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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART
O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y
bernard j. schaffer
BJ SCHAFFER IS DEAD J.A. Klemens
TUPPERWARE james pabarue
THE ORIGIN OF SADNESS susan barr-toman
WHEN LOVE WAS CLEAN UNDERWEAR author profile
WALT MAGUIRE
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c o n t e n t s ART
FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART
O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y
CONTENTS FEATURES 3 8 10 15 17
BJ Schaffer is Dead (essay) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bernard J. Schaffer Tupperware (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J.A. Klemens The Origins of Sadness (essay). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Pabarue Monkey See (novel excerpt). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Walt Maguire When Love Was Clean Underwear (novel excerpt) . . Susan Barr-Toman
POETRY 6 9 11 12 18
5 Springtime Swirls by Allison Levin.
(see bio below)
6 Blossom by Vincent Natale.
Where is the fox.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Margaret A. Robinson Bedtime Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Gwen Wille ILLUMINATION: 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Hayden Saunier Devon Drive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Pat O’Brien Breech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Kate Delany
LOCAL AUTHOR PROFILE 14 Walt Maguire
PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/Fiction Editor Carla Spataro Publisher/Managing Editor Christine Weiser Poetry Editor Conrad Weiser Essay Editor Julia MacDonnell Chang Associate Fiction Editor Marc Schuster Director of Development Sharon Sood Production Manager Derek Carnegie Web Design Loic Duros
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3 Cornfield Indiana by Vincent Natale. Vincent is an artist, writer, and bartender living in South Philadelphia. He studied briefly at the Fleisher Art Memorial and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. His work has been awarded the Merit Prize from the Cape May County Art League
Auction Committee Joanne Green, Kerri Schuster, Holly Anzuena, Emily Gill, Sharon Sood, and Jamie Elfrank.
Editorial Board David Aichenbaum, fiction Holly Anzuena, fiction Courtney Bambrick, poetry Anne Buckwalter, fiction Christine Cavalier, poetry Liz Dolan, poetry John Drain, fiction Jamie Elfrank, fiction Sandy Farnan, non-fiction Teresa FitzPatrick, fiction Marylou Fusco, fiction Denise Gess, fiction Emily Gill, fiction Pat Green, poetry Joanne Green, fiction Matt Jordan, non-fiction Cecily Kellogg, poetry Aimee LaBrie, fiction Nathan Long, fiction Walt Maguire, fiction Patricia Mastricolo, fiction George McDermott, poetry Harriet Levin Millan, poetry Elizabeth Mosier, fiction Julie Odell, fiction Ryan Romine, fiction John Shea, poetry & non-fiction Michelle Wittle, fiction
(see bio above)
8 Eddie by Jayne Surrena. Jayne is a Philadelphia native who has been actively showing her art since she graduated from the University of the Arts in 2006 with a BFA in painting. She has recently returned to UArts to receive her masters in Art Education.BIO
10 bean pie: take the seed outside by Tamsen Wojtanowski.Tamsen is a 2008 MFA graduate from the Tyler School of Art. To see more of her work please visit www.tamsenwj.com
20 Purple Nude by Jennifer Lynn Albright. Jennifer is a local artist.
Cover Art: Sunbathing Birds by Allison Levin. Allison is a high school art teacher in the Central Bucks School District, specializing in drawing, painting and photography. Allison has focused her recent creative works on a technique called "papercuts", which involves cutting intricate designs through layers of paper. Allison is a co-founder of True Sister Designs, a company that specializes in personalized artwork and crafts. See more at www.truesisterdesigns.com.
Philadelphia Stories is a non profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists and readers through the magazine, and through education programs, such as writer’s workshops, reading series, and other affordable professional development programs for emerging writers and artists. Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3 and is managed completely by a staff of volunteers. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!
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BJ SCHAFFER IS DEAD
Cornfield Indiana by Vincent Natale © 2009 wenty years ago I was famous. Not so famous that my torrid affairs with young starlets were covered by national magazines, and being thirteen at the time, that wasn’t really much of a problem. I was famous enough that strangers followed me around the Montgomery Mall when I went shopping. Famous enough that even now, a lifetime away, I can still Google “BJ Schaffer” and find web pages ranging from IMDB to Wikipedia that relate to acting jobs I did before I was old enough to drive. It is a surreal thought that, a hundred years from now, all of this information will exist in some massive computerized database, and there will be no mention of anything I’ve accomplished since. I could cure cancer, win a
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Pulitzer, run for President, and someone, somewhere, would shrug and say, “Yeah, but didn’t he used to be on TV?” I have no one to blame but myself. When I was nine, I suddenly decided that I wanted to be an actor, and my parents were crazy enough to listen to me. We were directed for advice to the only person in my hometown with any professional acting experience. Bill Hickey had appeared in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” as an extra for about half a second, and was therefore qualified in our eyes. He told me to learn to sing, dance and act. If I got good enough at any of those three, the rest would fall into place. Strangely enough, Bill was right.
I haven’t thought much about this stuff for nearly twenty years, but by my recollection I won two major dance competitions, which secured me a meeting with Cathy Parker Management. She began getting me auditions, and in short order, I’d appeared in over twenty national television commercials, performed in two major productions at the Walnut Street Theater, done a skit on Saturday Night Live, and worked as a regular cast member on the Nickelodeon series “Don’t Just Sit There.” My mom recently visited the Walnut Street Theater, and was shocked to see my photograph still hanging in the lobby. I guess the cleaning person never got the memo advising them to take it down.
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By the time I was twelve, my name appeared in the Horsham Township “Who’s Who” Directory. It was a red booklet with the names of all of the important people in that small Pennsylvania town where I grew up. It was the same town where my dad had been born and raised, and where he served as a police officer. My grandfather and uncle lived there, too. Small towns have a strange way of reacting to celebrity. It’s slightly infectious. At ten years old, I was given carte blanche to cease attending school with any kind of regularity. The superintendant and I were on a first name basis. It didn’t matter what tests I missed, what school programs I did not get involved in, what educational foundation I lacked. They wanted me to perform at the talent show, which I did, dancing in a green and silver “space man” outfit designed by my mother. They wanted me to be in the school
d e a d play. To this day, I can recite the lines of Prince Chulalongkorn, from “The King and I.” When you are an ascending star, just beginning to acquire the smell of that alluring narcotic “fame”, it’s impossible for people to not want to attach themselves to you. It was routine for me to go to school for a few short hours, then leave to be driven to New York City. I’d spend an hour in Manhattan auditioning, then return home. I did this several times a week, for about three years, until I finally began living in Manhattan. I remember my father looking at my first paycheck for “Don’t Just Sit There” in wonder. My weekly pay was roughly $1,800. My old man looked at me and said, “Jesus, B., you make more money than I do as a cop.” I spent every night learning lines, or practicing scenes for auditions. We con-
stantly plotted which career move needed to be made next. The beat did not slow down on weekends. These were devoted to dance, voice and acting classes. To this day, I sometimes dream of riding in an empty car for endless stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike. The road goes on and on and I never arrive where I am going. By 1988, at fourteen, I was burned out. You can only spend so many hours on the Turnpike, eating rest-stop cuisine. You can only spend so many nights in motel rooms. You can only go for so long before the reality of adolescence sets in. When your laurels rest on being the Boy Next Door, it’s all downhill once your skin starts breaking out, your voice squeaks when you talk, and your body begins to change. Plus, there’s always another, cuter wannabe waiting in the wings. After four years of semi-celebrity,
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear Friends, As usual, things rarely slow down for us at Philadelphia Stories, and this spring was no exception. With the introduction of our successful fiction writing workshops, taught by Aimee LaBrie and Marc Schuster, we’ve branched out into another area of professional development—one that Christine and I hope will continue to thrive. This spring also saw the launch of our second title from PS Books, Marc Schuster’s The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl at our Spring Fling on May 9th at the Swedish Historical Society. The event was another fun day of live music, Chinese Auction Items, and good food and company. The Spring Fling was also the culminating event in our spring fundraising campaign, which began with our online auction. This year we raised over $4,000 at the auction and another $2,000 at the Fling. This will help us to continue to publish a few more issues of Philadelphia Stories, but we still need your help. If you are not already a member, please consider becoming one today. As little as $20 gets you home delivery of Philadelphia Stories—and know that you are doing your part to help support the Delaware Valley’s vibrant writing community (see our member form on the inside back cover). This summer will be just as busy. In June, Philadelphia Stories will co-host the second annual Rosemont Writer’s Retreat at Rosemont College and the free Philadelphia Stories Writer’s and Readers Series (sponsored in part by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council). In July, Philadelphia Stories will also host a variety of workshops and readings as part of the Chestnut Hill Book Festival.
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And finally, we are pleased to announce our first serious prize for fiction. The Marguerite McGlinn Prize will be awarded to any American author for a work of short fiction up to 8,000 words. Submissions will be read between June 15-October 15, 2009 and the winning piece will be published in the Winter 2009/10 Issue. There is a $10 reading fee for each work submitted and the prize is $1,000. Elise Juska, author of Getting Over Jack Wagoner, The Hazards of Sleeping Alone, and One for Sorrow, Two for Joy will judge. Complete details are available on the website. We hope that you have a happy and productive summer. All the best, Carla & Christine
www.philadelphiastories.org
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I just wanted to be a normal kid. That’s the sign they hang on you when you are a child-actor. “He’s such a normal kid,” they say. Bullshit. Normal kids play baseball. Normal kids get used to turning in homework assignments. Normal kids have friends. Real friends. Not phony show business friends. Of course, when you remove someone from their natural habitat during the most fundamental years of their life, you can imagine it’s not the easiest thing for them to simply get back into the swing of things. When I returned to my hometown in the middle of 9th Grade, I found myself a complete outcast. People had developed deep friendships, forming groups based on shared interests, which I could not hope to penetrate. Students took tests that they’d had years to prepare for, even if it was by simply learning the discipline of doing their homework. I had none of those things. At that point, Springtime Swirls by Allison Levin © 2009
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I could not even join a sports team, because, at the age I should have been trying out for varsity, I hadn’t kicked a ball or swung a bat since Little League. By the time my peers began to consider which college to attend, I’d become so used to answering the question, “When are you going to go back to acting?” that I really expected to make a big return to show business. But the harsh reality is that contacts dry up fast in that world. Also, it costs a lot of money to go back and forth to New York City, especially when you have no income and have to begin worrying about paying rent, buying food, gas, etc. Unfortunately, at that point in my life, I had nothing
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d e a d else. By the age of eighteen, I had to seriously consider the fact that I was a Has-Been.
Where is the fox
Nothing fills me with dread as much as the shows on VH-1 about former Child Stars who became drug addicts, or are still plugging away, desperately seeking to recapture that glimmer of fame. Eddie Munster is an old man.. He still goes to conventions dressed up in his old costume, hawking autographed photos. Scott Schwartz, the kid who stuck his tongue to the flag pole in A Christmas Story and starred with Richard Pryor in The Toy, started doing porno. For the more legitimate, mainstream performers like Britney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan, I look at what these poor kids
when I can’t see her long tongue lapping a drink from the leafy pool in my birdbath
Margaret A. Robinson
has she registered with a political party does she attend home-and-school night to fight against sweetened drinks in vending machines as bad for her cubs is she friends with the doe and four fawns who also troop through my yard or the buck with his full rack of antlers looking like an insurance advertisement does the raccoon advise the vixen on mascara length of eyelash have they agreed it’s silly to shave their legs will the fox catch a neighborhood cat will she lie down with a lamb chop topped with mint and a paper ruffle where do her feet foxtrot at night?
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Blossom by Vincent Natale © 2009
Margaret A. Robinson's new chapbook of poems, about breast cancer and love, is called "Arrangements" and is available at the Finishing Line Press website. Robinson teaches in the creative writing program at Widener University and lives in Swarthmore.
b e r n a r d have become, and I have to think that maybe, just maybe, if the people around them had waited to thrust them into the very adult world of the performing arts, they’d have a better foundation on which to build a decent life. Maybe not such a famous life, but a good, decent, normal existence. These days I cringe when I hear friends talk about signing their kids up with a modeling agency. You know, the one where you pay thousands of dollars to have a “portfolio” made, and the agency promises to start sending your kids on “auditions.“ I always react badly when people suggest my kids have what it takes to “get involved with show business.“ Don’t I know that my son has the personality and looks to be on a sitcom and become America’s Boy Next Door? Of course he does. Don’t I see that my daughter is beautiful enough to sell oodles of Pampers or Gerber’s baby food? Of course she is. But that will never happen.
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laboratories late at night. At 34 years old, I’m a police detective who makes his living putting bad people in dark places. I’m a father to two children, and I can tell you that their love and admiration means more than the vacant adulation of the masses on any level. It’s been a long, curving road toward the man that I am now, and to be honest, I sometimes struggle with how to tell people that I used to be on television. It’s an embarrassing subject. My life is not a famous one, and unless you’ve been where I’ve been, you might not understand why I’m glad for that.
Bernard J. Schaffer is a police detective in the Philadelphia Suburban Region. He is a lifelong resident of Montgomery County. His previous work has appeared in “American Police Beat Magazine,” “Comic Zone,” and “The Enemy Blog.”
Children should be children. They should play, learn, get scraped up and brushed off, lose big games, win bigger ones, dance with a sweetheart, lose him or her to someone else, get a better one later, have big sleepover parties, and grow up without the pressures of having a career, or the expectations of an entire small town to be successful. BJ Schaffer is dead. He was just a commodity. A face in a photograph, a television personality, a small blip on the bright, vast universe of Entertainment. You can know everything there is to know about him on the handful of web pages that still mention him, or bear his likeness. Me? I’m a guy who worked at a gas station to make ends meet while I went to the Police Academy. I scrubbed toilets, worked landscaping and mopped
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TUPPERWARE upperware, Ziploc, Rubbermaid. Circle, square, cube, cylinder, shallow rectangle, deep rectangle, long rectangle, almost-a-square-but-notquite rectangle, big circle, small circle. Circle with the little spout thingy. Rectangle with the clicky edges. Green, orange, clear, clear with blue tint, clear with green tint, translucent blue, sickly sea green. Permanent, disposable, semidisposable, Chinese soup takeout. Warped, melted, scratched, grated, scraped. It was inevitable, but all the same he hadn’t thought they would get there so soon. Not one lid would match up with one receptacle. They had reached perfect Tupperware entropy. Let’s make sure I’m not being premature, he thought, and so began to sort into the broad categories. Circles on the stovetop, lids on the right front burner. Rectangles on the kitchen cart, lids propped between the trivets and the cutting board. Squares on the little strip between the stove and sink, lids balancing in a pile over the edge. He’d have to be careful not to knock them over. He knocked them over immediately. He picked the lids up and put them on the little bit of dishwasher that projected from beneath the microwave instead. The deep ones he piled by the coffee maker on the other side of the sink, lids propped between the olive oil and vinegar. He stood in the center of the narrow galley that they pretended was a kitchen, all of them laid out within his reach, and checked them. He checked each circle container against every circle lid, and even when it was obvious that it wouldn’t fit, he went through the motions, pressing lid to container lip despite the
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Eddie by Jayne Surrena © 2009 inches that gaped between them, just to be sure. But it wasn’t quite as precise as all that. The lids for the squares might have been rectangles, and the deep cylindrical
containers could also be circles, so those all had to be cross-checked as well. There was one circle that kind of fit, and might even have been the original lid— he checked, and the brand was the
t u p p e r w a r e same—but it had been so warped and stretched that he couldn’t make them come together. Actually he could, but the slightest touch popped them back apart again. And so, half an hour after he had started, he gave up and put them all back in the cupboard. And that was when it hit him. Even if they got a new piece now, it would have to go back in that cupboard. Even if she found one— and she would find one, briskly, efficiently, in those early hours before he was even awake—it would eventually go back into the cupboard and be lost to him (if not to her). All he could do was shove them back into that space where they angled and jostled against one another and the rest of the dishes, big lids below and small lids tucked in on the side, always threatening to spill over and knock the drinking glasses to the floor. He could take them out and throw them all away, but they were hers, really. So many of them had preceded his residence in the house, so who was he to relegate them to the trash? What if a lost lid turned up in the dishwasher or under the kitchen cart? There might still be one that fit, and his rashness would have lost it. Twenty or thirty pieces. Two people. Ten years. Moderate use. Potlucks, takeout, Christmas cookies from one or the other set of parents. And none of them fit together any more. He thought about chucking them all and going to the store to get new ones, but then he realized that in another ten years he’d be right back in the same spot, so why bother? And the next ten years would go by faster than the last—a smaller fraction of a life,
after all, a more-or-less quarter versus a more-or-less third. And once another decade had gone by, he would be standing in the same spot looking for lids, wondering where this one had come from, how this other one had gotten so badly mauled, why none of them would fit, and how she kept finding ones that did. He opened the cupboard again. Cramped kitchen, cramped cupboard, the house itself too small. It had always been too small, though it hadn’t seemed that way back when they still came together with a satisfying snap on the sofa, at dinner at the kitchen table. When they still fit so well together in the bed, arriving at the same time, the bedtime ritual after the late news and maybe some stupid show with cops and lawyers or a bunch of doctors whose names she could remember but he never could, the do-si-do in and out of the tiny bathroom, the arm that fit beneath the pillow, the nose that fit into the small hollow at the back of the neck, the hips that pressed up into hips from behind. The fit of his dreams and her aspirations, hers still well formed, his scratched and warped and melted and maybe not fit for fitting anywhere anymore. Laptop, cellphone, camera bag, hard drive. Car keys, office keys, passport, wallet. Toothbrush, medicine, deodorant, toothpaste. Sport coat, rain jacket, winter jacket, sunglasses. Underwear, trousers, jeans, socks, dress shirts, t-shirts, sweater. Manila folders, books, notepads, manuscript. Pocketknife, favorite pen.
J.A. Klemens is a biologist who lives in Philadelphia
Bedtime Story Gwen Wille If we tell another day without wasted breath or furtive glances set free from hazy dreams and desire, I could pretend your real life away. Standing on the ledge with an eye on lamp-lit streets, I’ll hold your hand for that first step into lands hewn from letters or shapes of cobwebs and dew in the eyes of bright Tigers who measure it out, all even, and name the breeze. And you are once again a World War One flying ace with a shrug to steel wings and I’m Billy the Kid as I dust off my britches and peek through the sheet to your unwritten tale: a rhyme unraveling on the crease of a carpet aired out from your soles as you forgive an old line behind the coat and hat of a gentleman’s parade. Here then the pen on your page draws the hem of my smile as poppies fall loose from my tongue, one draught to help you sleep soundly tonight without stolen sight to ever after’s addictions. Gwen lives and works in the West Chester area. She graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2005, and was born in Santa Fe.
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THE ORIGINS OF SADNESS even a.m. on a Monday morning and my mother is the only one awake. She pads downstairs. In the kitchen, she raises the shades, letting in weak, gray daylight, then turns to find the coffee pot. It’s where it always is—on the counter, next to a bowl of clementines—but it is filled only with hot water. It sputters happily. (Mocks her, you know?) “Dammit!” Her voice, though not a shout, rings sharply through the house. I hear it in my secluded room and wonder whether something is actually wrong. “Dammit, Jim, did you set the coffee maker last night?” She knows he didn’t; if he had, there would be dark brew instead of clear water in the pot. But she calls upstairs to him anyway, just to make him admit his mistake aloud. And now my father enters this reallife play—thickset, goateed, brownskinned, wavy-haired, kind. Unhappy. Lying on his back in bed upstairs, while his petite white wife berates him from a floor away. “Jim?” Tone curls up at the end— shrill and accusatory. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry.” He speaks without moving anything but his lips. Lies motionless on his back in bed. A turtle, a turtle. (God, but a loveable one. Can’t he see?) After another hour of lying still while his wife and son whirl around him, the turtle crawls out of bed. He languishes for an hour in a room adjacent to his bedroom before getting into the shower. The wife and son have left for work and school by the time the turtle emerges from the shower (fresh, but not refreshed; clean but never cleansed). He pulls on an expensive
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bean pie: take the seed outside by Tamsen Wojtanowski © 2009 suit, plods downstairs, skips breakfast, clambers into an expensive car, and drives off to a job that is slowly killing him. His heart is a landfill.
My father’s childhood could be the source of his current problems. People are pottery, it seems to me—if there are mistakes made early on in the crafting, and the piece is put into a hot hot kiln
t h e and fired anyway, the flaws will be there forever. Depression is one such defect. If you were to skim a written summary of my father’s life thus far, you might read, near the bottom, in the second to last paragraph or so, that he was diagnosed with clinical depression. But I would argue that the seed of an adult’s unhappiness is planted early on; it is a spore that lies dormant in the head. Whether in an instant or over a long period of time, the spore eventually blooms and a dark mold spreads over the soul, weighing it down, down, down. Rotting it through. My grandmother – a mixed-race, fair-skinned, upper-middle class woman with coarse Indian hair, and hard black eyes – gave my father all the necessary tools for developing a healthy case of depression. She made little James Archibald Amar Pabarue feel as though he, in his natural state, was worth nothing. She anglicized him, sending him to Groton boarding school in Massachusetts where he was one of two black students in his class. (He wished he were one of the white kids; doesn’t identify with black Americans and never will.) She scolded him for his untidy hair. (He brushes it now obsessively.) She beat him with a worn leather belt because he was overweight. (Tough love, tough love.) No one cried much on that sunny day when my grandmother was burned to cinders, sealed in a black box, and buried. So little Jimmy went through his years with that devilish, black seed of depression festering in his mind. Selfconscious, self-doubting. (But his hair was always well-combed!) And I know when the turning point came. My father was a “freak” in high school—a cross between a “straight” and a “hippy”. His true passion was and still is
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rock and roll music. My mother first met him as the long-haired, blue-eyeshadowed, gown-wearing, pot-smoking lead singer of a band called Dingo. (What a ladies man, and so happy singing his tunes in a silky-smooth tenor). After college, he started playing with a new group, Duck Soup, and with them tried to break into the music industry. They wrote and wrote and practiced and practiced and played and played and toured and toured. They were poor— macaroni for most meals, you know—
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but they were happy and fiery and young. Two years of mild success and countless empty boxes of macaroni later, it became clear that the world was not ready for Duck Soup. My father had to write off his dream. (“Sorry, Dream, I can’t chase you anymore. Maybe we can meet up later?”). He traded his lyrics sheet for a law degree, his gown for a tailored suit, his eye shadow for aftershave, his band practice for board meetings. His pot for Prozac. His microphone for a fountain
ILLUMINATION: 2005 Hayden Saunier They took away our windows for two weeks, ripped them from kitchen walls with wonder bars, then nailed up sheets of chipboard, while we waited for new windows to be manufactured in a long steel building somewhere east of Trenton. It was never really cold or hot inside, just dark, just really dark; the place stayed dry and we had fun one night shooting insulating foam into the cracks before a massive cold front blew across the Appalachians, but even then the dark was working on us. We had one trouble light, a single bulb that sat inside an orange cage, suspended from a hook above the pantry door. That, and the TV’s nervous blue light, flashing its parade of hooded men in orange jumpsuits, bound and kneeling down on both sides of the ocean: that was our illumination. The windows came in, insulated, thermopaned, their sashes riding oiled blue sliders like a guillotine. Light came through them, made our canary hearts swing wide inside their cages, but after so much dark, we could not shake our boxed-in bitterness: our view was not the same.
Hayden Saunier’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, 5 A.M., Rattle, and Philadelphia Stories, among others. A 2008 Pushcart Prize nominee, her first book of poetry, Tips for Domestic Travel, is due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2009.
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Devon Drive Pat O’Brien I am trying to remember blackberries on my tongue, and my mother’s rolling pin flattening out the oily dough for pies, and didn’t dad lay the slate porch we etched in chalk, and didn’t we nap on the hot slate until our eyelids glowed orange, and how many times did the woods drip secrets, and how many steps were there to sock island where silver minnows darted back and forth like underwater flags rippling, and wasn’t it below the abandoned railroad tracks where we dug in clay mines to shape ashtrays, and what it was like to win that crab-apple fight with the Rockwood gang. I know there was always wonder, and when the sky streaked pink under a pulling moon, weren’t our mothers always calling us home. Pat O’Brien teaches Creative Writing at Penn State Brandywine. Her poems have appeared in Philadelphia Poets, Mad Poets Review, and Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts. She lives in West Chester with her husband and two daughters.
pen. The laughter and music for sighs. He sheared his long hair and brushed it down smooth, and deep in his head a little seed sprouted.
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My mother is too pragmatic to help. “He should just fix it,” she says. She is sitting in an armchair in soft lamplight, knitting methodically. (Is she entangling herself in that web of yarn? Is it a cocoon? There are so many strings. How does she keep track of them all?). She takes a sip of tea. “I mean really. It’s not a disease. It’s all just a mental thing.” She means well, she really does. She loves him for who he is, she really does. She just doesn’t know what to do, and she comes off as callous and insensitive. “Why can’t he just go get some friends instead of paying a shrink to talk with? I don’t have a shrink, and I’m perfectly fine.” I am too much of a teenager to help
him. “Jay-Bo-Bay, Jay-Bo-Bay” he says in the morning, smiling wearily. He reaches out to tickle me. All I have to do is say Hey, Daddy, How are you this morning?, and sit down beside him. But I can’t. “Not right now,” I growl. “I’m not in the mood. Are you done with the bathroom?” (I wish I had been nicer as soon as the words leave my mouth) “Yeah, it’s yours,” he mumbles, and shuffles back to his dark room. I don’t help, I don’t help, I don’t help. I could help. Could I help? Can I help?
I’m pretty sure that I can’t help. It’s up to him. Or perhaps it’s up to some god to chip away the concrete blocks around his feet and the lead around his eyes—up to some hammer-wielding Thor or some squat Buddha scurrying around with a sharpened chisel in hand.
But maybe it can’t be helped at all and he’ll forever walk in place in a muddy rut on the side of the road, gradually sinking deeper and deeper. Perhaps he’ll be sucked underground and only a patch of neatly-brushed hair will peek out. I think he wouldn’t even mind much. I think. At two or three a.m., when most employed adults in their right minds are sleeping, my father sits sunken into the couch, letting the flickering blue lights of late-night television wash over him. His salt-and-pepper hair runs laterally in uniformed waves. He blinks from time to time. He isn’t watching the screen; rather, he’s looking past the TV set, either silently grieving over his past, or inventing a bleak, bleak future for himself and staring coldly at it. There has never been a face so wholly empty. Off goes the TV at some ridiculous hour. He rocks to his feet and trudges upstairs, the hardwood steps creaking as he goes. He forgets to set the coffee. Jay Pabarue, a Philadelphia resident, and high school student, dabbles in both poetry and creative nonfiction. While walking down the street with his hands in his pockets, he either hums or does not. This is his first print publication.
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WA LT M A G U I R E What if apes were living side-by-side the human species, wearing clothes from Urban Outfitters, taking public transportation, and even talking? What would they talk about? That’s the task author Walt Maguire seeks to answer in his new novel Monkey See (ENC Press, Summer 2009). Laced with wit and satire, Monkey See follows Ed, a bonobo talking ape, as he struggles to find his place in society. Complete with a love story, ethical uncertainty, and lessons in ape etiquette, Monkey See is sure to leave you seeing the world from a different perspective.
Tell me about your new novel, Monkey See. It’s set in a time when not only have scientists cracked the code for giving animals intelligence, but it’s becoming a little too commonplace. Ed, a young ape, is trying to find his way through the new social order, stuck halfway between American pop life and what the other apes want – finding a job; getting an apartment; going to parties; planning the overthrow of humans, or not. I’ve described it as Planet of the Apes from the ape’s point of view, but it’s more a coming of age story…with bananas and robot tanks.
What research did you do when writing your book?
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Quite a lot – I was already interested in Jane Goodall’s work, and I knew about the Gorilla Foundation’s work with sign language, though like most people I’d never really studied their research. Apes have been studied, trained, and written about since at least the days of the Greeks.
What was the most challenging part of writing your book? I was so wrapped up in the story it took me a while to realize that a story about talking animals could be
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misinterpreted as a metaphor. I wanted to be careful that I wasn’t unintentionally making an anti-immigration argument, for instance. I’m talking about actual talking animals. The point I was trying to make is that monster stories are moving from being a metaphor for discussing social issues to being an actual, possible situation. Something I hadn’t planned for the book is a running commentary on parenthood – the scientist who’s “enhancing” these creatures is, when you get down to it, a bad parent. He brings them into the world and then abandons them emotionally, not to say twists them to his own ambitions.
What is your favorite scene in Monkey See? There’s a scene where Ed is worried about Gigi and tries to get help from a militant chimpanzee named Chekchek. The chimp hates Ed for being so easygoing, but he thinks Ed has secret information Chekchek needs for his revolt. The more they talk the more Ed drives him crazy. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to writing a Three Stooges routine.
“They remembered what we had made them think unimportant. We wanted them to type, we wanted them to speak, and we did not care about trees to their way of thinking. Cogitomni watched the great muscled back disappear into a pine and thought We cannot explain ourselves to them either.” This is a central idea to your book. Do you have any underlying social commentary in this passage? One of the things I ran across in my research was a comment on the nature of language, which said, basically, that even if animals learned English, their frame of reference would be completely different. It reminded me of all the remarks over the years about “people not like us” – it ties back to the old idea that prejudice is largely based on assuming the other guy is somehow sub-human and unworthy of fair play. The human race is very creative at making excuses. For complete interview, visit www.philadelphiastories.org
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MONKEY SEE (NOVEL EXCERPT) hen Ed got home, he turned on the late talk and fixed himself a bowl of ice cream. He slumped on the couch and let the vanilla melt as he flipped, finding nothing comprehensible. Humans in ties laughed or insulted each other but he could not get the earlier argument out of his head. If it had been his dining room, he never would have let Chekchek through the door. Out his window, next to the tv, a streetlight burned at eye level, washing out the moon he’d passed on the way home. He could see, in the shadows, other Improved Apes in the trees, crouched, sitting, staring at the same moon that rolled above Africa, Madagascar, Ceylon. He could walk out this window and join them, but he wouldn’t be sure he had joined them. There was no way to tell if this new language meant the same to all of them. He lifted his spoon and swallowed his ice cream like a good boy.
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Chekchek sat in the tree in his backyard, fuming at the mortgage rates around here. Backyard trees had become a hot commodity since the neighborhood went Ape. Still, he liked his ranch house, and it was convenient to Interstate 95. The moon seemed another trick to him now that the humans had explained what it was – an airless ball of quiet dust, chipped in a thousand places by other chips of rock and ice. He could not articulate to himself what he thought it was before the operations, but it was better than that. In the next house he could see that the good professor’s wife had gone up to bed. The professor himself seemed to be stalling in the kitchen, weakly filling ice
trays. He kept meaning to climb over and see what happens behind the upstairs curtains, but he resisted, not wanting to risk trouble with the human police before he had a chance to complete his plans. When the time came, he imagined the joy of tearing down those ugly brownflower curtains and scaring the bejabbers out of Cogitomni and his wife. He bit into another of his fresh-baked madeleines and chewed silently, lost in thoughts of his plots and remembrance of what was half known in the first place. Harold Pryce Cogitomni, Doctor of Gerontology, Professor of Cellular Biology, Doctor of Large Animal Veterinary, Professor of Tweaked DNA at Princeton, filled the ice cube trays very slowly from a tight trickle of pure spring water out the jug dispenser in his kitchen and thought, too aware of the obvious metaphor, of how impure the world was, of how he had muddied the waters between the species. They did not need ice, but he was the only one to ever fill it, and he was grateful for the small responsibility, the incredible insignificance of the work. He pulled his robe tight. There was a chill in the vinyl tiles under his feet. Fall approached. The night rustled. He looked to the full moon out the window, above the trees he assumed were filled with his new neighbors, though he rarely spotted them even in daylight. Someone had proposed banning tree-climbing at a neighborhood meeting, but legal questions aside there seemed no practical way to enforce it. His wife had hung thick curtains over all the windows except for this small one over the kitchen sink, and he found himself drawn to it now on these nights when he could tell himself he knew his audience was out
there, watching him, judging him, struggling for a verdict and then a punishment. He poured himself a glass of water from the plastic jug and added one of the fresh ice cubes he’d popped from the trays. He told himself he could taste the purity, though of course he could not; there is a taste to impurity, and it is sometimes what we want. He heard a sound beyond the curtains and he moved to the french doors to see a great silverback gorilla, almost white as the moon and streetlights reflected, leap from tree to tree. He had stripped off his human clothes, playing in the night’s yard. The apes wore human clothes not out of humiliation or vanity but because they had come to understand it gave them portable shelter in a cold climate, and all the freedom pockets can bring. But in the night, in the undressed distances, in the proper lighting, they could not stand to ape us. They remembered what we had made them think unimportant. We wanted them to type, we wanted them to speak, and we did not care about trees to their way of thinking. Cogitomni watched the great muscled back disappear into a pine and thought We cannot explain ourselves to them either.
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WHEN LOVE WAS CLEAN UNDERWEAR (NOVEL EXCERPT) hapter One.
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Lucy took the oxygen tubes out of her mother’s nose and turned off the tank so they could share a last cigarette together. Marge’s last cigarette. It was October 30, Mischief Night, the day her mother Marge had chosen in the hope of being buried on All Souls’ Day. She chose the time, around 11:15 p.m., so that she could watch the lead story on the 11:00 news; she no longer cared to hear the five-day forecast. They sat in the dining room, which had been converted into a makeshift hospital room with an adjustable bed, a commode, a TV tray covered with prescription bottles, and the oxygen tanks. Lucy held the brown cigarette to her mother’s mouth. The smoke hung about Marge’s face. Her lungs could barely pull it in or force it out, but she still enjoyed the smell and taste. The lead news story had proven a disappointment. The “werewolf boy” from South America had plastic surgery at Children’s Hospital to remove the thick hair covering one side of his face; skin grafts were required. Instead of after pictures of the boy’s face following the procedure, they aired pre-surgery video. Dr. Eugene McCormick, a man in his early fifties wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a white medical jacket, outlined an area of the boy’s face with a black marker, while the anchorwoman stated that the boy was recuperating and in stable condition.
“He is the same,” Marge said through parched lips, as she turned her face away. She had motioned to Lucy that it was time. Reluctantly, Lucy let go of the aluminum foil-covered antenna of their old television. She didn’t want to kill her mother. She didn’t know whether she could kill her mother. Lucy took a drag and then offered the cigarette to her mother again. Closing her eyes, Marge parted her lips and sucked ever so slightly on the filter. She opened her mouth to let the last of the smoke escape and studied its rise. Then Lucy tapped out the cigarette in the ashtray until every ember was extinguished. She went into the kitchen
to empty and wash the ashtray, a ritual Marge insisted upon after each cigarette. One that Lucy was grateful for now; it gave her a just few more minutes. “Smoking doesn’t have to be a dirty habit,” Marge would say. As Lucy returned to the dining room, Marge pointed to her purse. Lucy knew what she wanted—the index cards with Marge’s final to-do list. Each step of her mother’s death was printed clearly, ingrained in blue ink, on its own index card. In the past few weeks, she’d meticulously jotted down notes while watching reruns of Columbo and other detective shows. From these notes, she created the concise, detailed to-do list. For as long as Lucy could remember, index cards were how Marge ordered the days, weeks, and seasons of her life. She kept all but these final ones in a recipe box on the kitchen windowsill. Mostly they were instructions on keeping house, some recipes—Marge’s parting gift to Lucy “so she wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every morning.” Protest was futile. Lucy cautiously brought up that some in the Church might consider it a mortal sin. Marge said, “I’ve got that covered.” Lucy pleaded that she wasn’t up to the task, maybe there was someone else, perhaps Marge could do it on her own? “I gave birth to you. This is the least you could do for your poor dying moth- 17 er,” Marge replied. The conversations ended always with Marge’s standard endof-discussion scowl. Lucy sat next to her mother and when Marge nodded, she read from the
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Breech Kate Delany since it was halloween anyway, they carved a big jack-o-lantern grin just above my pubic bone and from inside that sinister smile they scooped you out, pumpkin seeds and all. i’d asked you to turn for months towards the light, towards the exit sign, towards that nice warm spot in me, breeching seeming not just a position but a breach in our contract that you’d enter the world not just loiter there, umbilical cord looped around your neck like a condemned man at the gallows waiting for someone to kick the stool away. in the end, they removed you like tonsils, a lump of appendix, something you get ice cream and mylar balloons for as a kid. as I lay on the gurney, enough light above me to bleach my bones, the nurses looked on, and the residents, and the med students and I don’t know, maybe popcorn was passed around. I couldn’t see from behind the screen where they carved me up like a big fat dinner carcass, chirping away with their happy questions— “what’s the name?” and “what would it have been if it had been a boy?”
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it wasn’t till they held you over me, a dangling cloud of blood, my arms splayed out and strapped down that way, Jesus on the cross style, that I realized for the first time you weren’t something heavy I’d eaten for lunch, a bowling ball implanted in a dream. You were mine. then they gave you to your father and they wheeled me away. Kate Delany's publications include a book of poetry, Reading Darwin, published by Poets Corner Press. Her poetry and fiction has most recently appeared in Art Times, Sotto Voce and Chicken Pinata. She lives in Collingswood, NJ with her husband Seth, daughter Samara, and cats Esmeralda and Emile Zola.
first card: “Number one. Place pillow over my face and apply firm but gentle pressure for a minimum of five minutes.” Marge reached for the pillow behind her head. Lucy took it with one hand and looked for a place to set the stack of index cards. Finally, she decided to put them on Marge’s lap, then she stood. She wanted to say something or do something meaningful but Marge seemed eager to get on with it. Afraid she’d fail her mother, Lucy started, “Mom . . .” Marge calmly waved her off and motioned for the pillow. Lucy took a deep swallow, put the pillow over Marge’s face, bending its ends around her head, and held it tight. Her mother’s body became rigid. Her fists pushed into the mattress. Marge had warned Lucy not to break her nose. People would suspect foul play. And she didn’t want black eyes for her funeral. “It’s not that I’m vain,” she’d said, “I just want to be presentable.” After a few moments, Lucy’s hands were wet with perspiration; her joints ached from the pressure, the tension. Her mother lay still. Lucy had forgotten to check the time before starting. How did she get stuck doing this? Who else would do it? Her father was dead. Her sister Anne would never have agreed to this; and Marge would never have asked her. Lucy lifted the pillow. “Mom, are you there?” Marge’s eyes opened, startling Lucy, then Marge began coughing. “Are you okay?” asked Lucy. Her mother moved her head. Lucy couldn’t decipher if she was shaking it or nodding. “Do you want a glass of water?” Marge’s coughing subsided and she glared at Lucy. “Get the egg timer,” she whispered with what was left of her voice. When Lucy returned, Marge set the timer for five minutes. Pushing aside prescription bottles, she positioned it on
s u s a n the TV tray next to her. Then, she pressed the button to recline the bed. She motioned for Lucy to place the pillow over her head again. “I’m not sure I want to do this!” Lucy started crying. Marge patted her daughter’s shoulder and reset the timer. She pushed the pillow to Lucy. “Okay, okay,” Lucy mouthed. Right before she put the pillow over her mother’s face for the second time, she noticed Marge blowing air out of her mouth. Her hands lay across her chest, her gnarled fingers neatly intertwined and pressing down. Death could not come fast enough for Marge. Her mother had been ready for death since her husband Joseph died twelve years ago. She’d curled into herself like a pill bug only her armor left showing. Marge never forgave Joseph for dying so unexpectedly, so poetically, and so well before her. His dying was not in the plan. He’d broken their agreement. He’d abandoned her. Joseph Pescitelli was a house framer. One day on the job, he stopped hammering, clutched his chest, and slid down a wood stud until his tool belt clunked against the plywood floor. It was all one fluid motion. He died with one hand on his chest and the other still holding his hammer. Theirs had been a May-December romance. Joseph was twenty-two years older and a confirmed bachelor when he met Marge. But he had always acted younger than his age and she, older. It was as if, in marrying Joseph despite her family’s disapproval, Marge O’Connell had committed her one act of youthful passion and been done with it. At the young age of fifty, Marge seemed to welcome the cancer, having grown bored and frustrated with living. She was furious that she was confined to a hospital bed with oxygen tubes up her nose, peeing in a pot in the middle of the very same dining room in which she conducted Christmas and Easter celebrations for thirty some years. Her dying was nei-
ther poetic nor quick. The egg timer ticked the seconds. Lucy stared at the white pillow covering her mother’s face until she saw spots. Then she looked to the window and saw the reflection of the simple circular chandelier, hovering in the darkness. A lone white feather that must have escaped the pillow slowly swayed back and forth making its way to the bed until Lucy blew it away. Marge’s body was tense and shook slightly. Lucy stood, her arms straight, pushing down. Her elbows and knuckles ached. The dark hair on her arms stood on edge in contrast to the brightness in the room. Everything seemed alive and watchful. The egg timer, the feather, the chandelier—all witnesses. Lucy turned her face away and stared at the twisted zigzag lines of the television screen. Her vision was already blurred with tears as she tried not to notice her mother’s feet twitching under the blankets like two land-bound fish. Voices from another channel cut in and out. She couldn’t make out what they were selling. The health reporter spoke with great earnestness about the merits of drinking tea. The elderly British people she interviewed proclaimed that their religious consumption of tea was the reason for their longevity. Many had grandparents who had lived well into their nineties. The Pescitellis were coffee drinkers. Marge’s body jolted, once, twice, three times. Lucy held tight onto the pillow letting her tears fall from her jaw. Her throat ached, trying to release a cry. She swallowed. Next up on the news was a man who had invented a device for yanking trapped plastic bags from tree limbs. The news took a break to advertise the following day’s 6:00 news. The egg timer buzzed, rattling against the metal TV tray. Lucy lifted the pillow and held it against her chest. Marge’s milky blue eyes were open. Lucy hadn’t expected that. She waved her hand in front of them; they didn’t blink. “Mom? Mom? Are you there?”
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NUMBER TWO: MAKE AB SOLUTELY SURE I AM DEAD. Lucy lay her head on her mother’s chest. Sometimes when she was little, Lucy woke up to the sound of her father snoring in the front bedroom and the noise of the television downstairs. There her mother had fallen asleep in her recliner, the flickering light on her still body. Quietly, Lucy climbed on her lap and listened to her mother’s heart beating, her soft murmuring in her sleep. Now, there was no sound, no motion. As instructed, Lucy placed a handheld mirror in front of Marge’s nose and mouth. It didn’t fog up. She couldn’t make the call to the doctor unless she was absolutely sure Marge was dead; her mother had emphasized that several times. Lucy checked for a pulse in her mother’s wrist. “Mom? Are you there?” Lucy stood above her and gently shook her shoulders. Marge’s body was limp. Lucy placed Marge’s hands on her chest, as they did at the funeral home where she worked. Her mother’s hands were rough. The perpetual cycle of scrubbing, washing and scouring had left her hands with the swollen, bruised look of a fisherman’s face after decades of exposure to salt air. NUMBER THREE: PLACE PILLOW UNDER MY HEAD. After closely inspecting the pillow for any traces of bodily fluid, Lucy returned it to its place under Marge’s head. She straightened Marge’s faded strawberry blond hair with traces of gray. The muscles in Marge’s face were relaxed, but Lucy could still see the line between her eyes. Oddly, in death Marge appeared younger. For a moment, Lucy considered holding her mother in her arms, embracing her, but her mother’s eyes were still watching. Instead, she quickly kissed her forehead,
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something she would never have done while her mother was alive. In her mother’s house, love was clean underwear, not hugs and kisses. When she stroked Marge’s cheek, she was surprised by its softness and the light peach fuzz. She assumed her skin would feel more like burlap than silk. Her sister Anne bore a very strong resemblance to Marge—tall, slender, and fair with freckled skin and thin lips. Lucy took after her father, which meant she was shorter, rounder, her skin olive. Her dark hair was noticeable on her upper lip and sideburns, more pronounced on her arms and legs than the average woman’s. Lucy couldn’t help but wonder if Marge’s interest in the werewolf boy was an indirect slight at her. NUMBER F OUR: REINSERT OXYG EN TUBES. Lucy released a heavy sigh, not realizing she’d been holding her breath. The tubing rested on Marge’s throat. Lucy carefully inserted the prongs into her mother’s nostrils and turned the oxygen tank on. When Dr. Cuchinnati arrived it was to appear as though Lucy was so in shock that she left her mother untouched.
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NUMBER F IVE: OPEN WINDOW AND RELEASE MY SOUL . Lucy opened the window next to the bed. Marge had told her to say a prayer for both of them. Lucy heard the Million Dollar Movie theme music coming from the TV. Beyond the alley, in the moonlight, the clothesline shimmered, a
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shooting star against the cinder block walls of the backyard. In the upper pane of glass, she could see her own dark reflection and the white brightness of her mother’s blankets behind her. If she stood perfectly still and concentrated hard enough, she thought she might see her mother’s soul leaving her body. “God forgive us,” she whispered. A chill traveled up the length of her spine. Had
evision. It had compartments specifically designed for a matching checkbook, address book, cigarette case, and key chain. When Marge saw it, she knew it was the perfect purse for her— a place for everything and everything in its place. The pages of the address book crinkled like old parchment from the stress of Marge’s printing as Lucy searched for the doctor’s information even though she knew the number. She needed the prop. The line rang and rang and Lucy envisioned the octogenarian slowly making his way to the telephone. Finally he answered. She could hear her mother’s voice in her head as she recited her lines: “She went peacefully in her sleep during the 11:00 news. I called to her from the kitchen to see if she wanted anything and there was no answer.”
With Marge’s purse in tow and the index cards folded into her palm, Lucy waited for the doctor on the front stoop. Being alone with her mother frightened her now, despite her years of practice keeping the dead company. Purple Nude by Jennifer Lynn Albright © 2009 Since the doctor lived several blocks away and stubbornly refused to her mother left? Turning away from the take a taxi, Lucy knew she’d be waiting window, she watched her mother’s for some time while he hobbled over. motionless body. She grabbed the index The coolness of the marble step seeped cards and her mother’s purse from the through her threadbare sweatpants. She foot of the bed, then slowly backed into reached into her mother’s purse and the kitchen. pulled out the matching cigarette case. NUMBER SIX: Some of its color had crumbled away. CALL DR. CUCHINNATI. Her hands trembled as she lit a cigarette. Marge’s purse was heavy, twenty Then, she began to pull at the hair on years old and camel-colored faux leather. her forearm; the pain grounded her. Sometime during the Seventies it was She looked over at the darkened row available for purchase exclusively on telhouses across the street. Her entire life
s u s a n had happened on this narrow street in South Philadelphia. She knew every neighbor at least by sight. The houses were all the same—two-story red brick fronts, a bay window on the first floor, two windows on the second. Tonight, they resembled yawning faces. Some neighbors had opted to install aluminum siding over the brick front; others stuck artificial grass to their steps, perhaps in an attempt to bring some green to the lawnless neighborhood. While Marge disapproved of these embellishments, her pet peeve was the adornment of the bay windows with Virgin Marys, or cat and dog figurines, or plastic flower arrangements against white vertical blinds. The Pescitellis had sheer curtains and heavy, dark mustard-colored drapes. A single crystal lamp lit the window. On this night, many houses had seasonal cardboard decorations of ghosts, witches, and black cats taped to the windows. Only a few trees were on the block. In front of their house, at the base of their stoop, was a square of mismatched cement. When her father lived in the house alone, before he’d met her mother, a tree grew there. In the spring, it produced white blossoms. Marge had it removed, fearing it would fall on the house or tangle its roots around the sewer pipe. Lucy slipped off her black flat and stubbed out her cigarette in its soft foam sole, which resembled a waffle from wear. Marge didn’t like butted cigarette marks on the sidewalk and Lucy didn’t want to reenter the house alone to retrieve an ashtray. Through the vertical blinds, Lucy spied the purple-pink light of televisions in some of the houses. The street was quiet. She lit another cigarette and stared at the burning embers and the smoke drifting up. Since it was Mischief Night, she thought she might see some kids making mischief. At twenty-nine, she’d never seen it happen. But every Halloween morning, without exception, she awoke to see soaped-up car windows and doorways
and store fronts splattered with overripened tomatoes and raw eggs. A couple approached; they weren’t from the neighborhood. “Those’ll kill ya, ya know,” the woman commented as they walked by. “Yeah,” Lucy said, “I know.” She took a deep drag, then blew the smoke out in a steady stream. So far the day had gone exactly as planned. In the morning she had finished some minor household tasks before the visitors for the day arrived. Fr. Reed heard Marge’s confession, gave her Holy Communion, and seemed to suspect nothing out of the ordinary in their behavior. Jack Kelleher arrived in the afternoon. Marge had respected and trusted Jack as a friend and a lawyer and because his aunt, Mrs. Garrity, who lived across the street, was her best friend. Jack was in his late thirties and had gone away for law school but returned to the neighborhood. Something graduates rarely did. He was the opposite of her sister Anne who only returned for funerals. Lucy lit another cigarette with the last one. The folded index cards were damp from being clenched in her fist. Despite this, the lines and dots Marge had embedded into the cards still felt like Braille. When Marge first reviewed them with her, Lucy felt demeaned by their simplicity and repetitiveness, but they had proven a comfort this night, allowing her to focus on tasks, not the implications of her actions. She unfolded them. The next card gave instructions for calling Anne. Lucy wasn’t to do this until Marge’s body had been taken from the house. Marge didn’t want Anne coming over and
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asking questions while she was still there. Lucy flipped to the last card. NUMBER EIGHT: DESTROY TO-DO LIST. The final item. St. Peter’s loomed large over the squat houses. Its muted bell rang out midnight. Her cigarette had burned down to the filter; it singed her fingers. For a moment she absorbed the pain. Then she ground the butt into her shoe and shoved the cards into her pocket. The sound of footfalls echoed down the deserted street and Dr. Cuchinnati’s elongated shadow appeared before he turned the corner.
Excerpted from When Love Was Clean Underwear by Susan Barr-Toman (www.susanbarrtoman.com), winner of the Many Voices Project’s Fiction Award 2007. The novel will be published by New Rivers Press in October, 2009. Susan Barr-Toman teaches writing at Temple University and holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
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favorite recent reads from the editorial board of philadelphia stories
QUICKPICKS The Mysterious Life of the Heart: Writing from The Sun about Passion, Longing, and Love Sy Safranski has been publishing The Sun monthly since 1974, and in this collection of essays, poetry, and fiction he has gathered a poignant, honest, and sometimes painful look at love. A deft mix of genres and subjects, Safranski advises in his forward, “…[to]read aloud to a loved one, by candlelight, between the hours of 10 P.M. and 2 A.M. But using this book to seduce someone or to justify the unbelievably selfish way you acted last week is expressly prohibited.” Philadelphia author, Denise Gess’s essay, “The Kitchen Table: An Honest Orgy” alone is worth the price. The other pieces in the collection are equally as good whether read by candlelight or not. -- Carla Spataro
FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART
What Space This Body, by J.C. Todd (Wind Publications, 2008) What Space This Body is an apt title for this celebration of the mortal body and its delights and rituals. Poems such as “Pissing,” in which a wife observes her husband, or “Men Kissing,” featuring a goodnight kiss between father and son, “homophobic and affectionate,” offer an erotics of everyday familial life. In language supple and glinting, Todd is fully present to her subjects, treating human beings, art and the natural world with wonder, tenderness and respect, “the tough muscle/some called heart.” -Alison Hicks End Credits (Casperian, 2008) A.F. Rutzy’s End Credits offers an imaginative romp through the mysteries of the afterlife. The fun begins when the novel's narrator, Raymond
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Kessel, dies while crashing the wrong funeral. Instead of plucking a harp behind the pearly gates, he finds himself desperately trying to get a straight answer from a Grim Reaper named Cleo while inhabiting the body of a wealthy advertising executive. From here, the novel only grows curiouser and curiouser (to borrow a phrase) as Rutzy introduces us to a wide cast of memorable characters including a desperate would-be rock star, a bumbling accountant, and a pair of wild hogs with an apparent fondness for sunglasses and shopping malls. Conjuring his vision of American excess with a careful balance of exuberance and aplomb, the Finnish author weaves an intricate web of characters and amusingly outlandish scenarios that had me hooked from the word go. – Marc Schuster
Members as of May 22th, 2009
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