that all the day's frustration soon to be expelled, will scatter forth from deep within its former casing in relief and celebration.

Untitled Tulips. Two-Lips. Two lips. Even the playful rearrangement of the name betrayed his ache. Split. Lips. Spit. Lips. Tulips. Two-lips. I Lust. He shook the thought from his head and turned his attention back to the TV. The flower sat on the kitchen table, patiently. His eyes flitted from the flowers to the TV, back and forth, nervously. He could not make up his mind. He blushed. He sweated. He shook. She sat on the kitchen table, patiently. He wept; quietly of course at first and then a bit louder as he debated whether she preferred a sensitive man or a more stereotypical masculine one. He decided on the latter and choked back the small eruptions of an already subdued desperation. Self imposed subduing of course. Although he would like nothing more than to pour his feelings out like water on her sou/il, he had already decided that pathetic and sensitive were not the same things. Finally, some decisions were being made. For weeks he had made do with the full color spreads and foldouts in the magazines he shamefacedly purchased, and then snuck home in paper bags. Heavily detailing things like moisture, warmth, fragrance, in relation to the fairly proscribed process of procreation; these serials were definitely not of topics suitable for young men. When he decided that it was time for the real thing he contacted a friend who knew a guy, and a few hours and a monetary exchange later, she was sitting

on the kitchen table, patiently. As time dragged on desperation and the ache for knowledge overpowered. She was his. And He knew this from the beginning. And she sat on the kitchen table, patiently. Tulips. Two-Lips. Lips-Split-I Lust. He lusts. And when not sin nor vice nor trespass troubled him he pulled the petals off her shoulders, off her hips, and he knew her.

morning snapshots of â&#x20AC;&#x153;becomingâ&#x20AC;? (1) light-splintered blinds offer the risk, the promise of broken ankles _______________a precipice (twice the distance from my pupil to the wall) coaxes joints to guard their wrinkled comfort. (2) somnolent hedonisms snake their silken strands around my fingers; my touch is muddled. (3) nocturnal brews prove more insipid than youthful seconds or hoarded gold. the day has come ____eyes half-ripped open as if to thank the collection of discarded moans writhing humidly beneath the mattress.

(4) ambient sobs can only go so far beyond the throats that utter them.. much easier to force mouths against the soft silence of a pillow much easier to subside than bargain [r][i][s][k] or revelation much easier to hit snooze and by virtue of immobility postpone the histrionics.

Forgetful coast on the forgotten smoke: beach after the storm. go and get on my hands & knees & I begin to burrow. Soon I run into a whole array of fellow burrowing creatures of the muck; unearthed they panic and frantically dig/frolic back into the mud (their world of constant flux). Mud I hold in my hands and bring towards my face. They dig with translucent fingers that poke from an orifice where an anus should be [1]. My fingers are not invisible : no invisible fingers in/from my anus please keep your hands where I can see them. I want to sit and calculate my bones fill them with iron and ambrosia until I am more than man [2]. Once I know every bone and tissue and finger I can construct charts and diagrams, hand them out to girls when we first meet so we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get in trouble trying to dissect: burrow the invisible.

[1] Though Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sure there are invisible fingers of which I am unaware. These fingers cause me to tunnel everywhich way, leading me into the damp and dark as soon as I taste the air and see see a kind face face trying to peer into one or two hole in my face. [2] If I sit and wince long enough perhaps this will become true.

Hat Sketches

organs Untitled (from untitled series)

37 Un titled In Havana, Dan was eating arepas when the sun quickly shook the porch. An earthquake, that morning, killed thousands in Haiti. When Dan cleaned his room that day, he played Public Enemy and Bach on his turntable. He laundered his socks, and his hat collection. If secret tremors are scurrying between islands, beneath oceans, and Haitians are hurt under bricks, and the survivors in Port-Au-Prince sing hymns, together, and dust is a church for the whole city, what does Dan know of pain & redemption. The truth is, not nothing.

Sirens Do you remember when the word siren stood for something more beautiful than this sound? Once I mistook you for a mermaid, forgot you couldn’t breathe below. I took your hand and pulled you down down with me, bubbling, “Look, we’re merpeople now. We’ll lunge toward the seabottom and shake our fists at the one-clawed crabs for being too quixotic and easily taken advantage of. We are sorry crablets, but also thank you for being so delicious.” I sang and sung you out of it until bubbles fluttered out your nose and one day we even learned to laugh at the ringing and the blue and the crabs. What have I got to do with you? So we swam and bubbled and nearly drowned one another, but now you crawl up mountains like you can’t get close enough to the sky. And I, well I lie spinning flailing feet like propellers and float in pools praying for salt just to hold up the conviction of a homecoming.

Running water prompts secret songs jealously stolen from a muse. Under showers or sinks washing city-dirty hands I still sing to you so no one can hear but me and I try to suck it all up and in like the sea but lacking the sweat and salt of you. Coarse-throated and jaw-clicking Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m like an out of tune piano. I dreamed of learning to play to loosen my bones then decided it best to throw it all out in the pool where we would one day tap keys together where no one else would hear our sad songs as we desperately try to drown out the voices of our sirens.

No Love in Bomb Shelters We are not silk flowers, but we are mass produced. No worth in stasis, put ear to earth and hold the rumble in your chest or consent to the flashes. Yellow poplar blooms explode within measured frames. Bask in Hiroshima embrace to deteriorate cause there is no love in bomb shelters, canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist in an airtight universe of canned goods and gods. Minute-winged impulsions gorge on poplar nectar for a few hours. No worth in stasis, put ear to earth and absorb the rumble in the distance to calculate the end. Mayflies have the most beautiful lives. They are born to fuck to die. They never remember and if one looks another in the eyes he always sees thousands: fractal lover. No trace.of recognition.

hanging out

organs SUPREMEEMPERORPUPPY

43 untitled there was something that I wanted to say, O, that it would make your fists curl, girl, your curls gone ga-ga, empty-faced and faceted across the banners of the room. there was a thing I expressed so dearly, held close, the face of a ribcage adorned neatly on a sweater, the curls gorged in deep Christmas red and saturated blues. there was a word escaping my lips when, all of the sudden, a sort of bird-of-prey intensity, a sort of debilitating sadness, swept up by the hoof of time and left to dirty on the kitchen floor. so be it then, a slight curb of dust and nothing more.

Poem # 2 How gritty can I let one day be? Or full can I force it to stretch? Or sad can I help it to get? How two-dimensional can things look, like drawing boxes with perspective? How three-dimensional, like wearing that girlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s IMAX glasses. Or one-dimensional, like how everyone gives you black-and-white cookies because sometimes when you forget yourself at parties, you have mentioned that they are your favorite and now they are your nickname. Or silly, like not knowing grammar. Or abstract, like a dull wind in a quarry full of mouse-holes that erupts at dawn to eat the Christmas messes from the Christmas party where we wore our Christmas dresses. How close can we get to the point?

45 Yes Billy wanted each one of his mannerisms to be treated as a biological study toward some final theory. He wanted to get figured out and then look at the paperwork afterward. Then he would watch television with a family, any family. Silence is a confounding thing, especially in America— maybe more of a puzzle than funerals, a harder thing to decipher than nutrition facts on the backs of juice-boxes. There is always an unbearable sense of knowing that something is indubitably wrong, but that there is an all-encompassing rightness, and there you are, violent and artificial, surrounded by mist: a Boeing 747 through a cloud. Billy feels like a kidney, the removable one, wading under a heart. It’s like he’s got a doppelganger somewhere, just on the other side of the spine, and it’s more adaptable than he is. It does magic tricks and knows how to cook chicken marsala. Billy feels like he might be an undesirable. He wishes he had never heard of Charles Bukowski, wishes he never knew about irreverence. He wants a ham sandwich. In between the pet store and the law-firm, underneath the I-95 overpass, there is a T. G. I. Friday’s. It’s a great place to go when you are feeling like an asshole. The blood red lights and striped servers can swallow you up and leave you chewed, like a rubber bone. So Billy goes. The dissonance in T. G. I. Friday’s is like the innards of a pinball machine. His waitress, whose plastic name tag magnet is engraved with the name Linda, is the ugliest woman Billy has ever seen. “Can I get you something to drink?” “Mozzarella sticks,” Billy says, feeling nihilism now like it’s a frightening helicopter.

“You want to drink mozzarella sticks?” “Yes. Grind them up, and put water in it.” T. G. I. Friday’s is owned by a conglomerate of men in pinstriped suits who play golf, buy presents for their families, and want nothing more than to give Americans the opportunity to dine in a Pinball machine. Billy knows this intuitively. On some level, it has to be true. “Okay, then. Would you like an appetizer to start with? Our special appetizer today is crab rangoons. It’s half-off. That is, it’s half off the price, not the food.” “My high-school wrestling coach loved crab rangoons.” “Oh.” “Yeah, he would yell about them when we were on the bus, on our way to tournaments. ‘Can’t wait for those Crab Rangoons,’ he would say. Because there was always a Chinese Buffet, or a Mongolian Buffet. Either way, they all had the rangoons. Even Shoney’s had them, I think. Then we would all lose our matches. Every single one of us, and then we would eat at a buffet. Yeah, I’ll take an order of that, for old time’s sake.” He flashed a smile and slapped the table when he said this, which shook the basket of menus and the ketchup. “We’re not allowed to talk about Shoney’s. If you hold on a minute, sir, I’ll be right back with your rangoons and your cheese water. If you mention Shoney’s again I’ll have to ask you to leave.” Billy recognizes a simple feeling of distance, an image of vastness too large to fill with anything. Linda is cambering away from the table. She is shadowy. She sidesteps another

waitress, a busboy named Javier. Billy enters a lull while she’s gone. To his left there is a baby looking at him. It is spitting cheese onto itself, looking at Billy. Billy is making gargoyle faces back at the baby, and the baby sobs a little, but no one at its table notices. Each person at the table is ravenous, swallowing whole chunks of burgers. Why are they doing that. Why is it that as soon as people learn something, they have to do it feverishly. If life required that kind of action, then everybody would be good at it. Billy is thinking, but everybody is good at it. If the act of eating food is performance art, then the people at the table with the baby are the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar. They are all Donny Osmond eating hamburgers. Linda is back now, and Billy is drawn to the faint scent of her lavender perfume. Since she is close, about two feet away and taking her last steps toward the table, he expresses a thought. “One thing that’s good about anything, is that there’s always a way out.” “You know I think I learned about that stuff you’re talking about,” says Linda, “today in my metaphysics class.” She takes off her wig. “I find you very metaphysical.” “But I swear, whenever I go back to this rotten kitchen back here.” She points over rows of booths to the back wall, where the wall opens into the kitchen. People in striped uniforms are moving in and out of view. “Whenever I go back there, my fingernails get filled up with chicken grease and I see the frozen food that comes in body-sized bags, and I watch Pete, the chef, shooting up drugs by the dumpster, and outside the smell of garbage makes me want to vomit, and it stays on me until I go home—

“But I need this job to pay for school, and I don’t even know what I’m in school for, truthfully, because it seems like all I’m doing is looking for ways to push reality somewhere else, and what’s reality anyway, and even if there were millions of ways to push it to an infinitely secret place, I don’t think I have that kind of strength. Look at my biceps.” She points. It’s true—they are small. “Really, I want to just sit next to the dumpster outside, and see if I can find stars hidden in the city glow. I want to just try to feel good even when Aunt Camille is throwing waffles at my boyfriend, or even when everyone who comes here is an asshole.” Suddenly, in the urine colored lamplight crowding from the ceiling, Linda is a high-order Samurai, spitting pearls from her mouth, each one landing at Billy’s toes and entering him. Billy, while staring in her eyes, slowly picks up the saltshaker and flips it, holding it there in its upside-down position. The salt leaves the container in clusters that resemble breath in cold weather. Billy remembers eleventh grade Biology class. He remembers how electrolytes are made of salt and how a kidney has something to do with regulation of electrolytes—He leans forward, and licks the scattered salt off the table. There will be a bench outside of Friday’s. Billy will sit outside and listen to the swish of traffic, and wait for Linda to get off work. He will sit as long as he needs to.

Contributors’ Notes / Essential Facts Elizabeth Bejarano is somewhat of a renaissance man. She loves to study the renaissance. Some would call her passions extreme. They vary from day to day, but are always tremendous in strength. She has a long-standing fascination with alligators and can’t seem to escape a series of cryptic reptilian visions. What do they mean? Whether or not she finds out, she plans to retreat to the desert someday. Or perhaps the mountains, as her penchant for grizzlies is fierce as well. David Belew meatismurder. David Bennett survived for a number of years under a large rock in Florida subsisting only on twigs, dirt, and tiny snails. When highway officials arrived to pave over David’s habitation, his soul exited his body, flew west and possessed the corpse of Buddy Holly, who now shambles around the Pacific coast looking for “the right stuff.” Sara Blazej studies painting at the Pratt Institute in Manhattan. She has been told that she smells like pencil shavings, which perplexes her, as she rarely draws with anything but pen. Natalie Catasús sprouted legs sometime within her first nine months of life. She thrives on lemons and turquoise, and is mostly a creature of the late morning. When she was seven she fell into a swamp, forever misunderstanding the true smell of earwax. Her inner sound consists of a disjointed folk symphony of human hums against the backdrop of a twangy guitar playing the blues. Raphael França studies anthropology and ethnobotony at Hampshire College in Amherst. He has been to the Amazon, and will tell you that malaria is not sexually transmitted.

Leo Neufeld is an avid collector of hot dogs, and this Hobby is the source of his inspiration. His cousin Nennel, who is blind, types most of Leo’s work while he massages Nennel’s knees and eats Newman’s Own products. Alexandra Primiani wrote this article while she was in Munich, where she eats less sausage than she had expected she would. Her interests include linguistics, baby oil, and ABBA. Craig Chaplin Tyler studies menswear at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He also works at a pizza place called Waldy’s. Jose Villar was born on an island. He spends most of his days ruminating the hyphenated anxieties of being, at which he is quite adept.