Tag: shortstory

On Art and Relationships: “Extending the Pattern”

for josh

word by Josh Elyea 

colour by Mojo Wang

          Jane knows that compartmentalization is the key to a healthy relationship. She’s put all the little boxes where they belong, and for God’s sake, she’s going to leave them there.

          Jack says the simplest things in life are the most insidious. Comfort, for example. No good can come from comfort, he says. He’s speaking while deftly disassembling a French press that hasn’t been cleaned in months; Jane is only half listening, since she’s just put on Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros and is ruminating on the late singer’s post-Clash career with a keenness she’s not able to summon for the tired lecture aimed in her general direction. Rather, she’s enamoured with the sound quality pouring from their new BOSE Sound System. You really do pay for quality.

          It’s only after a large purchases, like a new BOSE Sound System, when Jack and Jane fight about money. It’s only in those moments that Jane’s chosen profession matters; only after the limited square footage of the apartment has been claimed, carefully cordoned off with a clear presence on either side does it matter what she does for a living. Jack wouldn’t go so far as to suggest she do something else with herself; no, he’s fairly certain art is where she belongs. He’d sure to like to see her make some money from it though, and he’ll be damned before he feels awful for saying so. Or, at least, that’s how this argument went the last time they had it, and the time before, and before…

          It’s not like Jane is overburdened; student loans notwithstanding, she owes a few hundred dollars on a VISA and has an unpaid cell phone bill in collections (she’s only recently stopped receiving calls where a bland, deathly voice asks “Hello, may I speak with Mrs. Jane _____ about an outstanding and quite frankly egregious debt…”). Other than that, she doesn’t owe a cent to anyone. So she’s just getting by right now – so what?   

          Often, Jane wished Jack would try and understand what it meant to be an artist, what it meant to try and create something from nothing. She wished he wouldn’t stare so obviously when she said she didn’t make much progress on her novel that day, and that he wouldn’t move with such reluctance when removing his credit card from his wallet to buy things like BOSE Sound Systems. Hell, she wished he’d stop buying things like BOSE Sound Systems so she didn’t feel so indebted to him, so she didn’t feel like she owed him anything.

          Jane looks towards Jack and sees there’s a torn piece of wallpaper where the counter-top ends; looking behind it, she can see that the little black and white boxes don’t end where they appear to, and the pattern extends far beyond her cursory understanding of it.

 

See more colour by Mojo Wang

 

real

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It’s winter and it is snowing pastel. Réal is selling the magazine again, in front of the pharmacy. He is a camelot in French. It means he stands on the corner and holds out a periodical to passers-by. In this digital age, one would expect a mobile app to do the job – but Réal is ubiquitous to me every day, in every weather.

His permanent frown had led me to assume he was a grumpy guy. My dad would have said Réal just didn’t flex his smile-muscle. I had just moved to the area where he was assigned, and he had quickly become a landmark to avoid. Crossing over to the southern sidewalk, dodging his broody stare, I would wonder if he was trying to repel us.

Us, one-time customers, potential long-term subscribers, do we get a smile?

I might have irreversibly fallen for the comfortable trimmings of preprogrammed greetings: into barista prickly welcome, fake customer service friendliness, miscalculated voicemail inflections. All I had to do was talk to him, and his forested eyes lit his nested face, teeth standing strong like elder mountains, uncovered by a dissipating set of clouds.

I had to question Réal about his salesmanship. We had broken down our assumptions, flooded the gutter with cigarette breaks and all apprehensions of human contact had melted away with the season. Had he ever tried to vary his approach? Tried talking to people directly? I wanted to ask him, in a medical way, would he try smiling?

I said, Réal, how can you get more people to buy your magazine?

He gets fifty percent commission – the rest goes to support persons without homes. Increasing the clientele helps people in need. I wanted to feel that I could help Réal help customers help the magazine help the homeless.

He said he had tried many approaches, but the way he was doing it right now was the way that worked best for him. It just wasn’t him otherwise.

His frown was his unique selling point and I was someone who had fallen for it.

It is nice that flowers come right after snow. You would expect the castaway autumn leaves to leap back onto their branches, like a rewound tape, so as not to startle the scenery. Like an old hand-drawn cartoon, autumn colors swirling in reverse, smudging circles into the background. But spring here comes like an overdue vagabond, and Réal is a perce-neige in French. It’s Flower for “snowdrop”. But instead of insinuating gravity, perce-neige pushes its stem through the ice asking for the sun.

word by Hoda Adra

colour by Sam Rowe

From the author: “This foot goes naked every other second. It made me think of how someone could find themselves bare from one day to the next, how the cycle of homelessness can be brought upon by a single striking event. Conversely, the shoe appearing reminded me of the resilience I’ve witnessed, from support networks and individuals that work within and through issues of homelessness and displacement.”

she dreamt in tiny fists

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She dreamt in tiny fists. The fever pushed at her eyelids when she kept them shut, and leaked out and over when they were open. Each morning Nathanael came to her with tea and the newspaper and an orange but every afternoon she woke to find the tea cold and the orange so soft and pungent she had to pick up and throw it away, an effort that made her grunt—a wild sound against the curtains.

She didn’t know what day it was, or what time it could possibly be. She only knew that she threw the oranges in the afternoons because of the clock that ticked like loss on the blue wall. Sometimes she threw the orange at the clock, but it was invincible.

Each hour became a cold and wobbly upper arm that no one ever touched or thought about. Perhaps this was what depression was like, she thought, as she blew her wretched nose and spluttered into the sleeve of her dirty nightie, but it wasn’t: she could see that through the waves.

Once, after throwing the orange and wondering for a long time whether it had landed on the air vent where she imagined it heating up and bleeding out onto the floor, she sat up and turned and bent her legs and lifted, and then she stood.

Her head was still on the pillow as she rocked gently there on the carpet. Eventually it met her in its place and together they walked to the corner of the room where the orange lay, nowhere near the air vent, perched on top of a yellow dress she had forgotten all about.

She laughed then and coughed and a purple snake slid past her foot before she tipped herself back in and under the covers.

Nathanael came at night to pick up the oranges and dispose of the bits of newspaper she had used as tissues. One night he had six heads—one night, seven incredulous eyes. Then there was the night that he had one face, and it was beautiful, and she wished she would recover so she could love it better and kiss it more.

That was the night it was over. Suddenly her stomach ached for food; it writhed and echoed with hunger. Can I have some soup, she asked, lightly and without commotion. Nathanael smiled and opened the curtains to the moon.

word by Laura McPhee-Browne

colour by Young Wavey

From the writer: “When I first saw this piece of art, I was instantly reminded of a dream; a feverish dream of the sort you have when you are ill with the flu, and sleep is confused and brief and uncomfortable, with a sort of sick surrealism just around the next corner.

When I have had a serious case of the flu in the past, I remember thinking in quick bursts about things that later made no sense. I remember having no appetite except for relief from the heat and the pain, and I remember feeling like I was going to be sick forever and ever. This story is an attempt at encapsulating how it feels to have the flu, and the dream-like nature of being stuck inside an unrelenting fever.”