Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by May W.

Will wore a three-piece suit every day of the week, even on exceptionally hot days when sweat would pool in dark arcs under his arms. Although vague on the subject of employment, he was always headed somewhere important—a business meeting, a work-related trip. He existed in a state of constant movement. He was tall and wiry, of East Indian descent, with a graying beard that lent suspicion to his professed age of twenty-nine. He lived one floor above me, in the same duplex apartment. He was my roommate and my boss, and the most ambitious individual I had encountered during my few months in the “real world”. The notion that he was destined for greatness was a truth that I immediately accepted without doubt or consideration. His name alone meant conviction.

When we first met, I told him that I was a writer. It was a word that felt like bubblegum in my mouth—sweet and inauthentic. He was ecstatic, jumping up from the couch to exclaim, “Perfect! I’m starting a magazine. It’s going to be huge. You can be my business partner.”

I eagerly accepted the position as Will’s devoted subordinate. He had the experience and smarts and business savvy, while I had the energy, and what Will called “potential”. He called me “Tiny Boston”, shortened to “T.B.” His optimism was contagious. There was a professional energy between us that seemed guaranteed to propel us forward and up. I soaked in our schemes and plans, voraciously.

I was always learning new things about Will to shock and amaze me. He had lived in seven countries, and had been “banned” from several, including Thailand and China. He had called off three engagements to three separate women, all at the last minute. But he was, deep down, a romantic. He had smoked opium and spent time in brothels. He was immune to mosquito bites because they hate the taste of gin.

For weeks, I devoted my nights to the magazine. We often brought our laptops to bars—Will preferred to write when he was drunk, but I found that my ability to form sentences disappeared after the first gin & tonic. Will rarely slept, and I mimicked him, typing until six or seven in the morning and sleeping all day. It was discombobulating, this lifestyle. I found myself constantly exhausted and unfocused, mulling over the same paltry sentence for hours. In two weeks, I produced less than three pages of content. Will seemed thrilled with my work, his optimism unflinching. “You’re doing great, T.B.!” He would heap me with praise and order another round. There was always a bartender around who knew Will’s name, would slap him on the back, refill his glass.

Of course, it began to dawn on me that none of this was real.

One day, Will returned home after a four-day disappearance, unkempt and haggard and reeking of booze. He postponed paying me for my work, offering plea bargains in the form of small vials of drugs, half-empty bottles of wine and, once, a coupon for a free haircut. What finally convinced me was the spoon. At the time I struggled to recall the exact details of its context or application. I was on the couch with friends at four or five in the morning, drunk, my mind swimming against the tide of sleep. He was there, splayed out on the floor, focused. Through my haze I thought I saw a knot of rubber, and a spoon, and something else that filled me with a sense of dread. I woke up the next day, dazed and uncertain. But when I went to the living room, it was as I had remembered, there on the floor—a spoon—a little mirror that turns your world upside-down.

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by Matt Weston

As the man held the silver disc above his head, looking ridiculous, no doubt feeling ridiculous, I had this thought: while he would like to be anywhere else but here, in this field holding a disc above his head in the heavy August air, there is no place I would rather be than here, centered in a spot of shade under an oak tree, watching him struggle. He seemed to communicate his plight in his posture: his right knee bent (Is she even using my light?), his back bowed (This shot ends at three. What time is it?), his hands grabbing at the disc, slowly turning it (Sonofabitch).

A dog, a small dog, maybe a dachshund, ran off its leash and started barking at the man, then stopped barking and opened its mouth and licked one of the man’s shoes. He just stood there, defenseless. Past the dog and the man, down a short drop in the field that lead to a cement walking path, stood the subjects of the shoot, a man and a woman, he a full foot taller, their hands hugging a bouquet of flowers. To their right squatted the photographer. With camera in hand she either jumped up or lurched to one side, all the while pointing her finger at the man holding the disc. He took a step forward or back in response, doing his best to make like he was fully invested, giving 110% all the time, the shot was all that mattered.

I took a bite of my proscuitto and mozzarella sandwich (Delicious) and stretched my body out a little longer on the blanket. A satellite dish rose in my mind, one built with serious, industrially thick crossing bars painted white that fought for real estate with a swimming pool in my friend Mike’s backyard. Inside the house his dad would change the channel and outside the dish moved to pick up the signal, nearly hitting the side of the pool. We joked that it wasn’t the chlorine in the water that stung our eyes but the radiation coming off the dish.

I wondered then if Mike’s dad was still watching that old TV with the huge bulb swelling the set all these years later, and what the odds were of an errant signal bouncing off the clutch of Comcast satellites above Mike’s house and reaching this man’s disc in a field in Brooklyn, a man who would have given anything to change the channel.

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by Saba Afshar

Allen Iverson nearly made me cry. It was unexpected, mostly because I don’t care about the personal lives of celebrities. And while I’ve always viewed Iverson as a supreme NBA talent (for a long stretch of time, the most entertaining player to watch in person), I never regarded him as one of my favorite ballers and even thought the style he ushered into the NBA was bad for basketball (see: 2004 U.S. Olympic team, the).

And yet. Allen Iverson nearly made me cry.

Why shed tears for a multimillionaire, hall-of-fame, once-in-a-lifetime talent like Iverson? This dude barely pushed six feet but dominated a sport designed for athletic giants. What was I relating to?

I—surely not uniquely—hope to overcome the mistakes of my past. Not only to rise above them, but to erase them from my personality. I don’t want to be haunted by the underachievement in my career, the pain I caused women I loved, the distance I put between myself and my family’s crises.

As Iverson drove the lane and avoided the limbs of the tree-like defenders, absorbing body blows that would drop any other person, he overcame the controversial, racially charged bowling alley incident that put him in jail at seventeen. On the court, the questions about his “thug” style became laughable. The outcry to be a better role model sounded foolish and unnecessary. Watch his hustle on the court; image what you can do if you put out that much effort in your own life. Even listening to him talk in press conferences and interviews gave me hope—that I too can overcome. The man loved what he did, loved his children, always gave the impression that he was striving to be better in all aspects of his life. He was the hardest working family man I could think of. Sure it was just basketball, but that’s where his talents lay, and that was his ticket to a successful, happy life. Despite his shortcomings, he was a man worth emulating.

But then. Recently, after an already tumultuous year and on the same day it was announced that Iverson had to leave the 76ers to be with his ill daughter, a report came out announcing that his wife, his high school sweetheart, was filing for divorce. And soon after that, it was revealed that Iverson reportedly had issues with gambling and alcohol. With his playing career winding down (or quite possibly over), Iverson’s future happiness seemed plagued with all the same problems that checkered his life. His critics, sadly, expected this.

Allen Iverson nearly made me cry.

Because no matter what he accomplished or did with his life, he couldn’t shake his past or the stigma that followed him since he was teenager. Maybe, unfortunately, in the game of life, everything you do accumulates or stains. I can’t erase my regrets. In life, there is no practice.

by Rose Annis

The only reason I ever talked to Bob was because he said he was going to drown those kittens. He already had captured three and he promised that as soon as he found all five, he would tie them in a bag and throw them in the river—the French Broad—it was just the other side of the highway. Those small mewling faces had an expiration date. I wrote down in my day planner “save kittens” as if I had something better to do.

“Bob”, I said. “This isn’t a just add water situation.”

Bob listened to Alex Jones every night and slept in a bus, a bus that had its front seat carved out and refashioned into a toilet. We met because I was living on what used to be his land. He had sold it six months previous to my friend Chad for 10,000 dollars in silver. Bob didn’t believe in banks. Or the government, or shirts apparently. He burned his social security card back in 1987 and still wandered our side of the mountain like it was his.

He called me Wendy. As in Wendy Darling. From Peter Pan. I told him I wasn’t maternal enough. He told me I reminded him of his daughter. He told all the girls that. A few times he tried to teach me to play horseshoes, but he would always stand too close to the stake, and we lived on a slope. The only direction the horseshoes would tumble was down.

Every few weeks Bob would say something about Jesus, or pussy, or the New World Order, and he would be banned from the property. Days would pass and we would forget that he was out there. Occasionally the putt-putt growl of his motor scooter could be heard out on the gravel road, and we would be satisfied that he hadn’t thrown himself into the river along with those kittens.

by Liz Wyckoff

We’re gliding silently through the underbelly of Penn Station when my loud-mouthed neighbor makes a phone call (who knows how he even gets service down here?) and starts repeating his social security number.

Now, one can easily fault New Yorkers for over-exaggerating, overpaying, or over-swearing, but I’d never refer to them as oversharers. When I lived in the city, I participated in many (perhaps too many) relationships without learning so much as a first name. Yet, here’s Seth—someone who has never even aided me down from a bar-stool—shouting out his digits as I sit less than five feet away.

I don’t even know what can be done with someone else’s social security number. There’s the possibility of identity-theft, although I doubt I could get very far in that department. Still, aren’t we trained to treat our numbers like secrets? Things that should only be exposed under safe and particular circumstances, like internal organs? In fact, the people with intimate access to our bodies—parents, lovers, doctors—are often the very same people with access to our social security numbers. No wonder, then, that Seth’s proclamation makes me uncomfortable. I think this relationship is moving way too fast. If the SSN is the numerical equivalent of an internal organ, Seth is opening up a gaping wound and showing it around to some strangers on the train yelling, “Touch this! Come on! Look at my insides!”

And to that, I say: “Gross.”

I’d love to type Seth’s information into this document now, and I would if I could. But Seth took a chance on me, and he was right to do so. I didn’t memorize his information—not the phone number, the address, or even his last name. I will simply remember him as I’ve known him on this five-and-a-half hour train ride: loud, irritating, and overly (perhaps endearingly) trusting. As I head north, into the colder, lonelier countryside of Northern New York, there’s no impression of city-dwellers that I’d rather take along with me.

by Tim Mucci

Its eyes, your eyes are hollow, cracked voids. Shallow bowls, empty sockets, blind ditches in the upper half portion of your face. If it could it still be called a face. The upper half portion of your skull, because let’s, in the spirit of all honesty, call a spade a spade: you are a skull. A human skull purchased in a small antique shop in Maine, a “must have” item for any study, for any lover of the macabre, for any serious writer. Trafficking in human remains? Check. The dealer told a clipped story about purchasing it (you) from a lawyer who used you (it) in a court case. You don’t look fresh enough for that to have happened this century. Your yellowish color defies the norm of grey-white bone, you’re missing your mandible, but despite it all you’re still beautiful, a riddle.

Your four front teeth are missing, seemingly knocked right out of their maxillary homes, but the rest of your teeth are fine. Canines, premolars, and molars are all intact, which lends sinister thoughts to how you may have become what you are. The missing teeth, the small half-inch divot in the frontal pate, and the large gaping hole in your left fossa temporalis; these are all cause for dark thoughts. I’ve always assumed that you were a woman due to your size, your smooth brow, the gentle slope of your nasal cavity. You’re a reminder, a soft whisper in those quiet moments, what you are I once was, what I am you will surely become.

Tan bone, hard and cold with a byzantine filigree of nicks and scratches. Twisting lines where the bones meet like a roadmap of night’s desert; or lonely rivers, dry and searching for their outlet to the sea but finding only parietal, occipital, and temporal bones.

by Rosemary King

Katherine’s weekends involve tights, pink or black, but they always have seams running up the back of them. They say once a dancer always a dancer, but in the real world she’s an ad exec. She has received two promotions in as many years and it is widely held that she is among the top young talent in her firm. Yet on the weekend, from 11 o’clock to 1:30 at a ballet studio on the Upper West Side, she still regards her hip turnout with a critical eye and regrets the loss of the muscles that once jutted out above her knees.

Katherine once danced seven days a week in her summer intensive programs, eight hours a day. As a student she danced with Boston Ballet, Princeton Ballet, American Ballet Theatre in New York. Her feet, a source of endless pride, were envied for the curve of their arches. While Katherine now strives to head off any criticisms she might receive at her job, once being ignored for corrections was a massive blow to her ego.

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