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The Seven Verses of Grief

8/14/2016

 
BY MICHAEL McCLELLAND
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Picture
Painting by Casey McClelland

​As the door shuts quietly behind Christopher I throw my bowl of raspberries and cream at it, hoping for a cathartic explosion of porcelain and blood red fruit pulp. But our damned loft is so huge the bowl arcs limply and thuds onto our wine-barrel floor, a single crack down its center releasing the little raspberries. They skitter across the floor like hermit crabs searching for a new home. 

​
After fifteen years, Christopher has just announced he is leaving me, saying he didn’t want to, but it was what we need for our next album to thrive. 

“We’ll be like Fleetwood Mac,” he said, casually, like saying “we’ll be like the Thompsons in 2B.” (We won’t actually be like the Thompsons in 2B. They smell like asparagus and are worth a hundred million.) 

“They were all breaking up and fighting when they wrote Rumours,” he said, staring at his phone screen, not me, “and it’s one of the best albums of all time.” 

“Their next album was Tusk, which means cock!” I screeched back at him. “I take it you’ll be writing that one?” 

​Some context: We are the world’s first and only chart-topping gay-husband pop duo. I write the music; Christopher sings lead vocals. I also play the piano and sing back up. His job is to look and sound pretty. Our first two albums both went platinum. Our third, an ill-advised folksy tribute to our attempts to adopt a child, had flopped. Hence Christopher’s decision to join Grindr and move into our country house, leaving me alone in our Soho loft to write our fourth album, which was supposed to be about going back to our roots. 
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Mrs. Feigenbaum

8/14/2016

 
BY MICHAEL FRYD
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Cinema by hundrednorth / Flickr

​The Surrey was packed with people eager to escape the stifling August heat, and luxuriate in air-conditioned comfort for 39 cents. The crowd dressed just south of modesty, reeked of sweat that impregnated the worn cloth seats. That smell, and not the sand, surf, sun and bikinis of Sandra Dee-Troy Donahue California beach movies, was what Jake associated with summer. 


He had just been promoted to evening relief manager for the J&J theater chain after a year ‘s stint as an usher. It was his first time sitting in the manager’s office, dressed in his high school graduation blue serge suit, master for the night of this dark, and blessedly cool, magical domain. The job wasn’t much, but in the two years since they had immigrated to America, his father had been unable to get a steady job and Jake’s paycheck helped his family survive. Besides, it was just temporary, his first stop on his journey to a brighter future. He had passed the entrance exam for City College, and next month would take his first step into a brave new world of ideas and learning, where he would emerge from his shabby immigrant cocoon, and become an intellectually scintillating scholar, a college professor, or best of all a writer.

Loud pounding on the office door brought him out of his reverie. He opened the door to one of his ushers, a painfully thin sixteen years old with moonscape cheeks, and a proud Hebraic proboscis. Marvin was out of breath from running up the stairs.

“You must come down, we have a problem at the door” he gasped.
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My Own Boss

8/14/2016

 
BY JAMES WADE
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Dick Candy by Marc Diego / Flickr

​My co-worker told me to eat a bag of dicks. I should have been appalled or pissed or offended, but instead I started imagining these boxes filled with like, mini, snack-sized dick bags. All these assorted flavors of dicks started running through my head. Cheddar dicks, sour cream and onion dicks, spicy barbecue dicks, the works. I even imagined the hypothetical Bag-o-Dicks company having one of those competitions where customers come up with a new combination of seasonings that taste like weird shit. 


“Liz, do you even care that you just cost our team the Jefferson account?” The co-worker, Samantha Somebody, was still standing in the doorway of my doorless cubicle. 

“Buffalo and blue cheese dicks,” I murmured, lost in thought.

“What?”

“Huh? Oh, nothing. Yes, Jefferson account, totally my fault. Definitely dropped the ball. It won’t ever happen again. Most likely. It most likely won’t ever-- you know what, it will probably not happen again. Like percentages and stuff say that it would be pretty unlucky if A) the same thing happened and, B) it was also my fault, so.”
​

“Do you even care about this job?” The way she asked the question made it seem like I was thirteen again and everyone had gotten their period but me.


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If I Was Your Girlfriend

8/14/2016

 
BY CARLA SARETT
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​Bathroom Sign by Shelly Prevost / Flickr

​First of all, I need you to understand: Glen was just an OK boyfriend.  Merely acceptable.  He was not, and I have to stress this, superior.  For example, he never sent me roses on my birthday, which I happen to feel is a basic requirement of a “real” relationship.  He felt that flowers are corny, even on Valentine’s Day, and only Midwesterners send cards.  


“I am from Indiana,” I pointed out. 

“You are so funny,” he said.

You see what I mean?  OK, I’m an accountant, but I need more.  Anyway, the problem was how to break up.  There hadn’t been much of a spark in the first place, so I couldn’t exactly say it fizzled out—and we were a fixture at the office.  As the song goes, breaking up is hard to do.
 

So one day, Glen treated me to lunch at a fancy place downtown—and Glen never picked up the tab.  I had a mouthful of wild salmon when he announced, “I think you should know, I’m not a guy.  Or I won’t be soon, which is more or less the same thing.  I’m a woman.”

“Hey that is fantastic,” I said, and I meant it.  “This merlot is fantastic, too, very well-priced.” 
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