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.
