Memorial Day

Nadine had foolishly decided she would join her sister down at the beach for the long weekend.

“No, no, I can leave on Friday. It’s fine,” she’d said. Her sister laughed and warned her about the apocalyptic traffic, but Nadine didn’t mind. It would be worth the hours on the Bay Bridge to see her sister and feel the sand baking the soles of her feet. It had seemed like a good idea a few days ago.

The highway leading to the bay was a parking lot. An accident was only a half mile or so away, and Nadine watched an ambulance wedge its way through the traffic. A school bus merged onto the shoulder, its windows gaping open with teenagers hanging out, watching the scene.

The air conditioning roared, but Nadine’s face still felt sticky. She stretched her hands, popping her knuckles. She had a habit of clenching the steering wheel as if her car might drive on its own and careen off a bridge. Her jaw felt tight, too, another sign of her anxiety and stress. Unlike her sister, Nadine could never be accused of having “resting bitch face”—instead she had a sort of “resting Frankenstein face”—a jutted chin, teeth clenched. When she felt her face hardening, she would wiggle her jaw until her face softened, reminding herself to loosen up.

That’s how she met Dale.

In an effort to relax a bit, Nadine went out to the karaoke bar with some co-workers. “Friends” wouldn’t be the right word for those people, but she liked them well enough, and she had hit her limit with binge-watching sitcoms. When her co-worker, Hannah, lamented how pretty and boring Nadine was, Nadine felt a twinge of agreement. She accepted the invite for drinks and karaoke, surprising both Hannah and herself.

She felt self-conscious walking into the bar, like someone might look up from their drink and shout, “Hey—she doesn’t belong here!” It’s not that Nadine was anti-social, but she preferred to be alone most of the time. Her sister—older, prettier, bossier—seemed to be the sole owner of chattiness and volume, and Nadine was happy to be the quiet, “pretty enough” sister.

When Nadine spotted Hannah and her other co-workers, she felt relief. In the back of her mind, she’d always suspected that she’d end up like Carrie: covered in pig’s blood and humiliation and friendless. She had no reason to think this other than too many hours of high school TV dramas. Hannah waved her over, sliding a beer toward Nadine. “We ordered for you. Hope that’s okay.” Nadine thanked her and took a sip of the beer. The icy bubbles tasted good, and for a moment, Nadine felt some relief from the late May heat. She reminded herself not to clench the bottle too tightly.

After the group chatted about the day at work—the boss is an asshole, those customers were rude huh?, I can’t wait for vacation—they turned their attention to the stage as the lights were dimmed. “Hey everyone, I’m Dale!” The emcee raised his beer and continued speaking,

“Welcome to Karaoke Night. If you’re new here, be sure to talk to the DJ and sign up for your song.” He pointed his beer toward a booth off to the side of the stage. “If you aren’t new, do us a favor and sing something different!” He laughed awkwardly, his breath hitting the microphone a bit too hard. He put the mic into the stand and called up the first singer. A young woman in a bachelorette sash climbed on stage and began her shout-singing rendition of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

The emcee walked over to the group and leaned onto the table. “Hey, Hannah. Can’t get enough of this place, huh?” He leaned closer to her, a dopey grin spreading across his face.

Hannah responded with an exaggerated groan. She nodded toward Nadine and introduced them. “You can have him, Nadine. I’m going to the bathroom.” She slid off her barstool, and Dale sat down, now grinning at Nadine.

“Nice to meet you, Nadine.” He shook her hand and took a long swig of his beer. “Are you new to the group? I see these guys here all the time.” Nadine immediately liked Dale. He was friendly and attentive, and Nadine didn’t understand why Hannah seemed so dismissive of him.

The rest of the night was a blur. She felt her cheeks ache from smiling and giggling with Dale, and when she’d spilled her beer on his lap, he didn’t even flinch. He laughed it off and bought her a new drink. Nadine was pleased with herself, pleased with Dale’s kindness, pleased with the evening overall. They went home together that night and settled onto her couch, Dale polite as he kissed her. They made love that night, and it was sweet, restrained, and appropriately quiet for Nadine’s liking.

They parted ways in the morning with a kiss, and Dale promised to be in touch soon. Nadine believed him. He seemed so genuine. At work that day, she fended off Hannah’s questions and criticisms of Dale. Nadine felt special—not weird, like usual—and she wanted that feeling to last. The work day dragged on, a blur of collating and stapling, and Nadine hadn’t heard from Dale. Her phone buzzed with a reminder to pack that night, but no other message appeared. She worried he would forget about her while she was gone for the holiday weekend.

She had plenty of time to obsess over Dale now that she was sitting in Memorial Day beach traffic. She kept reminding herself that it would be fun. She wanted to tell her sister about her adventure. Nadine was giddy at the idea of shocking her.

The traffic inched on slowly, and Nadine’s car was almost to a large overpass. She wanted to be out of the direct sun, and the promise of shade was only a hundred yards away. And then she saw it: the overpass and the enormous scrawled message. I <3 U. The fuzzy black letters emblazoned on the grimy concrete. The letters were so scraggly and misshapen, she imagined the painter hanging upside down to get the right angle.

She thought of Dale the night before, his slow fingers tracing lazy hearts on her shoulder, how he said he loved her serious eyes. She imagined Dale’s hands swooping together two pieces of a heart on the overpass. She imagined him standing back to survey his work, nodding to himself, and praising his work. The flutter of imagining made Nadine flush with embarrassment.

But why? Why should she be embarrassed? It was possible that a man could become infatuated with her and that he might want to share that with her and everyone else on the highway. He felt so confident that she would know this message was for her, from him. Had he pictured her sitting in her ’98 Corolla, pondering life and traffic, then her serious eyes moving upward to the declaration?

Nadine thought of taking a picture, and for a moment, she clutched her phone, angling it toward the overpass. No, she put the phone away. Free of criticism or speculation—she wanted to keep this for herself.


Written by: Whitney G. Schultz
Photograph by: Matt Crump

Some Dreams

“You will feel a slight pinch followed by some pressure.”

At least that was my interpretation. What I actually heard through his thick accent was something more akin to “You vil fil a schlight binch follow by some brezher.” And pinch it did. It pinched like a motherfucker. I tried to breathe, to shift my thoughts to anything other than where I was, to put the fear aside. It didn’t help that between the vaguely eastern European inflections of his voice and the monstrosity of a moustache flowing over his upper lip, the dentist gave the impression of a certain long dead Russian dictator. But if he could stop the howling pain in my jaw and wrench free this abscessed tooth, he would be my hero forever.

“I vil be back, you try relax.”

Stalin got up and left the room. As the anesthetic kicked in, the numbness slowly crept through my gums and palate, bringing with it a hope of relief. I sat in an old barber’s chair, slightly refurbished and retrofitted with at least some of the accoutrements of modern dentistry. I glanced around the sparsely decorated office space. Four completely white walls and one solitary window blacked out. Definitely didn’t want the looky-loos peeking in from the alley. A small sink stood in the corner. No framed diplomas, no syrupy inspirational quotes coupled with generic sepia photographs. No saccharine pop music to put one at ease. This space was clearly all business, no play. But in a way the lack of adornment of the room was soothing. It gave the place a sterile feel, one not shared by the surroundings. Stalin returned and I could hear the din of consumerism coming from the dirty little bodega that fronted this illicit enterprise.

“You vant da lavin gas, no?”

He held up a small nasal mask attached to rubber surgical tubing.

Lavin gas? Laughing gas? Oh sweet Jesus yes!

I nodded my head affirmatively and tried to get my deadened mouth to talk. He fit the mask to my nose and started the flow of nitrous oxide. In seconds, a wave of warmth and tranquility radiated through my entire body.

“Open vide.”

I opened my jaw as far as it would go, which wasn’t far. My abnormally small mouth had made for some difficulties in eating sometimes, but at least it didn’t affect my social life. It could have been disastrous if I had other proclivities.

Stalin pried at my mouth, and though the Novocain had done its job, I could feel him grasping at my infected incisor.

“Vider.”

A furrow appeared on Stalin’s brow, and I could see him begin to sweat.

I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. It settled on a piece of graffiti I had read outside, adorning the wall of the dank alleyway where I parked my car.

You don’t have dreams, you make them. It was a beautiful sentiment and glimmer of hope for all of the denizens of the ghetto.

“I pull now.”

You don’t have dreams, you make them. I could almost see the grin on the optimistic tagger’s face as his words blossomed to life in front of him.

Just wait kid, just wait. Make all of the dreams you want. One day the inconceivable weight of reality will come crushing down on you and you will find yourself far from your suburban home getting third-rate dentistry from a third-world refugee in a room behind a corner store because you can’t afford anything else.

Stalin put one hand on my shoulder and pressed down, while tugging at my tooth with the other.

You don’t make dreams, kid. You make mortgage payments and you make school lunches and you make sure you have enough Tylenol to make it through the day and you make up excuses as to why you have been stuck doing a job beneath you for the last fifteen fucking years. But you don’t make dreams.

“Open vider.”

Wider??

My mouth was open as the hood of an old Buick. Stalin dug in, gave a grunt and there was an audible pop as the tooth relinquished its grasp and came free.

The door burst open and a boy of about ten came bounding into the room.

“Papa! Papa! I got an A, Papa!”

Stalin, now hovering above me, turned to his son.

“Good job Alexei, Papa is proud. I vil be done soon. You go tell Mama.”

Stalin sat back down next to me and started to pack cotton into my now empty socket, a new glint in his eye.

“My boy gonna be dentist too.” He cast a forlorn glance at his surroundings. “Not like dis.” I caught a faint smile peeking out from under his shaggy moustache and he started to beam with pride once more. “Real American dentist. Is why we came here. For him. For his dreams. You rest now. I be back soon.”

Stalin left the room but didn’t quite close the door. I could just make out the joyous sounds of true familial love.

For his dreams.

I tried to smile but only succeeded in letting a bit of bloody drool seep out of the corner of my mouth. I couldn’t wait to get home and hug my wife and kids. Every mortgage payment, every morning cursing my alarm clock, every ache and pain, every hardship I had to endure was worth it. For them. For their dreams.

You don’t have dreams, you make them.

Written by: Ben Cook
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

All That's Colored

When the shift occurred, without reason or warning, there were enough talking heads to fill a stadium – and many did. Lecterns were manned with the rapidity of automatic machine gun fire. But this was always an intellectual war, fought in city council meetings and university halls, among other places. Theories and ideas were lobbed with a casual surety that had never been reserved for bullets. They settled on calling it evolution, and when they did, the divisive nature of the human race took form in two very different but equally important questions. Which question you asked would ultimately define you in this new age of COLORBLINDNESS. I use this word in the most literal sense because over a period of 252 days from Mid-February to Late-October, mankind – the human species in its entirety – lost its collective ability to perceive color. The world through our eyes had become entirely black and white. As I said before, there were two immediate questions. The first – HOW? asked by the scientists among us. Theories were raised and dismissed until only one possibility was left standing – evolution. By a method of deduction, it was acknowledged by the scientific elite that receptors in the human eye had been somehow naturally modified. Strange it seems that, given the cavalier nature in which we use a word such as evolution, there have been no significant theories proposed regarding the so-called end game. We are evolving, but to what? There have been reports of increased audioception, gustaoception, olfacoception, and tactioception in test subjects, though the authenticity of these reports has been questioned. Regardless, they are known collectively as “The Mutation Papers,” and bring us to the next question – WHY?

***

In the days of THE BLINDING, most found themselves in their house of God. I was no different. I sat with my mother and father, brother, and little sister on wooden pews. With my hands clasped together and my elbows resting on my knees, I bowed my head and prayed. The Sunday morning televangelists coined the term THE BLINDING. They shouted into microphones chronicling our many sins and thousands fell at their feet. My father, disgusted, would turn the channel and whisper, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Like most everyone as time went by, we continued on. My father rested after a hard day’s work. My sister attended second grade. My mother cut fresh-grown tomatoes in the evening and sprinkled them with salt. And yet every morning I believe each of us opened our eyes, and for a brief instant, it seemed possible that the world was once again overwhelmed with color. I surely did. My mother jokingly called it the hindsight of the damned. Many believed this to be some sort of punishment, while a few others thought it an awakening. To this day, we all fail to speak of the future. There will be a time, not so far off, when the last set of eyes that recognized color will finally close - and on that day we all will have lost something and we will ask why. But my mother used to say that day would also bring our salvation, and I prefer to think of our future as such. God has taken our color because we will survive, we will persevere, but we will never be the same. I believe there is assurance in that.

***

We’ve come to this place because some need to see it and some need to feel it. Some need to remember what it meant to have these walls, these gorgeous murals with all this color smashed together. Bold and bright they sit in our memories like beacons in the sea. Of all the cultural phenomena that have taken place since the blindness, the glorification of graffiti must be the greatest. Across the globe people flock to these places like they once flocked to Roman ruins. These walls of graffiti, from California to Buenos Aires to Jerusalem and back again, have become something more powerful than simple tagging. They’ve become remnants of a lost age – like Stonehenge or the Easter Island heads – wrapped in wonder, mystery, and a bit of sadness. I suppose our mystery is that nobody does graffiti anymore. They still sell spray-paint of course, and one could still physically tag a clean wall - but nobody does. Out of some mutual desire we’ve decided that creating new pieces like the one in front of us is disrespectful, or even evil. Personally, I think everyone knows that if we create new graffiti the old pieces don’t work, don’t mean anything, and if that happens then what do we have left? Some would say we are left with a species and a world that is unexplained, and we as a civilization are afraid of nothing more than the unknown. So in some form of group therapy we’ve decided that we without color are different. We do not yet know how we’ve changed, or how we will continue to progress in this particularly shaded world, we just know that we miss our color. So we take comfort in memories like graffitied walls, and we lean on them like vibrant walking sticks. We crowd around the scribbles because there will be no others like them and because there is communion in past appreciation, even if said appreciation was not so long ago outlawed. We look because we are now black and we are now white and ultimately, we are all in this together.


Photograph by: Emily Blincoe
Written by: Logan Theissen