September

To show: On the first day of workshop the first thing the professor explains is that in true literature there are no happy endings. There can be bittersweet endings. There can be tragicomic endings. Most certainly there will be sad endings.

To tell: No gets out of this program alive.

October

Struggle with duality.

You must open up your soul. Your heart must be unlocked and eviscerated, mined for nuggets of truth and sorrow, the bloody remains left for carrion birds. Every memory must be recalled, molested, touched in unwanted ways. Here’s an important lesson in contrast: there is a sinister meaning under every sunny image, a sunny meaning under every sinister image.

You must harden your soul. Every secret put to paper will be scrutinized. Your classmates will snicker. In red ink will appear the words, Fake! Not buying it! So pointless! You must bare your teeth like a cougar, drip saliva onto the page, and rewrite.

November

In seminar, the professor poses the question, What is the duty of the writer?

A blonde woman from Texas speaks loudly, It is to marry art and commerce into something that the public will buy in mass quantities.

You love her more than anyone else in the program. In workshop, she gives you flippant, derisive comments on the stories you submit. What your stories really need, she writes in her responses, is more space aliens. Why don’t you do more space aliens? When you speak to her after class, who are you and how did you get from there to here? she blows cigarette smoke in your eyes, the sting of it excruciating, exquisite.

Baby, oh baby. Yes. Material.

December, January

Go home for winter break. Get stoned by yourself on the balcony of the second floor of your house, exhaling blue smoke into the blue twilight. Under the glow of Christmas lights, you feel five again, loose limbed and pliant, stupidly giddy with the scent of pine in the air. Smile in your sleep. On New Year’s Eve you kiss no one, not even your own ass goodbye as you head back to school, back to that frozen urban tundra, back to that workshop.

February, March

A classmate introduces you to post-modernism.

It is a disembodied fist on a dirt road, index finger protracted, pointing towards the sunset, like a compass, like an accusation.

It is a broken light bulb lodged in a ceiling too high to reach.

It is during workshop when the woman from Texas dumps the contents of her purse onto the table, a compact, a tube of balm, a wallet as fat and heavy as a brick, faded receipts and gummy bills fluttering down like dirty secrets, her screaming across the room, This, this is what your stories look like!

April

It is the cruelest month.

In the darkness, in the glow of your laptop, read the news and expand your grief:

Bacteria and viruses are getting smarter. The sun is more cancerous. The weather is apocalyptic. A famous author publishes a book about people eating, gasp, other people.

Everywhere, across borders and skins, people are dying unjust deaths.

When people ask about your well-being say, Research.

May

The best you have: A man falls asleep and falls in love with his dream, unsure of which world he has created and which he has left behind. It’s lofty and indulgent and narcissistic and the worst part is, you fucking love it. Call it a memoir.

June, July, August

Back home, your father parades you to his friends like prized livestock, like rare jewelry. My son is going to be a doctor, he says, and when you try to correct him, try to explain the dull intricacies of your degree, this Master of Fine Arts, he pinches you in the side.

Later you tell him, I’m not going to be a doctor, dad.

What? he says. Something inside him deflates. His face begins to melt right before you. Wait, he says. What?

Your mother says little except when she peers suspiciously at the bags under your eyes, asking, Are you on drugs?

Your friends don’t recognize you anymore. Across bar tables and in the passenger seats of speeding vehicles they look like they are mourning. Dude, they whisper, so that’s what it’s like to get off drugs.

September

To show: Who is this person, this character, this narrator, now? What place, a place full of bear traps stuffed with blue cotton candy, are you headed to? When will that pinprick of white light, when will it expand into something resembling salvation? Where are you going with this? Why did you do this to yourself?

To tell: I don’t know how.

JONATHAN PADUA recently completed an MFA in Fiction at NYU, where he received the New York Times Fellowship. His work has appeared in pindeldyboz, Fugue, and other places.

Arturo was so much happier before the revolution. And this is how he should be remembered, performing every night of the week at La Huchina, two shows, some nights three. Old regime, new regime. It didn’t matter to Arturo. His politics ran only as deep as the acne scars on Generalissimo’s brutal face. Arturo poked fun, mimicked, took potshots from the low stage. Then he would retreat and mock himself for three quarters of an hour. His lack of height. His wide ass. His crooked teeth. Arturo flopped onto the stage and pulled hard at the fine hair on his temples, wiped the glossy sweat from his bald pate.

We don’t need another revolution, he’d say. The old one still smarts.

Draw it mild, his agent counsels without disagreeing. You want to be a captive performer in buggerer’s bay?

Fascism can be funny. But you have to tiptoe. Arturo makes a joke about the waterboarding—pretending to confuse the term with wakeboarding. Tiptoe.Tiptoe.

-o-

After the late show, Arturo gets a note from the Minister of Public Affairs and International Relations: Topical, thought-provoking jokes are welcome by the new regime. But take care not to compromise the island’s re-blooming tourism. Don’t you want to be the face on all of the colorful brochures, Arturo?

But what wit can stay shut up with parody the ruling power? Arturo wants to paint a wordless still life of the puppets and seize the island with laughter.

Arturo labels the Generalissimo’s anti-gay campaign as the fight of the fairies. His twelve-piece band plays a leaping tune. Arturo tiptoes girlishly across the stage, then implies in so many words that this battle originated internally for the Generalissimo. Tiptoe. Tiptoe.

Americanos. Canadians. Germans. The happy-go-lucky Dutch. And lately the Irish, who tend to empathize, perhaps, too much. All can generally be described as old but mobile. Men too old to veer from their vacation habits, they come to the little lemon-shaped island with half a million mature lemon trees and half a million carefree women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. They love to laugh at Arturo each spring. They love to see his perfecto impression of the Generalissimo. Without it, their vacations would be incomplete.

Arturo: Lemons are the chief export. Next come round asses and pretty tits.

Arturo is a good son to his aging mother. Forget about the early woes, the beatings that she attended to. All the new foreign coins go to his Madre. Arturo calls her his banko securo. She’d chase away any daring robber with her pistola breath.

Dig a hole, Arturo, she advises. Do it before I die, she says, crossing herself quickly. Dig it deep. And in her prayers Arturo’s mother says, Lord, I will forgive these women of today who have a higher tolerance for filth, but I better know that they wash between their legs to make a clean place for my Arturo.

Arturo to the cute touristas: Come with me. Arturo will teach you the native tongue.

The Generalissimo shares with Arturo the same taste in wristwatches, sunglasses, and young chicas. But when Arturo scores first with one the imported showgirls, the Generalissimo must not know. Still, as the Generalissimo sits at his table with the leggy blond dancer from Texas, Arturo lets his audience in on the secret of his seduction with a nearly undetectable wink right in front of the Generalissimo. Arturo can wink with both eyes at the same time.

Arturo, so sly, smooth: I only taught her to dance the lemon merengue.

Arturo prepares for Ms. Texas a double-rum-lemonita, unsweetened. She sips from a thin straw and her face craters with a painful looking pucker, involving not just her mouth but her eyes. Two days later, she is gone, gone, gone. The Generalissimo has no comment for the press.

The right friends for the island and the right enemies, too. Good rum. A Coca-Cola bottling plant running three shifts a day. The blessed lemons. It’s like they tell the little league ballers: You can’t walk off this island, slugger. Arturo swings away, no matter the count. Ball four is not an option. Always the big swing. Always thinking homerun.

A good tux but ill-fitting, comically snug. Arturo’s passable singing voice:

If you lose the coup the joke will be on you.

And all of your pretty sisters, and their sisters’ sisters, too.

Under his breath, with the microphone behind his back, Arturo sings another couplet:

And all your cousins’ uncles and the man who sells you bread.

Everyone who ever hugged you—a bullet in the head.

Tiptoe. Tiptoe.

At the end of his act, Arturo bites hard into lemon after lemon, shows his sour face to the audience. This is my country, he says. This is my flag.

WILLIAM WALSH is the author of Without Wax: A Documentary Novel (Casperian Books) and Questionstruck (Keyhole Press). His story collection, Ampersand, Mass., is forthcoming from Keyhole Press in spring 2010.

Interrobang Magazine: I understand you started painting later in life. What inspired you? What continues to inspire you?

Jim Fuess: I spent grades 7, 8, 11 and 12 in Rome, immersed in Medieval and Renaissance art history. We got to see the real art with teachers who treated us as adults. Because I’ve had essential tremor in my hands since birth I assumed that I could not be an artist. I was going to be an academic. When I was thirty, a lady friend left for Switzerland and gave me a pile of paint and canvas and said “play.” I’ve now been painting for 35 years. I love art. It’s what I do. I paint, I write about art, I’ve run the New Art Group (www.newartgroup.com) for 18 years and I curate art shows.

IM: Can you talk a little bit about your technique and how that’s developed?

JF: I work with liquid acrylic paint on canvas. Most of my work is abstract, but there are recognizable forms and faces in a number of the paintings. I am striving for grace and fluidity, movement and balance. I like color and believe that beauty can be an artistic goal. There is whimsy, fear, energy, movement, fun and dread in my paintings. A lot of my work is anthropomorphic. There is interaction between abstract forms and forms that represent animals and humans. The shapes seem familiar. The faces are real. The gestures and movements recognizable.

The painting technique involves using squeeze bottles with different viscosities of liquid paint, two brands of paint, and a number of interchangeable nozzles of different apertures.

IM: Many of your paintings a macro quality about them, the sort of abstraction that comes from viewing something either very close or very far away. Confrontation, Schizophrenia, War #2 — they all have this naturalistic feel, like aerial photography of a littoral zone. By contrast, “Evolution” looks like something you might observe under a microscope. Is that a conscious decision on your part?

JF: One of the fun parts of what I paint is that one painting can look like it is underwater or outer space. They can seem to be both a large or very small image. In Schizophrenia, the contrast is between the huge clouds overhead and the screaming double-white face in the foreground. Confrontation is what leads to the chaos of War. It seemed appropriate that they should be in stark, contrasting black and white.

IM: When you say “confrontation is what leads to the chaos of war,” are you drawing a line between those pieces (Confrontation and War#2)? Can we read them as a loose narrative?

JF: The series goes – Confrontation 1&2 – Attack of the Furies – War 1&2

IM: The names seem to help conjure the desired effect – “War”, “Schizophrenia,” etc., but others, like “Abstract 254″ don’t give any hints. Is there something specific you try to evoke in your pieces? Or do you take a more laid-back approach to how others view your art?

JF: I try to get the viewer to look into the images by giving them a hint, however some of the images are just abstract. This gets the viewer involved and slows down their viewing process. I also want them to have fun and play. Some titles come when the work is finished; some take a while. I was at a show when two older ladies looked at one of my images and said, “look at the two poodles” and by God they were there. They created the title.

IM: You’ve talked about form and movement, and I think there’s a very kinetic aspect to your work. A sense of motion, collision, accretion. How important is the communication of movement and tension in your pieces? And how much of your composition is planned at the outset and how much is spontaneous (and is that important)?

JF: I like movement, collision, or relationships between forms and images. It makes for energy. Some of the images such as the flower series are static. Some of the composition is planned but I’ve learned that a painting can take on a life of it’s own. I don’t fight it.

IM: Anything else you’d like to add?

JF: Over the past two-and-a-half years I have had the privilege of having over 100 images of my work in 73 print and literary sites. I would like to thank the literary community for their selfless, untiring and mostly unpaid devotion to their dream and their help to others.

IM: Thank you, Jim.

JF: Thank you.

- Interview for Interrobang by Christopher Curley

Henry King always worked his own garden. Henry King worked his garden everyday; he was working it this morning. It was just now ten o’clock and already over ninety degrees. Henry King was sweating. The highway toward Macon went past his farm. The traffic on it stayed heavy; this congestion increased the burden of heat with by adding brute noise.

In recent years suburban housing developments had started closing in. Clusters of large houses, of three thousand square feet or more, set on treeless tracts of at least two acres that had been parts of peoples farms were standing within three miles of Henrys’ land. The folks in these houses didn’t farm; Henry didn’t know what they did. There were two golf courses built in the county in five years. There never had been one in the county. The houses and golf places belonged to new people.

Henry King kept working steady; he was close to being done. His heavy breathing and the cuts of his hoe made a sort of rhythm for his thinkings.

He had always lived here, except for the war, when he’d crossed the ocean, seen it, and the killing in France. Henry had always lived on the same land, his thirty acres, in the same house that had started out over a hundred years ago as an overseer’s cabin on a plantation. He’d bought his land, the first land anyone in his family had owned, with a government loan he was able to get when he came home from the war. The last few of the once strong family who’d built the plantation had sold off the place in pieces when the young father, the great-grandson of the man who started it, who’d inherited the place, didn’t come home from the war. With the young major lost, the operation was left with only a sad young wife, the dead man’s mother and her unmarried sister to try to run it. That family took the money from the sale of their land and went to live in the widows’ fathers’ home in Savannah. Henry felt sad for them; but it was his and his kind’s only big and best chance to not work shares until they died.

Some of his kin had gone to Chicago and Detroit to work in plants; they seldom ever came back home after they left. His cousin had been able to go to work for the railroad; he lived in Atlanta. Henry had been all the way to France. He’d come home. He’d gotten the land, improved and expanded his cabin with rough oak sawmill slab he trimmed square with a handsaw. Henry added a wide porch; it was a place for his family to sit in hot evenings. After his first good season of cotton, he’d put on a new galvanized metal roof. It’d lasted. He’d bought a big cast iron fat-man stove the next fall and with the original fireplace, the place was warm enough for his family. The next pair of good cotton years, with selling his produce, and help-work on some neighbors’ farms, paid for the glass windows and screens he put in with Sam his oldest, and young Oscar helping.

The year after the war ended, when he got his place, he’d gotten electric lights, then a Frigidaire. The same well from plantation days had always stayed sweet with plenty enough for him and his. He always fed his family. His vegetable gardening was famous. Henry built a smoke house and made hams and bacon from hogs he slaughtered late each fall
after frost. Henrys’ boys and Louise never missed having a Christmas.

Until this past year, Henry had farmed. For the last four years young Oscar helped Henry make the crop. Oscar had helped out to make Henry happy. Oscar was married now, gone to trade school in Macon and learned air conditioning work, and just didn’t have much heart for farming.

While he and Oscar had worked it, they’d put half the land in soybeans; made rotation with cotton, with both crops they’d made pretty good.

Henry had gotten older. This year, Henry made a lease deal with a big farmer who had put in soybeans. Like always, Henry still made his garden himself, but since his children were married and gone off the place, his wife dead, most of it, went to his children’s families. Henry figured as soon as he was gone; his children would get together, talk a little around someone’s table, and then sell his place to a house developer. He didn’t think his children and their families would
be able to resist cash.

His wife had been dead ten years. She’d always delighted keeping the bare dirt yard swept. She’d sweep the yard twice each day; once right after breakfast and again in late afternoon. Her broom left a pattern in the red sand. The rounded strokes of her tied brush broom had looked like banks of clouds in the sky. Louise used to say clouds in the sky were the resting beds of the angels of tired people who’d got to heaven.

With Louise dead, he could now eat anything he wanted. He fixed and ate as much as he had of what he wanted. Mostly, Henry baked a pan of cornbread in the morning, ate it with butter and the preserves Oscars’ young wife made special for him. His favorite food was watermelon from his garden. He grew a big patch each summer. He mostly ate melon for his meals at midday and night. He loved the big ripe Congo melons, their smell and their rich deep green color. To himself, he thought of their smell especially after he cut one open, as a smell of rain and ground. To him, the smell referenced fertility as potent as the smell between a woman’s legs.

Now, he didn’t miss Louise; he’d stopped the aching of her going long ago. Oscars’ young wife did his laundry, but Henry wouldn’t let her clean up his house; they had fights about that. He’d always treasured his alone with his mind time. He was now able to keep to himself and he relished his thinking time being free of the distractions he had with the duties of a young family man making his way. These days’ whole worlds, ways, and whys came to his mind in sudden and surprising ways. Sometimes his mind time was as vivid as when he’d been spoken to by the rattlesnake.

He’d been real sick from the snakebite. He’d nearly died. He’d been delirious several days. Doctor Williams, and the man Stone, whose hay he’d been bailing that day, had got him through it. They’d told about his being delirious and they thought him a sure goner. His living through was like a transforming story from the Bible.

After the snakebite, he’d been out for a good three hours in the hottest time of the day, in the field beside the tractor where he’d fallen. His employer, Stone, found him. Henry was taken home to die. Stone had stayed on the porch at Henrys’ house waiting with the doctor Stone had sent and paid for, until Dr. Williams decided Henry had wrestled down
the snakes’ evil and had started to get clear of the poison. The two men told Henry his getting out of the bed was as big a miracle as Lazarus being freed from the grave.

They’d told him about the snakebite, but Henry remembered the all of it. He remembered how the rattler struck him from out of a bale of new hay and through the time his fever passed and he could sit up in his bed. He remembered tearing the big snake, a gleaming young one, but a good five footer, it hung from the side of his face, it bit his hand as he freed himself, but he managed to pitch it away from him. He’d watched it crawl beneath the fence. It had coiled, and sat there watching him.

While Henry lay in the sun, beside the tractor, the snake had spoken to him in voices as clear as a choir. Henry King remembered all this. It came in the dreams he’d had when he was sleeping off the snake poison. Over his years, on other nights the dreams from the snake still came. Once, in a gun battle in France against a German tank crew, Henry had heard a voice speak to him, but he hadn’t recognized the voice. That was before Henry was snake bit.

Stone and Stone’s friend, Liege McCondell, had found Henry by the tractor, they’d said they’d searched, but there was no rattler still around. Henry King knew the snake had stayed close and never left because he’d seen him, and heard the songs. The words of the snakes’ songs told Henry how the rattler had put a mark on him; it informed Henry King of the space in the dreams between the two of them.

Both Stone and Dr. Williams always told Henry King he was the luckiest man, black or white, rich or poor, in all of Georgia. The snake poison had left crescent shaped scars on the left side of Henrys’ face, taken Henrys’ left eye, withered that hand, and stolen the good use of his left arm; but Henry was stronger with just his right arm than most men ever were whole. Stone, Henrys’ white friend, and sometime employer, who’d fought the Germans in World War I, came to see him a lot, when they took a drink, Stone liked to say “not even the Nazi German bastards could kill Henry King the mighty man from Georgia. Who’d broke their backs and caused their widows to weep and orphan children cry when he was sent by our Living God to punish them.”

When his kids and grandkids were little ones, the babes would like to touch his snake marks and hold on to his withered hand when Henry would tell his stories about how he knew snakes spoke and carried messages between the worlds. Once, Louise had challenged him, saying such talk was the Devils’ words. Henry had blasted her with “I heard it speak wisdom as clear as hearing a bell rung telling me about the world from the hand of the Good Lord…it be louder than any preacher could shout.” After the snakebite, Henry King never attended church meetings. He knew nothing he could hear there could match or gain beyond what he had heard his day in the sun blasted field.

This day got hotter. He figured the summer would get much worse. There’d been a two-year drought in his part of Georgia. Every one he knew was worn out from it. Brush fires broke out all over, and irrigation on big farms was pushed hard; it wasn’t even deep July, never mind August. He’d hauled up hose and a diesel pump to his well for the precious watermelons and garden.

It was at the hottest yet when he found the third dead cat. He’d found one two days ago, another a week before that. His cats were members of a large inbred tribe started years ago by Louise who was crazy on cats. She’d kept getting more. Henry thought strays crossed all of Georgia and South Carolina to find his place. With Louise gone, they were his best company. He liked them; he fed them every morning. He’d cook them table meat pieces and bought sardines for them. He’d admire any new kittens or welcome a new stray.

Henry had fondness for the cats but would not baby about them. If one got killed on the road, or by quick dogs, or a snake, they just got killed. There were a lot of things in the world waiting on the unlucky. But losing three in a week was a rare odd thing and Henry King was looking out. The third dead cat looked like the other two. This one had died in a hollow place in his firewood stack. The head was swollen just like the first two he’d found under the stairs going up to his front porch. There were no marks or wounds on the swollen small bodies.

His morning was wearing out. He kept working his garden. He was almost done on the patch of watermelons. He’d decided on a particular fine big melon to pick for himself later this afternoon to have for tomorrow. He’d put it in his Frigidaire so it’d get ice water cold.

When he’d started to chop a thick clump of grass, he heard the highbuzz. His hoe cut was in motion. The diamondback was as big as Hell’s Own King and Keeper. It was dusted pale gray- pink on its’ fat sides from the red dirt, it sat in a wide coil like the mooring ropes on the deck of the ship he’d taken to France in nineteen forty- three, was better than seven feet long and was as thick as Henrys’ right arm.

Henry knew it. The rattler had spoken before to Henry King and was talking again in the same voices the words Henry had learned in Stone’s hayfield. At the moment before it struck, the snake locked eyes with Henry King the mightiest man in Georgia. It hit Henry high above his knee, recoiled, and cocked back to come again. As it severed the neck, the impact of Henry’s blow right behind the great creatures’ head shattered the hoe handle.

The snake was as dead as if it had been a man shot through the head. Henry staggered down cracking open the pretty melon he’d decided would be tomorrows’ meal. His leg burned like it’d been pumped full of flaming gasoline. The fire was grabbing him. The burning of it was filling up the inside of his chest and ripping his heart.

A memory picture ran into Henrys’ mind of a day in France, of some German men he’d helped kill, he had won a medal. The enemy soldiers were wrapped in fire; Sergeant Henry King and two other men had blown up their tank. When the Germans tried to escape the wreck, they were aflame from burning fuel. Those solders burned as they ran. Henry remembered the hard feel of the recoil of his rifle from each pull on the trigger. He saw them now. Henry had killed each man and Henry King had killed the diamondback; sadness for it all crossed him. Henry hissed, “That’s all… it’s certain… there ain’t a place for two old fellows in this world now time days. Soon Stone… and McCondell… Doctor Williams gone all them peoples in France… gone now…all of us be goin’ away…”

He stood up tall, tried to lift the huge wonderful snake over his head, but it weighed too much. Henry could not get the full length of the great rattler clear of the ground. The crushed neck remained in the red dust near the severed thick wide triangle head. For the few seconds it hung lifted by the tail in Henry Kings’ strong right hand, the diamondback throbbed and thrashed like a whip being cracked by a mindless moon- blinded child stirring up dust in the middle of patch of brilliant green, fat, and exceptionally sweet-fleshed watermelons where Henry King fell with his wonderful diamondback dead beside him. For only a moment Henry King might have noticed feathery beds of rainless clouds in a searing bright sky.

E. SMITH GILBERT is a pseudonym for a writer living in Tennessee. He is retired from a long business career. He has recently become a writer for documentary film.

OK: your character is named Jennifer. Is she a heroine? To be determined. Let’s see where she takes us. Could we make her a superhero? Literary fiction about a superhero? Has that been done? Look into this. Perhaps for another story. Perhaps this one, if it’s a page one rewrite.

OK, Jennifer. Jennifer is Roman Catholic. A Roman Catholic superhero? I can’t shake that idea. Perhaps that means something. But will it sell?

Back to Jennifer: a Roman Catholic Nurse. Side note: superhero could be The Nurse. Tracks down crooks, treats them afterwards. It’s like how Batman doesn’t kill his victims, taken to an extreme degree. Batman in white. Deadly with a clipboard. This could go somewhere.

But, oh, Jennifer: let’s go. Roman Catholic Nurse. Not a single mother. Single mothers have been done, are done. We don’t need to go there. Marriage is done, too. This is literature for women who don’t have kids. This is an untapped market. This will sell.

So, yes, Jennifer – you are single. You will remain single. You’re not even looking for love. Everyone’s looking for love these days. Love is done. Love is out. Side note: don’t be so upfront about this in the text. People will think you’ve just recently watched Down With Love. You haven’t. But privately: this is Down With Love, but she doesn’t find love in the end. Remember, Jennifer, you’re not even looking for love.

All right, so we have our Single Roman Catholic Nurse who isn’t looking for love. She’s not gay, either. Everyone’s making their characters gay. You’re not gay, Jennifer. Isn’t it possible for a woman to not be looking for love from a man or a woman? What happened to those women? Jennifer, you will be the Emma for that kind of woman.

Speaking of – gosh, what’s the title? You’re Emma, but you’re not going to be “Jennifer.” That’s bland. This needs to sell. I can’t call it “The Nurse.” That’s the superhero literary fiction title. Which, let’s be honest, may still happen. You punch a bank robber in the mouth than take his temperature. I need to keep that, remember that. That will sell.

But Jennifer, back to our title: what’s our title? You’re a Single Roman Catholic Nurse who isn’t looking for love from a man or a woman. That’s too long to be a title, but maybe it’s a subtitle. Short stories never have subtitles. Perhaps that’s my in – John Carroll presents the first New Yorker short story with a subtitle. That’s bound to go on the wire, right? Papers will pick that up. People pick up papers. People buy New Yorkers. This is our business plan.

We have a title, Jennifer. “Jennifer: A Single Roman Catholic Nurse Who Isn’t Looking for Love From a Man or a Woman.” Coming to the New Yorker soon.

But what are you doing, Jennifer? The title almost begs the question. We’ve established so much. The reader is about to skip the short story. But then they wonder: if you’re not looking for love, what are you doing? Now we have them, Jennifer. Excellent work.

Let’s get back to it, though: Where are you? You’re not at the hospital. That’s too predictable. Sure, you’re not looking for love, but you’re not some workaholic. Why would someone even think that? That’s entirely predictable, Jennifer, and if anything, we’ve established that you’re not predictable.

I know: you’re in Duane Reade. Yes, New York. Don’t worry: two years ago, New York was predictable. Now everyone’s getting their characters out of New York. Let’s bring them back to New York. You’re bringing them back, Jennifer. You’re in Duane Reade.

What are you doing in Duane Reade, Jennifer? You’re not looking for love. The stock boy in your aisle is unattractive. In fact, he’s wearing a wedding band. Off-limits. You’re no homewrecker. How could you be? You’re not looking for love, remember.

You’re looking at condoms, though. That’s right, condoms. You’re not looking for love. Not even for sex. You’re not one of those, Jennifer. No, here’s what you do: you make balloon animals with condoms. It’s your quirk. Every character needs a quirk. I think they’re calling it twee, Jennifer. Condom balloon animals: this is twee.

Come to think of it, though, do condoms present too much of an edge? Children read newspapers for the comics. What if they come across our wire story? What if they pick up a New Yorker? Will this scar them? Is this controversial to be twee? I think we’ve veered off into dark comedy, Jennifer.

No more condoms. You’re looking at pens. You collect pens of every color. You find a navy blue pen. A lot of people probably don’t even know that navy blue pens exist. It’s twee. It’s informative. That’s the New Yorker. We’re rolling.

Jennifer! You look to your right. There’s a kid there – not yours, remember, as you don’t have kids, don’t want them, don’t need them – and he’s stuffing something into his shirt. He’s shoplifting. You look back to your navy blue pens. There’s a half-dozen there. You want it, but you feel somewhat certain there will be navy blue pens there later.

You call for the young man’s attention. He knows what you want. He saw you put the navy blue pen – which he didn’t know existed – down. He runs. Little does he know, you run three miles every morning. You’re fit. Note to self: establish this earlier in the story, or people will find this too convenient. Note it as casually as possible. You don’t want people to think it will play any part in the end of the story. In fact, Jennifer, we’ll write about your entire workout, as well as your protein shake, to throw them off the scent. Don’t let them dwell on your running, Jennifer.

You’re giving chase, Jen (can I call you Jen?). You’ll note something – and do it wryly, Jennifer, as you’re a very wry single Roman Catholic Nurse who isn’t looking for love from a man or a woman – about all of the independent coffee shops next to the Starbucks. That will resonate beyond New York. People in Iowa subscribe to The New Yorker, Jennifer. You should know that: you lived there in your early 20s. Note to self: see how many Starbucks there are in Iowa.

Your juvenile bolts into traffic. But you saw it coming. You saw him eyeing an opening and took off moments before him. You go at him at an angle. You tackle him, and you do it at the median. Safety first, Jennifer. Remember, you’re a nurse.

The boy is struggling to free himself from your grip. You reach into the jacket and pull out the box he’s stuffed into his jacket. Robitussin. The extra-sized bottle. He looks up at you. Ma’am, he says, I’m sick. I just need to get better, get back to school.

Jennifer: pick him up. Dust him off. Keep the Robitussin. Look him in the eye. I’ll get you better, you tell him. But first – but first, Jennifer! – we must take him to the police. Then to the Duane Reade. For while you’ll nurse him back to health over the coming days, you must first concern yourself with the law.

For you are The Nurse. And you concern yourself with not just the health of your patients, but with the health of society.

Now, Jennifer, I’ll bang this out and get it to the New Yorker. Let’s meet again tomorrow. We must begin hashing out the screenplay.

JOHN CARROLL is a short fiction author who is currently pursuing a graduate degree at American University in Washington, DC. The fiction is short, not the author. John clocks in at a quite average 5′10″.

Perhaps her name is Loretta.
The red-head in the candy apple dress,
cursed to stare at that book of matches,
teetering on a tightrope of fire.

on a canvas left untouched, leaning
in Edward Hopper’s studio, she runs
through cornfields, silver threads
of her mother’s crown, prisms for a painted sunset.

Choice, the seam sewn up the back of her dress,
she crawls out of at night’s end,
a swan with tangled feathers in a post-
industrial landscape, ensnared by the fibers

of her dancing dreams. It was a cold Iowa
Tuesday when she split in two, when one
girl went back to the farm, washed laundry,
made biscuits on the old iron stove,

and another followed train wheels to a place
where everything glowed, steel gaze, glittering eyes,
the city beat in her bones, click-clack of shoes
like them Rockettes in black and white.

Tonight, she waits. Glasses clink,
a spoon rests on a saucer, heat breathes
from the man’s fingertips near hers,
as smoke rises from his Lucky Strike.

Together, they are the night, an intoxicated shadow,
drunk with mystery, sultriness, half in,
half out of this world, the moon, ripe, full
makes everything worth dying for.

She stares and waits, nails tapping,
to decide on one match, tucked in a solitary
street corner, a tiny blaze, flickering
before her, she could ruin this painting,

set the world on fire, peel back the corners,
snuff out the fluorescent tube light,
melt the vinyl stools, watch it eat everything,
lapping, licking, roaring for more.

LINDSEY NEVES graduated from URI in 2008 with a B.A. in English and Secondary Education where she co-edited and wrote for The Independent Scribe. She currently lives and works in North Attleborough, Massachusetts as a sixth grade English teacher. Her poem featured in this issue was written in response to her own class assignment. Her work will also be featured in the upcoming winter issue of the Boston Literary Magazine.

The private beach was ours the rest of the day,
Kentucky Lake sparkling from noonday sun
and cloudless sky. Boaters skied in the center
of the cove; jet skis sliced a path between us.
We waded in the shallow water near
a friend’s dock while willow flies buzzed nearby.
A neighborhood dog joined our party, barking
and tail-wagging from shore. We flung a stick
ashore to placate her, and she brought it in
the lake—her muscles surging in the dark
water. Her focus squared on staying true
to her breed’s distinctiveness.
                  We all took turns
tossing the soggy stick, and she pursued
each of our throws, her wood baton firm
in her jaws as she returned the prize. This chase
endured for fifteen minutes or so, until
the dog began to tire, paddling fifty
yards from shore thanks to a calculated launch
from one of the boys—sadistic motives fixed
on gauging her endurance.
                                                    Still she returned,
her breath heavy, jerking her legs through grainy
water. She heaved herself against my body
as if asking to be held so she could lap
the bulky air. She clung to me till someone
faked a toss farther into the cove. She kicked
away and chased nothing, sometimes slipping,
sinking down in the dark before rising with
foolish focus. I yelled for them to stop
and let her rest—but her instinctual slog
became amusing to them.
                                                   I found a wad
of weeds and twigs, making a nervous racket,
splashing, shouting—hoping the dog would hear
the thrashing, favor my gob of gunk and turn
back toward the shore. But she kept swimming,
paddling away into the blinding light
like Icarus, until her golden body
dropped out of sight, obscured by passing pontoons
and a jet skier jumping wakes for show.

JEREMY BYARS’s first poetry collection, Eyes Open to the Flash, was published in 2008, and he’s completing his second collection and beginning a work of historical fiction. His poems and reviews have appeared in many journals, most recently storySouth, Ariel, Poetry Midwest and If Poetry Journal.

Can’t say yet. Working on it hard.
This time I’m so full of strangeness.
Still I see the neighbor mom parting
the lips of fat, wailer Jr. in the wood
chair to bury the dog food chunks.
Dad will want to play catch tonight.

The boy stands near him. Dad has
learned to throw the ball high up to
give the boy a chance to get under
the meteoric ball. It is not the same.
I start a hack into my shirt. My hand
comes away with what feels like sea salt.
There is a problem with this, I feel.
If only I could have the cherry tree
of my childhood back, then there
would be no more spying on the
lives of others; I always go close.

My first time was unforgettable.
I, so full of disorientation, waited
in the roominghouse. My nose:
a poor drying rack for the dune
of yellowy sick that scrabbled in
a flurry of hot fits up my slack

throat. They brought the body
in its priceless rigor mortis. The
first munch being hardest; a cult
member held the bathroom door.
Nothing yet. No runny nose at all.

I remember thinking to myself:
What base would cannibalism be?
I started to laugh at my own inner
joke: an inside-the park home run.
Seeing green when it gets late. Yet
these binoculars do not have night

vision. Boy, I sure would…I would
love playing catch with those two.
Would they notice my being so
full of strangeness? I do have a
brand-new, brown, leather glove.

KJ lives in Orange County with a dog named Mr. Bear. He has work forthcoming in decomp, Yellow Mama, and Oysters and Chocolate. Find his blog that wants followers here.

Jessica perches on the edge of her seat, stretching the pages for class discussion taut between both sweating hands. Her eyes betray the zealot’s frightening glitter as she licks her lips and dives in to her rant against the semicolon. My eyebrows rise and rise and reach the upper limit of muscular contraction. “Blasphemy!” I whisper.

She freezes. “You actually like semicolons?”

“Are you kidding?” I blurt. “I’m a semicolon slut!” A frisson of titillation and dismay circles the table, every mouth in turn elongating into a surprised “O.”

;

The semicolon is the seal, still warm, of Eros on written language. It signifies union by a grammatical invitation to intimacy; the semicolon is the shared blush of a successful seduction. As with all seductions, the relationships between clauses joined by semicolons are ambiguous; this is not the punctuation of hierarchy, but of nuance.

Other forms of punctuation—periods, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, even the interrobang (a question mark superimposed over an exclamation point, denoting both astonishment and confusion)—exert themselves over their surrounding clauses with clear purpose: separation and stratification. The colon, for example, tells the reader that the words which follow it proceed in sequence from the words which come before. An apostrophe indicates either possession or what is left out of a word, but either way, its duty is to denote ownership and exclusion. Periods are the nuns in the dance hall of a paragraph, holding a ruler between swaying couples to make sure they are twelve inches apart. As for the comma, although it may at times approach the semicolon’s impulse toward union, it also tells us which clauses are subordinate, and to whom, and keeps the items in a list from bumping up against each other. Additionally, the comma insists on space in a sentence for pompous little interjections like indeed, and hallmarks of rhetorical sorting such as therefore and however. (In British English, where the comma may join independent clauses, the comma’s duties may overlap with the semicolon’s, but here in the U.S., it is not so.) Only the promiscuous little dash approaches the semicolon’s energy, but it is too hyper for real romance—too much the flibbertigibbet to sustain the consummation that the semicolon celebrates.

The semicolon proposes the union of equals, the lovemaking of the ideal marriage, but the semicolon does not reveal all the secrets of the bedroom. Although the use of a semicolon between what would otherwise be two sentences joins them into one sentence together, it doesn’t tell the reader why. This coy maneuver tempts the reader to make the interpretive leap and decide what links these two independent clauses, as one must sooner or later find oneself, at date’s end, on the doorstep, where one must choose, considering the evening’s sequence of feints and approaches, whether or not to lean in and try for a kiss. The semicolon invites the reader to puzzle out degrees of connection.

When the semicolon joins long, comma-inclusive items in a list, the semicolon represents, if not actual union, then the proliferation of the free-floating erotic energy that can surprise even the most sedate among us. Consider the surprisingly good-smelling neck of a colleague whose shirt tag, white and sharp cornered against her skin, begs to be tucked down; the muscular hands of a grocery checker (a hockey player on Saturdays) rolling a can of soup across the scanner; receiving the look-and-look-again, crossing the parking lot’s hot asphalt to the bank door, of even the chubbiest stranger; finding oneself, at a party, pinned to the floor by the grin of a man one would not so much as have coffee with: these moments are the semicolon’s to store, to log in its book of potentials. The semicolon holds these small, unlikely connections worthy of our appreciation.

As an agent of connection, the semicolon’s drives in syntax enact metaphor’s arrangements in image. In her essay “A Meditation on Metaphor,”^[i] Alicia Ostriker recovers metaphor’s etymology to demonstrate its nature:

Metaphor: a carrying across. You see the word on delivery vans in the dusty avenues of Athens. Metaphoros. A carrying across, a getting over, a bearing there, of what? Of course, of love. Of the erotic. Metaphor: that which joins, that which announces connection, overlap, shared essence, and yet retains the actual distance between whatever objects it brings together. (157)

The semicolon is metaphor’s syntactic equivalent, marrying clauses with the very joint that holds them apart. It is the unveiling, if not of love’s contents, then at least of love’s architecture.

DORINE JENNETTE’s poetry collection Urchin to Follow is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press in May 2010. Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as the Journal, Ninth Letter, Coconut, Puerto del Sol, and The Georgia Review. She earned her PhD at the University of Georgia, and earns her keep as a copyeditor for university presses. She lives in Davis, California.

So a balloon is twisting up
in the power lines while I’m walking
along a street in Queens,
gazing up, thinking
it might pop before I drop
below the sidewalk,
down the stairs and spin
through the turnstile to the platform

where I stand behind the yellow line,
looking down underground,
tarnished rails and workers on the tracks
with brooms and bags, picking up
the rush hour debris, abandoned
soda bottles, clear and green and crushed
with tattered labels, floating
in the rainbow sludge between the ties,
mingling with cigarette butts and broken glass
crunching under boots.

a whistle blows and they take refuge
on the other side of the track
in rows of cubbyholes,
vanishing behind the approaching train
as brakes scream metallic
murder, silver doors jerk open
and we strangers board,

take our places, elders sitting
while kids lean and dangle
from the poles, mixing smells
of grinding metal and sundry people
as nobody breathes too deep,
daydream gazing
at all the bright advertisements,
headphones and sunglasses
donned to override the overload,
looking out plastic windows
at strangers looking back,
when we start forward
and they start backward
I reach out to grab the metal
and the lights flicker, riding into
the blinding assault of Times Square.

CHRIS DOLLARD was born in Montville, CT, and raised in South Kingstown, RI. His work has appeared in The New Verse News and The North Central Review. He is also the poetry editor for Shoreline, the Rhode Island College literary magazine, and lives in Providence.