Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Joa Suorez

The earths we lure them with
fit inside
their delicate mouths,
just sized
to sift sand.

We interrupt
great nebulas
they spit
with our universal nets,
no yield yet
but gravity
and celestial dust.

by Liz Mathews

You’ve seen her all across the United States, primarily in middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhoods, where all the children have their own bedrooms and mothers fret about balanced meals and getting to soccer practice on time. She is tall and slender and sports shoulder-length hair, typically drawn back into a loose ponytail. She favors shorts or skirts in the summertime that are cut high enough to suggest something, but are still long enough to pass the scrutiny of parents and schoolteachers. She is thirteen to seventeen years old, probably a good student but keeps it on the down-low, and has no problem speaking her mind when something’s on it.

She wants to be an artist or a writer. But she has a problem.

“My life is just too good,” she says. “I don’t have any struggles, so I don’t have anything to write about.”

She will pause, and twirl the end of her ponytail around a finger.

“Ashley got upset with me when I told her that,” she’ll continue, “And told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Like I should be happy or something! Nothing I ever create will have any substance. I haven’t suffered.”

Then she’ll sigh. Maybe she’ll have a stick of Burt’s Bees pomegranate lip balm in her pocket, which she will take out and apply.

“I mean, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Maybe I am lucky. But I haven’t ever starved, and I’m not manic-depressive, and my parents aren’t divorced. Nothing I create can possibly say anything.”

And here, you will sigh, though as imperceptibly as possible. If you are her friend, you will remain silent because you know that any response will be the wrong one. And even if you aren’t her friend, it’s best not to say anything. Telling her, “Eating disorders worked for a friend of mine,” is not appropriate. And suggesting that suffering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be will fall on deaf ears.

After all, the grass is greener on the other side, even when that grass that’s so desirable is lush with thistles and snakes.

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by caitlin macrae

At the time of this written record, I am twenty-five years old, the year is 2010. Although I live in the kind of place where, reputation has it, Big Things Are Happening All the Time and the Whole Town Has Insomnia, I am at this moment watching more television than ever. Serial dramas, mostly, an embarrassing number of which have to do with high-school-aged people and their romantic entanglements. Perhaps it began while at college, stoned, with the freakishly earnest update of the already freakishly earnest Degrassi. Last year’s Twin Peaks obsession nearly ruined my life; we will not talk about Fire Walk With Me. And then, just when I thought things were going okay, Buffy happened. Now it is several months later, and Buffy has un-happened. And here I am.

Things are different. There is more time now, I suppose. When I’m sitting at my desk in an art-making mood, the computer stays closed, and I can stay focused on the tools in my hands without thinking of how, yeah, I’d stake someone if I needed to. The ambient noise in my life now is the music I’ve listened to since developing my own tastes, not the soundtrack that reminds me of late-nineties summers in a summer camp minivan. I have stopped making as many thinly stretched comparisons between places I grew up and hellmouths, former lovers and fictional vampires. I can have conversations with people I actually know without simultaneously wishing I could check in with people who I not only do not know but who do not actually exist. These things, they are good.

But there’s another side to this. The thing about serials, their predictable arcs and soft falls, is: I spent a long time being sanctimonious about not watching teevee or whatever but, in truth, these shows stop time. It’s a lifetime in under an hour. That hour contains a world in which loose ends resolve, people communicate, all things that happens are things Of Interest, and you know that they’re Of Interest because there’s music playing. And once it’s over, all you can really do is think about it, how time actually passes, and nothing is incrementally tidy, and how when a made-up teenage vampire slayer sleeps with someone and they turn into a demon it’s a metaphoric plot device, but when it happens to you it’s really just a bummer.

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by Liz Wyckoff

Everyone knows about Amazon’s missing breast. The fabric of her sweater wrinkles strangely in its absence—three folds that look like the aftermath of a lion’s paw.

“Look,” she jokes, stretching to grab a kabob skewer across the table. Her arm crosses her chest at a tight angle. “Life without a rack! Now I realize how easy men have it.” The other women titter and smile with their lips. “If I want lamb, there’s nothing to keep me from the fucking lamb.” She pulls her arm back across the table, inserts the skewer into her mouth, and pulls a grilled square of pepper off with her teeth.

They give her knowing looks, but they don’t know everything.

Trotula of Salerno, the doctor who detected the lump, knows more details than anyone. Details about disease. Procedures. Prostheses.

Ethyl Smyth, her friend since high school, knows the history. She has been around long enough to remember those first rumors that circulated in ninth grade. The word “loose” scratched onto the front of Amazon’s locker. And senior year, after she cut her hair short and swore never to sleep with a man again, how the boys hummed “Dude Looks Like a Lady” whenever they passed her in the halls.

Amazon smiles back, chewing her lamb. Such serious women.

She’s imagining an after-dinner scene. Later tonight after Trotula has finished her bottle of sambuca and Ethyl has had too much wine, they will become brave and ask. And Amazon will say, “Let’s all.” And they will let their breasts loose at the table.

In the candlelight, St. Bridget will unbutton her madras shirt and bare her pale, pointed pair. Elizabeth Blackwell will pull the t-shirt over her head to reveal her bulky bosom. Even Emily Dickinson will unclasp the pink frills of her push-up and expose her breasts, laughing, over the brie.

Then they will know the starburst stretch underneath Amazon’s sweater. Her skin stitching into itself like a purse, a silky zipper hemming something in. The secret she is just waiting to let loose.

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by Ming Holden

The beauty of a gem depends primarily on its optical properties. Gem durability depends on resistance to cleavage. The physical properties by which gems are distinguished from one another include presence or absence of cleavage. Other distinguishing factors: type of fracture in stones without cleavage; luster; and transparency.

Roeser’s doesn’t exist anymore. Thrifty replaced it, then Rite Aid. We didn’t even boycott it. I don’t know when it happened. It happened after I looked at the green and orange and black lipstick in the Halloween section. It happened after I collected semiprecious stones, which I did sporadically from ages eight to thirteen or so. Roeser’s was one of my favorite places to peruse. I’d sit cross-legged on the floor at Roeser’s, the bins of semiprecious stones prescribed in a row the same way those delicious candy smorgasbords are set up: silos of sugared orange slices next to caramel in cheerful wrappers, delicious gleam after delicious gleam. And how they felt—the tiger-eye and hematite, especially—smoothed. I remember late afternoon, more specifically, its light on the stones. I remember saving my allowance. I remember my breasts were long in coming. I remember one very special plastic box with compartments for beads of quartz, aquamarine, topaz. I got fishing twine. I strung them together. They got lost easily between the large, soft nubs of our off-white carpet. The amethyst wandered over to the tiger-eye and mingled there. I kept the box for years, and also spent three dollars on a large, hard-edged piece of rose quartz that awakened my whole palm, all of my fingers.

Rose quartz and I got along well, which is odd since pink and I did not. I lost my heart necklace in Oregon. I still, thanks be, have not lost my heart earrings. They belonged to a beautiful woman, Deena, who married a close friend of my father’s. The friend, Harry, gave them to me when he became her widower. I wear them often, they are my most elegant jewelry, they somehow give the face whose lack of my mother’s jutting cheekbones pains me a somehow heart-shaped softness; though I look nothing like Deena did, the earrings look nice on me. I somehow think this is Deena’s doing, and I wear the earrings to anything she might have liked: a concert, a dinner, a romantic walk somewhere. She, like the stones, like the memory-whitened sunlight, is other, elsewhere, ethereal and the result of something compressed into bead and shine. “A gem,” is how my father described Deena, alive.

I would like to say that the origins of these stones, their place in the steamy inner workings of the mantled celestial body, their former life as cogs in the groaning, close sprockets of the turning planet, fascinated me. I would like to say I ran home, looked up the hexagonal structure of their molecules, and drew their chemical bonds with educated relish. I did not. I was not romanced by the iron oxide, the vertically striated prismatic crystals. Rather I merely held them in my hand; it was their smoothness, manmade, my affinity for sparkles and pretties, also arguably manmade. It wasn’t their history and identity as inlays of the great, shifting vertebrae of the world, it was that they seemed in their splendor to be not of this world. It was their impossible smoothness, it was their weight in my sweaty palm; I would angle them on my eyelid as I laid on my back, I would line them up on my belly and one would sink below sea level into my navel.

What can I say? Quartz is the most common mineral on the face of the earth. The first time I saw the earth heave it was actually a red rug, and it was 7:30 a.m., a red rug pulsing and heaving, and I was thirteen years old, and hoped in my adolescent outsider fragility that this meant the world was beginning to speak to me, that I was like the girl with the silver eyes. I was in English class. I loved English class, and no one loved it with me, and sometimes even now the ceiling or floor will churn in quiet seriousness. It is as shadowy a thing as my ability to account for how it feels to have breasts and know that they weren’t always there. Roeser’s does not exist anymore, and Deena does not exist anymore, and the respective effects both have on me are as mysterious as the strange compressions of the planet and the heaving it does at odd points, despite having learnt something of geology and chemistry, even of the biological facts of death. Somewhere ghosts are not transparent and their bodies are holdable and striped, luster ebbing pain. Deena’s skin turned yellow from the cancer. I scavenged crimson, rubbing with my girl fingers the beady eyes of wonderful beasts.

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by Ian F. King

Five days into living in this apartment, I woke up on a Sunday around noon after a very late night, with the midday sun pouring uncomfortably over me. Across the apartment, it sounded like my new roommate was up and watching television. It seemed to get louder, and after a couple of irritating minutes passed I recognized it was the song “Car Wash.” There was no getting back to sleep, so I went to get a glass of water and a handful of aspirin. The living room was empty and the television was off. I went to the windows that look out over Fifth Avenue and saw an entire street fair I wasn’t expecting, including the DJ booth right below my window, now blaring Biggie’s “Juicy” which they would do at least two more times that day.

Since that morning, the annual Fifth Avenue Street Fair, a Park Slope tradition of bouncy castles and overpriced lemonade and sausage stands as far as the eye can see, carries mostly negative connotations for me, triggering an uncomfortable claustrophobia, a feeling like I can’t escape it. Which I can’t—even with all the windows shut, hiding in my room on the quiet side of the building, there’s no peace anywhere in my home for eight solid hours. But not every time has been bad. I spent one Fair so newly and wildly in love that I almost adopted a cat. In hindsight, the cat is probably lucky it didn’t happen, wherever it is.

This past weekend, the presence of the Fair rang in another year for me in the same apartment, and I had every intention of avoiding it, which of course didn’t happen. Everything was the same. The same food stands were right where they always were. The same Beatles cover band was playing a few blocks up. The bouncy castles might have been different, but they looked the same too, at least as far as I could tell. And the same DJ booth was right outside my apartment. However, right in front of the DJ booth was the only thing different I have seen at the street fair in the four times I’ve been. I’m pretty sure they always have a break dancing square, but, this time, one of the kids in the break dancing crew was wearing a full chicken costume.

Obviously, as soon as we saw the kid, there was no way we were going to walk away without watching him dance. Unfortunately, the crew was on “break,” and only a couple of them were doing spontaneous warm-up moves. Then, one of the overweight break-dancers (of which there were two) announced the “show” would start in three minutes. It was closer to six minutes, but once they got going, they were pretty good. The two overweight ones might have been the most impressive, but that might be because you don’t see too many overweight break-dancers. Of course, when the kid in the chicken suit finally put his chicken head mask on, the crowd tensed in anticipation. Turns out we were all waiting for the chicken to dance. The pressure was seriously on, and the crowd couldn’t fault the kid if they ended up being underwhelmed by his reserved and basic performance. The costume looked fairly restrictive, and the mask part of it was surely prohibitive as well. The life lesson he was giving us all was: you show up in a chicken suit, you get an A+ just for being there.

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by Katherine Cooper

When I meet Roosevelt, he is seventy-seven and just recently retired. He’d been assembling parts at the nearby Ford factory in Lorain, Ohio, for about fifty years. In addition to health insurance and a steady pension, Ford is now paying for Roosevelt to enroll in some classes.
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by Liz Wyckoff

Judy Chicago’s 1979 art installation, The Dinner Party, is a triangular table with place settings for thirty-nine women who significantly contributed to Western Civilization, from prehistory to the mid-twentieth century. The artwork begs us to consider how these women would interact as contemporaries, and what they would be like if they were alive today.

Trotula, as her friends say, is a little “crunchy granola.”

She’s healthy, polite, fond of bird-themed items. She wears one of those headbands with a plump, speckled feather glued onto the side, as if she’s just returned from a walk in the woods where she befriended a Guinea fowl.

Trotula passes on the wine. She sneaks off to the kitchen, stealthy as a hen, grabs a fistful of ice cubes from the freezer, and drops them into her white goblet. Back at the table, in her seat among the other guests, she fills her cup from a bottle of sambuca. Trotula cares deeply about hygiene, cleanliness, sterility.

She’s an OB/GYN. She wears printed scrub tops with flowered patterns and pulls her hair back at the nape of her neck—bundles it there with a rubber band. A real rubber band. When she takes her hair down at night, the band makes a ripping noise. Always, there are splintered hairs pinched between the cracks of stretched rubber.

Trotula is tough. She has walked through a wall of protestors on her way to work, parting them like a sea, or a pair of legs.

She knows intimate details about these women, her friends, sitting around her. She’s chatted with Hildegarde von Bingen about the female orgasm, supported Eleanor of Aquitaine through her unpleasant divorce, detected the lump in Amazon’s right breast. She knows that Sappho loves women and that Artemisia Gentileschi was raped as a young girl. She meets Margaret Sanger at the park on Saturday mornings and they jog by the river, holding passionate discussions about reproductive rights.

But at the dinner party, Trotula is quiet. Reserved. She’s a good listener. She leans back in her chair and breathes anise out into the room in a fiery chill. When she gets home, she will wash her face with oatmeal soap, brush her teeth with fluoride-free paste, place the feathered headband on her bedside table, and quietly turn out the light.

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by Liz Wyckoff

A month ago, with one week left to finish my graduate thesis, I started my first quilt. I had no idea what I was doing and I needed serious help. In more ways than one. That’s how I ended up at the Sit and Sew class with Geary, Ruth, Peg, and Vicki.

When I arrived at the quilt store, the women were already set up in the back. I rushed in and started pulling things out of my bag: rotary cutter, quilter’s rule, pin-cushion. The Quiltwork Patches flier read, “No project is too old, too undone, or too unusual.” I think that rule applies to quilters, too.

Peg—the oldest of the women—immediately wandered over to my table. “Lemme see whatcha got,” she said, frowning over my scraps. I took out the book I’d been working from and shyly pointed to my pattern, called Just Peachy. Then I revealed the squares of fabric I’d sewn so far; thread dangled from their edges. I’d created a pile of soft, flat jellyfish.

While Peg fingered the squares, my sewing machine sat quietly before me—the needle seeming to blink like a sharp, metal cursor. “Very nice,” she finally squawked.

“It’s wonderful,” Ruth added, “to have a young person here!” And the others nodded in assent.

After that, the women and fabric became a sort of insulation. Yards upon yards of cotton sheltered me from thoughts of my writing—floral patterns, animal prints, polka dots, paisleys, plaids.

Instead of literary characters, the women chatted about Sunbonnet Sue and Overall Sam. They oohed and ahhed over Peg’s grandmother’s quilts—the stained squares she pulled from dusty boxes. Vicki called them “kind of retro,” and Peg hollered, “Kinda what!?”

“Retro!” Vicki yelled, tossing her thumb at me. “This one here doesn’t even know the meaning of the word!” The women hooted. I envisioned my thesis, that flawed arrangement of words on my laptop across town. It’s hard, I thought, to know the meaning of words.

“Never again will I let them pick their own patterns,” Ruth clucked toward the end of the class, referring to the children for whom she’d been sewing quilts for years. “They don’t know how long these things take. They have no idea!”

She’s probably right. They have no idea. But I have a feeling she’ll keep on letting them choose. Sometimes, self-sabotage can be a means of survival.

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by caitlin macrae

Inside of two minutes I’m basically naked at church. But it’s not church, just a Manhattan apartment with deep wood walls and carvings of saints and pews lining the wall, but I am definitely, literally naked, my cold toes tapping a line of masking tape stuck to the marble floor, making small talk. When he walks into the room, I realize that I had no idea who I was expecting. Someone really gnarly, maybe, someone I’d not want to sit next to on the train, the kind of man you feel is banging you in his mind when he says good morning. Instead he feels kind. Just kind. Like he’s genuinely happy to have me there, like we’ve met before and it is just so great to catch up like this. He is wearing an intimidatingly bright gold-and-diamond snake-shaped belt, is tall and soft shouldered, and looks to me sort of like David Lynch. This last fact is abstractly very comforting.

He is excited about the fact that I make things, too. “I bet you’re thinking all kinds of things, standing there.” Click click click. Click. He steps forward, tenderly swivels my hips and shoulders to the right, and steps back. I tell him that, actually, I really just enjoy not having to think of anything at all, that it’s nice just to be in my body. He smiles and says, “That’s how I feel when I watch TV.” This is not a man you imagine watching television. What on earth would he watch? Sixteen and Pregnant? Reruns of Boy Meets World? I can’t even imagine. We talk about mannerist painting for a while and he tells me he maybe wants one hand on my breast, the other near my crotch. Like a Venus. He mimes it for me, holds his hands up. When we are done, he tells me that he doesn’t know if it was mannerism, but he liked it. When it comes time for me to put my clothes back on and sign a waiver, he is sitting in a gigantic chair like the kind kings and priests have in period pieces, plush red with tall wooden columns rising up to the ceiling. He sits there and tells me about the Brooklyn he grew up in while I negotiate my laundry day clothing. He holds my hand just a little too long when I leave, just long enough for me to wish I was twenty years older and into abject artists.

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