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    Wild Stabs at Love or Something Like it
    Wild Stabs at Love or Something Like it
    Wild Stabs at Love or Something Like it
    Ebook70 pages1 hour

    Wild Stabs at Love or Something Like it

    By Jessica Harman

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    About this ebook

    Wild Stabs at Love or Something Like it is a short story collection in which love is examined as an imaginary place in the mind, as well as an agreement between two people that is real but tentative. These are stories of two ships passing in the night, of intercultural communication, of being lost and finding one's self in others, and in one's self.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhilistine Press
    Release dateMay 20, 2013
    ISBN9781301094769
    Wild Stabs at Love or Something Like it
    Author

    Jessica Harman

    Jessica Harman is a writer whose work has appeared in journals such as "Nimrod," "Spillway," "Bellevue Literary Review," "Stand," "Arion," "Poeisis," "Tears In The Fence," "Iconoclast," and "Rosebud." Her first full-length collection of poetry, "Dream Catcher," released in February 2013, is available on amazon.com, and also from Aldrich Press. Her second collection of poems, "Sky Juice," is forthcoming from Propaganda Press in the autumn of 2013. She teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, sometimes.

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      Book preview

      Wild Stabs at Love or Something Like it - Jessica Harman

      Wild Stabs at Love or Something Like it

      By Jessica Harman

      Published by Philistine Press at Smashwords

      Copyright 2013 Jessica Harman

      Edited by Frank Burton

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      More information at www.philistinepress.com.

      Contents

      Whispered Emergencies

      The Overly Critical People’s Club

      The Turtles

      Ants

      Dance Therapy

      Snowy Day

      Something to Do With Fate

      Oceans of Black Tulips

      Not a Boyfriend

      A Moment Stopped at a Red Traffic Light

      Acknowledgements

      An earlier version of A Moment Stopped at a Red Traffic Light was published in the online magazine, U.M.Ph!

      Whispered Emergencies

      The pool tables in the bar named after a Jean-Paul Sartre novel were bathed in red light. Their green velvet looked like a deep black. I perched on the edge of the smooth wood of one of these tables. The shot was difficult, but if I shot with the stick behind my back, maybe I could manage the yellow striped ball in the left corner pocket. I imagined the trajectory as if I was a sniper and my life depended on it.

      Analyzing geometry was fun, but it wasn’t as much fun when you were trying to look beautiful. I knew I didn’t look beautiful yet, tonight. I hadn’t been able to switch on the light within me this evening. Everyone was feeling it. After all, Jimmy and Kevin were here with me because I had been so beautiful on the train, and at dinner, and now here I was looking like a facecloth on the floor. I was playing pool badly, to boot.

      The reason I wasn’t looking beautiful was because I was too nervous to look beautiful. A little voice within me was saying, You’re not it. You’re not it. And it meant beautiful. When I was relaxed, it came almost naturally. I still had to pump myself up a little bit. I’ve learned that if you pretend you use really expensive four-hundred face cream, it’s just as good as using the real thing. Mind over matter.

      Do you guys believe in Mind over Matter? I asked suddenly, as I was perching my ass in tight black denim on the edge.

      There was a three-second pause.

      I guess, said Kevin.

      Jimmy said, It can work, I suppose.

      I remember around the antebellum mahogany table with a turkey in a state of being carved, the suburban Virginia darkness outside the picture window glistening a little in the rain in the darkness, my brother said, Jodi Foster says beautiful isn’t something she is. It’s something she does. I’ve always remembered that, and my brother gazing into the turkey as if it were a crystal ball telling him that one day he would meet Jodi Foster, though he would not.

      That was when I talked to my mom and stepfather. That was back when my brother would talk to me.

      I prayed a little bit as I pointed my cue stick at the white ball. I felt Jimmy’s eyes on me. In a moment when I wanted choirs of angels around me, but felt they weren’t there, I took my shot, and missed.

      I wanted to sink into the black wallpaper of Nausea, this cool bar, but of course that’s impossible.

      Kevin’s turn.

      I slid my ass in my tight black jeans off of the pool table’s edge, to give him room. His grunge hair fell in twirling locks that verged on dreads. He was the kind of guy I dated in high school, not so long ago, who smoked pot but was still really good at math. Of course I couldn’t ask him if he smoked pot, but he did smell of patchouli, which I took as a clue. He reminded me of a cowboy but without the hat, horses, or cows, and with dreadlocks starting to form. He had large hairy nostrils. This was one of the reasons why I didn’t find him to be good-looking, which is why I was trying to get Jimmy instead. Also, Kevin was tall, and I never like to be into guys who I feel could pound me into the earth. I like to have a leg up on them: I liked the shorter guys, the skinny ones.

      I studied Kevin’s features, almost too big for his face in a roundish way, as he walked around the pool table, deciding what to do.

      He got a blue solid ball in.

      Jimmy began walking around the table. I liked Jimmy’s scarecrow thinness and pointy nose. He looked like a poet-lover-boy in a beret, back in Paris in the day, though he couldn’t really speak French (whenever we came in contact with someone who only spoke French, like that waitress at The Shed Café, they called upon my shaky expertise, which might have been shaky, but was still there, nonetheless). Jimmy was on my team: the two of us against Kevin as we oscillated turns.

      I wondered if Jimmy was fixated on me secretly. I wasn’t at my best tonight. He said something to Kevin and they laughed, but I couldn’t hear, because a Metallica song started playing on the sound system. I wondered why there was heavy metal in a punk bar, but I suppose there’s some cross over.

      I went through the motions of the game. What was at stake? Coolness. Being desirable. I was young, only twenty-one, and I wanted to make some

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