Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

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 caitlin macrae

Dear Sensitive Groper,

Hello there, dude. I bet you’d describe yourself as a sensitive guy, no? I can tell you would say that about yourself, on account of how you’ve only sort of been grinding on my butt for the past few songs, as opposed to going Full Hump. This, you must think, is what separates you from the truly sleazy. The sensitive dude, by contrast, informs a lady of his amorous intentions through unsolicited hip fondling and a light, tasteful boner graze.

But you know what?

Fuck it. You really may as well go Full Hump.

You see, Sensitive Groper, I get that you are probably very conflicted inside, but there is something to be said for really making a commitment to personal goals. I, for example, am cooking two new things a week in an effort to be a better cook. Why, just the other day I spent seven hours learning to make Oaxacan mole negro! And let me tell you, friend, it was worth the hours spent scouring my neighborhood for ingredients, and it was worth the thick paste now encrusted like a giant, richly-spiced barnacle to my stovetop. I was decisive, I persevered, and as a result I learned something. I like to think I am better for it.

Likewise, Sensitive Groper, it is your responsibility to really put in the effort, to gaze deep into your inner self’s shifty little eyes and say, “Self! Tonight is the night! I am either going to sip my cocktails respectfully from the perimeter of the dance floor amidst oodles of booty, or I am going to attack said booty with all the thrusting fervor of pistons or jackhammers or other things that thrust! There will be no in-between posturing, no fronting like, Oops, my awkward erection just happened to bump up against your ass in time with the booming beats of early nineties hip-hop, which—since I’m a nice dude—is totally not something I’d ever do unsolicited… unless you’re into it? Which, you’re not beating me up, so you must be at least a little bit into it? Oh, but you’re scooting away from me, so either you’re not super into my refined, ambiguous gestures… or this is some kind of sexy game? It’s a game, isn’t it! Those days, they are over! No longer shall I make women so vaguely uncomfortable they only kind of recognize they’re being lurked on, and as such don’t feel justified responding negatively to my dick pokes! From here on out, it’s all or nothing. Without guts, self, there can be no glory.”

For you see, Sensitive Groper, to everything there is a season. Leaves will fall, children will grow up and grow old, monuments made to last the ages will crumble and be replaced by stucco strip malls and prefab chain stores. Likewise, now is your moment to evolve, to reflect your truest self—a self which, I suspect, is in fact a gross, molest-y dickbag.

The time is yours, Sensitive Groper. Time to decide whether you are in fact a decent and respectful dude, or if you are the kind of dude who would nudge his erect penis against an unsuspecting woman’s behind, attacking from the rear to avoid easy identification. Try as you might, you cannot be both.

Kisses,
Caitlin B. MacRae

by Naomi Solomon

All told, Julia did not give off the impression that she would be a thoroughly difficult roommate.

Julia laughed a lot, and she had a great laugh. It started out low and soft, a rumbling in her chest, but when it really got going it was high-pitched, perky and joyous but not annoying—like the kind of person whose conversations you would want to eavesdrop on in public. Julia also had a great smile, cherubic between round pink cheeks, and her blue eyes—I’m going to say it—her blue eyes sparkled behind her glasses. In almost every way she came off as easy-going and even-tempered.

The awkwardness came from her English (which she spoke with precision and gusto). Julia was a German student, and the two of us were living in a university apartment with another American student, a Mexican student, and four local—that is to say, Spanish—students. I was the first of the non-native speakers to move in before the semester began, and though I had the notion that my housemates probably spoke some English, I never tested it. I figured I was in Spain, living with Spanish-speakers, and really when else was I going to have the chance to mime/interpretive-dance half of everything I wanted to say?

The day after she moved in, I came home to find Julia having a conversation with my roommate, Ana, entirely in English. For two weeks I had been saying things like “the yellow piece in the center of the egg,” and “I walked [circular hand gestures for ‘all around’] the street but I couldn’t find the store of food,” and here was Ana keeping up perfectly well with Julia’s rapid-fire dissertation on her first day of classes.

“Hola, um, you guys,” I said from the doorway, going through a mental catalogue of all the under-my-breath sing-talking I’d done in the past two weeks. (I tend to talk to myself a lot, and at some point I’d decided that singing everything I would normally say whilst talking to myself would make me seem less crazy to a roommate who hopefully wouldn’t realize that I was asking, “Where’s my clean underwear?” to the tune of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” In retrospect, Ana probably knew Bon Jovi and could have figured out that I was getting the words wrong regardless of any language barrier.)

I tried to bring it up casually with the other American in the house, Rochelle.

“I know,” she said, skipping straight to annoyance while I loitered in vague embarrassment. “When I got up yesterday she was complaining to Marco about how all her professors and classmates and everyone talk too fast, and she’s sooooo glad she can come home and speak English.”

“Wow… and English is totally her second language. I wish I felt that way about my second language.”

“But come on—we’re in Spain and we’re supposed to be working on our Spanish. It’s like she’s totally missing the point. Hey—let’s agree, let’s only speak Spanish at home. ¿Vale?”

So we agreed.

That night I walked into the kitchen to find Ana, Julia, and Rochelle all in various stages of cooking and eating dinner.

“¿Cómo van sus clases?” Rochelle asked the room.

“I guess they’re good, but one of my professors doesn’t know how to run a discussion. He will never call on the people who actually have something to say, he just goes down the class list and picks anyone to answer the question. And half the class hasn’t done the reading.” Julia paused for breath and Rochelle seized the moment.

“¿Y tú, Ana?”

“Más o menos bien,” Ana answered, “pero creo que esta clase de química me va a matar…”

Julia wasn’t quite glaring, but her eyes weren’t doing their usual sparkly thing, either. Her cheeks even seemed less pink than they had a few moments ago.

“Y… I don’t know why I’m even taking it,” Ana finished.

This turned into the pattern when Julia was in the room: every conversation was a tug-of-war between English and Spanish, with Julia on one side, Rochelle and I on the other, and the rest of the roommates holding their hands just above the rope a foot or two from the center, unwilling to throw themselves into the struggle. (Though I’ll confess that Rochelle and I sometimes cheated if we were the only two at home.)

Midway through the semester, Julia slowly tapered off from talking to either of us, until one day Rochelle and I found ourselves being ignored in all English conversations, trapped in the stuttering limbo between pride and a limited vocabulary.

by Joa Suorez

We saw the way
you let love in,
the little door
you opened
when the light
began to change—
and night pressed
cool against your face.

When your heart
began to swell
the way the moon will
just before rain
we saw the wide world
in your eyes again,
that wild joy
love sometimes brings.

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by Liz Wyckoff

I recently visited my old roommate in Brooklyn. I don’t live in the city anymore, but she’s still there. Still next to Prospect Park. Still a short walk from all the things I miss: the backyard at The Farm, the muffins at Blue Sky, the polyester dresses at Beacon’s Closet. There are plenty of things about it that I don’t miss—that’s why I moved away. Only, now that I’m out of her life, my old roommate has moved into a new apartment—one so heavenly that I can’t believe how lucky she is to be rid of me.

“I haven’t seen a roach in two years,” she said off-handedly, as I opened my suitcase on her spacious hardwood floor. This seems impossible. We had bugs in both of the old apartments we shared. Maybe I did something to entice them out of the cracks in the walls and onto our kitchen counters? In our first apartment, we killed a cockroach by chasing it into the dishwasher, then running it through the rinse cycle with all our dirty dishes.

Now, in place of cockroaches, my old roommate has pots of flowers and herbs. She’s cultivating basil, heliotropes, and Vietnamese coriander. In the window, there’s a sensitive plant that curls its leaves inward like praying hands at the slightest touch.

Above the fireplace in our old apartment, a pocket of water once appeared after a storm—a belly of polluted rain expanding from the wall like a pregnancy. The layered skins of paint stretched until my roommate and I stabbed the bubble with a knife and watched the rusty juice dribble out. We’d painted the walls in that living room. All by ourselves. Now my old roommate knows better. She asked her landlord to paint the walls of her new apartment, and it was done before she moved in. The new walls are off-white. Clean and pure.

She says she misses me, my old roommate. But when I see her in that new apartment, I understand why she’s still living in Brooklyn and happy without me. It’s almost enough to convince me to try again.

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by Ian F. King

When I showed up to help my friend move apartments on Saturday afternoon, I expected to walk into a work party already well in progress, catching the easy end of a day’s labor after watching the U.S. v. England match in a giant, crowded bowling alley. Instead, as I sauntered up the sidewalk, there he was sitting alone on the back of a U-Haul truck. No one else had been able to make it. His new studio was up three flights of stairs. The humidity had my T-shirt starting to soak through after only a few trips. Aside from the truckload we had, there was a whole second truckload of his stuff back at his old apartment.

Flash forward eight hours and we were finally on the tail end of the second leg of the move. We had done so much walking up and down stairs that, as okay as I felt at the time it was all over, I would barely be able to walk the next day. (When I still couldn’t walk well the day after that, I went to see my doctor at 9 a.m., my legs covered in so much IcyHot that when the doctor wandered into the lobby he asked loudly why it smelled like mint everywhere, and I sheepishly raised my hand.) During one of these final loads, the landlord’s son came in and went knocking on his parent’s apartment, saying something loudly in Polish. I thought he might be concerned we weren’t guarding the front door well enough, so I stayed on full-time watch downstairs while my friend hauled some boxes up.

Soon enough though, the son went upstairs and started yelling, still in Polish, at another tenant on the second floor. Realizing we weren’t the problem, we went back to moving things as a group. As we dragged the top of a heavy steel desk up past the second floor, a wave of steamy heat emanated out of a cracked door. As we turned to go up the next flight of stairs, a heavy-set Polish man, naked as the day he was born, came to the open door shouting into his phone. We kept walking up the stairs, asking each other, “Did we really just see that?” When we walked by later with another part of the same desk, the old man’s door was still wide open, but he at least had the modesty to put on a pair of briefs at that point.

On the final trip up, weak and weary and ready to be finished, we were almost to the top of the stairs when my friend stopped dead still and bent over. He had picked up a small bug and was examining it. There had been bed bugs in the last two buildings he had lived in previously, which had of course brought loads of grief into his life. As shell-shocked from those experiences as he rightfully has been, when moving this time, the first thing he did was check for any bed bug reports about the building online, finding none. As he stood there, grinding the bug slowly in his fingertips, I insisted numerous times it wasn’t a bedbug, though he calmly, confidently said it was. We dragged that last storage tub into his apartment and crashed down on top of it. I went on and on and on about how much he was going to love living alone for the first time. It was just past 2 a.m.

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by Liz Mathews

For two years, back when I lived in Park Slope, I would see Grandpa on a near daily basis. Sometimes in the early dark mornings of winter, after I’d finished my run, I’d stretch outside our building and watch as strange men would help Grandpa into a van to take him off to wherever older men spend their days when not at home. He was a fragile-looking guy, and though he was probably only 70 at the oldest, Grandpa looked about 89 or 95, so while lifting him into a van wasn’t necessarily a feat of strength, it was a careful process in the morning moonlight.

Other times I’d spot him several blocks from our building, and excitedly point him out to whomever I happened to be with. “That’s the old man from my building!” I’d exclaim. “And far from home!” My friends never seemed that impressed, but would humor me with an, “Oh, huh,” and steer conversation back to what we’d been talking about before.

Most often, though, and on Saturday mornings in particular, Grandpa would be sitting in a lawn chair in the entryway of our building, a forty of Olde English at his feet and a cigarette between his gnarled fingers. The door to the street would be tied open via a rope mechanism that I could never figure out how to use myself, and anyone going in or out of the building would inevitably get caught in a conversation with Grandpa because his chair took up the whole doorway.

“HiiiIIIIIIIiiiiii!” Grandpa would start off, and follow it with his signature toothless grin. “How are you?!” Typically I’d tell him I was doing good, and ask him the same. “I’m fine,” he’d say, trailing off, his voice becoming much, much quieter and more despondent. But then, “Have a good day!” he’d finish, his moment of self-reflection seemingly forgotten.

Sometimes there would be more of a conversation. On the day many Americans voted for Barack Obama, Grandpa was waiting around in the building at 7:30 a.m. when I returned from voting. “I tried to cast my vote,” he told me, “but the line was too long. My legs couldn’t take it.” Another time I ran into him in our building on Mothers’ Day. “I wish I could visit my family,” he explained as we stood on the second floor landing, “but they live in Atlantic City. And no one has a car.” We related over being far from our loved ones, and I went to my apartment. Later on my roommate Mackenzie came home with the news that Grandpa had wished her a Happy Mothers’ Day in the hallway just moments before. My other roommate, Chris, and I wondered if Grandpa knew something about Mackenzie that we did not.

It’s been well over a year since I moved from Park Slope and last saw Grandpa, though I understand he’s still doing all right. A few weekends ago while I was out for a friend’s birthday, Chris sent me the following text with a photo attached:

“Ummmmm… Guess who’s at Southpaw? Listening to funk and smoking Marlborough Reds?”

Mildly intoxicated and not sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me when I looked at the picture, I texted back, “Who? Where? What?”

“Grandpa! From our old apartment!”

He seems to be doing all right, indeed.

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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 J.B. Staniforth

“When I was seventeen,” said Marie-Line, “I had this job babysitting. The guy who was the father, he was a deejay at a swingers’ club, and his girlfriend would go to the club with him—I guess that was better than sitting at home, bored.

“The way it worked was that I would stay the whole night, and I’d get paid to be there until noon the next day.”

“So they didn’t need to worry about looking after the kids when they got home?” I asked.

“Basically, yeah,” Marie-Line said, “but mainly so they could stay up all night and sleep late the next day. Sometimes they’d bring people home with them, you know? Swingers?”

“Right,” I said.

“And this one morning,” she went on, “I walked into the living room just as this couple on the couch was waking up. It was clear that the woman lying there had no idea who the man was, but what was even clearer—the look on her face, I mean. I have never in my life, before or since, seen such a look of revulsion.

“I remember she had just a bit of mascara smeared by one of her eyes, and this look of absolute disgust. Maybe with herself, maybe with the guy—I don’t know. But she got up right away, put on her clothes, and walked out without saying so much as a word.”

“Nothing?”

“Seriously,” she said, “she didn’t even say goodbye.”

“Wow,” I said. “She put her clothes on? Was she naked when you came in?”

“She was wearing, like, a tank-top. That was all. Anyway, it was nudist house.”

“Amazing.”

“For sure it was,” she said. “That was my first exposure to real regret. Adult regret. I wasn’t even seventeen!”

“How on earth did you find that job?” I asked.

She laughed, closed her eyes, and slowly shook her head. “I got it through Girl Guides.”

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by Vanessa Hope

See that picture there?
In the bedroom. Above the bed.
That’s my wife.
She lives out in Colorado. I pay for the house there.
And her asthma treatments.
She can barely breathe. But we can sleep with whomever we want.