Author Archives: oblongmagazine

Sep 12 2013
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Fiction

Mr Morden’s Tree

by Joshua Mostafa

The soil had to be perfectly moist – if it were too dry, the first tendril of root would curl back on itself and the seed would wither, but if sodden, the seed would have no purchase, and might be washed away; and on that Saturday, when Mr Morden stepped out of his back door and inhaled the morning air – fresh with the scents of pine, cut grass and dew – he knew at once it was the right day to plant the seed, and went back inside to retrieve it from the envelope in which it had lain for almost a fortnight, leaving a rectangular clean patch on the window-sill when he picked it up, tore the paper open with a blunt freckled forefinger, tipping it carefully so that the seed, large and nut-like, rolled out onto his palm, while with the other hand he picked up his cup of black tea, not so much for drinking as for habit, to warm his hands, and the sight of its steam rising in the chill of dawn, pleasantly reminiscent of smoke from a burning oil tanker, trailing over his shoulder as he walked one careful step after another on rheumatic legs with joints that creaked (a long time had passed since they had sprinted, one-two like pistons, while radio static crackled close behind), down the stone slabs of the path to the foot of the garden; this was the place, the equilibrial sweet spot where sunlight was tempered by the dappled shadow of a yew’s branches, enough shade to protect the sapling’s first pale shoots in their fragility; where the garden’s peaty soil began to give way to firmer ground, clayish, thickened by the pressure of rain-scored paths running to the creek below, something for the roots to get their teeth into, and that pleased him, because this was what he did, plant trees, though there was no point, really: trees grew of their own accord, as they had done before the first bald, bickering apes descended from their branches, and they would do so long after the extinction of this interloping species, a thought that gave him some satisfaction in those moments when he accidentally read the headlines, or someone tried to speak to him, as the man next door almost did at that moment, catching a glimpse of Mr Morden’s hat dipping as he pushed and twisted at the ground, desiccating it and slicing through fat earthworms with the point of his shovel, which brought a comment to the lips of the neighbour, something about his own rose-beds and the intransigence of the earth giving him blisters, stillborn words turned to a cough, because he remembered in time that Mr Morden was not one for a chat, surly old bastard, and he was correct both not to speak and not to take it personally, for Mr Morden’s solitude was profound, extending beyond misanthropy into something deeper and more expansive; old friends, fellow activists of the 1970s, hearing he had bought this house, tucked away in a village where the only open shop-counter was the post office’s every other day, supposed that he had mellowed with the greying of his hair, and that like theirs, his outrage at the world (that had once propelled him to confrontations with mining companies, industrial loggers, bureaucrats, police, every functionary and appeaser of cruel and rapacious human society that crossed his path) had waned, that time had brought accommodation and a measure of peace, but if any of them persisted past the unreturned emails and disconnected phone, and visited in person, at most they would have mourned the loss of a friendship, or assumed from his hostility that something had become unhinged – if only – they would not have grasped it, the disgust, not the cloudy melancholy that touches everyone from time to time, but a rage in the marrow of his bones, inflecting every breath and gesture, the flip of his shovel that sent a stone bouncing across the grass, the hiss he made when he saw a squirrel watching him, which sent it scampering into higher branches, because not just human but all animal life was parasitic, a stain, a mutant aberration, while honesty and virtue resided only in the green flesh and sightless being-there of shrub and tree, the grace of photosynthesis; on the rare times he voted, it was always for the most disingenuous wishful thinkers on the ballot paper, climate deniers and corporate puppets, precisely for the danger they represented, to hasten the end, for the poison was its own remedy, and until the last cursed and poisonous creature – two-legged, winged, or scuttling millipede – choked on effluent or drowned in a sea returned to pre-Cambrian savagery, and until nature, having reversed its mistake, could create from this tabula rasa a new green world of unseen beauty, everything was a pastime, a way of counting down the minutes: the seed Mr Morden pressed into the ground with loving care was a dot in the long ellipsis of the decline of man; he patted down the earth with the flat of his shovel, closed his eyes, the sun on the nape of his neck, and exhaled slowly, a wordless prayer that asked not for forgiveness but for oblivion, and in the ground, the seed felt the weighty embrace of soft earth, and gradually, in its unhurried way, a week like a blink, began to reach out with the first threads of its roots.

– Josh studied in London and Sydney. Bookworm and sub bass addict, he co-founded Inna Riddim Records, and is currently working on a novel and on a poetry magazine due to launch in late 2013, the New Trad Journal. He can be found online at joshuamostafa.info or @JoshuaMostafa.

 

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Aug 18 2013
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Fiction

Telescopia

by Kevin O’Cuinn

In this one, a grainy black and white, you look a lot like Anne Frank, and I remember you saying how much you enjoyed her diary, insofar-all-considered. Consider: That time I came home and found you in a closet, how you scrunched your face and shushed me, then tiptoed west, from A to B – B being the farthest point away, within the confines of these walls. Later, tearing downstairs, shrieking ‘Do you see that I am your friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?’ Dances With Wolves – I mean, who didn’t see it? Your brother (‘Shame I don’t get to give you a kicking’) dropped by for your stuff. It took him six hours to tick everything off the list and drink my beer. I’ll never believe you forgot the album – you left it – and even now, sometimes, I’ll squeeze into the closet and browse. The one where you look like a spinning top; the one with the cracked grey eyes; the one in the snow – how you said snow was boring and disgusting. My favourites, though, are of your shadow, but then like now I think of him, holding the camera, then later holding you.

– Kevin O’Cuinn lives and loves in Frankfurt, Germany. He comes from Dublin, Ireland, and is Fiction Editor at Word Riot.

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Jul 21 2013
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Fiction

Paper Wasps

by Hall Jameson

The dewy air clung to Hannah as she rolled onto her stomach, mattress crinkling under her weight. A persistent drone hung in the air, not quite mechanical, almost musical.

What is that damn noise?

Was it the air conditioner? Was it broken again? The sound did not hesitate like something broken – it churned with intention.

Hannah sat up and blinked, her rump sinking into the mattress. The top of her head brushed the ceiling, warm beneath her palm, the texture, like newsprint. Her legs dangled through a hexagonal opening, her backside nested in another. A neat pattern of geometric sections fanned out from her resting place, some vacant, some housing plump, pulsing larvae.

Hannah shuddered and looked into the empty compartment on her right. It faced downward, providing her with a startling view: a cascading series of horizontal combs filled the interior of a large chamber.

She crawled, wary of slipping through one of the hollows, or worse, into an occupied space. As she descended, the hum increased. Dark forms weaved in and out of the hollows around her.

The first of the workers crawled toward Hannah on sunny yellow legs, its slender petiole trailed by a sturdy black-and-yellow-striped abdomen. Its antennae twitched and its jaw worked. Semitransparent, tawny wings rested over its back and sides like a cape.

She opened her mouth to say hello, or perhaps to scream, but all that came out was a choppy buzz. The worker passed by, its left wing brushing her thigh.

Hannah descended the comb, hands and feet becoming tacky with wax. She reached the bottom comb, precise in its circumference, and looked through the weave toward the exit. The walls surrounding the opening glowed amber and were hot to the touch; her eyes stung as she navigated the last few inches and poked her head into the daylight.

A batting of smoke hung in the air. She crawled to the exterior of the hive, her limbs the jointed yellow legs of a wasp. The spring leaves of the oak tree at the back of her yard surrounded her. The wasp’s nest, her new home, constructed from curls of bark, saliva, and woody strips of vegetation, hung from a thick arm of the oak.

Hannah crawled back into the heart of the hive. A worker approached and guided her gently into one of the empty compartments. It covered her with wax, sealing her in, protecting her from the smoke, but she was not afraid. The other workers joined in.

Thank you! Thank you! She tried to whisper. Once again, it came out as a buzz, but they seemed to understand. The voice of the hive swelled.

Hannah woke with a start. She was in a cot in the high school auditorium, the room filled with buzzy snores, raspy breathing, and soft crying. Cots lined the room in tight neat rows. Bundles of personal belongings clogged the aisles.

She recalled her dream and shivered, and wondered about the massive wasp nest at the edge of her property. She chose to leave it there, because paper wasps kept them themselves unless threatened. She wondered how they would react to the smoke and fire. Surely, they would not abandon their home as she had done, they would stay behind and fight. She wished she could help them; take them in, as they had taken her in.

Hannah rounded the final curve and her mailbox popped into view, untouched, the red flag still in the upright position. The drive had revealed a checkerboard of burnt properties, the husks of houses eaten by the flames, and perfect green lawns and shingled structures the fire had spared. She was sure her own home would be gone as she pulled into the driveway, but it was still there, untouched. The surrounding woods, however, were charred and skeletal.

Hannah rushed behind the house, to the corner of the lot. The fire had stopped there, at the hem of her back lawn, her deck still intact.

‘No!’ she cried, when she saw the blackened stump of the oak tree, its precious leaves devoured by fire, the wasp’s nest evaporated.

Hannah dropped to her knees, fingers sifting through the ash, the curled, charred bodies of wasps falling from her fingertips. She discovered a small chunk of comb in the ash, the only thing that remained of their home. She cradled it tenderly and took it inside.

– Hall Jameson is a writer and fine art photographer who lives in Helena, Montana. Her writing and artwork has recently appeared, or is forthcoming in Crossed Out Magazine, Post-Experimentalism, Redivider, and Eric’s Hysterics. When she’s not writing or taking photographs, Hall enjoys hiking, playing the piano, and cat wrangling.

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Jun 26 2013
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Fiction

Recommendation Letter

by Rob McClure Smith

Dear Graduate Director:

I am delighted beyond human ken to write a letter on behalf of Ms. Lauren Appleton for entry to your prestigious M.F.A. program. The transcript of her academic record in my own department hopefully speaks for itself, as I seem to have misplaced my copy, but I can think of no recent undergraduate more superbly equipped for the cutting-edge, genre-defying creative work your program elicits from the current generation of digital natives.

I will first observe that Lauren’s creative writing fully embraces the reality hunger (©Shields) of our post-postmodern episteme, embracing the manipulation of found text, flarf, randomly generated Google searches, exquisite corpse reveries, Eno-esque oblique strategies, I Ching stick-tossing, thrown dice, spilled beer Rorschach etc. For her Senior Portfolio she submitted a complete novel, Onno Korenino (a found text rewritten with a key vowel change and transposed to contemporary Nigerio), a stunning work whose climactic episode in a Logos (yes!) train station was brilliantly conceived and utterly heartbreaking in its meta-textual narrative surprise. Memorable also was her Writer’s Forum oral presentation ‘SDSS1416+3b And Other Galactic Phenomena I Like,’ for which she arranged an accompaniment by our local regional symphony, indigenous Moroccan Qraqeb, intermittent tubax honking, an overlay of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry dub, seagull squalls and a series of visceral recordings made by herself at the local Farmland Foods slaughterhouse while surreptitiously garbed as an FSIS poultry inspector. Her intense reading with musical augmentation that night evokes still, in my mind’s eye (sic), images of some horrifying industrial accident or perhaps a Scott Walker recording. ‘She’s something,’ the director of creative writing told me afterwards, still trembling uncontrollably. ‘But it’s sure as hell not a creative writer, have a word?’

The word I had was ‘conceptual,’ and it proved inspirational. Newly immersed in Dada and Fluxus, Lauren subsequently developed a series of impactful performance pieces including Walk (3), the video of which is part of her portfolio. On day one, she filmed herself walking naked across campus wearing only a backpack. On day two, she was filmed (by an accomplice) walking across campus in an empty (‘naked’) backpack. On day three she walked back and forth across her backpack for 3 hours 3 yards from Old Main, while being filmed filming her own filming, this last nude walkabout drawing a large crowd of onlookers including prominent members of the local art community, picketers from the nearby Church of the Immaculate Conception and, latterly, a cease and desist order from our college President.

Sadly, Lauren did not complete her Honors Project. By her senior year, she was already moving beyond language into a space of Beckettian conceptual silence.1 The intended thesis, a wordless performance inspired by Carolee Schneemann titled whippedcreamchocolateyumkinkypillows designed to be performed to select paying viewers in local motel rooms, had to be postponed due to an injunction brought by our philistine mayor under our small college town’s antiquated gross indecency regulation and then by her subsequent expulsion.

My own acquaintance with this student is longstanding and intimate [as her portfolio photographic sequence intercoursepro(o)f evidences]. I got to know her especially well in my ‘Intro to the Contemporary IPhone Filmic Experience course’ and I well remember the first time we spoke, some six weeks in. ‘Who are you?’ I asked, intrigued by her presence and Sherman-esque costuming. ‘I am Lauren,’ said Lauren, ‘My name is Lauren. This is my first time here cause I’ve been going to the class next door on accident.’ ‘How can that be,’ I asked, querulously. ‘Isn’t that Economics 101?’ ‘I know,’ Lauren said, smiling winsomely, ‘I was, like, micro this, macro that, how’s about you just show us some movies, dude?’ Suffice it to say she made an immediate impression upon me and I especially recall her astute remarks about Art.2 To speak further to this young woman’s wellspring of unfathomable creativity, I would observe that maugre writing a final paper, she chose to do an elaborate presentation in which she modeled all Hitchcock’s leading ladies, from Madeleine Elster to Norman Bates, appropriating Edith Head’s original costume designs, and if not for an inopportune interruption by campus police during her recreation of the necktie strangulation scene from Frenzy, would have received an A rather than the somewhat misleading Incomplete.

In summation, I can only reiterate that her exceptional artistic talent3 and grotesque creative propulsiveness make Lauren a superb candidate for entry to your distinguished graduate program. It is rare you will find a candidate so of our cultural moment, effortlessly limning as she does the flimsy osmotic boundaries between Sheila Heti, Frank Ocean and Johnny Manziel. Please God take her off our hands.

Sincerely,

Per Tosk-Bedra

Department of Creativity

Sanguisuga College

 

1 Lauren did not ‘tell’ me this having, as noted, moved beyond the prison house of language, instead miming it for me using a combination of an inflatable Bozo the clown doll and a sock puppet representing Marina Abramovic.

2 Art Cassidy, the TA for my course, a young man who sadly lost the lower portion of his left leg in a childhood tricycle collision and who Lauren, although usually sensitive to the differently-abled, affectionately dubbed Hopalong.

3 She also is lead bassist for the noted death metal combo Bataan Death Tango.

  

– Rob McClure Smith is an expatriate currently living and teaching film studies in Galesburg, Illinois. His fiction has appeared in many literary magazines and he is a previous winner of the Scotsman Orange Short Story Award.

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May 08 2013
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Fiction

An extract from ‘Far From Standard: A Life in Jazz’ by Jollymont J. Arnold

by Esteban Stanwo

Willow weep for me; so sang the aching heart of Ann Ronell in nineteen thirty-two, a time when the music was so popular that songwriters could reasonably expect their audience to include quite distantly related species. Always a favourite tune of mine, leafing through the working book of any of the bands of my career, one would no doubt have found there pressed into the pages of musical history its skeletal catkin. But let me ask you, have you ever heard a willow weep? Well I have, and believe me you might question the sentiment if you had actually heard the thing.

Nineteen sixty-two brought a freak estivation for me, a riverside burrow beneath our titular trees providing a home for two young lovers snugly wrapped in those lyrical lovely summer dreams. Though an affair of some biographical import after years attempting to erase the grubby finger marks she left all over the personal version of my life story, I shalln’t now confound matters by writing her, from the flitting, careless hands outwards, bodily, whole, into the hard, public copy. Let the narrative skip like a stone over the water: love cools with the earth and come fall I awake to find that those lovely dreams have indeed gone and left me weeping along the stream.

If I may be forgiven a clichéd phrase to navigate this difficult change, let me note that in times of strife both the devout and the damned are apt to turn their worried heads to the heavens. Well, I have always been a true worshipper of Apollo and after a lifetime of offerings my supplications did not go unanswered. With the bursting of an empathetic gathering of clouds he makes a carnival mirror of the water, placing my sorrowful expression as one illusion amongst many. For dramatic effect he calls on Aeolus, a minor deity, who sends gusts through the reeds. Then because those clouds, keeping to the order of being, have to attend to the lower fields, they shake a last few drops and part: and there is my golden lord beaming down upon me as I lift up my hands in which he has placed a golden trumpet; and I blow.

    Willow weep for me

    Willow weep for me

Running it through once for the remembering stirred a low round of applause from the leaves; once more with feeling garnered a chirped encore from an ascending starling; so I decided to join her, taking flight upon another chorus. I do not know to where. I have played Pied-Piper in university towns and I have inscribed love spells upon manuscript paper but only once has my playing rent a tear in the sad silk of Maya’s veil. Too bad there wasn’t a tape recorder running.

    Bend your branches green along the stream that runs to sea

    Listen to my plea

    Listen willow and weep for me

I blew and I tell you the tree wept.

    I loathe the loam that keeps me growing

    To ring in each new year

    And woe the wind that keeps me flowing

    The psithurism in my hair

The voice was at once a rich baritone, the grumbling of raw earth and the rustling of leaves, and quite melancholy too, oh yes. Naturally I looked around me but Apollo had drawn no prankster into the picture book scene. The only signs of life were those being made by the swaying willows, the billowiest of which was looking particularly pained in a mild breeze.

The weir runs on below us but I do not forget my training. This is clearly call and response; but is he really listening?

    Gone my summer dream

    Lovely summer dream

    The sun and sea which spring showers

    Tell to me their budding grieves

    Gone and left me here

    To weep my tears along the stream

    Which effloresce as summer flowers

    And are shed as autumn leaves

    Sad as I can be

    Here me willow and weep for me

But he did not, and I, having received this vision, the unfulfilled promise of communion, felt the more hopelessly alone and could only weep for myself. What trick is this Apollo?

In contemplation of this extraordinary experience I have found mystical and metaphysical angles frustratingly obtuse, but then perhaps truth is not a matter of reflection but rather refraction and I fancy that I can at least make out recognisable forms as I place over here and peer through the lens of the aesthetic.

In purely musical terms the exchange had proven rather poor. The tree had responded neither to the rhythmic, harmonic nor melodic implications of my lines. The iambic plod of his delivery though allowing certain subtleties of phrasing and probably indicative of his ancient nature had certainly swayed rather than swung. Perhaps he was playing ‘out’ or speaking ‘across’ me; if this is the case, then although I am no traditionalist, all I can say is that I was not moved. As an artist I believe that the tree failed to perform.

Anyhow, I present this episode to you as one of the more anomalous events of a life in jazz. I have returned to that tear-strewn stream many times since on the bandstand and perhaps after all when approaching that place I have been listening for, somewhere in the music, the voice of the willow. One cannot so easily forget. But let us move on to nineteen sixty-three, to city life bright through a haze, where voices sing a thousand different songs and where sorrows are drowned in less ostensibly limpid fluids. Let us follow the course upstream and don’t ask Old Man River for answers because he really don’t say nothing.

– Esteban Stanwo was born in the industrial garden town of Scunthorpe, studied Philosophy at the University of York, and currently resides in Bristol. He has authored several erotic short stories and is a winner of Poem of the Month in the Official Nintendo magazine. He writes with a Pentel Ultra Fine S570 pen.

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Apr 15 2013
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Fiction

The Sexton-Lily Intersection

by Tyler J. Petty

At 5:07 PM, an Impala’s brake line ruptured as it approached the Sexton-Lily intersection. The Impala was headed west on Sexton and had the right-of-way, but was forced to slam its brakes when the Camry approaching the intersection from the south failed to stop; the driver of the Camry was blotting a spilled fountain drink and did not notice the red light. The Impala and its failed brakes clipped the Camry’s rear bumper, sending it skidding into a parked Durango. The Impala’s driver maintained control of the car until its momentum petered out a quarter of a mile down the road. Neither driver sustained any injuries. This was the third accident the Sexton-Lily intersection had hosted in two weeks, and the ninth in the previous two months. Todd Morton arrived at the intersection at 5:10 PM, a few minutes late because of a customer service call from an entitled teenager.

Morton could only watch as the Camry’s driver, a dark-haired young woman, fought with her door, and Geronimo, the owner of the corner’s soup cart, heroically rushed in to help her escape. One cigarette could have ignited the smoking engine. When officials arrived to pry apart the Camry and Durango with a wrecker’s winch, the metal groaned like an elephant in labor. The police closed the block to traffic and distributed placards warning pedestrians of broken glass. Morton snatched a shard as he walked past the accident site, coaxing a bead of blood from under his fingernail with the jagged point, and entered the church on the next block.

Inside, Morton lit a candle on the altar and blew out the tapered lighter. Then, after a brief pause, he reignited the device and lit two more candles before taking a seat in the third-row pew. The sanctuary was empty save for a couple kneeling in the front row. Morton knew they were praying for their son, a troubled young man. The three of them occasionally discussed the absent members of one another’s families. Morton leaned forward and inclined his ear toward them, trying to catch a snippet of prayer, but all he heard was the whoosh of the building’s air conditioning system as it sucked their words into the ventilation ducts.

The couple concluded their supplications, stretched protesting knees, and left. Morton nodded to them on their way up the aisle. Alone in the sanctuary, he considered the stained-glass scenes on the wall. One depicted Jesus carrying the cross along the Via Dolorosa, and another showed Daniel and his friends emerging unbroiled from the fiery furnace. Both images were on the east wall and looked more impressive in the morning sunlight, with dancing flames and glittering haloes. In the afternoon, they still appeared holy, but not magical. A scene on the west wall, toward the back, revealed the spectacle of Samson’s death after God gave him the strength to tear down the temple of Dagon. No one called Samson a suicide.

The driver of the Camry wobbled down the sanctuary aisle. She steadied herself on the arm of Morton’s pew.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, I’m good. Great, I mean.’ She nodded toward the street.

‘I was just in an accident, but I’m okay. Just a little woozy. I saw this place while I was talking to the police and I figured, give credit where it’s due, you know?’

‘Sounds like a plan.’

‘This is a cool building. I’ve never been inside before.’

‘I come here every day,’ Morton said. ‘But I’m on my way out now. If you’ll excuse me.’

Three days later, Morton arrived on time. A Prius driver talking on his cell phone throttled west on Sexton, accelerating as he neared the Lily intersection. Geronimo dragged his soup cart across the street, oblivious to the humming oncoming vehicle.

A second before the Prius would have hit Geronimo, Morton slammed into the man’s shoulder. Knocked off his balance, Geronimo’s palms scraped across the sidewalk, but otherwise he was unhurt. His cart rolled to the curb. Flipping over, he saw Morton squealing in the street. The unfortunate man’s hands crept down his right leg, feeling for the source of his agony. He stopped at the knee. Everything below it was unrecognizable.

‘My God! Are you okay?’ Geronimo asked.

‘I’ll live,’ Morton said. Another wave of pain seized him. ‘Probably forever.’

 

– Tyler J. Petty graduated from Ball State University in May 2012 with an MA in Creative Writing. His work has previously appeared in The Broken Plate, and he once gave a presentation about a British alien invasion movie at a literature conference in Canada.

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Mar 11 2013
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Fiction

Letter to Emma Goldman

by P.A. Levy

Dear Em,

I do wish, and of course you’re an exception to this, that Anarchists still grew bushy beards, so instantly recognisable from those reactionary Communist moustaches; which, let’s be honest look a bit gay.

Anyway, the reason I mention it, I was shopping in Sainsbury’s just last week, I’d run out of Garibaldi biscuits, when I swear to god, OK not to god , but dearest Em, Durruti is not dead.

Isn’t it exciting!

He already had some wine and bread and was selecting a packet of cheese produced by the Kazakhstan Revolutionary Workers Collective when I’m sure I heard him say: ‘I am satisfied with my basket. I have all I need.’

Such a star, and wouldn’t it be fantastic if you and all yer mates were still gigging.

Bakunin could host a chat show, Kropotkin could be a judge on Comrade’s Got Talent. There could even be a daily soap set in the Paris Commune.

Oops! My bad.

Sorry Em, I think I may just have got it wrong, I’m not too sure it was Durruti, now I come to think about it I think he was our milkman. I knew I recognised him from somewhere. No! I’m wrong again. He wasn’t the milkman, he was the barman at the Pink Pantaloon Pub. But he does look a bit like our darling José only with a Stalinist moustache.

Sorry Em, er which I suppose means Durruti is still dead. Best go, gotta get me tea on.

I’ll write again soon.

Comrade X 

(and X stands for a kiss)

– Born in East London but now residing amongst the hedge mumblers of rural Suffolk, P.A.Levy has been published in many magazines, from ‘A cappella Zoo’ to ‘Zygote In My Coffee’ and stations in-between.  He is also a founding member of the Clueless Collective and can be found loitering on page corners and wearing hoodies at www.cluelesscollective.co.uk.

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Feb 20 2013
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Fiction

The Secret Lives of Secret Lives

by Len Kuntz

The words are still razor wire, so I don’t say them aloud. Instead, I just think what I know – that my father enjoyed being beaten by women.

I found this out while sorting through his shoes boxes. There were piles of pictures stuffed inside a boot, Polaroid’s with my dad’s block letter handwriting at the bottom in some sort of cryptic code.

          HU^^Q^ = {}

          WL0 + ## = !!!

          7676 &&& NnN – %

          )))”’”::::::

The women wore costumes – red-paint pleather or latex – and snarled. Once in a while they jeered.

Sometimes there were implements involved. Other times they merely used their fists or feet. Each photo was a pornographic clown show made macabre.

I’m thinking about this as I stare at my wife dozing. The most violent she’s ever been to me was pounding the kitchen counter once when I forgot to pick up our daughter after ice skating.

She sleeps with an Asian-themed eye mask she got from the airlines on one of her antique shopping trips to the Far East. Both her hands cup the silk hem of the blanket as if she’s doing a chin up or peeping over someone’s fence. Her nails are chipped, but otherwise long and sharp. I imagine them raking across my face, ripping out chunks of my scalp, gouging an eye. None of that does a thing. I’m dead down there, my pulse unchanged.

All your life you think you know someone and then you discover you don’t. That must be how it is when neighbors learn the insurance salesman in the rambler ends up being a serial killer.

I retrace my past loves, sending them on a slow assembly line down my memory bank. Did I want them to hurt me? In any way?

The closest comparison I can find is Roxanne, the woman before my wife. I thought she was the one. Roxanne and I were engaged, then a month before the wedding she gave me news, saying I was a good listener and all, but bland in bed, that she would have helped me if she was the patient type. I laughed at first, thinking it a joke. Later that night, I sat in a corner, cradling a bottle of Jim Beam, crying like a toddler.

I try to think about all of the bad stuff I’ve thought or done but haven’t told anyone. Rounded up in giant dung heap of history, I’m surprised that it’s hardly as repulsive as I would have guessed. Even my misdeeds are bland, the darkest stuff only going as far as charcoal.

Still, the man’s blood is in me. His DNA detritus is coiled around mine. How can you share one and not the other, not even a little?

A few hours pass. I wake my wife up, nudging at first, then pushing until she flips the eye mask free.

‘I want you to do something to me,’ I say.

When I tell her, her eyes dance like sun-spackled diamonds, an eager smile unfolding.

I suck down a deep breath, hold it, wondering how I’ve ended up being so bad about judging others.

– Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State. His work appears widely in print and online at such places as Eunoia Review, The Northville Review and Abramelin. You can find him at lenkuntz.blogspot.com.

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Jan 27 2013
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Fiction

Fake French Fish

by Teresa Stenson

She’s getting herself ready to go out with The Fish. I’ve seen them, acting like they’ve known each other for years. They’ll probably go to a posh restaurant. He’ll choose the wine with his French accent. He’s not even French! Not that she, or anyone else in this cul-de-sac, has noticed. They can’t see past the plate spinning, which, apparently, is part of a ‘front’ he puts on in public.

‘He’s actually very vulnerable,’ she says, applying red lipstick. Red!

‘Why you wearing that?’

‘So I can’t look nice now? It’s for me, George. I’ve told you, Christophe is my friend.’

‘Why can’t I come along?’

‘Because you’ll make him uncomfortable.’

‘Should be uncomfortable, all this air. Should be dead, biologically.’

‘Very nice, George. Accepting. How very accepting.’

It’s not just her – somehow he’s charmed the entire cul-de-sac. They’re all, ‘Oh, a fish with legs – he’s an evolutionary marvel.’

Oh, a fish walking out of water – basic! Nothing marvellous about it.

‘I don’t trust him. What kind of fish is he anyway?’

‘I think that is a very personal question and I for one will not subject him to such scrutiny.’ She blots her lipstick and tissue sticks to her bottom lip. Ha.

A car pulls up outside. ‘Honk, honk, he’s here!’ she yells, grabbing her handbag. I follow her to the door.

‘George, don’t be embarrassing.’

‘I’m waving you off.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘Yes I am.’

‘You dare.’

‘I do dare. I do!’ I say the ‘I do’ loudly, hoping it’ll remind her of our long ago vows. It doesn’t, and she leaves, pulling the door quickly behind her.

I run to the drive and shout, ‘It won’t be as easy as you think, Fake French Fish, to steal my wife!’

They zoom away in his open-top sports car, heads thrown back in laughter.

I remember the tissue-lip. ‘Ha’ I shout in her direction, even though she has gone.

– Teresa Stenson’s short stories have been placed in several international writing competitions including The Bridport Prize, The Willesden Herald and The Guardian Summer Reads. She is in the process of putting a collection of her stories together and can be found at www.teresa-stenson.blogspot.com.

 

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Jan 03 2013
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Fiction

Ceramist

by Robert McGowan

E. L. Cutting. Egbert Ludwig. It’s hard to imagine any parent without cruel intent naming a defenseless infant Egbert Ludwig. In adulthood, understandably, he introduced himself as El, signed his name always as El, was known only as El.

El Cutting wasn’t a great artist, but of course few are. Still, he was good enough to have made The Big Time, or somewhere near it, had he been concerned to drive himself in that direction. Many artists far less than great are found in The Big Time, and El had, if only latently, the cunning and the energy required to get there. But making that effort wasn’t a priority for him. Truth is, it would have been hard to say whether El had any priorities at all, except for his work itself, about which he was passionate and protective. Everything else fell into the mid-range, where lie both the not-all-that-important and the could-be-somewhat-important-depending.

He made horses. Big ones. Big for a ceramist anyway. Which is a word he never used — ceramist. If he had no alternative to mentioning the material he worked in he would say, ‘I work in clay,’ or ‘I do terracotta sculptures’. Except for the most puffed up clay artists, or the very defiant ones, or the oblivious ones, ceramists in the fine arts are generally disinclined to use the words ceramist or ceramics in speaking of themselves or their work, this because of the hobbyist connotations of those terms. In fact when they can’t be called simply ‘artist’ or ‘sculptor’, or something else non-medium-specific, then the phrase clay artist is probably the handle they most widely prefer to go by. Underclasses of all stripes are ever at pains to define themselves and to settle on what words they want to be known by, and ceramists, as the stepchildren of the art world, are no exception.

The ceramist’s relatively lowly status in the art world has not been a consequence particularly of the limitations of the medium; printmaking and photography after all, both warmly enfolded within the high-art family, have their limitations too. No, the operative demeaning factor is clay’s ancient, almost exclusive identification with the humble aesthetics of craft, with utilitarian production pottery, and in this era with the hobbyists, the bisque painters, the slip casters of figurines, the makers of decorative kitsch.

But El’s horses were serious business. Some of them, made and fired in sections, approached life-size. Former fancy-dressed merry-go-round steeds, is what they dreamlike were, lying dead now and in advanced stages of putrefaction in livid visceral hues and remnants of garish fairground paints. How shockingly voluptuous decay can be. And the titles of these sculptures subtly evoked the piteous circumstances of this corruption: We found Beauty, a rotting buckskin pony appearing to have been caught inescapably in a tangle of barbed wire; Sunk, the remains of a colt mired helplessly in stream-bank mud; He got free, a lost horse starved to death on a grassless plain… All of this from dark memories of El’s childhood rural experience.

By any informed and unprejudiced judgment El’s horses were powerful works of art, wholly sufficient and uncompromised. For which reason he was faintly galled, from time to time more than a little defensive despite himself, about their being always spoken of or written about as ceramics, about his being more often referred to as a ceramist than a sculptor. ‘They don’t goddamnit say Richard Serra’s a steel sculptor, do they? di Suvero an I-beam sculptor. Or Louise Nevelson a wood sculptor. They’re plain sculptors! So why am I for Chrissakes a ceramic sculptor? The motherfuckers.’ With a drink or two or three in him he’d cuss and rant, cuss and rant. ‘Motherfuckers. Motherfuckers. Motherfuckers.’ But next morning he didn’t care anymore, or thought he didn’t, or behaved as though he didn’t. The disenfranchised typically take one of three routes: they knock ceaselessly and meekly on the door of The Legitimacy Office, seeking favor from on high, or if they can get by with it they vociferously demand affirmation, or they adopt a fuck-you attitude about the whole revolting shenanigans, refusing to humiliate themselves by revealing even the faintest hint of longing to consort with the sanctified. El wasn’t meek so would never have taken the first path, but he wasn’t bombastic either so wouldn’t have taken the second. He took the third, except that his indifference was only superficial and subject to undoing, especially in circumstances involving drink and provocation.

At the opening reception for El’s third solo with his midtown gallery, where for six years his work had sold reliably despite its unvarying depiction of foul decay, but paradoxically because of the riveting pathos attending that decay, his shows there having been over the years widely and favorably reviewed, El had too much gallery wine and punched a prominent art critic in the nose. One who throughout the evening had been razzing him with the term ceramic sculptor.

A few days later a brief account of the scuffle appeared in the local arts monthly.

SCULPTOR PUNCHES CRITIC

Next issue carried the critic’s review.

CERAMIST HORSES AROUND

‘Motherfuckers.’

– Robert McGowan’s fiction and essays are published in over five dozen prominent literary journals in America and abroad, have been four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and have been several times anthologized. He is the author of the story collections NAM: Things That Weren’t True and Other Stories (Meridian Star Press (UK), 2011) and Stories from the Art World (Thumbnail Press, 2011). McGowan’s work as an artist is in numerous collections internationally. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Website: http://robert-mcgowan.com.

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