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A Place of Our Own

Stacy Wakefield — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:57:48 -0700

For a while I thought Lorenzo would be my boyfriend. I’d had guy friends like him before, I should have known better. They think I’m great because I’m not girly, we like the same bands and talk about records, and they really like me, but when it comes down to it, they can’t deal with the size of my ass. Lorenzo practically told me to my face that I was a million times cooler than the little waitress from the coffee shop who wanted him to come over to her apartment and screw in a light bulb. She stood over our booth in her little skirt, twisting a curl on a finger. Lorenzo seriously wanted to complain to me about how she was kind of a twit, like I should have sympathy for him.

Whatever. I just wanted a house. We had been sleeping on the roof at ABC NoRio all summer, it was like a tent city up there. It was fun at first, but summer would be over soon, we needed a place to live.

Narrative Night 2012

Narrative Night — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:52:12 -0700

Ah, it was a glorious night. Our evening began on March 7 in San Francisco with a sold-out Patrons’ party in an art-filled house that also managed sweeping views of the city and an impossibly beautiful full moon. Afterward, everyone met up at the Cowell Theater on the Bay, where Narrative cofounders Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks introduced Matthew Dickman, Melanie Gideon, and Abraham Verghese. Matthew Dickman joked that he planned to read for a full hour and a half—and no one would have minded if he had. Melanie Gideon previewed her novel Wife 22, which has already sold to thirty countries and been optioned for film. Then Abraham Verghese took the stage to read from his best-selling novel, Cutting for Stone, and to tell the story of how his experiences as a young doctor with AIDS patients in rural Tennessee led him to writing fiction. As columnist Leah Garchik later reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, “While Verghese told his tale, the silence of listeners became more silent. . . . If there’d been coughing, it stopped; if there’d been rustling, that stopped too. In an evening about the power of storytelling, that response told its own story.”

Is It Okay to Be Okay Again?

Marc Kaufman — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:28:58 -0700

We survived the summer. Or almost. The thermostats were dutifully set to seventy-eight, everywhere, so the lights wouldn’t go out, and they didn’t. And maybe they never would have, but in a changed world so soon after those terrible spring days, we did what we were told. Or mostly. The screens in Shibuya had been restored to full power, free again to deliver one pointless advertisement after another, to light the starless Tokyo night sky in all its brilliance. August still brought the jellyfish meandering toward the coast, brought people back for hometown reunions, and couples in yukatas headed to fireworks, Awa Odori, or other summer festivals. In some places fireworks or festivals were canceled or shortened out of respect for the north or owing to lack of electricity, which we apparently didn’t lack, but the fear of lacking was worse. Still, in Tokyo everything looked the same as it did before. Summer was still thick and unbearable, it still pasted my shirt to my sides and lower back in a sweaty film like it always did, and made me wish, like it always had, for fall.

Cartoon Art Volume 2012-04

Various Artists — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:24:49 -0800

Metaphor for My Daughter’s Birth

Frank Giampietro — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:01:33 -0800

Having myself been thumbnail scored

while folding cellophane into an origami swan

Metaphor for My Son’s Birth

Frank Giampietro — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:01:28 -0800

Having been carried to the roof

of the jungle’s dark canopy

on my wife’s back I find

I am famished, so I take

Cartoon Art Volume 2012-03

Various Artists — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:32:43 -0800

The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:35:15 -0800

Chapter 13

Now almost a whole month has passed since I touched these notes of mine, which were begun under the influence of confused but intense impressions. The catastrophe which I felt to be approaching has actually come, but in a form a hundred times more violent and startling than I had expected. It has all been something strange, grotesque and even tragic—at least for me. Several things have happened to me that were almost miraculous; that is, at least, how I look upon them to this day—though from another point of view, particularly in the whirl of events in which I was involved at that time, they were only somewhat out of the common. But what is most marvellous to me is my own attitude to all these events. To this day I cannot understand myself, and it has all floated by like a dream—even my passion—it was violent and sincere, but . . . what has become of it now?

The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:33:42 -0800

Chapter 8

On the promenade, as it is called here, that is, in the chestnut avenue, I met my Englishman.

“Oh, oh!” he began, as soon as he saw me. “I was coming to see you, and you are on your way to me. So you have parted from your people?”

“Tell me, first, how it is that you know all this?” I asked in amazement. “Is it possible that everybody knows of it?”

“Oh, no, everyone doesn’t; and, indeed, it’s not worth their knowing. No one is talking about it.”

“Then how do you know it?”

“I know, that is, I chanced to learn it. Now, where are you going when you leave here? I like you and that is why I was coming to see you.”

The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:31:17 -0800

Chapter 1

At last I have come back from my fortnight’s absence. Our friends have already been two days in Roulettenburg. I imagined that they were expecting me with the greatest eagerness; I was mistaken, however. The General had an extremely independent air, he talked to me condescendingly and sent me away to his sister. I even fancied that the General was a little ashamed to look at me. Marya Filippovna was tremendously busy and scarcely spoke to me; she took the money, however, counted it, and listened to my whole report. They were expecting Mezentsov, the little Frenchman, and some Englishman; as usual, as soon as there was money there was a dinner-party; in the Moscow style. Polina Alexandrovna, seeing me, asked why I had been away so long, and without waiting for an answer went off somewhere. Of course, she did that on purpose. We must have an explanation, though. Things have accumulated.

Aim High Olongapo

Matt Pavelich — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:10:34 -0800

Gray was a seagoing marine and a good one in that he disappeared into his duties whenever he was at sea. It had been difficulties ashore that had kept him these three years at the same rank, a rank entitling him to a bottom rack in the enlisted men’s berth. Aboard the USS Mansfield his was an ant’s routine, scurrying to distantly issued commands, calling fools “sir.” On orders, he might go prowling the steel passages in body armor with a scattergun, or running and ducking through watertight hatches, all in the pretense that some plucky enemy had stormed a nuclear aircraft carrier in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Stand by to repel boarders—sure.

Flares of Little Warning

Joselyn Takacs — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:08:41 -0800

“There’s your new mother,” our father said. “How d’ya like that?” He leaned on the glass door labeled Pool, and nodded in the direction of a lady in a bikini, suntanning on the pool deck.

The summer when I was nine and Juliana was four was our first motherless summer. Our father crumbled slowly after the initial shock of her affair. He was like so many sidewalks in our small central-Florida town, where the roots silently broke through. It was the Fourth of July, and we watched our father for signs of cracking.

We Are What We Have Lost

Lindsay Allen — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:06:22 -0800

Ella cleaned baking-soda residue from miniature volcanoes and took down crepe-paper streamers. At next year’s science fair she would ban explosions. When she turned to toss a paper towel into the wastebasket, she noticed Logan standing at the door of her classroom, his pale-green button-down shirt now untucked from his khakis and unbuttoned at the top. He held his hands clasped behind his back, looking more like a student than a fourth-grade math teacher. Ella and he often graded papers together in the teacher’s lounge, working their way through each unit, since the math and science curricula overlapped.

“I’m looking for the Environmental Threats and Global Warming exhibit,” Logan said.

“You’re in the right place.”

“Very nice,” he said, inspecting a diorama of the earth’s core. “Yes. Well, I need a drink.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and cracked his knuckles. “Do you have any booze?”

Star of the River Opera

Simon Han — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:43:33 -0800

The musicians I knew about were white boys, always in groups, their sculptured hair slicked back in the images of them on textbook covers, folders, and sparkling new lunchboxes. Top 40 radio exhausted their songs; every girl at school could recite the lyrics. As for my family, we didn’t own a radio until my parents bought a car, and then they preferred the hum of the road to the glittering beats of boy-band pop.

Nor was Mr. Chiu, my grandfather, an avid follower of American music. But there was one song he always sang: Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.”

A Partial History of Lost Causes

Jennifer duBois — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:03:15 -0800

Aleksandr

Leningrad, USSR, 1979

When Aleksandr finally arrived in Leningrad, he was stunned by the great gray span of the Neva. The river was a churning organ in the city’s center—not its heart, surely; something more practical and less sentimental but just as necessary. The amygdala, maybe, or both kidneys. It had been six days from Okha—on a boat and then a train—and out the window he’d seen the entire country: first the teetering spires of Sakhalin’s drilling rigs, as familiar to Aleksandr as his own dreams; then the abandoned green train at the port, melting into the sand ever since the war with the Japanese; then the ten thousand salmon rotting in the sun on the eastern shore, waiting for Moscow to telegram permission for their loading; then the curling stems of smoke above the villages that were impossibly far apart (he never knew he’d been living in a country this enormous all along).

Birthday Girl

Evelyn Walsh — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:14:08 -0800

You can’t remember this woman’s name, but you know other things about her. Where she lives, more or less. That her husband was out of work most of last year. Your kids used to go to the same school. She makes something on the side, woodcuts or stained glass. They moved here from upstate. Although you don’t know her very well, you think she’s nice.

“We really needed to get out of the house,” she says, cooing at the newborn slung over your shoulder.

You nod. “So did we. A little exertion.” The indoor playground is a good choice when it’s rainy or the weather runs to extremes of hot or cold; it’s good any time you can’t line up a playdate. But it’s the weekend, and you forgot there would be so many birthday parties.

Men Against Violence

Gabriel Tallent — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:49:56 -0800

I tie a Windsor knot in my silk tie and lean over, holding the tie to my chest with one hand, while I spit blood into the sink. In the mirror, I peel back my upper lip to expose a puckered cut where I got hit playing Frisbee. I dry the cut with recycled paper towels and straighten the knot in my tie. Then I step out into the small but elegant lobby of the Hennessey Art Museum.

There are sixteen tables, set with white tablecloths, votive candles, and vases of orchids. At the podium, Brooke Hennessey leans forward to the microphone, speaking to her assembled audience of men in suits, poshly dressed women, and students in business casual. I wind my way through the crowd to my table, and as I go, I pick up a crumpled napkin and press it to my mouth. The napkin soaks up the blood, a little anemone in the dark, candlelit room.

Rainy Season

Amy Parker — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:49:55 -0800

The maids are leaving the compound on their scooters. Maizie and Jill watch from the tennis court. The red clay is still hot, and when Jill closes her eyes the white fault lines linger behind her eyelids. Jill lobs a ball, and Maizie misses.

“There’s Neepa!” yells Maizie. Their maid’s nightly transformation—from a self-effacing shadow who sweeps the floors with a handleless broom to a glittering sexpot with flying hair and jeans so tight they might have been lipsticked on—thrills Maizie.

The guards roll back the gate and the maids shoot out. The maids’ laughter is high and bright when they perch sidesaddle behind their boyfriends and grip the seats as the scooters go over the speed bumps, catching air, fishtailing a little before regaining traction on the uneven street outside. The guards wave to the maids; the guards never salute them. Jill and Maizie stand there silently until the gate clangs closed.

Stretch Out Your Hand

Nathan Poole — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:49:54 -0800

I saw it go out from the ends of her hair. So many long strands of light. Milky, drifting upward—each hair casting off something that looked like silk until all the filaments were impossibly thin and lucent and seemed lost where they passed through the lamplight. They rose from Ruth’s head and congregated in the joists of the ceiling. A bright, glowing nest.

“The fever’s broken,” my father said. He lifted my younger sister out of her bed, legs dangling, toes pointed down. Her arms hung unfastened behind his neck, where the fingers curled up in two loose fists. He pressed his cheek against her forehead to feel her temperature again and he held it there for a long moment.

“Momma, it’s broken,” he said, nearly shouting at my mother.

Cartoon Art Volume 2012-02

Various Artists — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:03:40 -0800