Assignment

Assignment May 2016, Volume #2

THE LITERARY MAGAZINE OF SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIVERSITY

Issue 2: Warzone Jennifer Percy Justin Taylor Greg Jackson Student Contest Winner Nadia Owusu Writing exercises from the contributors

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Assignment May 2016, Volume #2

THE LITERARY MAGAZINE OF SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIVERSITY

ASSIGNMENT Issue 2, 2016 EDITED BY Benjamin Nugent Daniel Johnson

ADVISORY BOARD Allison Cummings Diane Les Becquets Michael Brien David Swain Kristina Wright Sara Howe Harry Umen Stephanie Collins Traci Belanger Robert Seidman

PRODUCTION MANAGER Lisa Bonacci

GRAPHIC DESIGN Karen Mayeu

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WRITING EXERCISE by Jennifer Percy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 OPS, LPS, IPS AND TPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 An essay by Jennifer Percy

WRITING EXERCISE by Greg Jackson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 THE PARK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 A short story by Greg Jackson

WRITING EXERCISE by Justin Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 ALANA CLAIMS HER BIRTHRIGHT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 A short story by Justin Taylor

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 An essay by Nadia Owusu

“THE ANARCHIST IN ME”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 An interview with Justin Taylor

CONTRIBUTORS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

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WRITING EXERCISE Jennifer Percy

Think of someone you love and now imagine that they have died and you will dress them for their funeral. Write about this process.

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OPS, LPS, IPS AND TPS

by Jennifer Percy

There were few towns. Galactic smears appeared in areas of sky that earlier I’d thought were empty space.

The man I was with I’d known for one day. But this was Vermont, at a writer’s colony, and time passed slowly. He was fresh from a foreign war and tattooed in all the places where his muscles had curves. Each one inked with the faded blues of gas station candy bought for a quarter from plastic jugs. I touched the flames on his calf.

They gave off heat after he ran.

We’d found a bench made of cement, though it wasn’t really a bench, more like a slab and this slab was in a field near the road. We lay here, side by side, and it was impossible not to think about the two of us in a coffin.

“Would you rather eat food forever in heaven or have sex forever in heaven?”

“Sex,” I said, thinking that would be the answer he would want to hear. An answer that would eventually lead us out of friendship and into love and into sex.

“I would choose food,” he said.

The stars were fish eyes in the dark.

He said he liked to have sex like a praying mantis.

“How do they have sex?”

“Sometimes the female eats the male,” he said.

He told me a story. It began in Colorado when he was snowboarding with friends and had an accident. His unit deployed to Mosul the next month and he was at home with a broken arm. Everyone in his unit got blown up in a Humvee. That story brought us to the question of God. He said it must be God but anyone who believed in God was an idiot. Then he noted patterns in our lives, simultaneous calls and messages, uncanny moments that pointed toward belief. “You made me believe in God.” We decided we

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were atheists who believed in fate. When he finally shipped off to war again he survived night raids because he had a pair of lucky war boots.

This was the second story, and like most of his stories, it began in America and ended in Iraq. In college, in Virginia, he punched the man who called him faggot.

He talked about the way the wound bloomed on porcelain skin, and this got him to thinking about the day in Iraq when the soldiers could not make a decision about killing the girl with no legs.

“Where were her legs?” I said.

I could fit my leg inside his leg.

All over the place. Blown up. No way to put them back on now.

“It was already a bad place for a girl,” he said. “But a girl with no legs?”

This was actually all over a Facebook chat. It was all really casual, our evening wind down.

I told him a colonel had been spreading rumors about how it was easier for the Iraqi people to cope with death than it was for Americans because over there “death is God’s choice.”

“War is fun,” he said. “So what did you think of me when we spoke over the phone?”

“We never spoke over the phone.”

“I was in my kitchen, remember?”

“No it was over email. I have it.”

We never spoke over the phone, but I liked that he thought we did because that meant he was already telling a story about me in his head.

Back in Vermont, at the artists colony, we woke up with sunflower seeds pressed into our skin. We slept in the bed where the sick poet had slept before she’d left. What she’d told me was she’d taken a nap and then woke up and thought she was inside a hot tub.

“I have promises with three men to punch them,” I said. The sunlight made it impossible to open our eyes. “They’ll punch me back of course. That’s part of the promise.” He started bouncing on two feet. “Like this,” he said, showing me a one-two.

“Go for the nose.”

“I’ll remember,” I said.

“Fuck,” he said, “First night with a girl and I’m already teaching her how to punch. I’ve got problems.”

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He told me to come back to the bed and he held my face. He said he wanted to be with me because he thought he could make love to me forever. I told him that was a pretty good reason.

Later I ate Graham crackers out of a Dixie cup while he carried my bags down creaky stairs. They looked like toys in his hands. I skipped the airport shuttle and let him drive me to the airport where I’d take a plane back to the Midwest. “I’m starving,” I said. I held my stomach and bent over.

“You aren’t going to puke are you?”

Instead I listened to him talk about how his father was in Vietnam, how he killed a lot of people. His father left his mother and married a woman twenty years younger.

Our relationship lasted two months. Unlike him, I’m good at ignoring signs.

He had this thing where he asked everyone what they thought about Iraq.

These were regular people he ran into at the grocery store or the gas station. I never saw him do it but he told me about his encounters. I thought it was annoying. “We never ask the simple questions,” he said. “Simple questions fuck you up. The problem is I think that the wars are so foreign to Americans that they demand that it be given to them by the spoon, in a homily-like style, like the good little heirs of Tim O’Brien that we ought to be.”

“I tried to go to Iraq when the war began,” I said, “but my dad said he’d come to the airport and tie me up with ropes and wait for the war to end.”

“That’s some totalitarian craziness,” he said.

He invited me to a wedding in Mexico. On the way to the airport he said he just didn’t understand why he always made his mother cry. A dog recently got in a fight with his pit bull. It ripped open the pit bull’s stomach. This was a pet dog on the street, not a stray. The owner ran off and there’s a record out for the guy’s arrest. It was like a hit and run situation, only with dogs. The mother made a joke and asked whether the warrant was for the dog or the owner.

“I didn’t laugh!” he said. “She started crying.”

“I think it’s funny.”

“She’s miserable,” he said. “She’s never gotten over my father.”

In Mexico we searched alleys for cocaina and vicodin. He bought me a peanut butter cup at the pharmacy. The bride was half-Mexican, half-Palestinian and her family owned a house here on the beach near the town of Rosarita. The girlfriends

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of his hometown friends said they wanted to go the beach. “Is it safe to let them go alone?” one of the men asked. “Yeah,” he said. “The cartel already passed through.” He bought muscle relaxants and shook the bottle as we walked. We drank beer near this bar called Papas and there were little plastic army men falling from the sky, hundreds of them all over the beach.

He gave me half a pill and I hid it inside a French fry.

At the wedding he couldn’t stay awake, he kept nodding off and jerking his head like people do on airplanes. “I took one muscle relaxant and it didn’t work,” he said. “So I took four more.”

At dinner he disappeared. “Where the fuck is he?” his friends asked.

We found him practicing Arabic with the Palestinians. And there it was again, the story of the girl with no legs.

In the morning, he took us surfing. I’d already told him I didn’t want to go because I din’t know how and I was afraid of sharks. We’d already been parachuting. “Now sharks?” He laughed and said undertow was a bitch. He sent me a video of a shark ripping a man’s boy in half. It was a video from the beach where we would be surfing.

We went surfing anyway, escorted by his friend Kevin, a smiling bird-like man with no hair.

I changed into my wetsuit in the parking lot. They both noticed another woman who had cool hair. They were preoccupied with dark women, especially Persians, Palestinians, Egyptians. “I would never date a blond,” he said. I wanted to suggest that it was because they put on a uniform and invaded countries full of women with dark curly hair and that their imperialism could be reenacted most potently in the bedroom. But I didn’t say this because I was worried it would be true.

I dove into the cold Pacific and paddled and when the first wave came it took me and set me on my back and pushed me under the water. When I emerged he was gone and my sinuses burned from breathing saltwater into my lungs.

Kevin paddled over to me. “How did you get interested in this?”

“What?”

“All this icky boy stuff.”

I made a joke that when I was a kid I enjoyed ripping Barbie dolls in half.

“I’m on your team,” he said. “It’s just so goddam elemental that I have to break my neck to look away.”

He made his hand into a visor. “I don’t know where he went. Well, you’ll be okay?”

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“Fine,” I said. And I just lay there on my back and looked at the sky.

An old man swam up to me like a seal with his nose poking out of the water.

He seemed concerned. “Do you need help?” he said.

On the drive back to America, traffic was slow. Customs long. A woman on the street sold him three ceramic skulls. They were the size of children’s heads and he gave one to me. “It’s a gift,” he said, “so you’ll always remember Mexico.”

Back home he spoke in his sleep, muttering the way infants do, and once I had no idea he was even asleep, in the afternoon, and he rose a little and whispered, “Fifty years of this,” he said, “fifty years.”

I woke him up and told him what he said. I thought it was sweet. That we’d get to wake up next to each other for the next fifty years.

He slapped his head. “Even in my sleep I’m thinking about dying. Just fifty years before this is over and we’re dead.”

Things were happening to him when he slept. Once when I came close he swore and jumped and said, “I thought you were a crescent moon coming in here! And look at this, I’m sleeping in the shape of a crescent moon.” He was a crescent moon: long and elegant like a diver.

He apologized for speaking grunt. “The FOBs and S-VBIEDs and triple-stack 155s and OPs, LPs, IPs and TPs,” he said. He took off his baseball cap and put it on again.

“It’s the beautiful clipped banter that says so much by saying almost nothing at all.”

It’s the thing he missed most about the Corps. “It’s shorthand, a field poetry that owes existence to Hemingway and Chandler and doesn’t even know it.”

It was Halloween and we took the job to heart. We were going to dress up as Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. When I picked him up at the airport we were in a long line of cars, and when it came our turn to pay parking, the box for credit cards broke. That same day the pipes in the house where I was living broke and shit filled the basement. My bank account drained. “Destruction follows me everywhere,” he said. “What do we do?”

We decided today was the day to jump out of a plane. We had to wait a long time for our turn. When my parachute opened and floated over Iowa strapped to an instructor I was cold and felt like vomiting and there was a sign on the ground made of old parachutes that read, Will you marry me? We were quiet and waited for the earth to

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reach our feet. The sign wasn’t for me. The parachutist asked: “What did you imagine when you were falling from the plane?”

“That I was invading another country,” I said.

We were still in character after all.

At home we searched for reasons for our exhaustion. “I can’t keep my eyes open,” he said.

“Look here,” I said. I showed him a site I found about adrenaline and exhaustion. “We used it all up. We have nothing left. But we can’t go to bed now,” I told him.

I peeled back the lids on one of his eyes. It had felt important to me that we reenacted our life before we lived it. I guess that is what we had been doing all along, imagining ourselves as people who went to war and came out the better for it. We had made plans to go to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.

“Hang on,” I said. I painted a mustache on his face with my eyeliner. “Looks real,” I said.

“It won’t be real without whiskey,” he said. “And we need cigarettes.”

“Should I be sexy Martha Gellhorn?” I said, showing him my shorts.

“No just be real Martha Gellhorn. She wouldn’t wear those. You need pantaloons.”

“But I don’t want to wear pantaloons.”

We ate a box of fried chicken. He was mopey and never mentioned the war.

I brought up the fact that we were supposed to go to Afghanistan together. “I can’t just go alone,” I said.

“If you are going to go to Afghanistan,” he said, “you might as well go when it’s most dangerous. The longer a war goes on, the more you come to resemble your enemy, which you chose and obsess and pine over. Men being men together. Haji and L.Cpl. Schmuckatelli aren’t getting any, so they take it out on each other in frustration.”

“By fucking?”

“No, please. By killing each other.”

“How does this relate to me?”

“I think there’s a certain restlessness, secrecy and self-destruction that comes with war work. I think it’s tempting for veterans to think that if you ever explained your experience completely that there wouldn’t be any mystery left to trade on. That’s all veterans have in the end. The mystery.”

“Why does it need to be a mystery?”

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“Sometimes it’s good to leave a lot of it unsaid or merely hinted at because if it were explained, there would be no romance. War never loses its mystery but for someone who wants respect, the mystery is a card. It’s a card that always plays to win.”

I asked why he was so upset. He said he didn’t know. He said he thought it was because he made lots of promises but couldn’t fulfill any of them. Like what? I asked. He couldn’t even tell me. He promised me love and when the fantasies ran out, so did our relationship. And it was all a fantasy, he told me. None of it was real.

“The day I went from dumb jarhead to war journo I was washed of my banality and women got interested in a whole new way,” he said. “I’ve spent years on sweaty cots formulating all this doggerel.”

My friend offered me an anecdote from an essay written by one of his students. In the essay there was a boy who texted the author only when he wanted sex. Otherwise he didn’t talk to her. He ignored her on campus. One night, it’s snowing and below zero and he tells her to come over. She is outside on the sidewalk. She says: let me in. He tells her to wait because there’s another girl there and he isn’t sure if he wants to be with her or not. He says he needs to think about it. He says to wait. The guy never texts.

The girl waits and waits. She doesn’t have a coat but she stays because she is waiting.

“You are that girl in the snow,” he said.

I didn’t notice until a few weeks later, but on top of my fridge I found a paper grocery bag with a face on it, staring at me. I remember the day we went shopping together and used that bag. We’d made salmon and sweet potatoes and he took the bag and stood away from me and started drawing on it. I wasn’t paying attention. I was hungry, busy scooping diced garlic from a jar, mixing salt and ginger. On the bag he drew what must have been the face of Hemingway, with a mustache drawn in permanent ink, and eyes wild and full of lines suggesting exhaustion or fury. He’d been watching me this whole time. I slipped the bag over my head.

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WRITING EXERCISE Greg Jackson

• Compose a sequence of questions. The word “sequence” is important. Each question should follow, loosely, from the question or questions before it. Make the questions specific and particular, peculiar even. Probably they should concern what we might call a character, or two characters, or a small group of characters. I can’t imagine that fewer than twenty or thirty questions will suffice, but if you think they are questions that require long answers, perhaps.

• Answer your questions.

• When you have answered your questions, remove the questions so you are just left with answers. Do these tell a story? Fill in what’s missing. If you don’t like the answers, perhaps the answers tell you what questions you should have been asking instead. How do the questions you choose to answer affect the style and tone of the story you produce?

What questions lead to the most interesting answers? If you have not produced a story, what sort of questions might need to be answered to make it a story?

• You can think of the questions as the photo-negative of your story. Or are they a different kind of story? Write the story entirely as questions.

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THE PARK

by Greg Jackson

James went by Jim, Jimmy, some people called him Tim as a joke, his ex,

Kathleen called him Alexei, for no reason, when she was feeling affectionate, otherwise James, he’d met Frankie at a residency some years before, an artists’ colony, where he was a poet, where she did performance although she focused more on her music now, her band, Felix, an electronic sound, bluesy vocals—she sang—and they were getting older, not yet forty, but they were getting older, it was undeniable. They were getting older, and they were friends. To say lovers would have been too much since they saw each other only infrequently. Repositories for each other hungers.

Ponds ungreased by love. They submerged together and hid for days. Their friendship was moderated by the extravagance. It all existed in a glass orb cut off from the world though transparent at the warped curvature of its boundary. To see each other more often, to be friends who asked that being known came with . . . well, anything, would have shattered it. Vacation, they called it. When Frankie wasn’t in the studio, wasn’t on tour. When the high school where James taught went on break. They bought good liquor, turned their phones off, lowered the blinds.

Were they unhappy? No. Not more than most people. They were artists, so

their unhappiness drew on the melancholy of staying open to the possibility of sadness all around them. Maybe it wasn’t a choice. Possibly it was hope. In one sense it was the sadness of having cast their lot in with transcendent things, which flickered into existence and just as soon out. So not sad, but in a state of persistent longing, you could say, for a faintly envisioned world never to come but that shimmered promiscuously in moments alive with beauty or proximate to affection, intimacy, and forgiveness. In a piece years before, Frankie had spent a month embracing strangers in a bed. This took place in a gallery. She studied their bodies, the body’s language as it lay. If they lay long enough, their breathing would slow and the feeling of even touching would dissolve to nothing. Only a few touched her inappropriately. She 13

moved their hands back to her stomach. When at the end of the month she tried to rise she found she couldn’t stand. Her legs buckled beneath her. And she was weeping, she discovered. For a month she had held strangers, they had held her.

They had held each other breathing as if a quiet momentous thing were about to happen, and she had felt their desire for something momentous, and her own.

The blinds were drawn in Jim’s apartment. They glowed in the afternoon

light a color like unripe melon, luminous. The dust eddied at their blades like a spray of tiny ashes. Vinyl, ashes, the way the sea turned in on itself. Frankie enjoyed the summer heat. How she was already dirty. Dirt was proximity, the sweat in her clothes.

Jim sat at his breakfast table smoking: tobacco mixed with weed. She smelled the heaviness of the two against a background of flowers and rot, lavender, pollinating trees. He sat by the window in an undershirt, close enough to peer down through the blinds at the trucks and children and the bright golden effluence of summer in the street. He had set up the liter bottles on the credenza. Thick glossy lemons and limes.

A still life, half a joke. The hardwood creaked. He must have swept, she thought. The wind pushed the blinds into the room.

When she told friends she knew a poet they said, I should really read more

poetry, by which she understood them to mean they should read any but wouldn’t.

She believed people didn’t read poetry because it didn’t lead anywhere and it terrified people to feel time pass doing something that didn’t lead anywhere. James wrote poems about things that led nowhere, only further in, and so in a sense he wrote poems about the terror of being a poet and the experience of reading poetry.

When they had regarded each other in appraisal and silence and delayed

gratification of the moment, their smiles at last irrepressible, he rose, slipped by to slide the chain guard in the door—he rarely locked it—held her, and kissed her cheek.

They rested like that awhile. She smelled of desert, he thought, of perfume fired by the sun, volatile on hot panels of skin. Her body gave, not fleshy, not firm or thin. A body, that is. He would pour himself into it. In a second, he knew, he would become liquid and mix with it, throw himself at its porousness, softly, until like metal rings in a magic act they trespassed each other. Already it was too much, for already in the initial moment he felt the later moments, when Frankie would shower and dress and strap her bag and—

She left his hand trailing in the air after hers and moved to the table where she

relit the spliff. She pulled long drags off it. She looked at him. He looked thin and she remembered how she had thought him unlovable when they first met, not a cruel thought, he was only ugly, but then so decent (he had brought desserts, tea, books 14

of poetry to her cabin), so decent and sound, so fully present when she spoke that she could not see him as ugly. He was not ugly. He was altogether an object of love. No, she didn’t love him. But she wanted to be near him. He was as real as water. Also hopeless, which you could see by his apartment. She could not imagine him buying an article of furniture, certainly not a pillowcase. He had probably inherited these and his towels and certainly his dental floss from an old girlfriend. Not that she was Martha Stewart. Not that he deserved pity.

Sex is a coordination of subjectivities. It is a remarkable thing to do with so

little speaking. In the bedroom they removed each other’s clothes with significant interest. They hadn’t seen each other in months and this charged their bodies with newness, as though it were a stranger consenting to being undressed. This was exciting. It brought forth a hunger. They kissed and let the spit linger in the kiss, pressing their mouths together as though on the far side were the counterpart to consciousness, perhaps. They touched, licked, sucked, inspected. Ran fingers through vales of hair. Turned and repositioned. They made signal noises and whispered the novelty of each other’s names, laughed at themselves, the helpless confrontation with all they were permitted and the impossibility of its simultaneous performance, the aromas and entries, the reality and pliancy of genitals, the unabashed warm enactments of possession and submission, taking and ceding control, the wordless and desultory harmonies, the limitless feeling bound in careful lust. They had perhaps never said no to each other. They had perhaps never asked anything demanding enough.

How was life, Frankie wanted to know when they were done. They lay there

like they were floating in the river of gold that ran down the street just before townhouses opposite would eclipse the sun, the light as thick and warm as the vital chord change in a country ballad, a lament, the hinge heartache swung on.

Life was all right, Jim said. Was it all right? No. He could not find a publisher

for his second book of poems. It had been seven years since his first. His first had been a well enough received collection in the style of the New York School, which school he longer believed in or trusted. It was glib he felt, he had been young. People wanted something casual and inviting. He didn’t tell Frankie this. She thought he was a poet, but he taught high school kids English, and they went off to have lives that had nothing to do with poetry. He lay there naked with a beautiful woman, he thought her beautiful, and his fingers had been inside her, and he taught high school students how to write meaningless essays and identify themes. What on earth was a theme? He might as well have taught children to suffocate living creatures. But he told Frankie 15

none of this, and said that he felt, with each passing year, that he was living in a murder mystery in which no one would be killed.

Killed? Frankie said. Who do we want killed? But he didn’t answer. How could

he? Didn’t she know? I’m just being stagy, he said, to make it all a joke. How are you?

And how was she, how was she? She was good, but how could she tell him that?

Busy was the word she settled on. This was true, but she said it in the tone of

an oppressiveness she didn’t feel. These interludes had offered her an escape in the past, a break, but when she said it she realized she had only come this time not to disappoint Jim. Oh, you know, career stuff never ends, she said, but when I manage to stop and look around, I’m pretty happy with what life’s become. And as she said it she was happy, and her happiness worried her because she thought Jim would see it. But I never get to just be, she added quickly. I miss the pure, undivided time. I miss this.

Did she?

This was the idea, or part of it, to abandon time as a conceptual framework.

Time of course didn’t exist but we were asked constantly to pretend together it did.

And what did time look like, feel like, unmeasured, left simply to pass, away from the scrutiny of clocks and watches, phones, the metrics and intrusions? It looked like fluids of changing light. It felt like open space. Jim greatly resented the church bells ringing in the street because they had one message: time is passing…passing! But no, he was time, they were time, not simply immersed in it but it, passing with it, buoyant in its lightsome current.

The sun had begun its long summer bow to evening. They made drinks and

climbed to the roof on the rusted fire escape, where they sat on day-warmed tar and watched the brilliancy sift through the city. They talked about the people they were seeing. Frankie had a lover in San Francisco she liked. We fly to see each other once a month or so, she said, something like that. Serious? Jim asked. Maybe, she said, too early to tell. And he felt no possessiveness, as he never had with her, he didn’t know why. Maybe he had simply never invested some part of his identity in her constancy.

It was possible sexual jealousy had nothing to do with sex and was just the simple idea of what someone would sacrifice for you, whether people could be trusted at their word. We were petty creatures. He did not feel petty with her.

Grit on the roof dug into their elbows and the undersides of their legs. They

leaned against the cornice, shoulders pressed together, and jostled each other as they talked. To the west the buildings shone in a sky like fallout, a deep, unnatural fire dripping through the towers. Windows blazed. The ice in their drinks had melted.

Muddled mint like wet clippings clung to the glasses’ sides. And Jim’s romantic life?

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He did not want to tell her he’d been seeing a former student but she got it out of him with the bourbon. Eight years ago, he said. Stop smiling, she’s a grownup. She’s a grownup, Frankie repeated. Well, no, he admitted. That had been the problem.

But it was fun, she said. Very briefly fun, he said. Then a great big drag. And the sex? she asked. Young people can’t fuck, he said, and they didn’t say anything after that because it was simply true.

We do role plays, Frankie said a little later. We? Me and Raf. What sort? Father-

daughter stuff. She colored slightly. It’s fun. James said they could do that, and Frankie said all right. He considered it. I don’t feel very paternal with you, though.

No, she agreed. No, but she would call him Daddy if he liked. Daddy, oh, Daddy! she said, mostly teasing.

They had sex standing up in the kitchen. Over the sofa. They were in much

too much of a hurry to make it to the bedroom. They drank. James held Frankie off the ground, her legs around his waist, fucking, until he got tired. They smoked on the fire escape after. The night rivered around them, collected in a pool, was limitless.

In the velveteen dark. Strike that. In the permissive dark. It was wonderful to drink till dawn, to give each other permission, to smoke, to laugh, to touch each other every so often and start again, past the point where they could come. They laughed, they laughed.

When they awoke it was after noon. James regretted checking, but couldn’t

help it. They had sex again, dissipating the hangover a bit. They sat at the table by the windows, the blinds still drawn, listening to the breeze shake through the trees.

They drank beer. The languor and alertness, the pleasure, the fatigue, the crisp cold beer at two in the afternoon folded them in a tide of flickering happiness—there, then shadowed, then there again. Frankie suddenly had access to the feeling of being young in the city in spring, long days of moving between apartments and bars and outdoor music venues. A feeling of adventure she found painful to remember it was so great, so full of hope and the beauty of other people. The physical and sexual beauty of their cruelty and availability. But had it felt like this at the time, did it have the thickness it had now, the mediation as though under glass, the sleepy molten quality to the light and the emotion that played through it, or was this only the addition of memory and did we try to recapture what we never could because what we remembered had never been?

They lay in the sun on the roof and passed a rolled cigarette with a dash of

weed in it back and forth. The light spilled through their eyelids. When they got too hot they went to the bedroom, draped a dark sheet over the window, and watched 17

movies all afternoon. Sometimes James would slip a hand down Frankie’s stomach and into her underwear, and they would watch a little longer before pausing the movie. Sometimes she would play with him while they watched. Later they put on clothes and played games that asked them to drink and strip. They sat on the floor ten, twelve feet apart and tried to land bottle caps in mugs of beer. Jeanne Dielman played in the background. They fell asleep to Godfrey Reggio. James awoke, early, encased in a brittle pain. The pain felt like weak seams in his bones. It pulsed in his head. He didn’t want to move but forced himself up, took three aspirin with a swig of rum, cut up lemons and limes, squeezed them into glasses, shook salt into the mix, and filled the glasses with cold water. He brought one to Frankie who sat up on the couch where they had fallen asleep. She drank it gladly. He fed her the pills he had clenched in his hand, which she swallowed without asking. They were only aspirin.

Jim showered and left to get them food, to give Frankie time alone if she

wanted to shower and shit and text her lover if it was that sort of thing. He felt a twinge even stepping into the sun below the sycamores, the trash smell, the beautiful morning, the premonition of her leaving, the patient endurance of reality. The world would still be there waiting at the end of it, unchanged and never the same.

Frankie did shit—why be coy about it? She would have shat with James there,

but it was better this way, unselfconscious. She thought about the band’s new album, sitting there. They had just finished recording, and fingers crossed they were done— but already she could tell something was different, a new dimension, a fullness or maturity, as though a flat image had been granted depth and sprung in that instant to life. She showered, thinking about the gulf between the experience of making art and the world’s experience of the art, thinking, Was it possible James did not own shampoo? Yes. Well. She wouldn’t wash her hair. The only thing in the shower was a silver of soap so thin it bent in her hand. Oh, come on, James, she said to herself, speaking to him tenderly and a little angrily because in some ways he was a child and she wanted to be a child too but she couldn’t be one for as long as James could or in quite the same way. This set a small wave of anxiety rolling through her, fear really, a spasm in her stomach, until she looked at herself in the mirror and put it forcefully out of mind, smiled at herself, deciding that she was very happy and very sad all at once and living the life she had always dreamed of it and it was a life of such intense poignancy that at times she could scarcely breathe.

She ate radishes sprinkled with salt, sitting at the table by the window waiting

for James. People passed on the street below, holding children’s hands and walking in pairs. She kept expecting to see James, and she felt it would be strange, even 18

embarrassing, to see him out in the world, unaware of being watched. She picked up a notebook of his lying among the papers on his worktable. She brought it over to the table by the window and read: “—August 17. The park at dusk…A quality of green, deep and plush as chenille. Dogs play in naked tracts of puddles the rain has left on the lawn. They wade to their haunches and shake water from themselves. Two men reading on a blanket, lying on their stomachs side by side, possibly in love. Of course it rained, I remember now—the tapping on my windowsill, the impatient spirit trying to secure my attention to tell me no message was coming, not to expect one. Love is a type of reading, side by side. A far-off siren amplifying the peace. Planes crest the southern trees every minute or so on the flight path from oblivion. A pinpoint in pale orange, the color of the fireflies who spark in luminous dells, and the bulbous lamps stringing the walks like polished stones on a necklace. Where the substance of life gathers at too great a concentration and ignites, we say here is nothing but…a firefly, a chemical. And love is a siren in the quiet damp. The buildings facing west relay the parting words of a sunken sun. The woods are empty. Why did no one think to come here but me? And if the fireflies’ blinking has no meaning? No, we will call them spirits in the dark. We will tell the stories of their loneliness, and of their mischief.”

Frankie returned the notebook to the table and took a copy of James’s book off

the shelf to read the poem about his mother she loved and the poem about exploring the forest behind his grandparents’ house that went deeper and deeper in and never came out.

When he returned he had bags and bags—of cheese and bread, fruit and nuts,

a compote, cucumbers, tomatoes, wine, and a papaya that didn’t look ripe. He had started to think it was a person, he explained. Do you ever see something so ugly that you can’t believe it doesn’t have a soul? I left it, but I kept thinking about it. I kept thinking it was a person, and I was the only one who realized it and I’d left it. So I bought it.

But we can’t eat it if it’s a person. Of course not, he said. But at some point it

will rot, she said. He looked at her, annoyed, maybe tired, maybe sad. She considered taking his head and holding it to her chest, stroking his hair, and murmuring gentle nothings. It was in fact what she wanted to do, but she didn’t know where that path led once they went down it. She gave him a quick kiss on the lips. Had she ever told him about Gregor?

Who’s Gregor? he asked. He dropped two knelling ice cubes in each of two

glasses and poured rye over them. Me, she said—or a character. Sometimes I called him Felix. He was a project a bunch of years ago, but I never did anything with it.

19

I’d dress up as this guy, Felix, this slight, weird, delicate outcast. He was like the archetypal outcast, you know. I cut my hair short and dyed it black. I had a theater friend help me with a mustache. We gave me really bad skin. I had these skinny shapeless pants that didn’t go down far enough, glasses. And I’d explore the city as Felix. Ride the subways out to the ends of lines. He had these postures and faces. She twisted herself up the way a tent or map folds cleverly in on itself; her face took on a grimacing smile, a slight asymmetry. Gregor read the free papers, she said. He liked the ads, things he could never afford. He never had more than a few dollars crumpled in his pockets. People gave him the strangest looks—or maybe I just expected strange looks, maybe their looks were normal.

She had started to become Felix, she explained. After a few weeks, she felt

a change come over her, and felt this enormous fear. Because I thought: What can I call on? What do I have recourse to? Say I’m scared or in danger. Say I want to die.

What could Felix call on? He had nothing. I’d given him nothing. He was invisible, hideous. He had no money. No one cared about him or wondered where he was. I remember waiting on a train platform up above the street. The day was overcast. A few drops of rain had found their way into the wind, like the day was still deciding what it would be. And I thought, I am going to die, I am going to die. And Felix laughed just then, just as panic was seizing me. He laughed in a way I have never laughed and never will. It was the laugh of a dark freedom, horrifying, grotesque.

Ha ha ha…It seemed like the air was wicker in the laugh, breaking. It was a laugh that said there was nothing, absolutely nothing, and then filled the nothing.

They ate in silence. There is a point in everything when you realize you are

closer to the end than the beginning and you must either start making your way out or else do violence to yourself with each further step. The day turned gray. James cut his foot on something invisible and blood dripped on the apartment floor. He put a wad of paper towel on the cut and tied a T-shirt around his foot to hold it in place. He walked around for the rest of the day in his underwear with the T-shirt tied around his foot. He drank to still the rattling in him. He went down on Frankie with the knot slipping, the bloody towel falling to the floor. He thought it was Felix’s vagina he was licking, and he felt it had to be done, that it was the right thing to do, but he felt nauseated. Stop thinking about Felix, Frankie seemed to say, although it might have been a question—Are you thinking about Felix?—or maybe she just said Felix or moaned, or sang a sad beautiful song that told the story of making drugs in the mountains and having nothing like a normal life.

20

In the morning James awoke at daybreak feeling not the slightest bit tired.

He looked at Frankie’s mouth agape in sleep, the breath drifting into and out of it, and he quietly left the house. The morning was very still. You could hear the odd car a few blocks away and the delivery trucks downshifting on the avenue. The sun hadn’t come up, but the day was light. The moon, about full, rested above the buildings to the south, far too big and much too luminous for the daylight around it.

Jim walked the edge of the park, the broad stone-paved promenade. People

were assembling with bicycles. Quite a few people, in colorful skintight Lycra. It amused him—he had stumbled on a small secret. There were so many secrets, the world held so many secrets. And the city was so big and empty right then that it seemed possessed of an incredible bounty. The bikers took their bikes gingerly from their cars. The morning was very quiet. And on the benches beneath the boughs that grew over the walls slept homeless men, sleeping so they touched everything they had. And the birds, the flowers, and the daylight stirred. And the world slept. And the moon was a thing, hovering at its remove in the sky, a true thing.

Jim did not know Frankie’s band would make it, that it would take off soon and

for a time she would make a name for herself. There wouldn’t be any more vacations.

They would never make the same sense. He would not even know when she played the bandshell he was passing just then, a year later, to a thronging crowd who wanted something—what? Well, something—although he would hear the music that day, from a far corner of the park, and think, How nice, and think, Oh, I should go to one of these concerts one of these days—because I am looking for something too, something that lives in moments and must be drawn from them and never can be, fully. The world was very baggy. There were folds and folds…And no one would ever know everything that had taken place in just one moment of it, no one ever would. James would lose his phone, and later he would read that Frankie’s band was a sensation, a thing, and he would want to congratulate her but that wasn’t how they did things, and he didn’t have her email, strange as that was, and though he could have tracked it down easily, he didn’t.

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22

WRITING EXERCISE Justin Taylor

Write a story where the passage of time is the primary driver of the plot. Start wherever and however you like, but at the first opportunity, have your narrative make a significant jump forward in time. (What constitutes a “significant” amount of time is up to you, and will depend on the story you’re writing.) As soon as you get comfortable in the new scene, make another jump. Repeat as often as you care to, always moving forward; do not resort to space breaks or fantastical conceits to signpost or justify your choices.

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ALANA CLAIMS HER BIRTHRIGHT

by Justin Taylor

She stands wrapped in a wide white towel, hotel-threadbare, droning blowdryer aimed at her wet head. Her flight from Ft. Lauderdale landed at four o’clock yesterday; she dropped her bags and went to the city for dinner and drinks with a friend she hadn’t seen since college, stayed out later than she should have, but made up for it—more or less—by cabbing back here instead of trying to navigate the trains. Sixty bucks up in smoke but at least she got some sleep. It’s five-thirty in the morning now. In fifteen minutes she will be downstairs, dressed and checked out, on a shuttle bus to JFK. She’ll meet the tour group at the terminal entrance and they’ll check in together, go through security together, get fast into the habit of spending all their time together, togetherness being largely the point of it, or so she’s been led to believe.

Together on a bus tour across Israel for ten days.

Alana puts the dryer down on the marble-patterned plastic counter; leans in

close to the mirror; wipes fog with a washcloth she then lets fall. She parts her hair in small successive sections, looking for a gray that she hopes she won’t, and almost doesn’t, find. But there it is, over on the far left side (right side in the mirror), unmistakable, and bright rather than dull in the halide light.

They don’t come often, the grays, only more often than they used to. She

knows she isn’t as young as she used to be, but also that she is too young to entertain such a neurotic and obscene thought as I’m not as young as I used to be. She’s twentysix years old, God’s sake. Slamming the heel of her frustrated hand down onto the counter, flat smack in the humid room, towel shaken loose by the force, oh hell with it let it fall. She takes a step back from the sink and regards herself. An unashamed woman, leaning on her left leg, elbows out and hands on hips, a classical nude or almost, half-phantasmic in resurgent mirror fog.

25

She picks up the wash cloth and wipes the glass again, then isolates the long

strand, the gray, and pinches it at the root. Her fingertips flush against the seam of exposed scalp.

Alana enjoyed Hebrew school, though she never finished it; wasn’t Bat

Mitzvah’d either. She attended JCC camp every summer growing up—her parents’ decision, of course, but she liked it enough to return, of her own volition, as a counselor during college. The pay wasn’t much but then she hadn’t really needed the money, and anyway enjoyed the familiarity and tradition, or whatever. Her basic stance toward her heritage is one of vague allegiance glossing a fundamental lack of interest, itself both unexamined and disavowed. Everyone she knows has, at some point, taken one of these so-called birthright trips. Sacred land and raging parties.

Olive-skinned black-eyed soldiers—male and female; eighteen, nineteen—smoking hot and smoking cigarettes in their Halloween-costume-like army fatigues. Her friends have hiked Masada, snapped selfies atop lumbering camels. They come back storytellers, exuberant babblers, gab-gifted, claiming renewal and dedication; Alana eternally sipping her drink and rolling her eyes, déjà vu lapping at her like ocean surf.

But the half-life of exuberance, Alana has learned, isn’t much. They go over and

they come back and they swear how everything is different and then they go back to their secular American lives—medicine and finance, wealth management and contract law—and everything is the same. Alana is the only person she knows from high school who isn’t engaged, or else already married, to someone else from high school. She has an English degree rolled up in a cardboard tube in her closet. She works as a paralegal for now and is developing a knack for it, though the thought of actual law school makes her a little sick. All of which is perhaps another way of saying that exuberance, lasting or otherwise, is a rare commodity these days. Recently paroled from a longishterm relationship, she struggles each month to swing the rent on the apartment she now occupies alone—and is doing it, mind you, with barely any help from her parents.

This is no small point of pride.

The Birthright trip is ten days of international excursion, nearly all expenses

paid. A vacation! And one which has earned her the unqualified approval of all those adults in her life whose approval she still reflexively—guiltily—seeks. Her parents feel that she has “turned a corner” and only wish her grandfather had lived to see it with his own eyes. Her boss, Mr. Michael Beckstein, is so pleased to see her “taking an interest” that instead of objecting to the two weeks she’ll be out of the office, he has hinted that a raise may be waiting for her when she gets back. Won’t that be sweet?

26

“The Dead Sea’s harsh,” her knowing friends said, “but not as harsh as they say

it is; just keep your eyes closed.”

“Make sure to get one cute picture with your soldier or you’ll be sorry.”

“You’re going to love love love it, Al; oh em gee.”

And then, of course, the universal warning. Sudden hushed tone, winning grin

in brisk contraction:“Just be careful.”

The cut-off age for Birthright is 27. If Alana doesn’t go now she will “age out” of the program. Small wonder that those scare quotes have culminated in this gray-hunt, or the once-more-over in the mirror she’s giving herself now to confirm that, yes, she is a beautiful woman, or, in the likely parlance of her trip-mates, a hot chick. She can tell herself this without vanity. She has known this body all her life and can observe it, she feels, if not with objectivity then certainly with a subjectivity that is judicious and invested, and which enables her to determine that this, right now, is the best shape it—she—has ever been in. She kept herself too skinny in high school, bad skinny, what all the girls had wanted and their mothers should have intervened to save them from, only their mothers had wanted it (and mostly had it) too. All that patriarchal body image shit South Florida forces on you—she shed the worst of it in college, gave herself over to the campus cafeteria and nightly boozing; to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and the twenty-four hour pizza place. Now she cooks brown rice at home and does Pilates; hasn’t read Marx or bell hooks in, well, a while; can hold her own with any twenty-year-old, or even eighteen, not that it’s some competition, and not that getting laid is even on her agenda anyway, though it isn’t exactly not on it, and God knows how many times her mother has mentioned that this could be a chance to “meet a nice boy.” Though her mother, come to think of it, opts for a pronoun rather than an indefinite article. Not a chance, but your chance. As in, Aly, honey, this is your chance.

Alana is pretty sure she’s older than the trip leader, a bullhorn brunette in unfortunate white shorts and an oversized sorority sweater, a name tag that says her name is Bree.

Bree meets everyone at baggage check and herds them together toward security. Now Alana’s standing in the x-ray line between her first two new friends. Ahead of her is Alex, a jitterer, his oily face agleam beneath a Jets cap, the brim folded so the cracked plastic shows through a hole in the green fabric. The first thing he tells her is that his mother told him not to be shy. His mother, Alana feels, would be very proud of Alex,

27

who talks nonstop all the way to the gate, and then keeps going. Eighteen years old, born and raised in South Jersey, where he still lives with his parents. He confesses, unprompted, to having had an energy drink with his bagel at breakfast at the hotel.

The other boy introduces himself as Fish. Dylan “Fish” Fishbein is 22 and has

a prominent strawberry scar on his left cheek, just below his hipster glasses. He buys two liters of Jack Daniels from the duty-free, because he’s been warned that Israeli bars are expensive and that whiskey is hard to find. He also loads up on cigarettes because he’s heard Israeli tobacco is shit.

The flight turns out to contain several Birthright trips, and plenty of

unattached commercial travelers. Alana finds herself seated next to an older couple.

She considers trying to negotiate a switch to be with her group, but doesn’t know who even is in her group, other than Alex and Fish of course, and with all due respect to their geniality, she’s not prepared for eleven hours with either of them. Anyway she’s going to have nothing but company—indeed, companionship, camaraderie—for the next ten days, as she forges lifelong relationships and explores her roots and does all the other things the brochure and her friends have promised she will do or have done to her. Best to preserve her solitude while she can.

She wakes as the plane lands, 5:00 AM Israel time, an entire day effectively evaporated from her life. By 6:00 they’re loading their luggage into the underbelly of a charter bus, a local guide awaiting them on board. He’s dressed as if for safari and greets them warmly, each one of them individually as they edge past him in the aisle: the boys get great pumping handshakes and it’s hugs for all the girls. Uri, his name tag says. Alana takes an open seat next to a boy wearing black skinny jeans and a black T-shirt and a jean jacket he must regret already, this being Israel in July.

Sparse stubble on his face, short tousled hair, a wide mouth partway open, his head against the window: asleep. He knuckles his eyes, then sits up and looks at her. In the confines of the bus seats they’re practically nose to nose.

“Oh hey,” the kid says. “I’m Eddie.”

“Alana.”

“Hi. You wanna ride with me?”

“You’re offering me my own seat on this bus?”

“I’m being a gentleman. Or whatever.”

“It’s appreciated. Where are you from?”

“SUNY Binghamton. You?”

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“Hollywood—not Hollywood, California. Hollywood, Florida, like near Miami.

I’m from Miami, I guess.”

“Fun in the sun,” Eddie says, turning to face the window again. The bus is

moving, the trip has begun.

They ride for the better part of an hour, first on highways then on smaller roads that wind past run-down houses; up a hill. The bus stops on a steep incline at an empty intersection. Alana can hear the motor whining as it idles. Uri, tall and lanky, probably in his early 30s—a small mercy, and registered with gratitude—stands up front by the driver and looks out at them. She imagines what he must see: twenty rows of young American faces, bleary and caffeinated, upturned with expectation or else slumped down in sleep. He claps his hands above his head and says to them, “Okay! Now this, what we do, a little unexpected. But you will trust me.”

Bree rises to clarify. “It’s a trust exercise, guys. You know? Like an icebreaker

game. And there’s a surprise at the end so no peeking!”

Uri and Bree pass out black bandanas and instruct them to blindfold

themselves. The cheap material is rough against Alana’s face. Her right hand clasped in Eddie’s left, they stumble along the aisle and are helped down the steps of the bus. Her free hand is taken by a stranger as they’re formed into a human chain, making their herky-jerky way through what must be a parking lot, a patch of grass and then onto something solid, maybe more asphalt, maybe stone. Hot riffling wind in Alana’s hair.

“Steps coming up,” comes a call from ahead. Eddie is behind her in the line,

but after they get past the steps he moves to her side as Uri and Bree adjust the chain of them into something like a row. A tinny, distorted rendition of the Hatikvah fills the air, though the recording seems to deserve better than whatever it’s being played on: full choir, orchestral swells. Alana notes, as she always does, that she has known this song phonetically for twenty years but has absolutely no idea what the words mean. The melody alone is enough to give her goose bumps. She’s humming it under her breath while she stands there, holding Eddie’s and some other stranger’s hands.

“You can let go now,” Uri shouts over the music. “Your blindfold you can take

off and look.” She pushes the scratchy fabric down so it hangs around her neck. She opens her eyes to see that she stands on the Mount of Olives, the Old City with its low white buildings laid out below her, the Dome of the Rock a gold hump, but duller than she’d expected, more earth-tone than luster. It sits just off-center in the iPhoneable moment, though her phone doesn’t work over here; she has a pocket-size 29

digital camera she unthinkingly left in her bag on the bus. Gray-yellow desert sweeps out around the city like a frozen sea.

“Welcome home!” Uri shouts.

They turn from the city to see him standing in a patch of shade, a crappy

blaring boombox held in triumph above his head.

The Hatikvah, set to loop, finishes and then starts up again.

Sub sandwiches for breakfast. Alana, skeptical about any fish that has been on the tour bus for longer than she’s been in-country, passes on the tuna and asks for the vegetarian option, which turns out to be pickles and swiss cheese.

The bus takes them back down the Mount and drops them at the gates of

the Old City, where they’re met by a Rabbi—an American in beige Dockers with a crisp white shirt tucked into them. Salt in his beard and a rich phony laugh like a pediatrician’s. Hand-knit blue yarmulke on his mostly bald head; no jacket or tie.

It’s ten o’clock in the morning and ninety degrees—no worse than Miami this

time of year, and without the humidity, hell, it’s almost nice.

The rabbi leads them through the Old City past Roman ruins, down narrow

roads paved with ancient stone. Alana is shocked to see cars on these roads. Whenever one appears, the forty of them have to press themselves against the side of a building (all on the same side) so the vehicle can squeak by. The rabbi is so un-phased by these episodes that he does not interrupt his monologue for them, or for anything. He has a practiced storyteller’s cadence and a story, equally practiced, to go with it. He’s some kind of New Age Zionist, a reconstructionist-orthodox hybrid—which doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s like some kind of lab-grown monster: a zebra with a lion’s head or an octopus with wings. She saw him give Uri a manly backslapping hug but greet Bree without so much as a touch of hands. Yet his soliloquy is peppered with reference to his dissolute hippie youth—the long strange trip from Chico State to Jerusalem—and he has a pop cultural fluency which makes clear that even if he keeps strict Shabbat every Saturday, he keeps up with Buzzfeed and Twitter the other six days of the week. Walking through a courtyard where schoolchildren kick a soccer ball he blithely describes the scene as “the divine unfolding of a 2800-year plan.”

Eddie leans in close and whispers in Alana’s ear, “He’s like one of those crazy

Christians who preach on street corners.”

“Yeah,” she says, keeping her own voice low. “Except he’s one of ours.”

Fifteen minutes later they’re back on the bus, en route to a shuk—an outdoor market, Bree explains—where Eddie gets a shawarma and a straw cowboy hat, proud of himself 30

for bargaining the hat guy from 20 shekels down to 15. Alana has a fresh ginger-carrot juice and an order of fries, half of which Eddie eats, not that she minds. He has long graceful fingers and grubby bitten-up nails. They mingle with some of the other tripgoers. Just as she suspected from the get-go, Alana is the oldest person here.

Nathan has a heavy Southern accent. He is from West Virginia, he says, and

didn’t know he was Jewish until he was fifteen, which is pretty amazing, everyone agrees, though all the salient details of the story—by what method his true nature was revealed, how he was raised before then, how said revelation changed things for him, etc.—are left unmentioned, and after a few demurred inquiries, people mostly leave him alone.

Jessica from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a junior at Tufts, where she took a

writing workshop with a teacher who’d written a novel set in Mandate Palestine just after World War I. That’s what started it for her. Kevin from New Haven, sophomore at U-Mich. Danny from somewhere Alana doesn’t catch; Elena from San Fran stayed local, will be a senior at Berkeley come the fall.

They’re all so impressed by Alana—out of college now longer than she was in it,

living in her own apartment, holding down a job.

“I got fired from my last like three internships,” Jessica says, not sounding

overly broken up about it. “I guess I’ll end up working for my dad.”

“What’s he do?” Nathan asks.

“Our family’s in consulting.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

A butcher walks by with a cow’s head, skinned and eyeless, cradled in his arms.

Dinner at Ben Yehuda street: a tourist area. Eddie’s annoyed but Alana thinks they can’t get too snooty about it since they are, after all, tourists—indeed, on a tour.

Their group is forty strong plus guide and leader and security. They move as a pack, a platoon really, with two shouting people at the front and a guy with a rifle bringing up the rear. Everyone wearing the same shirt except for Uri in his safari gear.

They eat at an Italian place. Pounded-flat chicken breasts lazing in a thin

orange sauce. A girl named Jessica—not the one from the market, a different one, though that Jessica is at their table, too—asks for grated parmesan, but it’s a kosher Italian place, and here they are eating chicken, so. Out the window, down at the corner of the block, they can see Israeli high school kids smoking cigarettes and messing around on skateboards. Eddie wants to go check out what they’re up to but 31

Bree tells him going off by himself is against the rules.

“You’re gonna what, call my parents?” Eddie says. He’s grinning, has pushed his

chair back from the table and now stands up. “You gonna put me in time out?”

“Eddie,” Bree says. Her tone is resolutely chipper. She’s smiling big as he is.

“Are you going to be my special headache this trip? Are you going to be the kid I tell my next group a a story about?”

“Is there always one?”

“You wouldn’t think there’d have to be,” Bree says. “Because it’s not a fun

story. It’s a story about never getting to hike Masada and having to pay for your own plane ticket home.”

“When you put it that way,” Eddie says. He sits back down and loads a fork

with chicken. Bree is still beaming. Sorority wattage, Alana thinks.

Back at the hotel they get their room assignments. Alana’s with Elena, which

is nice, and another Jessica, the third one she’s met so far. Jessica 3 says there are a few other tour groups staying at this hotel and everyone’s partying downstairs and they should go, so they do go, but Alana takes one look at the writhing mass of teenagers and turns back. She lays down in the room, glad to be alone awhile and unable to believe that everything that has happened so far—landmarks, meals, new friends—has happened in a single day. She wonders if every day will be like this, and hopes and slightly dreads that it might be; her speculations blurring into dreams as she sinks into sleep, only to be awoken, who knows how much later, by retching in the darkened room.

She sits up. There’s a razor of light beneath the bathroom door, and enough

ambient gloom to make out Elena asleep on the foldout cot, which means that the retcher is her own bedmate, i.e. Jessica 3, who flushes the toilet and then spills out of the bathroom, backlit because she’s left the light on, completely naked and holding a trash can liner open with both hands in front of her. She moves with seasick determination through the small space, sets the liner carefully on the nightstand by her side of the bed. A lock of her auburn hair smeared with something the color of their dinner. The liner in place, Jessica 3 flings herself onto the bedspread and is still. Alana closes her own eyes and concentrates, trying to hear whether Jessica 3 is breathing. She can’t tell. She opens her eyes and watches the girl’s chest and stomach, both almost concave when she lays flat out like this. Alana cannot verify a consistent rise and fall.

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She puts a finger below Jessica 3’s nose and holds it there. A few beats pass

before she feels air trickling across her skin. Jessica 3 will breathe better for being on her side, probably. Alana wants to roll her over but doesn’t want to risk waking her; doesn’t, truth be told, want to touch her at all. But here’s the question: is she more squeamish about the necessity of laying hands on this insensible puke-covered stranger, or about the prospect of waking up next to a naked corpse? It is, Alana recognizes, a quintessentially undergraduate question. This is basic college party math she’s faced with here, or maybe Philosophy 101.

Jessica 3 sits up abruptly, knocking Alana’s hand away and leaning herself out

over the can liner. She throws up into it, wipes her mouth with her hand, ties the bag shut with a loop-knot and lets it fall to the floor. A minute later she’s curled up on her side and snoring, vertebrae and ribs fully articulated, skin taut as Saran wrap over her bones.

Today is Yad Vashem.

They meet after breakfast in a conference room in the hotel basement and

Uri and Bree look very serious and issue warnings about what to expect and how to behave. Jessica 2 is sent back to her room for a long-sleeve shirt to go over her halter.

Eddie is instructed to remove his political buttons from the lapel of his jacket: a peace sign and a small circled A. He is warned to leave his straw hat on the bus.

Then everyone is invited to share personal stories about the Holocaust.

The conference room has no furniture so they’re all sitting cross-legged on

the floor.

A girl named Nancy talks about a great-grandfather who she never knew,

a rabbi killed at Dachau with his entire family except her grandmother, a little girl at the time, who was successfully spirited away to English cousins: the only reason Nancy herself exists today. A guy in an Æπ tee shirt has a similar story about a great-uncle. Alana is sitting next to Nathan. He whispers to her in a choked-up voice, “Wow, I just, like, don’t even know. I really don’t. That could be my story, my family, and I’d have no clue. No dang clue.” Alana gives Nathan’s hand what she hopes is a reassuring squeeze. She likes being the girl into whose ear the boys choose to whisper. Nathan, Eddie. In college she was a one-of-the-guys girl, so if this trip is shaping up to be a retro-college nostalgia thing—for her anyway, since everyone else is actually in college—it makes sense for her to reprise this role, albeit as a kind of elder statesman now. She can look after these boys, laugh at their jokes and figure out which girls like them—she can see Nathan maybe with Jessica 3. He’s a real Southern gentleman, Alana thinks, someone who will hold 3’s hair back and not try 33

anything when she’s too blacked out. And Eddie? Well it’s too soon to tell about Eddie. He was quick to approach her in the breakfast buffet line this morning and renew their seat partnership for a second day.

Burnished gray concrete and shining black steel. Cantilevered on a hillside, with a tunnel- or tomb-like entrance, you pass through the solemn horror and boggling history and emerge, finally, onto an open platform that looks triumphantly out over green slopes, Eretz Yisrael, as far as the eye can see.

The tour itself reminds her of the one at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Also of an exhibit she saw once at the Jewish Museum in New York, and various films and film strips—countless lessons instilled and repeated over the course of childhood. Never again. Only this is a bigger, better version—the biggest and the best, she guesses, though isn’t it awful to say “better” and “best” in this context? Though you can hardly use “worst” as a superlative, can you? Even though the thing that makes it the best is that it has the most comprehensive coverage of the worst thing that ever happened to anybody ever—well, more or less.

“What about slavery?” Eddie says. They’re on benches out in front of the

museum, eating floppy kosher pizza in the shadow of their bus. “What about the gulag? Stalin. The Khmer Rouge. Fucking colonialism, like, overall.”

“I don’t think we need to rank world tragedies,” Elena says. “We’re not

competing for some oppression prize.”

“Though we’d win it,” interjects Jessica 2.

“Hoo-ah!” Æπ says, extending a hand toward her. They slap five and do a finger

snap.

“I’m just saying,” Eddie says, nominally to Elena, though really he’s talking to

all of them: orating, or trying to. “It’s all fucked-up ideologies. It doesn’t have to be like one thing or another. The ideologies are what it’s always about.”

“Yeah, true that,” Alana says, feeling another year slide off her age as she

deploys this no-doubt archaic slang to validate her new friend’s babble. Which makes her how old now, exactly? 24, maybe 23 by dinner. It’s only day two. At this rate she’ll be 18 by midweek, will return to Miami a 10th grade virgin with a restricted driver’s license.

“Well I think six million is a pretty solid figure,” Nathan says. Alana notices his

eyes are still red from before. She heard him stifling sobs in the Children’s Memorial, a pitch-black room filled with tiny lights that twinkle like stars when you cry when 34

you look at them. They had needed to form another human chain to find their way out of there, and if Alana hadn’t been able to stop herself from feeling that the messaging here was a bit melodramatic, even cynical, she at least had enough decency to hate herself for having thought so—and anyway she’d also cried.

“You know what I think?” Nathan continues. “Y’all are so used to this stuff

you’re numb to it. You see it but you don’t, I mean you really don’t.” Nathan, with his mysterious backstory, stands up from the pizza circle and walks away, past their bus and deep into the parking lot, where the air swims with heat. Elena gets up and goes after him. Alana, impressed by the swift fealty, thinks, Well so much for Jessica 3.

They have dinner at the hotel and then are taken back to Ben Yehuda street, to a bar where they’re given a few drink tickets apiece and set loose, albeit forbidden to leave the premises, or step outside to smoke without a buddy—not that you need to go outside to smoke, but American habits die hard, or maybe some people just want some fresh air with their smoke.

Alana doesn’t smoke. Pot, sure, if only anyone had any, but tobacco was never

her thing.

Elena’s loaded halfway through her second martini and storms the dance floor,

sticks her ass out, gets both fists pumping, and there’s poor Nathan, skittish and attentive, orbiting her like a moon. Eddie whines about the music; he wants to hear something punk. Alana chucks his shoulder and tells him to quit being a baby—you can’t dance to punk. “Who’s dancing?” he says, and goes to bum a smoke from Fish, who Alana realizes she hasn’t spoken to since back at the airport. Alex either. Weird how things go in a big group like this; you really have no choice but to cluster into subgroups. So when did Eddie met them? She spent the whole day by his side.

Maybe they’re rooming together. Alana watches her trip-mates as they drown the long emotional day in rounds of shots and what, in an all-Jewish bar, passes plausibly as booty dancing. All-Jewish and all-American, Alana notes; there are no Israelis in this place except for Uri, seated at a small table near the back, drinking water and looking over tomorrow’s itinerary.

The guy in the Æπ tee shirt walks up to Alana and asks her to dance, takes her

by the hand before she answers. Big smile, this kid; short spiked hair, scary-straight teeth, boozy gleam in his eye. They’re playing a Beyoncé song that was huge in the states two summers ago. It’s nice to let herself be led like this. She puts her hands up like Elena and doesn’t flinch at Æπ’s hands, warm and firm around her waist. A new

35

song comes on, one with a harder pounding beat to it, some old school gangster shit off a movie soundtrack she was forbidden to own in middle school. She gives herself over to her drunkenness, to flop sweat and hip shake, to the body inscribed in space.

They are getting down and dirty, Æπ’s cock hard inside of his J. Crew khakis and fast against her ass as they grind to the song and when her eyes flutter open she sees Eddie—gape-mouthed, arms crossed—at the far end of the bar. She waves at him. He pouts the whole bus ride back to the hotel.

They leave Jerusalem at daybreak, rousted half asleep from their rooms and loaded onto the bus, Eddie and Alana seat-mates again, the arrangement at this point feeling permanent, undiscussed, surviving even the fact that he’s clearly still put out about last night. The bus is chilly, A/C and engine both droning, the hot desert world like an in-flight movie, a nature show, projected against the big tinted windows rather than seen through them.

They drive along the West Bank border fence for a while, past a security

checkpoint that Uri, over the loudspeaker, mentions leads to Bethlehem.

“Bethlehem,” a Southern voice repeats a few rows behind them, dreamy and un-self-aware, caught off-guard by the very word. Alana has always imagined these “checkpoints” being like the ones at U.S. airports—metal detector, maybe a conveyor belt or the x-ray thing you have to stand inside. Couple of dour agents. Bored people snaking through a backlogged line. What she sees instead looks like a small industrial park or factory. The main building is a windowless hulk. Look-out towers spread around the grounds of it. The fence itself is a twenty-foot-high stone wall, several feet thick.

“Nice fence,” Eddie says, and there is, in fact, a chain link fence wreathed in

barbed wire topping the fortification like a crown.

Over food court Chinese at a highway-side mall, Alana lets Eddie rant at her,

in part because she can see he needs to let off some steam and in part because she feels guilty about last night at the club, though at the same time she’s indignant about having the guilt, because laying emotional claim to someone without making a move on them is such a shitty, bullshit, teenage boy way to be. She doesn’t owe this twerp anything! She can sit with anyone she feels like on the stupid bus! She isn’t hungry for a husband to fill her with Jewish babies for her own mother to frame pictures of. She came here—well, why did she come here? What is she doing? What does she hope to gain or clarify from this bizarre exercise in generosity and propaganda? Or is that itself

36

a shitty way to think about all this? She understood what Birthright was when she signed up for it. Nobody tricked her. The trip is, if anything, more exactly what she’d expected than she’d dared to expect.

Alana wanted to take a vacation and these people offered her one. That’s the

length and breadth of it. And if they—the Birthright people—have ulterior motives, well, who doesn’t? And anyway “ulterior” isn’t the right word, since they’re totally upfront about what they want: for you to fall in love with Israel! Maybe fall in love in Israel! What does Alana want? She wants to have a good time, learn something about her heritage, make her miserable parents happy, not get sucked into the black hole of “the conflict.” One cute picture of herself with a significant landmark in the background, in which she looks neither flushed nor sweaty, but athletic and exhilarated (a little bit of sweat would be okay). Something Facebook profileworthy: that’s what she wants. And if that’s a bad reason, so be it. It’s her reason, and she is willing to own it, if not with pride, precisely, then certainly without shame.

She is taking the trip in order, in large part, to have taken it. In case it might mean something to her later to have been here now. In case she ever does get married, have a daughter who might ask to hear about it. Some hypothetical tween in the backseat of a Prius, jamming her Bat Mitzvah study guide into a frayed purple book bag and rolling her eyes at everything her mother says.

Eddie, meanwhile, wants to save, or destroy, or otherwise—somehow—change

the world.

“It’s like everyone’s against ‘the situation,’ ‘the conflict.’ Everybody is opposed

to violence of all kinds on all sides in theory but then any time you say, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m with you and this was the last thing Israel did that was fucked up, so if we want Israel to be, you know, I don’t know, better, then we should say, I mean we have to say, ‘Hey! stop doing that fucked up shit,’ that’s when they bust out with how we’re ‘misinformed’ and ‘don’t understand’ because we’re not here all the time. It’s like, they tell us ‘welcome home, this is your people and your land’ and you don’t even want to believe that but then, okay, say you believe it, and it’s like ‘Yeah, this place is mine, I want to be part of it, here’s what I think’ and then it’s ‘Dude, you’re not part of this, it isn’t yours, nobody gives a fuck what you think.’”

“Who have you been having these fights with?” Alana asks him, flabbergasted.

“Nobody,” Eddie says. “Why would I? I’m just saying that’s the way it would go

down if I ever tried.”

After lunch they are taken to visit a famous cave. It’s called Bar Kokhba.

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Everyone has to crawl on their hands and knees through a narrow tunnel. Some people hang back: nervous, claustrophobic, fat. Alana wriggles along on her belly, conscious of Eddie behind her, his head near her sneakers; her ass and thighs basically in his face.

They emerge one by one from the dusty passage into a chamber where there’s

room to stand. Bodies shifting in close space, leaning against walls and each other, quiet strained breathing, a coolness in the still and fossil air.

There is no natural light here. People sweep their flashlights over the walls and

ceiling, flick lighters, hit glo buttons on digital watches, light their phones up if they thought to bring their phones. Uri asks everyone to shut off everything. “Put it all away, anything glowing, and we must allow for the dark to be restored.”

Uri’s voice booms and echoes as he tells of the heroes of old. A small but rugged

band of insurgents who waged guerrilla war on the occupier; they made the Roman legions quake with fear. “In the end, of course, we lose,” he says, slipping into both the royal and the present tense. The fighters’ lives and the lives of their families end horribly, after long and horrible years eked out in these very caves. But the point, Uri continues, is not so much victory or defeat but rather the fact of resistance.

That they held out as long as they could. That they fought from a sense of inherent righteousness, and a dignity that must never, and shall never, yield. “It is little-known today,” Uri says, “but we Jews invented, how you say—”

“Asymmetrical warfare!” Bree offers, her sorority voice cleaving the dark like a

cotton candy battle axe.

“Terrorism,” Alana whispers to Eddie. She’s standing behind him, her lips

against the cup of his ear, her voice the barest dribble of sound. This isn’t a joke anyone else will think is funny, but she knows it’s what he’s thinking, what he’ll say to her later first chance he gets if she doesn’t say it to him now. Call it a peace offering.

They hike Masada. They float in the Dead Sea. Alana leaves the gift shop with $85 worth of special mud and Eddie chides her for the bourgeois excess of it: all that stuff Alana pretty much agrees with, though rather than admit he’s right she tells him calmly, even pleasantly—almost sexily—that he doesn’t know the first thing about women, and at this rate never will.

They stay a night at a kibbutz in the Negev, the one where Ben-Gurion is

buried. It’s cool, Alana thinks, that he didn’t choose the national cemetery. He chose his kibbutz. They stand by his tomb and Uri reads the Balfour declaration, then brings out his old friend the crappy boom box and plays a tape of the Balfour declaration being read on the radio, the original broadcast, scratched and crackling history alive in 38

the cold desert night. The largest closest clearest moon Alana has ever seen. It is easy to see how this place raised up three religions.

The cold white fire of the moon sends a holy tremble through her, scalp to

bones, something on the cusp of blossoming open—then Bree makes them all hold hands and sing the Hatikvah again.

Oh well.

Alana hangs back by the grave as the group starts making its way toward

the dormitories. She can see Eddie receding ahead of her, walking with Fish, their cigarettes bobbing like ship lights on the ocean of the night. Without exactly meaning to, she waits for Bree.

“So how’s it going?” Bree asks her. They start walking. “Are you having a good

trip?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I think so. I guess—well, I don’t know.”

“Come on, chica,” Bree says. “Spill it.”

“No, no, there’s isn’t like a thing, you know. It’s great. All the history. Culture.

I guess I’m sorry I didn’t go when I was younger, with all my friends or something. It’s like summer camp on steroids—”

“Haha yeah totally, that’s like so totally true. But listen. There’s always a few

people on the trip who have trouble making friends but it’s, I mean not to put it all on you but, it’s mostly you holding back and not them. Like you can just go for it, you know?”

“I’m not saying I feel left out. I’m just…observing. How many of these trips

have you led?”

“Like five or six now. No yeah this is six. Anyway you’ve got Eddie and you guys

seem really cute together. A little summer love never hurt any—”

“Oh we’re not, I mean—”

“Wait seriously?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well no offense, girl, but if you’re not even boning him what are you putting in

all that time in for? The trip only lasts ten days.”

What, Alana wonders, should she say to Bree here? That it isn’t about that?

That she likes how Eddie is earnest and cerebral—the way she’d like to believe she herself was once and maybe could be again? That she is bizarrely drawn to the sadness pulsing below the surface of his punky angst? That she likes the way he just blurts out things she’d never have the nerve to say even if she believed them, which she isn’t sure whether she does or not, because she’s never thought much about any of 39

this stuff before? Or she could say, “Hey Bree hey you’re actually right and I already passed up what was probably the last frat boy I was ever going to bag in this life and now I’m going gray here waiting for this pischer to man up and make a move.”

“Well who are you boning?” Alana asks.

“Oh em gee, chica, I’m the counselor, I can’t—”

“Yeah but c’mon—it’s your trip too, amirite? Girl talk here.” Alana is amused

with herself, her mockingbird argot, and glad, even eager, to give some shit to Bree— presumptuous bitch that she is, with her condescending life lessons and camel-toe shorts—but then Bree goes, “So okay can you like totally keep a secret?” and without waiting for an answer continues, “So okay, you know Nathan, right?”

“The hick with the secret past?”

“It’s not secret. He was adopted. His family were like Catholics or Witnesses or

something but then after his parents got divorced his mom got over it so when he was sixteen she let him order a DNA kit from 23andme and he found out he was Jewish.”

“Wow.”

“See, kid? People are easy to get to know.”

They come to a stop in the sand near the dorm, not yet ready to go inside. Bree

absentmindedly tugging on a lock of her own long hair. Alana says, “Well so how well do you know Nathan?”

Bree tee-hees. Then she actually says, “Tee-hee.” Then she says, “He’s not

circumcised yet.”

“Yet?”

“Yeah they never did it when he was little, because whatever, and now that

he’s getting in touch with his heritage he wants to do the right thing. So he’s thinking about getting the surgery after he goes back to the states. That’s how the whole thing started.”

“The you and him thing? Over surgery?”

“Well he was asking for guidance.”

“So you fucked him to show him that he’s okay just the way he is?”

“Hell no! I told him to do it. It’s a mitzvah, duh. But in the meantime, well,

it had gotten late while we were talking and he’s such a Southern gentleman, and I’d never seen an uncut one before, so—well like you said, it’s my trip, too.”

“You’ve never seen an uncut dick before? How is that even possible?”

“Oy gevalt, girl. You really are a bad Jew.”

They’re running late to Herzliya, where all of the Birthright groups concurrently

criss-crossing the little country are to converge for dinner and dancing at a beachside 40

resort. An event referred to, not colloquially but officially, as The Mega Event.

The Mega Event is essentially a long narrow field with an amphitheater at

its far end. They find themselves the captive market for a host of fast-food vendors, Zionist outreach groups, and masters degree programs. The extent of the facilities appears to be a row of port-a-potties. The grounds themselves abut the beach, but it’s fenced off and they are forbidden to go down to it. There is no exit or re-entry. It looks and feels like nothing so much as a county fair.

In the open area by the amphitheater, cliques and tour groups and new-formed

factions chant, cheer, and sing. Wave flags they’ve gotten from who knows where.

They blast music and dance in the grass. Great circles of people clapping hands and shaking bodies. Orgiastic exuberance and unity, this wild gift, to be alive and young and thriving, to be free and Jewish and here. Fellowship and inheritance. The diaspora in-gathered. Faith, belonging, immersion. Fullness of experience, depth of commitment. Strength. Eretz Yisrael.

We are here we are here we are here.

Eddie is crying. Tears run down his face and his chest heaves, jaw clenching

back sobs he’d sooner die than release into the world, this wicked son, his faithless faith only and forever in the error of his very presence, wracked with horror at this vision of blood-pride and the fear of being found out for a fraud, scapegoat, infiltrator—whatever it is he believes he is. Or maybe it is the self-made myth of his non-belonging that has been shattered, and he is swallowing the glass of it. All of this really is his, whether he wants it or not. Eddie mourning for the part of himself that could abide in simple fiery lies.

She takes him wordless by the hand and leads him away from the roaring crowd

back through the dark part of the field, vendors all packed and gone now, cast-off pamphlets riding the night breeze. They walk along the fence at the edge of the dunes, hoping for a gate and finding instead a small section that has been pulled down. Stray cats all over the beach. They step out of their Birkenstocks and wade in up to their knees. Alana dips her hands into the water. She brings them up wet to Eddie’s face and he closes his eyes. There is a full moon and the Mega Event feels distant, dislodged not so much in space as in time, like something so far in either the past or the future that it cannot possibly have jurisdiction here. Every place is its own place, self-created, and every experience is original, a historic. She washes his tears away with water from the sea.

His breath has stopped hitching but his heart remains a jackhammer. She can

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hear it, she can feel it, with her head against his chest.

His arms around her middle, loose first then tighter, his breath in her hair and

then her face as she cranes her neck upward to meet his awkward, smokey kiss.

In his unstifled eagerness his hands find her breasts almost before their lips

touch. She maybe won’t mention that part when she tells the story to her girlfriends back home. Or how he whimpers like a newborn, grateful, when she unzips his shorts and takes him in her still-wet hand. Those long fingers, inelegant and welcome, searching down the stubble on her mons. They are 8th graders slipping out of a bar mitzvah reception hall; camp counselors furtive behind the boat house while the kids eat lunch. But this isn’t 8th grade or any grade, and nostalgia—thankfully—is not the same as déjà vu. He knows what he is looking for and finds it. She presses her thighs together around his hand until the knuckles are nearly flush.

The ocean moon is beautiful but it is nothing like the desert moon.

Though of course this is only a manner of speaking, there being only the one

moon, luminous or hidden far above the world—though of course “far” is a relative concept, and “above” is just a figure of speech, too.

Desert moon. Ocean moon.

Soon the Mega Event will end and with it this time outside of time. There are

still, impossibly, four more days of ruins and kibbutzes and sing-alongs and malls. But these minutes here on the hot dark stoop of the Red Sea are what she will remember, what will survive the fogged-out grammar of archetype that awaits them. All the attenuation and frenzy of so-called summer love. Arms around shoulders in photos; conspiring for privacy, bargaining with bunkmates for alone time; slumped against each other out cold on the return flight; weepy in the taxi line promising to keep in touch. There is release in the preemptive bittersweetness. A leaden contentment that is almost hope and remains hers to refuse.

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THE SNHU MFA STUDENT CONTEST WINNER 43

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL

by Nadia Owusu

We watched from a safe distance. The civil war and the poverty that it wrought had brought us here, but we were only observers. In the morning, the guards, armed with rifles and machetes, opened the gates to let out our fleet of chauffeured white SUVs bearing diplomatic plates and the logos of UN agencies, international NGOs, and embassies. From behind tinted windows, we watched the other Ethiopia go by. It was built of mud and cardboard. It was full of crumbling buildings. We passed through it on our way to ballet lessons and the Hilton pool.

Behind the walls and barbed wire of the compound, we lived in cozy cottages

with manicured gardens of roses and chrysanthemums. We had seesaws, tire swings, and paddling pools. Our parents entertained each other with cocktail parties and barbeques under the stars. The compound was a miniature suburb where Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” ride had been made real. Our families were from India and Bangladesh, from England and America, from China and Japan, Sweden and Denmark, Kenya and South Africa. Some of our families were multinational and interracial. We ate each other’s food, listened to each other’s music, celebrated each other’s religious and cultural holidays. We were the kind of community that people wrote hopeful songs about. Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do.

After school, all twenty-one of us would gather in the large green lawn at the

compound’s center. We’d play with bicycles, kites, and skipping ropes until our private tutors and house-girls summoned us indoors for homework and dinner. Later, our parents would come home with family-sized bags of potato chips from America and chocolate from Switzerland purchased at the UN commissary. They would ask us about our days spent at the international school where we did not learn about the history that was being made around us. We learned to speak French and made erupting volcanoes out of papier-mâché. Our parents would read us bedtime stories and tuck us into mosquito-netted beds, leaving us to sleep peacefully under whirring 45

ceiling fans while they whispered to each other about impending coup d’états, rebel armies, and food shortages upcountry.

On the other side of the walls, shanty towns sprawled for as far as the eyes could see.

People with amputated legs dragged their bodies along the rock-littered dirt roads, balancing themselves on one hand to stretch the other up to stalled cars for pittances.

Donkeys carried filthy sacks of grain to barren markets. Raw sewage flowed like creeks between the corrugated tin shacks. There were days after school when we would sit in our treehouses, built for us by the compound’s gardeners, and look down into that other Ethiopia.

Sometimes, we called out to the children in the shantytown who played with

balls made of plastic bags and tin can cars on sticks. They fashioned these toys themselves with scrap from Addis Ababa’s giant landfill, which was patrolled from the air by vultures and from the ground by the stray dogs our parents warned us never to touch. We held our noses when we drove by the landfill to keep from gagging. Those children climbed up its rancid hills of waste, scavenging for plastic, metal, clothing and food that their families might repurpose or sell. One man’s trash, etc. We waved to them and they waved back. We were fascinated by their lives. We watched them as one would a television show, gossiping about them and imitating what they were doing.

Once, bored of our treehouse perch, a small group of us contemplated going

into the other Ethiopia to find adventure. Because it was forbidden, even talking about it made us tipsy with fear and excitement. After hours of plotting, and assessing the repercussions of our parents finding out, we voted to fly the coop. In just a few breathless minutes, we threw a rope over the wall and shimmied down one by one.

We played soccer with the children from the other Ethiopia, weaving around their makeshift homes and kicking up dirt. The house-girls, discovering that their charges had escaped, deployed the guards from the gate to apprehend us and bring us safely back behind the walls. We were easy to find. A multicultural group of children in brightly colored T-shirts and shiny white sneakers, Swatch watches on our wrists, we did not blend easily into the backdrop of extreme poverty. Our parents scolded us for our recklessness.

“You could have been abducted,” they said. “You could have been…hurt. It’s

not safe out there.” Their pauses were full of dangers that we did not yet understand.

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Sometimes, on Friday afternoons, the children of the house-girls who lived in the servants’ quarters behind our cottages would come to visit. There would be knocks at the compound gate and the guards would ask the children’s names and the names of their mothers. They would come to our doors to seek our parents’ permission to allow the children in. Our parents would say, Of course. They would give the house-girls the evening off.

Most of the house-girls’ children disappeared into the servants’ quarters and we

wouldn’t see them again until Sunday when it was time for them to leave. Sesai was different. He would walk through the gate swinging his long arms and whistling. He would gravitate toward us and ask us about our game. If we were running races around the lawn, he would sprint past us, pumping his fists. He would jump into our games of double-dutch and skip faster and higher than any of us. His mother, Mulu, would stand in front of the servants’ quarters, laughing and waiting for him to run over to her for his dinner of injera and stew.

We loved it when he came to visit. He didn’t come often because he worked

as a gardener at the home of a wealthy Ethiopian family. He spoke English quite well and he liked to ask each of us where we were from. When we would name the country or countries, he would nod his head with a serious look on his face and say, ‘Ah, yes.’

He had a big gummy smile and when he laughed, he opened his mouth wide and his whole body shook, but no sound came out. He taught us how to do backflips and how to walk on our hands. Sesai was thirteen.

One weekend, some of us had been playing cards in one of the cottages when

we heard what sounded like rain falling on the tin roof. The weather had been sweltering hot so we threw down our cards and ran outside to feel the cool drops of water on our skin. The sky was blue, and the sun was still fierce. One of the guards came running over, shouting at us to go back indoors. He went around to every cottage to give all who were home a warning. The pattering on the roof was not rain. It was the sound of falling bullets.

Bands of rebel soldiers had been arriving in the city by the truckload. They

waved their weapons from the truck beds. We pressed our noses to the windows of our cars and stared at them. They did not look like the guards at the compound gates, nor did they look like the uniformed, government soldiers who we saw everywhere we went. They looked wild and desperate. Their hair was matted into dreadlocks, their skin ashy with dust. Some of them were children.

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The next week, school was closed because of a security alert. On the eighth

day of freedom from study, we were playing tetherball on the lawn when Sesai walked through the gate. We shouted his name and started to run to him, but he did not look at us. He did not ask us where we were from. He just walked straight into the servants’ quarters where his mother lived.

We waited for Sesai to come back out. When he didn’t, disappointed, we went

inside to watch cartoons. Our families back home recorded our favorite programs on VHS tapes and sent them to us in the mail because there was nothing to watch on Ethiopian television except for the news in Amharic. Between us, we had a pretty big collection of videos. We decided to watch Tom and Jerry and we all piled onto the couches or sat cross-legged on the floor. Someone went to get us chocolate chip cookies and Kool-Aid from the kitchen. We sat there for hours. The sun set and darkness fell. The adults came home from work and patted some of us on the head, asked after some of our parents. Soon, it would be time for those of us who didn’t live in this cottage to go home for our evening baths and meals.

Mulu and Sesai burst into the room. Mulu, whose voice rarely rose above a

whisper, was shouting, trying to get the adults’ attention.

The adults came out of the study, Mulu’s father with a newspaper in his hand,

her mother with a cup of tea. Her father looked odd. Mulu’s terror jerked the lines of his forehead apart so that his face was wide.

“What is it? What is happening?” Mulu’s father asked.

“The soldiers!” Mulu searched for more words but could not find them. She

was pointing in the direction of the gate. She opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water.

Sesai stepped in front of his mother. “They have come for me,” he said.

Both the rebel and government armies had been forcibly conscripting soldiers.

They did not care how young they were. We never learned what made the soldiers burst into the compound that day. Perhaps they were looking for potential recruits like Sesai whom we might have been harboring. Or perhaps they were angered by the sight of our pristine enclave, our oasis in the desert of their bloody battle.

The soldiers charged into every cottage. They threw porcelain plates and

glass vases full of pink roses from our gardens to the ground. They brandished their weapons and laughed. They barely acknowledged us as we sat trembling on the floor, holding each other and crying. On the television, Wile E. Coyote blew himself into smithereens. The father of the house tried to be brave.

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“I am calling the United Nations,” he said waving the telephone around as

though it was a match for guns. The soldiers sneered.

Sesai had been standing when the soldiers threw opened the door, but as

they tore through the house, he had nestled among us on the couch. Mulu distanced herself from where we sat. She leaned against the door to the kitchen.

After what seemed like a flash and an eternity at the same time, the soldiers

moved on. As they made their way around the compound, we could hear our parents’ shrieks and protests. Sesai stayed sitting with us on the couch. We stared at the television, no one speaking, until the guards came in to tell us that our brief occupation was over.

All of us, children and parents, rushed out onto the lawn to recount the horror,

to exchange the details of our damages. None of us had been harmed. Damage to our property was minor.

The sons of two of the house-girls and one of the gardeners were taken. The

house-girls were weeping. They stretched their arms up in the air. They asked God or the moon to grant them some mercy. Mulu cried for those children too. She cried while she held Sesai’s head to her chest. He was safe because the soldiers thought that he was one of us.

We disappeared back into our cottages so that our parents could wait for

instructions from their employers. Non-essential personnel and their families, they were told, were to evacuate Addis as soon as possible. In the next few days, all of us would board planes destined for Kenya or Tanzania. We would watch Ethiopia fade from view until all we could see was sky and clouds. A few of us would come back for a while after the government had been toppled and the country split in two. Most of us would never return.

We don’t know each other anymore. We only see each other on the internet.

We are adults. We have children and master’s degrees. We create global monetary policy and write for newspapers. We go on safari vacations in Africa. We wonder what happened to Sesai, but we don’t wonder enough to find out. We see him trembling in our nightmares. We tell this story to friends and lovers. We tell the parts of it that we know, anyway.

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“THE ANARCHIST IN ME” an interview with Justin Taylor

In Justin Taylor’s debut short story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, we encounter a punk rock house in Florida in which the inhabitants drink, drug, have sex, burn textbooks and sermonize. Many of those characters reappear in his novel, The Gospel of Anarchy, in a similar communal domicile.

Gospel reveals that there’s something shared and ritualistic—religious, even— about these pilgrims of punk and their contrarianism. At the core of anarchy is a desire to belong. In Taylor’s fiction, every rebel is lonely.

This holds true for the socially acceptable rebels in his second collection, Flings, as well as for the protagonist of his story, “So You’re Just What, Gone?” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2015. In the story’s final moments, Charity, a sixteen-year-old girl, is at the aquarium in Seattle, observing a romp of otters as they feed. She’s just endured a vacation in which her mother has all but forgotten her. Her dementia-addled Grams has yelled at her, her crush back home has stopped texting her, and a stranger she met on the plane has sent her dick pics.

Her response to all this: wandering the aquarium, she shoves her phone in her mouth, takes a picture of her uvula, juxtaposes it with a pic of chum being hurled at the otters, and blasts it out on Instagram: “Fish gutz / my gutz: Compare & contrast.” This is Charity’s moment of anarchy, and we don’t want to leave her.

I came to love her.

Towards the end of our correspondence, conducted almost entirely over email, Taylor and I were both at a party in New York City that neither of us knew the other would be attending. We bumped into each other on a white spiral staircase. He was in town because he had moderated a reading for the seventh and final issue of The Agriculture Reader, an annual poetry and arts journal he and his friends had started when they were grad students at The New School.

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He greeted me like a friend. We had both been drinking, which is to say we were more stunned than we should have been that we would run into each other like this—what were the odds, etc. He gushed then, as here, about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Before we parted ways, we said that we should pretend the following conversation took place on that very staircase landing. Above us, a skylight shone a clear April midnight, and below, a French Swing quartet played a Guy Lombardo tune by a fireplace.

Soon after, he flew home to Portland, Oregon; he moved there last year after living nearly a decade in New York. He spends a lot of time by himself.

— Daniel Johnson You recently moved to Portland. How do you like it?

In Portland I am blessed and cursed with surfeits of time. It has taken about a year to get used to the lack of pressure NYC provides. External mechanisms of enforced productivity have had to be replaced by self-generated ones. This is curiously more difficult than it sounds. My wife’s new job—the one we moved for—is another factor. It used to be neither of us was 9-5 but now she pretty much is, and I like to be around when she’s around—plus my current “office” is a desk in a corner of the dining room—so I try to get my work done while she’s at work. On a good day, I have breakfast with my wife, dig in on a manuscript when she leaves, editing or writing or whatever it needs, then knock off for lunch and/or running errands. If the morning went well I might get back at it in the afternoon, but usually by then I’ve moved on to paying work of some kind, whether that’s reviews or teaching.

This is just one of your two major relocations in your career, the first having been a move to New York City from Florida. Do you find your writing changes with each move? Country to city, etc.

It’s hard to say exactly how much changes in my writing were tracked to the moves, because the time period covers my late teens through early 30s, when I was growing and changing a lot as a writer—basically figuring out if I would really try to be one, and if so how to go about it. I think one thing the move from South Florida to NYC really forced me to do was commit to the writing life I wanted—self-motivated and productive, studiously impoverished, peripherally employed. I took extra loans out to live on during my MFA at The New School in 2005, and bought myself two years to experience the city as the rich do—all day long, and aimlessly. I think that made as 52

much of a difference as anything. My first apartment in the city was on 107th street and Amsterdam Ave; it was an absolute pit and I loved it.

Then I got into adjunct teaching which could admittedly be a grind and a hustle, but was also incredibly rewarding, and meant I was getting a paycheck while only actually having to show up somewhere a few hours a week. I had so much time in those years to experiment with different kinds of writing, fiction and poetry and criticism and editing, and to just read and read and read.

There’s something salutary about the quiet out here, though, that’s for sure, and I’m sure its affected my writing though I think that will only become clear in the coming years, if and when the fictions I’m working on now get finished and start to enter the world.

What fictions?

I’m two and a half years into a novel about former child actors.

You were a child actor for a while, right?

That’s true, from when I was very young—an infant, really—through maybe middle school, though I might have been in 10th grade when I did my very last thing, which was a TV spot for a roller coaster called The Mantis at Cedar Point in Ohio. You can find it on YouTube.

I heard that you auditioned for a role in The Sandlot.

I think a lot of people tried out for The Sandlot. I read for the part of Yeah-Yeah, one of the smaller but I guess more memorable roles—he’s the one who talks real fast. Got a callback actually, but that was as far as it went. I vividly remember having to memorize and inflect the line “Squints was pervin’ a dish” and that figuring out the emphasis was difficult because the only words in the sentence I understood were “was” and “a.”

When I was very young it was just this thing I did, so it made sense in the way that anything in a child’s life makes sense—things are how they are. When I got a little older I tried to be more serious about it, then when I got a little older than that I backed off. When it got to the point where the truly serious kids were starting to take classes, play actual characters rather than say “Kid 2” in a 30-second spot for orange juice, relocate to L.A., become beautiful teenagers—all that stuff. I either couldn’t 53

do it or didn’t want to, so I just sort of let it go. But the early experience served me well in that it made me a very comfortable public speaker. I did debate in high school, hosted an open mic in college. I have rarely if ever felt uncomfortable at the front of a room, which is a lucky asset for a writer

I think the only time I’ve seen you speak in front of an audience, you said: “Books live long and largely hidden lives.”

That panel was about giving readings, which I had understood to mean it was a consideration of the link between the written and the spoken, what the relationship is and how the translation occurs. A topic I have plenty to say about since I write by ear and reading aloud is a big part of editing for me. It turned out when I got there that the discussion was more logistical-practical—how do you set up an author tour? What’s the etiquette for pitching yourself to a book store? For a writer with limited resources, is it worth it to travel to promote? So I was a little out of my depth in that regard.

I think what I was trying to say there was that you sit by yourself and you write, then you sit by yourself and you edit, then you publish the book and people sit by themselves and read it. I think all this solitude is essential to the process and the experience, but the public reading and conversation can be a valuable exception.

The main advice I was trying to give people was to think about the reading in terms of its value in itself, and not in terms of what else it might cause to occur.

Do you have a favorite reading experience?

The hardcover launch for Flings. I read at BookCourt and was not “in conversation” with anyone, so I had to carry the whole show. I wanted to read my story “Sungold,” which had been the last story added to the collection; I wrote it very late and snuck it in when the book was almost in galleys. The story is a long crazed rant that takes about 45 minutes to read in its entirety so I read about the first 2/3 of it, which I knew would take a half hour, and longer if people were laughing. I also knew that if it didn’t go over well it was going to be a huge drag of a night. But I took the chance and people were really into it, and it felt like everyone I knew in New York was in that room.

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Any horror stories?

I’ve sat through some pretty miserable readings, where the writer either has no sense of the audience or no respect for them. I won’t name names, but you never forget that feeling that your good will as an audience member has been disrespected or abused.

Some writers can get up there and just wing it, and others can’t. But when a can’t thinks he can, it gets ugly quick. Me, I plan what I’m doing. It’s the last vestige of that actor thing—I know where my laugh lines are, my pauses. I know how long the whole thing is gonna run.

I wonder if that’s a short-story writer thing? Do you think the story is still a vital form?

We live in a culture that doesn’t respect concentration or solitude, and takes an active interest in limiting or proscribing self-reflection. People have been saying for twenty, thirty years now that they don’t understand why short fiction hasn’t become more popular given the shortening of attention spans. Don’t we want something we can get through faster? But if that were true we’d all be into sonnets and haiku. The doorstop novel remains a mainstay because it insists on its own importance and because it is serial in nature, almost irrespective of how it is written. You can read it distractedly and come back to it, and there it will be waiting. It’s the exact same logic as narrative television, which of course is having its own heyday for the same basic reasons. A short story might be analogous to a novel chapter or a single episode of a TV show in terms of the time it takes to consume it, but you can’t read a short story in 2 or 3 page bursts or while you’re doing the laundry. Its demand is not for more time but for undivided time—better time—and that’s what people won’t give it. To me, the short story is much closer in its aims and even in its formal demands to the poem than it is to the novel.

Do you write any poetry?

I haven’t in years. I used to, and I learned a lot from it, but those lessons are well enough internalized at this point that I can follow those same lines of inquiry/ exploration in my approach to prose, without having to risk inflicting my mediocre poems on the world.

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You said that, when you were an MFA candidate and an adjunct, you experimented with different kinds of writing. It sounds like poetry didn’t stick. What did?

I wrote a lot of things that were not entirely successful—poetry among them, so-called flash fictions, other stuff like that. I’m not sorry I tried my hand at any of it, but I was callow enough to publish more of it than I should have. The best of it—a handful of experimentalish pieces—wound up in my first collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, and probably represents me maxing out my capacity to work in those modes. Or maybe just my interest in pursuing them.

Now all that time that used to get spread around is concentrated in one or two places. So I guess I’d say that not many of the experiments themselves stuck, but the openness toward experimentation has. And the experience of failure and limitation were deeply instructive too. Anyway a lot of that stuff informs the work I do now—the poetry especially—in ways that are sometimes more and sometimes less obvious. I only wished I’d published less of the really rough stuff. People warned me at the time, but I had to learn it on my own.

When you find that you need to recharge your batteries creatively, is there a stack of books you reliably return to?

Moby-Dick will always wake me up if I’m feeling run down. Rilke’s poems, especially the Sonnets to Orpheus. DeLillo, especially Mao II and Point Omega. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, though I teach it so often I don’t have to go out of my way to get back to it; same goes for Jesus’ Son, though my favorite Johnson might actually be Angels. I also love his poems. I guess over all I go back to books of poems or collections of stories more than novels. I’m not a Wallace Stevens devotee but I like to have a copy of his Collected around, just in case. Raymond Carver’s stories. Joy Williams’ stories. Barry Hannah’s. Hawthorne, who gets weirder and more urgent every time I go back to him. Is there a more disturbing story in the American canon than “Young Goodman Brown”?

“Young Goodman Brown”?

Hawthorne arrived at this pre-Freudian hyper-Freudian climax, a kind of apocalypseorgy, where the revelation is that everyone but you is in on the secret, which naturally suggests its own counter-conclusion, that there is no secret and you yourself are just nuts. Brown either has to believe that he is a total isolate and the only true Christian in a thriving nest of Satanists, or else he has to believe that everything he saw was 56

a delusion, in which case he is a total isolate for the perversion of his thinking and the depth of his mistake. Two polar opposite and mutually exclusive possibilities which nonetheless lead back to the exact same place of isolation and despair, which in a way makes the choice between them less impossible than pointless. The only solution would be to return to a false normality, to refuse to choose an interpretation, which would mean, in effect, the forcible denial of the revelation itself. It powerfully anticipates Kafka, even gets beyond Kafka in certain ways, and that’s hardly the only example. “Wakefield,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Minister’s Black Veil…”

That’s terrifying.

Hawthorne wasn’t always as good as Melville, but when he was, he really was.

You’re quite active on Twitter. Your feed is funny. You rant to yourself a lot, reply to yourself in bursts.

I like the self-reply because it seems easier to read the tweets in order, if there’s going to be a bunch of them. That’s my experience as a reader of other people’s rants.

Every now and then, you rant about The Grateful Dead.

Jerry Garcia once described his band as being like licorice. He said, not everyone likes it, but the people who like it really like it. And (he didn’t say this last part) when you’re in the mood for some, nothing but the real thing will quite do.

Speaking of social media, can we talk about “So You’re Just What, Gone?” for a minute?

Sure.

Social media, as well as waiting for and avoiding text replies, was this rich undercurrent of tension for Charity in your story “So You’re Just What, Gone?”

Whenever I see or, you know, read someone like Charity—someone so stubborn, commanding and punctuated in her face-to-face communications with her mother and Mark Perv, but so exploratory and vulnerable in her digital correspondences— I can’t help but feel lonely for her.

I think that’s a fascinating reaction, and a deeply empathetic one. Yeah, Charity’s loneliness is not directly discussed in the story but it informs all of her behavior.

Charity’s mother is pre-occupied with Charity’s grandmother (understandably, because the grandmother has dementia) and Charity is at this physical remove from 57

her friends back home, and even when she is with them there’s the usual teenage anxieties about who likes who, etc. The initial attraction of Mark—after the shock of him, I mean—is that everything about him is obvious. In a world of hesitation and reticence, he jumps the gun. Of course, when he asks her for nudes, it’s obscene.

Charity understands that. But one thing she likes about him is that she knows exactly where she stands and in a weird way has the upper hand. All the choices to be made are hers. Which is where the device of the cell phone becomes truly useful; the phone is the precise point where the story’s larger questions are manifested in the plot. If she takes the train to his hotel and the door closes behind her, the power relations shift radically. The story conspires to keep her away from him as a way of preserving her autonomy, which in a way means protecting her status as the protagonist.

That sort of social-media-generated power sounds so isolating, though.

I think it’s incontrovertible that social media has wrought massive good, specifically in the literary and pop-cultural worlds, in the way that it’s made access to power possible for individuals and groups who have not traditionally had it, and in many cases have been kept from it by main force. And I do not mean that in some kind of vague paton-the-head PC way. I come across things on Twitter that I would not have found on my own in a hundred years, written by writers who in another life might have waited a hundred years to have their voices heard—writing in isolation to be rediscovered later by some scholar, or else just lost. Instead they’re publishing and talking to each other and some of them are getting famous and paid. This is real and lasting impact happening on the broad scale of culture as well as on the scale of specific individual lives, which to me is maybe even more important. So it has democratized or decentralized things in bizarre and frequently heartening ways. There has been some chaos attendant to that—pile-ons and mob scenes of various kinds—but it wasn’t up to me to judge that stuff before so I don’t see why it would be now. And the anarchist in me believes it is always, always a good thing when use-of-force monopolies are broken.

The downside of social media, specifically for the writing world, is that it encourages us to be too entrepreneurial, far too conscious of the self-brand. I’m as guilty of this as anybody—actually, check that. I’m far less guilty than some. Some people are really monsters on there. And yeah, it’s weird the way your reptile brain can be triggered into that “everyone’s at the party but me” feeling (which is really just Young Goodman Brown’s fear recast as envy) or the “everyone’s succeeding but me” feeling, but there’s 58

an easy solution for it—which is to tune out, unplug. I joined Twitter two years ago because I was writing a novel that I knew would involve people using the service and I wanted to be fluent in how it worked. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it—this is coming from a guy who hasn’t been on Gchat in maybe six years and who tries to get on and off Facebook in five minutes or less. But I liked the quickness, the real-time dissemination of actual news.

Since I moved across the country it has sometimes felt like a life line—but at the same time, there’s a risk of depending on it too much. I took it off my phone a few months ago, to stop myself from doing that thing where any time you’ve got 10 seconds you check it or you tweet something. I felt like I was practicing bad attention of the kind I described earlier, the kind that makes you not understand poetry.

I wanted more aloneness in my alone time.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Jennifer Percy is the author of the nonfiction book Demon Camp (Scribner, 2014) which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick and a New York Times Notable Book. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, Esquire and The New Republic, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Columbia.

Greg Jackson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Vice and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His first book, Prodigals, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March.

Justin Taylor is the author, most recently, of the story collection Flings. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Bomb. He lives in Portland, Oregon and @my19thcentury.

Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. She grew up in Rome, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Dar-es-Salaam, Kumasi and London. She is a degree candidate at Southern New Hampshire University’s Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Huffington Post, Catapult, and the Nonprofit Quarterly.

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The Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction Faculty includes Chinelo Okparanta and Wiley Cash Weeklong residencies in June and January Scholarships are available on a limited basis and tuition rates are competitive

www.snhu.edu/mfa