PRAIRIE
A creative arts journal by The Fine Print
In Spring | Claudia Conger What My Mother Said | Kimberly Kemler Eating Your Entire Family | Helen Stadelmaier
Somewhere in Mississippi | Danny Duffy
Lochloosa | Erin Connelly
Rare Reminders | Kimberly Kemler
Apartment Squatting (Limbo) | Andrew Donovan Garden of Eden | Maitane Romagosa
After Death | Tristan Worthington The Bats | PD Roberts Old White Men Doing Weird Shit | Maitane Romagosa
EDITORS Managing Editors: Samantha Schuyler Sarah Senfeld Poetry & Prose: Melia Jacquot Victor Florence Photography: Sean Doolan Visual Art: Sara Nettle Layout & Design: Sarah Senfeld Cover Art: Sara Nettle Hand-Bound by The Fine Print editors: Adriana Barbat, Sean Doolan, Erick Edwing, Sydney Martin, Molly Minta, Shannon Neheily, Sara Nettle, Samantha Schuyler, Sarah Senfeld, Leanne Sheth, Kai Su, Shayna Tanen
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IN SPRING Claudia Conger
THE FINE PRINT
I use my wet hair to water red begonias and comfort the earth as though it never knew rain. God lives in the apartment across the street; God is a voyeur. He watches as I take off my skirt with apathetic exhibition shaded blue in Florida morning, like before gym class in elementary school. I didn’t understand why I wanted to stare as the other girls lifted their polo shirts. I crush the begonias beneath my fingers—let Him watch.
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WHAT MY MOTHER SAID Kimberly Kemler Don’t go past that man’s red umbrella, she would tell me, rubbing sunscreen onto my shoulders the way only a mother can—too thoroughly, for too long—and don’t swim out farther than your sister. I wandered up and down the strip of beach, to and from the red umbrella, picking only the shells that had small holes from where the radulae had drilled to find the clam, threading them together on a length of nylon red as the red umbrella. This was how we spent our summer: noting the heat and the day’s boundaries when we reached the sand, careful to avoid the regrowing dune, the loggerhead nests. If you can’t hear my voice, you’re too far, she would remind me, but I was sure, just further, I’d find sand dollars, sea glass—instead of venus and helmet shells, the occasional whorl.
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Pure Shenanigans, Desirae Lee aka Kaleidescope
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Abandoned, Desirae Lee aka Kaleidescope
EATING YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY Helen Stadelmaier
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The first step will be preparation. Your family is not a TV dinner like the Kardashians or the Duggars. You will not be able to simply place them in a microwave for a few minutes to quickly enjoy a highly varied experience providing little to no nutritional value. It will not be a meal of instant gratification. You will have to learn the skills necessary to extract the correct flavors and create a dish that is creative, poignant, and delicious. The best way to learn how to cook like a pro is by watching as much of the Food Network as you possibly can. Spend every waking moment doing this. Watch Chopped especially, and take notes. Cooking your family will be like this, you will have to think on your feet. You will be provided with four miscellaneous ingredients to and given only 30 minutes turn them into a meal. You will have your sister like a can of lima beans, your brother a hearty slab of steak, your mother a strawberry yogurt cup, and your father a potent fish sauce. You will have to figure out how to use what you’ve been given to make something excellent and it will
not be simple. You will probably fail. Like with Chopped, where four contestants compete for the prize, you will only have a 25% chance of pulling this off. Assuming that you have properly cooked them, it is now time to dine. You will start with your brother, who is easy to digest. You understand him pretty well, so you designate him to be your appetizer. His muscles and tendons will be a bit of a challenge, but overall this will be a painless experience. Your canines will be able to tear through the tough flesh and you will find that he has been cooked to perfection. You experience a sweet sadness as you reach the end, knowing that he is gone and you cannot simply refill your plate. You must move on to the next course. Your sister will be a bit more difficult, because you feel as though you have failed to cook her properly. As you eat, you will begin to wish you had marinated her longer, or perhaps added more seasoning. As her bones crack and are ground up by your molars, you will feel disappointment that you hadn’t the foresight to remove them, or simply to slow cook her so that
food, but the whole thing felt vulgar and distasteful. So we will skip dessert and move on to the next segment which is digestion.) Digestion will be extremely difficult, especially after eating your parents. The moment after you have finished your parents you will begin to feel nauseated. You will be tempted to throw up on your living room floor. But hold it back with everything you have. It is absolutely imperative that you do. Otherwise, you will be forced to lick up the vomit from the tile and swallow them over again, like the hot dog eating champion Kobayashi who threw up and reswallowed it all in the name of the game. He did not win that time, the judges called this a “reversal of fortune”. Do not let this happen to you. You will feel so doubly disgusted, you may throw up again and begin a never ending cycle that lasts until the day you die. If you make it through the night, though, everything will turn out okay. The final step is of course is excretion. Have some dignity about this, and make sure you flush twice and wash your hands.
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the flesh split from the bone more easily. She was a soft girl, after all. She should have been tender and juicy, like a barbecue pulled pork sandwich from that holein-the-wall joint you two used to eat at together. You will fail to be satisfied with your performance. By far the most difficult for you to swallow, however, will be your parents. You have saved them for the main course because you were not ready to eat them in the beginning, but now you must face this challenge head on. Your parents will taste like all of your worst fears combined. Dissatisfaction, an unremarkable job as an accountant, mountains of laundry, forming friendships with daycare moms, routine sex, (or worse) kinky sex, painting bedrooms yellow, and meatloaf. It will take tremendous effort to force all the ressentiment down your throat. You use that old trick of holding your nose to avoid the sensation of flavor on your tongue, but it doesn’t really work at all. Once you have swallowed the last bite, a great relief will rush over your body. But you are not finished yet, there is still more to be done. (Note: I was going to include here an instruction here about how to eat your girlfriend for dessert, since she is and is not your family the same way dessert is and is not
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SOMEWHERE IN MISSISSIPPI Danny Duffy nuns teach “abstinence” in school, written on the blackboard in thick block letters. Their anxious hands break the chalk. “Kissing is bad, too,” they tell the sixth graders, who don’t like themselves—never mind each other. Reaching adolescence they forget this lesson, however.
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On the first day of summer, they run nude through the sprinklers to escape the heat and God together. While the nuns fan each other with pages from the King James, their sweaty habits fall to the floor. Those familiar ten letters are erased from the board.
LOCHLOOSA Erin Connelly shrugged. “Stop reading my thoughts.” A car pulled up behind us and when it stopped, two firecrackers, seven-year-old redheaded twins, opened the back doors and came running over. Kelly opened the passenger side door and climbed into Brian’s lap. I grabbed his scotch before it spilled. “Uncle Brian!” she said. She wrapped her arms around his neck. “Hug me, you old stinker.” Dana stood watching Kelly. “Let me hug your sister,” Brian said to Kelly. He stepped out of the car but Kelly clutched his neck and dangled when he stood. Brian kneeled and Kelly let go, letting Dana in. Brian kissed her forehead. “Yikes!” Dana said. “Uncle Brian, you need to brush your teeth. Your breath stinks.” I got out of the car and set Brian’s scotch on the hood. “Go say hi to your aunt,” Brian said. He nudged the two girls toward me and I kneeled so I could receive their hugs. I buried my face in their joint mess of red ringlets. When Steve got out of the car, Brian had finished his drink and held the empty glass against his chest, the bottle in the crook of his elbow. The two brothers shook hands, the gesture full of tension—Brian’s frustration at Steve’s inability to have faith in his sanity, and Steve’s resentment that Nan had left Brian the house. Steve said, “I’d argue right now, but you’re always two steps ahead of me — so what’s the point.” Leaves shook in the wind, and Dana shivered inside my arms. I held
THE FINE PRINT
It was my cousin Brian’s idea, as we pulled up to park in front of the house, to spend a long weekend with Brian’s brother Steve and his two daughters at Nan’s old house on the lake, which Brian had inherited after Nan passed away two years ago. Brian was in the passenger seat, his legs stretched straight in front of him, crossed one over the other. He rested his elbow against the open window and in his hand he held a glass tumbler of scotch. “Like how we used to with Nan, you and me and Steve,” he said, referring to the summers years ago in which our respective parents had had it and sent us off to Nan’s: first as kids in the back of Brian’s dad’s Volkswagen with nothing but our bathing suits and a few changes of clothes, later packing the three of us in Steve’s old Chevy with cans of Bud and a few joints. I looked at the old house. Spanish moss hung from the gutters. Nan’s old rocking chair sat on the front porch, creaking slowly back in the lake’s breeze. It was our first trip back since Nan died two years ago, and it felt like instead of moving beyond, she’d just moved through, inhabiting the same space in a different way. “She’s still here, though,” Brian said, and I believed him, because Brian is usually right about things like that. Steve had only reluctantly agreed to meet us. For Nan, we’d argued—we’d always remember her here. “But not like that,” Brian said. “Not like in a memory.” “You’re drunk,” I said. Brian
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the girls closer to me, inhaling the fruity scent of children’s shampoo and wondering what they could see and not see, and how I might progress to their heightened levels of ignorance.
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“But of course, Aunt Grace” Kelly said to me, “you’re not really my aunt.” “I’m not?” I asked. I was unpacking Brian’s clothes for him. Brian and Steve were downstairs fighting, and although I could easily open the door and eavesdrop, I found that I didn’t want to. Kelly was on the bed, lying on her stomach, legs crossed in the air behind her. Dana was next to her, sprawled on her back. It was the bed that Brian and Brian’s brother and I had shared, the three of us, whenever we visited Nan. Nan sewed the quilt herself. There were little squares of fabric stitched into roses. “I learned about this in social studies,” Kelly continued. “We learned about families. Uncle Brian is my uncle because he’s daddy’s brother. But you’re daddy’s cousin. So that makes you my first-cousin-once-removed.” She attacked the words slowly, carefully articulating them. “The only way that you can really be my aunt is if you were daddy’s sister or if you and Uncle Brian got married.” “Uncle Brian and I are cousins,” I told her. “So?” “Cousins aren’t supposed to get married.” “But you’re best friends,” Kelly said. “Best friends aren’t supposed to get married, either,” I said. “That’s not true,” Dana said. “Kelly is best friends with Bobby
Sanchez and they got married last week.” “He gave me wildflowers and a ring made of grass,” Kelly said. I wasn’t surprised by the news of Kelly’s nuptials. She was the more coquettish of the two twins. Dana was less sharp, softer, more perceptive. I suspected that Kelly will grow up to be charismatic, a naive knockout with her heart on her sleeve, whereas Dana will make them work for it. “Bobby is nice,” Kelly said. “He doesn’t yell. Not like Daddy.” “Why is Daddy yelling at Uncle Brian?” Kelly asked. “Is it because he says Uncle Brian is crazy?” Dana asked. “Is it because he says Uncle Brian has a problem, and is sick?” Kelly asked. “Daddy seems like he’s not very nice, sometimes,” said Dana. “Uncle Brian doesn’t seem crazy to me.” When I was in grade school, Nan had said to me about Brian: He’s melancholic. I’d nodded my head, struggling to understand, with the vague notion that it was like that feeling at dusk, just after the sun has set and nighttime is struggling to catch up. “He might need you more than he realizes,” Nan had said. I wondered if I’d understood her correctly, delivering to Brian over the years unending compassion instead of tough love. I sat down on the bed. “You’re not supposed to know about that.” As if I’d commanded it, the air in the room felt warm and thick. The walls seemed to start humming, drowning out the shouting. I lay down, the two girls on either side of me. I asked Kelly to tell me more about married life, which is a feat that I have not yet conquered and doubt that I will ever feel young enough to have faith in.
Shaked 2, Ashley Miller
Shaked, Ashley Miller
APARTMENT SQUATTING (LIMBO) Andrew Donovan for Hai-Dang Phan I am now on a daily regimen of multivitamin and the Poem of the Day. Radio filler, the U.S. Naval Observatory, tells me it is June 29. Oh, and they featured Blake. I listen to navel-gazing rock and roll for salaried men. There are no supplements, however, for two summers ago, when, at a good point on my J-curve, you asked me to sit by your filled, modular IKEA shelves a couple times a week. On your sofa, I read Milton, covered
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the sonnets, no one forcing me. I thought about watching Nashville on your small TV. There was an interview with the Stones playing when I had spoken for women over, and they popped all your corn, dashed your spices liberally. I might have watered your plant poorly. Nobody taught me. Not a single person sat me down and said, “This is the life.�
Dollhouse, Emma Roulette
Crane, Emma Roulette
Shadow, Steven Zill
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Sleep Apnea, Sean Doolan
RARE REMINDERS Kimberly Kemler We wanted a clean break. Rare reminders, in the yellow light of his kitchen or the blue dawn of mine, brought on by the scent of oranges in winter. Adjustment, realized after a long move to a new city, made as an afterthought. It went on, him seeing her, and me asking for the hard truths. Naïve, I thought it might be like a climb: accustomed weakness, a quiet progress.
It’s that I dread—years later, on the shoreline, people finding what they lost: the handle of a kitchen drawer, a pet’s worn collar, his sweater in a box of winter clothes, his name in my relatives’ mouths at Christmas—presents bought out of habit, hidden behind their backs or shoved, as if mistaken, back under the tree.
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My roommate nods. She says, life happens in waves. I think of my first week on the island and the disaster preparedness course. Tsunami, they had said. There, we learned how tectonic plates shift, causing a drawback before a moment of calm (like how you turned your back to me before falling asleep). There are two kinds of damage, they told us. One from the impact, and the other from the retreating water, taking things with it.
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Untitled, Rafael Hernandez
GARDEN OF EDEN Maitane Romagosa
THE FINE PRINT
A woman died in a McDonald’s somewhere but nobody noticed as she rested her head down on the frigid table for the last time, nobody watched as she ate her Last Supper, (small fries, four chicken nuggets, small Dr. Pepper) and everybody ignored her as she crossed heavens alone where God greeted her under a sparkling golden arch, He handed her a Happy Meal where inside she could find the collectible plush toys that she had kept with her all these years, eating fries and apple slices, the only meal she could pay for with crusted green coins around the edges where she would scratch them against her lips, mumbling under her breath as she walked, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
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Untitled, Rafael Hernandez
AFTER DEATH Tristan Worthington
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In the space where the form asked “reason for visit,” she wrote ORGASM. She knew that, under certain circumstances, ORGASM was something that came in conjunction with sex. She also knew that sex and the subsequent deployment of haploid cells could, under certain circumstances, produce the beginnings of life. A boy had told her that— at least in the work of of James Joyce—an orgasm meant the ultimate and ineluctable death of one’s self. It represented the act of creating a new life to replace your own. Shortly after telling her this the boy made her orgasm, and afterward she lay awake on top of the polyester sheets, sweating in the fecund summer air and thinking about her own impending death. When she was nine, she was sure that she would always be four feet tall, staring up at the wan faces of adults and tugging jumpers over creased panda shirts, until one day she woke up and was fourteen. Then she had to start watching for wet-lipped van drivers hunched over cracked steering wheels on the walk home from school.
When she was fourteen, she thought she would always be sneaking cigarettes from her mother’s desk, doodling on rubber soles and lining her eyes as thick as her parents would allow, until one day she woke up and was twenty. Suddenly there were people asking her to be responsible for things, people depending on her—show up at work, pay the rent, file your taxes, please pull over to the shoulder and present your license. Weeks after the boy who had made her orgasm left her bed, weeks after she had filed her taxes and paid the rent, she started feeling sick. Her memory of what the boy had said, unwinding in her mind like a roll of negatives, made her even sicker. He had become a grim reaper, leaving her with a sense of finality that made her leg restless and her cuticles shiny-raw. Then she knew she was dying for sure. As she finished the intake form, she stood up from the cricky waiting room chair and handed the clipboard back to the desk attendant. The woman glanced over the sheet of paper without a flicker of acknowledgement. A simple nod or some soft noise of understanding would have given her all the reassurance
from inside. “I’ll just go to the first four, then.” She had stifled death, had proclaimed its end before it cried her own. “Support groups are offered on Tuesdays and Fridays after five.” She had learned that it was not the circle of life, but the seesaw of life. One life had to be pushed toward the ground in order to lift up the other. “On your way out, help yourself to our mental wellbeing brochures by the door.” She had beaten mortality this time, but her calf jiggled and the nail of her thumb absently peeled back soft skin. This was a war she had lost long before it had begun.
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she wanted—just an indication that the woman accepted her, or maybe empathized with the way the world now looked flat and matte, like a dull nickel that too many greasy thumbs had rubbed over. “Health insurance?” the woman asked. She tapped her foot. “I don’t—at the clinic they said I could come here for free.” The secretary raised powdery penciled eyebrows and made a red circle around the bottom of the form. “First four sessions are free. After that, your card’ll be billed.” That boy had left death to unfold within her, to blossom and bloom and consume her
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Cocoon, Michelle Eshelman
The Florida Motel, Tamara Dobry
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Untitled, Margaret Brauer
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Prairie Series, Brittnay Evans
THE BATS PD Roberts The sun’s last attempts light the trees in rhombuses, wind crackling through their leaves like coals. For now, it’s me and three anhingas, roosting in an arc, heads curled like question marks. A cry in the distance—a lazy tornado drifts across the sky, shrieking like fire.
More people have come to roost than birds. The bats will come soon. Fading light turns the mirror to murky translucence. An egret flaps a foot in front of me, not acknowledging my presence. People flock to the bathouses, like Roman patricians. One small girl begins to echolocate.
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Through the middle of the lake a bird swims, his wake like a migrating flock. He’s flying through an impressionist’s exercise on how light distorts life on a rippling surface, dueling with the realist reflection on the shore. Nearsightedly, the bird has chosen icon over index.
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Pinhole 4, Erica Sterling
O LD W H I TE ME N DO I N G W E I R D S H I T Maitane Romagosa sings “Just Like Honey.” He hopes to influence their musical taste starting from a young age. His wife lets him play the Vitamin String Quartet version of all of his favorite songs. Richard tucks Jesus and Mary into bed on a Saturday at around 9 p.m. I would go into detail about the sex he and his wife had that night, but it was very good sex and writing about very good sex is something I cannot often go into. There are too many details about very good sex. Very good sex can either come out to be a long list of details or it looks something like a blurry picture taken on a disposable camera because you were too excited to stop and actually take a good picture of whatever was happening. So, in conclusion, to describe the sex that happened I will give you this: a blurry photo of flesh in motion your wife lips half smiling her hand in front of her nose hiding behind painted nails that left indents on the center left portion of your chest. Richard now lies naked next to his wife in bed. It is 2 a.m. and he is wide awake. He has problems sleeping and is a self-diagnosed insomniac. He takes this time, the hours between 2 a.m. – 5 a.m. to roller skate. The Wallack family knows about his early morning rituals. His wife is proud of him. She used to laugh about it, especially when the neighborhood teenagers would make fun of him,
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He tucks in Jesus into bed, wondering if his wife has ever questioned the choice they made of naming their children. She came from a religious Hispanic family, so the names Jesus and Mary weren’t something ridiculous to suggest. But Richard Wallack, born in Charlestown, Indiana had no religion, no Latin American blood. His father was an Office Depot manager in Florida. That was the closest the Wallacks had ever gotten to South America. The closest Richard himself had ever come to finding God was puking on the steps of a neighborhood church after an okay party. Richard thought any party he had ever attended had been okay. Richard did not believe in good parties or bad parties, just varying shades of okay parties. Richard Wallack had no reason to want to name his children after important characters from the Da Vinci Code, as he always joked around with his wife. But Richard has one secret. The only secret he has ever kept from his wife. He named his children after The Jesus and Mary Chain, the Scottish alternative rock band. He reveled in the day that he was old enough to share The Jesus and Mary Chain with Jesus and Mary. He loves to tuck them in without his wife, because just before they close their little eyes and drift, he quietly
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but now she defends her husband and does not let any of the teenagers make fun of him. Richard does not know the teenagers make fun of him. His wife is a fierce protector. She knows about the bookcases filled with old roller skates in Richard’s home office. She knows about the childhood spent at the roller skating rink. She knows about the trophies won for artistic roller skating. She did not think it was serious at first, but she underestimated the drive of a man that never gave up on a dream. The dream to become a world-renowned artistic roller skater. The dream to make artistic roller skating a worldrenowned sport in the first place. He has a helmet with a bike light duct taped to it. He has knee pads and elbow pads and very expensive skates. He lets the garage door open before him slowly before he takes off over the driveway. The Wallacks live in a gated community, and the gate guards are used to Mr.Wallack’s weekly skate-by. He never says hello. His back is arched and his feet are steady and his arms tight. The guards respect him, they cheer him on when he passes. They call it their weekly mini Tour de France. Richard skates out of the neighborhood into the light of an empty mall parking lot most nights. Here, he has free reign. He is king of this parking lot. In the silence, he has every spotlight on him. The sweat glistens on the bridge of his nose and hangs at the side of his jaws. This takes work; this takes ambition.
His legs work like a machine. One after the other, one after the other, one after the other, one after the other. Tightly around the corners and spreading farther apart for the distances. He throws his arms back and opens his chest to the humid night air. He spins in an infinite loop, closing in until he is at the center of his own target. His knees bend and unbend and never complain. The muscles on his calves smile crookedly, the knuckles on his fingers refuse to bruise when he carves them into concrete when he falls. He is a warrior. His mind only breathes in motion with his lungs and whispers to his eyes to catch the sparkle on the floor. The sound of his skates punching the concrete is something that he hears everywhere. He wants to skate his way across America. In his daydreams he is side by side with the cars on the freeway. He is delivering his own damned mail. Fist-shaking is a part of his performance. Sometimes, he likes to arch so close to the ground when he’s going really really fast that he imagines his head scraping the road. This image scares him. He does not tell his wife about this. After his routine, Richard slides back into the open garage. The sun is rising, but he doesn’t care about that anymore. He showers. He goes back to bed and sleeps with his feet dangling off the side of the mattress.
FROM THE EDITORS This journal was published as a special creative release by The Fine Print. The Fine Print is a quarterly alternative publication dedicated to quality, advocacy journalism and thorough coverage of Gainesville’s social, political, music and arts cultures. We operate entirely independently; our staff is composed of passionate and dedicated volunteers – we do what we do ‘cause we simply love to do it. Read, discover, submit, apply to work with us: www.thefineprintmag.org.
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