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PaperfingerDecember 2013 The Fur Issue

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PaperfingerDecember 2013 The Fur Issue

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FEATURE

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The irritating buzzing of my alarm interupts my dream and I suddenly have to remove myself from

my warm, cozy bed and step onto the frigid hardwood floor to stop the incessent buzz. Goosebumps fill my skin and I shiver, why can’t my mom turn the heat to a reasonable number? It’s not my fault she thinks 60 degrees is hot.

I turn my sleepy eyes and there it is, my bag, all ready to go with my clothes folded neatly on top. Getting up early is terrible enough and this way I can get an extra ten minutes of sleep and I don’t have to think much, I just follow the same steps I take every morning.

After getting changed I walk out of my room, good, the lights are already on downstairs.

I find my mother sitting at the dinner table on her laptop, she looks chipper, as she does every morning. I don’t know how she does that at 5:25 but she always does. “You ready?” she asks, I nod. “Okay, lets go.”

We get in the car, my frosty breathe lingers in front of me, mocking me. I look out the window at the tall spooky, leafless trees, the water below us when we cross the bridge, the few cars on the road, and I look at my mom who is happily singing along to the radio. We pull up to school.

“Katie will give me a ride home after practice tonight.” I say.

“Okay, have a great day!”

“You too” I tell her as I step out of the car with all the other kids

hurrying to get inside, out of the cold. I walk into the locker room and strip down to the bathing suit I smartly wore under my sweats, grab my cap and goggles and head to the pool.

There is a trail of other, sleepy girls, no talking like in the afternoon, when our coach can barely get two words in, no, in the morning we are quiet.

“500 warm-up girls!” he bellows. “Lets go!” He yells. Slowly we put on our caps and goggles and hop in the water one by one, our sick ritual. Our frigid bodies enter the warm water and we begin our 20 lap warm up.

The water warms us, the movement of our arms and legs, slow at first, awakens our bodies and minds and we get a little bit faster.

Jessica Frick

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Perhaps it is this past that draws me to Amelia Alcock-White’s artwork. I love the water, I always have. I have no idea what kept me going to 11 swim practices a week, I don’t know why I didn’t quit. Although its been years since I swam in high school I still think about it often. Amelia’s work, reminds me of my beloved water.

Her work has an incredible quality that is hard to describe. It is realistic while also being abstract. She uses the water to abstract the way that people, animals and objects look. Her ability to paint the water is indescribably impeccable.

Amelia is from Vancouver Island and studied art at Vancouver Island University and then went on to Emily Carr Institute and later pursued painting full-time. Amelia has received awards for her work and has held exhibitions in the United States and Canada from vancouver and Toronto to New York and Los Angelos. From looking at her work it is not hard to see why.

“Art’s mission is beyond being decorative or merely pleasing; it has potential to awaken, arouse; provoke thought and discussion. My paintings are inspired by life’s harmonies and contradictions.” To me, this is something all true artists have been trying to say for centuries and she is able to say it so clearly and concisely, Amelia is so much more than a painter, she is a is a storyteller and a gifted communicator. She believes an artist is a conversationalist and that art is the medium for which an artist expresses their emotions.

“In my paintings I attempt to transcend the limitations of self and the illusions of the three-dimensional world in order to depict a universal, archetypal, objective, reality. In short, is is the magic of reducing feelings to a two-dimensional surface of color, shape and light.” The way she describes her meathods is fascinating. When

she makes somethig she has a very clear motive to why she does what she does.

Of everything Amelia says to describe herself I have to say I was most struck by her description of what fascinates her, “I’m fascinated with things that cannot be understood but perhaps only appreciated.” This is something that is obvious yet that I had never considered before. This is the root of truly good, thought provoking art. It is about pointing out subtlties in life that most wouldn’t notice.

Amelia feels that her art is personal and depicts private feelings but that “It seems to me the journey of self-discovery is made even more valuable by sharing it with others.” Another true, obvious statement that, again, I hadn’t really considered. Of course this is another root of good art, we want to know about other people, the details of their lives, what makes them tick, and although being so revealing can be scary and potentially embarrassing it is truly liberating.

You can find more art my Amelia Alcock-White at ameilawhite.netfacebook.com/ameliaalcockwhiteand on twitter @alcockwhite

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KANNE

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There were a few weeks I’d say I was in a strange limbo between questioning the validity of acting honestly, as I’ve always done, or utilizing opportunities to lie in order to keep maintain order in my life. I

thought a long time about this idea after I read about a German baron named Munchausen. He served in the military and after he was through he returned home and told tall tales about his experiences.

‘He told people that he’d travelled to the moon. Ridden cannonballs. I wondered what the point of making up stories was. Could Baron Munchausen just be liked for being himself? For being honest? Could anyone?

Later that day, I picked the Perfect Mexican recipe book off my built-in wall bookshelf, needing comfort food desperately. I flipped open the cover.

On the bright tangerine page a note was scribbled Happy Birthday to our “Adorable Mexican Chef.” You

are just perfect in my book! Love, mama T.

The scribbling looked foreign, like a coded passage from a world I wasn’t a part of, so I flipped over numerous pages past the scribbles.

I thought of Munchausen telling stories about eating live bulls in Africa.

Tracey, “Mama T”, was my ex-fiancé, Charlie’s, mother. She gave me the cook book for my birthday two years ago.

The foreignness of the note stuck with me as I passed over entrée titles.

I held the Perfect Mexican book, and it looks too big, and it feels too heavy for the weight of my small hands, and I think about I’m not exactly sure how her and I got to this point. I flip pages and try to imagine her saying I was perfect now. Page two-hundred

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and fourteen: “To finish: chocolate chip and chili ice cream.”

Place an egg and sugar in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water; beat the egg and sugar mixture to get a light and fluffy consistency, slowly adding chopped chocolate, milk, dried red ancho chili, and vanilla bean until the chocolate has dissolved and the milk is almost boiling, stirring occasionally.

“Well, maybe you’ll level him out,” Momma Tracey said once.

The two of us were lying on the beach, sweating under the white sun. Charlie had already left for the Navy.

“I mean, one could only hope.” I shrugged and smiled at her. I held my hand over the spot in the sky where the sun was whitening my vision. She rummaged in a cooler then offered me an apple.

“No, you’re doing just fine.”

I thought of Munchausen traveling to an island of cheese surrounded by a sea of milk.

My vision whitened again as I took the apple from her hand.

Place aside to let cool.

One day she told Charlie that she was heart-broken that Charlie loved his “new family” more than he loved her.

Lightly whip heavy cream in a separate bowl and fold into the cooled mixture.

I saw the Baron dancing in the belly of a whale.

The adventures were lovely, challenging, mystifying, but they weren’t real. I knew that, and Munchausen did, too. Why did the Baron lie to all those people? What could anyone gain from telling lovely, untrue tales? I read that there were even psychological disorder names after Munchausen: Munchausen Syndromes. A person with this disorder lies to get attention and sympathy for “being ill.” These are the people you expect hypochondriacs to be, but hypochondriacs are completely convinced by this false sense of illness.

Those with Munchausen syndrome know there is no illness.

They know it’s not real. They know there’s nothing actually wrong.

Transfer the entire mixture into a freezerproof container and freeze for one hour.

I receive a phone call from the naval base in Connecticut, and I’m sitting at my black, rusted coffee table out on my screened-in porch in Florida. I can pinpoint the unusual clarity I notice in Charlie’s voice, although the conversation mushes into one giant mass in my mind, but a few things stick in my brain like left-over residue that lingers on the back of envelope seals.

His voice holds defiance and surety. It holds a curveball strongly in its thin, white, angry fingers. The wind up:

“We’re not on the same level, and if we keep going it’s just going to get worse.”

His mouth releases the curveball from ninety miles per hour. Fast and hard and coming right for me.

“I’m not happy. I can’t be who you want me to be.”

After the hour has passed, transfer the partially-frozen mixture from the freezerproof bowl into a mixing bowl and beat the mixture to break down the formed ice crystals.

Munchausen is telling me, “I escaped from the murky, thick depths of swamps using my own hair as a rope!”

Charlie is telling me I’ll get over him. Telling me this isn’t working.

Telling me he rode on a horse that was cut in half, and shortly after the back part of the horse ran away into a meadow.

The Baron and the front half of the horse continues on their adventures. Charlie hangs up the phone.

Yes, these stories are lovely. Shiny, enticing, alluring.

I fall out of the limbo I’m stuck in.

But those stories aren’t fulfilling the reality: none of it is real.

Place ice cream in freezer until ready to serve.

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The top of the campus chapel clock tower didn’t seem as high as Charles remembered. Years of retelling

his heroic climb was making the ground seem closer than it ought to be. But the tower was at least four stories up and that should do it, right? He was a poetry professor, not a physics instructor. Former poetry professor. Dr. Charles Pool, PhD in Creative Writing. Divorced. Stripped of parental rights.... and recently fired. All because Tammy, some trust fund undergraduate, didn’t like her final grade and cried “rape”. Charles had never touched any of his students. His wife, Georgiana, had been his everything. Or so he believed until she gave him little Emily, and then Anne two years later. He’d had it all, what every man dreams of and more. But Tammy had ruined it with one word.

No more job.

No more wife.

No more daughters.

He had laughed when the chair approached him about the accusation. Surely Stacie was joking, he thought. But there was no humor on her face that day. Tammy Higgin’s father was a senator. The chair, sympathetically and chokingly told Charles his career was over. No matter the

outcome of the trial, it was a senator’s word against a poor man from Brooklyn, NY. A poor, black man. She had been right. The institution fired him, Stacie stuck by his side and argued for him to stay on, but the board of trustees had made up their minds. Charles leaves, or the money leaves.

Georgiana had stuck by him in the beginning, but when a social worker showed up to remove the girls from their home, she lost it. He didn’t blame her for picking the kids over him. He didn’t fault her for moving in with her well-to-do aunts. What he did blame Georgiana for was forgetting. It was no secret her family disapproved of her marrying “a man of color” but she’d never seen him that way. He was her gallant knight for over ten years. Now she spoke of him as a street thug who could do unspeakable things to their children.

This clock tower was where he first met Georgiana. Her term paper for Dr. Claymore had been carried out of her hands by a gust of wind. She had managed to collect most of the pages but Georgiana was insistent one page was on the clock tower. Young and stupid, Charles had two of his buddies help boost him onto the low roof of the hall attached to the structure. He then scaled the side of the tower. She had been right; page three was pinned by the wind to the brick

facade. Security detained him the minute he was back on the ground. Charles handed her the rescued page of her paper as they marched him past. Something about the way she looked at him that day made Charles know that was the woman he was going to marry. And he did, at this very chapel.

He looked back down at the quad. This was where he thought his life had truly begun. Charles never thought he’d ever entertain the idea. He was a good, moral, Christian man. But no support was left. Not even the church, who believed the worst. He’d done nothing wrong except treat everyone fairly, no matter of family name. But he’d learned his lesson. Good breeding always wins. The accusations were made. Actions were taken. He was finished.

Charles managed to crouch awkwardly on the ledge. Taking out his pocket watch he received last Father’s Day, he stared at the etched globe with a ribbon reading “World’s Best Dad”. He opened it and looked at the picture of his wife and kids. Smiling. Happy. He looked back to the quad. How long would the fall be?

One Mississippi... Two Mississippi...Three Mississippi...Four Mississippi....

Lexy Evans

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Pic of Lois

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Growing up as the only Singaporean in a classroom filled with beautiful Australian girls made me turn to a life of vegetarian baked beans and beef lasagnes at age 4. Writing helped distract me from my addictions and I grew to love it. Nodding along convincingly during college poetry classes helped me blend in with the other poets even though I knew next to nothing about analyzing them. I just write, because.

-Lois Goh

MEETLOISGOH

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Atrophy

Filling out forms can be such a chore.Especially those online ones with the drop down menus. It isn’t the act of fillingout the form. It is a chore for theheart to go through such blatant uncertainty. I scroll down to select Singapore as my country of citizenshipbut my track pad is enthusiastic. Itscrolls down one option too many. Slovakia, it selects. The cursor hoversand blinks, innocently. Atrophy. It plaguesme. Our countries are sadly nothingmore than a cliché. A literary device. For they are so near yet so far. How have you been? Who do you think of?

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For Fur’s Sake

Dear Nicole, where are you?Oh. That’s rather far off. I’m not sure that ourfriendship will work ifyou don’t make the effortto come visit me everynow and then. Don’tblame it on me, I’ve checkedthe ticket prices. I wish I could visit but they’re so pricey. Plus the journey is pretty long. JAX-HEAfor the cost of my life?No thanks. For now, I’ll just stay here on earth andwhine about how you died before giving me that cute denim dress. Youknow, that one with thestrange fur trim?

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Peace

The stories that I hear from othergirls are really rather interesting.There’s that one girl who realizedthat she was over a boy only whenshe was under him. It was a ratherstrange feeling but nothing thathis taut body could salvage. His smooth skin, a disguise for hisslowly dissolving heart. Acidic.Corrosive. Unlovable. So she wentthrough the motions until shecame up on top. Then, she laughed.It started out as a chuckle but thenjust a little bit more. A giggle, a laugh and she can’t quite containit anymore. She’s laughing and hertummy hurts. She’s crying andmaybe her heart hurts. The peaceof love, it just could not be.

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3:21

If you wake up alone, remember that the ocean is 6 miles deep. Remember the names of the clouds you learned in school (cumulus, cirrus, stratus)and try and picture the last mountain you stood on.There is a forest somewhere that no one has set foot in-It doesn’t matter what the trees sound like when they fall. Think of the cosmos (of the ones you never knew existed) and the song that was playing as you watched the sun rise. It’s not the middle of the night, it’s the middle of your favorite poem (your favorite song) story memory spring summer or winter fall back in love with the bottom of the sea and it’s inky wonder,with brick streets you wandered under scattered stars as the moon shining through the curtains turns the tides.

Ft Pulaski

I am learning that, silly as it may sound, palm trees don’t care much for state lines.Mosquitos don’t hold allegiance to a Florida/Georgia game-as long as they get their ounce of flesh in the end.The fish that swim near the surface of the sea don’t worry about state taxesWhile the crabs that crawl, slowly, across the low-tide don’t fret when it disappears under salty waves.The marsh mud under their miniature herds smells the same between their toes as it does mine; even after bringing it all the way back home and watching it swirl around the shower drain.

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Fir

The house always smelled like cookies and stale fir needlesthis time of year but the smells talking and relatives stifledwarm air. The decorated captured tree dominated attention,demanded sacrificial gifts and left ground we could notwalk on with bare feet. Cool outside solitude refreshedher chapped lips. Winter solstice – new beginnings she wouldthink. Would stomp her feet. Would kick at the frozen groundwith the tip of her boot. Uproot the snow. Prepare the earthfor new green shoots of Spring.

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Service with a Smile

Sit wherever you’d like. Yes, that iswhat the sign says. Please, take a menu. Anyoneelse joining you today?Please don’t sit at the big table when there are only two of you.My name is [insert name here] and I will be yourserver today. Let me know if you have any questions.Of course you have questions.What would I recommend?How the hell should I know?Well what are you in the mood for? A sandwich? Fries?A slap in the face?Can I start you off with something to drink today?

I’ll give you a few minutes.Yes, we can put that on the side. No, sorry, that doesn’tcome with fries. It should be out in fifteen minutes.Sorry, I know you said you wanted it on the side. Yes, Idid put in on the ticket.Cooks make mistakes, but I know you think I was the careless one.Yes, I can take it back off the check and dump it on your head.Here’s the check whenever you’re ready.Please remember I make $4 an hour and tips are part of my salary.Five percent? Just for me? How generous of you.

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Fur

There is a tiny bit on my back.He sits and spins the goldenhairs around his finger. Once.Twice.

Release.

I like it.I like you and your unconventionalbeauty standards – your delicate fingersdrumming my spine.

Feeling wild around you. I amyour wolf girlhuntinghowlinghome.

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In My Black Coat

In my black coat I’m Zelda on the town, voice, warm and loud.

I’m Greta from the silver screen,your jazz age beauty Queen.

I am Ms. Parker, writing limerickstil I think of something darker.

In my black coat I don’t fear the rainin it’s persistence, nor the chill chasing me in from the bay.I slip it on and set out.

Up to my ears in fur,Up to my fill of February nights.down to the pub I go, In my big black coat.

Keep The Warmth

Keep those sweaty palms in your pockets.I want the hard feeling of cool tile on my flesh.Know that I will never hog the covers.Keep those hot blooded assumptions of where I’ve been.I want to be sopping wet in the may rain.know where heat oppresses, cold collects on claims.Keep those furnace feet to yourself.let me shake, rattle, and shiver out of your reach.Do you know how to you manage an Indian burned heart?You scold the bad child, and apply the ice

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Furry Place

I wanna feel your skinon mine. Warmwith a touch of foreign.A foreign I do not know. Have neverseen. But experiencedmany times. Just notthere. Not thatlocation.

With every touchyou take me there—toyour foreign place. I don’t know what it is.How you do it. But you make mewant to go back. Again.

And again.

And again.

I wanna feel your skinon mine. Warmwith a touch of foreign....**

With every time Ibecome a little foreignmyself. Dispatchedfrom our physical locationyou take me elsewhere. Perhapsthere.

I thought I had forgotten how to get there, but you showed me the road. With every delicate touch being a clue on how to get there. My body is a road map and you know exactly how to read it. You go in and make me feel what has been there all along and I am very much willing to give it all to you. To share it with you. Seeking new adventures. Discover new things. You had me taste the foreign. A taste so odd. Distant. A distance bringing us closer together. I never thought I would go back, let alone go there. To your foreign.

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Thank you to all my incredible writers!Think you’ve got what it takes to write something for us?Submit your stories and poems to jessicafrickdesigns@gmail

Photo Credit:All images from Amelia Alcock-White except page 30