April 2014 Cover: Mandula Van Den Berg Editors: Marta SantivĂĄĂąez and Sofia Moreira Layout and Design: The Dew Crew Made in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
editorial There was The Publishing Cabin in Flekke, and the two of us decided to found The Typing Dew. It was born as a project in a combination of an afternoon in a café next to school and an evening in the new part of No Flash. There was a banana involved in it, as well as a wall made out of stones. But The Typing Dew couldn’t be a two-people project, and we knew that. The Typing Dew metamorphosed into The Dew Point after a lunch meeting and many discussions on the purpose of art. We never responded to many of the questions that arose afterwards. We know close to nothing about that supposedly-real purpose of art, or whether writing creatively when we are told how to do so destroys the core of its nature or not. We are holding the same discussions when we try to defend our own creation from the argument of its lack of creativeness. We have fun. Regardless, we kept on pushing it, and we pushed through with the seven deadly sins. We read and wrote and read some more. There wasn’t much editing from the raw texts that we got, because there was no point on it. At least, that is what we thought and what we are still trying to make out of this idea that became a project that is a reality: a platform to condense the ideas in our minds and let them flow. That is, in the end, the dew point. It is where we stand right now: knowing nothing, aching for more. We got something out of it. We enjoyed the process, we love the result. We hope you do, too.
The Dew Crew
ENVY
ERIKA BATIZ
Envy is the color green, but not just any shade or hue. Envy is the vivid pigment of a heavily saturated forbidden forest green; though you know you should not go there, you still find yourself wandering among the looming, leafy trees of everyone elses’ successes, their tops just out of reach as you struggle to balance on the tips of your toes. Envy is the bitterly metallic taste simultaneously settling at the back of your throat and the tip of your tongue. Envy is the taste of an acidic poison that erodes your insides; a toxic brew of ignorance, as you fail to recognize your own good fortunes, and justice, as you seek to right the wrongs that have been handed to you, and lust, as you crave for that which is not yours. Envy is the stack of university acceptance envelopes without your name on them. Envy is not the sound of pure, joyful excitement, a chorus that your voice doesn’t join; instead, Envy is the sound of your sarcastic retort, “Congratulations, have fun in the U.S.” just convincing enough to obscure the underlying twinge of resentment. Envy is the sickly sweet smell that floods your nostrils when you open the car door at the petrol station. Envy is the scent that is astringent in the knowledge that it harms you, yet it is refreshingly unfiltered and candid; it is relished and inhaled deeply, inflating your selfimportance to help you rationalize your malice. Envy is the feeling that boils slowly, hidden in the shadows of your heart among the scattered cobwebs of missed chances and rejected dreams.
sloth
REBECCA RECHENBERG
Hunted by the clock hands We find satisfaction in working hard. We find individual fulfilment In our tasks. We find hope in the appreciation of our performance We lose the fine art of doing nothing.
GLUTTONY
MOHAMMED ZAAHIDUR RAHMAN a Babel “Eating is vital. Eating sustains. Eating is natural,” spoke the mantra in our collective conscience. On an individual scale the ravenous excel and on a macro-scale hunger drives the world; without it we would have no desire for economies, no desire to suckle the inflamed teat of the Arabian Peninsula and none to consume the tall vistas fossilised in Das Kapital. It is so that in this way, quills stand like sentries on the eight corners of our cities. Stoic, they are like the guard dogs of God’s house that need never be fed. They are gargoyles atop the furnaces of industry. And their feet are black and green, musty and flaking. You know this. Everyone knows this. “Consumption is vital. Consumption sustains. Consumption is natural,” spoke the coercion of our mothers. Mum is at the head of the table. She looms and looms and looms and your chair stands a few feet too high. Escape would risk the mangling of your mollusc legs. Delusion tells you it will all go in the bounce of dough- you know it will really go in the wrench of ligament, the gulp of joints and the slashing shriek. You barely care though. Before you, a banquet sprawls. Dead fish and mammals slump in grotesque embraces, fins and hooves clamber over one another and scaly tentacles grope. What colours lie there! Emerald coils, purple tangles, gamboge domes, all aglisten in their fragrant juices. “Eat and grow strong,” she coos. Her lips poise in the shape of a beak, regurgitating the long thin strands of the saliva she is about to embroider you with. A fear smoulders in her eye. To see an infant among the carcasses, envisions itself over and over in her mind like a Colgate advert. Within it stars a very specific, faceless beige shape; its stiff wings bend upwards, its succulent thighs bunch low. Basking in the paranoia, you stretch your round arms in delight. “Gorging is vital. Gorging sustains. Gorging is natural,” spoke, behind the marmoreal skin of a palm, cupped. Enveloped in auburn hair, a boy whispers beside you. His skin, it smells pleasant enough; fruity, if you will. Apparently, eating is a skill, he tells you. Dumbfounded, you watch him. What was once his blushing face is now a caricature. He pouts his lips into small berries while clenching his eyes. Involuntarily, your eyes are held captive. He relishes the taste. You learn somehow. Another chamber of appetite peers open. All over your body you climb into the velvet of his skin, luminous with fine hairs caught in the
aureate sun. It helps you to remember. “It’s easy, it’s just like skimming a rock on a lake,” he tells you as he skips from the frame, taking his cyan shirt with him. For the first time, you salivate. “Devouring is vital. Devouring sustains. Devouring is natural,” spoke the tannoy at the camp of the standing mile-walls. Tendrils of redolence lackadaisically pirouette over and between the turrets; scent blares in your lung like a prised-open kiln. Left, right, left, right. On your feet the rubber soles gnash the dust. You know that they march at their own command. Here they are made hungry. After being strapped into the chair for hours, they know the refrain by now. Such sights have been injected into your eyes by that Ludovico machine with its myriad babbling pixels; true culinary pornography indeed. However nobody betrays the fact that you have never actually eaten of it. Assuming you know they all emit the full toothed sigh one hears following the lisp of a Pepsi can. Only you know that you’re a dirty novice. You’re an embarrassing, glacé-cherry virgin. Forever your arms salute, angular and spring-loaded; four-thousand Pascals of instant death, reared, awaiting command. Yet under the khaki there lies an open secret. Your ribs, they are visible. They are the sneer of those who are beyond the walls, or so you wish. “Cannibalism is vital. Cannibalism sustains. Cannibalism is natural” spoke the wry SavilleRow-clad guru astride a blue carpet, woven of overalls. Rustic Mama’s pot holds nondescript shapes. How boorish! The philistines eat from those pots. Watch them in their hovel, you have been implored to climb out of the capsule and spectate. Hordes chomp the legs. They are slurping the stock and getting potato smeared between their molars. Reeking like a fakir’s hut, they take dominion of the loud odours of the world. You know better. Nowadays you feed like a hummingbird and you do it through a cabalistic syringe. Everything you drink is like absinthe, you make elaborations for nobody. Elaboration is for the coiled-up flatulent tubas of the world. You are above the dull, brash brass. You are a clarinet; piercing to the mark with finesse. You know what hits the spot. You are haute cuisine hawking phlegm onto McDonalds. Novelty does it,
novelty and subtlety. At some point your chrysalis peeled open and the metamorphosis from gourmand to gourmet was complete. You prowl with your ornate, scrimshaw proboscis, leaving mediocrity crumpled beneath the drone of your regal wing. “Autophagy is vital. Autophagy sustains. Autophagy is natural,” said the truth. What is there left in your clasp? Any appetite has escaped you. Those reins are torn. Who knew? The stomach has a threshold. She is twinned to mortality. Joint at the spine, some may say, like an unfortunate birth defect. Behind your rumbling cells, you wither. You are done with the cuisine of this world. You give a blissful sigh as circular as Buddha. In your weary skull your irises release, blooming like small onyx parachutes. With your deft right hand, you push the monolithic china away from you. The table moans, but then it is still. With dilated pupils you glimpse the bones on the plate. They stack high. They even wrote about you. According to them, you saw the moon. According to them you dropped the atom bomb and you salved wounds in the Crimean war. You grew penicillin from sandwich crumbs and smoked Pall Malls. What oddities one finds among mere bones. This pleases you. You bare a maniacal arpeggio of cavities and plaque, just as brown as the glass of water you drink from. They gleam like cutlasses under the chandelier. Chortling, you wheeze something with a profound stare. “Hail the glutton, hail the glutton,” and, “hail the glutton.”
greed
LUSHIK WAHBA
It touched me or I touched it. Who initiated doesn’t matter. All I know is that the moment I felt it was a moment too late. At first it came like water in a desert, it brought me to life again and I became determined never to lose that feeling. Except in my quest for, the person and the word that led to that initial feeling of satisfaction, its meaning was lost. My quest wasn’t long or hard and I found it easily. I found it over and over again losing myself, not in the search, but in the memory of the initial feeling that echoed through my being at the sight of the person. The feeling faded with every find, not because of its insignificance but simply because the memory got older and more distant as memories tend to do. Despite the initial feeling only getting more distant, its association with the person only got stronger. Eventually I stopped reaching for the feeling and simply sought the find. When I found the word I wanted more of it. When I found the person I wanted more of them. It stopped being about that initial feeling and its absence left a chasm which only wanting distracts me from. It consumes my ambition, gives me purpose. Wanting keeps me living, makes me able to keep up with the demands of the world and the systems I live in.
lust
ENDI MATO
killing at sexual range 1. Imagine a room at the end of time. Imagine cold cinnamon tea and faded stars. Imagine light pouring through tinted glass* at twilight. 2. Smash the glass. Regret the fact that lightning precedes thunder. Breathe in the light. 3. What breathing looks like is the invasion of space. There is only so much space in structure. Breathing has very little to do with oxygen. 4. Exit the room. 5. There is no space left. 6. Gasp but don’t make a sound. *The glass is tinted orange.
wrath
SOFIA P MOREIRA That morning he didn’t seem to be able to walk. His ligaments were weather-beaten, as if he had stood by the rocks at the beach for too long. He gave up of getting up and stayed in bed instead, wondering if the newspapers had arrived already and if the pretty lady that brought the milk every morning had already left her house. There were no answers to those questions. Not only because the blind was low but also because he had flushed his watch down the toiled in the night before. Out of compassion for himself. Compassion for lacking the thing that was most precious to him. He ran away from his thoughts and turned his whole body to face the door. He couldn’t see it. His cornea was scratched. He wondered why. He tried to remember what had actually happened the night before, but his memory was blurry, as if he had drank too much. Alcohol is a bad friend but a brilliant solution, his dad used to say. When his memory reached that point, he felt it in his ears. He could hear his father yelling at him. He could feel the bitter taste of shame and feel all the thousands of gustatory papillae opening to receive the organic compound of anger. He hated when his father yelled at him. He suddenly felt pain. An unpredictable and dislocated pain that he couldn’t quite comprehend. Where does it hurt?, his mom would have asked him. In the meanwhile, the man in bed started to hear the whistle of the pretty lady that brought milk every morning. It meant that it was morning; he finally knew it and the pain seemed to have disappeared. He wasn’t a Kafka character or a section of a sand beach. He was a man lying in bed, waiting for another day to start. He got up and didn’t even realize that he could actually walk. He ran towards the front door, anxious to see the face of the pretty lady. He knew her traces by heart. She was his alarm clock, waking him up for a reality, which he could not remember. Because every single day he would forget it. He felts his legs getting longer and his teeth growing to an extent that they couldn’t fit inside his mouth anymore. On the way to the door, he broke about five chairs and two tea tables, apart from all the books that he turned into mere paper on the floor of an empty living room. He was fragile and did not even know. He did not remember who that woman was when he opened the door. He was Kafka himself. He couldn’t resist. But, in reality, that was not even a single parcel of his being that considered resisting. He was practically possessed when he opened the door. A man inside a monster body. A monster without ligaments, with no memory. He was immediately knocked down by destruction. It was accurate and precise. On his eye. The metal went straight through his eye with the help of the hand of the pretty lady. She had brought the milk.
pride
MARTA SANTIVÁÑEZ
Proud, pride, prided It triggers, and you don’t notice, but it triggers, and then it is triggering and then it did. Or he did. It doesn’t really matter, because it is done, and then you are, and then you are full, and then you are not. It all comes to a single person in the end, you know.