Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Liz Mathews

You
You go upstairs to the vending machines to get a Diet Coke. While there, you notice that the snack machine has Twix, for once. You drop $0.75 into the machine and step back in anticipation. The coil around the front candy bar unwinds. You wait for the bar to fall. The coil unwinds more. It stops. The Twix dangles maddeningly.

You attempt to shake the machine, but the machine is too heavy. You consider hitting the machine, or body slamming it, but then think of the people working in the offices nearby. Your shoulders fall with disappointment and you leave, the Twix still dangling out of reach.

Your Coworker Jen
Back on the 14th floor, you approach your coworker Jen. “Is there any way to get back $0.75 the vending machine stole?” you ask her.

“Email Office Services,” she replies.

So you do.

Office Services
Office Services does not respond to your email, which is mostly fine with you because you feel like an ass for bugging them. But then, on the third day, an email appears:

“Leave a note with your name and extension on the machine, and the vending machine guy will either get you the candy or your money.”

Great! you think, because here is a solution to a problem you’d forgotten about. Except then you think about it some more, and realize that everyone in the entire Flatiron building could read your note, and know that you are a cheapskate and a glutton.

But then you think about it even more, and write that note and run upstairs and tape it to the machine.

The Vending Machine Man and the Woman Who Leaves You a Voicemail
More days go by, and you forget what you’ve done. One morning you return to your desk and notice you have a phone message.

“Hi. I’m calling from the 19th floor, right by the door on the south side. The vending machine guy left you a candy, some M&Ms, because he didn’t have any Twix. You can stop by whenever to pick it up,” the voice trailed off with slight annoyance.

You’d thought you were embarrassed before, when you left the note. But now that an innocent bystander has been drawn in, you seriously consider abandoning your candy in effort to save face.

But she already has your name, and extension. So you trudge up to the 19th floor, and seek out this woman who sits by the door, who you walk past every time you decide you’d like a Diet Coke. She hands you the peanut M&M’s. You can barely look her in the eye. “Thanks,” you say, and then, “I’m sorry.” She has no response.

You, In Conclusion
That day during your lunch break you stop in the Duane Reade across the street and by a 12-pack of Diet Coke. This ensures that for at least three weeks you won’t have to show your face on the 19th floor.

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by Naomi Solomon

Storefront Jesus looks out onto not very much for the spraypainted son of all creation: some parked cars, some litter, a tree trunk almost naked of branches, and, on the far side of a chain link fence, the blank wall of one side of the Ridgewood Wash-N-Fold. He looks tired but calm, as if tired is the normal and unsurprising state of things, and the wind rattling his metal grating is like the prelude to a sigh that never gets released: a long, sharp intake of breath that leaves him slightly shaky, all puffed up with no place to go.

There are days when the deep sunflower yellow of his sprayed-on aura looks cheap: the gaudy shine of a thin-paged, gilt-edged bible in the hand of a street-corner evangelist, coming with the expectation of pamphlets filled with Doomsday cartoons and too much italicized text. Those days Storefront Jesus seems abandoned, as if behind His corrugated gaze there might be only dust and empty soda bottles, a broken folding chair or two. As if He is a flimsy patch over a hole and not the modest wrappings of greater things hidden within. As if passer-by should look down and walk faster, caught somewhere between the uncomfortable solemnity of witnessing a stranger’s funeral procession and the driving need to not be preached at, not today when there’s a glower to the sky and the parking lot is full of honking cars.

Other days there seems to be a true glow as the light hits the yellow paint and glints off the bits of exposed steel like the quick, intense shake of a spray can, as if Storefront Jesus were reminding the other churches in the neighborhood, the huge institutional-looking churches, the traditional ones with all the stone walls and pointy bits, that there is glory to be found in the small things, too; that if you just make a small place holy, it will be holy, too.

Then maybe the congregation can see and make this glory as easily in a storefront as in a cathedral, and maybe they have already fixed it so that when those doors roll up and Jesus disappears above the entry way, the storefront church is flooded with light, light glinting neatly off of simple polished pews and hardwood floors kept just so by proudly bent backs and strong arms, light shining off an altar of family rosaries and household reliquaries, lacquered ceramic vases filled with whatever is brought in this week: flowers or tree branches, carefully twisted pipe cleaners, tinfoil blossoms held in place with copper wires. At the back an elaborate organ hidden away like an inheritance, like a million mouthed thank-yous to generations come and gone, which through an incredible feat of soundproofing the congregation has managed to keep a massive and gleaming secret, out of the neighborhood’s awareness.

[img via Naomi Solomon]

by J.B. Staniforth

Mawuko was from Ghana, a student at the international MBA program at which I’d found a job as a receptionist. We first met during the winter, which was, like most Montreal winters, ferociously cold. And like many immigrants to Montreal from warmer countries, Mawuko suffered it with a sense of humor, first amazed by the cold and snow, then tiring sarcastically of it as the novelty wore off, and finally amazed again at the wait for spring to come in May.

By the time spring came, we’d become friendly. My girlfriend also worked at the reception desk on alternating days, and Mawuko took to passing time on breaks by wandering over and chatting with us. He introduced us to his wife, who was also studying in town, and brought us Ghanaian chocolate after he’d gone home for a desperately-needed visit in the mid-winter.

As long as I knew him, Mawuko’s dress was standard business-casual, except for those days in the program on which he was required to attend a meeting or presentation and wore a suit. So I was enthused to discover that as the summer temperatures reached those to which he was more accustomed, his wardrobe widened to included dashikis, kaftans, and kufi-caps. Part of the fun of the job was encountering people from all over the world and asking them about the customs of home, and Mawuko took great pleasure in pointing out that there weren’t many people in Montreal with his sense of style.

Thus, it was in a brilliant purple kaftan that he appeared through the door during the third day of the first heat wave of summer. The city was living up to its meteorological reputation of “nine months of winter, three months of hell,” and as Mawuko staggered into the air conditioned office, I could see he was sweating mightily. A V-shaped patch of sweat darkened his purple kaftan nearly to the belly, while two dark u-shapes descended from his armpits. Upon entering, he paused in the air-conditioning to blot his forehead, temples, and upper lip with a handkerchief. Then he looked at the desk and saw me.

“Have you been outside lately?” he asked. In spite of his musical accent, his tone was accusatory, as though I was somehow responsible for the weather.

“No,” I said. “I got here early for the air conditioning.” That was true; I didn’t bother to add that my roommates and I had taped cardboard over all our windows in the hope of blocking out the cruelty of the sun.

“It is so hot outside,” Mawuko said. “I mean, it is unreal.”

“It does get hot,” I concurred.

“No, you don’t understand. It is hotter than Africa. Africa! And you know what they say about Africa? That it’s a hot place?”

“It’s the humidity,” I offered.

“You’re damned right it is! We don’t have humidity like this in Africa. It’s terrible.”

I shrugged; I couldn’t then, and can’t now, afford to live anywhere else.

“And in the winter,” he went on, “it is so cold. So terribly cold. What is wrong with this country? Why do you people live here?”

“I can only speak for myself,” I said, “but I stay mostly because the rent is cheap and all the insects are very small.”

Mawuko shook his head.

“You people are crazy,” he said.

The last I heard of him, he and his wife moved home to Ghana immediately upon completing their studies in Montreal.

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by caitlin macrae

At the time of this written record, I am twenty-five years old, the year is 2010. Although I live in the kind of place where, reputation has it, Big Things Are Happening All the Time and the Whole Town Has Insomnia, I am at this moment watching more television than ever. Serial dramas, mostly, an embarrassing number of which have to do with high-school-aged people and their romantic entanglements. Perhaps it began while at college, stoned, with the freakishly earnest update of the already freakishly earnest Degrassi. Last year’s Twin Peaks obsession nearly ruined my life; we will not talk about Fire Walk With Me. And then, just when I thought things were going okay, Buffy happened. Now it is several months later, and Buffy has un-happened. And here I am.

Things are different. There is more time now, I suppose. When I’m sitting at my desk in an art-making mood, the computer stays closed, and I can stay focused on the tools in my hands without thinking of how, yeah, I’d stake someone if I needed to. The ambient noise in my life now is the music I’ve listened to since developing my own tastes, not the soundtrack that reminds me of late-nineties summers in a summer camp minivan. I have stopped making as many thinly stretched comparisons between places I grew up and hellmouths, former lovers and fictional vampires. I can have conversations with people I actually know without simultaneously wishing I could check in with people who I not only do not know but who do not actually exist. These things, they are good.

But there’s another side to this. The thing about serials, their predictable arcs and soft falls, is: I spent a long time being sanctimonious about not watching teevee or whatever but, in truth, these shows stop time. It’s a lifetime in under an hour. That hour contains a world in which loose ends resolve, people communicate, all things that happens are things Of Interest, and you know that they’re Of Interest because there’s music playing. And once it’s over, all you can really do is think about it, how time actually passes, and nothing is incrementally tidy, and how when a made-up teenage vampire slayer sleeps with someone and they turn into a demon it’s a metaphoric plot device, but when it happens to you it’s really just a bummer.

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by Liz Wyckoff

Everyone knows about Amazon’s missing breast. The fabric of her sweater wrinkles strangely in its absence—three folds that look like the aftermath of a lion’s paw.

“Look,” she jokes, stretching to grab a kabob skewer across the table. Her arm crosses her chest at a tight angle. “Life without a rack! Now I realize how easy men have it.” The other women titter and smile with their lips. “If I want lamb, there’s nothing to keep me from the fucking lamb.” She pulls her arm back across the table, inserts the skewer into her mouth, and pulls a grilled square of pepper off with her teeth.

They give her knowing looks, but they don’t know everything.

Trotula of Salerno, the doctor who detected the lump, knows more details than anyone. Details about disease. Procedures. Prostheses.

Ethyl Smyth, her friend since high school, knows the history. She has been around long enough to remember those first rumors that circulated in ninth grade. The word “loose” scratched onto the front of Amazon’s locker. And senior year, after she cut her hair short and swore never to sleep with a man again, how the boys hummed “Dude Looks Like a Lady” whenever they passed her in the halls.

Amazon smiles back, chewing her lamb. Such serious women.

She’s imagining an after-dinner scene. Later tonight after Trotula has finished her bottle of sambuca and Ethyl has had too much wine, they will become brave and ask. And Amazon will say, “Let’s all.” And they will let their breasts loose at the table.

In the candlelight, St. Bridget will unbutton her madras shirt and bare her pale, pointed pair. Elizabeth Blackwell will pull the t-shirt over her head to reveal her bulky bosom. Even Emily Dickinson will unclasp the pink frills of her push-up and expose her breasts, laughing, over the brie.

Then they will know the starburst stretch underneath Amazon’s sweater. Her skin stitching into itself like a purse, a silky zipper hemming something in. The secret she is just waiting to let loose.

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by Katherine Cooper

We lived in a one-bedroom for the first few years of my life—my parents, brother, and I. It was in one of those white-brick buildings from the seventies, with a taut green awning and a doorman in a gold-trimmed suit lingering nearby. It was a generous one bedroom, for sure, but still there were four of us living together in that small, tight space. My parents graciously slept on a paisley pull-out couch in the living room, while Sam and I had two red-framed beds in the master bedroom. I was young, but a few distinct images come to me: a plush grey rug on the living room floor, eating squares of cinnamon toast on my knees beside a boxy television, shelves lined with rows of books and big, square records.

My mom is a writer—a novelist—who was miraculously able to take care of two children and have seven books published by the time they were grown. She spent hours in her room, filling up notebooks with tiny prose, but was also impossibly attentive, coming out to check on us constantly. Did we need anything? An orange peeled and sectioned? Some pretzels? Did we want her to make us some milkshakes?

I had a lot of trouble separating from her when I was little. In kindergarten I’d sit, encircled in a ring of damp, shredded tissues. I could concentrate on nothing except the absence of my mother—that raw, vast space between us. Even as a seven- or eight-year-old kid, I’d throw tantrums each time she left the house. A quick trip to the grocery store or post office would leave me in tears—sweaty and breathless.

But until I was old enough to go to school, I had a babysitter, Corrine, who took care of me during the day. In the morning we’d take the elevator downstairs with my mom, who was heading somewhere to write, to be alone with her thoughts and away from the cluttered space we all shared. Corrine held me as I kissed my mother goodbye, and tried to ease that fresh panic in my chest. We’d go the laundry room and sort through different colored socks—tiny and studded with flowers or fake jewels. Sometimes we’d take walks or go a toy store on Madison Avenue, where she’d lift me up beside a golden stuffed bear who, with a tiny red wand, blew perfect circles in the air. We spent days in the park or playing games on the living room floor, all the while eagerly awaiting my mom’s return.

Years later, I am leafing through a binder that my dad has put together—a collection of articles and book reviews, little clips from magazines about my mom’s work. I pause at a review from the Times—examine the faded text beneath a glossy sheath. The reviewer praises the book, calls the work “wry and insightful,” and then explains how the author (with the help of a babysitter) is able to seamlessly convince her young daughter that she is leaving for work each morning, heading downtown to an imaginary office building.

When Corrine and I headed to the laundry room or took walks in the park, my mom crept back upstairs into the apartment. She’d sit on my bed, her small body propped up by an enormous turquoise pillow, and write for hours each day. And for a moment, I can imagine the hot sting of betrayal, the utter disbelief if I had simply opened up the door.

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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

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 Katherine Cooper

I went to New Orleans about four years ago with a group of kids from college. It was the January after the storm, but winter there is often warm and humid, the sun bright and persistent. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of a beautiful wooden church. Next door were big houses with white columns and glistening lawns, sidewalks dotted with palm trees.

We’d drive this bulky white van into the devastated areas and gut entire houses. We carried it all out onto the sidewalk: oak dressers and glass tables, couches still swollen and damp, cardboard boxes filled with Christmas ornaments and full sets of wine-colored encyclopedias. Nail polish and splintered hockey sticks. We’d knock down walls, slamming our hammers and crowbars from dining room to kitchen, bedroom to bathroom. We dug tiles up from the mud—turquoise and coral—slippery with sewage.

Whole lives were emptied out onto their front porches and lawns. Sometimes people watched as we hauled out their belongings. Be careful with that antique frame and those ceramic mugs. But they quieted as we knocked down their houses, crowbars smashing through ceilings, fiberglass falling like pale, pink snow.

In a suburb west of the city, we found a sailboat tilted and positioned through the front door of a home and cars piled on top of each other. Mattresses still wrapped in floral bedding.

And now it’s four-and-a-half years later, and I’m here visiting Sarah, and all the furniture and clutter is gone. Most of the houses are still there—vacant and boarded up with pieces of wood across the windows. Sarah asks me what’s changed. When we were here before it was like an entire city had been taken away in the midst of a disaster, and now the evidence of that chaos is mostly gone. Though the orange spray paint on the doors is still lingering—a big X to say the houses had been checked for people. 9/4, 9/5, 9/6. One cat left and two dogs. Everyone else gone.

It is ninety degrees and we climb up onto the levees. The water looks so calm and harmless, like a drowsy monster waiting to rear its head. I keep thinking of this one place we saw that winter: a one-story brick house whose front door and windows had been blown in. There were a handful of branches sticking out through the empty door frame, and white numbers dangling beside it. In blue paint someone had written across the front: You Won, Katrina. I wonder where they are now. If they’ve come back, renounced that surrender. Or if they’ve abandoned this place entirely, their anger and frustration having ebbed away, drowned by the need to go on.

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