Welcome back, Miscellaneous readers! This week is a crossover episode: the Carleton Manuscript meets the Second Laird Miscellany [some are calling it the most ambitious crossover event in history. We’re not sure who. Couldn’t possibly be us].
The Manuscript is Carleton’s student-run literary and creative magazine, open to pretty much anything that can fit on paper—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, paintings, photographs, pictures of multimedia work, witty text messages, etc. There’s a Fall, Winter, and Spring issue each year, and editors meet after fifth week to put together a new edition showcasing the talents of the college’s student body. Submissions are now open! Send your work to carletonmanuscript@gmail.com to be considered.
For a taste of Carleton, here’s a sample of previously published work in the Manuscript. Have fun, dear readers, and be inspired!
Terra Firma
By Becca Helmstetter
In Philadelphia, a living room is cluttered
with wax figures and stained sofas.
Dust clogs the pores of the cushions, heavy on the velvet.
My mother had laid out a clean sheet for me,
but we were talking late.
Her face sat, creased and shining, on the rim of her water-cup. We watched the clock on the stove.
She spoke to me long into the morning, while I sat
in a kitchen chair, knees into chest, and drank tap water.
And upstairs, another pilgrimage:
Grandmother, still in bed, with the covers pulled over her eyes. When I shook out my pins and needles and found
my mother’s keys, the house was still crowded.
Dust in the velvet, sheet on the carpet, death-watches
in the walls.
the funeral affair
By Anonymous Submission
If you’re going to do this job, you need to understand that hatred is genetic. It bleeds down from grandparent to grandchild, skipping the wailing mother, who will ask after the will when she is done placing flowers at the grave. The first funeral that you attended was solemn and dark, except for the girl who actually lived with her dead dad, who knew that he wanted bright colors and showed up in an orange flower dress. She gets chewed out after the service by her living mother, who walked out on them to live with the band director at the girl’s high school.
But this isn’t a story about the girl, the mother, or the dead dad. This is a story about you. You are paid to show up at funerals, to cry better than any actor, and greet the little ones as Great-Aunt Irma who they’ve never met. Or Great-Aunt Betsy. Or, on days when the makeup is caked onto your face and you can put a spring in your step, you are graduated to Aunt Marjorie, who wants to be a cool aunt and takes the kids out for ice cream while the parents get drunk.
The night before your next job, Calvin is in your bed. You met him when the Funeral Hiring Agency put the two of you together for a great-aunt, great-uncle job. You thought his hair looked soft, peeking out from underneath his bowler hat and you had to clasp your fingers behind your back to keep from touching it at the funeral. After, he opened the door of his car for you and then opened the door to your house. Even then, he knew how to read your mind.
You watch the wind blow the flowery curtain and listen to Calvin breathe evenly. There’s a spider in the corner, minding its own business and making a web that you’ll have to vacuum later, before Calvin screams. You roll over in the bed.
Calvin’s eyes are closed but his breath shudders, so you know you have woken him. In these last few years, he has aged, and now he sleeps fitfully. Sometimes, you wake up to see him sitting on the edge of the bed, head in his hands, trying to calm himself down. You never know what to do when that happens, so you rub his back once, twice, and then turn back over.
His eyes drift open. He meets your eyes and smiles, the corners of his mouth hinting upwards. “Will you marry me?”
You don’t answer. You haven’t got one, anyway. The two of you haven’t spoken other than the occasional proposal since the first one, when he took you out to dinner after a funeral and you felt like crying, right there in the restaurant, but you had to save your tears because you were working the next day. You haven’t had tears to yourself in a while.
“Think about it.” Calvin rolls over, his back planted firmly in your way.
This is how the conversation always goes. You never have words for him. You only know that in your experience, marriage doesn’t save anything. All it leads to is one person asking for another’s money at the funeral. You don’t have any money that Calvin might want, because he has kind eyes and there aren’t many men in this business so he’s in high demand. He’s never had trouble keeping work separated from his life. He taught you not to let it bleed in, but you do anyway, in the darkness after he’s gone to sleep.
But for the job, for the job, you should say yes. Married mourners get paid more, because they keep up the façade better. They can trick the kids into thinking that people who loved the body in the casket exist. But you took this job, after your museum curator gig, to prove to yourself that you could be independent of the man with the grasping hands. And you have, until you met Calvin.
You have a speech to make in the morning as Marjorie. Every Marjorie speech starts the same, with a list of thanks for the dead person that the family has given you in advance. But then you might go off script a little, because you’ve always felt that speaking from the heart is best. Even that will feel familiar, because you’ve done it before. The gist is this: we are born, we live, and then we die.