BROOKLYN READING WORKS

FEATURED WRITER: MICHAEL DRINKARD

FROM REBELS TURN OUT YOUR DEAD:

James hated moccasins. He wore big boots that cracked twigs. Seventeen and newly conscious, he was given to symbol and metaphor. When there was nothing to be excited about James was especially. Day or night, indoors or out, coarse woolen trousers or no trousers at all, girl or no, he was often hard. He wondered if this happened to all seventeen­-­year­-­olds, but his curiosity was never satisfied because he never whispered his question ­aloud.

Mend the fence, demanded Salt, the father, the moccasin­-­wearer. Tall and ruddy, today he turned forty. With three ax blows he felled a balsam fir a half­-­foot in diameter and dragged it to his sons pile. Work well done was backmaking, not backbreaking, a message he was determined his son learn. Thick red hair grew on Salts head and down his cheeks, stubble battling to overtake his face. He wore buckskin leggings and a hemp shirt that his wife, Molly, had ­sewn.

Who broke it should fix it, James ­said.

Boots dont make a man. Salt timbered another tree. The zinging woodchips incensed a half dozen sap­-­drunk yellow­jackets, which in turn spurred the blue jays to jerk their crests and ­squawk.

Drinky Crow, Salts farmhand, winked at James. At least somebody was listening. Where moccasins were false on his father, they were true on Drinky Crow. Because he was Indian. Plus Drinky Crow, James had been told, died already seven times. Nobody believed this literally. But anybody that dead everybody ­liked.

Drinky Crow looked younger than sixty, or older, depending. His black face had soaked up the decades. Jet hair ruffled like the feathers of his namesake. His squint made eyeballs seem unnecessary. The offspring of rapea runaway negro, a squawDrinky Crow had been sold on a plat­form in Newport to a tobacco farmer. When he turned nineteen his master died, leaving a will that stipulated his slaves be manumitted, and Drinky Crow most significantly, with one­-­sixty­-­fourth of the estate. Drinky Crow had been a capitalist ever since. He lived with four or five women on a spit of sand at lands end in Rockaway. Maybe there were six ­women.

Squatting opposite each other, he and Salt hoisted the naked trunks, lifting in parallel choreography, interlacing the logs six high at a slight angle, like fingers at the top knuckle, while James bound the projecting butts to a post with rope. The next section would zag, followed by one that zigged, and so ­on.

Why go to pains when theyre going to tear it down again? James ­fumed.

I wont do something but the right way. Salt knew they could save time and trees by setting the fence in a straight line, without the slight angles, the way they did in Virginia. Some people said the South was about fast money, others that there werent trees enough. Everyone admitted that straight Southern fences toppled after a season or ­three.

What good is a fence, for that ­matter?

What kind of a question is ­that?

Theres no purpose for ­it.

Salt scratched his sideburns. To keep the cows from the corn, for ­one.

What cows? Thieves got every last ­one.

Careful who you call ­thieves.

It made Salt happy, physical labor. And the blue sky made him happy, too, and the small ears of corn each stalk yielded, and the fresh scent of hewn wood, and the dangling legs of flying yellowjackets, and the companionship of son and farmhand, and his moccasins and hemp ­shirt.

James spat. Its not even your ­fence.

idi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'" Until just this moment, Salt had been able to forget that he was not in fact working for himself. Whats good for your granddad is good for us ­all.

James was quick, the rope a blur, hands a flash. In a snap the joint was ­lashed.

Now can we eat? Unlike his father, James did not like toil. Nor did he share his fathers illusions about the task at hand. This work was not backmaking; it was the opposite. Some peopleand everyone knew who those some people werehad broken the fence and taken the logs for their own purposes. Some people had stolen not just the fence but the hours that had gone into its construction. It frustrated James that his father did not share his rage. As for Drinky Crow, James did not hold him to account in the normal constellation of human emotion; Drinky Crow was ­mad.

On this job, as on all jobs, James got it over withthis required less effort than to make a statement by not doing it, or to prolong agony by doing it negligentlyso he could get back to shooting things with ­guns.

Seventeen was too young to matter, too old not to. James thrust his hand into his pocket to rearrange himself, but first he gave it a yank. Another. And one last. Then he got his pistol out of its holster, which was set on a fallen tree. His father and Drinky Crow both had Pennsylvania rifles. You could bark a squirrel in a tree at three hundred yards with a Pennsylvania rifle. But all James got was a pistol. He was lucky when he hit a turkey ten feet from his face. It wasnt fair. The pistol was just better than nothing. It was made in Britain, a gift from his grandfather.

FEATURED WRITER: PAOLO CORSO

Excerpt from "Unraveled" from Paolo Corso's short story collection: "Giovanna's 86 Circles" (University of Wisconsin Press)

AFTER THAT, I wrote every week, telling Lisa how long Mrs. Natoli's knitting had gotten. It was growing steadily. I knew because I checked every day. It practically covered Mrs. Natoli's knees and then began to drag on the floor it was so long. I used up most of my writing tablet explaining all this to Lisa when finally she wrote back and said she was about to have the baby.

I wrote her right away and told her everything in a letter�that when I visited Mrs. Natoli, she used up all the yarn in her tin and even had Harold break away from the camera to get her some more. He did when there was a commercial. Mrs. Natoli yelled to Rosetta to come down and try her gown on. She stepped up to a stool right through a strip of sunshine. Rosetta was covered in a web of blue that glowed so bright that I swore I could see right through her. Mrs. Natoli began tugging at the gown in places where it was too short. When she put her needles down to use both hands, the yarn dropped out of her lap and onto the cement floor. I reached to grab it for her, but it rolled out of my reach over to the cellar doors and up the stairs toward the backyard. At that point, Rosetta began spinning around like a ballerina, almost as though the force at the end of the yarn sent her in a thousand circles as the gown began to unravel. Her feet clawed the stool, her knees knocked, and her thighs shook like Jell-O salad. When the part around Rosetta's stomach was about to unravel, Mrs. Natoli pushed me out the door and yelled for me to stop it.

I followed the trail of blue yarn past the woodshed where it slipped between two leaves of wild rhubarb and into the brush. My feet twitched with every stone and buckeye that landed underneath my ting tongs. I could see the blue strip ahead of me except where it disappeared in the shadows of tulip trees. As I got closer to the river, the ground began to spring back from under my feet like sponge cake. Beads of moisture hung a pearl necklace on the weeds. The yarn was damp in places now.

I let it glide through my hand until I reached the end: the belly button of a baby. It was laying on a patch of green moss floating on the river. Its skin was as smooth as a clean blackboard. Its hair stuck to its scalp. Its hands made tight fists. A bubble peeked through its open lips. I never held a baby this young before but knew enough to hold its head. I ran as fast as I could and would have gotten lost in the woods if it weren't for the trail of blue yarn to follow back to Mrs. Natoli's cellar. I couldn't wait to hand Rosetta her baby in a nest of yarn. Finally, she'd have a baby to love as much as Harold did his science. Mrs. Natoli took a pair of scissors and snipped the yarn off the baby. Harold came out of the bathroom and took his goggles off. He couldn't wait to weigh and measure it.

FEATURED WRITER: LISA SELIN DAVIS

FROM "BELLY:"

SARATOGA SPRINGS was stoic as the Statue of Liberty with Grace Kelly’s face and the body of Bettie Page. That’s the way Belly O’Leary thought of his town, like she was a woman in a Greek robe, to be revered. He stared out the big tinted front window of the Greyhound bus as it hobbled north on Route 9, down the long line of motels that sat hungry all winter and grew fat with tourists in the summer. They were fat now. August. Cars streamed out the little roundabouts and bled onto the highway.

August changed the face of Saratoga, from Grace Kelly to something a little brassier. Kim Novak, maybe, or any of the girls on the Alberto Vargas cards his father used to keep hidden in his sock drawer. For one month a year, she was a woman with a bad dye job and too much makeup, and this was the town he was coming home to in 2001; this was the lady welcoming him back.

Only he didn’t recognize her. Where once green fields graced the sides of the highway, glass-box office buildings now rose like the great pyramids. Traffic and strip malls and smog choked the last promising stretches of hillside that used to hug the town.

The closer he got to home, the sicker he felt. A moan rumbled in his solar plexus. He recognized it as heartache. He was returning two years early to his hometown, four instead of six, his sentence commuted for good behavior—something he’d never been accused of in his life. He worried now he was back too soon. The town wasn’t ready for him. He’d walk in on her with another man. He’d catch her in a lie.

For four years he’d kept quiet in a cinder-block cell, waiting to hear from his old mistress, Loretta, waiting for word from their colleagues at the New York Racing Association. They’d advised him not to talk. They’d sent Loretta to the courtroom to remind him, quietly, with a hand pressing gently on his shoulder, that two of his three remaining daughters still lived in this town. Loretta with her lips twisted into that sideways life-threatening smile, walking off with his unmarked $172,000 stashed in her fake Hermès Kelly bag.

He half imagined her waiting for him, his midwestern princess, at the bus station now, opening her arms to him, opening the sack of cash, pulling out from her cleavage a shiny gold key to a small office at the back of City Hall, where the NYRA boys and the Republican chairman would offer him cigars and checks bubbling with zeroes and shake his hand for not giving up their names. But he only wanted to see Loretta in his fantasies.

The bus pulled up to Springway Diner and squeaked to a stop. He sat there, in seat 3C, the other passengers milling about, collecting their things, getting up to stretch as the driver turned off the engine and announced a twenty-minute rest before continuing on to Montreal. He sat there and thought about what the prison doctor had told him after his release physical: no salt or cigarettes or alcohol, nothing that might raise his blood pressure. He wanted all of those things now, anything to calm the erratic beating of his heart, to lengthen his short breath. His hands shook. Only two other times in his life had he been this nervous, so nervous it burned, it was something that had to be doused: at his wedding and then, twenty years later, at his third daughter’s funeral. Both those times, and now, he just wanted the moment to melt away, to have already happened. He wanted to turn around and see the hard times behind him.

He stepped off the bus into a blast of heat that surrounded him like an embrace. He’d left a dewy, cool Pennsylvania that morning for this: a thick stew of atmosphere, the air heavy and wet, and he was at that moment so very tired. Across the street from the bus stop were new stores and crummy old motels with new paint jobs and the road sparkled with new, dark tar. His oldest daughter, Nora, was not waiting for him. No one was. He looked at the strangers and tourists loitering on the concrete outside: Who the hell are all you people and what have you done with my town?

This used to be a twenty-four-day town, Belly thought. He remembered the queer quiet just before the racetrack opened each summer, the whole town preparing for the rain, the reign, of tourists to descend. It was like that every year: upscale specialty shops selling fancy linens and New Age chachkas and glossy horse paintings bloomed on Broadway, only to wither once track season ended. But now, since he’d been away, the racetrack stayed open almost twice as long, reaching back into July and stretching all the way to Labor Day. A season of horse racing straddled the town, scarring it up for the rest of the year, just like what they used to say in AA: one foot in tomorrow, one foot in yesterday, and you’re pissing all over today.

FEATURED WRITER: ELLEN FERGUSON

I Did It!

I Did it!
No one is angry with me!
I can die now!
No, I'm not a published author.
No, no one cares about my theories.
No, an earlier dream unfulfilled — I'm not the star of a musical
But -
All I ever really tried for,
All I ever put my heart and would
Into, falling further and further in -
No one, no one, is angry with me, al all.
Success!
It just shows, if you really try for something, you can do it.

There's the Duane Reade Where I Bought the Band-aids

Some of us are born great.
Others of us buy Band-aids
For the feet that wear the shoes we bought
To hear how great you are.

Some of us write prizewinning papers
Others of us grade those papers,
Unless
We're out buying shoes
And earrings
And a new knit absolutely useless
Tank top and mostly
Band-aids, Snoopy Band-aids,
To cheer up not only ourselves,
As we hobble home,
But someone waiting there,
Who, is just so happens, was
Also born great,
But her mother, unlike
Your mother
Failed to notice

FEATURED WRITER: CHRISTINA FRANK

Lucy will always have two mothers, and I am inextricably linked to the other one wherther or not we ever meet. I needed her to create Lucy; she needed me to raise her.

I feel most connected to this woman on Lucy's birthday, the one day out of 365 when I am certain she's thinking about Lucy, maybe even wondering about me as I wonder about her. Just as were as phsycially close as we could ever be during my visit to Vietnam, on Lucy's birthday I sense a spiritual, real-time, across the oceans closenss. For those twenty four hours, I breathe a sigh of relief, feeling that for the a brief time, I have found her.

-An excerpt from the essay, "She is Among Us," by Christina Frank in A LOVE LIKE NO OTHER.

FEATURED WRITER: REGINA McBRIDE

From THE MARRIAGE BED: CHAPTER ONE

1910
Merrion Square
Dublin

My husband's mother had decorated the little room at the back of the house with me in mind. It was a room meant for solitude, for revery and prayer, because the face I had presented then, fifteen years before, had suggested a contemplative girl, a girl given to intercourse with the saints. To her I was an unassuming girl, a kind of empty vessel like the Virgin Mary, who would carry holiness in her womb. They were an ecclesiastical family; she wanted her son to father a priest.

A fortnight or two after we were married, and before Manus and I left Kenmare in the west, Mrs. O'Breen came to Dublin on her own and furnished this old Georgian house for us. It was then that in a surge of generosity toward me she had the walls of this little room painted sea green and scallop shells impressed into fresh plasterwork. She said that she'd been concerned that I would miss the Atlantic. In fact, after having been cloistered at Enfant de Marie, so far inland, I had grown to find the smell and sound of the waves diminishing.

But I never expressed such truths to Mrs. O'Breen. As I never expressed them to Manus.

I was up at dawn this January morning, though it was a Sunday, attempting to draw a blue vase that I'd brought in with me from the dining room.

The night before, Manus and our two daughters, Maighread, fourteen, and Caitlin, thirteen, were speaking in low voices at the dining room table. I'd come in and they'd gone quiet. When I asked them what they'd been speaking about, Manus evaded the question and began describing a horse he'd seen earlier that day on Grafton Street, decked out in ribbons and bells. There was a winter fair in Phoenix Park, and the city had been adrift with gypsies.

I struggled now to draw the likeness of the vase, but my mind was not on it. I'd had it before me for over an hour, yet I had only drawn a few faint lines. I was fixed, instead, on the static representations of water along the wainscotting.

Mrs. O'Breen saw decorative potential in all representations of the sea. Here they were, trimming the very room in controlled waves.

In spite of the plasterwork, the room she had bequeathed me was stark. The barest in the house, furnished with only a dresser and a draftsman's table more suitable for a child than an adult. The table faced the dresser upon which I placed the objects of my still lifes: flowers, fruit, bottles, and jars. When I'd finish drawing them I always cleared away the objects and replaced them with those that Mrs. O'Breen kept there: a marble statue of praying hands, and to either side of it, two separate pairs of gloves, lying palm up. They were the white novice gloves that I had been wearing the day I'd come to marry Manus in the house in Kenmare-by-the-Sea and the nuns' black gloves I would have worn if I'd taken my vows as I had been close to doing before Manus's proposal. But this morning a rebellious humor flickered in me, and I toyed with the idea of rearranging everything, and relegating the gloves and praying hands to some dim cabinet.

In the center of one bare wall hung a painting of the Annunciation in a heavy frame with fading gold leaf. There was nothing grand about this particular Annunciation. No lilies or terra-cotta floors. No sunlit cypress trees out the window. In this representation, only an empty, boggy field and an Irish sky with clouds inclined to thunder.

The angel, human looking, wore gray, one muscular knee and calf apparent as he knelt. He was earthbound, without a trace of divinity about him, except perhaps for his wings, which, in the tension of the moment, appeared slightly flexed, and, though his upper body did not lean toward the Virgin in the manner of a Botticelli angel or di Paolo's, he appeared attentive of her.

Over the years I had thought of asking Mrs. O'Breen about the painting, but in her presence my natural impulse was to be silent.

As she had selected everything else in this house, she had also selected me. I was only seventeen when she saw Manus staring in my direction at Mass at Enfant de Marie. I was a novice then, as she had been a novice when her own husband had proposed marriage to her. My quiet, careful demeanor appealed to her. I had come from a wild, windswept place, the Great Blasket Island. She'd liked the idea that I was an islander and probably thought, as many did, that islanders were more backward even than tinkers. I would be out of my element in her family, dependent, compliant.

The face I wore then suggested stillness and grace. Before my wedding night, Mrs. O'Breen had given me tea in a room with a sea view, filled with statues of female martyrs. Agnes, Lucy, Cecilia. I was at the height of my saintly persona, managing it so well that I had felt myself radiating light. Mrs. O'Breen could not take her eyes off me. For a while there was gratification in being this girl, but the young are in love with the moment, and disappointment had been inevitable. Even I knew that it would come.

FEATURED WRITER: NANCY GRAHAM

When we woke up it was the tomorrow after tomorrow.  Outside white
without the dark colors. Our car a lump, like the snake that ate the elephant in The Little Prince.  A lump you could climb in and drive away or a lump you could climb on and lumber away, into the snow on the street, the various snows. I clambered out there, into the street because no traffic.  Snow ice covered the powder in a layer just thick enough for me to step on and just thin enough to break before I could take another step.  It felt a little like walking up an escalator except for the part where I tugged my leg out and banged my shin against the ice lip.  I could feel my skin turning blue green under the windbreak pants I wore over my silkies.  Raphael didn’t wear anything but jeans, which are not waterproof and in most cases, his included, run thready holes at the knees. I tell him all the time about layers but little kids don’t know when they’re cold and they don’t do what anybody says about clothing unless they’re made to and I won’t make him which means he’ll probably freeze before we reach the oil people. 

Before mom said she was tired of the cold and died she said if the heat stopped working and the phones were down we must get to the oil people and try to strike a deal with them.  She said when they saw we were kids they would look kindly on us, and that there was still plenty of oil in reserves for special cases and that could get us through to something that would feel more like spring.  The next day we opened the door to let the cat in and he was frozen in a ball in a snow nest on top of a hedge that now looks like a sweet happy bump of snow. His fur was covered in black ice.  That was before the strong snow ice, another snow storm and the weak snow ice came and made it so Raphael and I could now be out here walking if you want to call it that, step crash shinbang legtug, in the way that we are, underdressed for this I would say and what will happen if we get across river to the oil people I do not know. 

When we go out on an expedition like this, to get a bit of food or candles or wood, my hands heat with the effort of moving through snow.  As soon as I get home I rush to the piano with the hope of pliant fingers.  I place my fingers on the cold keys in the opening position for Sheep May Safely Graze and my joints seize up. Someone should have invented microweight gloves that would keep hands perfectly warm, I think, watching my fingers go gray against the ivory.  Someone should have invented a radiant-heat piano, with an element beneath each key, and several more in the bench, where no one ever stores their music anyway because there’s never enough room.

FEATURED WRITER: ELIZABETH ROYTE

THE DREAM OF ZERO WASTE from GARGAGELAND: ON THE SECRECT TRAIL OF TRASH

I had been touring San Francisco’s garbage infrastructure for two days now – prowling around the city’s transfer station, poking into its curbside bins, and following its garbage trucks. My hosts were Bob Besso, who worked for Norcal, the private company with which the city contracted to pick up refuse, and Robert Haley, from the Department of the Environment. Dressed in blue jeans and sneakers, Besso had the lankiness of a marathon runner. He was in his fifties, and he’d worked in recycling for decades. His and Haley’s easy-going attitude, and their penchant for plain speaking, were diametrically opposed to the formal inscrutability of New York’s sanitation operatives. The best part of hanging around Besso was his competitive streak: both he and Haley were walking poster children for Zero Waste. Who could throw out less? Who had more radically altered their lifestyle to leave a smaller human stain?

The Zero Waste concept was a growing global phenomenon. Much of Australia had committed to achieving the goal in 2010, and resolutions had been passed in New Zealand, Toronto, twelve Asia-Pacific nations, Ireland, Scotland, the Haut-Rhin Department in the Alsace region of France, and several California counties. So far, no community had reached this nirvana, a condition perfected only by nature. For humans to achieve zero waste, went the rhetoric, would require not only maximizing recycling and composting, but also minimizing waste, reducing consumption, ending subsidies for waste, and ensuring that products were designed to be either reused, repaired, or recycled back into nature or the marketplace. Zero Waste, said Peter Montague, director of the Environmental Research Foundation, had the potential to “motivate people to change their life styles, demand new products, and insist that corporations and governments behave in new ways.”

            

FEATURED WRITER: MATTHEW ZAPRUDER

   

Park Slope

Where far into evening
speculation is
without further instruction
a staircase one kneels,
an always continuing upwards.
Where I inspect myself
for a black and white cat
who hides my sluggishness from inspectors.
His name is Joselito.
Where sometimes a word can fill the sails.
Where I grow smaller
like a view of a harbor.
Where hydrants are painted
hyacinths arguing
point with pleasure in every direction!
glitter slowly
through conversation with windows!
Where into the bitter dust of my mouth
I bring my face,
to stare back at tacit approval,
wearing huge red feverish hands
rubbing my beard
like a saint.
Where one logician
with half an eyeglass proposes
o perpetual attitudes of summer!
light grey sky
constitutes interference
and is proof of a wariness high above clouds.
Where his neighbor
pissing on the low wall contends
it was merely stolen
from thousands of silvery windows
by an amnesiac painter
a jump rope and naked laughter.
Where a silent chorus of blinking sirens
asks if so who forgot us
stretching it onto his scaffold?
Where down at the corner
of afternoon and 4th
children have been invented again.
Mischievous mothers
paroled from daytime
bend among the lounging bodegas,
filling their starry
implications of sundresses,
climbing a few rungs
of spanish without me.

Copyright © 2002-2003 Matthew Zapruder

FEATURED WRITER: SHEILA KOHLER

FROM CRACKS

Fiamma fainted in chapel this morning. The teachers do not know we make ourselves do it, though they suspect we do. They even had a doctor brought in to examine us, but he said there was nothing wrong with us. He said he had never seen such a healthy group of growing girls. We do look healthy. Our skins are gold with all the sunshine, and our hair and teeth look very white in contrast. Weekdays we wear short-sleeved white blouses and green tunics with their big R's embroidered on our chests and our short green socks. Our tunics are worn four inches from the ground, measured kneeling, so you can see our knobby knees.

Perhaps Fiamma did not make herself faint. Perhaps she just fainted. The girls on the swimming team take turns fainting in chapel. We all know how to do it. Before communion while you are on your knees and have not had any breakfast, you breathe hard a few times, and then you hold your breath and close your eyes. You sweat and start to see diamonds in the dark. You feel yourself rush out of yourself, out and out. Then you come back to the squelch of Miss G's crepe shoes, as she strides along the blue-carpeted aisle to rescue you. She makes you put your head down between your knees, and then she lifts you up and squeezes your arm. Miss G is our swimming teacher, and she is super-strong.

You lean against her as you go down the aisle and feel her breath on your cheek, and the soft swell of her boosie. Your heart flutters, and you see the light streaming in aslant through the narrow, stained-glass windows: red and blue and yellow like a rainbow. Miss G leads you out into the cool of the garden. You sit on the white-washed wall under the loquat tree in your white Sunday dress and undo the mother-of-pearl button at your neck. Miss G sits on the wall beside you and smokes a cigarette, holding it under her hand, so Miss Nieven, our headmistress, who has an M. A. from Oxford, will not notice if she comes upon her suddenly. When Miss G tells you to, you take off your panama hat and set it down on the wall. Then you lean your head against her shoulder. You get to sit there under the cool dark leaves of the loquat tree and feel the breeze lift the hem of your tunic very gently and watch Miss G blow smoke rings until she asks if you feel all right now. Her voice is deep and a little hoarse, like a man's.