The Fine Print: Prairie, Spring 2013

PRAIRIE

A creative arts journal by The Fine Print

T A B L E of CONTENTS Absence | Jessica Hudgins 01 02 Cautionary Tale | Cesar Evans Depth Charge | Jeff Horn 03 Peaking | Anna Walters 05 06 Chickena | Logan Jaffe The Lemon | Anna Mebel 07 09 Hands, Outside | Amy Lobasso Laundry Machine | Joseph Villavicencio 10 Hardwood Floors and Drywall | Jessica Hudgins 11 A Night in the Shithouse | Yeni Sleidi 12 14 Resurrection Fern - Pleopeltis polypodioides | Ross Whetstone Brace Yourself | Jessica Cook 15 Curious and Hostile Enemies | Emilio Sola 16 Last Swim | Keri Smith 21 22 Laptop Flea Market | Logan Jaffe The Stories | James Loop 23

EDITORS Poetry: David Eardley Prose: Danny Ennis Managing Editor: Lily Wan Layout and Design: Danny Ennis Cover art: David Eardley Illustrations by: Emma Roulette Hand-Bound by The Fine Print editors: Ashira Morris, Danny Ennis, David Eardley, Emma Roulette, Isabel Branstrom, Lily Wan, Melanie Brkich Funding support from Campus Progress

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ABSENCE Jessica Hudgins I mean to disappear into the woods like an old pet.

The chair that every afternoon held me, sun-dazed and napping, will not remain unoccupied.

My family will sit together on my made bed.

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Cautionary Tale, Cesar Evans

D E P T H C H A R G E Jeff Horn myself. So here I am, still, stuck, talking, or listening.

Her eyes— ! and after three days but who’s counting came out from the waves— come see where it happened, if an ocean after just one moment can be the same place—it’s my fault if you know what I mean, the paper goes only one way, and when you start anew, the freshness saves you—her cool bed was infernal with bodies, once—two three or more— So I sing as we sink toward the depths, at least. You still think I can’t tell you things like this?

The one who doesn’t look like the surfer is the surfer.

(—blue radial eyes, in sequence, and deadly, looking,) Coffee strong like drinking iron. Sky the color of old jeans.

Daytime light color washed like old Polaroids leaves brittle static fuzz made of shadow on the paved paths and grass and street.

The feeling was the privacy of the beach when it is not crowded but there might be crowds of something you thought of was that the ocean was crowded with water and fish no matter how many people were on the beach and in the water and under awnings on the street by the edge of the beach—

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People ordering coffee and passing it around.

They sat at a sidewalk at a table in the smallish, vaguely southern college town, drinking. Before whoosh ! Let me begin now, without your vaguest notions making any vague waves on vague oceans; let me begin here, where, without time and things, or waves, I see clear, or something. A hope! that I can be cleansed, like a handprint from sand, eventually, from this great slate sheet, where nobody thinks or even cares. (she had a twin who died early, that is, free from pain) So we sit here discussing things drinking champagne. So it’s something somewhere, summer here. So we sit here discussing. So we said it’s nothing but the best sort of pain for us, nothing less. So withdrawal is worth it, she said. It’s empty.

So we’re discussing music, only the best for us. Only the best of us: sitting, listening, and talking. She’s listing music, me mostly listening and she mostly talking. I only listen to music my friends made. And I eye them and twist my head, making sure it’s real; no fake shit here.

And air about us hardly breathable but still I’m breathing.

Who knows where to go next? Not

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With all dreams recorded, all dreams reworded—let’s get some fish, let’s get some fish, let’s go to sleep— From numbness, the very coldest emotion (in the beginning there was numbness, like licking your fingertips), and look in my whitelight whiteheat warehouse eyes and eat me—through your white-lit white-hot head eat with black dilated eyes, glass; to the back of— brother, let me be—come!

I distill a weak spirit with the memory still; I distill memory to a weak spirit here, now let me begin.

Let her touch simmer like rain on the hot car hood let her tongue touch numb with a bump from a whitecapped key let her be—!

(He tried sending her back to land as a comet but she burned to dust in the atmosphere again.)

The first two times I was on like a wide-eyed moron, looking at her.

Let me begin, brother, with the blue hot ocean, and in that time, on that medication, on that occasion, I was the surfer.

You saw the surfer from far, viewing Vivian looking windward westward— I was overused to it, totally going, gone on something when I approached; that was the only way to penetrate that area of the field; (I couldn’t hope to do it sober) and that’s not the point of this exercise— At seventy eighty 100 miles per hour—clean, blue, diamond-cut, and private, and only for you—(your

black eyes reflect neither me nor the sea)—the surfer, so far, knows all into forever, to where I might have her, where two free wills meet, in the hurricane, in which her face was first cleaned, let them see how, what, the way I can see—a wave, genius, a word—death—that’s everything that it means. We laid there when I could lay and not remember lying before—the beginning is the best— but it spreads.

I went through where there once only was blue, and mirrors, and a difficult sheen of expecting something gone to be here, still; a choke, only said once, come! come out, and brother, let me begin, let touches numb pain, on your tongue, while sterile things complain! For what is in bloom but cut up still stays best; I squint my eyes before the light after the rain; now let’s be numb who we are.

And now she’s a puzzle with an answer only I cannot see, a dream, except for the blue, and blue and blue—the surfer befell her, swept her, moving again— She is an object even waves cannot move, cannot lift.

And she is an object, insurmountably heavy even I cannot lift— To distill her memory in the same woods where it happened (original sin), let the same thing be said now—let me begin.

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Chickena, Logan Jaffe

PEAKING Anna Walters

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She thought hard about that time she made him wear a dress and some lipstick and asked for pink and glitter kisses up and down her back. Sometimes she felt crazy like she was an alien and talked to herself in mimps and murbles.

Other times she thought she had it all figured out like that actress who seemed like she could be totally well-adjusted even though you’d never be able to tell because she’s hardly ever in the tabloids. Only that once when she got divorced. But try not to think about that.

Think about the nervousness and the constipation and the way you feel when you see that Pilates instructor and how she makes you feel excited and a little scared like that time your first boyfriend told you his dad had left when he was young and it made you want to kiss him in ways you hadn’t before but also made you want to race home on your bike past all the orange streetlamps and make sure your family was really still there.

You’ll want to squeeze the fleshy parts of their arms and think about how their freckles are just like yours only in different places and how it’s weird that we’re not supposed to see our family members naked even though it might help us feel a little more normal and a part of something even if its only a little bit bigger than ourselves.

THE L E M O N Anna Mebel she’d heard on a sitcom: “This is just where I am at this point in my life.”

She thought of carrying a lemon in her purse as a sort of performance art project. It allowed her to test out the reactions of the people around her without resorting to anything particularly strange. Having a lemon in her purse made her feel extraordinary in a small sort of way, and Angela Greenberg liked to think that she was an inventive and original person.

She had the lemon for a week when her dad took her to a Chicago Bulls game on her visit home. They had to go through security before getting into United Stadium. She had completely forgotten her lemon and opened up her purse for the large lady with dreadlocks.

“Is that a lemon in your purse?” she asked.

“Yes,” Angela said.

“Why do you have a lemon?” she asked.

Angela shrugged. She wanted

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For the past few weeks, Angela Greenberg had been carrying a lemon in her purse. She had taken it from a grocery store on a snack run one night. She felt bad about stealing so she didn’t ask for change when she paid for the bag of Lays.

The cashier gave her a strange look, but she insisted that she just wasn’t a big fan of coins in her purse.

She put the lemon to good use.

When she had nothing to say to someone, she would tell the person that she had a lemon in her purse.

“Why do you have a lemon in your purse?” asked Steve, the pinkfaced guy she was talking to at a party.

“It was given to me, you know what they say,” she said. Steve smiled at her, and made a joke about lemonade. Later, she found that he had slipped his number on a napkin into her bag. She was glad he didn’t steal her lemon.

She tried to rationalize having a lemon in her purse with a line

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to give the lady a reason but she didn’t know how to articulate it. The lady called another security guy over.

“Can she bring a lemon into the stadium?” the lady asked.

“I don’t see why not,” the security guy said.

He had wide shoulders and a dark mustache.

Angela walked into the stadium. Her dad was waiting for her.

“Is it me or has security become stricter these days?” he asked. They headed up the spiraling stairs into their seats.

The Bulls lost to the Knicks by three points that day. Her dad shouted at Luol Deng because he gave one bad pass after another. The basketball players looked larger than they did on TV. Angela liked hearing the squeaking of their shoes on the polished court when there wasn’t any music playing, though she didn’t like the pop music—it made everyone in the crowd feel too strongly. It was strange to shout “de-fense, de-fense!” one second and then cheer the next for the Bulls to score points. What differentiated their team from the enemy? The more excited the crowd got, the more detached Angela felt.

When they got home, Angela made a pot of Earl Gray tea with honey and the lemon. She and her dad drank out of teacups dotted with roses. They agreed that they still didn’t know what the hell a pick-and-roll was.

Later, Angela regretted cutting up the lemon. She had imagined carrying the lemon around until it became brown and shriveled.

Outside, Amy Lobasso

Hands, Amy Lobasso

LAUNDRY MACHINE Joseph Villavicencio

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A blue-collar worker’s dry cleaner, the breadwinner of every household’s basement, the custodian who doesn’t protest minimum wage, a Bauhaus basin, a jacuzzi fit for newborn babies, you are a success story: a one-armed fighter who’s never lost, not with any day’s hide, not even with that ruthless, rubber-bragging duo with those huge checkmark tattoos.

Catechism classes on a beautiful spring day, your heartless gut is a notorious torture chamber known for waterboarding and its manipulation of a (fake) centrifugal force. A three-foot snow globe of God’s wrath, you are the final destination of my disease-ridden offerings. A room-temperature marinara made of dead skin cells, starchy dick-puke, and my human fur, that is your undeniable forte.

The product of a belly dancer born of robot culture, the victim of an epileptic seizure, your intense gyrating sends fabric prisoners up only for a second and then down again.

A resume-builder for housewives around the world, a necessary evil for most, you are of the worst breed. But you always deliver, brandishing your metal smile for the next guy, to baptize the wrongdoers and bleach out their sins.

HARDWOOD F L O O R S AND DRYWALL Jessica Hudgins The Dexter dryer’s crunching lurch makes me blush— my roommate’s mattress moves like that.

and listened instead to the spin cycle’s unhurried, humming diminuendo.

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I heard her boyfriend once; I took candy and a carful of clothes to the laundromat

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A NIGHT IN THE SHITHOUSE Yeni Sleidi Back in Gainesville, Florida, I lived in a house that had been dubbed “The Shit House.” It was a massive teal-colored eyesore, and on any given day, if you sat on our porch and looked over at the International Deli that was across the street, you could spot someone trying to take a shit behind their dumpster.

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The five people who I shared the house with—a group of 19-yearolds who had spent their summer vacation watching Skins and taking notes on how to be cool—jokingly appointed themselves the unofficial cast members of our city’s edition of The Real World. And as the quiet, but secretly opinionated member of the cast, I found a confessional in the form of a journal.

It’s Tuesday and the time is: 2 a.m.

One of my roommates has at least seven of her friends over and they are all singing along to Brand New offensively loud. I want to be angry because they snapped the sleep right out of me, but my anger’s subdued by the fact that I really like Brand New and can’t stop myself from mouthing along to “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad.” However, I’m going to be livid once they put on a song by Drake, who no one will ever be able to convince me is good.

2:15 a.m.

This is not the first time that I’ve been kept awake on a school night.

Two weeks ago, the same kind of faux-karaoke-night- nonsense went on until I resentfully walked over to where everyone was and shut off their yellow boombox midway through the fifth repetition of Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper.” You know how in “A Clockwork Orange” classical music makes post-op Alex go berserk? The line, “I wish you would step back from the ledge my friend,” has the same kind of effect on me.

2:33 A.M. I want to walk over to my roommate’s bedroom and while foaming at the mouth, rant about how I need to sleep. But I know that I will only be sneered at and then permanently labeled the “bitch” roommate, and I’d rather remain the awkward one who is so still somewhat likable.

3:30 A.M. A slow song! Sleep is imminent.

3:35 A.M. Nope. Someone squealing.

is

now

pig

3:39 A.M. I tried to use some crumbled up

fight over the smell of his mustache, and all of her friends will begin to disperse, because none of them want to see her cry, they just want to party.

3:45 A.M. It sounds like the cast of “Stomp the Yard” has now joined everyone.

5:55 a.m.

Bon Iver. This probably means that she went on Stereomode--a website that allows people to listen to music that fits their mood--and wrote down “sad.” If she didn’t choose to use a slash to pair that up with an “angry,” I’ve hit the jackpot. Her angst will finally lull me to sleep.

4:00 A.M. I ran into a drunkard while I was on my way to the bathroom. He asked me if I had any gasoline. And when I asked what he needed gasoline for, he said that he had been dared to walk across a pile of flaming glass.

Now, not only am I being kept awake by Crazy Town’s “Butterfly,” but also by the fear that I will wake up and find myself trapped in a burning wooden-frame house.

4:24 A.M. My roommate’s ex-boyfriend just crashed the party. This is the same guy that, much to my amusement, once broke into her room after a fight, wrote “fuck you” on her floor using Sriracha, and then passed out.

I predict that within the next half hour, the two of them will get into a

4:50 a.m.

My roommate’s alone in her room, and she’s crying to Fleetwood Mac. I’m tempted to walk over there to console her, but the last time that I did that, she wrapped her arm around me and forced me to participate in a “Landslide” sing-along.

But I know that the party will resume after my roommate’s ex brings her some conciliatory buffalo wings and a Four Loko.

When I wake up, I might buy a deadbolt, and some earplugs.

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toilet paper as ear plugs, but I took them out when I remembered that I have a somewhat serious fear of being killed while asleep. I need to be able to hear the approaching footsteps of a murderer so that I can wake up, reach for the chef ’s knife that I keep under my bed, and then quickly stab the dark figure in the neck. I know that sounds like the most brutal form of self-defense, but if I went for the thigh, the dark figure could still limp its way toward me, so a fatal wound must be inflicted.

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Resurrection Fern - Pleopeltis polypodioides, Ross Whetstone

B R A C E YOURSELF Jessica Cook I’m always drawing teeth and grinding teeth licking teeth, gums binding teeth.

I’m a loose fang

bumping incisors.

I’m a cutter, and you’re all swords fingered to shear the flesh they slice.

You’ll fail to do anything else.

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Reinforced diastemas gape on the edge —am I the cause, an effect or affected?

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CURIOUS AND HOSTILE ENEMIES Emilio Sola

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I had been wanting to read this story I’d read once before by Ann Beattie. I wanted to read it again because I remembered this line in it that struck me as very funny; the narrator cuts off all her hair in the living room and her law student boyfriend comes home and says, “What have you done? You’ve cut off your hair,” and the narrator says something funny, like “He will make such a good lawyer one day.

He understands everything.”

I didn’t own the book I’d read the story in and so I contemplated calling my brother Tate, whose book it was, but I knew that if I showed up at Tate’s he would beat me down and I would not get a stroke in against him. Nor deserve one, granted, because I’d slept with his 19-year-old wife, Tina Strong, on the night my own fully-grown wife left me. But this evening it was 10:45 before I got home and the libraries were closed and so I thought if I could remember the story well enough to write it out for myself up to the funny line then maybe that would satisfy me.

I started recalling the story from the beginning and transcribing it onto a yellow legal pad—she is on a hill, I think, in the morning with her big dog, and she pets the dog and the dog wanders, and her

boyfriend is away, she suspects some infidelity, because of her hair, and the dog shits, finally, and then no hill, now, but a bench in a flat fenced-in dog park, and your head in her lap, it’s nighttime, and when she compliments you on something trivial you’re unreasonably pleased about it, like a child no one liked.

But of course only half of that was the Ann Beattie story and then half was some old memory of me and my wife somehow loosing its fetters, and so at the dog shitting I stopped writing notes.

I decided I couldn’t remember the story well enough, only that lawyer line, which was funnier in context, and the dog, which probably only shits by implication, anyway, I don’t think it is described.

The good thing about the line is that it is not said derisively, but very honestly, and even had I remembered how the narrator got from that hill to the living room I would have botched my retelling because she would have come off sounding niggling, sarcastic. I thought of Tate, who was often sarcastic, especially to Tina Strong, and on nights when he would come home stinking of somebody else he used sarcasm as a defense, would deflect all charges with a mocking admission of guilt he expected I

guess to debase her, which I suspect it did.

My wife called the next afternoon while I was working.

She didn’t sound tearful but maybe a little tense. We made plans to have dinner the next evening at Dominics, which was not an overly nice place and also not a very good one.

When I got home I shaved off my beard and thought about getting a haircut, but I had already spent forty dollars on a gun and eaten out for lunch that day because I hadn’t had anything at the house to pack.

I imagined telling my wife I had

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The next night when I got home I set to installing new locks on my front door. My house had been broken into during the day while I was at work about a week before, and the front door had been damaged. To change the locks I used the screwdriver that I had been carrying around the house every night as a weapon since the incident. I carried the screwdriver because it felt less ridiculous than carrying a steak knife, which is what I’d really wanted to carry, because it was plausible I would need to use the screwdriver if one of my ceiling bulbs went out and I needed to get the glass cover off of the fixture, and besides I didn’t have any steak.

Afterward I went to amazon.com on my cell phone and keyed in “guns.” The first result was a Smith & Wesson M&P pistol (medium), which I was halfsurprised to find until I tapped to the product page and saw that it was actually a pellet gun. I ordered the cobalt-colored version for thirtyseven dollars with free expedited shipping, which I felt pleased about.

Then I searched “Anne Beattie” because I knew that on amazon.com you could sometimes read some pages of the books being sold. All of her books came up even though I had spelled her first name wrong, but I realized I didn’t know which book I had read the story in. I browsed

through some of the pages but I also didn’t remember the title of the story. Then I searched “steaks” and saw that steak on the Internet could be very expensive.

I thought about the fact that I had spent money on a gun—a pellet gun, admittedly, but still a purchase I never would have considered before my house got broken into.

It seemed natural to me that I should want to protect myself and my property, but also I had spent probably two full minutes deciding between the cobalt and burnt sienna colored grip tape. I thought about how much the things I wanted had to do with the things I was afraid of, and wondered if this was the sort of relation you could determine using science or mathematics. If I had ever paid attention to those things I might have solved a lot of problems, I might have told you better what was right and who.

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bought myself a Smith & Wesson, which sounded more masculine and less deranged than telling her I had bought a pistol, and less ineffectual than admitting to her it was a pellet gun. Then I decided that if she told me she was marrying somebody else that I would tell her I was marrying somebody too. I thought about who I would say I was marrying, and my first thought was Tina Strong, but that wasn’t a very good answer. I decided I would have to make up a name.

In my room I did five pushups and stopped not because I was tired but because I didn’t like doing push-ups. Exercise made me selfconscious so I watched myself in the hallway mirror executing various poses and gestures I thought I might

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perform during dinner the next night. When they looked all right I considered what I might look like if my house got broken into, but I still only had my screwdriver, so I stopped thinking about it.

I got to Dominics a little late the next evening, because the Smith & Wesson had arrived by the time I got home from work that afternoon and so after I changed I practiced a couple of shooting poses in case there was another housebreaker when I got back. I had left the gun in the glove compartment of my Ford, which I drove to the restaurant, because I didn’t want to leave the gun at my house so that the intruder could use it against me. I asked the headwaiter

still hadn’t responded with who she was marrying. I turned the ringer to silent and put the cell phone in my pants pocket too.

I checked the doors and windows of the house. They were all locked, and I decided the back door seemed the most penetrable.

I leaned my weight against it and tried the knob one more time, then pushed harder. I was careful to be quiet because I couldn’t be sure that Tate wasn’t home. When I knew that I wouldn’t push through the door I decided to pick the lock, so I took my phone and my keys and my Zippo out of my right pants pocket to get to the screwdriver. I put the cell phone and Zippo aside but kept the keys handy because the lock on his back door looked like one of the ones I’d installed at my place and those had been cheap enough that I believed my key might work on his.

It didn’t, but the key kind of went in a little, so I started picking around the bit that had gone in with the blade of the screwdriver.

This wasn’t effective, so I started hitting the key with the butt of the screwdriver’s handle, which felt better but made noise. I tried to think of what other tools I could use to pick the lock. The Smith & Wesson made my back uncomfortable where I was sweating against the metal and for a moment I thought about shooting the key in with a pellet.

I put the screwdriver and the keys and the Zippo back in my right

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at Dominics and she told me that no one had been in yet so I stood outside for a while and smoked two cigarettes. When my wife still hadn’t shown I called her cell phone and there wasn’t any answer.

I went into Dominics and sat at the bar. I stayed there for about forty minutes and I didn’t hear from my wife. I sent her a text message that was only a question mark and then I used my cell phone to e-mail her and I wrote in the subject line “i am marrying Anne Beattie.”

After I’d started my truck I called Tate, who didn’t answer his phone either. I said “fuck” out loud and considered calling them both and leaving that as a voicemail. I put the phone someplace where I wouldn’t look at it and then I drove over to Tate’s house.

His car wasn’t parked anywhere on the street and it looked like the lights were turned off in his house.

I took the Smith & Wesson and stuck it in the back waist of my pants. The barrel pushed against my wallet so I moved the wallet from my back pocket into one of my front pockets. I also had the screwdriver in my front pockets as well as my wallet and keys and my cigarettes and my Zippo. I wished I had some of those work jeans on with the hammer loop, though if I’d thought to practice poses with a handgun shoved into the hammer loop I would have quickly changed my mind. Before I locked the truck I grabbed my cell phone and used it to check my e-mail, but my wife

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pants pocket and I sat down on the steps with my cell phone to Google lock-picking instructions.

There were too many results to read so I checked my e-mail and there was nothing. I wondered whether Ann Beattie had the story on her computer and whether I could possibly find her e-mail address, and then I wondered whether Ann Beattie was someone who was still alive.

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I sat in the cab of my Ford and Googled “cobalt” on my cell phone because I thought of cobalt as a deep blue-black and I had decided the grip tape on my Smith & Wesson was really a rather dull charcoal. The image results for “cobalt” were all cars and most of them were red. Then I read the Wikipedia article and learned that cobalt ore in German was called goblin ore. Finally Tate pulled up in his Volkswagen and parked on the curb in front of his house. I had been waiting up the street where I knew he wouldn’t notice me.

I was not surprised to see Tina Strong riding shotgun in the Volkswagen, her hair done up high and big bug-eyed shades on although it was evening. I supposed she and Tate had reconciled and thought maybe it would be all right for me to knock on their door that night. I was happy not to test this theory and I was feeling altogether calm. I knew the best thing I could do was to wait, it didn’t matter for what. I wanted Tate to learn to be faithful to Tina Strong and I wanted her to feel secure. I wanted them both to forgive me though I knew I had betrayed his trust and manipulated her in her unhappiness. If my own wife ever called I would tell her I had purchased a pellet gun and I would not be ashamed that it had made me feel better. I watched Tina Strong lead Tate into the house where I knew in all likelihood they would remain unhappily together, until one or the other had gone.

L S

A W

S T I M

Keri Smith

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My mom moved away from Melbourne, but I remember our last swim there from the last time I visited. In late august, with the windows down in the car driving south on A1A, only I don’t know the name of the state park where we went into the water, only the surprise I felt seeing my mom in so little clothing, and so sexual! So beautiful, still in her 60’s, and not a bad surprise, just a quiet adjustment; what animals must feel in the dark when they think they’re alone and instead discover another body sleeping quietly near.

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Laptop Flea Market, Logan Jaffe

THE STORIES James Loop

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Tell me the story of the man who got fed up packed up and took flight, how we chased him all night through the swamp across the throbbing sky and only afterwards remembered what he’d said: that nobody ever dies they just get redesigned.

Tell me there was watermelon that summer in abundantly yellow living rooms and frozen flasks of gin.

Tell me about the girl who poured the pumpkin soup into ceramic pumpkin bowls after the last rain when the weather turned and the friends who sat too close to the fire and their shins blistered and the twenty four bottles of wine.

Tell me that winter there was cold tile steam and frosted windshields and mercy and days that vanished right before your eyes even as you tried to still them and they left you shaking like a newspaper out in the wind.

Tell me about the early days with the man that loved you like a cat all flashing limb and razory eye, how you felt when he took you in his teeth, how violently the world shrank to a set of brown jersey sheets and you were bedridden with the hilarity of it the world and love, loving.

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Tell me about days the days themselves enjoyed: grapefruit in the morning two naked bodies on a sunlit bedspread the sunlight crashing down on the leaves all afternoon and the nights glowed a sweaty indigo and there were a hundred front porches, each with its own stranger its own story hummingbird feeder and cigarette ends.

Tell me six in the morning was all hushed gold but don’t tell me about time.

Please can we forget once to talk about time, draining batteries all day running the stop lights all night red green yellow red green yellow red for no one for nothing.

The phone’s always ringing.

The phone never rings.

And we forget the real stories are unending: that they grow and twist in us everyday and once or twice a year in the early morning’s pregnant light or amid the pastel spasms of dusk they burst beneath the skin into blossom and we swoon forward and into relief.

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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.thefineprintuf.org.

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