As told to /One/: Stephen Shore once said something like, “A snapshot is a close as you can come to take a picture without thinking.” I think it was Shore who said that, though he may not have. I only heard it secondhand from my friend, Shane, while photographing in a crumbling parking lot on New York Ave in NE Washington, DC. So that’s what I try to do – take pictures from the gut.

I would also admit that I’m a little preoccupied with American politics, the American social landscape, American identity, and American-ness, just generally speaking. This is just a phenomenally complex, muddled, awful, amazing place and I look for the details that reflect the tensions underlying life in an impossible country.

—

Greg Wasserstrom

Greg Wasserstrom is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Greg grew up in Texas and earned a degree in government from American University in Washington, DC. He spends most nights re-imagining his website.

Then she came: hair coiled into snakes,
brazen jewels, tattoos twining
her arms. Queen of another
country. In her secret

lonely room, she looked
into water
her face rippling
into my face.

At first, the girl didn’t understand the pleasure of her plainness.
How the whole of her, ignored, had been at peace
shielded in the space left by her lack of loveliness.

Each woman, she told me, is a queen taken apart;
reassembled.

But I who was raised as queen and wife
on the chessboard of kings,
knew the mirror well –

The mirror speaks (you see) and
depending upon sight or light
is cruel or kind.

But the girl had her own misery—
growing lovelier by the hour—
without it.

I didn’t want her mirror.
I saw in people’s faces
the hunger
beauty creates:

First the eye widens—
the gaze, like a hand,  stretches towards you

eager to touch—and once
touched—wants—

the heart, the lung, the liver.

My Fate:
Beauty
like ice—timed
to disappear.

Here is what I learned as The Girl;
For Beauty you are cut like a diamond
cleaved, held
to a lap,

indexed and soldered with wax,
searched for flaw,
covered with shellac
rubbed and scoured
with the jeweler’s
rouge,  bound
till all facets are smooth—

though later
you’ll crack.

We have no pen, no paper
to write our story.

We scratch our marks
on the backs of your mirrors
between the lead and glass.

—

Veronica Golos is the author of Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, 2011), which just won the New Mexico Book Award (2011). In 2004, Golos won the 16th annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize (Story Line Press) for her book, A Bell Buried Deep (to be re-issued by Red Hen Press). Ms Golos is the editor for 3:a taos press, and Literary Consultant for Heather Mitchell of Gelfman-Schneider Literary Agents, Inc., New York City.

Ms. Golos has been an award-winning curator and teacher for Poets & Writers, Poet’s House and 92nd St Y/Makor in New York City.  Her work has been published and anthologized nationally and internationally, and adapted for theatrical productions in New York City’s Theatre Row, and the Claremont Theological Seminary in California. Her poetry was the centerpiece of My Land is Me, a four-artist multimedia exhibit in Taos, NM that questioned the western view of the Veil. She lives in Taos, New Mexico, with her husband, writer David Pérez.

Lacey slowly heaved herself out of the chair and down the narrow hallway, knees cracking, one arm stretched out to her right, one hand pushing off wallpaper for momentum. “Goddamn Thursdays.” She flicked on the bathroom light and stared in the mirror. A globular face mapped not on foreign landscapes and forgotten towns, but on a lifetime of voluntary entombment and inner warfare. The outside world had been locked out a long time ago. Lacey’s borders now wedged between the snap of two deadbolts and the power switch of her TV remote. Except for Thursdays.

Lacey opened the medicine cabinet and rummaged through a smudged pink cosmetic bag. She worked red spirals into each cheek. Mascara followed in tiny, bird tracks above each eye. One smear of lipstick and the orange lips spread.

“My name is Lacey Calhoun,” she said out loud to the mirror. “I’m a housewife, mother of two beautiful boys grown up and already out of the house. My hobbies are bowling and puzzles. I love crosswords and Wheel, of course. I never miss your show, Pat.” She didn’t bring up Jeopardy.

Pat Sajak smiled and put his arm around her. “Glad to finally have you here with us, Lacey. You’re first up, so why don’t you go ahead and give that wheel a good spin.”

The audience clapped and Lacey clapped with them. She bent over the wheel; black prongs in a perfect circle reached up to meet her while the audience locked in place around her like a city. The eyes of the public were multiplying. Home viewers scattered in living rooms across the country, the world, the map!

She started to tremble, grabbed the sink and stared at her face. Makeup lay on top of her like a bad haircut. Tumors. She pulled up her white blouse and pushed on the loose skin around her stomach. Maybe she had one. She turned out the light and hurried back down the hallway. She sat by the window with her coat and purse in her lap. She searched through her purse until she felt the smooth, metallic outline of her Dale Evan’s pocketknife. She never went anywhere without it. She waited for a pale, dirty car to pull up in front of the building. She checked the door seven times on her way out. Locked.

*    *    *    *

The bowling alley was crowded. Lacey stood off to the side of the counter, let her boys say their hellos and get the shoes while people clustered, kids screeched and fat men drank beer. The orange room pulsed with orange chairs. Everything vibrated in one steady crescendo. She clutched her purse and counted twenty-one cigarette butts in an ashtray. Her older boy yelled to Lacey, “Lane number seven.” She followed him, while her other boy made the detour to the snack bar. She pressed herself into one of the glossy, cupped seats. The older boy dropped shoes in front of her. Red and blue suede. Last week’s had been green and red leather. She saw rows of shoes in separate compartments, wondered how many bowlers had worn the same pair–a whole community of crusty feet crammed into the same shoes nauseated her.

Hotdogs and bloody fries descended on a tray. A cold orange drink was secured in Lacey’s hand. Her boys were now in their twenties, but they still fought over who would go first and who would score. She took a long sip, then pulled a tattered tissue from her purse and wiped germ crud out of each shoe. Bowling balls thundered. People slid in and out of her vision. The bowling alley permeated a rank perfume of flat beer and old socks.

Lacey felt bodies around her. She froze when she looked into the menacing stare of a slumped, pale girl. Lacey watched in horror while a pink bubble the size of a brain popped slowly from the girl’s mouth on to her face. The girl stuck her tongue out at Lacey.

“The category is fear,” a man’s voice said.

“What?” Lacey said, looking around. Pat Sajak stood just beyond the girl.

“Have you forgotten us already?” Pat asked. The studio audience laughed. “We’re waiting.” Pat smiled at everyone and shrugged his shoulders.

“Sorry, Pat. Of course, I’m always ready to play.” Lacey smoothed back her hair and smiled. She forced a trembling glare back at the snarling girl while consonants rallied in her head. She knew the answer to this one.

“I’d like to solve that puzzle, Pat,” she whispered between clenched teeth.

The girl popped her gum and looked away.

“CLAUSTROPHOBIA,” Lacey yelled.

Vanna’s teeth emerged from behind glossed lips while the audience roared. Lacey labored for breath and tried not to visibly shake.

It was Lacey’s turn to bowl. One of the boys set the heavy black ball in her lap. She plugged the three holes, shaking her way into an avalanche. There was the damn audience again, and now they all looked like her ex-husband. Her red-and-blue suede shoes crept forward to the red painted stripe that marked the starting point. Dying would be much easier than this. Lacey clutched the ball to her chest and stared down at ten white pins that stood, stupidly attentive. She counted three lunging duck steps and pushed the ball off. It dropped into the gutter. She was used to that. Her boys waved their arms, yelling out directives, though she was already aware of the procedure: she would have to bowl again.

The balls were on a track in a semi-circle, eight bulging shadows, twenty-four holes. She took one from the group. The boys grabbed it from her. Not the right weight, they said. She smiled and saw them both younger inside a gold frame she kept on a shelf between books. Their arms hung low, stationed on either side of toothpick legs with frozen grins that showed every tooth. They were an exact replica of their father except for the eyes. One look in their father’s squinty, glowing eyes proved he was some kind of fanatic. Lacey had spared her boys their dad’s religious ravings. They’d been young enough to forget him. Neither boy had ever read the Bible or stepped inside a church while they were under her roof. She couldn’t control anything they did now, nor did she care to, but religion didn’t seem to be a priority for either of them and that was a comfort to her.

Their father had called himself a Christian, which she later found out meant a thief, a liar and a madman. He wailed day in and day out from the Book of Revelations about Armageddon and impending doom.

“Armageddon was an everyday occurrence when that bastard was in my home,” Lacey said to herself.

*    *    *    *

“He that overcometh shall not be touched by the second death.” Her husband looked up from his book at Lacey. “Blessed is he that watcheth. The Reverend and I were walking and I said, ‘Stop!! Can’t you smell it? There is the unwanted stench of Bethlehem here.’”

Lacey’s husband talked like a walking Bible. She set out three plates for him, the Reverend, and the drunk they’d picked up that day. She counted five russet potatoes, seven Brussels sprouts, a wing and two crusted chicken legs for each of them.

The husband rambled on, “And I said Give us oh Lord, and there he came… out of the blistered hands of the back alleys, shuffled the bent knees of the crucified.” He was always on the lookout for another prophet.

Lacey looked across at the latest Jesus-contestant, folded into his needs, as dirty and unsated as the five before him. Her husband picked them up out of the gutters. The bum’s fork and knife severed his chicken flesh and he sucked it down with half a bottle of wine. He kept one eye cast on Lacey’s husband beside him, careful to chew tragically before this dream of another man’s insanity was pulled out from under him–God be all employing.

*    *    *    *

The Christian had pledged Lacey his eternal love and a permanent spot with the group saved from Armageddon if she married him. But then, time was its own sorcerer, sealed with the blood of whole civilizations that rose up and buried themselves in the bitter song of a single hour, and one could remember almost anything if they looked back far enough.

Lacey married the Christian when she was eighteen. He was the only boy who noticed her with any interest at school. When he actually proposed he got down on one knee, raised his arms skyward and bellowed, “And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.” He was exotic and had conceptualized what no one else had ever considered. Lacey had always been an island. That alone was enough to fall in love with him at the time.

A few months into the marriage Lacey was pregnant with her first boy. Eighteen months later she had cried her way through the birth of a second boy. Shortly after that an outlined phantom of the crucifixion appeared over the marriage bed on the wall where the Christian’s wooden cross once hung. He was gone. Lacey’s money and jewelry were gone. It took a few more weeks before Lacey stopped setting a place for him at the table.

*    *    *    *

Lacey picked up another bowling ball from the revolving ring in front of her and listened for protests from her boys. They were composed for once, so she pressed her fingers into the holes. She moved up to the line, placed her feet together, swallowed three times, bent her knees, took two long steps, then froze midway to three. Another puzzle was evolving. Pat Sajak was pointing at a girl standing in the next lane scrutinizing Lacey. Lacey didn’t like being caged. She turned toward the intrusive eyes of the girl and whispered, “Why must you all circle me like a vulture?”

The girl grinned and flailed an arm in the air to let Lacey bowl first. Lacey smiled with no intention of following commands and shuffled back to the red line. She held her ground and stared ahead until she saw the girl charge past her out of the corner of her eye. She waited for Pat to announce the next category.

“Category: A person with, let me say, quite an unusual appetite.” Pat grabbed Vanna’s arm and pretended to bite her. The audience loved it.

Lacey was able to solve this puzzle with little effort. “That would be CANNIBAL, Pat.” She wobbled out another gutter ball, then hurried back to her seat.

Lacey sipped her soda and pulled the ratty tissue out of her purse again as she watched the bowlers in each of the various stages of the game. Some stood at the red line, legs together, ball up under their chin, staring down at the pins like the fingers of God. Some glided, some erupted forward, some sashayed, some puffed up like turkeys, and some were in a state of frozen suspension, one leg thrust up behind them, arms raised out to their sides, watching their balls roll them to glory. Rumbling cracks steady as the hands of a clock and every one of them grinning and clapping for themselves like they had a right to.

Just like the dim-witted Wheel contestants, groping out there like they had no concept of an alphabet–all of them drunk on the polluted waters of Greed and Vanity. No thank you, Lacey said, when her boys pleaded with her to appear on that show, swearing that she’d have made millions off Wheel by now, and maybe she would have. It was no mystery to her. The alphabet rolled in her head, filling in blanks, not that it mattered one way or another to her how many boats and vacations the rest of them racked up.

*    *    *    *

Her boys yelled, “Mom, it’s your turn!” Lacey pushed herself up out of her seat. The chain of balls stared up vaguely from the wheel until her oldest son picked one out for her and set it in her hands. He was the vigilant one. He called Lacey every day and came to visit her a few times a week with groceries. He never forgot her favorite ice cream. He had seen more than the younger one and looked afraid. She smiled at him and then slowly creaked her way to the line. She took a deep breath and thought of knocking out her ex-husband’s teeth. She let that ball fly out of her hands and smack down the alley. Pins flew in every direction. Strike! The boys clapped and rallied around her, hugging her.

“I knew you could do it, mom! Perfect. Just keep it moving like that,” the older boy said. Lacey was thankful to sit down for a break. Thursday nights were almost more than she could take, but it kept her boys happy and off her back about getting out of the apartment at any other time.

A gutter ball was like another day. Lacey drank tea all morning and watched the news, talk shows and soap operas. The horned antennae poured out a detached carnival of con men and stalkers, posers and thieves–all of them out for fame no matter what contemptible acts they had to perform. Lacey could never have been a contestant on Wheel. She wanted only to disappear.

*    *    *    *

Seven nights without sleep, Lacey’s boys stood in her bedroom door while madness raged through the room like a ravenous secret, smashing through the whispering objects, threatening to push any of them over the edge if they wandered too close.

*    *    *    *

The ball shuttled up from its tunnel below. Lacey retrieved it and moved back into her starting position with the clamor wading distances around her like a sea. The ball hurled out with the tide, and slithered into the gutter about halfway down.

Lacey ignored Pat Sajak and the audience this time. She counted fourteen steps back to her seat and watched her boys bowl. There was an ease about them that depressed her. She made no claim to a mother’s pride in genes (they carried so little of hers), but to watch them suck down beer and jab at each other with the same competitive idiocy over french fries or scores disturbed her. She smiled and clapped loudly for them, though, careful to remind them that crazy mothers didn’t go out Thursdays to bowl. This was a sacrifice she had to make. Between four gutter balls, she counted seventy-two bowlers over thirty lanes. It was hard to keep track. Bowlers lumbered off in continuous corpulent waves for snacks or beer.

Lacey looked up at the expanse of an industrial ceiling. A bowling alley was as perfect a setting for the final battle between good and evil as any. The ceiling dangled fluorescent bars strung in blinding rows of long, treacherous tubes. Lacey looked over the wretched faces around her and felt Armageddon start to pulse down.

*    *    *    *

Darkness descended into a hail of hands. Lacey was seven again and her Uncle was raping her in the back of the kitchen pantry. He shuddered a cry to God and clamped into the throbbing pain of her body. She screamed, but her voice swallowed itself like a prayer. She was devoured and slain by the dark of the sun until everything was dead. Her dolls were dead. Her friends were dead. Even her parents were dead. She, alone, stood a graveless body by the endless coming of her seventh year.

*    *    *    *

Lacey’s youngest son grabbed her elbow and pulled her up slowly. As the ball settled into her arms, she clutched it while the heads of heretics and sinners rolled down the bowling alleys along the periphery of vision. Her boy maneuvered her to the right side of the line, and she watched his arm swing back and forth and listened to him tell her, “Slowly, Mom, you can do it, nice and smooth.” He hugged her and left her alone with his advice. She forced a smile and stumbled forward, counting her threes, then swung the ball with both hands. Pat Sajak parted his legs and the ball rolled between them.

“Category: A state you can find Vanna in quite often.” Pat chuckled. Vanna smiled and slapped him on the shoulder.

Lacey’s crawling ball took down four pins. The boys shouted and clapped with the audience. One of the boys scratched a number onto the long, white score sheet stretched out in front of him, while the other prepared her for her next ball.

Her lips buried themselves. She dragged another tissue from her purse and blotted her forehead.

“CATATONIC,” she whispered.

The audience roared its approval. Lacey wrung the tissue around her fingers. She knew what was about to come. Multitudes reached out to grab her from behind television screens, from inside living rooms–the army continued to grow.

*    *    *    *

From out of the dark angles crawled the uncle instead, who wrenched Lacey back into the pantry, flooding in the blind directions of the clock with the shifting heresy of his swallowing hands. She was seven years old. She went rigid as a wax doll, and a voice yelled, “Hide us. Hide us from the face of Him.”

Again, the ball was burdened in Lacey’s trembling arms, and she was led to the line with a son’s voice in her ear, “It’s okay, Mom, just do your best.” She saw spots in front of her eyes. She flung the ball away and returned to her seat before it slammed into the gutter.

*    *    *    *

Her uncle’s wind gusted over the voices that leaked from the windows of houses that propped up the block. Her house was just another yellow blot on the game board that nestled like a tumor in the private shade of its quiet inhabitants when her mother was home, cutting vegetables and humming anonymous tunes and Lacey was peeling potatoes and dropping dead white lumps into a bowl and the pantry door spread open in front of them with the mocking yawn of another day as though nothing ever happened in there. Rows of canned beans, tomatoes, jars of sauces and jams looked out from their proper places with the indifference of family.

*    *    *    *

“Category: I’ve been working this job for how many years? Some days Lacey and I feel like we’re traveling down the same path, don’t we, Lacey?” Pat commiserated with Lacey while the audience laughed.

They’d committed Lacey once. Dying was easier than crazy. Either way she knew where she was headed. Maybe a tumor would buy her seclusion. Another puzzle solved. Conceal the conflict, counter the course.

“CONDEMNED.”

*    *    *    *

On the third floor of this house the Uncle lived with an Aunt, while below them open rooms gaped like mouths in an unlocked labyrinth of lethal doorways resounding with the shatter of loose keys from the Uncle’s pockets, and Lacey sat on her bed rocking while the door slowly opened, and from out of this widening gap stood her two boys instead with the neighbors, waiting for her to parade insanity like she was some spectacle, but she’d kept her mouth shut, wiped her eyes. Let them spy on their own families. She would cooperate with the sons; go to the doctors, take the pills. She saw the conspiracy. Keep this one to herself and move them in another direction.

*    *    *    *

Lacey counted one hundred twenty orange seats, twenty-three bald men, added six points to her score.

A rumpled man lowered himself into a seat across from her clutching a Styrofoam tub with nachos running yellow over the sides, while a conveyor of chips drilled into his mouth in rapid succession.

*    *    *    *

Every Sunday came up on Lacey like a noose when the Uncle and Aunt descended for supper and barricaded themselves with Lacey and her parents around a centerpiece of carved pork roast or lamb. Glass bowls circled it, moving hand to hand–mashed potatoes, green beans, fruit salad and beets. The stench of crusted meat was so powerful it was able to stretch its grisly fingers into the shuddering grasp of the following day. The Uncle sat directly across from Lacey, tucked tightly into his suit, black and buttoned as the law. He stuttered out his shaky opinions with eyes that lowered and trembled. Her parents would smile and nod, encouraging him, while the hacked centerpiece long dead, but strangely honorable in its bones, sat back and looked on in silence.

*    *    *    *

It was the tenth frame. The final battle had arrived. Lacey sagged in her chair and counted bodies again. She calculated around eighty people now. The man with the nachos picked at the soggy remains of his sinking ship with a thorough and disheartened yellow finger. The boys argued over scores, one yelling that the other had cheated. Lacey stared into the face of a man no saner than the zealot she’d married. He leered back at her while he sucked down his beer. Lacey grimaced at the two eyes that turned up at the corners in a smug, flattened face. “What the hell are you waiting for?” she hissed. “Armageddon is no more than a rerun, playing itself over and over again every day of your life.”

The boys started bowling again.

Pat Sajak called out the final category. “Dear Lacey, it’s the only way to survive. It’s the story of our existence.”

Lacey rooted through her purse until she felt the cold, smooth curve of her Dale Evans pocketknife. She opened it easily and slid its dulled blade across her wrist. She never pushed too deep–just enough for the promised seal from God. The Christian always cut her on the forehead, but she couldn’t do that. She touched the scar above her eyes. It was one of the few things he had left behind.

The man in front of her guzzled the rest of his beer and talked to himself with nothing over his scuttling eyebrows but a desolate layer of skin. “No one’s saving you, you bastard,” she whispered as she got up and moved toward him. She grabbed his neck, took the blade and slid it across his forehead. Someone grabbed her from behind as she shut her eyes hissing, “Hide us. Hide us from the face of Him.”

*    *    *    *

Lacey’s Uncle rampaged again from the smoldering furnace of time, attacking her with the fury of scorpions. His fingers drove into her shoulders. She barreled her vision through the pantry prison into a pickle jar that blazed in front of her. Blood trickled metallically off her distant tongue while she breathed the same prayer to God. “Make me invisible. Help me escape. Make me invisible. Help me escape.” But this time God was actually listening. The jaws of this cavern she was dragged into while the parents were out lifted like a great boulder. Light swung in like a crazed sickle. The Uncle was dragged off Lacey with his pants still chained to his ankles and a fury of thick, dull fists raged their assault upon him. A violent gust swelled up massively from out of her mother and with the primal immediacy of a thunderous God, down cracked an iron blunt shovel over the bloody skull of the sinking, stumbling Uncle while everything around Lacey went black.

*    *    *    *

Lacey opened her eyes to her boys’ faces hovering above her. The younger boy was blotting her forehead with a wet napkin, while the older one was wrapping her bleeding wrist and talking to security. The man Lacey cut got away with only a minor scrape, but was screaming about pressing charges as his group ushered him out.

Lacey didn’t hear him. She listened to the bowling balls rumble over wooden planks and the habitual massacre of exploding pins. One son pressed a paper cup to her lips. She took a long bubbling gulp of another orange drink, wiped the dripping water from her forehead, and forced a withered smile at her boys. Terror whispered from their sad, sharp eyes as the security guard questioned her. A small pool of strangers fed on this public display and shifted impatiently from foot to foot, waiting for her to supply them with more. She drained the last of the drink and looked at a frightened son on either side of her clutching his beer and Pat Sajak, who stood grinning behind them.

Pat put his hands together and pointed at her. “Can you solve that puzzle, Lacey?”

One son crouched down in front of her and began to unlace and remove her bowling shoes, while the other whispered of doctors and pills. Vanna waved an arm and smiled, glittering off to one side of ten blank white squares that strained to be revealed.

“That Christian’s Bible was worn down flat as a bald tire, but it still never got him anywhere.” Lacey put a tapping finger to her temple. “Here’s your Armageddon.” She looked up at Pat. “I’m ready to solve that puzzle.”

“COMPLIANCE.”

Vanna turned the letters over with nothing less than professional ease, and Lacey clapped her hands together in a brief, solitary celebration of another bowling night overcome. The audience dissolved again with the circular compliance of a weekly communion. One of her boys grabbed her hand and pulled her up, while the other wrapped her in her coat and got her purse. She waded cautiously between them through a rolling sea of six demented moustaches, four vagrant beards, and a pair of pencil-scratch eyebrows shelving shoes at the counter.

*    *    *    *

It was ten-thirty. Lacey snapped the dead bolt and checked the door seven times. Locked. She watched out the window for a pale, dirty car to drive off and then shuffled back to the kitchen for ice cream. She’d swallowed the pills, finished a meal, and tomorrow she would go to the doctor. Let it be cancer this time. She clutched her bowl of ice cream and made her way slowly toward the recliner. She sat in the dark and stared out the window.

Points of light, fixed stars, the moon a glowing consonant, a celestial C. She pushed up her shirt and slid her hand back and forth over her protruding stomach. She could see the week ahead of her much clearer from this side of Thursday. Shoes dropped. The recliner lurched back, and one hand groped over the end table for the remote.

—

Meg Tuite

Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Berkeley Fiction Review, 34th Parallel, Monkeybicycle, Hawaii Review, and Boston Literary Magazine. She is the fiction editor of The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press. Her novel, Domestic Apparition (2011), is now available through San Francisco Bay Press (sanfranciscobaypress.com). She has a monthly column, “Exquisite Quartet,” for Used Furniture Review. Her blog is megtuite.wordpress.com.

—

Jim DeBarros

Jim deBarros is a Brooklyn based artist and designer whose work focuses on intimate watercolor portraits. His work reflects subtle emotion with the spontaneity of a snap shot. Inspired by artists like Nan Golden, Barry Moser, Ted Lewin and others. Pratt Institute was a neighbor and ultimately his school of choice. He has illustrated covers for HBJ Publishers and worked as a designer for Sony Music, and Elektra Records. He has shown in small galleries in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Long Island. He currently works for MTV as VP of Off Air Creative leading the design team promoting shows like SKINS, Beavis and Butt-Head, VMA’s and more.

www.canvasnyc.com

Patrick Gorham

AfricaWrites is an online cultural resource and reference website. The e-zine provides detailed stories, images and information to the public and serves as a resource for people who might not ordinarily be interested in learning about the unique history and cultures of Africa. The organization also works with the governments of West Africa to provide educational programs and sponsorship for over 182 children in villages throughout Guinea. They also sponsor medical assistance and agricultural programs within Guinea, Liberia, and Rwanda.

Patrick Gorham is a researcher, writer, editor, photographer, explorer and the director of the non-profit African cultural research team, AfricaWrites.com and the Cultural Studies Foreign Liaison (Focal Point) for the University of Kankan (Guinea, West Africa).

Interviewed by Josh Korenblat

/One/: How did you become interested in AfricaWrites?

Patrick Gorham: My interest in African culture began in the 1970’s, during my childhood in the United States. As a child, my mother told me stories of Africa, its great chiefs and pharaohs. My grandparents taught me the lessons of my elders, which were passed along my family through generations of slavery.

Current events informed me too. As I grew, I listened in awe to my uncles Angelo, Enoch, and Calvin, who talked about the greatness of my larger-than-life hero, the boxer Muhammad Ali; a few years earlier in distant Zaire, he had fought to recapture the world heavyweight title against the unstoppable George Foreman. And like most kids, I learned to dance. The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, taught me how to get down with African dances like the Watutsi. Shaped by my childhood experiences, I gained a larger sense of identity, a sense of purpose and a cultural curiosity to see and someday learn more about Africa, my ancestral homeland.

As an adult, this interest grew, and I researched continuously, hoping to learn more about the cultures of Africa. In early 1999, I checked out books about African history at my local library and read about the continent’s people and their traditions. Over time, I realized that much of the public information available lacked an African perspective. Despite the excellent studies, observations, and evaluations of Africa’s cultures conducted by many renowned scholars, I felt that a need existed: a greater emphasis on research in Africa from an African perspective, by Africans.

Life in Africa would be more accurately represented if somehow each unique ethnic group were able to present their distinct histories, stories, and cultures. From this idea, the original concept for AfricaWrites was born. In 2005, I visited Africa to research the rituals and ceremonies of Guinea, where I met Robert Saa Millimono, Mr. Moussa Kourouma, and Mr. Aboubacar Fall. They each shared my vision and passion for research in Africa and became the first members of the AfricaWrites staff. Since then, we’ve worked tirelessly as a Guinean non-governmental organization across the entire continent to record the sights, sounds, rituals and history of each and every African ethnic group.

/One/: Is your work not simply to chronicle present-day incidents and the lives of people today, but to share the histories and the cultures of peoples in Africa with the outside world, which may remain unaware of the diversity and richness of African culture?

PG: By sharing the richness of African cultural heritage through our website and via the African Cultural Studies Center of Kankan University, we hope to elevate the level of dialogue and understanding of African culture beyond many of the misconceptions present in modern, global popular culture and academia today. We chronicle events past and present in the hope of collectively, in conjunction with the respective ethnic groups involved, assemble a more accurate narrative of the peoples and cultures of Africa.

/One/: Why do you consider the work of AfricaWrites to be so urgent at present?

PG: Our work is a constant race against time. With each passing day, we lose an opportunity to learn from aging African elders and with them, opportunities to unlock many complex mysteries of the past. And we risk losing the ability to understand the complexities and historical details that inform Africa’s cultural present.

/One/: Please tell us about some of your cultural findings in South Sudan.

PG: The first cultural expedition of the AfricaWrites team in Sudan was in January of 2009. During that time we conducted studies of the rituals and ceremonies of the Ed Damzin and East Equatoria regions. A year later, during the summer of 2010, we returned to Sudan to study the rituals and ceremonies of West Equatoria and East Equatoria Sudan. Our research, limited in scope due to the rapidly evolving political climate within the country, focused on the Azande, Baka, N’gaams, Mundari, Acholi and Lago ethnic groups.

The findings of the AfricaWrites team, part of which were published on the AfricaWrites website, were presented in narrative form, mirroring the method by which the information was provided by Azande elders and powerful Azande traditional doctors, known as Abinza.

The Abinza gave insight into the rituals of decision-making faced by the kingdom under the rule of mighty King Buduwe and the process of “wasting of the water,” the Vu Ime, to appease powerful spirits and bring peace throughout the land to thwart impending disaster.

/One/: In South Sudan, have the Janjaweed and the forces of the North tried to expunge the languages, art, and culture of the peoples? How have they done this?

PG: In the past, forces allied with northern Sudan have sent militias—such as the Janjaweed-affiliated Ambororo, collaborating with Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)—to kill, maim, rape, and pillage South Sudan, and abduct child soldiers for the LRA army, sewing the seeds of instability and undermining the government of South Sudan. By initiating waves of sporadic and virtually unpredictable brutal killings and abductions, northern Sudan’s government-sponsored insurgents forced thousands to flee from their homes across the regions of Western Equatoria and Bahr Ghazal. Through these acts of ethnic cleansing, many longstanding communities and traditions were displaced, forcing evacuations and resettlement in other regions of South Sudan.

Ethnic cleansing breaks down cultural unity by dispersing ethnicities through violence. Those effected are forced to flee from their traditional, professional, and cultural environments to lesser concentrations of their ethnic groupings within larger and possibly more dominant cultures—without the resources of their prior environments, traditional physical, professional, and spiritual. Today, the government of South Sudan has since taken great measures to keep the public safe, deploying military forces to intercept and halt rebel activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ambororo.

/One/: Are the cultures that you interact with under threat politically, or more often are they simply changing or disappearing due to forces of modernization?

PG: Cultures are usually more complicated than we see them externally and are at  shaped in ways both big and small by their political environments. Although a lifestyle can change and practices can be altered, people generally adapt ancient or traditional ways of life to their continuously evolving surroundings and environments, physical, spiritual or political. Sometimes, if you look closely enough or have the patience to try, you will find that despite modern aesthetic changes, many of the ancient cultures of Africa survive intact beneath the aesthetics of modern dress or habitat. The politics of culture usually depend on the dominant religion and ethnic group of the nation. Established colonial religions have done little to halt the practice of traditional African spirituality.

In Italy, for example, it’s well known that many dialects of the Italian language gradually disappeared following the invention of the television. Television use is widespread and growing in Africa, but not to the same extent that it factors within Europe, the United States, and Asia. That said, as populations grow, shift, decrease or are replaced by a larger dominant culture, within Africa, sometimes language dialects merge or are enveloped by the dominate cultural group.

/One/: When various groups create works of art, how do the people see them and use them? In Western societies for instance, the more useful an object becomes, the less it is viewed as “art.” Instead, often art rests in white-walled museums, far from the concerns of daily life. How central is art to various African cultures?

PG: In Africa today, modern concepts of art coexist with the traditional functions of art. In many African cultures, art and functionality go hand-and-hand. We see this in the multiple forms and distinctive roles the various Nyao mask entities play, representing the Gule, Chitere and Songowe of Zambia. Mask entities revealed during Nyao rituals identify the level of initiation achieved by initiates within the Nyao society. And today, in southwestern Sudan, the finely crafted iron blade of the Mambere is carried by Azande chiefs and dignitaries during ceremonies that signify status within traditional Azande society. In these examples, the function of art is to identify the status and standard of the Kpinga bearer, representing marriage to a certain number of wives.

Art carries meaning in Africa through its ability to convey words and ideas across boundaries, touching all aspects of life and death. Virtually all traditional African art forms serve a particular function.  The Tambaa of the West African Sanana, for instance, is a weapon provided to village ancestors by the ancient Koma spirits of the land. The various decorative animal shapes each represent a particular spirit manifestation that may be summoned for battle or ritual purpose upon the command of its wielder. In this instance, art communicates directly with the ancient Koma and provides a gateway between the physical world and the spiritual world, inhabited by the Koma.

Ritual and dance bridge the boundaries between worlds of the spirit and the physical. In the example of the See Ze Lee, the rite of spiritual cleansing and purification of evil spirits, ritual and dance are used to command spirits for the purpose of healing. In contrast, other dances or rituals, such as the Zere, the dance of the chimpanzees performed by the Mano peoples, celebrate the living and endow participants with the pragmatic attributes of strength, stamina and courage, especially in war. The Zere dance symbolizes the Kan Kie Mia, a chimpanzee family native to the nearby Nimba mountains. Revered as the reincarnated ancestors of the Mano peoples, these creatures animate the most sacred rituals of Mano culture.

/One/: In the West, the individual enjoys privileged status and some believe that one can determine his or her destiny without relying upon help from others. How is the individual viewed in traditional African cultures?

PG: Although the dynamics may sometimes differ based on ethnicity, economic activity, religion and or local politics, there is a great emphasis on the sense of family, village, and community. There is the belief that one’s destiny and the destiny of his or her community are intertwined. Among the cultures that we have observed, the needs of the individual are usually second to those of community.

***

On many second dates, I am sitting in a noisy restaurant in New York City. The restaurant, of course, is never the same, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the inevitable questions about what my date and I see in our theoretical future. Before making any decision, I go through calculated, analytical steps, so the idea of planning for a life with someone comforts me. I’m not afraid to answer questions like where I see myself in ten years. But the question that unnerves me and, in turn, unsettles my date, is Do you see yourself having children? After learning from a few oversharing moments, I have formulated an answer that allows me to stay relaxed: If ever I was dumb enough to get pregnant, then yes, I could see myself having children. It’s not that I’m trying to be funny, or maybe I am, but because so many men expect my answer to be an unequivocal yes, they laugh. Others might be horrified, but it’s still the only genuine answer I can offer. It’s an answer that deflects the question without revealing my fear of having to hold my potentially dead newborn.

***

When my cousin Kelley, Michael’s younger sister, was five, Michael gave her a book after she had a nightmare. He said that whenever she woke up terrified, if no one was awake to console her, she could read the book to calm down, which was something he did as a child whenever he had a nightmare. Before the baby shower in the summer of 2009, before Sarah unwrapped gifts one by one, pausing every few minutes to rub her inflated belly, Kelley and I sat in a parked car at the end of a neighborhood cul-de-sac in Westchester. Kelley was going to pass Michael’s book down to River. She opened the book and read aloud the inscription she wrote earlier that morning, which she had waited to sign. Would she write Love your Godmother, “Aunt Kelley, Aunt Kel, or Aunt K?” We didn’t know what River would end up calling her. The two of us went back and forth for fifteen minutes until we decided on “Aunt K.”

***

My father’s family had a tradition where they spent part of their summer camping at Baxter State Park. In the mid-1950s, they started a message box that held journal entries, notes, poems, and letters that were written over the course of the trip. They placed them in a metal tackle box wrapped in plastic tarp and buried it near a tree by Kidney Pond. Almost forty years later, a family found the box after a heavy storm washed it up. They read each note, poem, and journal entry that members of my family had left and were so taken with the history that they made copies of each paper and left a bound folder with copies buried under the tree. Michael and Sarah had made the trip every year together since they started dating, but in the summer of 2009, before River was born, they stayed home, concerned about Sarah’s and the baby’s health. My family left notes anticipating the arrival of a new family member. Uncle Peter and Aunt Kate left notes about their excitement at becoming grandparents and at Michael and Sarah having a baby.

***

I sat hand –in hand beside my sister at Michael and Sarah’s reception, our eyes on Michael’s brothers while they made their toast to the newly married couple. It was three years before Sarah would get pregnant, and I couldn’t imagine a happier moment as they pushed through tears to describe how Sarah was the angel that pulled Michael from the rubble. At a wedding, it seemed cliché to most, but not everyone knew the battle with mental illness our family had endured. When Michael’s brothers called Sarah an angel, my sister squeezed my hand, as if in a silent prayer of gratitude for the joy that we were witnessing, which had seemed impossible for so long. In that moment, I naively believed the love between Michael and Sarah had cheated disease, that the fear and desperation from their past had suddenly lifted, and that their future would be clear.

****

The doctors said it helps for grieving families to spend time with the baby. In my mind, I am always entering this room for the first time:

A nurse leads Kelley and me into a private room, with bare walls painted the color of eggshells. There is one small window, with cheap plastic blinds shut three quarters of the way and pointing downward. It is always afternoon, always after River has died and the sun burns too brightly through the blinds, dousing the room in a soft haze. The nurse enters the room and Kelley drops my hand. She inhales, settling her breath as she opens her arms to the baby cocooned in a teal blanket. It seems like a cruel joke to be holding a dead baby. River becomes a Cabbage Patch doll. The nurse places the doll in Kelley’s arms with such care, as if he would crack if she dropped him. Kelley cradles him, slides off his thin knit hat to rub his head. Bent over, she presses lips near his ear, and tells him how she loves him; how he is the most beautiful boy she has seen. Before passing him to me, she whispers, lips touching ear, I wish I could have spent more time with you.

I look down at River, dead and heavier than I thought, in my arms. His forehead is frozen crinkled at the top, just like Michael’s I think. It gives him the strange appearance of being alive, but then I imagine a live baby—how the forehead crinkles when a baby yawns. Or when a baby cries. I picture River as he dies, mouth opened for air, screaming, tightened eye slits—the permanent wrinkle in his forehead, evidence. I trace my fingers over his pale arm, cold, lifeless to the touch; his skin tinted yellow with seeping stains, patched green like clumped algae. Bruising, I wonder, but will not confirm. His hair is wispy and brown like Sarah’s. His arm skin folds near the shoulder and elbows. I want to kiss him, but when I get close he smells clean and he disappears like a ripple in water; much too clean, like the smell of fluoride at a dentist’s office. Is this what he would taste like if I pressed my lips to his skin? I pass the dead baby back to Kelley.

***

On October 3, 2009, after hearing the news that River has died, I imagine Sarah in a hospital bed, eyes closed, blankets gathered in a hump around her belly—now empty but still protruding. I imagine how her insides feel with no extra heartbeat, no kick, no tumbling. Her breasts are swollen still with milk. What will happen to her milk?

I recall reading a memoir about a woman who was forced at sixteen to give her baby up for adoption. She wrote that afterward she did not internalize the tragedy of her loss until the moment when she had to squeeze her breasts and squirt her milk into a sink. I imagine, over and over, Sarah bent above a sink, her belly like a loose sack rolling over itself with so much skin in the way, Sarah squeezing her hardened breasts into a sink basin, no suckling, no teeth.

I can’t stand the image. Can’t stand the sight of Sarah, the bump in the sheets and her full breasts.

***

In my mind, I am always holding onto something, grasping at a shirtsleeve, trying to pull someone close. This is how I want to save Sarah.

My legs move as if I’m wading through tar-laden water as I search for someone in white. My legs are slow and my knees buckle and click with each step in the hospital hallway. I grab at a nurse and watch her face move from surprise to horror as I dig my fingernails into her forearm.

“What are you doing about her milk?”

“What?”

I tighten my grip around her arm. I can only make out the blurred edges of a face: peach, blonde hair, a smeared red lip, and maybe two dark spots for eyes.

“Her milk. Do something. She has no baby to drink it.”

“Calm down. It will be fine.”

“Her baby is dead. She still has milk in her breasts. You have to…”

“Calm down.”

“Just get it out! You need to do it before she wakes up! Just get rid of her milk!”

I can hear shuffling, feel the ground move below me. An arm tugs at my waist, walks me over to sit down somewhere, a cushioned chair beneath me. I tremble in arms, bury my head in a folded elbow that cradles and rocks me back and forth.

***

On the night before my twenty-sixth birthday, nearly two years after River’s death, I dreamed that I was caring for the Boliver children, who I used to babysit. They were two little girls, Louisa and Charlotte. In the dream I bathed them in a tub and took them out, one by one, wrapped up in pink terrycloth towels. I rubbed my hands frantically across their shoulders with a towel, drying them off as they giggled back at me. I smoothed my hands over their slicked-back hair, and braided it while they sat on the lid of the toilet. I pressed my lips against the tops of their heads, smelling their freshly shampooed hair, before leading them back to their bedroom. Before tucking them into bed, we had a pillow fight. At some point, and it may have been Charlotte’s idea, they asked me to stand on the floor and throw them onto the mattress, into their pillows. We piled pillows and stuffed animals into the center of their beds. When I picked each girl up to throw her, she landed on her feet, cracking her bony legs. The girls started crying and I could hear their bones cracking, but I kept throwing them on the bed, hoping their cries would turn into laughter. I didn’t stop until the comforter pooled with their blood and bones stuck sideways through broken skin. I woke up in a sweat, sure that I had killed them, sure that I had heard the crunch of their little bones.

***

On the first anniversary of River’s death, there was no tombstone to visit. Michael and Sarah had spread River’s ashes across a river near Kidney Pond at Baxter State Park. I imagined them driving in a 1994 navy Volvo, the backseat littered with pretzels and sandwich wrappers, Michael’s eyes fixed straight on the highway, Sarah gazing out the passenger window. When they approached the entrance to the park, they would pause. They would stop and read the inscription before entering the park and they would think of River: Man is born to Die, His Works are Short-lived, Buildings Crumble, Monuments Decay, Wealth Vanishes But Katahdin in All Its Glory Forever Shall Remain. They would get back in their car and think about their precious boy. They would camp out by the river near Kidney Pond, where his ashes had long settled into the sediment; had washed downstream, cupped the banks, flat shouldered against earth, and risen to the water’s surface, pressing palm to river.

—

Courtney Cullinan Robb

Courtney Cullinan Robb worked in finance for three years while living in New York City. Her work appears in Shadowbox and Linger Fiction, and is forthcoming in Apt. She is also the recipient of the Melanie Hook Rice Award in Creative Writing for work on her novel, and was nominated for the AWP Intro Journal Awards in nonfiction by Hollins University, where she attends the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing.

He felt the spasm of an anxiety attack. Mirsky was only fifty-five years old and this was another in a series of words that he’d been forgetting lately. About six months ago he noticed his wife, Elaine, was finishing his sentences for him. Mirsky had always been a fast thinker and a fairly rapid talker, so while he’d observed this behavior in other couples, it was a new experience for him. He laughed about it when it started with Elaine and even later when friends or co-workers began doing it to him too. No one thinks much of tossing a word into another’s sentence—it is a common phenomenon, and probably has been forever.

He remembered listening to a Bob and Ray bit called, The S.T.O.A.  The   S   l   o   w       T   a    l   k     e  r   s    o f     A   m    e  r    i     c    a.   In a piece Mirsky found hilarious, Ray was interviewed by Bob, and Bob, frustrated at Ray’s slow talking, continues trying to insert words to increase the pace. It doesn’t speed Ray up, and even after Bob says the slow-to-come word, Ray eventually says the same word when he gets around to it.

But at his age, when friends and relatives are talking about their parents’ dementia or Alzheimer’s, Mirsky has started to worry. Until this moment, with the sidewalk word, he hadn’t shared his thoughts with anyone. Putting his pen down, he reflected on what was happening, and why people were finishing his sentences. Mirsky thought that perhaps his voice trailed off, or he spoke slower as he came to the end of a sentence. Then he realized that he’d really and truly been having difficulty thinking of last words.

As Elaine walked by his office door and smiled at him, Mirsky waved her in. She had a great smile and used it often. “What do you call this part of the subdivision road?” he asked, pointing to the line on the plot plan. “The curb?” she asked without hesitation, as if he’d sprung a surprise quiz on her. “Why? Are you looking for another word for curb? Have you tried the thesaurus?”

She must have noticed the sad look on his face as he grabbed the pen and quickly wrote curb before forgetting it again. Elaine, his wife of almost thirty years, and proud that she was still able to fit into her prom gown, walked over and kissed the top of his head.

“I’m worried,” Mirsky said softly. “This isn’t funny anymore.”

“It never was,” she said.

“There’s something wrong.”

“You’re just overworked and tired,” she said, kissing his head again and throwing a little extra wiggle into her walk as she left the room. Mirsky knew her “follow me” wiggle when he saw it, so he quickly capped his pen, turned out the office light, and headed for the bedroom.

As he was walking by the kitchen, Mirsky saw a loaf of rye bread on the counter. He paused and tried to remember why he was standing outside the kitchen. Automatically his hand moved up and his thumb and forefinger massaged the creases between his eyes as if that would answer the question. How nice a salami sandwich would be, he thought, so he put together a dandy one with stone ground mustard, Muenster cheese, and a huge hunk of lettuce on that seeded rye. As he was opening a can of Coke, Elaine walked into the kitchen in her “take me” nightgown.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Bite?” Mirsky offered, holding out the sandwich.

—

Paul Beckman

Paul Beckman is a frequently published author of short stories and flash and micro fiction. He’s had two print collections and a novella published and several stories adapted as plays, and his work has been in several anthologies. He has been published in England, Australia, Germany, Canada, and New Zealand. He’s been a seven-time nominee for a Pushcart Prize. He earned his M.F.A. from Bennington College. Some publishing credits: Exquisite Corpse, Connecticut Review, Soundzine, 5 Trope, Playboy, Web del Sol, Long Story Short, The Scruffy Dog Review, Other Voices, Raleigh Review, Connotation Press, Microliterature, and The Molotov Cocktail. Stories upcoming in Abe’s Penny, Frostwriting, The Brooklyner, and The Boston Literary Review.

—

Valerie Chiang

Born in Taiwan in 1992, Valerie currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her interest in photography began when she joined the popular photo-sharing website Flickr. What started out as a mere hobby quickly progressed into a passion for fine art and fashion photography.

Photography is the medium Valerie uses as a method of escapism. With her camera, Valerie turns her ordinary, sometimes even banal, surroundings into something more magical and imaginative. Her innate ability to tell stories through images stems from a childhood spent daydreaming and an obsession with literature and cinema. By applying a mythical, almost enigmatic aesthetic to her work, Chiang incorporates elements of both realism and surrealism into her photographs, striving to offer viewers an opportunity to stretch their imaginations and form their own stories from the images. Drawing inspiration from creatives such as Wendy Bevan and Chris van Allsburg, Valerie shoots dreamscapes that reflect her love of the make-believe.

Marion, IN, August 7, 1930

Thomas and Abram were gone, but the lynch mob, as it happens sometimes,
stopped to pose beneath the tree, happy crows under the dangle, and I
wondered for a second if that was enough, if they were going to feel
if that was the eye and tooth they were hungry for that night. If like
the Sheriff, who was beginning to sweat his regret to the crowd, a
pardon might bleed me free, or at least to trial. But they rallied, and motherless,
I was chanted out of the sledge-hammered cell, lifted like a child.

Sometimes (and God forgive the vanity) the thought occurs that
I might know Christ, as he tred his last mile to the planks and nails. At least I
feel it when I dream of mine, and I’ve dreamt it often; my body, dragged at ruffian pace,
like if I could catch one white eye as I’m beaten towards the thirsty limbs,
a world might be won. This could have been his last disappointment as
motherless, our steps were pelted by fury. I was courting angels,
child, before the posse stalled. Each day I button my collar, I know my neck is rare.

—

Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady  is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Putnam, April 2008). His second book,Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985; in 2001 Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work in theater includes the libretto for an opera, “Running Man,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999. His play, “Brutal Imagination,” won Newsday’s Oppenheimer award in 2002.

In 1996 Eady co-founded, with writer Toi Derricotte, the Cave Canem summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. More than a decade later, Cave Canem is a thriving national network of black poets, as well as an institution offering regional workshops, readings, a first book prize, and the summer retreat.

Eady has been a teacher for more than twenty years, and is now a professor at Notre Dame University.

A talking woman was on the screen but they couldn’t hear what she was saying because Delores had turned the sound down. The woman’s hair was like a bubble that encased her head, with a large curl exactly in the center of her forehead.

“I think her hair is terribly cute,” Ed said. “Maybe you could fix yours that way.”

“She’s a whore,” Delores said. “I’d rather die than look like her.”

“I wonder how she gets that curl to stay just so,” Ed said. “It must be glued in place.”

The woman on the TV stood up and moved to a microphone and waited for the band to play an intro and then she began singing. She opened her mouth all the way until you could see saliva and the fillings in her back teeth.

“It’d help if you’d turn up the sound,” Ed said. “Then we could know what she’s singing about.”

“I don’t want to hear that whore,” Delores said.

“How do you know she’s a whore?”

“Just look at her!”

Ed picked up the newspaper and looked at the TV listings, leaning forward to read by the light of the TV.

“There’s a beauty pageant on at 9,” he said. “Do you want to watch that?”

“Why would I want to watch a bunch of skinny whores parading across a stage in bathing suits? They look completely stupid.”

Ed flipped channels until he stopped on an old western. He always liked westerns. A bunch of cowboys were riding furiously in a cloud of dust across the floor of the desert. “Here’s something good,” he said.

“They look like a bunch of whores to me.”

“They’re all men! How can men be whores?”

She snorted, forcing cigarette smoke out her nose. “If I have to tell you that,” she said, “you don’t need to know!”

She switched channels until she came to a movie musical in which a man was tap dancing in front of a backdrop of a beach with palm trees. He was playing a ukulele and singing while a woman wearing a grass skirt did a hula dance all around him.

“Oh, how I hate anything with dancing in it,” Delores groaned. “Just look at those fools! Did you ever see anybody look so silly in all your life?”

“Maybe they wouldn’t look so silly if you would turn up the sound so we could hear what’s going on,” Ed said.

“Why would I want to hear that crap? Just look at that silly whore shake her hips! She ought to be ashamed of herself. And look at that man! I always did hate tap dancing! How could anybody think that kind of dancing is cute?”

“Everybody’s got their own tastes,” Ed said.

“Well, thank goodness I don’t have a taste for crap like that!”

She changed channels again and stopped on a horror movie.

“Oh, would you just look at that?” she said. “That silly whore is just sitting there. The monster is two feet behind her and she doesn’t even know he’s there. Is she deaf or something? If there was a monster anywhere in the house, don’t you think you’d know about it? How stupid can people be?”

“Maybe her senses are dulled,” Ed said. “Maybe she’s a nurse and she just came off a long and difficult night shift.”

The woman, realizing the monster was behind her, jumped up and turned and faced him. At first she thought it was her boyfriend playing a trick on her, but when she realized it was the monster she raised both of her fists to her face and opened her mouth all the way and screamed. Then she fainted and the monster picked her up in his arms and carried her out of the house and across the lawn and into the woods.

“Ha ha!” Delores said. “That silly whore is getting just what she deserves. Anybody as silly as she is deserves to be carried off by the monster.”

“Turn the sound up so we can see what the monster does to her,” Ed said.

“I don’t want to hear that crap! I can’t stand it!”

“I like it,” Ed said.

The monster carried the still-unconscious woman to his lair deep in the woods. Her hair had turned white in the two minutes since she had first seen him. He took her into a room that looked like a dungeon and just as he started to put her limp body on a table she regained consciousness and started screaming again and hitting his chest with her fists. He threw her down and locked her in while she was still screaming and pulling at her hair.

“I hope he kills her,” Delores said, lighting another cigarette.

When the woman’s boyfriend discovered she had been abducted, he rounded up about two hundred men from the countryside. Carrying axes and guns and lighted torches, the angry mob set off through the town to go to the monster’s lair to rescue the woman. Leading them was the stalwart young boyfriend, looking dashing in cape and fedora.

While Ed and Delores had been watching, they were unaware of what was going on outside. A thunderstorm had developed and announced itself with a deafening clap and a brilliant flash. In a moment, rain and wind were lashing the house.

Just as Ed started to turn up the sound on the TV, the electricity went off and they were plunged into darkness.

“I’ll light some candles,” Ed said.

“Don’t bother,” Delores said. “I’m going to bed. I’ve seen enough crap for one night.”

When they were in bed, Delores, unable to sleep, lay and listened to the wind and the rain, punctuated by thunder that shook the house to its foundation.

“What if the electricity doesn’t come back on right away?” Delores asked.

“We’ll eat cold food,” Ed said.

“No, I don’t mean that. What if we’re not able to watch TV? What do people do when they can’t watch TV?”

“Count their blessings.”

“Ed?”

“What?”

“Did you lock the back door?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Will you go and check?”

“No. I will not go and check. I don’t much care if the back door is locked or not.”

“Well, I don’t much care, either, then.”

She rolled over on her side and covered up her head. She thought she would go to sleep right away, but the thought of the back door being left unlocked was vaguely disquieting and kept her from surrendering herself to sleep. What if somebody came in to rob the house? That wasn’t very likely—she and Ed had nothing of real value; anybody wanting to rob houses would be sure to pick one with a more promising outward appearance.

She heard a thump in the kitchen and looked over at Ed to see if he heard it too; he didn’t move so he was obviously asleep, a lifeless lump underneath a pile of blankets. When she heard the thump again, she knew she’d better get up to investigate, but the bed was so warm and comfortable she couldn’t bring herself to swing her legs over the side and put her feet on the cold floor and walk all that way into the kitchen in the dark and find that the back door was locked after all.

With a flash of lightning and a rumble of thunder she awoke, not realizing she had been asleep. She looked at the ceiling in confusion and then turned her head toward the doorway to the bedroom and saw standing there a seven-foot-tall monster with massive shoulders. She was unable to see the monster’s face, but she knew he was looking right at her. He approached the bed and picked her up as easily as if she had been a rag doll.

He carried her out of the house into the rain and, although she still couldn’t see his face, he seemed strangely familiar in a way she wouldn’t have been able to explain. She didn’t struggle but found herself clinging to the lapel of his jacket. She nestled into his arms and, except for the rain pelting her in the face, she was quite comfortable.

She didn’t know where the monster was taking her or why, but it didn’t seem to matter. She only wanted to get out of the rain. Chances were very good that he wouldn’t kill her and when he got what he wanted—whatever that was—he would probably let her go.

If she lived through the ordeal and made it back home, she would have a story to tell. She would be in demand for the first time in her life. Newspapers and magazines and, most of all, TV, would want her to tell them what it had been like to be carried off by the monster. She would be the woman with the bubble hairdo opening her mouth as wide as if would go to sing a song for an appreciative studio audience. She would sing either Bye, Bye, Blackbird or The Sunny Side of the Street, exactly as she had always wanted to. And when she finished her song and took her bows, people would have tears in their eyes—tears of love—only for her.

—

Allen Kopp

Allen Kopp lives in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, with his two cats, Tuffy and Cody. His fiction has appeared in several publications including Skive magazine, Midwest Literary Magazine, Superstition Review, Black Lantern Publishing, A Twist of Noir, Abandoned Towers magazine, Bartleby-Snopes, The Legendary, Danse Macabre magazine, Best Genre Short Stories Anthology #1, Berg Gasse 19, ISFN Publishing, and Santa Fe Writers’ Project Journal.