Future Sarah

Marjorie had a general disposition of quiet wonder. At rest, her eyes were wide, her mouth gently ajar. Many men and women, young and old, had looked up to find Jorie staring at them, wearing her pat expression. Really, she wasn’t staring. Her eyes may have been fixed, but she didn’t see them.

Who could say what Jorie was thinking? If you sat beside her and were acquainted enough with her to speak, you might ask her, “What are you thinking about?” Jorie would blink at you, consider the question for a moment, and then, smile and tell you that she didn’t know, or she might simply say, “Nothing.”

She knew, of course, but would never say. She sat, in reverie, imagining fortresses of white stone, built out of and into a sheer cliff face. She saw rows of quartz horses marching, frozen in formation along the workbench of an aged artist. She followed alabaster stepping stones to the alabaster gate of an alabaster palace.

She sat in plastic chairs at laminated tables, on the thinly upholstered seats of a steel train on steel rails, on a leather sofa in a hardwood-floored house built of wood and wool and plaster, but she dreamed of rock, polished or roughly hewn, carved by chisel or shaped by the weather, paving the seaside or buttressing cathedrals.

I knitted a girl from wire. I wrapped her bones in masking tape. I chewed up newspaper. I mixed it with glue and made her flesh.

Her skin was pallid and gray. She had typeset freckles. On her breast, I pasted a bold, black ampersand.

Overnight, she hardened. She became brittle and flaky. In the morning, her outside layers curled and crinkled and cracked.

I dressed her in pages torn from paperbacks. I crowned her with braids of twine, but her painted eyes watched and waited. Her painted mouth never quite smiled.

She was always saying to me: And? And?

And nothing, my dear. You are paper and saliva. You are glue and tape and wire.

She sat on a shelf beside girls of clay and girls of wood. The others had no words, but the newspaper girl was always asking:

And? And? And?

(Source: inkslinging.xanga.com)

I’m starting up an informal, digital magazine. It’s going to be entirely handwritten and hand-drawn. If you’d like to contribute, this is the call for anything written or drawn with your own hands (aided by pen, pencil, brush, crayon, marker, toothpick, lipstick, etc.).

Please send (along with how you’d like to be credited or not) to:

• PO Box 635016
  San Diego, CA. 92163
  United States of America

There will be no payment for submissions or reimbursement for postage. Submissions will not be returned, but copyright will be retained by the writer or artist.

This is how I came to be:

My mother and father had no children, but my mother wished for nothing so much as she wished for a baby. My parents went to fertility clinics and specialists, but they had no luck. They went to adoption agencies and foster care programs, but my father had been jailed for drug-possession when he was twenty-three, so no one could give them a baby.

One day, after my mother had all but given up, she accidentally cut her finger on the page of a Nora Roberts novel, and the paper soaked up the little bit of blood that had touched its edge. Sucking at her paper-cut, my mother looked down at the small red flower that had blossomed on the page and wished to herself:

“Oh, how I wish I had a child with skin as white as the pages of this book and with lips as red as my own blood!”

Then, she went and wrapped a band-aid around her finger and continued reading.

A little less than nine months later, I was born, and my mother named me Bianca.

Then, she died, but you already knew that.

(Source: inkslinging.xanga.com)

I liked his details: the way the hair on his arms, where his sleeves were pushed up, was bleached by the sun; the way his fingernails were trimmed neatly but almost to the quick; the way one of his eyes was always squinted slightly more than the other; the way he took notes double spaced; the way he tapped his pen in sets of even numbers; the way one of his pant-legs always seemed to be unintentionally cuffed.

He smelled nice, I think. It may have been the girl sitting on my other side.

His penmanship was large and pointed, sharp, angular.

Everything I knew about him aside from what I could see (or hear or smell) I knew from his short stories, but those details I couldn’t be sure about. What seemed like autobiographical prose could have been entirely fabricated.

But the hair on his arms looked like flax against his tanned skin. It was nonfiction.

(Source: inkslinging.xanga.com)

I got up from the sofa with empty glass in hand and left my sisters in the family room. We were about half-way through Pride and Prejudice, the long one with Colin Firth, and my Coke needed refilling. My sisters were laughing and talking while the Bennet sisters laughed and talked. The eight voices - on screen and off - ran together into a pleasant but intimidating din. As I retreated into the dark kitchen, the sound faded slightly, and I could make out the chorus of chirping crickets through the screen door.

The night was warm - August - and the air tasted … perfect, moist, heavy, thick. Like walking by a field on a sunny day when the sprinklers are on.

I set my empty glass beside the sink and quietly opened and shut the screen door, stepping onto the lush back lawn. The lights in the family room lit the backyard through the big, multi-paned windows. I could see small clouds of gnats or probably mosquitos hovering over the grass, and I could still hear my sisters. But now: the crickets.

I stood for a while or maybe just a short moment, listening and breathing, before one of my sisters called my name, wondering where I was, and I went back inside.

(Source: inkslinging.xanga.com)