Those people who latch on
for stability.
What good is it to you
to bear the weight
of their despair?
Forced down
by the pressure of shared frustrations,
strapped to the same sinking ship.
Sure, blueberries can float in water…but can we?
word by Jessica Goldson
colour by Mi Ju
The bottoms of the little creature’s feet were rough, as if they were covered in the tips of hazelnut shells. This was a thing it didn’t much like about itself. If it could have gotten some kind of procedure to fix its feet—surgery, maybe, or even something more temporary like a medical pedicure—it would have done it, but it wasn’t sure that it had time or money and besides, it didn’t even know if such a thing existed. Sometimes, just as it was about to fall asleep, the creature would feel the skin on the soles of its feet catch against the smoothness of its bed sheets (especially if the sheets had just been laundered), and it would wince.
Today, the creature was hurrying to work. As it scurried down the sidewalk, the petals on its back fluttered in the wind. The delicate, podlike lashes around its wide eyes blinked, keeping the debris of the city out of its face. The creature was carrying a stack of important documents. It wore a backpack and a satchel and was almost indistinguishable underneath it all—it must have looked, to passersby, like a worried fire hydrant. It didn’t wear much of anything, being covered in bright, yellow feathers (unlike poor, naked humans) but it wore a pair of dress shoes to the office—not because of its horny soles, but because it was afraid of the condensed exhaust and glass dust on the streets around its place of business. These dress shoes protruded from the bottom of the moving stack of bags, papers, and glittery fluff that was the little creature.
Rounding a corner, the creature caught a man staring at it. It was aware of its unusual appearance—how could it not be—but sometimes, it also caught people staring deeply into its eyes, which were a swirling, flaming mash of reds, like the palette of an indecisive stop sign. When the creature looked deeply into another person’s eyes, it could see an awe and an uneasiness there that made it think that it might be more powerful than it itself suspected. It wondered what this power could do. Sometimes it felt that, being an extraordinary creature, it should be trying to do more interesting things with its life. It knew, at the very least, that it should be asking for a raise.
The creature was so distracted by the staring man and its own racing thoughts that it didn’t see the bicycle coming around the corner. It was knocked onto its back, violently. Its papers were scattered through the intersection. As it went flying inconveniently through the air, it heard a small child on the sidewalk yell, “Mommy, what is it?” As it landed, it heard the cyclist yell, “Oh shit!” It could see the reds of its own eyes. It hoped to God it didn’t die before it had the chance to do something about its feet.
word “More Interesting Things,” by Charlotte Joyce Kidd
colour, “Lemon Bear,” by Mi Ju
“Teach your children well, their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams, the one they fix, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.”
“Teach Your Children,” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
‘What a fucking spread!’
‘Who woulda thought?’ Frances agreed.
‘Bagels, lox, whitefish, coffee, salami, bologna, provolone, macaroni—”
‘Chicken salad!’
Several parents crowded the cream cheese station at the back of the auditorium. Henry admired his wife’s breasts as she crouched to pick up a tomato. 37.5% of the couples there were gay. Mr. Hall, the middle school coordinator, wore a pesto green suit. The hunchback look worked for him. Everyone there paid $2.75 to ride the train to P.S. 463 if they didn’t hop the turnstile. But by the looks of it, there were a few who might’ve jumped.
‘Hey!’ Caleb, 4’6”, rushed over and hugged his parents. ‘Thanks for coming!’
‘Our pleasure!’
The chatter inconspicuously petered out when Mr. Hall tapped the microphone. ‘Family, friends, distinguished guests: thank you for coming to P.S. 463’s annual Role Model Day! In humanities this year, the students considered adolescence. In lieu of their studies, they reflected on their role model’s unique qualities that they hope to emulate as rising middle schoolers. Today, you will hear some of their thoughts.’
A little girl climbed on stage. Mr. Hall adjusted the microphone stand appropriately. She looked down at her notecard: ‘Hi.’
After a pause, the audience realized it was being invited to exchange greetings. ‘Hi!’
She continued, ‘My name is June Langley and my role model is Hermione. Most of all, Hermione is a genius. One day, I want to be a genius. Hermione also helps Harry beat Voldemort again and again and again. I want to defeat evil, too!’ June bowed, and the crowd cheered. An ‘I love you sweetie!’ and, ‘You are a genius, babe!’ were made out from the clamor. Surely it was June’s parents.
Another girl stepped on stage. Her name was Anne Carney. She had no index card. Her role model was Serena Williams. Serena, she informed the crowd, always wins and hates to lose. Anne does, too, she tells the full house. When she grows up she wants to be successful, like Serena! The sound level meter for June’s speech reached a higher altitude.
Now Caleb hurried up the steps. He took a piece of crumbled paper out of his pocket and unwrinkled it. This had BOY written all over it. Not once did he lift his eyes. ‘My name is Caleb Monroe and my role models are my mom and dad. Mom wakes up everyday at 5:00 and packs my lunch. She fills the fridge with my favorite snacks. Dad fought in court for my autistic brother Fred to go to a good school. He drops me at basketball practice after school and always wants to play. They are exhausted from work and then come home and cook. If there is no food, they go shopping. And tomorrow they’ll do it all again. They do not get paid for this job, and never ask for anyone to clap for their demanding work. Being a parent is so heroic. There’s no applause for a hero.’
The audience has no idea how to respond.
word by Jacob Goldberg
“After I learned that “La Practique Du Calcul” roughly translated to “basic calculus,” I wanted to write about how difficult calculus was for me but easy for others. With that in mind, I hoped to sketch a story about something that I feel is at once important, simple, and uniquely hard: showing appreciation and love for those that really matter to us.”
colour by Julien Coquentin
Rebecca Platt is and continues to be a member of an unrecognized but nonetheless elite club: Senior Superlative Actualization. Rebecca Platt’s Willstown High School Class of ‘12 voted her Most Likely to Find The Meaning of Life. As senior superlatives go, Ms. Platt’s was considered one of the more unachievable ones, along with Most Likely to Steal the Statue of Liberty, which Damon Quinn has still had no luck with.
The Class of ’12 had no good reason to believe that Rebecca was going to Find The Meaning of Life. This is because Ms. Platt is as dumb as a doornail. For example, she is known around Willstown High as the girl who infamously commented, ‘Is this Pennsylvania?’ on Hank Wiley’s photo in front of the Eiffel Tower. She has regrettable tattoos. E.g., a trail of generic lips runs down her oblique and beneath them reads, “Christ Was Here.” Her fridge is empty because she spent her $300 monthly allowance on a Sun Conure, which she named JFK. And with no additional money for a cage, JFK has been shitting everywhere.
It’s a boring story of how Rebecca Platt came upon The Meaning of Life. She didn’t have a vision; there was no beam of light. What it was was a series of mundane events that gave her some insight into the way the world is. It happened on her 22nd birthday.
Rebbeca Platt was on the subway to work. She sat across from a woman whose triceps were loose flaps of fat. The man next her said, ‘Happy Birthday, Beth.’ ‘What?’ Beth said, leaning closer; she couldn’t hear him. Beth was a mirror for Ms. Platt that day. Fifty or some odd years separated them. Beth’s arms were in some metaphorical sense a signpost of what Rebecca had to look forward to. Ms. Platt imagined herself with her own flaps of fat, her own hearing aids, and sensed that she was deteriorating, nearing the end of her visit here. Everyone has a Beth, and Rebecca observed that she could either neglect her eventual decay or accept it. So she decided to bow to her mortality instead of avoiding it.
The subway stopped. ‘Someone on the train needs medical attention. We appreciate your patience.’ Work started in ten minutes and if Ms. Platt were late again she’d be fired. Surprisingly, she didn’t get irritated. Other people on the train are probably in similar or worse conditions than I am, she thought. Rebecca didn’t know what to call it, but what she understood there on the stalled train was the importance of compassion.
Ms. Platt then learned about forgiveness. ‘I’m sorry I always said that your brother was the smarter one,’ Rebecca Platt’s mom said through a teary happy-birthday call. For most of her childhood, Rebecca was blue. But daughter forgives mother, and by waiving her inner rage toward her mom, Rebecca relieved herself of a lot of psychic pain, and grew steady.
When Rebecca Platt got home from work later that day, though, she was unemployed and hungry, and still had to clean up all of JFK’s shit.
word by Jacob Goldberg
“If there is a meaning to life, I think it has to do with the stuff in the story. And if you were to come across it, I imagine that a palette of colors might merge as they do in the artwork, and people would realize that deep down we can blend, too. It’s important to always keep in mind that even if you think someone is stupid, they might in fact be worlds smarter and more capable than you think they are. People are mirrors, and we shouldn’t miss out on opportunities to see ourselves in them.”
There is a room in the red house up the block that lets sound neither escape nor enter. Its floor-to-ceiling window faces East. The other walls are bare. In the center of the room stands a canvassed easel off of which loosely hang a palette and brush. But there are no colors to paint with.
At dawn, the woman who lives in the red house goes to the room and locks the door behind her. She takes the palette and brush and settles in front of the canvas in a painterly posture. The brow of the sun emerges from behind the buildings opposite her house. The sun washes the room in the same hue as scrambled eggs. She does not speak as she studies the canvas or the landscape in front of her. She searches them with the intensity of one who is trying to pop her own pimples.
Her stomach’s growl sounds like someone squeezing an empty bottle of ketchup. Every wall is a window. The suck-suck of her heartbeat fills the room. The woman dabs at the empty palette with the dry brush, which she holds the way you might imagine holding a wand.
The sun still rises. She runs the brush over the surface of the palette several times. An inflating lung sounds like the hush when you go from out to inside a tunnel. Her control of the brush for all intents and purposes seems limited to Mr. Miyagi’s recommendation to ‘paint the fence.’ The bristles on the brush appear frayed from overuse. She has been doing this for a while. Alive, she restores the palette and brush and leans on the wall adjacent to the window.
In this room, she is sound.
A crowd of boys on the street below walks hunched together. One of them holds a baseball. They can’t be older than fourteen. The woman in the room smiles down on them as if they were her own children. Her grin reveals that her 9th and 10th teeth have been badly broken. The boys down below look up at her and mock her. They pretend to paint. The boys, they have all seen her before. The woman’s expression, though, remains.
Her ears ring painfully as the glass shatters. The room gasps for sound as would someone for air. The baseball rolls across the ground and stops by the base of the easel. The boys below laugh and walk away triumphantly. The woman does not say anything but she has stopped smiling. Their laughter hurts the way it hurts to have a snowball fight barehanded. The woman wonders why they threw the ball through her window. She spends the remainder of the morning picking up the glass shards and putting them in a recycling bag.
I wonder if she is a sad woman.
word by Jacob Goldberg
“The artwork that goes along with this painting gave me pause about how I can let technology control my life and consequently, forget to maintain focus and care about on what’s going on around me and inside me. The woman in this story fights that as she is disciplined and compassionate – she just gets picked on for being different.”
colour by Yukai Du, an illustrator and animator from Guangzhou, China, currently based in London.
“In 2012 I finished my BA Animation degree in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, China.
‘Musical Chairs’ was my BA final project, also my first animation film.
Two years later I have received my MA degree in Central Saint Martins College in London.
I focused on research skills during my first year study in MA Communication Design
and then transferred to MA Animation in the second year for a more practical project ‘ Way Out’ – my second animation film.
Meanwhile, I have also been working as designer and animator in M-I-E studio, London.”
There was, of course, Joan.
It was Tuesday, and it was drizzling out of a low sky. The clouds looked preoccupied. Elijah’s 1900h yoga class was held in a studio on Delancey St. between Ludlow and Broome. Joan was one of the regulars. And on that Tuesday, she, Elijah, and I were the only ones who showed. The studio probably used to be a smoking room in one of the tenements, given the smell. Certainly the most curious item in there was a folding screen.
Tuesdays are my busiest day: I leave for work at 0630h, arrive at around 0800h, work until 1700h, whereupon I return to the lower east side for therapy, leaving me about ten minutes to get to yoga, which is thankfully three blocks from my house. As we waited for Joan, I considered the unpalatable pathos involved in paying someone to listen to your thoughts for a given amount of time. I am likely to discontinue therapy.
When Joan arrived she used a tissue to dab at the corner of her right nostril, which wasn’t leaking any material as far as I could see. She looked like a walking Nike advertisement and unrolled her yoga matt at about ping-pong distance from me. I have been doing yoga for four years.
Elijah began the session. He reminded us that no one was to speak. That this was an advanced class. I had done yoga with Joan for three of those years. A white noise machine hummed along outside the studio. Yoga has taught me many unexpectedly sexy facts. One is that if enough of the people in a room are quiet, you can hear the sound of perspiration. Another is that some people have the capacity to flex any combination of their abdominal “packs,” whenever they choose. And as I sank into locust pose, we sank into the quiet.
The session ended earlier than usual. Joan used one of the gratuitous Clorox wipes that Elijah leaves out to wipe the sweat off of her mat. When we leave the tenement, Joan asked if she could use the bathroom at my house because she lives back in Brooklyn, and my house was on her way to the F train. The air had the texture of a peach. It still rained. A picture falls out of Joan’s wallet; I pick it up. Fog collects on the windows of every apartment. It was then that I learned that Joan is the type of woman who keeps a picture of her chiropractor in her wallet.
When we entered the house, I removed my shirt, soaked as it was from the rain. Joan found the bathroom easily enough. And I was slicing carrots for dinner when I heard the bathroom door open behind me. Joan said, Thanks partner. And as I began to turn, I felt her naked breasts drag across my back. My temple popped like a chicken you’ve left in the microwave too long.
From the author: “The chief thematic concern of this story is the nature of people beneath the masks that they sport everyday – and Joan is wrestling with trying to take hers off; she is trying to be human.”
The thud on the porch means that the newspaperman is now awake as well. The boy retrieves it (i.e. the paper) and takes with him to the bathroom the most important section of the New York Times: the Arts. He finishes shitting in about 3.5 min. but is in the bathroom for at least 26. He has had one hemorrhage from these marathons.
The cover story is titled: “Sgt. Pepper’s New Look.” The boy reads that The Beatles have reunited for a world-tour “with a catch:” they have surgically removed their heads and replaced them with various members of the Rosaceae family.
Details of how this is done safely are enumerated by Dr. Kumari in the Science Section.
As he gets dressed, the boy cleans his circular glasses and checks his Facebook for notifications. Avery wants to see the Beatles live. Caleb wishes him a Happy Birthday.
The boy is convinced his computer is Canadian, because red DNA strips appear below the words “favorite” and “color” [sic]. Sierra, his cousin, was so “inspired” that she got the picture of the four of them inked on the nape of her neck. The girl who wished him a happy birthday was a day early.
It is now 0630h and the boy leaves his house and walks to the subway, which is three blocks away. He nods to the man who works the opening shift at A&M Deli. The 15th Street Subway stop is bizarrely multi-leveled for a station that only services two trains, both of which run on the same track.
A woman sells churros out of a cooler that probably held beer over the weekend, given the smell. The boy realizes he has never once actually looked at the ceiling of this station and subsequently realizes how often he misses anything that is above eye-level.
The G train pulls in and the boy gets in the middle cart, and goes to his favorite seat (which is totally, undeniably, everyone’s favorite seat: the one by the window on one of the old trains).
He overhears a girl say: ‘If I got that done to my head, I would have certainly gotten carnations.’
A smell hangs on the train. The boy cringes at the omitted ‘had,’ but agrees with her assessment. He grows uneasy.
A few stops later, as the train exits the Smith and 9th Street Station, he peers out of the window and looks east as the sun is still creeping over Brooklyn’s horizon. This is the only time of the day that Gowanus Canal could be called something other than repulsive. Kentile Floors in big letters w/ Seraphs looks as though it’s been tattooed on the sky right next to the Chrysler Building.
It was the boy who farted. He feels centered. And as he stirred from his dusk-dreams, he looked out at the city’s silhouette, and he committed himself to the idea that for his 17th birthday, tomorrow, he will turn his neck into a vase as well.
From the author: “People, myself included, are heavily influenced by pop-culture. The characters in this story surrender their identities to The Beatles. What happens here is tricky: one thing is that the protagonist loses his sense of identity (one may wonder whether he ever had one in the first place, given its (viz. his personality) malleability; another is that when people so quickly look to celebrities (or preferably artists) on what it means to be Hip, we so often forget what made them “cool” in the first place. It was certainly not their style, but their artistry, and their ability to uniquely express who they are. This overwhelming loss of identity leads to loneliness.”
Above and below surfaces, things fall apart.
*
I am slick and black but I am not like you. Undulating beneath New York City pavement and thrashing against walls of concrete, my slippery skin has begun to wear. I am speaking to you when you are not listening, filaments of plastic wrappers bind my teeth but I have not lost momentum. The weight of the ocean is throbbing against the tunnels of your subway trains and cars, threatening collapse of cherished architectural capital. How much longer will the patchwork of your tired men hold up the cohesion of this city?
*
See my shadow as I pass, roaming pre-historic. Feel the echoing THUMP of my tail as you unlock your bicycle from the post, a little tipsy after midnight.
Watch the bathwater drain from the tub and listen for the suction as I inhale your pubic hair, phlegm and soap scum. My belly is pulsating, white, smooth and heavy and I am sick on your waste; hear me groan.
See the ripples and cracks in the concrete, press your ear to open gorges in the sidewalk and listen. I am speaking to you when you are not listening: Hear me as the F train exhales upon arrival – look down for a moment between the platform and doors that rattle.
*
As you stand immobile on that subway train hurtling underground, remember your mortality. This city constructed with imperial dreams and blood, shrouded with fears as my hard, black dorsal fin propels me through the organized chaos, the quick of my tail displacing the debris, my underbelly pulsating, white, smooth and pristine.
As the tides rise, feel me coursing through the underground arteries – hear me gnash my teeth and see my shadow pass silent beneath your feet.
*
Above and below surfaces, things fall apart, and you are bound to one another. You glide over oceans, across invisible lines, to reach each other. Return to Montréal and see how colours turn outside your window, suffused with light: you steep handpicked medicine in cold glass jars, wrapping threads she wove around your wrists. You have eaten the fruit: wet strawberries from California, the mint and green grapes she sliced into halves.
word by Alisha Mascarenhas
colour by NYCHOS
wordandcolour 
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