Intimacy & Isolation
Featuring stories by Christopher Green, William Cass, Mark Sadler, and Brian Birnbaum; performed by Kristen Calgaro, Olivia Killingsworth, Tim Farley, and Matt Biagini. Hosted by Andrew Lloyd-Jones at KGB Bar on 5th February 2020.
Everything You Need
by William Cass
Alice was forty-nine, overweight, and had never been married. At noon, like always, she left the large downtown department store where she’d worked most of her adult life for her lunch break. She sat on her regular bench in the little plaza off the busy street, opened her paper sack, ate her sandwich and orange, and watched the passers-by. Any shy attempts she made to catch someone’s eye were met with disregard or disinterest. It was a late-fall day hung with low clouds; she pulled the collar of her gray overcoat up under her chin against the chill.
The Drinks Trolley
by Mark Sadler
The folklore of the frozen north resides in the boughs of the great tundra oak trees that, once matured, seldom grow leaves, even during the summer. They are the biggest and the oldest of all living things; bigger and older, even, than the migrating canutus whales, who parade like chorusing monks along the deep-water trench of the Hagathee Sound. The stories the trees tell are their own. No god whispered these tales into their swaying branches. Mankind did not invent their mythology. He lives inside it, like a character in a book.
Even a Dark Place Will Shine
by Christopher Green
The walls of the Mirrordome were made from broad corrugated steel, painted hellish, Barbie-aisle pink with purple accents. Even with a creeping moss patina and a few decades of sun they were still visible from a great distance, between the trunks of huge cedars as Mirian made her way through the grass, following in the wake of her friends. It had rained through the night and early morning of that day, and she had to keep her eyes mostly to the ground, watching out for thick streaks of mud that might suction off her sneakers, or for the telltale pattern of a copperhead between tufts of knee-high grass. But on the occasion that she glanced up, it swayed ahead of her, that distant place, as though it were loping toward them and not the other way around.
Maudlin Boy in a Greek God’s Body
by Brian Birnbaum
Head down, features pinched, Benison crawled along the fluorescent halls of KeyArena’s underbelly. In his ear, JAY-Z flowed over a silky synth arrangement. When alone, he’d sync up to the lyrics, but the locker room’s voices still followed him down the hall.
He passed lighted glass displays set with SuperSonics relics – trophies, jerseys, pennants. Between the show windows were large stills of Seattle’s hardwood legends. Gary Payton, reaching clean to thief a too-high dribble. Shawn Kemp, rattling the rim, hanging on it and grinning something angry.