"...It hits you like a thousand feathers."


by B. Foote

The first smell is your grandfather’s garden. It is heavy and green. The corn smells like wet paper and the shed like grease and pesticide. You spend whole summers camped in the corn rows, making trips to the shed periodically for old bolts, wire, and garden spades to make secret landmines for epic wars with enemies hiding under the shadows of the corn stalks.

Later there are the smells of carpet and Lysol. Your mother’s house is always clean on Sundays and everything smells bitter from telling friends you can’t come out today, there is work to be done. But through the bitter is your mother’s perfume. It is radiant and forgiving. Woman. It smells like department stores and her bedroom. It is scraped elbows and broken toes and good grades and dinners with just the two of you on the couch watching Westerns.

More years and now you have new smells. Adina’s hair in the autumn. The smell of your father’s truck as it rolls into the driveway and cools off from the long trip home. It smells of fuel. Carbon. It smells like a father. And father smells like the military. Kwik boot polish and military cotton. Airplane fuel, and missiles, other scents that can not be located because you have never smelled the work of men who load bombs, and you were not there when these men guided planes down from the sky, soaking themselves in jet fumes that flood the flight line.

And one day you have a precious smell. The smell of another boy’s mouth, and neck, and navel. And these smells are also heavy and green. And you are in another kind of cornfield, with cool shade and earth; his standing over you, skin wet with adolescent ache and hunger.

So now you know where are. Another year or so has passed and all the smells you need have been taken in through the avenues of your nose and mouth and stored inside your chest and head for catalog and keeping. You will only have variations of these smells that you have collected.

Until it hits you like a thousand feathers. You are in some small store where you shouldn’t be, looking at things you shouldn’t look at. It is a new smell that you have not known. You look around the shop for where it is, and you want to take it and run away with it so that you won’t forever associate the smell with plastic door curtains and posters of pot leaves. It smells like exotic rich gold and emerald. You are young and will never know a smell like this again.

You buy three boxes of it. Inside the blue and white package is wax paper stamped in Hindi.
India.

You should have known that was what India smelled like. It smells like youth and tomorrow and different. Not begging children and bogus yogis charging American Express for bankrupt dharma bullshit. It is the India of strange elephant headed, multi-limbed, pink, crimson and baby, baby blue gods pumping peace and better memories into the air. You are concerned about the little yellow stick that barely holds the wet of the damp grainy resin up. The very smell of it seems to bend the poor thing into an obscene curve.

You will spend an entire year burning this smell in your room and car, and it will permeate everything you own. And you will have peace.

It is ten years now and you are in a metropolis with too much to smell. You smell the panic of people around you, you smell the postman delivering upset letters from the State of New York. You smell another pitiful cup of noodles and greasy bread. You smell more boys and for a while you smell a lot of powders. You decide it is better not to smell at all. Now you breathe cigarette smoke out of your nose, rejecting scent, pushing it out away from you to keep other smells at bay. You only want to smell yourself.

Until one day you are walking down across 21st Street and you smell India again. Briefly you are in pink and orange rags with garish head markings and corn stalks, car parts, sex, summer, fighter jets, fathers, grandmother, and hot strips of asphalt in your myriad hands and you turn to tell a friend,

“Heaven smells like Nag Champa.”

LANGUOR
"An opiate torpor, soporific, trancelike, and sublimely languid. A poet’s morphine dream, a listless journey into a gentle dream and the precipice of intoxicated madness. Paperwhite and black narcissus, three lilies, black poppy and tuberose and a hint of hypnotic opium den haze."

Ian Talty, 2008

CATHEDRAL
"Venerable and solemn: the scent of incense smoke wafting through an ancient church. A true ecclesiatical blend of pure resins."

"...A poorer, sadder version of myself."


by M. Maiden

Some of my strongest memories from my youth have to do with that brief time I attended school at St. Albert’s in South Milwaukee. I was only there through first grade, which is long enough to know that what they called a playground was a fallacy (it was actually the parking lot they used for church on Sundays) and that I never had a nun for a teacher (but the principal was a nun, and she would refill your Elmer’s Glue bottle for a quarter).

Before I was pulled from this bastion of academia, I knew a girl named Leslie Stakowski. Leslie was like a poorer, sadder version of myself. Whereas my mom just made me wear enormously thick glasses to correct my lazy eye, Leslie had to wear the glasses AND the patch to correct hers. Whereas my school uniform was definitely used, hers was threadbare. Her last name was alphabetically similar to mine, so we often had to stand next to each other: lunch line, on the way to gym, assemblies, Halloween costume parade (I was a die, as in “too poor for the pair of dice”, she was a ghost or something equally pitiful). Despite these similarities, I don’t remember getting to know her much. Rising above my economic disadvantages, I still hung out with the girls whom had twirly earrings and fancy scrunchies, and Leslie was not a fancy scrunchie girl.

However, because of our Christmas pageant, Leslie will forever remain in my memory. Our pageants were nothing more than all of the parents crammed into the same cafeteria that we had our pancake dinners in and singing Christmas songs, grade by grade. I believe I wore a velvet dress, white tights and black shoes (no plaid jumpers for us!) and, of course, I was standing next to the similarly last-named Leslie. As we filed in, I could smell the unmistakable aroma of French’s Yellow Mustard.

I was not a mustard eater by any means. I have always had an extreme love of hot dogs; despite never being quite sure which part of the animal they come from, I can eat hot dogs any time, any place. One of my first memories is of cruising around my grandmother’s kitchen in my Walk’n’Go with a chopped up hot dog on the tray in front of me. However, I never ate them with mustard, since I was—and will forever be—known as a ketchup girl. But I knew that yellow smell, and that day it was pungent.

As we filed in and stood on the carpeted risers, the smell grew stronger. Our music started, probably "The Little Drummer Boy", and I looked around to see when to start singing, and I caught a glimpse of Leslie: brown corduroy jumper, coke bottle glasses (no patch tonight, her parents took mercy on her) and there, caked around the corners of her mouth, was yellow mustard. Not just a bit, but enough to look like she’d eaten three hot dogs right before walking on stage, without access to a napkin or wet-nap. And I just stared. And inhaled. And wanted to die.

My mother retains sole ownership of the video from this particular concert and you can clearly see me staring at Leslie in disbelief; me, barely singing, her belting out the lyrics and loudly clearing her throat (no doubt it was probably so caked in mustard she was having trouble breathing). As an adult, I can finally eat and enjoy honey mustard (it is the new ranch), but the smell of French’s Yellow Mustard will always make me want to retch.

HUNGER
"Evokes sheer, unadulterated carnal lust. An undeniably warm and sensual scent. Black narcissus, orange blossoms, and vanilla."

Ian Talty, 2008

DEEP IN EARTH
"Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone.

Rose geranium, Spanish moss, Irish yew, and graveyard dirt."

"I felt dirty in a whole new way."

by Jenn Kelly

We have all known since we were very young that the sense of smell is not to be trusted. Don’t pretend you weren’t one of those little kids who took a swig out of the vanilla bottle even though you were warned that, contrary to its intoxicating aroma, it tasted like ass. Yet we’re taught to not only trust but rely on this sense. People use it to make sure that the milk hasn’t gone bad, that the fruit is ripe, and to lead them to the Froot Loops.

Like most things in life, scent’s trickery comes with rougher consequences as we get older. It’s not just a bitter taste anymore. It could be a scrumptious cologne on a not-so-cute boy eliciting the olfactory equivalent of beer goggles. Or, as I recently learned firsthand, it could actually be someone else’s sense of smell that triggers the regret. The problem is that smell lingers, and it will shamelessly rat you out.

On a Saturday night, I found myself having a great conversation with an awesome boy. He was funny, successful, not a jackass, and met the crucial older and taller criteria. He was great company but when I couldn’t get him to stop trying to make out at the bar, my self-conscious instincts got the better of me. Like a fight-or-flight response where all other thought processes take a back seat until stress levels return to normal, eliminating the potential to become part of the gross couple that needs to get a room became the only thing that mattered. In a flash of impeccable judgment, I suggested we leave.

On the Upper West Side in his one bedroom apartment, he started giving me these eyes like a sexy face gone horribly wrong and I finally caught on that being seen wasn’t the biggest problem here. Oops. Unfortunately, in my dense misinterpretation of the situation, I had left myself defenseless - it was too late to bring up an early morning commitment and I was clearly too lucid for him to believe I could actually pass out. I had no choice but to adopt the cafeteria mentality: in the face of only gross choices, you have to shut off your head and just take the plunge. You can’t think about it or you’ll never make it through. Sadly, we weren’t talking about a questionable turkey sandwich here.

I took my cab ride of shame the next morning feeling completely confused by my own stupidity. Seriously, what made any of the previous night’s decisions seem like the right ones? No more vodka. I was about to give myself a full mental beating when I had the genius epiphany that I could make everything better by simply pretending it never happened! I was one of only two who knew the truth, and I might never see the other again. All better.

I walked past my doorman in my four inch heels and running makeup. “Crazy night with the girls last night!” I unnecessarily explained with a cheesy smile. He gave me one of those raised-eyebrows nods that means he thinks I’m still drunk. As I approached my studio, I was internally rehearsing lines about the dude being a gentlemen and dropping me off at my place on his way home, which I would later feed to my gossip-hungry friends.

At home, I was anxiously greeted by Vijay, the most puppy-like cat you will ever meet, always happy to see me. I reached out to pet him, which usually leads to him leaning his head in as if he just can’t get the affection fast enough. But instead, he pulled back a bit and crinkled his cute little nose. What was this? I held out my hand, hoping he had merely inhaled some of the chili powder that I use to keep him from chewing on exposed wires. Vijay cautiously sniffed. Then he ran away. “Vij?” I called. He looked at me, shook his head, curled up on his cat tree, and refused to make further eye contact. Oh my God, he knows! The cat is judging me!

I love my cat more than most parents love their children, but keep in mind that this is an animal that prefers licking the faucet to his water bowl. Sometimes, he sticks his paws directly into the toilet because he is oddly fascinated by water, and later that day I will find him licking those same paws. Even on nights when I stumbled home smelling like booze, cigarettes, pot and various other New York City aromas that osmotically tainted my being, Vijay still followed me around and bit my ankles until I picked him up. But this smell of lowered standards, this disgusted him. I felt dirty in a whole new way.

I immediately jumped into the first of roughly eight showers I took that day. I moisturized, sprayed perfume and put about fourteen products in my hair. I washed away my sins leaving everything from vanilla, to coconut to lavender in their place to regain the love of my cat. I spent about $25 on the subsequent laundering of all of my towels and another $15 getting a moisturizer that could actually repair my now dried-out skin. Don’t underestimate the sense of smell, it trumps sight and touch. It will give away your mistakes even if no one saw, and if you smell like mistakes, no one’s getting close enough to care how you feel anyway.

CATHODE
"A negatively charged scent. Ambergris, Spanish Moss, oakmoss and three electric mints."

Ian Talty, 2008

LURID

"Shocking, horrific, fierce, savage, sensationalized, luminous and hazy: black currant, Bulgarian lavender and white musk with a dollop of thick resin and a voltaic charge of ozone notes."

"Subtraction"

by Eli Dvorkin

He took a handful of sand
from the beach in the heat
of the day while we slept
in the shade of the whale

that heaved and then did
not heave but our eyes did
not open but our noses did
fill with the reek of dead

and we awaken to find one
whale grey rotting to bone
taking with it our shade
and we redden

and we burrow caught
in hermit crab flight
as our fingers claw beach
we find it has changed —

he had taken one
handful away.

KUMARI KANDAM
"The hollow scent of a vast antediluvian civilization, now frozen and buried, smothered by a thick sheet of ice and trapped deep beneath the ocean. Thick incense, clay, stone, and hothouse blooms with a spike of frost, a hint of decay, and heavy, dolorous aquatic notes."



Ian Talty, 2008


51
"Luminescent, glowing, and otherworldly: green mandarin, neroli, honeydew, white amber, guava, freesia, white and green musks hovering over desert scrub, smashed wood, and the dry, biting scent of night air over the Groom Lake salt flats."

"Who's your favorite uncle?"


by Chris Kelly

Standing across the room from me is my nephew Will, who is now sixteen months old. He lives with my brother Ryan and his wife Leah in Minneapolis, and I see them rarely. Several months ago, the last time we had the chance to spend time together, Will could neither walk nor utter intelligible words, two skills he has since acquired. Other than slight increases in height and weight, his appearance remains remarkably similar, but these developments make him seem like an entirely new being: he is no longer a doll, but a person. I look down at him with apprehension and wonder. He looks up at me and smiles. "Book!" he shouts, grabbing a cardboard copy of Goodnight Moon and beginning to waddle toward me.

I am 27 and have thus reached the age when it becomes acceptable for others to wonder about my long-term plans. As a single gay man, I am afforded a great deal of leeway in this area: few relatives are willing to ask me outright when (or whether) I am having a kid. They rely instead on hints, most of them revolving around my skills with my nephew. "Chris, you're so good with Will!" "Oh, Will loves you!" "Will, who's your favorite uncle?" They eye me expectantly, hoping that I might shed some light on my intentions in this area without being directly solicited. And I might, if I knew.

Straight couples are expected to reproduce. The rules are not as clear for me. My longest relationship was with a partner who was vehemently anti-child, and when it seemed likely that I would marry him, I was content sharing this outlook. More recently, I was involved with a boy who mentioned on our second date, and several subsequent occasions, that he could not wait to be a father. I don't feel the burning desire to take on an heir at present, nor does my current way of life make such a thing advisable, but I cannot undo the months I spent imagining myself as the other dad in that equation.

"Book!" Will says. It's true. I am good with him. He loves me. I am his favorite (and only) uncle. "Get over here, Billiam!" I shout, earning a grin from his Gerber Baby face. We will once again run through the familiar routine: I lift him onto my lap and read over his shoulder as he turns the pages too early, likely stopping before we have finished the story when he reaches toward the table to make a new selection as I wonder if this is something I could one day do with my own baby. This time, however, we deviate from the usual agenda. Will stops before he reaches me. Squats. Furrows his brow. Grunts. I have an idea what is happening here.

"Ryan, I believe your son needs a change."

And my brother, a lawyer, linguistic ace, wry humorist, model of patience, unapologetic nerd, and world-class father, picks Will up over his head, plants his nose in the seat of the boy's pants, and inhales deeply.

"Yep," he says, reacting as casually as if he were reviewing the contents of the morning's mail, "it's about that time."

Not for me, I realize. Maybe for you, Billiam, but not for me.

MAD HATTER
"A gentlemen's lavender-citron cologne unhinged by the feral pungence of black musk and a paroxysm of pennyroyal."



Ian Talty, 2007


WHITE RABBIT
"Strong black tea and milk with white pepper, ginger, honey and vanilla, spilled over the crisp scent of clean linen."

"King of Shit"


by Tom Blunt

I've never thought shit was funny, not even from a young age when everything is supposed to be funny and poo is one of the few artistic mediums at hand. It was impressed upon me at a very early age that bathroom time was personal, and that no good could come of attempting to share it with others. I remember prowling around my mother as she weeded the backyard, taking it upon my three-year-old self to gather up all of the fresh, clean rabbit droppings that odorlessly littered the ground. I became obsessed, like Godzilla at an Easter-egg hunt. When my pockets were full to overflowing, I began to fill my little toy wheelbarrow industriously. When it too was filled to the brim, I presented this harvest to my mother. "Look, mom! Rabbit turds!" I proclaimed, as if I was the king of them. The look on my mom's face was unforgettable, and left me no illusions about the real worth of my kingdom. Personal, I reminded myself, even for rabbits, and I went inside and washed my hands. Twice.

Shit is the one inescapable indignity, but humor is supposed to save you. Unfortunately I lost my humor at an early age when I found myself unduly shit upon—once at first, then over and over again. Even with a keen sense of smell to warn me, it managed to slip past my detection and assault me from all directions, no matter how content I was to leave it lay. I was still King of Shit, only now I sat begrudgingly on the throne.

At five, I was excited to attend my first rodeo in full cowboy regalia. I was plenty aware that my stiff new jeans and itchily-embroidered shirt established me as a man-in-training, and so I toured the stalled livestock with a cousin my age, fitting business for men of our stature. My boots dug into the muck like little hooves, and I was careful to pick up my feet when I walked. As we strolled along observing the bored cattle, a lank tail suddenly twitched to one side and there was a noise like squeeze ketchup, and before I could blink I was covered in a thin layer of watery shit from head to toe.

In real life, it was just that quick, but my memory is happy to slow it down to five frames per second. I can see the anus distending like a snail's eye on its stalk, I hear the muffled report (sound travels faster), I feel the impact on the various zones of my body, not excluding the face. Then the smell reaches my brain, interrupting my denial. I assume a Carrie-esque posture of catatonic disbelief. And then I wail, wail as if dying, my cousin (unscathed!) leading me gingerly all the way back to the house. The women gathered in the kitchen were nearly as sympathetic as I wanted them to be. I was stripped of my man-costume, put in a hot bath, and forced to endure the shame of an evening indoors with the ladies while my clothes tumbled in the drier. And it was not funny, not in the least—in fact, I took it personally, a warning to me from the universe itself about the inhospitable nature of the world, the dangers of manhood. My small fingers shriveled in the water as I lay there, taking note.

I would relearn this lesson many times. When I was eleven I noticed the cattails growing back behind my grandparents' farmhouse for the first time, and eager to pick and examine some, found myself treading deeper into a thick marsh where the grasshoppers crackled and the stalks grew higher than my head, so I held my breath to keep from inhaling pollen and bugs. Suddenly I realized my feet were immobilized, mired in black mud up to my ankles. In my struggle I lost both shoes and fouled my socks wading back out. I burst into the kitchen completely begrimed but with a whole crop of cattails in my arms. The adults knew before I said a single word that I'd found the septic trench that was fed by the household's sewage and gray water.

Dad laughed as he rescued and hosed off my rank sneakers, asking (for the amusement of the grownups) if I'd been fishing back there, and if I'd managed to catch a "Missouri Brown." That afternoon while I cowered in my room, he and my aunt snipped the stems off a few of the fat brown cattails and floated them in the toilet, filling up the camera their sister had accidentally left behind with shots of this as a surprise for when she had her vacation photos developed. Not funny, I thought from my hiding place. And though the events of that day would only make me more paranoid about the public humiliation of getting shit on, the very next summer I'd require adult rescue yet again, having buried my grandfather's four-wheeler to the floorboards in what I'd assumed to be just one more mud puddle, but was actually a deep lagoon of sun-ripened feedlot cowshit.

I could do nothing but grow up and hope my life would turn out to be more than just a string of miserable incidents requiring cleanup with a hose. While I still cringe at shit humor (a quirk which, in my family, is an even greater liability than vegetarianism or a vote for Kucinich), I do have to admit that my concept of “personal” expanded greatly as a result of my trials; at first, writing was merely an escape from embarrassing reality, but over time it’s become a new way to relish it—if the joke is on me, then I may as well be the one telling it. Even if it stinks.

MARQUISE de MERTEUIL
"Stately, bold, aristocratic and cruel. Opulent galbanum and amber, glistening peach, and a bouquet of French florals, with a merciless undertone of jonquil and heartless vetiver."



Ian Talty, 2008



VICOMTE de VALMONT
"'I promised her my eternal love, and I actually thought that for a couple of hours.' Rake, scoundrel, demon in a frock coat. Devilishly seductive, ultimately tragic; a villain undone and redeemed by love. Based on an 18th century gentlemen's cologne: ambergris, white musk, white sandalwood, Spanish Moss, orange blossom, three mints, jasmine, rose geranium and a spike of rosemary."

"Sunday School in Alabama – 1976"

by Jason Daniel Thompson

Mother bought a special foot for the sewing machine to tackle the thick double-knit material that she would expertly fashion into two tiny leisure suits just in time for Easter Holiday. We were a secular family and Brother and myself were just two of twenty-seven
first cousins and seventy-one second cousins, so childcare resources were always stretched thin. Into this vacuum, local churches had no trouble attracting a captive audience of pagan offspring to their educational offerings.

Father had met Reverend Pruitt in January, he was selling construction supplies and The Reverend was a contractor. In their first conversation The Reverend had offered to send the church bus through our neighborhood a mile away from his church to pick us up at seven AM on Sunday mornings. We did not ordinarily rise that early and my memory of the first class is similar to what Patty Hearst might have felt when the SLA ripped the hood off. Who are these people? I recognized a few kids from school, the boys were an average assortment; the girls were different with hair that had never been cut falling to the waist or elaborately braided and carefully pinned to the skull. Brother had been pried from my body by two broad ladies and carried off screaming to the baby room, which seemed like a good idea to me at the time. Free to socialize, I set about discerning exactly where I was. Dresses in the palette of Jordan Mints nearly touched the ground as a group of the devoted clued me in on the tenets of their faith. They did not watch television or read the newspaper and the women were forbidden to cut their hair. That was it really, at least according to the four-to-eight year olds I had been sequestered with.

We gathered around a felt bulletin board and a lady with bosoms the size of an ice chest told us Bible tales with paper dolls backed in adhesive. At the conclusion of each narrative I would stand and clap; this is what we did at daycare at the conclusion of play pretend, or “children’s theater” if you are a sophisticate. After the third story had drawn to a close, Mrs. Bosoms asked me why I was clapping. You are so good at this, I said. Why do you think it is good? she asked. Well, I could never make up such long stories and keep track of the dolls and… the faces of the children around me cast downward. I had said the wrong thing, again. These are not made-up stories, child. She leapt upon me, burying my face in suffocating cleavage. These are the stories of the Bible, child, stories of The Lord God Almighty Jesus Christ who died for you sins and will return at The Rapture. Take the lord into your heart, repent, and repent. She smelled nice.

A sound began to seep through the drainage holes in the cement block construction. Not singing, yelling, or talking, still it was a passionate human sound. That’s the tongues, someone said. I would not figure out the meaning of that short sentence for years but I slipped it into my vocabulary immediately. Grandmother offers you a mealy grocery store tomato, that’s the tongues I would say.

Between the classroom and the service that children attended, tongue-free, we would take a break and were invited to play on an acre of barren red clay. I would decline, my Mother may have been known across three generations as the stain master but I would never test her temper with the kind of damage these wildings wrought on their wardrobes.

It was on the field that I first noticed Steven. At eight, he was older and taller and his speech was slurred. His red crew cut and white skin were striking, movie star handsome and Star Trek guest alien all in one towering package. All attempts at conversation were rebuffed. My mother filled in the blanks. A part of Steven’s brain had been damaged during birth and he would always talk that way; be nice to him she said. I wanted to do more than be nice to him; I wanted to teach him to speak. I told Mother we had been instructed to wear old clothes to church and spent the next two months chasing Steven around the yard yelling at him to be still and sit. He would grunt over his shoulder at me and keep running; I must have frightened him.

By Easter I had given up on good works. Mother had finished the leisure suits. Mine was foam green and Brother’s was white, both had snap closures in the jackets she put in with a special spring-loaded tool that I wasn’t strong enough to use. Twice as many people came to church that day, which was tongue-free the whole way through. Everyone was in fancy clothes. My parents came for the first time and introduced me to many people whom I was not aware they already knew through work or school. There was an egg hunt on the field. Some teenage boys held up a clear plastic shell filled with name-brand candy bars. A duplicate shell had been hidden along with one hundred eggs. The child who found the candy-bars got to keep them, obviously. The child who found the most dyed eggs would win a fancy basket filled with still more bars.

After the big announcement the kids just milled about, not really seeing any place eggs could be hidden. It was hot, the metal clasp on my clip-on tie seemed to absorb the heat from my body and direct it back to my throat. At the edge of the field was a wooded lot and there was a discarded car hood that I had found while chasing Steven. I nonchalantly began snaking towards it, trying my best to look purposeless. When I had my hands on the rusty metal I looked up, satisfied to see that no one had followed me. I heaved and nothing happened. I heaved to exhaustion. A voice was closing in, Over here baby, over here! A teenage giantess with a newborn tucked under one arm pole-vaulted into the grass. With one hand she flipped the steel artifact towards me. I narrowly escaped being crushed. She lofted her prize. Looky looky what I got, e’rybody!

No one looked. While I had been struggling alone the other children had realized the ingenuity with which those teenage boys had hidden the one hundred eggs. They were under the clay. With fresh eyes you could see the divots quite easily. Fifty children rooted through the soil like truffle pigs slinging muck in every direction. People were running back and forth screaming full Christian names. It was an angry Easter. Mothers were screaming for those responsible, who took off on foot through the lot. Red dirt on savage faces met the slaps of home training. I ran around the building to our car to wait out the siege.

We switched Sunday schools the next week. We still saw Reverend Pruitt and occasionally his wife. They would come by the house to pick up a package of nails or get drafted to perform one of my Aunt’s second weddings. I ran into Steven a decade later when we were teenagers. I was exiting a movie theater and recognized the back of his head from years before on the field. Father had told me that he had learned to drive and was working bagging groceries. I called out to him and he turned around, saying Do I know you? I explained the connection and he looked worried. Don’t tell my Dad you saw me here, he said. It was difficult for him to speak and he was already making his way to his car, so I let him go. I was happy he had the independence of spirit to see Terminator Two if he wanted.

I moved to New York and people at home started to get married and die with greater frequency than I remembered from childhood. The Rev and Mrs. Rev as we called them always attended these events. They had been fond of me when I was little and I looked forward to a few minutes with them each time I saw them, a pleasure I was denied. They were all business, breezing in at the last minute and leaving as soon as the service was over. I made assumptions, after all I do live in sin city and I am a sodomite. I began to passive-aggressively tip them larger and larger amounts. Customary gratuity for a wedding or a funeral would be fifty to a hundred dollars. For Brother’s wedding I gave two hundred, for my grandmother’s funeral I gave four hundred. Still, they seemed to ignore me.

Five years went by and my father called to say that Mr. and Mrs. Rev were in New York celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary and they wanted to come visit me at the restaurant where I worked. I was shocked on two accounts, our recent history and the fact that only my immediate family and three closest childhood friends had ever come to see me in the twelve years I’d lived here. Two aunts and a cousin had flown through without so much as a phone call. Long-held resentment gave way to the warmth of being acknowledged.

After I had seated them at a table and been introduced to their pastor friend who had a congregation in Queens, I asked them how they’d been. We are just happy to be alive, The Rev said. We were both diagnosed with terminal cancer ten years ago and now we are both in remission. That's wonderful, I said with the shame and full knowledge of my own pettiness and self-centeredness heating up my belly like a can of sterno, There is so much to be grateful for in life, isn't there?

Amy Lee Pearsall, 2007

Most teenagers need the empowerment of making their own decisions. As far a moms go, I got a good one, and she respected that notion to the best of her ability. The only two things I ever begged for that got the "Not until you're 18" response were getting my belly button pierced and getting baptized into the Mormon church.

So that makes at least two guaranteed mistakes she saved me from. --Leah Blunt

Amy Lee Pearsall, 2007

"...The sand gathered around his body and eventually buried him."

by B. Foote

Though not religious, or even spiritual really, my life’s been pock marked with a handful of moments that have perforated the lining of my already anemic head. Lacan says that our true self is shattered in childhood and that we spend our lives trying to put the pieces back together, only to make matters worse. It’s like Jenga, trying to put the blocks back in is just as likely to tip the whole damn thing over as pulling them out.

I clearly remember the first time my reality cracked a little. I spent my early childhood with my grandparents. Good, solid, hardworking people who bought the American dream with a sensible mortgage and believed in Jesus with the same amount of gravitas they believed in the promise of their pensions. Good was God, and Bad was the devil, mischief was a negotiation between the two, and short of a death in the family or the occasional car wreck, there wasn’t much reason to question the divine order of things. By and large you could handle your own with a little good sense and a strong back.

Any kind of misfortune that came our way was blamed on Reagan first, the new neighbors second, and bad luck if the first two somehow dodged the bullet. What I remember from that time was that the stakes were so low. There’s something about childhood that swaths you in understanding. You know the answers before you know the question. Two houses down, Mrs. Woods sat on her porch and talked with all the old ladies who walked by doing their morning laps around the block on doctors orders to keep the weight down and the lungs healthy. We’d sit on her porch and she’d relay information she’d picked up from her morning intelligence reports; we’d learn that Betty had passed away last night, and Arlo’s grandson was going to have to take summer school. Somehow the universe was in order; people died because they grew old, kids lost a summer because they horsed around too much in the fall. The world would continue and we’d make our weekly trip to Montgomery Ward’s to pick up a new pair of jeans for my grandfather since he tore a hole in the old ones.

On one of those easy afternoons, while my Grandmother was taking her nap, my Grandfather and I flipped on PBS. This was a high ritual for us, he’d explain things about Egypt or the dinosaurs that our narrator had failed to mention and the two of us shared a space that was timeless. The handing down of wisdom from a life of experience and learning, a ritual probably millions of years old starting in the Russian Steppes and continuing on down to the two of us, on the couch still covered in plastic that only came off when company was over. The episode that day was about Africa, and how animals lived there. My Grandfather had dozed off, tired from a day in the garden, and I watched as the film followed a pack of hyenas from their birth till their end.

It was the end of one of them in particular that wrecked me. These hyenas had traveled together for some time, hunted together, taken care of their young, and somehow found themselves traveling in the desert. Days passed and they couldn’t find anything to eat. Weary and starved, the pack was swallowed by a sandstorm. They could do little but march on as one by one they began to fall over from exhaustion. Eventually the tribe decided they would all stay together and wait out the sandstorm, so they huddled together and settled into the dunes. But one of the hyenas got up on shaky legs and started out away from his marooned family. The narrator said something to the effect of “…but one of our hyenas knows his death is certain, and chooses to press on…” and the camera followed the apostate as he staggered off into the storm. He walked ten yards or so, the camera trying to keep him in focus through the khaki waves of sand, until suddenly he collapsed. The camera held as the sand gathered around his body and eventually buried him.

By this time I was sitting a foot from the TV, my glassy eyes reflecting the horror. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. They’d done nothing wrong, they weren’t old, they were just lost. I remember looking back at my grandfather, and him being asleep. I wanted to wake him up and talk to him, have him tell me something, anything to make me feel like the world was different for us, but I knew if I woke him he’d be upset. So I turned back around and turned off the television. I don’t remember much else, just running my hand over the static of the television screen and the smell of their house.

Amy Lee Pearsall, 2007

"Chaos Ekstasis!"

by Tom Blunt

In those days, at that time, initiation didn't come cheap. You had to do for yourself or risk never being done at all. The desert is supposed to be a spiritually powerful place, which I suppose is why the metro Phoenix area covered it all up as fast as it could; to the uninitiated, such an expanse isn't even threatening-- it's just a blank screen to project one's ego onto. And that is how you end up with people struggling to maintain moist green lawns in 117 degree heat.

In those days, at that time. People refer to everything before September 11th, 2001 in terms like those. Those were the last great days when it was safe to be spiritually ambivalent. Before the renaissance of the pale, sweaty moral majority, before the backlash of antagonistic atheism peaked in pretension. Islam was a weeklong chapter in your Comparative Religions syllabus. My growing obsession with concerns beyond my life in this world was merely silly, having not quite yet become revived as the national past-time. And as much as it seemed fitting to me that I struggle alone in my entanglements, I was not alone. In fact, in some ways I was never to be truly alone again, for the unsolicited arrival of a new friend broke open my world bare months before four plane crashes rudely initiated the rest of America into a national religion of prophecy, purgatory, and pride.

Vince was just the friend of a friend, but would be your best friend if you let him. The way you did this was to feed him if he was hungry, and answer every question he asked you; in this way, he would associate you with nourishment of the flesh and of the mind, and seek you out at any hour when he required either. Anything he took from you was returned tenfold in the forms of inspiration, unexpected gifts, or new friends (in the form of others who found themselves dragged along within his gravitational field, whom you might end up feeding as well). Vince was shocking in conventional ways-- he tamed his wild curls with Elmer's glue, he wore his vinyl trench coat in all seasons, he gave his poor catholic mother hysterics with his occult-themed artwork-- but he was conventional in shocking ways. He was a clean and sober college student, was earnest and considerate, made good grades, and seemed to attract no end of consistently beautiful women, no matter how unbearable he seemed determined to become. On the day I turned 22, when we still barely knew each other, he was so excited to discover it was my birthday that he insisted on driving across town to take me out to lunch. He had been out shopping, preparing for a performance in his acting class which required him to dress in drag, so this was also an opportunity for him to test his new look on an unsuspecting public. As we sat in a sunlit booth during Souper! Salad!'s lunchtime rush, I looked across at him and suspected we'd be friends for life. He could have actually passed for a woman-- a big, scary woman-- if only his store-bought hair had been any color other than fuchsia.

As one of the many who loved him but one of the few who could tolerate him in marathon sessions, I came to occupy a unique role in Vince's life. I quickly became not just a sounding board for his ideas or a late-night source of entertainment, but a human laboratory where experiments could be performed. We took turns as each other's witness or rhesus monkey for this or that theory of gnosis or ekstasis. What are the Mormons trying to keep hidden under Joseph Smith's hat? How much Hebrew does one have to learn before the kabbalistic spheres would divulge their secrets? How many Hare Krishnas can dance on the head of a pin? Can one simulate the effects of a sensory deprivation chamber by sealing the bathroom door with duct tape? If you hold magic to scientific scrutiny, is justice served to either? Can one adopt a truly ascetic lifestyle that somehow doesn't exclude video games?

From the outside, our friendship probably seemed pretty ordinary, punctuated by the late nights at IHOP and long drives to nowhere that are the main source of entertainment in para-suburban zones. In fact, our only truly suspicious quality was attitude. Vince was unfailingly cheerful and tended to tell the truth no matter what was asked or who was asking, qualities that endeared him to his professors but bugged the shit out of store employees, police officers and concerned bystanders who preferred their young no-good weirdos to play a little closer to type. Countless times I grew panicky and finally all but dragged him away from someone in the middle of his explanation of why the Universalist congregation was perhaps more Christian in spirit than any of the Protestant churches he'd been to, or why the inverted five-pointed star wasn't really the sign of the devil. Years later he would finally have me write a list of safe deeper-than-small-talk topics that he could keep in his wallet for emergencies, as in most social situations he went from greetings to Jesus in about six sentences. If we had been dutifully angsty and antisocial, we could have operated invisibly; instead, I found myself playing sheepdog near constantly, making good use of leftover social paranoia from high school (which Vince may never have had to begin with). If Harvard had no patience for Leary and Alpert, we certainly couldn't expect any love from ASU campus security.

At about that point, it all became real to me, no longer just a steamer trunk full of esoteric spiritual traditions that we liked to play dress-up in. I'd participated in all these games, rituals of self-transformation and reality-manipulation, as a temporary refuge from the plain facts of life that had always kicked me from behind to keep me marching-- but ultimately they were proving to be a door I could step through into a new way of living altogether. And they were hard work, and I had to begin to take care of myself in previously unfathomable ways in order to keep up physically and mentally. Who was this confident stranger sleeping in my skin? Could he be trusted with my future, devoted as he was to things that were not thought to exist? I spent the summer of 2001 watching the world go by as if from a high ledge, daring myself to jump, silently begging to be pushed.

One hot summer night Vince asked if I wanted to go to the wheatfield. Since when did we have a wheatfield? I asked incredulously. It only took a fifteen minute drive to prove he wasn't making it up. Somehow, there was an endless wheatfield just past city limits that seemed to be ours for the taking. Our asses dented the hood of his car as we stretched out under the moon and continued the same long talk that we'd been having, in bits and chunks, for several months. Tonight it was Jesus again, a subject Vince relished picking apart and putting back together the way a soldier would his gun. By now I was numb to Christianity. It was like looking at yearbooks: bad enough when I was there the first time around, so why would I want to look at the pictures? I laid back and made the most of the scenery as I patiently waited for him to run out of steam. If I let him go for another few minutes he'd inevitably change the subject all by himself, most likely to women; that was just the track his mind followed.

It was a mistake to think he wouldn't notice my disinterest, or would tolerate it. A restful silence descended over us. I felt him slide down off the hood and heard him pace toward the wheat, followed by the snare drum of urination against the cracked earth. He returned smiling. Beatific. Tom, he said. Don't move, okay? I want to show you something. You have to trust me, okay? Well sure, at this point anything goes, right? He went to get something out of the driver's side of the car, so I stayed put. Then the engine roared to life beneath me, but despite the instinct to leap off, I caught myself. Despite everything, I really did trust him. I'm going to drive, he said. Hold onto something. Are you sure about this? I asked. He had an expression of resolute concentration on his face; we were back in the laboratory, the experiment was about to begin. I gripped the hood on either side of the windshield wipers and held on.

The car began to roll through the wheatfield and turn back toward the dirt road that landed us there. Holding on through the turn was hard, but once he got us moving in a straight line I was comfy enough. Then he went faster. And faster and faster. Perhaps not so fast really; the earth orbits the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, no wonder we earthlings are such speed-junkies. The acceleration threw my mind into turmoil, I laughed at the top of my lungs, I couldn't see where I was going, the wind tore at me from all sides, tears uncurled like pennants from the corners of my eyes. What is happening to me? I thought between screams, And does it really have to end? Chaos ekstasis! The car peaked in speed, and then began to slow down. I relaxed my grip on the hood. For those last few seconds, I flew.

I found myself on my knees in the headlights, dust swirling like the cosmos through the beams and into my hair and eyes. I heard footsteps as Vince bounded from the car. He stood over me and began to read from the Gospel of Thomas:

And Jesus said: If they ask where you have come from, say to them, "We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established itself, and appeared in their image." If they ask, "Is it you?" say, "We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living father." If they ask you, "What evidence have you of this?" say to them, "It is found in motion and repose..."

He may have continued, but when I heard the words "motion and repose", something wrenched inside me, and I was filled with unbearable emotion. In experiencing motion and repose simultaneously, so suddenly and so literally, I had for just a few moments appreciated the state of effortless activity combined infinite potential that was the seat of creation. An outsider driving past would have thought we had pulled over so I could be sick, or that perhaps I was under attack-- for once, Vince's demeanor was deadly serious. For once, though, I was moved beyond the point of keeping up appearances. I wept in the dust and clamored to absorb the essence of my ride through this new lens, through this Christ who so many fools brandished as a weapon, and captive in the bright lights, I clung to Vince's leg, grateful to finally see through his eyes, even if I had to be driven halfway to hell on the hood of a car to do so. The dove descended. Please, Vince. And more. Gimme that Jesus. The place where the light. Motion and repose.

He helped me up. Sniffing, I collapsed into the passenger seat, surprised to find reality enfolding me again so quickly as we rolled off down the road, leaving the laboratory behind us. We rode in silence sharing a menthol cigarette. The heaviness in my lungs was a ballast as I watched streetlamps flit past and longed to fly with them, though of course I knew that they were really standing perfectly still.

This was our last innocent experiment, just as the first three quarters of 2001 were an innocent experiment for everyone as we played at putting on a new millennium the way kindergartners put on pageants. As if the millennium could be something we had, instead of something that happened to us. And after it happened, Vince and I still experimented, together and separately, but with such high stakes hovering over our world that our frivolity became sharpened to a point. We each had to work on becoming the person we'd have to be in this new world, and though our day-to-day lives seemed to change very little, it was suddenly easy to feel genuine nostalgia for the summer that had passed under our noses just months ago. Vince became more serious, more manic. I discovered a rare calm that had always seemed to elude me. Talk of Christ was everywhere, suddenly everyone in Arizona felt themselves to be a New Yorker and a Nazarene. I moved to New York. Vince's college program sent him to Israel. Neither of us had ever had a brother before.

Amy Lee Pearsall, 2007