CURTIS HA

MILT

ON

Aping the monsters, abetting the hunger, she ate her nightly sleep. It was imported, it was all imported. She wondered what the Chinese must know about the insides of things that remained a mystery to herself. Why she would think in clichés is equally a mys-tery, but not one that she could concern herself with. Rather, she had to stay focused on be-ing productive. Her lifestyle was violently productive. So productive that what idle won-dering she did manage to do — and when she did, she found the activity enjoyable — had to be crammed into obscure mo-ments, often punctuated, inter-rupted even, by long hours of employment. And so her char-acter began to come into focus. She would perhaps have liked to

experiment with desire; she had found her youthful explorations of the area invigorating, but sim-ply hadn’t had much time for it since. Nonetheless, she had, some time ago, put her photo on the In-ternet in case desire would easily fi nd her without herself having to

invest too much unproductive ef-fort. This is also why she almost exclusively ate food from China. She would have liked to perhaps experiment with cooking her own food, but it sim-ply wasn’t effi ca-cious.

For his part, he was growing weary of his own

transparent cynicism. Especially given that he spent his days try-ing to be more like her, to emulate her ever more precisely, until, at some imagined point, they would become indistinguishable. At that point, he imagined, they would

go on a date. The objective condi-tions for dating would be realized, he rationalized, and at that point perhaps even sex would become a feasible proposition. This re-mained, for the time being, wildly theoretical. Fringe, even.

The city had manufactured both of them, from suburbs to center, set them on their own vec-tors. Somewhere, he sensed, some unseen authorial database could place them as points on a grid. His smartphone confi rmed his suspicion, as did the frighteningly relevant ads for thermostats, vi-nyl tubing, and waterproof pens that would appear on his social media feeds.

Her city was free of the impu-rities that fi lled his own. Where he was habituated to daily mun-dane violence — a boy knocked

off a bicycle by a Sport Utility Ve-hicle with tinted windows, a man on the corner casually throwing a small cinderblock at another man — her city was clean, well-lit, and teeming with children that she fi rmly instructed her own hormonal system not to notice,

lest it act up and threaten her fo-cus.

Yet both of them faced, each in her or his own way, the tempo-ral inevitability of the weekend. He, a natural idler born into a life of mental la-bor and raised in a casually misog-ynistic culture, unconsciously

associated consumption, and al-coholic consumption in particu-lar, with physical pleasure, and so used the one as a replacement for the other. She recognized an at least theoretical need to engage with humans nonprofessionally,

and, at the edges of her awareness, a healthy set of desire.

And so, as the author would have it, they ended up at the same bar early on a Saturday evening. They had both, as is expected, come with a small group of those in the city most familiar to them-selves. They had in common their humanity; they were neither ab-normally confi -dent nor outgo-ing, though they did share a certain unremarkable beauty, a result, for both of them with separate histories, of an intense & destruc-tive period of ado-lescent self-con-sciousness during which they had shaped their growing bodies to fi t the mediated images of which they were so acutely aware.

With all this context hanging in the smokefree air of the bar between them, they caught each

others’ eye. Yet it is uncommon and unnatural to break away from one’s own friendly and familiar huddle in the midst of imbibing, and even more so to approach a stranger, herself entwined in the fl ows of her own conversation, and so he did not, and of course

she did not, and so they looked away, back into their own drinks, and did not meet. That night, he drank to the upper limits of civility, and she to the lower. Although she caught the eye of many other men, she was surprised that his were the

ones she found herself remem-bering, albeit briefl y, on the sub-way ride home.

The night consumed them un-til they could reemerge into their own usefullnesses.

JED BICKMAN

Dear Mom,

By the time you get this letter, I’ll be all grown up. I wanted to tell you that summer camp has been good so far even though it’s so short. We sang a song, made Indian headdresses, rowed in a canoe, and now it’s all over. I’ll miss the friends I made, but, you know, I just wish I was home. Is dad feeling better?

I’ll see you soon. I met a really nice girl across the lake and I think she wants to go steady. Send dad and Sparks my love.

Yours,

Dear Steve,

By the time you read this letter I will be dead and your father will be gone too and you will have your own life to lead, maybe even your own children. I met your father when we were both at camp, so I know the score. I don’t think we got a chance to tell you that before you left. Was it really just this morning? Like your father always says, “Here today and that’s all she wrote.”

HANNAH SCHULMAN

Your father and I leave you three things. It may not seem like a lot, but it’s all we have and it’s more than some of the neighbors. (How much can you accumulate when time is so short, Steve? Your father often wondered that, and look how sick it left him.)

We leave you our home, which is where hundreds of your an-cestors have lived in the last two years. It’s old and comfy and you know your way around. It’s no mansion, but it’s yours and your children’s and your children’s children.

We also leave you Sparks, who has been in our family for twenty-five generations. This sounds odd, Steve, but your father and I love that aphid like a daughter. Maybe you don’t understand now, but you will when you have a child of your own and he or she goes away to camp.

And though you may not have the time for it—being a parent, you’ll learn, is so very time-consuming—your father and I have also left you all of our family’s correspondence. You never got a chance to meet your grandparents, Steve, and while your father and I didn’t know them that well either, we think it’s important that you have what our family has written. You’ll never have time enough to read them, and we don’t expect you to, but their letters are all here for you if you need them.

I have to go. I want to be with your father when it’s time. But just remember that you can’t think of the past for too long, Steve, you just can’t. We don’t have much to look forward to, we mayflies, and it seems so sad when all we do is look back. So don’t, Steve. Just don’t. Fly, my lovely. Just fly.

Yours always, Mom

HUBERT VIGILLA

www.oneoffmag.org

transmit:send@oneoffmag.org

Cover by Brendan Walter:

After my grandfather passed away, we went through all of his belongings, as families

tend to do. Before the internet age, when people went on vacation, there was this strange personal correspondence through post cards that went on. It was personal, but somehow impersonal and trivial messages like ‘Dear x, We got to the hotel at 5 and then went out for dinner, then went to bed. Now we’re going to sleep. Will write again later. - Love, x’ It’s the same sort of thing that is done in a quick text message these days and transmitted in an instant or even be thrown out into the atmosphere on something like twitter or facebook, without the strange artwork accompanying it. I saw all of these dusty collections of art with hand written facebook status updates on the back and decided to make a collage of these beach and mountain vacations. The collage tells the story of all the messages that were written behind and all the fun that was had.

Issue 03

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0

Edited by Tyler Henry & Jed Bickman