The Fabulist Monthly

A collection of undergraduate literary musings, and then some...

[thefabulistmonthly]

Letter From the Editors (Volume 2, Late Fall)

Dear Reader (s?)

  How are you?

  Us?

  Collective pain in the ass

Don’t want to do this

(Dread/regret the next issue)

  Lucky for us, good talent happened upon the threshold of our respective apartments

Whoops

  Can’t wait to get this issue over with so we can stress about the next one

Trying to raise my (Laura’s) blood pressure—it’s too low says my dr.

  Tired of pretending to like literature

It hasn’t gotten me enough ass

  Maybe I should move on to Tindr

Get rid of Microsoft word

  Gotta pack up and move on

Sell that nice book collection

  Maybe we can make them editors

We’ll just be presidents

  No longer ours

  Man, how about The Thrill these days? Thanks for giving us some press

  “Top 10 DIY Lit Mags on Campus”

Anyone? Anyone?

  Sorry Observor editor Gabe Rom, I don’t care for your Draconian word limits

  Did anyone read the first issue? They look nice

On the shelf I’m sure

  I’m glad I don’t work for the newspaper.  Their Thursday printing keeps

Our bi-weekly bonfire burning. 

  This is too real.

  Thanks be to god, we found writers other than ourselves

Although you still had to suffer through the editor’s letter and our introductions

  Here’s our Late Fall issue

Enjoy!

[thefabulistmonthly]

"An Evening," "Istanbul," "What Love Could be in 2013," "Casco Bay," and "Ghazal for White Walls" by Emily Graf (Introduction by Ryan Mach)

The act of reading poetry almost always involves the search for some kind of emotional release, the desire to see one’s own feelings replicated and transformed into something with concrete significance and meaning. Despite this somewhat obvious and superficial fact, the act of writing poetry feels like a perpetual evasion of emotional meaning. To the poet, self-expression is an act of opacity, of masking and re-masking, of relieving oneself of the very burden of sentiment and personality by way of its transcription. If there are poets at Kenyon who grasp this problematic tension, Emily Graf is certainly one of them. Ms. Graf’s work is boldly personal – one gets a sense almost immediately of her emotional position relative to her subject. But what’s truly striking about this poetry is its reserve in spite of this involvement. Her tone is marked by a persistent refusal to stray too far from ambivalence and uncertainty, often culminating in a cathartic moment that is itself skeptical of the very validity of catharsis. Ms. Graf maintains a healthy balance between emotional desire and poetic distance, and manages to achieve this balance differently in every poem she writes.

In “What Love Could Be in 2013,” pure levity hedges us between described subjects and their possible interpretations, juxtaposing the surreal and the sensible with intimidating descriptive restraint. “Istanbul” fabricates fascinating images and breaks them with straightforward confession, suddenly interrupting physical movement with stark emotional paralysis. “Ghazal for White Walls” is perhaps the most compelling example of this technique, holding off the sentimentality of grief at arm’s length with confounding parallels that challenge our grasp of the difference between hallucination and reality, desire and memory. Ms. Graf’s talent is strange and engaging because her personality seems to haunt her poetry, making itself known without ever really revealing itself. Her sentiment is a truth told slant, and it exists so comfortably on the precipice of ambivalence that we will fail to notice the athleticism of this balancing act if we aren’t careful in reading it.

  --R. Mach

  An Evening

What was that you said about Ezra Pound?

In my room, getting drunk,

Only four hours sleep and red with appetites.

  You were dying piece-meal,

bits of dinner drying on your black dress,

wine bruising your lips. Ezra Pound was a racist,

I think you said. I can’t see myself in his poems.

To be honest, it did not matter if what you said

was true or false; I would not

have disagreed. It was important only

to be happy.

  Your hand, torn apart by teeth,

skin strung from the cuticles, came down on the desk.

I can’t imagine that I will ever stop

being in love with you. Istanbul I woke tasting globes and picked up a pamphlet on Istanbul from beside my bed. My lips were dry from arguing with my sleep, I wondered if your lips were on her ear and my tongue turned like a key in a PO box. The pamphlet pages were confident and smelled like gasoline. In the deep there is a beach with sand like black glass, where birds shatter the moon with their thin shadows. If you had walked a beach with me you would have learned something: the tongue is, after all, the most curious muscle. I woke and the sun was American and bland and I wanted Turkish coffee. I imagined that the men in Istanbul looked nothing like you. I felt I had forgotten to tell you something important.

  What Love Could Be In 2013 Coffee. Milk. A green rain. Later you brought me the Leviathan yellowed pages sour grapes. I do not know if I want you after all.

Casco Bay Once, I was not capable of drowning. Once, I woke with the dizzy notion to plunge from the pier into the sparkling bay, so cold it is almost dry— Late summer. Young men throw ropes from the Aucocisco. Shouts, because the bay is full of porpoises. When I woke, I realized I wanted them to see me. I remember that feeling: To leave the sundress in the closet would be wasteful simply because it is beautiful, if that makes sense. Outside the general store, plastic chairs too hot to touch. The men lowering freight in chafed cages. At the railing, a girl drops crabs back into the water. Mainland in the distance. My mother tightening the strings of a tennis racket and next to her peppery marigolds in black constant earth— Once, August burned blue and wind-drunk, pines tripped over each other to land at my feet their roots shallow, clutching at silvered debris of leaf and shale. Years broke. The island surrendered its skin to hurricanes. In winter I checked the weather from a thousand miles away— Yet surely I will arrive again at late summer, at the cliffs intact and wetted black, the swells interrupting each other, doubling back— For it is still the sea, it is always meant with affection.

      Ghazal for White Walls

  Walls shock-white, tabula rasa-white, Ophelia-white—

I don’t want tabula rasa. My heart’s already blank for him.

  Slowly, invisible hands dressed her in heat. Teeth, once in a while,

scraped like chalk, and in the dark she’d quake for him.

  Morning enters through smudged wineglasses

on the countertop. White roses, nodding off, decay for him.

  Once he said to me, “Happy fucking birthday. We’re all graced by your presence,”

then fished for sparks in the small of my back. We baked a cake for him.

  Don’t say autumn is beautiful like a terminal illness. Inside, we dig

sweaters out of storage bins. Do I wish illness had blackened him?

  Rebecca’s face goes skim-milk blue, like Renoir’s girls, in the airtight chill.

He’d push windows wide and offer her autumn, restless light stilled for him.

  Burning logs turn to sugar. Leaves, ice-edged, are wet and trembling

like my hands, wet and trembling, for him.

  The kitchen stays clean for five minutes, then clutters

with hallucinations: he makes chicken curry, cracks a beer. We were all going to marry him.

  Sleepless-white walls. Every time I hear a door open, I think

he is doing the opening. We leave them all ajar for him.

[thefabulistmonthly]

"Poem", "Diego's Girl", and "Haiku" by Elizabeth Cheever (Introduction by Allyson Young)

Poem, Diego’s Girl, and Haiku, written and arranged by senior Elizabeth Cheever, a veteran of spoken word or slam poetry, is a trio of arresting magnetism.  The poems, composed with a distinct intention for the page, reflect, nonetheless, her experience with slam, which draws on beats and sonic experimentation and finds its grounding in the performative aspects of language. Cheever’s poems are so interesting because they combine the complexities of arrangement, which are inherent to written verse, with the whopping dynamism of a slam piece.   The poems build momentum with revisions and repetition of metaphor and imagery in the first few stanzas as in Diego’s Girl. Cheever intones, “Drowned women with dark nipples/black snarls of hair/birds like fallen fruit.”  A similar technique guides This is How to Cheat at Haiku, which employs the repeated and revised simile, the constant “like,” in order to propel the language forward.  Cheever masterfully moves between moments of initial stasis and eventual forcefulness, as if she is building vocal and emotional momentum. 

The poet Bob Kaufman said once, “each slam, a finality.”  These poems recall a similar concept.  They build and build and end, finally, concretely, and wonderfully.

--A. Young

  Diego’s Girl, 1938

The water gave her

a shipwreck

a mess

drowned women with dark nipples

black snarls of hair

birds like fallen fruit

a sopping dress

a spitting volcano

rocks stacked like crooked teeth

twisted wing mosquitoes

No lighthouse

only bloody feet

only strange wilted flowers

a tangle of earthless roots

While the bath grew cloudy

and cold.

    This is How to Cheat at Haiku

This is how to drive a manual transmission:

Fearless like a fire engine, like a macaw,

like hula hooping, like splatter painting,

like not how my brother does, which is

like balloon-popping, like dandelion-pulling .

This is how to bake a chocolate soufflé:

Careful like tip-toes, like cloud vapor,

like lighting candles, like planting seeds,

like an abacus, like writing in cursive,

like not how I do, which is

like a hippopotamus

while my sister shakes her head.

This is how to run away from everything:

Quick like a school of angelfish, like broken glass,

like Beethoven, like a finger snap,

like not how my father does, angry in the stalling car,

leaving the kitchen like smoke, like burnt sugar.

  Poem Beginning With a Hangover and a Line from Jake York

for the tongue telling Saturday night something of Sunday morning,

there is light licking its way

over a cusp of black hill—

at once like a fire,

like a doe with a brick of salt.

for the women who wake and dress quiet in the summer cold,

there are grandchildren still asleep,

there are headlights dim

through the half-night—

at once like dawn,

like twin streaks of moon—

there is the ugly face of the mop,

a wreath of soap in the bucket,

there is bile in the carpet, in the sink

there is torn paper on the walls,

there are someone else’s grandchildren

still asleep.

for the temples being told something of whiskey and honey,

may you look in the mirror and see your doubleness—

at once soft-hearted and imperious,

at once children and cruel.

There are spiders

on the sun-red windowsill,

there is dawn slumped on the floor.

[thefabulistmonthly]

A Bitter Cure: Genetic Therapy as a New Sort of Pharmakon by Samuel Kaplan (Introduction by Gordon Slater)

I am by no means a man of science. This has always been true; from the second grade on I decided that science was "not my thing" and in high school the Academic Dean sat me down and, looking at my grades from Chemistry and Biology, told me I would never take Physics. I did not mind. I realized that I was no whiz kid. Today, I am proud to introduce Sam Kaplan, on assignment for The Fabulist writing on the current state of genetic research. Mr. Kaplan's writing represents a style, non-fiction, and a field of study, science, previously unaddressed by our magazine of Literature and Letters. Sometimes, my ignorance and lack of proper scientific education can lead me to disdain the comings and goings in the Biology or Chemistry community. New innovations? Why should I care! Exciting breakthrough? I'll never understand what it all means, back to flowery poetry and manic prose! I did not do well sophomore year in "Why Size Matters: Scaling in Biology," but I did even worse in "Biology of Female Sexuality."

Working with Mr. Kaplan, however, I realized that he is precisely the person I want to hear about all sorts of complicated scientific matters from. Mr. Kaplan is, after all, a chiller of the highest degree. When I say "chiller" I mean the sort of guy I don't mind sharing a six-pack with, the kind of guy who can grow a powerful beard. For me, Mr. Kaplan represents a new sort of scientist/writer, a chiller on the forefront of almost every significant movement and breakthrough, who can explain things to me I've always been told are above my head. Please consider the work of Mr. Kaplan, good day. 

--G. Slater

  A Bitter Cure: Genetic Therapy as a New Sort of Pharmakon

Though Andrew Niccol’s 1997 biopunk thriller Gattaca bombed at the box-office, it seems that its vision of the “not-so-distant future,” one where genetic screening is commonly used to profile citizens, may be more similar to the current state of science than we think. Genetic screening technology is already widespread and is, in fact, often extremely useful for expecting parents.  The main difference between the society in Gattaca and that of the present day, however, is the consequences of finding a genetic mutation: while (the society in Gattaca’s approach to genetic screening) profiling an entire population based on genetic sequences can be aptly described as eugenics, modern medicine takes a far more therapeutic approach to the treatment of hereditary conditions.  Often, symptoms of disorders can be mitigated with drugs so long as the mutation is identified early enough.  Recent research, however, holds the possibility of treating not merely the symptoms of genetic diseases, but the root cause of these (symptoms) maladies: our own DNA.  Li et al. (2008) demonstrates researchers’ ability to knockdown the expression of three genes that directly lead to the formation and development of tumors with a mechanism known as RNAi, or RNA interference.  RNAi works by introducing small snippets of genetic information (small interfering RNA, or siRNA) into a cell, which attach to and disrupt the deviant regions of the cell’s DNA.  With these three genes thus disrupted, tumors in mice virtually disappeared.  Unlike existing forms of cancer therapy, RNAi is relatively nontoxic, and attacks only cancer cells.  In contrast with chemotherapy, which indiscriminately kills all cell types and is highly toxic to the human body, RNAi therapy targets only the genes responsible for tumor growth.  It is, therefore, a more refined means of treating cancer based on a better understanding of how our genes direct so much of our functional existence. 

Existing cancer treatments such as chemotherapy recall the Platonic notion of the pharmakon, a substance that offers a cure but is in itself a poison.  Chemotherapy works because it kills cells indiscriminately: patients tolerate highly toxic substances, hoping the poison will destroy that which ails them—the tumor—before it destroys that which sustains them—their body.  RNAi ostensibly circumvents the destructive qualities of existing treatment methods, but it could be in itself a different sort of pharmakon, one that offers novel approaches to treating diseases while simultaneously exposing humanity’s desire for artificial perfection at any cost.

                  Genetic research has looming consequences for both scientists and laypeople alike.  No RNAi therapy has been yet approved for use in humans by the FDA, but, as aspects of RNAi become more refined, medicine could well warm to the idea of a therapy that specifically targets only whichever genes the doctor desires.  Further, use of RNAi is by no means limited to cancer therapy: any gene in the human body could be silenced by unimaginably small bits of genetic information. Of course, the possibility of doctors altering gene expression at will carries with it grave ethical concerns.  Widespread use of RNAi therapy could see us move beyond the mere genetic screening in Gattaca towards actually molding our populace to more resemble our image of the ideal.  Such a future is surely a terrifying one for most readers, but why?  Given RNAi therapy’s proven effectiveness at treating tumors, shouldn’t it’s development been seen as a boon for the millions of people worldwide who would benefit from its wider implementation?  Further, shouldn’t researchers seek to develop RNAi for use beyond the treatment of cancer?

                  RNAi therapy is a technique on the forefront of modern science; even if it becomes more widespread in its use, patients may not see it used in clinical settings for many years.  Phase I clinical trials in humans serve as a proof-of-concept, but FDA approval for the use of RNAi therapy requires far more trials that will delay its implementation.  Without approval by the FDA, no company can manufacture RNAi products for public use.  Further, while most drugs approved by the FDA are single chemical compounds, RNAi therapy falls under a broader category.  It is technique for the treatment of disease around which an infinite number of specific treatments can be designed. 

This summer’s Supreme Court ruling, preventing research companies from patenting a human gene, also complicates the timeline for implementation of RNAi therapy.  The ruling does make ethical and practical sense: geneticists usually do not create the genes that they study, they merely elucidate their sequence.  Exercising patents on existing pieces of genetic code would mean that, effectively, your body becomes the property of these drug companies.  Preventing companies from charging royalties on the use of genes means that individuals have more equitable access to gene therapies.  While some researchers do create novel variations of genes that, when inserted in animals produce specific mutants, no drug company creates the genes that each human has within their cells.  The patenting of a gene cannot be considered ethical because no individual can be held accountable for the production of genetic material that is expressed constitutively (that is, genes that are present in the body without any modification). 

However, one of the ruling’s adverse effects is that it stifles the impetus for development of genetic therapies.  Biomedical research is a hugely costly endeavor, and drug companies necessarily rely on securing patents for their innovations in order to recoup their costs.  For this reason, the research of Li et al. (2008) presents an alternative means for drug companies to secure patents on RNAi therapies.  While the gene silencing that resulted in tumor death is a promising finding, the most exciting aspect of their research is the engineered nanoparticle that delivers the siRNAs specifically to tumor cells.  By developing a unique treatment strategy independent of the modified genes, these researchers have found a patentable technique could deliver better clinical outcomes for numerous cancer patients.  If a drug company were to secure a patent for this deliver method, they would effectively circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on patent restrictions.  The money earned from such a patent would allow further research and development into novel aspects of genetic therapies, potentially saving even more lives.  The public perception of drug companies is certainly negative, based on the vast sums of money they charge for their products, as well as, in the U.S., their direct-to-consumer advertising which subtly encourages consumers to request drugs based not on sound medical advice but rather on marketing tactics.  However, uproar over the exorbitant revenues of drug companies misses a fundamental truth in the industry: research cost money.  Lots of it.  In the past 100 years, life expectancy has more than doubled, due in large part to advancements in medical technology and health sciences.  In order for drug companies to fund the research necessary for such advancements, someone needs to foot the bill.  While grant funding from institutions like the NIH or CDC can help laboratories cover their costs, exploratory research into new drugs requires a degree of user-funding.

Ultimately, whether or not genetic therapies become standard practice relies largely on its acceptance by the federal government, which exists to supposedly protect the interests of the general populace.  Public opinion on other genetic issues such as animal cloning is decidedly skeptical, but will the possibility of a novel approach to cancer therapy sway these detractors?  The question, reformulated, is this: is the public willing to take a chance on the newest pharmakon, or are the consequences of its misuse too grave for society to bear?

Li, S.D., S. Chono, and L. Huang.  Efficient oncogene silencing and metastasis inhibition via systemic delivery of siRNA.  2008.  Molecular Therapy, 16.5:942-6.

[thefabulistmonthly]

A Great Ocean, A Small Room by Katie Mach (Introduction by William Harrison)

In the ongoing internal battle of the young wannabe writer—somewhere amidst the ebbs and flows between inexplicable brash confidence and wracking self-doubt—the question needs to be asked: do I even know how to read this stuff? Who am I to evaluate the work of others if I can’t even finish a damn piece myself? Luckily for the wannabe writer turned amateur editor, sometimes a story comes along that cannot be ignored. Sometimes, a colleague, a proud older brother, is struck with the urge to show off the work of a sibling. And lest our detractors criticize us for staying “in house” and taking another of those damn Mach’s on board, rest assured—Katie Mach has got it. “A Great Ocean, a Small Room,” opens with confidence—we are already in the midst of a razor-sharp conversation. Well-rendered dialogue anchors the piece, but one of its most fascinating qualities is the contrast between what the characters are saying and the world they perceive around them. Within the wonderfully paradoxical ethos that Ms. Mach’s fiction inhabits, our protagonists Charlie and Bennett belittle each other to no end but seem to mutually thrive from this undercutting. Their ceaseless banter, like the seagulls they see outside, cuts “through the marine fog,” unafraid to make a place for itself amidst an indifferent world. 

  --W. Harrison

  A Great Ocean, A Small Room

“Sometimes, when I’m at work, and I’m writing my tenth email of the day, or I’m waiting in line at the grocery store, I remember that miles and miles below me, hot liquid metal is pulsing around the core of earth, hot enough to incinerate us in a second.”

“And then I can feel it, the pulsing I mean, the liquid moving within the planet, metal surrounded by rock surrounded by people, and I feel sick.” Bennett lifts his drink, and the ring left behind on the table swells as it releases the glass. “And then I feel even sicker when I realize that no one else feels it. Not only that, no one knows it’s there. No one else is terrified to be running around this turning mass.”

I’m watching the seagulls rear against the slow-breathing water. They cut through the marine fog, calling for fish that hide below the tired surface. The edges of the sleepy drift are sharp and uneven, like warped plastic lying murky and gray. “That’s because it’s a stupid thing to be terrified of, Bennett,” I say as he puts down his drink. He looks silly with alcohol in his hand; his flat nose and flushed skin make him look very childish. When he becomes drunk, the rose in his cheeks spreads across his face, clashing with his orange hair. Lucky for him, it is still too dark to see.

    “That’s what Cass said.” Bennett looks up at me, and I suddenly feel embarrassed. “She said, ‘you’ve got a baby on the way, you have plenty of things that should worry you, and you’re choosing something that shouldn’t.’” He casts his eyes back down to the table and glances at my empty glass.

    “Cassie’s right.” I hear myself say it, but I don’t really like Cassie and I don’t care about what she has to say. “You’re fine, you know you’re fine. Finish your damn drink.”

    When he first introduced me to Cassie, she had been a sculptor. When they got married, she had been an elementary school teacher. When she got pregnant, she ran a baking business out of her home. Cass has been many things, but she has always been insufferable.

When Bennett and I went out last night, he told me we were celebrating my new apartment, and it’s true, we toasted to it every time we threw back drinks, but what burned in my throat was less the alcohol and more the silence that had risen from me when Sarah asked me why she should stay.

“She just needs time to think,” he had roared over the groaning bass that invaded our ears and pulsed violently from the sticky table into our fingertips.

“Bullshit,” I yelled. “In five minutes, we think one thousand things and act on none of them. She’s already  made up her mind about me. She’s just hesitating to follow through.”

Bennett, at this point feeling very tipsy, raised his arm heavily and deliberately as though it were on a slow-moving pulley and pointed at me. “You’re one of the cleverest guys I know, Charlie, but you are a fucking idiot. Just tell her you’re sorry. Even if you aren’t.”

Orange and green lights danced on the surface of his glasses, and he looked quite insane. It was funny, and it made me feel very grateful to have him here insulting me.“God, it’s disgusting in here.”

I’m not sure, but it looks as though the fog is starting to clear. I glance over at the waitress, a stout but pretty-faced woman who had been idling by the door for some time eyeing our table. We have been here for several hours and ordered nothing but drinks. She is probably worried we will never pay our bill.

“Have any ideas for next month’s comics?” Bennett is embarrassed of what he has revealed to me, and the quick subject change makes me think that maybe the red in his cheeks was not from the alcohol.

I lean my elbows on the plastic table and uncross my legs, because my right thigh has grown numb. “Yeah I have an idea for one.”

“Tell me.”

“All right. So it’s these two fleas. One is a human flea, and the other is a dog flea.  And they-”

“There’s different types of fleas?”

“Well, yeah, there are different species of fleas for dogs and cats and rats and humans and all that. Anyway, these two fleas are arguing, because they both think that they’re superior to the other. The human flea thinks that because it lives on the most intelligent species with the most advancements and the greatest evolutionary strides, it has chosen a much better home. And the dog flea says that, no, it lives on the animal with the most living space, the most fur to burrow and hide in, the most places to expand a family and settle down. And then, at the end, they settle the argument because they agree that whatever it is, dog or person, they all scratch the same.” I take my arms off of the table and re cross my legs, this time the opposite way.

“So?”

“So what.”

“What’s the joke?”

I shrug. “Whatever part makes you laugh.”

“What? There’s no—that’s not even going to fit in a comic.”

“I may have to do it over two weekends.”

“Alright. I don’t envy you the letters you are going to get for that one.” Bennett shook his head and turned his gaze to his cell phone. I think he stayed out with me all night to prove that nothing has changed, but we both know that Cass will kill him for this. I consider telling him that Cass is a bitch. I consider telling him that I’m happy for him, starting a family. I settle for telling the waitress to come over to our table.

“I’ll have another rum and coke. Hey listen. Tell me what you think about this- two fleas are arguing-”

“Oh, god, Charlie, don’t.”

“No, no, Bennett, I think you’re wrong about this, I think she’ll appreciate it more. I’ll bet she’s a patron of the arts, she’s a waitress, so she probably wanted to be an actress at some point-”

“Go to hell. Miss, please do not bring him another drink.”

“Why can’t I get myself a goddamn drink?”

“Because you are drunk and you are an asshole.”

           “Don’t think I don’t know it.” I turn around, and the stocky waitress does not appear to be interested in serving us any longer. “Okay, okay, no drink.”

Sarah used to tell me that I whenever I got so drunk my tongue was dull, and the words I stumbled upon in slurred improvisations were the most like what was living in my mind, I would talk about my childhood to her. She said that sometimes we get drunk because we want to feel the wonder that a child feels every time they see something that is not quite like them. I told her that I never want kids.

“You’re lucky it’s still too dark out for her to recognize you next time you stumble into this place.” The sky was changing from midnight blue to the color of velvet, that velvet skirt she wore when she cooked me dinner and she spilled cooking oil all over it. She cried and the night may have been spoiled but I showed her that if you put baby powder on it it’ll soak up all the oil, see Sarah, it’ll be fine, just throw it in the wash like normal now. I bet Bennett didn’t know that, I bet no other guy knows that.

“Not for much longer.” I gesture at the lightening horizon with my pocketed fist. Bennett pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked outward. He sighed. “It just keeps on spinning, huh?”

“Haven’t you noticed, Bennett?” I am starting to feel the open palm of the morning chill wrapping me, and I shiver against it. “The world stopped turning a long time ago. It’s us that can’t stop spinning.” The seagulls run along the docks, slapping their feet against the swollen planks and dropping flailing fish in their path . My father told me that when I was a baby, he would strap me to his back and go for walks on the beach. When I saw the seagulls, I’d laugh and squeal so much I’d drool all down his back. I check the corners of my mouth with numbing fingers.

We both look out on the shore as the sun heeded no warning and rose again.

[thefabulistmonthly]

The Waiting Room by Samuel Anderson (introduction by Laura Rothman)

I first encountered Mr. Anderson's work in an edition of Hika my sophomore year.  The medium was poetry, and his language was stunning.  It recently came to my attention that Mr. Anderson had stepped into the fiction arena.  My appetite was whetted.  The jump between poetry and fiction seemed impossible to me.  How do you create narrative? Characters? How do you write that many pages? Mr. Anderson's prose reads like poetry translated into paragraph form.  He creates images that resonate beyond the page, complex characters, and dynamic yet subtle action.  Mr. Anderson unites prose and verse in exceptional harmony.  I am excited to present "The Waiting Room," a study of place.  Mr. Anderson drops the reader not only into a place, but also into a very distinctive mindset.  The monotony of hospital life kicks-in, and the writing buoys the emotion.  As the narrative progresses, I felt increasingly stuck in the hospital, stuck waiting.  I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I did.

--L. Rothman

The Waiting Room by Samuel Anderson

It was hard to find a break from the action in the sleepy medical facility where my father was living out what would be his final weeks.

My father was hospitalized after falling trying to kick a soccer ball to his three-year-old neighbor. The fall resulted in a broken hip, a deleterious injury upon a body already in a state of accelerated dematerialization. He looked thinner and older lying there in the hospital bed than he had just the week before, the last time I had seen him before the fall. When I realized in that first meeting how long it might be until he would leave that bed, I started coming back daily. My visits lasted an hour or so at first but grew longer as the injury healed slowly and health complications cropped up in the rhythm of a tolling bell. Each time the doctor came to say that my father was feeling nauseous from the morphine, or had developed a chronic runny nose, or was coming down with pneumonia, the next bit of news became more manageable, despite the increasing severity of the ailments.

I never avoided glassy tap of the doctor’s approaching footsteps. This was not the sort of action I wanted to get away from. The physical action I witnessed in the hospital was subdued rather than frenetic. The hospital was the older and smaller of the two that were in town, and had seen a decline in patronage since the larger one had been remodeled. Like the surrounding residential community, the ICU was mostly populated by retirees in a general physical decline, and the staff seemed accustomed to a slow, intimate pace rather than a state of emergency.

I acclimated easily to hospital ritual: the slow passage of nurses in and out of the room checking to see if my father had touched his dinner, or the discussion of post-mortem logistics with my brother after he arrived from LA the second week of my father’s sojourn. By the end of the second week there was almost nothing left of the matter to discuss, but our father was still alive. I wanted the news from the doctor to come faster, to knock me off the tightrope I felt beneath my feet as I walked through the facility. My father’s death unfolding before me seemed staged above an invisible but precipitous height, one that I couldn’t seem to dismount when I left his hospital room. 

Hospitalized. The word grew into a double entendre in the days after he was admitted went on and I began coming back each day. The first time I left him in that room, I walked quickly to my car, so that the open doors to patient rooms passed quickly in the corner of my eye; like the steady cam shots from TV medical dramas of itinerant doctors speed-walking and shouting medical jargon to someone offstage. I came midmorning the next day and felt a pang as I left the balmy and full wine country air and entered the atmosphere of the building. It was air-conditioned; a composition that was both organic and artificial, the air inside weighed on me heavier than the strong sun outside.

As my father’s stay in the ICU persisted, and my visits to the hospital blended together, I became a more of an inhabitant like my father. Eventually I slowed my walk to and from his room so that I could see each gray body repeated in my line of vision. I dozed in the chair beside his bed, next to the window looking out to the residential street outside. It was lined with one-story ranch houses, which were easy on joints and easy to sell. The kind that were always coming on and off the market with the high turnover of their inhabitants. My father had moved into one like it across town after our mother died.

The air in the building was deadened by an immanence of grave possibilities. The swinging doors and contraptions along the walls suggested only the potential for action; medical devices, defibrillators, heart monitors, empty beds all left transitionally in the hallways suggested proximity of medical episodes just occurred or still to come. The thick plastic that encased the periodic shiny red “emergency” buzzers along the walls remained untouched. Reminders to hand sanitize, and cover your cough, moot advice for those who felt not the risk of acute illness in their all-ensnaring declines. In the absence of action, these hallways felt like empty highways.

The noiselessness was pre-apocalyptic. The quiet in my father’s room when he was asleep was even more profound. The possibility of an asteroid coming through the ceiling almost assumed. In the movies the elderly patients would fly through the foreground, faceless and cast in CGI. I hoped such a resolution might come for my father, who was, as the weeks went on, constructing a serialized soliloquy in his periodic outbursts of dumbfounded reflection. “I don’t know how to do this,” he would say. Later he would betray a certain acceptance, uttering stock answers to an unanswerable question. “Well, I’ve had a good life. It’s just my time to go.” It was after responses, at best divined and at least programmed, that I would stare wonderingly at his draped little frame and hoped for a Hollywood planetary overtake.

I wanted the same dreamlike quality that hung over my last engagement with an intensive care unit. I was more impervious the last time I had been summoned to the bedside of an ailing progenitor. When my grandfather was dying, the family pilgrimage to New York was spent with long days at the hospital, punctuated by short exchanges between my grandfather and my brother and me in the moments he was awake. My father would leave my brother and me in the waiting room to go be with his father for longer meetings. His absence would generate a conspiratorial air between my brother and me and we stole away into the network of the building, peering into other patients’ rooms or finding abandoned wheelchairs to push each other around in.

At that age we were beginning to target each other with adolescent venom, but our friendly fraternal energy revived in the isolation of the somber family getaway. We were conscious of the incongruity of feeling so playful with one another in such a setting, but we couldn’t help ourselves. The air changed when our parents left us alone. With all three generations in that hospital, and us being the youngest, it was a as if our scheming was a primal celebration of the life cycle. And especially of our special status in the hereditary line, the prized youth poised to inherit.

My brother went back to LA the day after a week in Sonoma with our father. As I was walking from the cafeteria to the ICU to see if the nurse had already come to take away my father’s dinner, I paused at the waiting room sign. An offer of atemporality. Where I might best enact the avoidance I’d been constructing for the last two weeks. A place where my place in time and space would be as conspicuous as it had becoming walking repeatedly walking past the rooms of frail bodies.

It was this action I wanted a break from, to redirect my path away from the potentialities creeping around the corner, to freeze my progress in the space-time continuum. Into the waiting room where I might find a different air entirely.

I wanted a chance to go back into the antechamber, but someone had pushed a red emergency button and I heard my last name being crooned over the loud speaker.

[thefabulistmonthly]

Reporter in the Field: Edmond Goes to the Pool

After generations of fine sports writing I have finally decided to enter the arena myself.  To prepare for my swimming games.  I was told to buy a simple thong in the fashion of those young ladies one so often sees at our nation’s various beaches, lakes, and monuments.  This is clearly a malicious trap as it is well known in our glorious republic that water is quite cold even when it is not ice.  Donning my finest wool pants and grandma Edna’s mink coat, I paced furiously around the edge of the rink.

                    My fellow gymnasts seemed to be in fairly good shape. Looking at the row of sculpted Adonises I suddenly felt ashamed of my unusual elbows. My whole body seemed somewhat swollen next to the toned abs of the other riders. Suddenly, someone shouted at us to mount the chopping blocks. I tightened my mink coat a bit and pulled on my visor.

                  With the care of an automobile engineer, I had spent the afternoon grooming my body. According to certain textbooks on the subject, the best shape for water travel is “hydrodynamic.” Luckily my whole family possesses great natural hydrodynamics and I didn’t need to trim my mustache or my nails before my swim game. 

                  I entered the water boldly. At first, I feared I resembled a drowning rat more than Gertrude Ederle, my favorite woman to first swim across the English Channel. My progress was slow, but I was warm and sweaty thanks to my coat. Instead of becoming a fish, I decided to retain my dignity and walk along my lane with my head held high. I splashed my arms up and down to create a tumult in the pool. On lookers described my progress as, “less graceful than Hurricane Ike.”

                  Once again, my strangely small feet came in handy. Though I entered my aquatic cage in a fit of trepidation, apprehension, and nervous hives, I exited with a renewed sense of wonder. Why is the water so different from the sand and air of traditional land-based settings? Why do I not sink like a rock, or a ship when there is something wrong with it, or a ship in distress, or a ship when it is torpedoed, or a sinking ship?

[thefabulistmonthly]

Didn't get a physical copy? Let us know and we'll make more!

[thefabulistmonthly]

Call for Submissions!

Hello out there!

Consider this a formal request for your submissions.  Email [email protected] with any writing, drawing, photography, etc. that you have.  It can fall under any academic discipline, as well as social commentary, politics, sports, and more! We look forward to reading what you've got.

Best,

The Editors

[thefabulistmonthly]

Our Sportsman in the Field

Dear Editors,

This February, I received my choicest assignment yet: covering golf, reputed to be the greatest sporting event in the world.  Golf is, by far, the largest global, cross-cultural phenomenon, known in some cultures as soccer.  Excited about my first real job (outside of babysitting and aviation) but unsure as to what protective equipment would be necessary for safe reporting, I donned a visor to prevent forehead sunburn. It immediately became clear that golf is by far the most dangerous sport, featuring prominent “hazards” and sand pit “traps” throughout the entire pitch. In addition to this, golf courses feature varying lengths of grass and inexplicable areas of gritty sand and stagnant, poisonous water that disrupts forward progress across the golf fighting pitch due to shoddy landscaping. Golf Courses are even riddled with small holes that come in handy for tripping opponents. What’s more, unlike a night at the theatre, Golf has absolutely no standards of civilized etiquette or coherent rule structure of any sort. For instance, after losing their ball in a tripping hole, players are forced to apologetically salute the crowd, strip naked, and declare themselves unfit for golf-ball clubbing, leaving the pitch forever.  To “win” in golf, the fighters seek to achieve the highest score and to be the last champion standing on the field. It is also necessary to avoid angering the Chief Line Judge, who often becomes irritated when players refuse to stay within the batting box during the final shootout. In a public shaming ritual, the loser who completes the golf challenge with the fewest points is forced to wear a hideous green jacket.

The true heroes and sportsmen champions of this originally Dutch pastime are obviously the much-honored “caddies.”  I first witnessed a caddy in real 3D while waiting at the golf set commencement area, known locally as the “tee.” Ferdinand, the truest golf hero I observed, displayed particularly admirable patience standing next to a sack of fighting clubs, achieving him 25 points from the line judge. While the lowly golfers whack balls around the pitch seeing who can lose their ball in the bush first, the caddies compete in a complex series of agility and etiquette tests. They carry large sacks full of ball-strikers (aka fighting clubs) while driving quickly in perfect unison across the golf court in Smart Cars. Golf clubs have traditionally been divided into two basic categories. Woods are small headed, short-shafted, sharpened stakes used to drive the ball deep into the turf on the pitch field. Irons are long shafted metal clubs that resemble a Ping-Pong paddle affixed to the end of a pool cue, and are used to slap a rude Golf Ball Striking Enthusiast or to lightly fan oneself on a warm evening out on the golf court. Ferdinand, who is revered as a demi-god in his home province of Canada, fetched a cup of cool lemonade for the Golf Pitch Judgment Leader with such grace that three Golf Pitch Audience members (golf ball striking enthusiasts) fainted in their spectator pits.

In conclusion, golf scrimmaging offers an affordable outlet for irritated laborers. I propose a massive plan to build a series of golf rinks throughout the nation that will allow children to enjoy victorious heroics from handsome celebrity caddies while their parents can jeer at the hilarious antics of ugly golfers as they run about tossing golf pucks into giant wicker baskets.

Your Sportsman In The Field,

Edmond

[thefabulistmonthly]

"Bathtub" by Laura Rothman

Bathtub

  I lay in a bathtub and

catalogue a life led and a life to lead.

My legs turn red with hot water

and my throat grows parched.

  I wish I could write music to scream and

yell torment torture inequality.

But a poet’s pen speaks in

whispers and murmurs of a note passed

between friends in the back of a classroom.

  Dissonant tunes are banged out on my mother’s

upright piano when no one is home.

I make noise—loud noise to rouse the neighborhood.

Look! I’m here!

  No one but my dog hears and his

inquisitive head peeking through

stair rails is not an affirmation

of my existence.

  I’m just a black and white shape

against a black and white background.

  Will someone kill me here so I can

be immortalized in paint.

A modern Marat in my family’s tub.

  One hundred years later an art historian

might find it.  With astute observation claim:

“Oh, that’s not what she looked like” or

“Doesn’t the blue palate scream apathy?”

[thefabulistmonthly]

"Terrible News" by Ryan Mach

“You only lose what you cling to.”

-Gautama Buddha

  In the summer that I left April in Ohio and moved to Los Angeles, I was not in a very good place. My landlord and her two dogs lived directly below me, and not one of them could go very long without making a hell of a lot of noise. I couldn’t read on my very nice balcony before work because my landlord would strut though the small back lot we shared carrying her tennis racket over the small lawn of grass and into the driveway and tell me good morning and ask me what I thought about the weather or the President or her pear tree, which was very beautiful. It’s very easy for me to cordial with people and I’m often told that I am a very polite person, but I am not proud of this. I would rather not talk to most people most of the time, and yet there’s a compulsive sort of spinelessness that has pushed me headlong into hundreds of tedious conversations. I don’t like to discuss politics in California, the weather rarely offers anything new to talk about, and I’ve never had much of a vocabulary for describing plant life.

  The dogs were very large boxers who spent most of their time staring through my back door. Between the helicopters, the sirens, and the screechings of the mentally ill, the only sound I ever heard in Los Angeles was the ceaseless barking of those goddamned dogs and the ceaseless scratching of their goddamned paws against my back door. Even worse, they scared the piss out of my cat, a very neurotic animal that had now taken to urinating in every conceivable crevice of my house besides the one in which the litter box was located. I might have complained, but the last thing I wanted was to have a conversation with my landlord that could conceivably turn into a losing argument. Besides, I rarely slept at night – it felt petty to try to blame the dogs for that.

  One Thursday in July, April called me as I was leaving work. She would call me very often that summer, which I expected, but didn’t like. Sometimes I wouldn’t pick up, but I did many more times than I should have, not because I wanted to, but because it seemed as if I didn’t have a choice. She would sometimes call at night, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the day, but no matter what time it was or what we were doing, the conversation would go in the same useless direction.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi.”

  “Can I do something for you?”

  “Just checking in, I guess.”

  “Alright.”

  “Was your day okay?”

  “It was okay, yeah.”

  “What are you up to now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you trying to punish me? I don’t know what you want me to apologize for, I have no idea what you want me to do! It’s so fucking ridiculous that you just left like you did and it’s even more ridiculous that I have to beg you to come back! Will you just tell me what I did wrong?”

  “No, you didn’t do anything, this isn’t about anything. It’s nothing.”

  “You packed up everything you own, rented an apartment, and left me alone here over nothing?”

  “That doesn’t seem so unbelievable to me.”

  “Are you trying to make me sad?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you love me, Thomas?”

  "Mmmhmm."

  “So you love me then? That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing in California?”

  “I have a job. I don't know. It doesn't matter. What's the weather in Ohio like right now?” I started to miss Ohio very badly and think about the rain falling on my bare back as I sometimes do when I am no longer in control of my thoughts, so I hung up on April and called Bobby.

  Bobby had moved to LA a few years ago, which is part of the reason I came. I enjoyed talking to Bobby, which was not particularly common and probably the principal reason that we were friends in the first place. We arranged to get dinner at some usual restaurant on Pico where the people were young and attractive with interesting haircuts and good teeth. It was one of those places that refused to decide if it was a café or a bar or a restaurant and demanded that an expensive salad be included in whatever meal you ordered and required you to pull your water from an industrial-looking metal spigot, but I liked it because of those nice-looking people who made you felt like somebody when you were there. When I arrived, Bobby had already reserved us a table outside (it was warm and sunny that day), so I immediately ordered one of those cheap domestics that it is better not to mention by name and sat down. Bobby was a tall, attractive man with a thick head of dark, wavy hair and a beard that would have been very full were it not being constantly pulled apart by his fingers in fits of nervousness. His high cheekbones, rigid jaw and strong nose made him look very noble, an impression he constantly contradicted with his somewhat forward, energetic mannerisms and his rough way of speaking and dressing. He wore a faded Daniel Johnston t-shirt with a noticeable hole in the armpit and a pair of dirty-looking, thin-fitting jeans. “Feeling inspired today? Anything worth writing into an ad about testosterone pills is worth writing into poetry,” he said, grinning and leaning in.

  “I’m not talking poetry with you, you hate poetry.”

  “I don’t hate poetry! How can you hate poetry, I love poetry, I just don’t understand it, that’s all. Can’t you write something that will make you some real money, though? Like music or a screenplay?” Bobby tended to speak and gesticulate exuberantly, which was helpful because the cars on the street behind us were barely moving behind the traffic lights. The hum of motors and the dissonance of different radio stations tended to blot out the more subtle facets of conversation. “Money’s what I write the ads for.”

  “I don’t mean ad money, I mean money money, as in famous money, as in ‘move out of the city’ money.”

  “I thought you liked the city.” “I love this city, I fucking adore it, but you can’t live here when you’re famous – you have to go to the Palisades or something, or maybe even La Jolla. God, wouldn’t that be nice, Tom? In fucking La Jolla?”

  “I don’t want to be famous.” “You’re a goddamn liar is what you are. Everyone wants to be famous, you’re rich when you’re famous, everybody loves you when you’re famous.” “Why the hell would I want everyone to love me?” “Because love is the whole point, Tom, what kind of a question is that? Love is the whole center of happiness, it’s what keeps this all from becoming some huge pissing contest, it’s the only good reason to do anything at all!”

  “Jesus, the drinks haven’t even come yet.” “Well if I were famous – oh, hold on.” An ambulance dragged its load in and out of traffic as it rolled towards the restaurant like it was stuck in neutral, pulled towards its destination only by the ineffable forces of fate and gravity. The flashing lights and unbearable siren screeched for our attention as loud as almost anything in Los Angeles, and it was nearly five minutes before it could crawl through the congestion of Pico boulevard far enough to let my ears stop ringing.

  As its whine began to fade away, Bobby simultaneously pulled at his beard and sipped from a glass of water. “If I were famous,” he started, halfway through swallowing, “I’ll tell you one thing, Hallie would marry me in a heartbeat. There would be no hesitation, no question, no nothing. That, my friend, is what fame does for love.” Bobby would always talk half-seriously about marrying his girlfriend, which didn’t seem to cause either party any discomfort. He was a funny guy and she was a good sport. “Is that why you want to get famous, Bobby? So you can get married?”

  “No, of course not, it’s not like that, good God! I love that girl, dammit, I want to get famous so I can marry someone I love!” “You are so full of shit, nobody wants to get married anymore. Things change too quickly for people to get married, it’s an absurd institution. You sure talk about love a lot for somebody who doesn’t care for poetry.” “What does that have to do with anything?” The waitress arrived with our beers and she was very pretty with perfect skin and nice glasses and a charming little gap between her two front teeth and I forgot where I was going with that point about poetry.

  The conversation moved haltingly but enthusiastically like this for a few hours as the beers we drank turned to whiskeys we ordered. We were many drinks past dinner when Bobby had learned the waitress’ name and started asking her all these questions and giving her all these compliments, so I dropped nearly enough money on the table and told him I had to catch up on some work.  It was nighttime now, and I was drunk, and the cars drove slowly enough down the street so that you didn’t have to run where there wasn’t a crosswalk. The moon occupied the very same space it always did and the street was as empty as it usually was and so my mind began to function predictably and I became very bored.  Walking the three blocks back to my house, I tried to improve some copy I was supposed to finish by the weekend that was bouncing around in my head.

  A dazzling…red-carpet…celebrity smile. It’s what everybody wants and now it’s what everyone can have. Now, you can have a bright, radiant smile in just 20 days or less.

  A couple in a beat-up Honda Civic parked ahead of me was having a violent argument and I hurried past them with my hands in my pockets. I turned at the fluorescent beacon of the McDonald’s sign and started down a residential street. No, that wasn’t a strong enough sell – people don’t want to have a good smile, they want to have a smile better than everyone else’s.

  A dazzling…red-carpet…celebrity smile. It’s what everybody wants and now, it’s finally what you can have. Now, you can have a visibly brighter, more radiant-looking smile in just 20 days or less.

  Sounded wrong, awkward. About fifteen feet away, a pit bull in someone’s yard was straddling another pit bull against a chain link fence, snarling and biting as it thrust against her. With each push against the steel, the female’s lips would peel farther and farther back until there was nothing but shiny white teeth. I crossed the street. Advertising should make people feel like they don’t already have what they want, like it feels bad to not have it and it will only get worse.

  A dazzling…red-carpet…celebrity smile. You’re either born with it – or you’re not. Right? Well, not anymore. Now, you can have a bright, radiant smile in just 20 days or less.

  Having reached my house, I promptly stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk and started to feel self-conscious, though I didn’t think anyone was around. I walked up the stairs and fumbled with the key a bit, struggling to remember which parts of the big wooden door I had locked and which keys were supposed to fit into them. As soon as I was inside, I dug out the bottle of my nicer whiskey, poured myself a drink, kissed the cat, threw it out of the bedroom and slipped into bed. “It’s so easy to go to bed drunk,” I thought, leaving the whiskey on the bedside table. When you aren’t drinking and you aren’t working, you tend to think quite a lot, and when I’m not drunk or worried about anything I think about nothing, which is very bad for me. I used to spend a lot of the time I wasn’t spending drinking or working writing poetry or reading the news, but when all that was done I had nothing to think about. Sometimes I would think about sex, but thinking about sex eventually led to thinking about April, and then I had to think about nothing again. But when you’re working, you’re thinking about something, and when you’re drinking, it isn’t so unpleasant to think about nothing – nothing seems fine and you can fall asleep and gradually fade into nothing yourself. Still, it’s much easier to fall asleep with the TV on, so I turned on the news and let the sounds of middle-eastern chaos drown out the roar of the dogs outside.

–

Every morning I would make the coffee and feed the cat and go out to the balcony to read the paper before my twenty-minute commute to Santa Monica. The front page was mostly made up of things I vaguely remembered from the night before: the fighting in Egypt, the new general, the Muslim Brotherhood, the failed negotiations. I read about how the general wasn’t really at all interested in talking things out with the Muslim Brotherhood, how he’d told the U.S. and everyone else that diplomacy had failed when he hadn’t actually tried it, he was really only trying to justify shooting Islamists through the windows of parked buses. Senator Graham would speak to the general for hours at a time, the conversations being lengthened considerably by the use of translators. Although the two men got along well, the general was unreceptive to the Senator’s arguments for peaceful negotiation with the Muslim Brotherhood, insisting that the group was made up of reckless and violent terrorists who couldn’t be reasoned with. Though the general was widely regarded as a sober and reasonable leader, “the way things were going seemed to leave him rather intoxicated with power,” according to Senator Graham. As of press time, over 500

  “Hey Tom, any good news for me today?” My landlord stood outside of the house, holding her tennis racket above her eyes in order to squint upwards at me. She was alarmingly pale in the sunlight, and her garishly colored athletic wear left so very little to the imagination, and yet so much more than it could have possibly wanted to consider. I peered from my chair over the plain black steel of my balcony’s handrail onto our gaudy back lot with its absurdly verdant lawn and its constant sprinklers and its bizarre foliage that hung and twisted and bloomed in manners that seemed unnatural and smiled as hard as I could. “Oh no, you know, only bad news, gloom and doom in the middle east and all that,” I said, reluctantly putting down my paper. “How are you this morning?”

  “Ugh, I can’t stand to read the newspaper,” she replied loudly, “not in the morning. If I’m in a terrible mood I play terrible tennis.”

  “I’m sorry the news makes you feel so terrible.”

  “I just get so angry hearing about all those people hurting one another! So much hatred! I tell you, if you live here long enough you just can’t understand why people can’t get along together.” Her jaw grinded mechanically around a wad of gum as she spoke.

  “I suppose people don’t feel as strongly about politics or religion here.”

  “And is it any wonder? That’s all that stuff ever brings is anger and bloodshed and misery. I say believe whatever you want to believe, it’s all the same when you really get down to it. Just feel love for everyone, you know? Not just people like yourself. Those Buddhists were on to something, if you ask me.”

  I really didn’t want to talk about this with her any longer. “Very sensible of you,” I said. “I don’t want to get you all worked up over this, will you be any good at your tennis match?”

  “Oh it’s just practice today. But thanks so much for thinking of me, Tom, you’re so sweet!”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “Well, I’ve gotta run, don’t want to be late – please don’t forget to take the trash out tonight.”

  I bristled at the obligation. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I smiled.

  “And don’t let the dogs out. Thanks, Tom!”

  “Any time!” I picked the paper up again and resolved that ten was as sensible a time to go to work as nine. As I read, I knew the sky in Santa Monica was making promises of rain that it wouldn’t keep.

  Writing advertisements is not particularly challenging or glamorous work, at least when you are writing smaller spots to appear in print. The work I did would usually be tucked away in some tiny corner of a local newspaper, or sometimes flashing urgently along the margin of a web browser, intended to reach only the small-minded, elderly, and naïve. There is a sort of basic psychology involved in writing such things, but it’s only slightly more difficult to grasp that science than it is to be fooled by it. It is a good job to have early in your adult life because it introduces you to the fact that supporting yourself almost always involves manipulating or somehow injuring someone else.

  Sitting at my desk, I typed out the wording that I’d decided on the night before. One advantage I had in this business was how readily I could memorize phrases and sentences. I’d trained myself to grasp each concept or phrase that entered my consciousness and focus on its particulars, the ordering of the words and intended messages on a billboard, or the timing and phrasing of a punch-line in a movie trailer. This is a good way to think in Los Angeles because the city expends so much effort and money on giving you useless information that it becomes very easy to ignore it and let it subtly influence and manipulate you. It is also a good way to prevent boredom.

  A dazzling, red-carpet, celebrity smile. You’re either born with it or you’re not. Right? Not anymore. Now, you can have a bright, radiant smile in just 20 days or less!

  This ad seemed to be a satisfactory length and would only need a tagline and a phone number before it was published, given that it would occupy a fairly small space in a fairly obscure section of the Santa Monica Mirror. I started to peruse the more useless annals of the internet. There was always much more work to be done, but the work was easily shirked and quickly forgotten. Except for a few necessary assignments, being a low-level “creative type” did not require much dedication, tenacity, or enthusiasm. In fact, I found it expedient to be as impartial and unenthusiastic as possible about the work I did because enthusiasm fosters attachment to one’s work. Serious attachment to anything is necessarily a hindrance of some kind, but attachment to one’s work seems plainly absurd to me. While the other things we grow fond of over the course of our lives are usually characterized by convincing illusions and engaging mysteries, there are really no decent reasons to care about what happens to the lies we construct, however carefully we construct them. I stood up to take a walk and discovered that Bobby had been standing behind me.

  “Wow, it makes me immensely uncomfortable to think about how long you’ve been back there,” I said, noticing that he was wearing the same shirt he was wearing yesterday.  “Don’t you have anywhere to be?”

  “Out to lunch,” he said absently, pulling at his chin and half-forgetting where he was. He looked up at me and regained some consciousness of his surroundings and purpose. Only half of Bobby’s anxious energy was directed outwards, the rest of it contributing to these fits of something near paralysis. “Drinks tonight? With me and Hallie? There’s some loud-ass bar near Melrose and Fairfax, sometimes they have burlesque shows.”

  I knew exactly which bar he was talking about and the idea didn’t interest me at all. The bouncer would be wearing a fedora and a vest and spending most of his time telling kids with flip-flops that they’d have to come to the bar later with different shoes. The drinks would be served in mason jars so as to inconspicuously sell less liquor. The men would be aggressive and the women uninteresting. “I’d rather not go there,” I responded.

  “Great, of course, wonderful. Do you have any other suggestions?”

  “Well, there’s a wine bar on Broadway that’s halfway between here my apartment-“ I stopped short, noticing that Bobby was looking at the carpet and not at me, pouting and twisting his fingers in his pockets. I’d offended him by rejecting him outright and he was pouting about it. If I’d considered the bar before telling him I didn’t prefer it than none of this would be difficult, but I’d complicated things by being direct. “Oh, nevermind,” I said. “You already told Hallie your plan, we’ll go down Melrose.”

  Bobby smiled. “Great, knew you’d come to your senses, was a little pissed off that you didn’t want to go, honestly, but forget about it. Want to get lunch?”

  I looked outside. The marine layer had cleared away and it was warm and sunny again. “Thanks, I’ve actually got some work that I was going to do,” I lied. “I’ll see you tonight.”

[thefabulistmonthly]

"Radio Lab" by Allyson Young

In Nashville

We learned color on the radio

I fell asleep thinking

Names are inherited like blind blue eyes and thin fingers

“Green” could just as soon be “Lila” or “Nyekundu” 

“Blue” might have been “Amarillo”

Linguists have drawn deep lines through the shades.

  And more too, that people see them differently that

Certain teals may appear aqua to someone else and this startling news: that

Very few people, and all of them women, are born with the ability

To see an incredibly rare shade of almost purple.

  Somewhere near Birmingham

I counted white lines on the black highway

The sea in Homer’s Odyssey is wine-red.

  In Florida

A new friend unfolded herself to me in a myriad of oranges and

I told her about the greenish barnacles I can’t pull out of my insides

She fell asleep in my bed and I wondered if her hair was really blond

If those were really

Her knees in the backs of mine

Or just the word, “knees”

And my imagination

  In the morning I knocked my own knee against a bookshelf

And we agreed her hair was brown

But the sun was gold and the lemons in the fridge were yellow

And both would bleach us brighter.

[thefabulistmonthly]

"Poem Beginning with a Line by Di Piero" by Laura Rothman

The sodium streetlights burr outside my window,

And the mechanical humming of the 35 Eureka

lulls me to sleep.

  I get that mood indigo when my baby says goodbye.

No music, no riff, no fugue comes pouring from my fingers,

just the steady breathing of my dog

punctuating my existence like an unwavering double bass.

  Downstairs my brothers murmur a soft tenor.

You, you ain’t never been blue.

Their voices, the rhythm of trains and buses,

Carry me swiftly down some urban Lethe.

  The sodium streetlights burr a blaring trumpet solo

And the woman sifting through my trash hits the cymbal

With every aluminum can she finds.

  My final waking exhale echoes through the house.

The city’s tune rumbles to a crescendo and ceases.

When I get that mood indigo, I could lay me down and die.

[thefabulistmonthly]

"George and Lily at the Met" by Gordon Slater

The last time he was in New York City, George lost track of time in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sweat himself wet rushing downtown to miss his train home. His parents were not surprised, and his father only said, “I’m glad I wasn’t there.” It is the European Paintings, though, that usually make George late; at twenty-two he is stubborn enough to say that the

European Gallery is his favorite place in the world. The only thing George hates about the museum are the men in white jeans and black t-shirts who march furiously through galleries, confronting each painting as if to say, “What the fuck are you looking at, buddy?”

Subterranean rumbles follow George out of the 59th St./Columbus Circle station. The warm, piss-y air of public transit brushes away from him with the crushed-leafs of a windy, fall afternoon. Bracing against this fresh gust, he shivers. It is almost Thanksgiving time again, and men are starting to wear scarves under the flipped-up collars of their fall coats. Some women still wear skirts and the bravest one’s strut bare legged, but stockings are more common now. These impervious, long legs impress the young man.  Both George’s cold hands, stuck deep in jean pockets, and red ears, half covered by straight blond locks, are early indicators of an approaching frost.

On Central Park South, walking towards Fifth Avenue, George remembers that he promised his mother he would buy a bottle of wine for dinner, “something red that costs at least $20 dollars,” she had ordered. Reaching into his back pocket, George opens a leather wallet and leafs through the bills inside, frowning. Fall is George’s favorite season, and fall in New York is liable to awaken the deepest sorts of romantic notions in his heart. With the sun shining so brightly, George notices that he has a particular spring in his step and this makes him smile, feeling suddenly lucky. He realizes, though, that this excitement really must be hidden, Lily wouldn’t have it. But the thought of her can’t help but turn him on in some old corner of his mind.

Walking uptown now, on Fifth Avenue, George wishes he had a sweater on under his thin, blue button-up canvas jacket. Lily will be waiting for him on the steps of the Met, she has never been late, and George quickens his pace slightly in acknowledgement. On gold posts, green awnings stretch out from the tall, stone apartments along the avenue. Walking past the entranceways, George finds himself making eye contact with a doorman in a black, boxy suit.  The doorman, much older than George, is standing behind the glass entrance to a grand, marble lobby trimmed with gold all around. The man’s nose seems almost pressed up to the pane. The doorman’s grey mustache is neatly trimmed and below a black cap, he sports short, charcoal hair. His hands are folded at the waist and he bears the bored expression of a man eternally anticipating someone’s arrival; two blank eyes lack friendship but George can tell by the wrinkles above his cheeks that warmth is easily produced. 

The cross streets pass quickly under George’s loping gait, and he whistles a bit, excited now, walking even faster as the blocks up to the Met recede- the 65th St. sign suddenly reading sixty-nine. George hasn’t seen Lily in a few months, and only once since their break-up that spring. They had been talking though, occasionally, on the phone and via email. In the grey light of an early fall afternoon, George could remember clearly what it had been like to walk the avenues of the Upper East Side with Lily, back when they had only just begun to kiss. His chest felt tight when he thought of those days.  Some blocks over, a year earlier, George had nervously chattered away to Lily, rambling about his favorite paintings at the Met. He assured her she would love them just as much as he did. How could she not?

It was fun for George to watch the foreign women leave the buildings along Fifth Avenue. George would always try to guess their nationality from their accents and fashions, confirming his assumptions from the gold-bronze plagues on the light-pink stone of, say, “The Embassy of France.” He could hardly help but cheat now, of course, as he knew Fifth Avenue well; when he dated Lily he would ride the train in from Connecticut every weekend, and repeat this walk from Columbus Circle. George liked the stroll because it gave him time to prepare for Lily, who intimidated him always in her natural beauty and grace. George liked watching the wealthy women in furs walking furless dogs smaller than their purses and the drivers who waited outside of black Mercedes and Audis to ferry these women off to somewhere even prettier. Up the block, George walks past doormen who seem somehow more fashionable now, younger and thinner, wearing grey suits and standing, or pacing, under the awnings. A few are talking together, cracking jokes in entranceways.

Before the relationship had cracked-up, George was always thinking of things to do with Lily, special places to take her when he came into the City from Connecticut. It was hard, living so far from her, when at College they had so easily slipped into a routine- lunch together between classes, the library after, maybe the gym at night if they weren’t too tired. Their friends joked that they were like a married couple, but here George was, walking to meet Lily, and he wondered if this was what it felt like to be divorced.

                                                                        _

Lily strides down Fifth Avenue, head into a breeze, and long blond hairs blow lightly in her wake. She wears an annoyed expression and walks confidently, her legs half covered by a loose dress that clings to her skin as she moves. Her dress is a grey just darker than the sidewalk, and she ties a tan, cashmere sweater loosely around her hips. The grey marble of the Metropolitan Museum of Art looms a few blocks ahead and behind her a crowd swirls around the white swirl of the Guggenheim.  Lily wonders if there is a rule that all museums must be white, but then remembers the red-stone Museum of Natural History and smiles to herself.

It is sunny and bright, and Lily squints, having forgotten her sunglasses in her annoyed rush to leave the apartment. George is always late, she thinks, holding her hand to her brow as she looks down the avenue. Lily wonder’s if he’ll make her wait long- it is cold, even in the sun, and small hairs stand on end along Lily’s arms.

Waiting to cross the Avenue to the museums steps, Lily notices a small dog at her feet, tethered ridiculously to a bright silver collar and leash, which is studded all over with silver spikes.  A skinny woman stands holding the leash nonchalantly, talking fast into a cell phone pressed against her ear, “I don’t care what he says, the cabinets have to be done by Tuesday or the countertops can’t be put in… oh fuck him!”

                  Lily rolls her eyes and kneels down to look the dog, a little white thing that licks his lips at the girl.

                  “Aren’t you a good little boy?” Lily says, smiling at the dog, patting its head and rubbing its ears between her fingers with a soft, delicate touch.

                  “Actually, she’s a girl,” The woman says, glaring down at Lily and tugging at the leash, pulling the dog with a jerk out into the crosswalk. Lily sighs, and the pup looks back at her forlorn, in love.

                  The traffic purrs as Lily bounces across the street, and a man on the corner, watching, thinks that she must be walking on her tiptoes, so barely does Lily touch the ground. The Metropolitan looks positively welcoming, two white dove wings spreading to embrace the populous, which mills around below the central entrance’s pillars, everybody waiting for somebody else. Tourists sit on the steps, looking down at the devices in their hands, scrolling with an even pace through endless streams of pictures and messages. Lily tries not to join them for a bit, until her leg is tapping on the marble step and she pulls out her phone to text George.

                                    [Where are you? I am on the steps, hurry hurry]

                                    A buzz heralds his reply.

                                    [Two blocks away, patience!]

                    How many times had George nagged her to come with him to the Met? Lily was surprised she had even agreed this time, but she felt the pressure of George’s pleasantness when he had called her, and they hadn’t seen each other for months. Still, Lily thought, she lived a few blocks from the museum and had been going all her life! George’s starry-eyed aestheticism always seemed to rankle her, its not as if he studied art, it was just one of his many “things,” his recipes for how to be happy in life. Lily used to love hearing him say absurd things like, “Museums remind me to appreciate beauty in everyday scenes, all I have to do is imagine them painted and the world seems fresh to me.” Towards the end though, she had made fun of him for those kind of words, laughing when he asked her to go to a new show, “You won’t come to get drinks with Irena and Julie, but you want me to wait on line an hour for this shit?” Lily complained. She felt guilty later, knowing that she would have liked the show, and even more so with George grinning like a child at her side.

                  It was sad Lily realized, to meet like this with everything so much in the past, no feelings alive and present that could buzz between them. In fact, when George had called she had to warn him, “Don’t try anything,” because their break up had been hard enough without getting the financing together for a sequel. But how could she just forget what she once felt? Just the thought of George made her remember a thousand times she had felt happy and beautiful, but a bitter annoyance lingered too, with these bedside memories.

Lily could see him now, across the street, walking with his awkward gait that came from having legs a bit too long, his head in the clouds, whipping around to look at the people he passes and never fully aware of what is two steps in front of him. Lily smiles, untying her sweater from her waist and pulling it over her head so for a brief moment her blond locks are trapped under the collar, pressed down around her face. George sees her now and she waves with one hand, pulling her hair free with the other. Smiling, waving, and pulled by the tug of unshakeable affection, George crosses into traffic, running between two cabs and up to the steps where Lily stands now.

                  “Lily. You, well, you look amazing, “ George, his face bright, stumbles around with his words and Lily laughs.

                  “Shut up, its good to see you,” hugging him, Lily lets herself fall just for a moment into his embrace before pulling back. She motions with her head towards the entrance.

                  “You’ve been wanting to take me long enough, lets go,” Lily smiles but her eyes are dim, looking down, sad, “I have dinner with my parents in a bit.”

                  Walking up the stone steps into the Museum, Lily realizes that they must look like a couple, striding close to each other, a well adjusted, attractive couple that does civilized things together, that wanders the Metropolitan together.

                  “Where are we going first?” Lily asks George, like a schoolgirl on a fieldtrip. She knows this museum just as well as George, if not better, having grown up only blocks from its steps- but she is content to let George lead the way this one time, absolving herself of an old obligation in the process.

                  “When are you meeting your parents for dinner?”

Suddenly, George is awash in a memory of Lily’s parents. Her father, dark, handsome and intimidating, always asking George what he is reading, wondering if George had a plan for after Graduation. Lily’s mother, who is eternally youthful and as elegant as her daughter, full of small jokes, so kind and charming that Lily actually felt jealous watching George talk and laugh with her. They had taken him to dinner once, to a sushi place on the West Side, when they were first dating. George kept on slipping his hand around Lily’s leg under the table, and she would throw him dirty glances and move her leg. Not mad for long, she would always grab his hand in her own. At dinner, George had spent the whole meal trying to make the family laugh, and he was almost sweating with embarrassment. Lily had an entirely disabling effect on him, and with her George had only the singular focus of making a good impression. George could have relaxed; it wasn’t his charm she loved, but his empathy.

George has been wrapped up in his own thoughts so much that he doesn’t realize they were almost at the paintings he wanted to show Lily. The night before, George lay in bed and mumbled to himself, trying out things to tell Lily, words to explain these paintings that meant so much to him, alone, in his impressionable mind. 

                  “Where are these paintings? You said you wanted to show me a Gauguin or something?”

                  “This way, just around the corner.”

                  The Met is crowded, school groups and clumps of European tourists wander, talking quietly, in the hallways that divide the galleries neatly. George likes to watch the crowds, each group maintaining their own pace through the collection. Off the hallway, Lily and George watch a woman standing perfectly still in front of a large Monet, one of his water lily paintings, staring at it with intense, furious concentration. The woman, wearing a black headset like an air traffic controller, appears to be a statue, a new piece of installation art. George and Lily laugh, smiling at each other, both amused by the deliberate dedication of their fellow museumgoer.

                  “Who do you think she is?” Lily had always liked to ask George questions about strangers they saw together; he always seemed to have an idea.

                  “Oh her? She is the eldest of ten children that all grew up crammed together in a ranch house on Long Island. She never got enough attention and forever felt like no one appreciated how sensitive she was. The other nine kids played sports, soccer and lacrosse, but she was the artistic one. These days, her husband won’t come with her to Museums, but she doesn’t mind, she prefers the headphones to his complaining. I’d say she is happier than we could imagine right now.”

                  They walk on, deeper into the gallery, past two men, both curly haired and chubby, who speak fast in Italian and point rapidly at a map of the museum in apparent disagreement. Across the room, George spots one of the paintings and taps Lily on the shoulder.

                  “There, that’s what I wanted to show you. That one most of all.”

                  Set against the white, clean walls of the museum, spotted by George from between the shoulders of amateur art critics jostling for the best angles, hangs Paul Gauguin’s “The Siesta.” In the frame, four women lounge with little concern for the viewer. Resting in the shade of roofed-over porch, escaping the heat of the sun, the women have always seemed to George to define the term “casual.”

                   “What is she doing, the one in the back, in the maroon dress?” Lily waits a few beats, allowing a respectful silence to settle, before asking.

                  “Ironing. I’m surprised you can’t tell, I seem to remember you taking issue with the state of some of my wrinkly button downs.”

                  Lily ignores George and wrinkles her eyebrows at the painting, Gauguin is a “post-impressionist,” she remembers from an art history class, and famous for his vibrant, pastel colors.

                  “It is beautiful, the pink in the wood on the porch and how the shadows are all one shade, no graduations.”

                  George nods. He has stood in this spot so many times, thinking, for the past few years, of Lily, who he thinks is as effortless in her style as the woman lounging in the foreground. He is tongue tied though, standing there with her, not knowing what to say anymore. Lily always surprised him, knowing more about art than he thought, more than him actually.  Lily always knew a bit about an artist or a painting that George was familiar with only in the realm of his personal taste; without any real, critical training in art history, George relied solely on his intuitive aesthetic preferences to form surprisingly strong opinions about his favorite pieces.

                  “I just love the clothes, the dresses and tops, the blue and white polka-dotted scarf tied around her hat,” George pointed at the mysterious figure in the foreground, “Her shawl is such a dark blue that it almost looks black, no?”

                  “I love her pose, she seems so relaxed but I can’t tell if she’s tired or bored, or happy. He says so much with her positioning that he doesn’t even need to show us her face!”

                  “I don’t think that pose is even natural, something is off, proportionally. It is perfect though, especially with that dress, it must be lace or something. The blue of the dress is so soft, light, and with those little flowers on it… I think she is gorgeous.”

                  Lily rolls her eyes and sighs.

                  “Of course you think she’s gorgeous, Gauguin was totally imperialist, eroticizing these “exotic” women. He was obsessed with the idea of romantic, ‘simple’, ‘unspoiled’ beauty.”

                  Lily was always competitive, and she would come at George swinging, hoping to catch him in a moment of ignorance. He really couldn’t argue though, she was kind of right about Gauguin.

                  “I think they are cool, that’s all. No one dresses like that now, I’d die if I saw a girl in that hat, with the polka dots.”

                  “Oh, would you? I didn’t know polka dots turned you on like that. When did you become such a critic of women’s fashion?” Actually, Lily had always liked George’s taste in clothes, and used to love when he would compliment her on an outfit in his awkward, earnest manner. George has a good eye, Lily thinks, not that he knows much at all about fashion.

                  A shrill alert disturbs the gallery, Lily’s phone ringing and she steps away, motioning that she has to take the call. George stands alone now, in front of the painting, and wonders if Lily cares about it at all. Was he stupid to call her and ask her to come with him? Lily has seen this painting before, no doubt, and she was always hard to impress anyway, wary of anything that George was too excited about. George wants to tell Lily that he thinks of this painting when he thinks of her, but it wouldn’t go over well and he knows he cannot. Suddenly the painting seems unbearably somber to him, all these women looking away from him, avoiding his gaze. They are ignoring him, George thinks, tired of his incessant admiration. Lily leans up against a wall, chatting into her phone for a minute, hangs up and walks back to George.

                  “I’m sorry, that was my mom. I have to go. Do you want to show me something else quick?”

                  “No, it’s ok. Thank you for indulging me and Mr. Gauguin.”

                  Lily hugs George, kisses him on the cheek and steps away, thinking that he looks sad, which makes her feel awkward. A part of Lily wants to hug him again.

                  “I’ll see you soon!” Walking away from George, the positivity in Lily’s voice rings flat and empty, and she feels bad for saying anything at all.

                  Down the steps and out of the Met, Lily feels strange and almost nauseous. It is colder now, and the sun is beginning to sink down over the West Side and the crowd is still stirring around the marble wings of the Museum. Lily starts walking uptown, staying on Fifth instead of cutting east to her apartment.

                  George leaves, five minutes after Lily, and starts walking downtown. His step is heavy and he feels colder than before, the setting sun casting long shadows down towards the East River. George doesn’t think much as he walks downtown. Averting his eyes from the doormen standing in long, warm looking coats, George feels embarrassed, something Gauguin has never made him feel before. Walking slowly, George barely notices his progress and without realizing it, he crosses 59th. George walks a few blocks down, scanning the storefronts, looking for a liquor store. He finds one, and inside, George walks down an aisle between long rows of wine bottles, red and white and probably rosé too. Peering at a price tag, George picks a Pinot Noir and carries it over to the counter. The cash register reads, “15.99,” and George pulls out a ten, a five, and four quarters from his wallet, which is empty now, besides for a folded map of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

                  Uptown, Lily turns into the park on 105th Street, and wanders into the Conservatory Garden. In the summer, thin walkways separate rows of flowers and bushes in bloom. Lily likes to feel the fuzzy leafs on one green bush, and she loves the small purple flowers that she never remembers the name of. A small fountain hosts a family of water lilies and some sickly looking gold fish, when its warm, and Lily pauses for a moment at the empty pool, thinking of Monet’s big canvases. It is the Rose Garden though, circling around a larger fountain, which has been Lily’s favorite since she was a girl. The roses aren’t in bloom anymore, the pink pedals only recently wilted and scattered on the ground by the season’s first frost. Some pedals on the ground are still pink in spots, but most have turned brown like old bits of newspaper. Lily thinks that she would like to take George up here sometime, when the flowers are in bloom and it is warm; she is sure he would like the quiet gardens. The sky is dark now, and Lily shivers. It won’t be warm again for months.

[thefabulistmonthly]

"Mountain Elegy" by Allyson Young

When the sky opens up to the plains,

Rain soaks through the things that I want

  To hold your name forever on the roof my mouth

To run very fast in the other direction

  Until they are too heavy to carry.

[thefabulistmonthly]

"Missed Connections" by Laura Rothman

Beautiful Symphonic Busker - m4w (financial district)

Montgomery Street BART,

end of the day, our eyes catch

with a beautiful smile.

  But alas you are there only rarely

and I have places to go and things to do.

I would love to meet you.

  Quiet Cashier at Safeway – m4w (twin peaks)

  Safeway checkout late last night,

I was buying milk and an avocado

for breakfast.

  You grinned when I said

“together they make a great stew”

I paid and left, maybe next week?

  Fur Wearer on F – m4m (embarcadero)

  I’ve seen you twice now,

I think you go to the Art Institute.

Why else would you wear fur?

  You make eyes at me, I

can feel it. But you need to

say something to me.

  Great Boots –w4m (Upper Market)

  I walked by you and

commented on your leather rugged

outdoorsman boots.

  Maybe we can hike sometime?

I ride the 37 often

and carry exorbitant amounts of granola.