On my grandmother’s tukador there was an Avon blush-on compact, a jar of Pond’s Vanishing Cream, a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder, an Ever Bilena lipstick in a gold tube, a saucer of hairpins, and a rosary whose beads…
Common descriptors from readers of working-class literature tend to devolve into one of two fields. The first, with words like “gruff,” “gritty,” and “crass,” tend to simply describe the economically depressed settings and the hardscrabble lives of the characters…
Max was two. Zoe, seven. I was forty, when the nurse called and told me I needed to come in for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound. My manners couldn’t catch up with my physical reaction. I started yelling why…
Essay by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif • What do short stories have in common with jazz? Like the innately improvisational quality of jazz, the nature of the short story genre—constrained by the need for a high amount of drama in a…
I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…
I go to churches because they’re quiet. The world is too loud. The first time I went, I was hiding. I’d been paying for a flat white at the café near my old office when my ex-fiancé and his…
Gordon Bishop, fifty-six, is a one-eyed, one-legged, one-breasted single father. He is a native New Yorker who shares an antique-filled one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with his teenage daughter. Every night, Gordon sits at his desk wearing tighty-whities and…
BAŅUTA RUBESS pioneered feminist theatre and contemporary opera to national renown in Canada and Latvia. She has lived in four countries and writes in two languages. She has written plays, libretti, radio drama, television biopics, stories, and…
It’s all a blur. It can be separated into two five-year periods: using alone and using with Haley. Haley had piercings everywhere: the bridge of her nose, her septum, her nipples, her belly button. She had stretched lobes—one had…
In “What I Do and Don’t Remember from the Days and Nights of Endlessly Smoking Crack and Shooting Heroin,” I wanted to give the reader addiction. I wanted to transmit it like an STD. I am aware of my magical thinking as it pertains to writing, and so I settled for the lesser hope of writing about my addiction in an experiential way. I wouldn’t expect a reader to have firsthand knowledge of the world this essay inhabits and so I attempt to impart it through structure: a list.
I’m nearly finished writing a memoir-in-essays and for the sake of the collection, I needed to introduce the reader to addiction. I needed to build a world that I could call back on in later essays. Obviously, this essay isn’t about recovery nor does it explore my using relationship with Haley. Instead, I was attempting to siphon my experiences, create a highlights reel, something detailed but crackling enough for a reader to leave the piece with an emotional experience, a movie in their mind, a sort of transference.
“How do I give the reader addiction?” I asked my gut. Understandably, these are my memories and they span a decade of time. From a craft perspective, I knew momentum would be important, and the list-like structure accomplishes that goal. Also, the list allows a sense of place and time to be captured through a collage of dynamic details and scenes. It’s not like I sat down and calculated all of these particulars before writing. I simply asked the questions and began to remember my own addiction.
CHRISTIAN BODNEY lives in New York City. He/they is an MFA candidate in creative writing at New York University. He is currently nearing the completion of a collection of experimental essays/memoirs. He has work appearing in Hobart, Ninth Letter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Sonora Review. Find him on Instagram @sisyphus.is.happy.
