The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
CINDER-Type EllaYou might not know my interviewee here, Ella Brenner, but you certainly know her father, visionary Henry Brenner, the man who revolutionized prosthetics technology for the modern world. Nearly every civilized country on the planet used her father’s technology for overcoming the limitations of the human body. Ella started by telling me a little about the day Henry Brenner died.
Even now, Ella, barely seventeen, still stared up at her father like a doe-eyed five year old. “Dad, is it okay that you left your meeting?” “It’ll be fine, pumpkin. Your mother’s the one who enjoys those droll meetings. A bunch of leeches gorging themselves on blood, the lot of them.” The two of them stepped out of the doors of the convention center, into the blinding afternoon light, and towards the parking pad where there cars were landed. Only a small cluster of cars were flying at the moment, in what was normally a busy intersection between the spacescrapers that adjoined the building, and Ella thought it nice to see the sky uncluttered for once. She must have unwittingly made some pleasant expression, as her father noticed her, and smiled. “Step-mom, Dad. She’s not my real mother,” Ella pouted. It had been three years since her dad re-married, but Ella still hadn’t adjusted to her new matriarch, Tricia Maine, and the two daughters she brought with her. They were pleasant enough, she supposed, but they didn’t feel much like family yet. Maybe in time. Aside from her father, and maybe her auntie Faye, Ella had trouble following adults, which had gotten her in trouble in the past. “Ella, dear, I wouldn’t have missed your presentation for anything,” Ella’s father smiled at her, and she felt warm. She had designed a new articulation system for prosthetic joints, one that was safer and smarter than even her dad’s designs. A lot of investors showed up for her presentation, but it wasn’t until her father arrived that she could really be excited. As they approached her father’s car, the doors glided back, and they sat inside. The flight controls whined as they moved into Henry’s preset positions, and they lifted off from the parking pad. Even as they ascended to four thousand feet through a city thick with mile-high buildings, Ella remembered the basics, what came before. How ground transport was once the norm, and how building materials used to limit a building’s height to a couple hundred stories. This was also her father’s way; you have to know how others reached their milestones before you can launch yourself towards your own. Ella glanced at her father’s hand, from which his fingertips had split into a grid of machinery, each cordlike appendage doing its own task, and she asked, “Dad, how come I don’t have any prosthe-techs?” The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
MelanieBy Adreyo San QuailBellMagazine.com Daddy liked Melanie Wilkes. That I liked dresses of silk didn’t impress him much-- this bothered me none. I knew the Melanies. There were cigarette burns on their tits. #MelanieWilkes #SilkDresses #CigaretteBurns #Poetry #CreativeWriting
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Polyester TulleI'm a collector of many things; some of which being wedding gowns from local donation centers. the young mothers-- ribs flexed between polyester and tulle; these hairless darlings with fingers pinned in the furrow between fertile lands and hollow hips. and their young husbands with docile fingertips tracing the pathways made by isles of beading, over cork board, porous frames to be propped upwards while our jaws sink back; mouth heavy with teeth, swallowing each breath to swell the lungs with a pale elastic tension; until the blood turns metallic burrowing its way through veins like little led balls, until settling into bronchial boughs; laying, tendons taut, eyes rotating in socket like granite globes, to stare at your feet and wonder how they got so far away from the rest of your body this it to be considered as rehearsal for open casket wakes. The tongue of caustic cotton; filaments of starched felt are complaisant to absorb the gnostic gospel like daffodils to sun. That night I decided that we will name all of our children Ammonia. And I hope that they have the same copper rings that control the diameter of your pupil so that when I show them how to walk on the creases of paper houses their metal wire lashes will bat against their cold until pink and my daughters heels will be shaved flat. and after I combed back the tissue that harbor home to marooned facts I recall the layout of my childhood grocery store, after the freezers in the meat isle and what hid behind the gallons of milk choke mute; what is left is the static awe of holy tongues grappling to the letters of your name, the tip poised behind bleached enamel this, all emerging as a result of the churning of the ocean, was your autumn bit hand poised between my shoulder blades nudging me towards the nice woman with angular lips lined with a terra-cotta crayon chapped with a pigment close to ginger root asking us for our Shop-Smart Card. now, everything is humming. I hear a thump. a pigeon had broken it's neck by throwing itself against the fogged up glass in the refrigerated section. I recognize this humming as a hymn, a song of praise, as it was in the beginning, both now, and always, and to the ages of ages —my throat now sticking like two halves of grapefruit meat pressed back together- as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. #Poem #Poetry #CreativeWriting #Illustration #PolyesterAndTulle #WeddingGown
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
SunbeamsBy Nikolaus Euwer QuailBellMagazine.com A moment caught; harnessed like the Earth and its minerals. I’ve found you. I know you better now. Eyes full of light, your body leaves prints on the air. How long does a sunbeam rest in one spot? How long does a color dazzle before breaking into infinite pieces? Your presence uplifting; your breath serene. The air has called us, and now we are clean. I want to follow your compass, but the Earth is changing - perhaps we can know true North in each other. How does the cold of space rest on your skin? I will shiver with you, and we can gaze at the stars. #Poem #Poetry #Sunbeams #CreativeWriting
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
A Thousand Times A thousand times' is composed of 98 photos repeated five times, and layered with my lyrics & vocals. This film deals with the fear of losing someone to their personal sadness, of which a relationship cannot fix. The repetition of photos highlights the unending cycle of bearing others burdens, when in reality we are incapable of fulfilling a role as their savior. #Film #LisTropea #AThousandTimes #Photography #Relationships #Loss
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Helping The Fox#Illustration #Painting #TiffaniKrajci #Fox #FoxIllustration #AnimalIllustration #AnimalNarrative
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Shawa neighborhood cobbled together from my memories of a white girl who wrote short stories about living in a neighborhood full of blacks ridiculed because racism bounces off row houses, hitting its targets and knocking them over like a game of poison ball played in the wider alleyways snaking around the convention center she, the cracker, salty and brittle, so close to breaking but finding strength in her corner store pen instead #Shaw #DC #Washington #DCNeighborhoods #Racism #BlackWhite The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
"Q" is for Quail#Painting #BlacklightPainting #Quail #AnimalAlphabet #QIsForQuail
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Say YesBy Charlie Beckerman QuailBellMagazine.com Marcus’ knee is bouncing restlessly and I have to put my hand on his leg to still him. “Whoa there, Padre,” I say, giving his thigh a squeeze.
He scowls and folds his arms, doing his best impression of a grouch. “What do you think he wants?” “He” is our daughter Joanna’s long-term boyfriend, Nathan—to my knowledge, the only boyfriend she’s ever had. He called us five minutes ago, asking if he could drop by. There was a flimsy pretext—“I want to get Joanna something special for her birthday, and who better to ask than her dads?” Marcus thinks he needs money, but I find myself unable to hypothesize at all, instead brooding on the idea that we’ve reached the age when someone can reasonably expect that we’d be home in the middle of a weekday. The doorbell rings. Nathan is wearing casual Oxford button-up and a nervous smile. Marcus asks him if he’d like coffee, and then disappears into the kitchen to make a cup. We sit back down in the living room on either sides of the coffee table. He’s perched on the armchair, his hands moving nonstop. I quickly move through the general questionnaire of the father of the girlfriend—how was the drive, how’s Joanna, how’s the job—and according to him, everything’s fine. He uses this word half a dozen times in what I suppose counts as our conversation, but his attempts at being coy are being undercut by his anxious hands. Without Joanna here—this may be one of the first times I’ve been alone with Nathan, Joanna not in the next room, or upstairs, sleeping—I start to notice how good Nathan looks. Not in the way I’m supposed to—healthy, Irish face and a solid, hearty build, signs of good genetics and an ability to save my daughter from floods or alien invasions. No, I’m seeing a glimpse of chest exposed by his open shirt, his full, slightly pink lips, his gym-conditioned shoulders and biceps, and as Marcus returns to the room and Nathan stands, a firm, pert ass in a pair of Dockers I’m sure I would have noticed before. Maybe he does need money. “So,” says Marcus, sitting next to me on the couch, placing a hand on my crossed thigh. “What’s this all about?” Nathan takes a sip of his coffee and then sets it down gently, as if the cup is full of explosives and might kill us all if he treats it too roughly. “Marcus, Fred…I wanted to ask you two something, but I wasn’t sure—I just, I’ve never done this kind of thing, and this situation is, you know.” He looks at the two of us. “Different.” For a moment, I’m terrified he’s about to tell us that he’s gay. This happened once before, with our older daughter Kelly’s first real boyfriend, when she was sixteen. For months, we had been hearing rumors of earlier boys—Joanna, thirteen, would pass me information surreptitiously, which I would have to swear upon pain of death not to repeat to anyone (a swear I would make Marcus repeat before I shared it with him)—but these had been short-lived connections: a week, a month. Not wanting to pry, I would only take what information Joanna offered, so by the time an update arrived, the “relationship” was often already over. “Oh, Dad,” Joanna had said, after I’d asked once if her sister was still going out with this or that boy. “That was over three weeks ago.” It was February of her junior year when Kelly had fixed us both with a serious look across the counter in the kitchen one morning and told us, in what Marcus called her adult voice, that she was bringing her boyfriend to dinner that Friday. “We’re getting serious,” she said to us. |