VALENTINE’S DAY
Praise for VALENTINE’S DAY by Don De Grazia:
“Hold onto your hearts, folks, this eminently readable tale about the redemptive power of pre-genital love is sweeter than an ice cream soda served with two straws.”
– Don De Grazia
By Don De Grazia
“Valentine” was my stripper name. One day, after my lunchtime shift at the Hun-ee-Suckle Gentleman’s Club, I put my tassels and g-string back in my locker, got dressed, and walked to catch the bus to that shooting gallery in the abandoned building, so I could trade in the crumpled dollar bills that all those gross men had thrown at me. You know–for a fix. As I walked to the bus stop, I saw a piece of notebook paper floating in the gutter. It was all folded up into a triangle, like how kids do when they play that football game where you flick the paper “football” back and forth on the desk. It reminded me of the time I played that game in 3rd grade with a boy named Tuck. Tuck liked the crusts cut off of his peanut butter and jellies. He wouldn’t eat a PB&J if there was any trace of crust on the Wonderbread. Tuck was the only boy in class who didn’t call me “Tubs” because I was so chubby back then. It was like he was blind to all that baby fat. It was like he saw something beautiful inside me. (more…)
SPIRALING
By Noelle Aleksandra Hufnagel
When Veronica tells me she’s leaving, as she’s saying the words, I begin to imagine all the ways she might die before I get up the nerve to tell her I love her.
At first, they’re your average, run-of-the-mill death-scenarios. Appendicitis. Meningitis. Brain Aneurism. But then they become more specific, more uncommon. Black Widow Spider. Anthrax Exposure. Freak Nuclear Explosion. There are so many possibilities. I know them all by heart, every last one of them. These facts and statistics used to give me a certain sense of control, but now they’re turning against me. They’re making me feel helpless again. (more…)
WHEN SPARKS FLY; WHEN DOVES CRY
By Julia Borcherts
WEEK ONE
It’s my first night of welding school. I’m standing in a simulated shop with twenty-three men. We’re all in our twenties, all go-getters who’ve taken the initiative to learn some skills to get better jobs.
But they’re all standing in a huddle as far away from me as they can get; unified in a wordless pact to freeze me out. It’s clear that they resent my intrusion—playing with fire is a macho way to spend your Thursday night but the badass factor drops down to zero if there’s a pussy in the posse who’s trying to pretend she’s one of the guys. (more…)
ROMEO AND JULIET
By Jessie Morrison
Every year at about this time I teach Romeo and Juliet to a new crop of freshman English students, and every year, I fall in love with the play all over again. As a general rule, I’ve found that my female students are much more forgiving of Romeo’s streak for the melodramatic (this is especially true after I show them clips from Baz Luhrmann’s version of the movie, where Romeo is played by a very young, very sexy Leonardo Di Caprio). The boys, on the other (more…)
CONFESSIONS OF A FOURTH GRADE LOVE SLUT
By Darwyn Jones
I, Danny Boyer, was a fourth grade love slut.
I loved Julie Sadowski because she sat next to me. I loved Ilana Shabanov because she shared a sandwich with me once. I loved Eileen Dougharty because I saw her at the dime store and she might have waved at me. In my community of Arcadia Valley, Missouri, there were 42 girls in the fourth grade class and that year I fell in love at least 50 times. (more…)
AND THEN THERE’S ME
By Cyn Vargas
Of all the days, it was on my birthday when I realized that Steve had a crush on the pretty girl that worked at Dunkin Donuts.
“Come up to the counter. I don’t bite unless you’re into that sort of thing,” she said.
“Sometimes,” he said to her. (more…)
THE TRAINS IN TOKYO
By Amanda E. Snyder
You should know that if you ever go to Japan, you will never, ever pour your own drink. A carafe of crystal clear sake will be sitting on the table in front of you, and should your hand even flinch in its direction, should you even glance at your glass – your Japanese friend Emi, sitting next to you in the booth, or her kind-of-sort-of boyfriend Haru-san, sitting across from her, or perhaps your date, a ladies’ man with a glittering smile named Katsu-san, will immediately take the carafe (more…)
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
By Wyl Villacresto really suggest that it should have.
BIG GIRL PROBLEMS
By Emily Schultze
I’m going to make an embarrassing confession here. In seventh grade, I was majorly obsessed with a boy. Now, when I say majorly, I mean majorly, and when I say obsessed I really mean obsessed. I know being a bit dramatic about a crush at that age isn’t exactly shocking. Unless you get all puberty fueled psycho about the whole thing. (more…)
SLEEP FREEDOM
By Matt Martin
I’m six-foot-three. It’s a fact. My official medical records prove it: Matt Martin is six foot three.
I swear.
I’m just tall enough to get poked in the eye by a low-hanging tree branch while shooting a coy smile at a girl. Just tall enough to resist the urge to strangle every person who puts their seat back on an airplane and just tall enough to sometimes get uncomfortable when I have to sleep next to a girlfriend. (more…)
I WAS ALMOST A NAVY WIFE
By Virginia Baker
I was almost a Navy wife. And by almost I mean that I was dating a Navy guy for a while, say two and a half years, and the two of us would talk about our inevitable marriage over and over again, never tiring of the topic. By the time I turned nineteen, we had planned our small, backyard wedding that would take place in my quaint suburban town in New Jersey. Our friends and family would be dressed in their nicest clothing and they’d all smile and give nice speeches, toasting the two of us, the love we’d sustained, throughout (more…)
FIRSTS
By René Cousineau
May 28th 2007
Mason comes over to my mom’s house and we watch M in the basement. His hair is short, and he’s wearing a pink button-down shirt. I keep thinking that he’s way too attractive to be hanging out with me. When he walked through the door, my mom silently mouthed, “He’s cute.” (more…)
REDBIRD
By Daniel Nathan Terry
May-Nell Wilson opened the bag of Wonder Bread, bypassed the heel, took out the first slice, and then gently fed it into the side of the chrome Toast-O-Lator. She tucked a loose strand of her graying hair behind her left ear, leaned over the kitchen counter, and watched, as intently as a child, as the machine swallowed the white bread like a silver snake’s head devouring an egg. She listened to the low hum as the internal coils heated. They sounded so satisfied. (more…)
SHATTERED
By Gary Beck
When love has departed
and only bitter dreams remain,
I think of midnight meetings
as we groped like two deaflings,
eager to touch each other,
until there was no more past. (more…)
PERSONAL PRINCE CHARMING
By Gibson Culbreth
Let’s talk about love. It’s what all the cool kids are doing, right? It is February; time for love stories and big plastic heart-shaped things swinging from store rafters. But let’s really talk about it for a second. Let’s talk about what love means to you. To me love is a fucking huge concept. It’s this stretchy, luminous thing we strive for every day. Whether or not we’re apt to admit it, love or the desire to find loves tends to be one of the biggest driving forces in everything we do. My first attempt at love was with a guy named Ethan and we were together for three whole years. That’s great right? (more…)
LOVE IS A BRICK HOUSE
By Liz Grear
When I was 16 or so, my dad started suffering from seizures and strokes. In the middle of the night I would hear commotion outside my room and immediately know it was my brother calling the ambulance while my mom smoothed down my father’s hair as if it was expensive silk.
But this is an essay about love, you’re thinking. I know that. Bear with me. (more…)
IN IT TO WIN IT
By Nick Ward
Dan Deacon was playing the Logan Square Auditorium but I wasn’t feelin’ the dance floor. Instead, I was hunched over the bar, sipping on water, elbows propped on the U-shaped countertop. Concert-goers pushed past, shouting out drinks and moving on. Behind me, what seemed like hundreds of people drank, danced, and flirted to Deacon’s set, lost in his dense electro suites.
“Hey!” My friend Jeff materialized out of the crowd. “It’s crazy out there!” (more…)
PLAN B
By Mikaela Shea
“Are you coming in with me?” Nicki asks.
“Nah, I’ll wait in the car. I’ll look like an idiot in there.” Jace avoids Nicki’s gaze as he says it, tinkering with the radio.
“Whatever,” she says, slamming the door, walking across the parking lot. Between the doors, she wipes the tears that have streaked lines of mascara down her cheeks. (more…)
THAT LOVELY DARK-HAIRED GIRL
By Andrew Reilly
It usually happens in crowds, usually when I’m not even thinking about it, maybe a young woman outside of Water Tower Place shakes her head just so, just enough to make her long black hair shuffle over her shoulders, tips becoming tiny brushes painting the world around her so full of promise and possibility, head turning to reveal a soft smile curling in such a way that it’s her, I tell myself. It has to be her.
Except it’s not her. Because it’s never her. So I keep heading south on Michigan. (more…)
Into the Minds of L. Ron Hubbard and Other Idiots: A Review of “Going Clear”
By Emen William Garcia
Going Clear by Lawrence Wright is largely a history of both the Church of Scientology and the one and only L. Ron Hubbard, its eccentric and obtuse founder. It also explores the membership of some of Scientology’s most well-known followers, like Anne Archer, John Travolta, and Tom Cruise, as well as filmmaker and screenwriter Paul Haggis, who left the church in 2009. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a 2006 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower, couldn’t have been more thorough in relating how this star-studded, richer-than-God religion came into being and remains relevant in spite of its notoriously repressive history and unsurprisingly thin following (according to Wright, a recent ad claims that Scientology welcomes 4.4 million new devotees every year—and yet, as was mentioned in a recent PolicyMic article, the number of Scientologists in America is less than half that of Rastafarians in America). (more…)
