Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Liz Wyckoff

Mr. Chartrand lives in Harrisville, New York—a village forty miles south of my hometown, with a population of six-hundred and fifty-three. He’s eighty-seven years old, wears his shirts tucked in, and has deep creases stretching from either side of his nose to the corners of his mouth.

Since he was twelve, Mr. Chartrand has been a dowser. He uses a stick to detect water far below the earth’s surface. Some people call this water witching or divining or doodlebugging. Others call it bunk. Rubbish. Hooey. Mr. Chartrand calls it “a gift from the good Lord.”

“There’s quite a lot to it,” he says. The stick must come from a fruit tree. It must be large and freshly cut and shaped like a Y. He pulls the branch apart with both hands and walks off in the direction of hidden water veins. Once he’s found them, he paces off the precise location for a well and provides instructions on where to dig and how deep.

Some dowsers have been known to locate other things, like gemstones or gravesites, but not Mr. Chartrand. He can’t explain why—he’s just good at finding water.

Still, I can’t help but wish he’d help me find other things. I wish Mr. Chartrand could pay me a visit, clip a crotched branch from a cherry tree down the street, and extend his arms to find me a job, for instance. I’d follow him and his tucked-in shirt on a jagged path across town to an office building with some open position waiting to be filled.

Or, even better, what if Mr. Chartrand could find love? He’d collect an apple bough from behind my apartment and allow its invisible pull to lead him to another human—some man that he could mark for me like an X in the dirt.

Maybe each of us has a gift for finding something. Lucky pennies on the sidewalk, arrowheads in the weeds, used clothing that doesn’t smell, funny friends with infectious laughs. And maybe those things are just as important as water.

If I told that to Mr. Chartrand, I’m not sure he’d agree. But I bet he’d smile, stretching those creases on his face just like a divining rod, and that might tell me all I need to know.

[img via]

by Naomi Solomon

Storefront Jesus looks out onto not very much for the spraypainted son of all creation: some parked cars, some litter, a tree trunk almost naked of branches, and, on the far side of a chain link fence, the blank wall of one side of the Ridgewood Wash-N-Fold. He looks tired but calm, as if tired is the normal and unsurprising state of things, and the wind rattling his metal grating is like the prelude to a sigh that never gets released: a long, sharp intake of breath that leaves him slightly shaky, all puffed up with no place to go.

There are days when the deep sunflower yellow of his sprayed-on aura looks cheap: the gaudy shine of a thin-paged, gilt-edged bible in the hand of a street-corner evangelist, coming with the expectation of pamphlets filled with Doomsday cartoons and too much italicized text. Those days Storefront Jesus seems abandoned, as if behind His corrugated gaze there might be only dust and empty soda bottles, a broken folding chair or two. As if He is a flimsy patch over a hole and not the modest wrappings of greater things hidden within. As if passer-by should look down and walk faster, caught somewhere between the uncomfortable solemnity of witnessing a stranger’s funeral procession and the driving need to not be preached at, not today when there’s a glower to the sky and the parking lot is full of honking cars.

Other days there seems to be a true glow as the light hits the yellow paint and glints off the bits of exposed steel like the quick, intense shake of a spray can, as if Storefront Jesus were reminding the other churches in the neighborhood, the huge institutional-looking churches, the traditional ones with all the stone walls and pointy bits, that there is glory to be found in the small things, too; that if you just make a small place holy, it will be holy, too.

Then maybe the congregation can see and make this glory as easily in a storefront as in a cathedral, and maybe they have already fixed it so that when those doors roll up and Jesus disappears above the entry way, the storefront church is flooded with light, light glinting neatly off of simple polished pews and hardwood floors kept just so by proudly bent backs and strong arms, light shining off an altar of family rosaries and household reliquaries, lacquered ceramic vases filled with whatever is brought in this week: flowers or tree branches, carefully twisted pipe cleaners, tinfoil blossoms held in place with copper wires. At the back an elaborate organ hidden away like an inheritance, like a million mouthed thank-yous to generations come and gone, which through an incredible feat of soundproofing the congregation has managed to keep a massive and gleaming secret, out of the neighborhood’s awareness.

[img via Naomi Solomon]

by Naomi Solomon

The saint—Saint Thomas Aquinas, I believe—is still there on the side of the building, hovering on a small concrete platform just above the third floor, looking out onto a dull strip of Fourth Avenue: a fenced-off lot under construction, a fast food Chinese restaurant, dirty snow, parked cars. Or would be looking out onto, if not for the box he has been in since the vacant St. Thomas Aquinas School became the new P.S. 124 in September.

The conversion seemed frantic after years of silence. (Granted, it took me a while to notice the silence: I work less than a block from the school, and walked by it at least twice a day for over a year before I realized that there were never any school buses, never any kids coming and going, that the giant area of scratched-away paint on the front door that sometimes looked to me like a hunched-over alien and sometimes like a baby with a balloon never grew more chipped. That the same brown-and-tan tweed couch cushion that someone had, at some point in time, tossed over the fence was always sitting there moldering in the same corner of the schoolyard, surrounded by weeds growing completely undisturbed between cracks in the pavement.)

At first I couldn’t tell if the school was being torn down or fixed up. Construction workers filled the yard with dumpsters, and filled the dumpsters with a rubble of plaster, scratched chalkboards, and rusty-looking electrical equipment. Open windows revealed mangled lighting fixtures and heaps of dirty classroom furniture. Then they set up a little booth for a security guard at the school gate, and the alien/baby-with-balloons disappeared under a fresh coat of paint—red this time—and one day I walked by and the yard was paved, and a man in an orange vest was tracing out a four-square court in chalk.

Lastly, just a week or two before Labor Day, bright plastic signs announcing the building as a public elementary school went up over St. Thomas’s name set in concrete over the doorways, and wooden panels painted brown went up around the statue of the saint himself. The transformation is strangely temporary, as if the Department of Education is prepared to hand the school back at any time, put uniforms on the kids and take evolution out of the textbooks. Tear down the signs, let the saint out of his box, and return to the way it must have been before the paint on the door chipped away.

by caitlin macrae

After last Christmas I went back to the place where I met you. It was warmer than what I’d left. Things had changed but you were still going to bed after sunup, roving the quiet town in the fake mustache I’d lent you the last time I was home and sleeping while the rest of us moved.

We went to your mom’s house, with your new friends who were high as all get-out, and your mom made us the best dinner. When we got there, and even on the way there, I was so mad at you, on account of the highness, and the high driving through high-winding mountain roads, and my righteous grief-induced demi-sobriety. You, as always, told me not to worry, that everything was fine, or would be. I, as always, said okay. As always I didn’t mean it. It’s like that between us, where I try to will myself into okay-ness with things that are normally so much less than okay. I let it slide and I believe you because sometimes believing is everything.

And besides, once I saw you and your mom it was easy to worry less. Because if someone’s mom is hugging them in that mom way and making mom-type jokelets and jabs about you in front of your friends, everything really has to be pretty much golden. It was a good night, talking art with your mom in that cavernous house, doing the dishes even though she told us not to. Clearly, then, it’ll all be fine.

And we drove back from your mom’s house, down from the mountains to the ocean, and somewhere around Summerland this song came on, the most perfect late night long drive sleepy song, and I would’ve asked you who it was but then I would’ve had to stop looking in the rearview mirror into the back seat, where you were curled up with the first boy I’d ever seen you hold, and you looked so well, not tired or jittery or too cool to be my friend, just well. Had I asked, you might have moved, and honestly I just couldn’t risk it.

by Mike Phillips

“There are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.” —1 John 5:7-8

I looked up from my book as the train emerged from the tunnel, creaking with care onto the great steel bridge. Even though we had all had made this trip countless times, at this moment everyone in the car lifted our heads to greet the island city, brilliant in the slanting light that warmed our faces.

But there was one man on the other end of the car whose chin remained firmly on his chest. I had noticed him when I got onto the train, the way both his knees were bouncing up and down, as if in anticipation.

After a moment, I saw his chest expand and collapse in an exaggerated breath. He got up and began walking purposefully in my direction, leaving his cluster of plastic bags on the seat. I pretended to read. I felt relieved when I realized he was not coming at me but pacing back and forth.

“I got a real simple question I wanna ask you,” he bellowed at no one in particular, in a tone more of accusation than inquiry. “It’s a real simple motherfuckin’ question, but nobody can tell me the answer.”

His voice was muffled by the clatter of the train as he turned away from me. I strained to hear as I stared blankly at my book. He turned back: “I asked college professors this question, and they can’t even get it right. Motherfuckin’ P-H-D, don’t know shit. I asked—,” and his voice faded again.

He went on for a minute more, until the train plunged us back into the dark. Then he stopped, turned, and sat back down. He didn’t say another word. I never heard his question and wasn’t sure if he had even asked it, but I knew that I didn’t know the answer anyway.

by Mike Phillips

“When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’” —Luke 9:54

I was surprised to see his enormous feet dangling toes-down over the arm of the couch, like two miniature sides of beef. He had a habit of rising early and letting himself out after a bender. I considered pulling the sleeping bag away from his close-cropped hair and waking him violently, but then I noticed the rivulet of drool, the only proof that he was still for now among the living, and thought better of it.

As I turned away, some recently displaced piece of furniture materialized in the exact spot where I was about to place my foot. Awoken either by the noise of the collision, the sound from my mouth like steam hissing through a broken radiator, or his irrepressible lust for Schadenfreude, he slightly lifted his head and muttered, “Hey Fuckface, get me a glass of water.”

When I returned from the kitchen, he was halfway sitting up and mostly naked. His furry thighs formed an obtuse angle, the leg-holes of his briefs not hugging his skin quite closely enough near the vortex. He scratched his chest loudly and said, “Man, those guys were assholes last night, huh?”

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by Mike Phillips

He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah.”
—John 1:41

He breathed hard out his nose, somehow sighed while inhaling, and expelled his inevitable refrain: “Yeah, well, their earlier stuff is way better.”

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by Mike Phillips

“But we are the ones who have suffered through the Mother’s transgression.”

—The Letter of Peter to Philip (Nag Hammadi Codex VIII,2: 139)

He kept trying to skip stones on the river’s surface, but each time he was answered with a distinctly unsatisfying plop. I told him to knock it off, and he shuffled over to the picnic table, swung one leg over the bench, and immediately started scratching at the peeling paint.

“I just don’t get it,” he mumbled. He looked at me, then away, across the water. “Why are all women crazy?”

I told him that everyone’s crazy, by which I meant that he was crazy.

“Nah, bitches, man.” Now he was digging flecks of dried paint out from under his fingernails. I noticed they needed a trim. “I mean, they’re so irrational. It’s hormonal or something.”

He was always going on about purity, simplicity. That was what had started the argument. He told her she was wearing too much makeup, and that he liked her better without it. He just couldn’t understand why she would get so upset.

“She should be flattered, right? Doesn’t that prove that I love her, no matter what she looks like?” By now he was putting his fingers into his hair, taking them out, putting them back in.

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