thread Volume 5

thread volume 5

2011 Selected and edited by: Cory Barrows Michelle Cook Carson Frame Connor Holmes Hunter Taylor

Advised by: Ira Sukrungruang Cover photo by: Kristen Prosen Design & Layout by: Hunter Taylor Special thanks to: Jessica Edmondson Sponsored by: USF Student Government USF College of Arts & Sciences USF Council of Undergraduate Research

thread Literary Inquiry is an undergraduate literary journal staffed by student editors. We strive to publish the best undergraduate writing that the University of South Florida has to offer. Submissions are accepted across all genres and within these categories: short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literary criticism and screenplays.

Learn more about thread at: english.usf.edu/thread facebook.com/threadUSF Copyright thread 2011 All rights reserved and revert to authors and artists on publication.

contents Editor’s Note

3

The Stags Were Dancing in the Trees

by Robert Alderman

5

Of People and Wings

by Artrelle Eubanks

10

Vivid Illustrations

by Amanda Molinaro

11

Beyond the Romantic Aubade

by Christopher Hawthorne

13

What it Means

by Christina Moore

19

A Love Letter to Rio de Janeiro

by Kevin Schutt

21

The Idea Thieves

by Brogan Sullivan

23

Loose Thread The Alligator

by David Delisle

33 35

Why Common Illnesses are Exactly Like Altered States For the Betrayed

by Kirsten Holt

37 40

The Reverb of Faulkner’s Light in August

by Dolores Presutto

41

1

cont’d 49

Mistake #12

by Danielle Hamilton

50

How to Be a Man

by Ryan Bollenbach

56

Mine

by Palmer Hennessey Cole

57

Biblical Redaction

by Paul Vinhage

64

Sink

by Thomas Neubauer

65 66

Once, I Dated Ernest Hemingway Ice and Seashells

by Rachel Fogarty

68

Parallels

by Neil Pepi

2

editors’ note Revise

—a word both feared and respected by writers. Revision represents a change for the better, but it’s also an acceptance that the first try isn’t good enough.

When thread launched in 2007, it was an experimental, online-only venture into USF’s creative population. This edition of thread is the fifth draft of a quaint literary journal that will only get better as time passes.

Volume 5 marks several changes from last year’s edition. Most notably, this submission cycle garnered us the most entries we’ve ever seen at thread, causing us to increase our page count and print run.

We’ve also made thread Vol. 5 the most environmentally sustainable of all our editions. Last year, we created the journal’s first print edition. We followed that ambitious step with a year dedicated to maturing our publishing process.

Fueling efficiency by reducing our use of paper, we collected submissions online for the first time to the relief of reams of paper everywhere. To green our publishing activities we hired Bookmobile, a company committed to environmental sustainability, to print our journals.

While we place no thematic restrictions on submissions, the pieces in our journal engage in a contemporary conversation; literature is not created in a vacuum. Authors destabilize social institutions such as gender and religion to capture a year fraught with economic, political, and existential uncertainty.

Published works juxtapose confident contemporary iconography with focused personal insecurities.

Are you still reading this? Turn the page. That’s where the good stuff begins.

3

The Stags Were Dancing in the Trees

by Robert Alderman

“W

hat’s your problem, kid?”

I woke from my glazed stupor and saw Charlie staring, his big bushy eyebrows furrowed in confusion. He was swishing the half-melted ice cubes around his glass of Glenlivet to the swing band’s drumbeat.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean those two feisty mountain cats across the bar. They’ve been licking their lovely chops the better part of an hour now. They want a taste of you.”

I followed the nod of his head and had a good look at them. They were pretty, yeah—a pair of real fine kittens. One had these long curly-blonde twists of hair that hung over the left side of her face, a natural screen she used like a bobcat hiding from her prey. Her summer dress had these pinktinged plumerias blooming up and down her tanned body—a nice touch to the camouflage, I thought. The other woman looked hungrier, her thin but muscular arms laced with inviting tattoos, promising that dirty-good sex. Her hair was shiny and black like a panther’s, cut short as fingers would allow, and she was wearing a pair of taut, pinstriped pants that boasted athletic legs. She was definitely the runner of the two.

Charlie didn’t miss how much my eyes lingered.

“Like I said, what’s your problem?”

“I don’t know, Charlie,” I finally said. “Are you sure they’re looking at me?

Maybe they’re staring at those jowls of yours. You’ve got such a pretty face.”

He snorted and shook his head.

“You don’t need to tell me my face is pretty! But why won’t you send them a drink? You’re not a bad-looking guy—maybe not as pretty as me, but

5

certainly not bad-looking.”

He shot me that big grin of his and then washed away his smile with the scotch. After adjusting his seat, he reached his left hand into the oversized pocket on his postal uniform and pulled out a thick, white cigarette.

Meanwhile, the large, rounded fingers of his right hand thumbed open a matchbox and lit the cigarette without effort. Then Charlie took a long, satisfying drag. The smoke came out slowly. We watched it mingling with the thick cloud of smog above.

“Is it the divorce?” he asked quietly.

I didn’t say anything.

Just then, two collar-popping young stags crept across the crowded room to the kittens we were watching. They were fresh, for sure. As they pulled up seats next to them, the women shot each other a quick glance and smiled.

“You know,” Charlie said, “You’re like this guy I once knew, name of Bob Guthrie.”

I blinked for a moment.

“Bob who?”

“Bob Guthrie. I used to work with him a few years back. He was a real short guy, only five-five or five-six, and somewhere on the lighter side of sixty.

But his eyes looked old like death.” Charlie blew out more smoke. “I’ve never seen eyes so old,” he said.

“I don’t get it. Why am I like him?” I asked.

“Easy son, I’m getting there. How about another round first? You’re empty—and so am I.” Charlie turned to the bartender and signaled for two more.

“So, Bob Guthrie,” Charlie said, “He was one of my supervisors when I worked downtown at the mail plant. Most were a real pain in the neck, always talking productivity and goals, that sort of thing. ‘An honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage,’ they would say, right before mentioning how your performance needed to increase to ‘meet the needs of the service.’ I swear, with those guys, you’d never hear the end of it.”

Charlie took a big swag from his drink and then continued. “But Bob was different. He was soft-spoken, barely talked to anybody. And as long as we were doing our jobs, he didn’t bother us, so we respected him for that. It all worked out pretty nice, actually. He’d look good because we’d do our job, and

6

we’d be happy because he left us alone. Simple enough, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Oh, and Bob always remembered your birthday. I liked that about him.”

“Are you saying I always remember your birthday, Charlie?”

He laughed and told me to shut up, putting out his cigarette. Lighting my own, I noticed that the foursome across the bar was heating up. The women, who were laughing, had bought the two stags a round of shots, tequila by the look of it.

Charlie kept talking. “Well, I worked alongside Bob for two years. Only spoke a couple times to him when necessary. And it’s not because I disliked him. He was a good guy, I suppose. It’s just we didn’t get buddy-buddy with management—and Bob was management.”

I nodded and kept watching the girls. The dark-haired one was clawing her fingernails down her stag’s chest. I could almost feel it across the bar. It made me shiver. The guy blushed and turned to his buddy, a big shit-eating grin on his face. But she raised an eyebrow and smiled towards me when he wasn’t looking. I got the message.

“But I’ll never forget this one time we spoke,” Charlie said. “It was Christmas Day. I had volunteered to work that year for the overtime, and like most holidays, things were pretty lax—the big bosses were at home eating their gingerbread and turkey. But Bob was there that day, and on one of my breaks I chatted him up a bit.”

The blonde started slow dancing with her stag to a jazz tune sung by a bad, Billie Holiday impersonator. As she swayed her hips into his, she eyed me through her golden tangles, but he didn’t notice.

Charlie kept right on talking. “Back then, I hunted in Georgia. Threw in with a couple buddies and bought some land there, to go whenever we liked.

I asked Bob to tag along that weekend. But he stopped smiling when I did.

Shook his head and said he was sorry, but he didn’t hunt anymore. At first, I thought he was some dickless hippie, but then I asked him why.”

Charlie scratched the back of his head and lit another cigarette. We were watching the girls kissing their guys, lost in a jungle of music and shadow. They were no longer looking at me.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Well, he was a medic in Vietnam and ran laps with an infantry unit. But

7

one day, he found himself in deep shit. A piece of grenade shrapnel sliced through his neck. He said if it had been a centimeter to the left, it would have hit an artery and he’d have been toast.”

“Man,” I said, “lucky guy.”

“Yeah, no kidding, right? He even showed me the thin scar on his throat.

I’d never noticed it before—must have mistaken it for a wrinkle.”

I was no longer watching the girls, instead listening to Charlie’s voice riding a trio of saxophones.

“The thing is,” Charlie said, “after he got hit, he fell—paralyzed and gasping for breath—thinking he was going to die. He said he felt the blood running down his neck and death floating over him, listening to the explosions, the gunfire, and the screams of the dying.”

Charlie put his cigarette out.

“What then?” I said.

“He lived. They patched him up and sent him home for good. After that, Bob said he could never go hunting again. He said he understood how the deer felt as it lay on the ground, afraid and dying. And he just couldn’t do it anymore.”

I stirred the rocks in my scotch and Charlie finished his drink.

“That’s why you’re like him,” Charlie said. He was suddenly looking me in the eyes. “You went into the wild and some hungry mountain cat sunk her claws in your throat, brought you close to death. And now, you’re too afraid to do it again. That’s why you’re like Bob Guthrie.”

Across the bar, the two kittens had gone and the stags with them.

“I’m getting tired,” he said, slapping me on the back. “I think I’ll head home for the night. You take it easy.”

I nodded. He paid our tab and left.

For the next hour, I sat there thinking about the story of Bob Guthrie. I imagined the little old vet walking in his quiet way, a clipboard and fountain pen in hand as he went about his duties, his old wrinkles telling painful tales few could understand. I imagined him silently loading his rifle, bearing its crosshairs upon a beautiful stag drinking from a cool, forest stream, his old hands a veteran at pulling the trigger. But this time they were as green as the leaves. And lowering his rifle, I could see the deer rising, suddenly aware of him—and in a moment, it was gone. And then I imagined him lying on

8

the ground in his bloody fatigues, scared and helpless—his young eyes wide and open, as wide as they had ever been. But no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t see Bob Guthrie’s face. Instead I saw mine.

Someone bumped my shoulder. A tall redhead with feral green eyes was leaning over me buying another drink. Around the dark room, the shadows loomed like a canopy of leaves, and the women seemed like felines stalking upon the branches. The young stags were among them, too, dancing in the trees, drawing attention to their fine coats and strong frames, daring to give chase. I wanted to warn them, but I couldn’t utter a word. The blood was running thick down my neck.

9

Of People and Wings

by Artrelle Eubanks

Passels of trees lined the asphalt pathway.

Clustered with orange globes dangling proudly, Until stripped of their security by Overall-ed, plaid shirted people, With straw hat covered faces, As birds, flies, and butterflies, Drank of the nectar, Of those that did not survive, The hanging or the picking.

10

Vivid Illustrations

by Amanda Molinaro

T

he sound was unmistakable: a porcelain plate, one that you collected, one with a Norman Rockwell illustration, shattering on a table surface into pieces. It fell from the wall, from its place amongst the others, the wall of dusty attributions, and demanded to be remembered.

I was shut away in my room when I heard it. The crash and the scattering; and then silence. A silence that you should have broken with scolding. Except, there was none; a pause, and then crying.

Have you ever heard your father cry? I saw mine doing this only one other time: it was a little after his mother died. He was sitting in an easy chair when he fractured into tears.

You were there, you squatted to comfort him and the tendon in your knee popped. I heard that, and I saw you hold him. I only sort of remember what you told him, it felt something like lovely sadness.

No one was around to hear him but me this time. Separated by white painted walls and a wood door, in the sound of his lament I saw his head go into his hands. He was pleading for your forgiveness, his chest had to have been heaving. I was in my room, pretending not to notice. * Noticing a picture frame in my room every morning. I notice the picture in the frame as a spattering of you. There are dots to be connected, it’s clear, and I scan the surface and my reflection for a sketch of your face. It has been so long that my vision has been failing, but the crackling behind my eyes are flashes of you and me spinning.

One of them is ring around the rosy. Spinning in a swimming pool singing; and then ashes and ashes and we both dissolve like salt into water. In this one

11

we can always reemerge for breath and start over again. We can always come back, that is my favorite part.

Other times you would still me. You take me by the shoulders and square me. Really, you said that I was beautiful, you said your father never told you that you were beautiful, and you said that I needed to know. He never told you but I know that he felt it, because I was there when it was over, I saw your father crying. * ICU, I still see you in dark times laying in a sterile room. For three days you lay, did you lay there and listen? I need to apologize for our last conversation.

It held the spitting of something sinister, a foreshadowing, a prediction; granted, a wish: don’t ever talk to me. The last of my voice burrowed into your ears. And now, ICU, because something else heard me too.

Mechanical breathing, plugged in through an outlet, pumped through a tube. An accordion, like the one you played when you were my age, sending precise percussion to your lungs. One of the long nights, I tapped my foot and mimicked the meter: two brief quarter notes, a long half rest, a whole note forced breath, and then refrain. A hard decision interrupted the metronome and ended the accompaniment.

It was mid-February when your friends and family were gathering, halfmoon encircling you. A black-gold brass plate was set on top of a hollow, amongst a collection of others on a marble wall. This slab sticks firmly and poses no risk of shattering. The etching captures your vibrant life still, like a Norman Rockwell painting.

12

Beyond the Romantic Aubade:

The Religious Wakening in John Donne’s “The Good Morrow”

by Christopher Hawthorne

I

n John Donne’s “The Good Morrow,” the speaker addresses his lover in the morning following their night together. This has given many critics cause to label the poem an aubade. Their evaluation may indeed be justified; however, Donne does not follow the tradition as strictly as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, or Shakespeare’s depiction of Romeo and Juliet’s parting. Rather, through Biblical and figurative associations, and by utilizing the common poetic convention of two lovers rising to greet the day, Donne compresses time and the neo-platonic cosmological order to make the search for God and immortality a matter of learning how to love (and in fact equal to love).

Ultimately, the central image of daybreak is employed as a symbolic apparatus for discussing heavenly ascension. The poem’s very title encourages such a reading due to its portrayal of characters inevitably rising to a joyful day (in this case, the everlasting joy of life in heaven).

To understand the spiritual depths underlying Donne’s thought, one need only turn to his sermons, where a conceptual analysis of his worldview can be found. Of God he wrote: “God is Love, and the Holy Ghost is amorous in his Metaphors; everie where his Scriptures abound with the notions of Love, of Spouse, and Husband, and… Marriadge Bedde” (Moses 159). The poet’s emphasis on the sanctity of the “Marriadge Bedde” and its proximity to his idea of God as love supports the claim that this poem shows the similitude of divinity with romantic love. To Donne, the aubade must have seemed the perfect vehicle for relaying his loving conception of the Abrahamic God; aubades traditionally take place in the midst of the lovers’ bed, which by Donne’s reasoning, stands as a gateway to finding God. With this vision of God in mind, the speaker’s initial question gains new dimension: “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved?”

13

(lines 1-2). The trochee at the start of the second line requires the reader to stop suddenly on “Did,” so that the impact of “till we loved” becomes greatly emphasized (more so than if it had been written otherwise). If the reader equates love with God, as Donne implies, the question can be understood in quite a different way. It asks, “What were we doing before we found God?” The poet answers this question with another question: “Were we not weaned till then, / But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?” (lines 2-3).

In this second inquiry, the speaker wonders what life had been before loving, and suggests that the time before the lovers’ meeting was marked by adolescent mindlessness. Yet, the alliteration of “were we not weaned” highlights the word “weaned,” and implies that the mortal world, the world experienced before ascending to God’s high order, is but a world of preparation. Indeed, Donne suggests that the lovers are being weaned from the mortal world, and elevating to heaven via their love and connection to God. This analysis is buttressed by the allusive line “Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?” which has obvious ties to Christian mythology and repeats the “s” sound in order to evoke a sleeping, loveless world (line 4). Following this third question, the poetic voice affirms the lovers’ godless slumber with “Twas so,” then promptly reminds his addressee that the pleasures they enjoyed in their sleep (i.e. the mortal world, or the world they experienced before finding one another) were but illusive “fancies” (line 5). Here, the voice illustrates for readers that, compared to the pleasures of the eternal heaven the lovers now share in God, the pleasures offered by a mortal life appear trivial at best.

Ultimately, this is Donne’s expression of the idea that our world’s finite time diminishes in the face of God’s timelessness. Thus, these lines create tension between love on earth and the love experienced after death, or in heaven (i.e. on “The Good Morrow”).

Donne extends the sleeping conceit, claiming, “If ever any beauty I did see / … ’twas but a dream of thee” (line 6-7). Here, the poetic voice implies that, within the world of sleep, before awaking to God, the only semblance of beauty and substance one may observe is the vision of God’s grandeur in the face of one he loves. When the reader considers the religious overtones of “The Good Morrow,” this curious observation may indeed arise. The “thee” of line 7 apparently refers to the lover, but it also stands for God (or rather, God within the lover). This is consistent with Donne’s own conception of people’s role in nature. In his sermons, Donne writes: “All things that are, are equally removed from being nothing; and whatsoever hath any being, is by that very beeing, a glasse in which we see God, who is the roote, and the fountaine of all

14

beeing” (Moses 144). Given the metaphysical qualities of Donne’s poetry and worldview, the usage of the second person may indeed slip between addressing the lover and addressing God. This will be discussed in more depth later.

Nonetheless, the opening of the second stanza assuredly addresses the poet’s bed-mate. With the introduction of the poem’s title phrase “And now good morrow to our waking souls” (line 8), the sleep conceit finishes. Love has saturated the two figures and created a sense of transcendence by waking their “souls.” The lovers’ waking to God is expressed by a spondee followed by a pyrrhic in “good morrow to.” There, the line’s movement slows and then hastens back to iambic feet.

Now in the light of love, the glory of God, the two lovers do not watch one another out of fear (line 9), because the pure radiance of God/love is a power great enough to color all sights with itself (line 10). With their vision filled with love of God’s divine essence, the lovers become one with that great power. This is the point in the work where Donne’s words collapse part/whole relationships and the lovers in turn form the macrocosm in their microcosm with “And makes one little room an everywhere” (line 11). This observation concerning the microcosm and macrocosm, coupled with recognition of the central conceit as “oneness of the world,” does not offer a new understanding of this poem’s content. However, the idea that these lovers have now transcended to a heaven on earth is somewhat novel. By finding passionate love together, filling themselves with the sensation of the divine, these lovers have touched on a numinous reality that in Christian discourse may only be recognized as heaven. Their realization of God’s loving perfection is the point in the poem where time begins to collapse and immortality reigns.

The anaphora of the word “let” in lines 12, 13, and 14 marks the beat and lengthens perceptual time, illustrating the onset of the lovers’ immortality.

Here the idea of their joining to form one world in themselves is made explicit in line 14, “Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.” Furthermore, the spondee expressed in “one world” makes the phrase stand out as the lovers’ moment of embracement (perhaps both sexual and spiritual). This part of the poem is another point where the referential qualities of address become blurred; the poet acknowledges that we all possess and are one world (God included). Line 15 opens with “My face in thine eye,” which most people take to be the lover’s eye, and at one level it certainly is. Yet, now that ascension to heaven has become a reality for the lovers, God’s presence is a given, and the latter part of the line following the caesura, “thine in mine appears,” further recalls images of Judgment Day, when it is said each shall stand before

15

God face to face (King James Version, Corinthians 13:12). Furthermore, the assonance in “eye” “thine” and “mine” expresses the similarities between each of the interrelating words, as well as their relation to Judgment Day. The presence of a supernatural addressee is further supported by similarities within the book of Job: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shalt stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another” (King James Version, Job 11: 25-7, my emphasis).

The end of days is also acknowledged by line 16, “And true plain hearts do in the faces rest,” where hearts and faces are equated. According to Christianity, what lies in the heart will become apparent before God’s judgment. Afterward, the poetic voice seemingly returns to the allure of his lover. Donne then wrote two often misinterpreted lines: “Where can we find two better hemispheres, / Without sharp North, without declining West?” (lines 17-18). Some believe that the hemispheres refer to the eyes of the lover.

Others, like Joe Nutt of the City of London School, take them as a reference to the lovers being two halves of a perfect sphere. I am inclined to agree with the latter observation. However, Nutt’s reading of line 18 says that the negative adjectives for the North and West imply a “humorous assertion that the lovers have only positive qualities” (Nutt 49-50).

On this point I disagree, and assert that one must go to other works by Donne to understand his true meaning. In Sermon VII, Donne writes on the glory of God: “If you looke upon this world in a Map, you find two Hemisphears, two half worlds. If you crush heaven into a Map, you may find two Hemisphears too, two half heavens; Halfe will be Joy, and halfe will be Glory; for in these two, the joy of heaven, and the glory of heaven, is all heaven often represented unto us” (Moses 310). Lines 17 and 18 are really asking, “Where can we find two better parts without actually dying and rising to God’s heaven to see those perfect hemispheres of joy and glory?” The images of the “sharp North” (an abrupt spondee that imitates the mire of death) and “declining West” elicit images of death and dying; the North often represents dark, unlivable lands, while the decline of the sun in the West often represents the end of a life. Although these lovers have already found heaven on earth, their lives are not forfeit for the achievement.

Line 19 indicates that dying might be the only event superior to the lovers’ current experience of heaven: “Whatever dies was not mixed equally.” This line is a reaction to the question posed in lines 17 and 18, and anticipates the

16

subsequent statement of their immortality through love. It also harkens back to the mortal status of those without love as seen in the discussion of the first stanza. In a sense, those who do not experience love for others are, in the words of the scholastic philosophy of Donne’s time, “not mixed equally.” But this is not the case for our lovers, as the last two lines of the poem make clear.

The “thou” of line 20 represents the final instance in which the speaker appears to transcend linguistic parameters, addressing all others who are a part of the one. The phrase “two loves” sticks out with its spondaic irregularity, and hints at the two loves required for salvation: the love of God and others. The lovers of this poem become a model for the reader, and in line 21 Donne is directly saying that immortality, or ascension to heaven, depends on sharing love: “Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die” (line 21). Indeed, the “none” here is a reference not just to the two lovers, but to all members of humanity. It is important to note that the poet never addresses the physical appearance of the lover, as was the convention of his time. By avoiding this convention, the poem’s words achieve a new universality.

Donne claimed that, “In heaven we shall have Communion of Joy and Glory with all always… Where never any man shall come in that loves us not, nor go from us that does” (Moses 310) and in another sermon that, “At that last Judgement, we shall be arraigned for not cloathing, not visiting, not harbouring the poore; For, our not giving is a taking away; our withholding, is a withdrawing; our keeping to our selves, is a stealing from them” (Moses 305).

Both of these passages point to the poet’s true meaning: that to embrace love, in all of its multifaceted glory, is the key to salvation.

Only with the love of one’s neighbors (platonic or sexual) and the love of God “none can die” (line 21). Because the lovers have already consummated their love (presumably in the night prior to the morning scene in which the poem takes place), they have already found God and thus achieved their immortality. The final three words of the poem recall John 11:26, where Jesus says, “whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (King James Version, John 11:26) as well as Donne’s own writings on the Beatific Vision: “No man ever saw God and liv’d; and yet, I shall not live till I see God; and when I have seen him I shall never dye” (Moses 308). In essence, “The Good Morrow” is not simply an aubade from the voice of a lover discussing his immortal love, but a figurative glimpse of love as a vehicle to immortality with God.

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Works Cited Donne, John. “The Good Morrow.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. Greenblatt, Stephen and M.H. Abrams, 8th ed. New York, NY: Norton, 2006. 1263-64. Print.

Donne, John and John Moses. One Equall Light: An Anthology of the Writings of John Donne. Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2004. Print.

The King James Version Bible. Ed. Nick Hengeveld. Web. 2 March. 2010. [http://www.biblegateway.com/] Nutt, Joe. John Donne: The Poems. Analysing texts. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Print.

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What It Means

by Christina Moore

to have syllables trapped in air, the morning lost to noon, and everything green turned brown — it terrorizes the birds to know they’re next. Appalled, they flee, seek to distract themselves with sunnier visions.

What it means when children curl over to sleep, knees tucked up, as though protecting something vulnerable and alive in their chests. What it means when I say they’re not children at all. What it means that the only perfect silence is made by the rhythmic sighing of another’s breathing body warm and unflinching beside you.

Any other silence is just miles of gaping sand, every step swallowed instantly, fatigue and uselessness surrounding you like a coma. Parents love their children.

It means they aren’t special, they will never climb higher than that second or third rung, and the parents know

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what this means: no one else can love them.

What it really means is that parents could never admire perfection enough to embrace it, having never seen something so foreign, and will shun it like a dreaded disease that must be caught before it causes irreparable damage. People shed happiness like bloody clothes, leaving a naked broken thing.

It means a heart bursting with joy must eventually rupture, leaking out thick, unsightly, heated emotion. The evidence is damning. The rainclouds that follow don’t wash away the blood.

What it means, so many little deaths. Nothing.

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A Love Letter to Rio de Janeiro

by Kevin Schutt

I don’t know what it is, but it is, and that’s all I need.

Marvelous city, I love you and you love me, but only in the way a city like you can love.

It’s the gentle finger plucks of a guitar, life breath of your Bossa-nova.

Melancholy, like the kites of the favela children dancing above the tin roofs of crimson huts of scraps and clay.

It’s the chirps, chatters and whistles of that waterfall, off the beaten path, past the Macumba offerings and next to the jack fruit tree.

I know everything you know you learned from the sea.

It’s in the sway of waves and hips belonging to creatures, envied by angels, and praised by temptation.

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They capture her sound and force it in their vernacular.

Trembling in the voice of the people singing Nao Deixe o Samba Morrer.

As you wait in the embrace of the soap-stone colossus, my quill dips in the tears of Odysseus, for my Penelope is far from me, and I am in love.

22

The Idea Thieves

by Brogan Sullivan

F

irst the thieves stole Roosevelt, the President’s Jack Russell. The networks treated it like an outrage: right-leaning shock jocks spun it as yet another example of the Democratic party’s sour-grape stance on losing the election; left-wingers hinted at a Republican hoax, a plot to garner public sympathy and boost the President’s approval rating. When the Liberty Bell and the memorial stone for the victims of the Boston Massacre followed, we felt a quiver of uncertainty. Was this some new form of terrorism we hadn’t anticipated? But then the Quadriga at the top of the Brandenburg Gate disappeared overnight, and one of the elevators in the Eiffel Tower vanished, and no one could pretend that it was an American issue anymore. The thieves had gone global. But who were they?

Speculation proliferated. Major news outlets tapped retired masterminds as “consultants” in the trade. They differed on methodology and motive; but they all agreed that whoever they were, the thieves had shattered the ceiling. One, appearing on Capitol Forum, said, “The Brinks Job in 1950, JFK airport in ‘78, Antwerp in 2003: each one a masterpiece.” He sipped from his network-branded coffee mug. “But they pale in comparison to this. They’re not even in the same league.”

The anchor smiled. “So, who do you think is behind it?”

“I can’t say.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Believe me, no one I know could’ve pulled anything even remotely as elegant as this. Museums and banks are one thing; breaking into the White House and stealing the first dog? If I had ten years to plan it and all the money in the world, I couldn’t do it. And where’s the angle? How’s anyone gonna

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profit off it? It’s not like you could hold the dog for ransom. ‘Put fifty million in unmarked bills in a duffel bag and stash it in the bole of an oak tree, or the pooch gets it.’ Come on.”

The anchor was eating this up like candy. “So where do we go from here? Is this the beginning of a new cycle of one-upmanship in the global crime trade?”

“Sure, but what really matters is what will disappear next? The Hollywood sign? The Black Rock of Mecca? There’s an entire world out there, just waiting to be stolen.”

The anchor turned to the camera. “There you have it, folks. Next up, reaction from the President; stay tuned.”

The internet seethed with breathless theories and improbable conspiracies.

The standard moves were made: it was the Illuminati, or the Gnomes of Zurich, or time-traveling aliens. Theyre-here.com posted a grainy video of what appeared to be a giant corpse-white slug crawling across Constitution Garden and into the reflecting pool at night, with the lights of the Lincoln Memorial glaring in the background, but the next day CNN interviewed a GW film student who claimed to have shot the footage for an assignment, and the buzz died away in the wake of the simultaneous disappearances of Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Khufu. On Salisbury Plain, where the megaliths had stood for four thousand years, there were no gaping holes—the earth was simply undisturbed. And in Giza, on the spot where the pyramid had sprawled, defying the ponderous imperative of time, only a patch of sterile dust remained. It was as if they’d never existed. * The United Nations, together with the global intelligence community and a plurality of the most influential and wealthy corporations across the world, formed an initiative they called the Vigilance Project. Its stated mission was to “guard and preserve the global heritage.” Its motto, “the Eyes of Truth are Always Open,” intended to sound noble and resolute, succeeded only in filling us with a vague discomfort. Whose eyes, after all, would be watching? And whom would they be looking at?

The activities of the Project were covered by a vast cloak of secrecy at first, but when their plan went live, we were stunned by the sheer size of it. It was as if the world had to take a collective breath and find a place to lie down.

The cameras were everywhere. They studded light posts along the streets and peered out of foliage in the parks, stared from the cornices of government buildings and winked inscrutably in the bathrooms of convenience stores,

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swept the floors of museums and library corridors, eyed mountaintops and riverwalks, watched from the podiums of churches and from behind mirrors in adult bookstores. And these were only the ones we knew about. What beady, narrowed eyes glared out at us from other hidden places? What covert ears gathered up the sounds of our arguments and reconciliations?

Then came the inevitable revolt. Demonstrations raged in the streets and public squares. Privacy advocates decried the Vigilance Project on television and talk radio as the greatest threat to personal liberty since the Patriot Act, but the halls of power stood firm. The threat was too severe to allow inaction.

It wasn’t merely an attack on a nation or a certain ideological position. The thieves were champions of chaos, dedicated to the destruction, not of the world, but of reality itself.

Came the day when a fatal flaw destroyed the Project. Its creators had designed it according to a fundamental assumption: that the thieves could be caught, like any ordinary criminal. They were certainly the most successful criminals in history, and were no doubt extremely powerful and well funded, but they had to show their faces eventually. This was eminently reasonable, as tautological as two times two equals four, an inescapable feature of the universe, like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the weak nuclear force.

Except that it wasn’t.

At the Met, in the middle of a performance of The Magic Flute, and in full view of the Vigilance Project’s cameras, just as the Queen of the Night was about to sing “Hell’s vengeance boileth in my heart,” the orchestra faltered, and the singer choked on her breath. She stared out into the lights, her hand pressed to her throat. The conductor shuffled through pages gone suddenly blank. He turned, aghast, and looked out at the crowd. A murmur of unease rippled through the audience like a current of electricity. The conductor’s face twisted up; he clutched his chest with spastic fingers, dropped to his knees, fell flat, and died.

The same night, the International Prototype Kilogram in Sêvres, and all six of its replicas, and every single copy around the world, vanished from their climate-controlled, constantly-monitored vaults. The VP techs sat at their monitors in unadulterated amazement. They rewound the feed, pored over it from every angle, refined the images and ran them through their infallible supercomputers, checked and rechecked the results, and then did it all over again, but in the end they had to admit defeat. Not a ripple, not the slightest disturbance in space or time, had been detected by any of their high-definition sensors. The tumult was unprecedented.

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Not at first, of course. Not until a famous scientist—whose face we’d seen on Sesame Street and Oprah, and who we therefore trusted with our lives— came on Capitol Forum and put it all in perspective. “This will affect the world in ways we haven’t even thought of yet,” he said. “The IPK is the global standard of mass. We measure every dose of medicine, every gold bar, every steel beam in every skyscraper and bridge on the face of the planet against it. The force of gravity, the ampere, Planck’s constant—these all depend on our ability to check them against this single lump of platinum-iridium or its copies. And they’re gone.”

“But surely we can find another way to measure these things,” the anchor said, smiling reassuringly at the camera.

“We haven’t yet. See, the IPK’s been losing tiny increments of mass; something on the order of the equivalent of a grain of salt so far. We’ve been trying to come up with a way of replacing it with some universal constant, kind of like how we measure the period of the second by the vibrations of a cesium atom, but we haven’t been able to nail it down yet. And until we do, well—we’re basically screwed.”

“What do you mean by that?” The anchor’s face turned the color of pounded veal.

“Let me put it this way,” the scientist said. “The last thing I did before I came to the studio tonight was to cash out every one of my bank accounts. I’ll see you on the flip side, if there is one.”

Followed a few moments of agonizing silence, during which the anchor looked as if he might start weeping, and then the network broke to a commercial, and when the show came back on, a frazzled-looking woman dressed in a wrinkled jacket which didn’t quite fit had taken over the anchor’s spot and read the rest of the news from a teleprompter, squinting as if the words she saw there didn’t make any sense. * The world didn’t end, despite the scientist’s pronouncement of doom. The stock markets crashed, and homicide and crime rates rose dramatically. But no one rioted. Instead of panic and despair, there was simply a deep, abiding chill. The talk around water coolers and dinner tables became strained and contentious. We went about our business, but business no longer held our interest. We rode the subways and buses as usual, but in a kind of stunned trance, our eyes unfocused, distant, feeling the groan and tremble of the machinery under our feet as a subtle reminder that we were no longer in

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control of where we were going, that somewhere, forces completely beyond governance were orchestrating everything according to the specifications of an ancient and terrible blueprint.

Faced with its enormous public failure, the Vigilance Project quietly slunk offstage. The cameras and microphones were dismantled. The Eyes of Truth closed forever. The global heritage would have to fend for itself.

Came a long period of silence. It stretched through Christmas and on into the new year. The next incident was so improbable, so utterly unexpected, that we could barely bring ourselves to accept that it had happened. On Easter morning, thousands of priests and ministers opened their Bibles to give the reading and found that the Gospel of Matthew had disappeared. It wasn’t that the pages had been ripped out. The Old Testament ended with Malachi and the New Testament began at the Gospel of Mark. There was simply twenty-five percent less good news than there had been the night before.

Most of us didn’t really care that the meek would no longer inherit the Earth. No one really knew what being meek meant anymore. It sounded vaguely self-defeating, as though it implied a weakness of character, or unpatriotic treachery. What truly bothered people was the suspicion, a cold tickle at the base of the skull, that when they got to the end of reciting the Lord’s Prayer, there was supposed to be something that came after the part about their daily bread. Something about a kingdom, and eternity, but no one could remember how it went. Congregations trailed off into a strained hush, and stared up at their pastors, who shuffled the pages of their sermons as if they’d forgotten what they were supposed to be doing up there behind the podiums. They felt useless, absurd, like children at a spelling bee in which the words were in a foreign language.

The repercussions of the Event took a long time to dawn. The directors of Interpol, the FBI, MI5, the CIA, already at wit’s end at having to pick up the pieces after the collapse of the Vigilance Project, refrained from comment.

It wasn’t a matter of criminality anymore; this was something wholly new.

Besides, it wasn’t like some thing had been stolen. It wasn’t their problem; it was outside of their purview. They sent memos to the various heads of state suggesting that it was a matter for the Vatican.

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The Pope, after an agonizing month of silence, issued an encyclical, Evangelium ago, saying that nothing had fundamentally changed; the Word was infallible, and could not be altered. Did the first verse of the Gospel of Saint John not say, “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”? Perhaps there had never been a Gospel of Matthew. What hubris, to suppose that humans could have a more perfect memory than the Creator of the universe, and since the existence of the cosmos was sustained, at all times, within His inscrutable mind, it was heresy to question Providence. Academicians cried foul, but when they consulted long-trusted sources in preparation for their outraged replies, they found that it wasn’t just the Gospel that had disappeared, but every reference to it, in every possible formulation, going back across two thousand years of scholarship. Their articles were never written; the public outcry calmed to a simmer, then to a quiet, steaming fume, and finally congealed. Time got back to its old task of healing all wounds, and wounding all heels. * But then, as if they’d grown impatient with the human race’s ability to ignore atrocity, the Idea Thieves (for that was what we began to call them in our prayers and private conversations) waged a campaign of conceptual larceny that threatened to bring the world to its knees. One commentator called it “a carpet bombing run, a daring raid on the culture, which left behind smoking craters of cognitive dissonance.”

Some of the disappearances we considered no great loss. The theft of every single copy of the second edition of Great Expectations, for example, discomfited a few wealthy collectors, but since all the other iterations of Dickens’s novel remained untouched, the outcry was muted at best. Likewise, the discovery that the entire body of the works of Torquato Tasso had gone barely registered. After all, we still had Dante.

But then the Thieves began to erase things we considered so fundamental to our lives that we became disoriented. We stumbled over the gaps left behind, like refugees walking through minefields. The sudden exit of the coffee bean plunged people into fits of existential despair and chronic lethargy, not to mention ensuring the collapse of the economies of a handful of countries already teetering on the edge of financial ruin. Producers of tea chortled over their corresponding rise in profits, but a few weeks later, as if correcting an oversight, the Thieves took that too. Tobacco went next, followed by grapes, the five noble hops, and the poppy fields and coca plants. Certain moralists took this as a sign of hope; the vices that had plagued mankind for so many

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centuries were finally being conquered. But strangely, the humble cannabis plant remained untouched, and in the absence of our usual recreational substances, we felt that some revisionist legislation was in order.

It was an empty victory. After the dust settled, we discovered that in the interim, we’d lost the recipe for making chocolate. * The thefts continued unabated. Every week or so, something vital went away, and with it, another piece of our comprehension of the universe. The two hundred and sixty-three Foucault’s pendula around the world absconded, leaving us only the Sun with which to guarantee our confidence in the Earth’s rotation. The Mona Lisa’s smile trundled off into oblivion; she scowled at us, she had always been scowling at us. She was no longer a mystery, or a paragon of enigmatic beauty. After a few days, the curators at the Louvre took her down from her wall and put her in storage, acknowledging what we all felt: what gave her the right to stare at us like that, as if she was accusing us of some terrible violation? * We started lists, on paper or in electronic form, catalogs of loss, which we brought along with us to restaurants or juice bars to pore over and analyze, to see if we could detect a pattern, or some constellation of significance. We had become like lepers checking for new lesions, for evidence of the necrosis that we knew seethed somewhere, deep down at the roots of everything. But the lists were tentative, irresolute. Some items we thought we’d lost turned out to have been merely rearranged, as if to patch over a spot of the cosmos that had become threadbare. Others had never existed in the first place; we simply wished they had.

The worst entries referred to things we knew were really gone, lost forever, beyond recovery, because when they disappeared, our memories of what they signified soon followed, and all we had left were their names, each one an empty tomb. They filled us with an ache we could not describe: Maseratis. King Lear. Golden Retrievers. Madagascar. The White Album.

Bananas. The hypotenuse. Ashrams. Six-toed cats. Honey. Bubble baths.

Biscayne Bay. Redwood trees. The Aurora Borealis. Cinnamon. Hockey. Lava Lamps. Icebergs. The Tango. Uluru. Sunday mornings. Beaches. Crossword puzzles. Catamarans.

The lists made their way onto the internet, posted, at first, by amateur bloggers. They morphed and grew, modified by and modifying each other,

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passed on and shared and added to, until they streamed through the ether like wisps of semiotic prayer. In time they pooled together, and began to circle around themselves, and we felt as if some cosmic embryo had been born out of our incoherent sense of loss, and was drawing in a tremendous breath. We listened for the scream, but it never came. Whatever we’d conceived had been stillborn. We turned our attention away from the List and let it die. * We held on to hope. We were still here, after all. We had each other. So much had been taken that we began to lose faith in the constancy of things and ideas. The Thieves revealed that what had seemed so fundamental, so integral to the formation of our daily lives, had been empty, illusory.

Before, we’d had hobbies, vocations, interests. We pursued these things, as if by attaining them we could inhabit a sustained happiness. We’d sought fulfillment, authenticity, wholeness, in religion, or politics, or cars, or food, or music, or money, or television. We’d thought of ourselves as consumers, but all along, we were actually being consumed, fed upon, absorbed. And in that process we’d become estranged from the one thing which we now felt could sustain our souls and grant us grace.

We began to knit ourselves back together. We gathered in groups of two or three. These grew, at first in additive proportions, and then by exponential law. We sat around campfires in our front lawns, basking in the glow of shared experience. We resolved to live in the present tense, for only what is happening right now can be guaranteed and verified. * Soon our gatherings are too large to hold in neighborhoods, and we leave the cities in streaming caravans. We become nomads and barterers. We learn to listen to the rhythms and patterns of life. People die, but they do so surrounded by the group. We give their bodies to the fire, and speak about their lives as if they are already part of legend, because after all, they are.

We leave the written word behind us, in the cities. Language is a living thing; it dies as soon as you write it down. Only the spoken word has any meaning, really. People who can tell stories take on the mantle of our reverence. As we listen to them, we feel our hearts glowing. We are collected, unified in our acceptance of the absolute truth of what they say. A conviction grows in the deep caverns of our memories that this is how we are meant to live, as one people, clothed in the raiment of a story that goes back to the most distant past, and will continue on into the future. And although we know we

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will not survive to see it, that future will still, somehow, contain us.

But even this does not last. We’d imagined that the Thieves had retired, content in the fulfillment of their design. But they’d simply bided their time, as we finished what they’d started, as we tore down the remnants of the curtain they’d poked so many holes in. The final stage of their plan had yet to be set in motion. * It begins again. At night, as we sit and listen to the Storyteller, we realize that he looks less sure of himself. A quiet turmoil works its way through the audience. Only the children, who’ve not yet learned discretion, dare to put into words what we all are feeling.

“That’s not how the story goes,” one murmurs.

“Hush,” her mother says.

“But Mommy, he’s telling it wrong.”

We all know she’s right, and by his expression, we know the Storyteller feels it too. But we don’t say anything, and he continues, and when he’s finished, the music starts and the dancing helps us forget what has happened. But as the days wear on we feel the changes taking place, and find a new dread lurking behind every conversation and bartered exchange. We try to ignore it as long as we can, but soon it becomes too obvious to overlook.

The Thieves are stealing words, at first one at a time, and then wholesale.

Entire families of verbs dissipate. We can no longer conjugate our way through any single chain of action. Links of causality snap like twigs. We grope at each other with what remains, but we find it difficult to express something even so rudimentary as the current exchange rate between eggs and cloth. The unity we’ve come to rely on is slipping away. Our communities dwindle. Every day another ten or twenty people wander off into the wilderness, their aimless eyes expressing openly what we know is growing in ourselves: we are lost, unhinged, destitute. Homeless.

Those of us who remain try to hold out against the tidal wave of entropy we sense is gathering out there at the fringes of the disintegrating universe.

We grow frantic. The life-urge blooms within us, in terminal rebellion. We abandon ourselves to sensation. Our lovemaking becomes indiscriminate, savage, bestial. We tear at one another, as if the flesh is all that remains of us, as if all meaning, all consummation of our will, resides there alone. *

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The sun is setting. Has set. We have forgotten the word for what it has always done after that. It meant something like hope. It was a promise the world made to us every night.

We are very few now. We are staring into the fire. This is the last fire. The world contains no more than us and the gray earth we’re sitting on, and the fire, and very soon that will go out, and we will forget what fire is. * I am here. The others have gone. What others? What are others? I can’t remember the word for what it is when I am part of a group of what I call “I.” There were two words, in fact. They were small words, but they contained so many.

I am here, talking to myself. I don’t know what it would mean to talk to any thing other than myself. What does the word “myself ” mean, if there is nothing other than what I am?

I am here, and here where I am, it is dark. What is the opposite of dark?

What is the opposite of me?

I am here, and I know only that here is where I am.

I am here.

I am.

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Loose Thread

by David Delisle

a finger on your spine electric shudder teeth marks tread parentheses across clavicle pages the parking lot lamppost shines through steamed windows an impressionist’s haze swirling light its yellow reach revealing your landscape like the earth when it was young the moon in its radiant blue youth smiling on luscious valleys and peaks every so often one of us wipes condensation from the window checking for other cars the memory still fresh

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of when the cop found us in the beach parking lot his intrusive light searching my car so delicately asking you does your mother know where you are or when my parents came home early and we threw on our clothes in a flurry of limbs you ran to the bathroom leaving your bra stretched across the floor I stuffed it into my pocket like a secret as the front door creaked and my parents’ shoes clopped across the tile it wasn’t until I was talking to them that I noticed the strap dangling like a loose thread that with a single tug would unravel our sins on the living room floor

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The Alligator

by David Delisle

It lies there on the lake shore lifeless in the sand a prehistoric beast, jagged teeth protruding from a snout of cracked leather.

Ridges run down its back, converging at the tip of the tail like neat rows of head stones on a dark graveyard hill.

“Jesus, Jim.” “I had to,” he says.

“It kept coming into the yard when the kids were playing.”

Pink flesh opens at the caved in skull, red oozing down the dark scales.

In the grass next to it: Jim’s Louisville slugger speckled with blood and grease from the garage floor.

“It’s against the law to kill one.”

“What should we do?”

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“I guess we should bury it,� I say.

We shovel and scoop damp earth till the ground opens its mouth to a suitable depth.

As we drag the dead weight of the carcass through the grass I think of how the nearest body of water is eight miles away.

Did it know it would find water?

Or did it simply trust the voice squirming in cold blood, venturing out in faith, in the promise of quenching reward?

I imagine it lumbering over all that land, a reptilian tank, dead grass crackling against the armored plates, tail swinging side to side like a metronome keeping pace.

Can you imagine when it came to our pond, the cool still waters a perfect reflection of the sky above, the flash of silver fins slicing the mirrored surface?

It must have looked like heaven.

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Why Common Illnesses are Exactly like Altered States

by Kirsten Holt

S

o there you are, puffy-eyed, skull feeling like a zeppelin, standing in line at the ghetto Walmart with orange juice, and bottle of Tylenol Severe Cold medicine, staring at this woman asking to see your ID. You didn’t bring your ID. It’s 11:30 at night. You’re only vertical because you drove out here in your pajamas in a panicked stupor when you realized that you were out of medicine and your current dosage would wear out in roughly 45 minutes. It’s been ages since you’ve been carded, but there you are, hoards of very impatient customers with tank tops, lawn furniture, and kitchen utensil— which they absolutely need in the middle of the night on a Thursday— trying to understand why this woman is asking for your ID. You try to politely and quietly ask why she needs identification. She explains that the product requires it, suggests you talk to her supervisor if you have any questions. You intend to cough hazardous contagions all over her supervisor.

You are not Lil Wayne. You are obviously a very ill college student who has to be up at an ungodly hour to service the last-minute office supply needs of the white collar industry. But that’s when you realize with your Batman pajamas, three-day-old eyeliner, hair thrown into some tangled knot, and breathing out of your mouth, you probably do look like a robotripper about to make some very syrupy screwdrivers.

Of course at the moment this is significantly less humorous than the time you were rung up at Walmart and you were actually high. No, see, then it was just a very dangerous video game you were in, on a mission to rescue the cookie dough from its corporate oligarchy and retail prison.

Your friends— apparently not as high as you were— took the keys because putting your shoes on the wrong feet constitutes a complete lack of cognitive

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reasoning on your part. You were escorted to the backseat, where you proceed to question how palm trees have the balance to stand upright, and laugh at the fat child in the raincoat who you were convinced was E.T. But now, having forgotten your own car has doors in the backseat, you are trapped. Friends to the rescue once again. After laughing suspiciously at every single late-night shopper you pass, you have slain the freezer knight and attained the cookie dough trophy; you make your way to the boss battle: the check-out line. You stalwartly manage not to make a single noise while the cashier rings out your items, you don’t even answer when he asks debit or credit? Once he hands you your bag of cookie dough, you abruptly turn around and run toward the exit, laughing maniacally. It’s a wonder you weren’t arrested.

The issue here is that when you’re in college, every action you make will appear to be under the influence of heavy alcohol consumption or methamphetamines. Your mother explained this once when you asked her what adolescence meant. She told you it would be a time in your life when every decision you made would be wrong and you should therefore consult her before doing absolutely anything. She was probably referring to decisions like challenging the burliest, bearded man in the Kettlebell Club to a punching match. That wasn’t you talking, it was the nine long island iced teas. Of course, how can you differentiate alcoholic anger from grumpy head-cold stupor? Your boyfriend certainly can’t. He reminded you of this when you were screaming at him, delirious with fever, for letting all the goddamned velociraptors in the house, before you passed out in cold sweats.

And then of course there’s vomiting. Even in high school my mother had to play Twenty Questions to find out if I was legitimately sick, or just skipping school because I was hung-over/bulimic/pregnant. From an outsider’s perspective, vomiting is just vomiting. When you’re plagued with a flu virus or three-day-old sushi, you will be puking at home, in the comfort of your own shag bathrug, making pillows on the trashcan with JC Pennys towels. When you’re in an altered state, you’re vomiting all over someone else’s bathroom, and violently. In fact, their terrible purple hand towels and angel wallpaper— which matches the angel soap dispenser, angel figurines, angel wall sconces, angel toilet seat cover, angel faucet fixtures, angel freaking toilet paper—will probably make you puke more. And you’ve never vomited until you’ve vomited under the influence of more than one substance.

For instance, when—three bowls in—you and Jessica decide that Hulk shots would be a spectacular idea you weren’t considering that the affects bonuses would stack. Jessica is a bartender. Jessica is your friend. But

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bartenders drink like beached whales. She’s pouring more shots before you finish the first. Five minutes later—thank you delayed reaction time—you realize that somewhere in the mess of delicious concoctions, you had pulled out double shot glasses. You’re not high and only four shots in. You’re high and eight very-quickly-consumed shots in. Now, Jessica is a bitch. Jessica and her green drinks. And you’re on a very slow and wobbly boat ride with that bitch straight to your own damnation. But why stop there. Hookah might at least calm your system down.

Incorrect.

Hookah, lovely hookah, opens up your internal organs, makes things all nice and cozy inside. Now you’re running—or maybe crawling, or waddling, or doing the chicken dance, you can’t tell—all the way to the bathroom, which must be at least a quarter mile across your living room. And when you’re puking, you’re puking smoke, and it’s actually fucking rising. Of course you’re also puking green, and you know it’s from the Hulk shots, but you don’t think that, you think you have cholera, because you’re puking in slow motion, and there’s smoke, and green swirling monsters in your toilet. And you’re in for another 3 hours of this.

And Jessica is dancing to Incubus in your living room. And that bitch is perfectly fine.

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For the Betrayed

by Kirsten Holt

Misery is my own swamp where your peat moss steeps as it has steeped often before, but not with the careless fingers that fastened round me those eight years.

Cicadas are deserting their shells today with masses of husk.

They resign as we have this fulcrum, this bisection.

But the anguish in my wrists is not as callous as they were in their former ardor.

Now I feel that itching and finger the braille scars.

My father told me if you chose to unearth men like seedlings and bones, you abandon your name for the dead, as Lot tasting the ashes of his wife. Now you immerse your fingers in my salt, my sinew and savor my aching.

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The Reverb of Faulkner’s Light in August

by Dolores Presutto

“T

he only alternative to progress is death,” William Faulkner stated to the Daily Progress, a Charlottesville newspaper, during an interview about segregation and integration in 1957 (Inge 147). This quote rings in a characteristically modern way, implying a reluctance to progress despite the recognition that it is the only available choice. In literature, this sentiment reverberates a chatter of doubt, violence, and disillusion. The poet abandons god, the farmer loses his land, the woman begins smoking, and the worker is alienated. The fear of miscegenation spreads throughout the South after the Civil War, intensifying the tension in racial relations. Faulkner explores this fear in his 1932 novel Light in August, which tells the story of Joe Christmas, a character who becomes alienated because of his mixed race, and who can be seen as a human example of such an “alternative progress” that results in death.

The novel’s other major characters exist in peripheral social spaces as well; they don’t belong to active communities and they also embody some of these modern characteristics, including isolation and religious disillusionment.

Faulkner describes his goal in writing as representing “truths” about “man as he comes into conflict with his heart” (Inge 163). His motive in portraying such “truths” has proved successful. Though Faulkner’s statements about race were often contradictory and even considered racist, his fiction deals quite elaborately and delicately with the subject, revealing a realistic view of culture in the South following the years of slavery. Recent African-American critics have praised Faulkner for his honest and involved depictions of human consciousness; his frank portrayals of racial and sexual relations create exemplary worlds in which the relationship between “the self ” and “the other” is explored. By exploring interactions that are usually met with discursive silence, critic Craig Werner says we discover the “aspects of our experience that we least understand” (Werner 35). As African-American writers shaped their

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post-Civil War discourse by engaging with text written by and about black experience throughout American history, a critical interest grew in Faulkner’s representations of race. The critics’ interest in his representations of the “other” and in his aesthetic methods, suggest an intertextual discourse between Faulkner’s fiction and contemporary studies of race.

Faulkner as novelist used his art, an escape from life into the aesthetic, to work out his frustrations with the socio-political circumstances surrounding him. Comments in various newspapers and lectures reveal that Faulkner’s convictions about race were uncertain, yet he was clearly fascinated by the topic; this encourages the idea that Light in August is an intimate exploration of the author’s own struggle with the subject “race.” In 1957, twenty-five years after the novel’s publication, the Charlottesville newspaper Daily Progress quoted Faulkner as saying, “the white man had better take charge of it (Integration) and control it, rather than have it thrust on him.” In the same paper the following year, he states, “He must learn to cease forevermore thinking like a Negro and acting like a Negro. This will not be easy. His burden will be that, because of his race and color, it will not suffice for him to think and act like just any white man; he must think and act like the best among white men” (Inge 158).

There has been much criticism of Faulkner for such statements, which unapologetically forces the African American into conformity with white society’s standards; what makes this view even worse is that a rejection of white behavioral norms damages or burdens the offender. In other words, Faulkner requests the renunciation of black customs, culture, and tradition in lieu of its white counterparts; such a disavowal of black identity seems to be counterintuitive to Faulkner’s artistic world. Nonetheless, I think we can attribute most of his racist statements (by today’s standard) to his contemporary historical and geographical moment, where African Americans were subject to scathing oppression (economical, social, sexual and educational), making the vision of a parallel and independently-valued black community nearly unimaginable. The fiction of Zora Neale Hurston is a further example of internalized stereotypes in representations of African Americans in fiction. For example, “white features” often mean acceptance and admiration in her most notable work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Even Faulkner cannot avoid the influence of social stereotypes and discourses that inform his writing; this seems clear in Light in August, where certain racist assumptions (like the perceived incompatibility of “white” and “black” blood)

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seem to function unconsciously within the text. Philip M. Weinstein confirms this assessment in his claim that Faulkner’s achievement is inseparable from his own “raced and gendered positioning and from [his] grasp upon the ferment of [his] times” (Weinstein 165). Perhaps Faulkner really did believe that the easiest and least violent way for peace to ensue in a polarized South would be the integration of African Americans into white society. In any case, Faulkner’s creation of Joe Christmas as protagonist shows a deep mistrust of racial divisiveness and classification, as well as a profound understanding of the delicacy of identity and the relationship between internal and external recognition.

The tenuous nature of Faulkner’s writing process and the way in which his numerous, and apparently strenuous, revisions of the novel can inform its meaning and the reader’s understanding of the author’s purpose have been utilized to further explore elements of the work. In Regina K. Fadiman’s examination of the various Light in August manuscripts, she finds that Faulkner amplified the uncertainty of particular circumstances over the course of the novel’s composition. For example, the reader never concretely discovers whether Joe is actually “part-Negro,” “Mexican,” or perhaps some other ethnicity; neither does s/he know if Joe killed his stepfather Simon McEachern or his lover Joanna Burden. The novel also abandons Joe’s internal perspective after his capture in Mottstown, making his second escape inexplicable and enigmatic. By leaving these major events obscure, Faulkner stresses the irrelevance of factual events and forces the reader to assume and imagine conclusions. Fadiman emphasizes Faulkner’s concern with “what the mind can believe without ever really knowing,” and how he induces this reaction in his reader by refusing them the satisfaction of “solving the riddle;” instead he reveals the impossibility of discovering the riddle’s solution (Fadiman 165). In this sense, his aesthetic and contextual aims work in similar ways: while he creates a fictional world that explores the political and social repercussions of race in a particular historical moment, he also constructs an aesthetic relic (the novel itself ) that outlives the context of the novel’s setting. The simple existence and distribution of the novel opens up infinite possibilities of discourse that were impossible or inconceivable in its contemporary moment. The ambiguity of key events validates multiple interpretations.

Like Fadiman, Doreen Fowler writes that throughout Light in August characters act solely upon their own perceptions instead of any “empirical sense.” Each character is driven by his/her individual narrative of history and experience, and his/her interpretation of these creates the “reality” in which

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s/he moves. “For this reason, what exists, in an empirical sense, is without consequence and irrelevant, while that which men believe...determines the course of the future and is...true” (Fowler 33). Fowler aims to show that Joe’s perceived “black blood” is only that, a perception; there is no evidence deeming it so. Joe moves through his life as a mythic presence, ghostly and detached. He believes he cannot reconcile his two imaginary racial halves, imaginary only because they are not empirical. Faulkner’s notion of “truth” is different for every individual and community and manifests in the internal narrative of each individual/consciousness.

In her article “Light in August in Light of Foucault: Reexamining the Biracial Experience,” Bethany L. Lam asserts that “in a Foucauldian paradigm, one might view race as a visual discourse” (Lam 50). This discourse is powerful in society because it produces stereotypes based on visual difference, so race “becomes an indicator of societal expectations for a person, to which that person more or less conforms” (Lam 50). The very existence of a biracial person transgresses the limits of normal visual discourse because s/he is inherently unable to conform to one category. Miscegenation poses a threat to white supremacist power, to tradition and to the racial hierarchy by which southern culture is defined. What daunts supremacists further is the inherent reality of multiracial reproduction, or the “contamination” of their blood.

In response, Lam suggests, a biracial individual can “attempt to marginalize society, just as society is marginalizing him,” although such an attempt, as we see evident in Joe’s actions, is a hazardous and complex (Lam 53). Joe responds with violence to classification, and strengthens the stereotype of miscegenation producing violent individuals. Therefore his actions support the community’s misconceived “truth” and legitimize the use of violence against him. Joe fails at marginalizing society as he ultimately falls victim to it.

Light in August is concerned with the consequences of memory, history, and social relation, none of which are tangible or closed concepts - though all of them play key roles in an individual’s sense of self. The ambiguous profoundness of the first sentence of the sixth chapter, “Memory believes before knowing remembers,” captures the mental space in which Joe moves and identifies, and it acts as a signal of value in the novel (Faulkner 119). This value lies in the exchange of meaning between individual and community that occurs through simple consciousness, characteristically defined by its abstract and intangible nature. Joe believes he has “Negro-blood” because of internalized social rejection – the taunting children at the orphanage, the coldness of Mr. McEachern, Bobbie’s rejection of marriage, and Joanna’s insistence upon accepting his “blackness” – all of these episodes expand

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the disconnect between his internal and external situation. Despite a lack of factual evidence, his consciousness is shaped by the hypothesis that he is isolated, and he trusts his memory in its knowing that the reason must be his “blackness.” He therefore creates a reality in which he denies meaningful relations with communities, and instead creates a sphere of existence in which he rejects all forms of conformity, a “narrative of endurance.”

Although Joe Christmas is no admirable character, Faulkner makes clear that his actions are shaped less by his own will than the societal norms and pressures that compose his environment. Joe has internalized the negative perceptions cast upon him; his inability to connect comes from his lack of a convivial place to exist. James A. Snead states that despite the novel’s “emphasis on perception,” it actually handles in “what people fail to perceive” (Snead 160). What characters fail to perceive in the novel is the absence of a proper metanarrative. Joe searches for a social space in which he can easily survive, but such a space may yet be nonexistent or imaginary. Unfortunately, there is no proper place for Joe in Jefferson; no matter where he goes, he is an outsider. However, Faulkner’s representation of Joe’s alienation does foreshadow the necessity of racial coexistence. According to Snead, Faulkner depicts “omniscience as unreliability” because “the narrator is actively creating error” throughout the novel (Snead 160). Consequently, “fact” is produced through “arbitrary codes of dominance,” which the reader must internalize in order to maneuver through the text (Snead 160). In this reading, the novel foreshadows postmodernism. In its rejection of existing metanarratives, its encouragement of active reader/writer exchange, and its intricate exploration of identity and areas of silence, the novel functions as a hotbed for postmodern sensibilities. The ambiguity of important plot developments in Light in August denies the reader the sense of control and certainty that would normally give him/her power over the text. In this sense, “Christmas represents the aporia that comes when real events do not replicate social expectations”; simultaneously, Faulkner’s aesthetic approach results in an aporia of intent and interpretation (Snead 161). By recognizing these elements in Faulkner’s fiction, readers are able to analyze how texts inform and speak to each other through time.

Werner explains how African-American critics have embraced Faulkner in the last twenty years in “Minstrel Nightmares: Black Dreams of Faulkner’s Dreams of Blacks.” While the initial phase of critics was mainly concerned with correcting Faulkner’s misconceptions about African Americans, this recent flux is interested in his focus “on the cost of excluding ‘others’ - either racial or sexual - from active participation in the dialogue necessary to the

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excavation of history” (Werner 37). Coming to terms with their past and creating their history also means accepting the “other” (in this case, the white man), causing critics to engage the “call-and-response dynamic of AfroAmerican expression as a way of mediating between individual and communal values” (Werner 38). This response to Faulkner lies in his “true representation” of racial and sexual conflicts and lends a dimension of insight to “the white poet’s” perception of African Americans in history. Though his objective gaze is often praised, Faulkner is criticized for missing the “underlying dynamic of Afro-American experience” (Werner 42). Interestingly, there is a continuity between African-American narrative patterns and “Faulknerian motifs,” primarily the alienation and isolation from the white male world that is experienced by a marginalized character. Joe Christmas is a prime example; however, Faulkner’s racially othered characters are usually tragic, subject to “a narrative of endurance, a static, past-oriented framework,” instead of the movement-oriented narratives of “ascent or immersion” present in AfricanAmerican narratives (Werner 42). Critics have also applied the “minstrel dynamic” to Faulkner’s fiction, where characters are interpreted as a parody of African-American behavior. This informs the intertextual presence of discourse about African Americans in literature; each representation is based upon a previous representation, creating a collective discourse of stereotypes that dictate social performance. Werner also relates this dynamic to representations of women, especially black women, who have internalized a “narrative of endurance,” being doubly “othered.” Joe can be viewed as completely “othered,” the absence of his parents ensured his otherness, and his mixed race locked him in it. However, what remains of Joe’s experience, the novel Light in August, has informed literary discourse for nearly eighty years, and has expanded African-American history, creating an intertextual space where “others” learn from each other, instead of insisting on extreme power struggles (Werner 55). This impulse is apparent throughout Light in August.

Consider the description of Joe’s death and how it, in particular the image of his (black) blood, becomes a relic for the community: “Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading

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and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.” (Faulkner 465, emphasis mine) The image of his blood is tattooed into the community’s collective memory and will inevitably become part of its history. The “it” in this paragraph specifically refers to Joe’s blood, his very source of struggle, and strangely it becomes transformed into an aesthetic artifact, “of itself alone triumphant.”

The triumph of community over criminal helps society file Joe Christmas away into the category of “nigger murderer.” By doing this, the community normalizes him and re-establishes previous misconceptions by blaming his crimes on his race.

What Faulkner shows readers is how individual and collective opinions, standards and/or desires shape ideas of self, environment, and truth. The internal and external are dependent on one another. When his characters believe something to be “true,” their lives become defined by that truth.

Subsequently, Fowler writes, they become locked in a circle where “a set of unquestioned assumptions forms the basis for a code of behavior which elicits responses that reinforce the original assumptions and behavior” (35).

This is evident in Lena’s consistent retelling of her story. Her utter disregard or ignorance of other people’s reception of it, as well as her innocent belief that she will find her child’s father, place Lena outside the circle of norms.

Rather, she represents a kind of fluidity and faith in life that has no place in a politicized society. Likewise, Joe continues to react with violence to social classifications and remains isolated; thus, he too exists in an asocial space. His unknown parentage, and subsequent absence of a personal history, agitates his sense of value and relation; he has no trustworthy authoritative narrative on which to base his own. He feels he must be either black or white, because those are the two prominent races and the most conflicting, even though he has no empirical information about his genetics. Faulkner makes clear the ridiculousness of Joe’s entire life - his struggles over blacks and whites, his violent responses - when he reveals that his father might have been a Mexican.

To use race as an identifying factor becomes death in Light in August.

But there is hope in Lena’s [possibly biracial] newborn child, who will have a mother and therefore be loved, something Joe never had. She represents the fluid progression of life that ensures the good as well as the bad. The recent renaissance in Faulkner studies by African-American critics offers an interesting and valuable relationship between Faulkner’s construction of racial identity, his emphatic view of the “other,” and his aesthetic response to social injustice; this relationship correlates with Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s call for a

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“black aesthetic.” The importance of creating art about personal experience is to remain in an area of discourse, in the pages of history. By focusing on racial relations so seriously, and by portraying its creator’s Faulknerian truths, Light in August opens and brings into focus a turbulent moment in history.

Works Cited Fadiman, Regina K. Faulkner’s Light in August: A Description and Interpretation of the Revisions. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975. Print Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Random House, Inc.,1932.

Print.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Writing, Race, and the Difference It Makes.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 3rd ed. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 1891-1902. Print.

Fowler, Doreen. Faulkner’s Changing Vision: From Outrage to Affirmation.

Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983. Print.

Lam, Bethany L. “Light in August in Light of Foucault: Reexamining the Biracial Experience.” Arizona Quarterly Monthly. 64.4. 49-68. JSTOR. 22 April 2010. Web. Snead, James A. “Light in August and the Rhetorics of Racial Division.”

Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1986. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. 152-169. Print.

Weinstein, Philip M. “The Circulation of Social Energy: Race, Gender, and Value in Light in August and Beloved.” What Else But Love?. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 156-183. Print.

Werner, Craig. “Black Dreams of Faulkner‘s Dreams of Blacks.” Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1986. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. 35-57. Print.

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Mistake #12-

The last three weeks I lost

by Danielle Hamilton “It is such a pleasure to burn”—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 the Poetry War, words absent, like a spider vanished from an overturned plastic cup. Houdini with a hat trick. A large hat.

I shook my head as if my mane were wet to try and make them form, but the words wisped away, creeping out through the sutures in my skull like green plastic men with a mission to fly. If I were from certain places in South America, my metopic suture might not fuse until I was in my twenties—the space above my nose and between two eyes ajar like a child’s soft spot—but I am not and I am twenty and the words still seep out as if evaporated by the sun. In a dark room, the words are swallowed, pigmented over until they could not be seen even if made of neon or mercury. If my words are Juliet and Juliet is the sun then the sun must be selfish—a tease of insurmountable measures, a fishing line cast out to catch me by the lip or tongue and tug, leaving a mute poet drowning, watching words slide off her tongue and swim like the fish above her, desperate for the sun, desperate to breathe. It must be such a pleasure to burn. And if the sun should break through the waves, deep down, twenty thousand leagues under the sea to where I am, I will have nothing.

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How to Be a Man

by Ryan Bollenbach

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tart with examples of famous men that came before you like Sean Connery, Ernest Hemingway and George Clooney. Be careful not to mimic them. Instead of becoming unresponsive in the exact same way they do: by diverting your attention to poker, hunting, or super heroism—echo examples from real life to create your own quiet demeanor.

Note the conduct of Mike, your best friend in the first two years of college, with his downplayed smirk as Sheena giddily confessed to a table of four guys that she had sucked his dick the night before. Remember how his lips hovered deceptively close to a straight face, and how, through doe eyed glances, Sheena noticed his smug facial gesture. It heightened her admonition, but you almost failed to notice his display of nonchalance at all.

In your research, forget the dark shade of pink your cheeks turned as you looked around the table, hoping that any one of your suddenly quiet friends was also uncomfortable with her testimony of fellatio. Try to forget the exact length she gave the table: seven inches, and how you said to your other friends that she was trashy and that Mike acted cocky around her even though you secretly admired that she could talk suggestively to a table of eligible bachelors while making it clear that her loyalty lay with Mike alone.

Forget, too, that you may never find a woman who is that excited to have sex with you. Before anything else, a man understands how he feels about women. You must come to understand your own feelings on women through isolated deliberation, so that when faced with the unblemished, perfumed shoulder of feminine rejection, you will never fall into even a temporary admission of love struck hysteria. Although this will not get you on the Time’s one hundred sexiest men list, it will provide you with the means to have a fling with a modestly attractive brunette at your apartment, complete with

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moaning, grunting, and smoke billowing over her thigh in the wake of the ceiling fan. No call the next day.

Learn to multi-task. Some men employ the use of multiple personalities, one for each woman, in order to better appeal to their feminine desires. Like Branden, who at one point had juggled one girlfriend and two friends with benefits. Notice the personality he took on when spending time with each.

With Jen, he was a loquacious and quirky man who, though he could be obscene or strange at times, mainly used words like cute and cuddle. He would only ever whisper to her when he wanted to call her sexy, as if her outwardly average exterior enticed him in ways only she should know.

When he went to the bar with Lisa, he was arrogant, boisterous and madly in lust, demanding more shots in-between kissing Lisa’s neck as she rubbed her butt to his groin before each toast. He always spoke loudly, not worried about who heard, telling Lisa and the rest of the bar that he hoped she was ready to be naughty when they got home.

Around Kelsey, his girlfriend and your favorite of the three, he was the Branden you preferred. He diverged from controlled displays of character and played into the mood of the group, sometimes waxing philosophic, other times laughing a dorky laugh at the slightly-racist jokes, a combination of Whose Line and the Chapelle Show, that your friends like to tell when they are stoned; the kind of joke that would perhaps be too out there to Jen and boring to Lisa.

Remember to forget that you felt jealous of Branden. He seemed happy as he charmed each of those girls during a time when you were having trouble finding a girl you even wanted to talk to. Try not to consider the time, three months after Kelsey and Branden had finally broken up, that he posted a bulletin on MySpace saying he hated “you” because Dinosaur Jr. would “never be the same.” Even though it was supposed to be cryptic, you knew that Kelsey had given him “Dinosaur Jr’s Greatest Hits” for Christmas and you saw later that her only response to his bulletin was an ellipsis.

Don’t revisit too closely your empathy when you saw, in plain Times New Roman, the ellipsis that made you want to call him to make sure he was okay, because silence from your first girlfriend was the response that kept you up that night, laying in bed and listening to Sigur Ros on repeat for four hours, trying not to throw up from nervousness until eight in the morning when you

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let yourself soak in lukewarm bathwater to calm yourself enough and finally fall asleep.

Think instead, of how Mike would have handled that silence: going out with his drinking buddies to play pool and drink pitcher after pitcher of Bud Light. Don’t make guesses about how the shoving match that Mike got into after a short Australian man came and ripped his pool stick out of his hands arrived less from his masculinity, and more because he hadn’t seen Sheena in over four months and probably went most places irritated because he didn’t know what stage their relationship was at. Instead, leave it at how the Australian guy would have gotten his ass kicked had Mike actually thrown a punch.

Men like Bill Murray and Steve Buscemi would probably handle the situation similarly, but not as violently, by showing vague signs that they are recollecting lost time spent with women while sitting at a bar drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes, tipping big but stopping at very buzzed, then walking to their limo and riding home; they would talk to the limo driver this time because he was the only one they had.

Realize that all men are method actors. Understand that even if their acts don’t work the best, they come from real experiences. Like how, when giving a friend late night advice on the phone you usually take the rational voice. You always stop yourself before telling her that you think she is selling herself short by worrying about her ex when you have seen her take stone-faced silence from him in response to a direct question asked in front of three other people, a gesture that you consider hostile at best. You still speak calmly on the phone even though, as her speech patterns become more heavy and erratic, you become closer to hanging up over the feeling that you have had this talk with her before. You are just as unwilling now as you ever were to take a risk towards her and demand as strongly it requires that she should just stop talking to him all together.

Draw parallels between how you act on the phone and how your father acted when he use to come home from work at eleven o’clock at night, three hours late, and your mom would yell at him; she thought he could’ve been in an accident, that he should have called her, and that he should show more backbone and tell his cheapskate boss that he owes him a raise. Consider how he never raised his voice to defend himself, instead choosing to calmly and arduously telling her why he was at the shop so late: his boss made him to clean out all of the old computer parts then load them in his truck so he could

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drop them off at the dump in the morning.

If you were in his shoes, you would be very upset, but you’d use the same measured tone. Think about the nobility of his calmness—how it always made your father seem like he had an eerie omniscience in those late night arguments, even if he wasn’t wise with finances. Realize that you probably picked up your low-key telephone voice from your father, and that your father probably got his from his father because every description you have heard about your Grampy was one of solemnity.

When finishing the phone conversation, don’t think about the disparity between your desire to avoid pushing your friend so hard that you make her feel ineffective and the possibility that by not saying enough you let her think that you don’t care. Maybe, as a friend, you are falling short because sometimes you are too scared of the commitment of giving advice because doing so could leave you with personal liability. Instead, you prefer to float in and out of people’s lives in fear of the responsibility of bonding.

Focus on the aspect of manliness that is most useful to you at the time. Do not always act cavalier. Act forthcoming when you meet a tall, elegant woman at the bar who makes a simple outfit—a plain black shirt, medium fitting blue jeans, and black and white vinyl shoes—into a display of her artistic reserve by showing she has conquered the urge to dress in tacky clothing that arises when working full-time at the vintage clothing shop, Le France.

Fall into contemplative and thoughtful glances at her boldly un-made-up cheeks as she reveals that she too feels that central Florida is a huge pocket of rampant conservatism, sexism, and all of the other-isms that go with the simple Ford Truck men of the area. Don’t be afraid to open your mouth and eyes extra wide when she tells you that she too likes Joanna Newsom, Beach House, and the Arcade Fire, a fact that means that she has a real interest in unique music because she is willing to hazard the frustration of navigating the deepest realms of the Internet to find it. Open your eyes even wider when she tells you that, despite one billion to one odds, she too has been to your hometown of Sundance and went to your Alma mater, even though she graduated ten years before you even started high school.

Reacting positively and allowing her to control the situation will make her feel like you two are really connecting. Ignore your instincts to turn away from her because she is thirty four and must have so much more sexual experience than you. Having sex with her would leave you feeling like a dirty child, but

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you assume it would be, must be, an inevitable consequence of a second or third meeting.

When it is time to go and Branden tells you it’s time to get her number, don’t try to distance yourself from Branden so much that you purposely avoid asking for her number despite the risk that you are quashing a friendship that could relax and enlighten you by exposing you to someone who is so much more cultivated than you. Most of all don’t let your ego sour the tangible attraction you feel towards her.

The next night, with all of the complications of being a man still swirling in your head, remember, after twenty one years of swearing off alcohol afraid that you may use it as a crutch, that it is okay to sit in front of the T.V. with your father drinking a bottle of Samuel Adams, making fart noises at the T.V. whenever Sean Connery bends over, and then falling asleep watching Dr. No. Have a plan. Men like Morgan Freeman and Walter Cronkite are so wise they seem like they would have figured out the meaning of life at eighteen.

In their wisdom, they understand that even for a man, plans get lost in the ebb. Other men, like your longtime friend and band mate Jonpaul, go into situations with only a vague idea of how to fulfill their needs.

Recall how after receiving a cell phone call from his girlfriend of three years, Amber, telling him that she had made out with one of her coworkers, Jonpaul immediately broke up with her to start dating other women. First, to boost his ego, he went on some casual dates with girls who found his being in post-hardcore bands sexy, despite not appreciating the music as deeply as he did. Second, the girl who would fill his physical needs, who he dated for about a month, who was more sexually open than the ones he usually went with, who was rumored to have given him head on their first date, whose relaxing clothes were an extra low cut black t-shirt under a black corset and a dark red skirt, who had a tattoo of the fruit of Eden on her right shoulder blade, and who always seemed invigorated by him even if their biggest common interest was the TV show Scrubs. Third, the girl who could fill his needs for society, who despite living two hours away was with him every week, who he always seemed to be in a silent argument with, but was always willing to go to Mike’s and get drunk with him, who took him to Applebee’s for food and beer on his birthday only hours after he had puked up beer on his front patio just as his mother walked outside.

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In between all of those girls there were whispers of Amber: the girl who he thought had fulfilled all of his needs. Whispers of him trying to talk to her and that he hated her wana-be gangster boyfriends. The whispers always led to late-night debates at Denny’s because he still believed in romantic fate. He still believed he was fated for Amber. You maintain that destiny is bullshit. You believe that he is simply unwilling to let go of an ideal that he will never admit gives him more pain than its worth.

The clearest indicator of the wisdom men gain comes from Jonpaul’s nod, confirming something Mike said: the cliché that no matter how many girls you fuck, you can’t get that “one” out of your head is true. When hearing this, don’t worry about hypocrisy. Don’t go back on how you thought they were sad and a little pathetic for seeking easy girls who you thought were less interesting than them. Don’t worry about how you distanced yourself from them because of their transgressions even though they were making honest attempts to grow when you weren’t.

Stop before you realize that you, to this day, still mostly take active steps to end any hope of intimacy in relationships with women by diverting conversations towards dick jokes, and only giving shallow compliments to women about their fashion sense in order to avoid closeness. Don’t dare think about how you have talked down and looked down on your friends, who have remained more loyal to you than you to them, for having an ego, despite the truth that your conduct around women is just as contrived as theirs, only for the opposite reason. Don’t dwell on the fact that you are willing to kill a few more relationships while waiting passively for a cliché lesson that fixes it all.

You know that in some form or another, the lesson has already come a million times before and that you’ve denied it because you were too afraid of what it might teach you. By thinking a little less and following these simple examples, you can be a man too.

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mine

by Palmer Hennessey Cole

while you stare at this page you can’t possibly see the strings that now connect you to me watch me pull and yank your porcelain puppet eyes line by line feel me slide my ink stained fist under your sweaty shirt inside your broken back my dummy when I speak you speak when I breathe, you breathe, you’re going to need it as I rip your jeans at the seam choking your stolen flesh with the power of possession don’t worry you’re safe as can be sitting in your chair it’s only my fingers you feel running through your hair

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a last caress to remind that before I go to feel me burn in your mind that this second this moment I’ve made you

Biblical Redaction:

D.H. Lawrence, Nietzsche, and Negative Religiosity

by Paul Vinhage

As for the appearance of their faces: the four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle. (Ezek. 1.10)

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nticipating modernist sensibilities, Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1895, published his renunciation and refutation of Christian morality and belief Der Antichrist. D.H. Lawrence, influenced by Nietzsche philosophically, published his poems Birds, Beasts, and Flowers! in 1923. Central to the collection are four poems concerning the Evangelistic Beasts; Lawrence uses these symbols of the evangelists to posit his own critique of Christianity and its moral philosophy. Through an examination of Lawrence’s relations to the Bible, Christian tradition and Nietzsche, I intend to show how his redactionist theory of the evangels and consequent negative religiosity arise.

Lawrence begins his exegetical negation with St. Matthew, the man. In this first poem Lawrence sets up two distinctions: light and dark, and surface and depth. “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your body will be full of darkness” (Matt. 6.22-23). Besides the implication of a ‘real’ behind an apparent world (i.e. the light revealing, as a lamp, the darkness of the body and appearance) there is the moral implication that light is good and darkness evil.

Revising this dualism, Lawrence writes: And I must resume my nakedness like a fish, sinking down the dark reversion of night Like a fish seeking the bottom, Jesus, ΙΧΘΥΣ Face downwards

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Veering slowly Down between the steep slopes of darkness, fucus-dark, seaweed-fringed valleys of the waters under the sea Over the edge of the soundless cataract Into the fathomless, bottomless pit Where my soul falls in the last throes of bottomless convulsion, and is fallen Utterly beyond Thee, Dove of the Spirit; Beyond everything, except itself. (58-59) The immediate image is the fish, which takes on a chthonic and Dionysian character, in opposition to Jesus who can walk on water (Matt. 14.22-27) but cannot explore the depths. Plunging into the darkness and depth of the water, the fish becomes a symbol of self-psychology, which revises and reverses Christian psychology (theology) that intrinsically seeks to look away from oneself, toward God. Looking to the Sermon on the Mount for moral guidance one finds not a will to control passions, but a will to abnegate passions. So, Jesus preaches divine reason and logic over passion (logos over pathos), but he “canst not quaff out the dregs of terrestrial manhood” (Lawrence 59). Through Nietzsche, Lawrence plunges back to Pre-Platonic thought, avoiding the remorseless logic of the Son of Man and Nietzsche’s view of Platonic anathema: “reason=virtue=happiness” (Nietzsche 43).

The next poem in the series evokes the beast of St. Mark, a lion with wings.

Lawrence uses the central image of the lamb inveigling the lion. The Gospel of Mark parallels the situation with the purgation of the Gerasene, Legion and Jesus’ arguments with the Pharisees. First, the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5.1-20) is a man possessed by the demon Legion, a reference to the Roman occupation of Israel and Judah in the first century CE. However, we must read further. The demoniac not only symbolizes the physical occupation of Israel, but also mental and cultural occupation. Expurgation erases the entirety of Classicism, Greco-Roman culture or what Lawrence calls voluptuousness, from the mind of Christians. Lawrence captures this change in the lines: So nine-tenths asleep, motionless, bored, and statically angry, He saw in a shaft of light a lamb on a pinnacle, balancing a flag on its paw,

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And he was thoroughly startled. […] He found the lamb beyond him, on the inaccessible pinnacle of light. […]Hence he became a curly sheep-dog with dangerous propensities […]Ramping around, guarding the flock of mankind. (62) Mark’s lion, once in repose, now must guard the lamb’s flock. Juxtaposing the culled lion with the herd of pigs, the reader receives a composite image of diaspora (perhaps destruction), not of Jews, but Gentiles. If one applies Nietzsche’s logic of Christianity, “this underhanded bigotry, conventicle secrecy, gloomy concepts such as Hell...unio mystica…that is what became master of Rome”, in other words, the lamb tames the lion, and thus deprives him agon, the Hellenic will to struggle (Nietzsche 193). Ironically, Jesus’ words to the Pharisees hold true; “For it is from within the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7.21); Christianity defiled Rome from within (Nietzsche’s theory, and very much Gibbon’s).

Besides the lamb’s innocuation (sic) (also, inoculation, and unoculation) of the lion, there remains the dualism of height and depth, heaven and earth.

Lawrence asks: Why should he have wings?

Is he to be a bird also?

Or a spirit?

Or a winged thought?

Or a soaring consciousness? (61) The image of removal from the earth pervades the poem. Christian signification of rebirth after death, evidenced in Mark 9.31(the second announcement) leads to a rejection of the ‘apparent’ world. For Lawrence this is a loss of sight, a loss of sense in a world yearning for resurrection. The oncenoble, once-fierce lion succumbs to senescence, “going blind at last” (Lawrence 61). While Christianity opens the eye/lantern to the Kingdom of God, it blinds the eye to the physical/material.

Having established the renunciation of the self as Christian dogma, Lawrence moves to the problem of passion in his poem St. Luke. Using the beatitudes and the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 17-49) as model for Christian morality, one finds stagnation and passivity instead of struggle/agon. “Do to others as you would have done to you” (Luke 6.31) operates under an

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absolutist philosophy; humans wish only to have good done unto them. If this utopian fantasia came to life, the world would crystallize. The very concept of action against another becomes lost; there is no refutation or revision, but only stillness. Modernist redaction sought to abolish the gradually freezing intellectual atmosphere with movement, heat, and noise. Lawrence’s bull in St. Luke is a vessel for the passions, for the will to struggle and battle. Lawrence describes the bull’s chest and heart: Nay, once it was also a fortress wall, and the weight of a vast battery.

But now it is a burning hearthstone only, Massive old altar of his own burnt offering. […] But also it was fiery fortress frowning shaggily on the world And announcing battle ready. (65) Like the lion before him, the bull also “serves the Son of Man”. The only respite against domesticity is sex, but even then sex is only one passion of many latent in humanity. This outlet “[constrains the bull] to pour forth all his fire down the narrow sluice of procreation / through such narrow loins, too narrow” (Lawrence 65). Erotic love is not the only human passion, and reducing all passion to such is dangerous. (There is still philia and agape love.)

Agape replaces eros in Christ. The selfless love, the love of tax collectors and bawds harms an innocent practitioner; prostrating yourself before your enemy is only an effective strategy insofar as your enemy feels guilt and remorse.

Christian passivity leads a people to exploitation.

Frustrated by governmental and ecclesiastical abuses, Lawrence writes, “So it is war. / The bull of the proletariat has got his head down” (Lawrence 66). The political swerve at the end of the poem grounds it in a modern context. Attempting to avoid the monstrous influences of history and religion, Lawrence looks to new thought and generates his own. Using Nietzsche’s Anti-Christian sentiment, Lawrence, like his bull, is able to charge out of the mean influences about him. Social change is impossible through passivity, so Lawrence advises activism. He revises Luke’s beatitudes, and they become not a mark of blessedness, but ironic fasces to placate exploited peoples.

The final poem in the series, St. John, grapples with the theological conception of Christ. Lawrence, blasting Christian morality and psychology in the previous three poems, now confronts the Word, logos. Recalling the ichthus from St. Matthew Lawrence uses the eagle of St. John to focus his dialectic of height. For his interpretation Lawrence uses the beginning of John’s gospel ( John 1.1-5). The poem often provides images of fantastic or unearthly

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height. “Oh that mind-soaring eagle of an Evangelist / Staring creation out of countenance / And telling it off / As an eagle staring down on the Sun!” (Lawrence 67) (Note the pun on sun/son.) In a Nietzschean sense John possesses the Hamlet intellect of The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche 39). He is far beyond the material world, much like the divine Jesus, who lives beyond men, at least beyond their comprehension. When Jesus speaks with Nicodemus ( John 3.1-21) he expresses a key idea, “you must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” ( John 3.7-8). This elucidates Lawrence’s claim, “he was one of Nature’s phenomena, no doubt” (Lawrence 67). Jesus as a force of Nature, an inevitable, immortal aura, must be so if he was conceived at the same time as the universe. However, this creates a paradox within the Son of Man; he is a man and a god, contemporaneous and timeless, and one who dies for all (a remorseless logic). Jesus qua wind, a natural metaphor, bestows preternatural power. While Jesus is a man, he is so far beyond humanity he can only look down. The enlightened Christian can only look down, not within himself; his Spirit overwhelms his flesh and he becomes a man removed from himself and the Earth.

When Christian logic comes under scrutiny and the ideal must meet reality, the modern agon ensues. When the process of redaction begins and negates religiosity, one falls hard from our airy vagaries of faith. Lawrence describes this when John’s eagle falls from grace: Shoo it down out of the empyrean Of the all-seeing, all-fore-ordaining ideal.

Make it roost on bird-spattered, rocky Patmos And let it moult there, among the stones of the bitter sea.

For the almighty eagle of the fore-ordaining Mind Is looking rather shabby and island-bound these days; Moulting, and rather naked about the rump, and down in the beak, Rather dirty, on dung-whitened Patmos. (68) Nietzsche’s nausea comes to mind, and the reader feels a strong sense of disgrace. Once humans “put salt on its tail,” or catch the bird, understand John’s argument and analyze it, they pull down its divinity into a negative apocalypse, thus the inclusion of Patmos. Stripped of fantastic miracles, of good deeds, of good intent, of divinity, what remains is a carpenter with a

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knack for parables whose philosophy has warped and expurgated humanity’s naturalism.

In a final ironic flourish Lawrence stages a mock resurrection: Ah Phoenix, Phoenix John’s Eagle!

You are only known to us now as the badge of an insurance Company.

Phoenix, Phoenix The nest is in flames Feathers are singeing, Ash flutters flocculent, like down on a blue, wan fledgling. (69) Lawrence’s redaction finally complete, he creates an image of Christianity in the modern world. The resurrected phoenix, a symbol of resurrected logic, resurrected religion, is only a puling babe, not the majestic Christ rising from his tomb to join God in Heaven. Giving symbolic and imagistic life to Nietzsche, Lawrence reveals that Christianity has become a morbid philosophy, “Nothing is worth anything - life is not worth anything” (Nietzsche 99). In a world removed from religious ceremony but pervaded by religious morality (an irony in itself ), the once bold eagle turns into a chick (something to be pitied, not respected).

Negating Christian morality, Nietzsche’s exuberant refusal of passivity (saying No to the Naysayers, and Yes to life) sets the tone, the chords, the mode, for modernist artists and thinkers for the next century. Christian tradition, as posited in the four canonical Gospels, became a philosophical and moral nodus which could not be worked out with logic. Only through redaction, through a negative revision of the text, could Lawrence expose the Bible to its instabilities; expose its water and wind to a chthonos and phlegethon of Hellenica which is more lively, active, and exuberant.

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Works Cited The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Michael D. Coogan. New York: Oxford, 2007. Print.

Lawrence, D.H. Birds, Beasts and Flowers! Boston: Black Sparrow Books, 2007. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

---. The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music. Trans. Shaun Whiteside.

Ed. Michael Tanner. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print

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Sink

by Thomas Neubauer

H

ave you seen my beer stained carpet? A reddish-brown stain in the back bedroom of my parent’s home. In my younger days, I would smuggle in a pint or two to pass the days until high school was over. A glut or two, but mostly sips, until one day, I left the bottle on the floor and knocked it over.

Reminds me of the pools that formed from tapped kegs in my dorm room at college. Raves and parties were the social norm. Garnishes and umbrellas would float along the tile floor like a miniature navy.

My apartment was a floating cruise. By the time I flunked school, rum was spilling out the door. Cans of soda bumping into my shins while I shuffled to the kitchen in the tiny cramped studio flat. My girlfriend’s cigarette butts puffing and swelling as the ripple tide takes me out the doorway.

The furniture in my condo is almost submerged by a lake of vodka. An orange couch and raspberry hutch are the last to go, dipping beneath the surface of the still water like the beach knoll of a forgotten paradise. I go back for seconds.

The swells are forming in my rented house, bounding into my chest as I wade to the bathroom to vomit. My wife floats along the gin river on her inflatable mattress. Pushing herself along the gentle current that takes her through the hallway and into the family room.

A sea of whiskey is eclipsing the window and up to my chin. A river of wine is winding down the staircase of our two story home. Our children slide down it, squealing merrily.

I drown myself on the recliner. The drink filled to the ceiling, burying me inside. The sounds of those around me, smothered and compressed by the weight of it all crashing down around me. The liquor burns as I open my eyes.

And all I took was a sip.

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Once, I Dated Ernest Hemingway

by Rachel Fogarty

He knew people everywhere we went, and I started to realize that the world he roamed was much larger than mine.

That was the attraction.

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Ice and Seashells

by Rachel Fogarty

‌and I suddenly do not understand why I fold into myself like a piece of origami, lines pressed, visible sharp creases; to put it bluntly, I am worried. Where is winter?

She has not yet shown her face, and as a matter of taste I wish she would never return. The cold ice covered windshields, the whispers of frost bite, the search for shelter, the white chapped lips and burning red hands; those enraptured snapshots have no place here. I am too engaged to want hibernation.

I know she will come.

I want to watch the healthy wild grasses continue to grow; the scattered seeds that break through soil, the marigolds in bloom like young lovers. I want river lights with pulse-quickening colors.

I want riveting, not gray prosaic January days. I want to stave off the winter skeletons, and the icicles that hang from the ragged margins of wool sweaters.

I know she will come.

I want to celebrate a Florida Christmas, the windows open – a cool watery breeze wafting through the wrappings and bows, imagine the smell of warm open air coupled with vanilla eggnog; the sounds of happy children like a seashell to your ear, the assemblage of generations on a front porch and moss covered oak trees.

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I know she will come.

The cold is as bitter as a bare stone. It is rimless dark and tracks left in the snow; it is misery—a wind-blown spectacle. It is weather with pauses that are deep and long; it is a movie you cannot remember nor forget.

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Parallels

a screenplay by Neil Pepi

Ext. outdoor café At a table, BENNETT is looking at papers in front of him, while his friend, DAVID, is leaning back, nonchalant. ENOCH is sitting on the concrete nearby with a cup and a sign, begging for change. His sign reads “in need, food or money please” in scribbled marker.

BENNETT So I think if we merge these two paragraphs that could make for a de-cent structure. Not only are they parallels, but the one depends on the other, so it seems like they should at least be next to each other. I just want to make this report as impressive as possible; I mean, you’re the only one in the office right now that knows anything about me.

DAVID Ok, ok Ben, whatever you want, as long as I get my sandwich. Speaking of which…where…is…that waitress…

DAVID looks around the group of tables for a WAITRESS to harass while BENNETT works more on the papers.

DAVID (off to the side in whatever direction he’s looking at) I swear, the food’s delicious, but sometimes they make me wonder if it’s really worth it.

BENNETT doesn’t hear him as he is too involved in the work he’s doing, now with his hand in his hair in thoughtful frustration. DAVID turns back and

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leans in towards BENNETT. DAVID Talk about the pick of the litter though, damn. This waitress now, she may not be speedy but she has a body that says she deserves a nice tip.

DAVID whistles, but BENNETT doesn’t respond. DAVID looks around a bit, feeling rejected, before looking back at BENNETT. DAVID You know, we at least used to be able to talk about shit like women. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Em turned you gay.

BENNETT looks up and shakes his head.

BENNETT Wait, what?

DAVID (loud enough to draw attention) You know, Emily, she got you whipped?

DAVID accompanies his comment with an equally loud whip sound and motion to further his point.

BENNETT Jesus, way to make a scene… And no, she’s… well she… I don’t know, I don’t think so.

BENNETT pushes off the subject and returns to his work. After a moment to recollect his thoughts, he looks back up at DAVID. BENNETT (quickly) See, it’s not that she’s overbearing or at least no more than she’s ever been, but I feel like…

DAVID Shit’s gettin’ dry?

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BENNETT No, no, it’s not that, it’s just that I feel like I’m…stuck. You know?

DAVID Stuck in a rut? ‘Cause I know you think you’re some sort of white knight, but if you really need to get off, there are things you can do about it. You know that girl from accounting? The redhead? With her it was toys, and I mean like sick assBENNETT (interjecting) This isn’t really about sex…not even in the slightest.

DAVID I mean even some new positions can be a treat, I can’t imagine you ran out…

BENNETT sighs, realizing his friend won’t compromise on the subject.

The two sit for a while in silence as DAVID taps his fingers on the table, impatiently.

BENNETT Actually, last night, well, we were watching…

DAVID Oh shit…

BENNETT (annoyed at DAVID’s interjection) What?

DAVID (as if continuing BENNETT’s sentence) You were watching porn and…

BENNETT No, TV, we were watching TV. Could I please finish?

DAVID Fine…

BENNETT So we’re watching TV and for some reason I felt this sensation, right? It’s kind

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of hard to explain, it just felt strange, which is what’s weird, because we were just doing what we do every nightDAVID (cutting him off ) Porn every night sounds amaaaaazing…

BENNETT Really? So anyways, this is like our daily routine but for some reason this time in particular, I feel this sensation. It was like something was about to explode inside me…and all the pieces just wanted to flow out through every pore of my body.

There’s a pause. BENNETT wonders if he’s finally said something that could shut his friend up.

BENNETT It’s like an urge…an itch…this need to do…something. So I’m waiting for this something to happen…but then I realize that…I can’t. Like I can’t do anything at all. As soon as I realize that nothing’s going to happen, all those pieces flow back in and send this chill up my spine. The chill started where Em had her hand on my back; it went all the way up and hit the back of my head. And when it hits my head, it hits it like a freight train.

BENNETT makes a driving motion in the air as if his hand were a freight train. Simultaneously, the WAITRESS shows up with the food.

WAITRESS Ok we got the usual, a turkey club on rye for you and the corned beef for you, Mr. Blue Suit.

DAVID Ah, you got the order right! That’ll be goin’ into your tip, Miss Perky Tits.

The WAITRESS drops the food, letting the plates make a loud smack as they hit the table. She then proceeds to shake her head in disgust and walk away.

She only gets as far as the table right next to theirs and be-gins wiping it down.

DAVID (through food) Hey man, I can give you...

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(swallows food) I can give you all the sex advice you want, I can even hook you up with someone, you know, get your quick fix on the side, but I dunno about all this psycho touchy bullshit. I say you pound a couple waitresses like that one and you’ll be set for life.

BENNETT laughs a short, sarcastic laugh, shakes his head and continues eating. The WAITRESS is now done cleaning the tables and takes a leftover sandwich tray over to ENOCH. She removes from it half of a sub sandwich and hands it to ENOCH. WAITRESS Here sugar, looks like someone left some crumbs for you.

ENOCH raises his head to see her and dons a face of a boy who thinks he has found true love.

ENOCH Oh, so generous, for someone who is already so pretty!

ENOCH is honest and polite in his comment, but the WAITRESS just laughs.

WAITRESS You’re far too sweet, hun, but don’t think I can make this a regular thing. My boss has a thing against begging and he’d have my job if he caught me.

She starts to walk away but stops after a couple steps. She turns back, reaches in her apron, and pulls out the tip she just picked up from a clean table.

WAITRESS You know what though, you always manage to bring the best out of me.

She tosses the dollar at his cup, but misses. The dollar sits on the ground for a second as ENOCH continues to stare. She turns again and leaves. Just as it is too late, ENOCH comes back to reality, realizing she is walking away.

ENOCH We should…

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His half comment is said in vain as she is too far away to hear. While he stares at the side of the stage where she left, the dollar gets caught in the wind [pulled by a wire on the side stage] and starts moving quickly on the ground towards BENNETT and DAVID’s table. ENOCH crawls to-wards the dollar faster and faster until he is almost at running speed while still in crouch position. By the time he notices their table, it is too late, and he crashes into it, sending the table, glasses, dishes, and cutlery to the ground. He does not acknowledge the mess until after he straight-ens his back and nods at both men.

DAVID Oh come on, really? Really?

ENOCH Ah, sorry, sorry, I didn’t…

The manager of the café storms into the scene in a fury.

MANAGER (hands waving in the air violently) What is this?!?! You gonna pay for this mess? Huh?!

ENOCH stands there with wide eyes looking back and forth between the manager and the two men.

MANAGER Move!

The manager pushes ENOCH out of the way so he can pick up the re-mains of the table setting. ENOCH stumbles backward and falls to the ground with his upper body in the street. BENNETT jumps to ENOCH fast enough to grab his hand and pick him up while a car swerves and honks. He gets ENOCH on his feet and they both stand for a second, still grasping the other’s hand. After a couple seconds, they come to and take their hands back.

BENNETT (almost mumbling) You almost got run over.

ENOCH Oh yes, yes, thank you so very much.

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BENNETT No, it’s alright, as long as you’re safe. Are you alright?

ENOCH I’ll be fine.

The manager storms over to ENOCH with an aggressive pointer finger almost pushing him back into the street.

MANAGER You are going to pay for every cent of dishes and plates and glasses that you just destroyed. Not to mention the embarrassment, you trash!

BENNETT Woah, hold on. It was an accident; I can pay for the damages.

MANAGER No, this dog has to pay for what he did!

BENNETT How about this, here’s more than double(hands the manager a wad of cash) -and I promise he’ll never set foot in your restaurant ever again.

DAVID Wait Ben, what do you think you’re doing?

BENNETT gives him a side glance to show how sure he is of his decision.

BENNETT then takes out his business card and hands it to ENOCH. DAVID Damnit Ben… BENNETT (to ENOCH) If you ever need anything, just give me a call, alright?

ENOCH (shocked) Oh…ok, I will do that.

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BENNETT Now go! Get home before he tries to take your head off.

ENOCH runs offstage. After BENNETT is sure he’s gone, he looks down at his hand, replaying what just happened in his head. DAVID comes up behind him.

DAVID What a lowlife… (shouting in the direction ENOCH left) Maybe if he got a job(now talking) -he wouldn’t have to scrounge for cash. Really makes you think about where you are in the world, am I right?

BENNETT Yeah...it does.

DAVID gives BENNETT a playfully forceful pat on the shoulder and walks back to the table to pick up his jacket. BENNETT continues to stare at his hand.

INT. ENOCH’S HOUSE ENOCH walks into a small, rundown house. ENOCH’S FATHER is drunk and passed out on the couch. His foot is in a cast and is propped up on the coffee table. ENOCH’S MOTHER is slaving away in the kitchen to make dinner. ENOCH walks over to a jar on the counter, opens it, and drops a few dollar bills and coins in. This wakes up his father, who is still rather drunk. His father turns his head toward ENOCH. ENOCH’S FATHER (mumbling) You pay me back yet? For the god damn roof over your head and raising you and…

ENOCH’S FATHER drops his head again, this time on his shoulder be-cause he had turned to the side.

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ENOCH No, Dad...

ENOCH sits down on the couch next to his father to watch TV. ENOCH What show is this?

[No response.]

ENOCH Hey mom, what show is this?

ENOCH’s mother (without looking up from cooking) You know how your father likes to watch old romance movies when he’s drunk.

ENOCH’S FATHER (mumbling on his shoulder) That’s ‘cause it’s like when we used to dance.

The two characters from the old romance movie dance on stage. The actors dance through the house as if any other characters, but they are really a representation of what ENOCH is watching on TV. [This will be made clear by dressing them in old-fashioned, black and white clothes and face paint, making it look like they are ripped straight from a black and white movie.]

It is a girl and a boy in their early twenties. They dance playfully on stage, with the girl teasing the boy. Once they reach the middle of the stage, the boy firmly places his arm on her back. They proceed to do a couple of steps together trying to imitate a dancer’s perfect form. The boy breaks the form by taking her hand, lifting it with his own arm, and spinning her around. He then spins her body into his with her back against his chest and he holds her close. He leans his head forward to whisper something in her ear as she softly touches her neck near where he is whispering. She twists out of his arms and slowly arches her toes up to bring her lips to his. After giving him a short, but passionate kiss, she touches her finger to his nose then runs off stage. He runs after her. While all of this is happening, ENOCH, ENOCH’S FATHER and ENOCH’S MOTHER do not remove their focus from what they are doing. After a moment, ENOCH looks up from the TV at his mother and father, then walks away, unnoticed, with his head down.

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Int. BENNETT’s apartment BENNETT’s fiancé, EMILY, is sitting on the couch and doesn’t take her attention off of the TV when BENNETT enters.

BENNETT Hey Em, how was your day?

BENNETT sets down his bag and sits with her.

EMILY (without looking up) Oh, good.

They sit for a moment without talking.

BENNETT (laughingly) So I was at lunch with David earlier, and I was trying to tell him some-thing important, but all he kept thinking of was sex! I think he really has a problem.

EMILY Shhhh, Bennett, the wedding planner show is coming on again.

BENNETT is slightly put off, but ignores it and continues watching TV. BENNETT Oh, right.

EMILY moves over to BENNETT and leans on him, resting her head on his shoulder and placing her hand on his back. They sit for a little while longer in silence. BENNETT feels the sensation he was trying to de-scribe to DAVID. He arches his back, starting at the bottom of his back and going all the way up to his head, causing him to crane his neck, all the while breathing in. After he cranes his neck, he stays there for a moment without breathing, but then shakes his head, relaxes, and sighs. EMILY sits up, slightly confused.

EMILY What was that, are you alright?

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BENNETT Oh that? No, it was nothing, I’m fine.

EMILY (persistent in disbelief ) You sure? You did that same exact thing last night.

BENNETT Oh yeah, it’s just cold. I’m just a little, uhh, cold.

EMILY stares at him, still in disbelief.

EMILY Fine.

She stays sitting up, but turns back to the TV where they sit in silence a little more. EMILY finally stands up.

EMILY I’m actually gonna go to bed, I’m getting kind of sick of this show.

EMILY starts walking off. BENNETT leans in her direction and motions for her to come back to the couch.

BENNETT (calling for her to come back) Em! EMILY Try not to be too loud.

EMILY walks out. BENNETT sighs and turns back to the TV. He changes the channel. A man comes on stage dressed as a news reporter. Just like the dancers, he walks on stage as if a normal character, but he is actually a representation of what BENNETT is watching on TV. NEWS REPORTER Every single day, these children have to carry gallons of water from the stream to their homes just so they can have the basic life necessities that we take for granted. Some of them not even seven years old have to look after their siblings, letting the younger ones eat while they slowly starve to death. If you

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call now, you can adopt one of these children and make sure they live to look after their brothers and sisters for at least one more day. Our toll-free line is 1-800-555-0685.

The NEWS REPORTER walks off stage. BENNETT lifts his hand, the hand that touched ENOCH, and stares at it for a second. He uses that hand to reach for the phone, which he uses to dial the number from the TV. INT. ENOCH’s Bedroom ENOCH is dancing around playfully to the 1940s-era music like the couple did in the romance movie. After dancing around aimlessly for a bit, he firmly places his arm on the back of his invisible female dance partner and proceeds to move in the same steps as the dancers from the movie, imitating the same form. He then takes her hand and spins her. Instead of spinning into his arms, his invisible partner spins off and dis-appears into nothingness. He follows her with his head as she goes. He slumps his shoulders in disappointment. Now upset, he turns off the radio, lays down in bed, and wraps himself in the covers.

After rolling around a couple times, he spies BENNETT’s business card on the bedside table and picks it up.

ENOCH Bennett Myers.

He gets off his bed and stands up, looking back and forth between the business card and his empty hand that before held BENNETT’s. He spins for a second, as the young girl did, then stops and leans backwards as if BENNETT is behind him, holding him close. He then starts touching his neck, imagining BENNETT whispering in his ear.

ENOCH twists around and pretends to kiss the invisible BENNETT. He stays in that position waiting for something, anything to happen, because he doesn’t know what is supposed to happen. He moves his head to the other side, still kissing, trying to imagine how it would really be. After a little while, his back arches from bottom to top, just as BENNETT’s did. When it hits his head, he cranes his neck and holds his breath for a moment. He slowly releases the position and breathes out, sitting back down on his bed. He brings his hands up to his head and lets his hands sift through his hair as his head falls.

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thanks for reading!

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