this new pandemic or the next or maybe some unknown future contagion might comprehensively scrub any of us from the Earth, the way the waitress, comprehensively, wipes down the diner’s counter two seats from me, sprays the surface with Lysol, then wipes everything away again. Spotless.
It’s late February in the first Year of the Virus. In a month this place will be closed, and then next it will no longer exist. But for now, the experts say, Wash your hands; all will be fine.
So, if you should, coughing just once into the concern of your elbow, sit near me at this counter, then look up to say, “What’s good?” I’ll say
the coffee is so good and also the cheeseburger and you must try the vanilla milkshake. The onion rings: excellent. The jalapeno poppers: exquisite. And here’s the sports page which says a guy just broke the world pole vaulting record
and that is also good. I don’t want to ignore peril. I’m not trying to distract from the threat of plague, war, or famine. Fate, like a meteor whistling toward us. I’m just saying it’s good
to have lived, even briefly, in a time when one’s vocation, one’s destiny could be the use of a pole to vault over a different pole which, for me, seems bizarre, though less bizarre
than other sports, such as, let’s say, bog snorkeling, cheese rolling, or “eel pulling” which was basically tug of war with a live eel and popular in the Netherlands in the 1800s.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-04-20 16:46:002022-02-25 17:18:49“Like a Dish Rag Soaked in Bleach,” by Matthew Olzmann
From the top of the old tower, Solitary bird, you go on singing To the countryside until the day dies; And your song drifts through the valley. Spring everywhere Shines in the air and exults in the fields, And seeing it disarms the heart. You hear flocks bleating, herds lowing; Happy, the other birds play together, Ceaselessly turning in the cloudless sky, Celebrating this gladdest of seasons: You sit apart, pensive, watching it all; No companions, no flights, No show of joy, you shun their games; You sing, and singing spend The year’s and your life’s finest flower.
After the car accident I bought the game :: now when I close my eyes I see the cliff-sides and dense tree cover, the fog shrouded island and the shimmering lake :: I keep busy collecting ore, mining it so I can buy things, special carrots and outfits for every type of extreme temperature or weather event :: I barely remember sliding backwards across the highway :: I’m 100% there collecting mushrooms and insects and killing reanimated skeletons :: the music still in my head face down on the chiropractor’s table, swelling to its jaunty crescendo :: heat on my neck, my shoulders finally slumping down from what feels like their permanent position by my ears :: I’m thinking strategy, what fortress to attack next ::
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-04-16 16:25:112022-02-25 17:18:48“Call to Adventure,” by Dane Slutzky (Poetry ’21)
Get a grip, Porter Atwood tells himself. This is no time to be acting like a fool. Then again, there’s no time like the present. Which is why he finds himself seated on a stool just down from Luther Krake and some other men over at the Y-Go-By. Porter, deep in his cups, nods to Luther, who’s well on his way, as Alvin Beyes sets him up again. “You’re getting married tomorrow, ainna?” Alvin asks Luther. Luther nods this is so. Luther’s nearly sixty. Alvin pours him a shot and pulls him a draft. “This one’s on me.” Porter’s known people like these men all his life. Men—some women, too, but mostly men—who can’t quite get a grip on their life until they’ve squeezed with the pads of their fingers the fluted wet coolness of a seven ounce glass of beer in the velvety half-dark of a tavern. The word itself, rhymes with cavern. No matter how bright the day, it’s always full shade in a tavern—twilight at mid-day, with electric lighting and the slight buzzing of those neon beer signs. Almost like a different kind of pulse. Men like Wally Czabek, seated two stools over, a decent man given to periodic failures of focus. Men for whom the world only makes sense here, in the company of other men given to similar failures and weaknesses, men who find a kind of sullen joy in each other’s company, comparing notes on the conspiracy outside. “The world’s a mess,” says Wally Czabek, who orders himself another brandy Old Fashioned with a beer chaser, as though that is somehow going to fix things. In here it’s okay. It’s okay, really. It’s fine. Outside it’s wrack and ruin, and if the sun weren’t such a blinding rectangle of light each time somebody opened the door to join them, they could even forget entirely that that other crazy world existed. And then something would remind them, a wife phoning them or an errand remembered, some destination that required you to get off your barstool, and they’d go home, carrying their unspoken heartache and longing like a disease. Until it was time for the next afternoon’s transfusion, the bolstering of meaning and courage and perseverance that could only be gotten here. It’s this bolstering Porter’s drawn to. He’s been out of sorts for the last two weeks, ever since that kid drowned in his subdivision. Can’t concentrate, keeps thinking about how that kid ended up pinned beneath some branches in that little creek—barely a creek, really—the water tumbling over him, a bunch of other boys standing around with rocks at their feet and defensive, guilty looks in their faces. No, the two didn’t have to be connected, only they probably were. And Porter made sure, given it was their parents who bought his houses, bought them in his subdivision, and the drowned boy was from some cheap-ass rental unit somewhere else, that nobody, including Police Chief Jones, looked at this as more than an accidental drowning. There’s what you know, and there’s what you feel. What he knew was what was good for his business. What he felt was something else, and he tried not to think about what he felt.
It sits where the shadows of other trees slide in late afternoon, dug deep and patted down. Touched by a breeze, then still, the green skin of soon-to-be sour fruit bends the branches, fruit that will be, in a week or less, halved and left to float in sugared water for the children. It is a small thing—this point in the future— but the man who planted this tree listens to it as if it were an orchestra tuning.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-04-14 19:05:002022-02-25 17:18:47“Lemon Tree,” by Eric Cruz (Poetry ’20)
“Do you ever feel like you’re losing it?” she asks. We just finished dinner—shrimp fajitas from La Cocina—and Chloe glares at me across the table. She’s smiling the smile that, in a former time, I might have perceived as an opening, but by now has already changed into something else. “What do you mean?” I say. I’m leaning in too close, I know, my elbows hunched over the table. I’d insisted on keeping the sitting table, which I bought at an estate sale when Chloe and I moved in together. The rest we split fifty-fifty. It must have looked ridiculous the day I came home with it: a table in the living room and not a single other thing to my name. “I wake up in the morning and I can’t find what I left out the night before,” Chloe says, pressing a napkin to her unmade lips. “Where all have you looked?” She hasn’t asked me over to her new apartment yet, but I can picture what’s inside. “Everywhere,” she says, taking in the whole of the room. The shoji screens are drawn in from the walls and there are candles flickering on the table. It’s a trick I learned from a video a friend posted about how to make plain spaces more intimate. It feels now like we’re floating in a cloud, a refuge of gray and white entirely our own. “I swear I think my new place is haunted,” Chloe says. “Like someone is moving my stuff in the night.” I stifle a laugh. “Like your clothes are sprouting ears and hopping like a rabbit?” “Jun,” she says, rolling her eyes, “I’m serious. Nothing is ever where I left it.” I remember when I first moved to San Francisco. Friends lectured me all about soaring rent prices, homelessness, summer nights that made you curse not bringing an extra jacket. But they’d neglected to mention the most basic warning of all. “I think I’m the wrong person to ask,” I say, taking a sip from my glass. “My things have a history of disappearing.”
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-04-13 19:00:002022-02-25 17:18:46“Petaluma,” by Daniel Tam-Claiborne (Fiction ’20)
a cento pantoum using lines from Ronald Barthes’s Mourning Diary (FSG, NY, 2010)
Mourning—a cruel country where I’m no longer afraid. The formal beginning of the long bereavement. This terrifies me. I know my mourning will be chaotic.
The formal beginning of the long bereavement. Eighteen months for a mother, a father. I know my mourning will be chaotic. We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in.
Eighteen months for a mother, a father. Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in. Suffering, like a stone (around my neck, deep inside me).
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. This morning—the offer of lightness. Suffering, like a stone (around my neck, deep inside me). I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.
This morning—the offer of lightness. For the first time, I decide to wear a colored scarf. I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering. I limp along through my mourning.
2021 fiction alum Olivia Zubrowski was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of Zubrowski’s story “City Life” below:
City Life
There was a photo of someone who looked like my voice teacher in the obituaries this morning. I was surprised: I had only just seen them a few months ago, and while they didn’t look well, they certainly hadn’t looked on the verge of death. I spent some minutes studying the uneven blue plaster on the ceiling, watching thin shadows of steam from my coffee bloom and fade. It was very bright for winter, the cold sunlight glinting off the dirty window, concentrating itself on my right temple. The kitchen used to be an attic: my apartment is small, with chalky walls and irregular, Victorian-looking windows. The voice teacher used to come here on Thursday afternoons. They always drank a cup of kukicha tea in the one nice mug I had, a solemn red LeCreuset. Just after I began the voice lessons, a few years ago, I started to dream that I didn’t have a face. These dreams stretched into months, then years. I always awoke to a sense of relief. I have no mirrors in my apartment. The times I do see my face–in old, yellowed photos, washed of detail; in the dull sheen of the lightbulb–there it is, obscene, ordinary. The voice lessons were the indirect result of my attempt to get over a past love. I thought I should take more walks, get out of my tiny apartment, the old plaster falling from the walls my only company. Most days I don’t mind the quiet much. When I was small, the neighborhood I lived in was crowded with houses. Trees tried in vain to take root between large driveways and boxy shrubs with poisonous-looking berries. In our backyard, the bedrock lurched up in indignation: a ten-foot granite face leered from the hillside; an eyeless face of mottled, grey scar tissue that shielded us from the highway. At the top of the hill, the rock dipped into a slight hollow. Often, I would climb up into that hollow and watch the sunset drain the color from the town, distilling the smog and neon to pale colors that gathered at the edge of the world. In that bower of thin, tough trees and blue moss, it was hard to tell the difference between raindrops and footsteps. One day, I watched a chipmunk slip into a gap in the rock I hadn’t noticed before. There was an opening: the mud was cool and silken. I pushed my body into the darkness, though I could only fit my shoulders inside. My breath came out in ragged, struggling gusts. I leaned my head against a protrusion in the rock: when I opened my eyes, the space was filled with rich colors. There were small scratches across the whole ceiling, half-words and rust-drawn figures, charcoal handprints and pale white outlines of unfamiliar animals. My walks often unearth silent and almost-forgotten memories like this one. In my efforts to forget my love, my walks got longer and longer, and I spent less time in that narrow apartment. I never had a particular destination. One afternoon, on the last leg of my journey back, I stepped into a cafe across the street from my apartment. What did it offer today, that it never had before? When does a piece of the world become something that invites you in?
In the meeting, James Halliday announced the company was being sold and then he couldn’t stop coughing. This was bad timing—both the sale of the company and the coughing— because everyone, including Mallory, had a lot of questions about the sale and the coughing fit seemed a little too prolonged to be real, theatrically timed and thus suspect, though James was well-liked overall and thought to be a straight shooter by the kind of people who used the term straight shooter and believed in such a thing. Mallory was also sick, though she wasn’t coughing. She had multiple doctor’s appointments scheduled but she kept canceling them and coming to work instead, because she, like everyone else, knew the sale was coming and wanted to be there when the news came out. She poured James a glass of water. He drank, his eyes wild and red and teary, then said, “As I was saying—” and started coughing all over again.
Mallory exchanged glances with Simone across the table. Simone looked panicked. Technically she was second in command because a sudden string of executive departures had left her there, designated-survivor style, but she was twenty-five and had confided to Mallory in the restroom, after asking her for a tampon, that she was applying to law school.
“I think what James was saying,” said Shyama from HR, “is that we deeply value everyone’s contributions here and the company will be looking to make this transition as smooth as it possibly can be.”
There was a silence strewn with James’s continued, though quieter, coughing.
“When?” Mallory said.
“When what?” Shyama said.
“When is the smooth transition? When is the sale? When is our last day of work?”
James Halliday finally subdued his cough. “It’s today,” he said. “It’s happening. It’s now.”
Some facts about James Halliday: He was exquisitely good-looking. He had high cheekbones and green eyes with notably long eyelashes. His mother was a Peruvian human-rights activist and his father was a cardiac surgeon who had met her while volunteering in the Peace Corps and the whole family, including James, returned to Peru for a period of time each year to do good works. Everyone at the company knew this from reading media profiles of him, though he never discussed it himself. When he was in Peru doing good works with his family, he was still accessible by email. He was always accessible by email. Mallory had never known anyone to return emails faster, on a regular basis, than James. On the evening she received her diagnosis, she wrote him at 10 p.m. to say that she would be taking a couple of personal days. She didn’t say why. He replied at eleven. I hope everything is right with you and the world, his email said, a message Mallory archived immediately so she’d never have to look at it again.
