by Tali Beesley
Gerard had known when he first met Melody that she would say yes to a date with him and not to the douche she’d been talking to. Not because Gerard is extraordinarily attractive—you know he’s not—but because he could tell that she is that kind of girl. I’d asked Gerard what he meant by that kind of girl. He’d said “You know the kind—the kind that dates men who are as smart as her but not as attractive.” “You mean that Melody actively looks for less attractive men?” He’d said he didn’t that think she did it consciously. “But she doesn’t want to deal with the uncertainty. With me, she’d know that I couldn’t do better. That she would be the best I’d ever get.” “And that didn’t bother you?” “No, because she was right.” And he was happy and grateful to be with her. I’d told Billy about that conversation just that morning.
Then I’d told Billy about the personality tests Melody had leant me. Billy asked if Melody uses the tests in her practice, and I’d told Billy no, Melody takes them herself. “She says she would never classify her clients in such stringent terms, but that she doesn’t feel like she can pinpoint herself.” Billy asked what the tests said about me and I told him “That I’m an ESTP.” He asked what that meant, and I said “That I’m a prick.”
He said that the dating website he was using had personality quizzes with it. He had answered all of the questions. But then, feeling unsatisfied, he created another profile and put his second-choice answers on that one. I asked him which profile was more popular with the ladies. He said he’d only uploaded pictures of himself on one of the profiles, and so it had a lot more traffic. I asked, “Why don’t you have pictures on your other site?” “Because then people would know I have two profiles.”
After coffee with Billy I walk to the park and even though it is the middle of the day, there is a mist in this grove that I find. It hangs heavy and is tinged almost blue and I think that I would like to come back here in an altered state of mind. I wonder if Melody would give me a prescription for an altered state of mind and then I know that she wouldn’t and I would never ask her. And then I wonder if she never would because I wouldn’t ask her or I never would ask her and so she won’t.
My time in the park is short because Billy calls me to say he’s going to the races, and would I like to come? I have never been to the races and so of course I go. At the races we run into Gerard who at one time was up twenty dollars and is now down forty. “But the important thing is that I am drunk at 4pm on a Tuesday,” Gerard says.
I call you on my way home and you tell me hushed that Gerard and Melody broke up. “But he didn’t breathe a word,” I say. “She slept with someone else,” you say. Apparently Gerard had already forgiven her, but she broke up with him anyway because she didn’t think she’d be able to stand the guilt. “How did you hear?” “Melody told me.” “Why would Gerard forgive her so quick? They haven’t been together that long.” “Gerard told her she was still the best he could ever get.”
After you get home, we are so loud that the next morning the little girl from the apartment next door tells me she can’t wait to grow up so that she can jump on the bed without getting in trouble too.
Categories: Short Stories
Tagged: Five Little Monkeys, Tali Beesley, talimckell
Reviewed by Andrew J Jepsen
McCullers is one of those authors whose prose seems strangely genderless, neither quite masculine nor feminine, who is neither ostentatious or austere and many of these stories are actually vignettes and brief character sketches where nothing much happens. In fact, some of these ’stories’ (McCullers may have been at the forefront of the Fast Fiction movement and never even known it) remind me of John Cheever – the same frankness, the same sorrow, the same pointlessness. An old Jew rides on a bus with a young hick who talks to him, before getting off the bus, no different than before. Some kids make a model airplane that doesn’t fly. A boy walks into a dinner and an old man tells him how love works. These are folk tales of the real sense – real people, real events that don’t signify if they don’t signify.
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Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Andrew Jepsen, Carson McCullers, Collected Stories
Reviewed by Andrew J Jepsen
The phrase I was searching for throughout “Sailor Song” was “wish fulfillment.” It’s difficult to read the protagonist, Ike Sallas, as anything but the same manhero that Kesey constructed in McMurphy of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and, in that same vein, as really anything but a stand in for the agonized activist Kesey himself. I’m loathe to draw comparisons between authors and their subjects, but Ike Sallas is simply not a believable character, and if he’s just a construct, well, then I guess that’s the only option we’ve got.
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Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Andrew Jepsen, Ken Kesey, Sailor Song
By: Andrew J Jepsen
They’d been sitting for at least three hours. Everything was packed and Maria was on the phone with the moving company. Her monologue was absurd because the words were so simple and short. All sentences began with “you” and rarely got beyond that. “Fuck. You,” Wilt thought at his mom. “You, are an unfillable cunt.” “You. You need to. You said,” his mother babbled. She was idiotic. There was nothing pathological about his anger and shame. She deserved it. It was very clear. “You have.” “Fuck you, Maria,” his dad told her. He was drunk, Wilt didn’t know. Maria put her hand to the phone and mouthed fuck you at Clarence. Bo wasn’t her fault. Clarence had to forgive her anyway. He was a black fat fuck in sweatpants whose only work was drawing red circles around classifieds and sending tepid emails. “You!” she yelled at the mouthpiece. It didn’t work. “Mom,” said Wilt. “He can’t help you.” Clarence left the room. He was in the bathroom where he’d sequestered a small bottle of vodka in the toilet tank. It was slightly below room temperature and he had nothing to mix with it. It was illegally bought before noon for $4.75. He should’ve slept with the woman who sold it to him. She’d wanted to. She’d smiled and tapped her nails on his hand. Clarence, she’d said no purred when she looked at his ID. There was no need for her to look. He could’ve fucked her. That mouth open and low tongued. She was forty and he was thirty. The vodka didn’t stain his breath. “Fuck you, you ignorant pecker,” thought Wilt at his father, tripping into the room. He was remarkably acrobatic and sloppy and had called Wilt’s friends niggers last Tuesday. Well he was the nigger. He hadn’t wanted to show his dad the jewelry and letters he’d found while moving his mom’s dresser. They should just kill each other. But they were moving, from black to white, his father said. Wilt hated them. “You fuck you!” his mother shouted at her cell phone and threw it down the hall. The three stared, watching the dark phone slide across the empty floor.
Categories: Essays
Tagged: Ajjepsen, Andrew J Jepsen, Andrew James Jepsen, Andrew Jepsen, Fast fiction, How to get on
By: Andrew J Jepsen
The way the grandson stood on top of his Hyundai, practicing great booming slam dunks on the newly close basket caused more rage in the dogwalker than he could remember feeling. It was much worse than when the dogs unleashed torrents of yellow shit that puddled while the white dog whined, his fur matted and yellowing at his ass. The kid smiled at him, all gums and lips like his mouth was one big wound and the dogwalker threw the gnarled tennis ball at the grandson’s mouth as hard as he could and started jogging with the bounding mutt. The grandson fell in what would’ve been a beautiful arc, if the dogwalker had stayed to watch him, the green tennis ball bouncing direct up off his smile that issued a wail and some blood until he bounced off the driveway, where he didn’t get up.
Categories: Short Stories
Tagged: Andrew J Jepsen, Andrew James Jepsen, Andrew Jepsen, Fast fiction, fiction, Leaving Back
By Emily Vigor
Photography has always been something I’ve enjoyed more behind the lens. An awkward recluse of a kid, I felt most uncomfortable when I knew the slice of round glass was on me. Growing up with a snap-happy father, I quickly became adverse to having a picture taken, creating an unconscious tic, a tensing of the body whenever I heard the wind up of the film, the popping of the flash, the inevitable “click” which meant whatever I just did was captured permanently.
I was not a girl who grew into herself easily. Friends around me were able to automatically create a persona in front of the camera, resulting in pictures that captured their burgeoning beauty, and yet were contrived, posed. The ability to morph oneself, to pretend to be happy, or sexy, or innocent…these were not skills I possessed. Appearing awkward, with a look of surprise or fear in my eyes, was the only way I knew how to take a photo that wasn’t candid. Today, I’ve been able to alter my tactic to just looking angry or making some ridiculous face. And yet I’ve always been fascinated by photography. In high school, I got my first black and white 35mm and had a love affair with a darkroom. I worked after school at a commercial photography studio, assisting in portrait sessions of families, high school seniors, and newlyweds. Watching the way people changed themselves once a lens was on them was fascinating. The shift in body position, the sucking in of certain parts, the jutting out of others, the lowering of the chin, the carefully placed smile (can’t look maniacal), I took it all in as though I were an anthropologist. Why was it we had to pretend to be the things we want to be? Most of these photo shoots ended in frustrated parents, crying children, and arguing couples. It seemed as though the option to just take candid shots of people didn’t exist. But the camera can be an unforgiving tool, and often exposes us to the sides of ourselves we don’t want to see. No matter how much we try to compose ourselves, the camera is relentless in its blatant attempt to make you look as ridiculously human as possible.
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Categories: Art · Criticism · Essays
Tagged: American Apparel, Beneath the Roses, Candid, Cindy Sherman, Complete Untitled FIlm Stills, Gregory Crewdson, high art, Marc Jacobs, photography
By Molly Langston
This past summer, I got together with two friends for a photo shoot. It was something that we had talked about at bars and over drinks and I don’t think any of us thought it was something we would really do. I think everyone had a different idea about the purpose. We all thought that it would be fun and that it would be something that would bring us outside of our comfort zones, as having our picture taken isn’t something that any of us are really comfortable doing. While we were getting ready, one friend made the comment that if nothing else comes out of our photo shoot, at the very least we will create a memory. She talked about how her mother had done similar things at our age and she was glad to have the photos now. So at least we would be able to create a collection of photos to look back on and reminisce.
But can we knowingly create a memory? In pointing a camera, depressing a button, opening a shutter to expose film to light, is a memory captured? Is the moment preserved? Photos seem to serve as reminders of an instant in time but without the accompanying knowledge that memory supplements, does a photo serve a purpose?
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Categories: Essays
Tagged: Emily Vigor, Memory, Molly Langston, Photo Shoot, photography, Tali Beesley
Michael Steffen
emilyvigor
christopherpatricksteffen
Ajjepsen
Tali Beesley
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Andris Liepnieks