Quail Bell (kwāl • bel) -n: 1. A social and artistic experiment in the imaginary, the nostalgic, and the otherworldly. 2. A fairy punk living, questioning, and creating anywhere, anyplace, anytime, online and offline. 3. A magazine and a community.
Youthful White Collar Crime
By Christopher Sloce - I was born into capitalism, whether I liked it or not, and thus, into marketing and fads, first recognizing this when Pokemon cards became huge. Only anecdotes can portray the true madness. People were taking cards to school and getting busted for them as if they were bricks of cocaine. There were books pricing the cards: I owned a copy of one of these books and grew convinced I’d never know firsthand what a student loan was. More...
Maybe shut your trap or shut your shop?
By Fay Funk - We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Signs with these words can be seen on businesses throughout the country, from antique shops to restaurants. No sandwiches or coffee for you if you are rude or dirty, or inappropriately dressed. And yet it’s so much more complicated than that. Businesses cannot refuse service to someone for being a woman, or being an African-American. They could in the past, of course, during an ugly time in American history. Boycotts and lunch-counter protests changed that, changed the law. Some beliefs though are hard to shake. In February Arizona attempted to pass a law that would allow businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people on the basis of religious rights. The bill made it much farther than any piece of legislation so More...
Put All the Racist Monuments in Museums
By Shawn Everett Jones - If you had a nutshell and you just had to put the history of America in it, the bare essence, the most basic way to describe the history of America would be: Civilization had been thriving in America for millennia, then the white man came and killed off that civilization with the help of enslaved Africans. But history is written by the victors, the invaders. So that turns the story into: A brave explorer discovered a new land where all More...
Male Spoon, Female Spoon
By Christina Tyler - "Male Spoon" and "Female Spoon" are both completely fabricated and Female Spoon’s handle is hollow-formed. Both handles are then patinated to turn the copper a satin black. The bowls of both spoons are formed and planished and white enamel is sifted over the inside of the bowl and kiln fired. After the first firing, the inside of the bowl is painted with wet black enamel in multiple layers of varying opacity, with a kiln firing between each More...
To Lilia
By Elizabeth Ballou - I. who sits four desks away from me in Italian and has a swan’s neck with collarbones like knives. I am falling in love with her, secretly, the way you might fall in love with Botticelli’sPrimavera across centuries. She has sleek skin, bronzed, full of shadows. The most beautiful skin I’ve ever seen. She is the only one in the class who speaks Italian better than me. I close my eyes to listen to her conjugate verbs in the present conditional, porterei, porteresti, porterebbe, More...
Your Ta-da Tee
By Hannah Grubbs - I would like to share with you all what I will call the "Freezer Paper Stencil Method." This is the technique I use to create my own graphic tees. It is super affordable, requires little equipment, and produces great results! Advantages: What is great about this method is that it allows for floating "islands" in your design where, in a traditional stencil, you would use "bridges." Disadvantages: After it has been painted, the stencil becomes More...
The Band of Roma
By Jessica Reidy - Papusza suffered for the song of her people, but what if we all sang at once? Today we celebrate the Roma. We celebrate the plates of food we leave for our ancestors to keep them loved and fed even in death. We cover mirrors, TV and computer screens, and bowls of water after someone dies, just long enough so that they are not trapped by their own reflection as they pass through the More...
Digital Bonding
By Zack Budryk - My senior year of high school, I was waiting for the bus home when I noticed a girl I’d never really spoken to reading Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. I knew her by sight; she was a freshman in the same specialty program I was going to graduate that spring. I was impressed by her choice of reading material, and I told her so. We chatted now and then for the rest of the year after that, but it wasn’t until the summer I graduated that we added each other on Facebook (this was before Peak Facebook) and began talking to More...
Blood, Ink, and Soul
By Courtney Barron - I write because no one in my family does. I write because this is the only way to really know me. I write because the sky makes me feel small and sometimes its silence screams at me. I write because my heart might explode with love and gratitude. I write because I'm just a teensy bit lost. I write because I might be sick like so many before me. I write to explain what I will never ever understand. I write because my favorite sound is the stormy summer More...
Self Meditation
By Jasmine Thompson - I am predominantly a portrait photographer and the process of choosing subjects and organizing time can sometimes require a break. These self portraits were taken during a time when I needed to focus on myself. It was very calming to not need to depend on anyone, because the only person I needed to take these images was me. Giving myself these blocks of time was a form of More...
With the Snowstorm
By Vladimir Ziniakov - “Her fault,” I whispered and saw my breath coming out in a milky cloud. “Her fault,” I said louder and shivered as the wind embraced me with its large snowy paws. I shook the flakes away and ran through the blizzard, without the courage to look behind. Why did I bring the knife in the first place? I had heard some rumors about her—something that I started to suspect More...
An Eldritch Platform
By Jonathan Bellot - Why do you write, a voice asks one lonely lamplit evening, and I realize the answer to that question is as one-in-multiple as a cubist painting. I write to raise a sunken figurehead from the deep, where the shipwrecks dream in bubbles; I write to learn the language of lost galleons, to understand the blueblack sadness of girls made of wood. I write so as to hold a kerosene lamp in the hallways More...
Zero's Tale
By Alex Carrigan - Wes Anderson is a director who loves to play with nostalgia and the retro in order to create memorable and great comedy films. Whether it's using elements of the French New Wave to tell a children's adventure tale (Moonrise Kingdom) or using the tropes of Jacques Cousteau to create one of Bill Murray's finest roles (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), Anderson's film have a distinct style to them that makes them stand out compared to other comedies and dramas. Everything he creates looks like it's straight out of a More...
At Fourteen
By Janet Shell Anderson - At fourteen I collected boys like little girls catch lightning bugs. Tony was “cute.” I didn’t know in four months he would be dead. Silver Spring kids, we met most often on a huge fallen log across the stream that ran into Rock Creek, and we balanced there, high above the water, smoked cigarettes, or wrapped in each other’s arms, body to body, practiced kissing and whatever else we could manage. More...
The Gertrude Chronicles
By Elizabeth Ballou - The lump in my sister’s armpit was the size of a ripe cherry before she would let herself be taken to the doctor’s. She had fought the idea like McCarthy bearing down on a suspected communist, delivering long dinner lectures about the normality of a gravelly bulge appearing in one’s underarm region. “It’s just armpit blubber. I’m fat, that’s all,” she said, plucking at fingernailfuls of skin from her thin arms and ramming her face into her chest to create a rippling series of chins. “See, look at More...
The Reader's Manifesto
By Jessica Malo - I read to escape. I read so that someone else’s pain entertains me, so that I feel small in comparison, so that my grandeur’s pride is tainted. I read to escape myself, the gray colors of the sky, the sound of the rebuking chimes carving their way through the silence I hold in my hands, fastened by the images the words are creating, fixed in front of my eyes so I see nothing else. I read because I am as afraid as much as the characters are. I read because I am cynical. I read because I see their big picture while they are immersed in the details. I read because I More...
Where Stories Come From
By Laura Steadham Smith - I write because I might be the worst person I know. I write because azaleas bloom in spring. I write to remember what it felt like to run through the woods as a kid. I write to become someone else. I write because one of my favorite sounds is pride in my Dad’s voice. I write because other people are infinitely more interesting than I am. I write because I am too many different people to keep track of. More...
The Artful Noodle Stand
By Alex Carrigan - Period dramas are a genre of film that many directors go to when they want to use the past to highlight or analyze a political or social issue that rings true to this day. This can be from using the Salem Witch Trials to make a criticism of the Red Scare (The Crucible) or using a mutiny as a piece of propaganda twenty years after the More...
Autonomy, Ruthlessness, and Sexuality
By Zack Budryk - It’s extremely important to be able to recognize a work as problematic, even if it’s something you enjoy. With that in mind, fiction featuring the femme fatale archetype tends to have a woman problem. The noir genre, which codified the trope, has a deeply misogynistic streak running through it, as does the femme fatale character itself. A woman who uses sex and deception is presented as exponentially worse More...
The Three Fairies
By Sandra Scholes - In times long gone there were three fairies—one good, one bad and one truly awful—and they all lived in a knot within an old oak tree. For at least a hundred years boredom had befallen two of them and the only way to quell it would be to play pranks on the local people. The oak they lived in was situated near a tall castle so sometimes they dreamed of leaving the cramped tree as the castle would, More...
Window
By Jessica Reidy -
Though the windows shine and shine and the lace is knotted up like the clutch of cloth at a woman's throat the windows are spidered with gloss and grime and splotches grow, and flies crawl on past More... In Your Own Skin
By Fay Funk - I see a lot of advice on how to do things alone. It’s a common question especially in the Internet age as more and more activities that once required human interaction can be done virtually. It’s usually framed as advice on how to meet new people, how to go out alone and make new More...
Invention
By Justin Meckes - rom the front porch, Pa could see the stagecoach charging toward the farmhouse. He was getting out of his rocking chair when I opened the screened door. He walked to the front steps and spat, then looked over our orchard and back in the direction of the approaching coach. The sun hovered straight over our heads. More...
Unhealed
By Gary Llama - I'm going to talk about something here that I rarely talk about. It's a disease I suffer from, and apparently it's pretty common, about 1 percent of the population, actually higher than Multiple Sclerosis, but you may have never heard of it. Why? Because people whom have it generally do not like to talk it. Partly because it's embarrasing, and partly because once you are done dealing with a flare up of it, you do not want this disease to take up any more of your time. More...
We All Live in Each Other's Shadows
By Zack Budryk - On the afternoon of August 15, 2010, a day before my grandmother’s 78th birthday, my mom, my aunt and I took her out to lunch. She’d moved into assisted living earlier in the year and was clearly hating every minute of it, so we tried to take her out whenever possible. Towards the end of lunch, we realized she was choking. More...
Awareness & Activism Make Us Stronger
By M Renee Osborn - Editor's Note: This is a trigger warning. The following piece discusses rape, sexual assault, harassment, and sexism. To be honest, I never felt so vulnerable about street harassment, sexual assault, sexism, and misogyny until I immersed myself in reading about it. Sure, I experience it every day, and I have been raped and sexually assaulted. More...
The Tree Fort
By William Holby - Ian Muldoon was an old man, as old as men can get after losing those they love. Throughout the neighborhood it was well known that you should steer clear of the old man’s house. Not because he would ever actually do something, but because of how scary and decrepit his wrinkled face was. His home was dingy and without oxygen. More...
The Windy City's Don't-Miss Alt Pub Event
By Christine Stoddard - The Chicago Zine Fest is this weekend and, though the Quail Bell Crew will not be tabling, we will be represented by River Rat Distro. They're carrying our anthologies and Issue 4 of our 'zine, so we hope to live vicariously through them. Another way to enjoy an event from afar is to preview it. Hence I took a few minutes to shoot the festival More...
Hats off to The Gay FCC
By Fay Funk - On Feb. 23, Alec Baldwin published an essay in New York Magazine entitled “I Give Up” announcing his retirement from public life. Following a violent altercation with the paparazzi, in which Baldwin called the man a “cocksucking fag” and referring to a tabloid reporter as a “toxic little queen” after a tweeting scandal involving Baldwin’s wife, Alec Baldwin faced massive amounts of criticism from the press and LGBTQ organizations. He lost a job as an MSNBC talk show host, likely because of the More...
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The Quail Bell Crew• Christine Stoddard - Editor
• Kristen Rebelo - Art Director • Mo Karnage - Associate Editor • Eleanor Fisher - Associate Editor • Laura Bramble - Assistant Art Director • Sidney Carter - Fashion Producer • Lindsey Story - Fashion Producer • Claire LeDoyen - Editorial Assistant • Katelyn Rebelo - Film & Video Assistant • Jessica Reidy - Staff Writer • Fay Funk - Staff Writer • Zack Budryk - Staff Writer • Alex Carrigan - Staff Film Reviewer • Raquel Lynne - Staff Writer • Luna Lark - Staff Writer • Sorcha Patricks - Staff Writer • Christine Skelly - Staff Illustrator • Helen Stoddard - Staff Photographer • Jasmine Thompson - Staff Photographer • Elena de Leon - Staff Photographer • Mama Quail - Staff Photographer • Sarah V. Smith - Staff Set Designer • M. Alouette - Contributor • Paisley Hibou - Contributor • Starling Root - Contributor • The Sparrow Goddess - Contributor • Belle Byrd - Contributor • Kay Feathers - Contributor • The Picture Pharmacist - Contributor • Lisa Marie Basile - Contributing Editor • Josephine Stone (R.I.P.) The Quail Bell Crew operates out of the DMV—that's the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia region to non-locals—but we receive submissions from writers and artists all over the world. Want to submit? Read our editorial mission and submission guidelines. Then contact us. 
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