Share Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
By Painted Bride Quarterly
5
1111 ratings
The podcast currently has 163 episodes available.
Episode 83: Goodnight, Mary Magdalene first aired in June 2020 and features three poems by Vasiliki Katsarou, a poet and publisher. This time last year, Vasiliki published a new short collection of poetry Three Sea Stones with Solitude Hill Press. It’s a great time to revisit Vasiliki’s work.
Dear Slushies, join the PBQ crew (which includes a freshly-tenured Jason Schneiderman) for a pre-pandemic recording of our discussion of 3 poems by the wonderful Vasiliki Katsarou’s work. Be sure to read the poems on the page below as you listen. They’ll require your eyes and ears– and “a decoder ring.” The team has a grand old time explicating these artful poems. The muses are sprung and singing in us as we read and decide on this submission. Katsarou’s poems teach us to read them without projecting too much of ourselves and our current preoccupations onto them. We’re reminded to pay attention to what’s happening on the page. But synchronicities abound! Before we know it we’re ricocheting off of the poems’ images and noting the wonderful convergences the poems trigger – we hear traces of Wallace Stevens “Idea of Order of Key West” or Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts. (But first we check in with each other, cracking each other up in a pre-pandemic moment of serious lightness. We’re heard that “Science” shows Arts & Humanities majors make major money in the long run. Kathy reports that “the data on success” shows that participation in Nativity Plays is a marker for career success. Samantha confesses she played Mary Magdalene in a Nativity Play. Marion might have been a Magi. And many of us were reindeer.. Also, Donkeys do better than sheep over time (which may or may not have been claimed on “Wait, wait… don’t tell me!”). Editing a Lit Mag shouldn’t be this much fun, Slushies. Listen through to the discussion of the 3rd poem’s deep magic and craft. And listen to our editors’ cats chime in).
Addison Davis, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, and Joe Zang
Vasiliki Katsarou grew up Greek American in Jack Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. She has also lived in Paris, France, and Harvard, Mass. She is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Memento Tsunami, and co-editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies: Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems and Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems. She holds an MFA from Boston University and an AB in comparative literature from Harvard University. She read her poetry at the 2014 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and is a Teaching Artist at Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey. Her poems have been published widely and internationally, including in NOON: Journal of the Short Poem (Japan), Corbel Stone Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series (U.K.), Regime Journal (Australia), as well as in Poetry Daily, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, Wild River Review, wicked alice, Literary Mama, La Vague Journal, Otoliths, and Contemporary American Voices. She wrote and directed an award-winning 35mm short film, Fruitlands 1843, about a Transcendentalist utopian community in Massachusetts. Vasiliki’s website: https://onegoldbead.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/cineutopia , Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vasiliki.katsarou, and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cineutopia/
The Future Arrives as a Redhead
They talk of mothers in law
her sun and her moon is our son
in an eye that looks like mine,
her hair like copper coils
a Maisie or Daisy, a woman of Stem
thumbprint keys, on an ancient island
the future arrives as a redhead
on us, we no longer count
sounds, and the future
*
Wedding, Key West
A stitch in throat saves time
*
Waited
you waited with me as the house
minted with ash and wishes
my echo’s echo
that morning of the supermoon
white fog settling into the hollows
you trained me well, M.
While we’re on a brief recording hiatus, we have a re-issue of an episode from 2019, when our team took a rare look at a non-fiction piece by author Andrew Bertaina. It’s great timing to take a fresh look at this episode, as earlier this year Bertaina published a collection of essays called “The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place”. Enjoy the episode and check out Bertaina’s new collection!
Welcome back to another Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. Today we have an excellent episode with a bit of something different. After a set of introductions in which Marion gets out her glue gun the gang dives right into a piece of non-fiction by Andrew Bertaina labeled “The Offering”.
Andrew Bertaina's work has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications including: The Best American Poetry 2018, The ThreePenny Review, Tin House online, Redivider, Crab Orchard Review and Green Mountains Review. More of his work is available at www.andrewbertaina.com
After an excellent reading by Kathleen, Tim describes how churches offer less of a sense of community these days; being more concerned with hellfire and crucifixion. Next, Marion describes how the piece offers a sense of timelessness while lamenting on her own exhaustion from various teaching duties. Marion contends that the piece allowed her to compose herself and gave her a sense of fulfillment. Samantha speaks a bit on curation, and how that differs from what is displayed on social media. Before voting Tim mentions how historically specific the piece is, and the idea of somebody that you used to know. Will this piece make the cut? Or will it fade into obscurity?
The Offering
At church this morning, I passed around a collection plate to gather up the scraps of all the people I have known. The bowl was silver and its size was like that of space. Inside, I found: a hike through a hailstorm in Colorado where blue jays where eating other bird’s babies; I found an evening spent from midnight till morning talking about the way that I dreamed of divinity; I found a piece of a tetherball string, still wound tightly around a silver pole; I found a pocket of gummi worms, unopened, thrown in the trash can at recess; I found a small side yard where I dug for dinosaur bones; I found a picture with the words I love you written across the top; I found tears and tears, until I was swimming through all the tears, trying to remember why we are all such bizarre puzzles; I found a slip of paper with someone’s e-mail on it that I threw in the trash; I found a cabin in the woods with a couch and a blanket; I found a picture of you standing with me in the same shirt I wore only two weeks ago, but it was more than a decade ago; I found that the years start to run together like water that you can’t separate out the moments that you used to; I found pictures of people in wedding dresses and tuxedos, people that I used to know, and I smiled at their happy faces, because they made me happy when I knew them; I found a picture of San Francisco, stiff breezes off the bay, always so damn cold, and inside the picture was another picture of a hospital, and inside that hospital a memory of people who are now dust; I found an evening in the mountains of Santa Barbara, and a sunrise too; I found a picture of five of us sitting in a room talking about the ways in which we had failed, the ways in which we’d like to succeed; I found a picture of a piano and green couches; I found a picture of a mountain trail, pine trees and old bear scat; I found a picture of the ocean, of your hand in mine, before we glided together. I found a picture of a tower in Italy, a winding staircase leading to a view of some ancient city.
I spent the evening afterward, sorting all these pictures into specific piles.
Afternoons that could have lasted forever.
Times I went to the ocean.
Women that I have loved.
Women that I did not have the time to get around to loving.
People that I once knew.
People that I used to know and wish I still knew.
Avenues that I have walked down.
Avenues that I wish I had walked down.
Pictures of places that I am not remembering properly.
After I was done organizing these moments, I wrote them all down on the computer screen, which flickered, in and out just like memory does. I know that thousands, millions, far more numerous than the stars, are still missing. I want you to know that I’m trying to remember all of you, despite the futility of it. I’m reaching out to the people I have known and the people I will know. I miss all of you already, so the next time you see me, let’s meet, not was if we were strangers, but as people who have, for longer than they can remember, been very much in love.
Slushies, waves abound in this lively discussion of a poem by Martha Silano and two more by Jane Hilberry. The way stream of consciousness can crest and fall, sound waves, the missed and caught waves in real life (including runs of luck or the lack of it), not to mention the different ways in which we experience poetry– the gang rides wave after wave. We regularly find that our process of reading poetry aloud causes one or more of us to experience a poem anew. Sometimes it provides clarity that wasn’t there when it was confined to the silence of the page. Sometimes it brings up questions. As always, we were grateful to have the trust of two amazing poets willing to share our discussion of their work. (We were going to call this episode “In Bed with Marion & Kathy” and we’ll let you find out why by having a listen!)
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Angelique Massey, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, Vivian Liu (sound engineer)
Martha Silano’s six books include This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, and available from Lynx House Press. She is also the author of Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She enjoys birdwatching, botanizing, and hanging out with her kids and cats. Learn more about her work at marthasilano.net.
The Luck of It
What counts is that my car, when it gets broken into, what’s gone
is replaceable, like that leather jacket my friend Alison threw at me
when she left for California. Please take it! (I got a new one for Christmas).
Once, when I left it unlocked, someone spent the night in my Hyundai.
All in all, I was happy to offer a place of refuge, especially on account
of nothing stolen, not the extra pair of socks, not my maroon hat or hand sani,
the only tip off being the empty bottle of Sprite. Sprite!
I mean, you’re kidding me. My husband jokes how I get so excited
about the crumb that drops on my plate from that giant chocolate croissant
in the sky, tells me I’m like a housefly with a tiny chunk of pizza
it can’t believe it’s had the good fortune to land on. And look! It’s even got a little dab
of pepperoni juice! It seems I set the bar low,
and maybe he’s right, though when I ran track,
the field part kind of scared me. In tenth grade, when Suzanne Glester
broke the state record in the high jump,
I could barely keep myself from looking away
as her contorted body landed in a heap on a thick mat
that never seemed thick enough. Honestly,
I’m just glad I’m not the guy on Next Door
who posted about the lonely chicken: I see her wandering around.
Seems like she need another little hen.
Do any of you have one you’d like to re-home?
Or the woman who shared someone’s been racing their car
up Juneau. making a hair pin turn onto Seward Park Avenue.
It literally rattles our windows. I’m tempted to respond I feel your pain,
but having rattling windows means you live in a home? I guess what I’m trying to say
is that when two guys were about to kick in
our basement window, I happened to stroll by with a bag
of dirty Huggies for the bin. Yep, a load of dirty diapers saved us.
Jane Hilberry is just weeks into retirement after a happy 35-year teaching career at Colorado College that began with Medieval and Renaissance literature and ended up in Creativity & Innovation. So far retirement involves mostly sleeping and swimming, but she aspires to write poems, paint, and make small objects for sheer delight. Her books of poems include Still the Animals Enter and Body Painting (Red Hen Press) and a chapbook co-authored with her father, Conrad Hilberry, titled This Awkward Art: Poems by a Father and Daughter (Mayapple Press). Paintings and small objects can be found on Instagram @jhilberry.
I might have planned badly
My friends are ga-ga over their grandkids, over the moon!
Pictures on their phones of the toddler pushing the vacuum,
the dog sleeping wrapped around the child.
My god, I was driven. I translated every word of Beowulf,
working out each noun’s case ending, nominative, accusative, genitive,
dative, or a vestigial instrumental. I spent my twenties
in a library carrel until 2 a.m. closing. I could regret it now,
but there was no stopping that one, whoever she was.
Baby, I’m going to be seventy soon, and eighty.
Coastal Cali
At the intersection, a stream of newly washed
Benzes and Bentleys. A man in a camel coat surveys
a café patio: "I'm dressed inappropriately,” he says.
He’s crew for Hollywood Medium. Against the roar
of leaf blowers, Que tiempo hace hoy plays on someone’s radio.
It's breezy, seventy-five.
Meanwhile, at the water,
surfers lift and fall, surge and sink. The dark triangles
of their heads and shoulders move like fins
in undulating circles, till one rises, twists and vees,
rides the wave into a bloom of foam.
What is this world? wrote Chaucer, What asketh man to have?
Xanax for the rough days. I can't identify the flora—
Yarrow? Ice plant? —or remember the gods of the sea.
Zephyr? Poseidon? No one here calls it the sea.
The natural world and human nature provide a variety of jumping off points for three poems that contrast the ego and experience of each poem’s speaker with other perspectives, both observed and imagined. The discussion touches on the use of a strong opening conceit, lineation that cannily reflects breathwork, and leaning into specificity as strong poetic moves. Let’s not forget the role that taste plays! Kathy’s internal sommelier springs to life twice to flag questionable taste in wine and a discussion of the third poem under discussion highlights the role that direct experience and cultural awareness can play in appreciating the landscape of a poem. The discussion also briefly lingers on the question of whether singer Dionne Warwick is still alive and well and performing. At the time of writing these notes, she most certainly is!
Some links we think you might like:
The Spin Doctors
Dionne Warwick, Do You Know the Way to San Jose (YouTube)
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Manuel López, Isabel Petry, Vivian Liu (sound engineer)
John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he teaches social work at Stockton University. He serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for the Mad Poet Society blog and has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM. Recent publications include: Rattle, Split Rock Review, Soundings East, West Trade Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. He is the author of the chapbook, Roadside Attractions: a poetic guide to American oddities. Find out more at: www.johnwojtowicz.com
Kolyuchin Island
Polar bears have taken up residence
within the marmalade walls
of an abandoned weather station,
the lone dwelling
on a small island in the Chukchi Sea.
This unexpected sanctuary,
strategically located
between Russia and Alaska,
has a post-apocalyptic feel
like the Statue of Liberty scene
at the end of the first Planet of the Apes, but cuter.
White-coated inhabitants
can be seen sunning themselves
on the front porch,
poking frosty heads from turquoise
window frames, wandering
their 2.8 mile yard littered with rusted tanks
and construction debris.
Pierre Boulle never wrote
a sequel to the Planet of the Apes.
Man loses. The End.
And with earth’s history of ruling classes
and our self-destructive tendencies,
this is the likely scenario.
If by some grace, we go out without taking
every living thing with us,
it gives me pleasure to picture
a sleuth of grizzly bears
as the heirs to Buckingham Palace.
As a whole, extraterrestrial
anthropologists will have to assume,
we cared very little
about the arctic fox, musk ox, and polar bear,
dooming these lifeforms
(and then ourselves).
And even though I didn’t do much to stop it,
I hope they’ll find
the remains of my glacial wall calendar
and arctic-themed necktie
or better yet the yellowed receipt
from a donation I plan on making
to the World Wildlife Fund
and conclude that I was one of the good ones.
Wild
The rugs haven’t been cut in a long while
and the shag is starting to tickle
my chin. It’s up to my neck
which is sometimes
how I feel navigating the jungle of my life
which germinated
from the garden of my childhood
and went mostly untended
for the first quarter or so.
Yes, it’s been some time
since I backpacked through nightclubs,
traversed the landscape of closing time,
tossed the map on an LSD trip.
Right now, I am dead-heading petunias
on my back deck. My two kids
are sleeping. The dog is chasing
lightning bugs. My wife is finishing a glass
of Moscato and will soon be
waiting for me in our bed. Earlier today
I added boat-tailed grackle
to my backyard bird list.
My zucchini is starting to flower
and so is (for the first time)
the southern magnolia
planted a few springs back.
The groundhog I nicknamed Big Orange
is on his hindlegs
taking in the evening news.
And as the sun moves to give someone else
a turn with the light,
I consider that this
might be the wildest I’ve ever been.
What's your love language, Slushies? Is it touch, or talk? Recipes or arithmetic? Join us for this episode devoted to poems by Jin Cordaro, whose work strikes an incantatory tone, draws us in, and gets us chewing on the riddles of the human predicament. How do our bodies know things before our minds do? How do other people's shopping lists make us ache for connection? We focus on the art of lists, the arc of poems, and the power of a poet's voice to invite and hold the reader's attention.
In post-production we discovered the poem “Flavor in the Hands” was accepted elsewhere. It will appear in Bacopa Literary Review in the future, and we’re delighted for Jin.
A link we think you might like:
Please Touch Museum, Philadelphia
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Samantha Neugebauer, and Holly Messitt, as well as our briefly larger than normal tech team Heath Bailey, Jess Fielo, and Vivian Liu (without whom we’d be lost!)
At four feet seven inches, Jin Cordaro believes she holds the record for most petite living poet. Having had twins, she also believes she holds the record for most times people have asked, “They came from you?” Her work has appeared in The Sun, Faultline, Smartish Pace, and Bacopa Literary Review, and has been featured on the podcast The Slowdown. She and her family live in central New Jersey.
That Time You Stole Someone’s Shopping Cart
With their shopping list in the seat,
and a flower doodled in the corner – a sign
not a curse or a prayer, a devotion,
a singular language
to nourish and be nourished.
Familiar words, combined in a cipher,
you can only translate every third word –
paprika followed by shallots means
to put effort or caring.
Cranberries combined with pecans
and butternut squash means
to sustain, keep well.
What would this taste like?
This list a thin opaque crepe filled with
the soft, oozing breadth of someone’s attention
and time. You slip it into your jacket
keep your hand on your pocket as
you walk the store. Rush home
to unfold it, imagine it still warm,
slightly browned on a skillet,
sweet and bready with love.
You chew it slowly –
the only piece of food
to be found.
1/3 parent + 1/3 employee + 1/3 spouse
does not equal 1 whole you but
permutations of you.
Only one can execute its function
at any given time.
Requirements call for
1 ½ parent you + 1 ½ work you + 1 ½ spouse you =
invalid calculation. Insufficient source.
Multiply by a factor of
school concert x illness x hosting holiday =
exponentially negative integer you.
Divide this number by
the number of your children,
given age as a factor of x.
Write a proof that demonstrates
1 you – job + bills = increase in sanity?
Or 1/3 parent you – cleaning toilets – cooking =
increase in you?
You are the product of division.
You ÷ x = disappearing you
reduced to null an imaginary unit
when all you want is to be prime
divisible by only 1 and yourself.
But 0 too can be divided by any number
and still remain the same
We just had to start this episode with a reassurance that everyone was dressed, which you’ll understand as soon as you read or listen to “Pneuma”, the poem by BJ Soloy that kicks everything off. The bonkers energy of a country and a world overflowing with bad news and tragedy is juxtaposed with some very real tenderness and self reflection in two astounding pieces by Soloy. These astutely paced poems are brimming with the overwhelm of modern life while threading in historical references (Brown vs. Board of Education, Troost Avenue, and scud missiles, for starters).
Some other links we think you’ll like:
Sapphic stanzas
Marion's IMDB credit
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Jason Schneiderman, Lisa Zerkle, Isabel Petry
BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography and other disaster songs (Slope Editions, 2019), and Selected Letters, a chapbook out with New Michigan Press. He lives and dies in Des Moines, home of the whatever.
Pneuma
Put your pants back on, America.
It’s four in the morning & also
five, three, & two, simultaneously,
you big lug. Plus, there’s snow.
In this light, really any light,
my nose looks like a tired potato
got punched in its mute mouth.
With any light on, I want to see other people
when I look in the mirror, when I slouch
in this bathroom booth where I hope to die
on the shitter, like an American,
like one of yours. Clinton, TN is any other frowsy town
with a cock & balls scribbled on its playground slide
& square pitbulls straining at their chains.
America, I came to bed late as always.
You roll over, softly surprised & then delighted,
offering, “I forgot where I was.” I’m yawning,
breathing just to get oxygen on this fire.
Well, tonight is not the only place I am
tonight. Beyond me & between me
light bulbs hiccup & burble
& a frenzied squirrel loses its map
of maples & restarts. Maybe we ought to
take what we’ve still got & laminate it in frost
& then salt & then the gold leaf over spring’s pat rapture.
There are things I’ve learned already this young
soft year I don’t know what to do with: one
gets a pregnancy test when in the ER
for their attempt on their own life. What to name that baby?
I worry I’m doing this wrong. I’ve got beans soaking, sharps
& meds hidden, the last dank well swill of our bank account
miraculously transformed into boxed wine. Winter’s here
with its expressive eyebrows & doomed neighborhood cats
under every car. You yawn so I kiss you & you taste better
than free food, but you can’t sleep & I try to stay up reading
but layers of exhaustion—wet blankets on this piss whisper
of a fire—keep accumulating. I worry you’ll do it right next time
& I’m still attached to this day of ours, whatever day it is.
Benesh
It’s been a long night & your mouth already tasted like rain an hour ago. Writing
often of the sky instead of tasting it, I look to the sconces & the sconces
look fake & their light looks fake & I have authentic responses to both,
which is how storms start. As seasons
digest themselves (a short talk on short talks), holiday cards become
less applicable & so more affordable & Fox 8 or whatever news vans circle
the weather or immanent site of tragedy tourism. Some nights I go out & walk
the sidewalk in socks or bare feet
longer than I’d meant to & notice the crystal glass & homely bends
& feel deeply the Troost neighborhood. My ears circle in on themselves, stereo
sinkholes, by which I mean I’m eavesdropping & I’m sorry. I’ve had bad teeth forever
& so got online & bought God’s vibrator
as a toothbrush & sunburned my mirror & stood boldly before the middle-aged self.
White as I am, I trust most the islands that kill their first tourists. Three weeks’
swim away, a cargo ship full of luxury cars continues to burn in the Atlantic.
A mother about a mile from right here
killed her dog & decapitated her son after calling the cops on the devil. The news:
The snows. The Olympics. Rubble-crusted outskirts of Kiev. The soft snoring
of our toddler. What do we do? I dither. I stand numb before the light.
I look deeply. I look like Fabio
if, instead of an angular chin, his face flesh just sort of dangled & then if also
that formless dangle continued on down the rest of the frame. My point is
I have long hair right now. A Hadean earth. A wobbling star. A thought floating in
like pickled nimbus, ghost fart. In the mirror,
I am an amplified echo of my middle school self making muscles at himself, waiting
for hair to grow, SCUD missiles arcing across the nightly news downstairs.
Tonight, I got news off Facebook, which makes me middle-aged again
& sad. You’d already gone to bed when I found out Robert died. I didn’t wake you up. I
didn’t even check you were asleep. You needed
a night & this news is not the night you needed. A neighbor is yelling at something,
maybe himself, & the still-lengthening night repeats. I rarely call in favors, but every
time I do, I claim to do it rarely, but still, please sleep. Please go to sleep or
keep sleeping. He was thirty-three. It’s later still & your mouth is full
of rain. I’ll tell you in the morning.
Our first order of business was debating lifestyle choices in NY vs. Philly, after which we dug into two wonderfully different poems by Glenn Shaheen. “Imago” plunged us into an elegaic interrogation of modern life, identity, and poetics framed by both the real world and open world gaming. With Glenn’s poem as our guide we roamed wide, touching on gaming terminology, Bey’s “Single Ladies” and 2008 as the last year of optimism, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, Shakespeare’s “filthy” Sonnet 135, and the ageless concern over the shelf life of language in poems and artistic works. The circular format of short, interlinked stanzas in the second poem, “Power and Punish”, introduced a real change in tone in the discussion. Frankly, we wondered if the poem’s format and approach would allow us to discuss it. We were delighted to discover it was possible, if different – but hey, you be the judge!
Some links we think you’ll like:
NPC (Non Player Character) on WikiHow
Beyoncé - Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
Michel Foucault on the Panopticon Effect, Farnham Street blog
At the table: Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest, Isabel Petry
Glenn Shaheen lives in Houston and is the biggest Star Trek fan you’ll ever meet.
We kick off this episode with some riffing on Hallmark movies and a suspension of Jason’s voting rights. No worries, though! The two poems under discussion are by a former student of Jason’s and it comes clear pretty quickly that we’re all fans. Don’t listen to this episode for the suspense, but for the delicious delve into narrative possibility and how poetry is wonderfully suited to keeping the door open long after a poem ends. Indented lineation and how it can affect a poem’s pacing gets some attention, as does the sensory tease of wonderfully selected symbolism and imagery. We also touch on the implication of the reader in a poem where the speaker is still working things out. In this film-tinged discussion, Kathy reminds us that a sweet ending can hit the spot, Sam confesses to thinking a lot about “Baby Boom”, Dagne owns up to seeing Raiders of the Lost Art eleven times when it was first released, Jason pays homage to Diane Keaton and Liza Minelli, and Isabel poses a question that underscores our theme of narrative possibility.
Some links we think you’ll like:
Whisky & Rum in Raiders of the Lost Ark, ThirstMag.com
How Baby Boom Set the Template for Future Movies About Working Mothers, Vulture
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Isabel Petry, Dagne Forrest
Georgia M. Brodsky is a recent graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives south of Boston, near the ocean, with her partner and their daughter.
The Tavern
After I cracked the 6-ball off the table,
he offered to teach me
to drive stick in the parking lot.
Before: whiskey
in no-one’s-joking-sized
shot glasses, the kind
the cool girl in Indiana Jones throws back
then stacks like a champ
while men fall off their stools
around her. Heavy glasses.
No windows. Just the door
to the lot, to the harbor
eventually, where earlier that day
I’d seen a girl my age
with a pocketknife, cleaning a fish.
She’d plucked the eyes out,
let them sit
on the ground staring up
like a figment in Charlie Kaufman’s
dreams. Every story is a version
of something else.
I followed him to his car. I didn’t.
I laughed and touched his arm. I balled
my hands into fists. My body
felt something was wrong. I felt
nothing. It always turns out alright
in the end. It never does.
I’m the girl who climbed
into the truck and the one
who got home safe. I taught myself
how to drive stick and how to run
the table. I’m the girl in the harbor.
All eyes.
At the Raw Bar, Housing Three Dozen Oysters for our Eighth Anniversary
We’re not in it for the sex,
if that’s what you’re thinking.
And besides, I’m not the kind
of person who shucks and tells.
That was a joke. But it’s exactly
what I’m talking about.
I’m the kind who makes jokes
when something matters too much.
We’re not in it for the sex.
It’s more about what happens
after the shell unlatches:
brine, salt, alive, pulling us in
by the shirt, shaking us
and putting us down as if
tentacles had launched out
from under the ice.
That wasn’t a metaphor
for our relationship. I’m honest
to God talking about oysters:
the knock-back, the vinegar zip,
extra lemon on the side.
A feeling like our bodies could turn
back into fish. A speedboat
revving from zero to sixty, that’s how
it felt to throw down my first
Mookie Blue after nine
pregnant months. Forget forks
or sauce or napkins. If every drop
of oyster liquor doesn’t make it
to your mouth, you shouldn’t
even be here, and by here,
I mean sitting across the bar,
gaping at us, saying, wow,
that’s a lot of oysters,
or standing on the shores
of an oyster farm, complaining
that the wind’s too cold.
Am I getting any closer
to explaining myself?
When we first met, he traced
his finger along the coves
of Maine’s coast, a chart
of waterways and kayak routes,
I swear, the only freshman
with a map of water pinned
to his dorm room wall, and
that was fourteen years ago,
but in that moment, I loved him.
We toast with a click of our shells—
he lifts one to his lips.
Watchers
Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn’t used to afternoon drinking. They can’t hear Zany over the Krebbs’ crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany’s little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.
The fingertips on Zany’s bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.
There’s nothing wrong with Zany’s arm, but that isn’t the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she’s up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I’ll take you across my knee. I don’t care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.
Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom’s salvaged lamps. “Why don’t you do that in your room?” Dad didn’t like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones. She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn’t the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?
Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It’s hard to budge through Mom’s junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don’t own a cat. Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.
“You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.
Zany hates Mom’s manly haircut and has said so. “It’s Gig’s turn!”
Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany’s attic where Mom’s hoard had been disallowed, but it’s begun trickling up. “No, it’s not!” Gig’s transistor blares louder.
“Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”
Mom can’t stand looking at the neighbor’s wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she’ll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won’t be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol’s mother did for chump change.
Zany’s legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she’s running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It’s a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.”
A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom’s, and Vi wears an apron and dime store lipstick while she does it. Fresh peas instead of canned. Real mashed potatoes instead of instant. Vi is a better housekeeper, too, organizing Mom’s trash into four-foot piles that line the walls. Every day Mom trolls back alleys and neighbors’ garbage in dingy clothes that make her look like a hobo. That’s what the kids say: Your mom looks like a hobo. She pulls a rickety cart and loads it with moldy linens, rolled-up rugs, dented wastebaskets. Zany wonders if Dad regrets marrying the wrong sister. She knows he regrets not having a son, a boy who could have been Lester if Dad had a different heart. Instead, Dad got Lester on at the blast furnace, because “No one sleeps under my roof for free.” Who needs a high school diploma?
In the kitchen, Aunt Vi lets out one of her sobs. She only does that in private after Mom’s third scolding: “He’s dead, Vi. Crying won’t bring him back.”
Zany misses Uncle Mo, too. His pocketful of peppermints. The trick coin he always plucked from Zany’s ear. The last time Zany’s family visited, she walked through their decrepit Franklin Arms apartment with its spongy floors and clanking pipes, but no maze of debris to negotiate. No cat piss smell or sister blaring the radio. She found Lester in his room at a child’s desk he’d outgrown, doughy boy that he then was, doing homework without being nagged. Astounding. His room was spartan, plenty of space for a second bed if Zany asked Aunt Vi sweetly enough. But no. Zany couldn’t abandon Andy in his Dawson Street sickbed. Lester’s only wall decoration was a world map strung with red yarn radiating from Pittsburgh to France, China, the South Pole. She wanted to ask why those destinations, but didn’t, entranced as she was by all that fresh-aired openness, plus his feverishly scribbling hand.
Now, Aunt Vi leans in the dining room dabbing her face with a dishtowel. She’s aged a decade since moving here and it isn’t all due to grief. She targets Zany on the floor. “Everything all right in here?”
Zany has stopped breathing. Her eyes are glazed and her tongue lolls from her mouth. She’s getting better at playing dead.
“All right then.” Aunt Vi is getting better at not reacting. The screen door slams behind her.
Zany pulls in her tongue and inhales. She starts counting bricks again until Aunt Vi calls: “There they are!” as she does every workday.
Zany pictures Dad and Lester padding up Dawson. Wet hair slicked back because they shower off the stench before coming home. Zany appreciates that. Their boots scrape the steps to the porch where Aunt Vi will take their lunchpails. And there she is coming through the door and dashing to rinse their thermoses at the kitchen sink. Mom will stay put and pour Dad a finger of scotch.
Lester bangs inside and pauses in the dining room entryway. He’s leaner now on account of the physical labor. Taller too. He eyes Zany’s bandaged arm, not with Aunt Vi’s alarm, but with the kind of baffled wonder Zany has always been after. Their eyes meet and it’s the same look he gave her the day she walked backward all the way to the Eliza Number Two—not because Dad and Lester worked there, but because it was lunchtime, and a gaggle of men would be eating beneath that pin oak by the furnace entrance. And there they were, her father among them, not easy to see having to crane her neck as Zany picked her way over the railroad tracks.
“What the hell is she doing?” said Tom Folsom. Zany recognized her neighbor’s voice. “She’s off her nut,” said another worker.
Zany twisted fully around to see if her father would defend her, but he was already hustling back to the furnace.
“Something’s not right with that girl,” said Folsom.
“Nothing wrong with her,” said Lester from beneath a different tree where he ate his cheese sandwich alone.
Folsom spit in the grass. “Shut up, fairy boy.”
Lester wasn’t a fairy boy, Zany knew.
Today, leaning in the dining room, Lester looks as if he can see inside Zany’s skull to the conjured Factory room she and Andy will one day share: walls scrubbed clean and painted white. Her drawings or paintings lining the walls in tidy rows. Maybe sculptures aligned on shelves. Or mobiles overhead spinning in the breeze. Lester nods at her fantasy as if it’s a good one. He has his own escapism. Zany knows that too, and she looks away first so her eyes won’t let him know that she knows.
Lester heads to the cellar where he spends most of his time. Mom partitioned off the back corner for him with clothesline and a bed sheet. Installed an army cot and gooseneck lamp on a crate. Andy Warhol holed up in the cellar when he was a kid developing film in a jerry-rigged darkroom. Zany constructed one from an oversized cardboard box she wedged into that shadowy space beneath the stairs. She cut a closable door in the box and regularly folds herself inside to catalogue her achievements in a notebook. Stood barefoot on a hot tar patch on Frazier Street for seventy-two seconds. Mr. Braddock called me a dolt, but I said: You’re the dolt!
From below, the sound of Lester falling onto his cot followed by a sigh so deep Zany’s lungs exhale, too. Whatever dreams he had got buried under apartment rubble along with Uncle Mo.
Outside, Dad has taken Aunt Vi’s creaky rocker. “He’s a strange one,” he says about Lester. “What’s he up to down there?”
Mom says, “Who the hell knows?”
Zany clamps her unbandaged hand over her mouth to keep that knowledge from spilling. She saw what he was up to the day she was tucked in her box and forgot time until footsteps pounded the stairs above her. She peeked through the peephole she’d punched into her cardboard door as Lester peeled off his shirt, his pants. He left on his boxers and socks. Didn’t bother to draw his sheet curtain, just plopped on the cot and lit a cigarette. His smoking still surprised her. The boy he once was was also buried under rubble. Zany regretted not making her presence known, but then it was too late with Lester in his underwear, and all. Plus, she was captivated by his fingers pulling the cigarette to his lips. The little smoke rings he sent up to the floor joists. She wondered if he was dreaming of China or the South Pole, or just sitting quietly at his too-small desk back in his apartment inhaling all that fresh air. Finally, he snubbed out the cigarette in an empty tuna can. Zany hoped he would roll over for sleep, but he slid a much-abused magazine from beneath his pillow and turned pages. Even in the scant light Zany made out the naked lady on the cover. Zany’s heart thudded, even more so when Lester’s hand slipped beneath his waistband and started moving up and down, up and down. She told her eyes to close but they wouldn’t, both entranced and nauseated by what she shouldn’t be seeing. She knew what he was up to, having done her own exploring when she had her own room. She’d conjure Andy Warhol’s face and mouth and delicate hands—because those rumors weren’t true. They just weren’t. Harder to explore in the bed she now shared with Gig. Stupid Aunt Vi, and stupid collapsed Franklin Arms.
What Lester was up to looked angry. Violent, even. A jittery burn galloped beneath Zany’s skin and she bit her lip, drawing blood. But she couldn’t look away from Lester’s furious hand, his eyes ogling that magazine until they squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a grimace that did not look like joy. The magazine collapsed onto his chest and his belly shuddered. Only then did Zany close her eyes as the burn leaked through her skin. When Lester’s snores came, she tiptoed upstairs to collapse on Andy’s echo. She caught Lester seven more times, if caught is the right word, lying in wait as she was, hoping to see, hoping not to. “You better be setting the table!” Mom yells now from the porch.
Zany grunts and makes her way to the kitchen where Aunt Vi pulls a roast from the oven. Zany heaves a stack of plates to the dining room and deals them out like playing cards. “Don’t break my dishes!” Mom calls. I hate your hair, Zany wants to say. There is a crash, but it’s not dishes. It comes from overhead where Gig screams. Thumping on the stairs as she thunders down, transistor in hand. “Zany!” Gig rushes into the dining room, ponytail swaying, eyes landing on her sister. “He’s been shot!”
Zany’s mind hurtles back two months to when Martin Luther King was killed. Riots erupted in Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods: The Hill District and Homewood and Manchester. “Who?” Zany says, conjuring possibilities: LBJ, Sidney Portier. But to Zany, it’s much worse.
“Andy Warhol!”
Zany counts this as the meanest lie Gig’s ever told. “He was not.”
“Yes, he was!” Gig turns up the radio and the announcer confirms it: a crazed woman shot Warhol in his Factory.
Aunt Vi comes at Zany with her arms wide, because she understands loss. “Oh, honey.” Zany bats her hands away. “It’s not true.”
Vi backs into Mom’s hoard. “Is he dead?”
Gig says: “They don’t know.”
Zany can’t stomach the smug look on Gig’s face, as if she holds Andy’s life or death between her teeth. Zany wants to slap that look off, so she does.
Gig screams.
“What the hell’s going on in there?” Mom calls.
“Zany hit me!” Gig says at the very moment Aunt Vi says: “Andy Warhol’s been shot!” “No he wasn’t!” Zany says again, wanting to slap them both.
Mom and Dad hustle inside where Gig cups her reddening cheek and bawls louder. “It’s nothing,” Mom says at the sight of her sniveling daughter, but Dad enfolds Gig in his arms. “There, there.”
“Don’t coddle that child,” says Mom, and for once Zany agrees.
“Now, Mae.” Dad cups the back of Gig’s head and there’s a different look on her face. Triumph, maybe.
Pounding on the shared duplex wall, Evie Krebbs, who never could shush that wailing baby. “Andy Warhol’s been shot!” she calls to them. “Did you all hear?”
“We heard,” Mom answers as the baby cries louder, and so does Gig, who won’t be upstaged. Mom says: “That’s the price of fame I guess.”
“Being shot?” says Aunt Vi.
“Put yourself in the public eye and anything’s liable to happen. Lotta kooks in this world.”
The neighbor kids’ chant sounds in Zany’s head: Your mother’s a hobo.
“I’d rather be shot than a hobo,” says Zany.
Mom’s head snaps back. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Zany doesn’t fully know what she means, or maybe she does.
Dad says, “Turn up the radio and see if he’s dead.”
Zany doesn’t want to know the answer, and to keep him alive she runs to the basement where Andy will always be a sickly boy developing film. Never mind Lester in his bed sending smoke rings up to the floor joists. Never mind her family still jabbering overhead.
Zany dashes to her cardboard box and closes the door, her body shaking, but not from any disease. Andy can’t be dead. He just can’t, because if he is Zany will never make it to New York. Will never pound on his Factory door. She will never be famous enough for someone to shoot.
She doesn’t know she’s sobbing until Lester’s voice drifts over. “Zany?”
It’s hard to speak with that hand gripping her throat and her father overhead still babbling: “Turn it up, Gig.” All Zany eeks out is a sob.
Lester’s skinny voice slips through that slit in her door. “Zany?”
The grip loosens and Zany puts her eye to the peephole.
There he is, Lester, on his narrow cot in the windowless cellar where he now lives. He slides his hand into his waistband and he tilts his head toward her. “Are you watching?” Zany’s breathing settles, and the overhead voices disappear taking with them the possibility of Andy’s death. Her eyes widens so she can take it all in, the violent strokes, his contorting face, because she won’t look away from Lester’s pain, or hers. Finally, she answers him: “Yes.”
Well, this could be awkward: when we last featured a story on the podcast a year ago, it also focused on parasocial relationships and included masturbation! This time around, we are again in deft hands. Marie Manilla’s short story “Watchers”, set in 1968 Pittsburgh with both the steel mills and Andy Warhol as vital elements, is replete with narrative and thematic echoes that satisfy and leave us wanting more at the same time. Tune in for this lively discussion which touches on budding creative and identity-based aspirations, celebrity, performance art, pain in public and private, and much more. Give it a listen -- you know you want to! (Remember you can read or listen to the full story first, as there are spoilers! Just scroll down the page for the episode on our website.)
(We also welcome editor Lisa Zerkle to the table for her first show!)
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest
Listen to the story Watchers in its entirety (separate from podcast reading)
Parasocial relationships
https://mashable.com/article/parasocial-relationships-definition-meaning
Andy Warhol’s childhood home in Pittsburgh (the setting of this story)
http://www.warhola.com/warholahouse.html
“History” article about Andy Warhol’s shooting by Valerie Solanas
https://www.history.com/news/andy-warhol-shot-valerie-solanas-the-factory
I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996 film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Shot_Andy_Warhol
** Fun Fact 1: the original poster for the 1996 film hangs in Jason's apartment.
** Fun Fact 2: the actor who portrayed Valerie Solanas in “I Shot Andy Warhol”, Lili Taylor, is married to three-time PBQ-published author Nick Flynn.
Nick Flynn’s author page on PBQ
http://pbqmag.org/tag/nick-flynn/
Dangerous Art: The Weapons of Performance Artist Chris Burden
https://www.theartstory.org/blog/dangerous-art-the-weapons-of-performance-artist-chris-burden/
In her fiction and essays, West Virginia writer Marie Manilla delights in presenting fuller, perhaps unexpected, portraits of Appalachians, especially those who live in urban areas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Marie’s books include The Patron Saint of Ugly, Shrapnel, and Still Life with Plums: Short Stories. She lives in Huntington, her hometown, with her Pittsburgh-born husband, Don.
Instagram and Facebook: @MarieManilla, Author website
Watchers
Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn’t used to afternoon drinking. They can’t hear Zany over the Krebbs’ crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany’s little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.
The fingertips on Zany’s bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.
There’s nothing wrong with Zany’s arm, but that isn’t the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she’s up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I’ll take you across my knee. I don’t care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.
Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom’s salvaged lamps. “Why don’t you do that in your room?” Dad didn’t like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones. She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn’t the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?
Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It’s hard to budge through Mom’s junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don’t own a cat. Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.
“You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.
Zany hates Mom’s manly haircut and has said so. “It’s Gig’s turn!”
Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany’s attic where Mom’s hoard had been disallowed, but it’s begun trickling up. “No, it’s not!” Gig’s transistor blares louder.
“Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”
Mom can’t stand looking at the neighbor’s wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she’ll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won’t be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol’s mother did for chump change.
Zany’s legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she’s running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It’s a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.”
A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom’s, and Vi wears an apron and dime store lipstick while she does it. Fresh peas instead of canned. Real mashed potatoes instead of instant. Vi is a better housekeeper, too, organizing Mom’s trash into four-foot piles that line the walls. Every day Mom trolls back alleys and neighbors’ garbage in dingy clothes that make her look like a hobo. That’s what the kids say: Your mom looks like a hobo. She pulls a rickety cart and loads it with moldy linens, rolled-up rugs, dented wastebaskets. Zany wonders if Dad regrets marrying the wrong sister. She knows he regrets not having a son, a boy who could have been Lester if Dad had a different heart. Instead, Dad got Lester on at the blast furnace, because “No one sleeps under my roof for free.” Who needs a high school diploma?
In the kitchen, Aunt Vi lets out one of her sobs. She only does that in private after Mom’s third scolding: “He’s dead, Vi. Crying won’t bring him back.”
Zany misses Uncle Mo, too. His pocketful of peppermints. The trick coin he always plucked from Zany’s ear. The last time Zany’s family visited, she walked through their decrepit Franklin Arms apartment with its spongy floors and clanking pipes, but no maze of debris to negotiate. No cat piss smell or sister blaring the radio. She found Lester in his room at a child’s desk he’d outgrown, doughy boy that he then was, doing homework without being nagged. Astounding. His room was spartan, plenty of space for a second bed if Zany asked Aunt Vi sweetly enough. But no. Zany couldn’t abandon Andy in his Dawson Street sickbed. Lester’s only wall decoration was a world map strung with red yarn radiating from Pittsburgh to France, China, the South Pole. She wanted to ask why those destinations, but didn’t, entranced as she was by all that fresh-aired openness, plus his feverishly scribbling hand.
Now, Aunt Vi leans in the dining room dabbing her face with a dishtowel. She’s aged a decade since moving here and it isn’t all due to grief. She targets Zany on the floor. “Everything all right in here?”
Zany has stopped breathing. Her eyes are glazed and her tongue lolls from her mouth. She’s getting better at playing dead.
“All right then.” Aunt Vi is getting better at not reacting. The screen door slams behind her.
Zany pulls in her tongue and inhales. She starts counting bricks again until Aunt Vi calls: “There they are!” as she does every workday.
Zany pictures Dad and Lester padding up Dawson. Wet hair slicked back because they shower off the stench before coming home. Zany appreciates that. Their boots scrape the steps to the porch where Aunt Vi will take their lunchpails. And there she is coming through the door and dashing to rinse their thermoses at the kitchen sink. Mom will stay put and pour Dad a finger of scotch.
Lester bangs inside and pauses in the dining room entryway. He’s leaner now on account of the physical labor. Taller too. He eyes Zany’s bandaged arm, not with Aunt Vi’s alarm, but with the kind of baffled wonder Zany has always been after. Their eyes meet and it’s the same look he gave her the day she walked backward all the way to the Eliza Number Two—not because Dad and Lester worked there, but because it was lunchtime, and a gaggle of men would be eating beneath that pin oak by the furnace entrance. And there they were, her father among them, not easy to see having to crane her neck as Zany picked her way over the railroad tracks.
“What the hell is she doing?” said Tom Folsom. Zany recognized her neighbor’s voice. “She’s off her nut,” said another worker.
Zany twisted fully around to see if her father would defend her, but he was already hustling back to the furnace.
“Something’s not right with that girl,” said Folsom.
“Nothing wrong with her,” said Lester from beneath a different tree where he ate his cheese sandwich alone.
Folsom spit in the grass. “Shut up, fairy boy.”
Lester wasn’t a fairy boy, Zany knew.
Today, leaning in the dining room, Lester looks as if he can see inside Zany’s skull to the conjured Factory room she and Andy will one day share: walls scrubbed clean and painted white. Her drawings or paintings lining the walls in tidy rows. Maybe sculptures aligned on shelves. Or mobiles overhead spinning in the breeze. Lester nods at her fantasy as if it’s a good one. He has his own escapism. Zany knows that too, and she looks away first so her eyes won’t let him know that she knows.
Lester heads to the cellar where he spends most of his time. Mom partitioned off the back corner for him with clothesline and a bed sheet. Installed an army cot and gooseneck lamp on a crate. Andy Warhol holed up in the cellar when he was a kid developing film in a jerry-rigged darkroom. Zany constructed one from an oversized cardboard box she wedged into that shadowy space beneath the stairs. She cut a closable door in the box and regularly folds herself inside to catalogue her achievements in a notebook. Stood barefoot on a hot tar patch on Frazier Street for seventy-two seconds. Mr. Braddock called me a dolt, but I said: You’re the dolt!
From below, the sound of Lester falling onto his cot followed by a sigh so deep Zany’s lungs exhale, too. Whatever dreams he had got buried under apartment rubble along with Uncle Mo.
Outside, Dad has taken Aunt Vi’s creaky rocker. “He’s a strange one,” he says about Lester. “What’s he up to down there?”
Mom says, “Who the hell knows?”
Zany clamps her unbandaged hand over her mouth to keep that knowledge from spilling. She saw what he was up to the day she was tucked in her box and forgot time until footsteps pounded the stairs above her. She peeked through the peephole she’d punched into her cardboard door as Lester peeled off his shirt, his pants. He left on his boxers and socks. Didn’t bother to draw his sheet curtain, just plopped on the cot and lit a cigarette. His smoking still surprised her. The boy he once was was also buried under rubble. Zany regretted not making her presence known, but then it was too late with Lester in his underwear, and all. Plus, she was captivated by his fingers pulling the cigarette to his lips. The little smoke rings he sent up to the floor joists. She wondered if he was dreaming of China or the South Pole, or just sitting quietly at his too-small desk back in his apartment inhaling all that fresh air. Finally, he snubbed out the cigarette in an empty tuna can. Zany hoped he would roll over for sleep, but he slid a much-abused magazine from beneath his pillow and turned pages. Even in the scant light Zany made out the naked lady on the cover. Zany’s heart thudded, even more so when Lester’s hand slipped beneath his waistband and started moving up and down, up and down. She told her eyes to close but they wouldn’t, both entranced and nauseated by what she shouldn’t be seeing. She knew what he was up to, having done her own exploring when she had her own room. She’d conjure Andy Warhol’s face and mouth and delicate hands—because those rumors weren’t true. They just weren’t. Harder to explore in the bed she now shared with Gig. Stupid Aunt Vi, and stupid collapsed Franklin Arms.
What Lester was up to looked angry. Violent, even. A jittery burn galloped beneath Zany’s skin and she bit her lip, drawing blood. But she couldn’t look away from Lester’s furious hand, his eyes ogling that magazine until they squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a grimace that did not look like joy. The magazine collapsed onto his chest and his belly shuddered. Only then did Zany close her eyes as the burn leaked through her skin. When Lester’s snores came, she tiptoed upstairs to collapse on Andy’s echo. She caught Lester seven more times, if caught is the right word, lying in wait as she was, hoping to see, hoping not to. “You better be setting the table!” Mom yells now from the porch.
Zany grunts and makes her way to the kitchen where Aunt Vi pulls a roast from the oven. Zany heaves a stack of plates to the dining room and deals them out like playing cards. “Don’t break my dishes!” Mom calls. I hate your hair, Zany wants to say. There is a crash, but it’s not dishes. It comes from overhead where Gig screams. Thumping on the stairs as she thunders down, transistor in hand. “Zany!” Gig rushes into the dining room, ponytail swaying, eyes landing on her sister. “He’s been shot!”
Zany’s mind hurtles back two months to when Martin Luther King was killed. Riots erupted in Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods: The Hill District and Homewood and Manchester. “Who?” Zany says, conjuring possibilities: LBJ, Sidney Portier. But to Zany, it’s much worse.
“Andy Warhol!”
Zany counts this as the meanest lie Gig’s ever told. “He was not.”
“Yes, he was!” Gig turns up the radio and the announcer confirms it: a crazed woman shot Warhol in his Factory.
Aunt Vi comes at Zany with her arms wide, because she understands loss. “Oh, honey.” Zany bats her hands away. “It’s not true.”
Vi backs into Mom’s hoard. “Is he dead?”
Gig says: “They don’t know.”
Zany can’t stomach the smug look on Gig’s face, as if she holds Andy’s life or death between her teeth. Zany wants to slap that look off, so she does.
Gig screams.
“What the hell’s going on in there?” Mom calls.
“Zany hit me!” Gig says at the very moment Aunt Vi says: “Andy Warhol’s been shot!” “No he wasn’t!” Zany says again, wanting to slap them both.
Mom and Dad hustle inside where Gig cups her reddening cheek and bawls louder. “It’s nothing,” Mom says at the sight of her sniveling daughter, but Dad enfolds Gig in his arms. “There, there.”
“Don’t coddle that child,” says Mom, and for once Zany agrees.
“Now, Mae.” Dad cups the back of Gig’s head and there’s a different look on her face. Triumph, maybe.
Pounding on the shared duplex wall, Evie Krebbs, who never could shush that wailing baby. “Andy Warhol’s been shot!” she calls to them. “Did you all hear?”
“We heard,” Mom answers as the baby cries louder, and so does Gig, who won’t be upstaged. Mom says: “That’s the price of fame I guess.”
“Being shot?” says Aunt Vi.
“Put yourself in the public eye and anything’s liable to happen. Lotta kooks in this world.”
The neighbor kids’ chant sounds in Zany’s head: Your mother’s a hobo.
“I’d rather be shot than a hobo,” says Zany.
Mom’s head snaps back. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Zany doesn’t fully know what she means, or maybe she does.
Dad says, “Turn up the radio and see if he’s dead.”
Zany doesn’t want to know the answer, and to keep him alive she runs to the basement where Andy will always be a sickly boy developing film. Never mind Lester in his bed sending smoke rings up to the floor joists. Never mind her family still jabbering overhead.
Zany dashes to her cardboard box and closes the door, her body shaking, but not from any disease. Andy can’t be dead. He just can’t, because if he is Zany will never make it to New York. Will never pound on his Factory door. She will never be famous enough for someone to shoot.
She doesn’t know she’s sobbing until Lester’s voice drifts over. “Zany?”
It’s hard to speak with that hand gripping her throat and her father overhead still babbling: “Turn it up, Gig.” All Zany eeks out is a sob.
Lester’s skinny voice slips through that slit in her door. “Zany?”
The grip loosens and Zany puts her eye to the peephole.
There he is, Lester, on his narrow cot in the windowless cellar where he now lives. He slides his hand into his waistband and he tilts his head toward her. “Are you watching?” Zany’s breathing settles, and the overhead voices disappear taking with them the possibility of Andy’s death. Her eyes widens so she can take it all in, the violent strokes, his contorting face, because she won’t look away from Lester’s pain, or hers. Finally, she answers him: “Yes.”
The podcast currently has 163 episodes available.
89,732 Listeners
5,362 Listeners
21 Listeners
1,055 Listeners