Articles – Page 138 – Philadelphia Stories

Visiting Day

One Sunday a month I go to prison, the Federal Detention Center (FDC) located a few blocks north and west of Independence Hall. The FDC is a stone fortress, built as much to keep people out as in. It imprisons over 1,000 women and men. I go to visit one of them, Marcela.

I bring Marcela’s fourteen-year-old son, Orlando, to see her. When I arrive at his foster home in Montgomery County he flashes a big grin and small bills as he hops in my car, eager to see his mom and spend money at the vending machines. Sunday morning traffic is light; we arrive in Center City quickly and park along Arch near Chinatown.

Once inside the FDC, I slide my license through a slot to the guard sitting behind inch-thick Plexiglas. He gives me a form to complete. I write my name, address and Marcela’s name and prisoner number. I check “no” to the questions asking whether I’m carrying contraband like drugs, weapons, or phones. I return the form, receive a padlock and lockup our belongings before heading to the metal detector.

Passing through security can be a challenge. Once, the guard told Orlando to change his khaki shorts because they resembled inmate attire. We grabbed a blanket from my car and wrapped it around his waist. As soon as we reentered the prison, the guard shook his head from side to side.

“How’s that different than a skirt?” I asked preemptively.

“It’s not a skirt,” he responded.

“How’s it any different?”

“If it was a skirt I wouldn’t allow it; it shows too much on the side. No slit skirts!”

We went to Rite Aid and bought pajama pants with pink teddy bears. It was the best we could do at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. Orlando didn’t care; he just wanted to see his mom.

After the metal detector, visitors enter an atrium. Pictures of President Obama, Attorney General Holder, the head of the Bureau of Prisons and FDC’s warden adorn the wall. We sign-in and the word of the day is stamped on our left hands with ink that glows purple under black light. We’re escorted to the monitoring station, flash our hands under the light and are permitted entry. Metallic clicks unlock doors of thick glass and steel. The door in front of us doesn’t open until the door behind us closes.

We enter the visitation room, which contains one hundred and sixty interlocking blue plastic chairs arranged in rows. No more than twenty-five chairs are ever filled. Consultation rooms for lawyers and their clients line the back wall. There’s also a children’s room with butterflies, birds and a castle painted on the walls. It has toys and books for imprisoned parents to read to their children.

We wait for Marcela, which can take as little as fifteen minutes or as long as forty-five. When she arrives, she smiles broadly as her eyes fill. Orlando leaps from his seat and they wrap their arms around each other. Marcela grabs his face, kisses him on the lips, on his cheeks, and on the lips again with a loud smack. She then embraces me.

“Hermano Timoteo, gracias por venir.” Brother Timothy, thank you for coming.

Marcela and Orlando sit next to each other, across from me. She runs her hand over his belly. His childhood chubbiness is thinning out over a lengthening frame. Marcela pulls the top of his shirt looking for pubescent hair. He giggles, pushing her hand away. Seeing her son only once a month, Marcela notices every change.

Mother and son hold hands, stroke each other’s faces and glow. His sun-kissed skin is darker then hers, which is no longer touched by sun. Her natural brown hair has slowly returned and pushed dyed blond further out from her scalp, marking time. She’s done twenty months and has ten to go.

I walk to the bathroom allowing Marcela and Orlando time alone. When I return Orlando heads to the vending machines. He returns with Doritos, one bag of cool ranch, one original and Cokes. Marcela offers me a little of everything. I pass on the Coke, but accept some chips.

This hospitality reminds me of my time in El Salvador. I worked in a small community much like the one Marcela left behind. Whenever I visited a family, the señora would grab a prized plastic chair and swat dust from it with a rag as a child ran to the tienda to buy a bottle of Coke.

“Está en su casa,” the señora would say. “You’re in your house.”

Marcela doesn’t use these words but the sentiment is the same. The FDC is no home, but life still moves here.

Every visit we see a girl about Orlando’s age visiting her mom, who is Marcela’s friend.

“Digale hola a tu suegra,” Marcela jokes. “Say hello to your mother-in-law.” His pudgy brown cheeks turn red. She tosses her head back laughing, happy to think about a day in the future, free.

We pass a few hours enjoying each other, talking about girls, school and court dates. Too soon for Marcela and Orlando, it’s time to go. She kisses and hugs him and blesses him twice, touching his forehead, heart, shoulder and shoulder.

I glance around as they say goodbye and see other families refusing to become strangers. One mother tearfully smiles, watching her baby boy taking unsteady steps. A father scolds his inmate daughter. Three girls in pink practice a cheer.

Marcela hugs me and thanks me for bringing her son. Then, once again, Orlando and I place our hands under the light; a lock clicks and the door slides open allowing us out. Escorted, we pass through more doors, through the atrium, and the metal detector. We collect our things, exchange the padlock for ID, and exit one last barred door out to the uncontrolled climate. We drive west on Arch past City Hall, and work our way to Walnut and the suburbs beyond.

Tim O’Connell lives in Drexel Hill, PA with his wife and two sons. He works for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in Hispanic Ministry. His writing has appeared at www.literarymama.com and Maryknoll magazine. Whenever possible he participates in the Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio.

Aixma; Or,

7) Imagine a world in which death was not a form of absence, but
heightened, excruciating presence—

“The dead are massed beneath the earth. They penetrate it, and bind it
together. They are motionless, overflowing with light: sometimes at night,
where the earth has been worn thin, you can see them—like lights in the
window of a distant house.”

(“And we are bound to them, the way branches are bound to a tree.”)

(8) Imagine the following ritual. When the dead man has been laid out for
three days, the local magician comes to his house and blows a tape-worm
in his ear. (“Months and months, I waited for someone to die, nursing the
worm, holding it in my mouth.”)

This worm would be a parasite of light: as it winds its way through the
dead man’s body, it turns his organs to undivided light, so that for five or
six days he is lit from within, like a window with the shade pulled down.
And then, gradually, he goes dark. When he is all dark, through and
through, the family buries him behind their house.

(9) Or—just after a man dies, his wife brings in a bowl of water. (“On the
day he died, I saw the old woman, dressed all in white, dipping her bowl
in the river, and pouring it out again—it was almost an hour before she
found the right water.”) The bowl is set out next to the body and
attended at all times by a mourner. When the water has all evaporated,
and the bowl is dry, the family buries it behind their house.

Toby Altman is this and that: a poet with some little publications and some little awards: the usual. Born, Chicago: 1988. Lives, Well. Mostly in Philadelphia. These poems are drawn from a longer series of prose poems, “Asides.”

Author Profile: Allison Alsup

[img_assist|nid=6585|title=Allison Alsup|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=125|height=167]New Orleans resident and budding author, Allison Alsup is this year’s winner of the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction, the annual Philadelphia Stories contest presenting the winning author with a prize of $2,000 and a plane ticket to Philadelphia where she was honored for her work at an awards dinner. Allison’s winning story, “East of the Sierra,” forms one chapter of her novel, a current work-in-progress tentatively titled No Place in This World. Allison’s other awards include the 2009 New Millennium Short Short Contest for her short story “Grass Shrimp,” as well as three stand-alone pieces from her novel that have won national contests. A fourth excerpt was selected as a finalist and will be published next summer in Salamander, a magazine for poetry, fiction, and memoirs.

Congratulations on becoming the winning author of the 2010 Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction! What are your feelings on such an accomplishment?

The Philadelphia Stories win has been particularly special because it has been so personalized — Ru Freeman taking the time to write such a gorgeous paragraph about my work, this profile, and the awards dinner where I met the magazine staff and the McGlinn family. To be an emerging writer and to have such efforts made on your behalf is overwhelming; you’re not used to it and you don’t quite know how to handle such positive emotions.

Your story "East of the Sierra" beautifully illustrates the struggles of two Chinese immigrants, as well as the relationship between a father and his son. From where did you draw your inspiration for the story?

The idea for “East of the Sierra” came from a two–sentence footnote in a history book. I wish I had some alluring explanation for why a white, educated, contemporary American woman is so fascinated by turn-of-the-century, working class Chinese migrant men. I am sure that part of my interest stems from the fact that my husband is half Chinese-American and that I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that has been significantly influenced and, in some cases, built by generations of Chinese-American men. There is also the California landscape itself and its endless inspiration. But I think what keeps me writing is that the “Bachelor Society” world of early Chinese migrants is one of conflict and tension, discrimination and identity issues, uncertainty and instability — the stuff of compelling stories. When I started, I thought, “what am I doing writing this”? I wasn’t even sure if I had the right to write about another ethnicity. But now I understand that I was drawn to such characters because, like them, my own future and sense of self felt so unsure. In many cases, they overcame impossible odds and demonstrated profound resilience. It’s what I’m hoping for.

You went from full-time teacher to full-time author – how did you make this difficult transition?

A little less than two years ago, I was laid off from my university teaching job in New Orleans. I was working part-time, having reached the tough decision that five years of teaching a full load of English was leaving me with no energy and inspiration for my own work. The decision to walk away from a possible lifetime position in favor of my fiction, which had no track record of success, was a little terrifying, but, like a lot of writers, I felt a had no choice. You have to write or everyone within hearing distance suffers. I’d spent about a year and a half financially maneuvering and slashing our budget to even get to a place where my husband and I could live on less. But the recession hit and so after just one semester of “the plan,” and just two days before Christmas, all the part-timers in my department were let go. Suddenly, I was applying for unemployment. I was stunned; there was no plan B. It wasn’t clear if there would ever be classes again. It was mid-year; I sent out resumes and received zero response. There were quite a few breakdown and tirades of the so-every-bad-decision-I-have-ever-made-has-come-to-this variety.

What finally made you sure that you had made the right decision?

In the beginning of January 2009, I realized I needed a new plan: just write. I told myself that I would allow myself two years to get any kind of bite, any publication whatsoever. If no one wanted anything by then, I would stop the bleeding and enroll in some sort of certification course. I was daunted, unsure of where I should put my energies. I think a lot of writers face these manic moments where we tell ourselves, I could do this idea, that idea, or the other thing I just thought of and, for a while, we have to date our stories before committing to a long term relationship. Finally, I told myself enough talking about it, enough finding clothes and dishes to wash, just do it. I gave myself one hour to start on an idea that I had very little knowledge but whose quiet, watery images kept playing in my mind. I referred to it as the Chinese fisherman story. That night I started a short short called “Grass Shrimp”–a conceptual overview of the novel I am now writing and from which “East of the Sierra” forms a stand alone chapter. About six months later, “Grass Shrimp” won the 2009 New Millennium Short Short Contest. When the call came in, I was filthy, having just helped my husband to install some rain gutters. I [continue to] work on a very part-time basis, teaching creative writing with an after school program that offers academic and financial support to inner-city high school students here in New Orleans. The program is called College Track and is in association with the Urban League.

What do you think the future has in store for you? What inspires you to continue to write?

As of this fall, new teaching opportunities have arisen, but I’ve declined. My husband Gavin, a historic home renovator, has managed to support me this far. We have no cash reserves, but we’re moving forward in a sort of faith and stubbornness that writing needs to occupy the center of our lives. Most writers, including myself, couldn’t do what I am doing alone. I could not do this without Gavin’s patient belief and his willingness to swing a hammer on my behalf. You need help: a little money, someone to hold you accountable, and you need supporters, like Philadelphia Stories, who say keep going.

This Silence

(1) Provisions for a journey into the unsaid: 1: anchor. 1: seal of the empire.
1: ink-blotter. 1: a california tiger lily. 1: terrence in his sister’s Sunday dress.
1: tin of salt. 1: tin of sardines. a good deal of: absence.

(2) Imagine a world where the Bible did not read, ‘Let there be light,’ but
‘Suppose there is light.’ Plowing a field, painting a water-color, sitting on the
porch to read at dusk; each would be as tender as grace and just as fleet-
ing, like talking with a relative who might die any day.

(3) I said, “Aixma if you could have any horse, what horse would you
keep?” And she said, “I don’t want nothing fancy. Just give me an old plow
horse, so I can teach my girls to sit in the saddle and handle the reins.” I
could see behind her the first streaks of morning, the sky, drunk with yester-
day’s rain. We were silent a while. And I said, “Aixma, it is time to rise and
tend our house. Today your sister will be buried.”

(4) I went down to the river, just before dawn. The new dead, their faces
painted white and their bodies still naked and clean, were laid out in rows,
the men-folk with the men, and the women with the women.

And I saw Aixma’s sister, Isa. Her hair was back behind her ears, her face
so pale and small, I thought I might swallow it in the palm of my hand. She
had a scrap of paper, an old prayer, in her pocket: “Rise now, and walk
into the light.

(5) At dawn, the waters split. And Charon rose from the breach, robed all
in music. He was as tall as my hand and just as fat, but his voice was like a
carnival barker’s: silence fled before him, beaten at every point.

(6) “I showed him the seal of the empire; all my store of salt; even the
absence I kept, just in case, in my sack. But he was not impressed. “From
here, Lady,” he said, “We journey out into the unsaid.” And she said,
“Goodbye John! Goodbye Mary! Goodbye Grace! Goodbye Canalou!
Goodbye sleep! Goodbye light! Goodbye juniper! Goodbye lightning-bug!
Goodbye meadowlark!” And when I turned to go home for breakfast she
was still counting off her goodbyes.”

Cathedrals of Homelessness

Letti gasped when she saw a realtor’s lockbox on the door to the townhouse. Would her key still work? Yes, but inside, the [img_assist|nid=6822|title=The Johnstown Flood by Rachel Dougherty © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=225|height=300]darkness reeked of carpet shampoo and fresh paint. She turned on the entryway light and rushed into the empty living room. Then she raced up the stairs. At the top, each door opened onto slices of inanimate space once inhabited by her mother, her stepson, and her husband. She clutched the banister. Unsteadily worked her way down. On the floor by the front door lay an envelope.

Dear Ms. Ferenz:

I write at the behest of my client, Mr. George W. Luciano, who wishes to inform you that he has filed for divorce. Copies of his court papers were provided this morning to your attorney of record.

Your mother is lodged at the Treetop Suites on West Pearson Street. Your dog is kenneled with its vet, Dr. Sandman. Your personal possessions have been stored with Closet-Away-From-Home on Anderson Avenue. Mr. Luciano’s son has resumed residence with his mother, in accord with the terms of custody contingent on Mr. Luciano’s marriage to you. A buyer has made a bid on Mr. Luciano’s townhouse, which remains his exclusive property pursuant to your prenuptial agreement. Please leave your key when you depart the premises.

My client does not wish to speak with you, but he has asked me to convey to the attached note.

Sincerely, Thomas Metzger, Esq.

Letti turned the page.

Letti:

You have been away sixteen of the last twenty-five weeks. I cannot take care of your mother and dog another minute. I cannot even take care of my flesh and blood son. I’m through with this charade. You can’t make me what I am not. We are terminally alienated, but you of all people will know how to survive this disaster. This time focus on yourself, not me or anyone else. George

As George intimated, Letti was trained in disaster response. She’d coped with everything from famine to chemical spills to violent conflicts. Her specialty was providing shelter for the dispossessed, and her basic recovery sequence was built on The Four D’s: denial—despair—dialogue—decision. Getting from denial to decision could take a while in places like Bangladesh or Somalia. It was tough in the U.S., too, where, after twenty-six years overseas, she had settled to focus on her own life and the lives of those dearest to her. That meant her elderly mother, Mom-mom; her third husband, George; George’s teenage son, Tony; and Norton the dog—but it progressively included the people she helped as a part-time FEMA disaster response specialist.

These past ten days she had been in southern Virginia, where a storage tank containing two million gallons of jet fuel collapsed[img_assist|nid=6823|title=Bronze Light by Brian Griffiths © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=249|height=166] and overflowed its containment pond, sluicing down local route 460. The red-hot catalytic converter of the first car that drove over this slithering liquid ignited it, causing an instant backflash through the gates of the tank farm. Another jet fuel tank and three liquid fertilizer tanks exploded, sending flames a thousand feet into the air and shattering windows four miles away. Total combustion: nine million gallons. Seven people dead, fifteen injured. Nine houses lining Rte. 460 destroyed. The groundwater that fed the wells of another thirty-one houses compromised. So she had her hands full. The only fun had been a helicopter ride she’d finagled for an overhead tour of the disaster site. Fires of that intensity tended to stay put, etching the earth with sharp-edged artistry.

Wink’s Mill was the nearest untouched town, so she stayed there in a battered old brick hotel with a sagging wooden front porch painted battleship gray. Cell phone service was vagrant, but most nights she spoke to George who said nothing about what he had in mind. “Letti,” he did say one night (without her detecting either the surrender or anger in his request), “what’s the song today? Sing me your aria.” By this he was inviting her to tell him about the procession of dislodged supplicants who, in their destitution, always reminded her of defeated churchgoers in the cathedrals of homelessness that encircle the globe, no roofs over head, no floors under foot, no possessions or effects. She’d sit there in her office trailer feeling humbled and enriched by the way their eyes scribbled distress messages in the air. Hymns, actually, not arias. Things she’d remember at night: the red creases around a man’s eyes, the hush of children who’d be better off playing outside but wouldn’t leave their mother’s presence, the impact of telling someone it would be three weeks until any modular units could make it from Arkansas when one day was eternity and two days hell.

Letti was gifted at this, yet guilt-ridden about it. She could not say no to a FEMA call just to keep a lunch date with George, or take Mom-mom to the mall, or walk Norton. She would pack the car and drive however long it took to meet the trailer in the dangerous regions of destitute America where the poor always seemed to be the ones who were burned, poisoned, and tornadoed. This was better and worse than the Philippines or Guatemala. There, the wailing went on for days, but she was insulated by strangeness from the depths of agony. Here, she was affected so deeply by the misery of people with whom she really could communicate that she had to shut down their agony fast. She’d look a victim in the eye and say firmly, “Now talk to me. I’m sitting here to help you decide what to do, and remember this is today, not yesterday. Talk to me about today and decide what you want to do.”

Saying things like that took it out of her. She could barely make it to bed at the end of the day, so she thanked George for asking but sang him no songs. “I’ll tell you when I get back,” she promised and remained conscious for just a few seconds longer in the high-ceilinged hotel room with its tall casement windows, drafts, and moody mixed glow of street lamps and the Pizza Hut across the way where she’d eaten dinner. Fifty-seven years old, short, thin, blonde, rigid as a clothing store manikin. Out cold, until the alarm at six and another coffee-fueled day in her chilly trailer, where what she thought about her own displacement didn’t matter. It was only temporary.

First, she went to Dr. Sandman’s to try to retrieve Norton, but Dr. Sandman’s strip mall clinic was closed. Then she drove to Treetop Suites.

“Were you surprised?” Mom-mom asked, meaning about George having the townhouse repainted and the carpets shampooed. She was wearing her blue cardigan, the one that felt so good because of the way it warmed her arms. “He didn’t want me to tell you that’s why he was clearing us all out.”

Awash in humiliation, Letti was unable to come out with it. Definitely surprised, she answered.

“That George is always doing things,” Mom-mom said.

“That George,” Letti agreed. She finished mixing a vodka and Coke from bottles she found in the courtesy refrigerator. “But his cell phone isn’t working, and the note only said you’d be here. Where’s he staying?”

“The Hilton. Better workout room, he says.”

“With Tony?”

“Tony’s with his mama. I think they’re getting along better.”

“Whoa,” Letti moaned, easing herself onto the little sofa by the window and pulling up her legs.

Mom-mom looked at her through her almost cosmic convex lenses. She asked how the disaster had gone. Letti said it was pretty hard at first. The tank field was a chronic safety violator that neither paid its fines nor corrected its flaws. The jet fuel tank was one of the few that had been updated—the 1936 rivets were switched to welds in 2003—but that led to the structural flaw that caused its collapse.

“The day you left I saw some coverage on the news,” Mom-mom said. “Poor Letti, I thought, she has her hands full this time.”

If by force of will or experience with marital failure, Letti were able to leap out of the chasm of denial and despair into which she had plummeted, that would get her more quickly to dialogue and decision, but there was Mom-mom, eighty-eight years old, a plucked-chicken of a woman with multiple miseries who didn’t know—or did she?—that Letti had done it again.

Even though Letti did not believe in God and equated faith in providence with supine passivity, she had encouraged her first husband to prepare for the ministry by becoming a missionary. “This is something you could do wherever I go,” she had coaxed him, wanting so badly to make things work. The fact is she was crazy about Gerald. She loved his slow, murky, uncertain lovemaking and credulous faith in what he called “the theater of the divine.” But fifteen months turned out to be the romantic limit to Letti and Gerald’s reckless self-endangerment. The memory still broke Letti’s heart: two twenty-somethings at war with each other in a rotting house in Léopoldville, Congo, in 1968. Prayer meetings in the huge living room from which Letti would escape by playing Big Pink very loud upstairs…no food, but plenty of gin, dope, tar-thick coffee, and Mom-mom’s Famous Boiled Water…and Gerald determined to cure himself of dengue fever by reading Psalms. When he did recover, he returned to the U.S., where he sued her successfully for his share of common property, including her small inheritance from her father. He had died at fifty-one in Lackawanna, New York, from which Letti and Mom-mom were permanent refugees. Letti called it Slagville in honor of the Bethlehem Steel plant’s horrific waste. She was haunted by childhood memories of mountains of snow growing blacker and blacker outside her bedroom window as the winter progressed. Lawns, fields, rooftops, and even woodlands were encased in metallic sheets of frozen soot. Who wouldn’t leave and never go back?

The second marriage, nine years later, was to a fellow humanitarian relief specialist, Franklin. Shouldn’t that have worked, especially since Letti’s guilt about her first marriage led her to urge Franklin to put himself first and climb the bureaucratic ladder, even if this meant that he took USAID assignments in Washington when she went overseas? Yes, Letti loved Franklin’s steadiness and practical idealism and ex-Marine physique, but she had acquired habits of personal accommodation during her nine years as a divorcee, and she clung to them during their separations. Getting wind of this, Franklin countered with accommodations his own. Divorce again. Another decade alone before the homing instinct fooled yet again into thinking if she tried one last time, she’d finally get it right. She’d do it for Mom-mom. She’d do it for her old age. She’d do it because they couldn’t spend another year in the waste regions of their wanderings, always talking about where next, always uneasy about their lives among strangers, kind or indifferent, interesting or boring.

But how could she talk with Mom-mom and bypass George’s reproach: I cannot take care of your mother and dog another minute? It wasn’t Mom-mom’s fault. Letti knew this; she was the one who put George through the Chinese water torture of knowing the exact temperature Mom-mom liked her coffee…of Mom-mom’s scandalized attitude toward spots on drinking glasses…of Mom-mom’s excruciating pacewhile walking: three steps, stop, look around; three steps, stop, look around. Perhaps if George had not had a teenager on his hands. She thought of Tony—he had a face like a chickadee, black hair and white cheeks—storing food in his room under the bed and in drawers and on the windowsill so he wouldn’t be exposed to conversation when making continual trips to the kitchen. And she thought of how she encouraged George to retire from the IMF, swallow the requirement that he give his first wife half his pension, and accept a new job, at sixty-one, as advisor to the Islamic Alternative Bank, guiding a mismatch of billionaire Bedouin backers and hotshot young Arab financiers as they accommodated themselves to the restrictions and prejudices they encountered trying to do business in the U.S.

“You were meant to do this: think of your Arabic. Think of all your experience in the Middle East and Washington. And I’ll be right here, no more work overseas,” she promised. “We’ll scrimp until we build up our finances. Mom-mom and I take up zero room. The townhouse will be fine for now.”

George accepted her arguments with almost fathomless desire and credulity. He wanted his son back and needed a new wife to persuade the court. So he said he was willing to put up with Mom-mom if Letti put up with Tony. Besides, he adored Letti, her spunk, her resourcefulness, her worldliness. Was this love? Letti thought it might be. Sitting with him over a glass of wine before dinner in a nice restaurant, she noticed that he no longer habitually wrung his large hands together as he talked, his big thumbs kneading his meaty palms and hairy knuckles. She also noticed that he would watch her every step of the way back from the ladies’ room. Would not start the car until she had her seatbelt fastened.

But the exciting, unpredictable, exhausting separations piled up, making perfect sense to Letti, none to George. She had long lived in a world that always collapsed; he had had the world collapse on him once—his first marriage—and didn’t want it happening again. They had spats, loathsome spats. She couldn’t bear his ornate, self-hating progression from complaining to moaning to giving up.

“We goofed,” he’d say, enjoying the way that word, “goofed,” belittled their attempt at playing house again in late middle age. “We’re each entitled to the air we breathe, but breathing the same air together is asphyxiating us. I’m thinking this can’t last, Letti. I don’t know how to be married to you. You don’t want to be married to me. Off you go all the time, saving the world. It used to be Suriname, now it’s Appalachia. God knows why. What are you running from? What is out there?”

“People in pain are out there.”

“We’re not in pain?”

“They have no homes!”

“You call this a home? You don’t want a home. Why are you dragging me through this?”

“So divorce me,” she challenged him at last. Yep, she had said it. The tremendous affection she felt for the man and fear of being cast back out on the streets of the world wasn’t enough to keep her mouth shut. And bingo, she got her wish.

Letti fixed another vodka and Coke, pouring the silvery Smirnoff first to make sure there was room to get it all into the plastic glass before adding the gelatinous Coca-Cola. She knew she wouldn’t be able to turn George around, unsell the townhouse, and get Tony back as easily as she would get Norton from Dr. Sandman. She was a schemer, but not that good a schemer. And to do what? Hole up in suburban Washington and die?

Mom-mom sat there quietly with her thin, speckled hands folded in her lap. Letti wondered if you could call this,though silent, a dialogue—like a silent auction or a silent movie—about her denial and despair. She asked herself, too, if that was the essence of her place in the world, a glimmering vault in which she flew soundlessly, never finding a broken window through which to escape

“Well, dear,” Mom-mom said at last. “What are you going to do?”

“He may have been the best of the three,” Letti said.

“I don’t know. I really liked the Preacher.”

“But Gerald never had a son to fight for, and he never took on anything like that crazy Islamic bank,” Letti said. “I think George deserves a lot of credit.”

“I ought to go live in a nursing home,” Mom-mom said.

“You know I would never allow that.”

“Then I suppose you deserve some credit.”

Letti made a dismissive sound, “Pah.”

The women sat a while, ruminating. There couldn’t be an explosion because that would be too hard on Mom-mom. The sadness did leak out, though, and pool around their feet, and under the sofa, and in the corners of the room. Back to disorientation, Letti thought. Time and again she’d counseled people to let it go; it was over: get to dialogue, make a decision, move on. And now once again it was her turn, but she did not want to listen to her own advice.

Robert Earle was born in Norristown, PA and educated at The Hill School and Princeton. His short stories have been published in dozens of literary magazines across the U.S. His first novel, The Way Home (DayBue, 2004), is set in Raponikon, PA (a fictionalized Norristown). He is also the author of a memoir of a year as a diplomat in Iraq, Nights in the Pink Motel (Naval Institute Press, 2008).

From the Editors

Welcome to our second annual awards issue, featuring our 2010 Marguerite McGlinn National Prize for Fiction winning story from Allison Alsup of New Orleans. We are thrilled to report that we will continue this prize in 2011, thanks to the generous support of the McGlinn family and the Dry Family Foundation.

As we look forward to the new year, we also reflect on the many great things we’ve been able to accomplish in our six years. Thanks to member support, we have been able to keep the magazine in print and free for all readers. We have been able to offer workshops and readings and professional development events. And, we’ve launched a books division to provide yet another voice for emerging writers. We’ve also established an executive board to create strategic plans to ensure the Philadelphia Stories continues long into the future.

We already have a few exciting plans for 2011 in the works. First, there’s our new Writers and Readers Series that we will host in conjunction with the Community College of Philadelphia; this will appear on CCPTV Comcast 53and Fios 21. Second, we are putting out a call for a new committee to plan a children’s version of Philadelphia Stories, tentatively titled “PS Junior.” If you are interested in more information about this project, please email Jamie@PhiladelphiaStories.org

Thanks to all who have supported the Philadelphia Stories community. Have a wonderful 2011!

Sincerely,

Carla Spataro and Christine Weiser
Publishers

Specialists

for Steve Powers

This fish shop is under your house. At your bedroom level, the Market local lines a map up its subordinate corridor. We have our firsts over take-out flounder on the platform; I saw you from the traffic island. We both live even with the train, on fourth floors a block apart, our initial degree of specialization.

From my cave, I drop down for a shape up, a shave, hot towel or towers of flats of white fish fried, fishermen cry if lemon eyed, sharks don’t sleep and I don’t either, looking up to where you’re flush with the elevated at your crab meat peak, packing pucks for a stepper who can smell it down the hill.

My kitchen’s got a clean reach on the island of the line. Watching for the break in the train waves, your touch on the doors and you’re out into the air caked in my lamb patties that I’m packing into balls of calm.

Camped in my coffee colossus, I’m baiting my kefta breath for the smile from the platform you’ll give me if you cut that neck scentways — the grin that spills squint eye in to deliver my milk-to-blame straight to my door.

There’ve been enough bees in my knee-deep honey to bust the sting in my step. If I’m slung into my sheets as a singular shepherd of share, if I’m digging in dulces to foot what logs on the clock before our talk time, then fry me a flat to cut the shake of the sugar down to level.

You’ve held the huck of my helipad long enough to get my chopper coptered, papered my filets and planed them into grade-A gliders on the meatstream — a sure flight in the air you can see to smell in — if I’m folded into hovercraft, I’ll land by for standing: king of the August model of the top step before your 4R, red to my temples to ring for you — open the door: holler! holler, and hear my heart beat.

Davy Preston Knittle is a senior at Wesleyan University. His work has appeared in Natural Bridge, The Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, and the Mad Poets Review. He was raised in Philadelphia.

Local Author Profile: Kim Brittingham

[img_assist|nid=6820|title=Kim Brittingham|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=200|height=191]Kim Brittingham’s Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting and Live Large is due from Random House this coming spring. A native Philadelphian, Kim recently took some time to talk with us about her work, our culture’s obsession with body image, and the future of the written word.

Let’s start with your book. Read My Hips is due in the spring from Random House. Can you tell us what it’s about and what inspired you to write it?

Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting and Live Large is a collection of stories about my body image and how it’s changed throughout my life. Body image is a complex, multi-layered issue and it touches nearly every American female alive today. I don’t think there’s a woman anywhere in the Western world who won’t identify with Read My Hips. It’s about food, dieting, self-esteem, the influence of the media and pop culture, the longing for acceptance, the desire to be desired; Read My Hips covers a lot of territory. Strangely enough, I didn’t set out to write a book on this subject. When I met my agent, I’d written a completely different memoir and that’s what I expected to sell. But I had also published some body image-related essays online–on iVillage, for example—and those pieces always drew a huge reader response. Most of the attention was positive and usually in the vein of, “Oh my god, it’s like you’re writing about my life.” My agent suggested I narrow the focus of my book to body image, and that’s how Read My Hips came about.

Why do you think our culture is so obsessed with thinness? Is it all because of the media, or is there something else at work?

I’m not sure why we’re obsessed with thinness. There are several theories out there. I think a large part of it has to do with corporate interests wanting the biggest possible share of our paycheck. It’s funny. We complain about having to pay so much in taxes, but we let corporations con us out of the biggest portion of our earnings. As long as people with something to sell can keep us convinced that we can’t be happy without their product, they’ll continue to get richer and we’ll continue throwing money after the dream they’ve painted for us. The quest for weight loss is pitched to us as this holy thing, this pursuit more virtuous than any other and, if you pay attention, you’ll find the message everywhere. We’re seduced into obsessing about the size and shape of our bodies; we’re even frightened into it, so we can be led like a bunch of sheep. It’s been working for decades now.

How did you come to accept and love your own shape? Do you have any advice for people who may be struggling with who they are as opposed to what they’re “supposed” to look like?

For me, self-acceptance didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual process. It started with some tentative “dares”, almost. At a time when I felt my life couldn’t begin until I was thin “enough,” I dared myself to imagine living life as a fat girl and still having a thrilling, satisfying life. I used to think that wasn’t possible. I thought I had to whittle and sculpt my body into some fantasy goddess shape before I could begin living in the role of the goddess. Instead, I let myself imagine living life as a goddess who also just happened to be fat. Over time, as I lost more and more inhibitions about my body, I felt less self-conscious. I was left only with embarrassment about individual body parts, but eventually I shed those too. The last to go was my shame over my legs. This past summer was the first time in years I romped around in short dresses and didn’t care what anybody else thought. It was liberating! It’s hard to give advice about this because the process is so individual, but I will say this: whatever you think you’ll achieve by changing your shape, imagine yourself having it without having to alter your body to get it. In other words, if you’re thinking, “Oh, if only I were thin, I’d pursue my dream of acting on the stage,” then try on a daydream of yourself acting in your current body. Imagine yourself being enthralled by it; imagine being successful at it. If you think changing your shape will bring you love, imagine finding love in the body you’ve got. The fact is, your dreams are entirely possible. The size and shape of your body doesn’t need to be part of the equation. Daring to imagine is a powerful first stepand it’s entirely safe. It happens in the privacy of your mind, so you can explore freely, go wherever you want to go, without limits.

You grew up in Northeast Philadelphia. Did that have an effect on you as a writer? Is there anything you’d describe as a Philadelphia sensibility that creeps up in your work?

I don’t see Philadelphia creeping up in my work, but it does creep up in my accent occasionally. Like when I ask for a glass of “wooder.”

Your presence on the internet is quite strong. How did your writing for the web contribute to writing and eventually publishing Read My Hips?

Writing for the web made all the difference in getting Read My Hips published. Without the internet, I don’t know what kind of writer I’d be today. I might still be hoarding spiral notebooks filled with Duran Duran fan fiction in my filing cabinet. My first essay was published by Fresh Yarn, which only exists online. That encouraged me to keep writing. I was further encouraged by complete strangers who found my essays and blogs and sent the world’s most supportive e-mails. My agent found my work on the internet and reached out to represent me. And because readers’ comments were visible in a lot of cases, it enabled my agent to see what subject matter I wrote about most affectingly. It all paved the way to selling Read My Hips to Random House.

Where do you see the web fitting into the larger culture of reading and writing—or within the larger context of the publishing industry? Do you see writing for the web as a good place for burgeoning writers to begin?

The web is a great place for writers. These days, you don’t have to fight so hard to get accepted into journals or sell your work to magazines. You can start your own blog; network with other writers; access more information than you’ll ever be able to digest in a lifetime – all for free. You don’t even need to publish a book to say what you want to say. You just write it and put it out there. I think the web has brought a lot of “closet writers” out into the open, and it’s a good thing. Communication is enriching and healthy. I’m not sure how reading will continue to change because of the internet; I just know that it will. My friends are all starting to buy Kindles now and there’s no denying they allow for amazing portability of reading material. I’m not one to stand in the way of progress and I wouldn’t try – but I have to admit, I love books. I’m already feeling nostalgic about them. I love the way they feel in my hands, I love turning the pages with my fingers, I love the smell of the ink and paper. But I do believe they’re going the way of the vinyl album. I still own some of those, too.

Do you have any plans for a follow-up to Read My Hips?

Right now, I’m developing a one-woman stage show based on Read My Hips, so stay tuned for that. I’m also in the process of writing the proposal for book number two, which has nothing to do with bodies; nevertheless, the subject matter is something almost everyone can relate to. Stay tuned for that, too!Marc Schuster is the editor of Small Press Reviews and the Associate Fiction Editor of Philadelphia Stories. His novel, The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl, was published by PS Books in 2009, and a new edition is forthcoming from The Permanent Press.

Writer as Creator, Not Conduit

[img_assist|nid=841|title=Aimee Labrie|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=104|height=121]In the fiction workshops I lead for Philadelphia Stories, I have one rule for the writer when we’re going over his/her story; you can’t speak during your critique. This way, we avoid the writer defending or explaining himself. After the critique is finished, the writer can ask questions. Often though, he or she will blurt out something like, “But that’s how it really happened!”

It’s an important point to make. Aspiring and published writers alike are advised to write what we know. And then we do, and we’re told by our colleagues that our scene, that thing that really happened with the rodeo clown and a busload of Girl Scouts, isn’t believable or doesn’t quite work. How can the story be true and yet come across as fake?

One of the first things I remind them is that they are writing fiction, not nonfiction, where readers assume you are relating real life events. As a writer of fiction, you are not reporting the world through the lens of an essayist or a journalist; you are creating a world where you, the writer, are responsible for making all of the choices on the page—from the title, to the first sentence, to the climactic scene, to the inevitable denouement. You decide if your story occurs on the plains of Kansas or in the Boston suburbs. If you are describing the lives of three virtual strangers or a family of twelve. If the story ends with a suicide on train tracks or a quiet and devastating betrayal between longtime partners.

Because you are in charge of shaping this story and its various parts, you may have to travel down unexplored pathways, to write scenes and characters you have not encountered in your real life. The process can be hard, but it also can be liberating. No longer does the narrative have to churn to the unhappy ending you remember. You are not just relating a tale; you are the god of it. In your fictionalized version, your heroine can come up with just the right stinging retort you only thought of a decade after the fact. You are allowed to write the world not only as you experienced it, but also as you want it to be. Above all, write your story with an eye toward how you can bring all of the elements together (whether remembered or invented) in an arresting and authentic way.

In her essay, “The Lousy Rider,” from Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Writing, Elizabeth Gilbert describes struggling with a story that began as an amalgamation of two things from real life—her husband’s desire as a kid to learn magic, and a tale she heard about a man who believed the neighbor had stolen his cat. She took the ideas and wove them together; writing about a magician who is convinced that his cat has been snatched by the people next door. Both parts of the story were based on real life, but Gilbert couldn’t find a way to merge these two interesting concepts together. Something wasn’t ringing true—she couldn’t exactly explain why the magician was so fixated with finding this cat. And, then, she had one of those “ah-ha” moments we all hope for as writers. The magician wasn’t obsessed with a cat—it was a rabbit. She writes, “Of course it was a rabbit! It had to be a rabbit. What animal would be most treasured by a family of magicians? What is the traditional pet of magic? Not a stupid cat, but a rabbit.” After that twist of poetic license, the rest of the story fell into place.

Your first few drafts, it’s fine to write what comes easiest or is most familiar. But as you move through the revision process, you’ve got to test each part of the story as you would a fault line. It’s not enough to decide that this dialogue exchange or that character description is true to your exact experience. You have to ask yourself if it is the best decision, because, as a fiction writer, you have choices about where a story goes or doesn’t go. Your job is to make them.

Aimee LaBrie teaches a fiction workshop for Philadelphia Stories. She received her MA in writing from DePaul University in 2000 and her MFA in fiction Penn State in 2003. Her collection of short stories, Wonderful Girl, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction in 2007 and was published by the University of North Texas Press. Her short story, "Ducklings" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Pleiades.

The Count of Three

[img_assist|nid=6815|title=Self Portrait, Health by Janice Hayes-Cha © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=259]On Saturdays, we folded paper boats. With his sleeves rolled, he stood beside the pond creasing triangles, corner to corner, his reflection rippling in the water. He sailed his boat, forced breaths propelling it, keeping it afloat. He counted the seconds before it sank, dissolving to pulp.

On Sunday mornings he made egg sandwiches. In his old blue robe, he stood at the stove, the sizzle of butter in a frying pan. He cracked open eggshells on the rim of a bowl, never breaking the yolk. While cheese melted on a Kaiser, he sliced the pork roll thin, hot grease popping in a second pan.

After breakfast, he took us to the park, my sister and me. In cut-off jeans, he stood behind the swings pushing us both at once. Higher, we howled. He snuck drags, and exhaled smoke between pushes. We pumped our feet, pointing soles toward the sky, leaning back, mouths wide open, catching the wind. The count of three: our two bodies, all angles and limbs, arcing through the air.

Two

I dug tunnels and moved plastic molded army men around in piles of dirt. I conquered fortresses, soldiers surrendering in the late afternoon sun. On my bicycle, I jumped over ditches as deep as canyons and taught myself to ride with no hands. I fell chin first into a gravel pit. Don’t you cry, he said, so I taught myself to hold back tears.

I learned to throw a ball, to catch whatever came at me, to bat left-handed better than the boys. I learned how to spit, until my mother scolded me. I stockpiled crabapples in the yard and hurled them across the street at the neighbor’s fort, hitting it every time. Don’t get caught, he said, so I learned how to disappear.

I launched rockets and climbed the tallest trees. I built a slingshot and took aim at rabbits and squirrels when they got close. I caught fireflies and plucked the light organs from their bodies, smearing the bioluminescence on my face like war paint. From the window of the house on Bridge Street, he saw me.

Three

On the day my father came home from Nazareth Hospital, at his request, I took a pair of scissors to his hair. In one hand, I held the fine-toothed comb lifting the strands of hair away from his scalp while with the other hand I opened the scissors, closing them like metal jaws, one sliding past the other, tufts of white falling onto his shoulders and the bed sheets, some drifting down to settle on my shoes.

In this same way, I trimmed the long wiry hairs of his eyebrows then reached carefully into the moist caverns of his nostrils with the tips of the twin blades. With each snip, he looked to me for comfort, searching with boyish eyes for a sign that it was almost over.

With my fingers still wrapped around the handles, I scissored the blades together, slicing them through the air, one half-grazing the other, a single silver screw allowing the simultaneous gesture of the object’s purpose and my intent.

At fifty-one, a massive stroke had left my father a hemiplegic. One arm, one leg, frozen at his side, no longer could he command either to move, to support his weight, to take him from one place to another. To bend. To wave. To hug. To hold on.

I was twenty-one when it happened. I spent my days conferring with doctors, my sleepless nights with bottomless cups of coffee and music blaring from headphones covering my ears. Springsteen screamed anthems of growing up and getting out, and here I was faced with knowing I needed to stay, to care, to piece together some kind of future for myself in Philadelphia, my father’s city, his family tracing its roots along the narrow, shadowy streets for more than a century.

When I finished cutting my dad’s hair, I began dressing him, starting first with a long white pair of socks. I rolled them in my hands then unrolled them onto his feet, the left foot first.

“Aaahhh,” he screamed, the sound dragging out longer than it should, a high-pitched, impulsive wail. “You’re hurting my toes.”

They curled under like commas, rigid and deformed, the nails brittle and yellow.

I slid the left leg first into the pair of pants, then followed with the right. As he lay there, wordless and still, I pulled the zipper up, aware of the two rows of teeth dovetailing together. My father stared upward, his body a horizontal plane, now parallel to floor and ceiling.

I pulled his shirt over his head and worked to maneuver his left arm into the sleeve. Misshapen and stiff, it clung tightly to his chest. New at this, I did not know the order in which I was supposed to be dressing him. I did not want to be dressing him at all. And I sensed my dad’s frustration. With his right hand, he clutched the forearm of his left, lifting it then letting it fall hard against his body.

***

The phone call came in the middle of the afternoon. My father sounded child-like, pleading for help, trying, though, not to alarm me. I urged him to call 911, offered to call for him.

“Please,” he begged. “Just come over and help me up. I’ll be fine once you get me back in bed.”

Every single day, I worried that he might fall. Physical therapists had helped him to walk again, but he was far from steady. He clutched a hemi-cane in his right hand, his left arm tightly fastened in a sling against his body. He stepped with the right leg and commanded the left to follow, a sliding motion more than an actual step. He lived at home with my mother, who now needed to work full-time. My dad’s days were spent alone, the television his constant companion. I stopped by frequently, drove him to physical therapy appointments, but he quickly became cut-off from the world outside his little house.

I drove fast, arriving to find him on the floor beside his bed, his left leg pinned between the bed and the wheelchair. I moved the wheelchair out of the way. He wanted me to lift him, to put him back in bed so we could simply pretend he had not fallen.

“Hook your arms under mine,” he pleaded. “I’ll help you by pivoting my body toward the bed.”

But his leg was twisted in a way that made me know I should not move him. And even if his leg had not been twisted, there was no way I could lift my father alone. He was six-feet tall and outweighed me by at least eighty pounds. I dialed
911.

At first, he seemed angry with me. I apologized more than once, then folded myself onto the floor beside him. I lay down facing him, eye to eye. As I extended my hand toward his, he reached out and squeezed my fingers. He did not let go.

“Remember that 1980 Phillies team, Dad? Think you can name all the players?”

I turned it into a challenge.

“Mike Schmidt,” he said first. “Greg Luzinski. Tug McGraw.” He went on to name the entire line-up. The paramedics arrived just as he finished the list.

I stood out of the way as the two men in uniforms hoisted my father onto a gurney, their strong backs facing me. Sweat trickled down my dad’s temples. “Don’t drop me,” he said, more than once, his voice quivering. With his right hand, he held on tightly to one man’s arm, his fingers clenched, sinking into fabric and flesh. Both men reassured him, their kind words and respect for my father filling my eyes with tears.

I climbed up into the ambulance and listened to the wail of the siren as we sped through intersections along Cottman Avenue, watching as the two men began assessing their patient—blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation. “Caucasian male, mid-fifties,” one announced into the radio transmitter. After the final stretch on the Boulevard, we arrived at Nazareth. Once again.

From off to the side where I sat, I saw him. I saw my father folding paper boats, cooking breakfast in his blue robe, pushing my sister and me on the swings. When the ambulance stopped, the two men lifted the gurney out onto the sidewalk. The count of three: his body, a single motionless plane, arcing through the air.

Kristina Moriconi is working toward an MFA degree at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. Her work has appeared most recently in The Shine Journal, apt, Verbsap, and Opium. Her connection to Philadelphia became increasingly meaningful after her father’s death just before the Phillies won the World Series in 2008. She has begun an extensive research project tracing his family history and has decided to stay here even longer.