A desk in the shape of a box sat in the living room of one Mr. David Nashe. Mr. Nashe, having vacated the putrescent premises of his abode this particular evening, distributed sequentially a series of ego-contents in spurts of fantastically phantasmagorical rapidity, his consciousness plastered about the total surface area of one Ms. Nora Veronica, seated and situated adjacent his person, seeping duly purposeful magnitudes of that superbly feminine magniloquence. Poised in the manner of a tiger in constructive possession of that great misfortune (that is, having been stuffed), she breathed slowly. A species of Caucasians adorned in (imitation) African dresses passed by the automobile in which they were stationed, a large Cadillac.

She spoke, each word tinged with the acrimony of repressed vehemence.

“Dinner was excellent, David.”

“It was lovely, wasn’t it dear?” He replied, obliviously. Inhaling naturally, as he exhaled his breath staggered and circulated, as if it were some transcendentally separate noose, about the circumference of his throat. Parked atop asphalt Symplegades composed of proscribed Dionysian bliss, they were occupants of a 10’ by 7’ space, articulated using execrably state-sanctioned paint. Beauty! Beautiful!

He placed his hand atop hers. They kissed.

And as they kissed, as they mangled and writhed the peristaltic excretion of infinite, impenetrable histories, they appeared to be mouthing some sort of word, or perhaps phrase, or one supposes it could just as easily be a sentence, a perpetually penultimate sentencing of all semiotic phrases, all denotata, all significations, and were this the case, they appeared to be screaming it over and over again, constantly interrupted by the other, the infusion, in these moments the interruptions constructing the coherence, nimbose facsimiles of ianthine verandas, drawing rooms dedicated to the preservation of ichnological artifacts, they trailed their alterations upon their securitizations of their insecurities, and they proceeded to travel upon a timeline iterating and re-iterating endlessly a distinctly spatial relationship, groaning the facinorous absorptions of a million inflictions into the net; kinetically etched ingraining of two-tone relief, their bodies,eleven and a half feet of warped papyrus scrolls, bearing some ancient mandate interestingly and uniquely applicable to the present day, or moment, or passage, which evokes the phraseology of an exodus- or the birth and psychosocial development of a child, or a genesis, or a flower blossoming like a moistened headline upon a morning paper carefully tossed within a puddle on your, their, or someone’s bloodied, asphalt driveway.

“Have you ever seen Ireland?”

“No, why?”

“It’s absolutely stunning. I’d say it’s the most beautiful occasion I’ve ever had God’s grace to encounter, but Id be lying.”

At that, Ms. Veronica blushed, and smiling said, “I like honesty in a man- it’s as rare as a glandular disorder potentiated by certain biochemical imbalances known throughout the aspiring medical community for facilitating severe depression of the central nervous system.”

He thought to himself, “Oh, how eloquent- how eloquent for a secretary. Oh, she’s perfect, now, if only she were violent!”

“Kiss me again, Nora.” They kissed.

“Once more.” They kissed.

“Again.” They kissed.

“Again.” They kissed.

“Kiss me, Nora.” They kissed.

He spoke, issuing his sentiments arduously, expelling each word with the force necessary to seal a sarcophagus the length of the Rhine.

“I’ve been lonely, Nora. So lonely, for such a long time.”

Laughing, she replied, “Oh, really?”

Bearing all the purified solemnity of solidified somnolence, he replied, “Yes, I have.”

“Oh, please, David.”

“No, Nora… I have been. You see? Past tense.”

“Ah, and now you’re, I presume, freed of your isolation?”

“No, not yet.”

“Oh? Well, may I be of any assistance, Mr. Nashe?” She asked, feigning both interest and sublimated subordination.

“Oh, perhaps. I’d have to acquaint myself with your credentials.”

“Ah, of course you would.”

And there they sat, breathing and occasionally talking, betraying the suppression of the subject each moment, each to each conspiring to attempt paroxysms of specialized alliteration. Mr. Nashe granted a casual glance to the myriad displays of the storefronts. Many days they had seen the stores, the images.  The advertisements, cloaking the destitution of their own daily crucifixions in a paucity of opacity- the image of the female, beneath whose sunglasses lie in beauty or ubiquity the veiled truth of her eyes, reflecting perfectly the process by which proudly born cloth lacerations of quotidian demure cloak the veiled truth of their lives- nothingness or Being, imprinted upon a static yet seasonal collection of dyes, ink and pulp- material whose instantiation is the residual realization of that which was once, but is no longer, alive. And they knew then, that we were torn limb from limb, our intestinal sinews institutionalized, our sinecures of central nervous systems extracted and used to bind crosses, mortal significations placating our gravesites, the cemetery being the image of the body in which we sleep, affixing prosthetic prophecies by way of our umbilical cord of somnambulism, gently faltering across the peripheries of our own poverty, and…

Then it is lost, it is all lost, it is given, there is nothing but the moment, there is, and all starvation withers in the laborious susurrus of a new beauty, in which we find our lives, of which we had only previously experienced beautiful premonitions, foretastes of feasts, and we return once more, to be honored by the menstrual spit of the dead.

Fixing his gaze upon her thigh, he spoke.

“The alphabet is the flesh of the spectrally disengaged,” he stated.

“To love is to speak. To be in love is to speak a language known to only two. To be a polyglot is then to be so desperately in love that each word uttered takes the form of a fall. Care to formulate an ambiguous genitive construct?”

“What about foreplay?” she said incredulously.

“Call it an afterthought, a punctuation.” His face twitched, teeming with that anxiety autochthonous to the Coliseum that is overt confidence.

He looked away, to the exterior façade of the strip mall. Bricks. Cement. Disintegrates to sand. He felt the urge to move. Twisting the keys with a fatal, mechanical stab, he shifted the wheel and turned on the radio. Two bodies instantaneously immersed in a sonic architecture, they palpitated within the throes of those motionless gyrations known as thoughts. A thigh shifted the car, an automatic, into drive. Being perched atop a slight incline, the car began to move. Gradually they sifted through isolated patches of emotional sediment. Rather suddenly and certainly unexpectedly, the car smashed headlong into a large tree. The blood of a classical antiquity slithered tenuously from the drab staging of this oft-romanticized scene. Silence in the manner of a post-coital embrace sculpted the valley, the remaining scraps of clay wandering about the horizons of an aptly prophesized non-entity.

—

Bromius Brakne is a 17 year old student living beneath a group of attractively uniform paving stones somewhere in NJ, USA.

“If you’re not a terrorist, if you’re not a threat, prove it. This is the price you pay to live in free society right now. It’s just the way it is.”—Sergeant Ed Mullins of the New York Police Department

Immediately following the devastating 9/11 attacks, which destroyed the illusion of invulnerability which had defined American society since the end of the Cold War, many Americans willingly ceded their rights and liberties to government officials who promised them that the feeling of absolute safety could be restored.

In the 12 years since, we have been subjected to a series of deceptions, subterfuges and scare tactics by the government, all largely aimed at amassing more power for the federal agencies and extending their control over the populace. Starting with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, continuing with the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and coming to a head with the assassination of American citizens abroad, the importing of drones and other weapons of compliance, and the rise in domestic surveillance, we have witnessed the onslaught of a full-blown crisis in government.

Still Americans have gone along with these assaults on their freedoms unquestioningly.

Even with our freedoms in shambles, our country in debt, our so-called “justice” system weighted in favor of corporations and the police state, our government officials dancing to the tune of corporate oligarchs, and a growing intolerance on the part of the government for anyone who challenges the status quo, Americans have yet to say “enough is enough.”

Now, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, we are once again being assured that if we only give up a few more liberties and what little remains of our privacy, we will achieve that elusive sense of security we’ve yet to attain. This is the same song and dance that comes after every tragedy, and it’s that same song and dance which has left us buying into the illusion that we are a free, safe society.

The reality of life in America tells a different tale, however. For example, in a May 2013 interview with CNN, former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente disclosed that the federal government is keeping track of all digital communications that occur within the United States, whether or not those communicating are American citizens, and whether or not they have a warrant to do so.

As revelatory as the disclosure was, it caused barely a ripple of dismay among Americans, easily distracted by the torrent of what passes for entertainment news today. Yet it confirms what has become increasingly apparent in the years after 9/11: the federal government is literally tracking any and all communications occurring within the United States, without concern for the legal limitations of such activity, and without informing the American people that they are doing so.

Clemente dropped his bombshell during a CNN interview about authorities’ attempts to determine the nature of communications between deceased Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his widow Katherine Russell. In the course of that conversation, Clemente revealed that federal officials will not only be able to access any voicemails that may have been left by either party, but that the entirety of the phone conversations they had will be at federal agents’ finger tips.

“We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation,” stated Clemente. “All of that stuff [meaning phone conversations occurring in America] is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.” A few days later, Clemente was asked to clarify his comments, at which point he said, “There is a way to look at all digital communications in the past. No digital communication is secure.”

In other words, there is no form of digital communication that the government cannot and does not monitor—phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, internet video chats, etc., are all accessible, trackable and downloadable by federal agents.

At one time, such actions by the government would not only have been viewed as unacceptable, they would also have been considered illegal. However, government officials have been engaged in an ongoing attempt to legitimize these actions by passing laws that make the lives of all Americans an open book for government agents. For example, while the nation was caught up in the drama of the Boston bombing and the ensuing military-style occupation of the city by local and federal police, Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The legislation, which the House of Representatives approved by an overwhelming margin of 288-127, will allow internet companies to share their users’ private data with the federal government and other private companies in order to combat so-called “cyber threats.”

In short, the law dismantles any notion of privacy on the internet, opening every action one undertakes online, whether emailing, shopping, banking, or just browsing, to scrutiny by government agents. While CISPA has yet to clear the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the spirit of it is alive and well. In fact, officials in the Obama administration have for some time now been authorizing corporate information sharing and spying in secret through the use of executive orders and other tactics.

The Justice Department, for instance, has been issuing so-called “2511 letters” to various internet service providers like AT&T, which immunize them from being prosecuted under federal wiretapping laws for providing the federal government with private information. Despite federal court rulings to the contrary, the Department of Justice continues to assert that it does not require a warrant to access Americans’ emails, Facebook chats, and other forms of digital communication.

While it may be tempting to lay the full blame for these erosions of our privacy on the Obama administration, they are simply continuing a system of mass surveillance, the seeds of which were planted in the weeks after 9/11, when the National Security Agency (NSA) began illegally tracking the communications of American citizens. According to a Washington Post article published in 2010, the NSA continues to collect 1.7 billion communications, whether telephone, email or otherwise, every single day.

The NSA and Department of Justice are just two pieces of a vast surveillance network which encompasses and implicates most of the federal government, as well as the majority of technology and telecommunications companies in the United States. For the past two years, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved literally every single request by the federal government to spy on people within the United States. There have been some 4,000 applications rubberstamped by the court in the past two years, applications which allow federal officials to monitor the communications of any person in the United States, including American citizens, if they are believed to be in contact with someone overseas.

These government-initiated spying programs depend in large part on the willingness of corporations to hand over personal information about their customers to government officials. Sometimes the government purchases the information outright. At other times, the government issues National Security Letters, which allow the government to force companies to hand over personal information without a warrant or probable cause.

Some web companies, such as Skype, have already altered their products to allow government access to personal information. In fact, government agents can now determine the credit card information and addresses of Skype users under suspicion of criminal activity. Aside from allowing government agents backdoor access to American communications, corporations are also working on technologies to allow government agents even easier access to Americans’ communications.

For example, Google has filed a patent for a “Policy Violation Checker,” software which would monitor an individual’s communications as they type them out, whether in an email, an Excel spreadsheet or some other digital document, then alert the individual, and potentially their employer or a government agent, if they type any “problematic phrases” which “present policy violations, have legal implications, or are otherwise troublesome to a company, business, or individual.” The software would work by comparing the text being typed to a pre-defined database of “problematic phrases,” which would presumably be defined on a company-by-company basis.

The emergence of this technology fits in well with Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s view on privacy, which is that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Unfortunately, this is not just the attitude of corporate benefactors who stand to profit from creating spy technology and software but government officials as well.

Additionally, police officials throughout the country have become increasingly keen on monitoring social media websites in real time. Rob D’Ovido, a criminal justice professor at Drexel University, has noted that, “The danger of this in light of the tragedy in Boston is that law enforcement is being so risk-averse they are in danger of crossing that line and going after what courts would ultimately deem as free speech.”

For example, Cameron Dambrosio, a teenager and self-styled rap artist living in Metheun, Massachusetts, posted a video of one of his original songs on the internet which included references to the White House and the Boston bombing. While the song’s lyrics may well have been crude and ill-advised in the wake of the Boston bombing, police officers exacerbated the situation by arresting Dambrosio and charging him with communicating terrorist threats, a felony charge which could land him in prison for twenty years.

Unfortunately, cases like Dambrosio’s may soon become the norm, as the FBI’s Next Generation Cyber Initiative has announced that its “top legislative priority” this year is to get social media giants like Facebook and Google to comply with requests for access to real-time updates of social media websites. The proposed method of encouraging compliance is legal inquiries and hefty fines leveled at these companies. The Obama administration is expected to support the proposal.

The reality is this: we no longer live in a free society. Having traded our freedoms for a phantom promise of security, we now find ourselves imprisoned in a virtual cage of cameras, wiretaps and watchful government eyes. All the while, the world around us is no safer than when we started on this journey more than a decade ago. Indeed, it well may be that we are living in a far more dangerous world, not so much because the terrorist threat is any greater but because the government itself has become the greater threat to our freedoms.

The following is an excerpt from Shannon Ko’s screenplay, Bet’n Jive:

EXT. UNIVERSITY QUAD – DAY

It’s a small Catholic University. The type that hosts haunted castles, secret underground passageways and cemeteries.

BET (O.S.)

(Shaken)

He… I… woke up in the communal

bathroom. There was… blood on

my thigh. My name is Angela Roberts.

Sun shines upon a healthy student body – we see an ultimate Frisbee match, theater club dressed in medieval costumes rehearsing and beach bodies sunbathing.

BET (O.S.)

My name is… Angela Roberts. Last

night, I was…

BET (20s) dangerously attractive female stands at the bottom of the quad staring up at the castle on the hilltop. She’s very PALE and visibly BRUISED, her clothes are RIPPED. She LIMPS her way up the walkway.

BET (O.S.)

Raped

(weeps)

 INT. CAMPUS SECURITY

DEAN HOWARD (50s) stares at several monitors, images fast forward.

SECURITY MAN

Two fifteen?

DEAN HOWARD

There.

Security guard hits play.

VIA Monitor – we see Bet at the entrance of a dormitory. She reaches into her purse when a masked man attacks her from behind and drags her into the dormitory.

In walks VICE PRESIDENT DAVIS (60s).

VICE PRESIDENT DAVIS

Well…

DEAN HOWARD

I’m afraid so…

(motions to the screen)

Vice President Davis leans in. We see her getting attacked again.

VICE PRESIDENT DAVIS

That’s the second one…

DEAN HOWARD

Third…

VICE PRESIDENT DAVIS

Jesus John, the semester hasn’t even

started yet. Set up a meeting now.

Dean Howard nods.

VICE PRESIDENT DAVIS

And John. Quietly.

DEAN HOWARD

(To security guard)

Second floor, South west corner.

Dean Howard nods. Vice President exits.

Security guard punches into a keyboard. Dean squints his eyes searching… Security guard takes another sip of coffee.

SECURITY GUARD

There… he took off his ski mask.

Security guard rewinds the image and points.

VIA SCREEN we see the back of a man’s head in regular clothes carrying a woman in his arms down the hallway and into a communal bathroom.

INT. EXAMINATION ROOM

Bet lays on an examination bed with her legs wide open. On her neck we see her skin has been chewed off.

The doctor examines her.

INT. CASTLE DEAN HOWARD’S OFFICE

A strong wooden desk rests in front of huge floor to ceiling windows. The books on the shelves match the carpet on the floor match the life size fully armed and armored jouster in the corner.

Bet sits on a chase lounge. She stares out of the windows at college life passing her by.

She looks down at a cup of coffee.

Dean Howard walks in with THERAPIST WOO.

They startle Bet.

They smile warmly at Bet.

DEAN HOWARD

The University agrees with your

decision. We fully support you. We’ve

reimbursed your tuition in full.

(Beat)

In exchange, we hope to keep this quiet.

There’s no reason to cause panic.

Dean Howard hands her a tissue.

She doesn’t take it.

DEAN HOWARD

Angela? Angela?

Bet snaps out of it.

DEAN HOWARD

This is Doctor Woo.

Bet turns to Doctor Woo; her face is full of pain.

INT. DEAN OFFICE’S BIG STATE UNIVERSITY – DAY

JIVE a late (20s) male is curled up on a window sill. He’s flamboyant with his colorful hair and quirky fashion sense. He clashes against the sports memorabilia which dominate the space.

DEAN SMITH (60s) teddy bear of a man shifts his attention to COACH TOM PARSONS a 40s man child.

Parsons plays with his cap which reads BEAT ALABAMA!!!

DEAN SMITH

Mr. Randolph, I assure you that

Coach Parsons will be rightfully

disciplined when the time is right.

Jive jumps off the window sill. He drags a chair across the room.  He crosses his legs. He uncrosses his legs.

JIVE

They did things to me sir. Things that…

Fuck your national championship!

He stands up and walks back to the window sill. He curls up again and consoles himself.

DEAN SMITH

Hazing is not…

JIVE

That was not hazing!

INT. BANK – DAY

Banker counts a bundle of money. Bet’s really enjoying a smoke.

BET (O.S.)

My name is Sylvia Roe and I was violated…

(weeps)

Banker stops counting and points to the no smoking sign.

JIVE (O.S.)

(distraught)

My name is Douglas Gannon and I was

Violated…

Bet blows smoke in his face.

BET (O.S.)

(screams)

I was violated…

He gestures – how rude. Banker continues counting.

INT. GREYHOUND BUS – MORNING

JIVE is caught off guard by a newspaper article and picture of a woman. Jive touches the picture. He’s full of guilt.

A male passenger sits down next to him, trapping him. Man stares at him.

Jive feels his gaze, but, ignores him. He swims in a bitter memory.

MALE PASSENGER

You do that too huh?

Jive notices that the paper is opened to the obituary page. CU we see a few names and lives circled.

MALE PASSENGER

…read the obituaries. Sometimes

you get a good one, you know.

Jive is uncomfortable, but not shaken.

JIVE

Excuse me.

Man doesn’t budge, stares at Jive some more. Jive tries to push his way through. He looks up at the man and again the slightest hint of guilt escapes his cool calm exterior.

We see Bet board the bus and immediately exit after spotting Jive’s situation.

MALE PASSENGER

Do you mind?

Man points at the newspaper.

Jive hesitates.

He rips out the section that he’s circled.

MALE PASSENGER

Bet you got all the good ones.

Male passenger lets him by. He continues to watch Jive.

EXT. BUS STATION BENCHES

Jive and Bet sit on the bench. They’re full of sexual tension.

A line of passengers with their luggage and travel accessories stand in line at gate 30.

Bet uncrosses her legs and rests her playful hand in between. Her sunglasses fall off. We see her eyes are closed. She moans. She gets up and rolls her luggage toward the station.

Bus pulls in. Jive looks at the bus, and then watches Bet’s sway. He looks down at his penis – a rock and a hard place.

INT. BUS STATION BATHROOM

Jive enters to the very long, very luscious leg show. Jive tries to lock the door behind him – it’s broke.

BET

Uncle, Cousin?… Daddy.

JIVE

Boss.

BET

Boss.

(She likes that)

Boss.

Jive’s in a sexual trance.

She touches her body and breathes a delicious erotic breath. She pushes her breasts together, opens her mouth and is about to… then changes her mind. She lets go of her breasts and Jive watches them talk to him.

She makes her way to him. She goes right for the crotch. She fondles him just the way he likes.

BET

Well…

JIVE

You lost.

BET

Yeah?

JIVE

Yeah.

BET

Well?

JIVE

No, no, you first.

She unzips his fly, reaches her hand inside. Jive’s playing it cool, but, well his little partner can’t.

BET

No, you first.

JIVE

70.

Bet looses her zest. She pulls his fly back up. She waits, she suspects, but, nevertheless she enjoys the games.

JIVE

…at Big State.

BET

70 at Big state alone.

(twitches)

I think I just came a little.

JIVE

Well, I guess you’ve had yours…

BET

So what are we talking?… 140?

Jive pulls his fly back down. He gestures. She knows what that means…

BET

FUCK!

Jealousy and admiration surface on Bet’s face.

She pulls it out and makes him feel like a man – a very spoiled man. In between the oral sex, she interrogates him. She can’t get an exact figure and it’s making her all the more excited.

MALE PASSENGER ENTERS.

Jive can’t get his pants half way up when he’s met with a powerful right, followed by an impressive combo.

Bet sits on the sink and enjoys the show as they fight near and around her.

Jive duck and well, jives. Jive spears him, man swings Jive’s off of him. They lock heads. They exchange blows. Jive head butts him – busts open the man’s lip. Man smiles – he apparently enjoys pain.

Man kicks him. Jive catches his leg. He slams the man. Man gets Jive into a submission hold. He gargles. Jive reaches back. He rips away at the man’s eyes. Man holds steady. Jive wiggles free.

Jive catches man with a violent elbow to the man’s throat. He chokes. Jive lands a series of punches, kicks and knees. Man finally falls over. Jive catches his breath.

He kicks him once more for good measure.

Jive pretty roughed up.

He turns around to see Bet lying on the floor in a FETAL POSITION dealing with a ton of pain.

INT. HOSPITAL

JIVE

Leave it… please.

Male Nurse hesitates.

NURSE

Are you two siblings?

Jive doesn’t answer.

Nurse’s disgusted. She exits.

Bet and Jive stare at a pan on top of an elevated platform in the corner of the room.

Bet takes Jive’s hand and kisses it.

CU blue lips, Chunky thighs and one slightly opened eye. We pan out on that slightly open eye.

I recently found myself in one of those arguments that I’m convinced every book-reading or movie-viewing American has at one point been involved in: arguing the merits of Twilight. And it got me thinking about Bella’s bed—in the fifth and final movie her and Edward retreat to their cabin cottage and end up next to a big, designer-chic bed, a bed which explicitly and cringingly is meant for one thing and one thing only—and seeing this piece of furniture got me wondering about love and marriage, but not for the reasons you’re maybe thinking. Let me explain.

The Twilight Argument happened with a group of friends at a bar, discussing literature because sometimes literature is what I have in common with people. The topic of Twilight came up, as it somehow inevitably does. Full disclosure: I’ve read all four books at least twice, and seen the movies countless times. I feel your judgment. Judge. Get it over with. Feel the waves radiate like an army of Slinkys. You are a child of the universe. Now, let’s move on.

I don’t love Twilight, but I also don’t love the typical arguments made against the series. We’re all writers, here. To call the novels low brow or cliché or redundant or sentimental would all be accurate arguments, but it would also be missing a lesson—they are a series of books which have captivated millions of people domestically and abroad. Every writer’s goal should be significant innovation, yet captivation as well. We learn innovation from Wallace, DeLillo, Austen, St. Augustine. We learn mass market appeal from King, Collins, Meyer, Doctor Phil, The Walking Dead, Procter and Gamble.

I see those red flags you’re waving—don’t worry, I’ll qualify. I don’t consider the Twilight series art, and I don’t see it as beneficial literature. It is escapism at best, and I imagine the statistics on how often eye imagery appears in the first book will be a footnote in future encyclopedias under death of literature. But to call the books plain old bad is reductive. My only point is that there is something to be learned from the mass amounts of people they’ve reached. I love to argue this—those books are entertaining to a whole lot of people, including yours truly.

Something has happened to the desire to entertain. The biggest mistake an artist can make—a mistake I’ve made hundreds of times before, likely one I’ll make countless times again—is assuming that their art is inherently interesting. I think I‘ve just accidentally called myself an artist. Once on the train I overheard a man call himself the most humble person in the world.

Say what you will about Meyer, but she never spent a page describing how the wing of an airplane looked in the moonlight—she never possessed the burden of well-crafted language. She’s never presumed her reader hasn’t just put her book down to fix a sandwich. She’s never presumed her work is inherently interesting, because it isn’t. She fights for it. She needs you to turn the page. We live and write in that world now, a world where people make sandwiches, where they don’t need books. Nowadays, a reader is doing a book a favor by reading, rather than the other way around.

The other night, I was waiting in the underground for Chicago’s blue line, and a man was standing near me, yelling his poetry as loud as he could. Never before has poetry only echoed on a literal level.

Art is a forceful medium of expression. It takes up a consumer’s time and headspace. Read this. Listen to this. Look at this. Appreciate it. Love it. Want it, need it. The imperative is doubled if the consumer has spent money, introducing a debt to the exchange of meaning. The impetus more than ever has been on the artist to pack, fill and delight. Writers like myself, those in the lit-mag game and attempting to bust out, should always be asking: will the reader need to turn the page? I can’t help but make overly melodramatic comparisons: sometimes when I think about Stephanie Meyer, I picture her as Russell Crowe, gladiator-clad, yelling at the coliseum: Are you not entertained?!

I was making a point. My only point is that there’s something to be learned, no matter how often you cringe from bar-bantering about Meyer’s writing. Cringe all you want, the words on the page won’t change. They’re kinda cringy books. I’m only saying there’s a lesson to be learned.

I’m only describing an argument I had with my friend.

We traded typical literary language and made our obscure comparisons and used ethos-dropping words like prolepsis. We all drank craft beers and competed to come up with the best one sentence short story. Mine, which was not the best, was: Demand the equestrian police, we’ve burnt the script.

My friend gave the usual stump speech, with which I did not and could not disagree: the themes of Twilight are anti-women. A woman has to control her primitive sexual urges or die. Sex before marriage will kill you. Sex without changing to suit your partner will kill you. A woman has to give up her family to be with the person she loves. Morals from the days of Spanish influenza are more moral than modern morals. It goes on. He argued it more eloquently. My representation is a brutal diegesis; hey, smart words for the sake of smart words. Other writers have argued more and most eloquently. We know the list, we agree with the list.

I couldn’t argue with my friend. He was right, completely and absolutely. Yet the books have been purchased (ugh, capitalism, right?) by millions of people, people thirsty for pathos. Look at the books conceptually, structurally, the plot and narrative satisfactions. I’m on no bandwagon, but just look at it—look.

I’m wary of mass opinion and sudden stigma. Everyone loves Target, but hates Wal-Mart. Everyone loves Lena Dunham, but hates Marie Calloway. Am I missing something here? These generalities aren’t entirely true, probably aren’t even generally true, but we see how the over-publication of every waking thought (I think I want a turkey sandwich for lunch, today. What do you guys think?) in the age of social media can lead to perhaps too-hasty dismissals in the file cabinet under M, for manipulative.

I’m not saying I’m not part of the problem. Who am I to be writing about Twilight? Exactly! Who am I to be writing about writing, as if I’ve eaten the whole wheel of cheese? Ask that question after every sentence. Disagree with me—I’ll say, “well, I’ve certainly been wrong before,” because that’s what I say when faced with my own polar wrongness, never actually admitting it.

In terms of plot, Twilight isn’t White Noise. In terms of satisfactions, it isn’t Junot Diaz or George Saunders. We can namedrop all day. Yet, still. I like to think that I’ve learned something from the Twilight books—something about craft, about reader wants and expectations, about narrative simplicity, about words and how they can be packaged. There is something to be learned about literature even from books that maybe don’t deserve that capital-L-title—perhaps how to understand mass-perceived depth to achieve empirical depth.

I don’t think I’m convincing anyone. That’s cool. That’s not the point of all this. The point is there’s a new problem with Twilight (gasp!)—one that everybody who’s ever been in a relationship has completely saw coming. Let’s talk about the movies now, specifically, the fifth and final of the series.

The problem I have with Breaking Dawn-Part 2 is that Edward and Bella’s love is a total not-credible fiction, and is showing the next generation of humans an inaccurate representation of love and how it really looks to be committed, lifelong, to another person. Sure, I’m twenty four. What do I know about lifelong commitments? But I know what they’re not. I’m not saying every movie needs to be brutal realism like Blue Valentine. But can’t we enjoy our popcorn and Twizzlers (a delicious combination, if you’ve never tried them together) in some type of happy medium?I buy into the fablistic and fairy tale elements of the vampire story, and I buy into the fact that Edward and Bella really do, truly and somewhat inexplicably, love one another forever—but actual ‘love,’ whatever that word means, isn’t just handholding and how-cute smiles and terribly uncomfortable sex scenes.

Hasn’t love as a concept been assaulted enough? Do we allow filmmakers to continually rely on the automatic pathos of ‘love’ without qualification? The word is meant to have gravity. That sentence is the most important in this whole essay, so I’m going to repeat it. The word is meant to have gravity.

Edward and Bella never fight. They never argue. They never disagree. They never have anything but gold fawning love eyes for their perfect other, for, ev, er. They never look at one another. I think the only thing they have in common is the fact that they love each other, and now vampirism. Their relationship is that of a ten year old circling yes on the note she received from the my-mom-says-I’m-handsomest boy in class.

The movie is a continuation of the Disney model which taught my generation and those previous that you’ll never be happy alone, that loving relationships never end, that that mysterious girl with the dark hair who smells so damn delicious after walking past a table fan will be the last person you ever want for the rest of existence.

More, it teaches America’s youth not just bent ideologies about marriage and sex and womanhood, but that when you find that person you want to spend the rest of your life with, everything will be blissful and perfect and you’ll go live in a perfectly decorated cabin in the woods and have an incredibly cute child who cries so rarely and only for well-timed cinematic effect.

Does Bella ever get tired of buying new beds? This is my example. One thing all five movies have made perfectly clear is the fact that vampiric sex is messy. Things get broken. E and B’s ambitious plan is to spend the rest of eternity having bed-breaking love with one another—we never sleep, we never get tired, we never run out of breathe. We can do this forever. Sure, they never sleep, and sure, money is no object for the Cullens, but still—furniture is the worst. I don’t think I’ve ever lifted something over ten pounds in my entire life without getting at least a little bit mad. Wouldn’t she get tired of having to buy new beds? Or if Edward bought the beds, would she get frustrated by his masculine tastes? Or by his feminine tastes? After a month, a year, one hundred years of breaking beds with their marital bliss? I see so many permutations for arguments revolving around this one pivot point. In the world of Twilight, I don’t see them arguing about beds. It would be too real, too human.

—

Jake Wrenn is a writer in Chicago.

“Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.”—Pete Seeger

Before the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Jim Hendrix, Bob Dylan and others, there was Pete Seeger. With his five-string banjo in hand, Seeger helped to lay the foundation for American protest music, singing out about the plight of everyday working folks and urging listeners to political and social activism. In fact, Pete Seeger is one of the most important musical influences of the 20th century.

Born in New York City on May 3, 1919, Seeger, whose father was a pacifist musicologist, was plunged into the world of music and politics from an early age. He studied sociology at Harvard University until 1938, when he dropped out and spent the summer bicycling through New England and New York, painting watercolors of farmers’ houses in return for food. Looking for but failing to get a job as a newspaper reporter in New York City, he then worked at the Archives of American Folk Music at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In 1940, Seeger met Woody Guthrie at a Grapes of Wrath migrant-worker benefit concert. Seeger, Guthrie, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell joined together to form the Almanac Singers, which became known for its political radicalism and support of communism.

In 1942, Seeger was drafted by the U.S. Army and sent to Saipan in the Western Pacific. After the war, he helped start the People’s Songs Bulletin, later Sing Out! magazine, which combined information on folk music with social criticism. In 1950, Seeger formed The Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. Targeted for the political messages behind some of their songs, the group was blacklisted and banned from television and radio.

In 1955, the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed Seeger to appear before them (read his testimony at http://www.peteseeger.net/HUAC.htm). During the hearings, Seeger refused to disclose his political views and the names of his political associates. When asked by the committee to name for whom he had sung, Seeger replied, “I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches, and I do this voluntarily. I have sung for many, many different groups—and it is hard for perhaps one person to believe, I was looking back over the twenty years or so that I have sung around these forty-eight states, that I have sung in so many different places.” He was sentenced to one year in jail but, quoting the First Amendment, successfully appealed the decision after spending four hours behind bars. However, he has been blacklisted most of his life from normal radio and television work.

During the 1960s, Seeger traveled around the country, continuing to play his folk songs for the peace and civil rights movements. Deeply offended by the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Seeger, along with other folk singers such as Joan Baez, led many protests.

“Wherever he was asked, when the need was the greatest, he, like Kilroy, was there. And still is,” said his long-time friend, Studs Terkel. “Though his voice is somewhat shot, he holds forth on that stage. Whether it be a concert hall, a gathering in the park, a street demonstration, any area is a battleground for human rights.”

In 1963, Seeger recorded the now-famous gospel song “We Shall Overcome.” In 1965, he sang it on the 50-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, with Martin Luther King, Jr. and 1,000 other marchers. That song would go on to become the anthem for the civil rights movement and be translated into many languages. Seeger also turned his attention to cleaning up the Hudson River that ran past his home. In 1966, he helped form Clearwater, an organization dedicated to educating the public on environmental concerns such as pollution and protecting the river. The group offers educational programs for children on a 76-foot replica of a traditional Hudson cargo sloop and holds a two-day festival on the banks of the Hudson River every June.

Seeger was awarded the Presidential Medal of the Arts and the prestigious Kennedy Center Award in 1994. In 1996, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his contribution to music and to the development of rock and folk music. In April of that year, he received the Harvard Arts Medal, and after decades of creating songs, in 1997, Seeger won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for his album, Pete.

Seeger, however, has not always been so lavishly praised. Often chastised for his “communist beliefs,” Seeger has dealt with criticism and misunderstanding. “I say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other,” he says.

While many of the legendary men and women Seeger associated with are gone, he continues his political and environmental endeavors. He still seems to subscribe to the same philosophy he held to four decades ago, when he advised young people to follow their hearts and take initiative: “Well, here’s hoping all the foregoing will help you avoid a few dead-end streets (we all hit some), and here’s hoping enough of your dreams come true to keep you optimistic about the rest. We’ve got a big world to learn how to tie together. We’ve all got a lot to learn. And don’t let your studies interfere with your education.”

At 94 years old, Pete Seeger is still speaking out. Indeed, in an interview I conducted with Pete Seeger several years ago, I asked him whether he had found an answer to the question “When will they ever learn?” which he repeatedly posed in his song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”Seeger’s response is one for the books:

We will never know everything. But I think if we can learn within the next few decades to face the danger we all are in, I believe there will be tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of human beings working wherever they are to do something good. I tell everybody a little parable about the “teaspoon brigades.” Imagine a big seesaw. One end of the seesaw is on the ground because it has a big basket half full of rocks in it. The other end of the seesaw is up in the air because it’s got a basket one quarter full of sand. Some of us have teaspoons and we are trying to fill it up. Most people are scoffing at us. They say, “People like you have been trying for thousands of years, but it is leaking out of that basket as fast as you are putting it in.” Our answer is that we are getting more people with teaspoons every day. And we believe that one of these days or years—who knows—that basket of sand is going to be so full that you are going to see that whole seesaw going zoop! in the other direction. Then people are going to say, “How did it happen so suddenly?” And we answer, “Us and our little teaspoons over thousands of years.” But I don’t think we have forever. I now believe that all technological societies tend to self-destruct. The reason is that the very things that make us a successful technological society, such as our curiosity, our ambition and determination, will also cause us to fall.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson corresponded for 13 years before they died on the same day. They asked, “How can one have prosperity without commerce? How can one have commerce without luxury? How can one have luxury without corruption? How can you have corruption without the end of the Republic?” And they really didn’t know the answer. Today I would ask, “How can one have a technological society without research? How can one have research without researching dangerous areas? How can one research dangerous areas without uncovering dangerous information? How can you uncover dangerous information without it falling into the hands of insane people who will sooner or later destroy the human race, if not the whole of life on earth?” Who knows? God only knows!

The Seeger interview in its entirety is available at www. rutherford.org.

I laid in bed on top of damp sheets staring up at the molded ceiling which just started to leak.  Drip, drip, drip, water fell into various pots and buckets spread around the room.  My grandmother’s “friend” allegedly fixed this problem the day before but I could tell Jim didn’t have a clue what he was doing by the way he strapped on his useless seventy piece tool belt, like he was about to build a dining room table.  Idiot.  Jim just wanted to impress Grandma Stone so he could get some more of her homemade raspberry cobbler— unfortunately not the kind you eat with a spoon.  He was disgusting.  They were disgusting and very loud in the adjacent bedroom.  I could hear my Grandmother trying to quiet him down, “You’re going to wake her up”, she would say.  Every Friday night he would come over for dinner, hours of the game show network, then late night dessert.  “Just because there’s a wall doesn’t mean I can’t hear you banging my grandmother”, I calmly told Jim while he was “fixing” my ceiling.  He fell off the ladder and busted his nose on the way down.  I guess I startled him.  Mom used to say I walked around the house with ghost slippers.

Drip, drip, drip—the robotic sound of water picking up-tempo like a metronome.  My dad would have fixed it.  The rain began to sweep into my bedroom creating an “under the sea” kind of effect.  I got up and shut the window as lightning struck and lit up the rumbling sky.  This was the first thunderstorm to ever make me smile.  “Maybe our flight will get canceled,” I thought.  I proceeded to open up my door—although sleeping with the door open always made me uncomfortable for some reason— to get some kind of air circulation going.  I plopped myself back into the concrete bed.  Back into soggy sheets, sweating, dripping, roasting, melting, helpless, like Donald Duck spinning in a set-it-and-forget-it machine.  The oscillating stand-up fan might as well have been a baster filled with oil and meat juices.  The clock read 4:50 am and I hadn’t closed my eyes all night.  Tends to happen when you think you’re about to die.

In less than five hours I would be on an airplane for the first time ever.  “How will they find our bodies if we end up in the Atlantic Ocean?” I thought.  My Grandma said it was the fastest way to Europe.  She also said that not too many thirteen-year-old girls from South Boston have ever traveled overseas.  That meant I was supposed to be thankful.  Thankful that I was selected by the Student Ambassadors Association of America—along with thirty-nine other middle school students from all over the city—to represent a country that didn’t care about the neighborhood I grew up in or the people in it.  I remember my Dad explaining to me what gentrification meant after we walked home from our favorite little league baseball park that was no longer there.  “Basically rich people move in, and poor people like us get kicked out,” he said.  “Where do they go?” I asked.  “At this rate we’ll all end up in the Charles River,” he replied.  There’s a Whole Foods there now.

I can’t say that I was thrilled to be a United States Student Ambassador, a fancy title that was handed out to everyone at the first delegation meeting—the first of ten.  Maybe if we had taken a cruise ship with batting cages on board.  I pictured myself smacking homeruns off the edge of the deck into the ocean.  It was after all the middle of July, the heart of the Major League Baseball season.  On a three-week trip I calculated that I would miss fourteen games including the all-important all-star game and home run derby, which was of course at Fenway Park that year.  Fenway Park!  Nothing was more important to me than baseball.  I stared at a picture on my nightstand of my Mom, Dad, and I at my first Red Sox game.  I don’t remember it, I was only two years old, wearing a “cute” Red Sox branded outfit, but I looked like I was having a good time.

The basic essentials filled the rest of my room.  A dresser stuffed with old clothes and books, an overflowing hamper, posters of Dustin Pedroia (my favorite), Ted Williams (Dad’s Favorite), Carlton Fisk (Mom’s favorite), and a wooden desk that I would carve drawings into instead of actually doing homework.  A packed suitcase lay next to my bed with a Student Ambassador lanyard draped across it.  “I can’t breathe,” I said whipping sweat off of my forehead.  The heat was unbearable: I had to turn on the air—a forbidden act in that house even if it was ninety-two degrees inside.  Ninety-two, I stared at the thermostat which I swear was sweating even more than I was.  I had never touched the AC before, but figured 64 degrees would do the trick.

Cool air pumped down onto my warped body.  “Hopefully Grandma stays asleep.”  It actually got comfortable enough for me to get underneath the covers, which had finally dried up.  I began to drift in and out of consciousness.  Next thing I know, my grandmother banged on the door.  It sounded like a sledgehammer.  I popped up, kind of disoriented.  Clock read 7am, and I was FREEZING—which meant Grandma woke up in the North Pole as well.  “Kat,” she said.  That’s what everybody called me.  Kathleen sounded like some southern house wife with five kids and a dog, I refused to acknowledge it. “Kat, are you up?” she said while continuing to bang.  I always hated when she said that.  “Of course I’m up, you’re banging on the damn door,” I murmured.  If only I could’ve had five more minutes.  “Just five more minutes please,” I said to myself, staring up at the ceiling.  She continued to bang.  “Kathleen Evelyn Stone,” the point of no return, I had to stick out my stubborn defiance until the end.  When she opened the door I flipped over and closed my eyes. My mom used to always give me those extra five minutes.  “Kat”, she said again.  I continued to ignore as I felt her eyes piercing through my skull.

Then, out of nowhere, she grabbed the covers with both hands and ripped them off the bed.  “Grandma, come on” I said.  She had a huge smile on her face. “Cold isn’t it.”  She bawled up the covers.  My long and skinny legs dangled off of the twin bed. “But it was boiling last night.  Give me the covers back.”  “I gave you ten extra minutes.”  “Please, just five more minutes.”  My Grandma was actually a very sweet and caring person, if you looked past her dark sarcasm, short temper, faded tattoos, and 5’10”, 200+ pound frame.  She began to laugh at me like a military drill sergeant waking up the new crop of soldiers.  “What are you going to do with five minutes besides make me angry?”  She had no idea that five more minutes would have completely changed my life.  For some reason, whenever I would wake up before the sun cracked the sky, an extra minute felt like an extra hour.

“I swear, that’s all I need.”  I put on my award winning puppy dog face.  “Please?.”  I thought I had her in the palm of my hand.  Then she smiled at me.  “Come and get ‘em.”  I smiled back then tried to snatch the covers from her.  She moved them out of reach then tossed them on the floor behind her.  I got out of bed and tried to force my way past her.   I was giving it everything I had and my grandmother wasn’t even breaking a sweat.  She may have been old but she was strong as hell.  I wanted those covers back.  She began to laugh at me.  I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet.  She grabbed the covers, tossed them on top of my head, and wrapped me up.  I began to wriggle and squirm like a mummy being prepped for burial.  I could barely breathe.  “Stop it!”  I shouted, sounding like a muted trumpet under five feet of water.  I give up, I give up.”  She continued to laugh.  “I need an apology young lady,” she said.  “Ok!  I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I said, waving the white flag.

“What was that?  I couldn’t hear you.  Speak up.”  “I’m sorry!”, I shouted.  Then she picked me up and threw me on the bed.  “Get dressed.  You’ll have plenty of time to sleep on the plane.”  I fought off the covers as she walked out of the room.  Breathing heavy.  Exhausted.  Then, like any other kid would, went right back to sleep and got five more minutes in.

—

Daniel K. Hunter is a Brooklyn based writer and an alum of Berklee College of Music.  He’s the co-founder, a long with his brother David, of the literary and lifestyle blog Writers and Hunters and is currently hard at work on the Epistolary Novel “Wake Up Ambassador Stone.”

Pharmaceutical Drugs have an average of 70 side effects or ‘drug reactions’, with some as high as 525. This is done to prevent lawsuits against the manufacturers rather than to protect people from them and I believe mainly done to advertise the drug. The most complex labeling can be seen in drugs for psychiatry and neurology, primarily for antidepressants.

The commonly accepted reason for stating all these side effects is for liability, however I think it goes deeper than that. It’s repetition, attention and acceptance. The side effects are repeated endlessly every time you see mention of the drug. This allows your brain to be conditioned, through repetition, to associate the drug with the condescending speech patterns and intonations of the speaker. Notice their hushed, deep tones and the authoritarian manner of speaking. The next phase of repetition is the daily barrage of advertising for these drugs. They club you over the head with it repeatedly, day after day.

The attention factor comes into play with the glowing scenes of beaches, vacations and trips to New Zealand. This is pure cognitive dissonance- showing something completely unrelated to what is being presented to get you to accept the original intention. Cognitive dissonance theory states that we have an inner drive to hold all of our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony. Cognitive dissonance occurs when there are conflicting beliefs or behaviors that lead to behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance, i.e.- taking the advertised drug. Your attention is captured by showing you scenes of life that everyone either wants or aspires to attain. Long walks on the beach, birthday parties and beautiful scenery are all part of the set up for the cognitive dissonance they are laying on you.

Through repetition and attention you have now unwittingly accepted the drug proposition in your subconscious mind. The side effects have now become part of the packaging and the repetition of them only further reinforces it. The stating of side effects is done to further assault your mind, cause cognitive dissonance and get you to subconsciously accept the idea of finding out more about the drug. This is done intentionally through statements such as…may cause internal bleeding…bruising…a tendency to gamble…uncontrolled sexual urges…..death…these are all shock value statements designed to create fear and grab your attention. Your brain wants to restore harmony from these vile conditions through cognitive theory and thus accepts these conditions as something that has to be dealt with- whether they apply to you or not. I believe that the side effects and the stating of them are more important in the advertising of the drug than the drug itself. The call to action is in the side effects as well as the attention gained through cognitive dissonance and repetition. The fear created through these aberrant advertisements is palpable and a primary motivator to get you to “…ask your doctor”, about the latest big pharma drug push. The drug cartels of the 80′s and the Mexican cartels of today have never been this ingenious in pushing their chemicals onto an unwary public.

—

Steve Ricke writes satire and short stories of real life experiences distilled through his unique perspective. His profession is business development management in technical and scientific organizations. He has a BBA in Management from the University of North Florida. His writing is entertainment and humor based, ‘off the beaten path’.

stevrer87.blogspot.com
“Internationally Acclaimed Writer of Gibberish”

I am by no means an anthropologist, theologian or a historian, But my work is based on all these worlds, just like I’m equally interested in Science as I am in Art. The history of science, like that of art is not a simple progression from lower to higher, but a sequence of responses to the world, conditioned by historical circumstances, and having the central questions of nature always at its heart.

At this moment I’m interested in man’s ability to recognize his own and nature’s patterns. I’m trying to create a graphic novel of some sort that deals with these ideas and it’s also a lot about catastrophic storms

My drawing style is similar to those displayed on 18th century etches: by using highly detailed accumulations of smaller lines I try to recreate all those structures inherent to the world on a sheet of paper. I use my fine liner to express every single thing I imagine in my head on paper. Etches and drawings of the Great Masters such as Albrecht Durer, Theodor Kittelsen inspire and educate me. But not only ‘great’ masters do such a thing. I’m equally touched by the work of Norman Pettingill, who was a true underground cartoonist; maybe known to a small coterie of cartooning connoisseurs but completely unknown in the wider world. He was an avid trapper and fisherman from Northern Wisconsin, and a self taugtht artist.

With all my heroes I find myself drawn to their sketching styles and techniques, I find their spooky visions and apparent love for detail inspiring and esthetically appetizing. A shrub in the background receives the same amount of attention as the protagonist on the forefront. One shows you the journey over the river Styx and the other expresses a wooden-cabin flavored barlife. Both absorb me in their detailing and darkness.

I usually draw in one of my A4 or smaller notebooks, although at times I will draw on much larger surfaces. My working process is always intensive and demands ultimate concentration and discipline.

I’m always working with creating interesting images and I have very clearly defined preferences for what I find visually attractive. I always try to ensure I have given my work all the attention it could possibly need. I often find myself leaning towards depicting wild and savage landscapes, tropical or rather winterish elements and natural forces, or of animals, mythological creatures, mystique and all forms of love.

Most important for me is that the picture I draw has to stand on its own. It has to be an image which requires exploration; taking one, quick glance won’t do. One wants to turn back, has to look closer, and keeps discovering new things. Sometimes the clues will be explicit, other times it will display more implicit and delicate elements.

While my subtly shaped compositions suspect a clear context, the precise nature of the work can be vague. There usually isn’t a clear historical timeframe in my work and I will playfully work with different eras, religions, customs and societies. This is because I want to create an image that fascinates, including scenes I have never even witnessed myself. Even with all the freedom a virgin white sheet of paper offers, I demand more. I need to be in control of everything that appears.

—

Margot Holtman was born in Amsterdam in 1984. She has a BFA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie. You can view more of her work here.

Of course, when I tell people that I was abducted by an alien, they laugh at me. Some listen politely at first, then they laugh; others laugh before I even try to explain. Some ask me if I would I like to tell my story to a doctor? And then there are the endless jokes about probing — I won’t even go into those.

It doesn’t help when I mention that the alien was a taxi driver, or that the abduction occurred via taxi. That prompts people to tell me they were abducted by an alien taxi driver too, and then they tell me their abduction story but it’s always about being taken to the wrong address, or the driver spoke an unknown language, or the like.

“No, I mean a real alien,” I insist, “like from outer space.” But they just laugh louder. It’s embarrassing, even without the probing thing, and the entire bar puts in it’s two cents worth, making me feel like a complete idiot for even bringing it up in the first place.

“Have you told your wife about this?” they ask.

“That’s a new way of covering your ass.”

“Why didn’t I think of that excuse?” chimes in another.

“How much did you have to drink?” asks a third.

“How much did you pay her?” and so on.

I certainly can’t tell my wife that I had sex with an alien. I want to stay married, and divorce could be very expensive. But I swear it’s true.

The taxi-driver was gorgeous, which should have immediately triggered my suspicions. Yet there she was, giving me a toothsome grin, and I do mean toothsome. I think she had a few extra but I didn‘t count.

“Airport,” was all I said.

She immediately whipped a tire-squealing, u-turn, crossing the double yellow line in heavy traffic, which seemed normal enough, but then we careened through red lights, and I hadn’t even said I was in a hurry. She actually drove on the sidewalk once or twice — yes, I know, a type of taxi ride many others have experienced as well — but get this: she managed it all without so much as a glance at the road ahead, not even once. She was looking back and talking to me the whole time, one arm casually draped across the top of the passenger seat, her other hand on the wheel. I was the one staring forward, my eyes undoubtedly bulging and my eyebrows probably arched all the way over the back of my head.

She started the conversation by asking if I was headed someplace warm and sunny? I thought it was important to not show fear, so I managed to stammer, “Not really, just D.C.”

“We’ll get you there in no time,” she replied. Turned out she wasn’t kidding.

Then we chatted a bit about sports, but I couldn’t remember the name of the local football team due to my concentration being focused elsewhere, like on the prospect of imminent death. About half-way to the airport she began inquiring about what sort of sex I enjoyed? I answered — somewhat lamely, I must admit, due to being further distracted by the frantically waving mom pushing a baby carriage along the sidewalk, whom we had just narrowly missed — “Oh, the usual,” after which she abruptly declared, “I need some stimulus,” by which I thought she meant coffee. Then she made an extremely hard right turn that almost had us up on two wheels, stunt driver style, slamming me over against the door, and zoomed straight toward the closed doors of a large warehouse. Just as we were about to smash into the doors they abruptly slid open and slapped shut directly behind us, bat cave style. We came to a screeching halt beside a silvery sphere that barely fit inside the cavernous place. The sphere shimmered and hummed, as if  there was electricity in the air. I surmised it was a spaceship.

After screeching to a halt, the engine abruptly switched off, she arched back in her seat and ran her fingers through her hair, which seemed to tousle itself, Medusa style. I sat almost stupefied, still suffering from the ride shock. Without a word, she got out.

By the time I managed to regain a small bit of my senses, she had strolled around to my side of the cab, pulled open my door and leaned in, allowing me a thorough look at the ample cleavage of her apparently mostly very human body, and asked pointedly, “You coming? There’s still plenty of time.” Then, while marvelously sashaying toward a ramp that had slowly and inexplicably extended from the sphere, she peeled off one article of clothing at a time, nonchalantly dropping each item on the floor as she moved along. She was completely naked by the time she got to the top of the ramp.

“Are you going to eat me?” was all I had the wit to ask as I staggered out. She shot me another toothy grin, replying, “Bring your suitcase, and I’ll take you for a ride.”

Man oh man, did she ever.

All I remember after that was her scratching me head and toe with some appendages that I hadn’t noted before and didn’t even want to look at because they might have scared the crap out of me. I just kept my eyes closed and pumped for dear life. Eventually she gave a funny little squeak and her hair shot straight out. Then she thanked me for the DNA sample and still managed to drop me off in D.C. an hour before my scheduled arrival time. The people who were there to meet me were quite surprised I approached them from the terminal side. But it doesn’t seem to help to wave around my unused airline ticket as proof I was abducted by an alien — people still refuse to believe me.

END

—

Gary Siebel has two books:  Sex and the Serial Killer and Ben Franklin, Opium, and the US Constitution.

The uniformed driver stands in front of gate 10 and wrings his hands. “The bus is full,” he says, then puts his palms up like two little stop signs. It is Thanksgiving morning and the gritty-eyed travelers still waiting to board grumble with frustration.

“It’s overbooked,” he explains with a shrug. “The next bus leaves at five.”

Frustration boils over and grumbles rise into shouts and curses. There is a commotion near the head of the queue, people screaming, elbowing one another. I watch one girl in particular from my seat on a bench at gate 11. She is not like the rest; no anger, no obscenities, just a wide yawn which she covers with the back of her copper tan hand. She looks Mexican; at least I think she looks Mexican, with these prominent cheekbones I can’t stop staring at. Maybe she doesn’t understand that the bus she is waiting for is overbooked.

“Your bus is full,” I sit down next to her. I speak slowly and with caution. I figure she doesn’t speak English.

“I know,” she says in perfect English. She rests her feet on the suitcase beneath her.

“Mine won’t be,” I point to Gate 11. Only a few people sit on a long, lonely bench. One guy is real shifty looking. He is wearing a PennState hat and has a tattered green duffle bag cradled in his arms from which he has been removing prescription bottles and popping pills. His face is pockmarked with broken blood vessels, all buggy eyed and confused, breathing heavily. I wonder if he has looked in the mirror recently.

“Where are you headed?” she asks after an uneasy pause, during which I pull two mini bottles of rum from my coat pocket and pour them into my half finished Coke. I offer her some, and she takes the bottle and sips.

“Erie,” I say. “My parents still live in that beat old town.

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, it pretty much sucks,” I tell her straight. “There’s like a foot of snow already.”

She nods and scrapes at her black finger nail polish with a set of keys. Glossy flakes fall to the floor. It reminds me of the scratch-off lottery tickets my grandma used to play. The last time I was in Erie was the day before she died. I’d been putting off visiting her in the hospital. It’s something about that antiseptic smell and seeing all those human bodies falling apart. To me, once the doctors admit you to the hospital for the last time you are already dead. My mom had called and said Grandma wasn’t doing too well, her vitals were vanishing. She said I needed to stop thinking about myself and make a trip up to see her before she passed on. When I got to the hospital she was in and out of consciousness propped up in the ICU with all those tiny plastic tubes projecting from her veins, trying to shrink the tumor bulging inside her brain, painfully slowing the inevitable. She was floating in and out of consciousness, talking a lot of nonsensical gibberish. The nurse said that the tumor was pushing against the prefrontal cortex and that was why she wasn’t able to speak very well. But before she slipped away she was able to hand me a scratch-off and guaranteed it would be a winner. It wasn’t.

“Where is your bus headed?” I ask the girl, jealous at those nails for being more interesting than me.

“You mean where is my bus headed without me?”

“Yeah, well, your next bus leaves at five. That’s what I heard the other driver say.”

“I heard him,” she says. “My ears work just fine.” Her voice is tired and growing distant, but she smiles. There is vulnerability in that smile. “I’m headed to St. Louis to see my cousins.”

“For Thanksgiving?” I ask.

“That was the plan. I won’t get there until midnight now.”

I tell her I’m sorry then pull a couple books from my backpack, pick one up and flip through the pages, then pick the other up and flip through its pages and make a couple notes in the margins with a pen. I want her to ask about one of them so we’ll have more to talk about. Maybe she’s read one of them in high school or something.

“You were staring at me earlier,” she says instead.

“No, I wasn’t.”

“I watched you,” she says. “I was wondering what a white boy was doing waiting around a dumpy bus station.” She looks down and examines a small stain on her jeans and rubs at it with the palm of her hand, those chipped nails sticking straight up.

I look around and notice that the only other white guy is that creep in the stained white PennState hat with his opiate care package. I turn back and look her in the eyes. They are big and brown and don’t say anything, except, in a way, they are trying to say everything. They seem to scream: I’m cold! I’m tired! I’m lonely! All the human vulnerabilities are there, and for a second I feel like I’ve known her forever. I wonder if my eyes say the same.

“I don’t own a car. This dumpy bus station in my only way home,” I explain.

“I’ve never met a white boy who didn’t own a car. You sure you’re white?” She reaches over and scratches the skin of my arm with her nails like it might scrape away and reveal a different color beneath.

She laughs. So I laugh too, you know, to even things up. But I’m not really sure why we are laughing because I can’t tell if it’s a joke. Maybe we are laughing for different reasons. She keeps scratching at my arm and we both keep laughing.

I hear someone calling for boarding at Gate 11. It sounds distant and for a moment I consider missing my bus to stay seated with her on the bench.

“That’s my bus,” I stand up and wave awkwardly.

“Bye,” she says and waves back with one hand bending her fingers like she is crinkling up a paper ball. She goes back to picking at her nail polish then covers a yawn of gargantuan proportions with her palm.

I pause before getting on the lonely bus and look down at where she scratched my arm. Red marks streak up my skin in a way that tells me I’m no winner.

—

T.C. Jones is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and is currently the director of the Jam2Jam literary and art series based in Pittsburgh. His stories have appeared in the Monarch Review, The New Yinzer, and won the TAR Award for Fiction in The April Reader. He is currently working on a collection of short stories examining Rust Belt Culture which includes the short story “Scratch-Off.”