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WORDHOARD

BY DAWN TEFFT

I've got a thing for the bottoms of chairs

for peeling paint

and books that feel like they'll end

soon

for being the person

who tells the joke less well

than everyone else

or telling it best

but I'm the only one who realizes

so when I tell you

Ammon Shea's favorite words

in the OED

are:

          unlove, miskiss

I think it's safe for me to say

he presses his penis

carefully

against the pages

that he goes to the bathroom

to have

something to do

and the OED is the longest

of mirrors

and this is a puzzle

about inaction

that I'm giving you

did I tell you about the tattoo

I want?

the one that would be right

here?

DAWN TEFFT's poems are published or forthcoming in Fence, Witness, and Court Green, among other journals. Her chapbook Fist is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, and her chapbook Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations was published online by Mudlark. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and works as a higher ed union organizer.

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THESE BOYS

BY DAWN TEFFT

There are boys rioting in the curtains of the house my mind built. These boys are all fists. No matter how many mothers, they can't hear their names through the confusion. These boys. They sleep underneath the furniture and inside the screaming kettle. I can tell they're boys because they send out signals that bounce back like emails. No message, just echolocation saying they exist. Sometimes they write in the morning while I'm still asleep. My friends show me the critics' glowing reviews: pornographic military humor in the style of Confucius. I want to smear their voices with neon and watch their words arc across an unlit room. Like when they hit fireflies with bats across the night sky.  Sometimes they remind me of my brothers, but my brothers are just ghosts of thumbprints in cakes. My brothers are usually in jail. These boys are everywhere, rusting on the insides of TVs. Every boy a show about chewed through wires soaking inside a shot glass. I want to coax them out of their resemblance to each other. I can't find the knob to turn off knuckles swinging at the moth's fluttering. These boys.They get their hands stuck in jam jars and look sadly out the window, waving a jar for help.  

DAWN TEFFT's poems are published or forthcoming in Fence, Witness, and Court Green, among other journals. Her chapbook Fist is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, and her chapbook Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations was published online by Mudlark. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and works as a higher ed union organizer.

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LESTRANGE

BY DAWN TEFFT

Celan could make it hurt better.

Could tune the strings until

all you hear is one sweet string.

And then make it fall apart again.

Every turn you make

in your sheets

is a shibboleth

whispering his wife's name.

You forget her name

while you say it.

You forget her name

but can't stop speaking it.

Paper dolls

whose hands never drop:

           Gisèle     Gisèle.

Paul ran a knife at her chest.

Did he just want to find his way in?

Knife-crime.

Manic scissors.

There's something you've been meaning

to buy

your entire life.

But you're always forgetting

what it is.

DAWN TEFFT's poems are published or forthcoming in Fence, Witness, and Court Green, among other journals. Her chapbook Fist is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, and her chapbook Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations was published online by Mudlark. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and works as a higher ed union organizer.

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We'll be reading tonight the HOUSE SHOW EXTRAVAGANZA, with our small press friends Meekling and Thoughtcrime, & many more. Hope to see you there!

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OUR FRIENDS AT MEEKLING PRESS ARE STARTING A LECTURE SERIES, AND YOU SHOULD APPLY.  PROPOSALS ARE BEING ACCEPTED THROUGH SEPTEMBER 1.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5tQp-cqXlCQTnhMMFpSU25Qenc/edit

Call for Proposals

We are accepting proposals for for Meekling Press’s inaugural lecture series. Lectures should be fictional in nature, however, it is up to each lecturer to decide what this means. This is a very serious and exacting endeavor. For example, you could present on autobiography,...

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It's been awhile. We shouldn't have kept you waiting. But we're here now.

Join us for PROJECTTILE READINGS SERIES, Vol. 5 - 

SUMMER READING PARTY! ft. readings from: MEGAN BURBANK REBEKAH HALL BRIT PARKS SUZANNE SCANLON & DAWN TEFFT

SATURDAY AUGUST 23 @ 7PM UNCHARTED BOOKS 2620 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, Illinois 60647

It's yr summer reading list, full of nontraditional writing with a feminist bent.

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FUCK ME! MY HUSBAND IS A TOMATO!

BY REBEKAH JOY HALL

Judith’s husband grunts at her from the bed as she dresses for work. His head a tomato about to rupture, his skin beginning to split. Juice beads cling above his top lip. He eats a portion of himself by letting his tongue out to lap up the red droplets. It was quitting his job that turned him into a tomato head, she suspects. It’s not fair that she brings in the money to pay the bills while her husband grows ripe for eating in the hothouse.

She has not mentioned to anyone that her husband’s head is now a tomato because she knows it is one of those things that no one else can understand. So she keeps the facts to herself until she can figure out a solution – if a solution is indeed possible. How do you find a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist? This question pounds behind her eyes.

“I’d like to focus on modeling more,” he’d said to her over sweet potato pie a month ago.

“What does that mean?” she asked. Her fork hung in the air between her plate and her mouth. If there was anything he needed to focus on more it was their marriage.

“You know my job doesn’t fulfill me,” he replied. He licked his fork and then his lips.

“You make twice as much as I do,” he said. “The only thing my salary pays for is cable and my gym membership.” He smiled at her. “It will give us more time together. I’ll work on modeling during the day while you’re at work.”

She’d agreed, swallowing the bitter potato. She tried not to let herself feel as if she were getting the raw end of the deal. She forced herself to be optimistic: With more free time, maybe he’d finally be more intimate with her.

Still, does he think she is fulfilled at work? It has only become more unfulfilling with her understanding of the world. She has worked at Rape Sims, Inc. for 15 years. She works in the editing department where she reviews all copy written for current and potential clients. For several months now the sentences have begun to repeat. She sits down at her desk each day, opens her email and reads hundreds of pages. All with the same sentence. “Rape Sims, Inc., with its 20­-year history in high­-quality rape simulations, understands your need for quality rape services and for that reason we propose our services for your needs.” At first, she thought it was a mistake. But after showing the pages to four different colleagues, she realized that they weren’t seeing the same sentences that she kept seeing.

It is difficult to find work to fill her hours when she has just one sentence to edit over and over, which is awful for the reason that she’s more bored than ever, but mostly for the reason that she has nothing to distract her from the knowledge of what awaits her at home or from the itch that can’t possibly get scratched now.

The horrible facts of her life are progressing rapidly­­ like a severed head rolling down a steep hill. First the repeating sentences, then her husband leaving his job to become a model, and now him turning into a tomato head.

How in the world would a tomato head be able satisfy her? Sometimes she wonders if she concentrates hard enough whether she’ll be able to return to the old world she still thinks exists for everyone else.

She changes the word “quakity” to “quality” and then returns the copy to its author. Done.

Next. No typos in this one except for a single missing period. Change, send, done.

But is going back to the old world really the solution?

Judith has always had a robust libido. When they were first married, she shone ­­ cheeks pink, eyes bright, skin moist ­­ with the satisfaction of having an able man all to herself. He is, or was, particularly talented at cunnilingus, which was something she hadn’t experienced before him.

But it has been awhile. Even before he was a tomato, he had gotten lazy about sex. She gets a knot in her throat now just thinking about the possibility of its probable impossibility. His tongue is thin and squishy now. He can barely form words with it, let alone hold it stiff enough to caress her clit in the firm, quick way that once impressed her.

She leans in and stares at the time on her desktop. She shifts her hips, pressing down into her seat. A seed of rage sprouts in her mind and she realizes that she needs to know as soon as possible if the tomato head can provide a pleasure alternative. With 15 years loyalty to Rape Sims, Inc., she can stand to leave early on occasion.

After gathering her purse and a book she brought in for her lunch break, she waves at her boss through his office window and leaves the building.

                                                       ***

At home, she walks through the front door to find her husband sitting on the sofa facing the television. While normally this would set her off, she barely notices because what she notices more is the long, wide crevice running down the center of his face. His eyes droop to the sides. His nose hangs limp to the right of the crevice. Pink spittle drips from both corners of his mouth, which has in fact become two mouths. She drops her bags and kneels in front of him, feeling a brief twinge of pity. She presses her palms on either side of his face ­­what would be his cheeks. They were firm just yesterday. Today they are squashy and bruised. She leans close and inserts the tip of her tongue into the soft, wet crevice. His juice tastes sweet and tangy. She pushes his cheeks in a little and lets the sap drizzle down her throat. His face begins to wilt slightly, but she notices a nub the size of an acorn rising at the top of the crevice. She touches her finger to it. It’s hard.

“Honey?” she says, trying to look him in the eyes. He grunts and juice splashes out of his face and onto her shoulders. “Would you mind lying down? I want to try something.”

He shrugs. His head wobbles. “Shwwkpsh,” he says.

She ignores whatever it is he is trying to say and unbuttons her pants. Once he is flat on his back on the floor and her clothes are entirely removed, she climbs atop his head. The nub is still evident, hard. She slides up and presses her clit into it. Not untongue­like, she thinks, and begins riding it slowly.

“Ggglllg,” her husband says from beneath her.

“Oh yeah, you like that?” she purrs, feeling better than she’s felt in a long time. In fact, she feels better than she’s ever felt.

Just as she begins to orgasm, his head explodes beneath her. She jerks herself up off him so that she is standing above him, feet on either side of his tomato. The floor is covered in red juice, speckled with seeds. His torn-­up head is now nothing more than a puddle of tomato skin soup.

She tries to imagine his old face, the sharp angled cheeks, his narrow forehead, his too-pink lips. After 12 years of marriage, his looks of course haven’t changed all that much while she seems to have gained at least a decade on him. It’s because she has to work all day at her tedious job and then spend the evening catering to his needs, which usually means stroking his ego and cooking his favorite vegan dinners. She isn’t nearly as good­-looking as most middle-­aged women and wasn’t extraordinary as a younger woman either, but she’d invested her best years in him. He owes her something.

She goes to the kitchen and grabs a roll of paper towels and a large bowl. She scoops up the globs of tomato meat and drops them in, daubs at the wetness on the carpet.

She’ll have to buy carpet cleaner later of course. Even though he’s home all the time, he still doesn’t do the necessary shopping.

She licks a blob of tomato from the back of her hand. He really does taste delicious now: a perfect mix of sweet and sour. She takes the bowl back to the kitchen and sets it on the counter, pulls a masher out of a drawer. He could last for weeks. There is plenty for pasta sauce, for a vegetable drink, for a pizza topping.

There are a few hard nubs here and there in the bowl. She gets moist between her legs. It’s a shame to smash the nubs. She picks one out of the slosh and sucks on it like a jolly rancher. She finds another nub, reaches down, and slides it into her vagina. And then another. She fills herself with tomato as she spoons the wetter, more slippery pieces into her mouth. Just as she presses the last nub into herself, she climaxes. The tomato explodes out of her and across the kitchen floor. She shivers for several seconds.

“Amazing,” she says to what remains of him in the bowl.

Still twitching, she spreads a sheet of Saran Wrap across the top of the bowl and puts the remains of his head inside the fridge for later.

REBEKAH JOY HALL is a writer from six states and two continents. She holds an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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A CUE

AMELIA CHARTER

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  AMELIA CHARTER is a Chicago-based performance artist whose practice is in cultivating a bridge between performance and sculpture that lingers in the intimacy between human presence and the properties of materials and place. A mother as a physical therapist and a father as a small businessman, healing the body and serving the community have been central to Amelia’s practice. Her artwork unfolds out of the transformation of individual and common suffering through thematically-based live performance and immersive/ participatory environments of process-based installation. She seeks to provide visceral art experiences that stem from both the personal and poetic that envelope our senses in dream-like states of being. Amelia’s process weaves together somatic research, improvisational structures, material investigations and hybrid writing. She builds furniture, sews garments, produces drawings, and maps performances with sound-scapes, and scenic elements composed of both found and highly crafted materials.

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PORTRAIT OF BERNARD

BY INDIA RADFAR

He’s done with Italy

He’s done with India

He’s done with Woodstock

He’s done with the Pacific Palisades

He’s done with my family

He’s done with his Indian clothes

He’s done with the avant-garde

He’s done with poets

He’s done with most of my friends

He’s done with most of my friends’ husbands

He’s done with sweet potatoes

He’s done with New York

He’s done with cottage cheese

He’s done with Eugene’s paintings

He’s done with his mother’s cooking

He’s done with keeping journals

He’s done with certain restaurants

He’s done with our aging cat Ginger

He’s done with Indian food

He’s done with Paris

He’s done with America

He’s done with every country except for Japan

He’s done with growing his hair long

He’s done with dyeing it

He’s done with decaf

He’s done with religion

He’s done with mentors

He’s done with dancing

He’s done with marriage

He’s done with jeans

He’s done with store bought bread

He’s done with poetry readings

He’s done with camping

He’s done with helping me on the computer

He’s done with eating sweets

He’s done with wearing sky blue t-shirts

He’s done with wearing his wedding ring

He’s done with wearing a full beard

He’s done with Venice

He’s done with prisoners

He’s done with teenage mothers

He’s done with going out to the movies

He’s done with most Persians

He’s done with his sister talking too much about herself

He’s done with Hollywood movies                                                         

He’s done with learning how to sing

He’s done with all of my poet friends

He’s done with museums

He’s done with art galleries

He’s done with our living room couch

He’s done with Leila’s toys in the living room

He’s done with the Oaxacan restaurant

He’s done with clutter

He’s done with wearing Birkenstock sandals

He’s done with Mont Blanc fountain pens

He’s done with homeopathy

He’s done with writing his first drafts on paper

He’s done with all the people he never really liked

He’s done with giving me presents on our anniversary

He’s done with our backyard

He’s done with our house

He’s done with his car

He’s done with being on the heavy side

He’s done with sitting for too long

He’s done with Judaism

He’s done with Italian food

He’s done with letter openers

He’s done with making collages

He’s done with the Venice Boardwalk

He’s done with academics

He’s done with all forms of schooling

He’s done with wearing a bracelet

He’s done with eating green beans that squeak on your teeth when you chew them

He’s done with tofu

He’s done with Whole Foods

He’s done with Starbucks

He’s done with Coffee Bean

He’s done with eating bad food

He’s done with small talk

He’s done with loud parties

He’s done with weddings

He’s done with raw silk

He’s done with sleeping eight hours a night

He’s done with flying on small planes

He’s done with wearing outdoor shoes in the house

He’s done with listening to Indian music

He’s done with the light fixtures in the kitchen and the living room

He’s done with slow walks

He’s done with watering the fig tree

He’s done with the grass in the backyard                                                  

He’s done with the squirrels eating the mulberries                            

He’s done with Malibu

He’s done with going to the beach

He’s done with health food

He’s done with health food restaurants

He’s done with letting the pets into the bedroom

He’s done with cat hair

He’s done with the cat scratching things

He’s done with the cat crying for food

He’s done with the cat crying to go outside

He’s done with replacing the batteries in the smoke detectors

He’s done with giving people the benefit of the doubt

He’s done with inviting people over to dinner

He’s done with expecting things to be different

He’s done with hoping they will change

He’s done with chicken salad, potato salad and egg salad

He’s done with mayonnaise

He’s done with all types of curries

He’s done with raw food restaurants

He’s done with birthday cake

He’s done with using bars of soap

He’s done with yoga

He’s done with tilapia

He’s done with mosquitoes

He’s done with houseguests

He’s done with the Dalai Lama

He’s done with Mother Theresa

He’s done with babies

He’s done with gold leaf

He’s done with picking up dog poop

He’s done with IHOPs

He’s done with hip-hop

He’s done with talking about Race

He’s done with The Gap

He’s done with feminism

He’s done with the New Age

He’s done with hippies

He’s done with answering the phone

He’s done with wearing shorts off the tennis court

He’s done with wearing Capri pants

He’s done with mystics

He’s done with crude comedies

He’s done with being bossed around

He’e done with his unconscious

He’s done with interpreting his dreams

He’s done with conferences

He’s done with belief

He’s done with philosophers

He’s done with painters

He’s done with intellectualism

He’s done with college towns

He’s done with sleep

He’s done with informality

He’s done with pretending

He’s done with bird lovers

He’s done with open-heart surgery

He’s done with compassion

He’s done with volunteering

He’s done with altruism

He’s done with pineapple

He’s done with crowds

He’s done with performances

He’s done with Church

He’s done with Temple

He’s done with University

He’s done with Mosque

He’s done with Sufism

He’s done with Buddhism

He’s done with meditation

He’s done with emptiness

He’s done with contemplation

He’s done with team sports

He’s done with antiques

He’s done with higher degrees

He’s done with Israel

He’s done with forests

He’s done with where he grew up

He’s done with missing Iran

He’s done with who he used to be

He’s done with who he was when we met

He’s done with loud noises

He’s done with equanimity

He’s done with always being in agreement with others

He’s done with getting along with people

He’s done with risking his life

He’s done with buying tomatoes from the supermarket

He’s done with all fruit from the supermarket

He’s done with all stores that don’t take American Express

He’s done with flying coach

He’s done with saving money

He’s done with being frugal

He’s done with appearing intelligent                                                          

He’s done with narcissists                                                                       

He’s done with nightclubs

He’s done with winter

He’s done with education

He’s done with politics

He’s done with charity

He’s done with the Divine

He’s done with twisting his ankle

He’s done with conventions

He’s done with trying to change

He’s done with trying to understand others

He’s done with the idea of living in an old stone house

He’s done with bad smells

He’s done with waiting

He’s done with owning tchotchkes

He’s done with Eastern Europe

He’s done with metaphysics

He’s done with bright sunny rooms

He’s done with putting on bright lights at night

He’s done with giving me backrubs

He’s done with the idea of God

He’s done with looking like Vivekananda

He’s done with Ladakh, Dharamsala, New Delhi and Calcutta

He’s done with aligning himself with any existing group or any one ideology

He’s done with being unknown

He’s done with not being understood

He’s done with being anywhere but in his own head

He’s done with being on anyone else’s time 

He’s done with the conclusions other people have reached

He’s done with heaven

He’s done with riding on boats

He’s done with letting anybody eat anything in his car

He’s done with letting anybody drink anything but water in his car

He’s done with wearing neckties

He’s done with celebrating on Christmas

He’s done with all the things he once did and now no longer does

He’s done with all the things he once thought and now no longer thinks

He’s done with being overly nice

                                                                                                                                                                                    Some of the things on this list he has never liked, and the rest he’s just done with.

                                                                                            INDIA RADFAR is a poet with four books of poetry: India Poem, Pir Press 2002, the desire to meet with the beautiful, Tender Buttons Books 2003, Breathe, Shivastan Publications 2004, and most recently Position & Relation, Station Hill/ Barrytown Books 2009; plus the chapbook 12 Poems That Were Never Written, Mindmade Books, 2006.  She teaches for California Poets-in-the-Schools, Writegirl, and The Creative Minds Project at UCLA for the homeless and mentally ill.  She is in the process of becoming a Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator for the National Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy.

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THE ALTAR OF ADOLESCENCE--A TEENAGE DREAM

BY ALICIA ELER

I. When I speak to my adolescent self, it goes a little something like this…

I am a teenager and I worship false idols.

I fell in love with Katy Perry as soon as she told me I made her “feel like she was living a teenage dream” because of “the way I turn her on.”

I eat cotton candy and whipped cream and rainbow-colored sprinkles because they’re sweet and I like the sugar rush.

I walk on a cloud of naïveté.

I stop at the convenience store to read Seventeen, Teen Beat, J-14, M, Popstar!, Twist and Teen Vogue.

I dream about Justin Bieber leaving Selena Gomez for me, and I pray the baby isn’t his.

II. Greetings My Love, You’re In Candyland

I find myself in Candyland, where I finally meet Katy Perry. She approaches me wearing a dress made entirely of pink cotton candy. Her mouth is permanently stuck in an “O.” She says nothing, only hums at a pitch that gets higher and higher until it turns into a deafening scream. I cover my ears and scream. There is a peppermint candy cane hanging from her right ear. A scoop of strawberry ice cream melts on top of her pink hair. She bends over, drips ice cream onto my left shoe, and then scurries away into the candycane forest. She climbs a Twizzler rope. (I see her snow white ass pop out from underneath her effervescent dress. I guess the cotton candy isn’t sticky enough.) At the top, she exits onto a blue cotton-candy cloud whose texture is much thicker than her pink cotton-candy dress. She lies down, removes her candy, and poses like Manet’s Olympia. Then she looks down at me, rainbow sprinkles in her eyes. I shoot whipped cream straight up into the blue sky.

III. Cotton Candy Galore

Katy Perry won’t come down from her cloud, so I leave to get some cotton candy ice cream. It’s summer in Candyland, and melted ice cream sticks to the soles of my bare feet. The gingerbread houses smell burnt instead of sweet. I arrive at the ice cream store, which is named COTTON CANDY GALORE. I stick out my tongue to catch some melting vanilla ice cream, which drips from the store’s sign. Workers come out and constantly replenish the always-melting ice cream, but they are never fast enough. The heat hovers hard.

I decide to try the cotton-candy ice cream flavor. I enter the store and get in line behind three chatty toddlers holding matching M&M’s bags. Their mother smacks them, trying to keep them quiet. A gummy bear soldier runs through the store, shouting at everyone to silence immediately because Snoop Dogg, the king of Candyland, will soon be arriving.

I space out for a moment and picture a woman, sitting in cotton candy, nude, looking out into the horizon. Her right thigh slips off the cotton candy cloud, which expands as it floats across the sky. She almost falls off of it, but before she slips it expands. Is Katy falling from the sky?

I’m next in line. The blonde cashier boy smiles at me. He wears a cotton candy ice cream hat that keeps melting. The flavor I want is sold out.

IV. Bubble Gum Nightmare

The ice cream store is gone. The gummy bear soldiers have disappeared. I look up at the sky and see Katy in her blue cotton candy cloud. She sees me looking and squirts whipped cream back at me. It lands in my left eye. The sugar burns hard. I can’t keep looking up so I run down the gingerbread street until I find the convenience store. Somehow it is dingy and without sugar coating.

I walk in and smack into the wall of Hubba Bubba pink bubblegum cartridges. They say “Awesome Original” in yellow bubble letters. They call it tape, actually, which is why it feels like I’m eating something fake and sticky when I rip open a cartridge and shove two feet of it into my mouth. My mouth turns pink and I fall to the floor, unconscious.

V. Why Does Kurt Cobain Sing To Me?

Am I having a dream within my teenage dream?

Kurt Cobain and I are on stage together, holding hands and gazing into each others’ eyes. He starts singing to me. 

The song is over but Kurt’s mouth keeps moving. His hands feel cold in mine but his grip is so strong that I can’t break away. The song starts over. I wake up, screaming.

VI. Teenage Tabloid Magazines

Candyland sucks, and I want out. But when I wake up on the sticky caramel-covered floor of the convenience store, I look up and see endless copies of Seventeen magazine covering the wall. The tired Indian guy behind the desk looks at me. He sports a shirt covered in black licorice stripes.

“You gonna get up and buy some magazines? If not, you leave now,” he says. 

I comply and stand up, though it’s a difficult task and now my back is covered in caramel and my head is full of Kurt’s creepy teen spirit. It smells like sweat and Old Spice, mixed with crisp expired hair gel.

I walk toward the magazines. 

I see Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, the bubblegum pink hearts with cut-outs of 17-year-old Scotty The Hottie’s face inside them and a blonde who calls herself Scotty’s “perfect girl.” She smooches his freshly-shaved cheek. Scotty and Justin and Selena’s smiles are sweet and teasingly sexy, I think—if you think teenagers are sexy.

I pick up the magazine. My hand shakes. I feel dirty, like I’m looking at Hustler or Playboy. I rip out the centerfolds of Justin and Selena and shove them in my sticky back pocket. The cashier doesn’t notice. I slip out the door and back onto the gingerbread-covered street.

VII. I Read The News Today, Oh Boy

As I wander down the gingerbread-covered street, I run into a Wall Street Journal newsstand. I pay the two peppermint candy quarters and open the creaky door. Confectionary sugar from the box poofs up into the hot, sticky air. I grab a copy of the paper and turn to walk down the street.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Selena Gomez made her first investment in a tech start-up called Postcard on the Run, an iPhone app that transforms your photos into real paper postcards. She handed over $750,000.

Here in Candyland, Selena is Katy Perry’s runner up. She isn’t old enough to be queen, but she can sure be the princess. She tells The Wall Street Journal that she invested in Postcards on the Run because she misses Justin and she wanted to make sure they had more ways to communicate than just texting. That’s when she started taking pictures using her iPhone camera and mailing them to him using Postcards on the Run.

It made her feel a lot closer to Justin. Well, until she found out about the terrible rumor!!! Justin may have impregnated a girl backstage after one of his concerts. His agents made him take a paternity test to find out if he was the man of that boy and the boy of that man. Then he went on Letterman, a show that’s not on in Candyland proper, and talked about how he would never cheat on Selena. (I’m thinking his agent gave him that line.)

That same night Selena sent Justin a Postcard on the Run that said “I love you forever and will you stay with me?”

I’m not sure if he received it.

VIII. BIEBER HAS BEEN STABBED!

Just as I finish reading the Wall Street Journal article, a giant sign lights up in Candy Times Square: “ATTENTION CANDYLAND! JUSTIN BIEBER HAS BEEN STABBED!” I whip out my iPhone and Google it. It just can’t be true.

Dreamboat teen heartthrob Justin Bieber has been stabbed outside of an LA nightclub. Other versions of the story claim Bieber was stabbed outside of a New York City nightclub.

But an article on The Naked Security blog reveals the truth:

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/12/08/justin-bieber-stabbed-facebook-scam/

No such stabbing has taken place.

The Facebook scammers are trying to trick fans into clicking on a link that says it will give them money. 

Unfortunately, young Facebook users are easily fooled. If they do end up clicking on the link, they are sent to a YouTube page that supposedly has a video of the stabbing. Users are asked to first share the link before they’re able to watch the video, which further spreads the scam across Facebook.

I post it to my wall, with a tagline:

I’m Candyland Tribune reporter Alicia K on the Internet scene. I’ll report back later with any new information.

IX. In Which Katy Perry Finds God, then Leaves Me and Candyland for Good (Rolling Stone)

I look up to the candy clouds, only to find Katy Perry Googling herself. I see her log on to Facebook and stop to gaze at a certain celebrity boy-girl named Justin. Snoop Dogg walks in and says, “Hey baby, are you two friends or something?” He seems a bit jealous.

She cocks her head, licks her lips and looks straight into her webcam.

“Oh yeah, like a Facebook friend? Like someone whose wall you look at from time to time but never fuck? Yeah, that’s pretty much my relationship with Justin.”

She turns to look at her computer and Googles the following: “Katy Perry Sex God Rolling Stone.” She finds the Rolling Stone cover story about her. I grabbed it for you just in case you weren’t sure how to find it:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/sex-god-katy-perry-rolling-stones-2010-cover-story-20110607

Katy grins from ear to ear. She turns to Snoop, who seems confused about all this Googling, and says: “Yes, I said I kissed a girl. But I didn’t say I kissed a girl while fucking a crucifix.”

Snoop gasps. He seems taken aback, and slinks away into the blue cotton candy cloud. Katy is in a huff, and so decides to start talking about her religious past—she was a Christian rockstar before transforming into her current pop star status.

“Listen up, I have a tattoo of JESUS on my wrist just like my daddy,” she tells the web cam. “God is still a really big part of my life, but the details are told in the Bible—and that’s still fuzzy to me. And I want to throw up when I say that. But that’s the truth.”

I am the only one standing in Candy Times Square right now. The gummy bear soldiers must be on break. Snoop is ignoring Katy still after her little outburst.

She sighs again, licks some whipped cream from the tip of the cotton candy cloud, and starts talking at the camera again.

“I look up into the sky and I’m just mindfucked—all those stars and planets, the never-endingness of the universe. I just can’t believe that we’re the only polluting population. Every time I look up, I know that I’m nothing and there’s something way beyond me.”

I breathe in the sweet sugar-y air and find myself drifting off into a quiet land of pink roses, light blue flowers and golden stars. Before I close my eyes, I see Katy waving goodbye to me.

X. Stop Dreamin’ About Candyland and Ponies! This is Real Life, Girl!

I wake up all wet and sticky.

I think I see cane sugar dripping from the ceiling, but it might just be a leak I’ve been too lazy to fix. I get up to use the washroom. When I turn on the faucet, for a split second I really do see red Slurpee syrup instead of water. When I walk back into my bubblegum pink-colored room, I notice that the walls are covered with posters of Justin, Selena, Katy, Kurt, Snoop Dogg and the gummy bear army. Did I hang those? I walk toward the saintly image of Justin and start peeling off a baby blue tape in one of the corners. I grow impatient and rip the poster off the wall. That’s when I discover the two-foot by three-foot hole; it looks like someone with a basketball-sized fist made it.

I poke my head inside. All I see are candy cane shadows.

ALICIA ELER is a writer, art critic and curator whose projects focus on American pop and consumer culture, social networked identities, adolescence and queer aesthetics. Currently a Staff Writer for Hyperallergic, her art writing and criticism also appears in Artforum.com and Salon. Her work has been published in Art Papers, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Flavorpill, RAW Vision Magazine, ReadWriteWeb and Time Out Chicago. She is currently exploring the world of fiction writing. You can follow her on Twitter at @aliciaeler. 

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TRAUMARAMA

A COLLABORATION*

BY MEGAN MILKS

Best section by far. Melissa would bring the new issue [of Seventeen] to the bus stop every month, and we’d go straight to the Trauma-Ramas. The boys made fun of us but you know they loved it too. One time Eddie pulled me aside to ask what a wet fart was like it was some secret girl thing, and I had to make something up because I didn’t actually know! I guess the word ‘shart’ had yet to emerge in the popular lexicon. Anyway there was one [a wet fart] in each issue, usually ruining someone’s lavender prom dress. And there was an early period, and someone tripping and spilling soda all down their shirt so their bra was visible, and someone’s dad walking in on them shaving their crotch. The same ones every month, a humiliation machine. We loved being unimpressed too. Like oh, you walked into the volleyball net…and a boy saw it! Come on. We wanted the most humiliating things imaginable to happen to other girls. —S.J., 28

I think they really equalized us. I mean, I felt so awkward and gross all the time, a pimply blobfish floating the halls. The Trauma-Ramas were a relief. I wasn’t the only one who’d made eye contact with a cute boy and promptly fallen down the stairs. I wasn’t the only one who’d imagined Chad’s note for Stacey could actually be for me. All of the Staceys had done these things too. —M.T., 31

Of course they were all made up—by the staff writers if not the girls themselves. During sleepovers, we would stay up concocting the worst Trauma-Ramas that could ever happen. It’s funny, we totally knew the formula—some sort of bodily exposure or malfunction, a cute boy or “major hottie” to witness it, a humorous quip at the end—but we were so naïve and, well, uninventive that the best we could come up with was an orthodontics mishap that’s probably physically impossible during a sexual encounter that’s also pretty unlikely. It went something like: “I was with my husband in our hotel room on our wedding night. I was soooo nervous giving him a blowjob for the first time…and then his condom got stuck in my braces! Now every time I give my new husband a blowjob I’m” —wait for it—“braced for disaster.” —C.M., 28

This is an excellent distraction for a rainy Sunday! I’ve been pondering your e-mail in the back of my mind for the past few days, and really haven’t been able to come up with anything show-stoppingly/jaw-droppingly/gleefully good. But here’s something, for what it’s worth: When I was in grammar school, I was speaking with a classmate by the sinks in the bathroom, and was so engrossed in the conversation that I mindlessly attempted to follow her into a bathroom stall, upon which time I was called a lesbian. So for the longest time I thought being a lesbian meant a) not being cognizant of the natural end of a conversation or b) someone who liked watching people urinate. —A.D., 25

It was 1997. The first Lilith Fair. I was wandering the grounds and reveling in the queer camaraderie when I spotted the woman of my horny teenage dreams. She sat sobbing by herself on the edge of a fountain in the cobbled square where vendors were selling hemp yoni necklaces. She couldn’t have been more than 22, but I gotta say, it took some brass ovaries for a 16-year-old to do what I did next. I sat down next to her and asked what was wrong. I nodded, oozing concern, at the same time stroking her hand and shooting her bedroom eyes. Little did I know, I was also oozing something else. When it became clear the woman wasn’t the Sapphic sister I’d hoped, I gave her a lame little platonic hug and retreated back to our spot on the lawn. As I knelt down to sit, I caught a glimpse of my crotch. It was my “Moon Time”! The Goddess had summoned forth my womanly essence all over the back of my khakis. The stain was shaped roughly like Africa. Not exactly the smooth loverboy look I was going for! —G.S., 29

I was speeding on my way home because I was about to have diarrhea so bad, I mean really bad, any second, and of course I get pulled over. I stop and I yell at the cop, “I know I’m speeding, I gotta go shit! Follow me to my house!” So he does, and he parks in the driveway with the lights going and gets the paperwork started while I race inside. I take my shit and I come out, and he’s like “Hey...did you go to Gretchum High?” It was Rob, that guy from Spanish. —K.S., 33

So I come home from my first semester in college and I learn that my mom has found my private journal and read it, and she’s corraled the entire family into confronting me about my unholy perversity. My family is a family of God, and I had been journaling extensively about my repeated attempts at autofellatio. Awkward! … I confessed to substance abuse. Not only did this divert their attention away from my exciting masturbation life, it also provided my mother with something more palatable to moan about with her church friends. —C.A., 27

I went to Miami my first spring break in college. One night we were at a bar and I was chatting with a guy who bought me a drink. So I drank it. I started feeling woozy, so I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I was able to get my pants down and sit on the toilet but then I lost my ability to move. Something was seriously wrong. I couldn’t even move to get up off the toilet. After a while my friends found me and helped me up and sort of dragged me back to our hotel. I know, my bad for drinking a drink I didn’t buy myself. I’m just thankful I was smart enough to recognize something was wrong and get myself out of the situation before—you know, I don’t even want to think about it anymore. I wish I had a story about tampons or something. —L.F., 32

When I was 22 I was seeing this girl and every time we fucked she had a tampon in, which I felt was not right, but because I hadn’t had a lot of sex and she had, and because she was incommunicative and kind of scary, I decided to make sense of it in the way that we all make sense of things that don’t make sense, through rationalizing. Maybe she likes the feeling of getting fucked with a tampon in, maybe it extends the feel of the fingers, maybe she is an ejaculator and the tampon absorbs the mess. Then one night I encountered a tampon in her vagina and it was slimy and gross and I knew with horror that it must be always the same tampon. I stopped and asked her about it but she kept dismissing me, saying I was only feeling the powerful muscles of her cervix, so I shut up and kept fucking her. This happened the next night too. (She was really scary, you don’t understand.) Finally I couldn’t take it anymore, I was having nightmares about TSS, it had to stop. So the next time we were fucking I didn’t ask, just coaxed out the tampon as gently as I could. It came out soaked and shrunken and stinking of stale band-aids. We both stared at it, silent, until in one motion she jerked out of bed, scooped the lump from my hand, and ran shrieking into the bathroom to dispose of it. Of course she’d had no idea it was there, and who knows how long it had been there, and meanwhile I’d known about it for two weeks and hadn’t pressed the issue because I assumed I didn’t know anything. We were equally mortified, I think. —L.O., 26

Last summer I went to a queer dance party with my girlfriend, who can get a little insecure when we go out, because I’m very social and outgoing, and she’s reserved and prone to jealousy. It’s an ongoing problem that we’re both aware of. Anyway, we were all having a good time I thought. I was dancing with my friend Dara and just having fun and my girlfriend comes over drunk. She grabs my waist and slurs all this crazy shit about how I’m flirting with Dara and making a laughingstock out of her [my girlfriend] in front of everyone. I laughed because it was so ridiculous. Well, that just made her angrier and she hit me in the face. Obviously this does not fly in any space, but in a queer space, it’s particularly bad, because there has to be all this processing afterwards. The organizers made her leave and told me she wouldn’t be welcome there ever again and that they would make sure I felt safe there, which was cool of them. But then the next day they send out a message to the entire Facebook group of like 800 people, attempting to process the violence and to reaffirm their safe-space policy. So now everyone—and these are people I know—thinks I’m some battered woman who’s staying with a shithead who beats her up, which is not true, this was the first time anything like this had ever happened. And you know what, I love this person and she’s absolutely mortified by this moment, this one stupid mistake, and she’s apologized repeatedly and she’s agreed to go to couples counseling and take an anger management class and curb her drinking, all this stuff. But my friends are all judging me like I’m some passive victim who’s too weak and codependent to get out of my abusive relationship. It’s just like, aaaahhhhh! —J.B., 29

I had a bunch of friends over one night and my roommate was the only hetero in a group of lesbian- and queer-identified women and to her this meant she needed to adamantly assert her love of cock, mainly to be controversial. She just would not shut up about cocks—“real cocks, not the plastic kind.” It was getting annoying and finally she was just being outright insulting to us, saying crap like “you don’t know cock until you’ve tried it, ladies, really you don’t know what you’re missing,” as if none of us had ever fucked a cis dude before, and it was so dumb and I shouldn’t have taken the bait but finally I just told her to shut the fuck up, and she told me to shut the fuck up, and this went back and forth for a while, our voices rising and her getting aggressively in my face and then something went off in my brain and I hit her. I smacked her in the head in front of everyone and then I ran into the house embarrassed. —N.R., 27

Hey friend! I am excited about this project and looking forward to reading what you come up with, but not feeling up to excavating old humiliations right now. I know you and others find sharing cathartic and necessary, but I don’t deal with things similarly. —A.G., 38

There are two genres of embarrassing slash humiliating stories I could tell you—one that is kind of funny and does not reflect badly on me in any way—and the other that is actually embarrassing and lessens my social capital. So the ones I’ll tell you, you probably won’t find interesting enough to use. I don’t think I’ve experienced anything that I would call truly traumatic. —A.W., 30

Honestly, I have so many I don’t know where to start. Okay. So I had this boyfriend who said the weirdest things. Once after I got on all fours on his bed and he stood behind me and fucked me with his fingers, and after I’d come, and he’d come, and I’d come again, this time begging for more fingers, he smiled and said pleasantly, Mildly kinky, eh? Another time, and I don’t remember if it was before or after that, I had read about talking dirty in a book my friend gave me, so I was talking dirty to him while I rode him, and I was doing this baby voice, and flipping my hair around, and I thought I was definitely his fantasy right then, especially when I said, I love it when you make me c-c-come, and he (again) smiled and said pleasantly, Everyone enjoys sex. So I shut up and just kept bouncing. I think it was a different time, but same position, I was approaching my theatrical climax—which was good but not that good, but I wanted to be his fantasy—so I was trying to sound like a little girl but also knowing and experienced and in charge of my own sexuality but also all gaspy and awed and surprised, when I of course farted, this quacky little duck-call fart, and his eyes got all big. He didn’t have any grins or choice remarks about that one and it’s the kind of thing we should have laughed about, and normally I love to laugh about farts, but that time I was grateful he pretended it didn’t happen. —J.H., 28

Oh, wait. There’s more. The boyfriend before that was finger-fucking me once, and he suddenly stops, and I look up, and there’s this look on his face of absolute horror, like he’s just reached into the Cracker Jack box and gotten a fistful of vomit. What? I ask him, and I’m kind of terrified, because what could make him look like that, there must be something pretty wrong, do I have herpes? and he doesn’t say anything, but he shows me his fingers, which have some brownish goop on them. I figure I must be spotting—it’s at the very very end of my period—and he doesn't know what that is, so I have to explain THAT to him as well, and he basically doesn’t accept it. This should not be happening, he says. Then he says, Can’t you just squat down and shake it out? I really can’t get him to see that it doesn’t work like that, and he goes to wash his hand, with soap and great personal offense. Months later he says to me, Remember the time there was all that old brown blood trapped in your vagina? This same boyfriend, I got pregnant with him, and he was pro-life (or whatever it’s fucking called) so he wouldn’t come with me to the clinic or take me to the hospital when I had a bad reaction to the anti-nausea drug they gave me but he definitely did not want me to have the baby, but sometimes he would poke my belly and say, Baby in there. I know it sounds like I’m trashing him, but the real joke is on me, because I was dumb enough to get pregnant a second time with this guy, deny it, wait for him to figure it out and dump me, have the abortion (uh-gain) by myself, make chitchat with the abortion doctor while she vacuumed out my insides, chitchat about a creepy professor of mine she knew from the gym, someone she considered a close personal friend, someone who whipped his shirt off in front of boys he liked during office hours and propositioned the head of the department, made chitchat with the doctor while staring at a goddamn inspirational poster with a picture of a hot air balloon on it and some bullshit about “there are no mistakes,” made chitchat until it really began to feel like I was being raped by this thing vacuuming me out because I felt it displacing my organs and pummeling my belly sick the way it happened when I had actually been raped, on a weird pseudo-date, the year before, and that’s the point when I stopped making chitchat and yelled at her to stop it right now, just stop it please, and she said OK, and she did stop. This same ex-boyfriend said he was against lesbianism because his sister had OCD and mentioning lesbians or things lesbian-ish triggered her. And I told this guy I loved him, a bunch of times. —J.H., 28

There’s not one event. It’s this shapeless ghost that travels with me, and it takes forms in all kinds of ways and when I least expect it. There are triggers, yeah, but sometimes I can’t predict them. And often I have to do the work of reassuring whoever I’m with that it wasn’t them, it was just this thing that happens sometimes. It’s this whole cycle. Like, I could contribute to your piece but I probably couldn’t read it without going down multiple bad head trips. —S.M., 27 

I was on the train going home, minding my own business listening to my iPod and looking out the window considering whether to make quinoa salad or a veggie burger for dinner and suddenly this dude’s hand’s between my legs. I was too shocked to  move or say anything and I just sat there for a long while, not breathing, not protesting, not stopping it in any way, not looking at him, not looking at his hand, in total denial that this was happening, instead fixating on the comforting whine of Taylor Swift and the hair of the person in front of me, which was long and dark and draped over the back of the seat with one strand hanging loose from the rest. I wanted to reach out and pull that strand, it was all I could focus on. Then the bell for the doors rang and snapped me out of it and I got up and pushed past him to get off the train. When I told my friends later they made a big thing out of it and I shrugged it off, no big deal. But it was. —B.Y., 26

I think that having it fictionalized or not quite right is almost more hurtful than sharing it with people. And it’s also almost more hurtful if were anonymous and not attributed to me. Because I own it. You know? And that’s the hardest thing. I own it and it took a long time to own it, to acknowledge it. Even just acknowledging that these things happened to me, that took years. And it’s not just me who was affected. Getting a reputation in high school, that’s not just me who had to deal with it, I have a younger brother and sister who had to live with that too. I guess I’ve always thought that I would do something good with it. Like work at Planned Parenthood and tell girls who want to have an abortion it is okay. Tell girls who have been raped that they are somebody. They will become themselves. I know you’re an artist and you can do whatever you want but I don’t know. This is mine. —J.D., 32

A former partner of mine had a really brutal experience as a kid that she wouldn’t tell me about. I mean she would occasionally refer to it to explain certain reactions to things but she wouldn’t tell me exactly what happened. Even though I knew it was a bad experience that she didn’t want to relive, I was a little loopy one night, maybe a little drunk, and I made it into a silly game, like I was trying to get her to share some juicy but benign secret, like who’s-your-crush, tell-me-tell-me. What-was-it-what-happened-can-I-guess-if-I-guess-right-will-you-tell-me, I went in a singsong voice, like it was fun. I’m so ashamed. She tolerated me for a few minutes with what I realize now was an embarrassed smile, embarrassed for me, I mean, and then she looked me straight in the face and said, firmly, No. —H.P., 28

_______________________________________________________________

*Some of these narratives are based on or were influenced by my conversations with others about their experiences; some have been written by those who experienced them; some are found; many are fictionalized; all have been anonymized and edited.

◊ This project lives on at http://traumaramaproject.tumblr.com. Please consider contributing!

_______________________________________________________________

MEGAN MILKS is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, forthcoming from Emergency Press, and most recently the chapbook Twins (Birds of Lace, 2012).

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THREE CLERKS

BY DENISE DOOLEY

Her husband thought she was shaking her head “no.”

“Now girl,” he said, pulling her into him. “Don’t get like that. They have the same rights to be out here as anyone.”

The woman who caught her eye had been wearing a sign that read USURY. As skinny as she remembered Sabine, for sure, and maybe as tall. Chanting her demands at the branch with the best of them.

Air flowed in through her nose, she held it, let it out, said ‘calm down Haylee’ in her mind until that became possible. That summer came up a lot, honestly. They all still called soda fizzy drinks, years later. They still called themselves her “clerks.” Whether she was embarrassed to see Sabine or to be seen by her was the question.

Neither, of course.

Neither one was relevant.

But strong personalities like that, they just make you remember. They take up space, but then that’s really all they do. It’s still clear as day to her: Sabine stomping down Bernal Hill, pigeon toed, stretching her leg against the railing at Café Sol as if it were a ballet bar. Carrying her lunch to the shop on a china plate: a buttered piece of wheat bread, a can of beer, and a carrot, washed but not peeled. Chewing out the side of her mouth as she lectured her three little clerks about things.

Life things.

"Love," Sabine once told them, “appears as though it is a sensory experience, when it is in fact designed to be a sensitive experiment." Her German accent slowed everything down. "Push on love, my girl," she said, "Or it will push on you."  She was six-foot-three, and browned, and thinner than any woman her age Haylee had ever met, with a line of bones rising where her cleavage would have been. She spent the summer instructing them. She argued they should each take many lovers, that hearts and groins alike need steady, varied work.

Her three clerks agreed vehemently.

Completely.

Maybe a little abstractly.

They’d turned twenty that summer. They were all three shapeless and shy and still deep in their ugly stages. They had tits like cutlets, even Lou, and no real worries about how to handle some surplus of sex, not for a long time yet.

Still the three clerks leaned on her counters, cherubic, sweating the glass cases with their pink arms, holding to her words. They agreed, absolutely, that polyamory removed ill will from love and left us freer, all of us, as humans, kinder and distinct from the powers of capital. All marriage is ownership, they echoed, trimming stems, all property is theft.

They found that artificial limits on affection impart a great violence.

They found polemic to be the one remaining romantic form.

They found it really, really helped to talk like this.

A deficiency of love can be tempered, turns out, by at least locating that dull trouble on the better side of an argument. They had a lot of free time to think about how that free time should be spent. Pairs are for squares, they joked, in dead Midwestern earnest. They were done worrying about the nobody they’d dated. They aspired to the difficulty of the five body problem.

                                                       ***

The very night they first drove into San Francisco, Sabine had welcomed them at the curb with kisses and tough muscled hugs. Their welcome party was already underway. She explained, walking backwards, she hosts a suckling roast every year on the night her summer clerks arrive and a nagashi somen dinner for their send off. In time they would come to understand the somen dinner was always planned, and always delayed, that Sabine had promised it to her friends for years but her delight in describing, in June, the restaurant in Kameoka where she had first caught cold noodles could never really match her exhaustion with the clerks by summer’s end. But that part comes later.

                               “To youth!” Sabine lifted her glass. “To youth!” the guests laughed back. They had their sleeves rolled up. They had children about your same age. Some of them helped themselves to a still red grilled salmon in cucumber gills.

“Haylee, tell us.” Sabine asked. “Your name, is it a family name?”      

“Wha huh. Hmm.” Her mouth was full.

“Is Haylee traditional?”

“It’s what my mom came up with.”

“But the spelling. Where does the spelling come from?”

“Oh.” I don’t know, she realized. Can I tell her I don’t know? The bread had turned back into dough in her mouth. “My mother read it somewhere.” It seemed these people would say mother, like that, and they would read.

“And Larissa? Is that a family name?”

“I don’t…. I’m not in her family. You could ask her?”

“Such interesting names. I always liked the name Eleanor.” said Sabine. “With an A. E- a.” Haylee stood nodding, rowing slowly forward into a sense that the conversation no longer had much use for her.

The back yard had aloes and roses instead of grass, and lots of hanging seats. She found a place in a hammock with a man who told her to call him Deep Sleeper, then laughed. He had been talking to a young Australian couple and they turned the subject politely from someone they didn’t agree with to mushrooms. They grow in the woods there, or on the side of the road. Haylee played it cool as though she’d met hundreds of Australians and sat listening until her eyes began to sting. She pulled her contacts out and wiped them on the chair cushion.

Hours later Sabine found her clerks leaning back against the driveway. She pulled them up by the arms and showed them how to work the combination on the door of the little garage she called their cottage.

“There’s torches,” she said, “and candles, until we get the wiring right again. And one bed, so you’ll be cozy. There’s a bureau for each of you. That one’s an Adler, that one’s a Frankl, that one, who knows.  And you can’t speak badly of me, now, because I’ve stocked the bar very well.” The walls were painted orange and blue and a chandelier with dried moss hung low over the bed. Haylee caught Larissa’s eye. If they’d been home in Council Bluffs, she would have grabbed her and yelled.

Larissa smoothed her hands down the front of her jeans, caught Haylee’s eyes, dropped them like whatever, and smoothed her hands down the back of her jeans. 

This was happening.

                                                      ***

Sabine was the first woman the clerks met who wore her smell like that, on purpose, or who didn't shave.  She was more interested in community than business. The store bled about two hundred dollars a day, but this loss was limited, as she only kept it open in the summers.

She ran it as a Marxist, she explained, not an idiot. She had thought this through. You have to live your life thought-through. She sold only things whose full taxonomy she knew: succulents, moss terrariums, perfumes from the real French houses, craft jewelry, tassels the size of a man’s fist, garden supplies. She had a philosophical approach to the practical. The shop had teal walls and upcycled medical cabinets filled with driftwood. The unexhumed life, she liked to say, is not worth living. Beauty and plants and living things are good for people. All living things are really people, she explained. Dead things, too. She saw the value of beauty, which is free, and of community surface. There are many more important things than the tall and mighty dollar.

While one clerk worked the morning shift the other two assisted her on salvage trips.

In the pick-up Sabine grilled them—what were their worries, their troubles, their parents’ situations, their relation to each other, their philosophies, what would they become. They watched her barter at estate sales and Chinese wholesalers, the flower market, the university surplus garages, the dump, the docks, the parts of the city where corner grocery owners might be willing to unscrew and sell her authentic hand-painted signs right off the awning. She drove a terrifying bargain. She made them each tell the story of when they lost their virginity. Haylee and Lou both invented something, and Larissa told the gospel truth—she hadn’t—which won her two months of advice about awakening her sexual core.

“Haylee, you’re the brains of the operation, yes?”

Haylee had laughed. As if in agreement.

“You have the air of an intellectual. Of a genius. Your studies have gone well so far?”

“Good enough.” She was glad they were alone.

“You’re a serious student?”

“Definitively.”

“I can tell. That’s good. That’s the right way. Already I know this about you. I have strong abilities to detect that in people, you know.”

Haylee was too flustered to say anything, but in a happy way. She tried to think of quotes about intelligence. There was something about Sabine’s face. The thinness of her skin, the way the light went through it and let those blue hollows under her eyes shine, the way her wrinkles were in fact beautiful.

How lucky Haylee was, to have such a spirit guiding her.

“Hay-l-e-e.” Sabine sounded out. “Is that a family name? Is that traditional?”

She squeezed their hands between thumb and forefinger—squeezed the webbing hard, so it hurt—and looked to see if their irises expanded. She checked their rising signs and lunar cycles and their natural abilities.

She told them about her ex-husband—he’d had a silver spoon, a literal silver spoon, with a matching double-handled sip-cup, and his father had been one of the first people in the world to privately own a pleasure aircraft and become an accidental terrorist. He’d been arrested in Cologne for flying donuts under and over the bridges, for fun. The framed newspaper photo of his arrest upon landing was hung in the shop in a Tiffany frame. There are three blonde children in the photo, pointy knitted caps tied down over their ears.

“That one,” she would say, tapping the face of a boy in an improbably miniature pea coat, “would grow up to run my heart.”

Her ex’s family money came from fizzy drinks. His mother never liked Sabine but had no problem instructing her to manicure his nails better. She like them very smooth, with no visible ridges.

The moral was that it is fine to marry a jerk so long as you don’t have any illusions. If you are zen about what you’re getting into you can’t possibly get hurt. Sabine had seen it coming a mile away, herself. That was the only reason, she explained, that it didn’t bother her, now.

                                                 What money came in was drawn by Sabine. Old gay couples in tank tops, young gay couples in ties, girls from startups, elegant moms—all of them thought they were her favorites. She could shill a hundred dollars worth of candles in ten minutes. She made change from her wallet, and went home with the cash. Neither the belled brass register nor the clerks served much clear purpose.

Once Haylee helped her lean an antelope head against a hydrant. Sabine inked “DO TAKE ME HOME AND MOUNT ME,” then tied the sign between the horns and sat back to watch it sell within the hour.  

 Mainly, they killed time. They read the sex advice columns in the free paper and went across the street to nag the sandwich artists for free cookies until they were offered free drinks. They sat out on the curb tanning their legs. But why not? Sabine needed for her shop to be the kind with an idle staff. Otherwise, who would give her the pleasure of sending them home early?

She’d roar in, flip the sign, dig spare bills from where she’d hid them in the jewelry cases or the curtain hems, then cut the lights.

“Walk with me, sweet. I need a mate.”

If the bench outside the coffee shop was taken she made her strategy clear. “You stand here and if those people leave you take that spot.  Stand and watch. Be a brute if you have to. Be a brave girl. Now stay.” She’d dip inside.

Whoever was sitting there would insist, no, insist that you take the bench, honey. They were just leaving. Really.

At every silence Haylee tried to think what Sabine most liked to talk about.

“I remembered I meant to tell you.” Haylee said, her hand on Sabine’s wrist. “If you ever do make it to Omaha, there is a Korean restaurant you have to try. Like, divine.” Sabine shot her some look. Haylee quieted as the summer continued. She learned instead to ask about the revolutions: tell me again about Chiapas, about Italy, about France.  

                                                    Her little clerks were visiting, Sabine joked, "from America." For five years they came from the community college in Council Bluffs, Iowa, always in trios, always passed down word-of-mouth from her cousin’s youngest daughter. Council Bluffs kids worked on detasseling teams growing up, or at Menards. They could not believe their good luck to stay rent free in a barely-converted garage and read all day in an antique shop, or smoke on the job and shower with a garden hose in the alley between the houses. Council Bluffs kids loved that you could walk around the city and smell little wet clouds of weed or see girls topless in Delores Park. They liked that you could drink in the streets at the festivals. You didn’t have to pay them very much.

“I have a ten-foot commute to work each day,” Lou told his dad on the phone. “What more could you ask in an internship?”

Lou didn’t tell his dad about the bed, although he should have, because everyone in Lou’s life pitied him for being gay and young and cute and wasting all of that on being closeted. But Lou wasn’t gay, more just soft and gameless, if pretty, with very black, damp hair and black lashes. He had a hopeless lean towards girls. They were, incidentally, the only kind of person he could not really stand to talk to.

He went after them with gentle punches to the shoulder, or extended campaigns of haughty silence. This didn’t ever work. Until, of course, it did. 

They all three loved their new habits. They felt like true adults. Sabine had introduced Lou to liver sausages, in tubes or fat pink slices. It tasted like bologna whipped with ranch. Larissa had said it tasted like foie gras, the difference being a degree of force and violence—something worse happened to the animal, but this tasted like it—although she was the only one who had ever had foie gras. The sausages sat in the mini-fridge pressed against their neighbors and their celo cover. Celo was a Sabine word, too, like bird or pants or lino or ciggie or dick as a verb. A good dicking.

                                                Gray-blue callouses grew over Larissa’s feet. She sat cross- legged, palming them. She had taken Sabine’s advice, started going for runs without shoes.

“I love it here,” Larissa said. The flagstones still held heat.

“Which of the three of us do you think loves it most?” Haylee asked.

“I think we all like it.” said Larissa.

“Oh, obviously.” Haylee said, “but just as an exercise. Just to think. Which of us loves it most?”

“You mean you think you do?” asked Larissa.

“No. I’m asking. I think the inverse, maybe, I doubt I do. It’s a very sensory experience, which I really appreciate. The sun. The micro-climates. But I’m a totally abstract person. Like I like to think and read; I like judgments. You can do those things anywhere. So therefore by that logic I’m excluded from loving it the most.”

“Yeah,” said Larissa. “Ok. I’m like, I like it here. It’s pretty here. I like the — the aloe things, and the lemons. I get homesick though. Is that funny?” She laughed. “Like babyish? ‘I miss my mommy?’ So it’s got to be Lou.”

“Yeah,” said Lou, “It is. I love it the most. The mostest.”

But then Lou had had the widest margin for surprise. The least expectation. He’d been invited at the last minute only because the girls realized he leased a car nice enough to drive out of state.

                                                       *** 

By the time Sabine invited them for dinner it had come to seem mysterious they’d never been inside her house. The clerks stuck there in the doorway, looking around. It smelled like a campfire. There were hard toadstool cushions and a blanket in the corner, but she sat on the floor with her legs in front of her, gripping her ankles, nose to knees.

Haylee sat, too, butterflied her legs. The dinner was wood bowls on a tray: salad greens, chopped cilantro, chopped purple carrots, black sesame seeds, white sesame seeds.

“Do you all know each others darkest secrets?” Sabine asked, half joking, and of course they said they didn’t. “You should tell me anyway. You could make them up, I’d never even know. How would I know? I wouldn’t know.” Larissa and Sabine and Lou talked about running for a while. They drank pinot and tequila and then, when they’d finished the bottle, beer. Haylee woke up on the wood floor, drooling.

The next weekend—the exact halfway point of the summer—the clerks started sleeping bare in their shared bed. They came home from the nude beach on Fourth of July with sunburns. Tired and dehydrated, the surf kept going in their ears. The springs pushed back against them from the bedframe.  Reverting to pajamas Sunday night would only draw attention to the weirdness of Saturday, so all three of them did it again.

Simple happiness could become routine, thought Haylee, ruining it.

                                      Sometimes Sabine did advice for the girls. She told them the hangover cures of all the different countries she’d lived in and the qualities Indonesian women seek in a husband.  She gave them vinegar to cool their skin and told them cramp cures, like sitting with a blanket over cedar boxes of coals and eucalyptus, spooning water so that the steam would clean them from the inside. She knew that in the Philippines your passport indicates if you’re a legitimate child or a bastard, and in Poland lovers bleed their fingers on the sheets for fun. She told them about the Dance of Anger and De-Selfing and the neuroses of sibling order, that you should take a year of celibacy after every heartbreak. She told Haylee to take a garlic suppository and smelled her wrist the next day to see if it took. She did the airplane donut arrest story again and again.

She remembered her ex-husband throwing ice chips over the curtain as she showered.

“I screamed,” she told them, her accent digesting the words. “I screamed my head off.  He had terrified me. He had a great sense. That sense of humor.”

                                                 When Sabine took Larissa and Haylee out looking for paving stones, they made it as far as Pescadero. She told them to lift with their biceps, like kettlebells, and stack them on a bed of sandbags. The wind was up so the girls felt filmic. They worked side by side while she scouted.

“Do you think Sabine is sad, about the divorce?” Larissa asked her.

“It was her idea.”

“You mean she says it was her idea.”

“It was. Her ex-husband sounds like a complete asshat.”

“Sure. But do you think she misses him?”

“People grow apart in a marriage of eleven years.”

“Ha. Forgot what an expert you are about the institution of marriage.”

That night Larissa and Lou were already asleep in their underwear when Haylee came in from reading. Larissa even had a bra on.

Haylee didn't have like, an objection to them sleeping together. She laughed, a delighted sounding laugh. Bell-like. “Uh Oh,” she could have said, or ���Whoopsie-daisy,” but they were asleep, they wouldn’t hear her.  

She put underwear and a t-shirt on and fell in next to them thinking, Unremarkable. Completely. Really if there’s anything surprising it was more to do with how they found the time, given Larissa’s stupid running schedule, or the privacy. There’s nothing wrong with them getting together. It’s perfectly natural and probably even a good omen but Larissa is likely to get really weird. She is weird around guys. There’s still something girlish about her. She hasn’t learned how to have confidence, yet.

                                                 “What’s so sad about the human animal,” Haylee said, “is that it doesn’t matter what it loves. Everything is so biological. We react to anything.”

“Wait what?” They still had to go to the bar together, because they didn’t know anyone else, and they weren’t going to sit around wasting their weekend.

“Its like, when you’re deer hunting. You can get this powdered deer urine and put it on everything and then the deer pursues it and it seems like its some successful hunter tactic. Like the hunter is so smart. But we’re all like that.”

“Sure,” said Lou. “It’s a logical fallacy.”

“It is not a logical fallacy. That is not what a logical fallacy is. You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Did he want to talk about this? Haylee would talk about this, sure.

“Tell me what a logical fallacy is.”

Lou looked over at Larissa. “I’m not sure I really care enough to answer that question?”

“It takes a white man, it really does, to give that kind of non-opinion with that degree of confidence. You know? Want someone to tell you what to care about, find a white boy. It never fails. It does.”

Lou laughed, and then he looked at her. He was waiting. He can wait, she thought.

“Oh, seriously, Haylee.” Lou sounded like a tiny boy when he was mad. “You are making zero sense. None.”

Her grip on the table was slippery.  She shook it a little too hard while she was standing up, and Lou snorted.

“No. Oh, no. I don’t have to be talking about this with you.”

Larissa looked up at them both, eyes blinking.

“No.” Haylee took her tote bag. She left the bar through the back gate and walked in the alleys, then the streets. She walked almost to the Sunset. For a three block stretch on Market, the driver of a Hummer-limo had slowed down to her pace and followed her, asking, “Where do you live, honey? Why won’t you tell me, my love?” Her body hurt in distinct chunks. At home she would choose to sleep on the floor, out of principle, and in the morning her shoe soles were studded with glass.

Remember they were not even twenty-one. They were very serious people, but they hadn’t had much experience brawling and it took everything out of them.

From this distance it’s hard for Haylee to put together what happened next, exactly, or why, but it definitely did not resolve itself. They went at it whole hog. For days. There were long walks—Haylee and Larissa, Haylee and Lou—grinding through what it means to be dependent, to be generous, to give more than you had, to participate in an ethics of antiausterity, to queer your attachments, to align your values, retain sovereignty, to work it out. To love in friendship.

She really thought it mattered, then.

That what you did was choose a way to be, then be it.

                                                      *** 

Sabine was open to exploring the questions that arose. She made herself wholly available, lent opinions and self-help books. For the first time she asked Haylee to her house alone. They discussed conflict aversion and conflict desire and Haylee cried her face redder than usual and Sabine cooed over her, acupressured her palms, told her to take a shower.

The shower had glass walls on three sides and beach rocks in piles on the floor. She ran Sabine’s Argan oil through her hair and stood in the steam feeling very certain.

Haylee had entered a new stage of her life, she was sure. She would not go back the same. It was terrible to see that her best friend hadn’t, but this is how growth works. When you move forward you pass the scenery. That’s what makes it scenery.

 The one priority Haylee wouldn’t budge on was her discomfort sharing a bed with anyone who had disrespected her. She was really clear about this need. When the others tried to test her on it she repeated it loudly, enunciating every word.

“I am trying to establish some boundaries here,” she said, sing song. he third time she repeated it Lou put a dent in the door with his bare foot. He slept on the cottage floor, then on Sabine’s couch, and finally flew to visit his biological dad in Milwaukee until school started. The girls drove his jeep back in silent shifts.

                                                  When they returned to Council Bluffs they gave each other a wide berth. Haylee talked plenty of shit, planned never to speak with them again, but there was only so much resisting—they were a constellation now.  

Later that fall they moved into an apartment with three identical bedrooms and textured ceilings. The next year Larissa and Lou moved across the state line to Omaha, then, following a brief breakup, got engaged. They married quick, with Haylee joining as a roommate a few months later when the mortgage on their condo was too much. Omaha took a hit from a tornado, then a recession, then another tornado.

They melted into place. It’s hardly surprising that ten years on it feels a little too close, of course, and Haylee wonders what the younger her would think about such stuckness. But she had no regrets, not really. The girls both stopped talking to their moms, which made this kind of family matter, and the music they got into when they came back home set them apart in a way that was hard to explain. When Larissa ruined her credit Haylee lent her SSN for job aps, and that is the only way, really, she got work at the bank branch in the first place. Lou got them prescriptions in his own name, and later stood up as best man at Haylee’s wedding. With the babies it was hard to take seriously those friends of theirs that didn’t run the same kind of interference, the exhaustion and static. Later on, in their separate houses, Haylee learned about the trouble her husband had been getting up to, all that boredom, and they worked it through it together. Larissa handled the cut when she split her knuckle and Lou handled the wall.  Haylee was principled and direct about her decision to leave him.  Later, she announced that they were back together, and her friends gave each other chewy smiles and moved her in again, no questions.

They hadn’t expected such relief from living so close, or from getting older. Like a sigh cut in a bag. That give that came with being wrong about each other: all three of them wrong so many times in unison, all the sharp turns that flip-turned back within a year.

DENISE DOOLEY studied at University of Iowa, Newnham College, Cambridge, and with the Next Objectivist Workshop. She works in Chicago and reads fiction for Chicago Review.

[projecttile]

ANNOUNCING! Projecttile Reading Series, Volume 4

Thursday, June 20, 7 p.m.

Launch into summer with the ROAD TRIP edition, featuring readings by the mega talented LESLEY DIXON, MEGAN MILKS, and AIMEE NORRIS.

@Uncharted Books 2630 N. Milwaukee Ave. Chicago, IL 60647

We’re going strong through summer and so should you.

[projecttile]

ANTARCTICA

BY HOPE REHAK

If I slipped inside the wall calendar of Antarctica, the bitter blue gloss on the photograph for May, which is penguins, would coat my skin. Brittle lacquer makes a finer sheen than sweat. June will be icebergs again, because it never gets warmer anyway. These Ohio springs are liars. 

I consider the blue through a silk curtain of my white bedroom, the stuttering zinc burn off a television set, lonely satellite sparks casting shades on the walls of the Ross Ice Shelf. A penguin somewhere became disoriented, waddled miles to volcanoes, not the sea. The scientists, not allowed to lead it home, only spoke. There remains a possibility that the icy interior at the forgettable base of the world is not unlike this Decembered room; moreover, is itself an answer. I consider the blue of sea-proof lanterns where they meet the glacial ceiling underwater. Antarctic divers kicking, untethered, must have confidence without a compass. That’s more than can be said for most; such bravery might ennoble the least of us. Or it could hold strictly the measure of meaning as a white sky over this blue world. Is it a fool’s errand only when something goes wrong? Divers, like scientists, think in odds. I consider the possibility of chronic blues, sad for the stranded penguin, his losing, what he was losing, how he was lost, how he lost. I close my eyes to mirror the blind sky, the blue ice.

HOPE REHAK is a comedian and poet from Ravenswood. She is a graduate of Chicago Public Schools and Oberlin College. You can find her online at hoperehak.com and on YouTube at thirstforsalt.

[projecttile]

AN ACCOUNT OF THE WHALE KING’S TRAVELS 

(THE WHALE KING’S DIARY)

BY REBECCA ELLIOTT

  November 23rd.

A coral reef is a wonderful thing to behold – all the tiny fish dipping in and out, the colorful mollusks and other creatures, the sun always shining through. I could swallow the whole thing with one bite, but what good would that do? My insides would be torn to pieces by the sharp coral, and the creatures that live there would be homeless. I read that just because it is possible to do a thing, it does not mean the thing should be done.

I sometimes think that if I had hands I would hold my head in them, bowed, while sitting on a chair in some dark room. It is only a chance of evolution that this is not possible for me.

April 12th.

This is an important day. I found a great stone, half submerged, surrounded by living foam. I came close to the foam: it was brown, and turned out after all not to be alive. It was white and brown. It was brown and another color I couldn’t identify. A bird landed on the stone and called out to me, but I swam away.

September 3rd.

I believe I can close my eyes, but I will never be able to tell whether or not this is true, without a friend in the world to reassure me. Today I realized I didn’t have a friend in the world. But the thing is, whales don’t have friends.

May 30th.

I have spent several weeks observing life in the coral reef. Things stay pretty much the same from day to day. It gives one an urge to eat something other than plankton, to drink something other than salt water. It gives one an urge to go wild, but instead one stays calmly in place, moving a little to the right to let a school of fish go past, a little to the left to permit a current—in this way one ends up in the same spot.

Last night I dreamed it was time to move on. The sand below me descended into darkness—it rushed downward like an elevator. I will wait two more weeks and then I will move north.

April 12th.

A stone rose out of the ocean an became a barren, rocky island. Birds made it their home. No plants grew, no fresh water appeared for them to drink. They swarmed the stone in enormous numbers, screaming to each other, screaming at the sky, which hung low with clouds. “This is no place to raise a child,” I told them, but of course they couldn’t hear me over their din.

  August 7th.

Coastlines, I have learned, are friendly. People come out in boats to say hello. The eagles that cling to craggy rocks are only mildly grouchy—eagles farther out to sea are ruthless. There are banners carrying my name in towns I never knew existed. Whenever I go about, a parade forms itself around me. The heavens open up and let down confetti in the shape of rain and hail.

  August 8th.

I took a long nap. When I woke I was covered in barnacles. I will now be covered in barnacles for the rest of my life. Either way, it has been a good life.

  Late September.

There is a definite difference in feeling when one passes through the equator. It affects the organs. It influences the direction of flow of one’s thoughts. As I pass into the northern hemisphere, I remember my mother; as I pass into the southern hemisphere it is my father who enters my mind. I have never known either one of them, and it has been said they were not present at my birth, but these memories make me question whether or not I really did just appear one day in the great library, glowing, next to a pile of books.

I have spent the entire day swimming back and forth between one hemisphere and the other. I think most doctors would advise against it.

The image of my mother: a tree growing in a desert.

The image of my father: a mountain spring.

  January 5th.

I have circled the globe twice, but there remain many places I have yet to visit. On a rocky shore, a monkey sits and throws crab-apples at me as I pass.

  April 12th.

A bird swimming far out in the ocean. A duck of some kind. I paused to ask her what she was doing so far away from land. “I’m waiting for a friend,” she said. “I’ve been here for seven days. He’s sure to turn up sooner or later. I have a gift for him.” She opened her bill and I saw she held a glittering silver stone.

“That is a lovely rock,” I said.

“It’s not for you,” she replied, and dove under the water.

REBECCA ELLIOTT is a maker of fine books and a maven of letterpress, with an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She's the founder of Meekling Press and her writing has appeared in Diagram and Artifice among other publications.

[projecttile]

THE COLLECTION

BY OLENA JENNINGS

Andrew collected bird figurines.  They reminded Rita of her grandfather’s house.  

Rita began collecting birds for Andrew, too. She found tiny birds made of Styrofoam and feathers at the flower shop perched on long sticks. There were cardinals, robins, and finches. At home, she put the tiny birds in the closet among the glass figurines and the candle owl that she had given to her grandfather as a gift before he died.  She wanted to give them to him all at once.

She wondered how a collection began, or more specifically, how Andrew’s collection began. She came up with the story that he had found a dead bird when he was child, lying cold beneath the pine that stood in front of his mother’s house. He had wrapped it in a towel and brought it inside. Of course, his mother told him he couldn’t keep it. He had cried; his mother felt guilt and bought him a stuffed bird to replace it. One stuffed bird had made him desire a whole parade of replicas of the escaped life that he had held in his hands.

In Rita’s dreams he was sometimes flying and she tried to get him back to the ground. 

Andrew told her that he never had such dreams.

“That’s okay.  I dream them for you.” 

                                                ***

They had met in their apartment building hallway. There had been a few awkward encounters and then they had grown comfortable with each other the summer they were both unemployed. They used to meet early in the evening after they had exhausted all the possibilities. They were tired from modifying cover letters and disappointed by the way their own credentials looked on their resumes. They spoke to each other in monotone and when they went places they read the ads for depression treatments that were all over the bus stops. They found that they both had the majority of the symptoms. 

Somehow they would always end up back in Rita’s yard, smoking cigarettes, the grass yellowing at their feet. Sometimes they could see stars and like children, they closed their eyes very tight so that they could see the stars behind their lids. 

Rita was afraid of what she had inside her body, pieces of him, jagged and painful. When she sat close to Andrew, she breathed in his scent and it was as if she had walked into the winter coat closet. Her nose was pressed to wool, polyester, and to the yellow rubber of a rain jacket. 

He was wearing a hat although it wasn’t cold and she was drinking beer, as she always did at the end of the day, before she began making films.

She was waiting for him to touch her. Her body was always ready, even when he wasn’t near her. The hairs on her arms stood straight up. 

“Tell me about the birds,” Rita said.

 “The birds?” Andrew asked.

“Why did you begin collecting them?”

“Because everyone needs something to return to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“To come home to. Otherwise I might as well go and live in a foreign country.  I’m establishing residence.”

“You’re establishing residence with birds?”

Andrew blushed. Rita realized she had wanted him to do just that.  She wanted him vulnerable. She wanted him to bend like a cattail to the sound of her voice. 

 Rita smiled. “Let’s go inside and get some wine,” she said.

“I drank last night,” he said.

“So did I,” she said.

He lay in the grass and when he got up, he had the imprint on his cheek. She wanted to kiss that textured part. 

“Well – ”

“So – ”           

“I have a bottle in the kitchen.  Let me get it.”

“Just a couple of sips.”

“You think I should open the bottle for just a couple of sips? Of course I will. Of course.”

She went to get the bottle and two glasses. The wine was red. He preferred white.  She knew this. She silently commended him for not saying anything.  She liked that he permitted himself to acquiesce to her. 

                                                 ***

Rita did not want to fall in love with Andrew’s girlfriend, but she couldn’t easily prevent it from happening.

That he had a girlfriend in the first place had been a surprise to her. She thought of him as her best friend. Still, he neglected to tell her the circumstances in which he met Molly. She was forced to imagine them. They were either pushed into each other just outside the mosh pit at one of the shows he always went to on the east side or sitting next to each other on the bus where he decided to take out the edition of War and Peace as big as a dictionary that he always carried with him.

Molly had a button nose and irises that were the color of oysters.

Rita’s heart was open to her, to her and Andrew both, together. Molly let Rita hook her arm inside hers. When she did this she was close enough to Molly to realize that her hair smelled of burnt toast. 

The three of them spent time together at the Comet bar, but before it had become their place it had been Rita’s. She would go alone and sit with a book, spending half her time eavesdropping on conversations.

The bar had some downfalls. One was that the glasses always seemed to arrive dirty to the table. It had a lot of advantages too. One was that they sold cigarettes. 

She had been meant for a life of blue vinyl. It had always been her dream to live in an apartment within walking distance from a bar that she would feel comfortable going to every night, but it turned out that she was not the kind of person who could be satisfied talking to strangers. After a couple of months she was disappointed again. 

Rita could see that they were holding hands beneath the table. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into Andrew’s face. She knew that he hated cigarette smoke, that when she smoked she became less attractive to him. She could have been a real alcoholic with scrapes from falling flat on her face. She could have found Jesus and spoken in tongues at the altar of the movie theater-turned-church. 

“Should we walk you home?” Andrew asked.

Rita almost melted at the possibility of Andrew and Molly walking her to her door and leaving her there to search for the keys in her purse, rush in and realize her roommate was in the bathroom, and then enter her empty bedroom, the sheets still creased where she had slept the night before. 

“I think I’ll go to the editing room for a while,” she said.

“This late?”

“I like leaving when the sun is rising,” Rita said. 

                                                 ***

They went thrift shopping for bird paraphernalia. Molly came along. She preferred the clothes to the bric-a-brac and distracted them with her findings. She liked sweaters with metallic thread woven through them and velvet dresses.   

At the exit, she bought sodas that were marked with white labels and permanent markers – cola, lemon-lime, and grape. She drank the grape until her tongue turned purple. She became like a piece of jewelry that when held up to the light, revealed many different colors.   

Rita and Molly went to the lake together. They spread an old blanket out on a log. Broken glass lay at their feet. It had been washed by the waves so much and scraped with the sand that it looked more like colored rocks. 

They sat for a while before Molly put her head on Rita’s shoulder. Rita reached up to touch Molly’s head. Rita’s palm was sweaty and strands of Molly’s brown hair stuck to it.

“Sometimes I think I made the wrong decision,” Rita said.

“The wrong decision?”

“Moving back here.”

“Every place has its advantages and you are alone in every one of them.”

Rita smiled, but she hated Molly for feeling alone when she was with Andrew. If Rita had been with Andrew, she would never have allowed herself to feel alone. If Andrew decided he would go to New York with her to visit her old friends, her happiness would be endless. 

“You feel alone?”

“It’s chronic,” Molly nodded. “You can always go between here and New York, you know.”

“Back and forth would mean that I don’t belong anywhere.”

“It would mean that you wanted variety.” 

“That’s not variety. That’s just one or the other.”

Molly and Rita waded out into the water. 

“It’s too cold!” Rita yelled. She was thinking of Andrew. She was happy to be spending the day with Molly rather than him. She wondered why, but maybe this feeling wasn’t hers to understand. 

“I can’t feel my legs,” Molly said.

She ran up behind Rita and embraced her. Molly’s skin felt like algae against her, slimy and pliable. Rita was silent.  

Molly ran her fingers slowly up Rita’s arms. Rita forgot about the cold. She looked down, but the water was too murky to see her feet.

Just before Molly’s hands reached her breasts, Rita turned around and kissed her.  

It was childish, a game. Rita didn’t let it end until she was ready.   

She also wondered what made Molly want to touch her.  When Andrew wasn’t with them, they would lie together on the couch with the itchy upholstery.  Molly would run her fingers gently down Rita’s arm.  Her spine would tingle. 

Molly wanted to always be close to Rita.  She was like a best friend from childhood, one whose closeness was forever pardoned.

  What did her love for Molly consist of? She imagined them in the house in the suburbs with a garden they would bend down to tend so that their asses would face anyone who drove by. She imagined the scent of peanut butter cookies and cinnamon. She imagined washing duvet covers and having help folding them back over the comforter. 

It consisted of the present and the future. It also consisted of the past. She felt that her past would float away, that it would no longer weigh her down.

Her love for Molly consisted of her love for her own future. 

                                                 ***

Soon both Andrew and Molly began to spend less time with Rita.  Sometimes they didn’t return her calls.  At first, she waited in bed, her body poised for the ringing. Then, she got up and began to do things around the house. She cleaned the stove until it sparkled, threw away all the wine corks that were lying in random places, dusted her books, and arranged the clothes in her closet according to color. In her cleaning, the bird figurines were a bit of nuisance. She didn’t know where to put them so they wouldn’t be on her mind.      

She put all the bird figurines in a bag and took them to Salvation Army.  It was not the way she wanted things to end.    

OLENA JENNINGS has published fiction in Fawlt, Joyland, and KGB Bar Lit. Her poetry translations from the Ukrainian have appeared in Mad Hatters’ Review, Poetry International Web, and Wolf. She has an MA from the University of Alberta and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University.

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    FORTUNA no. 9: GHOST TREASURE

BY CAROLINE PICARD

CAROLINE PICARD is a Chicago-based artist, writer and curator who explores the figure in relation to systems of power. In 2005, she founded the Green Lantern Press and has since released 29 slow-media titles. Recent short stories, essays and comics were published in The Coming Envelope no. 5 (Bookthug), Artifice Magazine, Anobium, MAKE Magazine and Everyday Genius; she has two contributions in vols 1 & 3 of The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press, 2012).  Other books include Psycho Dream Factory (Holon Press, 2011) and The Chronicles of Fortune (Holon Press, 2011). She is the Managing Editor of the Bad at Sports blog on contemporary art and culture.