Cathode
Sometimes, my memory is like an old television set, turned on after the show has started.  The screen takes a few minutes to warm up, the picture coming into view as a cathode ray tube writes analog signals, showing us—finally—a chubby kid standing on a sidewalk.  The camera captures him from above, through a dirty second-story window.  Pan left, there’s Rob, staring down at him.  Pan right, there’s Pat, slack-jawed.  Down below, the kid—Mike—is glaring at his observers.  Even from a distance, they can tell he’s trying not to cry.  He extends both arms away from his body, then extends both middle fingers, then continues to storm down the street.
Mike had invited all of us over the night before.  He wanted us to camp out in his backyard and play Dungeons and Dragons or Marvel Superheroes all night, which is something we frequently did in the woods near my house, but never out at his home.  None of us really liked going over to Mike’s, which was always messy and drafty, way out in the West Virginia wilderness.  His parents were strange.  His dad was frequently gone, and his mom—a teacher at the middle school we’d all just graduated from—seemed to spend most of her time screaming at her younger children.
I don’t know which of us mentioned it first, that day as our role-playing game club met in the office above the bookstore where we bought our ten-sided dice.  But gradually, we realized that none of us—and we numbered over half a dozen, I’m sure—had gone out to the house in the woods.  Nobody even bothered to call Mike to decline the invitation.  We laughed about this, and I guess we laughed when Mike flipped us off, too, although that was a more nervous laughter, a way to reassure ourselves that we hadn’t done anything wrong. Mike was just being a wuss.
Later that afternoon, at my house, we gathered our camping supplies and character sheets, ready to head out to the woods.  My old TV was tuned in to the local news.  This seems odd, in hindsight– 15-year-olds watching the local news?  Maybe we’d been watching something else beforehand.  Regardless.  The top story—local middle school teacher arrested that morning for having sex with a 13-year-old student.  She would later insist that he had seduced her, that she fell in love while trying to help him do better in his classes, and I don’t know.  Maybe.  I can’t really say what goes on in some people’s heads, and Mike never spoke to any of us again—his dad moved them away pretty quickly.  All I’ve got is that image—the kid standing on the sidewalk, trying not to cry as he flips off the kids who were supposed to be his friends on what, I’m sure, must have been the worst day of his life.  And then the image on the screen fades and caves in on itself, leaving only blankness.

William Bradley is the author of the hybrid prose chapbook Tales of a Multiverse in Peril! (published by Urban Farmhouse Press) and the essay collection Fractals (forthcoming from Lavender Ink), and his work has appeared in a variety of magazines including Brevity, Fourth Genre, Utne Reader, and The Missouri Review.  He lives in Canton, New York, where he teaches at St. Lawrence University.

 … return to Issue 7.2 Table of Contents.

Drinking the OED
I lose some days to the dictionary. On these blessed, dangerous days, I wake up late, and, post coffee and breakfast burrito, feel ready to brawl with hippopotamuses. And I do, of sorts, almost inevitably.
I start with the best intentions: to write, to read, to think the big thoughts, or at least grade a few student papers. But, as I am handling words, it’s only a matter of time before one of those bundles of squiggles and dots sends me into the Oxford English Dictionary, which is to say, into the wildwood of speech, with its petrified, dead words and its sapling-green ones, its centuries-long grime of connotations, forking etymologies, and amputated, lost meanings. I never stop at just one word. One doesn’t lead to two; it leads to them all.
Here, in the thousand-year forest, there be monsters, and they come in three primary flavors: the mouthfilling, Latinate behemoths; the chivalric nightmares of Norman ancestry that, once deboned, go down gooey and silky; and the Anglo-Saxon, consonant-fat beasts that feel as solid on the tongue as an old coin. Such abundant game boggles even a coffee-fortified brain. After a few hours of reading the dictionary, I start to feel word-drunk. My tongue goes clumsy. But beyond the sheer lexical profusion, one thing really wallops: usage illustrations, the more vintage the better.
A windfucker is a kestrel, which is a bit of letdown at first, and then really grows on you. (Why don’t we have vulgar names for all the birds?) And, unsurprisingly, the word is also used, as the OED tactfully puts it, “as a term of opprobrium.” Swish about and savor this 1602 quotation: “I tell you, my little windfuckers, had not a certaine melancholye ingendred with a nippinge dolour overshadowed the sunne shine of my mirthe, I had beene I pre, sequor, one of your consorte.” I have never read a more thrilling excuse. And to think I only say to my friends, “I don’t feel like going out tonight.”
Consider swag. It makes a fine noun, but swag comes into its own as a verb. The OED defines the word as “Criminals’ slang” (see cant, argot, and Thieves’ Latin) for “to push (a person) forcefully, to shove; to take or snatch away roughly.” Forget William Blake’s “Hungry clouds swag [as in sway] on the deep”; the following is swag poetry at its best: “So when we got swagged into the meatwagon I asked another geezer the strength of him, and the strength was that he’d got nicked for ponceing.” Swagged into the meatwagon (i.e. paddy wagon, ambulance, or hearse): I could say that all day.
The OED proves a heady rumfustian, a recipe for which the omnivorous dictionary includes: “a quart of strong beer, a bottle of wine or sherry, half a pint of gin, the yolk of twelve eggs, orange peel, nutmeg, spices, and sugar.” The dictionary’s stylistic sweep—the rocket jumps and plummets in register, zigzagging from an elevated windfucker to an underworld swag—gets me shickered to the eyeballs—drunk, I mean—because it’s all there, in the lexicon: a bright distillation of language, learning, and folly. If you could grasp it, you’d hold the whole known world.
Eventually, I emerge out of this ether-dark only to find that I’ve scribbled things I cannot quite understand. Confusion’s the price you pay to plumb the wordhoard. Not a bad tradeoff for a bit of time travel. For, ah, my little windfuckers, when I open up the OED the past bops me on the head so hard it swags me straight into the meatwagon.

David Macey studies translation and early modern pamphlets, and prays he will always have access to the OED Online. His Latin translations have recently appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Mayday Magazine, Loaded Bicycle, and The Literary Review. Raisins, he firmly believes, should be coated in chocolate—otherwise, why bother?

 … return to Issue 7.2 Table of Contents.

Crazy

Rosalee had just pulled me out onto the porch, away from everyone else, away from Anne. Even though Rosalee is Anne’s mother, Anne almost always calls her Rosalee, not Mom. Anne is my best friend. But her mom is weird.

If Rosalee was mad, she would’ve said so right in the kitchen with everyone else. But she saved her weird stuff for in private—unless it was totally public. Like, once, for Anne’s birthday, she hired some random guy to come to school and sing her a song. We ran away from him for ages, but eventually a teacher found us and we had to go to Barb’s classroom where of course a crowd had gathered, and this guy sang Anne a song about how beautiful she was and gave her balloons. Anne said she was so embarrassed—but no one else’s mom ever sent in a guy to sing for their birthday. So I’m not so sure.
That year, Anne got a big mirror on a carved wooden stand for her birthday.  Anne said Rosalee made a speech about Anne’s womanhood and seeing her true self. Sometimes I think that mirror was a dumb present for a sixth grader.
Now, with Rosalee dragging me out on the porch, I was all tense. She made me look at her. I really wished she’d act like a regular mom and just leave me and Anne alone.
“I want you to know how special, and beautiful you are.” Oh my god. “Now, look at me. Do you understand that you can do anything you want to? In the world?”
“Yes.” My mother told me this all the time but more like, Quit screwing around, you’re the smart one.
“And you are a beautiful, smart, capable woman. Do you understand that?”
Eye roll.
“You need to understand that you are a beautiful and smart and capable woman and you are going to do amazing things. I want you to tell me you understand me.”
“I do.” I didn’t mean to whine, but I did a little. “Can I go back in?”
“Yes. You can.” She smoothed my hair down on my head and sort of patted it. I could tell that I hadn’t answered the way she wanted. Like I was supposed to say, Oh wow, you’re right, suddenly you made me look beautiful just by saying it.
I have beautiful hair (when I brush it) and beautiful eyes (when I’m not giving a look). But I am not beautiful.
My grandmother has taken hundreds of pictures of me, usually for practice when she gets a new camera lens. She has told me a million times that I can have a pretty smile, if I don’t show my teeth and don’t curl my lip so it gets mashed under my nose. If I hold very still.
She says the problem is that I insist on doing unattractive things. Like popping my finger out of my mouth to make a water-dropping sound and slouching.
My mother has pictures of me that she says are very pretty. She says I’m photogenic. I guess that’s a kind of beautiful.
But it’s not the kind of beautiful that strangers see. They tell me that my hair cut is nice.
Grown ups act like Anne is stranger-beautiful. This one time, at a bus stop, this crazy guy was freaking out about how beautiful she was. He said, “If you were standing naked before some guy with your hair ass-length, you’d make his WORLD.” He also said he wanted to craft Anne a purse. Out of leather.
He didn’t say a single word to me the whole time, even though I was standing right next to her and no one else was around.
I don’t get it because Anne wears the same size pants that I do, but everyone knows I’m fat. One time, I mentioned this, and Anne got mad at me and said that she wasn’t the same size as me at all, that her waist was much smaller, only most jeans didn’t fit her right. And then I said, “Do you mean you aren’t fat, you just have a fat butt?”
I guess I have a fat stomach and she has a fat butt and that makes all the difference to hippie guys at bus stops. She also has blond hair and blue eyes and straight teeth whereas I have dishwater hair, and hazel eyes, and I am not supposed to show my teeth when I smile.
Anne doesn’t tell me I’m beautiful, the way her mother does. I don’t tell her she’s beautiful either, since everyone else does. I remind her that her ass is gigantic whenever she says something about how another gross guy said something creepy to her.
One time I told her to stop bragging about all the gross guys and she told me it can’t be bragging if she doesn’t like it. I don’t think that’s true, but she tells me I don’t understand, since creepy bus stop men leave me alone.
But that isn’t true, either. Bus stop men don’t leave me alone. They just don’t say anything that I can tell like a funny story. They stand really close when I’m sitting on the bench and there’s no where else to sit, so their cocks are right in my face. They sit next to me on the bus when I have a window seat and pretend to fall asleep so I have to push them when it’s my stop.
Once a bum came into our school, because of the open campus. He followed me until I was stuck in a corner by the auditorium. Then he slapped his hands on the wall next to my face and leaned in like he was going to kiss me. I dropped to the ground and got away.
Afterwards, all the kids told Barb how he must have been crazy because he wanted to kiss me.
Can you imagine? How crazy he must’ve been?

Chelsea Biondolillo’s prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Nano Fiction, Passages North, Shenandoah, Brevity, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Diagram and others. She is currently the 2014-15 Olive B. O’Connor writing fellow at Colgate University.

 … return to Issue 7.2 Table of Contents.

Job Description

Karyl Anne Geary is an adjunct instructor at Ivy Tech Community College and works on a psychiatric unit with children with developmental delays. She is the founder and workshop leader of the Rojong Yoin Writing Community in Louisville and is also working towards an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Spalding University. Her essays and poetry have been published in Sweet, New Southerner, so to speak, Stonecoast Review, IUSoutheast Review, and Barbaric Yawp. She is currently at work on a few projects, most notably a collection of essays about growing up in Kentucky and a segmented memoir about healing personal trauma while simultaneously working with child trauma victims, and blogs at karylannewrites.wordpress.com

 … return to Issue 7.2 Table of Contents.