Body & Mind
Featuring stories by Christopher Green, Rayna White, Stuart Snelson, Lauren Krauze, and Jessica Weisberg; performed by Kristen Calgaro, Rico Frederick, Michael Petrocelli, Erika Iverson, and Michaela Morton at KGB Bar on 1st October 2014.
We Were Present All Along
by Jessica Weisberg
We ate Skittles so we’d be awake when our patients died. On a quiet night, we would lay on the floor of the lounge or on its itchy red couches pretending to be bad doctors, analyzing x-rays of decaying livers like they were Rorschach Tests. We were twenty-six or twenty-seven or twenty-eight, without hobbies and on no sleep. We admired residents who still managed to follow their favorite sports teams.
A Slow Drive Home
by Lauren Krauze
When Nate pushed the rental car above 65 mph, the frame started to shimmy. The gear shift rattled. The steering wheel shook. Each time this happened, Nate sighed a long, deep sigh, let up on the gas and readjusted the rear view mirror. As it turned out, the speed limit was our limit, and we did the only thing we could: we slowed down, then kept going.
Pool Envy
by Stuart Snelson
He designed, in sun-parched climes, swimming pools for the prosperous.
To any whim he catered. He unearthed guitar-shaped hollows for rock stars; snake-hipped singers dipped in his myriad kidneys. For doe-eyed lovers he had designed a yin and yang pool. Blindly besotted, they only realised after installation that they were doomed to swim forever apart.
Any design realised, he had declared. It was a statement he would come to regret.
When Elsa Sings
by Rayna White
I know the days when Elsa's lover been over, 'cause those be the days when she don't stop singing. I heard her as soon as I got to the top of the stairs in the hall of our walk-up in Harlem. She was belting out a big, heavy gospel song praising the name of her most merciful, loving Savior. Couldn't nobody deny that the sound of her voice was like summer on a Saturday morning, like somebody bottled up and gave her all the joy of Christmas and Thanksgiving and she just gives us little tastes of it whenever she feeling generous. Wasn't no denying that her voice was heaven, but still the sound her singing made me cold.
Cross-Heart
by Christopher Green
Marcus’s obsession with yoga came on a little bit like a stomach virus: slowly at first, but then rising toward the end, a wicked stab out of the blue. For a long time he had been talking about it, quietly, at the dinner table, small mumbles that could almost be mistaken for chewing. Then one day Stella came home and he had the mat open in the center of the living room. Palms down, fingers splayed, ass in the air—a pose strongly suggesting a cat just woken from a long nap.