Best of Story Week Reader: Introducing the Lab Review

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best of the story week reader Faculty Advisor

Patricia Ann McNair

Chief Editor

Malissa Stark

Associate Editors

Melaina de la Cruz, William Horner, Giovanni Perry

Layout

Malissa Stark

Cover Design

William Horner

Story Week Artistic Director Eric May

Department of Creative Writing Faculty

Randy Albers, Jenny Boully, CM Burroughs, Garnett Kilberg-Cohen, Don De Grazia, Lisa Fishman, Re’Lynn Hansen, Ann Hemenway, Gary Johnson, Aviya Kushner, David Lazar, David McLean, Eric May, Patricia Ann McNair, Joe Meno, Nami Mun, Audrey Niffenegger, Samual Park, Alexis Pride, Matthew Shenoda, Shawn Shiflett, Tony Trigilio, David Trinidad, Sam Weller.

The Story Week Reader and Lab Review are published by the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Fiction, creative nonfiction, stories in graphic form, poetry, 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 Story Week reader annually in conjunction with Story Week and the Lab Review, a journal of student writing, monthly online. Visit the Lab online at http:// labreview.everafterdigital.com for past issues, market research, and industry interviews and videos.

For information on studying creative writing: http://www.colum.edu/Academics/CreativeWriting/ Copyright © 2014 Creative Writing Department

Editor’s Note:

The Story Week Reader has been a large part of my college career. My freshman year, with fear and self-doubt dancing maniacally on my shoulders, I was lifted up with the announcement that my itty-bitty flash piece was going to be published. The following year, a series of fortunate events led me to the editorial team of the same magazine. Now, in my final few months at Columbia, I am proud to be able to present the very best of that same magazine that boosted my confidence years ago when I needed it most. And with that, the wonderful introduction of the Lab Review, the brainchild of the Publishing Lab. In this special issue enjoy tales of boys pushing girls, a museum coming to life, misplacing your step-mom, and many more. The Lab scientists would like to extend a special thank you to Patty McNair, Re’ Lynn Hansen, and Jotham Burrello for their endless support of student writers.

contents fiction lighting a cigar is like a dance | Nicole Chakalis

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boy tackles girl |Josh Alletto

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rust and stones |Emily Roth

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red pennies | Cyn Vargas darcy | Dustin Pelligrini

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story in graphic form apple tree kid | Timmy Dustin

creative nonfiction ashes along the ganga | James Lower one last trip | Karen Zemanick cocaine |Krystn Fox

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the weight of things |Kristen Fiore

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the distillation of letters | Eliza Fogel clean break| Charlie Harmon

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born in the year of the dog | Kate Duva

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poetry whales | Liz Gower

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author bios

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lighting a cigar is like a dance | Nicole Chakalis (2005)

The once graceful mansions were divided up and looked like tenements with dozens of families living in each one. The buildings were salt-pitted and tumbledown, crumbling into the streets, all the windows out. As he looked closer Johnny saw the glorious past in the chandeliers now hanging in the grubby pizza places, the marble bathrooms with gold fixtures and no toilet seats or running water. But the streets were full of life, as if the people couldn’t see the city slowly falling down around them. Life went on for Cubans and music was playing everywhere. Johnny was in love with Cuba, a place stuck in the time frame he had been most happy in, the late 1950s.

Johnny and Jack followed the Malecón back towards the hotel and crossed the street. They sat among the Cubans in a little make-shift bar with wooden benches. An umbrella and a banana leaf roof covered the stand built of bamboo. It was lit up with a string of yellow light bulbs. They sold bottled water, Cuban beer and shots of rum. A pear-shaped, middle-aged woman in a too tight, blue striped, spandex dress kept smiling at them, showing her gold-capped teeth. A tall, thin man who was obviously drunk leaned over to them and said, “Americanos? Give to me a dollar!”

“Let’s go,” Johnny said.

“Just five more minutes,” Jack pleaded.

Ivan showed up just as they were about to get up and leave.

The cigar samples he showed them were good as far as they could tell. Not too dry, with the factory’s blue stamp on the bottom of the box, all nicely banned and he had ten boxes but without the green and white paper government seal. Straight out the backdoor of the factory, these cigars were definitely stolen.

“I can’t tell the quality of a cigar without smoking it,” Johnny said.

“Of course,” Ivan replied as he offered them each a cigar from his pocket.

“But first you must check the cigar for color and texture,” Ivan said as he rolled his cigar between his fingers and then

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passed it under his nose to sniff it.

“A good cigar will not appear dull, it will have a slight shine of the oils in the wrapper.” Ivan then gently squeezed the cigar.

“It should not be too hard or too soft.”

Johnny and Jack quickly chopped off the end of the cigars.

Johnny puffing rapidly trying to get it lit. Jack cupped his in his hand, doing the same.

“Señors, uno momento,” Ivan said, “to judge a cigar it must be lit with care.” He expertly cut the tip, removing only the smallest amount of the tobacco cap.

“Lighting a cigar is like a dance, a seduction, a romance, if you will. It cannot be rushed. The cigar prefers a long wooden match to anything plastic or disposable. So put your Bic lighters back in your pockets and watch how it is done. The flame and cigar must first be introduced.”

Ivan lit the match and let the sulfur burn off. He held the cigar in one hand and the match in the other; he then brought the cigar to the flame.

“They must have time to get to know each other.” He passed the cigar over the flame several times.

“The flame teases the cigar, warms it. When the cigar is heated it is ready to be lit. There will be resistance. The cigar will try to dominate the flame and the flame will manipulate the cigar with its heat.” He moved the cigar to his mouth and the flame followed.

“The cigar waits patiently, for now the flame wants the cigar as much as the cigar wants the flame. Watch now as the flame approaches the cigar and they touch, break away, then touch again. Finally, they stand still, facing each other, ready and eager to merge.”

Ivan drew on the cigar, the heat from it and the flame ignited. The flame leapt from the match over to the cigar. The cigar was evenly lit.

“You see how, when it is over, they withdraw from one another. All that is left of the moment together is a burned out match and some smoldering tobacco. Having given everything the flame, alone now, she dies. The cigar will try to escape the same fate, but he will fail. You show your respect for the cigar by never inhaling and your gratitude for the flame by blowing smoke back into the space where they danced, kissed, and set their worlds on fire,” Ivan said, as he blew smoke into the air.

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boy tackles girl | Josh Alletto (2006)

When I tackled Jenny Moriarty outside of her father’s bakery on Fifth Street, she was wearing a four-foot-by-threefoot foam-rubber suit shaped like a wedge of hot pink birthday cake. There was a hole for her face and the wedge part hung off of her like a clumsy fish tail. Her arms stuck straight out the front and made her walk like a mummy. Jenny worked at the bakery with her father after school and on the weekends and I had it so bad for Jenny I would have done anything to get her to notice me. And I knew Jenny hated Alex Bowlin who also worked at the bakery because his father and Mr. Moriarty were college roommates. Alex Bowlin, who had worn his 20th Anniversary Star Trek T-shirt to school every Friday for an entire year. Alex Bowlin, who sat next to me in Mrs. Robert’s freshman English class popping his pimples, raindrops of his tapioca slime soaring from his face to my desk. And Alex Bowlin, whom Mr. Moriarty dressed up in the foam rubber suit every Saturday and had to wave to cars and passing pedestrians. Had I known it was Jenny adorning the costume instead of Alex, who usually wore it, I would have never jumped out of the bushes across the street from the bakery, ran across traffic and dove from the curb to the sidewalk where I hung in the air like Superman, my arms stretched out to grab the cake suit. When I hit, it was like every noise, the cars in the street, the customers in the bakery, everything was one giant pulse wave of sound and it made my ears pop and my head ache. I hit her from behind and we flew forward so fast I feared we would slide forever, round and round the world. Unfortunately, friction got the best of us and Jenny’s two front teeth fell forward onto the concrete and made a scrapping noise like a hacksaw as they slid across the sidewalk, pushing back up into her gums, filling her mouth with the loosechange taste of blood and she spit a bubbly mouthful of it onto the ground.

I rolled off and stood over the cake. I still thought it was Alex. I had got him so good and it felt good and it was all good.

The cake remained face down, unable to roll over in the massive suit that now looked like a giant pink shark’s fin sticking out from a giant pink shark swimming under the sidewalk. Then I heard her start crying, wailing and struggling to catch her 7|

breath. I bent over, hands on my knees, and noticed it was Jenny. The blood was filling her mouth and it came out in waves every time she tried to say something, but she only coughed and the blood looked thick and sticky like a melted piece of candy.

Her upper lip curled up a bit and I could see where the two front teeth had chipped when they hit the concrete, the little points that hadn’t been pushed all the way up into her gums stuck out like little spider fangs. Small specs of white floated in blood beneath her.

And now watch closely because this next part happened so fast you might miss it.

I stood to run away, but kept my eyes fixed on Jenny whose cheek was resting on the concrete, and as I leaned forward to run, just as I turned my head, Mr. Moriarty stuck out his arm and I ran right into it, his thick hairy wrist colliding with my throat and I flew up into the air and came down with my back parallel to the sidewalk. And a crowd had gathered and Jenny was screaming and her father reached down and with one hand lifted me up into the air. I thought he was going to kill me. I saw Jenny crying on the ground, her pretty face forever mangled, and the accusing faces of the crowd around me and I kinda wished for a second he would kill me. But he didn’t. He dropped me instead.

I don’t know, maybe he noticed how badly hurt Jenny really was.

I didn’t stop to see. I landed on my feet and took off, and I don’t know, but I think I might have blown it with Jenny Moriarty.

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ashes along the ganga | James Lower (2007)

I watched them as they burned. Those people. Or rather the bodies those people left behind. There, on the ash-caked platforms along the Ganges River, there are always bodies burning. The greatest honor for Hindus in death is to be cremated on those banks, to be broken down into dust, smoke, and cinders, and then swept into the river’s flow to wash out to sea and to the next life. I’m not Hindu. I don’t claim to know quite what I am, but I do know that India’s hallowed city of Varanasi is a more real and spiritual place than any other I’ve ever known. Life there is hard, people suffer, people starve, people die and burn. Buildings crumble, streets are lined with filth. Shit is everywhere. Scar-faced street children with ancient eyes scramble and beg and harass to get their fingers on a few rupees so their parents won’t beat them severely at night. The air is choked with clouds of exhaust, curry spice, incense, the fumes off old flaky shit from yesterday, or steaming hot freshness just left in the alley by the man who’ll soon sell you your tea. Life there couldn’t be more alive, and yet it is pervaded by death and ashes.

One night I wandered through a labyrinth of narrow alleyways, a map of which must resemble shattered glass, all the while steadily sloping downwards towards the river. Suddenly, chants echoed down from the alleys behind me, a group of voices, of men, their chant in unison, growing louder. And they appeared, about ten of them, black moustaches and wiry limbs, a burdened stretcher upon their shoulders. To let them pass, I had to step into the gutter and press my back against the wall. Their stretcher passed before me, garlands of white flowers strewn atop gold and scarlet sheets. Beneath these lay a faintly familiar form that shuddered slightly with each step. Someone was under there, some loved one, his or her last breath already drawn and exhaled, his or her body growing cold before being brought to the river’s edge. I followed them then, those men and their body, because I wanted to see. I’d heard of the burning, of Hindu souls released from flesh, and some thread between me and loved ones

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I’d lost pulled me along after their procession. When we neared the water, they disappeared into the crumbling Manikarnika temple, leaving me to stare above it into the blackness, a thick, white plume of smoke wafting up away from me to be carried downriver by the breeze.

Steep steps emerged from behind the temple onto a cascade of platforms, each level with several pyres, separate stacks of logs in various states of burning. One sat unlit. I weaved through the watching crowd, all grieving men, to the edge of the platforms, many disapproving eyes on me, many others staring blankly ahead reflecting fire. Two men carried the stretcher down muddy steps and set it awkwardly in shallow water. They threw palmfuls of the Ganga on the sheets and muttered prayers. After carrying it back up to the open pyre, they removed the sheets and there it was, wrapped toe to head in soft, white linen, starkly human. The men, one supporting the shoulders, the other the legs, set it across the logs and stepped away. They said prayers and thrust a torch into the bottom. The kindling took, smoke wisping up around the body, fire gradually taking hold to spread out underneath it like a bed.

Before long the fire raged, blazing and crackling, the flames flickering high. The linen blackened, curled and disintegrated.

The fire absorbed the form, wrapping legs and arms in flame, surrounding the head completely. Flesh blistered, peeled, flaked off and fluttered away. Organs boiled, liquefied and ran. As if an illusion, the bones emerged, those of the feet protruding from the pyre, the knobby metatarsals hanging, draped in orange. Eventually, the logs broke and what was left of the body collapsed in on itself, smoke and glowing embers scattering high into the air.

Those fires warmed my skin. Those ashes blew across my face and into my hair. That smoke filled my nostrils smelling strangely of only scented wood. So lucid and real and unfathomably beyond me. Eerily enchanted, I watched them burn. Those people. I stood there drawing even breaths, my pulse in steady rhythm, and watched their bodies turn to ash, their plumes of smoke forming together as a single column and arcing up away from me into the night.

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one last trip | Karen Zemanick (2008)

His posture has always been stooped. He wears grey plasticframe glasses and a plaid wool shirt-jacket. Ice clinks as he sets his martini glass on the front left corner of the dresser scarf and opens the second drawer—where the socks, underwear, and handkerchiefs are kept, as well as money beneath one of the stacks. the wood of the dresser is dark and carved in relief, and the knobs are burnished brass. I hear the drawer slide—slightly musical like a fiddle bow—and smell the cedar. He has changed out of his work shirt and tie and is ready to go with me to the library.

At the municipal library he sits in the corner with the financial papers. We come here each week so he can look into his stocks and bonds. I don’t think he has many investments, but he is fastidious about them.

His rounded back is bent in a boxy chair over a thick set of bound journals. His hands look like mine, but broader all around.

The fingers are short, and the nails are ridged and flat like a new tin roof.

I can pick up anything in the room and happily occupy myself. I can go downstairs to Young Adult Fiction as I often do, but I’ve already read pretty much everything of interest on the shelves. Dad recommends instead P.G. Wodehouse, or Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. He likes to think it reflects well on him that I read these adult materials, nothing girlish or romantic, nothing that I really enjoy. I’ll make concessions to please him. I am twelve.

Resurrected after fifteen years, my high school French guides us through the streets of Montparnasse. My father trails behind.

From this angle he walks so slowly he seems to be actually walking backwards. His habitual gestures, like extending his hands flat open while he talks, now fill up empty pauses in his speech when he can’t find words. When he forgets what we just talked about, my stomach lurches. I have brought him here for one last chance to earn his approval before it’s too late for him to know me at all.

He knows what’s happening to him intellectually, but he has no more emotional insight than he ever did. Old habits grow 11 |

more stubborn, and our conflicts intensify, as the Army captain in him takes charge. He wants to convince himself, and me, that he has done all he can to stave off his illness, so he does puzzles and studies French and sticks with his low-fat diet.

I see him with his thick, grey-framed glasses, rubbing his hand over his head, pausing at the Metro map and writing notes to himself in handwriting that is so like my own that I’ve changed the slant of mine so that I can have my own voice back.

I don’t believe in the afterlife, but he does. I do believe in the soul of a person, and that as the faculties slip away, so does the soul.

The real tragedy is not death, it’s living in an empty room.

We are in Paris and no matter how slowly I walk, he keeps walking slower. He will not try to keep up with me nor will he release me to go ahead on my own.

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cocaine | Krystn Fox (2008)

“Just try a bump, baby.”

The summer sunset soaked through Frank’s car window, warming my body. It felt good not to be in the day’s scorching heat. We sat behind the Marathon station. He broke up the cocaine on the back part of a mix CD that he stole from someone.

He poured the coke out of the clear plastic bag, and used his license to crush it into pieces and make perfect lines. The anticipation of taking cocaine up my virgin nose was nerveracking. It felt like a pizza chef was tossing my stomach up and down.

My head was racing with questions, thoughts and worries that were too fast for me to comprehend or dissect. I was so tired of trying to stop him from doing drugs. I was so tired of hearing how wonderful coke was. Would it just be easier to do the drug with him and understand what the hell it was that made it so goddamn great? I gave into everything that I believed in; I gave into cocaine’s deceptive façade. Everything that I had ever fought him for, every tear I shed, it was all about to go up my nose.

It is partly my fault. By trying coke I made him believe that it was okay for him to continue. I played a major role in his love for drugs.

“I don’t know if I should. What if something goes wrong or I freak out or something?” The shakiness in my voice bounced off the doors to his car. There were several cars around the corner, filling up their tanks. What if someone caught us? What if a cop rolled up next to us? We would be screwed.

“Nothing is going to go wrong. I promise you’ll be fine. Just try a bump. Nothing is going to happen if you just do a bump.”

His stony blue eyes reassured me. I second-guessed what could happen—instant death, getting caught by my parents, a nosebleed. It scared me. But what fun would it be to sit back and watch him get fucked up without me?

Frank made a perfect pile of coke on top of his car key for me.

“Breathe out before you snort this. If you breathe out too close to the key, you’ll blow it everywhere.” His voice was content and excited. I took a deep breath in then out, bringing my nose to the silver, jagged key. I sniffed the bump up my right nostril like I had been the snorting cokehead from down the street. I took 13 |

another hard breath, and it hit me like a splash of frozen water. I watched Frank snort a line. He placed little piles of coke into the tops of our cigarettes. He was full of energy, hyped-up and bugeyed. I looked outside the car window, wondering if anyone saw us, but not a single person paid attention to us. We were in our own world. After doing a few more lines he packed everything up carefully and we left.

Zip! Whiz!

Ba-Boom!

My mind was speeding fast. All I could think about was how good it felt when everything dripped down my throat. Like an inchworm trailing down the back of my throat making a disgusting, hell-raised path.

“Is this how it always feels?” I asked, rubbing my palms onto my legs and tapping my feet onto the car floor quicker and quicker letting each moment melt into the next. I could ace a test, read a thick-ass book, have sex for hours, run a marathon, jump out of an airplane, anything I wanted.

“Can we smoke these cigarettes now?” I snapped my head towards him and twirled my ponytail through my fingers over and over. If I had gum in my mouth I would be chewing it viciously.

“Wait awhile. I want to wait until we get to an empty road because it sorta smells. I like to let the high sink in.”

“Okay, whatever you say.” He concentrated on the road ahead. I flipped the passenger seat mirror down. My eyes were large, black, and my skin was more pale than usual. No wonder he is addicted to such a good fucking thing. My heart pounded faster and faster. Each thought got speedier. I wanted more.

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the weight of things | Kristen Fiore (2010)

Mom wraps her fingers around my ponytail. My body burns from my eyebrows, down my spine, all the way to my heels. My feet appear from underneath her bed as she tightens her grip around my hair, dragging me.

“I—told—you,” she grunts. “Not—to—touch—my—things.”

I screech, reach my arms back, clawing at her hands. I am only five but my hair is brown and thick, the trunk of a baby tree, and it is long, the ends catching underneath my butt and tangled in Mom’s bare feet as she drags me toward the bedroom door.

“That—money—was—for—groceries.” I grab the door jamb.

My nails are too short, my hands too small to hold on. My ankle catches the splintered wood where the bedroom becomes the living room. I yelp, like a injured dog.

“I’m sorry!” I scream. Yesterday, I stole four dollars from Mom’s jewelry box to get a Slurpee and a hot dog from the 7-Eleven down the street. I am not sorry. I enjoyed every minute of it.

When I am five years old, this is the first thing I learn about money: taking four dollars from your mother is enough to make her hurt you; enough to make her pull you across your apartment by your hair when she has never hit you before.

I claw at the couch as she pulls me past it, my legs dragging through the ancient brown carpet. I flail, desperate for the burning in my head to stop, kicking the coffee table with my right foot. My leg tingles from my ankle to my hip. I knock over a plastic cup of water, a jumbo set of crayons explodes to the floor.

“We are poor.” Mom yells, so loud that it makes my ears ring.

“Don’t you get that?”

The second thing I learn about money: being poor means no new toys, only one TV channel that waves like a flag in the wind, and especially no Slurpees and hot dogs smothered with chili and cheese.

Our apartment is tiny, we’ve only traveled a few feet, but it feels like 100 miles. Mom finally lets go, tossing me against the living room chair next to the front door.

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“I’m sorry,” I mumble, feeling the tears well up in my eyes, my head throbs.

“Sorry won’t work this time, kid.” Mom’s face is tight in the middle, thin lines of tears curling around her cheeks. She shakes, stares at her hands, at me, then out the living room window next to her.

The third thing I learn about money: losing four dollars is enough to make your mother cry. Watching your mother cry is enough almost to make that Slurpee and chili-cheese hot dog taste like the worst thing you ever put in your mouth.

Mom grabs my arm. She lifts me up and slaps me down onto the chair. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my brother, Sean, standing behind the coffee table. He opens his mouth to say something. My heart jumps. My brother, my protector—who holds my hand voluntarily while crossing the street—is going to save me. Mom’s face shuts him up.

“You stay out of this. Understand?”

Sean nods. He collects his crayons, avoiding my eyes. He gathers his drawings—which are mostly of his cartoon-self riding dinosaurs and lions through green fields—into a messy pile and escapes to the kitchen.

The fourth thing I learn about money: stealing it, and making your mother cry, is enough to make your usually overprotective nine-year old brother abandon you for the first time in your tiny, little life.

Two days later, I sit half-naked in the middle of my bedroom.

I slice Mom’s scissors back and forth, watching hair tumble from my head, like leaves off a tree. Sean finds me first, dropping his box of crayons and backing quickly out of the room.

Mom rushes into the room a few seconds later, snatching the scissors out of my hand. She looks at the hair covering my naked chest and the rug like a second skin. She starts to cry.

She kneels down. She picks pieces of hair off my face. “Why did you do this?”

I shrug. I lift hair strands off my body. I let them float off my fingers, twirling in the breeze of the open window, amazed at how light they are when no longer attached to my body.

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rust and stones | Emily Roth (2011)

Anna was going to kill herself before the end of the summer.

She knew this with the premonition with which one knows what weather will come the next day.

Her reasoning may have been sheer boredom. It may have been profound sadness. Most likely though, Anna had convinced herself that after sixteen years of life, there were no great mysteries left to be uncovered.

Anna planned to fill the pockets of her favorite green sundress with rocks and wade out into the lake behind her house, the way she remembered reading that Virginia Woolf had done the deed.

Anna imagined herself floating on her back at the center of the lake. In her mind, the lake was a clear blue, free from pond scum and as smooth as glass on the surface. Her arms would stretch out, palms up, pleading for the sky to take her, even though Anna did not believe in heaven. Her hair was longer and redder as it splayed out from her head in a radiant splash and her skin and clothes dappled with fallen cherry blossoms.

In June, Anna had attached an old cloth bag with string to the last plank at the far end of the wooden dock that jutted out into the lake and secured it by relocating one of her mother’s owl statues from the railing and setting him on top of it. Each day, Anna walked out to the end of the dock and placed another rock in the bag. Even though she knew the owls were made from cement and glass, Anna felt that they watched her and understood what she was doing.

To Anna, everything needed to be precise and symbolic. The ritual of stone collection mattered much more to her than what would happen once the bag was full.

One morning, Anna was scrubbing syrup off of her breakfast plate at the kitchen sink when her mother walked up behind her.

“Did you move Gregory?”

“Hmm?” Anna turned to look at her mother. Her hair was dyed a darker red then Anna’s, coral colored lipstick carefully applied to her lips even though it was Saturday.

“Gregory is supposed to be on the handrail. Now he’s on the 20 |

dock. Did you move him, or did he fall?”

“Which one is Gregory? Is he the little blue one?” Gregory was large and brown, with eyes made of green glass.

“Never mind. I have a doctor’s appointment at one so I have to leave in a few minutes. Do you want to ride with me?”

“That’s all right.”

“You should really go out more, Anna. I don’t know why you don’t. You have a car. You can go places. People aren’t going to come knocking on the door looking for you.”

“I know, Mom.” A few minutes later, Anna took a stone from the potted plant in front of the living room window, slipped it into her pocket, and walked out the back door. She would only take these stones because they were all the same, perfectly smooth and round, all the same shade of off-white. She forgot her sandals by the front door. The grass was still slightly wet against her bare feet from the morning dew.

Just as Anna reached the edge of the dock, she heard the front door slam. A light breeze brushed against her cheek. Even though it was unseasonably cold and cloudy, the sky was oddly bright, and she had to shield her eyes against it as she shivered Anna felt splinters of wood brush against her bare feet as she traveled down the dock. All along the railing, the owls watched her passage with cold glass eyes, the jury that would, in just a minute, decide her fate. Anna took the last step towards Gregory and her gaze met his. She felt something puncture the heel of her right foot, as though a hot knife had stabbed into her. The pain traveled in vibrations through the bone of her ankle and all the way up to her knee until she lost control of her leg, and her knee buckled forward. Her other foot, wet from the grass, slipped on the wood and she smacked her soft head against Gregory’s cement one.

The next day, the paramedics would find Anna’s body tangled in seaweed under the dock, submerged in only three feet of water, a single weightless rock in the pocket of her shorts and a rusty nail in her bare foot.

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red pennies | Cyn Vargas (2011)

“Come here, Mila.” My mom would call me from the living room where she sat in a plush rocking chair that Dad had bought her for Christmas. Her stomach was gigantic, and when I placed my hands on it, I would always avoid her belly button that had popped out and was pointy like a chipped eraser.

“Hello, junior,” I would say, and sure enough my little brother inside would move, my mom would laugh and my dad, if he wasn’t on one of his business trips, would smile and everything was the way it seemed on TV. At show-and-tell, I brought the picture of my baby brother from inside my mom’s belly. Some kids said it looked weird and others yawned, but Mrs. Dreader smiled, said it was nice, and I got an A. Not long after, on a night where my dad was away again, my mom fell asleep on that chair, beige and soft like the dog I always wanted. I was lying in my bed, gazing up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that stuck to my ceiling, when I heard a scream.

I waited one second, one second, then—“Mila!”—my name exploded through the cracks in my door. I jumped out of my bed, the floor cold, ran and found my mother clutching her stomach, red between her legs, red on the floor.

“Mila!” she yelled. Tears puddled under her eyes and splashed everywhere as she scrunched up her face. Red polka dots covered the baby blue frame knocked over on the table, more ruby polka dots scattered across the world puzzle my mom was helping me with, now strewed on the floor, parts of countries sticking to her bare feet. Her arms wrapped themselves around her stomach and then stretched and flailed out to me as though caught in a windstorm.

“Nine-one-one,” she muttered. Her eyes shut, then rolled and looked straight at me as she grabbed between her legs and sobbed, “Mila, Mila, Mila,” this time she whispered as though telling me a secret. I heard the clattering of the wind chimes as the stench of coins crawled into my nostrils and burned there.

The moonlight peeked through the open curtains and cloaked across the room, just barely reaching my mother’s feet. The light seemed to be going into her toes.

I ran to the phone and first dialed 1-1-9 and then called 9-1-1 and some woman answered, “What’s your emergency?”

“My mom. Junior.”

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“Mila!” I dropped the phone and it knocked loudly againstthe wall as it swung there. I ran to my mom. Her hair was painted on her forehead like gloss and her gown, once white, was red. She rocked back and forth, back and forth so fast the chair screeched.

Her tears fell onto her hands, stripes of pink fell down her gown, her knees, mixing with the blood down her legs, swimming to the spaces between her toes. The plush chair squished and squealed.

Blood erupted from below like a rainstorm across the wooden floor.

My feet were wet. I looked down and saw brown between my toes as if I stepped in bits of chocolate. My mom bent over and I could smell her hair like lilies. I slid my hand up and down her back like she did to me when my tummy hurt.

She turned her head, looked at me, her eyes were washed of all green. She grabbed and pulled me to her, her hands covered in blood that smelled of pennies and was brown like pennies. Her arm wrapped around my neck like a string around a balloon. I couldn’t breathe.

Then some man pulled me away. “You are OK, now sweetie,” he said. He called me sweetie like my dad. Other men in white shirts went to my mom. One put his hand where mine had been, another put his hand on her stomach, and they lifted her up; red confetti gushed into the air off the seat.

“You don’t need to see this,” said the man, and he took me to my room where he gave me some candy. A red lollipop that tasted like pennies.

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distillation of letters | Eliza Fogel (2012)

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-

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swallowed and almost cried because I knew exactly how he was feeling.

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.

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clean break | Charlie Harmon (2012)

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 26 |

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.

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born in the year of the dog | Kate Duva (2013)

The dog was dying, but I didn’t know that yet. I was with this guy in Dad’s bedroom. We kneeled on fawny carpet watching ourselves in an enormous mirror. Meanwhile, Dad’s car was in the alley farting gas. It was a maroon Oldsmobile Toronado, bought off his drinking buddy’s senile mother, complete with Neil Diamond cassettes and a ceramic bootie filled with toothpicks.

We heard the back door squeal. All our clothes were downstairs. My boy scurried into the shower. I was of age and Dad was no saint—Follow Your Hard On being one of the mottos pinned up in his studio—but he boiled at the sight of anyone following his baby daughter. Bechhh, he’d say at the mere mention of a boyfriend. No one was good enough for his girls.

I came downstairs wrapped in a blanket.

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Dad’s trademark red face was drained of color.

“You’re early!” I said.

“Princess is sick,” Dad grunted. “Road trip’s over.” He popped a tear. My heart was thumping as fast as Princess’s tail would wag when she was a puppy. I just hoped that Dad would leave without seeing I had a guy in the house. All I wanted was to preserve his illusion that I was still his little princess too.

Princess was Dad’s sidekick as he cruised blue highways, shooting rolls and rolls of road signs and juke joints and marquee Jesus poetry in black and white. As a child I went on those trips too. If a town had a bead store, Dad would find it. “You’re the best,” he’d say, giving my butt a little pat-pat-pat as we waited in line to pay for my treasures, and he’d sing along with Al Green on the ride to our motel, where he’d smoke a joint in the john and sit poolside, chuckling and chatting up other guests while I splashed around. In a Memphis restaurant, a lady told him that men with creased earlobes were at higher risk for heart attack, and persuaded him to order the salmon instead of the steak. He went back to steak the next night, and his heart kept on beating for another dozen or so years.

Dad snatched up his keys and walked towards the back door, back towards the alley where I knew Princess lay drooped in the Toronado. He drooped too and said, “Looks like the girl’s on her way out.”

I slept with that girl for years, sewed a bonnet for her, smeared eye shadow on her fur and struggled to locate her lips so I could gussy her up. (“What a hussy!” Dad had said when he saw the results.) Princess was the sole audience of a strip show I performed at age ten, and a beast of burden when I stood on my skateboard, gripped her by the leash, and flung bones down the block. I never saw her again, but I was saved. I even finished that boy off while they were at the vet.

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whales | Liz Gower (2014)

I say I feel fat like it’s not just size and shape. Like it means more than rolls and cellulite and white lightning bolts touching down on thighs and stomachs. Fat like shame. Fat like disgust.

I saw the story about the one-ton woman fused to her bed with KFC buckets rotting beneath her. She smelled so foul the firemen cutting her out cried. My dad threw away all my Halloween candy after he saw that article. Told me it could happen to me.

I was thirteen, and I had already quit the swim team because the blue Lycra suits couldn’t hide all the burgers and shakes and extra crispy fries I’d consumed. I haven’t worn a bathing suit since. Now, not even lovers see my body without cloaking shadows. I should love the skin I’m in—Dove says so—but confidence only comes in over the counter pills selling caffeine and miracles. For the low, low price of shedding twenty bucks and dignity. Curvy should be a four-letter word because there’s nothing to flaunt when obesity’s a killer punch line.

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darcy | Dustin Pellegrini (2014)

I call her a home-wrecker because that’s what she is.

Mom made wooden clocks and sold them at craft fairs.

Dad’s a butcher in a grocery store. Darcy wrecks homes. I heard her cough the first time outside of Mom’s cancer ward. She gagged like she wasn’t used to clean air and when I stepped out into the hallway; I thought she was a giant snake. Her legs were wrapped in shiny green scales, her stomach bloated out of them like she’d swallowed something whole. Her fingers coiled around Dad’s arm, claiming him. She smiled as he introduced her and all I could think was, of all the animals you could dress like, who chooses a snake?

At Silver Medals that night, in a spongy booth by the bathroom, me and Hanna sat with our chins on the table watching Darcy in the front of the restaurant, her fingers jamming the jukebox, scraping the coin slot for change. Dad smushed the paper from his straw and said, “I get lonely. Darcy helps me with that.”

We watched Darcy blow smoke into a passing waitress’ face.

“Just until Mom gets out of the hospital,” he said. He winked at us, slid a single plate across the table. “Now, who wants to split a trip to the salad bar?”

Six days later Mom’s cancer was gone and so was she.

Seven more days and Darcy moved in. Dad said that we should bond with her.

Darcy took us out every day, to picnics in a cornfield where Illinois meets Iowa, pushing us across the border. We made trips to the Pawn and Go, saw rows of butterfly knives and lighters, me always asking Darcy for a Zippo, offering to pay half with money I didn’t have, always finding a “No” in the middle of one of her coughing storms.

It didn’t take long for us to run.

She’d turn her back, make the scales on her jacket hiss, and we’d bolt. We would run hand-in-hand down the yellow rows of corn, zigzagging when we heard her scream our names—the way animals do in traps. Deep and desperate. We bailed five times before she understood. At the store we would shrink inside cupboards and clothes racks and wait, watching her to see that angry panic clamping her teeth as she stalked, 31 |

not wanting to go back home to Dad and say those words: “I lost them.” She turned the store over searching for us, swung her purse into a glass case of gold bracelets. After the owner kicked her out she came home to find us already in bed and muddy.

After that, the outings stopped for good.

Twenty years later, Darcy’s face is skid-marked with wrinkles and her legs bulge too much for her scales and it’s a lot harder to lose her.

Most nights Darcy coughs herself awake, doesn’t recognize the attic that Dad moved her to, thinks she’s been kidnapped, and tries to escape. Dr. Johansson calls it ‘fleeing.’ He said it’s genetic. Basically, she was destined to go nuts. The lady with the pet lizards that chewed on the butts she drilled into their wood chips. Who saw that coming?

I remember waking up to one of her monsters digging its claws into my stomach and her hulking over me, holding it, the glow from her cigarette beaming through the dark. And she just got up and left. Not a word.

Dr. Johansson says she’s confused, she doesn’t understand.

But I know she does. She wants to get even.

When we find her now, she’s always somewhere we’ve been before: out in the cornfield, her toes stretched into Iowa, outside Pawn and Go, ducked by a dumpster, her hands coated in grease. She never fights us. She doesn’t even talk. Sometimes Hanna coos to her, says, “Darcy, Darcy,” swiping two fingers past her face. Darcy just grins at her. Sometimes Hanna looks to me, Darcy’s arms around our necks, and says, “How long can we keep doing this?” Instead of telling her we can’t stop, I just help load Darcy in to the bed of the truck.

Most times when we’re looking, I hope we’ll find Darcy dead.

Until then, I’ll keep searching, but I’ll pretend that it’s Mom. Mom asleep in her gown in the hospital, thin as her sheets. Mom behind her table at the craft fair. Mom, happy to see us. Smiling.

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contents

poetry halcyon | Siobhan Thompson in my space |Claire Doty

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i could be beautiful |Siobhan Thompson

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fiction without light | J.S. Walker

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optimistic apocalypse | Maxwell Raimi

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creative nonfiction hide & seek house party | Cody Lee

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lives made up of stories: an interview with garnett kilberg-cohen . . . . . . . 40 author bios

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halcyon| Siobhan Thompson

i worry that i’m idealizing the past that i’m taking my sepia toned memories and overlaying them with color, filtering out the fear and the uncertainty and leaving us walking alone in the abandoned city, palm to palm hard kisses against fences built just for us i worry that i’m forgetting that i have always been sad and instead pretending that during our first embrace in the headlights my dress wasn’t falling down my lipstick wasn’t smearing and i wasn’t still unsure i worry that i’m romanticizing our story adding details that weren’t there before but when i tell it to those who will listen they smile; they clasp their hands to their chests; i think that the only thing that matters is that we have a story at all. i remember things the way they happened (or so i think) summer never smelled like anything but lavender winter passed us by in a white flash things were quiet in spring when we slept side by side and fall lingered for years while we stood on windy train platforms, on our way home from a show.

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without light | J.S. Walker

The darkness was stealing her life, driving her insane, as it wormed its way into her mind. It shoved aside all thought, filling the spaces with nothingness. The complete black pressed heavily on her body, caving in her back and chest, her head and legs. But there was nothing to break up the deep obsidian. Not even a slip of light around the seam of a door. Not even the faded illumination of a covered window.

In the first moments of waking to find herself chained naked, she’d been frantic. She’d walked the room, touching from the ceiling to the floor and everywhere in between, searching for an escape. But there wasn’t one. Not one that she could find anyway. She’d been there for hours, possibly days, waiting. There were first the minutes to count—ten thousand two hundred and fifteen—but that became jumbled, as each minute bled into each hour, into each day.

Curled in a tight ball in the center of the floor, she shifted to her left side, biting back a pained whimper, as the freezing concrete ripped a layer of skin from her body. She’d lost count of the minutes again, forgetting to flip her torso so the thin film of ice that sometimes frosted the floor didn’t congeal to her skin.

She’d learned the hard way after mistakenly falling asleep, only to wake cemented to the floor. The wails of agony echoed around the small space as she peeled herself up, losing a layer of flesh along her right thigh up to the side of her breast.

She received a bottle of water and a bologna sandwich each day. She discovered it at minute six hundred fifteen, tucked in a corner next to a small metal pail. It wasn’t until minute nine hundred and one that she realized what the pail was for as she squatted down to relieve herself. Once a day, she would wake to find her pail emptied, and a new sandwich and bottle of water.

More than once, she’d tried to stay awake to catch the person, like a twisted, sick version of a kid waiting for Santa Claus, but even after being up for two thousands minutes straight, she’d had no luck.

The chinking rattle of her chains sounded as she stood to stretch, her back popping like firecrackers on the Fourth. She shifted the cuffs on her wrist and ankles, trying her best to massage the rubbed raw flesh.

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She dreamed of the sun. Of standing, arms outstretched, eyes closed, lips curled, face bathed in warmth, but woke to water caressing her face. Sucking it in, she choked and sputtered, shooting upright in her dark room. Water swirled around her ankles, quickly rising to her knees.

Terror renewed, she charged to the brick walls, beating at them, screaming for help, as the torrent slowly edged up to her thighs, then her waist. Tears poured down her cheeks as she patted the ceiling, pressing up, praying for a trap door to fling open. The overpowering stench of chlorine filled her lungs, sunk into her body, bleeding out of her pores.

It was up to her breasts now, ebbing and flowing over her nipples, causing gooseflesh to prickle her arms and back. God, but the water was cold, so cold, like being emerged in a bath of ice. The shivers turned to full body wracking shakes, as the water reached her neck.

Her screams had stopped. She knew that no one who cared could hear her. The swish of the water and the thudding of her heart mingled with the slowing of her chattering teeth.

Before she’d begun cataloguing the minutes, she’d never really contemplated her death. Her parents were in good health, and her parent’s parents were in good health. The closest she’d gotten was a dead goldfish in the fourth grade.

What must her parents think of her absence? Would they always wonder if she would ever be found, come back to them alive, and somewhat whole? Or would her captor throw her waterlogged body into some unmarked bushes in a forest, only to be stumbled upon by a hunter, naked and decomposing?

Head tipped back, she breathed through her nose, the water stroking her bottom lip. It was almost over now. Soon, she would trade in this darkness for a new dark; a dark that would bring her peace, that would bring upon the light.

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hide & seek house party | Cody Lee

Welcome in! Sorry about the staircase, he trips everyone up but watch your step, stone mazes from Mexico conquered the floorboard. Four mirrors of gold fill bare walls and the woman inside sits naked and white, nipples like pink pupils. Please show some respect, good sir, she’s my wife and since you’re my guest, I’ll have the butler bring over a human head this instant.

Onward, a bedroom of claymation waits, where anyone who enters becomes clay themselves. Powder panels, the bed to the right, and a window across the way. Outside, on this fine day, it rains in Paris and a couple shares a blue umbrella. It’s quite funny, actually, everyone has a blue umbrella today.

Follow me into the backyard, won’t you, friend? Rain bids farewell kisses to purple hills and a rainbow river flows next to the forest. Inside of the woods, women and men alike, nude and colorless, wander without a worry in the world. One climbs a tree, loose lips sucking air, and another plays a flute off to the right, penis head hidden in skin. Heaven holds no place for the politician tucked in a suit, spying on the oddity of perfection.

Here, he’s the stranger.

Beyond utopia, skyscrapers of a transparent jade stand erect next to red homes and ice block condominiums. The city’s empty of life and locked in a plastic bulb that God watches from above.

Dinnertime, dear! A big fan of the future, the kitchen’s bleached and beams in each crease like 2070. There’s Revolution Brewing in the refrigerator and a revolution brewing downstairs.

A flock of a hundred folks sip wine and tell jokes about nothing.

Never mind them: they come, go, tweet, and twat until sundown, dumping clock hands into garbage cans for fun.

Andy Warhol arrives with rose cheeks and Jackson Pollack smokes tar in a pool of grease. Beefy bodyguards regulate photographs and a baby spills white ink on a white canvas.

Everyone looks and leaves, slipping in the scarlet scum of blood blown from a brain unseen.

Take a swim in silicone space of dangling string, limbo laughs at the fish with fingers. Shattered glass and shards of rock cover the ocean floor and OCT.31,1978 makes me sick. The 38 |

rooms begin to blend but before you leave, you must see the master suite, sire.

Float through hallways of blanket pianos and melted legs, love or hate, mankind can never tell the difference. Check signs for direction, but blind eyes stay stuck in a dream.

Alas… A giraffe burns in peace while a woman with two faces and three arms holds a mustard butterfly among a panel of judges. The sapphire sky streams leftover balloons and the Inventions of the Monsters remain a mystery. Thank you for visiting The Art Institute of Chicago, but it’s eight o’ clock, now get out.

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lives made up of stories: an interview with garnett kilberg-cohen | Melaina de la Cruz

Garnett Kilberg-Cohen has published multiple short story collections, Lost Women, Banished Souls (University of Missouri Press), How We Move the Air (Mayapple Press), and now Swarm To Glory (Wiseblood Books). In 2005, she released a chapbook of poetry, Passion Tour (Finishing Line Press). She has received numerous accolades for her writing, from the Notable Essay citation in Best American Essays 2011, to four awards from the Illinois Council of the Arts, amongst others.

Ms. Kilberg-Cohen is a professor at Columbia College, and will be reading from Swarm To Glory during this year’s Story Week, on March 16th and March 18th. In preparation for this, intern and associate editor Melaina K. de la Cruz recently sat down with her to discuss craft, publishing, and the inspiration for her latest short story collection. ...

Melaina K. de la Cruz: After having published multiple works of fiction and teaching classes in nonfiction at Columbia College, would you consider yourself predominantly a nonfiction or fiction writer?

Garnett Kilberg-Cohen: Well, clearly, most of my books have been in fiction. But at the moment, I’ve been writing more nonfiction, but I think I still consider myself more fiction, even though currently, I’ve been doing a lot of essays.

MKD: How would you describe your experience of writing in both genres?

GKC: I think some material lends itself really well to nonfiction that might not lend itself as easily to fiction, and vice versa.

For instance, an essay of mine just got accepted to Crazy Horse,

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and it has a bit of an arc in it, but really it’s just a memorable moment. I think it works in non-fiction, but I think I’d need more of an arc—even though it’s flash—if it was fiction. That might not be true for all [fiction writers]; they might not feel it always needs more of an arc or a narrative or story, but I generally do.

Sometimes I don’t feel that non-fiction needs that.

Particularly, I guess if I want to extrapolate and talk on the topic, without necessarily having characters and building it into a story, I can do that in nonfiction. There are some fiction writers who do that, but I think that works better in nonfiction.

MKD: Do you find that writing in one genre is easier for you than the other?

GKC: I think it depends on what you’re writing and your mood.

I’ve heard some people tell me, who are nonfiction writers, that they just cannot write fiction. They can’t do it, they don’t get it, and they don’t know how to come up with characters.

I think that it depends on the person, but I will say, once I have the hook and the idea for nonfiction—and I’m using the term ‘hook’ loosely—once I have the general direction I’m going, nonfiction tends to be a little easier for me, as it’s there; it already exists. Whereas, what my fictional characters do doesn’t already exist. I have to find out what they’re going to do.

Sometimes you can spend a very long time on something, and what they do just doesn’t work out how you want it to.

In nonfiction, if you’re interested in the subject matter, you can usually craft it and shape it to work out how you want it to.

Sometimes it’s more magical than other times, but still—you have the material; you can shape it. You don’t have the material, or as much, with fiction.

MKD: Did this influence your decision to primarily teach nonfiction writing?

GKC: I really enjoy going back and forth between [nonfiction and fiction]. I’ve taught more nonfiction classes at this point, but that’s mostly because we didn’t offer fiction in the English department before, when [they were separate departments]. I would’ve liked to be teaching fiction earlier, but at this moment in time, I really like being able to go back and forth between the two. I’m not just in one genre all the time.

MKD: Do you have a specific ritual that you practice before you start writing?

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GKC: I wish I did! I’ve traveled a lot, and sometimes I take trips that are really just designated writing trips. In January, I went to Santa Monica, CA, and rented a very small garage apartment just seven blocks from the beach, and I just wrote all day. I really love it when my world is nothing but writing. This was a small apartment; it had a desk and the very basic, utilitarian setup. I just wrote all day. When I’m at home, I can write, but there are all those 0ther things of life that are pressing against me. If you don’t own anything in the place, you can put all your focus into writing.

I’ve gone to writing colonies in the past, but I don’t do that as much anymore. When I was younger, I’d gone to Ragdale two or three times in the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, but now I just kind of prefer renting my own place and either being by myself or going with just one other writer-friend. In some of the colonies, the social stuff can get kind of distracting.

MKD: Where did you draw your inspiration for writing Swarm To Glory?

GKC: The inspiration came from different things for most of the stories. It’s my third collection of short stories, and I have lots of other published or written stories that are not included in this collection, but the inspiration for it as a book, was to have stories that were either connected or related to each other somehow.

But each story has an individual inspiration; sometimes it’s an image, sometimes it’s an anecdote, sometimes it’s a character.

In the title story, it was really the image of the bees, and I was really driving myself to get to that image.

MKD: Did you have the general themes of endings and acceptance in mind when you wrote and assembled the stories?

GKC: I chose these stories that seemed to fit together before submitting it to a publisher. I tend to write a lot on the subject of loss and endings anyway. Right now, I’m working on a collection where every story has a party in it, so I don’t know how exactly that’s going to play out, but I wanted to intentionally work against the notion of loss, even though that’s what I generally go to. I think it’s always good for writers to press against themselves and go in other directions.

MKD: What attracts you toward writing short stories over novels?

GKC: I like stories better than writing novels because, I think, 42 |

I have so many stories that I want to tell or write, and within a novel you have to stay with one story for a long time. Stories give me the opportunity to change characters and other topics, plus I think stories are a more authentic way in which life plays itself out. We don’t usually have things happen to us, with one arc from beginning to end. I think lives are made up of stories, so I like that.

[Christine Rice], who recently reviewed the book [and conducted an interview for Hypertext Magazine], said she thought that a lot of the stories were novelistic in scope, and I think that is sort of true. There are a couple stories that I’d love to go back and write more about, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

MKD: Do you have a favorite story in Swarm to Glory?

GKC: I like “Abstract Faces”, “Bad News”, and “Swarm to Glory”.

A lot of times a story is a favorite right when I finish it, or come up with an ending, but it doesn’t stay a favorite.

MKD: Of course, because at that moment, it’s your baby.

GKC: Yes, exactly, it’s the new child.

MKD: Did you base any of the stories or characters off personal experience, or specific people?

GKC: Yes, some—probably “Abstract Faces” is almost all imagined. Others, it varies. I don’t think anyone can write fiction without drawing some on the people they know, or their own lives.

Even if it’s close to something real, the subtleties and small nuances that you change, make it so different in my fictional mind from how it happened in real life, that I don’t think it’s ever really that close.

MKD: How did you choose the cover art? The illustration of the girl sitting on the bed reminded me of Susie from “The Woman With The Longest Hair”.

GKC: That’s very observant of you. I wanted it to be Susie in the beginning. This was the cover I enjoyed working on the most of any of my books. The [other covers] were already existing [pieces of art], but this cover was made exclusively for this book. The designer did this one based on a piece of art I liked with a lot of variations, but the girl on the cover had short hair. I asked for | 43

her to have longer hair, so maybe she could be Susie. But she’s reading the newspaper, and if you remember, Susie already had shorter hair by then. The designer mentioned that. But I really prefer that people think, it could be Susie, but they’re really not sure if it could be someone else. I sort of like that it’s not completely clear who the person on the cover is.

MKD: How do you market your books?

GKC: That is continually changing, even talking from my first book to now. There were a lot more print reviews out back then; now there’s more blog stuff going on. You just have to put yourself out there so much. With small presses in particular, if they don’t have a marketing department, then you sort of have to double it. I wrote to bookstores separately about giving readings.

It’s a tremendous amount of work, even if you are with large presses that have a media department. Who knows what the next four or five years will bring, especially in terms of social media?

MKD: How has teaching in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College influenced your work?

GKC: I think teaching influences one’s work a great deal. I’m continually trying to find out things for my students about what’s going on in the world of creative writing. I’m doing that for classes, but it also feeds into what I’m doing for myself. I spend so much of my time talking about writing with my students, usually about their work or something I’ve assigned them to read…but it makes me think through things that I might not speak aloud.

To a certain extent, having colleagues that I can talk to about what we’re working on is helpful, too.

The most fortunate thing, of course, is if you’re making a million dollars off each book, but if you’re not, I think teaching is the most fortunate way to tie in your writing life with how you earn a living.

MKD: What writing advice do you offer your students who aspire to be successful writers?

GKC: Well, it depends on the student, but I think always telling them to read a great deal. If they want to publish in a particular magazine, know those magazines somewhat. For novels and longer pieces, they have to research agents.

The most important thing is reading and revising one’s own work and the more you read, the more you’re going to know what markets are available.

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in my space | Claire Doty

My desk is messy.

I do not have time to clean it.

There is no room for room or space fingers stuck together pages perspiring with thought What a mess, I thought Pondering surfaces less messy Pinterest perfect standards heaped together I can’t measure up to it.

This is my pace.

There is no room for room.

I am my shadow in my room changing perspective in proportion to thought I am in, and I am, my space I am messy and I can admit it.

Unkempt but still together.

We lounge and read together reading each others’ noise in a room without chalky, black clouds in it not one thought is not messy in our head space which extends into outer-space meeting together in an embrace so messy there is no room for room what a cute catastrophic bit, I thought I am glad to be it.

And don’t forget it, I say. Don’t apologize for lack of space that bashes together 45 |

with your skull and make room for less room Let it be messy.

My desk is messy, I don’t have time to clean it There is no room for room or space.

Fingers stuck together, paper perspiring with thought.

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optimistic apocalypse | Maxwell Raimi

Well friends, the predictions were right. The end is here.

The seas freeze, the hills melt, and the Earth splits open right down the middle. I can see Jupiter just as clearly as I can see the moon now, everyone that I know and love is probably dead, and strangely, I don’t feel so bad.

I know, I know, I’m a horrible person, sue me, but I feel pretty great right now, nothing else can go wrong!

Well…I can die.

Oh screw it! Today will be the greatest day I’ve ever had; I’ll make it so. I can start over right now for the rest of my life!

So just about a half hour.

I looked around me and saw chaos, explosions, burning hail, fissures in the Earth, the streets flooded with water and lava and blood. I thought quaintly how good a movie this would make, and remembered that they’d made it already.

And, oh, how the red sky is beautiful, I thought, decorated with the gems of meteors and tails of fire. “Red skies at night, survivor’s delight!” I chuckled.

I shot my fists up to the heavens and declared, “The skies, they’ve come alive!” A panicking man running nearby stopped to observe my madness and me. He was a wiry young man with just enough clothes on to be called conservative at a swinger party; the poor guy just got out of bed.

“The skies are alive?” He asked.

“Alive!” I cheered, hoping that I was getting through to him.

“Alive?”

“Alive!”

I saw the confusion on his face twist to understanding.

“Alive?” I asked inquisitively.

“Alive!” He echoed.

I gave him my jacket and he joined me in my optimism and we slung our arms over each others shoulders, merrily staggering through the burning streets and the broken ruins of humanity, singing and howling together like we’ve been drinking buddies all of our lives.

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We found a remote hilltop from where we decided it should be our final resting places. We looked down upon our old city as it sank into the ground and tornadoes gobbled it up.

We saw the sun go down on the world for probably the last time, but the skies still glowed red and orange with fireballs, and the occasional pail sized hail broke the apocalyptic light into several little rainbows as it fell. “Ooooh! Aaahhh!”

We sang that one song, “They say that falling in love is wonderful, it’s wonderful, so they tell me! And the moon up above is wonderful it’s won—”

We were interrupted by something smashing through the moon breaking it into pieces. At first we stared in shock, but then we just laughed, “Can’t sing that song anymore now, can we!” He said between laughs.

I recited poetry, at least all I could remember. “Shall I compare thee to a yellow wood? And quickly though the laurel grows, rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. She walks in beauty like the night, quoth the raven; ‘it is the work Sophia, Wisdom, Jewel, and it has made all the difference; Nevermore!’”

“Man, that’s beautiful.” said my wiry friend, “who wrote it?”

“I think it’s from the Bible.”

We stayed and we watched as the Earth tore itself asunder, reciting to each other all of the poetry and the dirty jokes and the songs lyrics that we could think of. Our backs were wet because of the flooding, but we didn’t get up. We just stayed there lying still, talking and staring at the rings of Jupiter getting closer and closer.

And then we saw something different than anything else we’d seen before. At first it was a little black line, flat and thin, parallel to the horizon. Then it grew until it took up the entire space in front of us, a big black aura vanishing the rest of the world ahead as it slowly approached.

It was the essence of black itself, the darkness to swallow darkness, the very void of space.

We watched as it approached, soundlessly and gracefully, devouring everything we once knew before us. We got up, and stood to meet our fate. “Might as well die in style,” he said.

We stood, shoulder to shoulder as the shadow of the universe came face to face with us.

“I’d hold your hand,” I said, “but that seems too cliché.”

“No worries,” he said.

I took one last look at my new best friend, and one last look at the Earth, and then finally I turned my attention to the void, glad that I would die on the happiest day of my life.

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i could be beautiful if i were somewhere else| Siobhan Thompson

in a different world with a different sun and moon under a foreign sky with strange new shapes of clouds maybe the stretch marks along my thighs could be the lightning of an oncoming storm maybe the scars that color my skin could be a map from your kingdom to mine maybe the hair on the back of my neck could be a garden and maybe my chewed up cuticles could be a graveyard with irregular headstones i could mourn the body that was never enough i could bury the hands that hurt you i could mourn the bleeding lips i could bury the beating heart. in a different world with a different sun and moon under a foreign sky with strange new shapes of clouds i would take my new body and all its rivers and valleys and make sure that we formed a tributary and we would never have a drought because the ocean that flows from my mouth would never dry up and your geography comforts me because i have explored it all and if my fingertips were new i could discover you all over again and i would never want for anything else, because the shelter under the shelf of your chin would protect the flowers growing along my spine, on the back of my neck.

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Nicole Chakalis Nicole Chakalis is MFA alum from the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago; she works as an administrative assistant in that department. She studied at the University of Havana as well. She received the Sylvia McNair Award for Travel Writing and the Arts & Media Award 2008 from Columbia College Chicago. Nicole was the recipient of a fellowship at the Ragdale Artists Residence and has participated in The Second Story performance series. She has been published in The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Journal, Hair Trigger 27, Pigeon Magazine, Fictionary, and Too Write.

Claire Doty is a freshman studying Creative Writing (Fiction and Poetry) and Theatre Design (Set Design and Lighting Design). She is delighted to be published in the Lab Review, her first publication at Columbia. Claire was first published in 5th grade in an anthology, and has published poetry through high school publications and now in collegiate publications.

Timmy Dustin is an author from Illinois. He graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Fiction Writing in 2011. He is currently attending Roosevelt University in Chicago where he is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing.

Kate Duva, an MFA candidate in the Fiction Writing department, is a developmental therapist and community organizer for families. Her work has appeared in Bookslut, Word Riot, Fugue, Hair Trigger, and Bird’s Thumb, and she was the winner of the 2014 Guild Complex Prose Awards for fiction. She lives part time in the 1930’s, where she is writing a novel about a burlesque dancer from the Dust Bowl and her stagehand, a man who talks like a human radio. More at www.kateduva.com.

Eliza Fogel is a writer building stories one word at a time. She lives in Minneapolis, MN. Please contact her for any questions or if you’re feeling lonely and need a cheerleader. She can be reached at eliza@fogel.com Krystn Fox currently works at OfficeMax as an assistant store manager. She recently got engaged in Hawaii to her fiancé Sean Anderson. In her spare time she loves to cook and spend time with her lovely family that has also grown since her engagement.

Liz Gower will receive her B.A. in Creative Nonfiction in May 2015. She has no plans for after graduation, no idea what she’s going to do with her life, and really wishes you’d stop asking, Mom. 50 |

Charlie Harmon is an MFA student in the Department of Creative Writing and grateful recipient of the Follett Graduate Merit Award. His work has appeared in the Jersey Devil Press and the anthology Chicago After Dark, and he an editor and contributor to the forthcoming Hair Trigger 37. He likes dogs and cats equally.

Cody Lee is a Creative Writing student at Columbia College Chicago who spends his free time talking to flowers and staring at the sun. He’s also an intern at 2nd Story with a concentration in Story Development.

James Lower pays his student loans by day, writes fictions by night. You can find him @JamesLower1.

Dustin Pellegrini is a content writer in Chicago mostly dabbling in cybersecurity and personal finance, as well as fiction.

He graduated Valedictorian from Columbia College Chicago.

Check him out at dustinpellegrini.com.

Emily Roth holds a BFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Her nonfiction writing can be found in places including Booklist, HYPERTEXT, and various Chicago bars on trivia night. She currently works as an editor and is a co-creator of the storytelling show 7 Stories.

Siobhan Thompson lives in Chicago and is working towards a B.A in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has appeared in Hair Trigger 37.

Cyn Vargas’ short story collection, On The Way, is being published by Curbside Splendor Publishing in spring 2015.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago, and is the recipient of a Ragdale Fellowship and the 2013 Guild Literary Complex Prose Award in Fiction. She was named one of Guild’s Literary Complex’s 25 Writers to Watch in 2014 and has received two top citations in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers contests. She is a company member of the award-winning storytelling organization 2nd Story. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Reader, Word Riot, Hypertext Magazine and elsewhere. www.cynvargas.com

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J.S. Walker lives in Chicago, IL where she attends Columbia College Chicago, and is working towards a BFA in Fiction Writing. She has written and published flash fiction, and is currently working on an Urban Fantasy novel under the representation of the Seymour Literary Agency. She loves reading and spending time with her daughter.

Karen Zemanick has published creative nonfiction and video essays. In addition to practicing psychiatry, she has worked as book review editor, nonfiction editor, and blogger for TriQuarterly, the literary journal of Northwestern University.

She is currently working on a collection of autobiographical essays that explore ethical questions such as paternalism in psychiatry and disparities in community mental health.

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