DECEMBER 2019 | that’s very nice
fiction | mark williams | mort
The thwanks Mort hears are in his mind, mind-thwanks coming off a metal mind-bat. Soon, Mort will regret his final words to Sal, who never gave up on him despite his many failures: Hub Capital, a wheel covering dealership; Kitty City, an indoor cat park. Sal didn’t even seem to blame him for the example he had set for their directionless, forty-two-year-old son, Hubert, last heard living in an Ozark Mountain yurt. “I love you, Sal.” “I’m sorry, Sal.” “You mean the world to me.” Anything other than, “That thwanking,” which Mort says now. Thwank.
There are Unseen Things Everywhere | Like the Depth of Parsley in Butter | We Used to Play with Baby Dolls | The Astronaut’s Wife Considers Perspective | Being the Murdered Doll Collector
I remember reading in a book on silent movies that Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin would have contests to see who could have the fewest intertitles in their movies, who could say the most in the fewest words. For me, that's what flash fiction is: telling your readers everything by barely telling them anything at all.
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ESSAYS | kimberly justice | east valley straight edge
Mike knew everything about everything. He knew about Rand, and introduced me to Vonnegut. He knew how to score on searing streets lined with orange trees, and taught me how to roll a joint on his bed, his screenless window open to the hot, perilous air of those unsupervised Arizona nights. He knew what to say to make me laugh, to make me love him when he asked to kiss me in a deserted plaza, and he introduced me to a version of myself I had never known before. He knew how much cough syrup to drink to get high enough to call me at school from his backyard pool, his brain boiling from the artificial venom, and he tried to introduce me to meth on our first date, his paraphernalia neatly strewn across his dark bedroom floor.
film | jeanne obbard | Woman vs the True Meaning of Christmas, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tinsel
… which brings us to a major feature of these movies: they are very, very tame. I’d be inclined to put them squarely in the romantic comedy genre – some of them are based on Harlequin novels, for one thing – except that romantic comedies usually strive for some kind of spark, some hint, however circumscribed, of the sexual pull of the beloved. It could be that Hallmark and Lifetime are keeping it clean for the kids in the room. Or it could be that the point of the Christmas Movie isn’t for the protagonist to find romance, but to find belonging, and romantic love is one component of that quest but hardly the only component.
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