Issue II

this issue of pulp feels like when you’ve finished off the juice box but you’re still sucking on the straw and chewing it like a flat piece of gum. it’s the shadow of something. it’s like if you stare at the sun and then you shut your eyes and you see different colors moving around like boncey balls. like licking the salt off your fingers after a day in the sea.

co-editors: danny duffy and maitane romagosa LAYOUT AND DESIGN: maitane romagosa

BRIANNA OSTROWKSI

prose contributers: Alexander Sorondo poetry contributers: levi bradford/claudia conger/stephen devinney/Cassie Hottenstein/Rhosalyn Williams art contributers: jennifer hart/chase machado/joey nunez/brianna ostrowski/lindsay raham/John Vorstadt

ALGEBRA

LEVI BRADFORD

Once, in seventh grade, I took a class in a portable that had a bathroom built in.

I sat behind a girl with brown hair that always smelled like dryer sheets.

When she would write, her shoulder blades would glide under her cardigan as if the wind of grace was making waves on the skin of her back.

When she stood up her eyes move to mine足足 the only mobile dots on a freckled complexion.

She walked behind me into the bathroom and I listened to her shit while the teacher explained that X always had to be greater than Y.

MY COMMUTE LEVI BRADFORD

It’s morning, rain has fallen making all the ground darker shade and I’m sweaty, and, god, I didn’t want to be sweaty.

I’m pushing panting up a hill in sixth gear on my six­gear bike because the gear­shifter has long since broken as a result of a time I cut too close to a old­fashioned lamp post, caught my pedal on it and went spinning headlong into a rose bush.

The trees are green, greener than I’ve ever seen them.

It’s morning and the cars shick by, rolling atop the water in the road like Christ did in the early years.

When I move my mind off my struggle, car tires and oily water together sound like the roar of a gigantic crowd at the end of a great speech.

When did our lives become so perfectly metaphored in cars?

The a to B life; stopping only when stopped by a glaring light or harsh word; filling up and running out; breaking down only on the road, never in my own garage.

A warm rain will fall this morning.

I hear only the breathy whisper of my breath out my mouth and engines and tires.

I think nothing, which is a hard­earned comfort seeing as I, like every person, have a lot to think about, ever since we invented the automobile; ever since we crucified a sinless man; ever since the moment we thought nothing, and were sent crashing into a rose bush.

THE STUDY OF RAIN CASSIE HOTTENSTEIN

A wind chime shaped like a hummingbird clangs on its wire every morning, declaring some unforcasted storm heading from the southeast.

The wind plays some tinny music from the tropics, a sailor song that prompts the neighbors with their weekday suits to search for red sky bleeding across apartment roofs.

They’ll find it. Even the pale Miami transplant sucking her pen in front of the sliding door glass knows that lluvia— her “y” the twang in “y’all”— comes at noon in summer.

When the complex empties for lunch, she’ll second the wind chime, whistling to the rain from the notes she’s written: “Austin heat was so dry,” marveling at the sweat steaming from the tarmac, her humid skin.

JOEY NUNEZ

CHASE MACHADO

THE FALL STEPHEN DEVINNEY

Recent polls show that 99% of wealth created over the last quarter went exclusively to those in heaven.

Experts say the firmament and surrounding neighborhoods have struggled to reduce the growing wealth disparity due to rising unemployment rates.

In a recent interview, Satan came under fire for calling the work culture in the Garden “subpar.”

He told reporters, “These people sit around all day and get handouts. I made a few investments that didn’t work out for me, but hey, now I’ve got my own company.

That’s how it goes in business.

In an attempt to curb recent policy failure, Jehovah introduced the postdamnation policy of “Synergistic Toiling” which was quickly criticized by opponents as Stalinist.

When questioned, nearby cattle were unsure of what Stalinism was but offered that it seemed like, “a good direction for the company.”

When asked for comment, Jehovah responded, “The dichotomy between rich and poor, owner and exploited, is fundamental to existence. To abstract oneself from this antagonistic division is to abstract oneself from reality.”

Jehovah’s favorability rating has been rising since topless photos from the Virgin Mary’s recent vacation were captured on a nearby cellphone and leaked to media outlets.

CEREBRUS

ALEXANDER SORONDO for a.e.

It’s somehow the case, though, that my current boyfriend didn’t find out about my dildo until we’d been living together for almost a month. Says it never came up in conversation, that he’s never even heard me speak of sex toys -- which I don’t have a good-enough memory to contest but do find highly unlikely. That I could’ve gone so long without mentioning it. Or that he never just saw it lying around my apartment at some point.

But he insists he never knew. And what’s worse is that he found it. It’s not like I just mentioned it out of the blue after all this time and he was like, “You have a what?” What happened apparently is he was in the closet looking for a pair of pants that he thought may’ve dropped off a hanger, was there on his knees sifting through piles of shoes and tupperwares and stuff, and then came across the shoebox where I keep the dildo and some lube and a DVD that I haven’t watched in like six years but for some reason haven’t thrown out. So the issue is that now he thinks I was hiding it. Me. That I let him snap his condom off and come on my face like twice a week but, y’know, I’m too much of a prude to confess I own a dildo.

He’s adamant, though, saying I was hiding it because I want for there to be a part of my sex life that doesn’t include him (heaven forbid) and so now it’s this whole big thing, and he’s using it to attack me for shit that I said like five months ago about his mom or whatever, and I just said, “Listen: I’m not having this argument,” and went ahead and exiled myself to the couch and so that’s where I’m sleeping now -- which is annoying, yes, and it’s killing my neck and I think actually affecting my metabolism but, if anything, it gives me time to think. And what I end up dwelling on is how his reaction to finding what he found -- his whole attitude like owning a dildo has some kind of moral component to it -- isn’t just obnoxious but also maybe reflects some less-than-modern ideas about what I’m entitled to do with my body.

I mean, I’ll be fair: the dildo’s no joke. Ten inches long and...I don’t know how wide, but it’s wide. I’ve maybe on like four occasions taken it to the base, and I was drunk every time. It’s pretty huge. But I mean at the end of the day it’s a rubber cock that I’m powering with my wrist. When I wanna get fucked, when I wanna be intimate, I’ll choose six inches of a human over ten inches of rubber. Especially if I’m in the arms and against the chest of somebody that I like. Or “love”. Whatever. Let’s be maudlin, why not.

His argument, though, to cover up how threatened he is by the size of the thing is to say that, oh, it’s “abnormal.” Getting off to an inanimate object. That it’s “perverse.”

Perverse.

The things this boy has asked me to do and he thinks a dildo is perverse. No. What this is about is he’s punishing me for having a source for getting more inches than he can provide. He tells me it’s fucked up to be turned on by inanimate objects and meanwhile if I leave my heels on during sex he scan’t take his eyes off them and he comes in like a minute. His ego’s a house of cards, though, and I know that if I mention the thing about the heels that I’m gonna have to hear about a million other things, so...not even gonna bother.

But so I’m on the couch now, figuring shit out, really angry but also worried. Trying to come up with a way of handling this that lets me keep the dildo and lets him keep his pride but it’s seeming like that might be harder than I thought. #

One solution that comes to mind is to get him to use the dildo on me. But first I’d have to get us amicable enough that he’s willing to fuck me and right now we’re not even talking, so.

The dildo’s in a shoebox in our closet, which is how I’ve always kept it and where he found it last week, and now in my head I see its presence as like some deaf, blind, oblivious third party in the relationship, and while I don’t mean to suggest that I’m turned on by any of this, and can honestly only see myself acquiescing to sex right now for the sake of breaking the tension and resuming my place in bed, something about the dildo constantly being on my mind now, as the catalyst of this whole issue, is making me almost desperate to use it in like a totally sexless way. Scratch an itch. And also I’m thinking of how it might help me fall asleep on the couch, which is an issue.

The only reason I haven’t gone and grabbed it from the closet to rub one out before he gets home from work is that I’m almost

positive he’s checking the closet every night to see if it’s still there. Probably even checking how it sits in the box to make sure it hasn’t been touched.

Which wouldn’t have stopped me for a fucking heartbeat maybe two or three years ago. When power in a relationship was still very much an issue for me. Now though, honestly, all I want is peace. And, yeah, it’s a little sad to think that my 20-year-old self might hate me for handling it this way, and the 22- and 24- and probably 26-year-old versions, but at the same time I’m so fucking exhausted by just life in general that I’m sure I’d be willing, right now, to make ridiculous concessions of dignity and pride just to be able to sleep comfortably in my bed again. To be able to roll over now and then to kiss or fuck or even just put my arm around somebody who doesn’t have a bug up his ass (or hate me for whatever I happen to put in mine)

To which you might say, “Well if pride’s not an issue then why not just apologize and be done with it?”

I did apologize. I wasn’t exactly bristling with contrition, fine, but frankly I don’t think it would’ve mattered. The reason this has gone on so long is because he hasn’t made up his mind yet about how big a display of subservience he should demand from me before he can feel like he’s man-of-the-house again. And also he’s already crazy insecure about his masculinity and so I suspect he’s asking all his friends for help, the manliest men he knows, and posting questions on the internet because with him it’s almost never about, “What does she have to do, or what do I have to do, so that we can resolve this problem and move on with our lives,” but more like, “How does a man react in this situation? What’s a strong response to this?”

This ridiculous pursuit of bravado doesn’t consume him to the point that he’s always doing little gestures like closing doors too hard, or buying really harsh liquor that he doesn’t actually enjoy and drinking it straight (as I’ve had boyfriends do in the past and cringe to admit I was turned on by), but it does complicate just about every problem we have wherein he feels that his masculinity’s been called into question.

Also, though (between you and me), this whole bravado thing makes him almost embarrassingly easy to manipulate. And this is one of the things I’d probably have a hard time explaining to my younger self, the versions of myself from between the ages of maybe 16 to 27, where I made a big deal about my Power in a relationship. When I felt like it was something that needed to be flaunted and acknowledged.

Deferred to. My position now is basically that any real power a person has is usually a secret. Needs to be. You can’t boast of it, can’t flash it to your friends. That the realest sorts of power are usually invisible, enjoyed in private. My “power” with my boyfriend is basically proportionate to how well I can convince him to see any situation as “gendered”. Make him think that his masculinity is being either bolstered or trampled and then steer him accordingly. #

You do start developing strange harmonies with a person after living together. I’ve had it happen with roommates when I was an undergrad and again with a boyfriend I lived with while I was getting my master’s. After a day apart, not saying a word to each other, you meet up in the evening, or the next day, and find that you’re craving the same food, or that you’ve been thinking about the same song, the same movies.

So it’s been like a week of tension between us now and when I get out of work on Thursday I mention something in passing to a colleague about trying to figure out what sort of wine I wanted to pick up on the way home (also secretly imagining a scenario where he comes home and finds me with a bottle and asks for a glass and the mending begins), and she tells me that she’s been really wanting to get a drink too and won’t I please please join her for a drink after work please.

I relent.

We go to this family restaurant by my building because drinks are cheap and one of the things my colleague (who’s 33) says she likes about me is that I’m so “precocious” (I didn’t know you could still be precocious at 29) because I prefer places that are quiet. So I end up choosing this place, in part, because I do kinda want this (barely-) older person to keep seeing me in a favorable light. Which I don’t...I mean she’s not even a superior.

But so we get there and it’s whatever, kinda drab, we just go straight to the bar in back. The only other people seated here are by themselves, all of them men, much older, and they look at me and my colleague but it’s nothing awful and nobody sends a drink or approaches.

After two glasses each I’m telling her about the dildo thing. She says it’s ridiculous, I agree with her. She asks me what I plan to do, I tell her about the whole “manipulating the manliness” thing, and again she says something about me being mature. I blush.

And it’s at this point that I hear a familiar laugh that almost sounds foreign on account of I haven’t heard it in so long. I turn around and, at one of the tables right by us, I see my boyfriend with one of his colleagues at a table, a mostly-eaten pizza there in the center, and two

girls sitting across from them. Twentysomethings. Business casual. Which pretty much rules them out as colleagues because my boyfriend’s a chef at a restaurant just slightly more upscale than this one. (Think Cheesecake Factory, but Greek.) And this probably sounds ridiculous but these girls, particularly the one I can tell my boyfriend’s focusing on, are attractive in the way that The Other Woman is attractive. If that makes sense. Like pretty in a weird Joan Cusack way where they probably don’t get lots of attention from single guys their own age, but married men can’t look away.

Then -- another example of harmonized minds -- he turns all the way around in his seat (which is totally weird and random as fuck and probably even he can’t explain why he does it) and we make eye contact. This is just as a third glass of wine is set down. Soon as I hear the little click of the glass touching the counter I turn back and fucking chug the whole thing in like two gulps. I get another, and I tell my colleague what’s going on and to not look, but after that, after that first little surge of anxiety, I say, “Fuck it. I’m here with a friend, I’m drinking, I’m not going anywhere and I’m not gonna ruin my good time.” Cuz I’ve got total leverage now. I’m in control. He flips his shit when he finds out I have a dildo, and then I keep my cool when I catch him out on a date? The game is mine.

So I keep drinking and proceed to get kinda fucked up, whatever, talk with my friend (I’m promoting her from colleague). When we get up to leave, maybe an hour later, my boyfriend isn’t there at his table anymore. His whole group’s gone. Which was mostly a relief, because I didn’t wanna have to deal with it, but also kinda hurtful. Gotta say it. That he didn’t use this as a chance to come up and talk to me.

End up getting a cab to take me home. Leave my car there at the restaurant. I get chauffeured to my door, head upstairs, and there I find him standing at the kitchen counter with a bottle of Tito’s, pouring it into a wine glass, drinking it straight. He’s wearing black jeans with a white buttondown, untucked, the cuffs unfastened and both rolled back a single fold and the shirt itself unbuttoned from the collar to the sternum. I see he hasn’t shaved his head in a few days and the fuzz at the sides is longer than I’ve ever seen it. He doesn’t look up at me when I come in, or when I drop my purse on the coffee table. Just keeps tipping his head back, finishing off the vodka in his wineglass, doing a good job of not wincing. I stand and just look at him for a minute and somehow know I’ll never forget how he looks right now. Drunk as I am.

“Well,” I say, “your friends were pretty.”

He dips his head in some passive-aggressive, like, here we go gesture.

Which of course only infuriates me, and then he adds this sarcastic little half-smile, and I go, “What? You’re amused?”

He doesn’t say anything and so now I’m the only loud one, which means I’m losing, but I can’t help it. And it’s only getting worse because the whole reason I’m mad is that he’s not showing enough emotion, I’m showing all of it, and as the disparity between our emotions gets more apparent I get angrier, thus widening that disparity, and so on…

And so finally I’m just too livid to care and I show all my cards. I say, “How about instead of being teenagers and playing the fucking silence game we just talk about your whole masculinity issue. That way we can just decapitate the problem.”

The button has been pushed. He looks at me. His features seem to undulate but that may just be the booze. He throws the wineglass into the sink and it shatters and with his shoulders all puffed out he comes around the counter like he’s gonna hit me but then just storms off into the bedroom. Only reason I don’t follow him is because I’m actually kinda scared.

I hear him throwing shit. Smashing around in the closet.

When he comes out a minute later he’s holding my dildo by the base (which is shaped like a pair of testicles and has a suction cup for the shower). He takes it back over to the kitchen counter and he snatches a meat cleaver out from the knife block beside the sink, turns and spreads the dildo out on the cutting board like a patient etherized on a table and then, hoisting up the cleaver, he looks at me and says, “You wanna decapitate the problem? Fine.” And he holds the dildo down on the cutting board with a splayed hand, lifts the cleaver, and smacks the blade down into the board, severing the head of the rubber cock from its engorged, neon green, vascular rubber shaft.

Cuts his thumb off, too, though. At like the hilt. Suddenly there’s this constellation of red dots on the opposite wall and I see his jaw go slack and he turns his head toward me real slow in a way that for some reason reminds me of Lazarus. More than pain, or panic, the look on his face is surprise. The biggest oops of his life. He looks like a little boy.

I swear to God we’re laughing so hard I can barely tell the dispatcher where we are.

JENNIFER HART

JOHN VORSTADT

JOHN VORSTADT

TO MAKE PEACH FRITTERS RHOSALYN WILLIAMS

Unwrap 1 neighborhood boy, you’ll climb the peach tree in Mr. Schmidt’s backyard.

Do not feel guilty when the overripe peaches drop from the branches, marring the grass with their spoiled bits— the best fruits don’t fall.

Eat slowly, slip sticky fingers into each other’s mouths, the juice will run clear from his chin.

Brush off the bark from your back, climb out slowly.

Slip into mama’s kitchen through the back door don’t let her know where you got the peaches.

Make sure to wash well, no one likes dirt in their pastries.

Wait until the oil is hot.

Set a frying pan in it, unpour peaches, and milk, and cornmeal.

Careful not to scald, although occasionally, you’re eager.

Deliver a parcel at his doorstep with a note in purple looped handwriting.

Wait.

Don’t watch him getting off the bus.

Don’t look for him sliding through the shadows with a girl in white lace socks. She’ll be dirty too, soon.

MARIONETTE RHOSALYN WILLIAMS

On an afternoon, some September between 10 and 14, I took my sister’s bicycle from the shed— fixed a fishing pole to the handlebars and chased the snakes to the river.

I plunged my hand into the wet earth, pulled six worms, warm from their morning meal and tucked them, sweetly into a newspaper cone.

I dropped my hook just beneath the sign that said “fishing prohibited”, to tell my friends.

When sport grew tired, I remembered that I couldn’t whistle bargained with the Clementine tree for a low hanging orange and rehearsed my aim with sleepy Ibises.

When all the fruits I could reach bobbed on the surface of the water I rolled my rod beneath the handrail, nursed my fishing line through the gaps in the wire and took a demerit around the unpaved side of the river.

Came back with M&M’s, melted on my palms, to find the worms negotiating burial shrines with Clementine blossoms and 93 degree weather.

My line was taut, to a great ripple in the water.

So I drew it in, but a bridge begs a heavy ride and I sifted the line between my weaver’s hands, brought my fish just to the wire; thin up close.

My hands played potter, shaped my boy’s sticky body through the gap.

He was odd, still when he landed— so I prodded his stomach with my fisherman’s hands, ‘till his whiskers twitched twice.

Mama don’t cook catfish, so I kept my hook instead watched the roar he made when he hit the water.

Watched the blood from his cheek, like yarn off its spool.

The Ibises grinned, happy not to mind mud fish.

LINDSAY RAHAM

1997 HONDA CIVIC CLAUDIA CONGER

The backseat of the car was unfamiliar to good things, although that wasn’t necessarily its fault. Sitting there made you feel like the rip in your contact lens, the bobby pin clasped too tightly against your forehead, and the pair of dance shoes that gifted you with burnt-cherry bruises. You always felt out of place in the backseat, where three seats, three bodies, and six thighs barely touched. Yours never failed to consume the most space. This is where hands searched you like dogs sniffing through landfills. Tinted windows aren’t romantic.

You don’t know why you weren’t brave enough to say that.

JENNIFER HART

THANK YOU FOR READING!