Ashley Bales 9/7/17 Ashley Bales 9/7/17

Boring Poetry: “Paterson” and the Observation of Repression

by Curtis Graham

The setting is a lustless marriage bed with gray sheets. Paterson lives an objectively boring life. The only thing more boring than his job as a bus driver, is his poetry. He is content. If he has aspirations, we don’t know what they are. We keep waiting to discover what he’s repressing.

Paterson’s poems appear handwritten across the screen, narrated earnestly in fits and starts by an endearing Adam Driver. The audience is part of the world with whom Paterson is afraid to share his work. We never hear a completed poem, and have to take his wife’s word that his poetry is spectacular. Driver’s voice expounds about the brand of matches he uses, and the burning sensation that love can give. He pairs physical descriptions with a writerly affect that even poetry students could snub.

But first person camera moves immerse us in Paterson’s existence, no matter how bland, and reveal that his sense of self is derived from observation of other people’s lives. Sitting at the front of his bus, he is a pair of eyes in a rearview mirror.

A middle school boy tells his friend he’ll dress as a shadow for Halloween and the camera shows us Paterson’s view: their feet nearly touching beneath the seat. This image is mirrored in the feet of two construction workers. They exchange stories of their weekend hook-ups. A woman offers them romance, and each turns her down for vague reasons. They bounce their heels on the floor, their feet as close as possible without touching. The camera rises, and we see the men sitting close together. One looks away before affirming that, definitely, he will call the girl back. A vertical pole divides them.

In the climax of the film, Paterson’s dog destroys his poetry notebook. His unphotocopied, unsaved, kept secret from the world, notebook, and in feeling Paterson’s loss, the poems gain significance. Each represents an unrealized life pulled through that rear-view mirror not from his own repression, but the repression of others. And we can finally feel his loneliness.

After the loss of his notebook, Paterson proclaims he is not a poet, but a sage Japanese tourist knows better and presents him with a new one, filled with blank pages. Where this convenient stereotype came from or went to subsequently, is uncommented on, but Paterson is redeemed and begins writing again.

Adam Driver’s voice returns to give us the line, but by the time the screen fades to black, we hardly remember it. The scrawled letters fade into the single word that is important to us: Paterson. We’re left with the hope that Paterson will continue seeing the people around him, even if they never see him.

Curtis Graham is a current degree candidate at Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Ashley Bales 9/6/17 Ashley Bales 9/6/17

My New Barbershop

by Daniel Johnson

I got my hair cut by the same woman, a family friend—we’ll call her Allison—for twenty-one years, mostly at an in-home salon her husband built for her as a gift. Allison charged us cheap and came to understand the contours of my misshapen skull. She always led off a cut by spinning the chair around so my back was to the sink, gently tipping my head under the faucet’s stream of warm water, shampooing me, and using her wondrously long nails to scratch my head until the product was thoroughly distributed. From this—the scratching—she knew I got a boyish, puppy-dog pleasure. It was something, I know for a fact, she didn’t do for anyone else in my family.

I’ve asked every woman with whom I’ve been romantically involved to, at some point, scratch my head, scratch harder, use your nails. Reliably, most have fallen short of Allison. It is at my insistence that the specter of Allison’s hands stalk the landscapes of both simple haircare maintenance and—what?—foreplay, post-coital murmurings. I believe pleasure spectrums articulate themselves over time. Somewhere along that process of individual definition, the gestures involved in a routine, pre-cut wash warped into sensations I register as deeply ecstatic; for the vast majority of my hairdressed life, I must have looked forward to Allison’s cuts because I found them to be strangely and thrillingly intimate.

Now that I live in New York, I go to a barbershop packed away in a corner on the first floor of a high-rise near Battery Park. Its name: Barbershop. Intimacy-wise, it’s got the charm of a roadside motel truckers hit for some suspect crank and a quick midmorning fuck, cash up front. It’s the size of a rather large storage closet, with dirty white tile covered in unswept clippings, lit by overhead bulbs in frosted, flypaper-yellow plastic encasements. It’s manned always by the same four Israeli guys who talk less to and more over one another in their native language, and never to me. I find this both melodic and merciful; I’m terrible at any conversation when I’m in a leather chair being examined, reshaped.

I go there on my lunch breaks. I’ve been five times; they still don’t know my name. My first visit, I told the guy what Allison texted me to say when they ask what we’re doing: one on the sides, three on top, long enough so that I can style it, low fade in the back. At that, all four men switched their buzzers off and, almost in unison, told me with great urgency not to say this ever again. That, next time, if I said it, they’d actually do it, and I’d be a “crooked, unhandsome man.”

“Next time, you say, same style but shorter. That’s it.”

Once I had left and the lingering social terror had abated, something almost likeable revealed itself about the jaggedness to that experience. Living in New York City, there’s an inherent pressure to establish yourself as the prototypical Regular at the places you frequent: You walk into a café, you’re third in line, and by the time you get to the counter to order, the barista has already brewed your usual. I often feel myself crave for my transactions to be an acute combination of personal, neighborly, intimate. I’d very much like to experience the bodega equivalent of being the only one in my neighborhood to get a warm wash and a head scratch before I buy an egg and cheese on a roll. And so too often, I think, are strictly transactional experiences interpreted—distorted—as rude.

There’s a concrete ceiling on my relationship with Barbershop. It falls stories short of any familiarity appropriate to walk in and say, “Just the usual today.” I don’t find it cold. I find it absolute. Same style but shorter. It’s easy.

Admittedly, my hairstyle looks different each time I leave. The only consistency is in their method: the guys there tug my head around, press the corner of the buzzer blade behind my ear, come just short of drawing blood. They either forget about or ignore the bald spot where my crown meets the back of my skull, and fail to compensate for the receding hairline on the right side of my forehead. But I’m out of there in twenty minutes tops. They always ask me to come back—about as friendly as they get. They say it to everyone.

Daniel Johnson is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He is currently an Editorial Assistant at Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

Ashley Bales 9/5/17 Ashley Bales 9/5/17

DFW on Lynchian violence in the new Twin Peaks

by Eddie Dzialo

I started watching David Lynch’s movies when I was too young. They didn’t ruin me, but I did see them before I was old enough to understand them—if they can be understood at all. When I was twelve, I saw Lost Highway for the first of many times and developed flu-like symptoms.

Now, at thirty-three, I am a father in the middle of remodeling my kitchen but still manage to make time to watch Twin Peaks: The Return. And I do so with the same level of enthusiasm that I had for Lynch when I was in middle school, minus the uneasy nausea. Part of that, is accepting that good art is the successful transfer of emotion from artist to subject. And those emotions don’t have to make you feel good. David Lynch’s work becomes particularly interesting when studying his portrayal of violent subject matter—the material that sent my stomach reeling at twelve.

In his essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” David Foster Wallace wrote: “an act of violence in American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself.” Watching Lynch’s films are so surreal (and nauseating) because the visual and narrative devices Lynch uses to portray violence are outside the desensitizing vernacular of popular media. As Wallace notes in his essay: “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching someone’s ear get cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” In Blue Velvet, when Lynch zooms in on a severed human ear that is resting in a neatly manicured lawn, he is taking everything out of the shot but the thing itself. The viewer’s attention has nowhere else to go; it needs to lock onto the severed ear. As one of Wallace’s own characters was fond of saying, “Never underestimate the power of objects.”

In a scene from “Part 10” (Lynch referred to them as “parts” rather than “episodes”), Richard Horne attacks Miriam, but Lynch obscures the violence from the audience. The scene begins with Richard Horne arriving at Miriam’s trailer. While Richard is standing in her yard, Miriam shouts through her locked glass door that she has told the police that Richard ran over the young child. Richard cracks his neck by tilting his head toward each ear, then charges the trailer, breaks the glass door with his knee, and goes inside. For twenty-five seconds, the only thing the viewer sees is the outside of the trailer from a considerable distance away. What the viewer hears is Miriam screaming until she stops, presumably because Richard has killed her. Lynch never shows Richard hurting Miriam at all.

Wallace argues that Lynch’s violence finds a way to refer to something other than itself because “Lynch’s violence always tries to mean something.” Audiences ask for violence. They ask to see the act itself out of morbid curiosity, something the entertainment industry has exploited in numbing volumes. When Lynch gives his viewers nothing more than screams, he makes the scene visceral, taps into a universal expression of pain while escaping the visual clichés that make its consumption less painful.

Because of Lynch, I can feel for Miriam when she locks herself inside the trailer, and because of Wallace, I understand why. I can’t help but watch and wonder what Wallace would have thought of the newest season of Twin Peaks . As violent as Lynch’s movies are, Twin Peaks: The Return is like watching Lynch’s dissertation on the depiction of violence. And he transfers raw emotion better than he ever has.

Eddie Dzialo is a current degree candidate at Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Ashley Bales 9/4/17 Ashley Bales 9/4/17

Re-beginning

by Ashley Bales

A funny thing about beginnings: they’re always false. They share this with endings, but while writers often talk about false endings, beginnings simply don’t start at the right time. ‘Begin as near to the end as possible’ is an idea about containment and a good lesson in why life and literature differ, or we can hope. A blog has a life and will begin as lives do at whatever moment an individual is born to it and will experience many more beginnings than the first. So, hello again. I give you the re-beginning of the Assignment blog.

I was once a paleontologist and finding beginnings was my job. Never the first beginning, only a committed search for prior beginnings. When a new species appears—something like this blog, reappearing, not reborn—it can always be traced earlier, though its life is no less significant for it. Needless to say, a blog for a literary magazine for an MFA program functions on hyperbolically compressed timescales relative to the life of a species. It adheres to the rhythms of application, acceptance, concentration, graduation, with new voices added and lost in 6 month cycles. It’s agglutinative, stratigraphic, an exercise in context.

Criticism is also an exercise in context: the successes of literary criticism (and the lit blogs that practice it) are not bound to facile judgement, but the ability to contextualize. This incarnation of the Assignment blog is re-begun within the context of me, my Mountainview cohort, the Fall 2017 entering to graduating classes, the year 2017, Trump’s America, all of our Americas, the blogosphere, a publishing landscape stuck continually re-beginning in a world where blogospheres exist (unless they don’t anymore), and a deep continuity of literary practice and practitioners reaching back without beginning to our earliest humanity.

My point being, an education in context aggrandizes the whole, as it humbles each individual start. Let's begin.

Last Week: Nabokov, Hardwick, and Emojis

For all the discussion of engagement flying around these days it’s hard not to want to ostrich-up once in a while. A new collection of interviews with Nabokov demonstrates his stubborn disengagement. He “… [didn’t] give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth…” limiting his political opinions to: "Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size." What would he have thought of this morsel?

In this inspiring profile of Elizabeth Hardwick, Sarah Nicole Prickett describes her as a "domestic writer," acknowledging the weight of applying that term to a woman. Prickett seems unsure how to discuss this unarguably feminist icon in the context of Hardwick's skepticism of feminism. Like Nabokov her concerns were literary and in so far as she did actively engage in and even help shape feminist literary criticism, she refused to be drawn beneath its homogenizing banner.

As citizens, that ideal unification we strive for turns us into the homogenized masses, which, as Auden so eloquently argues in his classic essay "The Poet and the City," has no place in literature. At least not as long as literature is still at its most powerful when presenting individual experience.

But a little engagement is unavoidable: Emoji poetry has made it into The Paris Review (blog), The New Yorker came out with it's first ever television issue mere days after Game of Thrones set it's narrative priorities airborne, but at least Curb Your Enthusiasm is coming back?

I'd rather go back to reading about Nabokov apologizing for cliched butterflies.

Ashley Bales is a current student of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

Daniel Johnson 6/7/16 Daniel Johnson 6/7/16

Fangirling & Fanboying: Sweetbitter, Binary Star, Guster is for Lovers

Guster at the house of blues, courtesy of front row boston.

Lisa Janicki -- Not surprisingly, there’s a theme of consumption in Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, which takes place largely in an upscale NYC restaurant near Union Square. There’s the eating, obviously, and the drinking and the snorting coke, maybe just as obviously. But there’s also being swallowed up by a new place, its inhabitants, and its rhythms. Some days, the city where you live is on your side: you go from A to B in one continuous movement: you breeze through turnstiles and catch every train; it’s all green lights and walk signals. There’s a welcome loss of self in times like these. Through Tess, Sweetbitter’s narrator, we experience this through the eyes of a server: “Specks of dust taking off from bottles, shadows darting onto the floor, glasses listing over the edges of counters and caught just in time…The reflex was to see beyond my line of vision, to see around and behind myself. The breath between consciousness and action collapsed. No hesitations, no projections, no order. I became a verb.” That passage is immediately followed by the best description I’ve ever read of what it means to be in the weeds during your restaurant shift. And how once you’re there, suddenly wrecked and paralyzed by your own surroundings, you can’t get back to the other side, you can hardly remember it. Danler presents to us these varieties of consciousness, and how slipping back and forth between the two can happen in an instant and is seldom in our control.

Eric Beebe -- About every Memorial Day I dig through my stacks of old CDs (yes, some of us still have such things) for Lost Ground, an EP by the band Defeater. The band made a name for itself with, aside from its myriad of talent, a distinct narrative style to its lyrics. Frontman Derek Archambault has so far written the lyrics to each new installment of the band’s music as different characters’ perspectives in a story linking all of them together. In Lost Ground, we are reintroduced to a homeless WWII veteran who plays the role of singing sage to the protagonist of the band’s album Travels. But the EP starts from this man’s adolescence, with a song titled “The Red, White, and Blues” kicking off his story as he drinks himself into oblivion before shipping off to war. Through six tracks, the EP takes us along the timeline of this man’s life. In the end track, “Beggin’ in the Slums,” our hero—returned home as a veteran and forsaken by his countrymen—spends his days playing guitar to passing crowds for change, and he sees the young man from Travels, on the run, and recognizes a look in his eyes he once knew as his own. With admittance of the time he’s lost, that he’s amounted to all he will, he finds hope that this young man will do better, somehow for the both of them. Because they both know the same thing: people deserve better.

Nadia Owusu -- I should have found Sarah Gerard’s short but intense novel Binary Star to be disorienting. It is structured less like a novel than like a long prose poem. It’s about astrology and anorexia, capitalism and addiction, love and self-hate. It’s about all of these things at once, sometimes all at once in one sentence. Time is undefined. The past and the present collide without notice. Dialogue is unmarked and undifferentiated from thought. And yet, I was transfixed. The novel did not, despite its unconventional structure, feel confused. It was beautiful and raw and thoroughly original. Rather than being experimental for experimentation’s sake, one gets the sense that Gerard followed the architectural principal that form should follow function. Binary Star is about a woman and a world in chaos. The fact that the novel attempts to wrench the reader out of his or her literary comfort zone only serves to heighten the emotional power of the story.

John Vercher -- There’s nothing funny about Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters. It is described as “a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post 9-11 world”, but the end result is, almost impossibly, something far more complex. Johnson’s slim novel is told from the first-person perspective of Roland Nair, a government operative (for which government, we’re never quite sure) on assignment in Africa to track down his former colleague, Michael Adriko, an African native with whom Nair has had some dirty dealings. During their reunion, Michael introduces Nair to his fiancée, Davidia, whose lineage involves Michael’s military past. What follows is a tumultuous journey that leads Adriko and Nair on a path to capitalize on the fears of post-9-11 terrorism with an ill-conceived plot designed to separate bad people from their money. While Johnson adroitly manages the tension of the plot, it’s the machinations of Nair’s mind that cause the greatest discomfort. He is a misogynist, a racist, and while he proclaims a love for Michael, he’s simultaneously looking for a way to steal his fiancée from under his nose. It is in this aspect where Nair’s characterization is most captivating, as his desires for Davidia spiral into obsessiveness in a manner that makes you question his sanity, and perhaps the reality of his perceptions. He is the most unreliable of narrators from which you can’t turn away. And while I found it somewhat difficult, at times, to separate the prejudicial ideations of Nair from the possible perspective of the author (Johnson did in fact spend time as a journalist in Africa prior to writing Monsters), the sentence structure is in fine form and the dialogue is masterful.

Daniel Johnson -- It's no well-kept secret that I am a tragic Guster superfan. In truth, I'm a little unsure whether recommending this band is a moment I was made for, or (much more likely) one I should have actively avoided, as there's just no chance I'll be able to articulate what makes theirs such timeless, quintessential, unbiasedly exceptional music. Regardless, here we are--you, me, and Front Row Boston's recording of Guster's January 15, 2016 homecoming concert at Boston's House of Blues, released in May of this year. The video is just over an hour long, comprised of 14 songs from their Night One set (I was at Night Two), spliced with commentary from vocalists/guitarists/bassists/everything-elseists Ryan Miller and Adam Gardner on their band's twenty-five year career. They formed in 1991, right down the road from the House of Blues, at Tufts University, where three of its remaining original members attended undergrad. So what's it like when they come back to Boston, when they come home? "It's always sort of emotional when we come back and play the place where we started--I mean, it's crazy," says Ryan. Adds Adam: "You can feel it, when we play, you can feel it in the crowd, you can see when you're looking out there ... Boston is the place that built our career." Such is the electricity with which they play during this show: beneath their characteristic lightheartedness, there's a palpable wattage of gratitude, sincerity, nostalgic revelry. It's no clearer on display than during their opus from Keep It Together, "Come Downstairs and Say Hello." These guys are object lessons in the rare sort of artistic brotherhood that endures and evolves (for a quarter of a century!), and as a fan, seeing that sort of synergy between them, strong as ever so late in the game, is intoxicating: to witness this concert for the first time or the hundredth is to understand a little better what lasting relationships at their strangest, funkiest, and most harmonious should look like. This is why--as we were reminded during the TNT broadcast of this year's NCAA Championship Game--Guster is for L<3vers.

E.B. -- While City Lights’s translated collection of Pablo Neruda’s poems, The Essential Neruda, offers a grand overview of his work—his odes, his communist beliefs, his musings on Machu Picchu—it was his love poems that hooked me. Most notable to me was his poem “XII,” from his Cien sonetos de amor (100 Sonnets of Love). It’s impossible not to be enthralled by Neruda’s use of language, albeit translated, that touches upon senses that make reading his love poems feel nothing short of an aphrodisiac. Now, having tracked down and read Cien sonetos from cover to cover, I only find myself more impressed with it. Each poem is titled simply with the Roman numerals marking its place in a progression of Neruda’s musings. The emotions wax and wane, rise and fall, like the moon and waves he drew upon for symbolism. His use of natural imagery and picturesque landscapes blend with romantic sentimentality; whereas lesser writers would butcher such a mixture, this is Neruda’s chief triumph. He draws upon one image or another knowing full-well the associations they brought with them and carefully balanced these associations to create sex on paper. In a time when postmodern thought has cast more doubt than ever on what love is or even whether it exists, Neruda’s work calls out to demand its reality and prove that it’s something floating at will between our senses and psyche. It says we don’t need to know what love is or how it is, just to know it’s there and—most of all—feel it.

Daniel Johnson 5/30/16 Daniel Johnson 5/30/16

Fangirling & Fanboying: Jandy Nelson, Kurt Vonnegut, Arturo Pérez-Reverte

From the cover of I'll Give You the Sun. — From the cover of *I'll Give You the Sun*.

Daniel Johnson -- Confession: Young Adult Literature, until recently, was oft absent from my shelves, and is admittedly under-represented (read: nonexistent) in these staff picks here at Assignment. It’s a sensibility thing, both as individuals and as a publication, and I get it. However, on recommendation, perhaps on challenge, and also because I’m in the process of renovating and expanding my tastes, I read Jandy Nelson’s 2015 Printz Award-winning novel I’ll Give You the Sun, and I fucking adored it. Seldom have I held characters as dear as I did Noah and Jude, the book’s twin teenage Californian protagonists, who we follow through art school rejections, the separation of their parents, and the eventual death of their mother, all of which leads to a monstrous rift in their relationship. From the very first page, I cared so deeply for their bond, was so invested in its loss and redemption, in each sibling's tumultuous road to individuality and healing; I longed so fiercely to wedge myself between their bodies during what Noah calls “the smush,” a sedentary position in which each twin abuts the other “until we’re not only one age, but one complete and whole person.” How many people, I wondered, read this book and realized that to be one half of a smush is all they’ve ever wanted? Nelson gives us a story that seems, on the surface, elemental because of its elasticity: twins start together, twins grow apart, two arcs that begin as parallels before they bend and meander away from one another, until they eventually snap into symmetry anew. What sets it apart as outstanding, for one, is Nelson's Lerner-esque ability to drive the story almost entirely through the interior registers of her protagonists. And then there's her language, which processes as flashes of color more often than it does as formations of words. Here’s Noah, speaking of his sister: “Jude looks at me. Her eyes are the lightest glacier blue; I use mostly white when I draw them. Normally they make you feel floaty and think of puffy clouds and hear harps, but right now they look just plain scared.” Both twins are artists, and their voices, as here, seem somehow liberated from the representational deficiencies of quotidian language; thus, Nelson’s prose scraped feeling from me with terrifying page-to-page ease, some of which was so complex and overwhelming and new that I struggle to name it here. What I can articulate, and what you need to know, is that I’ll Give You the Sun understands the rhythms of relationships, like Noah and Jude's, that are galactic in importance: it will leave you assured that it’s okay—beautiful, even—if one person is the central star to your cosmos, just as long as you’re unafraid to be ripped from orbit every once in a while, to be forced to go rogue and experience the universe as a sovereign world. Nelson is offering a comfort, here, that when it comes to her characters, or any set of twins, siblings, any and all family—plainly, when it comes to those we love—an inexplicable gravity will always ferry us back to them.

Eric Beebe -- To say I’m a fan of Kurt Vonnegut would understate the eye rolls and sighs of many friends of mine every time I mention his work yet again. I turn into a kind of missionary for his work—ironically, considering many of his themes—every time I meet someone who hasn’t read it, and I make a point of tracking down the gems he produced which didn’t receive the same fanfare as Cat’s Cradle or Slaughterhouse-Five or maybe just fell out of the public eye. This search brought me to Slapstick, which Vonnegut claims in its prologue to be the closest thing he wrote to an autobiography. “It is about what life feels like to me,” he wrote, which may sound strange regarding a story of a malformed, incestuous pair of twins narrated by one who becomes the last president of the United States, but therein lies the joy of the book. The story is so blatantly absurd, with things like telepathic orgies and a campaign platform of grouping the nation into artificial families, that it stands as one of Vonnegut’s best efforts he makes across many of his books with regard to showing us just how ridiculous humans really are. This book is a must while seeking distraction from real-life absurdities like the rise of Trump and other pains of the impending election, but it also satirizes such events like only Vonnegut could. It’s a story of triumph and failure in simultaneity, as is often the only true case, told through a hyperbolic comedy of the journey there which makes us question, in the protagonist’s words, “And how did we then face the odds, / Of man’s rude slapstick, yes, and God’s?” If you want the answer, go read Slapstick.

Ted Flanagan -- If you make it to the surprising, soul-crushing denouement of The Painter of Battles, it will be as if Arturo Perez-Reverte has combined the blizzard-cold human condition of, say, Crime and Punishment, the tragedy of Anna Karenina, and the construction of the mirrored city of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and condensed it into 211 pages without missing a chord of the originals’ beauty and cruelty. The protagonist, Andres Faulques, is a retired war photographer living in abandoned lighthouse on an unnamed stretch of Spanish coastline, and spends his days painting an epic mural along tower’s inner wall, bearing witness to the horrors his camera recorded. Into this solitude arrives a former Croatian soldier, Markovic, whose life was inadvertently ruined as the result of an otherwise inconsequential photo Faulques took of him while covering the brutal war arising from Yugoslavia’s death throes. The photo becomes a worldwide sensation, brings Faulques great fame and money, but also costs him the love of his life, who stepped on a mine near a muddy Balkan road two days later. The picture costs Markovic dearly, too, and he arrives at the tower to engage Faulques in a conversation, ask the photographer some questions, and then: “I’m going to kill you.” Throughout the characters’ extended daily conversations about art, love, death and war, Reverte’s writing is lyrical, philosophical, building to its surprisingly emotional climax slowly, one beautiful word upon another, in the way of all great literature.

From the cover of Half an Inch of water. — From the cover of *Half an Inch of water*.

David Moloney -- The birth of twin Appaloosa foals on a Western Indian Reservation could be an intense enough event to carry a story. But in his collection, Half an Inch of Water, Percival Everett isn’t content with easy narratives. Here, in “Finding Billy White Feather,” the elusive title character tacks a note on a rancher’s door, offering to sell both horses. Billy claims to be a Sioux, but is described by many in many different ways to Oliver (the rancher): “a tall, skinny white boy,” and, later, “Could be he’s fat,” by another. The note sends Oliver in search of White Feather, but each time he is thwarted. Like many of Everett’s stories, this one is shot out of a cannon, propelled forward without any backtracking or history, all the way to its bleak end—Oliver never does find White Feather, and the twin foals die. So it goes for the rest of the collection: Everett rarely leaves you fulfilled. But in each story, as with White Feather, there’s an intentional mysticism that surrounds the characters. In “A High Lake,” Norma Snow, an elderly horse owner who still rides every day, gets lost with her horse one morning. As she tries to find her way back, she enters a spirit-realm where her dead dog runs alongside her. Everett writes it as if this is a sure sign of Norma having perished on horseback in a meadow—a fitting end to a character who died doing what she loved—but somehow she finds her way home, to her fireplace, where she remains as the story ends. We’re left with the feeling that we were tricked: Did Norma go on that ride? Did she dream it? Again, unfulfilling. You’ll never know the answer, but you’ll be glad Everett showed you what that last journey would have been like.

John Vercher -- My father and I have never been close. There was a time though, however brief, during the mid-to-late eighties, when we connected for a few hours a week. Several days per week, we’d drive to the neighborhood gym. On those car rides, he’d tell me why my hair was different from other mixed kids and how I should assume all white people were racist until they proved themselves otherwise. Then we’d get to work on building our bodies. It wasn’t until I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me that I began to gain some perspective as to what was really going on in those car rides, in those subsequent gym sessions. Written as a letter to his fifteen-year-old son, Between is Coates’s declaration of the imperative need to preserve “the sanctity of the black body”, to protect it from the threat of systematic racism “that makes your body breakable.” Through Coates’s eloquent narrative and frank confrontation of an eminently necessary conversation, I gained some modicum of clarity about what was really happening in those car rides, in that gym. While my adolescent arms quaked under a weight I could barely lift, my father’s shoulders bowed, not from helping me lift the bar, but under a love he almost could not bear, trying to protect me from the world I’d inevitably come to know.

DJ -- This week, I'll be recording an episode with our friends over at The Critical Breakdown, which, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is a little movie-review podcast with a single hilarious (and existentially lofty) objective: "We review movies based on their Rotten Tomatoes score, starting at the very bottom with 0% and working our way towards 100%. We'll learn what makes a bad movie bad, if ratings are fair, and maybe even something about ourselves." Right now, they're at 8%, and after reading my piece on horror films here, they asked me to help review The Number 23, a pseudo-horror/conspiracy thriller/pulpy, oversexed detective noir flick in which Jim Carrey, as an animal control officer, tries (and so catastrophically fails) to defeat the 23 Enigma. Now see, I'm typically a JC-in-non-comedic-roles apologist, and I remember watching this film in 2007, when I was sixteen, alone in my basement with a take-out order of onion rings, and loving it. You'll have to listen in to hear what my opinion is nine years later (spoiler: the movie is egregious, really, just downright insulting). Scott & Max, TCB's hosts, are erudite and funny, and their rapport with one other is seamless. Perhaps most impressive about their approach is the tender seriousness with which they consider each movie; this is almost impossible not to appreciate, given the broken body of cinema they've handled thus far (Good Luck Chuck and Battlefield Earth, to name two). They've even got an official podcast poodle, Walter, who occasionally drops into the studio for some canine analysis. In other words, they quite organically inhabit the airwave space between smart and absurd; this is why I consider them legitimate and sincere critics, and why they're such good radio.

Daniel Johnson 5/24/16 Daniel Johnson 5/24/16

Fangirling & Fanboying: Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Mogelson, Nuruddin Farah

from the cover of homesick for another world: stories — from the cover of *homesick for another world: stories*

Benjamin Nugent -- In his essay "Michael", John Jeremiah Sullivan points out that Michael Jackson’s best songs have the peculiar catchiness of schoolyard chants. You’ve got to be starting something, Hey girl with the high heels on, Billie Jean is not my lover, I’m bad, I’m bad, you know it, etc. One of the reasons I love Ottessa Moshfegh’s forthcoming collection, Homesick for Another World: Stories, out next January, is that she too is a master of the taunting cadence, only Moshfegh’s schoolyard abuts a high school or a liberal arts school: “The deluxe shopping center on Route 4, where the fattest people on earth could be found…”; “But having held my dick in her hand, she seemed to feel she’d earned the right to belittle me as much as possible”; “The shoulder pads nearly hit his ears, as he had basically no neck.” Lesser writers don’t trust the reader to engage with narrators who express contempt, so their narrators are artificially aw-shucks and nonjudgmental. But Moshfegh knows that people make fun of other people to shield themselves from their own self-loathing, fear and loneliness, and she knows how to twist a story at the end so that the mask of disgust falls away and we see the desolation that was always lurking behind.

Daniel Johnson -- Why is it that all the world has yet to acquire a copy of New American Stories (2015), the 750 page anthology edited by Ben Marcus, and gorge themselves on it? Contained therein are over twenty-five pieces of short fiction--including installments by Don DeLillo, Mary Gaitskill, Wells Tower, and Kelly Link--that matter now, not only because they're individually outstanding with regard to their contributions to the endurance of the short story form, but also because, collectively, they're a clip of what the American voice sounds like now. It's The Unprofessionals, but more sweeping in scope. And sure, I'm quite aware this is a terrifically cliché way to talk about any book. But what else is there to say about the most quintessential curation of contemporary stories available? Perhaps that Marcus's intro is knockout: "The potent story writers, to me, are the ones who deploy language as a kind of contraband, pumping it into us until we collapse on the floor, writhing, overwhelmed with feeling." Perhaps, too, that the book as a physical object is gorgeous (see left), and simply feels like something substantial when you hold it. It's got the weight and paper gradation of a Bible. Just saying.

John Vercher -- As a new(ish) father, I find that certain books, movies and the like affect me on an emotional level they wouldn’t have pre-rugrats. Marlin finally reunites with Nemo? My chin crinkles. “Cat’s in The Cradle” plays on the radio? The eyes start to burn a bit. And don’t even get me started on that scene from Interstellar when McConaughey watches the video messages from his children back on Earth. So it went for me with Celeste Ng’s 2014 debut novel Everything I Never Told You. Lydia Lee, the teenage daughter of James and Marilyn, is missing. Her fate is revealed to readers by the end of the first chapter: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know it yet.” Despite the innards-twisting tension that Ng so deftly ratchets before divulging Lydia’s fate, it’s her family’s reactions to their loss and the memories conjured by it that deliver much of the novel’s emotional resonance. Ng writes with the painful beauty of a parent’s perspective as they bear witness to the cruelty of which children are capable. It’s stories like these that stop me cold, make me set the book down long enough to find my sons and hold them, with the hopes of protecting them from the world.

Sarah Eisner -- My mother often writes me lengthy emails about her childhood in Savannah, Georgia, and sometimes asks me questions about the way I remember mine in suburban California. I tend to respond like I’m less interested than I am, like I don’t know that I’m privileged to have a mom who wants to relive my life and share her own, like I don’t realize that someday I’ll wish I asked her everything I could. So when she mentioned that I should read The Rainbow Comes and Goes—a back and forth correspondence between Anderson Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt—I told her it wasn’t my thing, thinking it was another lame celebrity memoir. It arrived on my doorstep on Mother’s Day anyway. I was surprised to find how deeply satisfied I was with the way Rainbow explores motherhood, ambition, identity, aging and grief, framed within a unique narrative of a very particular kind of American privilege and pain. The relationship between Anderson and Gloria illustrates the way families remember through parent and child, and inspired me to ask my mom a few more questions.

from the cover of bright lights, big city — from the cover of *bright lights, big city*

Eric Beebe -- After far too long, I finally picked up Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and got to making up for the lost time it spent buried in my reading list. It quickly shot into place among my favorite books. The novel gave me the feel of following thoughts rather than plot, but with no lack of an arc to show for it—just gems of true consciousness that seem universal to human experience: “No. Stop this. This is not your better self speaking. This is not how you feel.” The universality of the protagonist’s thoughts is one of the novel’s greatest triumphs; it’s only aided by the way McInerney's style allows us to feel we know the character so well. In a world where we’re constantly pummeled with the differences, assumptions, and enigma surrounding baby boomers, millennials, or whichever generation, it’s an extreme relief to read work which—touted as definitive of one age and place—feels purely, innately relatable in its humanity. Bright Lights, Big City isn’t just a coming-of-age novel, or a New York novel, or an eighties novel. It’s a story about the disillusionment and disappointments that can strike anyone, anywhere, at any time, and the fleeting efforts we make to cope. Rumor has it that The Paris Review’s sitting on a forthcoming interview with McInerney, and after this, I’ll be counting down days.

David Moloney -- Luke Mogelson’s first collection of stories, These Heroic, Happy Dead—a title borrowed from the E.E. Cummings poem, “next to of course god america I”—would have you know that when veterans return from war, there’s no glory awaiting them. Rather, what happens is a continuance of trouble and violence. What is especially empathetic about these stories is how Mogelson not only focuses on the veterans, but also the people close to them: mothers, neighbors, and co-workers. In “Visitors,” a mother, Jeanne, loses her son a second time when he returns from war and kills a man in a bar fight. Jeanne is in denial, as she believes her son merely “had to go away again.” But Mogelson doesn’t condemn his characters for feeling wronged. Instead, he allows them to act out their anger and anxiety---as in “Human Cry”---only to find them in a worse way. The protagonist in “Human Cry” explores his own involvement in a man’s death and how he subsequently dealt with it with a self-imposed isolation from the world. But the full extent of the isolation isn’t understood until Mogelson switches point of view in the final page, revealing the protagonist’s bizarre and embarrassing actions to the reader---he’s been living in the man’s home, the man he is responsible for killing. These Heroic, Happy Dead is a book of war stories---perpetual war---and the consequences of sending men to kill and then asking them to return to family, work and normalcy no different.

from the cover of maps — from the cover of *maps*

Nadia Owusu -- In Nuruddin Farah’s rich and lyrical novel Maps, a young boy by the name of Askar bears witness to the violent redrawing of Farah’s native Somalia and neighboring Ethiopia post-colonialism. At the same time, he must make decisions about who he wants to be and what he is willing to fight for. Although the political and geographical context of this novel is specific, there are many parallels between Askar’s wars (internal and external) and the wars that are currently being waged, from the Sudans to Syria. Examining themes like religion, class, and community, Maps reminds us that identities and borders (particularly, perhaps, in Africa) are fluid and rarely easily defined.

Ted Flanagan -- The recent paperback reissue of Richard Price’s The Whites drops the hardcover’s unfortunate author attribution of “Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt” in favor of simply his name, which any devotee of Price would have known by the end of paragraph one. Consider the opening lines: “ ... a quarter past one in the morning and there were still far more people piling into the bars than leaving them, everyone coming and going having to muscle their way through swaying clumps of half-hammered smokers standing directly outside the entrances. He hated the no smoking laws.” The book has all the Price-ian staples. Its protagonist, Billy Graves, is a conflicted veteran police detective, now working a kind of overnight bunco-cum-broken-windows squad in NYC, all the while stewing about a case from his past involving a triple-murder suspect Graves could never pin with the crime. And then there’s the mysterious stalker, intent on destroying the Graves family. The change on the paperback cover just goes to show that a Price novel, even one intentioned to be a simple whodunit penned under a pseudonym, will always be a Price novel. If there’s a writer living today with a better ear for honest, human dialogue, or a more pathological inability to see every character in anything but full 360-degree, four dimensional view, who illuminates the wider world around us by focusing on the narrow world within his characters, and turns up the heat slowly, so you don’t realize you’re in hot water until it’s too late, I don’t know who they are.

Daniel Johnson 5/16/16 Daniel Johnson 5/16/16

Fangirling & Fanboying: This Week's Recs from Assignment

Enclosed: Facebook activists, but opposite

Benjamin Nugent -- I’ve used a metal detector to extract a lead .59 miniball from the dirt near Manassas. I’ve sipped whiskey from a party cup at the site of one of the last charges of the Army of the Potomac. I’ve been to the Chancellorsville gift shop and seen the bookshelf that’s divided into three sections: Northern, Southern and neutral. But until recently I was fairly ignorant about what came after the Civil War. So I picked up Black Reconstruction in America, by W.E.B. Du Bois, and The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand. Du Bois is interested in the masses: why, he asks, did five million poor whites support a war on behalf of eight thousand rich whites to keep four million blacks enslaved? It’s required reading for the Summer of Trump. Menand is interested is the intellectual foment that attended and followed the war. His book is set in the salons of Cambridge, Baltimore and Chicago. There are characters like Zina Peirce, who believed that adultery should be punished by execution or life imprisonment, and her philosopher husband, Charles, who cheated on her a lot. It serves as a reminder of how hard it is to find role models in the nineteenth century; even the most ardent abolitionists espoused some pretty appalling views. Their heroism resides in what they did, not in what they said. Sort of like Facebook activists, but the opposite.

Eric Beebe -- Ever since reading “The Weirdos,” I’ve grabbed any piece of Ottessa Moshfegh’s work I can. Her short stories fit my tendency to read in twentyish-minute bursts, but when I heard about her novel, McGlue, I had to see what she did with the extra length. The book follows the title character’s inner monologue, picking up where he’s accused of murdering his shipmate and best friend, Johnson. McGlue’s constant state of impairment by both alcohol and head injury keeps clarity to a foggy minimum, and that was perhaps my favorite aspect of the whole story. Being tied to his altered reality, I learned to stop trying to distinguish the corporeal from hallucination and simply accept what he saw in front of him. The dichotomy between these two forces becomes integral to the plot as the weight of events leads McGlue to seek escape by any means necessary, even if it kills him. The resulting feel falls somewhere between reading The Things They Carried and watching Reservoir Dogs while our narrator teeters back and forth between blacking out and drying out. Moshfegh doesn’t hand us just any drunken sailor; she gives us a man floating between two worlds, battling with himself over which to choose, if he can at all.

From the cover of Bright, Dead Things — From the cover of *Bright, Dead Things*

Lisa Janicki -- My favorite poem in Ada Limón’s collection, Bright Dead Things, is “Downhearted,” which begins, “Six horses died in a trailer fire. / There. That’s the hard part. I wanted / to tell you straight away so that we could / grieve together.” She’s a city girl who moved for love to the south, where even the tragedies are foreign. She bumps up against new idioms and “tornado talk”— the subtle stuff that’s peculiar to regions and can be so disorienting to transplants (“All the new bugs.”). And from these small moments, she elaborates larger impressions of her existence. She had imagined herself differently in this new life—more agreeable, more open to its magic, more like a child. But when our grown-up selves allow us to become children again, it’s often in a way that’s less magical and more sullen: in “The Last Move,” she writes, “This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important.” I root for Limón as she cleans her big new house and tries to like gardening, though it seems clear she’d rather be in her Brooklyn apartment. I root for her because she threw it all in for love, because she moved to Kentucky for it, because she had no Plan B. And mostly I root for her because I get the sense that she’s resurrected herself before, and she’s about to do it again: “What the heart wants? The heart wants / her horses back.”

David Moloney -- You’d think Olive Kitteridge would be the focus of Elizabeth Strout’s novel in stories titled in her name. But we’re instead given thirteen stories that concern themselves more with the residents of the small, coastal New England town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is a math teacher there, and she seems to have had all the book’s characters in class at one point; she always finds herself crossing paths with them when they’re stalled in a threshold of self-destruction. It’s these characters that are most central to the novel. Whether it’s a former student who contemplates suicide on a beach, an anorexic teen, or even her own husband falling in love with a much younger employee, Olive---through her staunch and sometimes misplaced contemptibility for weak people---says what we’d only wished to have the courage to say. She tells the anorexic girl in “Starving,” after giving sound advice about never giving up, “I know you’ve heard all this before, so you just lie there and don’t answer. Well, answer this: Do you hate your mother?” Olive isn’t always right (sometimes far from it); that’s when the book is at its best. The stories are so human, so New England, and in the closing moments, we know Olive did her best, and we know she never gave up—and isn’t that all we can do?

Nadia Owusu -- I first encountered Lydia Davis two years ago. I was thoroughly confused. What was I reading? Were these monologues? Prose poems? Scenes? “She is the master of the short story,” declared the instructor of my workshop as she assigned three of Davis’s stories to me. “But, where are the stories?” I fretted to myself as I diligently did my assigned reading, certain that I had made some sort of mistake. Don’t get me wrong: I liked what I was reading. I just couldn’t easily categorize it. Later, once my obsessive, ‘I need to make sure I’m doing the assignment right’ voice was quieted by a glass of red wine, I was able to admire the way that Davis was able to imbue such brief moments, untethered by much context or character development or setting or structure, with such feeling and meaning. This month, I worked on my upper body strength by carrying around her Collected Stories. In making my way through it, I tried to give some thought as to how she does what she does and why it works. I found myself particularly admiring how she takes her characters’ specific circumstances and in a matter of a few pages, or in some cases even just a few sentences (Davis’s stories are known for being minimalistic and very brief), makes them universal, raising and exploring difficult questions about the things in people’s hearts and heads that are often heartbreakingly left unsaid.

From the cover of Crimes in Southern Indiana

Ted Flanagan -- Reading Frank Bill’s gut-punch collection of loosely-linked stories, Crimes in Southern Indiana, is to bear witness to a nihilistic muscularity of prose one might expect of the love child of Jim Thompson and Donald Ray Pollock, if such a thing were possible. Bill’s slim collection packs a weight far beyond its pages, delivered at a high-velocity. His characters hint that their squalid, violent lives are the result of choices, often (as in drugs or alcohol or regret) the righteous reward for their own. But also, as in poor teenaged Josephine, who’s own grandfather, Able Kirby, sold her into sex slavery to a local gang—some pay debts incurred by someone else. The opening story, Hill Clan Cross, follows two drug dealers avenging their losses against two associates who got all entrepreneurial with the gang’s drugs, a big no-no in a desolate landscape where the only thing thicker than blood are dollar bills. From there, the book accelerates through the bleakness and darkness until the titular story, the collection’s last, in which Mitchell, a local police detective, attempts to help Crazy, a member of the notorious gang MS-13, which has populated the ranks of workers in a chicken processing factory. For me, that’s the brilliance of the collection. Crimes in Southern Indiana, as it insinuates itself, whispers amongst the brawling, crashing, and exploding backdrop that this isn’t just Indiana. It’s the 21st century Animal Farm, decrying not Fascism, but a distant offspring of it.

John Vercher -- Addiction has a name, and that name is “Scotty.” He’s an incubus and succubus for men and women alike, dangerous in his charm and seduction, fulfilling all cravings while reaping wanton destruction. Scotty is, literally, crack cocaine. He is funny, repulsive and impossible to ignore. In his PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel Delicious Foods, James Hannaham tells the story of Eddie, his mother Darlene, and her relationship with Scotty. It is a story of tragic loss and horrific violence infused with irreverent humor. The novel explores the depths of maternal love pitted against chemical dependence in the shadow of the titular farm where both Eddie and Darlene find themselves held captive. Hannaham’s stark and concise prose is instantly engaging, and doesn’t shy away from the horror of the subject matter while avoiding the melodrama that could easily overcome it. In between the braided flashbacks of Darlene’s youth and the tragic events that lead to her eventual addiction, we’re treated to Scotty’s dark humor and cruel charisma. He’s a twisted conscience in a novel of painful truths about desperate acts and the systematic racism that lead to them. Delicious Foods is at once heartbreaking and breathtaking with richly textured characters that has stayed with me long after the final page.

From the cover of Vitals. — From the cover of *Vitals*.

Daniel Johnson -- You've got enough to read (and if you're really interested in what I'd recommend, check out my weekly selections at The Paris Review Daily's "Staff Picks"). Meanwhile, let's talk obscure music. Like many of their fans, I discovered MuteMath when they debuted their first single, “Typical,” on Letterman’s Late Show in the summer of 2007. The band’s performance—and particularly that of drummer Darren King—stunned Ed Sullivan theater such that once the music stopped, all Dave could say was, “How bout that drummer!” Eight years later, in the Fall of 2015—one guitarist, a Transformer’s theme and two underappreciated records since Letterman—MuteMath started its own label, Wojtek Records, and released their first self-produced studio album: Vitals. King’s percussive energy and Roy Mitchell-Cardeńas’ critically acclaimed bass-playing have been at the forefront of most of their music; Vitals, however, is unquestionably frontman Paul Meany’s opus. It’s all vocals, all keys. The result is something like a contemporary eighties record, if only, say, Earth, Wind and Fire had grown up in bluesy New Orleans, where Meany and the rest hail from. Both the album’s single, “Monument,” and “Light Up” share the insane vocal range of “September”; both have that same wedding-reception-banger vibe. And though the album feels at times like a throwback or an homage to Meany's influences (The Police being a big one), it's actually a welcome step into the future for the band: Vitals is heady and joyous and wonderfully hypnotic in a way that most MuteMath is not. Meany has said himself that, when composing a work, he wants the end product to be “a picture of something dark, but it should be framed in light.” This is their first album that’s more frame than picture--just listen to "Stratosphere," my favorite of all eleven tracks: "The sun has lost its gravity / and severed my connection to the starlight. / I never meant to have to start all over / without you."

Daniel Johnson 4/12/16 Daniel Johnson 4/12/16

A Digital Ghost Story

by Nadia Owusu

I have been haunted for five years and six months. The voice first came to me through my Blackberry and then through my iPhone. Mostly there is just raspy breathing and incoherent whispering. Sometimes the voice hums my name and laughs. Sometimes there is nothing but background noise—horns honking, a fork clanking against a plate. Once I heard a baby cry and then the call was ended.

Occasionally, I am haunted through my Gmail. The sending address is always different. It is always a man’s name like Fred or Robert or Carl followed by seven or eight numbers. The messages are not especially interesting. Often there is just a question. What did I have for lunch? Was I enjoying the beach weather? Recently, Larry7678919 wanted to know what I thought about the Republican presidential debate. In 2013, the emails were mostly one-sentence directives. Let love in. Don’t be afraid of what you really feel. Open up to new possibilities.

I assume that the voice on the phone and the words in my Gmail are from the same person. It might be the guy I went on one date with in the summer of the year that I got the first phone call at 1:30 in the morning. The guy’s name is Rob. It’s not really Rob, but I don’t want to use his real name because he has a wife and two children now. I know this because I looked him up on Facebook. I was looking for evidence. I don’t know what kind of evidence I expected to find on Facebook, but you have to start somewhere.

On our date, Rob told me that, years earlier, he had stalked a woman who he was too afraid to ask out. He didn’t do anything to her, just followed her around as she ran errands and met friends for brunch. When he told me this, his voice was gurgling in the way that comedians’ voices gurgle when they are telling a joke that they think is really clever. We were eating lasagna and drinking white wine on the patio of a restaurant in the West Village. It had been one of those sticky New York days when you feel like you are breathing in dirty steam instead of normal air. But, now that the sun had set, there was a breeze that tickled the romantic candlelight at our table. The breeze and the perfect crescent moon made everyone happy and beautiful with rustling hair and luminous skin. But, Rob looked like he had smoked a lot of pot. His eyes were red and half-closed.

The stalking happened before he knew how to talk to women, he said. He didn’t have trouble with that anymore because he had taken a weekend-long seminar with a man who wrote a book about picking up women at parks and bookstores. I met Rob at the Guggenheim. I was annoyed that he approached me to let me know that I furrowed my brow when I looked at paintings and that might give me permanent wrinkles in the future. But, after that, he started talking about Analytic Cubism in a way that was endearingly nerdy. Later, I learned that the book about picking up women written by his seminar instructor encourages readers to say something mean instead of something nice as an opening line. This is supposed to change the power dynamic and make the woman feel as though she needs to impress the man. I think that is stupid advice. I agreed to go out with Rob because of the endearing nerdiness and because I liked the idea of telling people that I met a man at the Guggenheim. It had nothing to do with him informing me that I was going to be wrinkly.

I did not go on a second date with Rob. He said “Stop being so uptight” when I told him that all the talk of stalking was making me uncomfortable. Then, he said, “Why do women have to make everything such a big deal?” I got up from the table without saying another word to him. I walked home, looking over my shoulder whenever I heard footsteps close behind me. The breeze no longer felt enchanting. Now, it felt ominous. A shiver worked its way up my spine despite the heat. At home, I told my roommate the story, laughing. I left out the part about being scared.

Rob is at the top of my list of potential haunters. Also on the list are:

1. The guy I worked with at the Pizzeria Uno at South Street Seaport during my freshman year of college. He got my phone number off the schedule that was posted on the staff changing room door and called me to tell me he loved me. I told him that I was flattered but I did not love him. He told me that he would wait until I did. Two weeks later, he started dating the pretty hostess with very large breasts, but sometimes he looked at me when he kissed her hello or goodbye.

2. The ex-boyfriend who showed up in front of my job to say that he was getting married to the woman he cheated on me with unless I told him not to. I did not tell him not to. I had let him break my heart for long enough. He got married at City Hall and texted me a photo of his smiling wife. I texted him ‘congratulations.’ I really wanted to text him ‘you’re an asshole.’

3. The creepy yoga teacher from the studio I used to go to on the Lower East Side who asked a lot of students out, including me. He could easily have gotten my information from the registration system. He got fired for masturbating in the acupuncture room.

4. A robot.

The calls generally come between 1:30 and 3:30 in the morning. They come from a blocked number. I answer because what if it is my brother calling me from Ghana or my friend Pascal calling me from jail? My brother sometimes forgets about the time difference between Accra, where he lives, and New York. Pascal is one of the kindest souls I have ever known when he is sober, but he gets too drunk and fights people in front of bars.

The only thing I ever say to the voice on the phone is ‘hello’ and ‘who is this?’ and ‘stop this.’ I say these things several times, then I listen for a few seconds before hanging up. I never respond to the emails.

I do not believe in ghosts, but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a feeling that something is in my room, floating above me or standing silently in a corner. I have had this feeling since I was a little girl who was afraid of the dark and had to sleep with a nightlight. It is a thumping of heart, a tightness of throat. Recently, I jolted awake and saw a man-like thing sitting in the armchair by my bed. When I turned on my lamp, the shape of the man became a pile of unfolded laundry. Fear is an unpredictable and, at times, irrational emotion. It can be caused by dangers both real and imagined.

The number one lesson in the book about how to pick up a woman is to keep her wanting. Smile at her but then talk to her friend instead. Pretend that you have somewhere important to be so that she thinks that she has to sparkle to convince you to stay. Very slowly increase physical affection. Wanting is perhaps the opposite of fear, but they are both urgent forms of anticipation. The book aims to teach men to create in women the kind of wanting that works like a phobia—a type of persistent fear (want) of a being, object, or situation that the affected person will avoid (pursue) in a way that is disproportional to the actual danger (appeal) posed.

My ghost is a seemingly benign presence. It never threatens or rages. Sometimes, months will go by in which I won’t get a call or an email. Then, the familiar ringing in the dead of night, the realization that I have been waiting for it. The goal of a haunting is the same as the goal of a seduction: to become embedded in the consciousness, to not be forgotten.

Perhaps this is why I am convinced that my ghost is the voice and words of a man who failed to seduce me. Perhaps this is why, once in a while, a summer breeze against my back as I walk home at night makes me pick up the pace, makes me turn to see who is at my heels, makes me, still, just a little afraid of the dark.

Nadia Owusu is a current degree candidate at Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Daniel Johnson 3/22/16 Daniel Johnson 3/22/16

On Loving Contemporary Horror Movies

And so what’s the final temple? What’s our last defense from horrible death? After we have left our homes, all that we’ve got are our bodies. Which is why, so often, possession films are the most terrifying of all: The Exorcist, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Shining (sort of), The Conjuring. The reason we’ve seen such an oversaturation of these stories in recent years is because the horror industry has exhausted all its precedent anxieties. We’ve reached the end of a cycle in which the horror movies have systematically broken our sanctuaries down, violated them, reminded us we aren’t ever safe.

by Daniel Johnson

The Strangers (2008) — *The Strangers* (2008)

The most common response I get when I tell people that I studied horror films for my undergraduate degree is, simply: “No you didn’t.”

It’s true and it’s not. My Horror Films Studies course was only one three-credit elective toward the completion of my Film minor. Sometimes I deliver that line as if my degree thesis was, say, an analysis of how the graphic reportage of the Vietnam War contributed to the terror surrounding The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I do this, in part, because I’ll take any chance I can get to seem eccentric; it’s a fast-paced world out there, after all, full of people far more interesting than I am.

A fraction of the truth is that I’m particularly smitten by the genre because I associate the fear it elicits with the thrill of being young and dumb and in love. When I was in high school, such was the move: invite a girl to your place, share a blanket, and watch a scary flick on the couch in the basement, under the exposed guts of your house, pipes that would writhe and groan in uncanny rhythm with the silences in the movie. Lights off, obviously. Just she and I and the electric blue of the PG-13 hellscape on the old tube TV, a couple of Diet Cokes. This was my introduction into the realm of filmic terror.

It was also how I started seeing my first long-term girlfriend. Our initial dates were viewings of Disturbia and Cloverfield—two of those hedged, quasi-horror, quasi-thriller films that served to ease us into the genre before going full-on Rosemary’s Baby. We took it slow.

Those nights, beneath the blanket, we’d rub socked feet, lean into each other as cameras panned down dark hallways, excruciating and unhurried. If I was lucky, her shirt would have slid up during a jump-scare so that, when I put my hand back where it had been before we both reacted, it would be resting against the soft skin of her lower back. Some of my first exposure to intense, blue-balling sexual tension went just like that: my arousal, as well as the possibility of embracing its source, intensified at the same rate as manufactured fear.

With the same girlfriend, whenever we were at her place—a ranch home full of Catholic, conservative, God-fearing Italians—we’d have to play board games or watch rom-coms on the couch with her mother, who often chose the movie, and who could only handle leaving us alone for the duration of a bathroom break. We could hold hands. No blankets. She left the lamp on.

About halfway through Hitch or Just Friends, she’d feed us homemade, ultra-breaded marinara dishes made brick-heavy by all the cheese. My girlfriend and I would reluctantly eat on separate couch cushions while we watched the rest of the movie. We did this out of respect. My lap would grow warm from the heat of the food on the plate; I’d sweat in places I really didn’t want to be sweating.

I’m still convinced her mother was some sort of overprotective super villain. It was brilliant: she only made food that she knew would give us the meat/lactose sweats, so that whatever immediate attraction we felt for each other would be absolutely bludgeoned to death. The sexiest thing about those nights was the shit I would take when I got home that mercifully rid my body of maybe half the dairy I’d consumed for dinner.

To be clear, I wasn’t (and am not now) opposed to some good old fashioned family fun. I wasn’t (and am not now) a dog. But in that specific environment, under the shadow of my girlfriend’s mother, in the glow of a movie which likely had some ideologically rigid and self-righteous portrayal of love, trapped in home-cooked sweat, it all felt constricting. It felt like something that hadn’t yet taken shape was being viciously and unfairly molded by someone who had, all her life, suffered her various terrors. All her daughter and I wanted to do with each other was embrace terrors of our very own, twist ourselves in them. We wanted to use them to get weird with our unexplored, pubescent bodies.

Horror films were crucial to this sort of young, suburban passion. They were a superficial, straight-to-DVD rabbit-hole into the warped kingdom of my sexuality. At my house, what ended up happening beneath the blanket was always in stark contrast to the banality of the Diet Cokes, the buffalo-plaid couch, the artisanal, colonial décor of my suburban New England home. It was a netherworld made accessible by even the cheapest jump-scares.

She and I eventually moved on from the Cloverfields to more realist contemporary horror. Our staple was The Strangers: Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler alone together in house that wasn’t theirs, fucking on the table after Liv turned down Scott’s proposal for marriage. Three masked strangers with knives dog them through the night, mechanically breaking them down with horrifying foreplay: knocks on the window, record players mysteriously turned off in the other room, the front door left wide open. All of which led up to the slowest, gentlest, most terrifying stabbing sequence I’ve ever seen.

The ‘suburban’ modifier to that passion is perhaps its most important quality. In the short length of a year following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centers, vacancy rates in Lower Manhattan more than doubled. Families fled to places like my hometown: good public school systems, vast green commons, neighborhoods labeled as "Estates." I remember the influx of people, the municipal scramble to develop more cul-de-sacs, more condos, all the DPW trucks with their hazard lights flashing, fleets of them parked on top of berms outside vacant lots.

Over the course of the next decade, the horror industry exploited the safety America projected onto the suburbs. For those of us who were already there, like myself, the walls had closed in on our world a little bit. We understood then that we might be in the suburbs for the rest of our lives. At the time, after the attacks, we didn’t know how long those, our lives, would even last. We had less of a possible escape than we did before, and there seemed to be a doomsday clock on our American existence.

An example of how the horror/terror genre was always a step ahead of us: a film like Cloverfield exacerbated our fear of faceless, monumental terrors sacking our metropolises and burning them to the ground. The logical escape from that is an exodus to the suburbs. That’s where films like Disturbia, The Strangers and It Follows come into play; there are serial killer neighbors hiding in plain sight, and whatever it is that’s chasing us won’t stop just because we moved to a cul-de-sac. So okay, we’ll stay inside. But then our houses are haunted in films like Insidious, Paranormal Activity, and (my favorite campy-slogan example of this) When a Stranger Calls: “The call is coming from inside the house!”

And so what’s the final temple? What’s our last defense from horrible death? After we have left our homes, all that we’ve got are our bodies. Which is why, so often, possession films are the most terrifying of all: The Exorcist, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Conjuring. The reason we’ve seen such an oversaturation of these stories in recent years is because, within the last decade, the horror industry has exhausted all its precedent anxieties. We’ve reached the end of a cycle in which movies have systematically broken our sanctuaries down, violated them, reminded us we aren’t ever safe, the way masked sociopaths do to beautiful, nearly-married couples on vacation.

Perhaps that’s why it always felt like the awareness and discovery my ex-girlfriend and I experienced with regards to our bodies was a profound sort of transcendence. In beating the genre’s most unbeatable gambit, we came to appreciate it. I went on to study it.

This cycle is starting over. Earlier this month, Robert Eggers released his critically acclaimed directorial debut, The Witch. It calls itself a “New England Folktale,” in which a Puritan family is exiled from a settlement in 1630, only to move out to the banks of a forest, where they’re under siege from woodland witches. They struggle with their own fears of a fundamentalist God. We’re returning to the origins of American horror, to the forms it took when it secured its foothold in our country’s earliest people: when sexuality meant witchcraft, and believing in God meant believing that we were the devil.

Another response I tend to get when I tell people I studied horror films for my undergrad degree: something to the effect of, “Why?”

Fair question. A lot of them are unadulterated garbage. As a genre, though, and as a complete corpus of filmic art, they’re not deserving of such a reductive dismissal. Sometimes the psychology behind them is painfully on-the-nose, but at least they offer an accessible window into some complex ideas. They start conversations. They deserve their place in academia. A lot of them are kind of hot.

And yet, over time, my visceral lust for the genre has leveled off. There’s still all that hormones-on-parade history that textures those films with a certain nostalgic ecstasy. But as I've grown up, I've carved spaces for horror in tamer traditions.

Every Halloween, now, I get together in my basement with most of my fantasy football league—some years as few as three of us, others as many as twelve men and women. After I shut the porch light off at 9:00, we bring whiskey and beer and the remaining trick-or-treat candy to the basement and watch three horror movies on Netflix that we’ve never seen before. Lights out, obviously. Sometimes blankets, a better TV than before. We revel in the tradition, in the terribly-delivered lines that become part of our shared vernacular. Occasionally, we’re all genuinely scared. Even when we're not, there’s always a palpable energy in the room, something alive and slightly dangerous.

It’s no surprise to me that the folks with whom I watch sports are exactly those who appreciate the subtle nuances of sharing a horror film together. In his short essay for The Paris Review Daily, “Nauseating, Violent, and Ours,” Chris Bachelder (The Throwback Special) writes this about sports as a shared experience:

“I’ve spent some time wondering why I still watch and care about sports, particularly football, and I grasp at the idea that an avid interest in sports might be connected to a desire to belong. We could debate whether this is a justifiable and edifying expression of this desire, but the desire itself seems vital and real. In caring about sports, we join others in caring deeply about something over which we have essentially no control, our lucky socks notwithstanding. The stakes are not genuinely high, but they feel high, and worthy of our passions. Our powerlessness as passive viewers is mitigated by our sense of belonging, as it is by the comfortingly orderly rites and rituals of seasons and spectatorship. We experience occasional joy and wonder, frequent disappointment, and, in some cases, anguish and horror. All of this we experience communally, even when we watch alone.”

Why horror films? Five years ago, I would’ve told you it’s because they make for great dates. I still believe they do. But these days, it’s all about exactly what Bachelder posits: like sports, being terrified is a shared experience. Emotions are wrenched out of us by the spectacular. And it doesn’t really matter what in particular we feel. It doesn't to me, at least. What matters is the experience of feeling something, together.

Daniel Johnson is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He currently works at The Paris Review.

Daniel Johnson 3/15/16 Daniel Johnson 3/15/16

Beyond the Pale

by John Vercher

Laurie broke my heart. She didn’t mean to. I know that now. I’m sure I knew it then. But still.

My parents transferred me to the public high school after four years in two separate parochial schools. This is to say I knew no one. The first day seemed interminable. Class after class, I extended my hand to introduce myself and met with hard stares and warnings to not get caught in the parking lot alone when the bell rang at the end of the day. That all happened before lunch. Noon came, and I exited the food line, tray in hand and looked out across throngs of unfamiliar faces. They glared back. I weaved my way through the tables in the hopes that someone would slide a chair out for me instead of pushing the empty ones in. I ate alone and wished the day away.

Alphabetical seating arrangements left Laurie and me in the last seats of our respective rows of Algebra I. Blonde bangs hovered above her forehead, a waterfall that flowed out from the sawtoothed strands of her crimped hair. Before class began, she laughed with her friends and her braces glinted in the glow of the fluorescents overhead. Her laugh lines almost, but not quite concealed a mole next to her nose, a beauty mark, perfect in its imperfection. The second bell rang and as the students finished their murmurs and turned forward, she glanced back at me.

I opened to a random page in my book and hoped she hadn’t seen me. I felt her look away. Certain I was in the clear, I went to resume my stare.

She’d been watching me. This day was looking up.

The curtains pulled back and the movie trailer of our relationship played on the screen of my mind’s eye. Berlin sang “Take My Breath Away” over footage of me as I scrawled my first note to her. Will you go with me? Check yes or no. Sorry So Short. Cut to our own table at lunch. Cut to holding hands in the hallway. Cut to prom. As I stared off into space, I caught movement in my periphery. She looked at me again. This time neither of us looked away. My glasses, thick enough to see the future, had slid down my oil-slicked nose, and I pushed them back up. I finger combed at the duckling soft hair on my upper lip, smiled my gap-toothed smile (my braces wouldn’t come for another year) and just when I thought I the day couldn’t end any better, she went ahead and said it.

“You have a really nice tan,” she whispered.

The movie reel sputtered. The celluloid melted. The film broke.

* * *

In the countless times I’ve thought about that day, I haven’t figured out what I honestly expected Laurie to say. The truth is, I never expected her to say anything, at least not to someone like me; someone who collected comic books, played with action figures a little longer than he should have, and spent lost weekends with Sonic the Hedgehog and King Hippo. Someone whose clothes were less cool than his glasses, and with a complexion that resembled the terrain of a topographical map. I never thought about the fact that I had brown skin, a wide nose, and straight hair. I was a biracial geek before it was hip to be either. No wonder Laurie stared. To be fair, I shared her confusion, about what I was and about who I was. And though my struggles with identity had begun long before that day, Laurie still ended up my first.

With one statement, Laurie became the first person to make me realize that there was something else about me that people, particularly girls, would see before they noticed the barely-there moustache or my questionable fashion sense. That afternoon was my big bang, the event from which all other questions of my identity sprung forth. It was the beginning of a high wire act, on which I walked with a constant teeter, only able to take a step before I re-assessed my footing, before I found a balance between what I liked and what I was supposed to like. How I talked and how I was supposed to talk. Who I loved and whom I was supposed to love. As if being thirteen weren’t hard enough.

* * *

“I kind of have it all the time,” I said.

“Are you Italian?”

“Nope.”

“Spanish?”

I shook my head. She cocked hers with tight-lipped confusion. Her bangs didn’t move.

“So…what are you?”

“I’m black,” I said.

“Both parents?” she asked.

Laurie had exclaimed it with such surprise that a few students ahead of us turned. My face went hot, embarrassed at their watching, humiliated by her disbelief. My throat felt dry and I managed a nod.

“Huh,” she said, and turned back around.

* * *

My sons are three and one. My wife is white. Beyond the pale of her skin, my oldest boy looks little like her. He shares my wide nose, my gapped teeth, and my straight hair. My one year old has my wife’s features and her complexion. The frequency with which I’ve thought about that afternoon increased exponentially since I first found out we were pregnant.

My three year old might meet his own Laurie. She won’t stare at his skin color. She won’t list all the possible races and ethnicities she thinks he could be (because that’s a thing to do), and she won’t bark in disbelief when he names the only one she didn’t guess. They’ll pass notes, hold hands and maybe he’ll even bring her home to meet his folks. That’s when the questions will start, both his and hers. She won’t understand why I look so different. He won’t understand why it matters.

I know what to teach my sons about who they are, but not about who the world expects them to be. I want to infect them with mine and their mother’s rampant idealism, with the notion that we all crawled from the same soup, that we are all human beings but I know that doing so leaves them vulnerable to pain. I know that as much as we don’t want it to matter, despite the declarations that we live in a post-racial America, it does matter. I want my sons to understand the struggle, but I don’t want them to experience it. And I don’t know if that’s right.

I know that Laurie didn’t mean anything by what she said. I do know that even at our young ages, the fact that she thought it was okay to ask those questions isn’t okay, that it’s representative of a problem ever present almost thirty years later. I also know that while I want my boys to know why Daddy is nervous when he gets pulled over, they won’t ever have to be. I know that while I’ll be concerned when they’re out late with their friends, I won’t be worried because their pants are a little baggy or they wore a hoodie that night. I won’t be worried about these things, because while they look like me, they don’t look enough like me. For that I am glad.

And because I am glad, I am ashamed.

John Vercher is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. His piece, "Homewood," won the 2014 Assignment Student Contest, and can be seen in Issue #1.

Daniel Johnson 3/8/16 Daniel Johnson 3/8/16

Chill, Baby

by Nadia Owusu

There was, as is often the case, no warning that the G train would not be running past midnight. No flyers or posters. No announcements on the A train telling passengers not to bother getting off to transfer. Nothing. The woman on the microphone at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street station sounded thrilled about this inconvenience even as she apologized for it.

I was pissed off because nobody came into the restaurant for dinner that night so I didn’t make any money. I only had two thirds of my rent that was due in a week. I was going to have to pick up shifts during finals. I stood around all night polishing wine glasses and folding napkins instead of studying for my statistics exam. Tonight would be another sleepless one. There would probably be crying. I usually cried when I studied for math tests because I’m very bad at math. Doing things that I’m very bad at makes me sad about all the things in the world that I will probably never really understand, like electricity and Einstein's general theory of relativity.

During my shift, the bartender I was in the process of breaking up with had gotten drunk and annoying. He flirted all night with that blonde woman from across the street, and not just in the compulsory bartender way. She came to see him every night, even in this snowstorm. Usually he was polite to her, but disinterested. She had thick, square, acrylic French-manicured nails. She wore sticky pink lip gloss. She always started out her evening with a Sex on the Beach. Her voice sounded like her acrylic nails on a chalkboard. But, he leaned over the bar and looked into her eyes. He probably talked to her about his art, how he’d dropped out of law school for it. I did not like the thought of him sharing that part of himself, the part I liked, with her. So what if I had ignored his phone calls for three days? I was supposed to be the one ending it, not him. And now the stupid G train wasn’t running.

I kicked an empty forty bottle that someone had discarded on the platform. It was still wrapped tightly in a brown paper bag. It rolled unsatisfyingly for a few seconds then stopped at a middle-aged Rasta’s feet. He had his head tipped up as though waiting for further instruction from the MTA. I was not holding my breath for any such thing. We were, I knew, on our own.

“Chill, baby,” he said.

I hate it when random men call me ‘baby,’ especially when they’re telling me what to do. I might have told him as much. I thought about it. I was in the mood for it. But I had kicked a bottle at him so I didn’t exactly hold the moral high ground. I scowled at him instead.

“I hear ya,” he said, even though I hadn’t said anything. “How we supposed to get home?”

“Yeah,” I said.

There was a bus that would get me close enough to walk to my apartment. Not as close as the G train, but closer than the A train. I had never taken that bus but I knew it existed because my friend Sarah who lived down the street was always going on and on about how she took it everywhere. She talked about taking the bus the way people talk about juice detoxes and meditation which is weird because there’s nothing about the bus that is healthier than the train. At least nothing I can think of.

Outside, the snow was still coming down in heavy, sharp white pellets. It was the kind of snow that made opening an umbrella look pitiful. I buttoned the coat button that pinches the skin under my chin. I had to do that so my hood would not blow off in the whooshing wind. Google on my cellphone told me that the bus stop was six blocks away. The bus, I thought, better be running as usual. My brain said this in threatening tones. I needed the universe to know that I meant business.

What’s nice about walking in a snowstorm when you’re somewhat unreasonably miserable is that it makes your misery more reasonable. I don’t mind snowstorms when I don’t have to go anywhere except down the street to my favorite hole-in-the-wall for a hot toddy, or when I can stay indoors reading books and making soup. I do mind them under most other circumstances.

There were very few cars out that night; very few pedestrians. Downtown Brooklyn didn’t feel peaceful though. It felt abandoned. It felt like everyone was safe and sound at home except for me. I blamed a lot of people for this. I didn’t care if my reasoning was irrational. I was not interested in considering association versus causality. Perhaps this tendency is why I was having such a hard time with Statistics II.

It was my landlord’s fault for raising the rent by $150 when I was already struggling to pay it. I knew that this would happen when the hipsters moved in. I blamed those hipsters and their rich parents. I blamed my parents for not being rich. I blamed the university I attended for being so expensive. I blamed financial aid for not covering my whole tuition. It was the bartender’s fault for flirting with that blonde woman and making me jealous enough to stay at the restaurant for an hour after closing time to drink whiskey with him. The MTA was the worst institution that ever existed. Never mind that it ran trains and buses twenty-four hours a day so that I didn’t have to own a car. The G train wasn’t running right now. I also had a bone to pick with the mathematicians who developed theoretical and applied statistics.

I was walking with my head down so that the snow didn’t attack my eyeballs. They’re very sensitive. Walking in that way made it difficult to see where I was going. I had to stop every block to check whether or not I had arrived at the corner where I was supposed to turn left. My sense of direction is very poor. I was standing on Atlantic and Nevins when something large and brown leapt past me and into the street. A bus, perhaps my bus, rolled over it. The bus kept going, leaving the street empty and white again, except for a mangy mutt that was now bleeding red into the snow.

The mutt was silent. I rushed over to where it was lying. Its belly had been crushed and split open. The sight of its exposed flesh and guts filled my lungs with freezing oxygen. It—he—was dead. As far as I could see, there hadn’t been anything or anyone chasing him, nothing to spook him. I wanted to touch his nose but as I bent down and reached out my hand, I started to shake.

“Hey sweetheart,” called out a man wearing a backpack with a hard hat tied to it, “you okay?”

I don’t like it when off-duty construction workers I don’t know call me ‘sweetheart,’ but it didn’t seem important in that moment.

“There’s a dead dog in the road,” I yelled at him.

“Why?” he asked.

That the mutt had been hit by a bus was not the answer to that question. It was only a consequence.

“I don’t know,” I yelled. I didn’t need to yell. He wasn’t very far away. Maybe I wasn’t yelling at him.

I felt ridiculous standing in the street now, so I joined the construction worker on the sidewalk. The two of us stood in silence, looking at the mutt.

“That’s the way it is sometimes,” he said after a while. “It was probably the snow.”

What he meant by that last part, I did not know. But, I nodded and started walking towards the bus stop again. This time, I let it snow into my eyeballs. The snowflakes didn’t feel as sharp as I imagined. They just felt like cold water. I blinked and let them drip onto my cheeks. I had to accept that the storm would keep storming until it was over. And when I got to the bus stop, the bus would come or it wouldn’t. There would be reasons for whatever happened just as there must have been reasons for the mutt in the road. But, I might never know them. And they wouldn’t necessarily mean that any of it made sense.

Daniel Johnson 3/1/16 Daniel Johnson 3/1/16

So Go the Ghosts

I think the common misconception with Schrödinger’s experiment is that its findings can encourage indecision. But choosing to make no decision, to take no measurement, to send no text, are still in themselves active resolutions. I’ve consciously left the ghosts of those affairs in the box, cryogenically frozen, petrified in amber. They’re still there. In having done so within the Schrödinger framework, I elected for their life. Rather, I chose life and death and everything else; I elected for their infinity.

by Daniel Johnson

Last spring, I reacquainted myself with Schrödinger’s paradox, the early 20th century thought experiment in which scientists--namely, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger--sealed both a housecat and a vial of radioactive material inside a metal box to illustrate and examine the effects of quantum indeterminacy. Attached to the interior of the box was a small hammer rigged with a random timer; should the device trigger, it would shatter the vial, releasing nuclear fumes into the vacuum and suffocating the cat. Because the box was metal, and because the death-device was random, it was impossible for observers to know the outcome unless they opened it. And so Schrödinger suggested that, while the box remained closed, the cat existed in two states: dead and alive. His theory was that whoever opened the box and found the cat dead had been the one who, in a sense, killed it.

I was, at the time, spending the majority of my time tending to my family cat. Her name was Bonnie, and she was dying. For the better part of a decade, she had slept in the crook of my arm. She had trouble staying warm. The shelter we adopted her from thought she might have had a chromosome defect that resulted in abnormally thin, soft skin. She was the runt of the litter.

At the end, Bonnie had a bum leg that kept degenerating until she couldn't walk the stairs. Bonnie was my friend. I had shared almost half of my life with her: gray-fogged mornings before the bus ride to high school, afternoon naps when I was too hungover to pet her, evenings of reading marathons, of her chewing the corners of dust jackets and nudging me for attention. During those last days of her life, I worked from home, and when I held her, walked her upstairs, placed her at the foot of my bed and watched her fall asleep just to make sure that's as far as she'd fall, I grieved like she was already dead.

And so, Schrödinger. I pre-mourned my cat's death by spending midnight hours at the kitchen table, reading discussions about quantum mechanics on strange forums at the back ends of the Internet. I followed most the users who dedicated so much time trying to calculate the odds that Schrödinger's cat would be alive when the box opened. Bonnie would be asleep at the foot of the chair, tail wrapped around a wooden leg, belly rising in harsh New England moonlight that shone through the window over the dripping sink.

My fascination with the experiment, though, peaked with the Spring 2015 issue of The Paris Review, in which a character in Mark Leyner’s “Gone with the Mind” (now available in book form) alludes to the experiment in one of my favorite closing lines to a piece of short fiction (emphasis mine):

“Life’s harrowing fucking slog—we’re driven by irrational, atavistic impulses into an unfathomable void of quantum indeterminacy—but, still…it’s nice to have a friend, a comrade, a ‘paracosm,’ whatever, to share things with.”

And so, Bonnie.

I was in the room at Franklin Vet Clinic when Dr. Parker squeezed the euthanasia into the rubber tube feeding Bonnie's bloodstream. My hand was on her rib-cage. She breathed deeply, arrhythmically on a threadbare blue towel that was monstrously frayed at the edges. Everything was uncomfortably exposed in swipes of colorless morning light from a window over the examination table. I felt her tiny pulse halt as the final sleep coursed through her body after the doctor and her aide asked one too many goddamn times if I was sure, if I had considered the alternatives carefully enough to be certain this was the right choice. They made it sound like the alternatives were infinite.

I don't think I'm ever more conscious of how uncertain I am than when I try to feign the opposite. And so not only did an uncomfortable awareness of the pathology to the whole procedure rake fire through my throat—the small gasp of the needle, the stainless steel slab that smelled like cleaning products and served as my beloved companion's deathbed—but it also made me feel like I was assuming more and more agency in its execution. As is the case with many people who elect to put their pets down, I was convinced for a while that I had done the killing.

The idea of exchanging my decision for one in which I preserved Bonnie inside a sealed box is psychotic and sad. But I’m not beyond believing that, in my grief, I found some solace in the simple theoretical absolution of a cat that was both dead and still alive—still, somehow, with me—at the same time. I’d invoke Schrödinger whenever I hallucinated her ghost: black blurs of matted fur in my bedroom doorway, the phantom pat of paws on my carpet.

Lesser such heartbreaks followed in the summer. I was, around that time, on-and-off dating a string of women who were all committed to other men. With each of them, I absconded to hotel rooms in the New England country. If any of them were house-sitting for a relative, I made love, fucked, whatever, in beds that explicitly belonged to someone else.

It wasn’t always intense. There were smaller days. On the weekends we could get away, we went for riverside walks, read Ben Lerner’s poetry out loud to each other, made bets on who could better sear a blackened salmon for supper, picnicked in mountain valleys, fell asleep listening to evening rainstorms. Mostly, though, our relationships existed in the text messages and emails we back-and-forthed every day for the better part of a year. I shared things with them, told them about Bonnie. I fell in love.

After a while, as these things go, the nights when I felt good about the affairs became vastly outnumbered by the ones when I felt less so. I would eventually pressure each of them to leave their partners. They stopped responding altogether, which a friend recently told me is a modern love phenomenon called "ghosting." They all disappeared.

I never once messaged them asking why exactly they had gone away. And even if I did, I knew any attempt to find out would have ensnared me in the observer’s paradox: by trying to measure the outcome, I might affect its absolution—a mini Schrödinger on my shoulder, offering admonitions. A text might have ushered our relationship to a definitive, punctuated end. Whether they had reconciled with their men, or found someone else, I didn’t want to know. I wasn't ready for that. In a way, I disappeared too.

Schrödinger’s logic is abstract, but it holds. When you reduce the jargon of it all, you get a tautology and a platitude: we won’t know for sure until we know for sure, and sometimes not knowing is the safer state. Ignorance is bliss, etc. I once spent a whole night searching for any online evidence that Schrödinger had been heartbroken prior to conducting his experiment. Jury's out.

I had never been ghosted before. Handling such a sudden loneliness left me wayward. I took off to the Midwest, where I lived for a while in a friend’s study. I walked her dogs through dairy fields, gardened for her, bird-watched for sandhill cranes in soybean farms. I lived at the margins of other people's lives because it was clear I was a self-destructive time-bomb when I existed at center of mine. Sometimes my friend would let me talk to her about Schrödinger, about how I so obsessively believed the essence of his experiment was inseparably linked with all my most recent ghosts. For the most part, I tried to forget about him, move on from all of it.

I live in New York City now. People here ask me why I’m not dating, why I haven’t downloaded Tinder, why I stay after hours at the office, why I bring work to the bar. Mostly I don’t answer. I’m content, and it’s hard to talk about ghosts. There's no lighthearted way to articulate that I’m still learning how to gracefully repopulate—navigate, even—a world affected by all this absence.

So much of it had been well off my mind until a few weeks ago, when I heard news about the cosmic superstorm, and the gravitational ripple that all but confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity. I’ve been trying, as we all should, to understand the incredible magnitude of what this means.

All of it may suggest that the probability of plural realities and multiverses is more likely than ever. And so perhaps most fascinating about the impact of those two black holes coming together is the way its scientific implications echo religious sentiment. A hopeful reading of the multiverse theory offers a comfort not so unlike the idea of the afterlife, should you believe in it: whatever dissatisfaction we have with the current reality can be mitigated and even justified by the idea of salvation in that “Something After.” Now, it’s coupled with what one might call a “Something Adjacent,” a single reality—or billions of them—moving parallel to ours onto which we can superpose our most desired personal storylines. Theoretical places where the ghosts we carry just might be alive yet.

And so—again—Shrödinger. Of the infinite possible outcomes, our world is merely one of them. We’re just a random, mildly grizzly scene—“a harrowing fucking slog,”—that the universe came upon after it peeked inside its own box.

After the news, I thought first of Bonnie. After she died, my family received in the mail a glossed postcard from Dr. Parker, along with a handwritten note of condolence and a transcription of the prose-poem “The Rainbow Bridge,” one of the more famous consolatory pieces of writing regarding the death of a pet. In the poem, Rainbow Bridge is a destination for the departed—both a literal bridge and the place beyond it, two realities no longer gapped—described as an other-worldly meadow where “those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by.” There was a fairytale drawing in the corner of the postcard: a wooden bridge, some fluffy trees, a vast green country, blue skies. A reality where our ghosts are both dead and alive, where Bonnie tumbles between states, between that reality and the ones in my dreams.

I thought then of my affairs. In the throes of my Schrödinger fascination, I had spoken to each woman about different worlds where they weren’t with other men, where we were, in some actuality, together and uninhibitedly so. Ours were connections that transcended singular worlds, I said. Plainly, the most insufferable pillow-talk. But this was how I had justified their decision to leave me in boxes, locked in the dark metal chamber of other-manhood. It’s how I rationalized my decision to stay there. I told myself it was possible that I existed as a haven for them in their complicated and otherwise unhappy relationships. My very presence in their lives suggested a multitude of other worlds. That might have given them some sort of hope. It definitely gave them attention.

Most days, in the midsummer thick of grief, and of virtual and occasionally physical passion, it seemed like reason enough to stick around. In the days since the discovery, I’ve found myself wondering again whether I was right, replaying the memories, enduring weeping fits when I think of the way Bonnie looked at me from my lap as we drove her to the vet that spring morning, as if that wave of gravity bent me back through time.

I think the common misconception with Schrödinger’s experiment is that its findings can encourage indecision. But choosing to make no decision, to take no measurement, to send no text, are still in themselves active resolutions. I’ve consciously left the ghosts of those affairs in the box, cryogenically frozen, petrified in time. They’re still there. In having done so within the Schrödinger framework, I elected for their life. Rather, I chose life and death and everything else; I elected for their infinity.

This, however theoretically, stripped from those relationships a lot of the ugliness inherent in affairs. Over time, whatever love I felt for each woman has returned to its unspoiled, uncarved state, like the glimmer of poetic possibility before the pen touches the page. It exists now in its purest, quantum form: boxed away, stuffed in some corner attic of the heart, left to crust over until I haul it to a landfill, or reopen it to find something still breathing.

There are moments when I feel like this is as close to acceptance, closure, forgiveness, any of it, as I can get. There are others when I wonder if it’s more like desperation, or the unwillingness to let go, let die. But anyways, you can’t keep a ghost with a stranglehold, or with any conscious grip at all. You just let it be. It’ll stick around until it won’t. You’ll know it’s gone when you feel it pass through the walls of your room, your apartment, the twilit cityscape, the atmosphere—cardboard thin, all of it.

Ghosts go quietly, graciously. They’re like fireworks that don’t combust until the uncatalogued reaches of the universe, where black holes collide and gravity is a tidal thing, eroding us in waves.

Daniel Johnson is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He's currently interning at The Paris Review.

Daniel Johnson 2/23/16 Daniel Johnson 2/23/16

Winners and Losers

by David Moloney

A five year old’s birthday party at a Taekwondo school sounded like a bachelor party at an opera house. It didn’t make sense to me. I imagined kids clumsily kicking foam dolls, or throwing limp-wristed punches at padded walls, getting barked at by dudes in doboks until they collapsed in defeated tears. I didn’t imagine it was a place where a room of four- and five-year-olds would have barrels of fun.

There were twenty or so kids who attended. The school's Master told us to remove our children’s footwear upon entry. My daughter May ripped off her socks without hesitation and hurried over to the group. The kids sat on a blue mat and we parents were scattered throughout three rows of bleachers. The Master announced that we would have a day of fun and games in honor of Oliver, my nephew, the birthday boy.

The first game was dodge ball. I wondered how May would do with losing. May is dainty, cautious, and sweet. She would have been my first target in middle school gym class. The way the kids were so unsure of themselves made me remember the days of slinging the ball at the weaker kids first, the ones you knew would just stand still and frozen. I looked over the kids and I could instantly pick out the ones who would lose first, and the ones I would have hid behind early in the game.

Halfway through the game, a small boy lost and one of the instructors guided him off the mat. He cried. The parents in the bleachers exhaled a cohesive “awe” as he ran to his father. The instructors kept the music playing and the game going. The kids still in the game gave no attention to the boy crying. They played on, and no one else cried when they lost. The boy sat on his father’s lap and never rejoined the party.

May pirouetted her way around the bouncing ball. She twirled and skipped carelessly, as if she may not have even been part of the same game. She made it to the final four. When the ball finally found her, she walked off the mat smiling without searching me out in the bleachers.

There’s a growing concern among millennial parents about the absence of dodge ball in school. I’ve heard the argument that kids need to learn how to lose, that not everyone can be winner. My uncle Billy calls it the “pussification of America.” I’ve been entangled in this argument and I’ve championed the need for dodge ball, the need to “un-pussy” America. I’ve laughed in reminiscence about head-hunting the slower kids, the dainty kids, the kids like May.

The first thing my family mulled over at the after party was the dodge ball game and the crying boy. There was a collective praise from my siblings, my father, and my uncle Billy, about the way the crying boy was handled by the instructors.

“See how they didn’t even look at him?” my father asked. “That’s how you do it.”

This sort of praise was expected from my family. I am one of four children, and growing up, there was always a respected competitiveness amongst us. No one ever wanted to lose, even if the sport or spelling bee or game of flashlight tag didn’t include siblings. We always wanted to dominate. It came from the top down. My father wasn’t easy on us in games. He was notorious for the line, “I’ve never lost a game of (insert game here).” That included games against his children. He never let us win.

A string of snowy days the week after the party brought me to dusting off our Wii and setting it up for May. We sampled the games to find out which ones she was coordinated enough to play. She picked up Swordplay quickly, the game where two Mii’s battle on a platform with light saber type weapons until one gets knocked into the water below. May beat the A.I. fighters quite easily. Then, she challenged me to a duel.

Up until this point, our game-playing experience had been cooperative contests against a common enemy: get all the chickens back in the coup away from the hungry fox, build a rainbow so the Ponies can run underneath to a star dusted freedom. But now, I held the controller and stood against her.

May’s idea of trash talk was to make fun of my Mii’s ordinariness.

“Look at your eyes,” she said, “they don’t sparkle like mine.” She had insisted, when making her Mii, to have the eyes that were diamonds.

Best of three rounds, and without thinking I beat her round one. Her Mii fell into the water and she spun to me in disbelief. She yelled, “Daddy,” and in that moment I realized the position I’d put myself in.

She then told me she was going to kick my butt in genuine confidence.

The next round, May swung up and down a few dozen times and my Mii fell into the water. She cheered.

Round three I made sure to make May work for it. I blocked her wild slashes until her arms were tired and the swings became tiny chops. I brought myself close to the edge and May gave a final sweeping blow.

When you’re the one of the kids in gym class with a good arm and good hands, when you can flatten to the floor under a high throw, leap over a bouncing ball, you love dodge ball. You count down the minutes through math class until you can roll around and smash a red ball off kid’s foreheads.

When you’re a kid and you’ve lost hundreds of games of chess to your father, trying to out-maneuver him, figure out why you can’t beat him, and, then, finally win on one foggy morning in a camper at Lake Sebago, the victory stays with you like a proud scar.

But when you have the say on whether or not someone else wins or loses, when you control the outcome, the game changes. You’re a giant gripping the ball as swarms of easy-target little people run around your feet. You’re a teacher. You have knowledge of cause and lasting effect, of inevitable outcome.

As my Mii floated in the air with his normal-looking eyes, stayed suspended there for a moment, then plopped into the pixelated water below, I knew this first allowance of victory wouldn’t be my last. I’ll shelve the ball until she is ready to throw it back.

David Moloney is a current MFA candidate at Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency Program in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Daniel Johnson 2/17/16 Daniel Johnson 2/17/16

Leikmót, 2015

by Eric Beebe

When Matt invited me to Bill’s house for leikmót, I decided I’d bring a pie. I felt like I owed some offering in exchange for the welcome Matt had extended to me from Hurstwic, a group of modern-day warrior-scholars of ancient Scandinavian tradition. I had attended and participated in a few of their combat training sessions before, but I paled in comparison to Matt. I liked Viking history and the culture of the Norseman. He practically lived it. He’d refused to shave his beard for about a decade, and his skin was decorated with tattoos of runes and symbols linked to Odin. When we first became friends I could see myself striving for the same, but then years passed, and I accepted my place in this century while he held the link between the periods tighter than I could even hold a sword.

I made the pie with wild boar and apple and acorn, striving for whatever historical relevance I could muster. The day of the event, Matt drove us to Bill’s house. Bill was head of Hurstwic, and he hosted the leikmót and annual Winternights Feast in his backyard. I remember thinking his home bore surprising Colonial influence for what I half-expected to be a Nordic longhouse. His driveway wound through a thicket of trees like some hidden path to a wise man from a fantasy series.

The other visitors hailed us from the back porch. I recognized few faces and introduced myself to the rest with trepidation. After only making training on a couple occasions, it was hard to feel worthy among the more dedicated at this yearly ritual. Even their conversation was alien to me. Talk with friends and family always seemed such a contest of who spoke first and loudest. But these men and women around me took time with their words, letting spans of silence pass between them in peace, enjoying the October air.

Within the hour, Bill called all to order with an opening speech. He gave the history of the leikmót as a contest of might, speed, and cunning held with annual feasts before days grew short and larders keenly measured. Bill announced there would be prizes for the most impressive competitors.

We played knattleikur first. Like much known of the Norse, many fine details were lost outside of the sagas, but what resulted was some distant relative of rugby and hockey. The Swift Wings of the Valkyrie faced off against The Old Berserkers, blocking runs, stealing balls, and trying to trip each other with their staves. The Swift Wings won a bag of Icelandic candy. Everyone broke after the contest to cast a silent vote on an MVP.

There were then shield- and spear-throwing competitions. I watched Matt throw a shield every conceivable way for optimum yardage. Reynir, our resident Icelander, hit truer with each consecutive spear he threw. I couldn’t hit anything with a shield, and my spear-throws were far from any of our target’s imaginary vitals.

After archery and barrel-fighting drills, we prepared to feast. I helped two other guests bake flat disks of bread beneath the pot over Bill’s fire pit, where he had been cooking stew over the open flame. We just warmed my pie in the kitchen stove. Wooden bowls were brought out for us to serve ourselves, and we gathered in a circle to eat. Plenty complimented my pie, but I found it too bitter after parboiling the meat in an IPA and wondered how they could enjoy it. Bill’s stew was much more appealing to me, but I waited and waited for someone else to lead the charge before daring to grab seconds. We washed our dinner down with beer and Brennivín, Icelandic schnapps traditionally imbibed with rotted shark meat.

As we finished the meal, two attendees brought out a wooden chest and a hula-hoop wrapped in decorative tape. Bill explained Nordic reverence for rings and oaths taken on them and held the hoop out between us to grasp in unison. With our hands locked in place he convened Hurstwic’s bi-yearly meeting of associates. We talked as much about the blessings native Icelanders sent us from their ancestors as we did the groups P.R. and marketing.

With talk of business done, Bill conveyed the day’s prizes: Icelandic licorice candies, certificates, and stones. In Iceland, Matt had told me, the locals protected even their smallest stones. They were a part of cultural history, the spirit of the land.

“Rocks don’t grow back,” he had told me.

But now Bill awarded stones from famous sites of the sagas to a number of the games’ participants, and somehow even I’d made the cut. He handed me one the shape of a rounded triangle he said came from the site of knattleikur in the saga of Gísli Súrsson. I told him it was going on my mantle.

We concluded the meeting, and Bill insisted we leave our dishes and take any leftover beer and skyr, yogurt still made from Nordic bacterial cultures and once used to extinguish fires. He gave out books that he and a colleague were ready to pass on. Matt and I were keen on his offers and last to leave. As we toted paper bags of our spoils back to his SUV, I carried my stone in my shirt pocket. We set course for home with a vessel full of weapons, bodies pleased by the ache of exhaustion, and a piece of Iceland’s soul resting over my chest.

Eric Beebe is a current MFA candidate at Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency Program in Fiction and Nonfiction.