CONTENTSO B S E R V E D 3

A N O T E F R O M G O R G O N ' S B L U F F LT D 10

D I S C O U R S E S O F A M I D D L E M A N AG E R 22

T R U E T H I N G S I S H O U L D N ’ T H AV E S A I D A N Y WAY 4 4

T H E C Y N I C ’ S N O T E B O O K 75

AU T H O R S 9 4

S T O R I E S

M A R K W I S N I E W S K I 15 S T R I P P E D

J O E P O N E P I N T O 2 5 P L U N G E

K I I K A . K . 3 3 S OA P B E R R Y WA S P,

T H U N D E R C L O U D P L U M S

W I L L I N S T E N Z 3 6 N OV E M B E R - N OV E M B E R M A R R I AG E

D O U G L A S W . M I L L I K E N 39 P O P T I M I S T I C

J U D E P O L O T A N 47 D O G P E O P L E

W I L L M A Y E R 6 5 A H E L I U M A F FA I R

M I K E A L L I Z I 6 7 S E T T I N G R I G H T

S A T I M E L E N D E Z 7 1 L A F E I TA

T R A C Y E L I N 76 WAY N E ’ S S P O N TA N E O U S OV E R F L O W

M A R Y E L L E N W O E F L E 78 M E M O I R O F A S O C K P U P P E T

L I B B Y C U D M O R E 8 1 H O W T O M U R D E R YO U R F R I E N D S

E L L E N L A R S O N 8 5 F O R G E T M E N O T

S T O N E S L I D E | 1 51 4 | S T O N E S L I D E

STRIPPEDB Y M A R K W I S N I E W S K I

Sometimes I think everyone knows.Sometimes I think my parents have been cheating on each other

throughout my whole life and everyone’s known except me.For most of my life, all I had was suspicion. But then I came home one

afternoon and checked our answering machine, and it was blinking so I pushed what I thought was PLAY, but the machine was brand new and I’d pushed the wrong button—or my dad had when he’d been in our house having sex with the only girl I’ve ever been in love with.

Whose name by the way was Kat. Anyway, recorded maybe an hour earlier and now being replayed for my ears only was a conversation be-tween her and my dad, and it obviously wasn’t a phone call but instead an in-person conversation because you could hear our first floor toilet flushing in the background, with its desperate sucking sound at the end. After that sound you could hear Kat, apparently leaving the bathroom, saying “Do I need to leave?” to my dad, then my dad pausing by clearing his throat.

It occurred to me just after I heard this recording the first time, mo-ments before I saved it on my cell and deleted it from the answering ma-chine, that my dad, in his post-sex-with-Kat daze, had been checking messages as Kat “freshened up” or whatever adults call it, and in doing so he’d accidentally pushed the message-to-self button.

And it occurs to me now that my whole life has been like this. I mean: odd. I mean accidents caused by my absent-minded father, or maybe it’s pure self-absorption on his part. There are also plenty of angry things blurted by my rarely home mother, and it also occurs to me now that if she, my mom, weren’t gone from our house so often, she’d blurt more angry things than she does.

Mostly it now occurs to me that, since my dad is such an obvious jack-ass, I’ve been going through a kind of adjustment period in which I’m be-coming an adult with little or no association with him or my mom or the only woman I’ve ever been in love with, not to mention this adjustment period has lasted long enough that I’ve needed—as my school’s counseling center’s Prepare for Trauma booklet calls it—“support” from a guy named Craig-Jug.

Craig-Jug is called Craig-Jug because he juggles and his first name is Craig. He also has this godfather who plays hoops for A&M, and Craig-

S T O N E S L I D E | 4 54 4 | S T O N E S L I D E

True Things I Shouldn’t Have Said Anyway

K I D : When are we going to be at Grandma’s? I want to get out.

M O M : It’ll just be a couple more minutes.

M E : If we survive. There are more than 30,000 traffic fatalities a year in this country.

K I D : Mommy, when I grow up will I be pretty like you?

W I F E : Of course, sweetie. But remember it’s what’s inside that counts.

M E : Although studies show that attractive people make more money and are happier.

W I F E : Will you ever leave me?

M E : Never! I mean, not unless I get one of those brain tumors that makes you do crazy stuff. Like the guy who became an arsonist.

B O S S : How did my talk today go over?

M E : About as well as usual.

B O S S : Thank you.M E : That wasn’t a

compliment.

K I D : I’m so sad. Tracey didn’t invite me to her party. I can’t go on.

W I F E : I know it feels bad. When you get older, sweetie, you’ll see that these things pass. You’ll feel better.

M E : Or you’ll get depressed like Daddy and just not care about anything.

K I D : Butt cake, butt cake, Gramma made a butt cake!

W I F E : Sweetie. You know it’s called a bundt cake.

M E : Her nomenclature’s more accurate.

K I D : I’m scared. I think there’s a monster in my room.

W I F E : Oh, sweetie. You know it’s just your imagination. You can go back to sleep.

M E : That’s right. There are no monsters. When people use the word monster for murderers, rapists, people who steal or break into your house, or just people who really hurt someone else, it’s just a metaphor.

C O W O R K E R : Good morning.

M E : Hi. How was your weekend?

C O W O R K E R : Same old. But any weekend’s good. How about you?

M E : Yeah, the usual. Though a funny thing happened last night.

COWORKER: Yeah, what? M E : I had this really long,

intense sexual dream about you.

JA M E S BA N N E R M A N I am a letter-carrier at the Western District-Office. On the morning of 7th December, I was sorting newspapers and packets; the prisoner was sort-ing at the same table. I saw him pick up some newspapers and likewise a packet; after sorting the newspapers, when he came to the packet, instead of throwing it off into the box where it should have been thrown, he held it in his hand, balanced it, and shook it, and took particular notice of the address. I could see the address while it was in his hand—it was “Mr. Davis, 55 Wardour-street.” Later I looked into the Wardour-street box and missed the packet. I told Mr. Toll. I was present when Mr. Toll made inquiry of the prisoner. He asked him if he knew anything about a missing packet, and he said, “No, nothing at all.” Mr. Toll then said the bet-ter way would be for him to empty his pockets, and on that the prisoner immediately did empty his pockets, and he ex-claimed, “Why, there is something here. For the life of me, I can’t tell how it got there.”

* Adapted from the trial of George Valentine Gray for mail theft, December 17, 1860, ref. # t18601217-92. No part of this statement has been endorsed or approved by Gorgons Bluff Ltd.

SUCCUMBING*

S T O N E S L I D E | 7 97 8 | S T O N E S L I D E

his entire adult life and spent his nights writing his own essays. When I got old enough, I sat with him, and we both wrote under the same lamp. He was the rare par-ent who celebrated a child’s acceptance into a poetry MFA program.

I knew where to find the books he loved in his study because I’d seen him go to them for inspiration, direction, and solace. I read through Coleridge and Word-sworth and Byron. I read him Browning and the essays of Carlyle. And I could see from a relaxation in the muscles around his eyes that he was gazing into the dis-tance—past this fi-nal, dim room to an eternal landscape.

I was nervous in my first days at Splendid, like a virgin walking through the parlor of a brothel. There were five of us writers at Splendid, working in a corner of a recently converted warehouse space downtown. Sal did all the IT work, set-ting us up with various accounts, access to proxy servers, IP addresses, etc., so that we could focus on our writing.

Sal always told us to take our time, to look for inspiration, to care about what we wrote. In some ways, he was more encour-aging than any of my writing teachers. And his nod of pleasure at a finely wrought review was its own reward.

He started me on the easiest re-views—restaurants. Anything that you’ve experienced yourself and that lots of other people have also experienced is easier to write about movingly. And that was our goal: to move people. I extolled pizza and touted falafel. The only problem was that sometimes I would work so hard at imag-ining the crisp surprise of a bite of pizza that I became hungry myself.

MEMOIR OF A SOCK PUPPET

B Y M A R Y E L L E N W O E F L E *

Many people have asked me if I would one day write an exposé of my time as a sock puppet. They imagine a story of craven deceit, of principles and deeply held beliefs pried out of my soul by the crowbar dollar. I tell them that those years were actually the most creatively fulfilling of my life.

Six years ago, I was hired by Splendid Response Inc., a company that produced positive online reviews and other chatter for its clients. We were sock puppets. Splendid was run by Sal, a former bookstore owner and un-published poet, who wore a gray polo shirt every day of the year. He be-lieved the most effective reviews would be those that had true artistry in them—that a dash of artistic genius makes the most baldly disingenuous statement compelling. So, he hired out of the best MFA programs. He saw himself as a force for good, giving work to writers and artists; he applied for several grants from the city and from art organizations on that prem-ise. He also did pro bono work writing blog and newspaper comments in support of various nonprofits.

I can’t think of that time without also thinking of my father. He was in the late stages of a battle with cancer. A tumor had appeared in his abdom-inal cavity some years before. They operated. They did chemo. We watched, we held him, we read to him. And it seemed to have worked. For years he lived well, went back to work, and there was no sign of the cancer. But then it came back, like a Mongol horde offended by any resistance, and swept through his body, conquering and ravishing whole systems of life as it trav-eled. His world shut down until it was reduced to a single bed in a room in hospice around the time I started at Splendid.

I also think of my father because, while I spent most evenings reading to him, I never quite told him what I did. I told him it was a copywriting job.

He’d always been proud of my writing. He’d taught high school English

Sal moved me up to electronics, and I focused on the tactile description of the products. I wrote paeans to the click of a button and the slide of a knob. I loved the slight odor of new plastic, and the hum of working capacitors.

Love was the key. With practice, I could put myself in an imaginative state in which anything was possible (Keats’ “negative capability”), and I could steer my affections, and longings, and desires toward the appropriate object. And it was

not false. I truly felt the love, and the love showed in my writ-ing.

Sal eventually moved me up to his hardest client—a manufacturer of ob-scure instruments

for scientists and collectors. And this is where I did my greatest work, I believe. I saved some examples. Here’s one:

I have had two moments in which I knew with utter certainty that my life had changed for the better. The first was when my now-husband bent down to one knee, extended a ring to me, and asked if I would marry him. The second was when I first held a pair of 12 centi-meter micro dissection forceps by Gor-gons Bluff in my hand. The package had arrived via FedEx a few moments be-fore. I had naturally taken it down to my entomological studio and unwrapped it as quickly as possible. The bare steel pincers lying on my table looked little different from others I have owned. But oh! the feeling when I grasped them—lighter, nimbler, more precise. A perfect responsiveness in the hand. These are the forceps heroes would use to dissect the insects of Elysium.

I was nervous in my first

days at Splendid, like a

virgin walking through the

parlor of a brothel.