Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Features • Fall / Winter 2023
Fiction • Winter 2011 - Blueprint
People used to call my Pops a geep when he got old, which was, in a way, accurate. He used to wear the black socks all around the house. I don’t know where the term comes from: something with guinea, maybe the G-P of grandpa. I used to tell him when he just had the ripped white tee on, Pops, get the hell back in the house before someone respectable sees you. Anyway, it’s something I’ve been thinking about now that I’m around that age. My wife Lola tells me karma’s bitchy. My back isn’t too good. Sometimes I dribble in my pants after I pee. But I’ll tell you one thing, I’m always wearing white socks when people are watching.
My Pops was Italian, but Ma was a Jew, so that makes me a little different background than him. I’ve got a finely sculpted figure, like I used to, just someone recently put a little too much of the extra marble on my belly. I’ve still got the moustache, and the goatee, black, that Pops used to make me shave off, back when he told me I had a little of the Hasid in me, that I looked like a little dwarf when my hair balded at sixteen.
Pops was a showman, circus fella, when he got back to New York from the army. I’ve still got the first carousel he used to truck around to all the events. Back then there was big money in it, and he was a respectable man. The borough presidents used to call him up every spring to figure out when he’d bring the show to their big parks for the summer. That’s how I grew up: in a big house on Gerritsen Avenue. We were like the first settlers there, practically, like pioneering days, and we got a house that was as big as half a block. In the backyard was where we’d keep the carousels, the inflatable mazes, the bouncey-bounce, and the little baby roller coaster that took five hours to put together.
It wasn’t all great. People used to call us gypsies behind our backs and ask where the donkeys were. Of course in Kennedy’s America the smalltime carnivals didn’t have animals anymore. If we were a gypsy show we were gasoline-fueled and blow-up, going around in the back of a Chevy: rides, food, music that was strange to the American ear. But probably gypsy is what we would’ve been if we’d still been in one of my parents’ old countries. Then again, if we were in Poland, we’d probably be dead: cause I’ve got a long nose, and nobody likes gypsies even if that’s not really what we are.
Pops liked to tell us stories about his tour. He’d never been to Italy before it, though grandpops was born there. The army gave him a way to see the world, and he appreciated them for that. His war experience had been as good as you could possibly get, I’d bet: he was a truck mechanic in the sunflower fields outside San Gimignano. Pops used to tell us that everywhere, the air smelled like raisins. And when one of the military vans went by, the new ones with diesel engines, the sunflowers turned their faces to follow, and no one could tell if it was the wind from them passing or some weird magnetic force.
Pops had a favorite story, his defining experience, which went something like this: one day, he had leave, just for the second half of the afternoon. He and a buddy took bicycles that they’d stolen from the houses of civilians, and biked up the path towards town. It was a bustling and busy place then, because it was walled, and everybody who was anybody, civilians, in that area of Italy, was inside. They said that the place had withstood every battle since the Venetians dug a hole underneath during the Papal Wars.
Anyway, they weren’t supposed to be there, it was military policy to stay out of town, too many locals were getting screwed. So they go through the gates with local clothes on, no uniforms, and up this crooked alley. They make it to Via Berignano which goes through the whole village and they take that, left, looking for the restaurant that’s supposed to serve wine and hashish even if they know you’re a soldier. But they keep walking and don’t see the place until they get all the way to the city walls. They were crumbling like cookies between a pair of legs, Pops used to say.
There was a grove of peach trees and Pops stopped, peered behind them. There was a big wagon with a cow licking the green moss off the walls. The wagon was all wood and covered and painted in big garish colors. Show of the Universe, it said in purple script. There was smoke coming from a little canvas chimney towards the back—and the last thing Pops saw before the carabinieri came out of nowhere and hustled him and his buddy away with their arms on their asses was the woman lying on her back. She was underneath the wagon, next to the ruts that the wheels made, and she was completely naked, with her hands behind her head and humming something mountainous into the air that was stinking of peaches.
I’m not an anything person. I’m not that cheap and I don’t spend too much, sometimes I like to be outside while at the same time I’d rather just sit on the couch. I used to like country but I listen to rock and roll too. There’s things that I like half of when I should like the whole: women, babies, Oreo cookies. This is how I feel about my marriage sometimes.
I married a black woman, ok? Sure, Pops didn’t love it. But he didn’t love a lot of things, and in a way he was a filthy racist, which is a whole thing, not half. Her name’s Lola, and I met her at a job in Prospect Park. Once she told me that where she came from, wasn’t no one who didn’t like a little carnival.
Lola I like. We’ve got the house now, on Gerritsen. It’s the only big one left, everything else is rented. We’re this big decrepit place now with leaves stuck in the drainage and everything around us, one floor, is a condominium. I hear their babies squalling through the little walls, and their mothers getting fucked in the bedrooms. Lola likes to leave the music on and pretend the whole thing’s an opera.
I guess we had a kid late. There had been a while when we didn’t think it would work, though it wasn’t for not trying. Really it was like twenty years, which could have been time enough for a whole nother four kids. But we ended up with just the one, Tony. I love him to death.
Right now he’s at school, second grade, which really is a great age but I can’t help wishing that he were a year out of high school, because then he could’ve taken the family business from me and I wouldn’t have to sell the show. I’m getting tired of doing it, I’m a little too old, and it’s just not the same: carnival rides aren’t too popular anymore. We’ll do a summer-opening fair or something, but that’s about it for the major bookers. There’s always a couple of calls for July 4th. But the rest of the summer is pretty empty and you can forget about the winter, I just sit around and oil the machinery while the TV blares from the bedroom and Lola yells out the window, let the goddamn things rust.
It’s something I can’t really do. I remember Ma was really helpful with Pops when we were in season, and even outside it. She used to run the concession stands, sometimes hiring local kids to walk around with white hats and boxes of peanuts. Once, I remember, she had to fill in for Madame Starbright, the fortunetelling lady—and this was the most beautiful moment, her wrapped in blue robes with the sprinkles falling from the ceiling of the wood shack we did the readings in—and I think even Pops was surprised, that maybe Ma was something else entirely that he never gave her credit for.
I’m not saying Pops was perfect. That’s clear: he was a jerk sometimes and especially to Ma. You got the feeling that he thought he could’ve done better in life, coming back from Italy with the G.I. Bill, but somehow things didn’t work out, just a roll of the dice. Somehow he became Brooklyn’s Preeminent Showman. But because he did, he lorded it over Ma and me like he was coming from some other sort of place where things looked much better.
When he died a couple months ago I thought he was going to say something like, Sonny, make sure the show goes on, but instead he said, “Come here.” I dropped my ear real close. He said hoarsely, “I think, Sonny, that I left some broccoli in the refrigerator.” Ma had been gone for a while then and I guess he was looking out for my vitamin health. But that was the first time that I thought maybe I could actually sell the thing, get out of the business, retire. I saw a couple of ads the other day in the Skyline for delivery drivers, trucking stuff around to where people bring it into places on those metal pushcarts. I thought I’d look really good in one of those company polos that those guys always wear and maybe, because of my advanced age, they’d let me work part-time and have the rest off to ice my bones. That’d be nice, especially this being the end. Once I saw a stoner on the street with a cap and a sign on cardboard, The End, and I said to him, what, is this the movies?
Here’s something. I never went to college. Lola was done with high school by the time I got my GED, and at that point I thought, forget it, I make 10 large a go oiling the roller-coaster for Pops. Lola said I should’ve, that it’d come back to bite me in the end, but then there’s another thing I should’ve listened to Lola for, and I was wrong, I’ll admit it.
One thing I always liked about working the carnival when I was little was that Pops used to let me hand out popcorn, and when I was really little I’d give it to all the pretty ladies in high heels. Then when I got a little older my friends used to come and hang out and eat snacks by the generator. We were big into the blow-up obstacle course in those days, that Pops made us take our shoes off for. It was all made of canvas and air, and there was a climbing section and a sliding part and one place where you had to push punching bag things away. There was the year when someone tripped in the middle and punched a hole through the floor. I still remember the hiss while the whole thing sank down and collapsed. There were times we did it as races, two at a time until we’d all gone twice, and then the two fastest raced with everyone else screaming at them from the sides, hanging off the hand-holds and throwing popcorn at each other. Last year during a block party in Rockaway, when we were about to wrap up, I saw two kids sitting in the middle where it’s painted blue like a water trap, just talking. They were playing video games on their hand-helds. I told them they could have one more go through but then we had to close up and they said it was ok. They just left. I don’t know what to think about that.
Once a little girl asked me on the subway what I did for a living, because I was carrying a plastic bag full of balloons over my shoulder that kept trying to float above my head. I told her about the travelling carnival thing or whatever and she said, is that sort of like Santa Claus? I said first of all we work in the summer. And it’s not like we do presents and it’s not like it’s for free. She nodded really intelligent and said she hoped I’d come visit her neighborhood sometime, she lived in Bay Ridge. This was the R train which always takes forever and she must have been on a school trip, or something. She got off with lots of other little kids and a lady who kept holding the door. She kept looking at the bag and then back at me and then at the bag until finally I gave her a balloon and she got real excited.
Yesterday I was on the train because I dropped the pickup off at Flatbush, to change the breaks, and I’m standing with one hand on the rail when this guy goes, here you go grandfather, it’s your seat. First I was like who talks like that on Newkirk Avenue? Then I got a look at myself in the window and I said, God, I really am a geep. My goatee’s getting real fuzzy and there’s hair coming out my ears. And here I am sitting with a t-shirt tucked into my shorts.
The way it happened was the guy wrote me a check. He had a truck and his cousins had two more and yesterday they just took it all in that. It was 200 grand, which was more than the show would make in the next 15 years, Lola said. She’s right. We all sat down at the kitchen counter and I gave them coffee and introduced them to Tony, before he ran upstairs or something. They didn’t have any of the cake Lola made, which I thought was rude, until she said Jesus, not everyone’s half Italian.
When they left I went into the backyard to straighten the rest of it up. Lola’s in the kitchen making jerk chicken, or something. I almost knock over the plants in front of the screen door where we’ve been trying to grow pot, Lola’s little side business. A story about Lola: once she told me that when she was fourteen, before she came here, she was driving a jeep in Jamaica, up and down the mountain roads. These things were all dirt, she said, and one lane, so that if there were two cars coming at each other, one had to back up and find a little place in the rock to turn into. Lola was never a great driver but this happened to her once, and she was at a point on the hill where there weren’t any niches to turn into for a while, and so she drove down the whole thing backwards, yelling. When she got to the bottom, where the beach was, she got out of the car and grabbed a seashell and threw it at the windshield. It didn’t even make a crack. I’m never driving again, she said. And she didn’t. But she took the shards of the shell and took them with her, and put them back together with crazy glue, and now it’s up above the sink in the kitchen where she washes the fruit.
Our last gig was a week or so before, between Avenue M and N, on one of those streets that curves. Hasid neighborhood, who don’t party much, but some liberal Jews too who eat up this sort of thing. They rented the whole street and closed it down, so we had room for the rollercoaster and even the extra large maze that we hadn’t taken out in a couple years. I ran the barbecue for most of it while Tony ran to and from the truck getting hot-dog packets. He didn’t mind doing it and other little things as long as he got an allowance every Monday.
Because it was our last one, Lola decided to make it something special. She took out the Madame Starbright costume and did that for a few hours. She was really good too. I listened in a bit from behind the tent. “The Wheel,” she said, “Sagittarius. You resemble the Jilted Man appearing in the pocket of Jupiter.”
The night before, she’d been practicing. Tony was asleep after eating half a chocolate cake. I was just licking the rest off the spatula when she came in from the dining room, where she’d been looking at tarot cards. The way she did it was she came up from behind and spread her hand in the center of my chest.
“Want to hear your fortune?” Lola said. I told her not to be stupid, that she better get back to studying.
“I think I’ve really got it, Sonny,” she said. I kept doing the dishes but she tapped twice on my chest with her hand. “Please,” she said.
I know I turned the faucet off but it was drip-dripping while we went outside. The patio sliding door used to hum when you opened it, but it’s a little broken now so it just squeaks and starts. It was around that time in the summer when it felt like Halloween at nighttime. Next door the baby was crying and the TV going on. We sat down at the little table, next to the vines that went from the ground to over our heads.
She was across from me and she picked up my hand in both of hers and said, “Remind me to get charcoal for tomorrow.”
“We doing this or what,” I said.
She shook my hand up and down and kissed it on the knuckles. Then she closed her eyes and hummed. I thought she was going to say something any second but she didn’t, so I looked around a little bit, got distracted. I’d promised to paint a free throw line for Tony fifteen feet from the hoop.
When I looked back she’d stopped humming, but I hadn’t even known. Her eyes were wide open and her hands were tight around mine.
“Litigus, Dionysiac, Mesopatam,” she said. “I see that the Chariot is aligned with the Prince of Satyrs.” I grinned. She started to laugh too. She put my fingers over her eyes and looked through them. I mussed up her eyebrows and looked over her shoulder to where some of the equipment was covered by a tarp. There was a little bit of standing water in the middle from the thunderstorm last night.
“When I was sixteen,” I told her, “I used to come out here and make sure the stuff wasn’t getting wet, if it was raining, the night before a job.”
She put her fingers back on the table.
“You’re going to be ok,” she said.
When I get to the first delivery place from the ad they tell me they’ve diversified their interests. Actually their owner had gotten himself into real estate. I go to the second but they’re closed for the day. The third is the Herr’s outlet on Quentin Avenue and I find a spot and go inside.
It really is a warehouse: no front door but just an open garage. It’s like a hangar inside, but just filled with rows and rows of bags of chips. There’s a cashier’s desk at the front where it looks like they sell single bags and things like that, and the guy sitting there gets up when I come in and says, “Can we help you?”
I say you can, because it’s obvious that he’s the only one here. He’s got on dress clothes and black socks that are wrapped up around his dress pants, so that it’s like he’s wearing tights below the knees.
“I’m looking for work,” I say.
“Are you a veteran?”
“Do I look like one?”
“Merchandising?”
“No, delivery.”
He looks at me for a second as if to tell me that I’m too old, but then he says one moment please and goes in the back. The guy’s as old as I am. I can hear him making a call. The row of chip bags behind the desk is called Worcestershire Steak Sauce, Special Edition.
He comes back and tells me they’ll try me out for a run, do I have a commercial driver’s license? I do. Can you sign this paperwork? I do the pen. He tells me that the truck is parked out on 34th, it’s already loaded and I just have to make the stops on the sheet. Crown Heights, Flushing Park, a hub outlet on 248th in the Bronx. He brings out a map but I tell him I know how to get there. I figure I’ll do the Bronx first, then circle back. Then, while he’s checking over the paperwork and filing it in a folder, he asks me, “So what type of work have you been in?”
“Entertainment,” I say.
“Are you an actor?”
“Used to have a little travelling carnival, we did kids’ birthdays and block parties and things.”
“Maybe I’ve heard of it? What was the name?”
“Show of the Universe,” I said.
He straightened the papers. “Well this must be a let-down then,” then he looks at me and grins to let me know he’s kidding.
“We’ll see,” I say. He raps the desk with his knuckles. He asks me did I want anything else besides the keys? I give him an A-OK but don’t even answer, just grab the key-ring and walk my way out.
It was one of those days when it’s like the middle of the night on the street, no cars or traffic or anything. Then Ocean Avenue, down from Coney Island. I take Ocean Parkway to the Prospect Expressway, and I’m just flying, me and this truck. This must be what it’s like to drive a Hummer, I think. As if you could roll over the Toyotas in front of you, trunks crushing and bags of chips flying everywhere.
Pops used to say, there are five easy steps to living: The Mariner’s Inn has dollar beers on Thursdays, and I forget the other four. I’m passing Prospect Park, where there’s kids playing baseball and things. I don’t know what Tony’s gonna tell his friends that I do for a living anymore, because he used to say I was a magician, because I’d shown him some tricks with pulling a coin out from behind an ear. All I’m saying is, with the way driving this big baby feels, I want to go in for show-and-tell day, or career day, if they still have those.
I’m on the highway next to the East River, watching Manhattan get more wild as we go North. It’s true: there’s more trees up here by the water, and that big tower that’s supposed to be part of Columbia way up in the 100’s, that looks like a lighthouse, but made of stone. I’m passing Yankee Stadium and I’m changing lanes, going around the 18-wheelers and the little cars too. It’s like the first time I drove on the highway by myself, how it was just like dancing: sort of like when I was little and we’d be cleaning up after a job and everything would be packed, and it’d just be Pops and Ma, but the music still going. They’d put it on to something corny like Frank Sinatra, and sometimes Pops would hug her and go side to side. I had this little move, a sort of jump-in-the-air-split kind of thing that they asked me to do over and over and over. I showed it to Lola once as a joke and she patted my cheek and said, white people.
I double park outside the hub on 248th and some guys come scrambling out to unload. They nod, say, hey, you made good time. One of them claps me on the shoulder before he starts loading the handcart. They won’t let me do anything so I take a bag of Worcestershire and sit on the curb. They tell me it’ll be about half an hour, take a walk, go check out the Stella Dora factory a few blocks away.
I start walking and eating my bag of chips and it’s like when you don’t even realize how far you went because you’re licking your fingers for the crumbs and the salt on the bottom. I’m on Broadway where the 1 train ends and Van Cortlandt Park spreads out in front of me. It’s the badlands up here, no one coming except for track races and the immigrant soccer games. Places where just the crack addicts go at night to use the bathroom.
I walk across the soccer field and into the trees where it’s just a forest part. There’s a pond here where I always wanted to do a gig, set the roller coaster coming down the hill, let kids throw water balloons into the water. Only problem is the shit trees that have these blossoms that smell terrible. There’s a cave here, a waterfall too—it’s so far out in the Bronx that tourists never heard of it, and the locals have other things going on. I sit there for a while until I realize I have to go get the truck back. I take a piss on a tree because I’d been holding it in. When I get back to the outlet some respectable guy in a company polo opens the driver’s door for me, and then he closes the back with a bang and I start driving again.
Poetry • Commencement 2013
water hangs low,
rarely falls.
here, our trees and hands
fall victim to it,
vouchsafed by it.
victims, because it erases
cicadas’ footprints
and the army ants’ prey.
peculiar though, this erasure—
with wider aperture
humidity lifts and stays,
footprints are removed
and yet remain overhead
in extended exposure.
a suspension—
retaining multitudes
that ought to slide
like moments off the hands
you live through.
seize this history
in salt and landscape’s
italic interstice: hold.
Features • Winter 2012
On Thursday, December 8, Mayor Menino announced that he would be evicting Occupy Boston. I heard about it first on Twitter, where people were upset. Boston was one of the last places an Occupy settlement had not yet been forced out, and a restraining order had been protecting the site from police interference. In the newspapers, the announcement was framed as a success for Menino— finally he would be able to take action against a movement that had “tested his patience.” I got a few emails—the occupiers were demanding that as many people come as possible to support the movement. “You don’t have to get arrested,” they said.
My friend J and I got to the Occupy site around 10 p.m. Most of the tents had been removed, along with anything valuable, so what remained were scattered structures standing in mud. People were picking up trash and putting it into bags; a sanitation truck was parked on the street. On one end of the camp, next to a big building, a large crowd was holding a General Assembly about what to do if arrested. A man was yelling: “The police are violent people! The police don’t have law degrees! Don’t ask the police what to do—they lie!”
We went to find the protest chaplains, whom J knows. They were standing in a circle, deciding on a plan for the evening. They didn’t want to be arrested, but they wanted to show their support. It was an attractive group—tall men and women wearing white albs and clergymen’s outfits underneath their coats. A few of the members had come from Martha’s Vineyard, and they had that sort of precise, chiseled face that only New England makes. It was concluded that they would sing throughout the evening and bless the eviction as it occurred. A young man wearing a white alb spoke up. “We can say: Boston is watching, America is watching, the whole world is watching, and the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is watching.”
A marching band made up of old men had been playing in front of the T stop since we arrived. People were dancing in front of it. Members of the media arrived, and began to take pictures of the dancers. The band began playing “Solidarity Forever,” which was written in 1915 and has the same tune as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.
We walked around the camp. At this point, there were maybe 1,000 people. Everywhere, there were camera ashes. Across the street, a group of people were standing in front of an office building, watching. “I am the 99 percent and I want you to leave!” a man shouted.
In the sacred space tent, we took off our shoes and kneeled in front of a small table with books and electric candles. People were dividing up religious books so that they wouldn’t get destroyed. One man took the King James Bible, but there were no takers for a small bamboo garden in a jar. In a corner, a young man was talking about growing up in a Southern Baptist family and began to read the Book of Samuel out loud.
Later that night, after I left, the chaplains married two protestors. The crowd spilled out of the camp and into the streets, marching down Atlantic Avenue at 1 in the morning. Occupy Boston wasn’t evicted that night, but it was the next, when the police arrived at 5 in the morning and arrested 46 people.
Fiction • Summer 2019
The Last Woman on Earth lives in Los Angeles. She’s single and in her thirties, five foot seven, 145 pounds, a Virgo. She is the world’s most famous celebrity. Her talk show has the largest viewership of any TV program, with higher ratings than the Super Bowl and reruns of old Miss Universe pageants. The Last Woman on Earth is not particularly talented or charismatic. She blinks a lot and garbles her own script from the teleprompter. Prior to the annihilation of every other woman on Earth, the Last Woman lived in Ohio and taught preschool. She didn’t ask to be the Last Woman on Earth, but she’s doing the best she can.
The Last Woman on Earth’s talk show is called Afternoon Programming with the Woman. She models the show after Oprah. In the first season, men come on and sit in leather chairs and reminisce about women they used to know. Some men talk about their wives and girlfriends, but most talk about their mothers. It’s like therapy, but The Last Woman On Earth isn’t a therapist, so she just sits there and nods and utters vague, affirmative phrases like “wow” and “really?” and “that sounds tough.” The men always cry. The Last Woman On Earth gets tired of hearing about mothers and in the second season changes the focus of her show to baking.
In the second season of her show, The Last Woman On Earth bakes pie after pie in the studio kitchen. She ties her hair in a kerchief and wears a white apron printed with cherries. She invites experts in various fields to come talk to her while she bakes. For forty-five minutes the expert lectures to her sweatered back while she rolls out store-bought dough, mixes fruit with cornstarch, and brushes her lattice crusts with egg wash. A split screen shows a close-up of the pie in progress alongside the face of the expert as he drones on about urban planning or carpentry or neuroscience or poetry. At the end of each episode, The Last Woman on Earth presents the finished pie to the expert. She serves him a piece and waits for him to tell her it’s the best pie he’s ever had, hands down, bar none, etc.
Thousands of men apply to come on the show. Everyone wants to taste pie made by a woman. When the expert has had his fill of pie the Last Woman thanks him and retires to a dimly lit lounge, where she drinks cocktails with a female friend who is played by a mop. The Last Woman on Earth recounts to her friend all the interesting information she learned from the day’s expert. Sometimes a production assistant crawls onto the set and gives the mop handle a shake so it looks like the friend is listening. The episode ends whenever the Last Woman on Earth begins weeping.
The Last Woman On Earth appears on the cover of every issue of *Us Weekly*. Countless articles discuss her dating life, speculating on why she won’t settle down with one of the hundreds of millions of age-appropriate heterosexual men left in the world. In reality the only men who want to date the Last Woman on Earth are perverts and fame-seekers. It’s too much pressure, dating the only woman who exists. Normal men would rather just date each other.
In her spare time, the Last Woman on Earth enjoys hiking Runyon Canyon in clumsy male drag and making paintings that depict extinct species: the West African black rhinoceros, the Pyrenean Ibex, the Caribbean Monk Seal. But the Last Woman on Earth has less and less free time as her empire continues to grow. Her schedule is packed with meetings, with her agent, her personal trainer, foreign heads of state, and her ghostwriter, Phillip, who’s hard at work on her memoir, tentatively titled *The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die*. The Last Woman’s website receives thousands of inquiries a day. Men turn to her whenever they want a female perspective. Typically they are struggling to interpret the actions of a woman from their past. They turn to the Last Woman on Earth for closure. A team of interns handles this correspondence, typically by sending a form response that emphasizes staying in the present moment by practicing mindfulness.
But as years pass, men are less and less interested in what the Last Woman on Earth thinks. Thought pieces are published on Slate and Medium with titles like, “The Increasing Irrelevance of the Woman.” The Last Woman On Earth reads comments on these articles, and on YouTube clips of her show, and on gossip blogs that dissect her nonexistent love life. Many men wish the last woman on Earth was better. She’s so average, they say. Why couldn’t we be left with Rihanna or Megan Fox? Or, if not a physical beauty, we could at least get a Last Woman who’s a genius, or who knows lots of jokes. Men comment that her pies probably aren’t that good. She uses recipes from the old Martha Stewart website, and doesn’t even make her own dough. One commenter points out that there are thousands of talented male bakers in the world, but none of them gets his own show. Everything the Last Woman does would be done better by one of the Earth’s numerous men. The Last Woman on Earth agrees with this assessment. She is often sad.
In the third season of her talk show, The Last Woman on Earth goes back to the Oprah format. This time, she invites negative commenters onto the show and allows them to insult her to her face. Most of them are ashamed and say they’re sorry, which irritates her because it does not make for good TV. Once in awhile she’ll get a real fighter who tells her exactly what he thinks of her. The Last Woman feels truly alive in these moments. She instructs her cameramen to zoom in on her as the man spews his vitriol, capturing the subtle pain that flickers across her stoic face. But the audience hates these episodes. We only have one Woman, her supporters point out. We need to treat her right. All the men who criticize the Last Woman on camera are murdered sooner or later. On her show, The Last Woman on Earth goes back to baking pies.
When The Last Woman On Earth dies, days shy of her fortieth birthday, the 405 is shut down for a ten-mile funeral procession that is simulcast worldwide. No one goes to work that day. Everyone watches the funeral of The Last Woman On Earth on TV, in bars and recreation centers and women’s restrooms that have been repurposed as shrines commemorating the former existence of women. The men of Earth try to outdo each other in performing their grief. They dress up as the Last Woman on Earth, wearing wigs and lipstick and aprons over vintage circle skirts. Privately, they are relieved that the Last Woman on Earth is gone. They can finally do and say whatever they want. The English language is restored to its former simplicity. Everyone speaks freely about the fate of mankind.
It is a golden era for men, these fifty-six years it takes for the human species to die out. The Last Man on Earth is ninety-four years old when he moves to Los Angeles. He broadcasts subversive, thought-provoking and hilarious skits from the studio where the Last Woman on Earth had once taped her show. He wishes there was someone left to see his show, which is much better than hers was. He should have had his own talk show sixty years ago. Instead, the Last Woman on Earth had been handed a talk show, not because she deserved it, but simply because she was a woman. The Last Man on Earth dies with resentment in his heart.
*“The Last Woman on Earth” was originally published in Prairie Schooner.
Features • Winter 2016 - Danger
*Mark Chiusano is a Features Board alumnus who, during his time on The Advocate, published six feature articles in the magazine, as well as six short stories. Following Chiusano’s graduation from Harvard in 2012, his creative thesis, the short story collection Marine Park,was published by Penguin and received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Mark is currently an editorial writer for Newsday and amNew York (you can read his column at [www.amny.com/amexpress](http://www.amny.com/amexpress))and is at work on his second book. *
**You were able to professionally publish your creative thesis, the short story collection Marine Park. What is it like to have succeeded so quickly?**
So many of these things are luck. It was kind of…I was in the right place at the right time, having a book that was finished, and usually agents don’t want to waste their time on you unless you have a finished book to show them. The nice thing was, I was doing stories, but they were fairly linked stories, and it kind of formed a somewhat comprehensive whole, so I had a full project to show people. But you know, it was amazing. It’s one of those things that kind of happens in little leaps before bounds, I guess. By the time the book comes out you kind of forget how awesome it is. But the whole thing was so much fun, and so lucky.
**What kind of relationship does it put you in with other writers your age, who are still trying to get published for the first time?**
I think that most people understand that there’s no rush to getting published. Actually, a handful of mentors of mine, and friends, advised me not even to try to get this first book published…saying that it’s best to wait and make sure you get going with your best foot forward. But I kind of felt that this was what I had at the moment that was worth putting out. I think that it’s…very near a competitive game, but it’s better to avoid that sense of competition. Hopefully, one person is publishing your book, and another person is publishing another person’s book.
**You’re not currently pursuing an MFA. How do you feel about MFA programs?**
I thought I was going to try for an MFA. I was going to take a year after college [to apply]. I took the GRE, which was a horrible waste of time. And sadly, I think my GRE scores are about to evaporate. But I think, when I was graduating from college, I sort of wanted a break from the workshop environment, which I love, and which really helped me a lot. But at some point you have to go out on your own and make terrible, terrible mistakes, and not really have anyone to point them out so quickly. The other thing to say is that most of your readers in an ideal world aren’t college students or MFA [students] or in an academic environment. They’re usually in a working place environment. So it’s useful to have a sense of what actual occupations are like…what an office job is like. So I was kind of interested in going into the “real world,” or work world, and learning what that was like. The thing about the MFA is it gives you time to write, but through the Advocate I had already had that for two, three years.
**How do you balance having a real job with having time to write?**
It’s a constant struggle, and I’m figuring it out as I go along. But what I did from the beginning was do my writing first thing in the morning, for as long as I could—half an hour, an hour—then essentially forget about it for the rest of the day. Which is useful when you have a full time job. For a while I would write at nighttime when I got home from work, but that was just really depressing. You know, I would be tired, I would want to go out and meet friends. And if you do it at the end of the day, it’s easy just to decide not to do it, whereas if you do it in the morning it’s kind of out of the way.
** **
**Have your literary tastes evolved since leaving college?**
I think in college I was reading pretty much exclusively fiction. And after I left college I started working at a publishing house for a nonfiction editor, so I started reading a lot more nonfiction. That’s kind of what I’ve been floating toward these days. So I probably read about 50 percent fiction, 50 fifty percent nonfiction. I feel like we read so little nonfiction in English [at Harvard], which makes sense. But now I’m sort of catching up from college.
**Is that more because you enjoy reading it, or because you think it has a positive influence on your writing style?**
It is definitely very crucial for research. I read a ton of nonfiction for the fictional characters I’m writing. But I also think there’s also something to be learned from the prose style of nonfiction writers—very simple, very to the point, just getting across the information. And it’s good to have that in your arsenal.
**What’s the trend that poses the greatest threat to literary fiction today? What do you hate about contemporary fiction?**
I think there is a trend in contemporary literary fiction to be preaching to the choir...and the fiction that I like the most is the fiction that feels most urgent, and speaks to the broadest population. I worry that if writers screw themselves even more into academia and the MFA path and are writing for those people… The last line of *MFA vs NYC *says something like, “eventually we’ll make writers of us all.” So, if you have everyone with an MFA that’s fine, and you can write totally toward MFA students, but right now I work as a journalist and I think that that informs my writing a lot. I enjoy being out of the world, thinking of real problems, if not all problems.
**Who are some contemporary writers that you enjoy reading, and why?**
I just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s *Americanah*, and I really like her. [Americanah] is in one sense a phenomenal inward-looking story. It’s a beautiful love story, but it’s also a fantastic picture of race relations in America, and also of immigration patterns in both England and America. So there’s so much in it; it’s such an outward-looking book, in addition to having characters who are incredibly real.
**After you started working as a professional writer, what is the first thing you realized about the real world, that Harvard insulates us from?**
I think that at Harvard I was a lot more interested in aesthetic concerns…character, how beautiful a sentence was, etc. I read the Jennifer Egan book, *A V**isit from the Goon Squad*...I always really liked that book, but I think that what I liked about it changed after I graduated. In college…there’s one story that’s in the second person, and is very technically impressive, and I love that story. Then the last section of the book goes into the future and talks about this strange world controlled by corporations…. In college I sort of thought, well, whatever, unrealistic, that doesn’t have anything to do with me. But after graduating and being in the real world, and seeing what “real people” worry about, it became much more powerful. What you focus on does change, when you have to make money. I think that both sides of that real world divide are very valuable.
**What is the best thing that you’ve read all year?**
A really fantastic thing that I read recently is the Jimmy Breslin autobiography, *I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me*, which I have been sort of reeling from ever since. He’s a columnist, a New York columnist, one of the very first newspaper columnists, as we think of them now, and it’s a memoir about being sick and recovering. And he has a great line about the way he wrote this very famous column right after JFK was killed. He had to cover it, and the way he decided to cover it was to talk to the gravedigger. It’s a great story about journalism from the inside, and looking at a different perspective, which I think is useful in journalism class, but very useful for fiction as well.
**One of the reviews quoted on your website says, “Chiusano’s voice isn’t fresh. It is knowing.” What do you think of this description? How would you characterize yourself as a writer?**
What I feel like that person was trying to get at was that [Marine Park] is not a flashy collection, but ingrained in place and neighborhoods, and I do agree that that’s very important…that focus on the people I’m writing about, the places I’m writing about, that I’m trying to get at knowledge of them as opposed to a superficial, flashy picture.
**Do you think you will continue to write about similar things? Or will you ever take on a project that’s wildly different?**
In terms of the book I’m working on now…it’s mostly set in New York but is definitely much larger than the neighborhood of Marine Park. It sort of jumps back and forth in time…and even includes something outside of New York entirely. So who knows, if I’m lucky enough to finish a third book, maybe I’ll be outside of America. It’s important to keep changing and keep writing, but I am finding that I do always return in some way to Marine Park or to that part of the world.
**Do you find the challenges of writing a novel different from those of writing a short story?**
It is definitely a struggle. I think the hardest thing is continuing day after day…continuing to write the same story day after day. One thing I like about short stories is that you can follow your interest. Obviously there is a certain amount of time that you’re working on a short story, but maybe that’s two weeks, and then if you have a really good idea for a new story, you can just run down that rabbit hole for a while. With a novel…I’ve been trying to channel what I’m interested in into writing the novel, but you do still have to open that page of the novel, where you are at the novel.
**What do you think distinguishes the emerging generation of writers from previous generations? **
One thing, maybe, is a hopefully more inclusive group of writers… We’re hearing from more voices, or we should. I wonder…if there will be a move away from the small, precise short story collection—the idea of writing that first and then moving on to a novel. I wonder if people will be working on big entertaining novels from the beginning, depending on how tastes change. I wonder, are novels going to become something that’s for very few, almost like poetry in some ways…or will novels be this very important thing that people search out, because it’s the only form of media that lets you kind of drop into it without the interruptions of Twitter, or whatever. Maybe that’s the direction.
**How has being a young, published writer impacted your social life?**
I’m not so much in the sort of published writers scene, partially because I haven’t been invited into it yet. I worked in a NY publishing house for a while, so most of my friends were editors. Really most of my close friends are journalists…which is great because I think journalists are probably the smartest people in the world. You can so much from listening to journalists.
**Is there anything that happened at the Advocate while you were there that you would like us to remember happened?**
I love the *Advocate*, first of all. There were two readings in particular that I loved for different reasons. The first one was a Denis Johnson reading. He was the hero when we were there. He came and read…and someone asked him about his process, how he wrote. And he said that he made a pledge to write every day. He started out writing three minutes a day, that’d be his minimum. Some days only three minutes, sometimes more. But he could always find three minutes. And after I heard that I tried the three minute a day rule, and it totally works. It’s incredible. It’s a really good way to get yourself started. And I’ve written at least three minutes a day ever since then. The other one was a Jim Shepard reading…. I was the one who organized it, and he sent me a funny email on the before, asking if we were advertising for it, will there be any people there, and I said no worries, there would definitely be people there. But then I started to worry. So I started telling all my friends, go to the reading. And I got to the reading, and was letting him in, and was still kind of worried, and…you couldn’t move, there was standing room only… And he read his story “Boys Town” from the *New Yorker*, which is a pretty long story. He read the whole story, it was like 45 minutes long, and everyone was so into it. It was such a great example of how if you’re a great writer and a great performer you can hold a room captive by doing nothing else but reading your words.
**Do you have any advice for current Advocate members who want to pursue similar things?**
First of all, you’re in a really good place for it. I learned a ton from other *Advocate* members. I would learn a lot from them when we were in fiction classes together, but also on the side, reading each other’s work. Personally I borrowed techniques and tactics from other writers, and I’m sure they did same with me….But I think that really it’s just finding a way to keep writing. I mean it’s easy to not do it. So I really do think that writing everyday is a good tactic. Just keep going, and don’t worry so much about how much you’re doing, or if it’s good or bad. It does add up after a while…you look back, and you have a couple months’ work that really gets you somewhere.
**In honor of the issue theme, what is the most dangerous thing you’ve done recently?**
I as a rule am pretty danger averse. This is a good example of how risk averse I am: For a long time I wanted to jump into the tracks at the subway. It’s a fascination I have; almost every day I think about it. And a couple of nights ago I was waiting for a train, and you know, the garbage train comes by, there are workers on track. So there were probably no trains coming. And I thought to myself, this is the time! I can jump on the tracks, and pretend like I did this successfully, and you know, take care of that. And I was kind of bending down, giving it a shot, about to do it, then a worker looks at me and is like “what are you doing,” and I was like “sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I just walked away.
2026