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.
October 2010 | back-issues, fiction
By Brandon Graham
I consider myself an attentive father. And I know my daughter; I know she has a big heart. So when she made friends with this big fat girl who has two big fat parents I asked “Who’s that?”
My daughter answered “That’s Jackie? The other kids were picking on her and I thought she could use a friend.”
I said: “You ever think there might be a good reason the other kids were picking on that big fatty? Huh? You listen. You’ve got to quit hangin’ out with that Fat Jackie. And I mean now. Or her loser-stick will cling to you from now all the way through High School. Now you don’t want that, do you?”
“No,” She said.
“That’s my girl,” I told her.
I think we really dodged a bullet there.
October 2010 | back-issues, fiction
by Brandon Graham
The phone rings.
I know it’s my wife calling before I even look at the caller i.d. She calls everyday at the same time.
The phone keeps ringing. Even though the receiver is right by me, I let it go. On the fifth ring I pick-up and say “Hello.”
“My heart doesn’t feel right,” she tells me. “It keeps racing and I can’t catch my breath. I feel like I might pass out. I just wanted to let you know so when I die you can tell the doctor what was wrong. Also I was thinking you should keep the house when I’m gone; because we have a lot of good friends in the neighborhood. Plus the kids really like their school. Also church is near by and Reverend Chandler is great in a crisis. He’s just great. You will need all the help you can get. There’s a supportive network for you and the kids right where you are. Tell the Reverend I want to be cremated. I liked the eulogy he delivered for that nice old lady with the facial hair. Tell him that; but not the facial hair part. And play that song by the Cranberries. You know the one.
I really think you should keep the house. I am serious about that. Not to mention the burden of trying to find a new home, and put our place on the market and pack and clean and unpack and decorate a new house. You are not great at that stuff. I’m just being honest. That is not your best type of thing. You would already be grief-stricken, of course, and then all that stress piled on top; it would be too much. You would get irritable with the kids. And the kids will need you to be as patient as you can. This sort of tragedy is hardest on the kids.”
She stops talking. But I don’t say anything.
“Well, what do you think?” she asks.
I say “I will take that under advisement. But really, that will be a decision for me and the new wife.”
My wife laughs and says “You’re so funny,” because she thinks I’m kidding and she likes when I make jokes.
I knew she’d laugh. But I’m not kidding. Not at all. I’m dead serious. Not only that, but I don’t think it would be so unbearable if she died. It would be a lot of work. But you know – everyone likes a fresh start now and then. And I think I’m due.
October 2010 | back-issues, fiction
by Ashok Rajamani
Characters:
Arun Patel
Greg Atkins
Mr. Wills
Patel Family
Atkins Family
Setting: high school in small-town Illinois
Time: present
Arun Patel and Greg Atkins are best friends at Bluefish High School, a commonplace small-town high school in a commonplace town in Illinois. They are eighteen, in the senior year.
Greg is a dumpy, plump, pale Irish American. Arun is a stunningly handsome, dark-skinned Indian American. Cue scenes of Greg standing up for Arun, who is taunted mercilessly by his classmates and given names like camel jockey, towel-head, and sand nigger.
Arun and Greg dream of becoming famous, world-renowned actors. Arun, however, has the talent. Greg does not. Both hope to go to NYC after graduation, and attend Juilliard. The school’s final theatrical show is announced their senior year: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
The two chums cannot wait to audition, and know they are made for these roles. The far-more talented Arun, however, believes he is right not for Tom but of the main character, Huckleberry. After the auditions, held by the school’s frumpy middle-aged drama teacher, Mr. Wills, they are told that they will likely get parts, and would find out the results a week later. Although Mr. Wills does not specify what the parts will be, his demeanor (winks, smiles etc) suggest that they have won the lead roles.
Arun’s parents, like most parents of Indian descent, want Arun to give up his foolish dreams of being an actor, and do something “important” like becoming a surgeon, engineer, or IT man.
When they discover that Arun has the chance to play a major lead along with his friend, they change their minds and throw a party with Greg’s family. Both sets of parents are delighted. The party, held at Arun’s small house, is a vibrant scene that evokes an embracing of Indian culture by contemporary White America. Here, at long last, Arun and Greg have gotten their parents’ permission to pursue their dreams.
Come Monday, Mr. Wills calls them into his classroom to personally tell them which roles they won. With delight, he tells Greg that he will playing Tom Sawyer! Arun is delighted, knowing that he has won the lead role! Observing Arun’s grinning face, Mr. Wills reassuringly tells
Arun that he has an even more special part.
Last scene: the play’s opening night performance
Greg is giving, as expected, a bad performance as Tom Sawyer. Arun, onstage, is rowing a boat. But he is not playing Huckleberry; a nameless young blond White boy is playing the lead role. Arun, instead, is playing Jim. The Runaway Slave. His dark brown skin has been made-up to look even darker in the bright lights. ###
Ashok Rajamani is a writer and artist living in NYC. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including South Asian Review, Catamaran Literary Journal, and 3am magazine. His memoir, BRAIN KARMA, will be published by Algonquin Books in 2011. For more info: www.ashokrajamani.com.
October 2008 | back-issues, fiction
by Philip C. Breakenridge
Beams of hazy sunlight stroked Christopher’s skin as he took his usual place at the window. The gently rustling drapes, a melancholy shade of mauve, fingered his thighs and calves carelessly like an inattentive lover. Peering out over the newly awakened city, Christopher inhaled the fragrance peculiar to a late spring morning in Vancouver. A lush, green aroma rich with the pungency of Japanese blossoms and lilac bushes clung to the air. Christopher closed his eyes, timidly inviting the quiet of the early day to wash over his nakedness. He envisioned what was ahead and shifted uneasily in the rigid wooden chair.
Christopher’s eyes flicked open, his body tensing. The familiar silhouette darkened the window across the way.
Suddenly, Christopher’s stomach churned painfully; a bizarre combination of reticence and excitement wrestled inside him. An icy tremor resounded through his body as his quivering hand crept up to explore the firmness of his own chest. It was still difficult for him. Christopher’s right nipple hardened under his fingertip’s chilly touch. He twisted it between his thumb and forefinger, conjuring a delicious sensation of pain. The sharply shooting twinges of agony freed him, releasing him from a disobedient body. Christopher’s escaped self hovered above, a shadowy apparition gazing down on a vacant shell.
Christopher felt the stranger’s anxious presence in the distance. It was time to begin.
Fiery streams of water consumed Christopher as the last traces of the morning ritual swirled down the shower drain. Numbness washed over him as he pondered the repulsiveness of being touched by hands other than his own: hands that had molested the bodies of other lovers, hands that had sweetly mussed the fur of filthy, dumbly-devoted house pets. The oversized washcloth resting on the edge of the tub invited him to scour away these thoughts, a foul grime slick upon his skin. He gripped the washcloth tightly, scrubbing until his pale, freckled skin flushed an angry red.
Exhausted, Christopher slid into a heap on the shower floor, swallowed by a thick, dank blanket of dewy steam. Consciousness slipped away from him.
The boy raised a bruised hand to block the sun’s fierce rays. The colorful shorts set his mother had placed out for him that morning glimmered in its bright beams. A tepid summer breeze danced on the backs of his spindly legs. He squinted, scanning the expansive greenness of the backyard. His eyes refocused as the formidable man came back into view.
His father crouched uncomfortably ten feet away on the meticulously-manicured lawn. He wiped away copious beads of sweat from his crinkled brow with a meaty, calloused hand. A sigh of exasperation escaped his mouth, unresisted.
“Okay, Tiger. This time I wanna feel it burn right through my glove.”
The freckle-faced boy grasped the baseball clumsily. He struggled to wrap his delicately boned fingers around its shape.
“Here it comes, Daddy.”
Using a madly hurled overhand pitch, Christopher threw the ball with all the might a six-year-old could muster. The boy’s miniature physique lunged forward as the fervent force of his throw sent him tumbling to his knees. For an instant, he cowered on all fours waiting for the call.
“You still throw like a girl. Get up. Let’s do it again.”
Christopher stared down at the grass wishing its fierce green blades would wind their way around his body and pull him down into the cool soil. Droplets of childish determination welled up in his eyes. They had been at this for four hours and he wasn’t getting any better. He was still a sissy.
“C’mon. Get up. Only girls give up.”
His father ran his hands through a coppery-colored brush cut and smiled smugly. His boy would thank him for this someday.
“I’ll show you how it’s done. I’ll pitch it to you. You catch it, then throw it back to me.”
The little boy stood up and brushed flecks of dirt off of his grass-stained knees, feigning the bravado of a major league player. He swallowed hard and braced himself for the impact of his father’s pitch.
“Are you ready?”
Christopher tugged at the ill-fitting leather glove that engulfed his left hand and nodded. His father didn’t hold back.
The force of his throw seared into the boy’s chest, throwing him onto his back. Christopher lay on the grass, winded, gasping for any faint wisps of air he could smuggle into his lungs. A raucous cough rattled his chest, bringing up with it a ghastly mixture of blackened blood and spittle. The putrid liquid oozed from the corners of his pink mouth and dribbled onto his chin. Christopher stared up at the awesome summer sky, a deliriously beautiful palette of soft blues. Its radiance mesmerized and comforted him as he floated upwards to embrace it.
Suddenly, the blackness of his father’s stern expression fell across the heavens, darkening the magnificent sky like an ominous eclipse.
An hour passed before Christopher felt composed enough to leave his sodden refuge. Stepping out of the shower, he wrapped a plush towel around his narrow waist. With a sweep of his hand, he cleared the bathroom mirror of steam. His estranged self stared back at him as he ran his water-pruned fingers through an untamable mass of wavy hair. The sun had already turned it a shiny carrot-red. The murky blue pools of his eyes reflected back a sad vacancy.
The stranger had been coming every morning for over six months now. Christopher hated what his dark visitor made him feel. The detached connection that came with being watched was something Christopher both craved and despised. He was losing himself, a casualty of a sordid inner conflict. His carefully-constructed guise slowly peeled away, exposing a pinkish, tender sensualist flesh. Christopher craned his neck, bringing his face closer to the mirror. He poked at the finely etched lines tugging at the corners of his eyes. Maybe he was better off lost.
Christopher stared out into the faintly glowing blackness. The night air had an edge that prickled the flesh of his exposed chest. The pearlized buttons on his finely-tailored dress shirt were all undone. Its crisp cotton shape billowed on the breeze. Christopher summoned all the energy he could and directed it towards the shaded window. His eyes cautiously scanned the prodigious high-rise that looked especially foreboding after dark. The cold, grey building gazed back at him, its scattered illuminated suites forming a menacing grimace. Christopher focused on the dimly lit apartment across the way. Nothing happened.
He knew it wasn’t time yet. The shared addiction was precise and calculated. Christopher slid the frosted glass door back into place, shutting out the night.
Morning slowly crept up on Christopher. He awoke from a restless slumber and took his post earlier than usual. The familiar anxiety embracing him made the wait excruciating. Tiny beads of perspiration blanketed his body causing him to shiver slightly in the crisp morning air. A distorted collage pieced together with visions of other mornings just like this one spun in his head. The endless effort given to resisting the perversion of his own thoughts wore him down.
The masculine frame stepped out of the shadows, bringing Christopher to his senses. The stranger was already aroused. Christopher closed his eyes and laid back in the chair, balancing himself on the very edge. He gently ran his hands over the expanse of his chest. The stranger liked this – Christopher felt his approval. He lowered his hands, examining his rippled midsection with probing fingertips. He moved deliberately, pausing to feel each section of taut abdominal muscle.
Growing impatient, the stranger looked over his shoulder, into the black of his abode. Christopher gave him what he wanted. The stranger watched intently, fixed in the moment by an eerie stillness.
Christopher’s body convulsed with the force of his climax. He lay trembling, listening to the hurried pant of his own breath. He slowly peeled his eyes open. The stranger was pleased. The dark figure vanished into the obscurity of his apartment. Christopher was alone.
Christopher peeked through the sad drapes. Two dreary and vacuous weeks had passed since the stranger had stopped coming. The desertion had caused something inside of Christopher to short circuit, making the maintaining of his make-believe daily life unbearable. He was a fraud, a disconnected being, an unlovable abomination. Christopher had stopped leaving the apartment a week ago. The sour stench of his unwashed body grew thick upon the stale air inside. A dense, coarse stubble had claimed his smooth face. He ate only when the growlings of his belly demanded it; sleep came to him infrequently, in dreamless and gloomy waves.
Christopher’s robe slipped into a neat pile on the living room floor. He slid the balcony door open and stepped out into the midday rays, the sun’s brightness assailing his dulled eyes. He hoisted himself onto the wall of his balcony, his bare feet gripping the rough concrete ledge. Christopher closed his eyes and inhaled calmly. The thought of erasing a mistake was strangely soothing to him.
Christopher leaned forward, letting go of his balance. He simply let go.
