Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Naomi Solomon

It was a puzzle we were clearly not up to sorting out: the Sibling Tourists and the Mystery of the Little Kings. We had not been in Istanbul long and wouldn’t stay much longer, but we saw them everywhere we went, at different times on different days—more often in shiny, touristy Sultanahmet on the west side of the river, but occasionally in Beyoglu, the more everyday neighborhood on the east side. Little boys, ranging from maybe six to ten years old, dressed all in white and silver. Some had capes, some had elaborately embroidered vests that sparkled hotly in the dusty sunlight; most, if not all, had crowns. A few clutched silver-studded scepters, looking lightweight like finely sculpted tinfoil, in the hand that wasn’t tightly clasped by a beaming parent or grandparent.

None of the little kings looked especially jubilant. Relatives bedecked in slightly less regal formalwear swarmed around them, big smiles and disposable cameras flashing. The little kings smiled the way that children do when they know they are supposed to smile: tight and toothy, eyes pointed straight at the camera lense.

Sitting in the square with the Blue Mosque towering behind us, a mixed study in mass and delicacy, my brother and I watched a little king who looked to be about eight years old as he posed stiffly for photos with a bevy of aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, and grandparents. The child of honor in front, the Blue Mosque as a backdrop, and relatives taking turns on both sides of the camera, click.

“Maybe it’s for a holiday?”

“Maybe it’s for a ceremonial thing… like a Bar Mitzvah?”

“Maybe they’re auditioning for a Turkish children’s version of American Idol?”

“Maybe there’s, like, a Renaissance Faire kinda thing for little boys?”

We slipped into the mosque between services, our shoes off and my head and shoulders draped in a large blue scarf handed to me at the door. The huge, open interior, intricately decorated with blue and white columns, tile work, and stained glass, was full of light and whispering people. We eavesdropped on a guided group and learned that it was designed to be entirely lit by sunlight, via well-placed windows and mirrors. In the middle of the guide’s description of the mosque’s origins, a teenage boy (not in king regalia) came up to us. He said “hello” a few times before he caught our attention. He introduced himself as Mohammad and said he was learning English, and asked if we had any questions.

“Can you tell us why all these little boys are dressed like kings—with the capes and crowns and everything?” I couldn’t stop myself from miming crown, a quick upward sweep of the fingers over the sides of my head, not sure how much sense my question would make to Mohammad. He was just beginning his explanation, something to do with birthdays, when it was announced in English, Arabic, and French that evening prayers were about to start and anyone not there to pray had to leave.

Mohammad asked us for an email address, so he could continue to practice his English with us, and thrust a pen and piece of paper at my brother, who obliged. Mohammad said a polite thank-you, and we lost him in the crowd leaving the mosque.

We didn’t ask anyone else about the little kings in our last two days in the city, though we continued to see them, sparkling and solemn-looking. When Mohammad emailed us weeks after we had gotten home, the email simply read, “Hi I am your friend Mohammad that met you at the Blue Mosque.” I’m not sure that we ever wrote back.

[img via thisisbossi under a Creative Commons license]

by Katherine Cooper

The school for kids with special needs was two or three miles east off the main route in town. It was on a long stretch of grass surrounded by the county TB clinic and the juvenile detention center for girls. It sort of felt as though the town’s bleakest figures had been shooed away, only to converge later, in the corner of some abandoned field. The buildings were nearly identical from the outside—low masses of grey concrete—indistinguishable intuitions.

But inside, the school was different. It was lovely and colorful, brimming with a kind of warmth and energy that one would never suspect from its desolate surroundings. The walls were cluttered with collages and photographs, enormous signs with doilies and glitter and thick bold lettering. Students were awarded for everything, all the time: Most Helpful, Most Friendly, Most Smiley. Their faces taped onto glossy laminated frames.

Their disabilities ranged from mild to severe and affected all the different realms—emotional, physical, and cognitive. There were kids in wheelchairs with twisted limbs and tangles of tubes linking different parts of their bodies, but also those who ran freely in the yard with the ease and recklessness of most five year olds. I worked in Daniel’s classroom for a few semesters over the course of two years.

Daniel, by this point ten years old, had borne a diagnosis of autism for many years. Daniel was a big kid, heavy and ungainly, with a gentle face and a thick head of dark, curly hair. He wore baggy corduroy paints and white sneakers with Velcro straps. He had no verbal skills but used a range of different sounds and noises to articulate his needs and frustrations; I could never tell how he really felt about me—sometimes he’d smirk at me in this way that made me think that he loved fucking with me, that he was capable of so much more than he was letting on but wanted to see me fight for his attention. Other times he’d give me a look that indicated something like complicity, like we were working for the same team.

The other five or six kids in the class fit in at various place along the autism spectrum, some a lot more high-functioning than Daniel. The teacher was this amazing reservoir of patience and energy, though I don’t know what kind of progress they made—or even really how to measure such a thing. But they sang songs and learned how to hold pencils and trace letters and cut shapes from cardboard. She spoke in short, choppy phrases, telling the kids everything they would do as they did it. She guided them carefully through the routine of the day, always eased them slowly into change.

Daniel seemed to have a constant swell of energy trapped in his body. He was always tapping his feet and playing with this plastic, spongy lizard—shaking it violently between two of his fingers. Sometimes we held hands and jumped on the trampoline together, his legs flinging wildly behind him. Other times he’d purposely knock paint onto the floor or groan and clench his fingers when we’d try to write his name or make a mother’s day card.

Toward the end of our time together, Daniel was going through puberty. It was a really tough time, and seemed almost impossible for the teacher or her aids to help navigate him through it. The teacher was constantly reminding him to stop touching himself—there was a familiar chorus that rang throughout the semester: “Hands out of pants, Daniel. Hands out of pants.” She used the same sing-songy voice as always.

In May, the teacher told Daniel that I would be leaving, that I was moving away and wouldn’t be coming back to class. I hoped that in some small way, Daniel had appreciated our time together. I wasn’t sure it had amounted to much but he had enriched my life in some elusive way that I couldn’t quite understand. Maybe it was that we were connecting on some really basic, human level, one uncluttered by conventional language. Daniel looked at me blankly for a moment and then he stuck his hands down his pants. I turned away, but even from the corner of my eye I saw it—his hands moving around, in front and then in back. Then he took one hand out and he slapped me, a quick and ugly sting across my lips. He smiled, grunted twice, and then skipped away.

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by Katherine Cooper

I saw Lindsay everyday for a while. She’d always sit, hunched over, beside a stained yellow wall at the L stop at Union Square. She had pale skin, watery green eyes and a spray of freckles across her face.

I didn’t ever hear her ask people for money, or even really see her look up. But she held onto one
of those cardboard signs, generic in its pleading: desperate for cash, homeless and alone, please help. In the midst of their frenzied, hurried commutes, I watched people stop and stare, frozen for a moment in their tracks. Two seconds, or maybe three. She was just so young, undoubtedly still a teenager. I think we all stopped, struck by the same thing—this girl, so sad but also salvageable.

I never stopped to talk to her, but sometimes she’d linger in my thoughts throughout the day. So many of the folks I see and work with everyday are hardened veterans of the streets—they’ve been outside for so long that they can’t even pinpoint when or how they got there. But Lindsay, it seemed, was still right in the very thick and heart of that moment.

Maybe it could be a minor blip, just a tiny part of her story. I imagined her having fled from a drunken, abusive father in a cold, Midwestern town. Or maybe she’d been shooting up heroin for years and her mother, weak and exasperated, just couldn’t take it any longer. A couple of Greyhound buses through the night and here she was.

After several days of passing Lindsay during my morning commute, I saw her downtown by my office. She was sitting cross-legged against some big stone building just off Wall Street. My coworker and I crouched down and did our usual spiel. How long had she been staying outside? Did she need any services? Did she want a list of places in the area to shower or get a warm meal? It was the first time we’d made eye contact. She told us—softly and patiently—that no, she didn’t need or want anything. She said she was okay, but she looked so weak. It seemed as though it’d taken so much effort—all her strength—to utter the simplest phrase. I started to walk away but then asked her name.

Lindsay was back by the L train the next day. I had left work sort of late and missed the flurry of rush hour commuters. Her head was down and her hair, thin and blond, hung limply by her face.

“Lindsay?”

She looked up and said hey. I realized I had absolutely nothing to say. I just felt so compelled to call her name—to somehow make use of the information she’d been willing to offer me. We were quiet for a moment and then a guy approached us. He was tan and heavy, his hair fragrant and slicked back. He stared at her and then turned to me.

“Is this for real?” he asked, as though we were watching those men who, covered entirely in gold or silver paint, pose as statues.

“Excuse me?”

“Is this kid for real? Or is she faking?”

I told him no, I didn’t think she was faking. He dropped a five dollar bill by her feet and then headed down toward the track.

On the train back to Brooklyn, he sat down next to me. “You know, it’s impossible to tell, she could’ve been pretending. You never know what someone will do for a sociology degree.”

I said I hoped she was faking, but it seemed unlikely. He told me he could probably help her out a bit, and that he was so rich he basically owned the Giants. He pressed the back of his hands against his cheeks, blotting the sweat that had accumulated on his thick, leathery skin.

I haven’t seen Lindsay since that day. I wonder if maybe, she made it home—if she too felt what the commuters sensed that morning by the train: that tiny flicker of hope.

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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 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 Naomi Solomon

It was a Sunday night and we were sitting in Beth’s backyard, sipping iced tea and goofing around with her two young kids. Cynthia, Beth, and I used to work together in a small and hectic nonprofit, and I couldn’t remember a time when the three of us had just sat down and talked: no phones ringing, no meetings about to start, no urgency. It was nice to relax and focus on things like making the kids scared of their own backyard (who knows what’s making that noise! It’s probably your neighbor’s air conditioner, but sure, it could be a ghost!) and what foods, if any, it is unacceptable to pair with cheese.

“Look, there are stars out! Look!” squealed Samantha, Beth’s towheaded four-year-old. We craned our necks and squinted through the trees and haze, and sure enough there was one star. One blinking, moving star.

“Sammy-pie,” Beth said after a moment, “I don’t think that’s a star. Stars don’t usually, you know, move. Can you think of something else it might be?” Being the unhelpful person I am, I ambushed this gentle parent-explaining-the-universe-to-her-child moment.

“Oooh, Samantha, do you think it’s an alien spaceship?”

“Aliens aren’t real!” Samantha declared matter-of-factly, fluffing her tutu.

“I’m not so sure,” I teased.

“I’ve seen UFOs,” Cynthia volunteered. “Twice.” Beth and I made the appropriate spooky ooh-ing noises before Cynthia continued, “The first time, I was driving up to Connecticut along the coast, and there was this steady light that appeared over the water, going south. When it passed I us, I could see this big spinning disc in the middle of it.”

“Did they beam you up?”

“Did they fire laser beams?”

“No,” Cynthia said. “The second time, it was New Year’s Eve and I was up on a rooftop in Manhattan with some friends, and I saw the same thing again, flying really low over the buildings. I might’ve thought that it was a news helicopter, or maybe the police, but it had the same spinning parts and it was moving waaaaaay too fast for a helicopter.”

“So, uh, did it look like the flying saucers from cartoons?” Beth asked.

“Yeah, it totally did! And I checked with my brother’s girlfriend’s roommate, who worked for CBS at the time, and she said that no aircraft had clearance to be there at the time, but they’d gotten lots of calls about it,” Cynthia concluded triumphantly. There was an unimpressed pause.

Cynthia had always seemed like a reasonable person. Emotional, yes. Awkwardly enthusiastic about superhero action figures, yes. Susceptible to punctuation-less emails and animated emoticons, yes. But always reasonable. So either she was really, really bad at telling scary stories, or she was sincere and I was going to have to develop a sudden credence for UFO sightings or chalk another attempted friendship up to oh-the-weirdos-you-meet-in-this-city-itis.

A moment later, Samantha fell down and blamed her brother, and they both started crying, and there was a muddled rush to get the kids inside and to bed, to get the leftovers from dinner cleaned up, to get the ketchup off someone’s special teddy. The subject of UFOs was dropped, and Cynthia and I headed off to our separate subway stops before I could decide whether I wanted clarification, or whether Beth would appreciate a whispered remark about adding Cynthia to the (e)X-Files.

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by caitlin macrae

You hear about the L.A. River like it’s a sasquatch or a chupacabra, something mythic and mutant, a lie to keep children from going too far past the sidewalk in front of the house. And it’s basically just like that, a weak and scary thing, in parts, but mostly worse in your imagination: a trickle of liquid meandering around islands of upturned shopping carts and the shredded remains of plastic bags. It’s the image everyone knows, on the million contact sheets of a million amateur photographers looking for something gritty and teeming with metaphor, but it’s still true. Somewhere upstream there are river stones and swimming ducks and a riverbed not made of concrete. A river river, with green things, something that looks less like an aquatic memorial to an unwon war. But that’s all pretty far from us. When most of Los Angeles was a giant flood plain, the L.A. River used to connect to the Ballona Creek, which used to have wetlands, which are now a tiny swampy patch run through by the 90 freeway. Now Ballona is its own thing, sort of the L.A. River’s lame little brother, which is basically the worst fate to which a body of water could be resigned. Same islands of misfit refuse, fewer green things. There’s a bike path that runs along the creek, a series of steep drops and hills at impossible angles, punctuating long stretches of not much at all.

Gar used to take his family there on weekends sometimes, their fifteen-year-old hatchback Honda teeming with bicycles, everyone competing with fast food wrappers and barnacles of loose change for legroom. He had just moved to Culver City, had just gotten married again, had just bought his first house since the house in the valley with his second (now ex-) wife, the one with the red door that was sold in the divorce. Two of his five children come to his new house every other weekend. They are going to be a family, come hell, high water, or horribly drawn out group therapy sessions; therefore, families ride bikes. So.

So on Saturdays in the blistering California summer, a row of partially related people like ducklings draw themselves in a line along the pavement next to the water, flying down hills and crawling up hills while the small fake river shimmers and reflects promises of under-eye sunburns. The littlest one’s legs whirl with hummingbird speed but he is always farthest behind. The girl hates everyone around her and this stupid bike, hates Gar especially but gets worried every time he pedals out of sight. The rest triangulate up front, longer legs and outdoor bodies. They all take turns being first and last, a family that is not quite family, water that just barely passes for water.

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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 Katherine Cooper

I tutored Ashtin on Wednesday afternoons during my junior and senior year of college. She was eight when I first met her—a third-grader at the local elementary school. She was feisty and energetic, with a maze of tightly braided hair and long skinny legs. She wore brightly colored outfits and stretchy pants that had words like “sassy” and “spoiled” embroidered on the back. Mostly I’d help Ashtin with reading, which was always a challenge—her tongue slipped up on complicated words and she’d get exceedingly frustrated lumbering through a cluster of syllables. She would try to distract me by telling stories of her classmates and her sisters, or the trio of terriers she had at home. She’d ask lots of questions about me and my boyfriend at the time—did we love each other? Did we kiss? How often? And also, was I the shortest girl at college? To bring the focus back to work I’d bribe her with snacks—bargaining a couple of paragraphs for a handful of Goldfish or a mini-pack of Oreos.

Ashtin struggled with reading but loved math—converting percentages and fractions in a quick, seamless way. Once she told me that eleven boys like-liked her, and did I know that meant almost 34 percent of the class? She was also dramatic and generous with affection—always proclaiming her love for me. If I showed up a few minutes late she would throw her arms around me, Where were you? I was worried sick!

But beneath her charisma and charm lurked something dark. Her childhood had already been peppered with heartbreak—I could see it, every so often, seeping out through her vigor. She would relay these facts in passing: she lived with her grandmother because her mom wasn’t allowed to be near her, her dad came over to visit sometimes but was always smelly from beer, sometimes her baby sister made on the floor and nobody cared.

In April, a few weeks before I would graduate from college and move back to New York, Ashtin’s class began studying art. One of the last Wednesdays I saw her, she was sitting cross-legged on a feathery purple rug. Most of the other students were gone. She flipped through a book and didn’t look up at me, but patted the space beside her.

“Today in school we were learning about art, and do you want to know what the prettiest painting I’ve ever seen is?” She turned to the back, finding Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “Do you know it?”

I nodded.

“It’s so beautiful.” She dragged her finger across the swirls of color—blue and green and yellow. “And since it’s just a sky, it can be anywhere. You can live anywhere you want, in any kind of house, and it can be as beautiful as that. Don’t tell anyone, but when I look at it, sometimes it makes me want to cry.”

Ashtin was silent for a moment and put the book down. She stretched her legs out onto the carpet and began to double-knot her shoelaces. They were grey and frayed and she knotted them over and over, until it seemed impossible they would ever get loose.

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by Ian F. King

The most alluring personal ad in the history of the universe is on a white scrap of paper roughly two by five inches, written in hastily scribbled blue ink and tacked up on the far side of a plain wooden bookcase in the corner of a bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It’s pinned up with dozens of others. If you didn’t stop to look for more than a minute, you might miss it entirely. Each of these flare gun love letters follows the same exact template, and you’re given only two qualifiers to judge your potential partners: the books and writers they do like, and the books and writers they don’t.

Naturally, I first gravitate towards the “dislikes” part of the ad. It is amazing. Two of the three dislikes are overrated male writers from the middle of last century. The second name on the very-shortlist is Kerouac, and there is also an arrow that bends like an Allen wrench pointing to his name, at the other end of which is dismissively scribbled “F that dude.” I’m smitten. On the Road honestly never did anything for me, and my father’s shelves were lined with Kerouac’s when I was growing up, so I’ve always seen him as someone to rebel against, not with.

The third and final dislike is even better. “Who was it that wrote Juno? I hate Juno.” The assumption that Juno is based on a novel, even though its biggest accomplishment was winning an Oscar for best original screenplay only two years ago, is such an awesome slap in the face to a film I also didn’t care for that I became briefly transfixed with this short sentence, thinking of how I might have written it better. Then I realized there was no better way to express the sentiment.

Having completely won me over with its flippant-yet-concise criticism, I raise my eyes an inch to the “likes.” It’s here that my heart is grabbed on either end and wrung out like a wet washrag. The ad doesn’t give any specific book titles, but writes the names of a half dozen authors. This in general is a good sign, because it probably means that while the author likes bigger themes and the consistency of great style, she doesn’t necessarily go for the singular beliefs and convictions that people might draw from individual books, and their obsession therewith.

Much more than that, what really does it for me is the fact that, of the six names she writes down, the first one is Raymond Carver. Not only that, but she underlines his first and last name, which she doesn’t do for any of the others. Honestly, I can’t even remember the other authors she wrote down, though one of them might have been David Mitchell, which is cool but predictable (two other qualities I look for in someone: cool but predictable). Carver isn’t my very favorite writer, though he’s high on the list—but that’s part of the point: you shouldn’t necessarily want a lover whose favorite is also your favorite. The hook I’m reeled in on is the realization that this woman has consciously decided to make her semi-anonymous declaration of availability and search for companionship synonymous with her appreciation for the works of a writer famous for his weary, unsentimental portrayals of human connection. If you can subscribe to Carver enough to underline his name above any others’, if you can absorb and understand and align yourself with his confused and battered take on love and then stare it in the face and say, either defiantly or defeatedly, “I still want to try it,” then, my God, I want to try it with you.

Her email is there in corner of the ad, written just as hastily as the rest of it, lines going back over parts of one of the letters where the pen must have started to run out of ink. I almost reach for my own pen to get her email, but decide not to. I rejoin my friends, who are browsing on the other side of the store by then. That same afternoon we end up walking past the store two more times, and both times I don’t change my mind and run back in. If there’s anything I’ve learned about soul mates, it’s that you have to let them go.

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