April 24, 2023 Fiction Inertia By Kate Zambreno Michael Raedecker, solo 2021. Courtesy of the artist. In a novel that she had been trying to read the night before, she’d read the description of a late spring day as a glittery day, and she thought of that as she was walking with her daughters, and the dog, up through the boulevards. It was turning from a warm into a hot day, even though it was still morning, and not yet summer. The dog was panting, and they took a break, to drink their bottles of water thrown underneath the stroller. There was something filmy to the skin of her daughters, she had dressed them that day in their lightest clothes, and later, she had promised, they could put on their swimwear at the local splash pad. Before leaving she had quickly pulled their hair off their faces, and now they kept on taking off their hats and handing them to her, and she would throw them in the bottom of the stroller. They needed to get their hair washed tonight, she observed, as she looked at them, their curls greasy with sunscreen. The children had decided they wished to dress alike, or in corresponding colors, and today they were wearing shades of yellow. They were mostly quiet, strolling down the street, the older daughter riding on the attached wooden platform with wheels that trailed behind the stroller that they called the skateboard. She had found a piece of dark yarn and was finger-knitting with it, which she loved to do, or tying a piece of yarn into knots, or wrapping it around and around a stick. It was beginning to be the kind of heat in which one went about in a daze. Sometimes the children wanted to get out to walk and she would hold their hands while their father pushed the stroller, which was laden with provisions for the day. It was such a beautiful walk that morning. The green of the bushes and the trees at this time of year seemed lush and overgrown. Because of this green canopy they were in the shade most of the time, until they had to cross major streets and intersections. She felt that they were walking in a bright encroaching greenness, and had the sensation that they were alone with the trees and the gardens. When she got home she was supposed to work on an essay she had been commissioned to write, on an artist who painted landscapes that felt wild and overgrown like this while remaining strangely suburban. His green paintings felt like they were set in the middle of a forest, often enhanced with black glitter, iridescent beads, and black and green embroidery. There were no figures in his paintings, although there was a narrative, however mysterious, and suggestions of places where children were once playing, or, perhaps, of the abandoning of these spaces, for an unknown reason. There were cars parked outside with their doors left ajar, pairs of tents and treehouses, chairs overturned. This interested her more and more, the strangeness of an emptied landscape, and how then to write of this emptiness. Read More
March 10, 2023 Fiction Season of Grapes By Tennessee Williams Illustration by Na Kim. As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen. It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit. Read More
February 23, 2023 Fiction The Curtain Is Patterned Gingham By Mark Chiusano Illustration by Na Kim. Fictional wall texts, with thanks to the object labels at the Brooklyn Museum. A fight over pumpernickel bread results in tragedy. Quinto’s use of burgundy paint for the dried blood on the tip of the foreground figure’s machete is related to the shortage of crimson in the nineteenth-century pallet. Quinto died in Brooklyn in 1901. Gallup Trenton’s wife of forty-two years, Anne Grace Bellington, was his muse and model for works that range from photography to poolside performance. But it was a Memorial Day weekend encounter with his mistress, Pierra de la Fucci, that led to this joyous exploration of romance, foreplay, and the artistic possibilities of plaster of Paris. An artist herself, de la Fucci gifted this sculpture to the Museum after Trenton’s death. The monumental scale of the nude, including its commitment to puckered lips and seductive eye roll, is the embodiment of female power. The wood used to construct this early Dutch cabinet, including its secret compartment, comes from a genus of tree, Quercus, that is native to 10 percent of New York’s sixty-two counties. The latches are crafted from rose gold. Read More
May 12, 2022 Fiction Two in the Afternoon By Mieko Kawakami Illustration by Na Kim. Saki’s Moment Saki once had sex with Jin the Actor, and she couldn’t be any prouder. She hasn’t told anybody yet, so maybe pride isn’t the right word for it. Still, wherever she is, whenever she starts thinking about that intimate moment and everything it means, she slips into ecstasy. She’s in ecstasy when she thinks about how it’s going to feel to share her moment, when she thinks about the day the rest of the world will finally know what happened—when her moment will become a full-fledged point of pride. She imagines standing in front of all the women burning for Jin, the women who fantasize about him. She clears her throat and comes out with it as if delivering the best news they’ve ever heard: I had sex with Jin, Jin the Actor. In bed, in the middle of the afternoon, fair and square. Read More
February 14, 2022 Fiction Sephora on the Champs-Élysées By GauZ Illustration by Matthew Fox (@matteo_zorro). New Recruits The vast office in which the group of Black men find themselves is open-plan. No walls interrupt the space separating them from the glass cage emblazoned with the three letters—CEO—that mark the territory of the alpha male. A huge picture window generously affords a view over the rooftops of Paris. Forms are handed out, left, right, and center. Here, they are recruiting: recruiting security guards. Project-75 has just been granted several major security contracts for a variety of commercial properties in the Paris area. They have an urgent need for massive manpower. Word spread quickly through the African “community”: Congolese, Ivorian, Malians, Guineans, Beninese, Senegalese. Everyone takes out the various papers required for the interview: the identity card, the traditional résumé, and the CQP, a kind of official permit to work in security. Here, it is portentously dubbed a diploma. Then there is the cover letter: “To Whom it May Concern,” “part of a dynamic team,” “a profession with excellent career prospects,” “in keeping with my skills and training,” “please be assured,” et cetera. In a place like this, the medieval circumlocutions and ass-kissing phrases of motivational letters become risible. After all, everyone in the room has a powerful motivation, though what it is may be very different depending upon which side of the glass one finds oneself on. For the alpha male in his glass cage, it is maximum turnover. Hiring as many people as possible is part of the means. For the Black procession outside, it is an escape from unemployment or a zero-hour contract by any means necessary. Security guard is one of those means. The training is absolutely minimal, employers are all too willing to overlook immigration status, the morphological profile is supposedly appropriate: Black men are heavyset, Black men are tall, Black men are strong, Black men are deferential, Black men are scary. It is impossible not to think of this jumble of noble-savage clichés that is atavistically lurking in the mind of every white man responsible for recruitment, and in the mind of every Black man who has come to use these clichés to his advantage. But that is not at issue this morning. No one cares. And, besides, there are Black men on the recruiting team. Everyone fills out his form with a modicum of diligence. Last name, first name, sex, date and place of birth, marital status, Social Security number: this will be the most demanding intellectual challenge of the morning. Even so, a few of the men glance at their neighbors’ forms. Someone coming out of a long period of unemployment lacks self-assurance. Read More
December 22, 2021 Fiction The God of Ferns By Daniel Galera Illustrations by Oliver Munday. An adapted excerpt of the novella by Daniel Galera, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches. Manuela hates that it’s taking so long. For the past two weeks, she’s hauled her belly up and down the stairs of their building, and along sidewalks where dirty water from the last October rainfall still splashes against her swollen ankles—and she’s sick of it. She wants to sleep belly-down, without pillows to support her. She wants to get up from the toilet without needing to hold on to the sink, to stop being kicked on the inside of her ribs, to have normal sex again. And Lucas, who’s always thought of himself as the kind of guy who can fight off exhaustion, confident in the perpetuum mobile of stamina that’s stored in his guts and keeps him in action no matter how badly he’s being pounded—lately, Lucas has been feeling paralyzed by a fear that he can’t fully understand. He’s scared he won’t make enough money to cover the basics, that Manuela will get hurt, that he’ll have a stroke or a heart attack, that come Monday morning the country will be at war with itself. The autobiography he’d spent six months ghostwriting was published in June, and the book’s subject, a young businessman who competed in ultramarathons all over the world and had a near-death experience in the Atacama Desert, finally wired him the last installment of his advance just a week ago. Now Lucas, who in the past few years has found himself having to settle for more and more freelance assignments, each less inspired than the last, is barely working. He often wonders whether he should finally give up journalism and take a job doing public relations for a construction company, just so they won’t have to move out of the city to the countryside. Maybe, he now realizes, it was a matter of inertia. It’s as if he had wanted to take things slowly for a couple of years to savor the last dregs of inactivity, to ease into this unplanned fatherhood. Some days, he feels sure that he’s done everything he could have, but the truth of the matter is that he’s been in a state of denial. He should have said yes to every depressing, low-paid gig that came his way. He should have harassed his contacts and past clients until he had more work than he knew what to do with. He’s been attending boxing classes religiously at a cheap, dungeon-like gym near Avenida Goethe, where bald, middle-aged bodybuilders give him lip because when they look at him, all they see is a communist hippie who probably took a wrong turn somewhere. In the past few months, he’s exercised even more than usual, as though in response to the fact that his body, unlike Manuela’s, refuses to change. But he knows he’s too old for all of this hard work to make a real difference. Ever since they decided their apartment would be mostly a cigarette-free zone, he’s been going out to smoke at a small square two blocks from the house, where he does pull-ups on the steel bar of the swing set, making everyone around him feel awkward. Not long ago, he’d caught himself smoking and doing pull-ups at the same time, taking a drag of his Camel on the way down and blowing out smoke on the way up, all while his mind fabricated soothing, hyperrealistic scenes in which he died by illness, accident, or suicide. Read More