Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by S.K. Evans

Well, if Ian King can profile inanimate objects, so can I! I want to talk about emails. But is an email or a cough really inanimate anyway? Inanimate means not animate or lifeless. The word animate comes from the Latin anima which means breath but also soul (soul!). I’m not sure about coughs, but emails can certainly have soul.

I love emails. I labor over them, leave drafts in my inbox for weeks, rewrite them and feel personally offended when they go unanswered. I also love the impulsiveness of emails. I’m always shooting them off, saying the wrong things. Or, sometimes, saying the right thing because I didn’t give myself a moment for doubt.

Recently I’ve been corresponding (via email, of course) with an old love. With the old love. We all have one: the one you grew up with, with whom you created some kind of bond borne out of love but also out of the stupidity of youth. These emails are so often filled with all kinds of passive aggressive jokes and heartfelt sentiments that make you realize both how well you know each other and how far you’ve grown apart. Apparently, for example, I am still a melodramatic writer.

Quelle surprise, my friend! You are still arrogant and obtuse! But, I say this with love…

This correspondence is rare and nothing if not innocent. We live hundreds of miles apart, both physically and emotionally. But what these emails do is stir up all the silt that has settled on my life, shrouding my hopes and dreams. I remember what I felt when I was nineteen and where I thought I’d be by now. I’m nowhere near there which is both sad and comforting. We’re all in this struggle. Together and apart.

I love emails. Especially emails from people you love. Sometimes they have the quasi-magical ability to wake you up, turn you around, bring you back.

by Ian F. King

A month ago I came down with a sinus cold that scraped my throat raw and kept me from work for two days. That first day at home I took care of nearly everything I’d been putting off. I cleaned the apartment, paid bills, opened an IRA account, bought a train ticket to Montreal, watched movies I’d been meaning to see. Getting sick was a blessing that allowed me to tie up loose ends that had been gathering for some time. I went back to the office afterward not feeling entirely better, but bolstered by a sense of minor accomplishment and forward motion.

The catch in my throat and the clog in my nose never fully left, and almost two weeks later I caught myself one afternoon letting out a random cough. An hour later it happened again. The cough started back up so sporadically I could easily ignore it. When ignoring it was no longer an option, I chose to be optimistic, assuming day after day that tomorrow I’d get up and it’d be gone. Even when my boss began asking about the cough and suggesting that I get it checked out, I told him that aside from the cough I felt completely normal, which was the truth.

It went downhill from there, from my throat into my lungs, morphing from a breathy rasp into a sonorous rumbling. It rattled my chest and pressed against the backs of my eyes until my vision blurred. Still I ignored it, increasingly convinced it would leave on its own. It began to affect my sleep. Most every night it gave me trouble drifting off. Some nights it would wake me up nearly every two hours. Each time I would lay there staring out the window in the dark sweating lightly around my head and hands. One night I dreamt a woman for whom I’d secretly had feelings for a year and a half was leaning in to kiss me, and as our lips pressed I came to, coughing face down into my pillow.

My waking life began to suffer as well. I had meetings at my office where I must have made a dozen oddly strained facial expressions as I tried to keep from going into fits. I spent over five hours one night at a bar having a one-on-one conversation where I continuously turned off the charm by wheezing down my sleeve. Just three days ago I found myself in the chair at Tattoo Culture terrified that the phlegm that kept pooling in my chest would uncontrollably erupt at a wrong moment and cause a permanent souvenir of my stubbornness to be etched in my forearm.

It got to the point where every time the cough came I would purposely try to keep it going, desperately convinced that it would end if I could just cough long and deep enough. But it never worked like that, and when I got to my desk this morning, forty-eight hours into a last-ditch effort Robitussin haze, it was still there, tenacious, ready to fight me another day before I had even fully sat down. I reached for the phone, weary and defeated. I’m not a big fan of doctors. The only times I’ve been to see a doctor in the past two years were when I couldn’t stand up straight from back pain, or when the twenty-four hour on-call nurse at my health insurance company told me that she was obligated to advise me to go to the emergency room. But the cough won. I gave up. I’m going to the doctor. Tomorrow.

by Alex Littlefield

“Have you seen my legs?”

Francisco, the superintendent of our building, is sitting on the footstool outside of our bathroom, not fixing our leaking faucet. He is wearing his usual: saucer-sized eyeglasses, a yellow tank top, camo shorts, and construction boots. His hair is ash-grey, and evokes Beetlejuice or a Troll doll with its electrocution-victim frizz. His shins, which he is gingerly massaging, are covered with Spandex sheathes.

“I ran into a fire,” he says, as he peels off the protective skin.

Francisco’s legs are ravaged, plastic-looking things. He massages his left thigh just below the knee, and I see all the skin down to his ankle slide around in one solid sheet. I’ve heard that Francisco was a marathon runner, and also that he once got his son arrested for using drugs, and suddenly I wonder what sort of fire he was compelled to run through.

That information doesn’t seem to be forthcoming; Francisco is absently running his fingertips over his calf and scanning our kitchen thirstily. “Is there gonna be a glass of water?”

I’m amazed that we are having this conversation, though not for the obvious reason. We’ve never really been able to understand Francisco before. Whenever a problem crops up in our building (and they crop up frequently—the hot water is a repeat offender) and we have to call his cell, his side of the conversation is definitely not in any human language. Our neighbor thinks he conducts his phone calls in gobbledygook to avoid dealing with tenants’ work requests.

Now, though, he is perfectly intelligible. My roommate brings a glass of water from the tap, and Francisco takes a long, audible drink. He clinks the glass down on the counter top and goes back to working his legs, but one hand now stretches up to his forehead.

“Last night I fell down the stairs and hit my head real bad. Real hard. I had to go to the hospital.” Francisco looks up at us through lenses so thick they’re practically opaque. “I don’t know if I can do this job.”

“Yep,” my roommate says, moving past him. “It’s right over here, in the bathroom.”

by caitlin macrae

Somewhere in the internet she is dancing, spinning and spinning and spun, pointing with authority to the camera and the audience. She’s just a smudge of pixels. There is cheering, laughing, bottles falling and clanking and you can hear some dudes chuckling about something or other, but mostly you just hear her, off-key. You can’t even hear the song, really, over the rest of it. It’s a Michael Jackson song, you can figure that out eventually, and that’s really important to the story. The setting is less important, except for the karaoke, and the delicious soup they sell there, and the drinks, so okay, I guess it’s important: it’s a karaoke noodle bar out in the middle of the ocean. She is swimming in it.

The video lasts for thirty-eight seconds. Her white teeth are blacklight glowing, skin freckled even through makeup and a shitty camera phone lens, even through the swerve of lights and handheld recording devices and so many underage beers. It ends as abruptly as it began, mid-song, mid-word, mid-shuffle, the song isn’t even over yet. But the video’s over, it’s over really fast. So you start it up again, every forty seconds or so, until anything else about her is forgotten. Like the way she pronounces mojitos, the way her little butt looks in stretchy pants, that weird thing she has about cheese. Pretend that this is the only part of her that ever was.

She has never had a job, never taken a class, never had a burrito delivered to her front door, was never born, and will not die.

by Rosemary King

She arrived home from the bar with just enough energy to peel off her clothes, throw on a tee shirt and fall into bed, literally shaking with exhaustion. Her heart was pumping blood with a particular amount of enthusiasm and she had difficulty ignoring the pounding of blood in her chest as she fell into a fitful sleep. It was midnight.

She awoke at 4:17am. Her tee shirt was soaked through with sweat and her heart was still beating furiously. Her lips were dry and cracked. She was freezing.

Throwing back the covers, she went into her bathroom. She drank directly from the faucet, desperate gulps. She splashed her face with water, went into her large closet, peeled off her soaked shirt, put on a dry one and got into bed, breathing heavily. She lay there trying to calm her heartbeat, though she could still look down and see the pumping beneath her left breast.

As her eyelids were falling, she heard the rattle of the bathroom hooks. Her and her housemate’s bedrooms were on either side of the bathroom and there were hooks that you pulled and latched to get in. These hooks made a distinctive noise whenever a person was pulling at them. She didn’t give it notice until she realized that no one had entered the bathroom. The familiar thud of the door closing didn’t follow the rattle. The chain was simply being moved, as though a kitten was batting it like a toy. This went on for some time as she lay listening, then it faded out like a song. She exhaled, just as the heat pipe in her room began to clack. The clacking had happened before but this sound was different, as though the pipe was being tapped on, hard, with a key. This too went on for a few minutes then expired the way a skipping stone’s jumps become closer together before it falls, finally, into the water.

She fell asleep again almost involuntarily. Her eyes opened again at 7:00am. She sat up in bed and ran to the bathroom where she heaved bile for a half an hour before she sank heavily against the wall.

by Kiersten Tarr

My view from inside the doghouse that afternoon hangs in the Childhood Trauma Gallery of my memory, not as a landscape, but as a portrait. The portrait is of a pair of legs from the knees down—with skin like brown wax paper that’s been crumpled and reopened—ending in tattered, once-white house slippers. I am sure that her face was as brown and wrinkled as her calves, but its features are lost to me after more than twenty years, leaving only a vague sense of a sour expression floating nebulously under unkempt mouse-colored hair.

She was a widow, lived 50 yards from the elementary school, and looked after about half a dozen of us in the afternoons while we waited for our parents to get off work and rescue us from the embarrassment of having to play with kids we weren’t friends with at school. She was of that unfortunate class of person who is inexplicably angered and insulted by the childishness of children, and if she ever treasured our company, she hid it well.

Her distaste for me in particular, however, she hid from no one. I can’t speculate what it was in my five-year-old self she found so offensive, but I do wonder what she was feeling when she excluded me from the other children’s games, called me demeaning names, and locked me out of the house during birthday parties. I imagine a tight, squirming feeling in her stomach, the digestion of a sticky, rancid cocktail one part anger, one part pleasure, two parts fear, with a twist of guilt.

Here is how I ended up in the doghouse. I was kneeling by it, building what I considered a lovely front yard for it out of wooden blocks. The dog—small with a nervous disposition, a terrier or something—lay in the entryway observing my efforts, as I narrated to him my every careful move. Here, I explained, was the perimeter fence, not so high that you couldn’t see the street beyond, but high enough to keep out riffraff. And here was a sturdy picnic table, here a barbeque, here a tree (tree house forthcoming) with a nice roomy bench underneath for sitting and thinking. And all very spacious, even enough for a game of catch—and I tossed a small square block lightly in the air to demonstrate. The dog, apparently going through life without reflexes, made no attempt to catch it, but sat stupidly and allowed it to land squarely on its muzzle.

At this moment some infant Brutus ran squealing to the matron that I had been throwing blocks at her dog, and before I could protest, into his house I went. Having shoved me roughly inside that splintery apartment, she now directed the other children to throw all of the blocks at me, one by one. Strangely, I don’t remember any of my emotions from that point on—repression, I suppose. What I remember are her legs, shuffling excitedly in those ragged slippers, and her voice, a cracked, raspy alto: now you see how it feels! Now you see how it feels!

by Asha Iman Veal

Part three. Read part two. Read part one.

Marc liked Lisa. He liked how the pale pink tone of her large bottom lip contrasted against the gentle angles of her dark brown face. In his mind, Lisa’s bulbous mouth remained with him at the pet shop long after her fuchsia body and round nose physically departed. Lisa’s marshmallow lips drawn tight in a pucker, a rhythmic gaping just like his fish.

On tame nights the dark whole of Lisa’s face squished flat against his for an underwater kiss. Once upon a more brazen fantasy, he pulled off her pink puff coat, tossed Lisa’s naked body into the backroom exercise tank, and made love to his woman on a suspended bed of ocean weed while schools of tiger barb and gourami swam near. Lisa’s tiny breasts and nipples like a pair of chocolate chip starfish. Her petite body delicate as a flower of the sea.

“So what’s the visible difference between male and female fish?” she asked him. Marc prickled sweat from his underarms. He cocked his head back over his left shoulder and raised his chin, quite awkwardly, to mimic the laissez-faire posture held by more confident ladies’ men like MC Rappers, and Damon.

“It’s not actually too different from people. In some fish you can tell males and females apart by body shape, or patterns of coloring.” He bent over and turned a bit, level with the small puffer fish tank to their right. “Like Iris and Jack here.” Marc felt the fuchsia puff coat brush his side as Lisa lowered her face level to the tank, the pyrotechnic excitement of a July Fourth Independence Day parade sparking alive his insides.

“I don’t suppose that the lady fish have hips and breasts?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed and pink puff lips pursed together, impish, when Lisa smiled.

“No… they don’t. If you look at these two,” he motioned toward the fish, “Jack is larger and Iris has a darker stomach. It’s so he can intimidate predators, and because she carries extra nutrients for their eggs.” Marc’s prickles opened into full streams and he wondered if she’d notice the blurbs on his shirt.

Lisa pulled back from the glass.

“So do you spend all your time studying these fish?” she asked.

Marc, still streaming and a marching band about to fall out of his chest, thought hard to remember.

“Tonight actually I’ve got dinner with Moses, my best friend. And my brother, Damon.”

by Tricia Callahan

Boy on the subway, hair newly combed, eyes wet, cheeks glowing, nose running. Shoelace loops large. His feet barely hanging over the edge of the seat. One hand on the tiny backpack next to him; the other, blotting his damp face.

Mother in slacks, kneeling to eye level, asking him what is the matter.

Here is what we all expect: I hate morning. I hate leaving you. I hate that I’m hungry. I hate sitting next to my sister.

Instead: “I… I wanted… I wanted to take… the R.” Pauses are not for effect; pauses are where he takes deep, shuddering breaths through tears.

Sister who knows everything: “He likes their benches.”

His mother brushes his hair back with her hand and rises. Tells his sister to sit back. Asks if she remembered her lunch.

But there’s more to it than that.

“Mom?” Tentative. “Are we—” He takes a series of quick breaths, his bottom lip sucked toward his top teeth. “Are we on the,” the dread in his voice unmistakable, “G?”

Oh, dear lord, you can practically hear the surrounding commuters all think in unison—the nine-to-fivers that live and die by the clock—dear lord, no. We are practically hysterical with relieved laughter. And, forgive us oh G train, just like that we find ourselves smiling on a Monday morning.

by S.K. Evans

I was browsing the philosophy section of Barnes & Nobles, trying to find a Terry Eagleton book to buy for a boy who would never appreciate it, when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned to see a boy with an attractive, bespectacled face, a face which I had known so long ago. He asked me, in a polite and somewhat confident tone, if I had gone to such-and-such high school. Of course, I already knew who he was. He was the same and he was different—in that familiar yet disconcerting way we all seem when confronted with an intersection of our past and present. I doubt that in high school he knew how to scale and gut a fish or that he hosted elaborate multicourse dinner parties in a Williamsburg apartment. And I know he didn’t listen to, or write about, obscure indie rock back then—though he does now—because he recently reminded me that I introduced him to the Pixies when he was fifteen years old. But something about him still felt familiar.

The places where our lives intersect are so often punctuated by sex. This mystery blogger and I had never slept together or even touched lips, but a thread of sexual intrigue weaves its way through our friendship. My first love was a high school friend of his; since then, Slice Blogger and I have had our separate fair share of stolen kisses, secret sex, and laughably awkward encounters with a variety of mutual friends and acquaintances. In a way, little has changed since high school; we both have full time jobs and a longer and longer list of lovers but we still spend hours talking about our latest heartbreaks and listening to sappy music. What have we really learned? Maybe nothing more than how to do it all with a little more style.

by Ian F. King

At the Booklyn Museum on a recent Saturday afternoon, my friend Liz M. and I stood in the Cantor Gallery and stared as “Enfolding 280 Hours” unraveled in black sinews of painted masking tape, along the walls and onto the pillars in the middle of the room. A security guard, no older than twenty-one, who had been standing next to us in the otherwise empty space spoke up, explaining the difference in the technique they used to do the pillars from that used for the walls. “I was here when they were making it, was pretty interesting to watch.”

“What was the reason for the difference in how they did each side?” I asked, eager to appear engaged. He paused for a second. “I have no idea… You were looking around and I thought I should say something and that was all I could think to say.” It was the second obvious answer to a dumb question I had received that day. I told him he came across like he really knew his stuff.

The first obvious answer to a dumb question I got that day was a half hour earlier, on the way to the museum, where, a block south of Grand Army Plaza, I had looked up to see over a dozen identical white plastic bags strewn up in the dead branches of the trees. “What are all those bags doing up there?” I asked.

Liz succinctly replied, “You may have noticed—it’s windy today.” It was an exceptionally windy day, but I was somehow convinced that the bags were up there as some sort of elementary school rain collecting science project.

Paul, the security guard, didn’t have any more fun facts about “Enfolding”, but he did have a comment or two on the other exhibits, which he thought were both much better, including one which was “not really homoerotic, but it has homoerotic overtones.” (Paul, we were to discover, was actually downplaying the homoerotic factor) Though Paul generally liked the exhibits that passed through, he’d grown tired of working there, and didn’t get the joy out of coming to work in such a beautiful place that I told him I wanted him to have.

When he asked if we came here often I thought he was being funny, but he claimed we both looked familiar. Paul must have had an amazing memory for faces, because I hadn’t been there in four months at least, and if Liz’s assertion that she’s “usually just content to know the museum is there” is anything to go by, she wasn’t a regular either. I hoped Paul would put that memory to use making sure the right people get the right medicines once he became a pharmacist—a career track he’d recently switched to, he told us, previously having been an art history major.

On the walk back I looked up at the dead trees again and asked another dumb question. “When are the leaves finally going to come back?” Liz stopped us as we walked under a low hanging branch, pointing to all the barely-visible leaf buds that speckled it. These counted too, she insisted, and all the trees were covered in them. There were leaves, everywhere. I didn’t buy it at the time, but I might now.