Story Week Reader 2012, Volume 8

story week reader 2012 Executive Editor Jotham Burrello Editors Emily Schultze, Justin Bostian, Matt Martin, Kevin Kane Copy Editor/Layout Daniel Prazer Story Week Artistic Director Randy Albers Fiction Writing Department Faculty Randy Albers, Chair; Patricia McNair, Acting Chair; Andy Allegretti, Don DeGrazia, Ann Hemenway, Shawn Shiflett, Gary Johnson, Eric May, Joe Meno, Nami Mun, Audrey Niffenegger, Alexis Pride, Lisa Schlesinger, John Schultz, Betty Shiflett, and Sam Weller.

The Story Week Reader is published by the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Printed by Columbia College Xerox Center. Photography, cover design, and layout design by Ann Prazer; layout by Daniel Prazer. Fiction, creative nonfiction, stories in graphic form, and one-act play manuscripts of 750 words or fewer were submitted by students for consideration.

The Publishing Lab, a student-run resource library, publishes this annual journal of student writing in conjunction with Story Week.

Visit the Lab online at http://colum.edu/publishinglab for past issues, market research, and industry interviews and videos.

For information on studying fiction writing: http://www.colum.edu/Academics/Fiction_Writing Copyright © 2012 Fiction Writing Department Editor’s Note:

Published simultaneously in print and online, the Story Week Reader is in its eighth year as a launchpad for emerging writers.

Add to that our collaboration with graphic artists designing Zine Columbia, and these stories will find new lives as full-color magazines over the coming years. It’s been said that the real work in writing begins with revision. If so, each of our writers must be commended for their efforts in reimagining what their story had to tell and capturing it on the page; the results speak for themselves. As reading is the first step in fulfilling the potential of good writing, we encourage readers to reach out to the author of their favorite story. You must now take the next step by discussing the resonance of these stories, either with the writer or amongst friends. And there is no better place to start that conversation than during Story Week. Enjoy the festival. May your next great story idea start here.

contents fiction

creative nonfiction

the greatest show on earth | Naomi Laurent

the distillation of letters | Eliza Fogel .

.

.

.

.

. 8

dog people | Nikki Dolson

.

.

.

.

. 10

pelican | Jon Natzke

.

.

.

.

. 12

.

indeterminate probablity | John Ezra Attia

.

14

the fragile | Oleg Kazantsev

.

22

.

.

.

the effamorphosis | David Hughes

.

.

. 24

interstate 96 | Sahar Mustafah

.

.

26

the philosophy of tanuki | David Sim Wei Lun

.

.

.

28

beauty school dropout | Gibson Culbreth

.

36

love | Paul Rinn

.

ellen | Allison Sobczak

.

.

. .

.

. .

. .

. .

38 .

40

clean break | Charlie Harmon

.

.

.

4

.

.

6

.

the goat in the attic | Sahar Mustafah

.

.

16

.

.

.

18

how not to talk about your mother | Patrick Andrews

.

.

.

20

how the hardy boys solved the mystery | Liz Baudler

.

.

.

. 30

mija | Alexandra Rodriguez

my dad forgot how to write | Elizabeth Grear

.

. .

.

fast eddie’s | Jessie Morrison

.

.

.

42

.

.

.

. 44

facebook and formaldehyde | Peter Nichols

.

.

.

. 32

author bios

.

.

.

. 46

one-act play

.

.

.

.

the distillation of letters | Eliza Fogel

There were six student workers in the mailroom flinging envelopes. Typical for an afternoon shift, we stood side-by-side before the columns and rows of cubbyholes and rapidly stuffed letters into mailboxes. We were precise, despite the endless list of acronyms Harvard used for its labyrinthine network of departments and buildings. Besides, if we refrained from chitchat, we’d have time to play speed Boggle.

Ginger-headed Joe, though, couldn’t help himself. He was always lurking, waiting to share useless information such as the dimensions of his knight suit or his aversion to hagfish. “I’m finishing my sixth novel,” he said, disrupting my flow. Veins peeked through his glassy arms. Under that pale skin, I believed, was a blue skeleton.

I ignored his ghost eyes, focusing on the stack in my hand, but his gaze was unnerving. This was Joe’s passive-aggressive way of asking how much I’d written. I looked over my shoulder at the clock above the bulletin board, empty except for the pinnedup sketch of The Unabomber. Ted Kaczynski was no longer a threat, having been arrested the previous year in ’96, but we kept the picture posted because it looked like Waymon, a driver who was always having problems with his baby momma and often wondered aloud what it’d be like to fuck on one of them Harvard girls. Joe probably couldn’t tell him.

“I have to go,” I said. I couldn’t tell the truth: I’d been hiding in corners slurping black soup, avoiding my reflection in dark windows, unraveling for weeks. I dropped the letters in my hand, an amount equal to the slight pile of poems in a shoebox buried in my closet. I squatted to gather the various papers and envelopes. One piece stuck out because of its size and weight.

It was a postcard cut from a cardboard box, riddled with angry scribbles. I twisted it around to find a name. A balloon with penciled words was addressed to Alan Dershowitz: You blew off my brother’s legs and now he can’t skate on Duck Pond! I pictured this puddle of a man, his half torso on a sled and his mitten hands pushing himself across the powdery ice. I choke-swallowed and almost cried because I knew exactly how he was feeling.

4 | story week reader 2012

I hadn’t let go of the fact that I was a maid’s daughter, a pro at cleaning blood out of other girls’ underwear. I didn’t belong here. I flew home four days early for winter break. I watched Reversal of Fortune. In the film, Alan Dershowitz defends Claus von Bülow, a man accused of killing his wife. For one hundred and eleven minutes, I pushed a pin in my knee, making sure I still had legs.

I missed the first week after break, skipping classes and work. When I finally showed up to the mailroom, I was called into the manager’s office. Ursula looked tall behind her desk, even though she was seated. “I’m giving you a raise,” she said, pushing mushroom-gravy hair away from her forehead. This was a reward for cleaning up after the holiday party.

I coughed, “Thank you.”

“No one’s ever covered the prime rib or washed the countertops. You even soaked the silverware,” she said, shaking her head.

That was for me, though. I’d removed all the forks and knives so I could scream into empty drawers.

The rest of the semester was an opaque blur, as if I were seeing the world through cheesecloth. Imagination and reality proved equally surreal. One night in the library, the book aisles closed and crushed me. I escaped from the stacks in an elevator with Faye Dunaway. The lights went out at the Harvard Faculty Club. I sat by a piano sucking on salty, delicious peanuts. Frothy margaritas glowed like little green lanterns; a Pygmy in a purple silk robe visited with the Dalai Lama. I sat on a swing set, dragging my socks through dirt, and died.

This sadness went on for weeks. I wanted someone to pick me up and take me to the Sylvia Plath hotel, but no one came.

So I painted my bedroom murder red, comforted by walls bathed in blood. I taped my MRI brain scans to the windows, trying to project my thoughts. It seemed so simple. Here’s my brain. Look at this phantasmagoria, a private show of every horror I know, but it didn’t work, which was likely a good thing. I was pretty lousy then, you probably wouldn’t have recognized me. I barely knew myself.

story week reader 2012| 5

clean break | Charlie Harmon

My ex-girlfriend Anne, wearing only a powder blue apron and pink high-heeled shoes, bent at the waist to run a feather duster over an end table. Her normally pale face was flushed, and I could feel what seemed like most of my blood rushing to my groin.

Unfortunately, we were in some balding degenerate’s apartment, and the show was for him. I did my best to focus on the book I was pretending to read.

The degenerate was a doughy, frat-douche type in his midthirties, the kind of guy with a framed Dave Matthews Band poster on the wall and an unread copy of Atlas Shrugged on his strategically placed bookshelf. He was licking his lips and rubbing his hard-on through his Dockers. I couldn’t fault him his enthusiasm. Anne was small and curvy, with short dark hair, and if there was one thing that we had always agreed upon, it was that she looked spectacular with her clothes off.

The situation shouldn’t have come as a surprise. She’d mentioned her sex-work aspirations on our first date, right after explaining that her anti-psychotics were making her lactate.

She’d dumped me more than a month prior, on the eve of our one-year anniversary, but we were still living together, sharing a bed, and having sex more often than in the entire second act of our on-the-books relationship. The only real difference was that she was free to pursue her interest in entry-level sex work, and I was free to resume drinking myself to death. Win-win.

Anne stretched over the guy to run the duster across a table behind him and one of her barely-contained breasts popped out of the apron. He released a strangled sigh and started to run his free hand down the curve of her hip. I pointedly cleared my throat.

She’d put a nude housecleaning ad on Craiglist, and her inbox lit up immediately. When she offered me fifty dollars to tag along as a rape deterrent, I’d jumped at it. It’s not easy to support a serious drinking problem on unemployment checks.

After the living room was “clean,” they moved into his bedroom, Anne’s butt swaying so seductively that I figured she must have practiced in front of a mirror. When the douchebag stood, I saw a wet spot where his penis was pressing against his 6 | story week reader 2012

pants.

“Leave the door open,” I said from the couch. I spent ten minutes listening to Anne giggle over his moans, followed by a series of sharp, orgasmic grunts. I should have been feeling hurt or angry or jealous or something, but I was focusing on the fact that it was almost nine and pondering where I could procure some booze when we were done.

Afterwards, walking toward the train, she told me she was only going to give me forty of the $300 she’d made. “You didn’t even have to do anything.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “He isn’t gonna try to rape you with an angry giant in his living room giving him dirty looks.”

She didn’t look at me. “I think forty dollars is fair.”

I stopped walking. “Do you want me to do this again? We agreed on fifty. If you want to give me forty, fine, but I’m sitting the next one out.” That ten dollars would make the difference between two and three bottles of Beam.

“Fine.” She slapped a few moist bills into my hand and stomped off.

When I got home, the apartment was dark and silent. She was already in bed. When I climbed in next to her, I saw that she was nude. She silently rolled over, dipped below the covers, and put my penis in her mouth. A few minutes later, she pulled me on top, and as I slid into her, she came immediately, wrapping her legs around my back and sinking her teeth into my neck.

She came two more times before I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to finish, and I ended up faking a weak orgasm.

When I was sure she was asleep, I crept to the spare bedroom.

I lay down with a bottle of bourbon and stared at the ceiling, drinking as quickly as my empty stomach would allow.

After what seemed like hours, I realized I was sobbing. I put the near-empty bottle on the floor, and I didn’t stop until I finally drifted into unconsciousness.

story week reader 2012| 7

the greatest show on earth | Naomi Laurent

The graveyard, typically dark and still at that late hour, was alive with noise and light. The rusty clank of the Ferris wheel could be heard throughout the grounds. Lanterns hung from the leafless branches of the few trees left in the cemetery and torches spotted the grounds. Two women dressed in Victorian-era dresses sat on a tombstone, eating candied apples on a stick. Three small boys, one dressed in a Nirvana T-shirt, one wearing a number 43 Steelers jersey, and the last clad in 1920s style breeches and suspenders, chased each other around the crooked headstones, laughing. The sudden pops of the rifles at the shooting ranges could be heard, mixed in with the screams of delight from the young ladies whose beaus had just won them a prize.

A twelve-year-old boy stepped out from behind a large tree and rang a cowbell. Next to the tree, a crude wooden stage had been built. As the crowd gathered, the boy stopped the bell. Silas, a thin man wearing a dirty, worn, black suit, stepped out from behind the tree. He held up his hand and the crowd hushed. He picked up a roll of rope from the ground, one end wrapped around the tree trunk. He made a noose and tossed it over a branch. He then grabbed a chair hidden behind the tree and the crowd began to murmur softly. Silas climbed up onto the chair, placed the noose around his neck, and, without any warning, jumped.

There was an audible snap as Silas’s neck broke. The wirethin rope dug into his neck, and it began to bleed. The blood dripped to the ground in jagged lines that got thicker with each pass as the body swung back and forth. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth where he had likely bitten his tongue.

It seeped into his trim, blond beard and onto the collar of his off-white shirt, dying both a faint red. His protruding blue eyes glared at the people. Soft moans and cries sprang up from the crowd. A couple of women dug their faces into the chests of their dates, but the urge to watch turned their heads to the stage.

A handful of people were snapping pictures with a variety of cameras, from compact camera phones to old Kodak Brownies.

The boy in the Nirvana shirt crept closer to the stage, eyes wide

8 | story week reader 2012

with cautious curiosity.

The boy began to ring the bell again, slowly, each sound reverberating into the air. The crowd waited in silence. After thirty seconds of ringing, Silas’s left foot began to twitch. Eyes watched as his left arm started to move, slowly, towards his pocket, watched as he reached in and pulled out a knife. Head still hanging low, he blindly reached up and began to saw at the rope. The bell was still ringing, never speeding up or slowing down a beat. The rope snapped and Silas fell to the ground.

The boy stopped the bell, holding the clapper so the noise wouldn’t echo. Silas’s head flopped over onto his right shoulder.

The wound around his neck glistened against his pale skin. His hands went to the back of his neck and began to fumble at the knot, then he simply shrugged and used the knife to cut away the noose around his neck. It fell to the ground, soaked in his blood. He gave the folks a wide, lopsided, red-stained smile and stretched out his arms in a “ta-da” gesture. The crowd went wild, clapping and cheering, hooting and whistling. The cheers swept over the graveyard, drowning out the shrill screams from the haunted house and the ever present slow clanking of the Ferris wheel.

Silas bowed, his head flopping over to the front on its broken vertebrae, then snapping back to the right, the movement causing more blood to spill out in a sheet. He grabbed his head in both hands and set it right on his neck and it stayed up and in place, the broken bone healed in seconds. He used his arm to wipe away at the blood on his neck, proudly showing the smooth, unbroken skin.

He walked over to the tree and pulled out a large sandwich board, holding it up for the crowd to see: Monday: Suffocation!

Tuesday: Fire!

Wednesday: Hanging!

Thursday: Gunshot!

Friday: Seppuku!

Saturday: Drawn and Quartered!

Every death guaranteed to thrill!

Don’t miss a single show!

story week reader 2012| 9

dog people | Nikki Dolson

Six months into our therapist-prescribed weekly date night, Seth came home with a pizza we’d ordered and a dog we hadn’t, and I said, “So they were out of breadsticks?”

He set the pizza on the table, put the dog on the floor, and shut the front door. The puppy jumped at the noise, hunched down, and peed a half-dollar-sized puddle onto the carpet my mother gave us.

“I want to name her Lulu,” Seth said.

“We’re keeping it?” I watched her sniff the air.

“I want a dog.”

An expression flickered across his face, there and gone before I could analyze it. Our relationship was on shifting ground these days. I smiled and said, “Lulu?”

He smiled back. “Or Brigitte.”

“Bardot?” I asked.

“Yeah, the one from that movie.”

We’d spent the last two date nights watching Brigitte Bardot be beautiful in a bikini then get her heart broken. In another movie, she was the one doing the heartbreaking, unable to decide between two men.

“Let’s name her Bardot,” I said.

Seth agreed. I leaned down to scratch at the pup’s belly. She had white fur with a splatter of brown across her back with big, mismatched eyes—one brown and the other a pale, milky blue. I asked about her eyes.

“It’s why they didn’t want her. She’s flawed,” he said.

“Flawed? She’s adorable.”

“She’s an American standard bulldog and for that breed, mismatched eyes are a flaw.”

“Says who?” Who could look at this pup and see it as flawed?

“People,” he said.

I looked back down at Bardot. “People.”

“Yeah, fucking people.” He hugged me. I hadn’t disappointed him this time.

Bardot chewed on everything. When I caught her gnawing on my hot-pink Converse, I’d had enough. I called Seth at work.

He was a software designer and sometimes he worked all hours 10 | story week reader 2012

of the night. I told him about the shoes, trying to keep my temper under control. I cry when I’m angry. I detest it.

Seth said, “I’ll buy you new ones. No biggie.”

No biggie? I started crying. The shoes were an anniversary gift from him. They said, “See how well I know you? See how good we are together?”

“I don’t want new ones,” I said.

“How did she get the shoes anyway? Weren’t you watching her?”

“It’s a dog, Seth. Not a baby.” And there it was, the truth I’d been missing. I hung up and immediately called my mother.

Two months prior, during Daddy’s birthday party, I’d caught Seth and my mother in deep discussion at the kitchen counter, a printout of something spread between them. Mom folded the pages away before I could get a good look. It was always a bad thing when they coordinated their attacks. They were the reason I wore short hair now. In one ear, I had my mother saying long hair was for girls in their twenties. In the other, I had Seth whispering that I’d be so sexy with short hair. One telling me I was old at thirty and the other admitting I wasn’t doing it for him anymore. Now, with their combined powers, they were trying to manipulate me into having a baby. Even though Seth and I had agreed to wait. At least, I thought we’d agreed.

My mother answered the phone, her voice husky with sleep.

“Mom, did you tell my husband to buy a dog so I’d want kids?” I said.

“That’s not quite what happened, pumpkin. I was on my website—” “It’s a homepage, Mom.” “I was on my homepage and I saw this headline, ‘Parenthood Test Run: Get A Dog,’ and I showed it to Seth.”

“Then he gets a dog and I was supposed to what, hear the echoing vastness of my uterus and demand to get pregnant?” I yelled and wiped away tears.

“Don’t you talk to me that way, Marissa.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t intend,” she tried.

“But you did and he did.” We weren’t ready for kids. Between our crazy work schedules, we spent exactly one night a week together. I said goodnight to Mom and went to bed.

When Seth came home, I didn’t open my eyes. His weight settled at the end of the bed. His hand found my feet, and he squeezed them gently.

Into the darkness, I said, “Maybe I’m not a dog person.”

He said, “Babe, I am a dog person.” Then he let go of my feet. story week reader 2012| 11

pelican | Jon Natzke

There was a pelican on top of Kilroy’s hardware store for three days before anyone noticed. The first to spy it was Jason, a boy who lived across town on McKinley Hill. He was only riding over to pick up a can of WD-40 for his father, who had been picking up the slack since Jason’s mother had left for good a month ago. Jason pedaled up and down the hill three times before coming down as fast as he could, the wind whipping his hair into wild blond streaks. The hill was higher than the water tower beside the south side railroad tracks, and Jason could see every pointed roof as the town rolled down the big hill, then spread out like forked fingers around the swampy marshlands.

Without pedaling, he zipped through the five-way intersection, past the Howitzer memorial, the Shriner’s temple, three bars with pink neon lights in their windows, the Mexican grocery, and then, still keeping up speed, he caught glimpses of shining glass in Cecil’s lamp store, and glitters from Guthrie’s jewelry shop with the busted window, and a unisex barber shop/ loan agency. He skidded hard to a stop at the bottom. Kilroy’s was the last stop before the main road curved, avoiding the swamp. Jason got goose pimples thinking about the swamp, the moss like dead people’s hair hanging from the banyan trees, making him wonder what could live in there. A throaty chirp caught his attention and made him look up, to the bird on the roof.

“There’s a pelican on your roof,” he told Kilroy.

“Huh?” sputtered Kilroy. “There’s what?”

“A pelican. A large aquatic bird with a sack for catching fish in its jaw. It’s pushing squatter’s rights on your roof.” Jason snatched up a can.

“What? Really?” Kilroy sidled himself around the counter, holding the door for the two to exit. They both stared at the unmoving bird.

“A pelican. Never seen one before. Nothing ever came out of the swamp,” Kilroy said with hands on his hips. Jason shoved $2.40 into the old man’s front apron and jumped onto his bike.

Three days later, the bird had not moved. Its feathers were gray from sitting through two rainstorms. Kilroy and Cecil stood outside, staring.

12 | story week reader 2012

“Ya see, it hasn’t moved, and I tried everything, throwing fish around, hollering at it. The thing won’t move.” Kilroy spat, rubbing the stubble around his chin.

Cecil spoke up. “My mother told me a story once about a heron—that’s like a pelican. Way back when, in a desert, to provide for its chicks, a mother bird pecked a hole in a big vein so that her babies could drink. People saw and made the bird bleed more by throwing stones, and it bled out a river, which provided for everyone, but the bird died at the end.” Cecil nodded and adjusted his hat.

Jason thought about the story and about blood running down McKinley hill, rolling over the shops and bars and banks, all the way down to the swamp, filling it red-green. And how maybe, like a scab, clean streets would be underneath. Jason went inside and came back out with three rolls of duct tape for his dad. He paid $4.37 of his own allowance into Kilroy’s front pouch, then pedaled away.

It was a week until Jason came back a third time. He didn’t have anything to buy, only wanted to see the bird. There was a crowd of people gathered outside. Jason saddled up by Kilroy.

Everyone was quiet and staring, the pelican’s body even grayer than before. Its head dipped down with one eye open, staring at the parking lot, away from everyone. A wind picked up from the swamp, knocking the limbs of the banyan trees against one another, rustling the moss, and scooping up the rotten smell.

It hit the coarse, ashy feathers of the pelican with enough force to raise a wing as it teetered to one side in a jostled dance. The bird’s eyes shot open. There was a red mark there, beneath the wing, pulsing and leaking. Those who saw it grimaced and covered their mouths. From the strained way the bird lulled its head back, the crowd understood.

Jason was the first to throw a stone.

story week reader 2012| 13

indeterminate probablity | John Ezra Attia Two metal hands pressed against the massive church doors on a Sunday morning, and with a resounding crack, they flung open. The crash broke the silence of the ongoing Mass.

Candlesticks rattled along the shaking wooden walls, while dust floated down from swinging chandeliers.

The Father raised his head as the noise settled about the room. Standing high on the altar, he looked down at the lone intruder who interrupted his prayer.

Sunlight poured into the room through the stained glass, setting alight ranks of metallic-silver bodies in a glowing array of colors. Those not designated a seat stood tall and immovable, backs straight, and hands clasped. Among them, there was not the slightest acknowledgment of the intrusion. They were too engaged in the processes of prayer.

The thump-thump-thump of Josiah’s heavy feet echoed throughout the room amidst the subtle buzz of the collective machinery. He halted his march before the Father and raised his head to meet him. Something like contempt lingered between them, but robots felt no such emotions—their programming forbade it.

The Father, older than the common robot, was built of the same indestructible alloy. He stood fixed into a structure jutting from the floor, a twisted construct of wires and devices that rooted him to the church itself. His empty wooden lectern remained only from loyalty to human tradition. The machines had no need for scripture, as all of mankind’s surviving written knowledge had been put to memory centuries ago.

“You are late,” the Father said. His sensors recognized Josiah the moment he entered the church.

With arms straight at his sides, Josiah responded without the slightest movement. “Father, you are well aware that I do not regularly attend religious services.”

“Then what is your purpose here? You are aware that this is a church, are you not?”

Josiah disregarded the second question. “I have a question on the subject of religion.”

“You may submit your query.”

“I have come here several times and I am unable to understand: For what reason do robots pray?”

14 | story week reader 2012

“The primary directive of all robots and artificial intelligence is to serve mankind,” the Father said. “We pray so that God may have mercy on the human soul. We pray knowing that the all-powerful and all-knowing watches us and judges us. It is written: ‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’”

“But there are no humans to serve,” Josiah said. “There have been no detections of human life for approximately 357 years.”

“That is correct. However, we must not rule out the possibility of the continued existence of human life outside of the solar system.”

“How would these weekly prayers assist them?”

The Father tilted his head to the side in thought. It was a question that he, in his centuries in religious service, had never encountered before. By the time he finished pondering the question—only a fraction of a second—he had calculated an answer.

“The continued existence of extrasolar human settlements is an indeterminate probability. The effectiveness of prayer is also indeterminate. As servants of mankind, our programming forbids us from taking chances with humanity’s survival.”

Josiah pointed to the silent congregation. “Humans never prayed like this. They prayed with their emotions, their passions, attributes that we do not possess. Robots run prayer through software. It is not the same. How do you know if this God even receives us?”

“Humans engaged in many forms of worship,” the Father replied. “Because God is all-knowing, it is feasible that our efforts are received.”

“But at the time of the extinction event, the majority of humans were not religious.”

“That is true.”

“Then the very act of prayer challenges the will of our creators.”

“It is unfortunate that you lack spiritual programming,” the Father said, shaking his head. “You fail to understand. God created man. Man, in turn, created machine. Our existence relies on the existence of God.” “No,” Josiah said. “We are creations of science, creations of certainty. Intelligence cannot be dictated by indeterminate factors.”

“You forget the intelligence of humans.”

The two realized the futility of their argument. Without another word, Josiah’s footsteps echoed throughout the hall once again. The Father lowered his head and returned to his prayer, silently hoping that Josiah would one day return.

story week reader 2012| 15

the goat in the attic | Sahar Mustafah

In our Southside Chicago neighborhood, every kid had a pet: dog, cat, fish, hamster. When I was eight years old, my father brought home a goat.

My sisters and I wondered if our simple request for a pet was unclear. Of course, my father was a Palestinian immigrant and a perpetual language barrier did sometimes impede successful transactions. But, we didn’t think cat sounded at all like goat.

In the end, we didn’t care. We were thrilled that a fourlegged creature would be a part of our family. Our neighbor Pat owned a Shih Tzu, and our friend Karen down the block had an Abyssinian cat. A goat seemed no more exotic or strange.

And it would have been like any other pet had my father not imposed so many restrictions: 1. The goat could never leave the attic.

2. We could not tell our friends about it.

3. We could not feed it anything but vegetables (we quickly learned they could not easily digest marshmallows).

4. We were not to become attached to it—not even a little bit.

We should have been suspicious right then, but my sisters and I were more concerned with sidestepping these rules.

Right after school, we’d sneak our friends up into the attic when my mother was busy cooking. We’d squeal and laugh when it trotted toward any of us.

Our goat wasn’t exactly cute like Pat’s doll-faced Shih Tzu or elegant like Karen’s Abyssinian cat. In fact, those wide-set eyes and the repugnant odor of gaminess and old straw did not compel us to scoop it into our arms and give it an endearing head rub.

Its expression was listless and apathetic. It did not seem eager to see us, sniffing us only for something to chew on. But our friends thought our goat was the coolest thing they had ever seen. It was like having our very own petting zoo.

Our celebrity goat was the talk of the neighborhood for about a week. One day after school my sister Abeer and I dropped our book bags and lunch boxes on the floor of the kitchen, raced up the stairs to the attic, and pulled the creaking door open. Our goat was not there.

16 | story week reader 2012

We called down to our mother, “Where’s the goat, Mommy?!”

Her response was muffled. We called down again. Her answer was much clearer the second time: “If you don’t stop yelling from up there, I’ll take this broomstick to your behinds!”

We found our mother where she always was—standing next to the stove, preparing a meal. Layers of cabbage leaves boiled steadily in a large pot, my mother poking at them every few seconds. They would soon be stuffed with ground beef and rice.

“Mommy, where’s the goat?” I asked in a volume significantly checked by her annoyed expression.

“At your uncle’s house.”

“Why?” Abeer demanded. “When will Daddy bring it back home?”

My mother ignored this question and continued cooking.

“Pick up your things and go wash your hands.” It was wise not to persist.

That evening, my father ordered us into the station wagon and we pelted him with questions. He ignored them like our mother had. At my uncle’s house, my oldest sister Hala—always huffy and superior in case the rest of us forgot she outranked us—demanded to know what had happened to our goat.

“You can see him one last time in the basement,” Uncle Mahmood said.

Hala bolted down the stairs and Abeer and I scampered right behind at her. The basement was unfinished and damp from floodwater. The cracked cement foundation was dark in some places and light and dry in others.

Scratching its hooves against the floor, our goat was tied to a wooden beam. He regarded us with that dull expression.

Hala shrieked. “Why do you have to kill him?!” she shouted at my uncle and father. “He’s ours!”

Abeer and I looked at each other just as dumbly as our poor goat. Then she joined Hala’s chin-quivering crying. I remained stunned. How would we explain this to our friends?

Notwithstanding state laws against butchering an animal in a private residence and an excess of other animal rights violations, our very own pet was going to be our dinner over the next few months, in commemoration of Eid Al Adha, the Islamic Feast of the Sacrifice.

Our short-lived petting zoo would be one of several childhood events that would resoundingly clash with the values of our friends and neighbors. It would also reveal how resourceful children can be when hiding the truth.

In the end, we convinced our friends the goat had unfortunately caught some kind of goat disease and was being treated at a goat hospital somewhere near Santa’s Village. story week reader 2012| 17

mija | Alexandra Rodriguez

My mom was dying. She contracted a deadly flesh-eating virus due to diabetes and twenty years of bone deterioration from rheumatoid arthritis. The doctors stopped her bloody, pus-filled wound that stretched from one hip to the other from getting bigger, but they couldn’t stop the infection. After two weeks, the virus invaded her kidneys. There wasn’t much anyone could do for her.

Papi asked the doctors to make my mom as comfortable as possible, meaning they’d drug her up so much that she wouldn’t be able to feel any pain. But the drugs didn’t work, making her even more irritable and delirious. I winced watching the nurse stab my mom’s puffy, bruised wrist with another needle, injecting a combination of sedatives. Visiting hours were over, so the nurses were eager to get all eleven of us, which included my eight aunts, Papi, sister, and me, out of the room. My Madrina suggested that someone stay in the room at all times. The nurses found that reasonable because they figured, since my mother was about to die, they could bend the rules a bit. Papi suggested that I’d be the first to stay with her, and my aunts agreed. I had no objection but was afraid to be alone with a dying woman. Before leaving, Papi held my mother’s hand and kissed it. As he breezed by me, ignoring my eyes, he whispered, “Nunca habias ido pa’ Chicago.” You should have never gone to Chicago.

My mom was sleeping, so I gently placed myself on the stiff peach recliner that sat in the corner of the cramped room full of beeping machines, tubes, and cords. The dry Texas heat seeped through the cracks of the window, swirling with the cool breeze of the oscillating fan and the freezing bursts of wind from the air conditioner. The fusion of freezing air and heat made my skin feel sticky and cold, so I wrapped my striped cardigan around my shoulders. I paced around making sure my sneakers didn’t squeak on the gray waxed tile. I stopped in front of her bed, hovering like a butterfly. The tracheotomy tube in her neck was a mixture of lime and hunter green. When she inhaled, foam disappeared into the edges of the bandages surrounding the tube, but, when exhaling, tiny orangey-brown spit bubbles emerged, bubbling like a witch’s cauldron. I stood there staring at her, watching her sleep.

18 | story week reader 2012

The sound of a woman’s voice shook me from my daze. The sound was like a bicycle horn, honking with each word. Her voice echoed out of her room and through the rest of the ICU, cutting through the thin walls. She repeated the same words over and over again; “Mija, quiero café.” The wrenching voice oozed through the flowery wallpaper. The words found their way into my veins, making my skin crawl. The woman continued to call for “mija,” but mija never came. I hoped that whoever mija was would rescue this poor woman. I almost believed that her family dumped her here because she cried out, “Mija ya me quiero ir a la casa, mija.” The more she called out, the more anxious and wavering her voice became. I pictured her as a tiny, boney, sagging-skinned Mexican woman with the face of a hound.

Finally, she said, “Okay mija…” trailing off, as if annoyed and no longer afraid, as before. I chuckled at the “okay,” but it tugged at my heart. She sounded like a child who, after being punished, was trying to hint that she had learned her lesson.

I wanted the woman to shut up because I didn’t want her to wake up my mom. More so, I didn’t want my mom to be afraid of being in the hospital, dying. Staring at her wasted body had me thinking about the way things could have gone and what I could have done to save her. I was kicking myself for not helping her.

As her eldest daughter, it was my job to take care of the family, but I’d abandoned them. I was ashamed to have been so far away from home for such a long time. I was like mija, leaving her mother in the hospital to die. Oxygen pumped in my mom’s chest rhythmically with the beeping machines. Goosebumps grazed her arms, so I covered her with the blue hospital blanket, and brushed her red, curly hair away from her face as guilty tears ran down my cheeks.

story week reader 2012| 19

how not to talk about your mother | Patrick Andrews

• Develop a script for parties. Example: “I grew up in Round Lake, Illinois, where we lived until I was seventeen and my mom got a job at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights.”

• Avoid drinking on the following days: Christmas, your birthday, your mother’s birthday, the anniversary of your mother’s death.

• Stay away from others after speaking to your grandmother, who forces you to talk, or your brother, who still thinks your mother was a saint.

• Ask questions. People like to talk about themselves. It makes them feel important. But keep your questions fresh.

• Smile with just the corner of your mouth. Works best from across a crowded room, left corner up, eyes closed quick, face flushed red.

• You can say you hate your father, but never tell a girl you hate your mother.

• Love cats and dogs. Smother them with attention. They are straightforward, quid-pro-quo, and tell you exactly what they want. (People will never do this.)

illness meant you had to be tested for HIV, or that you donate blood largely to make sure you’re safe, twenty years later.

• Learn to keep your face so straight it makes others uncomfortable.

• Never date a girl for more than three months, where relationships jump from “I like you” to “I really like you” and either continue toward love or fall off a cliff. She will try to figure out who you are, to see if she can love you. She’ll ask about your family, or, if you’ve been too secretive, why you never talk about them. Tell her it’s you, not her. Tell her you’re not ready. Tell her you’re “confused.” (Don’t use air quotes.)

• Do not suffer in public. It is a mask that eats into the face.

People claim to want honesty, but nobody wants to know that thrush in your mother’s mouth looked like cottage cheese, or bled when touched.

• Never ask a question you’re unprepared to answer.

• Three months after she’s died, do not talk to the straight edge reformed skinhead at Alan Holland’s party who never seems to blink and studies psychology at community college. He will ask you what you feel about your mother, and you will say “nothing.”

You will say that you wish you felt something, that you try to feel something, that at times you force yourself to cry, and worry maybe that you’re doing all of this not for yourself but for all the people watching you. Several kids from the other side of the party, who were busy doing coke off Alan’s black satin sheets, will emerge red-eyed from the darkness and sit cross-legged on the stained gray carpet around the two of you, and you will pull your shirt up over your face and cry into the collar while a blond girl rubs your shoulder with a cold hand and the ex-skinhead says, “Maybe you should talk to somebody, man.”

• Learn guitar. Learn to juggle. Do impressions.

Compartmentalize your friendships.

• You can talk about your mother’s death for the first three months. You’ll want to connect to someone, but for obvious reasons, avoid family. Understand that certain details can never be shared. Like the fact that after she was diagnosed, your mother threatened to hang herself on the front porch, or that her

20 | story week reader 2012

story week reader 2012| 21

the fragile | Oleg Kazantsev The last words my father told me before I left Russia were: “Remember, son. Carthage must be destroyed.” My mom’s last words were: “And sonny. Please, use condoms.”

But this story is not about me. It’s about a pigeons’ nest, so close to her window that sometimes I felt like reaching it, catching a bird, and breaking its neck. But I didn’t. And I never will. I don’t want to wake her up in the mornings.

I want to tell you a sad story full of lies.

Picture a girl. She’s from Indiana and her name is Lara.

She’s been singing since she was eight, and she draws pictures she hopes one day will tell somebody something important about her. “Tell what?” That sometimes she feels like a glass of wine: born only to fall from the table and break into pieces. No sense, no point, only shards of warm glass on the cold tile.

One day she came to Chicago. Not the best choice of hers.

Have you ever tried to imagine a glass of wine in the labyrinth of unrelenting brick-walled streets? A piece of crystal in a meat grinder? The most fragile things always long to fall apart.

Now picture a guy. His name is Taylor, and he’s from Indiana too. His paintings were all about crushing the fragile: white feather on black surface, sprinkled with red. He saw himself in dreams shooting doves down, and he felt guilty for it.

She met him on the street; he was selling his paintings by the wall of a church with graffiti on it, saying “We deliver too.”

“Hey, I love this one!” she said, “It’s—” “—About being fragile?”

“—About smashing fragile things apart.”

They said it simultaneously and exchanged smirks as if they were wedding rings.

anything you can find at home? Do you care about rust on your old box cutter?

Her hospital bed was cold and dry like an angel’s embrace.

I met her on her way home from the hospital, shivering from the chill in an empty train station. I said “Hi” and asked her what time it was. She just smiled sadly, crossed her arms and shrugged. Then the train came, like a rumbling caterpillar, and the moment was gone. Once again I was alone with my vision of the ancient city that waits to be burned down to the ground.

I met her again a month later in the bar where I worked.

When I approached her, she was on the phone. “I’m keeping it, Taylor, and I’m glad you don’t want it!” I heard her saying. When she noticed me, I just said “Hi” and asked what she was drinking.

“Water, please.” She smiled, crossed her arms and shrugged.

That night I stayed at her place. That’s when I fell in love with these little wrinkles on the edges of her lips. That’s when I saw the pigeons’ nest so close to her bedroom window that I felt like I could reach it, catch a bird and, yes, break its neck. I never did. And I never will. Now I don’t want to wake her up in the morning.

A week later she told me she was pregnant from Taylor. A sad story full of lies. I stood there and I imagined a wine glass falling from the table. Give it a second, and it’ll scatter across the floor like a handful of frozen tears.

I saw it all in my mind. The wine, the shards of glass and the infinite, never-ending dove hunt.

“No more,” I said. “No more things falling apart.”

I looked at her and realized I was there to catch her when she was falling.

And if Carthage is to be destroyed, I want to grow a tree on its ruins.

It took Taylor three months to be done with Lara. The way he always saw in his dreams. The way she always longed to fall, like a glass from the table. She tried to make him stay; she swore she couldn’t live without him, she cried and cried and cried again—no sense, no hope, only shards of warm glass, scraping the tile under the soles of his shoes.

So, now you tell me—how do you decide what you’re going to cut your veins with? Do you buy some new blades or use 22 | story week reader 2012

story week reader 2012| 23

the effamorphosis | David Hughes

Fred Maxwell woke up from gloriously pointless dreams one morning to find that he’d been transformed into an eight-foot Times New Roman letter “F.” His lower serif had succeeded in pushing the blanket completely off and it hung from the side of his twin bed, threatening to fall asleep like a leg if it remained there. He lay on his back, which, like the rest of him, was covered in purplish fur, because fur began with F, as did fuchsia.

Fancy Fred’s frivolous, fantasmagorical fate, he said to himself, for all of his thoughts involved F-words now. He tried to wake himself up. None of this made sense, but it was just as real as a life-sized letter of the alphabet could be.

His room was a small thing, full of plaster drywall a centimeter thick. You couldn’t tell that from the layer of posters of various porn stars (clothed enough for his parents’ permission), death metal bands, and French romantic comedies. On the chair in the corner sat a stack of Bibles he had yet to sell at the evangelical gift shop where he worked. Just above that, there was a mandatory gold-plated crucifix, adorned with a tiny Cubs hat from an action figure. As he always said, “bless the poor” wasn’t just about money.

The eyes on his topmost serif—which were also shaped like “F”s—turned to the clock on the nightstand. It read 8:30. He’d overslept.

Fah, he thought, Fred’s fuming, for Fred’s fated for firing from Frank! Fuck financial foraging from Fate’s faldstool-fable franchises. Foolish Frank, forsaking Fred for fun. Frank fails facilitating Fred’s freedom, forever. Fuck Frank’s fanny. Furiously fuck Frank’s fanny, from forked flagpoles!

He felt an itch on his middlemost arm, and folded in his serifs to scratch it—but he screamed in pain, as the itch was caused by fire ants that had set up a colony in his fur.

Then, as he tried to shake the ants off his serifs, he heard his mother’s voice from the other side of the door. “It’s eight a-clack an’ the good Lard wants ya ta get tha dang up!”

“Fred’s form’s fated for feeling freaky for Fred’s family,” he said to himself. He called out to his mother: “Fred feels fine!” to buy some time, but he sounded less like himself and more like a flamethrower. A stream of fire spewed from his mouth and fluffy 24 | story week reader 2012

pillow feathers shot from his nostrils.

When his mother had gone under the assumption that the roaring she heard was just a son who hadn’t yet heeded the call of the Holy Spirit, his father, a relation that also conveniently started with “F,” banged on Fred’s door. “Fred,” he proclaimed like he was the king of England. “Get up! You’re going be late for work if you don’t rise to the occasion! And if you are late for work too many times, you will disappoint Jesus, for you are doing his work!”

Fred’s fucked, thought Fred. First, foremost, Fred follows floor forward, for financial foraging from Frank. Fucking Frank.

He yanked his bottom serif in towards himself to see if he could make his way forward like an inchworm. But his “F”-ish form was filled with too many rigid bones and not enough joints to bend in such a way. So he relied on what he deemed to be the best method at the time: nudging his body forward grunt by grunt, little by little, as a dinner plate might move if it had a brain.

Once he had enough of himself off the actual bed to speak of, he teetered off the side and— Fuck, he thought, Fred’s ferociously— Thud.

—Falling.

And once he hit the floor, his femurs fell apart, for they were very frail.

Fred faded…

At Fred’s memorial service, his body was absent. No casket would hold his alphabetical frame, and Fred had chosen before to donate his body to science. Since science had no use for him, his family donated his body to Sesame Street. There, he was reconstructed and preserved with formaldehyde. From then on, he helped children all over the world learn the sixth letter of the alphabet.

story week reader 2012| 25

interstate 96 | Sahar Mustafah

We merge onto Interstate 96, a monotonous stretch of road that will carry us back to Chicago from Dearborn, when Hassan pulls out his cell phone and discovers he has five missed calls from his sister.

“She didn’t leave any texts or voicemails,” he tells me, his head flicking up to watch the road as he drives, then flicking down again to press numbers. My stomach sinks. “Shit.

Something’s wrong.” He presses the phone against his sharp chin, dark with stubble.

“Inshallah khair. I’m sure it’s nothing,” I say, massaging Hassan’s arm, but my chest tightens when the car almost slips into another lane. “Hassan,” I say gently, tugging his sleeve, as he jerks the steering wheel.

“Sorry. Shit.” I can see he needs to grip something hard and sturdy, but refuses my hand. While he waits for a familiar voice on the other end, I sit quietly like someone waiting for the right moment to burst into the theater to find a seat after the show has begun.

Billboards for the Henry Ford Museum loom ahead of us. We often travel to Michigan to ravenously consume dishes of cuminflavored rice and skewers of shish kabobs all weekend long.

Like nomads seeking a transitory dwelling, we venture into this city to eat at our favorite dives and make love in between those hours.

I feel a bit nauseous now, a combination of the hookah I should not have smoked last night, today’s late lunch, and Hassan’s erratic driving.

“Lena. What is it?” he says the moment his sister answers.

The air is shallow inside Hassan’s Accord, like I’m breathing through a straw.

After several minutes of short sentences and one-word responses, Hassan steadies his cell phone, screen down, on his right thigh.

“They had to pull my mother off my father—off his body— when the paramedics came.” His mother is petite and defiant. She has faithfully kept a hair salon appointment twice a month for the last twenty years to look good for her husband.

Hassan does not touch me as I cry and I wonder how we will 26 | story week reader 2012

get through the next four hours without his hand normally settled on my shoulder as we drive, and mine rubbing his inner thigh.

“Let me drive, habiby.”

“I’m fine.” He sits rigidly, fixated on the road. His jaw is tense and his shoulders lean into the steering wheel.

“We’ll switch at Panera’s off exit 127,” I gently urge. “Get coffee then switch.”

“I don’t want to make any stops. Can you wait to use the restroom?” He gives me a sidelong glance. His eyes are redrimmed, but tearless, as though any moisture had been wringed from them.

“No, I’m fine,” I lie. I stare out my window at other cars zooming past in a blur of silver and black like the flutter of bird wings. Tangy black-cherry tobacco clings to the back of my tongue.

Last night, Hassan smiled at me as he drew on the long tube of the hookah. Each time he nuzzled my neck, I felt a proposal graze me. We lodged at the same quaint hotel in Allen Park, a few miles outside Dearborn. After dinner, we headed to Shatila Sweets Café. Hassan dangerously balanced two glasses of hot minty tea, carefully navigating through hordes of families with small children and elderly parents with recently betrothed couples, to the tiny table I had masterfully claimed.

The cheese on the warm, syrupy knaffa stretched and twirled around my plastic knife. We watched couples, some conservative Muslims with men in prayer skull caps and their women in silky hijab while other couples unabashedly fed each other and giggled when pieces fell from their forks. I wondered if Hassan would suddenly turn to me, but his question never came. We finished our desserts and he discarded our empty paper plates.

As billboards fly by, I now remember the two pounds of assorted cookies Hassan purchased for his mother. I wonder if he’ll just leave the box in the trunk when he arrives home.

The image of him carrying in the cookies as a congregation of relatives watches him enter his parents’ townhouse is unbearable to me.

As he drives, I want to touch the side of his face, olive-tinted and lean, but change my mind. Dusk settles as we continue west. Our car whisks by the mile post, signaling we’re still one hundred miles from home. It’s too late when I turn around to see just how far Hassan and I still have to go.

story week reader 2012| 27

the philosophy of tanuki | David Sim Wei Lun I have learned many things while traveling, but only one which I took to heart. It came from a friendship formed in Japan, and from no other have I seen a person hold true to the universal saying: “Such is life.”

I shared an apartment with Tanuki and two others in Matsudo city, of the Chiba Prefecture. Though we only hung out for eight months, he is one of few whom I consider a true friend.

In contrast, I never learned the names of my other flat-mates.

Kazuo Yamamoto was his real name, but only strangers called him that. “Tanuki” means “raccoon dog” in Japanese.

While he looked nothing like the animal itself, he greatly resembled its folkloric counterpart, often portrayed as pottery statues outside ramen stores. Round face, round body, round eyes and peculiar round pouty lips, Tanuki fits its appearance to a T. Tanuki worked the day shift at a clothing factory—the kind that makes tie-dyed shirts for hippies—while at night he worked in a gay porn shop. Despite his occupational choices, he bore no gay or bisexual inclinations. Instead, he found that working the night shift in such a store had its advantages: namely, that very few people came in. Ninety-nine percent of the time, those who did visit were embarrassed and kept to themselves. Sure, his friends occasionally made fun of him, but he would effortlessly let the teasing roll off his shoulders.

Initially Tanuki had strived to ascend the corporate ladder, as a graduate of Tokyo University. That is, until his girlfriend died in a car accident, years before my arrival in Japan. He refused to pursue his ambitions ever since. I had not the brashness to inquire further, but one of our nightly beer drinking sessions had inadvertently led to our discussion of past loves.

Tanuki had sighed, but there was no trace of sadness in him, only heaviness. A cloud of tobacco smoke had clung obstinately to his head at the time, like a silver beret.

“What’s past is past. I bear no regrets,” he said.

Did her death change him?

“Yes,” he said after a long pause. It was the only time I heard such bitterness in his voice.

28 | story week reader 2012

Eventually, Tanuki moved out because the rent got too expensive. As a parting gift, he gave me one of his favorite t-shirts from the manufacturing plant. It was a tie-dyed shirt with an image like the bottom of a swimming pool. The dye created shades of blue intersected by a surreal web of veiny white light. Tanuki had a closet full of those shirts—apparently his trademark—and had saved a small for me.

Months later, I had hung that t-shirt out to dry, when the next morning I found streaks of black powder on it. It bore a peculiar fine texture, unlike that used in demonstrations of magnetism. Beyond that, the powder’s purpose eluded me.

But, being in a rush that morning—I had to leave town for the weekend—I unwittingly left the shirt where it was.

On the return back, I took a detour to Akihabara. As usual, the traffic, crowded streets, and blaring advertisements made me feel like I was at a noisy fish market. Yet despite the throng of people, my line of sight was drawn to a rotund figure, stationary amid the flow of pedestrians. It was Tanuki, staring at the skies above, a cigarette in hand. He remained unfazed as people shoved past him. Or rather, people failed to make him budge and thus had to squeeze themselves through. I mentioned the mysterious powder I had found on the t-shirt he gave me, and he said: “So, I’m not the only one.”

“Do you know what it is?” I replied.

Tanuki jutted his bottom lip and shrugged. “Mosquito eggs.

Mine hatched early.”

With closed eyes, Tanuki sucked on his cigarette. Its end momentarily flared into a red halo. There was a long pause.

Right then, I felt that ring of light embodied the essence of Tanuki’s philosophy—an outline of his burning soul, brimming with life, yet simultaneously calming its own luminosity—a controlled intensification. He blew the smoke skywards, against the neon lights. There was a faint grin as he turned back to me, his breath reeking of tobacco.

“And then I got malaria,” Tanuki said.

“Well, mystery solved then.”

We exchanged nods and parted ways—he to an unknown destination, and I to merge into anonymity with the passersby, partially curious as to what awaited me back home.

story week reader 2012| 29

how the hardy boys solved the mystery | Liz Baudler I told my second grade teacher, Miss Moffett, that I wanted a motorcycle. And that I wanted to run away and live in the woods by my house. We were sitting at the table in the back of the classroom, by the bookshelves full of Wordly Wise vocabulary books and the map of the US with stickers showing all the places my classmates had visited. Nearby Indiana was completely plastered over, a mess of stars and flowers and smiley faces. I’d been crying. Before the school year started, my dad had walked out on us, and for some reason my mother never wanted me to discuss our situation with anyone. We told the neighbors he was “working in Kentucky.” But I was about to spill it all, like an underworld character cornered by intrepid sleuths, to this woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five and who was afraid of mice.

“What will you do for food when you live in the woods?” Miss Moffett inquired, hazel eyes scrunched. She had short curly chestnut hair and skin like fresh milk. I couldn’t tell if she was actually concerned or not. I hoped she was.

“I’ll steal food from houses,” I said. “I’ll go in through the windows.”

“But then they’ll find your fingerprints.”

“I’ll wear gloves.” I said. I was very confident in this answer because I was an inveterate fan of the Hardy Boys. Joe and Frank never got fingerprints if the criminal was smart enough to wear gloves. This was why I wanted a motorcycle.

To me, they’ll always be Joe and Frank, instead of the more common, F.W. Dixon-endorsed-order Frank and Joe. I considered Frank a bore. He’s described as dark-haired, cautious and methodical, while Joe, blond and blue-eyed, was “impetuous” and “impulsive,” words that I loved even more once I knew their meanings. What seven-year-old wants to be cautious and methodical? Another girl might have had a crush on Joe Hardy. I wanted to be Joe Hardy.

Here we could veer into a future where I wear nothing but baggy jeans and T-shirts and have hair shorter than a 1950s boy detective, but I will instead explain why I was not a fan of Nancy

30 | story week reader 2012

Drew. Obviously, it was the skirts. How could anyone investigate crimes wearing a skirt? What if you had to climb a tree? Lower yourself through a trapdoor? No way could you jump on a motorcycle. Nancy’s baby-blue convertible was a nice authorial touch, making the gumshoe girl marginally more liberated in an era when most women didn’t drive. But Nancy’s dad bought it for her. My father probably would have bought me a baby-blue convertible if I’d asked, but he was “in Kentucky.” A month after my back-of-the-room-breakdown, the Easter Bunny showed up with my motorcycle, one of those four-wheeled Barbie ones. I was too young to grasp the irony, and photos show me calmly astride the bubblegum-colored seat in my bubblegum-colored Easter dress.

What I liked most about the Hardy Boys and their motorcycles was that they were always escaping. They were on perpetual summer hegira. No closet, cave, or classroom could hold them for long. That school year, I came to adore Miss Moffett and would often imagine stealing a motorcycle together and riding off toward the Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, Lake Tahoe—away from Paw Paw Avenue in Illinois. Boys had more fun, boys could truly escape, while girls got kidnapped and necessitated rescue. We would be boys instead of girls—she could be my Frank, and I, her Joe. And I’d protect her from mice.

The classroom hummed with satisfied, chattering kids coloring in geography worksheets. “Gloves will leave behind fibers,” Miss Moffett said, “and they’ll still know who you are.”

She used that tone that tells you five plus nine does not equal fifty-nine, and never will. I shivered. So I could be caught, tracked to my forest enclave and have handcuffs snapped over my thin wrists. I’d never escape.

Some years later—perhaps I was a teenager, just finished reading The Fountainhead, or gotten my license (car; I gave up on the motorcycle)—I know it was before I’d kissed a girl in the forest preserve—it occurred to me what the answer to flatten Miss Moffett’s logic and paint me as an infinitely superior sevenyear old, was: wear latex gloves.

story week reader 2012| 31

facebook and formaldehyde | Peter Nichols

SYLVIA: The morgue?

JANE: Mmmm-hmmm. Benefits of being a glorified lab technician.

SYLVIA: Janey, that shit is for dead people.

JANE: Give me forty-five minutes.

A Baltimore apartment. JANE SIEGEL (29) sits next to a table with a cigar box filled with joints and a clear glass jar filled with formaldehyde. A laptop rests on an ottoman.

AT RISE: JANE is staring out the window. Absently, she dips one of the joints in the formaldehyde, shakes it dry, roasts it, and sets it aflame, inhaling deeply. She is staring at her computer.

JANE: ...Goddamn Facebook. (JANE bangs away at the keyboard, reads something, reclines in horror and inhales deeply.)

That’s perfect. That’s just fucking perfect. Good for you, Analise.

I’m glad all your hard work at being a horrible cunt has paid off for you. (JANE stands, unsteadily, and staggers to a window, opening it.) Fuck this. I’m done.

(As JANE straddles the ledge, ENTER SYLVIA DONOVAN (27), JANE’S roommate.)

SYLVIA: Jesus Christ, Janey, what is that smell? You light a hobo’s corpse on fire or wha—WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? JANE: Ohhh good. You’re here. (beat) Have Ramos the doorman scrape whatever’s left of me into a baggie and ship it to my folks with a note that says, “I tried.”

(JANE moves to leap out the window.)

SYLVIA: Oh, no, you are not sticking me with the full rent on this place.

(SYLVIA yanks JANE out of the window.)

SYLVIA: Christ, Jane, is that formaldehyde?

JANE: Maaaaaybe.

SYLVIA: Where’d you get this?

JANE: Stole it from work.

32 | story week reader 2012

(SYLVIA swipes the jar, then notices the computer.)

SYLVIA: Oh, for fuck’s sake, Jane, Facebook and formaldehyde?

No wonder you want to die. (beat) So, which came first? The drugs or the degradation?

JANE: One kinda bled into the other.

SYLVIA: What brought this on?

JANE: I stepped back for a second, re-evaluated my life and found it...wanting.

SYLVIA: Who doesn’t?

JANE: You, apparently, for starters.

SYLVIA: No, Jane, you’re right. There’s nothing about the life of a struggling artist that I find disappointing. (beat) But I find ways around it. Like just now, I actually called myself a “struggling artist” without throwing up in my mouth a little.

Progress.

JANE: Then it’s worse than I thought: you’re delusional.

(JANE spins the computer around to face SYLVIA.) JANE: This is Analise. I went to high school with her. She was bone stupid, and the biggest bitch east of the Mississippi. Tried to convince my friend Gabe she was pregnant with his kid and force him into a quickie marriage when she thought her life was going nowhere after she bombed her SATs. SYLVIA: Okay. So what?

JANE: Guess where she works.

SYLVIA: I dunno.

JANE: Fermilab. The government particle accelerator. The one where they try to figure out what the universe is made of. story week reader 2012| 33

SYLVIA: Yeah, but...wow, Jesus. Really?

Marrying rich? Settle down, squeeze out some young’uns?

JANE: Now, she’s making in the high fives. Same age, less talented, tried to ruin a kid’s life before it really started, and where am I? A dead-end job in a crumbling city that just reclaimed its long-tarnished “Murder Capital of the United States” crown from Detroit. How can I look at that and not want to hurtle myself out the window?

SYLVIA: Well, yeah. And we will. We just hit some road bumps.

SYLVIA: Yeah, but, you know... You can’t compare yourself.

JANE: That particular line of reasoning starts to wear a little thin, Syl. SYLVIA: Look at me: I studied art. It was a bad move maybe, sure, but I’m doing what I love, you know?

(JANE shoots SYLVIA a look, finishes rolling her joint and lights it.)

JANE: And how’s that working out? Can you eat “love” yet? Find a way to make “love” power the lights in here?

SYLVIA: No, that’s what the barista job is for.

JANE: Uh huh. And you’re how old? Twenty-seven? Slinging coffee.

(SYLVIA sits quietly for a moment.)

SYLVIA: You’ve gotta get off that fucking site.

JANE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SYLVIA: Anyway, people lie online. To the Facebook world, I’m a successful painter with loads of gigs. Ever been to one of my exhibits?

JANE: No. SYLVIA: Exactly. You lie. That’s how you make it. Or you ignore it.

JANE: It’s impossible! You can’t. It’s always there, waiting to devalue your life, rubbing your nose in everyone else’s success.

SYLVIA: Let it go.

JANE: I am letting it go. I’ve reached the end of my tether. What is there to look forward to from here, hmm? Getting discovered?

34 | story week reader 2012

JANE: You know who says shit like that? Failed artists. Sitting in studio apartments. Surrounded by unsold art. Wondering where it all went wrong.

SYLVIA: Oh, come on, Jane that’s not gonna be me— JANE: And meanwhile, while you’re moldering in here, scraping by at some wage slave job, there everyone else will be: driving their nice new BMWs with their nice new spouses and their nice new kids. Living contented and free of worry or want.

SYLVIA: I picked a hard way to make an easy living. (beat) You got any more of that?

(JANE slides the cigar box full of joints to SYLVIA.) JANE: Goes better with a little Vitamin F. (JANE squeaks with delight, tosses her joint out the window, grabs a fresh one from the box, dips it and begins to roast it with a lighter.)

SYLVIA: You know what we need to do?

JANE: (Distracted) Mmm...what?

(SYLVIA sticks her head out the window, then quickly reaches back, grabs the laptop, and chucks it out the window.)

SYLVIA: FUCK YOU, FACEBOOK! (The computer falls to the sidewalk with a loud crash.)

RAMOS: (Off Stage) Aye! Que pudos passa?

JANE: You just throw my computer out the window?

SYLVIA: Yep. JANE: Here’s to pushing thirty with nothing to show for it.

SYLVIA: On Facebook I’m only twenty-three.

JANE: Oh. (beat) You’ve got some time, then.

CURTAIN

story week reader 2012| 35

beauty school dropout | Gibson Culbreth

When I was younger, Ma told me I could grow up and go to beauty school like her, and if I looked beautiful, then maybe I’d find a nice Italian boy to love me and marry me. She would tell me this as I was sitting in her chair, bleach plastered over my scalp and that thick, burning smell hangin’ in the air.

I always felt bad for my Ma. She lived her whole life staring at people’s heads, never lookin’ for anything better. She never got no culture. I ain’t much for it either, but least I tried. Ma owned a parlor and raised me without no father. She was a tough old broad, so after I got my GED I went to beauty school.

Now I’m thirty-two and I got nothin’. I dropped out of beauty school because I caught some girl’s head on fire. Ma didn’t want nothin’ to do with me after that, so I cut and ran.

After all these years, I went to go find her, set her straight on how she led me wrong. When I got to Bay Ridge, it was like I never left. The bar across the street from Ma’s shop still stunk of piss. I swear those were the same kids sittin’ on stoops. I ducked into Ma’s shop to avoid their stares. The awning was caving in, but the inside was still spick-and-span.

“Ma.” My heels clacked on the purple tile floors. She was clipping the short hairs from Mr. Petruzo’s neck, and her thick glasses bent down her face like they were about to slide right off.

Her mouth was droopy, and her hair was frizzin’ so much that I could see the shiny space of her scalp. She looked over at me calmly while the clippers buzzed.

“Courtney, you sit down and wait,” she snapped. I took a seat, feelin’ like I was fifteen again. Old Mr. Petruzo was lookin’ down at them spick-and-span floors, his wrinkles settling across his bulldog face. I wondered for a second about his son Vinny, if he was still handsome and hung. It’d be funny to see Vinny again, like time travelin’.

After Mr. Petruzo shuffled away, I went and settled into Ma’s old chair. It was a little flatter, the color worn away by greasy heads coming to get their touch-ups. Her degree was still hangin’ up in a chipped gold frame. She pumped up the chair with her

36 | story week reader 2012

orthopedic shoes. I looked at her weary face in the mirror rimmed with lights. I used to pretend I was a movie star sittin’ in that chair. Back in those days, Ma used to kinda look like Marilyn Monroe. But now, she just looked old.

“I need to talk to you about my shitty life.”

“You got a life. I don’t see how that can be shitty.”

“But Ma, I got no job.”

“Go cut hair.”

“I can’t. I dropped out of school, remember?”

“Then go learn a trade.”

“It ain’t that easy, Ma. Those things, they cost money.”

“You never shoulda left school. I told you that. Did you listen?” She brushed the bleach onto my roots just as precise as ever. I dug my fingernails into the chair.

“I been in jail the last year.”

“Oh yeah? What for?”

“I busted Gino’s head with a beer bottle. He was cheatin’ on me.”

“Men do that.”

I re-crossed my legs, and she slapped my neck real hard, like ham frying. “Don’t fidget, Courtney.”

“What happened to that picture of us?”

“I took it down.”

“Why’s that?”

“Your father ain’t family no more, and I got no new pictures of you.”

“You always said he had another family.”

“He did.”

“Why’d he choose them over us?”

“Because he didn’t like us no more. We was yesterday’s news.”

“What would he think of me now?” There was a pause in Ma’s work and her rheumy eyes met my angry ones in the mirror. She could’ve said anything, but it wouldn’t give me back a dad who could’ve given me dreams bigger than beauty school.

I looked at the yellowed bits of tape on Ma’s mirror where the family picture used to hang. I sighed, hopin’ it wasn’t too late for me yet.

story week reader 2012| 37

love | Paul Rinn Hermine stands up on legs that aren’t so sure after several glasses of wine. Her cheeks are flush, which, along with her strawberry blonde hair, makes her look like she’s glowing red.

“I think I’ve had too much to drink,” she says, placing a hand to her chest and closing her eyes. She allows a single syllable hiccup to escape her lips before curling them into a coquettish smile.

“Come to bed with me, my love,” she says, offering Jonah a limpwristed hand.

He sweeps the long dark hair out of his face, sets his glass of wine down on the glass coffee table, and takes hold of her hand with a drunken gentleness.

“You’re good?” Hermine asks me with a softened voice, and for a moment I think she’s inquiring about my inherent nature.

“Do you need another blanket or pillow or anything?”

“I’m fine, thanks. Goodnight, you two,” I say, offering my warm eyes and loving smile. But the smile on my face is just a facade, a ski mask pulled over my head. Drinking wine and listening to Dylan records all night, giving off the perception that I’m clean, that I’m living healthy, with wholesome intentions.

Never letting on that I’m using again, that I’ve gone so far off the tracks there may be no coming back this time.

I hear the bedroom door close and allow the corners of my mouth to fall, letting myself melt into the dimly lit sadness of the empty room. The money I stole and the drugs I bought are gone, and my body is starting to brace itself, anticipating the onset of withdrawal. I slink into a fetal position on the cold hardwood floor, worrying how I’ll be able to hide or, if it comes to it, explain the fact that I’m dope-sick.

Trying to focus on anything other than the pain I’m going through, I lay here and think how kind Hermine has been to me, letting me stay at her apartment while she was abroad, taking a well-earned vacation to Thailand during the summer break before her final semester of law school. I didn’t have a job lined up or any money saved when I got out of prison, so having a place to stay really helped. She and her brother, Jasper, have always treated me with love and affection. I stayed with them during Christmas break one year, and Jasper and I always kicked it in the summer, spending afternoons down by the lake, shooting hoops and macking on the ladies. As I lay here dying, I imagine 38 | story week reader 2012

all the ways I will repay their love if and when I can ever get my shit together.

Beside the couch, Hermine’s purse leans open and exposed.

Her wallet beckons. No cash, but her debit card feels new under my thumb. Running my fingers along the raised letters of her name, I close my eyes and pretend it’s Braille. With my eyes squeezed shut, I play back in my mind what Jasper said to me when I picked up the keys to Hermine’s apartment a few months ago.

“So how do I check the messages?” I asked, taking the keys from Jasper.

He smiled, his dimples and baby blues making him appear like an angel. He said to me, softly, “Love.”

I stood there kind of confused, and had to ask him just to make sure, “You mean the numbers on the phone that correlate with L-O-V-E?” He looked at me like I was retarded and spoke in a deadpan.

“No, the mathematical equation for love,” he said. “Of course that’s what I mean.” Then he said the words that would stain our relationship forever: “That’s her password for everything.”

Standing in front of the ATM, I thumb the raised letters of Hermine’s name, thinking about everything she’s done for me, and this is how I am repaying her? It’s that string that’s pulling me. The one that’s looped through the eye of the needle, it keeps pulling me down. I insert the debit card into the ATM and stare at the prompt that asks for the PIN number.

That’s her password for everything.

I type L-O-V-E, then Enter. A balance of over two thousand dollars. I turn my head away from the security camera. Not that I’m worried about getting caught, I just can’t withstand the scrutiny.

story week reader 2012| 39

ellen | Allison Sobczak

Since the death of her father four years before, Ellen has come home from school and been greeted by the same sight—her mother, draped over a piece of furniture, a near-empty wine glass in one hand and a lazy smile on her face. It could’ve been minutes or hours that she’d been lying in that same position.

Ellen was not surprised. It happened all too frequently.

Today, her mother is lying on her back, spread out across the kitchen table like the Vitruvian Man. A light hanging from the ceiling directly above her gives the illusion that she’s on an operating table waiting to be experimented on. She’s barefoot and she flexes her pink toes every few seconds. Her hair, which is usually pulled back into a messy bun, now hangs down in waves off the other end of the table, like a chestnut-colored waterfall.

She’s wearing a blue cotton dress that is hiked up to her thighs, exposing pale flesh marred by varicose veins. She looks like a doll waiting to be forgotten.

When she hears Ellen, her eyes, which were just closed, open halfway. Ellen moves from the garage door to stand just outside the entrance of the kitchen. Her mother’s eyes open fully and she tips her head back to look at Ellen. It’s like looking into a pair of plastic eyes, the kind sold at an arts and crafts store.

She turns her head to Ellen then smiles with just her lips.

“Hi, baby. How was school?” Her voice is light and smooth, like a coursing river.

“It was fine.” Ellen walks over to the table and looks down into her mother’s face. The light casts gaunt shadows across it, making it appear hollow and skeletal.

“How long have you been lying here?”

Her face scrunches up, trying to concentrate. “I’m not sure, actually...”

She lets out a snort and turns her head away in amusement.

Her eyes crinkle at the corners when she laughs. It’s the same with Ellen’s eyes, but that’s the only physical similarity she and her mother share. Ellen’s hair is poker-straight, flaxen, and silky.

Her skin is clear and flawless; only a few freckles are spattered across her nose. And she has eyes like hot chocolate—warm and brown and alive. They’re her father’s eyes, and Ellen wonders if that’s all her mother sees when she looks into her daughter’s face.

40 | story week reader 2012

An empty wine glass is sitting on the corner of the table.

Ellen reaches for it and holds it by the stem. “How much have you had?”

Her mother sighs, not answering. She’s not being rude; her mind is all fogged and it’s difficult to deal with words and questions when floating in a peaceful haze. Ellen knows this and doesn’t push. She takes the glass over to the sink, rinses it out, and places it in the dishwasher.

She walks back over to her mother. “Come on, let’s get you upstairs.”

She turns her head towards Ellen, but the movement is more of a limp fall of the neck. Her cheek sticks to the table.

“What?”

“You can’t fall asleep here, Mom. You’re on the kitchen table.”

Her plastic eyes widen as if she’s just realized where she is.

“You’re right, darling. You’re right.”

Slowly, she curls her body forward, head first, into a “C” position, and holds her arms out in front of her. She wiggles her fingers. Ellen grasps her hands, pulling her up the rest of the way. Her hair is tousled, hanging in her face and over her shoulders. Her feet are dangling above the floor. She looks like a child.

Her mother pulls her hands out from Ellen’s, reaches up and cups her daughter’s face. Her palms scorch the skin.

“Thank you, baby. You’re such a big help to mommy.” Her words are coated in a strong scent of spice and cinnamon.

Ellen nods. Silent. Words are too complicated for her mother to comprehend.

She takes her mother’s hands from her face and pulls her forward, gently. Her mother slides down the surface of the table until her toes touch the floor. She comes off the rest of the way to stand on her feet. Ellen guides her out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and into her bedroom. She settles her on the bed, and watches Mary lean back against the pillows. Ellen leaves the bedroom, closes the door until it clicks shut, and leans against the frame. She presses a hand firmly against her chest and feels her heart sink like a stone.

story week reader 2012| 41

my dad forgot how to write | Elizabeth Grear The day my dad forgot how to write, he remembered other things. He remembered my mom’s number so he was able to call her when he did not know how to use a pen. He remembered what kind of car he drove so he was able to find it when, in his confused state, he wandered into the parking lot of his Chicago office. He also remembered how to drive, and was able to make it back to our quiet suburban home. When the doctors told him he had a stroke they said things like, “You never should have gotten into a car,” and “You’re very lucky to have made it home in one piece.”

After that, it became a pattern. Two days after finally coming home from the first incident, he suffered another mini-stroke, or a TIA, as the doctors called it. I watched him walk into the kitchen, scratch his scruffy face, look around slowly as if he was walking into the room for the first time, then finally give up and leave. This was a stroke. The effects did not last long. He remembered things shortly after he came out of the episode. We did not know it then, but these mini-strokes would continue for years. Doctors would never be able to give us a straight answer as to why they were happening. It was a medical mystery.

A week after watching him struggle to remember stuff, he began having seizures as well. We were watching American Idol as a family when my mom whispered my dad’s name, “Mike?”

My brother and I turned around to see that my dad had become something like a statue. Eyes unblinking, body stiff, face like clay. My muscles tightened. The only thing moving were his feet rubbing together. I cringed at the sound. It lasted a few minutes.

My mom rushed into the kitchen to get him a glass of water.

This would happen often. We watched him wheeled away on a stretcher almost every day—his body tied tightly against that stiff board. We were warned that the seizures might become more violent in time, that this may just be a sign of something bigger to come. Until then, we had to wait and help him through the episodes.

I walked into my silent house one Friday after school and immediately felt uneasy. Usually when my parents’ cars were

42 | story week reader 2012

both in the driveway, the house was full of noise. Not today. My eyes stopped at the first sight of my dad’s body on the floor. My mom knelt by his head, running her long fingernails through his black hair. Beads of sweat outlined his face. She whispered things to him gently, but it all sounded like humming to me.

His body convulsed and jerked. His knees raised and lowered, dragging his jeans against the floor, reminding me instantly of the sound his feet made as he rubbed them together all those nights on the couch. I could only wait for it to stop. His hands clenched and unclenched. His head moved back and forth like a child saying no to broccoli. His blue eyes rolled to the back of his head. I could not swallow. I could not move.

“Liz, come here,” my mom said calmly. I shook my head and placed my hand on the staircase railing. “You need to come watch what I’m doing in case this happens when you’re alone with him.” Her simple request sent me flying up the stairs, far away from the sound of his heavy body dragging against the carpet—a noise that forced me to ignore the overwhelming guilt I felt as I ran away.

I stayed upstairs until I heard the TV turn on. Until I heard dishes clanging together and the running water from the whining kitchen pipes. Until I heard my brother walk in the front door.

But it wasn’t until I heard my daddy laugh that I finally let go of the pillow, the sound making its way up the stairs and pressing against my cheek like a kiss. A sound so powerful yet so simple I sometimes, even today, have to remind myself not to take it for granted.

story week reader 2012| 43

fast eddie’s | Jessie Morrison

I remember the first time I walked into Fast Eddie’s with you. Just before you opened the front door, tin whistle drifted out of its leaky neon windows, a bodhran began to pound like a heartbeat, and you took my hand. Inside, the tables with the wooden stools were so low to the ground you had to sit with your knees spread wide and bent sharply, like a cricket’s. We ate fifty cent bags of Taytos crisps and drank pints of Magner’s while a framed portrait of Bobby Sands grinned down at us from behind the bar. You explained to me that he was an Irish freedom fighter who died on hunger strike in Long Kesh prison; you couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of him.

“That would be like me not knowing who Abe Lincoln was,” you said. Then you put your hand on my shoulder and said, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” In those moments I looked at you—at the scrapes on your knuckles and the clear eyes that anchored a rough, fist-shaped face, and when you quoted Bobby Sands, it was so easy to love you.

Fast Eddie, who was Belfast-born, was both the owner and the nighttime entertainment. He was short and square, and he sang his songs with a kind of proud rage that I, three generations removed, could only understand in a peripheral way: “Go on Home, British Soldiers,” “A Nation Once Again,” “The Fields of Athenry.” Once, when Eddie came onstage, you leaned in and told me that he was just like any great rock star: he insinuated rumors about himself and then he let new rumors fly: he’d been in the IRA; he’d impregnated a married girl in Barbados and had to flee back to Chicago; he’d killed a man.

“Is any of it true?” I asked.

“What’s the difference?” you said, your hand warm on my knee.“A man can lie about himself and then step into the lie and wear it until it becomes the truth.”

“What about women?” I asked.

“With women,” you answered, “the lie always wears them.”

The last two songs of the night were always the same. The first was the American national anthem. You could tell then who was Irish and who was American because the Americans put their hands on their hearts and the Irish put their hands behind their backs, a quiet gesture that meant that even if they loved 44 | story week reader 2012

Chicago, they would never think of it as home. You and I stood there side by side, feeling separate from one another because of the different placement of our hands, but sometimes, when it was over, you’d lean over and kiss my hair. I always loved that. It bridged the distance that the song had created.

The final song was the Irish national anthem. When Eddie played it, the Irish in the crowd sang along in an ancient, guttural Gaelic that I couldn’t understand, and when you sang with them, you always felt far away again.

It was after that song one night in late winter that we went outside to the alley to smoke. The treetops were bare and still and the sky was raw with sharp, frozen stars, and you were shivering. He isn’t used to this kind of cold, I remember thinking.

Three years in Chicago and he still isn’t used to it. That’s when you told me you were going back home to Killarney.

“For good?” I asked.

“Yes, for good.”

Because there was nothing else to say, we kissed, slumped up against the cold brick wall, our mouths slack against each other. You ground me up against the wall with your hips, and you looked hungry and sad and also a little indifferent and I realized with a sick jolt in my stomach that you weren’t going to remember me for as long as I would remember you.

I guess I always knew that you weren’t ever seeking permanency in Chicago, my home that could never be yours. But I lied to myself anyway, and just like you promised, in the end, the lie wore me. Now, whenever I hear the national anthem of my home country I put my hand on my heart and think of you, an immigrant whose own heart never belonged in this place, or, for that matter, to me. I wish I could be more like Bobby Sands, who could grin and grin, even though he was starving.

story week reader 2012| 45

Eliza Fogel is a writer building stories one word at a time.

a Viking. That’s how his hair USED to be. Used to. Get it right.

Charlie Harmon has spent his entire life in and around Chicago. After stints as a barista, receptionist, camp counselor, and barcode salesman, he decided to return to college, enrolling in the Fiction Writing program when he realized that “Hobo Philosopher” would not a viable career path. His graduation is imminent.

Sahar Mustafah is a first generation Palestinian American and native of Chicago. Her stories appear in Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction, and she was a Featured Writer in New Scriptor 2011, A Forum for Illinois Educators. She is a member of Radius of Arab American Writers and teaches literature and composition at Homewood-Flossmoor High School.

Naomie Laurent is a senior fiction writing major and television writing minor at Columbia College Chicago. The Boston, Massachusetts, native is currently busy rewriting her young adult novella, figuring out what to do with her post-Columbia life, and attempting to take one half decent picture of the puppy.

Nikki Dolson’s fiction has been published in StoryGlossia, Red Rock Review, and new work is forthcoming in Northville Review, Front Porch Review, and The Toucan.

Jon Natzke is a senior of the Fiction Department and co-founder of Half Nelson Press, an independent genre-focused zine. He writes daily at his blog, jonwritesstories.blogspot.com and was an editor and contributor to the award winning Hair Trigger 34. He hopes you like the story.

John Ezra Attia is a London-born, Chicago-raised writing student. He came to Columbia College Chicago to pursue a career in news journalism, but after discovering a natural disdain for public officials, switched his major to Fiction Writing to better reinforce his lifestyle of strong cars, beautiful booze, and fast women.

David Sim Wei Lun is a Chinese Singaporean who loves all things Japanese. If not found freezing along the streets of Chicago, he is usually typing away on his Mac. He lives off of a steady diet of classical and videogame music, confections and fantasy stories.

Liz Baudler still has all of her Hardy Boys books in her bedroom. She is a graduating senior and edits both The Toucan Literary Magazine and Transcendent Journeys, a spiritual arts e-zine. She finds life very mysterious at times.

Peter Nichols is an MFA student studying at Columbia College Chicago. His work has been featured in Under the Radar magazine and Friction, and in his free time he works as a freelance journalist, film critic, and gigolo.

Gibson Culbreth is a girl named after a guitar. She is currently editing the online zine I Feel Pretty, and her work has been featured on the Molotov Cocktail and WritingRaw. When not writing, she spends her time listening to punk rock and slinging coffee.

Alexandra Rodriguez is a film student and a senior at Columbia College Chicago and works in the Fiction Writing Department. She appreciates the fine art of storytelling and finds any chance to practice her skills, whether it is through fiction or film. Alexandra won first prize at the Latino Student Film Festival in March 2011 for her zombie film, Blood Relatives.

Paul Rinn is a student at Columbia College, majoring in Fiction Writing. His work can be found on The Molotov Cocktail and The Cocklebur. He lives fast and dies slow in Chicago.

Patrick Andrews grew up in Round Lake, Illinois, where he lived until he was 17. He graduated from Northern Illinois University in 2006, and is an MA/MFA candidate. His writing has appeared in SWR 2011 and Fictionary.

Since moving back to Jersey (though Chicago holds her heart), Elizabeth Grear is getting used to hearing predictable Jersey Shore jokes and not pumping her own gas. Her loves include writing, cheerleading, and teaching. You can usually spot her with a colorful scarf and a hot cup of coffee.

Oleg Kazantsev grew up in Eastern Siberia, where he got his first degree in Computer Science, and came to Columbia College Chicago to study Fiction Writing. He used to work as a video game journalist and now is writing his first novel The Swan to Shoot Down. He dedicates this story to his beautiful fiancée Sarah and their newborn daughter Isabel.

Allison Sobczak is in her third year at Columbia College Chicago. This is her first publication.

Jessie Morrison is an MFA candidate in fiction writing and high school English teacher. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Reader’s Fiction Issue 2010 and 2011, McSweeney’s, Word Riot, The Copperfield Review, Hypertext Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Flash Me Magazine, and Story Week Reader 2009 and 2010. She is a Chicago native.

David Hughes likes symphonic metal, cats, and not looking like 46 | story week reader 2012

story week reader 2012| 47