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Two Questions for Mikki Aronoff

We recently published Mikki Aronoff’s devastating “Truck Stop Tattoo.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the opening here: “Had another waitress served you…” It tells us so much about the narrator’s environment that she can imagine another waitress ignoring the swastika tattoos and treating this person like just another patron. It does seem like that is easier for some of us than others, doesn’t it?
This story rushed out the first day of a 100-word workshop with Meg Pokrass. The random prompt words offered quickly drove me to this truck stop. But fast as the story came, the feelings behind it have been bubbling up because of the wrenching, toxic divisions our country has been experiencing. Maybe the waitress is the emetic I needed. She knows her history and herself and is solid in her beliefs. She knows she’s probably alone in her views amongst the truck stop café staff. She’s fearless, but she also needs her job, so she keeps her subterfuge covert, subtle: lousy service. Cold coffee.

2) The reveal of the narrator’s tattoo at the end is so powerful. Why do you think she has chosen to memorialize her grandmother in this manner?
I see this character as constantly weighing her environment and judging how far she can go. She can cover up or not, choose when to provoke or discuss. She is a political being and a visible tattoo is her permanent conviction. It is a braver thing than I could ever think of doing as it makes her a target. But she has chosen this tattoo to concretize her own beliefs, to challenge herself and others, and most importantly, she’s chosen it to immortalize her grandmother, who had no choice.

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Truck Stop Tattoo ~ by Mikki Aronoff

Had another waitress served you, she might’ve sashayed to your booth, called you honey. Your coffee would have been hot, your cherry pie warm, a scoop of vanilla ice cream unfurling like a flag.  You’d grabbed utensils from my hand, broadcasting swastikas on the backs of yours. Later, I asked Lucy to give you your check and fled to the lockers to change. Outside, moon frost on truck cabs, gas pumps, a hungry mama cat. Light sliced through the room’s mesh glass window, casting a grid over the dark blue numbers inked on my arm, the same as my grandmother’s.

***

Mikki Aronoff’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Intima, Thimble Literary Magazine, London Reader, SurVision, Rogue Agent, Popshot Quarterly, The South Shore Review, The Fortnightly Review, Feral, The Phare, Sledgehammer Lit, Flash Boulevard, New World Writing, Emerge, The Disappointed Housewife, Tiny Molecules, Potato Soup Journal, and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have received Pushcart and Best Microfiction nominations.

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Two Questions for Emma Tessler

We recently published Emma Tessler’s lovely “Coat Rack Elegy.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) The longing here is something I think most parents are familiar with — wanting your children to stay small and nestled and safe. It’s a feeling that can be prompted by so many different things. How did you pick the image of the empty coat sleeves for the focal point of this story?
I have a slight inclination to lie here, because my answers to both of these questions are disappointingly concrete. But the honest answer is that I was staring at my kids’ coats hanging on the coat rack, and I just started writing what I was feeling. They were 1 and 2 at the time and their coats were so tiny. There was something very vulnerable about these limp, inanimate coats. And at that moment, they were off with a babysitter and so I was feeling what all parents feel when their kids aren’t around, which is ‘I wish I could hold on to them in this exquisite period of time forever.’ Of course, the moment they come back, the wish changes to ‘I wish I could pay the babysitter to keep them for longer.’


2) I love the reference to the scattered matryoshka dolls on the floor. It works so well with the imagery and desire of the story as a whole, but implies a larger world as well. Do you have an idea why the matryoshka dolls are there? Or would that be giving it away?
Ah, again I am embarrassed by how literal I am! Because, when I glanced my eyes away from the coat rack, they caught on the matryoshka dolls my kids had been playing with on the floor (that I had failed to clean up). Matryoshka dolls have been a favorite toy for both of my children, and when I noticed them in my coat-rack-y head space, I felt a little jealous of them. All those generations of dolls, nestled inside one another, somehow maintaining their autonomy but also being one larger entity. It reminded me of being pregnant, which in some ways I miss; the feeling that my child and I were one person and two people at the same time. So I suppose the implied larger world was quite literally the messy, child-stamped room I was sitting in at the moment, and this piece is that sort of heartbreaking moment of awareness when you, as a parent, remember how temporary that world is. 

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Coat Rack Elegy ~ by Emma Tessler

She looked at their little coats hanging on their hooks, the little arms dangling emptily on the wall, and she thought, as every parent before her had thought, that someday their arms would grow and fill coats with long empty arms, and how she wished that she could wrap her own long arms around theirs and they would be like pads of butter on warm bread and they would melt into her and they could be one person again, though not exactly one, but certainly not two, or three, rather they could be like the matryoshka dolls that lay halved and scattered on the floor, and they could nest within her again, being themselves but also being her and never having to worry about which empty coat arms they would fit into because her arms were the only arms that ever felt the cold.

***

Emma Tessler is a psychotherapist and writer living in New York City. She is on Twitter @emmatessler.

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Two Questions for Jared Povanda

We recently published Jared Povanda’s gorgeous “Season Finale Cliffhanger.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) I love the difference between solid endings and uncertain ones here, the difference between a mouse being devoured and escaping, between a thick curtain and a thin one. What kind of endings do you prefer?

I think it all depends on where I am in life. Because of the pandemic, I’m a little tired of uncertainty. I do love solid endings, especially if they’re happy. That’s the key, though. Happiness. Lock me into happiness. There were many moments growing up where I prayed for mutability. I wanted to be able to dream myself into a future that looked different from where I was. This is what I wanted to channel in this story. The homeless girl, so young and so afraid, wants the mouse’s fight to continue. She wants the fight to keep going because she wants to keep going. Going, active. I don’t think she can envision a conclusive ending that’s good—only bad. So uncertainty is very attractive to her, and I think it will be attractive to me again whenever I’m in a situation that feels endlessly bleak. Uncertainty can be scary, paralyzing, but it can also be a wish on a shooting star. A chance for something better to reveal itself beyond what’s currently looming ahead. 

2. The homeless girl, here, seems to think of her fate as hopeless, as predetermined. Do you think there is a glimmer of uncertainty for her that she, perhaps, can’t see? Or is she right to feel so pessimistic?

I think that glimmer is there, for sure, but when I imagine myself at twelve or thirteen, I know I felt similar to the homeless girl. I was never homeless, but I was bullied ceaselessly. When you’re a kid, you already have very little (or no) agency, and when the bullies pressed on my vulnerabilities day after day, it was easy for me to think, “This is the way it’s always going to be.” Predetermined is a perfect word. The clips those TVs play are on a constant loop, 24/7. Always the same. From a much higher vantage point, when the girl becomes a woman, when she’s in a healthier and safer position, I know she’s going to realize the ending presented in front of her on that very lonely day was as solid as mist. She never sees the mouse survive, but she will survive. She will. We all will, I hope. No matter how caging the dark, no matter how suffocating and seemingly finite the current moment is, you really don’t know what’s going to happen next. In this small slice of story, she can only feel pessimistic. But if all of the TVs suddenly went black, if the power went out and the girl stared into nothingness, finally able to construct a new ending for the mouse, I think she’d have the first inkling that permanence lies.

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Season Finale Cliffhanger ~ by Jared Povanda

A python swallows a mouse on Animal Planet, and the homeless girl watches that same clip loop over and over in the warm interior of a Best Buy two towns from hers, wondering how long it will take for the tiniest of its bones to dissolve. The homeless girl hates thinking of these sorts of endings as solid things. Curtains with weight enough to hide behind. Blackout, wool, never sheer. Never sunlight through thin glass. Never the beautiful and uncertain endings she dreams about—the ones where the mouse keeps kicking until the python’s mouth opens to blue skies. The ones where homeless girls make it out alive.

***

Jared Povanda is a writer, poet, and freelance editor from upstate New York. His work has been published in Uncharted Magazine, Pidgeonholes, and Hobart, among numerous others. Find him @JaredPovanda, jaredpovandawriting.wordpress.com, and in the Poets & Writers Directory.

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Two Questions for Kathryn Kulpa

We recently published Kathryn Kulpa’s stunning “Little Runaway.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the imagery and detail here, especially “dinosaur footprints of bass.” That is such a perfect description of that pounding bassline some drivers insist on! How did you come up with such a brilliant line?

I’m not sure! The story was written very quickly, in one uninterrupted burst, and I could hear that BOOM, BOOM in my head as I wrote it. When I was a little kid—like preschool and kindergarten—I was OBSESSED with dinosaurs. Dinosaur books were all I would read, and the term “Thunder Lizard” stayed with me. That scene in Jurassic Park with the impact tremors from the approaching T-Rex also made a deep impression. So, all these dino images, just hanging out in my head waiting for the right moment.

2) The little hints of what the character is leaving, the little hints of where she is going — it’s all so powerful. So, do you think she is going to get on the right bus? Which is to say, do you think (hope) things will be okay?

Yes, I think she will ultimately get on the right bus, in all the many meanings that bus carries. Unlike some of my characters, who are running away from danger, this protagonist is, on one level, throwing herself into danger. She wants to be the film noir heroine, the girl on the run. She’s rejecting safety, because safety feels like stagnation to her, but she also has an innate sense of self-preservation that tells her to fade into the background when the predators stomp by. She’s on the edge—fingernails digging into that soft windowsill—but she’s hanging on, not letting go.

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Little Runaway ~ by Kathryn Kulpa

Bus stop, wet day, here you are, waiting in the rain like a girl in an old sad song. You finally have a chance to be lonely. Unprotected. No longer snug in your mother’s soft flannel coat pocket. To be the stranger, the outsider. The girl at the bus stop hoping she’s getting on the right bus because she doesn’t know anyone to ask. Standing by the trash barrel with its peeling black bars, avoiding the man on the bench singing about red, red, roses; where have the roses gone? There are no roses here. A car slinks by, long and low, dinosaur footprints of bass stomping out of half-closed windows. You fade back onto the sidewalk, pretend to study rain-torn flyers on telephone poles. MISSING. LOST. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Girls who stole away, or were stolen. Girls who are not you but who could be. You’ve never lived before in a place where it rains every day. Smell of clothes drying on radiators, crumbling mulch, eucalyptus buttons. Even the wood of the windowsill gone soft, so soft your fingernails leave crescent-moon marks when you stare out your window with no curtains, only the green aquarium light filtered through pine trees and rain. I could still go home, you think. Think of your phone, smashed and sparkling on a dust-dry highway miles from here. The wood gets softer every day.

***

Kathryn Kulpa teaches writing workshops for Cleaver magazine, where she’s a flash fiction editor. You can find her stories in Atlas and Alice, Cease, Cows, Ekphrastic Review, Flash Frog, No Contact, and other journals. Her work has been chosen for Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf longlist.

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Two Questions for Harsimran Kaur

We recently published Harsimran Kaur’s stunning “2011 blue Subaru speeding to the end of the world.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) These girls! I know these girls! Everyone knows these girls! When you tell their story, they seem both familiar and new, all at once. So! Do you know these girls?

Throughout the piece, I have tried to know them. Understand where they come from. All in all, they need understanding and patience. They’re part of an image that I wanted to create. But there’s this space between them and me that seems ever-existing—building up unknown possibilities—because of which one moment I know them, and the next I don’t.

2) The distance between the narrator and these girls feels so immense — “never-ending,” as the story tells us. But do you think it really is?

I like to believe so! The distance builds much of the context in the piece—the making of their fierce characters justifies the same. The dream-like quality of these girls adds further to their estrangement and alienation faced by them as the piece moves. The distance between the narrator and them is both noticeable and perpetual, contributing to the immensity. The narrator tries labelling the girls into one category but it is the strong character [of the girls] that leave no stone unturned and leaps and bounds its way to the end.

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2011 blue Subaru speeding to the end of the world ~ by Harsimran Kaur

They are poised like French paintings, their boyfriends young and dangerous – the kinds that say here, babygirl; here’s how you deal with daddy issues or you’re so fucking fine. Their faces are unmatched with fear, hair tied in agony. They’re seventeen going on thirty, with bodies pierced with magnets. They say “marb red” to the convenience store clerk and then drive away with fifty more dollars in their pockets. They look at you in French and speak to you in German. They prefer boys who like sleek women, always taking out things from inside of them. For example, a baby that once climbed out of their frail bodies, later left wasted on the sidewalk. When they were young, the sun felt warmer on their face and their names rhymed like a poem. Now, they part their hair like they part their ways. Always late to parties. The life of parties. Pretty girls. One of those girls you stare, stare, stare, the distance seeming never-ending between you and them. But these girls, these girls eat quickly, taking the edge of their hunger. Go swimming in circles and sigh after their head bursts through the skin of the sea, always speeding past the world in their blue-rimmed sunglasses. Your mom doesn’t like them but you do because these girls know shit. They are left to themselves, the world around them is disguised in cheap stakes of cigarettes and ashes. They go to graveyards in search of peace. They build sandcastles that fall easily, headfirst onto the ground, take you to the lakes and dump you there, gawk at your dead body, take out your lungs and wear them to breathe like you, cut your heart in pieces and stare at it for a solid ten minutes before eating it, break your ribs to sell on their Etsy shops, make bracelets out of your eyes, pierce your nose and keep it as a souvenir on their desk. Burn all the water, and scream “fuck you” at anyone and everyone that says oh you’re so young. They darken themselves more with Dollar-store mascara and kohl, every inch of them clad in despair, I want you bad. These girls then drive to the end of the world with new lungs, hearts, ribs, eyes and noses. You only stare. The distance is never-ending.

***

Harsimran Kaur is a senior in high school in India. Her work appears in In Parenthesis, KNACK, Jellyfish Review, Big Windows Review, BULL, Jersey Devil Press, and elsewhere. She can be found on Instagram at @playitasitlaysss.