Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Joa Suorez

We feel the waves
before they arrive.

Though our thinner shells
make us more alive
to pain—we can’t help
but let the world in.

by Joa Suorez

You may need
some small life
carried loosely
in the mouth
to warble the sounds
trapped in the floorboards
of your house—the hard part
will be hunting one down.

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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

The dog walked into the train car, ears flopping and tail wagging, a brown mass of furriness on a long green leash. As if it were a person, the dog went for the only empty seat on the L heading out of Bushwick toward Manhattan, and then began sniffing the floor, as though it were a dog.

Attached to the other end of the leash was the dog’s woman, who immediately sat in the seat the dog had procured for her. She dropped her travel bag on the floor, barely missing the foot of the person next to her. Flipping her auburn hair over her shoulders, the dog’s woman focused her attention on the baby carrier she’d been clutching in her right arm.

Meanwhile, the dog, seemingly oblivious to this, continued sniffing the floor, its fluffy ears dragging like brooms.

It’s fair to say that everyone who had seen the dog board the train was now staring at the dog’s woman as she fumbled her way into the baby carrier. She put her left arm in, straightened her shoulders and passed the dog’s leash from hand to hand, flipping her hair back again. Next, the right arm, and another straightening of the shoulders. The carrier rested loosely against her chest.

The dog continued to sniff, unaware.

The dog continued to sniff, unaware until its woman started reeling it in on the leash. Then the dog continued to sniff, but it was a panicked sniffing, which is not sniffing at all.

Once she’d pulled it close enough, the woman snatched the dog up to her lap and immediately began manipulating its limbs into the baby carrier. Or dog carrier, as it turned out.

And then it was pretty much over for the dog. It put up a small struggle, but quickly realizing the futility of its efforts, the dog resigned itself to its fate. Soon all of its legs were sticking out of the padded red carrier, its little body sitting upright in an unnatural vertical position. The woman cinched up the carrier straps on her shoulders and sat back in the seat.

The dog, to its sorry credit, stared straight ahead as though it had intended things to unfold in this way. The subway doors opened at the next stop, people stepped off the train and others stepped on. The dog sniffed the air. And sniffed again.

And turned its head to the right, still sniffing.

In a handbag in front of the nearest door was a cocker spaniel, one leg hanging out of the bag. The dogs studied each other. Neither made a sound. The looks in their eyes said it all.

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by caitlin macrae

I have tried very many times; it’s just that he will not leave, comes back like that cat from that song. And he will not believe a word I say, each time resurrects himself as a man without memory. Lacuna Lazarus, I call him. Flabbergasted by any lingering sliver of anger or displeasure, cannot understand words that are not hello, how are you, containing upward tilting syllables like the kind you’d use on a friend. I suspect that most people have people like him; I suspect that I have been that person to other people at some point or another. If that is true, has been true for you of me, I am sorry.

There are times when scooping him into a jar and feeding him stale pieces of cake feels like the rightest, bestest thing to do. Times like now, when I’ve exhausted myself being angry, because how long can anger stay sharp, because at some point doesn’t it all just feel sort of ridiculous? There were other times, remember, back some years when there were laughs and bike rides and meteor showers. But then he crawls in through a loose floorboard, antennae waving, full of requests, demands, statements that use the word “I” no less than four times each. And at that moment everything changes, the nuclear silence switch hits, I reach for a slipped-off shoe and hold it just high enough and then I hold my breath but just for a second.

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by Kiersten Tarr

In a former life we were both human. We were lovers then—beautiful, devoted, and grateful. Someone up there liked us, and we basked in the knowledge of our good fortune. That was centuries ago. The unfathomable wisdom or whim of the Universe has seen fit for me to find you again in this life, although I have been demoted to the realm of the feline.

I only say “demoted” as a nod to the simplistic and unforgiving notion of karma. Really, once one adjusts to certain particulars of personal hygiene, the feline existence feels in no significant way inferior to the human. It is no less gratifying, and a great deal less complicated. It is not that Life, as it were, is no longer mystifying, as it was when I was human, it is just that I now care much less about how mystified I am. I wake up when I please, I wander aimlessly about my abode, I have a stretch and a nap in a patch of sunlight, I require a tummy rub, and all goes well with me. It is interesting. I remain myself, but I am a cat, and one does not necessarily supplant the other. Of course, I count myself lucky that I happen to be a house cat, with three square daily and all that. Many humans do not enjoy such luxury.

But back to you and I, and our history, and that karma nonsense, popular as it is. I do not choose to say whether or not it is at all meaningful that you happened to come across me in that city shelter. I do not suppose that I am being either punished or rewarded, or that this has anything to do with getting what I “deserve.” Maybe it is just a cosmic coincidence—or, more likely, an interesting case study conducted by some higher Something-or-Other—for me to know you in a new way after so much time, in a way that is different from how I knew you before—different but also the same.

This is all by way of explanation for those moments when you feel that I love you more than is usual for a cat to love a person. It is because I remember what we were, and find that what we are is just as blissfully perfect. (I will avoid the obvious pun there.) I tell you all this to explain, for example, the mornings—such as this morning—when you have awakened to find me lying next to you, my head on your pillow, paws caressing your sweet face, fixing you with an oddly penetrating stare. Well, oddly penetrating for a creature with a brain roughly the size of an English walnut.*

*Scientific research has shown the cat brain to be the most similar to the human brain of all the domesticated animals, with the capacity for long-term memory (up to 16 hours) and an identical region responsible for emotion.

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by J.B. Staniforth

I was in my home town for a night and after hanging out with my family until late in the evening, I decided to go check out San Francisco garage-band NoBunny. It was strange, however—after 13 years of living elsewhere, I knew virtually no one in the little club—just a room, really—where I’d have known everyone when I was younger. I found myself hanging around the merch table and eventually struck up a conversation with Jason, the band’s guitarist, who I learned was originally from Florida.

I asked what I always do of people who’ve lived in Florida: “Did you ever have any experiences with gigantic man-eating insects?”

He didn’t, but after a moment of silence the talk turned to alligators. Having been to Gatorland outside of Orlando a few years back, I said that gators all reminded me a little of my cat—basically laid back, but with eyes that could turn evil in an instant. Jason agreed: “They’re a lot like cats, actually—especially the way they’ll snap at you as a warning just to get you to move back.”

I said, “Have you seriously been close enough to a gator to have it do that to you?”

“Oh yeah, sure. A bunch of times. When I was living in Fort Meyers, I had a job planting aquatic plants in the man-made lakes out by the airport. And gators love man-made lakes. They’ll slide into one, and if they discover they’re the only gator living there, it’s a little piece of gator paradise. They can plant their eggs and defend them from other gators really easily that way.”

Fort Meyers, he explained, had upgraded to an international airport and, as such, had expanded. They had gathered up large parcels of surrounding land and began working to beautify them. That was where Jason found a job.

“What you’d do,” he said, “is put the base of the plant under your foot and kind of dig it down into the ground with your toe.” He illustrated this with a dance move that looked like a diminutive twist. “It was easy because the ground was so sandy. But sandy ground is just what gators like, so there were always some around.

“The big ones leave you alone,” he continued, “because you plant in groups of twenty or thirty and they’re not stupid. But the babies have no problem coming over and checking you out. They’re small, maybe the length of your forearm, and they’re really dumb. They’d swim up to you all curious”—he mimed wide, vacant eyes and a dim-witted smile—”and just kind of bump you, trying to figure out what you were all about. I bet they could tear your arm off if they wanted to, but they never did—they didn’t know that’s what they were supposed to do. They were pretty cute, but after a while a couple would come near you and you’d see the mother start circling around you. That’s when you needed to say, ‘Okay kids, you all need to get the hell away from me now!’ and push them off. Because you’re not allowed to get out of the pool, you know? Unless you’re hurt or you’ve been attacked, or you’re done, getting out of the pool means getting fired. That’s how I saw the gators snapping.”

“So—” I started, a little confused. “This is on the airport’s land, right? How come they bothered to plant things in there?”

“To make it look nice!” he said, as though I’d missed the obvious point.

“But who’s looking at it? Can people go out there?”

“Oh, no! It’s just for when you’re coming in for a landing, you go over these little lakes by the airport. They want people looking out the window of the plane to be impressed.”

Accordingly, he mimed looking down to his side, pointing, and went “Ooooo!”

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by Kate Axelrod

Several months before things ended, when there was still that faint promise that he’d stick around, Tim told me that all he wanted was a baby shark. It was early spring and we were in Riverside Park just before dusk—the sky pale and purple. He was lying with his head in my lap, my fingers absently tracing the contours of his face, the tips of ears. Every so often I touched my lips to his eyelids. All I need is a house in the country, a couple of kids, and a pet baby shark. He was always saying things like this—things that were about to be predictable and then would make some sudden shift or turn.

In August, Tim went to Mexico for a couple of weeks. Things had been deteriorating for a long while, and I felt a surge of panic when he left, wondering if there was any way to salvage what had become such an ugly and tangled mess. And then it came to me. I spent hours in my office looking through eBay listings. There seemed an endless supply of felt Halloween costumes for toddlers and stuffed animals with spiky white teeth and flimsy fins, but eventually I found it. A tiny, fetal shark, preserved in a jar, floating gently in a light blue liquid. He was packaged and all ready to go, could be shipped out from South Dakota for only fifty dollars! I was elated and flooded with a sense of calm, like I’d just found the key to something lost and treasured.

I brought the baby shark over to his house one muggy night, and handed it to him in a small brown paper bag. He smiled at me in this suspicious way and lifted the jar out of its Styrofoam holder. The shark was a grayish yellow, waxy and bloated—like an inflated piece of gummy candy. We stared at his sleepy, ill-defined features, the way his face nodded solemnly toward his neck, how he seemed to fit so comfortably in a jar small enough to for a couple dozen Spanish olives.

And for a while, it even seemed to work! We were swept up in the romance of something recovered, a love resuscitated. We took a trip upstate to a garden of sculptures, spent hours in the Queens museum studying a miniature replica of our city, and took ferry trips across the river. But of course, in the end, the baby shark (or it’s plain, hopeful gesture) wasn’t enough. Sometimes I think about him, tucked away in Tim’s bookshelf, resting in his little foggy vessel. I think about the sad and strange rituals we all go through in hopes of saving something already decaying, already lost.

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by Vanessa Hope

3 Months
It eats time like candy
Lips gleaming with hours
Belching thin, atmospheric serenity

6 Months
It festers in rank foulness
Sweating bugs and yeast
Tubes emerge from its veins
       Every bodily fluid the wrong color

9 Months
With pointed, gluey tongue
It dabs your brain with analgesic

1 Year
Heavy with allegiance
Struggling to see
Where the beast ends
Where you begin

Fever Dream
As did Mr. Hyde
As did the dark villains of the comics
So too shall this younger twin
(Achingly similar to the partner who came before)
Cease to require charity
Not for the struggle in making one
Not for the struggle of being halved

15 Months
Questioning understanding and standing up at all.

by Vanessa Hope

“The young scientist’s mistake betrays an inability to fully grasp that other people are just as needy, ambitious, and sensitive as himself—an inability to think, How would I like it if I had skin that barely held together?”

Our baby beast: bolted, sewn and seeping
A sack of air like a lightshade
Glowing, jaundiced, breathing just a little

We were desperate to close the fissures
Make this illusion tall and bawdy
We gave it a concave, hungry face
Made its muscles rumble without memory

If I try to drag it with me into night
It rends into a stringy paste—clinging
If I try to hide it in the darkness
It howls and moans and cries

It is unyielding but without will
(Any assembly will fight against being put back)
It is not a creation of our parts
But a monster of what is absent