Lit/Pub #IV - The Wake Up Issue - Spring2024
The magazine of Professor Andrea di Robilant literary class at The American University of Rome. "Last year’s issue of Lit/Pub was about the slow return to a post-Covid world. This year, the initial theme was dreams – time to get on with it and think about the future. But the more we discussed what to put in the issue, the more it became apparent that a lingering wariness was still in the air, even a certain complacency. Hence the exhortatory title – The Wake Up Issue – which Isabella Klepikoff has deftly captured in the design of this year’s cover: a wolf resting by a Roman fountain. He looks to be resting, but his lively green eyes tell us he is stirring back to action."
The magazine of Professor Andrea di Robilant literary class at The American University of Rome.
"Last year’s issue of Lit/Pub was about the slow return to a post-Covid world. This year, the initial theme was dreams – time to get on with it and think about the future. But the more we discussed what to put in the issue, the more it became apparent that a lingering wariness was still in the air, even a certain complacency. Hence the exhortatory title – The Wake Up Issue – which Isabella Klepikoff has deftly captured in the design of this year’s cover: a wolf resting by a Roman fountain. He looks to be resting, but his lively green eyes tell us he is stirring back to action."
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Fiction<br />
Hanging Rock Dream Clinic<br />
By Antonio Fronterrè<br />
Every day I wake up feeling drowsy. It’s been years now. I get out of bed and drag my feet on<br />
the dusty floor to the marble counter. I turn to the right, towards the mirror that my dear mother<br />
bought me as a house-warming gift, and look at my reflection. My eyes stare back at me, and they look<br />
confused.<br />
My morning breakfast is always the same. Sometimes I search the internet for new recipes and<br />
buy the ingredients, but after I store them in the fridge I forget about them and they sit in a remote<br />
corner for months until they are covered with mold. So it’s always scrambled eggs on toast and some<br />
podcast or other; today it was about the Bushmen in South Africa. It was interesting but by midday it<br />
had all faded out of my memory.<br />
On the drive to the office I realize that I have forgotten to give my face a morning wash. <strong>The</strong><br />
gunk in my eyes spreads across my sleepy face until I am swaying this way and that way, and nearly hit<br />
a light pole. Had I hit the pole, I think the police would have found a body that looked like a cocoon<br />
of gunk ready to hatch.<br />
In the past my dreams were vivid. Lately, they have become dreary. I dream of offices, scrambled<br />
eggs, and podcasts. I suspect some liquid device must have slipped out of my ear and on to the<br />
pillow while I slept, and fallen on the floor, seeping through and dripping to lower floors and then<br />
towards the center of the earth; my vivid dreams are gone and the ones that are still with me are like<br />
the monotone static of a TV channel long discontinued.<br />
After the light pole accident, or near accident, I reach the downtown area and read the big<br />
billboards spread out between the high rise buildings: “LOVIN’ IT” … “JUST DO IT” … and other<br />
meaningless sentences thought up by some marketing office in Boston or New York. I notice more tra-<br />
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