Samuel Glenn

MODERN LOVE AND OTHER STORIES

WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GENRE AND SCHOLARSHIP

INCLUDING A SURVEY OF THE TEXT

Thesis

Submitted to

The College of Arts and Sciences of the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

Master of Arts in English

Samuel Jonathon Glenn

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

Dayton, Ohio

May, 2014

MODERN LOVE AND OTHER STORIES

WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GENRE AND SCHOLARSHIP

INCLUDING A SURVEY OF THE TEXT

Name: Glenn, Samuel Jonathon

APPROVED BY:

______Albino Carrillo, MFA Faculty Advisor

______Andrew Slade, PhD Faculty Reader

______James Boehnlein, PhD Faculty Reader

______Sheila Hughes Chair, Department of English

Samuel Jonathon Glenn

2014

iii

ABSTRACT

MODERN LOVE AND OTHER STORIES WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO THE

GENRE AND SCHOLARSHIP INCLUDING A SURVEY OF THE TEXT

Name: Glenn, Samuel Jonathon University of Dayton

Advisor: Professor Albino Carrillo

Modern Love and Other Stories is a collection of short stories set around that oscillates between a central protagonist and his surrounding online world. This project presents and analyzes the challenges of finding a place in today’s society. With fiction as the tool, the short stories reveal truths about human nature, growing up, parental relationships and attempts to discover happiness. The focus is less on plot and more on the illumination and examination of structures of feeling within ordinary people.

Characters bleed from one story to the next, ideas remain afloat, and the reader finds meaning in the sum of the collection’s parts.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My eternal thanks is owed to Professor Albino Carrillo, Dr. Rebecca Potter, Dr.

Andy Slade, Dr. James Boehnlein, Dr. Bryan Bardine and Dr. Yvonne Teems-Stephens for their unwavering support and guidance—not only with this thesis but all phases of graduate school and teaching students.

I would also like to thank my creative writing professors from The Ohio State

University who played a huge part in my development as a writer: Erin McGraw, Lee

Martin, Kim Brauer and Julian Anderson.

Last but certainly not least, I need to thank my family and friends for not only inspiring these stories and these characters, but also inspiring me to be ambitious and to follow my passion. Everything I am is owed to your encouragement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT…………………………..………………………………………………….iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………...………………………………………………..v

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

The Short Story Collection: Genre and Possibility……….…………...…………..1

MODERN LOVE AND OTHER STORIES

I Was Dressed for Success…………………...…………………………………..14

Asphyxia by Proxy…………....………………………………………………….28

So Far Around the Bend…………………………………………………………31

Paralyzed………………………………………………………………..……..…38

A Study in Love Abroad...……………………………………………..………...44

Friction…………………….……..………………………………………………56

Cliffhangers………….………………………………………………………...... 59

Panopticon………………….………………………………………………….…64

Modern Love……………….………………………………………………….…68

WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………...... 80

VITA……………………………………………………………………………………..82

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

The Short Story Collection: Genre and Possibility

While the cultural history of the short story is only a few decades longer than that of film, the consensus subscribes to the belief that the short story existed in various forms for millennia. As William Boyd writes, if the short story was a new genre, why could

Hawthorne, Poe and Turgenev write “classic and timeless short stories virtually from the outset”? (Boyd, “A Short History of the Short Story”). The most suitable answer is that the short story lied dormant in the human imagination, and its later emergence only signaled the development of a well-practiced, literary mode of storytelling.

The modern short story in English is largely credited to Edgar Allen Poe, who pioneered and popularized the form in the nineteenth century. In addition to its first champion, Poe can be called the form’s first theorist. Writing in 1842, Poe declared that the aim of “the tale proper” was “unity of effect or impression” (46). By the twentieth century, Poe’s “tale proper” had adopted the sobriquet “short-story” and was viewed as a bona fide art form. In 1901, Brander Matthews expounded on the theory, clarifying that a

“true Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short” (57). Practitioners and readers of short stories knew that there was more to the genre than length, and began to list characteristics: “symmetry of design,”

“compression,” and “ingenuity” from Matthews (57); “oblique narration, cutting (as in the cinema), the unlikely placing of emphasis, or symbolism” from Elizabeth Bowen, nearly forty years later (153). Bowen went on to argue that short stories combat the “too often forced and false” denouement of novels with endings that resonate as closer to an

“aesthetic and moral truth” (155). The stories formerly known as “tale propers” became an accepted part of the literary community.

With the modernists, the short story advanced to the preferred method of storytelling for a period of time. Celebrated American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and, eventually, Flannery O’Connor took the form to unprecedented levels of respect and resonance throughout the middle part of the twentieth-century. There was a period in time when stories published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review produced substantial splashes in the world of letters. The short stories of this era established “the style” of story that survives today. Creative Writing programs in universities across the country still edify the style and form established during the modernist period.

By the 1970s, interest in the art form had waned. Charles E. May begins Short

Story Theories—basically the textbook for scholarship on the genre—by lamenting the current status of the short story: “Although the short story is respected by its practitioners, it is largely ignored by both the popular and the serious reader. Moreover, the most valuable critical remarks made about the form have been made not by the critics but by the short story writers” (3). Then, twenty years ago, May published an updated, buoyant version of his important anthology of theory, New Short Story Theories. In the preface, May reports that much has changed in the interim: “More serious writers are

experimenting with the form, more publishers are willing to take a chance on short-story collections, and more critics are seriously discussing the short story” (xi). The optimism was shortlived, however, as just two years ago, May checked in again, with an essay this time, “The American Short Story in the Twenty-first Century.” The hope of 1994 had faded; May reported plainly: “If readers do not want to read short stories, publishers certainly will not publish collections of them, and periodicals that have to make a profit will stick to pictures and celebrity-oriented nonfiction” (299).

In nearly two centuries of existence, the short story has seen its stock rise and fall.

From Poe to Matthews to May, there has been thoughtful engagement with the genre.

While the outlook seems as bleak today as it was in 1976 when May published the original Short Story Theories, there was a period when short stories had recaptured the attention of critics and readers alike—thanks to authors like Raymond Carver. This current downturn will pass; the short story is not dead. The genre and its practitioners will again adapt and re-engage with the reading public. As Nadine Gordimer wrote in her essay, “The Flash of Fireflies,” the short story

must be better equipped to attempt the capture of ultimate reality at a time

when (whichever way you choose to see it) we are drawing nearer to the

mystery of life or are losing ourselves in a bellowing wilderness of

mirrors, as the nature of that reality becomes more fully understood or

more bewilderingly concealed by the discoveries of science and the

proliferation of communication media outside the printed word. (179)

While that prescient essay was written in the ‘70s, the call to action can be transferred to the current generation. If short stories are to break out of this current recession, they must do so by carving a new place for the genre within literary studies and society.

A Case for Short Stories

It has been established that readers and critics are apathetic about short stories.

A.L. Bader diagnoses the problem in his article, “The Structure of the Modern Short

Story,” when he states that readers “maintain that the modern short story is plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous—frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance—everything, in fact, except a story” (107). Readers have expectations of storytelling and, while they’re satisfied with what film, television and novels provide, there is genuine uncertainty directed towards short stories. As for critics, May provides a succinct summation: “If the short story is not popular with popular readers, it is not taken seriously by serious critics either” (4). Why write short stories then?

As mentioned earlier, the short story has the capability of gaining influence over readers and critics once again. The genre is not outmoded or endangered; short stories simply need to remember how to resonate. According to Frank O’Connor’s “The Lonely

Voice,” short story writers need to find the previously neglected characters and bring them to the page. As O’Connor argues, a heroic protagonist has never defined the short story. Instead, the short story has showcased a “submerged population group” (86).

Current short story writers need to find that submerged population, which “changes its character from writer to writer, from generation to generation” (O’Connor 86).

Short stories are capable of presenting these submerged characters because, as

H.E. Bates puts it, short stories have “advantages of elasticity, in both choice of character and use of time” (75). With its flexible nature, the short story can be molded in ways that a novel simply cannot. Whatever purpose or intent, “the short story can be anything the author decides it shall be” (Bates 73).

Blending Cycles and Collections

Out of singular stories emerged short story anthologies, collections and cycles.

While typical anthologies span careers and subgenres, collections and cycles are written with the intention of being bound together as one cohesive unit. It is true that many readers are bothered by the “fragmentary, static, and irresolute” nature of short stories

(May 5). Cycles and collections combat that issue, allowing the reader to become acquainted with the author’s tone and the overarching themes, experiencing the stories much as they would a novel. In this way, cycles and collections produce a greater effect and provide readers with a totality that is not possible in standalone short stories.

Existing scholarship debates the distinction between the cycle and collection—at best, the boundary is blurry. Both share the goal of organizing stories around common themes and structures of feeling. In most cases, the major distinguishing factors are character and setting: cycles tend to revolve around a central protagonist or location (i.e.

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio). Collections, on the other hand, allow for divergence.

Bearing this in mind, I sought to blend the cycle and collection. Five stories in this collection feature the same protagonist. The reader meets this protagonist, Leo Glass,

on the first page. When his initial appearance closes, the next story throws the reader off course. Rather than finding Leo Glass in a new situation, the collection moves into a second person narration. The “you” story forces the reader to participate in a perverse search for love on the Internet. For the remainder of the collection, this pattern persists: first-person narrative from Leo Glass, accusatory second-person engaging in an escapade online.

According to Rolf Lundén, short story cycles and collections often feature

“anchor stories” and “fringe stories.” Anchor stories are those that assume a “hegemonic position in the text, such as ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners, “Big Two-Hearted River” in In Our

Time,” etc.; while fringe stories are only “tangentially connected” to the collection as a whole (Lundén 124-125). In the case of Modern Love and Other Stories, there is at least one story that can be considered an anchor, the titular “Modern Love,” but the collection was written with the idea that there would be one resounding effect. If separated, the collection has the potential to read as two discrete cycles. Instead, they were thrust together. The juxtaposition achieves the postmodern goal of fracturing the narrative. The stories involving Leo Glass are realistic, sentimental and, for all intents and purposes, conventional. The interspersed “you” challenges the continuity, ruptures the reader’s flow and locates the collection in the challenging present. Together, the sum of the disjointed stories is greater than its parts.

Addressing the Submerged

Modern Love and Other Stories addresses a submerged population: people looking for love on the Internet. There have been novels and stories that grapple with the

Internet, but the discussion is almost always satirical and critical. It’s not surprising that writers would have an antagonistic relationship with the device that signaled a major shift in the way literature is presented and consumed. Still, there have not been enough accounts of the Internet that depict it as a mode of communication and a remedy for loneliness. Gordimer believes that “our age is threshing about desperately for a way out of individual human isolation, and that our present art forms are not adequate to it”

(Gordimer 181). Is human isolation where the short story can exert its influence and satisfy this inadequacy?

In the search for personal connection to remedy isolation, issues arise when people allow outlets online to replace human interaction, placing themselves on a virtual island. As Jonathan Franzen describes in his essay, “Farther Away,” a person who creates a virtual island eventually will have

nothing but his own interesting self to survive on, and the problem with

making a virtual world of oneself is… [that] there’s no end of virtual

spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the

perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning. To be

everything and more is the Internet’s ambition.

(Franzen, “Farther Away”)

This is a realistic, nuanced view of the major problem that the Internet actually presents.

The endless Internet turns dangerous when a person allows the cyberworld to replace the real world. In a world without limits, instability leads to dubious decisions. I chose to present this in Modern Love and Other Stories through four stories in which the protagonist solicits love or intimacy on the Internet. These types are submerged

characters and what is most interesting to me is that they are submerged out in the open— they have normal jobs, families and hobbies. Internet life is a secret life in which we can either be ourselves or fabricate a new identity. Many choose to keep this life secret and hidden out of necessity or out of the pleasure of having a secret that no one else knows.

In this way, the secret online existence becomes an addiction. Again, borrowing from

Franzen, the illicit Internet actions operate as the “need to have something apart from other people, the need for a secret, the need for some last-ditch narcissistic validation of the self’s primacy” (Franzen, “Farther Away”). So while the four stories I present are certainly extreme cases and at the “last-ditch narcissistic validation” end of the spectrum, they represent a division of cyberspace that goes unnoticed.

The other five stories offer a contrast. The narrator, Leo Glass, is a young man who searches for love in more conventional ways. He struggles in this quest. There is failure and heartbreak—along with minor successes. In many ways, he is less successful than those that are willing to go online for their companionship. At the end of the collection, the titular story “Modern Love” blends the two cycles when Leo Glass ventures onto the Internet.

The Prevailing Middlebrow

I have no delusions regarding my prose. I doubt that many readers will need to pull out the dictionary to make sense of my sentences. In part, this is by necessity—when writing in the first or second person, it is imperative that the writing reads as much like human speech as possible. It’s not my language; it belongs to my characters. I am conscious of the text’s readability. It plays a huge role in the revision process. Did I need

to use the word “interstice,” or would “slight space” have sufficed? There are competing desires in the vocabulary. I want the language to work—there should be a poetic quality to it. But I also want it to connect with people. While I do not find it useful to appeal to a lowest common denominator, I do want to appeal to those readers who will experience my stories and find that they “encounter characters who remind them of themselves, their family members, or their friends,” as Timothy Aubry posits in his treatise, Reading as

Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (1).

Aubry declares that the literary landscape has shifted. The average American reader, a middle-class book lover, seeks texts that offer “comfort and companionship”

(1). These sorts of texts were once referred to as “middlebrow,” at best, or “lowbrow,” at worst. There are many intellectuals and scholars who decry the urge to connect with fictional characters. This desire is viewed as critical blasphemy: perverting the division between literature and life. For them, the scene of this crime is “middlebrow” literature.

It’s an archaic view and one that C.S. Lewis describes existing during his era in his book,

An Experiment in Criticism. He describes the disdain academics and the literary elite have for middlebrow—and no doubt, middle-class—readers:

They accuse them of illiteracy, barbarism, ‘crass,’ ‘crude,’ and ‘stock’

responses which (it is suggested) must make them clumsy and insensitive

in all the relations of life and render them a permanent danger to

civilisation. It sometimes sounds as if the reading of ‘popular’ fiction

involved moral turpitude. I do not find this borne out by experience.

(Lewis 5)

Aubry asserts the opposite in his text, finding that the tendency of middlebrow fiction to focus on the relatable and personal character contributes to the development of a

“common therapeutic vocabulary, which is capable of inspiring unlikely forms of sympathy among strangers” (2). Further muddying the stale notion that middlebrow literature is somehow inferior is the fact that it’s becoming much more difficult to categorize texts into either high, middle or low. If my fiction falls into the middlebrow category, it is not by accident—nor is it an insult. If the best ground to achieve a literary experience of understanding lies with middlebrow literature, I am more than happy to involve myself.

Taking this idea further, it is worth mentioning the two “types” of writers that novelist Jonathan Franzen has recently articulated. In his 2002 essay, “Mr. Difficult,” published in Harper’s, Franzen defines two different types of authors: “status” authors and “contract” authors. Status authors are typically modernist and see art as the only obligation; they eschew the interests and desires of the common reader. Contract authors, on the other hand, hold the narrator-reader relationship as paramount to any other contending responsibility. They believe that writing is a device for social and cultural communication; rather than language or ideas, human life is the ultimate subject of their fiction. I consider myself to be a Contract author; I would prefer for the reader to grapple with feelings over language. As Franzen writes, “Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness” (Franzen, “Mr. Difficult”). In a world of distractions, the competition for attention is critical. Franzen believes the writer only deserves the reader’s attention “as long as the author sustains the reader's trust…The

discourse here is one of pleasure and connection” (Franzen, “Mr. Difficult”). Pleasure and connection are guiding principles behind Modern Love and Other Stories.

Survey of the Text

When Modern Love and Other Stories opens, the reader is presented with Leo

Glass in the story, “I Was Dressed for Success.” Though the story does not occur first chronologically, it provides the basis for Leo and sets up tensions that will surface in the remaining stories. The story bears obvious influence from mainstream writers like Nick

Hornby (About A Boy) and Melissa Bank (The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing). The style can be characterized as humoristic and entertaining, while simultaneously presenting serious issues and hinting at hidden depths. Leo can be described as an unreliable narrator. Speaking to the issues of unreliable narration, Tilmann Köppe and

Tom Kindt articulate two types: the first depends on the narrator not providing

“completely accurate information or all relevant information” in a text, while the second involves “a lack of accuracy and a lack of relevant information” in the narration (85). Leo exemplifies both types of unreliable narration. He presents himself with honesty and humility, however, which complicates the unreliability—the reader wants to believe him but knows this trust is problematic.

All of the stories call attention to themselves as stories. Whether it is Leo presenting himself as a “case study” or acknowledging that he wants to jump around chronologically, metafiction persists throughout the collection. In many ways, the stories narrated by Leo qualify as “self-conscious fiction.” According to Patricia Waugh, this sort of fiction “self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an

artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (2).

Leo’s narration explores the self-conscious storytelling that is found with any recollection of events. The metafictional elements of the stories coincide with the unreliability of the narration: there are surely exaggerations, withholdings and misrepresentations. The use of second-person narration forces the reader into metafiction, as they must play narrator and experience the narrative.

The stories abstain from presenting tight, fulfilling conclusions. As Thomas

Gullason writes, “The story does not end. Nothing is solved. But the story is like a delayed fuse; it depends on after-effects on the reader via the poetic technique of suggestion and implication. We have enough of the parts to complete a significant pattern. That particular, isolated action moves to a more general plane of significance”

(27). The suggestions and implications allow the narrative to continue off the page. They resist a well-defined ending because it compels the reader to imagine the possibilities and contemplate the next move. In an attempt to incorporate meta-endings, one story has a self-conscious lack of resolution: “Cliffhangers.” In the story, Leo runs into past lover and makes the conscious choice to let things go unfinished. He tells the girl, Sloane,

“You know, you should learn to love cliffhangers,” as the subway doors and story simultaneously close. This is meant to be a reflection of real life, where there are no real conclusions—besides death.

Questions of plot surround the collection. According to Theodore Stroud, “At present time ‘plot’ has become a pejorative term, reserved for stories intended to evoke a simple kind of suspense. Prestige attaches instead to the stories which have a ‘theme,’ preferably discernible as a system of symbols and not as an explicit moral” (117). As the

stories revolve around characters rather than events, the collection aims for this second type of story marked by “prestige.” There is not an explicit moral to the stories but the themes of loneliness and a desire for human connection abounds.

With knowledge of where the short story has been and where it needs to go, I hope this collection showcases a potential direction. As H.E. Bates asserts in his essay,

“The Modern Short Story: Retrospect,” readers will eventually force the medium to change:

“In this way the short story can be seen not as a product evolved by

generations of writers united in a revolutionary intention to get the short

story more simply, more economically, and more truthfully written, but as

something shaped also by readers, by social expansion, and by what Miss

Bowen calls ‘peaks of common experience’” (79).

Modern Love and Other Stories illustrates “peaks of common experience” as they exist in contemporary society with hopes of achieving a better mutual understanding.

MODERN LOVE AND OTHER STORIES

I Was Dressed for Success

The summer after my stepmother left was the summer that I resolved to bring my father back into the hazardous world of dating. It had been nearly a decade since he was afforded the opportunity to gaze upon beautiful women without fear of retribution, let alone guilt. It was for this reason that I took genuine pity in him, as he had squandered many good years in a marriage that, from its inception, seemed doomed to fail. And fail, it did. I was of the belief that his newfound bachelorhood was both fortuitous and deserved.

Since she left, he had taken the curious and admittedly irritating position of rededicating himself to his children and their future. This did not coincide with my expectations of being a recent college graduate and, now, diplomatically-certified real world inhabitant. My lifestyle did not stand up well to scrutiny, however well- intentioned.

The day that it all began, I had just crawled out of bed and was reclined on our stiff leather couch—I had moved into his Tribeca apartment to offer support after the dissolution of his marriage—when he came in the door from his morning run, dripping with sweat and more awake than his son who’d slept twelve hours.

“Mornin’, buddy,” he said as he bent forward and untied his shoes. “I did some good thinking while I was in the park and I’ve come up with an idea. We should go out tonight, check out that bar over in the Meatpacking, Bass Monkey. How’s that sound?”

I swung forward on the couch and placed my coffee mug on the table. The tiger was ready to be re-released into the wild. “Bass Monkey” was a bar I frequented in undergrad and while I disdained seeing stale acquaintances, this was a perfect opportunity to begin my plot to find my father a new partner. “I’m going to say yes, that’s a great idea. But if we’re going to go, I insist you refer to it by its correct nomenclature: Brass Monkey.”

“Brass Monkey, huh? Cool. Sounds like a plan.”

My father’s inadequacies with popular culture and current trends would be a small obstacle in this scheme, but now a larger concern had been raised: attention to detail.

While I could forgive his transgressions and mispronunciations, I’m not sure a woman could so easily overlook these shortcomings. I made mental note to steer my father clear of women with strange or confusing names at the bar—he would perpetually struggle in a

Kirsten or Kristen dilemma. My therapist, Dr. Young, would applaud my foresight and exhibition of conflict avoidance.

When evening came, we emerged from our respective bedrooms in what we both considered to be appealing and fitting attire for the bar scene. The man across the apartment, on the other side of the kitchen, had many features that I recognized as my own. He was shorter, though, and could grow the hell out of a beard. His hair was once brown like mine, but little of that color survived in his clean and cropped side-part. I imagined his hairstyle to be a relic from another age; while his clothing begrudgingly

changed with the times, that side-part was steadfast. I hadn’t cut my hair in months, since my last job interview. It was a shock of brown that curled and hung low on my head. I was skinnier and had never been the athlete my father was. While he opted for the dress shirt tucked into his darkest jeans (the look every man over forty favored when “going out”), I had decided on jeans and my innocuous flannel. Better safe than sorry.

We arrived in a taxi on 10th Ave and walked the remaining block to the bar. My dad was in a genuinely good mood and my hope of planting the seed with a pretty—yet motherly—woman was increasing. The whole tucked-in shirt decision was dubious but I didn’t expect anyone to hold it against him.

Brass Monkey is an old brownstone building that was gutted at street level and turned into a huge, modern bar. There was an amber glow inside from the lowly lit lights and reflective wood paneling. The bar was to the left of the door and tables lined the right side. There was a staircase in the back leading to the second story and patio. Immediately

I realized we would want to move to the patio as it was crowded inside and the music was deafening. We grabbed a beer and headed to the stairs.

My father was not showing any nervousness even though this was his first real experience as a single man in years. He and my stepmother had been married only five years after a long courtship. To me and my older sisters, it had seemed a relationship of convenience and ease, but never anything that would evolve into a full-fledged marriage.

“Great view, isn’t it?” Dad said, pointing out into the city. It was the middle of

July and it was late in the day as the sun finally fell. My flannel and I welcomed the reprieve from the heat. “So, are we picking up chicks, or what?”

I looked around quickly, my face flushing, to make sure that no one was within earshot of my father’s question. I would have rather left it understood but unspoken.

“Yeah, dad, let’s start scouting for you,” I said. “What age range are we thinking?

Younger? Older?”

“Definitely older than my daughters. How about we say forty at least?”

There were two middle-aged women on the other end of the roof with a pitcher of beer on the table between them. “Over there?” I asked, gesturing with my head.

He looked back once, took a swig of his beer, and then looked again. “Here goes nothing.”

I couldn’t hear what he said, but both women laughed and the blonde one sidled over on the bench to make room for him to sit. He made it look easy. I went to the bar to make my solitude less obvious and asked for another beer.

After my fourth beer, I was listening to the small, brown-haired girl next to me talk about her ex-boyfriend and how she should have known he had a bad heart when he was mean to Mr. Jinks, her cat. When she asked why I was sitting alone at the bar, I told her about my father and his recent separation from my stepmother. I said I was reintroducing him to the sea of single women in New York and I hoped he would find someone more like my mother.

“It’s too bad we’re just meeting each other right now,” she said. “My mother was single until very recently.”

“We could have gone on a double date,” I said, laughing.

She shrugged. She was cute, but incredibly thin. She wore glasses that seemed to take up the majority of her face and I doubted whether they carried a prescription. Her red, polka-dotted dress hung loose on her frame.

Feeling my eyes had rested too long on the cat-lover, I looked across the patio to my father. The other woman had stood up to chat with friends while my father and the blonde remained at the table. They were seated next to each other at the table and the conversation seemed warm. Her elbow was resting on the table as she turned toward him, her hand in her face.

Not long after the girl with a mistreated cat left, I felt a strong pat on the back of my shoulder. “Ready to go, Leo?” My dad was done talking to the blonde.

“Yeah, sure. But what happened? Where’d that lady go?”

“Alma had to get her friend home. She had a bit too much to drink. Fun talking with her though,” he said. He raised his eyebrows. “What was going on over here?”

“Nothing to write home about.”

Later that night, back in the apartment, I was back on the couch with my laptop. I found one of the pretty cat-lover’s articles on the internet—she was a freelance journalist—and subsequently found her Facebook profile.

“So is this the girl, Leo?” My dad had been lurking behind me.

“What? Jesus. No. Just happened to stumble upon her page.”

“Wow. What a coincidence. I think maybe you should send her a little message and ask if she wants to go on a date.”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No, I’m not sending her a message. We’re not even Facebook friends. That doesn’t really fall within the etiquette of social media. Friends first.”

“Add her as a friend then.”

“I wait for people to add me.”

“She hasn’t though, has she?”

“Maybe she can’t find me.”

“But you already found her.”

“Dad, just leave me alone.” I placed my laptop on the coffee table and went into the kitchen for a beer. When I turned back to the couch, Dad was in my place, using my laptop.

“What are you doing?” I asked, handing him a beer.

“Trying to find Alma. And I went ahead and added Miss Reagan Murray as your

Facebook friend.”

“Thank you so much,” I said as I tried to grab the computer from his hands.

He dodged me. “Not yet. I want to see if Alma has a page. A-L-M-A-SPACE-M-

U-R-R-A-Y,” he typed impossibly slow with index fingers into the search bar.

“Wait, her last name is Murray too?”

“Yeah, pretty common,” he said, distracted by the results: twelve Alma Murrays were found. “Let’s see. Who’s blonde?”

“There,” I said, pointing to the woman from the bar. “That’s definitely her.”

He opened her profile. She was an attractive woman in her late forties. Her hair was still long and blonde, but a dirty, natural blonde. She favored dark eyeliner and

colorful lipsticks. There was a smoky but endearing quality to her face. “Are these her updates?” Dad asked scrolling down to her previous statuses.

I nodded. “Look, she posted something tonight: ‘Had a great time at Brass

Monkey with the girls. Going back tomorrow for round two!’”

“This makes it way too easy to stalk people. Man. That’s disturbing.”

“This is premium information, Dad.”

“Where is the romance in stalking, anymore? When I was younger we would have vague notions and hopes of where girls would be. If I met someone at a bookstore, I’d come back the next week and hope to see her again. That was romantic.”

“Sounds like a waste of time. So we’re going back tomorrow?”

“I suppose we have to.”

Later that night, I was smoking my bedtime cigarette, sitting on the steps of the fire escape, looking out over the railing to the street below. I could see the crowns of

New Yorkers walking left and right, every once in a while crossing the street. I felt at ease with the prospects of my father and Alma beginning a courtship. If their relationship blossomed, there would be less auditing of my life and my progress. I could relax.

Though, I did wonder if Alma would take issue with me sleeping out on the couch most nights while the TV quietly played HBO.

A smell separate from my menthol cigarette, one instead of spice and cloves, drifted my direction. The street lights above reflected off smoke rising from the opposite fire escape. I could see the intermittent embers glowing then disappearing. The figure's silhouette looked familiar. I recognized it as a slender woman. I raised my hand in a

wave. No reaction. I swung my hand side to side. The figure flicked the burning cigarette off the fire escape, silently sailing to the pavement below. She climbed a few stairs and re-entered her apartment.

I dreamed that I was back at Brass Monkey, but the sign was missing the “r,” so for once, my father was right—Bass Monkey. I looked at the back table and saw Dad dancing with Alma, his hands on her hips and his arms rigid, her hands on his shoulders and equally stiff. They were swaying like teenagers at their first dance, shifting nearly all of their weight from one foot to the other in repetition. I smiled and looked next to me, expecting Reagan Murray, the cat-lover.

But it was a different, more recognizable face.

“Leo.”

“Hi, Sloane.” She had a stock name and a similarly stock beauty. Long, blond hair. Tall and thin. Model in high school. Fashion major. Loves the color pink, reading magazines, dubstep, ripping out Leo's heart and stomping it with too-high heels.

“You need to stop dreaming about me.”

“I know that. I didn't mean to, I swear.”

“I don't want you in my life anymore.”

I had to turn away and bury my face in my hands. I rubbed and kneaded my cheeks and forehead with my shaking fists, opened and closed my eyes at varying speeds and intervals, all with the hope that I could wake myself up.

“Did you hear me, Leo? Forget about me. I can't have you in my life anymore.

Quit bothering me. No more e-mails or Facebook messages. Please do not write letters to my parents' house. That's not cute and it scares them.”

“But I stopped—or, well, I've slowed down. I'm trying to—”

“You're crazy, Leo. You're crazy. You're crazy. You're cra—”

“Leo,” my dad interrupted, shaking me. “You all right, bud?”

“I'm fine. Bad dream, I guess.” The back of my shirt was drenched around the neck and shoulders.

“It wasn't about her, was it?”

“No, no. I had been watching Boardwalk Empire. Got caught up in a raid.”

Dad looked at me. I couldn't find any disbelief on his face, but the concern hadn't been wiped away. “Sorry, bud. Maybe you should move to your room? The TV can do that to you sometimes.”

“Good idea. Night dad,” I said, leaving him in the living room and quickly traipsing to my bedroom. I could feel his eyes on me but I didn't look back.

I awoke early, the sun still low in the sky and my father still stretching before his morning loop around the neighborhood. I felt energized and purposeful. I was the rehabilitator: getting my dad back into the dating world, helping him forget about my stepmother, and easing parental concerns over my own future. One night of work proved that I had god-given talent in the field—Alma Murray, exhibit A. Tonight would be round two.

My father looked at me between his legs as he loosened his hamstrings. “Any chance you feel like joining me?”

I quickly deduced that this would be a perfect time to further plant the Alma-seed and get him in the proper mindset for another night out in the city. Preparation is the key to success. You always need a good plan. This is another example of progress that I need to bring up in my next therapy session.

“Why not?” I said as nonchalantly as possible, careful not to tip him off to my ulterior motives. I quickly dressed and after originally emerging from my bedroom in beat-up Converse All-Stars, switched to a pair of my father's running shoes he dug out of the closet before exiting the apartment.

We took the elevator—a wide, expansive stainless steel contraption affixed with ornate silver buttons and embossed floor numbers to make residents feel that their exorbitant rent was going to good use—down to the ground floor of the apartment building. The doorman, Edgar, bowed his head to us as we passed. “Good morning to you, Mr. Charles. Surprised to see you this early, Mr. Leo.” Fuck you, Edgar.

We began running on Harrison Street toward the Hudson so we could run with the river in view. There was a definite happiness permeating from my father, but for some reason he seemed to steal concerned glances at me every dozen steps. Apparently, my bogus Boardwalk Empire excuse did nothing to alleviate his worry.

“Hey, isn't that the girl from the bar?” My dad gestured out ahead of us to two people standing at the edge of the embankment, looking out to the river.

I squinted my eyes and did think the girl looked like the cat-lover. Her hair dropped low and she had the same huge glasses. Her jeans clung to her legs and she wore

shockingly bright, neon-green sneakers. I realized her body was complemented much better with tight clothing.

“It looks like her,” I said, pausing to catch my breath as our pace quickened, “but

I think it's just another girl with that style.”

“No, no. I'm almost positive. Look at her hair and glasses. Let's stop and talk to her.” My dad ran out ahead of me and waved to her. She smiled and waved. She had a vintage camera hung around her neck, one that's used for lomography—she must try as hard as me.

As we stopped next to her and her friend (a guy who looked European but had probably recently moved to New York from Nowhere, USA), I awkwardly put my hand up in front of me in yet another wave. “Hi,” she said. “You're the guys from Brass

Monkey, aren't you? This is my friend from school, Paolo.”

My dad was running in place. “Hey, Paul-o. Nice to meet you. And it was Reagan right?”

“Yes. Charlie,” she said, pointing to my father, and then to me, “and Leo.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Charlie and Leo,” Paolo said in a smooth accent and I instinctively wished he had never been born.

At this point, I was still ignoring the serendipitous apparitions of Reagan in my life. Sitting in his office weeks later, Dr. Young would call this a textbook example of

“motivated forgetting” as a defense mechanism. I told him he was a hack—that I was totally consumed in the process of finding my father a compatible mate—but as I tell you all of this now, I suppose I can see whatever the hell he was talking about.

Anyway, that evening, when Dad and I exited the cab outside the bar, shielding our eyes as we approached Brass Monkey’s gentrified façade, he turned to me. “Straight to the top?” We bee-lined for the stairs.

The rooftop had a much larger crowd than the night before and the only the lights above the bar were visible through the piles of people shouting over each other. My father politely parted the crowd and I followed closely. As we drew near to the bar, I looked over the people seated on stools in front of the bar. Alma and Reagan were drinking together, laughing. I stopped trailing my dad. He didn’t notice.

I watched as he approached, arms out, and hugged the two women at the same time. Alma then clapped her hands on either side of his face and pushed her lips against his. He showed no sign of surprise, just smiled and whispered something in her ear.

Either Reagan or Alma must have mentioned my name because he looked behind him pointing to the empty space where he expected me. Alma and Reagan know each other? I wanted to stay right where I was. I had the feeling that I wanted to get the hell out of there, but I answered my father’s pathetic confusion and joined them at the bar.

“You must be Leo!” Alma exclaimed, standing to throw her arms around me.

“Nice to meet you.” Reagan was watching me, one side of her mouth in a grin. I told

Alma I was happy to meet her. “Sorry, I’ll be right back,” I said as evenly as I could manage. I fled for the stairs, pushing my way past people in a cavalier way, exited the bar and lit a cigarette on the sidewalk.

It took me half of a cigarette to piece it all together. Reagan was alone at the bar.

Her mother had recently entered a relationship. We ran into Reagan by the river, where

she knew my father’s name. Had I told her my father’s name? And it certainly didn’t seem like Alma and my father were strangers.

“Buddy! What’s up? What’s going on?” My father had joined me outside. I looked back to see him with a real look of concern on his face, and it hurt me to know I caused it. My throat tightened, but I clenched my fists, ready to get some answers.

“You already knew Alma, didn’t you?”

He slowly lowered his stare to the pavement with his lips pressed together in practiced solemnity. “Yes, Leo, we have been dating for a few weeks. She lives across the street.”

“Reagan is her daughter then?”

He nodded.

“Mother fucker.”

“Leo, listen.”

“No, no. This is all fucked. You couldn’t just set me up in a normal way? Am I that fucking delicate? You have to pussyfoot around?”

“Leo. Stop. We planned to tell you tonight. I didn’t know if you’d like Reagan.”

“Bullshit. You were testing to see if I was over Sloane.”

“I didn’t know if you were ready, bud. I decided to accelerate my plan because

Reagan kept asking about you.”

“Your plan? Your plan?” With that, I turned around, saw the break in traffic, and ran to the other side of the street. Before my father could follow, I was in the back of the cab, giving the address of my old standby.

As my cab driver, Said, sped through the Battery Tunnel toward Brooklyn, I realized that the great matchmaker was really my father. And it pissed me off. He had obviously suggested Brass Monkey with the knowledge that we were going to meet

Reagan and Alma. He was playing it safe until what? I quit having bad dreams? I said his words aloud: “I decided to accelerate my plan because Reagan kept asking about you.”

“’Scuse me? You still want Brooklyn Library?” Said shouted into the backseat.

“Yes, yes, sorry. Talking to myself.”

So I whispered it: “Because Reagan kept asking about you.” I smiled.

“Turn around, Said. Turn around!”

He grumbled and began a U-turn, laying on the horn. “Make up yo’ mind.”

I thought about Reagan and her polka dot dress. I quickly scratched that image and put her back in the tight jeans she wore by the river. I laughed in a quick puff—I was downright giddy. “She kept asking about me, Said. Fuck it, I’m going for it. To the Brass

Monkey—and step on it!”

Asphyxia by Proxy

You live across the street from your mother, who still lives in the house you moved to in kindergarten. Your girlfriend insisted. It was practical; your brother and his family reside just down the street and your mom provides babysitting free of charge. But now you find it hard to breathe. Even the simple pleasure of cutting the grass—too loud for conversation, too necessary to be interrupted—has been sullied by your mother who you suspect listens for the sound of your mower before she decides to go outside and work in the garden. Without fail.

Arrive home late last night? Your brother and sister-in-law mention that they didn’t see your car when they were driving home at 10:30pm from “date night.” Your girlfriend goes on walks with the stroller, your mother and your sister-in-law on Sunday mornings. You feel the weight of their judgment through glares and knowing glances those evenings during “family dinner.”

These people you loved, that you moved back to your hometown for, have become the hands you feel tightening around your neck before bed every evening. And when you wake, they are the harbinger of gloom that weighs against your chest. Some mornings you don’t know if you can get out of bed and carry the pressure.

Before your nephew’s second birthday party, you receive a text message from your mother in a group chat that includes the whole fucking clan, a message that bears

instructions on designing, ordering, retrieving and protecting the birthday cake, you sit down on the tattered couch in your living room. Each breath is a labor. Your girlfriend comes in from the kitchen. She asks if you got the text. Your hands run along the fabric of the couch—the couch you grew up with, passed along by your mother—and your chest tightens. You start to gasp for breath. Your girlfriend asks if you’re joking. You can’t speak. You slide off the couch and roll onto your back.

You wake up in the hospital. The doctors can’t find anything physical. Must be work-related stress, they say. Work is your outlet, you think, your one reprieve. Your mother and girlfriend are there, clearly annoyed that you could be so insensitive what with little man’s second birthday party being later that afternoon and you being the point- man for the cake. You don’t understand the obsession with this gourmet pile of yeast and sugar. Your mother tells you that nevermind, she’ll pick up the cake for God’s sake. Your girlfriend says you need to cut back on the smoking.

You float through your nephew’s birthday party on Klonopins. All you remember of the party is the park shelter where you sat and the distant teenaged girls you watched, wearing bathing suits, playing in the creek.

The next week, you watch your infant son in his crib and wonder if you can leave him. You know you can’t. You wonder if you can take him. You know you can’t.

You begin to make up excuses to stay at work. You sit at your desk and stare at the twenty-four-inch monitor, letting your eyes dry out. If you had friends, you’d be at the bar these two extra hours, enjoying a beer and companionship. But they’re all worried about daycare and tee-ball and whether they’ll have enough money saved up to go to

Myrtle Beach this summer in spite of those absurd diaper prices.

You enjoy this solitude. Your girlfriend calls and says she’s near the office. Do you want her and your son to stop up and say hello? You know your son can’t speak yet.

You tell her that you have a meeting.

When you come home, your girlfriend says as few words as possible. This is still quite more than you’d like. After you brush your teeth and splash cold water on your face, you slide under the covers. You do not make a movement towards your girlfriend, but she turns away from you and lies on her side, centimeters from the edge of the mattress. This is a farce. You have not had sex since the second month of her pregnancy.

You lie awake and wonder why your girlfriend stays. You believe that she loves your mother, your sister-in-law, the whole goddamned family more than she likes you.

She was a tough shell to crack to begin with—intimacy took work. You begin to believe that because she has the child she wanted and the support system she needed, you are just a secondary character in her life. You serve a function, of course: money, yard work and errands, mostly. But romance is out of the picture. She hates your music, your DVD collection and your cigarettes. She is offended when you would rather read than watch television with her. When you didn’t know the name of the contestants in that reality show finale, she said you don’t care about her at all.

You slide out of bed, grab your laptop from the end table and tiptoe to the restroom. You sit down on the padded toilet seat that you hate. You know it will slowly pull from your skin when you stand. You open your browser. You type “affair” into the search bar and press enter on the keyboard. You are ashamed at your lack of originality.

So Far Around the Bend

From where she stood beneath the hanging globe lights that lined the patio, I was surprised how happy my mother looked the last night I ever saw her. Her tan skin appeared healthy under the glow. She appeared as if, for once, she had slept enough the night before. It was my older sister Charlotte's engagement party and the first official get together for Charlotte and Neil's families and mutual friends. No one expected my mother to show, but there she was, sipping a Dasani and listening to Neil's grandmother (who could have passed for Neil's grandfather on account of the stray eyebrow situated above her lip) talk about her dachshund, Candy. If my mother's presence seemed odd to the rest of our family, the Glasses, or our friends who knew better, no one let on. When I finally approached her, I'd already finished two Coronas and was feeling forgiving, so I simply said: “It's good to see you.” Her eyes were glazed with what I hoped were the beginning of tears when she hugged me, resting her head against my chest. “I think about you all the time, Leo,” she said. As my chin was tickled by her shock of curly, dyed-red hair, I allowed myself to believe everything was normal. Family could reenter our lives as easily as they left.

The party was taking place in the backyard of our house on Fieldson Avenue which stretched for hundreds of feet, ending where the woods of Roth Park began. My father was religious about his yard work and on gorgeous nights like the engagement

party, his insanity seemed a little like genius. When he noticed her on the patio, he merely nodded and raised the metal spatula from behind the grill to greet my mother.

Considering everything, I found it to be a more than affable gesture. Since my mother left, he took up running as his raison d'être and was down to his high school weight. I wondered if Mom even noticed. Dad’s hair was fully gray now and parted nicely to the side. He had remarried two years before to a woman named Rita. She was pretty, athletic, blonde and a decade younger. She wore her hair long and mostly talked about juice cleanses and the healthy fats found in guacomole. She was also an expert at pretending people (namely, my mother) did not exist.

I was nineteen, home in Ohio for the summer after my first year at Manhattan

College. I hadn’t seen my two older sisters since I had been home for Christmas. The one celebrating her engagement was Charlotte, the oldest at 29. Reed was the middle child at

26, but because of our age gap, she spent seven years as the baby, which, in my mind, disqualifies her from any claims to middle child syndrome.

Growing up, it was always Charlotte that my friends sexualized in order to torture me. Charlotte had not been single since junior high, going from one serious relationship to another. The engagement party was only surprising in that it took so long to finally come to fruition. Reed was pretty as well but so abrasive that she frightened off most men. In a different age, Reed would be an influential feminist voice in a revolution halfway around the globe. In contemporary Ohio, she is a bit much.

I noticed Charlotte and Reed walking towards us from across the lawn, doing their best to disguise whatever they were discussing with smiles and feigned interest. They were betrayed by the repeated glances in our direction.

“Hi,” Charlotte said when we could no longer ignore their imminent arrival on the porch. Reed smiled and held her hand up in a still wave.

“There are my girls!” Mom said, throwing her arms out to hug them both at once.

They reluctantly accepted the embrace, awkwardly patting her on the back with their free arms.

“It’s been a long time,” Charlotte said.

“Has it? About a year?” Mom asked. It was hard to tell if she was playing dumb.

“At least three,” Reed said. Her arms were crossed and she kept her eyes on my mother’s reaction. Mom’s smile started to wane as she drank from her Dasani water bottle with more urgency.

My mother first left our house when I was five years old. The memories are vague now, but Reed and Charlotte have attempted to fill in the details as best as they could.

Shortly after giving birth to me, my mother started to drink. A lot.

It began with the party to announce my arrival into the world. Some friends of my parents brought champagne to celebrate. My mother gulped it like it was ginger ale. My father, empathizing over the nine months of hell she had just gone through, poured her a second glass and ignored the fact that she was an alcoholic when they first met. My mother started bringing friends into the nursery to show me off.

A few glasses later, Mom woke me up and brought me out into the party for everyone to see. My first party experience; I was only weeks old. Eventually, my father put me back to bed and asked the guests to leave.

After one night, my mother had relapsed. I remember our trips to the liquor store when walking was new for me. I scanned the row of bottles, a wonderland of color and crystal. These trips were mutually pleasurable.

The year I began kindergarten was the year Mom went to rehab and Dad was gone all the time visiting her. My grandparents had moved in to take care of us. Since this time, my fifth year of life, my mother has only made sporadic appearances in our lives.

She never stayed around longer than a few months. I was in fifth grade when my dad gave up on her. I remember when he received the signed divorce papers in the mail.

After their brief exchange on the patio, Charlotte and Reed left my mother alone.

When Aunt Terri, my father’s sister came over to us, I took that as my opportunity to sneak away. I went around our old colonial house, out from under the globe lights littering the yard, and into the darkness of the far side of the house—opposite the driveway. I pulled out my pack of clove cigarettes and started to smoke.

Before I could finish a full cigarette, my mother had found me. “Leo,” she said, and I flinched at the apparition of a voice in the darkness.

“Mom.”

“You smoke?”

“Socially.”

“But you’re all alone. Let me have one.”

I pulled out another cigarette, put it in my mouth, lit it and handed it to her.

“Thanks. I could really use one of these.”

I ditched my first cigarette and lit another, my last. We sat and smoked in silence for what felt like an eternity. I could barely make out her face and instead focused on the ember of her cigarette every time she took a drag. I started to match my inhalations with hers. Quality time.

“I could use another one. Have anymore?”

“This is my last one,” I said, pulling the cigarette from my lips and turning it over between my fingers.

“Let’s go get some more.”

“Like drive somewhere? Haven’t you been drinking?” I pointed to her now-empty

Dasani water bottle.

“Just water tonight.”

We hopped in her old Toyota Camry and headed for the only convenience store in town that carried my particular blend of cloves. She accelerated hard in and out of turns and toyed with the brakes like it was her first time driving this particular car. But after racking my brain, I couldn’t remember what her driving had been like. I thought of riding with Reed while she drove and decided Mom wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary.

“So, how’s college?”

She smiled at me and I couldn’t find any hint of sentimental regret in her eyes.

She asked the most innocuous question, one that I had been forced to answer thousands of times in the last year, and yet it was stirring up emotions I had worked hard to suppress.

“I love the city,” I said.

“I knew you would. You know that’s where I went to school, right?”

My mother was pretending that it was normal for her to be just getting to know her nineteen-year-old son.

“I’m well aware. What made you come tonight, Molly?”

She stopped smiling and kept her eyes on the road.

“I already told you. I missed you.”

We pulled into the parking lot.

“You can wait here,” I said, exiting the car before she had a chance to say otherwise.

On the way home, we were smoking cigarettes when I noticed that my questioning of her reappearance had affected her more deeply than I thought possible.

She wasn’t crying, but she looked distraught. I couldn’t think of any way to console her—at least not any way that I felt she deserved.

The speed of the car increased as we wound our way through the adjacent neighborhood. I asked her to slow down and she told me not to worry.

“Slow down,” I repeated. “There’s a big curve here.”

“I am just fine.”

We were pushing 40 MPH when my mother lost control around the bend. The car veered into the left lane. I felt us go over the curb—hard—and into the neighbor’s yard before a crash—we skidded to a halt.

My hand was squeezing the handle by the door meant for such occasions. I reached over, put the car in park and turned off the ignition. My mother started sobbing.

She got out of the car and fell to her knees in the garden we had trampled. After a few minutes, I got out and joined her.

As we kneeled next to the ruined garden, she gestured to the trampled flowers and busted terra-cotta urns. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm so fucking sorry.” I had the feeling she wasn't apologizing to the plants.

Paralyzed

You are only twenty-eight, but your social life has shriveled. Your girlfriend asked you to leave two months ago. You never get to see your son.

All of your friends are married, legally or otherwise. They join you for beers now and then, always heading home to the Mrs. just as you’re reaching a sustainable buzz.

The wives aren’t speaking with you at the moment; in fact, you suspect there is an organized boycott of all your social media accounts.

You had been reluctant to install the Butterflyz application on your device. Your phone alternated between hand and jeans pocket several times before the desire for company trumped taste and judgment. And now, you’re staring at a stark-naked JPEG of some forty-five-year-old divorcee on the four-inch display. Her name is Lisa.

You started the conversation with an emoji. It was an innocuous wink, but the understanding was mutual: it was anything but innocuous. From the thumbnail image on

Lisa’s profile, it was hard to judge her countenance. The black eyeliner was thick and though you have not yet made this connection, dark eyes get you every time.

“I’m old enough to be your mother,” she said.

You didn’t care that she was old enough to be your mother.

“I have a son that’s 23,” she said.

You told her that you love kids. You told her you thought her picture was top- notch. You told her that it put every other woman on Butterflyz to shame.

“You want to see more?” she asked.

The pictures came in quick succession. They were snapped days, weeks, maybe months ago. You started to wonder how many different men had received these three explicit pictures. Then you decided you couldn’t care less.

You tell her that you love her nudes. You refer to them as nudes because the term lends an air of artistry and reminds you of Renoir or Cezanne.

She’s large. The profile photo was close-up, a glamour shot. There was no white space; it was impossible to obtain perspective. She did not follow the rule of thirds. But now, you can tell she qualifies as a BBW.

You have never seen breasts like hers. Well, you have, of course. But the breasts were never meant for you.

Her hair appears wet, though you know it is not. It’s blonde on the outside and turns to a dark brown near the scalp.

In the last photo, she is smiling at the camera. You don’t like this photo.

You ask her to come over.

“That was fast,” she laughs out loud. You appreciate her coquettish shtick.

You tell her that you have premium marijuana.

She says she’ll be right over.

“That was fast,” you say.

She LAUGHS OUT LOUD.

You hear her car before you see it. You slide your first two fingers between the blinds and separate to sneak a look. She drives a Chevy Cavalier two-door and the driver’s side window is cracked to allow her cigarette smoke to drift out after it hovers around her curled, product-filled hair. You imagine that her hair is as flammable as gasoline; if the cigarette glanced one blonde ring, it’d all be over for Lisa.

The Cavalier creeps through the parking lot as she squints, trying to decipher the faded numbers on each apartment building. She misses it the first time and you let her pass. You might be having second thoughts.

You watch Lisa figure out the numbering system, slam on her brakes and reverse over thirty feet until she is in front of your building. Your fingers slide out of the blinds, letting them close.

You feel your heart rate increase. As you take deep breaths and try to shake off the nerves, there is a knock at the door. You feel your scrotum retract.

You open the door.

“Hey sexy,” Lisa says.

You sit on the couch. She sits on the same cushion so her faded, sequined jeans press against your leg. The marijuana and smoking contraption rest on the coffee table in front of you.

Lisa grabs the smoking contraption. “Oh, I just love this bowl,” she says. “I got a real cute little pink one, all girly and stuff, but this ain’t bad.”

You try to smile. You pack a pinch of marijuana into the vessel. You offer it to

Lisa first. You like to think you’re hospitable in that way.

“Let’s see what we’re working with,” Lisa says, bringing the bowl to her right eye and closing her left. “It’s a little poopy, I got to be honest.”

You assure her that she is mistaken. This is medicinal-grade marijuana from

Michigan, you say.

“I think you got gypped, honey,” Lisa says, patting your leg. “Don’t worry, shag weed brings me back to my wild years.”

You fight the urge to slap the bowl out of her hand. You nod and grab the long grill lighter. You ask if she’s ready.

“Light me up, babe.”

You make sure that the flame roasts the hell out of the weed and don’t release until the surface has been scorched to a matte black. You’re pretty sure that Lisa is trying to look sexy as she pulls away and smoke pours from her nostrils. Then she starts coughing. She grabs your water from the table and drinks close to half of it. You hate when people drink out of your personal cups.

She allows her considerable weight to fall back into the couch. She rests her head on the pillow behind her. You pack another bowl and smoke it. You ask if she wants to watch anything. She doesn’t respond. You scroll through Netflix for twenty-five minutes with terrible ambivalence.

You ask if she minds watching Twin Peaks. She doesn’t respond. You tell her that she will like it if she gives it a chance. She doesn’t respond. Fine, you say, I’ll put on Law

& fucking Order.

After a frustrating episode in which Stabler fails to control his temper and compromises the physical health of a perp, you turn to look at Lisa.

She has not moved since her monster cheef. You ask if she’s all right. Her eyes are wide and her look troubles you. That look is a real bummer, what with all the THC in your bloodstream. You ask if she’s really okay and tell her that she’s scaring you.

“I’m paralyzed,” she whispers. You laugh. You’re what?

“I’m paralyzed,” she says and you can’t mistake it this time.

You remind her that she drove here and walked into the apartment. You assure her that she is not paralyzed. She continues to stare. You shrug and play the next Law &

Order.

You’re not even through the opening credits when she begins to whine. You ask if she wants water. “I can’t move,” she says. “I’m paralyzed.”

You tell her that, while there are many side effects to smoking marijuana, paralysis is not a possibility. You press play.

There is a steady noise that spills out of Lisa throughout the episode. You ascertain that it is a cross between whining, sighing and physical exertion.

“You need to call 9-1-1,” she says. “I can’t move.”

You tell her in no uncertain terms that you will not be calling the police.

After another episode, you calculate that Lisa has been rigid for almost three hours. You begin to worry that 9-1-1 will prove necessary.

You grab her cell phone on the coffee table. You ask her whom you should call.

“9-1-1,” she says. You tell her no. You ask for her emergency contact. “Call 9-1-1,” she says again. You ignore her and look through her phone for an emergency contact. You find ICE—In Case of Emergency. The contact is Preston.

You tell her you’re calling Preston. “No, please. Don’t call Preston.”

Preston answers. You explain the situation. Preston is livid. He says he will be right there. You are worried. Preston must be Lisa’s boyfriend. While his name carries zero connotations of toughness, you walk to your bedroom and grab your Louisville

Slugger. You return to the room, holding the bat behind your back. You tell Lisa that

Preston is on his way.

“Oh, no,” she says. “Oh, no.”

After ten minutes, there is a knock on the door. You walk to the door and peak out. A short, overweight man in a fluorescent yellow Lacoste polo stares back. His short hair is receding but he still uses considerable gel and attempts to style the top. You get the feeling that Preston is gay.

You place the bat in the closet next to the door and greet Preston.

“Where is she?” he says, walking right past you into the apartment.

You point to the couch.

Lisa sits still.

“Get up!” Preston screams. “Getupgetupgetupgetupgetup.”

Lisa doesn’t budge.

“Oh, you drama queen,” he says. “I will drag your fat ass out of here.”

At this, Lisa crosses her arms.

“That’s right,” he says. “Fat ass drama queen. New nickname.”

Lisa stands. “Real nice, Preston.” She storms out of the room. You back into the wall to clear her path. Preston follows her. You hear the door slam.

You sit down on the couch and pull out your mobile device.

You delete Butterflyz.You roast another bowl.

A Study in Love Abroad

It is not difficult to fall in love in the span of a summer. I mean, shit, we’ve all seen Grease. What takes real talent, though, is both falling in love and wrecking it in the course of two months. One morning, you’re in London, lying in bed with a girl who is talking to her mother on the phone, pretending to be alone, while you bury your face into her shoulder and smell the remnants of perfume on her skin. The next thing you know, you’re back in the States, sitting alone on a bus, banished from her apartment, crying so hard you can’t breathe. I present myself as a case study in this special romantic ineptitude.

In the weeks leading up to my connecting flight from Philadelphia to London, I pictured Europe as the place where my dreams would come true—my own personal

Disneyworld. You can imagine my surprise then, after I had said goodbye to my father at the terminal and taken my seat on the plane, when a panic came over me. I felt like my car engine died on the side of a highway in some godforsaken sticks with no cell reception. I was about to be across an ocean from any soul I knew. I felt tears coming and focused on not letting my face contort, like fighting off a sneeze. I hadn’t cried since I watched Russell Crowe die in Gladiator.

The lovely British couple in the seats next to me had taken an interest in the fact that it was my first trip to the United Kingdom, but I could barely listen to what they

were saying. “You just have to head Covent Garden for the shops,” the wife was saying, and I nodded, pulled my bag from under the seat ahead of me, and took the first Klonopin from my fresh prescription bottle. Then I swallowed another for good measure.

When I awoke, the pilot was telling the passengers the current temperature: “55 degrees Fahrenheit, or,” he chuckled, “13 degrees Celsius.” I made my way through customs and began looking for the designated meeting place for other students in the same program—outside the terminal for the Heathrow Express train to Paddington

Station.

After a few wrong turns (a refusal to ask for help was my attempt to be less of a tourist), I saw a group of college students about my age. For some reason, they were all wearing green and white, many with the Manhattan College logo in plain sight.

“Excuse me, are you guys here for the University of Greenwich program?” I asked to the group as a whole. The obvious leader stepped forward—a tall girl with long, frizzy brown hair in a ponytail. Her chin jutted out like Jay Leno’s and her breasts rendered the MANHATTAN part of her t-shirt illegible, stretching impossibly across her chest.

“Yes. Who are you?” she asked, looking at my gray oxford in disgust.

“I’m Leo Glass, a junior at Manhattan. English, creative writing. All that. You’re the group I’m looking for,” I said, trying to look at each and every person in the program as I spoke.

“Why aren’t you wearing school colors like the e-mails detailed? Didn’t you see us on the plane?”

“I forgot, I’m sorry,” I laughed, trying to break the tension. “I was a little out of it on the plane. Nice to meet you…?” I offered my hand.

“Suzy.”

The train ride to Greenwich passed in bouts of awkwardness whenever the others would make eye contact with me, the exile. It seemed my classmates were too afraid of

Suzy to extend an olive branch. It wasn’t until we approached our destination that someone spoke to me.

“Is this the Manhattan group?”

It's hard to discern the attractiveness of a person based on their voice, I know.

Look at Susan Boyle for Christ's sake. But this voice had just the right pitch with a twang from the south—though not too far south. Maybe the Carolinas. I turned around, fingers metaphorically crossed. The voice's body wouldn't have been out of place in a beauty pageant—long blond hair, tan skin, thick purple lipstick and tall, close to my six feet of height.

Suzy started to make her way over, but I stood up and cut her off. “Yes, this is the group from Manhattan College. I'm Leo, how was your flight?”

“I'm Sloane. My flight was--”

“Hello, I'm Suzy. We would have greeted you but you're not wearing the school colors,” she seemed to have burned up her reserve of contempt on me.

“I had to wear something nice for business class,” Sloane said.

What a lady, making first class sound less elitist. I tried to nonchalantly look over her nice black dress with its huge, leather belt lying decoratively across her waist.

“I think you look great,” I said, winking.

She looked at her feet in embarrassment and smiled. “Thanks.”

Fast forward six weeks, include a montage of us laughing and holding hands around London’s most famous landmarks, set to Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça plane pour moi”

(you know, the song from National Lampoon’s European Vacation), and you get the picture of how things unfolded. Sloane and I were a clichéd American-abroad romance.

It may have been because we were thousands of miles from home, but our relationship remained at a superficial level unbeknownst to either of us. At that point, we knew we had families and friends and ex-lovers, but names weren't spoken. Stories weren't told. We discussed where we wanted to eat lunch, how irritating Suzy was and which dance club we wanted to check out that night. This was all supplemented with lots of making out on the London underground. The first night, after the group had gone to dinner, we took the tube back to the dormitory. When it came time for our stop at Cutty

Sark, Sloane and I were too busy kissing, my back pushed against the side of the car for support. It was brilliant but, obviously, idealistic, and heading for a crash.

The morning it all went to shit, I rolled over in the bed of her dorm, the sound of her voice waking me. She was on the phone. The tone of her voice indicated it was a parent. “Yeah, I'm just lying here in my dorm. I overslept a little bit. Stayed up late reading last night,” she said, ignoring the X slashed across her hand in Sharpie. I rubbed my face against her soft upper arm and tried to fall back asleep.

“You're what?”

She sat straight up and nudged me hard in the back.

“No, no. I'll be right down—what? Fine. Bye,” she hung up the phone. “Leo, get the fuck out of here. My parents are on their way up.”

“What? How? They're here?”

She ran into the bathroom to fix her hair. “The resident manager gave them my room number. They wanted to surprise me,” she turned around. “Hurry up! Get out!”

I grabbed my pants and shirt from the floor, slipped on my espadrilles (I was

European now, after all) and headed for the door.

Out in the hallway I ran for the opposite exit, the one that led to the courtyard, to avoid encountering Sloane's parents in my boxer shorts. As I opened the heavy metal door, I heard voices enter the long, dimly lit hallway. Fatally, I looked back and saw two old people. Our eyes connected. I freezed for a second. They stared blankly. I nodded as if to say “cheers” and fled.

“Everyone assumes my parents died in a car accident and I was raised by my grandparents. But no, these are my parents. They’re just old as dirt,” Sloane was explaining to me surreptitiously as her parents purchased an umbrella at the street stand.

“Promise me they didn't see you as you were leaving?”

“What? No, of course not. I got out in plenty of time,” I lied, fiddling with the handle of my own umbrella. “Have no fear, my dear.”

She smiled. “Thank god. They seem to like you so far.”

We were walking down Piccadilly to a restaurant that Sloane's father, Mr.

McMann, had heard about from a business associate (to be clear, business associate was his term—not mine). I knew Sloane was joking to a degree, but I could see why people

often presumed that her grandparents were raising her. Mr. McMann had a suit on that day—the day I met him—and I had a feeling his closet was full of identical three-pieces, like some sort of cartoon character. His white hair was slicked back in a manner I thought had only been possible in the 1950s. He was a businessman, yes, but he allowed that position to define him in every possible way. The mother had clearly been a gorgeous woman like Sloane when she was younger. Now, however, she appeared to come out of

Talbot's catalog and wore her artificially blond hair around her shoulders, refusing to relent to the gray of old age. I'd later find out Sloane was the youngest of four, a surprise born to a forty-seven year old mother and fifty-two year old father. They were each around seventy as we continued our walk to The Wolseley, supposedly one of London's finest restaurants.

I was taken aback by the opulent exterior of the restaurant and had a sudden pang of guilt at how expensive my meal would be. The entrance was marked by its three high

Gothic arches with ornate twelve foot-high doors under the middle arch. I looked to

Sloane for reassurance that this splendor was something worthy of raised eyebrows, but she approached it unmoved, hastily drumming text messages into her iPhone.

I hopped into a power walk to reach the doors first and held the left one open for the McManns. “After you,” I said, pleased with the cobwebbed manners I dug from memory.

Sloane continued through, not looking up from her phone. Mrs. McMann allowed a “thank you,” while Mr. McMann stopped and put his hand in front of him, palm up.

“Go right on through, sir,” he said and my eyes were drawn to his Tag Heuer watch—I had a knockoff version back in my dorm. I awkwardly withdrew my position as the

doorstop and let Mr. McMann take over. As I stepped into the restaurant, my concerns were deepened by the marble staircase, high ceilings and antique black pillars. We were eating in a goddamn museum.

When I look back on my time with Sloane, I always point to this dinner as the beginning of the descent to a special kind of hell reserved for those who are the last member of a relationship to realize it's over—in this case, yours truly. It started when the

McManns began to ask probing questions of their only daughter's suitor.

“So, Leo, did you go to a parochial school as well before entering Manhattan

College?”

“Actually,” I held up my finger as I finished chewing the steak tartare they strongly encouraged me to order. “I'm not Catholic, really. My mother was, and after she passed away, my father let us lapse into a sort of scientific heathenism.” I was particularly pleased with the religious term I had coined and had used it for laughs since high school.

“I see,” Mr. McMann answered. Mrs. McMann gave me an impressive, but artificial, smile. Sloane looked at me and her eyes said You never told me that. I tilted my head to an angle that I hoped communicated You never asked.

The evening continued in this way, the McManns oblivious to the fact that I was a stranger to their entire family, while Sloane and I exchanged looks. A sense of dread began to collect with each successive question. The sheen of our perfect European love affair lost luster as the dinner wore on.

When the taxi dropped us off first at the dormitory before proceeding to the

McMann's hotel room, we turned around, smiled and waved until they turned out of sight.

Sloane didn't say a word as she headed up the cement steps to our dormitory's glass door.

As she swiped her ID card for entry, I attempted to broach the subject of dinner.

“Well, that went well, I thought. Food was top notch,” I said.

Sloane looked at me and allowed herself to stare long enough to make me uncomfortable. “Do you know what my mother said to me in the restroom?”

“No, I can't say I do.”

“They saw you leaving my room this morning.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she told me, you moron. She said that they saw you holding your clothes at the end of the hallway, standing their in your underwear, and you waved hello.”

“It was more of a nod, an acknowledgement,” I corrected.

“Oh, those are so different. Thanks for telling the truth earlier, by the way.”

“I didn't know if they saw me! It's a long hallway. I didn’t know your parents were fucking hawk-eyes.”

She stopped the elevator then got off on the third floor—two floors early for her, three for me—and took the stairs. She was pretending I no longer existed and I realized it was important in that moment to let her carry on that fantasy. I allowed her to leave.

When the elevator doors closed, I turned to my right and leaned my forehead against the wall. Whatever relief I felt from surviving the dinner had been replaced by the worry that the past six weeks were not of any significance. If any part of my brain realized then that

Sloane and I were fundamentally incompatible and nothing more than a physical attraction that had already played out, it was beaten into submission by the rest of the brain that had come to a resolution: starting tomorrow, I was going to win her back.

The following day, a class trip to The London Eye was in order. The London Eye is a giant ferris wheel on the River Thames, near Westminster Bridge. It offered the highest viewing point of the city so you can imagine how I was excited at the prospects of sharing a car with Sloane—the romance would overtake us, undoubtedly.

I put on my gray oxford and nicest jeans—the same outfit I'd worn when I met

Sloane (if at this point, you're finding my recollection exasperating, you are not alone). I went down to the bus stop to meet the class, still impressed with my ability to give her space. When the bus from Waterloo Station disembarked on York Road near The Eye, I decided it was time to put on the charm. She was walking near the front of our pack of twenty students, her backside swaying left and right with each step, accentuated well in her red-and-white polka dotted dress. She wore huge wellies that came up to her knee caps to battle the London precipitation. I was too self-conscious to break into a jog, so we were nearing the magnificent ferris wheel when my power walk finally caught up to her.

“Hi, I don't think we've met,” I said, putting on a serious face. “I'm Leo Glass.”

She smirked and I took that for begrudged amusement, though I realize now it was genuine disdain. “Hello,” she said, not playing along.

“I wanted to apologize for last night. I hope I didn't disappoint you.”

“You don't have anything to apologize for.”

“It seems that I do, though. I can tell you're unhappy.”

“I'm fine, actually.”

The line had moved quickly and half our group had boarded by the time Sloane and I made it to the front. “Room for one more in this capsule,” the attendant said, looking between the two of us.

“Let's see,” I said, turning around to offer it to another student.

“I'll go,” Sloane said, handing the man her ticket. He tore it in half and led her into the capsule that was now at capacity. I tried not to show any emotion as she disappeared. “Carry on,” he said, waving the rest of the group into the next capsule.

I spent the entire revolution of the wheel trying to look into Sloane's car. I thought

I could see her laughing.

“What are the chances this thing breaks and we plummet into the Thames?” I said to no one in particular.

“I'd say less than point-zero-zero-one percent,” Suzy said. “You weirdo.”

“So, you're saying it's possible.”

The night before we were to return to the States. Sloane had come down to my room to return some books she had borrowed. “Do you want to come in?” I asked. “I've nearly finished packing.”

“No. Thanks though,” she said. “I wanted to give you this. It's my phone number back in New York. Let's get together then.”

When she left, I could hardly believe my luck. It wasn't over yet after all! I began to make all sorts of rationalizations for what had taken place that last week. The dinner with her parents must have made her homesick. Then, she'd come to identify me with the

trip, and so I was really just a casualty of homesickness. It made perfect sense. You fucking idiot.

I tried not to appear too eager and I didn't want to be off-putting, so I was steadfast and somehow managed to not call her as soon as my plane landed at La

Guardia. Instead, I waited until I was outside looking for a cab. No answer.

The cab dropped me off outside my apartment building in Washington Heights, an old brownstone on 157th Street. I reasoned that three missed calls was the maximum you could leave for any person to find on their phone without appearing like a sociopath.

Once my bags were safely in my bedroom, I sat down on the futon in the living room and gave it one more shot.

“Hi, Leo,” she answered.

“It's so good to hear your voice,” I said. “Do you want to see my place?”

“Why don't you come to me actually?”

She gave me her address in Chelsea. I was there as fast as public transport would allow. I took the stairs in her apartment building two at a time, anxious to start over.

Shortly thereafter, her apartment door is closed behind me while the words,

“We're too different,” panged against the shell of my brain. I took the stairs one at a time, using the handrail for support, afraid I might otherwise let myself fall down and suffer traumatic injuries. I hopped on the first bus I saw and took a seat in the back. I thought of

Sloane the day we met, when she found me endearing on the train. I started crying, uncontrollably, and I did not care at all. A middle aged woman in scrubs turned around and stared at me. I just stared right back, defiant in my sobbing.

That was the last time I ever saw Sloane in person, in real life. I'd see her face in my dreams for another year after. Eventually, another girl would fill that void. Or at least

I'd find someone to fill that place—the void of love.

I'd later come to tell myself that I wasn't in love with Sloane, the person. It was

Sloane, the idea. Or at least the idea of love. I'd say there was no way it would have panned out—the more we learned about each other, the greater the distance became between us. But now, I can't help but wonder: if I had done things a little differently, could we still be riding the London underground, pressing lips together and missing stop after stop?

Friction

You heard about Craigslist Casual Encounters from the nightly news. The story was meant to scare the audience—like the majority of broadcasts—but you were intrigued. The anonymity afforded creativity and fantasies on a grand scale. Inhibitions were thwarted as sexual deviants sought out kindred spirits.

Since the split with your ex, you’ve been off your game. The contacts on your iPhone have been scrolled ad nauseam; your manifest desperation has soured any potential company. Casual Encounters strike you as the perfect remedy. One random night will break the pattern and establish a new rhythm. You’ll leave it rejuvenated, back to yourself, ready to engage with the opposite sex like you’ve always known how.

You open Craigslist in a new private window on Firefox. The simple website composed of tables, black text and blue links placates any unease. You feel organized and clean, like you’re browsing the aisles at Target.

When you open the Casual Encounters tab, the number of options overwhelms you. Women for men (w4m), men for men (m4m), man/woman 4 man (mw4m), et cetera. You decide to skip the filters and view everything. You don’t like to limit yourself.

The most recent posting reads “Group Gathering :).” You begin your research.

This particular group seeks as many men as possible to come to an apartment complex

and ejaculate on two lady’s faces. The term bukkake is never stated explicitly, but your experience with Internet pornography enables you to label the encounter.

You reply to the posting. You tell them you’re interested but want reassurance that no swords shall cross. Within minutes, the answer comes: “Sword crossing optional.

Door will be unlocked. Here’s the location.” You plug the address into Google Maps and find it’s only 13 minutes away.

You decide to shower—you want to make the best impression possible. You give your genitals a few extra scrubs with the loofa for good measure. When you exit, you wipe the steam from the mirror with your palm. You stare at your reflection; your eyes ask if you’re really the type of person who participates in this type of sexual act. You decide that you can’t stand the thought of another night alone with Netflix. You’re going.

When you arrive at the building, the quality of the neighborhood surprises you.

This morally abject performance is going to go down within a high-quality school district. You sit in your car for a few minutes to make sure that the coast is clear. There is no activity on this block.

You exit your vehicle and enter the building. You’re looking for apartment C.

Units A and B are on the first floor, so you climb the stairs. They creak with each step, alerting the occupants of a new sex partner. You reach door C and push it open. You step into the living room.

Two naked women sit on the couch: one with dyed red hair, the other blonde.

They are both overweight and you judge from their breasts that gravity has had at least forty years to exert its force.

Standing on the couch to either side of the women are two naked dudes. They are masturbating, abdomens flexing as they lean forward, slightly hunched. You stare. The noises suck you right out of the fantasy: skin-on-skin friction and soft grunting while the women throw in some moans for good measure. Why didn’t they put on music?

You turn around and depart as calmly as you came.

Cliffhangers

“Time is so crazy. What is time? It passes and before you know it, you die alone,”

I said.

“Your pizza isn’t ready yet,” he repeated.

“I’ll go sit down,” I said, then pointed to the table against the wall. “I’ll be right over there if you need me.”

Perfect Slice was empty, even for midnight on a Tuesday. Only two small laminate tables were occupied. The black-and-white-checkered tile reflected the fluorescent lights, signifying a fresh mopping and near closing time.

I resigned myself to people watching, as most of the other customers grabbed from the pizza slices sitting beneath the heat lamps, ready for the taking, and returned to the Brooklyn streets. I always chose to wait for a fresh pie with the appropriate ingredients—chicken and green peppers. I pretended I didn’t see the defeated looks on the faces of the employees at Perfect Slice each time the door chime signaled my entrance.

It was late for pizza—even by my standards. Reagan and I had had a disagreement, so I chose to leave before I said anything regrettable.

The door chimed and I looked over my shoulder instinctively. There was a mass of blonde hair belonging to three heads, bouncing around as they gesticulated and giggled. I went back to playing Tetris on my phone.

Then, I heard her name. “Which pizza are you getting, Sloane?”

My chest tightened and I lost control of the dangerous stack of polygons I had been fitting together. Sloane. My Sloane? I took a deep breath and looked to the counter.

She contemplated the slices before her. “Plain cheese, I guess,” she said, and her voice resounded like a favorite record I had just rediscovered.

I couldn’t help but watch her as she placed the pizza in her to-go box and paid the cashier. Sloane and her entourage were at the door when the manager’s voice called out my order: “Order for Leo Glass, personal pie—chicken and peppers.” She looked back, eyes wide, scanning the restaurant. She found me as I stood from my seat. I could feel my face heating up in embarrassment, so I chuckled as I put my hand up in statuesque wave.

“You guys go ahead,” I heard her say. “I’ll catch up with you at home.”

We were talking for the first time in two years, assuming the roles of old friends rather than jilted lovers. After twenty minutes of filling each other in on our current jobs and career trajectories, the unspoken finally surfaced.

“Why haven’t we stayed in touch?”

I fought to keep from balling my fists up. Why hadn’t we stayed in touch? Was she acting glib or was she really that forgetful? Was I that forgettable? She had haunted my dreams and waking thoughts for more than a year when she promptly broke my heart after we returned from our time studying abroad.

“No idea,” I lied. “Life gets in the way I guess.” I cringed at my cliché.

“Well, I’m just glad my roommates wanted pizza tonight,” she said. She smiled at me and I felt her knee against mine under the table.

“Folks,” the manager hollered to us. “We’re closed.”

We muttered quick apologies and exited to the street outside.

She turned to me. “So, where to?”

“I’m just over in Bushwick, actually. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m right down the street,” she said, confused. “I thought maybe you weren’t going to go home right away.”

This was typical of Sloane. She was incapable of putting herself out there and was skilled at pushing the impetus to the other person. I was a sucker and she knew it.

“We could get a drink,” I said, taking the bait. “If you want.”

She checked her cell phone for the hour, as if she needed to get home. “I guess I could get one drink,” she said, nodding. She looked up at me. “Just one though.” Her smile implied that I had ulterior motives.

We took a cab to Tip Top, a dive bar on Franklin.

After Sloane ordered us two shots of Crown Royal each and a beer, she finally broached the subject of our breakup.

“You know, Leo, I’ll be quite honest,” she said, looking at her left hand as she massaged it with her right. “I freaked out. Things were getting really serious, I got scared, and I don’t know. I wasn’t ready.”

“It’s okay, Sloane.”

“I want you to know that I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“And I want you to know that I think I’m ready for a serious relationship.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“Are you looking for a serious relationship?”

I thought of Reagan and realized that we had somehow avoided that topic the last two hours. “Yeah, I—I mean, yes. I’ve always been that way.”

“Shoot. My phone is dead,” she said. “What time is it?”

I pulled out my iPhone and let the screen light up. Beneath the clock was

Reagan’s face, wearing her oversized glasses. Her hair was pulled back and a large white headband crossed her forehead. I loved that headband.

“So, Leo,” Sloane said, accusation tingeing her voice. “Who’s that?”

I stared back into the screen. Reagan was wearing one of my V-neck shirts, which dropped impossibly low on her chest, out of the photo’s frame. I smiled. “This is Reagan, my girlfriend.”

“Interesting,” she said before finishing her beer and changing the subject. “You know, I finally watched The Sopranos. Remember when you tried to make me watch it?”

“I do. You didn’t want to watch it because you heard there was a cliffhanger.”

“I hate cliffhangers. Don’t you?”

“It was a beautiful ending.”

“One more drink?”

After a couple of failed attempts to decline, she convinced me to stay for a

Carling, the beer of choice while we were in London together. “For old time’s sake,” she said.

As we left the bar, she grabbed my hand. “Will you walk me to my train? I don’t like the subway at night.”

“Sure—of course.”

We crossed the street and descended to the station below. The air was thick and difficult to breathe in the summer heat.

“Come with me, Leo,” Sloane said, quietly.

“I shouldn’t,” I said.

Her train stopped in front of us and the doors opened. I wanted to get on that train.

I wanted another chance. I wanted to prove something—to her, of course—but also, to myself. I thought back to Reagan and our apartment. Odds were that she was half-asleep on the couch, Siggy asleep on her chest, watching some critically-acclaimed television series on Netflix. As Sloane stepped through the open doors, leaving me alone on the platform, I knew exactly what to do.

“Don’t you wonder about me?” she pleaded.

“It was good to see you, Sloane.”

Genuine surprise took over her face, an expression she hadn’t shown me since the first week we met. “Leo, just get on already.” She smiled, but it felt hollow. This was the

Sloane shaped from desperation.

“You know, you should learn to love cliffhangers,” I said as the doors closed.

Panopticon

Against your better judgment, you are back on Craigslist within days. You tally the shambolic lady’s faux paralysis and the disturbing circle jerk to bad luck. You find yourself on Craigslist every day of the week. In fact, it’s become something of a nightly ritual. When you can’t sleep, you check out Casual Encounters for anything that might be worth pulling yourself from your Goodwill mattress and desolate apartment.

You have only had contact with one other advert, an Asian dentist who was seeking another male to simulate rape with his wife. After giving him the third degree of interrogation by way of a twenty e-mail exchange, you surmised that he was acting alone.

You cornered the bastard into admitting that his wife would have had no prior knowledge. The simulation part of the rape was artifice. It was, actually, a violent crime.

You don’t let this one sick, perverted apple spoil the bunch.

On Sunday night, you find an ad that appeals to your sensibilities: “Panopticon of

Sexual Experience.” It seems safe. You appreciate the prose within the description:

“One can speak of our sexual desires in this movement that stretches from

cradle to grave as voyeuristic. We earnestly believe that we want to be

participants, but even when we are in the act of fornication, the real desire

is to be a third party, watching from the corner of the room, unseen.

Voyeurism is the ultimate empirical testimony to our carnal instincts.

Tonight is your chance to claim this desire that society has termed lechery.

Push past the fear, pass through it, let light rally the joy that lies on the

other side of this panorama. If you’re an atheist, you will get to know God

experientially, from seeing his creatures interface intimately. Join us

tonight. E-mail for the coordinates of this convention.”

Voyeurism means a lot to this guy. At first, you wanted to laugh, but after a second reading, you’re inclined to trust the theoretical framework he laid out so academically.

You e-mail for the location. It takes an hour for the response to come, by which time you’ve refreshed your e-mail at least thirteen times and smoked two cigarettes. His response reads: “Of us there will be seven. Of time it will be zero.” You’re dealing with the Rumplestiltskin of sexual encounters. On the following line, he provides latitude and longitude coordinates.

You have to Google search a solution to the coordinates. You find yourself on the

Harvard University Center for Geographic Analysis website. You plug in the coordinates.

The pin drops in the center of Heck Park, only two miles away. Easy enough.

At a quarter ‘til, you decide to leave on foot. You like the idea of being unshackled from the car. Also, you’re afraid to leave a vehicle—with plates that identify you to law enforcement—next to a park where some seriously shady things are going down. You hold a small canister of pepper spray in your right hand. The walk is nice; it’s what your mother would call “jacket weather.” There is some shame of walking in a suburban area because it typically signals that you are too poor to own transportation or up to no good. You worry that this might be true.

From the street, you cannot see any bodies or movement. The park is based around a wooded are that occupies its center. On the periphery, there are tennis courts, picnic shelters and an old baseball diamond that has found new life with kickball. There is a trail that cuts through the wooded area, so that you can easily move from one end of the park to the other. You figure that Rumplestiltskin must be within the trees.

The grass is wet. You regret wearing jeans as you look down at your shiny shoes and darkened pant legs. This is your cross to bear, you think. As you approach the woods and smell the pine trees that tower overhead, the streetlights are too far way and you struggle to make out distinct shapes. You begin to hear noises. There is a slapping sound, like someone trying to knock the last of the ketchup from its glass bottle. You hear vague murmurs. As you enter the timberland, your eyes begin to adjust. Here’s what you see: a little person, a legitimate dwarf, open hand beating the side of a large tub of mayonnaise, such a huge container that it was probably purchased at Costco. It looks as big as a marching snare drum in his hands. To his immediate right, you can make out the silhouette of one body on top of another—identifying details are obstructed. Two other pairs of couples are kissing, making out with vigor, heads pivoting to complementary 45- degree angles. You hear adolescent giggling. You turn around, from where you came, and see two small black boys, no older than ten, perched atop Mongoose BMX bikes.

When you see them, they use their feet to 180 out of there. You take off running behind them. They think you are following them, but you’re just getting the hell out of dodge.

As the Mongeese turn and cut the opposite direction, you keep pumping your arms as you race back to the street. Your vision is bumpy along the uneven terrain. You start to laugh to yourself, at what you just saw, at your juvenile retreat. Running feels

good. The cool air chills you at first because of the sweat around your ears, neck and forehead. You keep your pace as you approach the road. You decide to cut across the street and through backyards, fully embracing this pubescent scamper.

You hit the pavement and feel the weight of your aging body in your shins. You think to slow down. A light flashes and you can’t see anything. You turn toward its origin.

You never saw the car coming. The little black Lexus wrecked into your right side. You don’t feel much of anything, but you know you sailed through the air before landing on the ground. Your legs aren’t responding to your commands.

The next thing you know, there is an EMT kneeling at your side. He is talking to you but your ears feel wet and his voice is distant.

“Everything is going to be all right, sir,” he says.

His tone tells you that you’re dying. All you can think about is your computer at home. Your internet history. Your family, your girlfriend, your son, they’ll all know what you were doing the night that you died.

“Search history,” you say.

“Guys, search his medical history, stat!” the paramedic calls.

“No, no. Search history.”

“We’re on it, bud, we’ll get records A-SAP.”

“…”

Modern Love

My cell phone displayed 15:58 as I waited outside the Advantage Management office building on North Orleans St. I’d been there the better part of an hour, unsure when shifts ended on a Friday. I figured 16:00, TGIF and all that, but I had been antsy. I tried going to the bookstore to dispatch time but after treading circles in the Literature section, imagining how I looked to the browsing public when I opened War & Peace with what I hoped was a furrowed, concentrated brow, I gave up and found an open meter opposite the Advantage entryway.

I watched the light afternoon traffic, though I thieved glances at the office building in careful intervals. I watched a minivan get tailgated by a taxi before a merciful honk and position swap. I felt for the vehicles with alien plates as they were prodded, passed and horned by the natives and taxi drivers who fashioned themselves as keepers- of-the-street. If you grew up in the suburbs or the sticks and find yourself driving in a metropolitan environment, you’ll always feel like you’re in someone’s way. My metered space was a safety net.

I suppose I should tell you why I was lurking outside of this specific Chicago office building. Although I wouldn’t say I was lurking. That’s the appropriate verbiage for the mouthbreather who moseys his way up to groups of women at bars and sets up camp. I was waiting—patiently, mind you—on the love of my life, mi amor, Amanda.

The clock read 16:06 and no one had exited the building. The large coffee I’d been guilted into at the bookstore was assaulting my bladder. My eyes swept the buildings closest to me: just condominiums and an enclosed parking garage. The street could be described as officious. I regretted that I hadn’t cased the joint and located restrooms in the case of emergency urinations.

I let out a sigh of resignation, as though some invisible audience needed to know that this decision was not my first. I was going to have to go inside Advantage

Management—her office building—to relieve myself. I exited my car, waited for a break in traffic, and walked across the street, hunched over and dramatically pumping my arms to look like I was both hurrying and ashamed of my jaywalk.

Advantage Management was the only stone façade on a street of six-story brick buildings. It had steps that led to its elevated entrance, which made it seem like a particularly important office. But mostly, it resembled a miniature library.

I climbed the steps, grabbed the handle of the door, and took an extra long look at my reflection in the glass before entering.

Wait.

Before you jump to any sort of conclusions as to why I conducted a sting operation to speak with my sweetheart, I need to tell you the whole story. So instead of describing my piss, let’s flashback to how this all started.

I had just graduated high school and joined Facebook. Americans over forty were beginning to talk about puzzling new websites called MyFace and Spacebook. The movie

Knocked Up starts the wave of Judd Apatow flicks that still flood theaters today.

Facebook provides even more prescient context: there were no ads, you needed a .edu e- mail address to join and it was called a Wall, not a Timeline.

Anyway, I was in my bedroom (the basement of my parents’ suburban tri-level) when I received a friend request from a girl named Amanda Klayman. She was from Los

Angeles, but she was to attend the same university. Being my first friend request from a stranger, I was intrigued. My curiosity was doubled by the fact that her little 50 pixel x 50 pixel thumbnail photo showed a cute face, obscured by a hand over each eye, with eyeballs drawn into the outfacing palms—straight out of Pan’s Labyrinth. Taste.

Creativity. Humor.

I clicked Accept and combed through her profile. She had 1,108 photos to my paltry seven. I moved past the nod to del Toro and discovered a photo of Amanda dancing, long Joplinesque hair falling just shy of her waist. It’s held in place by a wide, black spandex headband. Her reserved smile and closed eyes signal that she had most certainly been burning a doobie. That made me hard.

Through her Personal Info, I learned of her interests: Favorite Music, TV Shows,

Movies, Books and Quotes. Her series of interests coincided with mine. Her About Me section reads: “i am small. but really, i’m big.” I could tell that she was operating on an ee cummings level with the lowercase accompanied by appropriate mechanics. Before I could click through the rest of her pictures, my girlfriend called and interrupted the meet- and-greet.

Caught up in the theatrics and inhibition of the “last” summer in my hometown

(I’d be back each of the next three summers), Amanda slipped from my mind as driftless crushes are wont to do.

7 0

Three months later, I was lying in my extra-long twin bed. My parents had left hours earlier, following the customary post-move-in dinner. I couldn’t sleep.

Back in the Spring, when I filled out my housing request form, I struck the fateful box next to “Single Dormitory.” Solitude is overrated. There was no A/C and while my floormates were resting before the first day of classes, I felt detached and restless. I was never a good sleeper.

I wadded the sheet against the foot of the bed—the cover had already been shoved to the floor—and procured my pristine laptop, catching a whiff of Best Buy as I unhinged its face. Facebook was my home page.

The latest status update was from Amanda Klayman: “can’t sleep.” Again, the capitalization passed because of the punctuation. She attached a link to a music video on

YouTube. The video turned out to be a stationary album cover but the song affected me.

It was one of those bands that lends credibility to your musical taste: Sigur Rós. I’d discovered them years before, thanks to a musically- and Robitussin-inclined friend in

AP European History.

But I’d never heard this song before. I haven’t the slightest idea what the singer trills over the contemplative strings and heavy e-bow, but I imagined it’s about insomnia and homesickness. I felt closer to Amanda.

I decided to send her a private message.

“I just wanted to commend you on being one of the few people (I’m apparently

Facebook friends with) who like Sigur Rós and Daniel Johnston.”

I copied and pasted Sigur Rós from Wikipedia to get an accent over the O.

“wow, we actually like a lot of the same music,” she said, nine minutes later.

“that's wild, i've only met one or two other people who like sigur ros. they're phenomenal live, they ended up smashing in their violins and the lead singer was crying during one of their pieces. it was intense but incredible nonetheless. basically i'm commending you back.”

She included an inviting smiley face at the end.

I took three minutes to compose and proofread my next message. “Wow, I'm really jealous,” I said. “I wanted to see them in concert but missed out. I'm actually pretty lame and have only seen The Strokes. I once tried to go to a Linkin Park concert in eighth grade but a snowstorm kept me from going—and really probably saved my life from going down the wrong musical path.”

“haha seriously. thank god.”

I noticed that she used fifty-two less words. I decided not to push the conversation further. After a slightly masturbatory hour, I drifted to sleep.

She penetrated my dreams. In the fifth grade, I decided that dreams were the truth—they gave you insights into yourself that you didn’t realize during the day. At least, that’s how I chose my first girlfriend. So when Amanda appeared in my dreams the next few months, I knew it was real. I wasn’t interested in the girls in my dorm or the girls in my classes. I had found the right girl; I just needed to figure out our meet-cute.

As luck would have it, a girl from my high school began to appear in Amanda’s photos. Brynne. They were rushing the same sorority. It was all falling into place.

Opportunity struck on New Year’s Eve when I was home for the holidays. The rich Korean kid who always threw parties—Chris—was throwing a massive reunion party. I knew Brynne would be there. We didn’t know each other too well; we had mutual friends but our interactions were mostly hallway nods and smiles.

An hour into the party, I saw her. She ran Cross Country and, unlike most participants, she was serious about it. She was in tremendous shape but had an unfortunate Tilda Swinton face. She struggled to smile.

I approached her.

“Brynne, I haven’t seen you around campus,” I said. “What dorm are you in again?”

“Hey Leo, good to see you. I’m in Reed Hall. What about you?”

“Atkinson. All the way by the river. Sucks. I have a little single occupancy cell on the top floor.”

She laughed.

“So, Brynne, I think we have a mutual friend. Amanda Klayman?”

“Amanda! Love that girl.”

She wasn’t inclined to say any more about Amanda. She continued to nod her head and smile, tucking her hair behind her ear, while I rubbed the back of my neck.

“We should hang out sometime,” I said.

“Definitely.”

Seed planted, we separated to interface with closer friends.

Several pulls from my fifth of Jim Beam later, I was in the basement of the

McMansion—dance party central. Chris was an amateur disc jockey so he had lights, a

premium sound system and two unmanned turntables. I saw an iPod resting atop the left turntable, acting as the real DJ.

Friends welcomed me to the small pocket they had found in the crowd. We were not natural grinders or fist pumpers; simple head nods between swigs of Natural Light sufficed. Sandstrom was reverberating throughout the crowded room. I saw Brynne among the faces, staring at me. She smiled and started to make her way over. My friends left me.

“There you are,” she said, hugging me.

“Hey, again,” I said. I must have misremembered our earlier conversation.

She threw her arms on my shoulders, clasping her hands behind my neck. She began to sway from side to side. I tried to follow.

“So, Brynne,” I said. “About your friend—”

Brynne pressed her mouth against mine. Time for a new plan.

I tried to explain it to my friends: imagine the perfect girl—your dream girl—says she has a crush on you. How can you not act?

“But Leo,” Vikram said. “She just sent you a friend request.”

“Right, technically yeah. But she sought me out. That’s crushworthy.”

“Sorry man,” Bud said before taking a huge, unnecessary bite of his burger. I had to wait for him to chew it before he had room to respond. “That’s not the same.”

“Let’s see her anyway,” Vikram said, motioning for my laptop.

I found her page.

“This is who you’ve been obsessing over? Nothing to write home about.”

“Gotta agree with Vik on this one.”

For some reason, this judgment made me feel better. What I thought was unattainable was suddenly within reach. I had a shot after all.

Perhaps out of cowardice, perhaps due to distraction, but my pursuit of Amanda never gained traction. I checked her Facebook page with frequency, of course; it’s just that I had resigned myself to the fact that my disposition was not cut out for this brand of chase. As I had ignored texts, Facebook messages and even e-mails from Brynne’s

University account, my hope for actual, personal association had evaporated. There was some concern that Brynne had told Amanda of my quick disengagement, but like anything that diminished my character, I quickly forgot about it.

There was one moment when Amanda and I converged. As I walked into

University Hall for my early AM Latin class, Amanda was trying to exit through the same door. Sweat materialized on my forehead with impressive speed. I could hardly manage an excuse me through my taut throat. I had no doubt it was Amanda, although I was surprised that she was, at best, five feet tall. She pursed her lips and nodded. There was no recognition; the profile crawling and routine photo browsing was one-sided.

Over the years that followed, I had an amalgam of romantic successes and failures. I’d venture to say that I came out of it batting close to .500. All right, it may have been closer to Ted Williams’ elusive .406, but still. And while I was committed to these girls and tried to imagine distant futures—however briefly—I always held on to the idea that Amanda was the prize. When there were disagreements over which movie to see that Friday night, or what music to listen to while we drove to dinner, I couldn’t help but

think this would never happen with Amanda. If I really thought about it, all of my relationships boiled down to the who’s-chasing-whom paradox. I didn’t want to be pursued. I wanted a girl who could be my match, who was cunning and independent and an all around hard-nut-to-crack, but if she proved to be too difficult, I quit. I was good at quitting.

Last week, with seven tabs open in Google Chrome, I flipped back to Facebook and found Amanda’s page. We had graduated college. I lived in New York City with my girlfriend. Amanda was living in Chicago, per my cyber-analysis.

I had been fighting with my live-in girlfriend, Reagan, just about every day. And though each disagreement was minor, I felt that they added up to something larger. I wondered if it was really supposed to be this hard before marriage. Isn’t that when things get stale? Shouldn’t we be having conversations late into the night? Shouldn’t I look up from my iPad when she takes her clothes off and changes into her long tee before bed?

So after a particularly clamorous fight in which Reagan recommended I take a long look at myself (figuratively) and decide if I want to be with her (literally), she left to stay with a friend. I drank with friends and enjoyed the momentary bachelorhood for two days.

It was near the end of those 48 hours that I resolved to find out about Amanda once and for all. I convinced myself that if I just knew it would work out—or not work out—with this girl of my dreams, I’d be a better boyfriend. A better lover. I found her

Facebook profile. I clicked on the About tab: Works at Advantage Management. I

plugged the company into Google. I typed the address into the Maps application on my phone.

I showered, packed a week’s worth of clothing—always the optimist—and hailed a bus to the parking garage where my car wasted away. I was going for it.

Remember, I had to pee with urgency. The receptionist at her office building had been on the phone when I walked inside, which allowed me to smile and wave, ignoring her “one-minute” index finger, and scoot directly to the nearest restroom. It was quite a relief; let’s leave it at that.

As I exited, several office workers were departing through the doors I had just infiltrated. Walking alone, I saw a girl, borderline dwarf really, dressed in black leggings and a long, beige blouse that fell below her tail and somehow classed up the ensemble. It was Amanda. I played it cool, waving to the receptionist’s suspicious countenance as I followed the staff out onto the city street.

Once outside, I watched Amanda exchange farewells with her co-workers before heading south. I pursued. I began to wonder how this was all going to pan out. I had to get her to stop walking. She needed to turn around.

“Amanda,” I said. There was no inflection like is that you, Amanda? I just said her name. Amanda. She turned around and looked at me. I smiled. Because she was a polite person, she smiled back.

“Do I know you?” She kept the smile.

“Uh, well, yesh,” I said. “I know you through Brynne Pummel.”

She looked relieved. “Oh, thank god. You scared me.”

“Sorry about that. Just thought I recognized you.”

“No, I’m sorry. I am horrible with names. You are…”

“Leo.”

“Right. Leo.”

She had no idea who I was.

“This may sound crazy, Amanda, but I’m on my way to the closest watering hole.

Can I buy you a drink?”

“You know what? Today sucked. I’m in for a beer.”

Thank you, Brynne, for your trusty character.

Things went, as they say, smashingly. We had a lot in common. But everything was perfect until it wasn’t. We were seated in a booth, an inch of beer remaining in our glasses while two sweaty full ones waited on coasters in the center of the table when I decided to bring up our, in my opinion, meaningful connection.

“You love Sigur Rós too, right?”

“How do you know that?”

“You just seem like a fan.”

She wasn’t buying it. “How do I know you, Leo?”

“Through Brynne.”

“I knew Brynne from the sorority. I would’ve remembered meeting you.”

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“That I don’t know you?”

“That you think you would’ve remembered me. I feel like that’s a compliment.”

“…”

“I’m flattered, anyway.”

“…”

“Okay. Full disclosure. We are Facebook friends. You friend requested me.”

“Oh,” she said, becoming interested in the shade of her IPA. “When?”

“Like five years ago.”

I can tell she finds this creepy.

“This is kinda creepy.”

“Yeah, but we’re here now, right?”

“…”

“I knew I recognized you is all,” I said. “And now we’re having fun.”

From the look on her face, I could tell she was less than believing of our serendipitous encounter outside her place of employment.

“I’m going to go, Leo,” she said. “It was nice to meet you.”

She smiled but didn’t show any teeth as she stood and abandoned the booth. I didn’t watch her go. I finished the extant beer and left.

On the way to the car, I thought to myself, this is one of those moments you will never tell anyone about. I drove home to my girlfriend.

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VITA

Education University of Dayton, Master of Arts in English, May 2014 The Ohio State University, Bachelor of Arts in English, cum laude, June 2012

Conferences and Public Readings Moderator, “Writing the Place of Self,” Interventions in English Studies, University of Dayton, 2014

Presented “Stuck in the Ironic Mask: Contemporary Literature and Its Problem with Sincerity,” Mardi Gras Conference, Louisiana State University, 2014

Presented, “And It Rained All Night: Writing Dayton, OH,” Stander Symposium, University of Dayton, 2013

Presented, “Travel to Contemplate Self,” Mardi Gras Conference, Louisiana State University, 2013

Activities • Committee Member, Graduate Conference, University of Dayton, 2014 • Reader, Dr. Patricia Labadie Essay Contest, University of Dayton, 2014

Awards/Honors/Publications • Fulbright Scholar, Czech Republic, 2014-2015 • Graduate Fellowship, University of Dayton, 2012-2014 • Dean’s List, The Ohio State University, 2008-2012 • Maximus Scholar, The Ohio State University, 2008 • Gateway Excellence Scholarship, Ohio University, 2007

Employment • University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, 8/12 – 5/14 o Teaching Assistant • University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, 8/12 – 1/13 o Writing Center Tutor • Baldwin Creative & Co., Dayton, Ohio, 2/14 – present o Copywriter

• Webby Dance Company, Dayton, Ohio, 6/09 – present o Web Developer • Boys & Girls Club of Columbus, Columbus, Ohio, 10/11 – 7/12 o Program Aide; Camp Counselor • KIPP: Journey Academy, Columbus, Ohio, 8/11 – 7/12 o Guided Reading Teacher