by jcdelbarcoii

Last year on Valentine's Day I was in the most romantic city in the world... Paris. However, I was bitter and alone at the time, so I spent the morning stitching the words "f*** love" onto a shirt. I wore it out to a group fondue night with my fellow American students. I thought I could steal attention from the sour holiday by convincing people it was my 21st birthday. After all, after some quick numbers in my mind, I figured V-Day could be the day my father planted his seed (me) into my mom. Anyhoo, the other Americans all caught on and spread the word quickly. I got caught up too deep in my mess of a joking lie, and felt awful. People were buying me drinks (that I essentially and remorsefully stole from them), and each one tasted more and more bitter than the last. I ended up vomiting in a bathroom of some classy French bar and walked home alone hating myself as much as the holiday itself. I was looking forward to Thanksgiving already.

VD08 has to be great for all of us.

by Andy Michelsen

The turkey season brings the swarthiest and grimiest critters out from the woodwork onto the streets and into the houses of distant relatives all across the country. A man that you have never before seen will arrive at your doorstep, call you cousin, and help himself to a fat seat and a plate by the television. His wife and three kids will follow. There is a dispute over the taste of the turkey as tempers slowly flare up like an acid flashback. Grandpa sits in the corner staring madly into the television giving a mumbling, incoherent version of play-by-play. Cross eyed stares from people who cannot believe what is going on in this house and want to run out into the driveway and start bashing windows with a Louisville Slugger as badly as I do right now.

Instead I creep to the backyard behind the bushes and the dog pen to have a smoke, finding my cousin Martin already there as he offers me a toke of his joint. To which I humbly oblige. The air is rich with fall scents of wood burning, home cooking, and night blooming jasmine. I shoot the shit with Martin about work, or lack thereof, depression, and his new Porsche. I start to tell him of my recent publication when he cuts me off and dashes out of sight leaving me hung out to dry like a martyr when my father approaches me with a sour, stern face like a drill sergeant with constipation. We stand silent for ten minutes before I head back inside, thinking about how even though my father had said nothing, I could still hear his disapproving, malignant words questioning what exactly it was I was doing with my life. Observing, I thought to myself.

I took a slice of pumpkin pie for the road and kissed my mother on the cheek. As I headed out the door towards my car, I thought again about knocking in a window or two, but decided it would be best to save my energy for Christmas dinner. I guess the car's owners should be thankful.

by daveoXwesleyfrancis

i sat on the curbing that
surrounded a dirt square
in a denny's parking lot

i saw a snail crawling slow
trekking his way toward me
with his antennae searching

i extended a single finger
out towards him and his body
strained upward to meet it

i pulled away just before we
touched - to me it signified
heaven and earth - to me it
signified everything

by Victoria Bolf

You know you should not tell your roommate you want to be set up on a blind date. You know making it into a joke won’t work, and you will sound whiny and pathetic.

You tell her anyway. You are filled with self-loathing.

One of your roommates just got a boyfriend. You are now the only one left who does not have one. You think about the way this reflects on you. Perhaps you should shave your legs more often. Perhaps you should stop giving your opinion on the Bush administration so much. You can change, you tell yourself. You must prove that you are not pitiful.

You feel yourself slipping more and more into desperation. It has been a year of “I’m the last one left”s. Your remaining single sister just got married, making you the last unmarried woman in the family. You are the last roommate left without a man or prospects. You are the last friend left who has not had a date in three months or more. You are the last one left.

Your sister—the newlywed—asks you, at every holiday and birthday party, if you have a boyfriend. She tries to sound casual, but you can hear the hope in the question, and the disappointment in her automatic response: “Don’t worry. The Lord’s got a great guy in store for you!” As though the Lord were concealing Christmas presents around the house, and your sister peeked onto the shelf where yours was hidden.

Your father was busy for most of your childhood building a new family with his new wife, new house, and eventually, new daughters. You couldn’t say you missed him, exactly. He bought you ice cream every other weekend until his other daughters were born. Your brother was around, too, and you felt much closer to him. He smoked, like your father. Unlike your father, he let you stand outside with him as he smoked each evening, chatting with you as you looked at the stars. You always loved the smell of cigarettes because of this. You never thought about not having a father around as a detriment to your personal love-life until you saw an episode of Geraldo Rivera on the subject. You wondered if you would end up on Geraldo—or worse, The Ricki Lake Show—shouting “Daddy, you ain’t never been there for me an’ that’s why I cain’t find my baby’s daddy!”

Nonetheless, in high school, you developed a relatively normal crush on a tall, skinny boy with no pigment. He played the bassoon and you thought you were in love. You spent all the time you could with him, calling him every day until his mother knew your voice, and also knew to tell you, “He’s not home right now. May I take a message?” You asked him to the homecoming dance, and he said yes. Two days later, he told you he’d changed his mind. Having already bought the dress, you decided to go to the dance anyway. It was the last one you would go to in high school. There are photos of you standing by the mantelpiece alone, wearing the corsage your best friend had bought for you, smiling as though you really were excited to be there.

"You'll never find a man if you're looking for one," you hear one freshman girl say to another as you walk past them on the quad of your college campus. You have heard this before, and it still makes little sense, though it resonates with other clichés that seem true, like "a watched pot never boils." You have also heard things like "the early bird catches the worm" and "a penny saved is a penny earned," which seem contradictory but equally commonsensical. Your head begins to hurt.

At a party that night, you feel genuinely sociable, which is unusual. You think your sociability might have something to do with the small bulbous ceramic pipe from which you have already taken three hits of something you have heard described as “chronic.” Why, any boy would be lucky to receive your attentions tonight. Lucky! you think as you toss back another Tecate to get rid of the burning in your throat.

At any rate, you feel good, if slightly unsteady in your ridiculous shoes. You sit down on the floor, waiting for a lucky boy. One named Justin walks past you towards the door. You’ve always thought of him as a sort-of self-absorbed, Ginsberg-idolizing boor, but desperate times call for desperate measures, you think, and this pot is taking one hell of a long time to boil. You know Justin will not say no to a quick make-out, which is all you really want. Afraid that he is leaving the party, you grab him by his pretentious tie and ask, "Are you going home now?" You think it sounds like a more or less innocent query, but this is not how Justin takes it. In fact, his coming home with you does not occur to you until later when you are both outside in an alley behind Jessica's apartment, and he is kissing you (you will find out later he has kissed three other girls in that same alley that same night), and he says, "Wanna go back to your place now?"

Your addled brain can muster no compelling reason why he shouldn’t come back with you. Isn’t this what you want, after all? “Okay,” you say to him. You manage to drive the both of you home without incident, and you even parallel park successfully.

The spindly loft bed shakes dangerously as he climbs in next to you, but you say nothing. You are beginning to think of a few good reasons why he shouldn’t be there, but you feel it is easier at this point simply to get it over with quickly rather than stop the presses, as it were. You hate to cause a bother. Justin slips off your panties eagerly, kicking them roughly to the foot of the bed before they are even off your ankles. Looking you up and down, he says, “Well, well, well, look at you." He is looking at the tattoo on your lower left hip. It happened in Amsterdam. You had told yourself that if you made it that far in your solitary two-month backpack across Europe, you would subject your body to needles and ink, though getting a tattoo was something you had always found slightly silly. It was akin, in your mind, to the undergrads who take their earnest mediocre poetry a bit too seriously. But this would be a mark of yourself to yourself, this tattoo, and only someone who knew you intimately and well would be able to appreciate it. That was why you'd put it in that exact place—private, hidden. Certainly the exhibitionism of a shoulder or foot never crossed your mind. Now you wish Justin had not seen it. You wish you could kick him out of your bed, watch him fall the six feet to the floor. But that would be so rude. You are nothing if not polite.

Justin keeps looking at your tattoo, even tracing it with his finger in a gesture that would be tender if you didn't resent him so much. Doesn’t he remember how you lampooned him in that review of his poem you did on the school’s literary blog? He somehow got the position of poetry editor, and used it to publish all his own self-important stuff. Your article said something like, “It seems like he just wants someone to say, ‘Wow, this really sounds like Dean Moriarty could have written it!’” You almost chuckle aloud, remembering, but the last thing you need is for him to stop his energetic-but-ineffectual ministrations below your waist and ask, “What’s so funny?”

The whole thing is over quickly. Justin is not quite the Don Juan you had assumed he would be, and the ceiling being less than a foot above him only makes things worse. “Shit!” he yells, as he slips out of you and hits his bare back overhead for the third time. “This fucking ceiling!” Five minutes later, he is passed out and drooling on your pillow. You find it exceptionally difficult to fall asleep, as Justin seems to have a tendency to sprawl over the entire bed, making it difficult to pretend he is not there.

The next morning, he sleeps late. He is hung over, as are you, but you can never sleep past eight. The small bed, cinched up to the ceiling as it is, forces you to straddle him as you attempt to climb down, and it is at this precise unfortunate moment that he half-wakes with a grunt and clasps you back down onto him. He smells of beer, sweat and semen, and you know you must smell that way, too. Disgusted, you disengage yourself and slip down the ladder. By the time your feet hit the floor you can hear Justin snoring again, having slipped back into a drunken stupor. He stays in your bed for an inconsiderately long time, until any hope of even a semi-civil goodbye is gone. He is just an annoying obstacle in the purification process you have started, preventing you from stripping your bed of its sheets. You shower twice while waiting for him to leave, scrubbing yourself with near-scalding water until your skin is red and almost raw. You even rub your feet and elbows with the block of gray pumice shaped like a foot.

Finally, around lunchtime, Justin leaves. He pulls on his pants and smiles at you, unembarrassed, as you wait by the bed for him to vacate the room. “Thanks for letting me stay last night,” he says lightly, as though he’d merely slept on the couch.

You snort in reply.

As soon as he is gone, you strip the bed roughly, light a stick of Nag Champa and point the fan out the window in an attempt to rid the room of its stale odor. Carting your sheets to the laundry complex, you keep rehearsing what you will do. Hot water. Extra soap. Dry on high-heat setting. You do not relax until you have finished the laundry and inhaled its chemical-clean scent. You re-orient your bed so that the pillow is at the other end of it. You briefly consider taking another shower.

You are in a library, months later, looking for back-issues of The New Yorker when you stumble across The Complete Works of Pablo Picasso. Your tattoo is of a Picasso sketch, “Visage de La Paix,” the Face of Peace. It is a woman's head with an olive-branch crown and a dove, the wings cradling her face. You leaf through the book, wondering how women felt when he took them home and traced the lines of their bodies. You wonder about Marie-Thérese, the mother of his daughter. You wonder if Picasso was a kind man, or merely a genius. You suspect that he was both, and that he never bruised the ankles of any of his lovers in his haste to remove their panties.

You will move to a new city after graduation. It is a large, bustling, diverse place and you will feel the difference keenly between this and your small university town. Sometimes you will revel in your anonymity, and sometimes you will barely be able to control your mounting hysteria at the thought of being forever alone. This feeling will come to you mostly when you are sitting in your solitary apartment, listening to the substandard plumbing.

You will flirt with the guy at the corner bakery who serves you your almond croissant every Saturday. He will flirt back until one day you coyly slip him a piece of notebook paper with your number on it when you pay. After this, he will avoid your eyes and find things to do in the back of the store when you are there. You will remember how stupid his jokes always were, anyway.

Your sister will call and you will chat with your niece, who informs you that she has her first boyfriend. You will be unequivocally happy for her. A man on the street, prosperous-looking, will stop to tell you that you are “absolutely gorgeous,” then keep walking, wishing you a nice day. Another, grandfatherly and kind, will admire your “graceful swimming” at the gym pool. You will appreciate these simple kindnesses, this vulnerability from men who want nothing more from you than your
momentary existence in their lives.

Your cat will watch as a procession of wildly varied men ring the doorbell to come pick you up on weekends. These are the men you have met through the online dating service you joined, or they are the men who hit on you during happy hour and look under thirty and semi-professional. They will be named Mitch, Carlos, Nikhil. They will wear grey suits, dandruff-dusted cotton shirts, or battered Birkenstocks. They will take you to expensive, self-conscious restaurants, picnics in the park, or cheap dives before the matinee. You will remember reading in a dating book that you should “have questions ready, like tennis balls you can toss back and forth. If your date misses one, toss another.” You will get the feeling you are heaving bowling balls at them. “Oh, I don’t consider myself that political,” they’ll say in response to your current-events quiz.

“Everything is political,” you will retort. “This salad is political.”

They will cough and look around the room or at their feet or at the bottle of wine, wondering what to say next. Taking pity on their desperate politeness, you will change the subject. At the end of the date, they will kiss you goodnight, though any hope of romance, for you at least, will have died hours earlier. You will allow these kisses, even when their tongues start exploring your mouth, even when they’ve kept you on the porch so long that it seems the only way to get to your waiting bed is to take them with you. The weeks following such nights will be spent screening your calls, ducking behind cereal displays when you think you see them in the market, and toying more and more with the pros and cons of celibacy.

You will go on a second date with grey-suited Mitch. He has a Master’s in Engineering and smiles too much, you will discover. He will be the best of the lot, but you will not be able to get over his rudeness towards the waiter or the smarmy way he swishes the wine around in the glass. He will ask confidently if he can come upstairs at the end of this date, and you will hesitate.

“I suppose,” you will say, annoyed with his self-assurance. Mitch will follow you closely up the stairs, a hand on your lower back. He will put in a movie like he owns the place, then sit on your couch and pat the seat next to him, as though you are a dog. Not fifteen minutes into the film, he will lean across the couch and nuzzle your ear for a moment, then start caressing your shoulders and torso. When his hand slides up your shirt and unclasps your bra, you will suddenly push him off of you, off of your couch, in a burst of decision that surprises the both of you.

He will sit, stunned, for a full minute on the floor while you blink at him. “I see,” he will say finally, as though you have explained something to him. “I see.” And then he will get up and leave without another word. You will sit on the couch for a while longer and then go stretch out on your bed without changing your clothes, savoring, for once, its empty expanse.

You will read the Sunday paper in its entirety the next day, and put blueberries and extra honey in your oatmeal, feeling like you are trying to make something up to yourself. You will catch yourself smiling, beset by some private satisfaction.

The next weekend, your sister will visit, leaving the kids at home with her husband. This means you are to have “girl talk.” You will go out for coffee and sit on the patio, sharing a pastry. “So how was that second date?” she’ll ask between bites.

You will watch her pick up crumbs with her fingertip for a moment before replying. “Well,” you’ll begin, “I found out he has a Master’s in Engineering.” You won’t be able to explain further, though, because you’ll start laughing, chuckles that evolve into deep belly laughs, until you are bent over the small table, gasping for breath. Your sister will smile at you, faintly confused, toying patiently with her paper napkin as you wipe the tears from your eyes with the back of your small, strong hand.

by Laura Wing

it was something that i had been trying to remember for a long time, her birthday. i knew that it had been on a friday, the friday that i was on my trip in san francisco because i had been looking out of a window at Peet's while writing the card. i knew that all i had to do was pull out a calendar to see the last friday in March but that would mean i would have to wait until i got home to look at my calendar. and by the time i got i home i would forget all about the empty corner of the now finished card and spend days in a vague anxiety at having left some unidentifiable thing undone. besides, this was something that i liked to do, calculate days. i enjoyed recounting everything i had done or eaten or felt. was it the twenty-forth?

as i was in the middle of trying to remember a time she had said the date aloud so that i could imagine her mouth forming the numbers, i caught eyes with a small girl standing in line with her mother. i smiled and waved, she giggled and pressed her face into her mothers thigh. i looked down at my book and smiled. this continued, catching each other staring and smiling, until the line moved. i reached out and touched her tiny head as she passed.

this is a problem i have, touching children as we pass. although i do not see it as a problem i have been scolded by many of my friends on various occasions for such acts of tenderness.

it is in public places, usually crowded and chaotic. places like super markets or restaurants or in this case, coffee shops. i seem to forget that it is not socially normal or perhaps acceptable to touch other people's children. even if it is in a kind and arguably necessary way. i have been informed that it is strange or "creepy" in loud gestures at parties or other social gatherings where people like to think of animated stories to tell.

but i cannot help it, although i am not sure that i have tried to, help it that is. the truth is, i think it is beautiful to touch a child. their bodies are so new. they are not afraid of answered questions, like human contact and need. so they never ask why we must do this or who i am. they know that we are not strangers because the idea of a stranger has not yet become important. and certainly not more important than touch. there are so many reasons to stop time and create silence, like touching a new body. or breathing, or closing your eyes, repeating your favorite words, holding something in your hand, or yes, it was the twenty forth because we flew out the next morning and i remember the number twenty-five typed on the left-hand corner of the boarding pass.