FICTION by:
Charlie Anders, Jessica Arndt, Dodie Bellamy, Eric Delehoy, Tim Denevi, Leigh Gallagher, Daphne Gottlieb, MC Mars, Sloane Martin, Donal Mosher, Aaron Neilsen, Matthue Roth, Lisa Ryers and Michele Tea

One night, there is nothing interesting on television and I have read every book in the house.
Bored, I decide to replace the moon with my heart. It takes a bit of work to scrape the moon from its perch, to hoist my heart in its place, but once it’s there in the sky, throbbing, it’s quite stunning. I am pleased with myself, even if people only vaguely seem to notice the substitution.

It is a summer night and windy,the 2001 baseball season. Barry Bonds is mocking home run records with each swing, this time against the Florida Marlins. I am hurrying through the manicured promenade of Pacific Bell Park’s lower deck, just before the game starts. Actually I’m being chased, though don’t know it yet.

I started shoe-shining when I was a youngster, about eleven or twelve years old. I guess it’s been more than twenty years. That’s incredible. How I started out: when Dad didn’t want to give me money for a Friday or Saturday night, it left me no choice but to get my little shoe shine box and go shoe shining around the neighborhood bars. Sometimes I would make more than my old man would, you know. There’d be times when my old man would ask me for money and I’d say in return, “well, Dad, why don’t you get your shoe-shining box.” Oh, he hated that. He hated it.

Jack followed the kid through the twilight haze. The nape of the kid’s neck winked from under his wool collar. Jack was not right, had not been right for so long that he was starting to forget what it felt like. He had found the root, but he could not dig it up, and so it grew longer, prying deeper as time went on. The two figures moved swiftly. Above them, stars and fog curled together like fingers on a bit of gold.

I knew my relationship with Rohan had failed when I saw the cactus. It started in the living room of the two-storey house and burst through the floor into Rohan’s bedroom, directly overhead. The bottom half and the top half weren’t connected at all, but Rohan used plaster and wood to create the illusion of ceiling and floor splitting. I dimly remembered that Rohan claimed to create another unfeasible art project with every breakup.

A person who follows a dead end road can give it up only if and when he sees clearly where it leads. Sometimes this means he must follow it to its very end. – A Guide To The I Ching, Carol K. Anthony

My first meeting with Gus Bango, almost two decades ago, couldn’t have been more bizarre. I had already been driving a cab for a five years, and certain metaphysical truths, profound iridescences woven into the tapestry of life were becoming clear to me.

The guy who sold us acid had lived in the park for six years before he started dealing, and now he had been there for almost forty which he said felt like forever and the place never went back to the way it was during the sixties. He was burrowed into a little hollow behind some trees just through the tunnel off of Haight Street on the way to the big colorful metal structure of the children’s playground, he rustled out and startled us with his voice scratch infested with nicotine Hey. You guys want some acid?

A student said he didn’t like characters who have eating disorders, as if this were a standard category of character, and since I’m always yammering on about embracing disenfranchised female experience, I told him about Anne Carson’s Simone Weil. I wish I were so weird I was mystical, that my weirdness were fetishized, famous

My body slants under the weight of flash bulbs resting against my hip. The man from table nine exits the men’s room and grabs my free arm.

“How about another celery champagne for my lady?” he asks and points to his regular table near the band. He has never seen me with a tray in my hand, only a camera. I am a camera girl, not a waitress.

It’s just three, too early for him to be home from work when I hear the front gate open and his feet on the steps, and then his key turning in our janky door. I’m too lazy and tired to get up off the couch to make sure it’s really Chris and not an armed intruder, or more likely, my mother and father coming to “rescue” me.

I sat on the edge of my seat as the streetcar clamored along the rails, my hands cupped under my legs while I gazed through the windows, awe-struck. There were men everywhere. Men like me. Real men, walking too close together for Nebraska, some holding hands, some with their arms hooked around each other, others kissing—out in the open—on the street corners. Casual. Free. Normal. I felt like a pilgrim on the bow of the Mayflower as I sailed on the F-Market down to the Castro, the unfamiliar coastline of the new world was in sight and ripe with opportunity.

Ah’ve seen, um, Ah’ve seen less killin’s. Uh, when I first moved in here, I, at least experienced two uh two murders; and uh and that was, like, the first year, four years ago; and, ever since then, eh, the Tenderloin, since…since Newsom came into power, I’ve seen a cleaner, more mellow Tenderloin than I ever saw before.”

I’m working in Chinatown today. They sell gigantic bags of oranges for 50 cents on Kearney Street. Asian oranges, too. My roommate Sue Lee grew up in Asia and has hands that intrinsically go into orange-cupping mode, like something left over from childhood. Like when you cup water, but tighter and closer to a sphere. And your thumbs are mobile so your thumbnails can cut through the orange grind.

High up, a single window comes to bright life on the dark façade of the building. An old woman leans out, smoking over the moonlit sill. Her body heavy. Her hair a back lit halo of wispy gray. Smoke rises as she brings the cigarette to her lips, as if her hair were being lifted gently underwater. Fog slides across the moon. I feel the milky texture of someone else’s skin in my mouth. How much of his day am I digesting?