ISSUE 01 Contents
03 On mojo (Letter from the Editor) 04 Carl James Grindley - Rocket Car 05 Carl James Grindley - Secrets of the Sea 07 Andrew Bales - Scrawls ad Dots: A Conversation with Heiko Müller 13 Dale Bridges - Welcome to Omni-Mart 34 Theadora Siranian - Persephone 37 Amy Fox - Miluo on Qu Yuan 39 Jamie Wilson - Trusting Story: A Conversation with Tim O’Brien 49 Marit Ericson - Message to the Aliens from this Dude, Isaac 50 Stephanie Wilson - Compartments 60 Mark Petrie - “I miss you, you beast.” Cover art: Study 08 by Heiko Müller
Editor Poetry Editor Staff Members Matthew Grolemund Nathan Lipps Katelyn Delvaux Jay McMahan Charlie Edwards Cynthia Moss Assistant Editor Non-Fiction Editor Ryan Gannon Woody Skinner Andrew Bales Brandon Rush Taryn Gilbert Soon Wiley Zac Goodall Fiction Editor Public Relations Becky Hunter Jamie Wilson Robynn Sims Joey Lemon Welcome to mojo – the new online literary journal of Wichita State University’s M.F.A. program.
Previous to this inaugural issue, WSU’s recent efforts have focused on publishing influential Wichita writers in Mikrokosmos, the program’s fifty-year-running print journal. And where Mikrokosmos continues to publish the best of the Midwest, mojo represents our effort to move from the regional to the global, to join the printed word’s expansion into the world of online literary publishing.
Within you’ll find the blossoming talents of the emerging writer and the reflections of the veteran. You’ll find stories and poems that create their own unique worlds, places that welcome us in and won’t let us leave. You’ll find a microcosm of an expanding literary space - portraits of the past and hints toward the future. And you’ll findmojo itself - an enigmatic spell, cast down on the page.
Matthew Grolemund, Editor CARL JAMES GRINDLEY
Rocket Car
Last night, Lora, everyone dreamt About me. Okay, just an ex-girlfriend Who wouldn’t tell me anything And my boss, who claimed I had A cool rocket car. Like in the Jetsons, She said. I suppose that is good Enough. Look: in real life, I have a billfold full of petty Expectations, the currency Of small states in ever reducing Denominations. Here is a note The size of something Barbie Would take out of Ken’s wallet The morning after. If you look Carefully, you can almost Make it out. I think it is worth A third of something that is a third Of something worthless. So at this Point, I am happy to settle for Rocket cars and living The glamorous unknown In someone else’s dreams. CARL JAMES GRINDLEY
SECRETS OF THE SEA
Science tells us that the common American Lobster, Homarus Americanus, can hold a grudge for two Weeks. After that, all is forgiven. Seriously. Ask The Journal of Animal Behavior. They published C. Karavanich And J. Atema’s article on the subject In 1998, so it must be true. There are, Therefore, no lobster Hatfields or lobster McCoys. And if a lobster archduke Is assassinated by a Serbian Lobster in an undersea Sarajevo, The whole mess boils over In fourteen hardshelled days, And if the plot took longer Than that to hatch, it never took place. That’s why lobsters don’t bother With chemical weapons, none of them Ever get out of organic chemistry, They all fail their midterms and get made Into rolls. Of course if the grudge is Immediate, all bets are off, the little Bastards will pull each other to pieces. Science has no name for this, but cooking Does. A lobster, utterly denuded of all Useful appendages is called a bullet. Surrealism suggests that lobster bullets Must be loaded into special lobster guns. Salvador Dali shot Filippo Tommaso Marinetti With a lobster gun at the Armory Show In 1913, after Marinetti claimed lobsters Had no future. Indeed, Carlo Carrà’s August Manifesto contains no mention of taste And therefore, no mention of lobsters. Scrawls and Dots A Conversation with Heiko Müller Andrew Bales Heiko Müller’s paintings are not only visually captivating, but embrace story through the many creatures that inhabit them. These creatures also highlight his range of talent; Heiko delivers a striking balance of scrawl and detail, of the playful and vibrant with the dark and haunting.
Heiko began working alongside his older brothers, who were separated from him in age by 10 and 16 years. Yet together they enjoyed music from Pink Floyd, The Who, Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin and the like while sharing a fascination with surreal Salvador Dalí posters. Over the years, Heiko’s interest in art hasn’t faded, and this cultural immersion shows itself in his work as a stylistic mix of everything from the Renaissance and folklore tales to comic books.
After studying illustration and design at Hamburg University, Heiko went on to work as a graphic designer before returning to the university, where he now teaches art. Meanwhile, his art has been displayed in galleries from Saint Petersburg to New York and has been featured in various publications. With translation assistance from Christian Krämer, I corresponded with Heiko about his recent work.
Andrew Bales: Your paintings show a combination of influences. How did you come about your pairing of styles?
Heiko Müller: I think I basically got that from my brothers. I had to share a room with one of them, and when he wasn’t there I used to rummage through his stuff and look at his comics. My favorites were Mort & Phil, Vampirella and The Phantom. But we had a number of art books too, which I thought as valuable as the comics. I loved the pictures of the surrealists and the old masters. One picture that made a particularly strong impression on me was Arnold Böcklin’s “The Plague.” No wonder I used to have nightmares as a kid. When I was a teenager my approach to art grew much more serious. I discovered so many amazing modern artists. Even today, looking for current artists is a part of my daily life. As I decided against defining my own artistic position, my art is probably a product of all these influences.
The Forest appears frequently in your paintings and is inhabited by familiar animals (deer, bears, wolves), but also creatures of your own design. Can you elaborate on these creatures and your interest in “the dark goings-on behind the facade of nature”? My creatures have a symbolic nature. Some of them represent threatened nature or even its death, complementing the Grim Reaper in a sense. Other creatures represent emotions of someone walking through nature, emotions inspired by the surroundings. Imagine you’re walking barefoot through a dense forest. You can’t see exactly what you’re stepping on. You don’t feel at ease because of that. It could be insects or other crawlies, thorns might be in there too, and your imagination starts to run wild; you see things on the ground that aren’t there. A withered leaf swaying in the wind becomes a rat. A short stick becomes a locust. Then you come to a clearing. You see the light shining through the trees and it seems almost palpable. Little insects are hovering in the air like dots of light and don’t seem threatening at all. The grass is wet and warm and your anxiety wears off. There’s something magical in the air; the atmosphere seems charged.
If you wanted to capture that in a photograph, you would fail. A painting will manage to get closer, however. This “getting closer” is an important aspect of my work. That’s why I often use scrawls in my pictures. Those represent the threat most of the time while the dots (of light) stand for positive energy. From time to time I find ideas in my scrawls, which I use for separate pictures. The same thing goes for the dots, which have grown into characters by now.
Schnabelpercht is a figure from ancient European folklore and also the title of one of your pieces. Tell us about this character and how these stories influence your work.
Schnabelpercht or Perchta is an equivalent to Mother Hulda. She visits homes to reward those who are hard-working and helpful and to punish the lazy and selfish. Unlike the Mother Hulda you find in the Brothers Grimm, Perchta doesn’t look like a nice old lady, but rather like Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy or a terrifying many-horned devil.
I like scary things and am particularly fond of the Schnabelpercht. It’s a simple but effective disguise. You make a mask out of a sheet, and the dress is old-fashioned women’s clothing. Most of the time young men are underneath. It’s interesting to see the effect the disguise has on people. Both the dressed-up person and the people around them start to behave differently. When I imagine dressing up myself like that or picture a Schnabelpercht visiting me at home to see if I’ve been diligent, I immediately get anxious, as if such an event were really about to happen. That in turn makes me want to delve deeper into the topic, and when I paint such a picture I hope to stir similar emotions in the viewer. You have two young sons. How do they react to your balance of cuddly creatures and scary figures and settings?
That’s different from case to case. Usually they prefer the scary creatures. Nonetheless I try not to make them too monstrous to protect my kids from nightmares. For example, when I drew the zombie lieutenant, I thought I’d better not hang it in the living room. My wife and sons liked the drawing though, so I didn’t think they would be scared after all. On the other hand I never thought my picture “Study 08” was particularly terrifying. While this one was on display in the living room, my son had a nightmare. When I tried to calm him, he told me he’d dreamt of a monkey staring at him from a tree. Then he imitated the monkey’s expression and it looked exactly like my picture. I could only think: “Oh my god, what have I done.”
dale bridges
WELCOME TO OMNI-MART
Barry wants me to terminate the babies in the morning before the customers arrive, and he’s the District Manager, so that’s what I do. I wake up at 5 AM and I go to the Family Education Department and I remove all the InstaBabies from the shelves. I open each package from the top, as per the instructions on the back of the box, and I pull the cords marked “Bring Me to Life.” In less than five minutes, there are two dozen fat, multi-racial babies crying on the floor in front of me. They are very loud and I am afraid someone will report the disturbance to the national office and I will receive a negative comment on my bi-quarterly performance evaluation. I run around in a panic, making silly faces and cooing noises to distract them, but it doesn’t do any good. Finally, I give up. Inside every box there is a small, silver key and on the back of every baby’s head there is a keyhole. To terminate an InstaBaby, all you have to do is put the key in the hole and turn it to the right. The product immediately disintegrates into a fine, white powder that can be swept up and thrown away. It’s a simple procedure.
The InstaBaby was created by the Nuclear Family Corporation, which specializes in merchandise that “encourages good, old-fashioned American values.” The target market for the InstaBaby is white mothers in their early forties who have a pathological fear that their teenage daughters will become impregnated out of wedlock by black men. This is a surprisingly large market. InstaBabies are designed to show these teenage daughters how difficult it is for a single mother to raise a multi-racial child in our society. After their Bring-Me-to-Life cords have been pulled, InstaBabies grow from infants to adults in the span of a single day. They bond with their caregivers and will not leave their side during that period. The teenage girl is forced to look after the InstaBaby during this time, and the experience is supposed to teach her valuable lessons about sexual promiscuity and social norms. But there have been setbacks.
Apparently, instead of discovering that raising a multi-racial child is difficult, some teenage girls don’t mind it all that much. Others even enjoy the experience. In Connecticut, a customer reported that her daughter never even considered dating an African-American male until she spent time with an InstaBaby. Now she is going steady with a black classmate and the mother has filed a 261-P Customer Grievance Report.
There have also been accounts of sexual deviants purchasing InstaBabies and using them for God knows what. Ex-convicts were taking out loans and buying them by the hundreds. Snuff films were circulated on the Internet. Dungeons were uncovered by local news stations. Charges were filed, but the courts were powerless to do anything to stop it. After all, InstaBabies aren’t human. They are commercial items, pieces of property, like bicycles or frying pans. New regulations were created, but the PR damage had already been done.
Of course, the Nuclear Family Corporation quickly recalled the defective product, which is why I am standing here at this unreasonable hour, trying to figure out which key goes to which head. Destroying babies is not exactly in my job description, but Barry likes to assign me demeaning tasks. He enjoys reminding me that I belong to Omni-Mart, Inc. and am therefore legally obligated to follow his orders. I have known Barry since he was a pimple-faced bagboy, a sad wisp of hair on his upper lip, so skinny he could barely push an empty shopping cart down the aisle. I once caught him smoking pot and looking at dirty magazines in the Adult Fantasy Department, and he literally pissed himself when I said I was going to file a 560-G Employee Incident Report. But in the end, I couldn’t do it. He looked so pathetic standing there in his urine-stained khakis; I didn’t have the heart. Instead I gave him a lecture on proper work-place conduct. I quoted from the Omni-Mart Code of Employee Ethics and reminded him that he was an Omni-Man and should behave accordingly. I don’t think he liked being reprimanded that way by a lowly Lifetime Service Associate, but I had him by the short hairs and he knew it.
That was eight years ago. Perhaps I went a little overboard with my admonishments. Soon after, Barry started taking weight gainer and attending night classes in the managerial program. He purchased a body-building kit from the Male Fitness Department. His muscles began to stretch the cotton fibers of his official company smock, and he memorized every paragraph in the Omni-Mart Manual of Conduct and Procedures. If I’d known then that he was going to grow up to be the size of a truck and become District Manager, I probably would have filed the 560- G and had his scrawny sixteen-year-old butt fired on the spot. But foresight has never been my strong suit.
Barry has never mentioned the peeing-in-his-pants incident, but I know he resents me for it and enjoys making me grovel. I have learned to live with the humiliation because, quite honestly, what other choice do I have? It’s either this or The Outside, and no one wants to be on The Outside these days. So I deal with it the best way I know how. Barry says clean the toilets and I clean the toilets. Barry says destroy the babies and I destroy the babies.
• • •
By the time Omni-Mart officially opens, I have terminated all the InstaBabies except one, a quiet, moon-faced child who is now approximately three years old. The label on the box says his name is Peter. When I approach Peter with the key, he does not run or cry. Instead, he reaches for me with pudgy hands and says, “Daddy.”
Now, I am not a sentimental fool. I know this is not a real human child; this is just an extremely sophisticated toy that will turn to dust in less than eighteen hours. On the other hand, I am a very lonely man. I am forty-two years old and I do not have a family. My parents were poor and, as is often the case in these types of situations, I was officially adopted by Omni-Mart, Inc. shortly after I was born. I have spent my entire life inside these walls. I am not complaining. These are tough times and I am lucky to have this kind of job security. I sleep in the Linens & Beddings Department and I have a substantial 401(k) plan. I sweep, I dust, I stock shelves. But sometimes I feel there should be more to life than this. I do not know what “more” would involve. After all, I have food, shelter, and satellite television. Omni-Mart carries every man- made product on the planet. I want for nothing. And yet, there is a yearning deep down in my chest late at night, like a fist squeezing my heart, and sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat. I don’t know what all of this has to do with a lifelike facsimile of a young, multi-racial boy, but I cannot bring myself to turn the final key. I decide that I am going to stand up to Barry, which is something I have not done since he became District Manager. I will look him straight in his bulging, bloodshot eyes and tell him that I have disobeyed his orders. I will say that he can go ahead and write a negative comment in my bi-quarterly performance evaluation and send it to the national office if he wants to, but I will not budge. Omni-Mart may be my legal guardian but they do not own my soul. I am a human being.
But when Barry finally arrives, I chicken out and hide Peter inside a rubber trashcan and tell him to keep quiet if he knows what’s good for him.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” says Barry.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” I say.
He leans in close. I can smell his musky cologne and the protein shake he drank for breakfast.
“Did you take care of that little problem?” he asks.
“Of course,” I say.
When Barry nods his Rottweiler head, the ropey muscles in his neck contract like metal cables on a suspension bridge. “Very good. So the problem is taken care of?”
“Taken care of.”
“Completely taken care of?”
“Completely.”
He stabs me in the chest with a meaty finger. “For your sake I hope so, big guy. Don’t forget that you’re an official member of the Omni-Mart family, and you know what happens to family members who don’t follow procedure. You don’t want to end up like Terrance Omni.” Terrance Omni was a Lifetime Service Associate who worked in the Wicker Furniture Department, and two weeks before his retirement Barry caught him taking an unauthorized cigarette break in the Sanitation Room. Following an emergency performance evaluation, Terrance was stripped of his nametag and ejected into the back parking lot, where he lived inside a cardboard box for three weeks before he was anally violated and then kidnapped by a roving gang of teenage psychotics. We watched it all happen on the security cameras. No one has heard from Terrance since.
I give Barry my very best customer-service smile and tell him that he has nothing to worry about, all the InstaBabies have been terminated. He glares at me and says I had better be telling him the truth. He says he’s going to keep an eye on me. He says there’s a clearance special in the Elderly Hygiene Department and I should get my ass down there pronto to demonstrate how to use our new line of adult diapers.
After Barry leaves, I lift Peter out of the trashcan and give him a lecture on how to treat his fellow man. I tell him that all humans are created equal and should be handled with dignity and respect. Just because you’re a large, muscular supervisor doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole. I tell Peter that when dealing with someone like Barry, humility is important. And patience. And kindness. And if that doesn’t work, you can always spit in their coffee.
Peter nods and says, “Always spit in their coffee.”
As part of the parental simulation experience, InstaBabies are designed to mimic the behaviors and speech patterns of their caregiver. Eventually, Peter will adopt as much of my exterior personality as the hard drive in his little head can hold. I am not accustomed to anyone paying attention to what I say, and even though I know it’s just a recording device triggered by a computer chip, hearing Peter repeat my words is sort of shocking to me. All day long, I take orders from customers and employers. I am told what to say and how to act. No one ever listens to my problems. No one actually cares how I feel about my job, my life. Do you have vegan dog food? That’s what people want to know. Does this remote-control espresso machine come with a warranty? Can I use this steak knife to cut burlap? These are the type of questions I get. Where is the Romantic Gestures Department? • • •
The Romantic Gestures Department is on the forty-fourth floor, section H-197B. It is where Cynthia Omni works, who is the woman I have been in love with since she was transferred here from Orlando five years ago. I spend all of my personal activity minutes in the Romantic Gestures Department. Like me, Cynthia is a Lifetime Service Associate, but unlike me, she once lived on The Outside. Her parents were successful orchid growers in Florida until the synthetic flower industry put them out of business and they were forced to sell their children to corporate buyers to prevent the family from starving to death. Cynthia’s parents then starved to death. She’s still bitter about it. She speaks often of her childhood on the farm, the fresh air, the sunshine. It sounds terrifying to me, but Cynthia assures me that it was all quite pleasant.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” I say.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” says Peter.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Cynthia.
Cynthia is wearing the emerald-green vest that designates her as a female LSA. Her chaotic red hair has been tamed into a tight bun in accordance with the Omni-Mart Dress Code Manual, but her blue eyes still snap with cold fire. She looks at Peter, who is standing beside me holding on to my shirt sleeve. “And who is this?” she says.
“No one,” I say. “Just a lost little boy looking for his parents.” I look at Peter and nod my head vigorously. “Isn’t that right?”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “Just a lost little boy looking for his parents,” Peter says.
Cynthia laughs, causing my heart to flip-flop in my chest. I have never told Cynthia that I love her. Romantic relationships between employees are forbidden according to Section 85:6 of the Omni-Mart Code of Employee Ethics. Section 85:7 forbids romantic relationships between employees and customers. This is not such a burden for most workers, but it is practically unbearable for Lifetime Service Associates, who are not allowed to leave the facility. It means that, essentially, all romantic relationships are forbidden. If Barry ever gets proof that I have an unauthorized emotional attachment to Cynthia, you can bet I’ll be out of a job faster than you can say “Please don’t violate my anus.”
Instead of telling Cynthia I love her, I buy orchids. Lots and lots of orchids.
Cynthia’s job is to arrange synthetic flowers. She makes the most beautiful bouquets. Her tiny hands move amongst the blooms like hummingbirds searching for nectar. The walls of her work station are decorated with giant murals depicting idyllic mountain scenes complete with babbling brooks and majestic evergreens and happy chipmunks foraging for acorns, etc., etc. Whenever I visit, I can’t look at the murals. I have to keep my attention focused very hard on Cynthia or I will start to hyperventilate and pass out. Dr. Peterson in the Pharmaceutical Solutions Department says I have the worst case of agoraphobia he has ever seen. He says that even the thought of The Outside is enough to put me in a psychological coma. I can’t handle open spaces. Green meadows cause me to break out in hives. Blue skies make me nauseous. To alleviate this problem, Doc prescribes various drugs and frequent sessions in his Isolation Chamber, which is a small, black box with a breathing tube that shuts out all light and sound. As Dr. Peterson says, the world can’t hurt you if it can’t find you. The only time I feel completely safe outside of the Isolation Chamber is when I’m watching Cynthia arrange flowers, but even then I have to be careful not to look at the murals.
To say that Cynthia hates the synthetic flower industry would be a gross understatement. She blames them for the death of her parents. But Omni-Mart does not acknowledge personal preferences when considering employee assignments; they simply look at your skills chart and match you with the most appropriate department. Cynthia got the Romantic Gestures Department. I got the Miscellaneous Assignments Department.
As we walk down the aisle, Cynthia identifies certain species of synthetic orchids and recites the prescribed customer information data for each one. I pick one of every species she identifies. Peter—now almost twelve years old—walks next to me, smiling and repeating every word Cynthia says. Soon Cynthia becomes annoyed with this and tells Peter to shut up. Which he does. However, this also seems to annoy her.
“What’s wrong with that kid?” she whispers to me.
I shrug. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. He just seems far too obedient for a boy his age. Is he…slow?”
By slow, of course, she means retarded. I tell her Peter is definitely not retarded. I tell her that he is just polite and accommodating. What’s wrong with doing what you’re told? What’s wrong with being a compliant young boy?
Cynthia shakes her head. “Okay, okay. Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Mr. Omni. I just think the kid is kind of creepy, that’s all.”
At the end of our walk, I have an armful of synthetic orchids, which Cynthia makes into a bouquet. I pay for the flowers with my monthly credit allowance. Cynthia informs her supervisor that she is going to take fifteen personal activity minutes, and we all go down to the Sanitation Room. The Sanitation Room is pretty much what it sounds like: a room where trash is disposed of in giant incinerators. I place the flowers inside one of the dormant incinerators and shut the door. I show Peter how to press the POWER button, and we all watch through the viewing window as the orange-blue flames ignite, turning the fake orchids into a heap of black ash in just a few short seconds. Cynthia smiles and my heart flip-flops once again. We do this at least three times a week, but I’d do it every day if I could afford it.
Without saying a word, Cynthia reaches over and slips her hand into mine. Her skin is dry and cool and flawless. I am ecstatic. And yet, I can’t help glancing repeatedly at the door. This is a clear violation of company policy. If one of Barry’s cronies were to walk in right now, I would definitely be terminated on the spot. Cynthia doesn’t believe it, but Barry has a crush on her. Every time Cynthia walks into the room, Barry finds an excuse to flex his muscles. Sometimes he lifts heavy objects for no particular reason and then sets them back on the ground, like a bored gorilla in the zoo. It’s kind of funny but also kind of scary, because I am afraid that someday Cynthia will look at Barry’s giant muscles and then look at my scrawny muscles and say to herself, what have I been thinking?
I hold on to Cynthia’s hand for as long as I can stand it, and then I let go, sick to my stomach at my own cowardice.
Cynthia sighs and leans in close, her breath tickling the graying hairs in my ear. “I want to leave,” she says for the millionth time. “I can’t stand it here.”
I can’t look at her, so I stare at the orchid ashes in the incinerator instead.
“It’s just not a good time right now,” I say.
“It’s never a good time. That’s the point. You just have to take a chance, cowboy.”
“We’ll go soon, I promise. I just need to get organized. I want to be prepared.”
Cynthia sighs. She steps in front of me, grabs the back of my head, and forces my mouth onto hers. She is much stronger than she looks. Our teeth sound like tiny tap shoes when they click together. I can smell the apple-scented shampoo from the Hair Supplies Department and taste the cherry-flavored lipstick from the Facial Cosmetics Department. “I love you, Leonard,” she says fiercely.
My heart pounds in my chest, and I want to take her in my arms and return her kiss and tell her I love her over and over again. Instead, I give her all the usual excuses why it’s a bad time to leave. I tell her we have no money. I tell her it’s the rainy season. I remind her of all the dangers on The Outside that have been reported in the news. War. Poverty. Famine. Violence. Besides, our life here isn’t so bad. Why risk everything on an uncertain future? We should be thankful for what we have, right?
When I finish my little spiel, Cynthia kisses me on the cheek and says, “You are a good man, Leonard. But you are weak. I can’t wait forever, you know.” She looks at Peter, who is obsessively pressing the POWER button on the incinerator. “And I don’t know who this strange boy really is, but you’d better take him to the Lost & Found Department before Barry figures out what you’re up to.”
“I’m not afraid of Barry,” I say.
“I’m not afraid of Barry,” says Peter.
Cynthia rolls her eyes and then leaves without saying goodbye. I take a white handkerchief from my pocket and carefully wipe her lipstick from my cheek. I fold the handkerchief into a perfect square, and place it in the incinerator. Peter pushes the POWER button. The flames leap high.
• • •
Sometimes I see a nice, elderly couple shopping in the facility and I imagine they are my parents returning to claim me. I imagine them holding me in their arms. I imagine tears of joy. I imagine Barry’s reaction when they tell him I was stolen as a baby and sold to Omni-Mart illegally. I imagine Barry’s large, red face turning even redder and his stuttering apology.
I wonder what they were like, my parents. Were they loveable, incompetent hippies with long hair and glassy eyes? Were they girthy, sincere small-town conservatives? Did they love me? Did my mother cry when they made the final decision? Did my father hold her and tell her it was all for the best?
My personnel file says I was discovered in the Office Supplies Department chewing on a stapler. I was wearing a diaper with a note attached to it. The note said, “His name is Leonard. We’re so sorry.” Every year, hundreds of babies are lost or abandoned in Omni-Mart. Of course, every effort is made to locate the parents, but after six months, the courts allow the corporation to adopt the children instead of turning them over to a Family Replacement Facility. I was raised in the Lost & Found Department until the age of fifteen, and then I became a Lifetime Service Associate. I could always resign of course. Cynthia keeps suggesting that we run away together. It’s a simple procedure—all we have to do is walk out the front door. But how do you quit the only family you’ve ever known? How do you quit your life?
• • •
All morning, Barry thinks of embarrassing tasks for me to perform and then he assigns them via the intercom so everyone can hear.
“Leonard Omni, please report to the Large Pets Department for a fecal-matter clean-up project. Thank you.”
“Leonard Omni, please report to the Plus-Size Women’s Department for a price check on a plus- size brassiere. Thank you.”
The other employees used to snicker behind my back about the way Barry treats me. Now they do it right to my face. I have absolutely zero credibility as an authority figure. This is what the memo from the national office said when I applied for the managerial program last month. The word “ZERO” was in all caps, which I thought was unnecessary. I wrote a long, impassioned response memo stating that leadership is not just about authority. There’s also sympathy and communication and developing a genuine connection to the people you’re working with. Isn’t there more to life than productivity? What about respect for the individual? What about basic human decency?
In response, the national office sent me a fifteen-dollar gift certificate and told me to apply again next year. • • •
At noon, Cynthia and I meet in the Frozen Foods Department, as usual, and select our meals from the endless aisles of rectangular freezers. Peter is now in his mid thirties and slightly taller than I am. His skin is the color of milky coffee and he has a beautiful head of springy, black hair. I have given him a company uniform to wear and he is happy following me around the store learning every detail about my life. Obviously Cynthia knows there’s something odd about the situation, but she has decided stay out of it. The hard drive in Peter’s head has absorbed my words, my facial features, my gestures, and he now predicts what I am going to say and do with disturbing accuracy. At times, I think Peter’s impersonation of me is better than the real thing.
While we eat, news reports about The Outside flash across the video-dome above our heads, each one sponsored by an advertiser. TEXAS AND CALIFORNIA AT WAR AGAIN. Enjoy Coke! WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION FOUND IN BROOKLYN. You’re in good hands with All- State. GORILLA ESCAPES FROM ZOO, STRANGLES CHILD. Beef, it’s what’s for dinner.
I am halfway through my frozen chicken-fried chicken substitute when Barry shows up with his usual smirk.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” says Barry.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” I say.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” says Peter.
Cynthia stuffs a forkful of ravioli in her mouth.
“So, Cynthia, still hanging out with the non-managerial losers, eh?” Barry says. He laughs too loudly and slaps me on the back, practically crushing my vertebrae. “Just kidding, big guy. You know I like to pal around with my employees.” “Ha ha,” I say. “That’s a good one, Barry.” Barry nods and leans against a display rack in a way that makes his triceps bulge.
“Technically, we’re not your employees,” says Cynthia, ignoring Barry’s bulgy triceps. “We are employed by the Omni-Mart Corporation.”
Barry forces a smile and leans harder against the display rack. “Of course, of course. But I am the Manager.”
“District Manager,” says Cynthia. “Omni-Mart is a global operation, and there are literally thousands of managerial positions.” Barry’s face reddens as Cynthia begins to list all the supervisors who have authority over him in the facility. “There’s the Area Manager and the Section Manager and the Regional Manager and the Locality Manager and the Province Manager and the Operations Manager and the Utilities Manager and the Custodial Manager—”
“And the Lifetime Service Associates,” Barry interrupts. He folds his arms across his massive chest and begins to bounce his pectorals up and down one after the other. Right, left, right, left, right, left… It looks like there are two nippled pistons firing away under his shirt. “You know, some people say the Lifers are expendable, but not me. No, siree-bob. We couldn’t function without someone to perform the menial labor. It’s the common people—like you two—that keep this company running.”
“I am also a Lifetime Service Associate,” says Peter.
Barry turns his attention to Peter for the first time. My heart drumrolls in my chest.
“So you are,” says Barry. “And how’s that working out for you?”
“Very well,” says Peter. “It is an honor to be a member of the Omni-Mart family. Omni-Mart is more than a corporation; it is a community. We hope to make the world a better place one customer at a time.”
Cynthia sticks her index finger down her throat and pretends to gag. I pray that Barry doesn’t move to the other side of the table and see the keyhole on the back of Peter’s head.
“I like your attitude,” says Barry. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Peter Omni.”
“Right. You’ve got gumption, Peter. How long have you been working for us?”
“My whole life.”
“Well, don’t give up. If you work hard, maybe you’ll follow in my footsteps one day.”
“That’s my goal,” says Peter.
“That’s bullshit.”
The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. I freeze, horrified. Cynthia smiles.
“Excuse me, Leonard,” says Barry. “Was anyone talking to you?”
“No, they were not,” I say. “I’m very sorry. I apologize. I’m sorry.”
“Do you have a problem with Peter wanting to follow in my footsteps?”
“No. It’s a worthy ambition. I’m sorry.”
“Is there something funny about an employee who wants to make something out of his career instead of pissing it away sweeping floors and stocking shelves?”
“Not at all. I’m sorry.”
“Then why did you interrupt our conversation?” Barry stares at me. Peter stares at me. Cynthia stares at me. What can I say? I can’t tell them the truth. I can’t say that Peter is a high-tech product designed to emulate me in every way. I can’t say that Peter is probably the closest thing I will ever have to a son. I can’t tell them that Peter’s desire to become Barry insinuates my own desire to become Barry, a thought so repugnant it made me blurt out two inappropriate words. I can’t tell them that I fear Omni-Mart does not just own the rights to my life; they own the rights to my character as well. I can’t tell them that every night I pray to a God I don’t believe in that I will suddenly find the courage to burn this whole place to the ground and salt the earth it sits upon. I can’t tell them that. Can I? No, I cannot. And I don’t.
“I’m so very sorry,” I say instead.
Barry smiles in a way that makes my stomach drop.
“That’s okay, big guy,” he says. He clamps a giant paw on my shoulder and squeezes until I’m sure I feel a few ligaments pop. “Hey, I just remembered. I have another job for you. How do you feel about windows?”
• • •
The older kids in the Lost & Found Department used to tell stories about The Outside. One of them was about a wolf that ate little girls dressed in red hoods. Another was about a witch who lived in a house made of gingerbread. I didn’t believe the stories, of course, but they frightened me anyhow. The Outside was so big, so unknowable, that every type of imaginable horror seemed possible.
One night, the bigger kids came to my bed while I was sleeping and kidnapped me. They tied me up and threw me into the parking lot behind the facility. I was trapped on The Outside for almost eight hours before one of the Pre-Employee Caretakers discovered I was missing. This happens all the time. Call it an initiation if you want. Call it hazing, call it torture, call it boys will be boys. Whatever. It happens.
It was the middle of August, and there was a lightning storm. The sky was pitch black and every couple of seconds a giant bolt of electricity would snake out of the clouds, followed by a loud roar. I had never experienced lightning or thunder or a pitch-black sky, and I guess I had a small break down. I’m not exactly sure what happened next. When I woke up, I was tied to a bed and I was screaming at the top of my lungs. The other kids said customers could hear me all the way over in the Ethnic Shoes Department, although that seems unlikely. The Caretakers tried to make me explain what happened, but I told them I couldn’t remember. I said I blacked out.
But that’s a lie. I remember. There was something out there in the darkness. I can’t say what it was exactly, but it was there. A wolf? A witch? It had wings and teeth and claws shaped like sharpened question marks. It came up behind me and sniffed my hair. It licked my neck with a long, pink tongue. I shut my eyes tight and started to cry. At first, I thought it was all just my imagination. Then I realized it was definitely my imagination. That’s when I went berserk. If The Outside was actually inside my head, it was even more dangerous than I thought. It was everywhere and it was nowhere. It was infinite.
I knew right then that I would never leave Omni-Mart. I screamed and screamed.
• • •
Barry takes me to the Observation Room, which is a room at the very top of the facility where customers go to look at The Outside. Every wall is made of double-plated glass. I have heard about the Observation Room but I have never been there. Even the thought of it turns my legs to noodles. As soon as we step off the elevator, I catch a glimpse of the sunlight gleaming through the giant windows, and I close my eyes tight. I fall to my knees. Vomit rises in my throat. Barry puts a wet rag in my hand and says “Clean.” I try to talk him out of it. I tell him I’m not feeling well. He says “Clean.” I tell him I have a bad back. He says “Clean.” I tell him I am frightened, I am lonely, I am desperate, oh God, I’m scared to death. He says “Clean.”
I take the rag and crawl forward with my eyes still shut. I reach a slick, smooth surface and I start to wipe it with the rag. I am shaking uncontrollably.
“You can’t clean like that,” says Barry. “Open your eyes, big guy. You have to open your eyes.”
I do. I open my eyes and look at The Outside. I am surrounded by an endless city filled with terror at every turn. I see metal vehicles hurtling through the streets and possible death on every corner. I see a dirty, unconscious man on the ground below. I see another man kick the unconscious man and take his wallet. I see a woman begging for money. Next to the woman there is a baby in a stroller. I see poverty. I see violence. I see death. Off in the distance, I do see the outlines of mountains, but they are hopelessly far away. I don’t see trees or rivers or playful chipmunks. There is only the city, with its labyrinthine buildings and factories, and beyond that, more city, more buildings and factories, more Omni-Marts. This is the result of human progress. This is what people working together towards a common goal can accomplish. I feel a warm chill in the crotch of my pants and I look down to see a puddle of urine accumulating on the floor beneath me.
“Oh, my. What is this?” says Barry. “It looks like Leonard Omni has pissed his pants. I don’t think that’s how an Omni-Man should behave, Leonard, do you? Clean it up.”
Barry puts his hand on the back of my neck and shoves my face toward the puddle, as if I am an incontinent dog that has had an accident in the house. I choke back a sob and start to mop up my bodily fluids, but I don’t get far. Spots dance before my eyes and I begin to hyperventilate. The room shrinks. My vision blurs. I pass out.
• • • When I wake up, I’m in a hospital bed again, but at least I’m not screaming this time. Peter is standing next to me. I must have been out for a long time because Peter looks ancient. He is almost completely bald and his skin is brittle and wrinkled like tissue paper.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” says Peter.
“Welcome to Omni-Mart,” I say. “Where’s Cynthia?”
“She is gone.”
I sit up. There are dozens of plastic tubes sticking out of me. “Gone where?”
“She has been sent to The Outside. She has been terminated.”
I start to pull out the tubes. “Terminated? For what?”
“Section 85:6 of the Omni Code of Employee Ethics. Romantic relationships between employees are forbidden.”
I am stunned. “But we didn’t do anything. I followed procedure. How could they know?”
“She was disloyal,” says Peter. “This is what you wanted. It is all for the best.”
For the first time, I look deep into Peter’s eyes and notice how shiny and lifeless they are. They are like two polished, alabaster marbles encased in wax. I stare into them intently and see my own disfigured, convex reflection looking back at me. In that moment, something small yet important snaps inside me.
“What have you done?” I say.
Peter cocks his head. “I did what you would have done if you were me.” I grab Peter by the throat and tell him to explain. He looks vaguely surprised, and he talks quickly. Peter says that after I passed out, he told the national office what happened in the Sanitation Room. How Cynthia kissed me and I ignored her. How Cynthia said she loved me and I soundly rejected her. How I remained loyal to Omni-Mart at all costs. How I followed procedure. He tells me that Barry called Cynthia in for an emergency performance evaluation and asked her if she loved me. Cynthia said “Yes.” Barry called in the Regulations Manager from the national office and asked Cynthia again if she loved me. Cynthia said “Yes.” Barry fired her immediately with the Regulations Manager’s approval. She was stripped of her nametag and ejected into the back parking lot.
When he finishes, I notice that my fingers have broken through the plastic skin on Peter’s neck. If he had been human, I would have murdered him. I take the silver key from my pocket and tell Peter that I’m going to terminate him once and for all. “I regret your existence,” I say, although this is not entirely true. “I regret your existence,” Peter repeats. He turns around so I have access to the keyhole. My hand is shaking, but I manage to perform the deed anyhow. I insert the key and turn it to the right. The product immediately disintegrates into a fine, white powder that can be swept up and thrown away.
I put on my clothes and run to the Barry’s office. Of course, I am too late. Cynthia is gone. There is only Barry and the Regulations Manager. The Regulations Manager is a bald man wearing a suit that costs more than I make in a year. I know this because he says, “This suit costs more than you make in a year.” He commends me on following procedure. Turning away Cynthia’s advances demonstrates where my ultimate loyalties lie. He says that he likes my gumption. He says that I’m exactly the type of guy he wants to see in the managerial program. Barry protests, but the Regulations Manager cuts him off. “What do you say?” he asks me. “If you work hard, maybe you’ll follow in my footsteps one day.”
I should tell him to go to hell. I know I should. I should spit in his face and run out the front door screaming Cynthia’s name. I should confront my fear of The Outside and find Cynthia and tell the world that I love her.
Sadly, I do not. A lifetime of following orders has taken its toll. Instead, I accept the offer to enroll in the managerial program without much hesitation. I promise to become the best supervisor Omni-Mart, Inc. has ever seen. I even shake the Regulation Manager’s hand and shed a tear. An honest-to-God tear. The look in Barry’s eyes while all this is happening gives me more pleasure than I want to admit. No one should feel this much joy over a petty vindication, but I do. This is the greatest moment of my life.
• • •
I study hard and eventually become the Miscellaneous Assignments Manager at my franchise location. I am not an abusive supervisor like Barry. I treat my coworkers with dignity and patience, and I am well-loved by my staff. I earn the respect and admiration of my superiors in the national office, and I receive commendations for my efforts. I purchase numerous expensive suits that cost more than I used to make in a year. Since I am now a member of management, I am allowed to date whomever I want. Eventually, I marry a pretty, young clerk from the Paper Supplies Department and we have a child named Leslie. Leslie has her father’s nose and her mother’s delicate chin. I am allowed to leave the facility whenever I desire, but I choose to live in Omni-Mart. Management applauds my decision and walls off a substantial section of the Linens & Beddings Department. We have a splendid apartment stocked entirely with state-of-the-art Omni-Mart products. I work hard all day and come home to a loving family and a home-cooked meal. My wife and daughter think I’m a swell guy. Leslie adores her father and she wants to grow up and be just like me. Often, Leslie will follow me around repeating every word I say. Sometimes when my wife and daughter are sound asleep, I slip out of the apartment and take the elevator to the Observation Room. With the help of several new products from the Pharmaceutical Solutions Department, I have overcome my agoraphobia, and I can now look at the outside without much fear. At night, the city does not seem so hostile. All of the poverty, the filth, the violence is covered up by darkness and the trash fires resemble tiny Christmas lights blinking off and on. I stare at the streets below and wonder if one of those lights belongs to Cynthia. Is she waiting for me out there? Does she still have faith that I will become the type of man she can respect?
I ride the elevator back down to my apartment. I kiss my beautiful daughter and slip into bed with my beautiful wife. There is no longer a yearning deep down in my chest late at night, like a fist squeezing my heart, and I do not wake up in a cold sweat. I am not haunted by the desire to find my parents or risk my life for love. Those aspirations are gone and now there is nothing inside of me. Absolutely nothing. When I close my eyes, I feel the exact opposite of passion. I feel hopeless. I feel infinite. I feel like an Omni-Man. Theadora Siranian
Persephone
1. Hunger
I tried to make her talk about her movements but nothing would do.
The slats in the floor kept moving with the rhythms of a broken raft and the back burner would not stop clicking.
Then silence, palpable as the blood -taste of metal before a snow storm, and the sweet smell left behind was haunting.
Two bodies at rest, the lamp on by the window, and the shades drawn. 2. Decay
I died so calmly this time I thought I was constructed from freestanding porcelain.
I could almost see my silver and pewter insides, wrapped around so carefully like a Balinese watch strapped slender and ornate around my ribcage.
3. October
She moved like the taut skin of sleep right before dawn. She wore a cascade of well-placed words and tender lips. She said blood made her think of breast-milk and money and when she kissed me I knew I had stepped into something dying.
I could taste the white moths in her mouth, beating themselves into dust against the outside door before the first frost, and I imagined the noise of my head hitting the bathroom mirror that summer so many seasons ago. Her fingers on my face were glass-tipped and I thought how they might feel under my teeth.
4. Yesterday
In the morning I dreamt it into life: two pairs of eyes and the delicate impression of bruised wrists lying next to me on the sheet. AMY FOX
Miluo on Qu Yuan1
He came back to me fully dressed.
I thought it strange he could one moment be towering above me serenading me with a face reflection scattered in the next—carefully floating a peculiar arm and leg emerging from my pools.
I begged the kakams to see what remained of his thin-framed form; fervently grasped at passing fish as the wind moaned through bare-branched trees.
1 Qu Yuan (340 B.C.E- 278 B.C.E.) was a Chinese patriotic poet from Southern Chu during the Warring States Period. Born into a noble family, he achieved a high position in court, but was slandered by his enemies and sent into exile. During his exile, his home capital, Ying, was overtaken by the state of Qin. Upon hearing this news, Yuan is said to have written the lengthy poem, “Lament for Ying” and later to have drowned himself in the Miluo River as a form of protest against the corruption of the era. They came and splashed drums, ordered rice to fall from heavens, carefully wrapped in silk to feed the River Dragon2.
They never did find you that night when it was already too late to save you, you who had been lost to a different drumming.
For safe keeping, now, I hold your Songs, the man I had myself to save when you had returned fully dressed.
2 Legend has it that the local villagers threw rice into the water as an offering to keep the River Dragon spirit from eating Yuan’s body. This legend persists in the form of dragon boat racing, where boats reenact the symbolic search for Qu Yuan’s body. Trusting Story A Conversation with Tim O’Brien Jamie Wilson
Tim wrote his first book when he was around twelve years old. He found a little league baseball story in his library and copied it in a notebook word for word, only he inserted his own name in place of the hero’s, and he went on to describe enormous blowout victories where he played every position, made every out, scored every run.
Tim grew up in Worthington, Minnesota, where the best thing to happen all year was the running of the turkeys, and on top of that he was no good at baseball. Imagination became Tim’s refuge. He would escape into worlds that were better than real life, and he would imagine possibilities that might unfold in the future. This is what Tim’s characters do. Going After Cacciato, which won the 1979 National Book Award, is about an imaginary journey away from the horrors of Vietnam. The Things they Carried is as much about memory and story as it is about war. The narrative in The Lake of the Woods cannot explain how Kathy Wade disappeared but only provide fragments of evidence and a limited field of recollections; the rest must be imagined.
Tim’s characters live between the struggles and confusions of their lives and the places they go in their heads to cope. This contrast of suffering and desire, of reality and imagination, is among the most beautiful and distinctive features of Tim’s writing. As Tim said to me in the interview, “These characters that I’m writing about in all of my books, they’re not just products of my own imagination, but I’m writing about their imaginations as well.”
Tim and I talked about this and much more over a lunch we had at the Wichita Art Museum this last October. The restaurant was packed and loud (one nearby table had a rowdy group of elderly women all wearing gaudy red hats), and it wasn’t just Tim and I, but three others joined us as well. It was an awkward setting for an interview, and I was nervous. But as soon as Tim got to talking, we went someplace else.
Jamie Wilson: Can you tell us a little bit about your process, how it’s changed over time, and the things you typically do to get yourself in a good mindset to write?
Tim O’Brien: Nothing much has changed over all the years. I get up early and write all day. I do it on Saturday and Sunday and my birthday, all the time. I’ve found that regularity is important. If I move away from a project, a story or a novel, for even a couple of days, it’s really tough to get back into it. It’s a bit like waking up from a dream, and you love the dream, and you go to the refrigerator to get a glass of orange juice, and you go back to bed but you can’t get the dream back. It’s gone. You remember as a writer what the story was about, who the characters are, but what you lose is that passion. To sustain that, I have to do it every day. I’m not constantly typing, but I’m there.
How contingent is your writing on other areas of your life going well?
Well nothing’s ever gone well, so it’s hard to tell. I think it’s the other way around. When things are tough, the writing goes better. You’re more in touch with difficulty and struggle. You’re talking to yourself when things aren’t going well. You’re aware in such a sharp way. When things are going well for me I’m just passive, and content. I don’t feel sharp though, I just feel kind of happy. I think it helps to have a little adversity. Not to be facetious, but if you’re a human being, there’s always something troubling you. There’s gotta be, or you’re taking too much Xanex. There’d better be something.
Is there a difference in the way you approach a short story and a novel or a longer work? Does each have a unique set of considerations for you?
I never have embarked on a novel. Things have become novels, but I’ve always thought of them as discreet stories. I’ll come to the end of a chapter, or a story, and there’ll be a kind of closure that stories have to have, but a day later, or a month later, or a year later, there’s something scratching at me, saying I’m not finished. It’s usually pretty definite. Maybe there’s a minor character, and I realize that this story is not over for them. And then I do another story. They won’t be causally linked. The one story doesn’t lead into the next one. But they share characters, and they share a mood, and they probably share geography, a place. I’m not much on linear, causal driven stories—A-B-C-D, a chain of events—because my life has never operated that way, and my memory—I just forget a lot of things. A lot gets erased. And I’m left with only chunks of things. That day, that moment, that battle, and everything around it is pretty much gone. The chronology of how I got there vanishes. So there’s something artificial for me in writing a story that is linked together neatly in a way that a standard novel is written.
As you go about writing these linked stories, do you know how they’re going to fit together as you go? Do you cut some stories out altogether?
Yeah, I do. I certainly cut. I don’t throw them away, but I certainly cut them. They’ll be used elsewhere. It’s a bit like it would be for a poet. That stanza doesn’t really link to that one directly, it links indirectly, like music, so there are huge time gaps, temporal gaps, and there’s no transition stuff in between. As I said, that’s how life has been for me. You have to learn to just trust story, to succumb to it, without trying to force anything, or make anything happen. You have to trust the story to deliver what you like line by line. You’re kind of guiding it, but you have to trust in serendipity, that a bit of dialogue will come along and tell you something important about a character, something very upside down, so that a character you thought you knew shows you a side you didn’t expect. It’s a bit like somebody who’s very sober and stayed, but after a couple of vodka martinis suddenly they start saying things you can’t begin to imagine. It’s a bit like that in writing. You have to be open to that. That changeability. When I read books I don’t like, and I read student manuscripts I don’t like, it’s always that same feeling, the feeling that this has been so controlled, so forced. It feels so artificial to me. There’s nothing serendipitous about it. I think keeping yourself open to change, for me anyway, is important.
There’s a section in The Things they Carried that reads almost like a fiction workshop, with Rat telling a story, and Sanders critiquing his delivery—his tendency to editorialize, the plausibility of the events in the story—and it seems like the story has to be told in a certain way, and the events have to be shaped in a certain way, for the story to work. I’m wondering how you view this relationship between the demands of form and what you have in mind in terms of content when you embark on a story.
I don’t have content in mind. I really don’t. I’ll write a line, “this is true,” period. Three words. When I wrote this line I didn’t know what “this” referred to. I didn’t know what the word “true” referred to. I didn’t know what was true. But I was interested right away by these three words. What is true? I mean, give me a break. And how true is true? I love you darling, and then the next night, what a freak you are. That’s how the world is. And it’s that way in science. Newton thought he had the truth pinned down until Einstein came along, and now Einstein’s being challenged. So I was fascinated by the word “true,” and I was curious about the word “this.” What is “this?” And then the next line came out of those words. “I had a buddy in Vietnam, his name was Bob Kiley, but everybody called him Rat. Well, I didn’t have a buddy in Vietnam.” The next statement is intentionally not true. I wanted to play with truth, and in writing a made- up story, I wanted to begin investigating things about truth, especially in a war. When you’re in a war your notions about what’s true, about what’s fixed, just go upside down. Things you thought were true about yourself—“I couldn’t do that in a kabillion years”—things just go upside down. Thou shalt not kill. You’d better kill, or they’ll court martial you. Everything flips upside down. So that’s how I work. Content isn’t what I start with. It’s delivered by the story. I don’t set out with an agenda, or a philosophy, but I really do trust in the story to help me learn about what I know and what I care about.
A lot of your writing seems to be about the role of imagination, and of storytelling in peoples’ lives. Your characters seem to rely on these things to cope with traumatic experiences and with loss. Do you see storytelling and imagination, then, as stabilizing forces in peoples’ lives? I do, in all kinds of ways. I think it’s a much overlooked human faculty that we don’t really think about much but we use all the time. We daydream. We ask ourselves, “what if I won the lottery?” There are all kinds of ways we live inside our heads, imagining what’s not happening, but what could. You do it in basic ways. Let’s say you’re in college, and you say, “I think I want to be a doctor someday.” At some point it goes from a pros and cons thing to imagining doctoring, thinking about if you could be happy doing it, if you could dip your hands in blood, if you could deal with death well. You go from rational things to little pictures imagining yourself doctoring, and then you make decisions in your life—the people you’ll marry, and all the things you’ll do in your life—not just in a rational way, but also in a kind of dream state. You picture yourself doing this or doing that, and at some point in the future you walk into your dream, more or less. Sometimes it’s a bust, other times it’s not. But I do think it’s a powerful faculty that we don’t talk about much, that governs as much of what we do in the world as pure logic, or pure rationality. So these characters that I’m writing about in all of my books, they’re not just products of my own imagination, but I’m writing about their imaginations as well.
When your characters arrive in a place like Vietnam during the war, they might have imagined things differently than they really are, and so are they having to revise their stories to fit the unexpected things they find?
Yeah, they are. Maybe one of my best books, Going After Cacciato, is an imagined story. The guy’s on guard at night, and he’s imagining walking out of this place. “I’m gonna walk to Paris,” he says, and the rest of the book is an imagined journey to Paris, away from the horror, and away from the blood and death. We did that a lot. We’d sit around at night at our fox holes after a hard day, and we’d look up at the mountains and say, you know, we could just walk out of here. Who’s gonna stop us? We have guns, they can’t stop us. And we have food, and we have guns to get more food. It was partly joking, but we were all into it. I read a biography of Albert Speer, the German munitions guy, sent to Spandau for twenty years. Every day they would give him this exercise period where he would go out into this courtyard, and he’d walk around this courtyard, and first he measured his step, how far his step was, and I think it twenty-seven inches—a tall guy—and then he would count his steps and go back to his jail cell, and he’d figure out how far he had walked that day. He had a map on his cell wall, and he was pretending he was walking around the world. Now I’m in Laos, now I’m on the border of Thailand and Laos. He’d get images in his head, and all through twenty years I think he went around the world a couple of times in his imagination. That’s not atypical. If you’re in a situation like a war, your mind can only take it for so long, and it has to shut it off. You’ve got to cut off the fear, and you cut it off by daydreaming, through imagination of hometowns, and your girlfriend, what it would be like to see one of them again. Will you be able to say a word about any of this to her, will she understand any of it. And there are little plays that go on. Some are kind of elaborate, and some are just a second or two, and then it’s over. But I do think it’s one of the ways that imagination is important. It’s a way of getting ourselves through things.
This makes me think of Cacciato fishing in a bomb crater.
Yeah, he was imagining he was not in a war. That bomb crater is a Minnesota lake, and I am fishing in it. They ain’t biting, but maybe they will.
Sentence level considerations like tone and rhythm, and what I’ve heard you refer to as the music underneath the language, these seem really important to your writing process. How do these come into play for you when you’re writing a story?
For me it’s like entering a dream, and the dream has language in it, and like you say a kind of music to it. I work to find the melody again for the first hour or two every time I go back to work in the morning. I don’t talk aloud, but I’m talking in my head as I’m doing prose, talking out the narration or dialogue or whatever, and if it doesn’t have the right sound, I do it again and again until I feel like I’ve captured the music that’s underneath the story. That’s what I meant by how difficult it is to break away. That’s one of the things you lose. You remember the easy stuff, like plot and characters, but without the music, no matter how wonderful the plot, how wonderful the characters, it’s gonna fail. It gives it the sound, and it’s hypnotic. You know it when you hear it. You know, okay, that’s the sound of the story. And that applies to things like the character’s voices, the sound of the general narration. Each of my books I think has a different sound to it. It’s not one sound; they’re not identical. They’re different. They’re not radically different, but they’re different. The sound is the key thing. It’s the thing that’s almost impossible to talk about. And it’s what’s always ignored—not totally ignored, but largely ignored—in writing workshops, the sound of the prose, because it’s so hard to talk about. You can point out flat verbs and things like that, words that are taken off a Wal-Mart shelf, but that’s not quite all of it. It’s something else too, that has to do with the sound of the music. It has to do with the richness of the sound. It has to do with the decibel level of the sound, how loud it is in your ear. Certain books, you start reading it, and it’s got a loud sound to it, and others are extremely soft and delicate in their sound. And to be faithful to your own sound throughout a story, it’s really important. Great question. There’s no answer to it except to listen to your own sound.
Is there a point in later drafts when you start to consider your audience? I have a quote from In the Lake of the Woods, as an example of what I’m talking about. John Wade is a character, and he plays with magic. In the war he takes on the nickname “Sorcerer,” and there’s a quote from the magician’s handbook that says, “In every trick there are two carefully thought-out lines: the way it looks, and the way it is.” And I thought, does this apply to writing as well? Do you take that into consideration when you are starting to think about how an audience is going to react to a story?
Oh, that’s such a great question, and the answer is, yeah. I could talk for hours about that subject. To boil it down and condense it for an interview answer, it’s impossible. I’m not gonna do justice to it. The short answer is just flat yes, that’s part of what you do as a writer, yes. What’s complicated is the how-ness of it all. I’ll give you an example. I put on a magic show in my house about two months ago. And by a magic show, I mean a magic show. Three acts, two and half hours, costumes, music. This was elaborate. Kids floating in the living room. The wife appearing out of nowhere. I had her dressed up in a playboy bunny suit. There were masks. And not a word is spoken. It’s a languageless magic show. Two and a half hours of no talking. One of the tricks has these three silver hoops, and I show one, and throw it up in the air, and show the other one, and then not only do they begin linking, but then begin floating and linking. They’re unlinked, and one will float down and link onto the other, and then it’ll float over here, and the third one will float off of my shoulder. Alright, so there are two aspects to this. First it’s a trick. But it took me I don’t know how long to master it. A year and a half, everyday, fifteen minutes or so of practice, sometimes an hour, with mistake after mistake, a little bit like making a chapter of a book let’s call it. When the audience sees it, you want it to appear magical and effortless. Not just how did it work, how’s he doing it? You want them to get over that, and think, this is just beautiful to watch. Especially against a blueish-black backdrop with the stars in the background, and I’ve got a mask on, and a cape, and there are these rings doing these things. So, back to writing, all the effort that goes into making the sentences—choosing the right adverb, the right music for the prose, the events in the story—all of them are made with hard work, just like that trick was made with hard work. And you want the apprehension of it to be beautiful, and feel beautiful, even if it’s an ugly scene, a scene of death and horror. You want it to have a captivating, hypnotizing beauty. All the work is meant to be hidden. I want my book to be read effortlessly. I avoid big words, and I avoid weird ambiguity—the kind of blurry, first year in workshop ambiguity, where everything is sort of amorphous and blurry, and nothing makes any sense. I want it to be beautiful, but there’s all that laborious, really tedious work that goes into making sentences. I mean, sitting there in my underwear, a grown man, hour after hour writing these sentences. What a stupid way to spend your life! It’s ridiculous. Not shaving in six days, and the last shower was on Thursday. But you want the effect to be beautiful. It’s a long answer. But they are very much similar, magic and writing, even to the effect of illusion. You read a book, and those aren’t real characters, and none of that stuff ever happened. Pure illusion, all made up. The first question I’ll get today will be what was that based on, and where did that come from in your life. They assume it just comes out of the real world, but it’s just illusion. I lived a life, but this isn’t the same thing that I lived. These are made up characters, and made up events. It’s all made up. But when it works, it feels real. This feels real. So real that it’s become a problem because I can’t convince anybody it’s all made up.
Speaking of magic, modern technology is kind of magical, and I’m wondering, do you think that new forms of technology, like e-readers, online publications, social networks, are changing the way we read and write, changing our relationship with literature?
I haven’t noticed it. It may be, but it may not all be bad. I have a kindle, for example, and in the airport, when I finish a book, I can just click and get another book out of nowhere. I don’t have to get out of my chair and walk down to the bookstore to get it. And the selection of course is much wider and better than in any airport, where you’re just gonna get crap. That’s all they have for sale. Maybe one good book, and it’s almost always non-fiction. But all the fiction is just—except for maybe some of Oprah’s selection—pretty bad. So the kindle opens up this whole world of any book you want. You can get Madam Bovary or whatever you want. So in that way it’s more accessible. And then there’s the issue of audience. I have a huge readership among young people—college and high school age and graduate school students (I’d say they’re three-quarters of my audience)—and they are all technologically savvy. They’re used to using this stuff and they don’t mind it. And I think that’s a plus. For me personally, I like the tactile object in front of me, and the feel of the page. I just like the feel of it better. It’s hard to cuddle up with a kindle in bed and get cozy with it. And then the kindle has another advantage, which is—and these are all technological—you can increase the font size. Paperback books, they have these tiny font sizes, especially in fiction, where they’re trying to save money so they cramp it all down. And words get caught in the crease of the book, and then the spine breaks, and with kindles you can enlarge it, and in some ways it’s easier to read. Still, having said all that, I personally like the physical book. Because it feels—I don’t know—it feels more like a made object. And books are made objects, they really are. They are made things.
How do you feel about the distinction between fiction and creative nonfiction? I’ve seen The Things We Carried classified as a memoir and as a novel, and anytime you bring imagination into depicting events, it’s hard to tell what’s true.
To me it doesn’t matter much. Words are words, and stories are stories, and whether they actually happened, as in nonfiction, or were made up, it isn’t too relevant to me. It doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. I wouldn’t like it if I were to, for example, buy a book billed as nonfiction, and then find out the guy invented it all. That happened with the Frye book. It was billed as something that really happened, but it was invented. I’m doing it the other way around. I’m saying this is fiction, and here and there real things find their way in. I don’t have to worry about being faithful to the real world, because I’m calling it fiction. So what you call a thing matters, because it sets up expectations. However, in the long run—a hundred years from now, 700 years from now, 10,000 years from now—what is going to be left of the real world? What’s left of the Battle of Hastings? Not a lot. Certainly the recollections of all those people who fought and died there, they’re gone. The archeology of the war is vanishing and being defaced by time. What lasts, or what endures, is the story. It’s Achilles and Hector going at it. What’s left of the Trojan wars? They think they’ve found the site of Troy—they’re 99% sure, not for sure- sure, but pretty sure. There’s not a sign that says, “Welcome to Troy,” but they think so. But if you look at pictures of the place now, it’s this windy, dusty, empty, ghostly place, not inhabited by anything. And then you go to Homer, and it’s inhabited by spirits. So I think that what matters contemporaneously, in the here and now, it matters a lot, especially if you’re a high school kid or a college kid. It matters a lot. It matters less if you’re say fifty, or forty-five. And when you’re ten-thousand-and-forty-five, it’s not going to matter much. You’re going to say, that was a good story, and the truth is going to matter less. We have as human beings a stake in the present. It matters because it’s ours, and we have a stake in it. But when you don’t have a stake in it, it doesn’t matter. I don’t go to see the Godfather and say, oh, that’s not really a horse-head in that bed, that’s just fake, that’s just made up by somebody. That person’s not really dying. Instead you surrender to the story, even though your intellect knows it’s not really happening. They’re not killing people in this movie. Unless it’s a snuff movie, and then maybe they are, but they’re usually not. In some ways that’s what The Things they Carried is really about in the end. What is salvaged is the spirit of a thing, and of a place, and of human beings. Not their bodies, and not the physical stuff. My hope is that in a hundred years from now somebody will read that book and they’ll feel something about a baby water buffalo, and baby Linda dying at the end of the book. They’ll feel something, and that’s something. Marit Ericson
Message to the Aliens from this Dude, Isaac
If you want to know, talk to the people with glasses.
Most of us say things like “Millennium Falcon” and “carb count,” but we don’t know what the heck we’re talking about.
We get insecure and lash out at things we don’t understand.
Like my neighbor re: marshmallow fluff. That stuff can be part of a balanced diet.
Do you just have a spoonful now and then, at two a.m., in your boxer-briefs?
Get in line, friend.
If you need anything, mi casa es su casa.
The fridge has a couple beers left, restroom’s down the hall.
I doubt we’ll have overmuch antagonistic friction.
I mean, hubbub. We’re not always on like, I don’t know, robots?
(Sorry, robots. If you really do feel.)
Okay, so I worry! I worry. But I’m a laid-back kind of guy.
Seriously though. Please don’t blow up my planet. It’s where I keep all my stuff. STEPHANIE WILSON
compartments
Front Desk
Dee was suspicious of the man the moment he walked up to the front desk. His black hair looked dirty, his skin was gray, and the shadows beneath his eyes inspired both fear and sadness in her at the same time.
—I’d like to get a room? he said, his hesitation transforming the statement into a question.
—Well, you came to the right place, Dee said, the retort escaping before she could check herself. Yet despite her brusque tone, the young man—she guessed he wasn’t quite thirty— offered up a smile, which seemed to cost him effort. He said he needed a basic room; it was just him.
Dee extolled the virtues of their standard double—give three amenities before you quote a price—which was $79 a night.
He said again that it was only him; she replied that the double was their basic room—after that you got into the queens and suites, and the price went up from there. The young man nodded, said he understood. But as she watched him fumble in his pocket for his wallet, Dee decided to help him. Perhaps it was his easy acquiescence—or was it resignation?—that made her feel sorry for him.
She lowered her voice and leaned over the counter, letting him in on a secret. They did have a single, but didn’t like to use it unless the hotel was completely booked. It was next to the ice maker, and hadn’t been part of the recent remodel— He cut her off; said he’d take it. She began entering his information, her fingers only pausing over the keys when he asked her to keep the checkout date “open.” Dee studied him, instantly suspicious again. He didn’t know when he wanted to check out? He shook his head. She pursed her lips, a disapproving gesture, but assured him that as long as he was putting the room on his credit card, he could stay as long as he liked. Or as long as your credit doesn’t run out, she thought. She made his plastic keycard, pointed him in the direction of his room, and wished him a pleasant stay. He thanked her, and she noticed the way his hand shook as he hefted his suitcase. Drugs, she decided, watching him walk away. She glanced at the shiny marble countertop, where the man had left an unintentional souvenir: a set of sweaty fingerprints. But before she could find a cloth to wipe them away, the marks evaporated into the air.
Room 201
After he let himself in, he put out the Do Not Disturb sign and locked the double locks. Then, he turned the heat on high. But nothing could warm his thin skin, his grating bones. He turned the television on and let it bathe the room in blue light and sound. Whether he used it to keep him awake or lull him to sleep he couldn’t tell; he was forever hanging in a place between rest and wakefulness.
Management Office
The daytime manager expressed his displeasure when he found out Dee had rented one of the single rooms. She apologized, said the man was insistent. The manager rubbed the stubble on his face and sighed, but chose not to pursue the matter further. Dee was a good employee, and this was a minor offense. After she left, he closed the door behind her, popped two mints into his mouth, and surreptitiously sniffed his forearm. That morning his wife had looked at him with disgust, said the stench of whiskey was beginning to seep out of his pores. Housekeeping
There was something suspicious about 201.
—He never wants his room cleaned, though he been here over a week, said Roz, working a pile of stiff laundry into folded submission.
—That’s his business, said Bev, filling her cart with tiny plastic bottles of shampoo. Maybe he just doesn’t want to be any trouble.
—Ha! said Roz, punctuating her laugh with the snap of an over-bleached towel. That would be a first. These people live to give us trouble.
—And if they didn’t, replied Bev, we’d be out of a job. Roz gave her an irritated look. Bev never complained about the guests, the management, or even the sharp-tongued, decrepit mother she cared for every moment she wasn’t working. When things got bad at the hotel—when the child of a guest smashed chocolate into the bedspread and the carpet, for instance, or their department was grilled about alleged thefts by the watery-eyed manager—Bev would only look up and say, Oh Lord, give me strength, and continue on,never stopping to lament the injustice of it all.
The house phone rang and Roz went to answer it, muttering a curse at the stiffness that had gathered in her knees from standing so long.
—I tell you, she said, pausing before lifting the receiver, 201 is trouble. I know it.
Front Desk
Dee received the call from 204: a complaint about a smell in the hallway. She sighed as she hung up—the guest had not bothered to say please, or even hello. Had people always been this rude? She couldn’t recall. Her fourteen years at the hotel had blurred into one long shift. She dialed Roz; asked her to make a pass at the second floor with some air freshener. And maybe use the powder stuff too, the kind that you vacuumed up.
On her own hands, Dee was conscious of the smell of garlic. No matter how much she scrubbed at them with soap and hot water, the scent remained, reminding her of the night before. She’d been making dinner for her and Clay—a kind gesture, as he cooked all day at the restaurant where he worked, and she was sure he would appreciate a break. But when he entered her kitchen, still wearing his checked chef’s pants, he took one look at her chopping the garlic and adding it to the still cold pan and sneered: You fucking moron. You’re supposed to heat the oil first. He took up the pan and all its contents and dumped them down the sink, shouldered her out of the way of the stove, and began preparing the meal himself. It wasn’t such a big deal, not really—people lost their tempers all the time over smaller things. But. Dee’s son had heard the whole thing, and it was his wide-eyed expression that she couldn’t scrub from her mind, no easier than she could wash away the stench of garlic.
The phone rang, and Dee took the call from 207, who wanted to voice her complaint about the noise of the vacuum in the hall.
Housekeeping
Kelvin the porter was there when Roz came to return the vacuum. She could tell he wanted to talk—or rather, wanted an audience—or else he’d be in one of the vacant guest rooms, watching TV.
—I heard you talking about 201, he said with a smirk. I’ll tell you what I think. I bet you anything there’s was a woman in there with him—you know, the kind who charges by the hour.
He crossed his arms behind his head and awaited her reaction.
Roz gave him a withering look. Kel delighted in inventing these stories. He would chortle with laughter any time they found used condoms in dresser drawers, in bathtub drains, and other odd places; it just provided him with more material. Kel was convinced that all of the guests engaged in various perversions all of the time. In the anonymity of their private compartments, they could indulge in acts they never would think of practicing at home. This was his grand theory.
Roz just shook her head and grabbed her cart; she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of her attention. But she couldn’t resist ribbing him, just a little bit.
—You’re a bigger gossip than all us ladies put together.
Room 203
The sales representative paced the room, rehearsing his speech.
—These adhesives last—he paused, consulted his notes—five times longer than the average—
He stopped again. The sound flooded in from the adjoining room; he could make out nearly every word being spoken on the television.
Tonight! On Action News at Seven…
The salesman set down his notes, scooped up his keycard, and headed out to the hotel bar.
Room 303
The engineer couldn’t sleep. The strange room felt too empty, too quiet. If he were at home, he’d hear the rumble of the icemaker, making cubes; the whir of the computer, which he rarely turned off; the creaks that were the sounds of the boards contracting, as the house cooled down for the night. And, of course, the steady breaths and occasional whimpers of Rusty, who always occupied the foot of the bed. Room 110
When they entered the room, the husband felt a twinge of excitement. The strangeness of it all, the room’s slight shabbiness, felt erotic. In the unfamiliar light, even his wife looked different. Until she began to scowl.
Was that a smear on the headboard? The remnants of someone’s unwashed head? She immediately stripped off the bedspread. These things never get cleaned. The wife pulled back the remaining sheets, examining them for hairs.
Once in bed, she recoiled at her husband’s touch. It was just so gross; she was just too uncomfortable—as she attempted to arrange her body so that as little of it touched the sheets as possible.
Room 203
The gin had put the salesman’s head into a fog; it should have been easy to sleep. But the noise was intolerable. No one should have a television on that loud, that late at night. He was a paying guest; he had a right to complain. He picked up the receiver and dialed “0”; the night manager picked up.
Room 305
To keep himself awake, Kel put on the television and changed channels until he came to a cooking competition. He thought perhaps his girlfriend was doing the same back home—the show was one of her favorites. Maybe the baby was sitting on her lap, watching too. No, it was past his bedtime. Kel didn’t like missing putting his son to bed, but he needed the overtime. It was criminal, charging as much for diapers as they did. The air crackled as a call came through on his radio: Security to 201. Not for him. But he sat up anyway, and turned off the TV.
Security Office
Bill received a call at 1:03 AM. Permission to enter. He rarely received instructions like these— once in a while, he’d have to break up a party, or help a hysterical mother who’d accidentally locked her keys—and her toddler—in a room. The rest of the job was checking license plates in the parking lot, making sure they belonged to guests, calling the towing company if not.
Bill stood, surveying the security monitors before attending to the call. The only sign of life was the night manager, standing behind the desk, tapping at the keyboard. No one stirred in the halls, or the lot, or the laundry room. The porter was nowhere to be seen, probably holed up in an empty guest room, Bill thought disapprovingly, as he turned to leave. He valued hard work, always had, though all it had earned him was wearing a polyester uniform at a time when he should have been retired. But no, he shouldn’t think that way. The fault lay with the people around him, who didn’t abide by such principles: his wife—rather, ex-wife and her lawyer—who demanded alimony, though she had been the one that wanted to move on. And his son, who could never hold a job. No, Bill’s problem wasn’t that he worked too hard or too much. It was that he too readily gave the fruits of his labors away.
He stood in front of 201, rapped his knuckles against the frame. Nothing. After about a minute of knocking and calling out, he reached for his master key.
Room 110
The wife woke to the sound of an object tracing a path across the ceiling.
—What’s that? she whispered to her husband, sitting upright.
He cursed, his frustrations still fresh. He knew they should have asked for a room away from the elevator. Second-Floor Hallway
After he called 911, Bill felt it was his responsibility to see the job through, no matter how much he wanted to turn and leave. But he stood outside the door to maintain some distance from the man inside. Also, it was hot in there; the man had turned the thermostat up as high as it would go. Bottles of pills lined the dresser and the air felt stale and unhealthy, as if his illness had somehow permeated the atmosphere.
Bill continued to keep watch when the paramedics arrived. He saw them peel the damp sheets off the man, off the body. His sharp limbs formed triangles as they lifted him onto the gurney.
Bill began to think—If that young man had a father—then turned from the scene, finding himself face-to-face with the porter, who had been standing behind him since the medics arrived, uncharacteristically silent.
Room 303
The engineer rolled over and sighed, worrying. He didn’t trust his sister to mix up the food the way Rusty liked, though he’d shown her how, twice. Nor could he count on her to take the appropriate time with the morning and afternoon walks; she never went in much for exercise.
He strained to hear once more in the darkness, and discerned a slight rumble. Was that the housekeeper’s cart, making its way across the pavement—in the middle of the night?
The engineer looked out the window to see a stretcher rattling through the parking lot, casting its flat shadow on window, then wall, window, then wall. He watched the men in blue, their arms encircling the stretcher, lifting it up into the waiting ambulance.
Room 201
It was inevitable. Once he finally got warm, the arms came, lifting him up, up. Then he was rolling, as if over water. He occasionally felt the surface hiccup beneath him, like catching wake from a passing boat.
Room 110
The shadows at that time of the morning, the glow from the lamps in the parking lot, stretched everything into the grotesque. Though that was not exactly how the woman described it to her husband.
—It was creepy, the way—
—Shh, said her husband. He placed his arm around her shoulders; she let it rest there.
—It was hard to tell—she continued—if the man was really that thin, his face that pale. He looked drained of blood. And in the hushed, cottony atmosphere of early morning, she heard the man moan, a horrible sound. Or was it, perhaps, the groan of metal on metal, of the doors shutting him into the ambulance?
Room 303
The engineer called his sister hours later, at a more appropriate time of morning. He described the man, a ghost, not appearing to register the sensation of the gurney bumping over the uneven pavement. His sister murmured, how terrible. As he hung up, the engineer realized he forgot to ask about Rusty.
Room 203
The salesman looked at his bloodshot eyes in the mirror, rubbed them with his fists. His meeting was in an hour. The person next door had turned off the television eventually—but too late for him to get a decent night’s sleep. Front Desk
The story reached Dee in fragments and whispers. Though the medics tried to be quiet—the night manager implored them not to disturb the other guests—people heard anyway, the bumps and voices coming through the thin walls, the muffled signals of distress.
Dee put off counting her drawer until the night manager arrived. What else could he tell her, she asked, about the man from 201?
—The paramedics couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed—
He stopped as guests entered the lobby.
From then on, the manager spoke in clipped sentences out of the corners of his mouth.
—The man knew he was dying. Obviously he planned to do it there. Not a suicide, no. A surrender to the inevitable. He didn’t know if the man had family, but one would assume— The more Dee pressed, the more resistant he grew.
Look, he only had knowledge of these facts: the man was dying, and he had been taken away. Yes, he agreed with Dee, it was terrible. But they operated in a world of strangers; it was not his business, nor hers. What could they have done?
Dee wanted to protest, to argue, but instead she took her drawer to the office to record its contents. She counted and stacked the bills and dropped the coins into their appropriate compartments—each penny, nickel, and quarter landing with a satisfying sound. As she worked, she tried to recall the man’s face, but found his image had already begun to fade away. Mark Petrie
“I miss you, you beast.”
...and I begin to hyperventilate in a J.C. Penny’s dressing room. Not because the fit but the make and model. Am I a Boot-Cut?
No, I am the Minotaur; I storm from the store, grumble my way into the outdoor mall. Dizzy and snorting amongst the Sunglass
Huts and ground fountains, my head, grotesque as a buoy, sweats as all the fat neo-Athenians scurry by. Before a Cinnabon, I snarl at the cashier brat who seems repulsed by an old woman rummaging for exact change. Give her time, you. I flare my nostrils through the crowd, bend my brow. Move, you big bastard. My palms feel empty without a hammer, something to swing, something dainty to smash. Ah look, some people have brought along their stupid dogs with their mouthy little faces. I am like them, the mongrels. From under an umbrella in the food court, I imagine the movie we’d star in, the terrier there, that other lummox and I, where in the end we all split, a good runaway bit full of cowardliness, lots of yipping. Digging for a cigarette, I find your postcard, and again I’m fighting back stupid tears. In this city, alone, I’m a lout without you. A ferine, brutish phony, wandering about, without you. contributors
Andrew Bales’ fiction has won second-place inGlimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and has appeared or is forthcoming in New Delta Review, Bateau, Midwestern Gothic, NANO Fiction, Johnny America, and other journals. His radio segment Into It airs regularly on NPR affiliate KMUW. Andrew is a gradaute student in Wichita State University’s MFA program and the Assistant Editor of mojo.
Dale Bridges is a fiction writer, essayist, and freelance journalist living in Boulder, Colorado. His writing has appeared in Barrelhouse Magazine, Monkey Puzzle Magazine, Metazen, Connotation Press, Out of the Gutter, the Umbrella Factory, and Draft Magazine, among others. Dale has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for his feature writing, narrative nonfiction, and cultural criticism. In 2009 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is currently working on his first book and his second childhood. To read more of Dale’s writing, go to dalebridges.org.
Marit Ericson is a poet originally from New England. Some of her recent work appears or is forthcoming in L.E.S. Review, Defenestration Magazine, and Rougarou, An Online Journal. She lives and writes in New Jersey.
Born in Philadelphia, Amy Fox has been enamored with poetry since the age of seven when she first tasted the words of Shel Silverstein. At twelve, she won two poetry contests and since then her work has been published in Kutztown University’s literary journals, Essence and Shoofly, and Schreiner University’s Illuminations.
Carl James Grindley grew up on an island off the West Coast of Canada, and studied in the US (including Wichita State University) and Europe. His book Icon was published in 2008 by No Record Press. He spends a lot of time on the train going into and out of New York City. This August, his house was wrecked by a stupid hurricane. Author Tim O’Brien earned a B.A. in political science from Macalester College in 1968. Although against the Vietnam War, he was drafted in 1968 and served until 1970. He was assigned to Third Platoon, A Company, Fifth Battalion, Forty-sixth Infantry as a foot soldier and awarded the Purple Heart. He pursued graduate studies at Harvard University from 1970-1976 and interned at the Washington Post. He was a national affairs reporter for the Washington Post from 1974-75. He has written several novels, including Northern Lights (1975) and Going after Cacciato (1978), based on his Vietnam War experience. He has contributed short stories to Harper’s, McCall’s, and other periodicals. O’Brien has won several awards including the O. Henry Award in 1976 and 1978, the Best American Short Stories Award in 1977, the National Book Award for Fiction in 1978, the Heartland Award in 1990, France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in 1990, and the Melcher Book Award in 1991. His war memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), was named Outstanding Book of 1973 by the New York Times.
Heiko Müller’s work has been shown in Estonia, New York, Paris, Saint Petersburg, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago, as well as various publications. When he’s not busy with art or media work, he can usually be found painting pictures with his two little sons in Hamburg, Germany.
Mark Petrie is a graduate student at the University of New Orleans where he studies poetics and literature under the guidance of several talented and experienced professors. His work can be found online at Booth and Ascent Aspirations.
Theadora Siranian is a student in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has been previously published in Gigantic Sequins. In 2007 she received the Academy of American Poets Prize from Emerson College.
Jamie Wilson, a Seattle area native, studies creative writing and teaches composition at Wichita State University. His story, “Our Fighter,” appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of JMWW, and was also named as a finalist in the January 2011 Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award. He is currently the Fiction Editor for mojo, and on a good day he can pick up a pole, fly down the runway, and polevault 14-feet.
Stephanie Wilson is in the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in Hot Metal Bridge and unFold.
Produced by the gradate students of Wichita State University’s MFA in Creative Writing program