Litro #170 - Back of the Bus

BACK OF THE BUS

Han Smith Chris Di Placito LaMarr Thomas Michael Nath Paola Trimarco Jeff Unaegbu Kate LaDew Jonathan Covert Rebecca Ruth Gould Steuart Osha

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Cover | Lauren Stewart

EDITOR'S LETTER Editor- in-Chief & Art Director Eric Akoto: eric.akoto@litro.co.uk Assistant Editor Barney Walsh: barney@litro.co.uk Designer Elina Nikkinen Head of Development & Partnerships Maria Salvatierra Arts editor Daniel Janes: arts@litro.co.uk Online Editors James Cook: essays@litro.co.uk Catherine McNamara: flash@litro.co.uk Dur e Aziz Amna: tuesdaytales@litro.co.uk Story Sunday: barney@litro.co.uk Cover image

by Lauren Stewart General Enquiries +44 207 257 9478 Subscription enquiries subs@litro.co.uk or +44 0203 371 9971 USA: 646 519 2452 All other enquries info@litro.co.uk © Litro Magazine LTD June 2018

Eric Akoto DEAR READER,

This issue’s theme, “The Back of the Bus”, though fairly open to interpretation – the back of the bus might be where the cool kids sit on the way to school – inevitably calls to mind the American civil rights movement’s struggle against the injustices of racial segregation and one woman’s action to insist on a basic human right. It was only sixty-three years ago, on 1 December 1955, that Rosa Parks made history in Montgomery, Alabama by refusing to give up her seat for a white man and go sit in the segregated area of a bus. This act of defiance would change the course of American history and earn her the title “mother of the civil rights movement”.

Rosa Parks’ refusal led to her arrest, which triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system, organised by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who would later go on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil-rights work. The Montgomery bus boycott marked the start of the modern civil rights movement in the United States. The movement would result in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

But within this month’s pages of Litro we have a bit of a mix: stories and essays more directly engaged with race and politics rub shoulders with stuff a bit more odd-

ball. On the one hand, Kate LaDew’s “Jo Ann Robinson” is a creative nonfiction about the life and work of another great civil-rights activist; Paola Trimarco’s essay “The Broadway 36” remembers 1970s bus rides through what King had called “the most segregated city in America”; Rebecca Ruth Gould’s essay “Jim Crow in Jerusalem” explores parallels between racial segregation in modernday occupied Palestine and Israel and in Jim Crow America; and LaMarr Thomas’s short story “A Harsh Spring Light” is about the pain and humiliation a black high-school senior is made to feel during history lessons about America’s greatest sin. All these explicitly political pieces sit in comfortable contrast alongside stranger stories like Jonathan Covert’s “We Pick Karen”, an unusual take on office politics, envy and competition, or Steuart Osha’s “Don’t Google Me”, in which a fifty-one-year-old woman comes unexpectedly into her heyday. Chris Di Placito’s “Animal Kingdom” follows a guy just released from prison on his bus journey back into freedom – or is it freedom? – and Han Smith’s elliptical “Reproduction Furniture” explores the aftermath of a horrible but everyday encounter on a bus. In a story set in Nigeria, “The Fulani Damsel”, by Jeff Unaegbu, the narrator impulsively jumps off the bus and into another culture, to be entranced by it; and,

returning to the theme we started at, in an exclusive extract from Michael Nath’s forthcoming novel The Treatment, about a fictionalised version of the Stephen Lawrence murder, a woman police officer goes undercover in a gang of racists.

And for another culture and perspective, our cover and photo series this month is "Life in Kashmir from a bus stop",

by Lauren Stewart.

www.litro.co.uk @LitroMagazine @LitroMagazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS 05

Contributors

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FICTION

08 10 13 17 25 37 45

Reproduction Furniture by Han Smith Animal Kingdom by Chris Di Placito A Harsh Spring Light by LaMarr Thomas The Treatment by Michael Nath The Fulani Damsel by Jeff Unaegbu We Pick Karen by Jonathan Covert Don’t Google Me by Steuart Osha

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ESSAY

21 29 43

The Broadway 36 by Paola Trimarco

Art

#170 Back of the Bus

Jim Crow in Jerusalem by Rebecca Ruth Gould Jo Ann Robinson by Kate LaDew

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Life in Kashmir from a bus stop by Lauren Stewart

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FICTION

Ff

P

POETRY

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FLASH FICTION INTERVIEW

Art

E ART

ESSAY

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NON FICTION

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CONTRIBUTORS

Han Smith is a writer, reader, transla- Chris Di Placito is a writer and illustrator, sort-of-teacher and definite learner, currently quite interested in hiding places, tides and unbodying. Selected for the Spread the Word 2017/18 PLATFORM programme for emerging writers.

LaMarr Thomas is a rather older emerg-

ing writer. His story “A Harsh Spring Light” is part of a collection he’s working on (ever so ploddingly!) entitled The Shadow of Slavery.

These stories will, and do, in one way or another – directly or indirectly – deal with the pervasive and continuing effects of race on various aspects – social, economic, political, cultural, and personal – of American society. He believes that fiction, that art, can help to change our world for better, and his hope is that his work can be a part of that change.

tor living in Fife, Scotland with his partner, their two cats, and a soon-to-be baby boy. He has a BA in Visual Communication and Digital Publishing. His work has previously appeared in magazines such as Bull, STORGY and Structo.

Michael Nath is a British author and ac-

ademic. His first novel, La Rochelle (2010), was shortlisted for the 2011 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. His second, British Story: A Romance (2014), was a Morning Star Book of the Year. Nath is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, London, specialising in modernism and creative writing. He lives in London with his wife, the neuroscientist Sarah Tabrizi.

CONTRIBUTORS

Paola Trimarco is a writer and linguist.

Her stories and essays have appeared in several magazines, including Mslexia, Fishfood and Shooter, along with two stories and an essay at The Creative Process website. She was shortlisted for the Wasafiri Life Writing Competition 2014 and her stage plays have been performed in London and Cambridge with support from Arts Council England.

She has authored four textbooks, is a co-author of The Discourse of Reading Groups and is a regular contributor to The Literary Encyclopedia.

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Kate LaDew is a graduate from the Uni-

versity of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, NC with her cats, Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.

Jonathan Covert received his BFA from

Jeff Unaegbu is a research fellow in the

Institute of African Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is author of nineteen books. A literary editor and film script writer, Unaegbu has also directed video documentaries. His story “Prey” was shortlisted in the African Writing Prize in Flash Fiction and published in the African Writing Online Magazine, Nigeria, April 2011. Another story, “Bye-Bye”, was long-listed for the 2018 Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Non-Fiction (Antioch University, Los Angeles); his poetry collection Ode on Lagos was second runner-up in the Association of Nigerian Authors/Cadbury $2000 Poetry Prize (2011).

Emerson College in Boston, MA. His work has appeared in Four Ties Literary Review, Vine Leaves Press, and is forthcoming in The Columbia Review. He was most recently awarded the Chicago University Graham School's 2017 Writer's Studio Student Prize.

He currently lives in Chicago, IL.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Steuart Osha is an educator and art histo- Lauren Stewart is an international freerian. She received her degrees from Harvard College and Columbia University. Her published pieces are: “Mannerism and Counter-Reformation” (Harvard Art Journal), and “Forty-Seven” (Bird's Thumb).

lance travel photographer based out of the United States. She has lived in China, Nepal, and India and has travelled independently throughout Thailand. She enjoys exploring other cultures through families, food, and religion. Her work focuses on documenting people’s daily lives to make global cross-cultural connections between the viewer and the subject. When it comes to finding a subject to photograph, her philosophy lies in the Chinese concept of yuanfen, the predetermined principle that dictates the people and relationships that come into your life. Because of this, she chooses to allow her instincts to guide the way. You can follow her on instagram @laurenalliestewart or visit her website at www.laurenalliestewart.com.

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FICTION

Reproduction Furniture

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By Han Smith It bites from inside.

When I try to understand this place, I don’t. The cups are hovering over the tables, and liquid is suspended in clouds above the cups. Chair legs do not reach the floor. The chair that is opposite mine is empty. I am waiting. Is that my mother? Where is she?

Sit down, I say. The chair is still empty.

The chair is not empty. The police officer is there. My chair is the empty one.

Sit down, says the officer.

I sit down.

Can you tell me exactly what happened? says the officer.

Yes, I say. It happened because I was assumed to be a woman.

Can you tell me exactly what happened? says the officer. Where was it that you got on the bus?

At the stop behind the memorial, I say.

And which route was it? Do you remember? says the officer.

The one that goes to the central station. The night route because it was already past ten, I say.

And where did the person you’re accusing get on? What time was that? says the officer.

Two stops later, I say. By the arches. It was half past ten or nearly eleven.

The chair is empty. The varnished wood is curved in ways that cast reflections of origins I can’t make out.

The chair is not empty. The doctor is there. My chair is the empty one.

Sit down, says the doctor.

I sit down.

Can you tell me what the problem is? says the doctor.

Yes, I say. It’s because it’s assumed that I am a woman.

Can you tell me when the problem started? says the doctor.

I can remember it happening at school, so it must have been at least ten years, I say.

How many times a day? says the doctor.

Usually eight or nine, I say. But the number isn’t really the problem. The problem is the pain and when it comes suddenly.

What kind of pain is it you have? says the doctor.

Like anger, I say. Like swells of rage that aren’t mine but against me.

Does it bleed? says the doctor.

It bleeds with no blood, I say.

The doctor blinks. The police officer blinks.

What happened when this person got on? says the officer.

He didn’t pay, I say. He didn’t buy a ticket.

Where did he sit? Next to you? says the officer.

He went past all the other empty pairs and sat down next to me, I say. There was plenty of space. There was no one in the rows in front of me or behind. There were only two

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F

Animal Kingdom

By Chris Di Placito Ye’re home.

It’s the eyes, man. The fucking eyes. They look at ye like yer something disgusting, something deplorable. But also something to be pitied. Like a mangy dog, man. Like a scabby fucking stray. They see the dog, and they tut and whisper among themsels. A pure sin, they’ll say, what a shame. But would they help the dog? Would they fuck. They’d look at it, everybody always looks, but they’d just as quick look at the floor. They’d cross the street and quicken their pace. They’d clutch their handbags, or their bairn’s hand, tighter against their body.

The dog’s no to be trusted.

And how? How do they even know? Ye walked into the town centre, away from the prison gates. This was a deliberate act. You’re jist getting on that bus the same as everybody else.

Ye have yer carrier bag, could it be that? Everything ye own, yer entire worldly possessions, stuffed and crumpled intae a cheap plastic bag. And yer shirt. Only it’s no your shirt, yours was torn and bloody. Your shirt was taken fae ye the night you were lifted. No, this is some charity shop shirt they gave ye on the way out. A minging, fusty smelling thing some auld cunt probably died in. It looks fucking terrible. Its two sizes too big for a start. Ye’ve tried to make the best of it by tucking it into yer trackies, but it looks like a dug’s dinner man.

But no, it’s no even that. It’s no yer clothes, or yer cheap fucking carrier bag. Not really. Ye just have the look, man.

Fuck thum. Ye look back at them, challenging their stare. ’Mon then, that look says.

Ye got a fuckin problem it asks, and ye jut yer jaw defiantly towards them. And their eyes flicker wi panic then. They look at their shoes, fiddle with their tickets, they shift their bags onto the space next to them. This seat’s taken, the bags say. And it’s always the same fucking dance man, the same auld routine, from back before ye were even inside. It’s fucking tiresome.

And it’s detrimental tae yer plight. ’Cause ye dinae want to fight. Ye want tae talk to people, tae make them understand that ye’ve changed. But how do they know ye’ve changed when they dinae even know who ye were to begin with? And why should ye have to justify yerself tae this lot, tae complete strangers? Nah, fuck thum.

So ye sit up the back, in the furthest away seat. This is where they want ye tae sit, where they expect ye tae sit. This is where ye belong – the back row. The back eh the classroom, the class clown, the fucking dunce. Where were you when they gave out the brains?

The back eh the queue. The back eh the dole queue. Fucking jobless. Fucking hopeless.

Yer stomach fills with bile and anger, the familiar venomous anger man. The same rage that’s bubbled inside ye aw yer life. It runs through yer veins and seeps out yer pores like a toxic, twisted sneer.

But no, this is no who you are. No anymore. These cunts don’t know you, they’re

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A Harsh Spring Light

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By LaMarr Thomas The pain of history…

Allan had only just sat down at his desk, but already he could feel the prickly heat radiating off his chest. Appreciatively, gratefully, he looked left out the classroom windows – always kept so clean, so clear – at the growing, darkening foliage of the trees. Swaying shadows of the wind-brushed leaves offered to him a prospect of cool restfulness, of sanctuary (Oh, if only I could, if only…). The sparkling sun – high, radiant – touched everything in the lawns across the street – the trees; the green, thickening grass; the yellow, white, red, and pink flowers (he knew for sure that some were tulips, but he didn’t know the name of the yellow, trumpet-like flowers) – every sunlit living thing seemed charged with unnamed, unknown, but unlimited possibilities, and this same fiery, glowing, pulsating sun seemed – in fevered, unbidden, uncontrollable moments – as if surging all through and around him. He was groping for words, he didn’t fully understand, he couldn’t explain, but throughout all these final fragrant days of April, he was urgently aware of, he teemed with, a nearly irrepressible, bursting joy that each day had framed all he saw of Broadway from his seat in this second-story classroom. Except for today. Slavery today. Today in history class they would be discussing slavery.

To a few of his friends he gave a quick, perfunctory nod, but as the seats filled, he lowered his head and pretended to be concentrating on his textbook. Mr. Havens walked into the room and closed the door, shutting off all the hubbub and the shouting of the many students scrambling through the halls, making their last-minute rush to get to their classes on time. Now it was just the twenty-six or twenty-seven of them, and a close, warm, oppressive silence filled the classroom.

Mr. Havens didn’t this day drop his teacher’s book on the desk the way he often did, as if to say, wake up, wake up, you students. Instead, in a subdued tone, he said, very deliberately opening his book, “My young and budding men and women, you will please turn in your textbooks to page three hundred fifty-seven.”

Allan had his book open, but not to that page. He’d already seen it the night before.

It was virtually the same as his junior year: More than half the page filled with a full-color drawing of Abraham Lincoln sitting on the upper deck of a riverboat. Thick, gooey, oblong, lugubrious, hot tears were running down Lincoln’s troubled cheeks as he watched slave women with brightly colored head rags and slave men in tattered shirts being chained up on the lower deck of the boat. “Young Lincoln,” the textbook said, “was filled with a great sadness as he witnessed firsthand this practice of slavery, and on that riverboat he swore that one day he would do something to put an end to the enslavement of the colored race.”

“When black folks was in sla-a-bber-ree—” Of a sudden, crazily, Bing Crosby flashed into Allan’s head – and there Bing was in that movie (he forgot the name of it – Hotel?), his eyes bugged out, his lips slamming down hard on every b.

When b-black folks was in sla-a-bber-ree, who was it set the darky free?

Abbbraham A-a-bbbra-ham-m-m.

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The Treatment

By Michael Nath Undercover in a gang of racists: an extract from an unpublished novel.

At The Black Gun, Kim’s boyfriend made a fuss of Claire, which was just to be welcoming, and had Kim pretending to be jealous. The boyfriend was called Marcus. He bossed the bar well: punters he liked, he rewarded with his manner; when he did smile, he was your friend, and meant it. He had chocolatey eyes. On a wooden wall behind the bar were a couple of posters of young men barred from drinking in The Black Gun. Claire didn’t recognize them, but when Marcus clocked her checking, he said they were just Charlton thugs, not consequential. Which got her thinking. And all the time, he was watching like he was waiting for someone in particular. So it wasn’t a surprise that at The Black Gun later that Sunday evening, Claire encountered one of the gang. By then, she’d had a few Pernods, and Kim’d got Marcus to make her a Red Witch. Getting tipsy was part of the cover. And when a young man in mirror shades appeared beside her at the bar (she hadn’t noticed him come in), it all seemed worked out. The DI’d taken her to meet Kim, who’d introduced her to Marcus. They were both agents, and they’d made preliminary connections with L Troop – since Marcus was now greeting Pete de Lacey and introducing Claire. And it was her job to come on to him.

So she came on to him, kept touching his arm, and laughing when he said things.

In The Black Gun he was the top boy, and he probably knew it; though he didn’t seem to care all that much; it was like he was after something else, behind those mirror shades. For the time being anyway, he went along with who he was: he took his money out to buy drinks for hangers on and toadies who were hoping to treat him; he banged his bottle down and turned suddenly and now and then he clenched his fist slowly, or made a throat-cutting sign and either he laughed, or shook his head when he did that. With racist remarks, he was sparing, limiting himself to throwaway comments on coons and pakis; laughing once when someone said something in his ear about the taxi-driver who got drowned in Victoria Dock, that that was the best you could expect from West Ham fans, who weren’t even clever enough not to get banged up for it, seeing as they left enough evidence to fill a 16-yard skip, boasted what they’d done, then got turned in by their fucking step-mums. It was old hat anyway, done and dusted, boring, mate. Then someone said, ‘Not like you, Pete’, and he turned to him and said, ‘What did I tell you, Tony?’, and pointed his bottle of Bud and made the throat-cutting sign with the bottle neck, so Tony flushed and crept away down the bar – for all the good it’d do him, if Pete was annoyed. And at last orders, he turned suddenly to Claire: What we doing then?

She said they could go back to hers, she had beer in the fridge and a bottle of Smirnoff. That wasn’t no good. He only drank Absolut. So she said she could get some Absolut, and he said where? Wasn’t nowhere round here sold Absolut this time of night on a Sunday, and he stared at her like she might have blown it, but then he said, Come on, let’s go down Robbie’s – you come too (meaning Claire, along with the hanger-on who’d mildly dis-

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The Broadway 36

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By Paola Trimarco Good people at the front, bad people at the back…

The terminal was just a few blocks from our apartment. Often we were the first people on the bus and had it all to ourselves. These were days in the summer months when I wasn’t at school. I would get the window seat so that I could feel the feeble air-conditioning being emitted from the metal frame. From there I’d watch the city scenes moving past me, transfixed the way I’d watch television. My mother sat by the aisle with a book opened on her lap.

Being among the first on the Broadway 36 meant we could sit near the front. We never sat at the very front, where the long seats ran lengthwise. Those were for old people and the occasional blind person with a dog – the only type of dog allowed on the bus. Why was the front so important? My mother didn’t need to say it. I can’t remember where I first heard it, but there was the assumption that – in the language of childhood – good people at the front, bad people at the back.

The bus would leave our Chicago neighbourhood, full of its Jews, Irish, Poles and Italians like us. That was how we categorised people. But as the colour of skin hides these finer distinctions, the Broadway 36 bus started its journey driving from one white neighbourhood to another.

When I was still a toddler, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr on a visit to Chicago referred to our city as “the most segregated city in America.”

The bus would roll on, stopping every few blocks, through other working-class and white neighbourhoods, passing along the commercial streets of shops and eateries. One strip of the early route followed Sheridan Road, with its residential high-rises and views of Lake Michigan. “That’s where the boss lives,” my mother would say each time as if I hadn’t heard it before. She worked for a pool of court reporters and did her typing at home. It’s the only time I’d see her look up from her book, almost as if she knew it was coming. I’d gaze at the glassy building, imagining its rooftop swimming pool and simply nod for my mother’s benefit.

The driver – usually black – would stretch his arms across the steering wheel as the bus turned off Sheridan Road. The bus would then be on Broadway Avenue and groan and squeak its way through the notorious Uptown area. It was a mixed neighbourhood. The whites who boarded often left a smell of alcohol as they swayed past us. The Hispanics and blacks would get on with the young men among them going towards the back. I knew that meant they were in some sort of trouble – or soon would be. My mother hadn’t noticed any of this. Her head remained bowed down in a book of pop psychology or some Eastern religion.

But I noticed people who appeared different from me and wondered what their lives were like. I didn’t always know what to think. From a young white girl’s point of view, the 1970s were full of contradictions. Black was cool. It was street films like Shaft and the music of Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. As a baseball fan, black was also Ernie Banks and Billy Williams – two all-star players. Being a racist was clearly a bad thing – like the villains in the

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The Fulani Damsel

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By Jeff Unaegbu Now I had to buy a cow…

Ordinarily, I would have continued on my way to Enugu and only wondered what some brown huts were doing up a hillock when they should be located somewhere in northern Nigeria. But after pointing out these huts to a very indifferent fellow commuter, I was immediately consumed by wanderlust. I simply pulled out from where I was crammed at the back of a heady minibus and yelled at the driver to stop. Everyone turned around and stared at me.

They continued to stare at me as I quickly disembarked and headed for the hill, matter-offactly wading through the green coteau leading upwards. They must have thought I was off the deep end for just taking off in that direction, alone and on impulse.

Well, halfway up, I saw her, I mean the most beautiful girl in the world. She was walking ahead of me, probably returning from selling her nono or milk. She had slightly bouncing legs half exposed by a sparingly-striped white wrapper. This wrapper covered curvy hips in a graceful manner. One of her queenly hands was holding onto a finely decorated calabash bowl with a straw cover of rich tapestry on her head. She clutched a circular band in that hand also. Her few grey balls of fura or curd were packed in a transparent plastic bag which was itself partly covered by smaller bowls atop the big bowl. And her black braids cascaded about a nymph face that should command the seas to water distant deserts. Yes, these braids were of curly supple sheen and spotted carefully with a parade of milk-white cowries. As she turned to glance in my direction, large brass earrings jingled and sparkled in the sun, as did gold bangles and (I think also) cowries and the mottled beads on her smooth waist. Soft almond eyes, daintily carved nose and thin sensual lips filled my consciousness. Just then a rich Fulani smile and naked shyness blew away the hot sweat on my Igbo brows. This smile welcomed dimples that complemented her fine dentition out of which a gold tooth dazzled the sun and my awed eyes. Then she slowed down to study me and I instantly noticed she was at peace with the world, unlike those civilized commuters reeking from paranoia as they headed for Enugu. And as she waited for me to come up to her, even as the wind played on the teal camisole shielding her bold breasts, I employed the little Hausa I had snatched from onion merchants at Onitsha.

“Inakwana?” I asked, making as if I understood the full import of my enquiry. Well, it was something near the approximations of a good morning, though it was afternoon!

“Lafialon, Sanu,” she replied or rather sang. And her voice carried me to Mount Everest and brought me safely back to Africa and to Nigeria, atop a hill near Enugu, all in three seconds. We stared at each other. Did they say the Fulani were quarreling with the Igbo in Jos? She said coyly, “Zakasha fura de nono?” (Would you take milk?)

I nodded for the opportunity of taking this milk I had always been curious, from a genteel point of view. She threw down the circular band and brought down her well-car-

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Jim Crow in Jerusalem

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By Rebecca Ruth Gould Parallels between racial segregation in occupied Palestine and Israel and in Jim Crow America…

(Figure 1) Robert Frank, “Trolley – New Orleans,” The Americans (1959)

“New Haven itself is a crime scene, the site of historic and continuing racism, segregation, and social inequality.”1 So wrote a scholar of the city at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This observation links America’s segregated past to its nominally desegregated present: anyone who travels from the New Haven train station to Yale University confronts the fractious legacy of racial segregation. While segregation in the United States predates 1896, the racial divide approved by the “separate but equal” ruling of the US Supreme Court (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) strengthened Jim Crow laws across the American South, and indirectly reinforced de facto segregation in the northern states. The racial divide was famously emblematized in a groundbreaking documentary photograph series currently held in New Haven, Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959). Four years after Rosa Parks had famously refused to cede her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger, Frank captured the starkly physical engineering of public space that segregation had set in place on a New Orleans trolley (figure 1).

The camera angle is evenly split between black and white, and iron bars divide each passenger from their neighbours. The riders stare at the cameraman, their countenances etched by public and private histories of grief. Ranging from defiance to desperation to denial, every face canvassed in the photographer’s gaze expresses a fraught relationship to a racially tainted American dream, adding dimensions to the axiom of geographer George Lipsitz: “race is produced by space [and] it takes places for racism to take place.” 2 1

Elizabeth Chin, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2001), 183.

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We Pick Karen

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By Jonathan Covert “Wow! That sounds competent!”

We pick one from among us. Her name is Karen. Karen can’t believe it. Or at least she acts like she can’t.

“Me?” Karen’s eyes, unremarkable only moments ago, become lost in the middledistance, shimmering with light from a fixture mounted in the office’s drop ceiling.

Yes, Karen, you. You have that special something. That je ne sais quoi.

“Moi?” Karen says.

Oui, Karen. *** Well, actually, nous savons quoi – we’ve made a list: 1. Karen smiles a lot.

2. Karen smells good.

3. Karen consistently demonstrates above-average capability in almost every enterprise.

(With the exception of Monday Movie Trivia Night, which leans heavily on John Hughes, for which Karen is too young anyway.)

4. Karen reads a lot of non-fiction.

5. Karen supplies healthy snacks (typically, a vegetable platter w/ hummus) at office functions, e.g. birthdays, co-ed baby showers, the Holiday Party, etc.

6. Karen knows her way around the gym.

(Which is to say, Karen’s butt won’t quit.)

7. Karen is objectively attractive.

(Propriety dictates we ignore this fact until about halfway down the list.)

8. She has that dark eyebrows / light hair thing, genetically-disheveled, like a stray puppy.

9. When she smiles, her upper lip warps into this tantalizing rim under her nose.

10. Karen is too humble to use the word “matriculate”.

(But we’ve definitely heard of both her alma maters.)

11. [lagniappe] Karen affords us the benefit of the doubt.

(Like, for example, this one time someone* ate Karen’s lunch out of the fridge, and Karen sighed and wondered aloud if someone did it by mistake, which was awfully kind of her, and totally ridiculous – Karen always labels her containers.)

Etc., etc.

We don’t tell Karen about the list. Instead, we say je ne sais quoi. *** If it had to be one of us, it was always Karen. Like a colorful beach ball at a music festival, * It was Fat Jenny.

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Jo Ann Robinson

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By Kate LaDew A creative nonfiction about the great civil-rights activist.

The youngest of twelve children, Jo Ann Robinson was born in Culloden, Georgia. She was the first college graduate in her family, and later earned a master’s degree. In 1949, she moved to Montgomery, Alabama to teach English at Alabama State College. In 1955, following the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person, Robinson distributed flyers calling on African Americans to boycott city buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by Martin Luther King Jr., appointed her to their executive board. In June of 1956, segregated seating was declared unconstitutional by Alabama’s federal district court. *** When you learn to move like someone always hungry and hollow, it gets easy not to overflow the borders of your body. Easy not to be yourself. Turned inward and scrubbed clean. But not too clean. Never better. Never better than them.

It was only one paragraph, a name and an arrest, but it made Jo Ann feel full. If she ate one letter a day, tearing the newspaper into bits, it could last her weeks.

After it got dark, she went to Alabama State’s business department to see John. She knew the chairman using school property for something like this could lead to anything.

So she hands the paper to him, only her eyes speaking. His immediate nod fills her up even more.

It was the empty seats that did it. That momentary feeling she was safe. That she could have this one thing. This one small respite. Not taking it away. Not stealing it. Just climbing onto a bus and sitting down in a seat occupied by no one. Years have passed but the bus driver’s rage, as immediate as John’s nod, took every good feeling away from her. She was going to be humiliated. She was going to be hurt. And it was going to be done by a man who thought her incapable of either emotion. A snapping of her back into place, her place, hungry and hollow, a stamp across her forehead. And she let it happen. As the driver advanced towards her, Jo Ann fled. Scraped her knuckles, her knees. Fled as if she had no right to be.

When night ends and the bright hits your eyes, sadness doesn’t start over again. Each day and the next and the next it builds, weighing on your heart until each beat hurts, sending little slivers of pain up and down your arms, behind your eyes, pressing, pressing, falling drop by drop, a puddle in your hands. As she walked home that day, years ago, eyes averted from every bus stop, she knew the pain would get worse until it felt like nothing at all. Until it was all she ever expected to feel. All she deserved. But that little piece, that little shard of all she really was had slipped away, hidden itself in that empty space under her heart and waited. Waited for now. She feels it crawl out, tentatively at first then running, running, sparking in her eyes. She sees it at the edges of her vision as she circles the mimeograph’s pressure roller, the ink staining each leaflet like fingerprints. She isn’t sure how many blacks live in Montgomery, but doesn’t stop turning until she reaches 50,000.

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Don’t Google Me

F

By Steuart Osha At the age of fifty-one … I was having my heyday.

My memory is of Rolly under me, marveling “we just want to please each other,” while I peered down at my pressed white breasts rocking against his damp chest. The furnished apartment on West 26th Street, which he’d rented when his wife kicked him out, was a luxurious little place by most standards, with wide wooden floorboards, a transparent kitchen table set, and an unused garden. But he hated it. He loathed being alone and under the intrusive gaze of his neurotic landlady, whose allergy to perfume required us to use a glycerin soap I found drying.

“Take your time, Elizabeth,” he’d whisper, holding my hips in his hands, “I plan to be fucking you for hours.” I gripped the headboard and looked at the tidy paintings behind it. To relax and concentrate, I would banish other images from my mind and focus only on him. Rolly had a heart-shaped face, heavy glasses, short-cropped graying black hair, and the most intelligent hands I have ever seen – “safecracker fingers,” he’d giggled. He stood five feet four inches tall, and when strewn atop him thus as if large myself, my mind’s eye might picture someone female there beneath me, like my tennis partner, Kitty McNulty, a cheerful tow-headed woman with large breasts and an aggressive net game. I wasn’t inclined to kiss women, not since I was nine and played Hooker and John with my best friend Gale, an unpopular bedwetter with dark red pigtails high on either side of her head.

“Whom do you belong to, Elizabeth?” Rolly would demand, jutting his pelvis up with a jerk, his eyebrows stern. I’d smell his densely shaven cheeks and get a thrill. “You, Rolly, I belong to you.”

It astonished me that at the age of fifty-one, when my friends’ husbands were suddenly leaving them, possibly for gay lovers, and certainly for mentally unstable women in their twenties who might wear a dirndl in an online photo, I was having my heyday. It does not escape me, I cannot overlook the sad cliché that this bright thing came by way of Rolly’s harmful antipathy for his wife, and that my giddy excitement would turn into despair.

At the time however, I delighted in his close attention, how he studied of all my movements, noticing any slight changes in my voice that indicated a shift in mood, or the unladylike way I would jab the end of a sandwich into my mouth with one finger; it was as if what I said or did were important. And unlike my husband, a dolt of a man – for there was this unfortunate fact also--Rolly was famous. Not famous to you, perhaps – not a celebrity like Marlon Brando, say, or Martin Scorsese, or Leander Paes, or whomever. But to my mind, he might as well have been. “It’s not whether he’s actually great that we’re talking about,” said Toryn, who’d been to Arizona for co-dependency rehab, “but rather the fact that you think he’s great that counts.”

“You like it when I possess you,” Rolly whispered. I could hear the landlady shuffling around upstairs. “I know you so well,” he said, tugging the duvet out from where it had

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Art

Life in Kashmir from a bus stop

By Lauren Stewart