January 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Nathan Schiller
Conversation Between Two Young White Men
Waiting for Food in Murray’s Bagels in the West Village, Manhattan,
New York, New York, U.S.A., 1 P.M., YR 2007
“So my buddy from law school, this one who
dropped out, he’s out in L.A. and started dating this girl.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, she’s like a porn star.”
“Yeah?”
“Like she’s in porn.”
“You mean, like, legitimately in porn?”
“Right, she does videos and stuff.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if she’s, like, a star-“
“Starlet.”
“Or starlet, or she’s up-and-coming, or what, but apparently it’s pretty serious.”
“That’s pretty crazy.”
“And it’s like, this guy, he’s this Jewish guy from New Jersey, real smart, book-smart like crazy, but he didn’t really feel the whole ‘law-school-thing’ so he just went out there and now he’s dating this girl. I mean he’s pretty good looking you know.”
“Must be pretty crazy to know your girl’s doing that. Is he cool with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Isn’t that like the most number-one question you’d be asking him.”
“It just kind of never really came up. Like, I didn’t want to be all, ‘So do you go to her shoots and check out these guys she’s banging or what?’ you know?”
“No yeah that’s true.”
“Right.”
“But still I’d want to have some inside sort of info about the situation.”
“I know, I probably should have asked him. But he did say something interesting.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, that she actually wasn’t that good in bed.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. But I’m thinking it’s this kind of expectation thing where he thought she was going to just like seriously rip him apart or have some magical powers you know and he goes in there with that mentality and then it’s like if she’s just come from a morning of having sex with strangers how is she gonna be able to rev herself up for the like mundane aspect of just normal sex with her boyfriend when her boyfriend is thinking he’s about to have like freak sex with his girlfriend. It’s just not gonna happen like that is what I was thinking.”
“Right. Exactly.”
“And the whole time he’s telling me this, I’m thinking, like, who is this girl. Like, where did she come from, how did she get into all that.”
“I’d be most interested in like how she would date normal people. Like, did he just go up to her in a bar and start hitting on her. And when she said, ‘So, I’m in the adult film industry,’ if that’s how she phrased it, what did he think, because there are like fifty things you could be thinking, and somehow one of them leads you to dating this girl. I’m making presumptions.”
“No, you’re totally on.”
“So you asked him about this.”
“. . .”
“You didn’t?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Why not?”
“It just didn’t come up.”
“So lemme get this straight. You’ve got a friend who’s dating a girl who acts in/performs in/participates in/belongs to the ‘adult film industry’ and all you know is that. Like you’re not even interested in his inner soul type of reaction to it. They’re like a different breed, man.”
“I am, but it just didn’t come up.”
“Yeah, well, that’s crazy, anyway.”
“Yeah.”
“So anyway, one of my teachers had us doing this whole thing about footnotes, and I usually hate all that crap, because, c’mon, you know, but so he gives us all this David Foster Wallace stuff, and, you know, it’s actually pretty good.”
January 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Joe Hillenbrand
Man, was I hungry. There was nothing to eat in the house so I ordered a large pizza and ate the whole thing – but I was still starving. So I searched for something, anything, to eat. Couldn’t find a thing. Not a slice of bread. Not a cracker. Not even a crumb. I scoured the cupboards, the fridge, the seat cushions, the floor, behind the stove – nothin’. I had to look elsewhere
That’s when I ate my pride. It was too hard to bite or chew, so I swallowed it whole. Nearly choke on the damn thing, but I managed to get it down. It wasn’t enough though. I wanted… needed more.
So I boiled my hate. Each mouthful more bitter than the last. My stomach growled for more.
I whipped up a bowl of pity. Creamy and sweet, it went down easy.
Love? There hasn’t been any of that around here for a long time. No… I stopped looking for love. Instead, I drank my tears and belched my apologies.
Then I found a bit of hope. Stale and moldy as it was, I took a bite. That was a mistake. I couldn’t keep it down. Just made room for more.
Confidence was a tasty morsel: meaty and juicy.
That was it. There was nothing left. I’ve eaten it all and it’s left me so I can’t get out of bed (having doubled and redoubled my size). But that’s OK; I don’t need to go anywhere. I’m not hungry… for now.
Tomorrow, it starts all over again.
January 2011 | back-issues, fiction
It was back in ’63 they set down in my wheat field, and I was too damn angry to be scared. I knew that crop was gone and it wasn’t a thing anyone could do about it. When they come out of their spaceship-no, no it wasn’t a door that swung down like on a castle, but a giant car door, like on my Buick? They come out, three of ’em no taller than my knee, and just stared at me, no expression in those big glassy eyes, no sorrow for what they done to my field.
“We come in peace,” they said without sayin’ it out loud but I heard it in my head, and I looked at my flattened, withered wheat and said, “The hell you do.”
Have you ever seen mangled wheat, the stalks cracked, the feathers singed? A whole season: It’s enough to make you cry. And I did, standin’ in the middle of my broken field with those three aliens, wellin’ up, the door to their giant ship propped open, a sickening light pourin’ from inside and slicin’ across my barren field like a knife. They do somethin’ like rock, paper, scissors and one come over and tells me I’m supposed to be some kind of alien ambassador.
100 acres, gone, the exhaust from their craft fellin’ my crop like a tornado, the shoots fallin’ like dominoes, like ambushed soldiers, the stink pourin’ into my nostrils.
“You fellas best be on your way,” I said as patiently as any man who just lost his livelihood can, and for the first time they look around. Sure I think they’re doin’ damage assessment, conjurin’ a way to bring the wheat back, and I picture those fuzzy stalks risin’ like an army of mini Lazaruses across the dead plain, work hard to send that image to them with my mind. But they’re fixed on somethin’ else now, and it’s Tessie, comin’ toward us, haunch-slow, jaws workin’, wheat cracklin’ beneath her bovine hooves. I point to her, my prize heifer, shake my head and give them a firm “NO!” But Tessie and the aliens, they’re starin’ at one another, stock still, as if hypnotized. And even today I wonder what they said that made her walk right past me, through the blade of sharp light and into that shiny crop killin’ machine: You’ll be happier with us, He don’t appreciate you, YOU are the true alien ambassador. So that’s how I lost my wheat and my cow in the same hour.
The man from the insurance company, he don’t believe me, but I know you do. You see this stuff all the time, so I was hopin’ you could talk to ‘im, tell ‘im about the giant car door, the two-foot Martians, a prized cow that trundled, hooves clickin’, into another dimension.
January 2011 | back-issues, fiction
Beyond and above –
no fear.
I crumbled.
The darkness invited the light.
Tender and trembling.
Uncertain and fading.
Surrounded by hideous giants…
A moment.
A sigh.
Departing from previous lives.
Defrosting
and pouring
over a bottomless well.
Awaiting.
And breathing.
Involved with no will.
Too late
or too early,
but never on time.
Suspicious.
Attracted.
Stuck to the ground.
Withholding one hand,
pulled by the other.
Survive or surrender –
above and beyond.
January 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Peter LaBerge
After a while, I got used it. I think the shrill wind’s kicking at my dusty, bloody ankles is the most painful part. I guess you could call it trading one set of parents in for another- the amorous couple in Cadmonic, then the old rickety woman on Lincoln Avenue, and now the newspaper salesman with the clouded cheeks and constantly stuffy nose. The first time, I had to sit for a couple hours at the train tracks across the street from Henry’s Barber Shop. The same boring Broadway and Poland Springs ads keep me company, as I wait to restart my life again and again, each time with a renewed hope echoing in 3.0 circular motions. I recite the words printed below the stoic mountains on the water bottle ad for enjoyment, sometimes even in exotic European accents. Eyes of various colors and shapes pierce into my body as I board the dingy Metro North local bound for Ansonia. I feel the set of needles the nurse at the public health clinic used to give vaccines last month re-puncture my delicate skin as my nerves twist my stomach around like dancing shapes on a chalkboard. Maybe food will help, I think, and I start nibbling away anxiously at the pack of 100 Calorie Oreos that the foster woman put in the CVS bag I always got full of things that are supposed to act as entertainment. The loudspeaker’s rusty voice croaks Ansonia Station and I collect my few belongings. On my way off the train, I hear a little kid lean over to his mother and say, Mommy, why does she look so miserable? I wipe away the tears clinging to my face before the blur of my new family’s car lights get a peek.
Peter LaBerge is currently a sixteen-year-old high school student. His writing and photography are forthcoming or featured in a handful of publications, including Reflections and This Great Society (respectively). When Peter isn’t writing, you can probably find him composing or playing piano music, singing in his a cappella group, practicing his improvisational comedy, or frantically studying.
October 2010 | back-issues, fiction
by Jenny Magnus
She was washing a reeking chicken. Taking a dinner party risk, putting the family in the pot along with the vegetables. Smelling wafters of putridity along with the spices. She had certainly cooked a million of them, baked, roasted, boiled. This one was most definitely over the line. Even the washing didn’t seem to remove the nagging smell. As she cooked, her long blue wrap of silky dusky blue was coming untied, like her plans. Falling apart, going down the drain with the watery blood, down.
She told herself that cooking it at the highest temperatures would help, believing that heat would heal and disarm the past expiration date. She supervised the table setting, the water glasses, the napkins folded in a funny way by the kid in the family. Tonight it was a diamond. She thought, that’s the hardest thing on earth, a diamond. Watching the outside of the chicken through the oven door as it cooked, as if that would reveal the rot; it looks fine, it looks good, it looks perfect, it looks fine…
The guest arrives, the chicken comes out. She sniffs it surreptitiously in the kitchen, carving it and sniffing it, serving it and sniffing it… Conversation, laughter, all couched, for her, by the waiting. Waiting after dinner for the first sign of gut wrench and roiling nauseal upheaval, waiting with a morbid assurance that vomit will be the end of the evening’s activity. She experiences a stretching out of time, her mind telling her that every moment is the last good one, now the storm starts, now, no, now…She watches each person, any sign of discomfort or a passing grimace is the beginning of it…she is sure… The heaving doesn’t happen. No one gets sick. Except she is sick with tension. So, after all was said and done, she had to reconsider what she thought she knew about rot.
She had only been wearing black. Maybe it was time for a change. If white clothes used to represent purity or some kind of simplicity or elegance, or lightness, or grace, now white clothes had the feeling of being in the service of something, like being a slave of a kind, or being employed by someone making her wear white clothes, or as if the clothes have to stay white, but of course they cant, and so she would be dooming herself to failure forever, and the person who was making her wear them was going to always look at her with a small private sneer because her shit stains or cum drip or coffee spill or sweat pit or drool line or snot wipe or blood smear was always going to be advertising her for the juice producer that she was. If it was very very hot, and the white clothes were like a kind of benevolent relief to bleached bones, shading out the sum of the beating down individual rays, one would have to think, by all means, wear white clothes. But if the reason for wearing them had to do with some kind of tremendous profound decision, a decision to change, where she was going to wear white clothes by god forever, then that was an obnoxious reason for wearing them. They made everyone else uncomfortable, and she knew it, everyone looks at white clothes and thinks they should be dressed more flowingly or ritualistically or simply or coolly or abstractly or less hotly or darkly or demandingly or frankly, and so feel indicted by her white clothes. She would have to take the white clothes away and turn them into rags. Once she’d have wiped up all kinds of things with the white clothes now turned into rags, if she had any energy for a project she might sew them back together into clothes again, careful to leave no stain under a seam, but parade the stains as a cool new pomo pattern. Once the coffee is cleaned off the counter and there isn’t any more mustard drip, and she’s found time in her busy schedules to sew up some clothes, not even with a machine but by hand because she never figured out the damned machine and spent more time on bobbin comprehension than it would have taken to make the damned clothes, so she does it all by hand anyway, and she does a bad job so that everything is haphazard a little, and she tries on the clothes that used to be white clothes and then were rags and now are stained up ripped apart and sewn back together clothes again, is she going to be grateful? Is she going to be grateful that she changed?
She sits and stares at the pundits. They seem to speak directly to her, prophesying Babylon and mortuary fanfares, candy apple sugar teeth and fancy hassle almost premiers. She hears really only one thing: its over its over its over. Wake up and get ready for it to be over, get dressed and get ready for it to be over, eat quick, its about to be over, stop whining, its already over. She wonders how they got to be pundits anyway, who licensed them for punditry, because she had a lot to say when it came down to it, she could lay it out on the self important egg waggers who represent what? Not her position, because if any of them were ever to find themselves in her position, she sure as shit would have no mercy, like none was done to her. She squints closer, her bad eye a melon splat in her vision, David Gergan already melon-headed to begin with and more so as she switches from Walgreens 4x magnifiers to dark glasses to nothing, restless to find her way back to real vision like it used to be. It usting to be something else is a dead trap of grey parachute folding freefall dinge, because even if they all act like they know, facebooking and texting, shoulder patting and bump hugging, sympathizing and empathizing all over her, they don’t know, they don’t know at all. They cant know, and thus, by virtue of her knowing, she is the true expert pundit of righteous anger analysis and detailed sufferance cataloguing. Get her on there with Wolf fucking Blitzer, she’ll destroy them with incisive dissolving laser rayed deaths head precipice wavering. They will hear and know, then, what real insight is.
Jenny Magnus is a writer, performer, musician, director, and teacher who is a founding co-Artistic Director of the Curious Theater Branch, an all-original theater company, now in its 22nd year, author/creator of plays that have been produced at Steppenwolf Theater, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, at the former Lunar Cabaret, the Prop Thtr and on tour throughout America and Germany. She has performed in many solo performances as well. She was a long-time member of the band Maestro Subgum and the Whole and made multiple records with them, as well as three solo recorded CDs, and is currently represented and distributed by UvuLittle Recordings. Her current band, The Crooked Mouth String Band, is also represented and distributed by UvuLittle. In addition to running the Curious Theater Branch and making her own work, Jenny Magnus is a long-time Adjunct Faculty member with Columbia College Chicago, in both the graduate Interdisciplinary Arts Department and the undergraduate Interactive Arts and Media Department. She has taught performance and writing at The School of The Art Institute, The University of Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools, the Metropolitan Correctional Center of Chicago, The University of Illinois, Free Street Theater School and her own Curious School. In 1998, Jenny Magnus was named among the Artists of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, and from 1998 to 2008, she was included among the 50 most influential people in Chicago Theater by NewCity Chicago. In 2010, Magnus and Curious entered into a year-long residency at The Museum of Contemporary Art, leading to the premiere of a play in the fall of 2011.
