Quarto 2008-2009 Issue

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QUARTO VOL. LX

2008-2009

QUARTO Literary Magazine of Columbia's Undergraduate Writing Program

Submissions of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and cross-genre

work received at: SUBMISSIONS.QUARTO@gmail.com Submissions for the 2009-2010 volume will be considered in the fall semester of 2009.

Questions and correspondence to:

EXEC. QUARTO@gmail.com

Copyright Quarto 2008 All rights are reserved and revert to aithors and artists on publication.

Poetry

Sandra Susser

Dennis Shepherd

Nicholas Sanz-Gould

Hannah Howard

a a e I JrerDM rrae rf i e I d - C h a

Sarah

Maria Jagodka

Poetry Index for the Ruination of Suburbia '

Sandra Susser

Fragment Found in a Plantation Cellar

As Oil Pops

Nicholas Sanz-Gould

Sick at the Ashram

Hannah Howard

Genitive Use

i Lane Sell

m

The Quiet Razor

Madeline Dangerfield- Cha

Buckminster Fuller

Maria Jagodka

Orcas Island

Wolfing

Dennis Shepherd

Ode to Fungus

Autumn

11.29 Take the number of Breakfast Club moments...

Dalton LaBarge

Rejected Manuscript

Large Hadron Collider

Sarah Terry

Julia Alekseyeva

Aaron Rotenberg

Index for the Ruination of Suburbia Sandra Susser

Index for "The Ruination of Suburbia" Section 1: The Sciences Poppin' Plastic in Today's Society

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Lemon,Water, and... Champagne A Little Zinc in Your Coffee Helps the Medicine Go Down

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Quilted Paper Towels and Disposable Mistakes Truth or Friction? Tales of a Toilet

23 30

Prick Your Finger on a Record Needle

4S

Unfastening the Toggles on a Shrunken Sweater

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bo

Two Cups of Detergent, One Load of Noodles

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Transcendent Training Wheels and Velcro Velocity

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Section II: The Humanities Bounding Forward in a Synchronized Society Underwater Birthing Techniques Rudimentary Rooms without Walls Blanket Ordinances from Swaddled Cruisers Pop-aratzi: Parenting Gone Wrong Tulle Camping Tents and Frosting Battleships Crepes Or Crowns: The Future of Art Bandaids & Lollipops or Acid & Bling?

The Elimination of Milk

75 90 99 114 137 141 156 179 200

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As Oil Pops Nicholas Saiiz-Gould

As oil pops from the skillet it lands teeth-first on the thin tendons of my wrist in response is swallowed by my hungry pores

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Ode to Fungus Maria Jagodka

Are you a fish, a dead-swimmer?

May I lay you upon my hunger-pang-plate And, with your flesh, my palette, decorate?

Peculiar, iris from pupil, how your gills do radiate!

You are so largely a fish, but own a larger part not.

A fish? I say not!

Perhaps it is a knight you are — Shield-wielder warding against elemental beasts.

What a remarkable resemblance!

You are capped like an umbrella-one.

Suspicious; who is the princess you protect From dragon-rain and dragon-sun?

Neither of those two; you are you And stunning, too! Skin of plump pallor And adorned with an up-turned lump-bowl Placed proud upon a stocky-stump pole.

Indifferent to day's rays or moon-glow, Yours is the land that lies lowest of the low.

Perfectly pretty upon forest-feet, to you I do Not prefer petalous or perfumed flowery-sweet.

I am ever-pleased, in your presence to be — Snowy-ball, barley; off-white cranberry.

Within a mollusk, made of the shade of trees, You sit, spore-pearl, contentedly disposed.

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Wolfing Dennis Shepherd

At last, die old man took me wolfing.

Wrapt in hides, our rifles shoulder-slung, we cut out for die territories.

The clouds were suspended snow. Our breath hung heavy as meat.

"See how the pelt peels ofl'the haunch?" He asked. "No damage to fur or flesh."

"Keep die teeth but spare die marrow for the raven."

Snow fell. We tailed tracks deep into Chic-Choc.

"I spent a lifetime in these mountains." He chuffed beneath his skins.

Our mittens were stiff with blood. Steam rolled from our bare necks.

"Time we head back."The old man slumped to his forepaws.

I dropped my rifle, and shed my skins.

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Fragment Found in a Plantation Cellar Dennis Shepherd

[torn away] pale bride. Bare feet on wet grass [folded, decayed] Marie Laveau.

Black crepe gown, [torn again] Spanish moss. [indecipherable from ink bleed] virginal, beneath the Live Oak. [folded, decayed] bridegroom hangs [blackened by water] dress shoes pointing down, glowing [blackened by water] swamplight. [torn, missing] stretches up to touch his clammy hand. Nuptial [scratched out by author] drips from his pant cuff [eaten by silvcrllsh] A tuberous baby shrieks [silvertish again] shim of moon.

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Sick at the Ashram Hannah Howard

Each dusk, the people throng Swamiji, who holds up his arms, narrow as chopsticks, to Mother Ganga.

Swamiji has been fasting since he found the forest at the age of eight, and in its fat trees, saw God. Each dusk, his vast hair billows, the hot air becomes thick with dark, hundreds of voices cry into the river.

I'm inside the squat white building.

The songs outside sound maniacal.

Everything smells like the daal we have been eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with rice or without, in silence.

A girl is offering me saltines and peanut butter from a backpack. They smell worse than lentils.

She says when she got sick they took her to a damp room that smelled like marijuana and rubbed green goo on her belly.

Most things are forgivable, Swamiji says.

Mother Ganga will wash them away.

She will cup your face in her soft hands, she will let you cry into her belly, she will wait for you while you wait.

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Orcas Island forjcnisc

Hannah Howard

The plan is to stay with your ex-lover in his house that used to be a chicken coop.

Isn't he gorgeous, you tell me.

He has a butcher diagram tattooed on his right bicep & garlic eyes.

It's his new girlfriend who picks us up at the dock, a sixpack and a zucchini the size of a baby in the backseat of her greygreen car, which chatters, unhappy down the road that hugs the ocean, her hair another ocean down her back.

In the chicken coop tliere are big jars of honey & carrots & beans all over the floor and tables, fermenting.The girlfriend makes his bed for us.

He sleeps outside under a sheet of plastic.

You and I listen to the rain start and start again, pretending to sleep. You are so bad at forgetting to be sad, the rain says to me, your legs slick like glass against my own.

In the morning, we swim naked in the ocean.

It is so cold we grab for each odier's arms, our breath hostage & icy in our mouths.

Here, people grow tilings and keep diem in die freezer. He is naked all the time, or working, or wasted. His girlfriend teaches us to hitchhike so we can see Doe Bay. Orcas is foggy & untouchable & dangerous.

On the boat home, we talk about going back, growing tomatoes, but the rain has stopped, and I know the proud island wants nothing to do with us & our garlic plants & our fantasies.

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Genitive Use Lane Sell

Last night I sat and drank Smoking cigarettes with a Finnish woman Large breasts, tattoos, body full, hair in two buns Pink ribbons She wanted to love in broken English, I did not take her home I could have lay in this empty bed this morning The Bronx overcast, misty beyond, and held her, reading aloud When she asked What is.. .voluptuous I would have held her right breast firmly and said Not this And loosened my grip to a caress But this And rolled between her pearl legs and been Voluptuous to her again The book trailing under our bodies to be rumpled Make sense of this all The overcast Her Finnish voice menacing and tender and lonesome Her skin, tattoos, my books This reticence to accept A woman dead in Georgia at 30 (31 ?)

Incense burning in the corner An invisible city My best friend's woman, whom I want to take in my arms A Puerto Rican mother killing herself with cancer in Kansas City The edifice of the University rumbles to life across the street j

On the shelves the ancient characters are silent except to me "What does mean," she asks "This is not true 'of?"

It is the genitive use — it means "concerning," "belonging to" The quality belongs to the thing If she understood she would only know By touching words "Like this," she holds her right breast lightly, "This is 'of voluptuous?"

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The Quiet Razor Madeline Dangerfield-Cha

The yoimjj nun Robed in brown Sporting slippers Dashes in To the mindful meal Armed With a can Of whipped cream.

She shakes it With a furious Unfamiliaritv J

And cackles Like dry rice.

Brother Wayne Who is jolly And round Like the Buddha Glances my way.

Nun on a rampage He says, wisely This is what Bald heads Are for.

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11.29 Dalton LaBarge

Last time I was a year older we skipped the party's tail for the worst of November snow to slump in a bank of it: two ornaments dropped from a branch, slipped into presents wrapping themselves in flittered silver and opal bows — too metallic and dismembered to bring angels where we lay. Akwesasne's constipated, you know, Kanasatake's burning eighteen years ago and tonight the lamp-post is a warm torch my balled fists are eager to take a swing at.

The familiar shapes words make in Winter condense into that time I shot out and Doc put my limey skin under a lantern, grabbed two ankles, exhaled clouds at both lobes and left. t> There have been so many pictures tonight, dancing crescendos up the gym rope from a cantaloupe to where puberty hit and no one took pictures anymore. I wonder if you know I've been sleeping eyes open. When adulthood gets to my bed it'll be dressed in midnight if it doesn't want a nosebleed.

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Take the Number of Breakfast Club

moments in your life, divide by four: and this is how many love poems it takes to screw in a light bulb Dalton LaBarge

I wrote you a poem about arboreal conservation efforts. it goes: ' You are like a family tree, barky and tall.

I like your branches — your roots could go.

You were one sturdy fellow before Ice Storm 1990.

I wrote you a poem about the directionality of ladders andf elevators. it goes: You are the vertical brain of plot, mechanical cliche in sheep clothes and indecisive.

I like the bends in your character structures.

You are the only surviving Foil to Mistah Kurtz.

I wrote you a poem about poems you'll never read it goes: You are my best poem after a car accident, stumbling, twelve cigarettes deep and suffering from night terrors.

I like the memories you never tell me about.

You are the abridged collection of everything wrong with n

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fleeing the scene ot the crime.

I wrote you a poem about the one time your dad got drunk and threw out all of your mother's dresses and made her stand outside in her nightgown until she admitted to being a whore. it goes: You are the way your mother's eyes glazed over, on her knees and huddled in the grass.

I like the sequins in the trash can.

You are alone in the kitchen I wrote you a poem in the lining of a gram-bag. a poem on pins and needles. a poem for standing ovations. a poem of promises.

I wrote you a poem about getting away and it goes

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Buckminster Fuller Sarah Terry

"We are called to be wchitects of the Ritiwe, not its victims. "

Dymaxion dreams that burst the confine Of flattened omni-misinformed ideals And shock the livingry with vast surreals, Dalinian, the futurist's designs Refuse conventionality of lines, Spin domes, ephemeral, that will reveal What synergetic shapes no more conceal And wake the world of sleeping silent minds.

Except you could not give those minds new eyes, And what thev could not see was soon dismissed.

The engines stalled and stilled your Spaceship Earth, Yet your tensegrity defies demise And through you, hopeful dreams we'd lost persist.

Set your watches: at sunsight comes rebirth

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m>

Large Hadron Collider Sarah Terry

In the ever-growing gusts, we charged like so many Lone Rangers with the William Tell overture pumping our hearts Rossini in our blood.

We kissed the dome of the silver sky as the world wrapped around us and us around the world, our reflections revolving a day in seconds.

Electric cackles echoed our laughter but the prickling in our quark-cores meant the storm was coming, sharp and swift, over the hills of silver.

Too late, we saw that our brothers rode the storm, flocking like dark geese from the bitter wind.

We rushed into the valley where the spark-grass grew; Collisions rang the world like a bell.

A new river ran up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom, the blood types of our annihilation.

And you, you sifted our souls to satisfy your curiosity.

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A u t u m n (Variation on John Ashbery) Julia Alekseyeva

How is it that the sound of your feet running, running, And how is my heaving breath, and how the dying sun?

The wind dies too, then lives again, our beloved.

The wilderness triumphs. Cement dies; all is earth, all is air.

There is only the gap between leaves, A deeper thing, melting into the soft ground.

Your eyes, glowing red, burn hot like lava.

You are that suffering stone.

And afterwards, radiant, the wet earth glistens, Fern leaves like confetti, flittering the crown Of your forehead, the oaks undressed among us.

This city lias fallen. Its limestone lies still.

This is the beauty of our autumn, and we dance An ode to splatter-painting. We draw maroon for the sinking Earth, a mauve for November skies, the last remaining Stones of summer — the ocean's lapis lazuli — Everything layer upon layer — as we dig, Impatiently, the fossils of ourselves Up from this wretched earth. A hard tiling.

How else are we to understand why everything dies?

And later, much later, autumn is a returning.

Did you feel it, too? Did you sigh like I did, The light in the gray mist as it sheds our dust To the home we've staked as ours.

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Rejected Manuscript Aaron Rotenberg

The question of if love can be found under die right orbital frontal region has been rarely considered.

Many hearts have been torn out to little result Introduction In lieu of maternal care Many young children have been left Searching for love.

Previously it has been found That it cannot be found.

It has been suggested that true love leaves no traces (Cohen 1977) Method 16 healthy animals were paired with members of the same or opposite sex A dating paradigm was used, Where subjects met at a party, made eyes, exchanged numbers, made plans, broke plans, sent flowers, had sex, had an argument and tearfully admitted to loving each other.

Upon admission the brains of the subjects were removed And inspected by high power Election microscopy

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Results One subject was found With cupid's arrows piercing the lower cerebellum (Figure 1) Before deep anesthetic, it was recorded that he muttered Whv did she never call?

No pattern could be discovered in the group Although many males Were found with thoughts of leggy women in the anterior hippocampus.

Fig. 1 Discussion Further poems Should perhaps investigate Longitudinal developments.

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Nonfiction

Non-fiction Letters Home

Ben Reininga

How Close Can You Get to the Dinosaurs?

Emiko Soekawa

Cranial

i

James Romberger

Letters H o m e Ben Reininga

Deai- Jeffrey Hello!

Perhaps it was some sort of overly clever self-referentialism — but, considering the content of your last wall-posting, it seemed a shame that you left prepositions dangling all over my wall, like sad strands of tester-spaghetti flung at the wall to see if they stick; your infinitives split wantonly like taut cherry tomatoes, en route to the simmering saucepot....

High-carb grammatical carnage!

But no, I jest. It's just fun to use big words in English again. I'm sure you'll make a wonderful writing; tutor for Yale's young freshmen. Although, somewhere some native speakers ought to be hanging their heads in shame. English is your 3rd language, if I recall. How does that old adage go? In the time it took you to blog about your Ivy hardcore band, ten kids from China got their PhDs? Something like that...

But seriously — sad days to be an American. Sometimes even Barack Obama seems like that last cute girl who gives you her phone number, before the party gets busted and you end up spread-eagled and beaten on a cement floor.

Or the lyrical and insightful paragraph you write about the Iliad, when the quotation you're supposed to identify comes from Joyce. Lace curtains on a sinking ship — that sort of tiling.

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Perhaps it's just cynicism from a distance, a defense against home-sickness, but I keep reading of natural disasters, all these mad tsunamis and die NewYork Times telling me something about how it's Mississippi that's underwater this time and no one cares. They shake my chmg-to ameism and conjure a big angry white-beard in the sky. The God of my elementary school, except now he's punishing me for nighttime thoughts about angel-faced boys in white turtlenecks and for my carbon footprint.

This is our generation. It's liistory in the present, and when I notice it, it gives a grim sort of satisfaction. Our Kennedy assassination, our Vietnam.

"Oh no, son. Katrina was in New Orleans. That must have been, let's see, well 2005, because it hit right when I arrived at Columbia freshman year. The towers fell years before that."

Oh, so we're young and restless and worried about the fate of the world, what's new? Or maybe we're not concerned with the fate of the world — just our place in it. That's why you study abroad, to make your own personal myth.

It's like something I read when I was a freshman.

"The way the very wealthy have homes in not one but two time zones, or exiles two homes in the wrong places. One always longs for the other home, but home, as one learns soon enough, is a place where one imagines or remembers other homes."

I guess that brings me back to Buenos Aires, a home where I imagine other homes, and back to Hong Kong where we met, and grew up in a way, turned into the sort of people who travel and write each other.

But — this is turning into a very very long and rambling wall-post. I diink I'll transfer it to an email and leave it here for die moment — hopefully vou are

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well and will respond. best, b

Dear Jeffrey I do hope that your parents contact me when they're in Buenos Aires, and not just for the free lunch. I think it'd be fun, and I need more friends who are grown-ups. I was having yerba mate with this silly brilliant boy on his roof the other day, talking about how I always had crushes on my SAT students and he said: So? They're 17 and you're like what? 19? I had to excuse myself and stand for a moment in the bathroom mirror, pulling back the skin around my cheekbones and saying diings like, "Young-looking at 22! A youth in his early 20's! With startling talent for one of such tender years!" with as much brightness as I could muster.

But that aside, life down under is moving right along. The semester is really just getting underway, classes started in the middle of March (it's a southern hemisphere thing) and run until the end of July. I am, on a whim, studying film at a film university called, rather appropriately, La FUC. It is a whim whose dark underbelly and light-shining scales I am just beginning to understand.

Asidefi-oma mandatory Spanish class, I have a global film history class, (yesterday we watched John Ford westerns dubbed into Spanish), an argentine film class, a class about pictures (moving and stationary), and thankfully a regular old lit class where I get to read Borges and Cortazar.

Most of the time, I'm gratified by the ability to do something so capricious.

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It's the part of me that lays awake in bed and thinks maybe it's not too late for me to be a rockstar or a child prodigy. Like this — this film thing — will be my golden ticket. My calling. The thing I'll stay up until dawn to do. Grandpa will walk again and I'll inherit the chocolate factory and maybe win a Pulitzer too.

Other times exactly though, the absurd uselessness of it all seems overwhelming.

I can bandy my way around a fairly intellectual conversation in Spanish, or stand smoking in a courtyard with my friends and joke about how Kant sounds just as dumbly obtuse in Spanish as in any other language, or about the way they pronounce, the Argentines, Barthes with two syllables. "Barr-tees."And in a month, I'll have seen as much French NewWave and early American Noir as the very best of them.

But I'm not really writing or reading or running or doing anything other than senselessly enjoying myself, reading in parks and meeting Germans in bars and volunteering at an art-house cinema. It's an odd kind of restlessness, 1 guess you could say I'm happy and aside from the occasional solitary bottle of Malbec, more vice-free than I've ever been, but I don't know what to do with it. It's a terrifying sort of happiness that lacks any sort of direction or cause.

Yesterday I sat in a lecture about Marcel Duchamp and an Argentine friend he made when he came down here to relax. He hung out in Buenos Aires and drew instructions for giant machines with wheels and glass boxes that he mailed back to Europe but that were never built. His friend was named Xul Solar, an odd Sun Ra sort of character on the periphery of the canon who painted but also invented musical instruments, mystical board games and a language called Neocriollo that he started speaking in his thirties and never stopped. The professor was a bald gayish Spaniard in his early fifties who'd moved down here long ago and whose eyes shone sadly as he described "a man whose brain was luminous, full of language and reckless energy" as if that spark, the discontentment of the second rung where genius is appreciated, out of reach, from the ivory tower,

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still lingered in him.

It's part of why I came here. My third time. Hong Kong, Beijing, Buenos Aires.

Each time hoping I'd find it, that I'd come back with drawings for giant machines instead of die misdirected angst of privilege. I probably should have stayed the first time, with you in our little flat in Sai Kung.

So graduate, Jeffrey, and get in your Toyota Matrix and move to die city seeking your fortune. Perhaps you will find it there. Perhaps the snozzberries will finally taste like snozzberries.

The old woman I live with, tells me that when I'm back in Argentina, like Coppolla, as a famous director, to promise mat I'll come and see her. She studied theater and always wanted to be a film star, like Madonna in Evita, leaning out over the balcony as the masses scream her name below. "Come back and see me, amor," she tells me, "and leave flowers on my grave." She spends her days at home, wearing a beige leotard and taking naps on the terrace, the radio blaring tango.

Then at night she can't sleep and so she takes pills that make her belly hurt. In die mornings, when she's making me coffee, I will ask how she is, whether she is tired, and she will tell me "yes, I am tired, hijito, tired of suffering."

It's hard to know where to take her seriously, where Elena the person and Elena the parody-of-a-developing-world-melodrama overlap, when to laugh and tell stories about her to my friends and when to feel sad.

This has turned into a very long and late-night sort of email. Ten points if you've read this far. Write back, and when you do, I'll tell you about Ian (insanity), Daniel Day Lewis and my new Colombian friend who stole my cell phone.

You still need to send me your real address. len days, or vour postcard goes to my mother.

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I am looking forward to seeing you again, to Ace Bar and Indian food. love, b

JeffI went last night, Sunday, to a bar in San'Ielmo called quite simply,"This is a Pub." It's furnished with dark wood and the beers are dark and cold, real beers pulled from the tap in a country flooded with Stella, heineken and little else.

All of a sudden, I found myself telling the girl I was with, who hails from your island, about Sunday nights a long long time ago, about a boy who'd break all the rules and climb over a fence to say goodnight. Who could drink me under the table and still climb back over the fence and be in class at eight, unruffled.

I miss you and hope all is well with you.

I am alone tonight, drinking a bottle of Malbec and smoking restlessly on my bed. It's almost two and I have class so soon, but don't want to sleep. What I want is to be back home taking a writing workshop and smoking on the bench outside of Lewisohn.

This afternoon I was home, reading Cortazar and drinking mate on my bed when the woman I live with came into my room with a giant egg tart she'd baked for me. She's not supposed to feed me lunch, it's not included in the costs, but she's terribly lonely and seems to host American boys less, out of economic necessity than a deep and unfulfilled maternal urge. When I told her I couldn't eat it, that eggs are on the list I wrote and stuck with a magnet to

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her refrigerator (buttermilk yellow with a bright silver handle) she sighed and left it on my desk, saying she was i*oiiig to go take some pills, one for her nerves and one for the pain in her feet and then go take a nap on the balcony.

I wrapped the tart in a napkin hoping to give it a homeless boy but then accidentally dropped it in the elevator. It bounced a little and splattered up onto die mirror and the sides of my jeans, and all through Historia De Cine I, I wondered if the boy sitting next to me kept glancing over because he thought I was cute or to see what it was that smelled like omelets.

Once, in Mendoza (and there are stories about Mendoza that I might have to wait until I'm back at the Abbey to tell you), I was in a cab with some Germans we'd met and one of them leaned over and asked me if I knew the Spanish word for "flash." I suggested something about a "luz luminosa" but he stopped me.

"No, flash, the verb."

"How do vou mean?"

"Well," he leaned over, waving his finders delicately, and whispering warmly into my neck, "like 'the fingernails of my lady love, they make me flaaaaaaash.'"

I just laughed and rolled my head back against the cold glass of the window, watching the city fly out of the tops of my eyes. Later at the dance party, he kept coming up to me and howling "Flaaaash party! Flaaaash party!" waving his arms and looking happy.

None of my friends could understand what it was I knew that they didn't, or how I'd suddenly become so cool. I just smiled and waved my fingernails, howled back.

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When I'm back in the north, I am going to have a flash party, and 1 do hope you'll come. It will be just like old times, except better. love b

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Breakup Letter Adrienne Giffen

To the girl, with the rope tied around her neck, dangling from my heart: I have been deliberating over this for quite some time, and I have to tell you that I have reached a very difficult decision: I am no longer going to be able to be romantically involved with you.

There are multiple factors that have led me to this conclusion, wliich I will share with you now...

First of all, I live here and you live there. It is not a practical decision to make when gas prices are so high and the economy is so poor.

I have also been spreading myself too thin, and I fear my studies are being compromised. I know you hate the fact that I never seem to have any time for you, but I often go out at night with my new friends here. Truth be told, things are just more exciting here. ;x And. Your house is way too smoky for me.

Secondly, I feel that though you and I are similar in age, and though we have similar ambitions for our futures, we are presently at very different places. You have so much potential, but you are just getting started. I really believe you can make amazing tilings happen with your life; however, right now you have

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a lot of changes to make and personal growth to do, and I do not diink I can give you all of the support and time that you need.

Moreover, as much as I enjoy your company and our conversations, I think 1 have allowed you to become too emotionally involved in a relationship that has no future. There are too many obstacles, so there will inevitably be a time when thev become too difficult to work around. I do not want either of us to J

get in too deeply or hurt too badly. I feel that we are still at a point where we can both walk away unscathed. After all you have been through in your life and in your various relationships, I do not think you need another messy situation. You are at a perfect point in your life to work on you, and after you do that, everything else will fall into place.

1 am really so very sorry to do this to you, but 1 can only hope I am being as honest and forthright as possible. I would love to continue a platonic friendship with you, and I would love to continue talking to and supporting you as well.

I do, however, completely understand if these are not things you feel diat you want at this point.

Yours, The girl's heart from which you dangle

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How Close Can You Get to the Dinosaurs?

Emiko Soekawa

Inada, my father's hometown in japan, was once known for an abundant granite export. Hundreds of years ago, miles of green rolling hills and flat rice farmland grew uninterrupted. Beneath them, lay an unlimited supply of storm-colored slabs. Granite can be used for many things; buildings, monuments, and gravestones.

Our family has a plot with an enclosed hedge in the village cemetery. I learned when I was five, that my siblings and I will be buried next to our father and ancestors. "Everyone in your father's family is buried in the cemetery in Inada," my American mother disclosed before my first -visit. "Will you be buried there too?" "No, I would like you to scatter my ashes in the sea. And have a party and dance." "No!" I argued. "Oh Emma, you have to release someone when they die. If you mourn forever they can't move on."

Two summers after high school, I received a phone call out of the blue.

An artistic couple downtown was searching for a babysitter. A family friend had given them my number. She knew I wasn't intimidated by illness, as my father's epilepsy had brought him in and out of NYU hospital for the past seven years. My father was in an induced coma to stop a fatal seizure pattern. It had already been five months. It was supposed to take three days. I had taken time off from college that year.

I did like children and so I went to the couple's home. Three-year old Oliver had eyes like watery pieces of a March sky. His parents told me they hadn't known what was happening.

He had begun to lose his balance, and he hated to be picked up. He had a brain tumor and they had it removed. I met him two months later. There were no bandages, just a scar two inches long riding a pale, boney, egg-shaped cranium.

Hair had fallen out and left tufts of air. Oliver hated that I was in their home and released a blood-curdling scream when he saw me. I did not uiink I could

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be of much help.

The mother had just delivered a beautiful, strawberry-blonde haired baby.

Ava was so healthy it was as if her emergence had drained Oliver to near death.

She was so full that when you pressed her to you as you picked her out of her crib, she felt like one big pulsing heart.

At least once a day, Oliver collapsed on the floor in a knot of limbs unable to move. Wrapped in someone's arms, he still howled. Ava constantly stretched her arms to grasp his struggling form. At those times, she watched from a baby carrier in the open kitchen. I made funny faces to ignite her deep flashing eyes and trigger her giggles and spurting bubbles to compete for air.

For the next summer and fall months, almost every day we painted and visited the kid's library on Carmine Street. I wheeled Oliver's stroller across J

Canal Street from the art studio, an area that the Holland Tunnel pours into.

The fumes insulted Oliver's purity and might. I winced when 1 jostled him over the lumpy black tar. His thin legs and jutting kneecaps folded together.

He shrieked short frustrations and push his back into the seat. Quickly, 1 ran to get the stroller across Canal without getting hit. Half wheeling it, half trying to lift it straight up and carry it, the books underneath made it bulky and dense.

Oliver slowly remembered to be silly. He liked to dance to The Beatles song,"OhYoko." "This song is Oliver's favorite." The lilt in his father's faded European accent declared. "Right Oliver?" The father had shaved his head in solidarity. They held hands, each dipped in paint as they swayed on the hardwood floors. Together, their exposed scalps carved the air.

Eventually, Oliver's hair grew back, bit by bit. Soft like rabbit fur with light wheat coloring. His lips look prettier as blood ran through diem again. They flushed the blue away. He liked the Children's Museum off Grand Street. I ran around the little tree house, knocked and pretended I lost him. "Oh no!

Where is Oliver?" I would call out to die no ones. "I'm in here Emi!" He would giggle and fry to see me through the windows, raised up on his toes. Even in his excitement, he was gentle. Soft. As though from another time. He wasn't the kind of boy who would bat you in the face because the playground made

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him crazy. He had the grace of a wise elder and the innocence babies lose once they start speaking.

One cooler day, I took him to the Natural History Museum. Oliver was obsessed with dinosaurs. We learned their names and who ate whom. In the huge hall, I picked him up to hold him as close as security ropes allowed. A pretty, petite forty-something visitor was watching us from behind, by the large windows. I thought she was going to lecture me for being careless, for coming too close to the display. Please don't ruin this moment. He is just getting better and he will breathe on dinosaur bones if it makes him happy! A second sideeyed glance revealed that her smile was both friendly and open. Perhaps, she was a friend of my family or a neighbor? I offered a quick, closed-lipped smile in return. Though Oliver was not heavy, my arms grew tired from holding him up so high. I carried him over to the kiosk where he could sit and hear Dino Facts. The woman slowly came over as I felt she would.

Very quietly, still standing a few feet away she whispered, "Is h e . . . " "No." I cut her off. Afraid he had absorbed her negative thoughts.

"He was. He's healthy." I corrected myself in a low tone. His hair and pale cheeks still hinted at illness. It was easy to see how she could tell.

Her face became flushed and full of a moist eyed smile. But no tears fell.

The light poured through the windows and left a pool of sun at her feet. "My son... He used to like to come here."

Oh. I looked into her eyes. I struggled to convey that, in some .001% sliver 1 understood what she was talking about. That I was sure she had done everything she could. If I could go back in time, I would try even harder. But right then, 1 felt more confident to say nothing than ruin the small hope for silent understanding. She left, we stayed.

On the subway ride home, I carried Oliver into the first car. I showed him how to look out the front window and hold his arms up to pretend he was flying down the tunnel. At our stop, he asked to wait for another train, so that we could keep flying. I told him that we would do it again soon. Oliver talked about dinosaurs for the rest of the walk and eagerly told his father which ones

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we had met. We read "How do you get a Dinosaur to bed?" before I left.

They had gone on sabbatical the year before and lived on the beach in Spain.

Did the pipes have lead in them? She walked around with him on 9/ 11. How poisonous was the air? Oliver's mother and I passed time in die kitchen. There were questions asked aloud, while she stirred stevia sweetener into berry smoothies. We synchronized the smearing of almond butter on multigrain crackers. Her organic foods and natural grace reminded me of my own mother.

Oliver's mom spoke about her years at art school. She created graceful pauses for me to talk about my father and refrained from forced comfort. Her nephew, who went to University a few blocks away, came over to the apartment some days. He told me that his mind was not in school.

J

That cold season, Oliver had gotten bigger. He became confident on the playground slide, as long as he was on a lap. I picked up Ava, the ready glint in her eyes growing more assured. I chased Oliver around the circular wooden living room coffee table with Ava sailing high in my arms. We slipped in our socks. We squealed. Their parent's eyes and mine seeped up new memories.

Oliver had become an easy-going big brother. He repeatedly told Ava knockknock jokes and forgot the endings. Then, he would throvv his head back and laugh at his own mistake. It was time for him to go back to school. I felt like it was time for me as well. My dad had left the hospital and was put in a rehabilitation center.

Soon, I became wrapped up in my own life. My extracurriculars distracted me. I had a new boyfriend. I visited my high school friend, Sophia in Mallorca, and thought briefly about those lead pipes. I didn't see Oliver for a few months.

He began to fall. In summer, his mother called and told me diey found tumors on his spine. 'Ilie x-rays looked hazy, like spikes on a dinosaur. She asked me if I might want to take him to the Children's Museum, to see if he could play just for a little bit. It was not a day for the tree house. After gluing pieces onto pieces, Oliver appeared sluggish. "I need water," his eyes set on mine and die request was more like a resignation. He held out a tiny hand, trimmed with barely-fingernails, smaller than Tic lacs. He led me to die water cooler near

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the check-in desk. I pulled out a thin, white paper cone from the holder and icy water gurgled out of the cooler. I handed the cone to him, still keeping my hands under his, to hold it steady. He looked at me, squatting beside him. "Are you thirsty Emma?" before he had taken even a drop. He tried to push the cup towards me and some Liquid spilled on our hands. He made me take a sip before he took one himself.

It was the fall. I sat there in Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, in the children's playroom. He didn't scream like the first day. His limbs were so thin that die I. V. raised his skin up Like a little burrowed worm. The arm attached just hung there. His hair, his perfect newly grown-in head of hair was gone.

Another girl, a summer volunteer, moved so mat he and I could sit next to each other at a child sized table. But, he just leaned on my knees while I built him a tower of Legos. Oliver's father was at work. His maternal Grandmother was there. We both looked like giants imposing ourselves on a village of tiny furniture. Oliver's modier and I staved with him alone while they gave him the medicine. We held hands and read a book he liked about a stegosaurus.

The next week, Oliver's mom called me during the dav. She said it would be a good time for me to come over. Oliver was in his bed at home. There was a cool afternoon light coming in through the tall bedroom windows. The veins in his forehead were transparently covered. His gaze floated over to me doorway.

"Hi- i... Em-ma." Sweet, high, fragmented syllables dripped out of his mouth.

I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. On the floor, opened halfway was the book "How do you get a Dinosaur to bed?"

His parents had everyone over. We sat cross-legged and on couches in the open living room. Friends, family and his pre-school teacher. We sang songs while a family friend played her guitar. Campfire songs. Beatles songs. Songs that make you cry when someone dies.

One year or so later, I saw Ava at a statue dedication ceremony in die neighborhood. A sculptor friend had built a plaster and metal dinosaur in Oliver's honor.

They were given permission to erect it in the park where his playgroup met each day. Knowing no one else, I planted myself at die side of Oliver's cousin.

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We spoke about school and what we were going to do with our lives. Ava's light hail- curled longer; she was a mobile person in a tiny navy pea coat. I smiled and waved as she flew by. She didn't remember me.

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Cranial Comix James Romberger

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C A ^ E kup TOOK -me cow AWAV .

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1

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!2H\ It betca Evans^P Saramanda Swig

Fiction *n Rewards

Rebecca Evans

%.

Perfume/ Mofe

Saramanda Swigart

How to Observe a Common Black Housefly Closely Matt

Herzfeld \

The Administrative Assistant

Mattheff A Ira Swaye

Who We Are Shayne Barr

Can you believe that's mvltid said John-John Jesse. Manuel Jesse was throwing his back into bicep curls. From the neck higher the two men looked just alike, but I knew what John-John meant.

Unbehevable I said. Manuel watched us watch him in die mirrored wall.

It's Mke he does it on purpose said John-John. Manuel read our lips I think. He racked his dumbbells three reps early, crossed the gym, and slurped at an arc of rush,- water.

Then he settled onto a weight bench and opened his log.

Working your back today? asked John-John.

Biceps said Manuel.

So what are vou writing? Poems?

Weighthfter records make the IRS look sloppy. Interviewing at Gourmet Gang that morning, I had shaken Mr. Beck's hand too hard.

You don't know your own strength! cried Beck.

It's what I know best I said, and suddenly all that I wanted in the whole world was to be able to touch my own shoulders again. Touching a pay check was important too. I had been fired from Cuisine & Company for stealing beef. Beck knew this, but scheduled me for an event that night anyway. We 're got a tux for you he said. You can change here. Be back by thiee.

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Driving towards the gym, 1 calculated that if I did not concentrate all of my earnings into chicken parts and protein powder, I might own a computer by June.

This is my last set 1 said to John-John, as Manuel finished recording his curls and shut his log.

Don't want to overtrain. Smart. Very smart, Massive said John-John. You're going to have to deal with injury eventually. But you don't want to end up like this. In the good old days when he could move his arms, John-John Jesse flexed himsell straight up The Stairway to He-Men. Each step ofThe Stairway is an amateur body-building competition, and in 1983, John-John swept all ten.

He had die calves to go national. Next season in the Atlantic City Adonis semis, John-John clenched his "Freakin' 'Rican" pose and just stuck that way; elbows locked at ninety-degree angles, knuckles down.

Actually I got another catering gig I said. / clock in at three.

When I was competing, said John-John, / drove a zamboni for the Rangers.

He was on the verge of a story, but Manuel nudged himself forward.

Could you spot me, Dad? For that? said John-John, summing the weight on Manuel's press. If you add fifty pounds, yes. He turned back to me. Congratulations on the job he said.

But dorj 't forget your real work. He clamped a hand on my shoulder and said This is who we are.

By the way that John-John moved his chin, I could tell mat he meant more than just the weights. He meant gram-by-gram protein tabulation and arms and legs whickered with veins thick enough to strum.

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Once I watched a TV movie about cardiac surgery, llie first scene opened on a doctor with closed eyes, wrist-deep in a dog's chest. Sometimes you just have to feceel it murmured the doctor, and by a dull clinkine I understood diat he was moving metal instruments blindly. I clapped iron plates onto a barbell, reclined with closed eyes, and just felt tliose diree-hundred pounds down.

Flatten out! roared John-John. Manuel must have been arching his back. He shifted against leather and growled through a repetition. I relaxed under a familiar crush. After ten years together, I never showed the barbell my teeth anymore.

Breathe! urged John-John, and Manuel blew his lungs out through his nose as I struck my fourth rep, my fifth rep, my sixth rep and racked the bar.

Excellent! Very, very good. Massive! I startled upright. John-John was looking at me instead of at Manuel's quaking arms. As the barbell forced Manuel's elbows level with his chest he abandoned form, just shoving the weight away from his throat, and as his resistance buckled, he neighed.

Whoaaaa there said John-John, after catching and racking the bar. What happened?

I got tired panted Manuel.

What do you mean, tired?

I got tired! We watched him stomp towards the locker room. John-John walked over to me. / don't even know him anymore John-John said, shaking his head. Great last set, by the way. You got a minute?

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I'd better shower I said. / need to change. John-John looked at his watch.

You Ye got a minute.

Let Is talk in my office.

OK I said. I'll meet you after cool down. Stretching, I saw that Manuel had forgotten his log on the floor. I flipped it open, and where numbers should have been, I found a sketch of a face that looked like Linda's.

The night that I delivered cordwood to Linda's home, the lumberyard boss had teamed me widi a man named Rick. Pale high-beams seemed only to accentuate the darkness as Rick and I pitched cedar and oak into a chassis hitched to a truck.

We filled the pickup bed next, and then lashed tarps over both piles. Speeding, Rick steered with his left fingertips while he ducked down between his knees, worked up a pant leg and clawed at an itch. The stereo panel cast a green glow over his hairless ankle and cab0, and his flip-flops.

Watch the road I said. Slow down!

Rick straightened and laughed this shrill

laugh. this is fast?he said. This aint' tast he said. Ihe wile and I were in a limousine in New York City, OK? So she leans forward to check the speedometer and sits back looking sick, so I take me a peck.

One hundred and forty fucking

miles an hour! Shrill laughter. / says 'Hon', I says, 'If we die, we die! What can we do?' I wondered why he couldn't have asked the limousine driver to slow down. A hatchet for splitting logs into kindling and stove-feed rested across Rick's thighs. Rick Lifted the hatchet and scratched his itch with a corner of the blade.

A few moments later, Linda's father waved our truck onto his property, signaling with a whiskey glass as if it were a flare.

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Stack it all against the fence he said, after Rick had backed up the driveway and into the lar^e backyard. JVeafiy he said, and then sprung backwards. Wasps!

Wood hornets! Son, your neck is huge. Huge!

That's just my neck I said, and began unloading wood, either holding logs straight in front of me to isolate my trapeziums, or behind my head to strain my triceps.

From the back door Linda called her father inside. The cold was such that had Rick dropped a

IOJJ

on his toes, he would not have felt it. Linda brought out

a tray of coffee. Her father followed with an icepack, which he insisted I press to my neck as we huddled in a circle, sipping.

So said Linda's father. /'// bet you hoys wish you d studied harder in school.

Dad! gasped Linda, as Rick's mug exploded against woodpile. Rick touched his nose to Linda's father's nose.

If I'd known I was going to he digging a ditch, Rick said, I'd have brought my gloves.

We Ve got a pair in the shed offered Linda's father. Oilier way. Behind you he called, as Rick pivoted and stalked towards the truck and hatchet.

Get inside I screamed. Go! Linda grabbed her father's elbow and ran for the back door. I braced myself between die pickup and the house, a log cocked over my right shoulder like a baseball bat. Rick turned the ignition, and drove away.

I rang Linda's doorbell. I leaned into the door frame, pushing my palms up against the lintel.

The house won't collapse ifvou come inside said Linda. In the foyer I thanked her lor the coffee. I apologized for Rick's unprofessional behavior, requested

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half-pay, and a ride home. Linda's father put down his glass and picked up his keys, which Linda snatched from his hand.

You 'II be a good mother I said to Linda, in her car.

Not tor awhile, I hope she said. You'll be a good father. Selfless. Brave.

We '11 sec I said.

Saving for school?

I want a computer. After this, we were quiet for a moment or two. / feel like I should know the man who saved my life said Linda, "fell me about yourself.

I bench press three-hundred pounds I said. Linda looked disappointed. I'm working my way up I said.

How many times do you lift three-hundred

pounds?

Three sets of six, once a week. At a stoplight Linda drew a pen from her pocket and marked columns of figures on her forearm.

That's 5,400 pounds per day. 270,800 every year.

Sure.

What do you want off your chest really?

What?

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Open up she laughed. I want to know who you are, not how much weight YOU can lift. Tell me why you spend so much time in the gym.

The Messiah won 'tjust come I said. He has to be brought. It's the same with a six-pack I said, and the clear ring of Linda's laugh made me feel as if I had told a joke on purpose.

7c// me more she said. / can lift three-hundred

pounds.

I know that.

But I can't touch my shoulders. Because my biceps are so big. I can lift threehundred pounds, but I can't wash my back.

I might be able to help said Linda, and that was that. For the next month she sat beside the water fountain every afternoon. Manuel was enrolled in a few classes at the community college, and they chatted about subjects they both understood while I ploughed through sets. I didn't tell Linda anything too true until I was sure that she was as in love as I was. When I was sure, I turned onto my side and I told her about how I had mistaken the sound of a chair being pulled away from a table for the sound of my name, and that 1 had looked up, excited, because I fantasize more about ha^^ng friends than about haling women.

Mv muscles feel like tumors I said. Mv entire body is a cry for help. Linda removed her reading glasses. She folded them, and she looked at me with all the tenderness of Mother Mercy herself.

What is this shit said Linda. Why would you ever, ever tell me these things? she said, and the next day I found this note taped to my locker:

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Nachman, Arc all of you giants so small? You need alot more than the Messiah.

The note had been printed on paper from a log like Manuel's. I shut the cardboard cover over Manuel's sketch, stood up from the bench, and drifted past men who all seemed to be dreaming of love. Their weights moved up and down but their eyelids fluttered, heads thrown back, gaping, groaning. Sweat blurred the mirrors and stunk. After the Atlantic City incident, John-John converted prize money into this real lifter's gym: noTVs, no Excercycles. Iron, never rubber weights. He and Manuel lived on the building's second floor.

A belt of blue linoleum dappled across the floor of John- John's office. Otherwise issues of Muscle and Fitness overflowed milk crates onto raw concrete; Billy, Manuel's old beagle, had made a bed of them. Young John-John, babyoiled to competition radiance snarled down from an old poster. Rippling with tedium. Rippling with hundreds and hundreds of hours of redundant jerks and seizures in a room like a dived submarine. Dumbbells weighted papers onto the card table that he used as a desk. John-John was looking at a framed picture of himself cradling newborn Manuel.

He s come a long wav I said. Nestled in the crook of John-John's aim, Manuel looked to be a second, freak bicep.

He '11 get there said John-John. He '11 go national. But Massive! How's it going, my man?

It's OK I said. John-John calling me his man made me feel better.

Listen,

John-John— Read this said John-John, pushing the Post into my hands. Wonder Mother Dumps Truck! announced the headline. Nadine Norman of Folding, Minnesota

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had tilted an Fl 50 Ford off of her infant, Samantha. Samantha had been pinned under the front driver's-side wheel.

Do you tliink it'll work hack wards John- John asked.

Could Samantlia have saved Nadine?

No! I mean Manny — John- John stopped. He grabbed a dumbbell and pumped out curls. I used to put up four-hundred and fifty pounds. Did you know that?

Four-hundred and fifty. In gyms, used to is worse than almost or could have.

I turned my face back into the paper.

And some of it has to be genetic said John-John. Manny just needs a reason to lift sometliing supeihumanly heavy. I just need to give him that reason.

After that, he'll know he can do it.

Love is the strongest steroid I said.

Exactly! John-John hadn't read the article through. Nadine Norman would bury her pancake baby tomorrow afternoon.

I'll run you over anytime I said, tossing the newspaper onto John-John's desk.

Except for now. I'm late.

Wait said John-John. You know how catering hows are. Make sure you get your lifts in he said, producing a key from his pocket. This opens the back door.

Don't forget who you are. When I took the key, 1 made John-John a promise.

I swept out of John-John's office, back through the crowd of sleep-lifters and into the locker room, where I rinsed quickly beneath a cold shower. I was otating my combination into my lock, when someone punched me in the side

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of my neck. Whipping around, grabbing hair, I slammed a head against the steel locker and the impact buzzed through the room. Manuel looked up at me from the floor, and then at the bridge of his nose. I hefted him onto the bench.

You 're lucky your John-John s kid I said. I 'd kill you. I used to fucking—

I'm John-John s kid murmured Manuel.

Shut up.

I twisted the last digits of my combination and tugged. I pulled harder at the latch, and saw my watch.

I'm Juh-John slurred Manuel. Rattling the latch with both hands did not uncrush the dent that sealed my locker shut.

I'm said Manuel.

You silit! I tore the sketch from Manuel's log, crushed it into a ball, and crammed it into Manuel's slack mouth. You thief! Thief! Brains trump brawn. But I had so much body to contend with. I stood up. I wound up. And I punched Manuel back onto the floor.

By nightfall, trie Country Club ballroom was set for three-hundred guests.

Transparencies tinted the houselights gold, toasting the room with the security of an old photograph. There were no windows through which any disturbance could fly or climb or be seen. I did not recognize Manuel's face when he entered. His lips and cheeks and the flesh above his eyes had closed together into one swelling, as the petals of certain flowers do at night. He waited just inside the threshold, where Linda took his arm.

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Like everyone else at the ball, 1 tried not to see Manuel, but Linda would not let him go. During dinner Manuel pointed to a shining cheek, then dismissed it with a wave. He boxed a one-two combo and ofFered Linda his face, which she touched just with her fingertips. Then she leaned into his talking lips and stayed there, stayed there, and I moved to bolt the doors, and burn us all to the ground. The lass broke, and with it, my flight. I was going to have to deal with injury eventually. I did not want to end up like this.

Manuel lurched backwards when I leaned in for his dinner plate. Linda dropped her fork. Manuel and I made eye-contact, but I had already decided.

I'm sorry, sir. Not finished?

All through managed Manuel. Delicious.

And you ma 'am? I asked Linda. She nodded stiffly, and I carried their plates back into die kitchen feeling selfless and brave. When die dinner dishes had been cleared, the band started up, and guests drifted towards the stage and danced. Manuel found me standing against the wall, lookiiig "friendly" as Beck had instructed. He waved a white linen napkin above his head.

Truce he said. His swollen lips made it sound as if the sketch was still lodged in his mouth. Let's call it even.

How is it even?

He thought for a moment. You took my dad. I took Linda. You took my face.

I took yours. I call truce.

It's not even I said. / want you to know, I said, that it's not even. But fighting won't change that. So OK. A truce.

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After serving desert, my shift, the shift that had prepped the ballroom, was dismissed. I drove to Beck's shop through a downpour. I punched my card, and then took my shakes directly to the gym. A hard lift would fix the way that I felt, and if John-John was awake to punish me, that was a beating I could stand. When I unlocked the back door, the office lights were up.

Massive! said John-John. I clenched my fists despite myself. Thank you he said.

What?

Thank you.

Why? You were at the Country Club?

Yeali.

So vou saw Manny's face? I nodded. Now he won t stand being a weakling.

You gave him some incentive. Loud rap music and a parking car roused Billy from the floor. He dragged over and nuzzled John-John's calves. Hey Billy-boy said John-John, scratching the back of Billy's neck. Hey Billy, Billv-bov, how's it going my man, he said. Manuel walked into the room with a cummerbund slung OA'er his shoulder, smelling Like Linda. His hair was slick with rain.

What's going on he asked.

We were just talking about you said John-John. 1 need a spot. He stood, clasped Manuel's arm and guided him to a bench press. Four-fifty. Load it up.

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you re joking?

Load it up.

Dad I— Four-fifty. We 're going for it.

John-John stretched while Manuel and 1 stacked four forty-five pound plates on each end of the bar, which bowed on the rack. Manuel looked at me for an explanation, but what could I say? When John-John lay supine beneath the barbell, Manuel assumed his station behind the bench.

Please don't said Manuel.

No lift-oft'said John-John, which meant that he did not want help launching the bar. He wrung his hands around the etched grip. He murmured an incantation, touched his forehead three times to the metal, and jerked the weight up on an exhale. The barbell stalled. It dropped and snapped past ribs as an earthbound bough snaps past twigs. The noises were just the same. 1 bolted forward, but Manuel's look stopped me, told me that I could not be the only one to save John-John Jesse's life.

Ibgether we tore away plates while John-John peddled air. He talked blood and forgot to stop pushing. Raising the stripped barbell off the wreckage of his chest, John-John bucked out three reps before we could wrest the bar from his fists, and then his arms went slack. We called 911, and we waited. I thought about that TV movie, about how that surgeon had broken open an animal, and then closed his eyes against the red mash and the white shocks of bone. Looking inside John-John, I wanted to tell him that I knew how he felt.

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This is who we arc I said, and slipped my key back into John-John's pocket.

By the time a bright ambulance arrived through the rain like a lifeboat, my swellings had already begun to subside.

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Rewards Rebecca Evans

The girl decides she wants a pet. She makes posters and hangs them around the neighborhood. "Lost Dog," they read. "Well loved. Please call if found."

She does not include a picture. She figures that anyone who lets a dog get lost doesn't deserve to have one anyway. She waits for weeks, but nobody calls.

II. On their first date she tells him this story over dessert, thinking that it will charm him and make her appear quirky and original and also romantic. He frowns and looks like he's concentrating. He pokes at the raspberry chocolate cake with his fork. "That's fucked up," he says after some moments. "What if you got some other kid's dog and just kept it and they never knew? How old were you, anyway?" She doesn't answer. She feels ashamed and when she feels ashamed she cries. She starts blinking very hard. When he looks up and sees her he changes the subject and touches her hand lightly. She can see that while her story upset him her remorse has made him like her even more. He is kind, she thinks, which makes her feel worse.

III. Much later he tells her a story. He had a cat that went missing. He plastered the neighborhood with signs until his big sister, exasperated and teenage and cruel, told him that their mother had run it over while pulling into the driveway and hadn't had the heart to tell him. He didn't believe her atfirst,but he didn't have the nerve to ask his mother if his sister was telling the truth, and after a while he decided she probably was. Just after he tells die girl the story he pauses for a moment. She can tell by the way he is breathing that he has not

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finished talking but is measuring his words as they well up in his throat before he lets them out into the air. They are lying in bed together. It has now been three months. "My father had just left," he says to the girl. "It was a hard time for everyone." She nods gently and drapes herself across his body. She has a secret sympathy for his mother. She too does not like telling people she loves the hard things. But she knows that telling a man you sympathize with his mother is as bad as telling him you dislike her. It is a delicate balance. You must keep your arms stiff out from your sides and look at a fixed point as you walk. You must not let yourself be distracted by bright colors or loud sounds or sudden flashes of unfairness.

IV. Later still she thinks she is pregnant. She doesn't tell him. It has now been more than a year so she probably should tell him but she does not and she does not ask herself why she does not. It turns out that she is not pregnant, but simply anemic, and also not sleeping enough.

V. It turns out diat he does not want children. It turns out that she does. This discovery surprises both of them, and comes apparently out of nowhere. It has now been four years. They struggle on for a while after this revelation but eventually he ends diings. "It wouldn't be fair to you to keep on," he explains, "and also it makes me uncomfortable." She nods because she knows if she does not express anything he will keep explaining and perhaps then it will begin to make sense. "I just can't trust you to make the right decision, if anything were to happen." She takes affront at this. She yells and eventually he yells back.

She throws a book at him. It is the first time she has ever done this and it silences them both even though she misses by an embarrassing distance. In the silence she leaves before she has to apologize, because having to apologize to him at that moment would nearly kill her.

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VI. She decides that it would be poetic if he were to put up a poster advertising a lost girlfriend. She has decided that a poetic gesture would be necessary to make up for the damage. Every night for a week after this idea comes to her she lies awake thinking about how she would react if she were to see such a poster, if she would ignore it or tear it down or call die number or simply show up. She decides she would call the number. For at least a year she looks carefully at all the posters but she never sees herself on them. Once she finds a dog huddled in her driveway and keeps it overnight. The next morning she sees a poster advertising it as lost. She returns it to its owners. Against her better judgment she takes the $50 reward. She starts to whistle as she walks home.

She is not very good at whistling but it is early and nobody is around to hear it. She wonders what to do with the monev. Maybe I'll pet drunk, she thinks.

She is embarrassed by the knowledge mat she will put it in the bank and leave it there, probably forever.

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Perfume/Mother Saramanda Swigart

lsis can chart whole sections ol her life by smell. For instance, there was the sandalwood era of childhood that was blended with a light bitter orange and something more flowery and low to die ground, jasmine perhaps, because that's the kind of perfume her mother wore at the time. Not a spray, it came in a tiny ^lass bottle and she applied it to her wrists and neck and on the inside of her knees, saying," This is what French women do," breathily, with a little laugh. Springtime; a rosy tilt to the air, each day like turning the pages of a worn and beloved picture book. And die peach tree in the back yard; lsis could tell when the peaches were ready to eat without having to feel for softness; they smelled sweet and round and she knew just when they would be a sweet eruption in the mouth. This was a spring of new handbags, large ones with die earthy smell of leather that her mother hoisted onto her shoulder when she took lsis to bars. She ordered lsis cherry cokes, while she talked to the bartender, or to other men. lsis liked die smell of bars. They smelled of home: muscular, sour and wet.

They smelled of cigarette smoke and sick-sweet whiskey and thick, polished wood of counters, and the burnt-sugar smell of heartache. The sounds of music and low voices and glasses and ice were a kind of poetry written on the nerves.

Christmas lights flickered on surfaces like oil slicks. The faces of the patrons were dewy: quick to tears and laughter, throats congested with love songs, words released like confetti into the cozy space. People were friendly to lsis in bars in a way diey weren't outside; they showed her tricks and laughed when she said things that were funny and paid close attention when she said things that were serious. They clapped and whistled when she learned to yo-yo; when she got roller-skates they watched her careen from one wall to die other. Their

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breath had the jolly smell of beer, or the Iruit-gone-bad smell of whiskey, or the wintergreen smell of gin, or the icy, nearly invisible smell of vodka, which was what her modier's breath always smelled like. Isis learned that even bad smells could provide pleasure and comfort.

In bars her mother would snake an arm around her shoulders and say, "Isis turned out so gorgeous. She's seven miles out of my league!" and her high-heels would click against the leg of her stool while her skirt, short and brightly colored, would ride up her leg and Isis would shake her shiny blonde head and men would laugh indulgently and say, "a knockout, alright!" Her mother's smell always filled a bar completely. It bewitched, niggling into every corner, like a snake-charmer's music. Men waited breathlessly for Isis' mother to speak.

They came up close to her and smelled the air around her reverently, with their eyes closed.

Isis could ask for anything in bars and her momer would give it to her. "Can I wear your shoes?" Isis would ask, and her mother would give her an alligator smile and take off her shoes and hand them to Isis. They smelled warm and sour and familiar and she would put them on and shuffle around the bar in them while men laughed and said jokingly, "what's your sign, doll?" Isis could say, "can I have money for the jukebox?" and her mother would give herfivedollars and she would go to the jukebox and put on the songs her mother liked. She knew all die words, and everyone clapped while she moudied them into an imaginary microphone. The only thing Isis couldn't ask about in bars or any odier place was her father. But sometimes very late she put her head down on the bar, closed her eyes and sat very still — very still - and her mother said little things about him, like she was dropping crumbs of food to an obedient dog. She'd say, "She's just like her dad; so serious", or "I don't know where she got that blonde hair. Her dad's dusky", or "I just don't know how her father can live in that god-awful city."

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Every night after the bars, before she went to sleep, Isis' mother asked her, "What does the moon smell like tonight?" and Isis would lean her forehead against the glass of the window and inhale deeply through her nose and say, "Like oranges", or "Like wool when it's wet", or "Like outer space", or "Like candles in church". Isis couldn't remember when this tradition started.

"Isis," said her mother, "what does the moon smell like tonight?" "like the inside of trees."

Isis looked at her mother and her face was beautiful, round and milky as a moon. One of her canines stuck out a little, but otherwise her teeth were very straight. She smelled of perfume and vodka and summer. Her hand rested on Isis' arm, a slim, lovely hand, with pale, oval nails.

"We're goddesses, Isis."

"I know, mom."

"When we die, we will be constellations in the sky. We'll always be adored!"

"I know."

It was sometimes just the two of diem, but there was usually a man around, a succession of men. They were agreeable or they were easy to ignore.

When they moved to California they entered the period of eucalyptus; the pale, medicinal folk-healing smell, die rubbed-away smell. Her modier started wearing a diflerent perfume. She watched her mother spray it into the air in front of her and walk into the mist it created. The bottle was sliaped like a cone

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and was too big to fit in her new purse, which was a fuzzy jungle print and had a silver chain and smelled like tobacco scraps and rubber. "Do me," said lsis and her mother sprayed the air and lsis closed her eyes and walked into the scrim offrajrran.ee,light and heady with a sting of citrus.

There were new bars in California, but bars always smell the same and they were like home. lsis shook her head, swiveling back and forth on her bar stool, so that her hair released die smell of her mother's perfume. She showed a man who smelled like soap and spicy deodorant how she could french braid her own hair. "You better show me that again", he said, "it looked pretty complicated". This was a man who would have breakfast with them the next morning, who would cook pancakes with frozen blueberries in them, wearing one of her mother's robes, and would heat up the maple syrup until the whole house smelled thick with it, but lsis only liked these men when diey were in a bar.

In bars they were almost a father: jovial, attentive, rushing out to get Band-Aids if she scraped her shin on an exposed splinter, reassuring her if she accidentally broke a glass. Bars were timeless; nobody wanted to be anywhere but there.

Mornings were just the impatient dead time before everybody made meir own way into the stunned day that smelled sun-drunk, like eucalyptus and leaving. lsis knew her mother was sick before her mother did. It was a smell, a gnarled, hard, wooden smell that solidified beneath the fresh skin-smell and the shampoo smell and the new gardenia and tea rose perfume her modier had recently switched to. lsis grew taciturn and angry. The smell made her afraid when she drew near her mother in that sudden, horror-movie way, like when you grab a fruit and realize that it's too soft, rotten inside, worms in it. This was when lsis learned that not all good smells are pleasant and comforting; ever after, the smell of gardenia would be associated with panic. Her mother squatted next to her bed and said, "what does the moon smell like tonight?" and lsis smelled her mother's perfume and her cotton dress and her familiar sweat and also this other smell, this mushroom smell, the disorienting, malarial

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rotten-wood smell and she turned to the window and looked at the frightened fish-belly moon and then back at her mother like you'd look back at a mirror when vou're afraid someone's behind you, ar>d she said "it smells sick". Isis's mother looked out the window too and her eves diminished with lear. Four months later a doctor showed her pictures of the tumor growing in her stomach.

Then there was one airport, and then another. Isis always had a window seat, and when she put her hand to the too-bright window it was very cold to the touch. Planes smelled singed and svnthetic and old, like coughs and wrinkled clothes and aerosol and too much time and too little space. It was a smell Isis would come to associate with loneliness. Loneliness was becoming an entity instead of an abstract concept or even a collection of behaviors, a thing that is wrinkled in a jar on a top shelf somewhere, or a shadowy figure that waits and waits at the door of an airplane lavatory, looking at the navy-and-burgundy floor.

People always talked to her on planes, but they weren't nice like men in bars, they were over-nice, with huge smiles and white oleander teeth. A man next to her asked "why are you traveling all alone, kid?" and Isis looked at his milelong; smile and imagined raking her fingernails down his face, the blood from his cheeks staining his white teeth. She turned toward the window and laid her hand flat against it. She was hurling through space in a giant aluminum tube, heading nowhere at all, just further and further away.

Then came the interval of Isis's father, with his square, masculine smell of aftershave and acidic sweat and leather cigar boxes and Pert shampoo. Isis, it turned out, had a father who lived in an apartment in a big city that had floor-to-ceiling windows that faced a polluted river and a mysterious windowless brick building at the end of a pier. "That's for ventilation," said her father, "for the tunnel", and Isis nodded shyly as if she understood. They stood very stiffly next to one another, facing the windows. "How old are you?" said her father suddenly and Isis said, "Nine", and her lather said, "Nine years and she never told me 1 had a daughter," and he awkwardly reached out a hand and rested it on her shoulder

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and she looked at him mutely, face hot with the elTort of not crying, and the ah" was full of uie smell of pitch and rotten water from the open windows and the old-book smell of the apartment and a cooking-onions smell coming from the hallway and Isis knew that this confluence of smells would always be the smell of caution, sweetened by hope.

It was summer and summer in this particular city smelled like urine and fish and a very busy human smell. Isis did not consider it wholly displeasing.

The peaches in the market were hard as little tumors, completely inedible.

The water of the river was almost toxic; when her father took her to the pier and she reached her hand toward the surface, he grabbed her wrist and laughed, saying, "That's a bio-hazard. Once I saw a dead dog floating down here. Don't touch it, seriously."

Sometimes she accompanied her fadier to the warehouse in which he worked.

He ran the local trucking department of a company that moved pieces of art from one place to another and sometimes stored them in giant vaults. The warehouse was in a section of town that was full of warehouses and when Isis went to work with her father she read books in the cool, sunny atrium or walked through the countless storage rooms touching artwork with her index finger, even though she knew she wasn't supposed to. Or she wandered into the galleries that were sprinkled around this section of town. She liked the smell of galleries; they smelled like quiet and dust and furniture polish and reverence.

She liked the way sounds that were usually neglected became amplified in galleries, like the sound her footsteps made, even when she had rubber-soled shoes on.

A httle cough was a great, resounding grate; a snapped finger was a commanding clap that existed long after me fingers stopped moving. Isis could hear the rustle of her clothes and believed that she could hear die internal machinery of her own body. She thought about her mother's illness, which she conceived as a hard, malevolent stone glowing in her belly. Isis listened within her own body for such treachery, for if she were sick then surely providence would even the

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scales and make her mother well. Surely one tragedy could be used to circumvent another.

On a very, very hot day that smelled like old lightning, or like something burning unseen behind a tannery, Isis' father held her hand and led her through blazing ripples of air down to a park where people roller-skated and walked their dogs and kissed each other on benches. They leaned on their elbows against a railing. On the other side of the railing the foul river slugged past.

Isis' father said, "Isis, your mother was loving and beautiful but... untamable.

She saw me as a trap. Eventually she escaped, of course." He turned and looked into her eyes. "I didn't know I was a fadier. If I had, I wrould have been a $*ood one. I think I would have been a good one." He stopped and the sunshine around them was as fragile as glass, "she should have told me." Isis didn't know what to say. She knew there were landmines in this territory. The air smelled like algae and sunburn and it was the smell of suspicion. She said nothing, so he said, "I loved her, you know. Everyone loves her. She broke my heart," and Isis loved him suddenly and said, "can we go to a bar?" and he looked at her, stunned.

"You want to go to a bar't A bar bar?"

"Yes." "1 don't think they'll let you into a bar."

"They always do."

"You and vour mom go to bars?"

Isis nodded her head very seriously.

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They walked to Barney's and her father bought her a green dress with an empire waist, and she twirled, watching the skirt rise up her legs as he bought himself a sport-coat. Then Isis led him to the perfume counter and he bought her a little bottle of body moisturizer called'heart's melody'. When they were secured in an uptown taxi Isis applied the moisturizer to her hands and arms and smelled her fingers. They smelled fresh and sweet, like lilac or sweet william. It was a younger smell than her mother-smells, and she leaned back comfortably into the cushion ol childhood. I he cab deposited diem in front of a tall building in die middle of the city and they took the elevator up several dozens of floors. "This is the Rainbow Room," said Isis' father as they entered into a huge room with little tables and wrap-around windows and the smell of linen and alcohol and money. Isis had never been in a bar hke this. A maitre d' sat them at a table next to a window, and Isis could see three bridges with scalloped lights hke strands of pearls from an old film, and the lights of buildings all bunched up together as though the city was very small and compact, hke the inside of a computer, as though it was navigable only by a forefinger. She touched the wall of glass and imagined poking her fingers between the buildings and tipping diem over, one by one.

In August Isis turned ten. Her father said, "That's all we need. Another Virgo in the family," and he laughed and Isis looked up at his face, which had wiinkles around the eyes and blotches of pink at the cheeks, and fine, feminine brown hair widi little bunches of gray over the ears, and two teeth that overlapped in the bottom row. She smiled hugely to make him talk more.

"Mom is, too," she said.

"She is," he said thoughtfully, "and so what do you do for your birthday?"

Isis considered. "We go to a bar. People sing happy birthday".

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He shook his head, his hair quivering. "Your mother," he said. There was smell of resignation, of loneliness about him. It was a smell that also contained its opposite: excitement, worry, anticipation.

He had bought a cake and put ten candles in it and he handed her a flat wrapped gift. She opened it and inside was a serving-platter-sized painting of a girl in stylized Egyptian dress, standing in a window, hands raised in supplication to the full moon. "One of our clients painted that for me, for your birthday."

When the summer ended, her father sublet his apartment, and the two of them flew to California. She sat in the middle seat, between her father and a young man in a blue sport coat with brass buttons. He gave off an airy smell, a smell like a field of dry wheat, and talked to her father over her head, and she felt the feeling like sitting between two men at a bar. She closed her eyes, not wanting the flight to end.

In California, Isis watched her mother grow very thin. A dry rash erupted all over her mother's chin and crept slowly up her face. She smelled like bad water, like the inside of something that wasn't supposed to be opened up. When she was home and came into Isis' room and knelt with difficulty by her bed and asked, "what does the moon smell like tonight?" Isis stared mutely at her face with its continents of rashes, unable to look out the window.

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How to Observe a Common Black Housefly Closely Matt Herzfeld

I was told this by an expert on houseflies.The common black housefly has quite intricate small bits. You can get a general sense of things through a mic• roscope, but it distorts the image.The glass lenses focus on one part or the other in portions slightly askew from reahty. The only real way to observe the common black housefly is up close, through the naked eye.This involves a partner who, using clothespins, can pry your stronger eye open (we all have a stronger eye, usually either the right or the left). After your partner has assisted, he/she must leave the room so as not to scare away the fly. You lie down on your back, head facing up, with an open jar of peanut butter next to you. Using your index finger, scoop a small bit of the peanut butter onto the tip and gently daub it on your eye. This is no more difficult than putting in contact lenses, but be sure to daub the peanut butter in the corner of your eye to minimize your reduced vision. The peanut butter should, after a few minutes, attract a common black housefly, who will land directly over your pupil while feeding. This gives you approximately thirty-five seconds to observe at close range (give or take a few depending on the quantity of peanut butter). The common black housefly has very light and soft feet, so there should be no painful scratching. I have yet to fry this because flies don't really interest me that much.

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A Faerie Tale Jim Urbom

Long, long ago before they had meds, Auggie/Aug/Gussie/Augustine/Tina/Tuna lived in the Queendom known as the East Village. Auggie had AIDS — the usual: Karposi, Shingles, PCP; CMV monitoring, and AIDS dementia in evidence.

Lev was Auggie's handsome ex who moved in to care for him the day Aug got released from "And God Bless Cabrini Hospital."

The care too was die usual: gagging, slipping on puddles of diarrhea; temperature, meds, roof runs to breathe; pillow over ears during ceaseless nocturnal keening, lifting from falls, losing job, mind, identity, horniness, cigarette abstinence, 24 lbs, and any possible hope for nice nails.

And Auggie was getting better.

So good he wanted to go to 'The Night of a Thousand Gowns at the Lovely Webster Hall - Elevendi between Third and Fourth.'

Why, he'd already made it as far as Second Avenue as Quenda, Roller Derby Queen, Wheelchair LInit; but Third Avenue

Alas! That was the End

of the World. But try, he must.

Saturday night! They put on his tux; they pinned it and taped it and no one could tell.

They walked arm in arm, so carefully, so slowly all the way to Third where Aug wept and Lev understood.

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"Lev? You were the best lover I ever had. . . . best friend, too."

Lev kissed his ear.

"Shall we?"

They crossed.

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Halfway Sacred Josie Duffy

You will never lose the immigrant mother or the two older brothers. You won't escape your name, either. You've always thought it was an awkward name—Besai. In Ethiopia it means despised, dirty. Your white Yankee father left your mother six weeks before you were born, and she gave that name to you, her only girl. Your brothers, biblical: Matthew and Gabriel. Your lather named them and they had spent their lives leaning away from those names, names that could never fit two kids from your neighborhood. But your mother gave vou history, a lettered sense of homeland, her own quiet rebellion.

And yes, when it's all over you'll still have that little lisp, plus the web of tangled eyelashes and lips too plump for your face.These parts of you might as well be encrypted in your skull somewhere, pieces of you that refuse to fade. But wait and you'll see— almost overnight you will surface from the thick cover of girlhood. You'll become a young woman with slender fingers whose tongue flicks the top of her mouth when she laughs, a young; woman with no fat or money or regret.

The beginning is explosive. It's May, and the apprehensive breadis of summer tickle your neck. Something about the weather makes Atlanta enchanted— maybe it's die winds, winds like a Southerner's Santa Ana. Your mother makes the boys go get the fans from die attic, two huge industrial ones diat gather dust like you wouldn't believe. (Your attic isn't really an attic just like your house isn't really a house. One half of a duplex with rooms small and haphazard, and the attic a low-roofed colony of spider webs.) Matt will carry one fan down no problem, but Gabriel of course will cry for help. Gabriel— fifty pounds overweight and growing. "Bes never has to do anything," he'11 grumble.

Matt, meanwhile, will be showing off his muscles. He works out six times a week but hasn't opened a schoolbook since junior high. Tells you all about the

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girl at the gym he got with in the locker room, "She's got thighs like you wouldn't believe, Bes." Those fans are the first time you will really feel summer. You will lie in your mother's armchairs, laughing with your only friend Cara, the only other girl in your neighborhood who qualifies for the gifted charter school. You will both let die cool air swoosh along your ribcage, kissing your clavicle, like perfect bursts of winter under your chin. Listen to the heat as it ricochets off the tin roof of the corner store on Flat Shoals. There will be no trees for shade.

The sun is confrontational.

Go to your first real party Memorial Day weekend. Matt will agree to take you. This is a big fucking deal, Bes," Matt will say. "Damien doesn't fuck around with his parties." Buy a newr shirt with some babysitting cash, low-cut and clingy.

When you walk in Matt's room he'll stop in his tracks, whistle, look at you like, "You better watch out."

You kiss your mother goodbye, whisper something about Cara and the movies.

Outside people gather in clumps and a fat kid collects crumpled money at the door. There is an avalanche of bodies, sweat in puddles on the floor. You'11 wonder who's going to have to clean the place up. Upstairs some guy in a red hoodie is blasting music and the bass reverberates through your legs. Damien's eyes get real wide when you walk in. He smiles, says "Damn, Matt, you brought the baby?"

You'll lose track of your brother less than five minutes after you get there.

All it'll take is the Dominican girl who grabs his belt loops and then he's all, "you got it, Bes?", not waiting to hear the answer. Only Hispanic girl that rides your bus line, and her ass won't leave the front of his pants for the next two hours.

You must fend for yourself. Boys who seem like men approach you, both eager and careful. Eyes that shine even through all the smoke. Before this there were boys who called you for advice but nothing more, who took you to get hamburgers but didn't kiss you. But these: they ask if you want a drink, a number, a mattress. Lean against the wall and submit to it, all these neighborhood

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kids. There is sanctity in the abandoned house— an old place missing floorboards, bare asbestos like cotton candy.

Get a ride home from Branden, Matt's only friend with a car. You're the youngest so you must sit in the backseat. He'll speed down long stieets named after dead French explorers. Nod when Matt says he'll be home later, his hand creeping up that girl's thigh.Tiptoe in through the side door so your sleeping mother doesn't notice you missed curfew.

First week in June, get your first job at the pool on Ponce and McClendon.

The manager's JJ, the light-skinned kid with green eyes from down the block.

Everybody knows he likes mixed girls. He'll finger the ends of his cornrows when you come in, his eyes dripping down your body. He'll hand you a scheduling sheet before you even sit down.

You'll have to walk to work. The bus is always late and no one has a car.

Make sure you leave early enough on your first day. Take the long way so you can walk off those little jumps in your stomach.

Learn the rules at work quickly. You must memorize the way MARTA moans on the cement overpass. Hand the Mexican women locker keys, listen as they yell "Nino!" to children the color of sun-baked brick. Mop. Mess widi the cash register. Don't touch the tape player, but you can tap your foot when they play Otis Redding, you can hum quietly to Stevie. The white girls won't like you 'cause you think you're too damn good, the black girls won't like you because you're too quiet.

It'll be time for the pool to close when the skyline reflects in die cerulean pool water. It'll be your favorite time of day, when the city looks gilded, as if the goddesses themselves had hiccupped out the city limits. The air will hover, thick and stagnant, like it's just one more person waiting at the bus stop. If you have to work past dark take die back road to Dekalb Avenue and take the bus from there. But if it's before sunset you can walk to the Piedmont line. But don't step on any stray needles if you take the short cut. And don't talk to the boys, especially the ones in the green shirts or the ones on the 3rd Avenue corner. The sidewalk is peppered with them. They're going to be all

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over you, too. Those long legs, shoulders like they were dipped in caramel.

Plus you got that hair, hair that looks like you soak it in ink it's that damn black.

When you walk by they'll be writing numbers on slips of paper, sticking them in your back pocket. They look friendly as hell, too: snow-white teeth, new fades. No, don't speak to them—but you can't fold your arms against your chest either. Then they'll know from the get go that you're another high-riding bitch from the block. And don't try to play coy. Remember: they don't really care about you at all.They like the way your ass looks in those cutoffs. And once they set their chocolate eyes on you, you'll be another girl who didn't graduate, another worthless girl who has ten kids before she's twenty-five.

When you get home every other Friday, hand your mother a paycheck.

Try to pretend like the worried lines on her face are soothed by the sight of the number. Help her unload groceries, grease the pans while she cuts vegetables.

Watch closely. The import of one single moment will change everything.

Until this point you will have had no lovers. You will have had no love letters.

You will have had nothing until this Wednesday afternoon in the middle of June. From far awav it will seem like some low-income fairytale, a late night Lifetime movie, but you will never see it like this because you will never be able to stand that far back.

You will be passing the playground two blocks up on Moreland.The city will have it now, got their hands on any place halfway sacred to you. When you were little you broke your arm on die monkey bars and you can still hear your mother's accent on the way to the hospital, fretting about healdi insurance.

The lead paint on the tin slide was peeling men. Now everything is new neon plastic. And, widi his back against an electrical pole, there is him.

Somediing almost perverse about the way you see him for the first time He looks sculpted, his body and face die sharpest angles, his skin so black that you have to squint to find features. It's his lips you'll really notice, lips you end up sucking on in his car that he' 11 pick you up with at 4 AM on school nights. Then there's diat long hair thin dreads, hair that seems to reflect light onto the same strip of pavement you'll be standing on. You turn away

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quickly and just like that his eyes are on you. Your limbs leaning on a wire fence, your legs turned out like the ballerina you might have been if lessons hadn't gotten too expensive.

Whatever you do, do not speak first.Twenty minutes after meeting him you will unconsciously give up all control you may have once possessed. He'll have you. He'll know it. Months, years from now the one thing you'll have to hang onto is the fact that he came to you.

He'll say, "Yo, you from around here?" An unlit cigarette in his hand, another behind his ear. He'll say, "Did you see how they turned this playground into a fucking McDonalds playplace?" He'll squint. Pretend like you don't hear him.

Look straight ahead and stall. Somehow the children running around at your feet will seem misplaced with their soft jumbles of energy. He'll nudge you.

"Hey. You got a five-dollar bill hanging out your back pocket." He points lazily.

"You keep money hanging out like that?" His laugh is throaty, gruff. He'll reach carefully for the crumpled five, his hand brushing against the bottom of your back. "Here."

He'll wait for you to say something. Listen—even through the sounds of the city you will somehow be able to hear his breathing. They are thin breadis, rhythmic. You say "Thanks."

"You got a name?" He smiles again. It's not a polite smile. You'll wonder what he was doing before you got there, what there is for him on this playground.

"Yeah. Besai."

He'll let it roll around his mouth. "Besai. Besai." He lights the cigarette.

"How come I've never seen vou around?"

You'll be tucking your hah- behind your ear like you do when you're nervous. "I don't know. I'm around" He'll inhale fixedly, the tip of his cigarette orange. "You go to school around here?"

"Yeah, up the street. At West Charter."

"Oh. One of those smart kids, huh?"

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Don't answer him. Just ask, "You go to Douglas?"

"Used to. Dropped out." His exhales make the smoke flickers around your face.

"What about you?"

His eyes will squint. "What about me?"

"You got a name?"

He'll laugh then, laugh and run his fingers over his head, like he's trying to decide if he should tell you. "They call me Cabral."

"Cabral?" You're silent for a second, trying to place him. "Were you born with that name?"

He'll shrug, blow cigarette smoke all over you. You'll feel the nicotine coat your nostrils "As much as you can be." He'll be quiet for a second, staring at the outline of the buildings downtown. "You go out a lot?"

"Not a lot." Across the street the fruit stand will be shutting down. Carts of old citrus tossed to the curb and people will converge to pick through the waste.

"You go out ever?"

"Sometimes."

"Yeah? Like where?"

"I went to Damien's party a couple weeks ago."

"Oh, did you?" and you'll hear laughter bubbling in his throat. When you don't say anything he'll say, "Where you coming from now?"

You'll pull out your cell phone like maybe someone will be calling soon, even though your mother will have given you strict instructions to only use it for emergencies. "Work."

"Waiting on someone?"

You shake your head. "No." "You got some boyfriend I should be looking out for? Bet he's a six-three motherfucker, plays football or some shit."

You'll laugh. "No. No boyfriend."

He won't say anything, he'll just stick his hands in his pocket. "So where's this job?"

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"Just the pool." You'll be swatting at mosquitoes. "On Moreland."

"Oh yeah?" He laughs. "I just got a job there too. Don't need the work really, but my pops wants me to get a real job. Helps to pay for gas. I've known JJ for a minute and he said I could come in for a couple weeks."

"You and JJ are friends?"

He'll smile. "Something like that."

It will happen before you have time to second-guess. He strolls into work an hour late. JJ turns a blind eye, just pounds Cabral's fist and says, "You just better have got me later."

You'll do your job quietly but he's always got your name coming out of his mouth. "Besai," he'll say, making the V sound like a 'z.' He wears t-shirts and basketball shorts. "You going to come outside with me?" Other times: "You hear that song, Besai? Wanna dance?"The other girls sit at the cash register, jealous. Don't look at them, just smile silently.

First time he kisses you the streetlights will have just come on. Night waits forever to take the stage in the summer. Dusk will linger for hours, waiting lor acknowledgement. You're barefoot, standing on your tiptoes, and suddenly he's got his thumb on your chin, his lips on yours.

Where, exactly, will it really begin? In the car, maybe. Old beat-up twodoor that won't stop wheezing until ten minutes after the engine's cut off.

Says he bought it off one of the guys on 17th. One broken window and a dent in the trunk. He'll grab your hand after work, take you to movies, sit you in the back row. Both of you frantic, his hands reaching in the thin cotton of your underwear, your lips on his neck. Takes you to houses with his friends, introduces you as "his girl." They will all look at you curiously, talk about you as if you aren't there. "Look at her, Cabral," they'll say. "She's cute. Quiet, but cute."

He'll leave you with people you don't know. He'll go in back rooms with other boys you've never seen. He'll tell you he'll be out in just a few seconds.

There will always be girls, girls who ask you how you know him. Shrug your shoulders. Say, "I don't know. From around."

He'll take you to the 7-11, buy you cans of Dr. Pepper. Everywhere you

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all go, he'll know someone. Smile, laugh, but don't make conversation.They all look at you the same. Intrigued, confused, pitying, jealous. He'll drive speeding down I-7S, get you home perpetually fifteen minutes past curfew.

You ask him if he's a drug dealer. He'll pause. "I wouldn't say dealer." He'll flip on his turn signal. "1 help out here and there."You ask him if you're his girlfriend. He'll pause. "I wouldn't say girlfriend."

Your brothers won't like him. Matt will hear from his friends he's been hanging around you and he'll come in your room from the shower. "Are you fucking with that kid?" he yells.

You shake your head, annoyed. "Can you stop dripping water all over my floor?"

"Good," he'll say, "Let me tell you about that motherfucker." And he will.

About how he jacked six hundred off Matt's boy at a party. How he messed with some girl for a while and then refused to talk to her when she got pregnant.

"All Cabral would say was 'handle it.' I don't want you talking to that kid, you hear me?" Don't agree. Just open your almond eyes wide at him, like you can't imagine. You'll think you know better.

There will be such beauty in the crevices. Nights when die two of you sit 6n the hood of his car. Pollution will have stolen the stars, but there will be enough frees to make it romantic. You'll tell him stories of your mother's childhood, stories you've somehow inherited. Stories of the sound of stretched animal skin, carcass drumbeats that could echo for miles, people dancing so intense that they swore they alone forced the sun to rise. He'll ask for more and you tell him stories of bananas as big as people's arms, hanging, golden, from trees. Sad stories, too. Stories of the civil war, of children's decapitated bodies scattered in the street. A place where the dead left no room for the living.

You'll ask about his parents and he'll shrug. "Both of them together.'" you'll ask.

"Yeah. I've got two baby sisters, can barely walk yet."

Sometimes there's no talking, just his lips on your forehead, your chest,

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77

the backs of your hands. "You're beautiful," he'll tell you. Enjoy this. This is the short and glorious period where you will be able to ignore things. Little things that will grow and suffocate. For a while the summer sun sprawls heavy around you and just the comfort of his presence will cloud out the rest.

But time is fickle and it's not on your side. It will push you away and then beckon you home. It will betray you.You'll think there are no rules, and then parameters sprout from nowhere. They begin to close in.

Your mother begins to look at you with thinned eyes, like she doesn't know you at all. You'll make plans with her, plans to cook, movie plans and discount shopping plans and he calls and suddenly you're gone. "Who are you going with?" she'll ask in stilted English, and you'll yell back from the other room, "Cara!"

"Cara again?" She will smell his cologne on your shirts. She will search for answers when you're not around. Hide the pictures of him in the lining of your old winter coat. She'll think it'll be better once school hegins, but she's

wrong.

The tide will rise. There are girls who come looking for him at work. One day they suddenly begin to matter. One in particular, shaped like Carmen Miranda. She wears a bright red bathing suit, sucks on red lollipops, brings him folded envelopes with notes in them. She's older, you think. "Should 1 let him know you stopped by?" you'll say, your tbroat dry with questions. She'll laugh. "No. Just give him that." It will get harder to ignore the faded numbers on his hand. Autumn is going to be eA'en less forgiving.

Autumn, where the dogwoods retreat. The weather like a personal insult, an affront. Autumn, where you go back to oversized school uniforms, sweaters that keep the chill from your bones. Put a picture of him in your locker. Put another in vour American Literature binder.

In the summer he would call at night, hours of his voice scratchy in your ear and you in sticky pajamas. But suddenly you won't hear from him for days, and then you'll be lucky if you get some payphone attention. You crave those snippets of his voice from random numbers. "I lost my cell phone," he'll tell

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you. You hear people in the background. Girls?

"Come over tonight,"you'11 whisper to him. "I'll sneak you in."

"No," he'll say. "Tonight I'm busy. I'll call you tomorrow."Tomorrow comes and you'll be sitting by the phone, wrapped in old blankets with your toes in front of the space heater. Outside the gray will have blanketed the city. The phone's plastic silence coats your stomach.

The mailman will come in the mornings, bringing letters that say your test scores qualify you for honors acceptance at the private schools by the North Highway. "It's an honor," your counselor tells you in a private meeting.

"An absolute honor, Besai."You'U nod your head, your hands clenched together to try to keep warm.

Weeks pass. Cara comes over after school. The two of you sit on your bed, your eyes darting to the phone, your palms meaty with constant apprehension.

She'll watch you. "Are you going to go?" she asks you.

"Go where?" and she nods towards the stack of manila envelopes on your desk.

"Oh."You look away. "No." "Why not?You're smart enough."

You're silent for a second and then you say, "It's too far away."You'll pick up the phone to make sure there's a dial tone, to make sure he hasn't been trying.

She's quiet for a second. "Cabral's no fucking good, Bes," she'll say.

Try to control that frantic in your voice. "He was good. Remember? He was good," you argue. "He'll call."

She'll look at you. "How long has it been now?" Cara, who won't let him slide. "Good thing you didn't fuck him."

"He'll call," you'll tell her. "He loves me." Ignore that look in her eyes, that look that says she knows what's coming, a look soaked in disappointment.

Soon October will knock at the door, insistent. The air will be angry, winds that have your skinny legs walking crookedly down the sidewalk. You must try to focus on school.

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79

Study for trigonometry, your worst subject.

One night die phone will ring.The clock Hashing 12:38. Pick up before anyone else hears it.

"Hello?"There's no noise in the background.

"You're not supposed to call my house this late." Don't let him hear you smiling.

He'll laugh and it'll sound like the summer. "Sorry," he'll say. "I wanted to talk to you. Where have vou been?"

You'll pull your knees to your chest. "I've been right here. Where have you been?" Do your best to sound angry. "You haven't called me in forever."

"You mad?" he'll ask. A question you've been ready to answer for weeks.

You'll scan through the things Cara told you to say, but none of them sound good enough, none of them sound right. In the end you won't answer him, you'll just twirl the phone cord around your finger. "Hey," he'll say. "I'm going to come get you."

Your stomach jumps and you're already slipping on a sweater and shoes.

"It's raining," you'll say. "It's late."

"Is that a no?" he asks and you'll shake your head even though he can't see you. Fifteen minutes later and you're on the road, tlae lights in your room carefully dimmed, your trigonometry book lonely on your bed.

"Where are we going?" you'll ask.

"I have an idea." In the car you'll listen to the first Nas album, music your brother played when you were in grade school. He'll pull up to the pool.

"What are we doing here?" you'll ask.

"I got the key from Jj," There will be dirty pillows and old blankets in his backseat.

Funny how you'll still be so stubbornly wedged in childhood.You won't even see what's happening. He'll be steps ahead of you— he knew you would agree, knew you would concede before you even knew the question.

The floor of the concession stand. Magical in all the wrong ways and you're trapped. Your eyes will be bluny, like your perspective has been tossed in your

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pile of clothes. You will notice liis fingers: sprawled, like tree roots. His hands seem big enough to cover your whole torso. Hands that will spread your legs expertly. In hindsight the whole thing will seem staccato, individual frames that don't ebb right.

You'll grab the steel bar by the icebox to keep from crying out, His back is expansive, smooth.You'll run your hands over it and he'll stare straight aliead, making noises with his diaphragm, liis teeth grinding. Your body tangled, your hipbones expanding against their better judgment.

There will be details you should remember but never will. Like the way the rain drips through a hole in the ceiling and gets the ends of your hair wet'.

Like the way he calls you baby but never once Besai.

Afterwards there will be so much silence that you'll swear you can actually hear morning. Lay on your stomach so he can't see you crying. He'll kis.s the spot where your shoulder bones come together. He'll pull on his pants, he'll tug on your hand. He'll say, "Come on, let's get you home."

He'll have you then.You: precious, frantic, compromising. He lucks you in his car mostly, always at night, parked behind the corner store down the street. He starts taking you to his house, climbing up a ladder by his window.

"I don't want to see my family," he says.

Later you will study the map of your history and wonder at which point you could have drawn the line.

Cara, incidentally, will stop answering your phone calls. Leaves you a note in the mailbox. It savs to call her when you're done with his shit, when you decide to grow up.You will open it at the mailbox, her handwriting abrasive.

Don't cry but quietly put the picture frame of the two of you face down on your desk.

You'll invite him to dinner at your house. You'll go to the department store and pick out the clothes you would buy him il you could.You'll become the mixtape queen, love song after love song in your tape deck You will fail two trig tests. You will completely forget about an English paper. "Where did all these excuses come from.''" one teacher asks, and you

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81

don't know what to say. You receive a new manila envelope rescinding; one school's offer to their program.

He'll come over while your mother's at work, his crooked bottom teeth poking; out from his lip, he never actually looks at you. "It hurts," you'll say, and he rolls his eyes. "Try," he says. "For me." He pulls out blunts when it's the two of you in his car. You'll try it, even though it leaves your head acliing, even though you said you never would.

The stakes are going to be much higher than you can possibly comprehend now. Your absentmindedness used to be endearing. You and Gabriel both forgetful, leaving house keys on the bus, forgetting to pick up the mango juice. Now, though, it will become an insult, a sheath of disregard for everyone but him.

Your mother: A woman with skin so dark that it shines, only a little hair on her head. She'll talk to you as you wash dishes. "You're just sixteen, Asha," she'll sav. Her word for sweetheart. "You must be careful ."You'11 tell her to calm down, but what you won't understand is that she used to be you. She knows that you don't think about anything but the next five minutes. She's forty-one with three kids and you're her baby. The last thing she wants is for you to be her.

But you will not be listening. In fact, you have already forgotten your mother's face. You'11 have to forget it, you'll have to make room in your brain for little things, you must memorize the pattern of his sheets.

December rolls in.The deep cold will be still.Your mother will bring thick quilts down from the attic.

You get two D's on your report card. "I'm not as smart as you think," you'll tell all your teachers.

You spend Christmas Eve with him at his boy's house, getting; high and watching cartoons.You try to sneak back in around four but your mother is sitting on your bed; awake, crying.

Before it all begins, you should know this: there will be days where he will offer you the crescent moon of his stomach, the wrinkled lines on his palm, that deep crease in his lip where you'll imagine the good collides widi die bad.

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You won't mind the heat so much wThen it's your skin on his. He will lead your hands, and years from now you will still be able to feel your fingertips skating along his skin, still feel the traces of his breath on your chest. His fan will blow the sticky hair off of your neck. On good days diere will be an actual bed, a tangle of arms, whispering.

But other days—most days— he will leave you throwing little rocks at his window, hoping diat somewhere in the corners of his mind he still thinks of you. From the curb on his street you will see other girls in his bedroom, silhouettes against the fluorescence of the streetlights. On bad days there will only be that car, old fields with tall grass at night, die back porch of theYMCA. No, it certainly won't be everything. It really won't be anything. But you won't know that you're allowed to ask for anvthing more.

Years from now you will be alone. But even then you won't want to take it all back—not these parts, at least. That first August, you will find yourself in an old water tunnel in the woods by work, straddling him while he goes up your shirt. You will feel like crying and laughing and screaming and vomiting, because you'll just know that it will never be like that again.

Forget that there is really no difference between "girl" and "young woman", between men and now-. You have to forget. Remember:You must not watch time as it floats. It will be agile at first, soft, and then suddenly it will hightail it, reckless.

Throw away report cards, use your school books for rolling papers. Do not count sunsets. Do not regret.

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83

The Administrative Assistant Matthew Ira Swaye

The young super noted her scar but said nodiing: "It's a walk-up, you know.

Every night the secretary lay there planning to paint the southern wall blue.

She bought a mosquito net and a new toaster.

"The kinkiest you ever made it," Bedi asked her at lunch.

"I once made it sober?" she'd said.

She lived there 7 years. The bloodsuckers loved her legs. The room got bad sun. Beth came over for a good Tuesday cry. Suddenly everyone was having a fuck in the morning. She made toast.

Bethfinallymoved back to St. Paul.

A little bird flew in.

The secretary had a pink grapefruit with sugar or talked in a very high voice or a low voice, drank a wine, watched the war. When a little bird flew in she quickly named it Lilly before it flew out again. She bought a toaster.

At her funeral, the super's daughter remembered a time her shower had clogged.

"At least," the super said, "she didn't mess up the walls."

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Quarto 2008-2009 Executive Editors Anastasia McLetchie Casey Black Visual Editor Max Mogensen Art and Design Marguerite Van Cook James Romberger Editors Nathaniel Allard Nathaniel Christian IV Jared Frieder Billy Goldstein Alisha Kaplan Calina Madden Molly Morgan Silvia Park Shira Schindel Olivia Tandon

JayYencich Faculty Muse / Whip Amy Benson Copy Editor Scott Jurkowski Thanks Adrian Baird Josh Bettinger Campo the laser cutter Dorla Mclntosh Kim Rapkins Douglas Repetto Erika Sklar - Ugly Fish Thanks for Nothing You know who vou are.

iviay^andoj) ^1 ^ A f i ^ Ka

II •1(11

ISSN: 0735-6536

Index of the Columbiunconscious

A look into our collective mind, courtesy of the Quarto contributors.

Index of the Columbiunconscious # 9/11 ••911 . . , . ,

. 34 , , , , . , , , . , 53

A AIDS............ , . . algae . , . . . * . , . , , . , , . . . . , . almond butter *.*„,„,.. mnfferittftNi » arboreal • . • , • . . . • . . * . . , » «

68 64 34 IS 13

Argentina ....;........ . . * . . . . 2 5 ashram . , , , . . , . . . , . . . , , , „ , , . . & Atlanta.......... . 7 0 Atlantic City . . , ' , / , ' , , , , , . 42,48 S bandy... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 B«rackObama, . , , , . . , . . , , 21 barky 13 Bartnes 24 beagle .

48 Beatles, T h e , - - • • . •• . 32, SS Beijing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 bicep , . . ' . . . 9,41,47 big w o r d s * * * . . . , . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 bung. * * . . . . . . . „ . . . , . . . , . 3

b r a l . 1 I " * ! *:..' .* .* *'J * ,' i ^ 17, 82 Breakfast C l u b . . breasts , , , , . . * * , , , , , , „ . .

13 10

B r o n x . . . . . , . , . . . . . . . . . 10 Buckminster Fuller . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 b u b b l e * . , , . . , . . . . . . . . . . , 12 fiueuos

Aires

. ,. . , • , . , 2 2 - 5

buns

.

10

cackles California . , , .

Canal S t r e e t , canine* cantaloupe , , . . capricious Carmine S t r e e cement. . . . . . , »

C , . . . JI, J 5 , , , . . . . . 60-1,66 , . , * . . , 32 60 . . « . . . , . . . . , . 12 23 t . . . , , . . . . . , , , 32 : . • . . * . , . , . . , . . . . . : . 16

c e r e b e l l u m • « • « : • • • • . « ' » ; . *: * « • • • • . • . 1 8

Chic-Choc

. . . . . . . ; . . . . . . . <

chicken coop * . . . . . . . . 9 China. . , ; . , . , , . . . . , • , . . 2J clammy , » , , , , , . , . , , 7 clothespin* , . . , . , , . . , . , . . 6 7 CMV 68 collider. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I S Columbia 22 confetti. , . . . . , . . . . . . . . , 16 CoppolU . . .

25 Corfazar , , . , , . . , , 23,26 c r a n i u m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 crepe . , , . . . . 7

D D a J t a n . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . 14 dangling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 , 29 Daniel D a y Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . 2 5 d e a d s w i m m e r , , ... ^ . . . . . . . . . . . 5 d.iarrhea . . . . . . . . . .

» » • • • • • » » » .< • 6 ^

D l n o Facts , , • , , . . . , . . . dinosaurs , , , , . , , . . , , . directionality. dogwoods . , Dr;Pepper. . , . , . , , . . . . dragon s u n• » . . . . . . , durobbcllf

, , , 33 3!,335 13 78 . . . 76 . . . , 5 41

East Village . . . . . . . , , . . . , . , . . . 6 8 electron microscopy . . * , • • « . - . » « . , 17 eucalyptus.'. , . . . . • . . . . . . . . 6 1 Evita*. , .25 extracurriciilars . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4

F faerie ,... . . , , . . , « Finnish woman • . . . . . . . » . .. . 10 fisli b e l l y . . , . . . , , . . .

62 fi.i.iWWKVtsh . . , . . . . . . , . . , , .

2 7

Folding, M N , . . , , 48 Ibrepaws-« » . . . .. . » . , . » . * , : , , . 6

forest.-feet • . » » . , . » » . : \ • „ • , . , S fossils .

16 friction . . . . 3 Fungus

•;/.••.•::»•>.;;$

Index of the Columbiunconscious G

l

.. 9

§ a y i * h . * . , ,.... , , . . , , . , . , , 2 4 genltive » , , > . , , , . . , , * , « , 1 0 Germans „ » . . . . . . » . . . . 2 4 , 2 7

gills

5

gin , , . , > . 57 gram ba^ . . , . . , » . . , , . . , . 1 3 g r a m m a t i c a l c a r n a g e ! . .,.,» . . • . • 2X Grand S t r e e t . . . 7 32 H heaving. . . . . . . . , . , , , ,

He Men heineken hippocampus .

. . , 16

42 26 „...>.*.». I t

HofiandTmincI

; . .

22, , housefly . . . , . . . , « , . . , . . V hunger pang-plate . . , . , . , . » . .

32 25 68 (S7 S

LV:. , . , . , . . . i * . - , . . . . . . i s niad. » . . . . . , 21 index „ . „ , . . 5,67 ififitntivcs 21 IRS 41 span i

31

aim Aslibery . , « . . . . . aha Ford . , . , , , . , . . , . , . » ovce . . • • • • . . . • • • . . . . , .

16 23 2t

I

. . . . . . .••> . . . . . 1 2 Kansas C i t y .10 K a n t . . , ; , , , , , , , , , , . , . , 24 Karposj . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . 6 8 Katrina , . , . , .

22 k e e n i n g . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . €i Kennedy , * * » , . 22 L U FUC, . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 lapis b s u l i 16 iigos 35 Lewiiahn. . . . . . . t , ,26 limey 12 livingrv , , , , . , » r . . . . . . . . . 1 4 lobes/ 12 bllipo|>* 3, 78 Lone Rangers . . . , , , , . , . . . . 1 5 longitudinal 18 krop-bowl., . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 luz Iitniirio8.« » . , , . , « , , . . » « . 2 7

M M 25 Malbeck 24,16 MzltercA . . . . . . f. . . . . . . . . . . 3 4 mango juice , , . „ . , . , , » » , , , 8 0 maniacal , . . . . 8 Marcel D u c h a m p . . . . . 2 4 marijuana 8 marrow 6 Marie taveau ... . . , , , , » , . , . , 7 m a u v e , , , . . . , . , . . . . . . , , 16 Memorial Sloan Ketterine Hospital.

35 M e n d o m . 7 ..* . . . . . . . . . . . 2 7 Mississippi 22 Mi*tah K u r t a , - . . . . . . . » , 13 mollusk , 5 mosquito n e t . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4 Mother Ganga . * , . . , . 8 Mother Mercy . . , , . . * . . , . * . . . 4 7 N Nas, . . .. ... , .. , .... ,. , .

Natural H i s t o r y M u s e m . . . . . . . .

N e o c r f o I I o . . . . . . . , , .

New O r l e a n s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

N e w a r k City NewYbrkTiin«*. _ , . . . . . . . . noodles . « . . . . . . , . . , . . , , , nupti.il . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

NYU hospital.

• . , , . .

80 33 24 22 44 22 3 7 31

O oleander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2 aruiii m i s i n f o r m e d . . . . . . . . . 1 4 orbital, . , , . , , . . .

•-. 1 ? ordinances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Index of the Columbiunconscious pancake , . .

PCP . peanut butter , Pert . . . . . . . platonic . » . .

78 . . . . 49,61 68 ; , . . . 8,67 ... .62 . . . . . . SO

poos . . . . . . puberty . .

3 ....... 4 12 ***.,. 5

quavk -cores Queendoiti

.

Q

15 68

.

Rainbow Room , raven . .

R .

•ribcaee

.... . . . . 25 . . . . . . .8 58 ,26 ... . . 70 .29 . 21 . . . . . . 13 17 7 . . . . . . 68 7

Sai Rung. , . . *• saltings Santa Ana » saucepot . ,

, . . .

slum Shingles . . . . . silverttsh. . . , . slil>t)tTS

65 6 10 . . . . . . 71 , .

. . . . .

. 29 . . . . . . 25 14 . . . . . . 34 . . . . . . 16 . . . . . . . . 16

Spaceship E a r t h .

S p a i n . . . . . . . splatter- painting

. . . . . . 21 ... .84 . . . . . . 26 24 8 .... .1 . . . . . 14

St P a u l . . • . . stelb . . . . . . .

Sun Ra , . , . . , Swaniiii . . . , , swaTnplight . . . syncTgetic . .

T

6J 4 . 14

taciturn ... teeth-first . , . .

'1

tester-spaghetti TicTacs. toggles 4 ,A

toftet

.

.

.,

. 34 25

'loyota Matrix . . triceps

. .

tsunamis

80 22 7

. . 34,47,63 , 22

tumor , . . , . .

U

5

underwater birthii

63 V

Vietnam

. .

3 *2

.

59-60 . . . . . . 10

w . whiskey wolfing . . . wood hornets

. . . . . 11 , . . 44,58-9 . 45

X Xu Solar

. . . . . . 24

Y

23 . 83

yerba mate YMCA .

V0.-VJ3

;

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/

•

"

"

.

*

•

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. . . ••

*

zamhoni.....

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58

. . . . , , , 42 . . . . . . . 3