AUR LitPut III Spring 2023 - From Now To Then
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria. The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced). The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta. Rome, May 2023
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is
having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria.
The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced).
The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta.
Rome, May 2023
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Short Fiction<br />
For truce.<br />
Break.<br />
Start again?<br />
Never again.<br />
I watch my lips move and recognize the pattern. They’ve danced on my tongue, my mind<br />
before. <strong>To</strong> think I had come so far on this long, treacherous creation of self. I thought I was standing<br />
on solid ground. But in the mirror, I take in my stumbling feet. I see that I’m two steps behind.<br />
“Che diavolo stai facendo?”<br />
I freeze.<br />
Amadeo, approaching me from behind, repeats, “What the hell are you doing?” I’m in the<br />
middle of the road, miles away from my apartment. He must’ve followed me here somehow.<br />
“Nothing,” I blurt. Deflect. Avoid. Get out.<br />
I try to walk away, but I can’t move. He’s got me, my wrist, the entirety of my being. Ignorant.<br />
An echo from last night’s fight. Selfish. It’s all about what you want. A grip of my wrist and his<br />
low rumble. Stop. Walking. Away. He doesn’t say these things to me in this moment, but his words<br />
perpetually get trapped inside my head. I’m a dweller, as Amadeo often tells me. Debilitating, hurtful<br />
words were said, but I am the one who triggered them, and I need to move on. Walk away from how<br />
he hurts you, but don’t walk away from him.<br />
“I don’t want to walk away,” I gasp. Amadeo’s eyes are wide in confusion and pain. Screw you<br />
for screwing this, I scream in my mind, for screwing me, for making me want to walk away.<br />
“But maybe it is you,” the creature in the mirror hisses. “The one who’s screwed him. Who’s<br />
screwed yourself.”<br />
Amadeo steps closer and envelopes me in his arms. At first, I push him away, but then I lean<br />
in. I melt into oblivion. I melt into the cobblestone. I could walk away from this, from us, but he’s got<br />
my hand, and tomorrow will be the same day. <strong>To</strong>morrow, he’ll make me take back what I’m about to<br />
say. So, before I forget what I’ve seen in the mirror, before he makes me take it back, to myself and to<br />
the street, I crawl out from the ancient stone that’s buried me. I whisper what I want.<br />
23
Change language