A PATCHWORK PILLOW, by T.J. McIntyre
McIntyre writes from a busy household in rural Alabama. His poems and short stories have been featured in numerous publications, including recent or forthcoming appearances in Moon Milk Review, M-Brane SF, The Red Penny Papers, and Illumen. A debut poetry collection, Isotropes: A Collection of Speculative Haibun, came out in 2010. He writes a monthly column for the Apex Books Blog, regularly contributes to Skull Salad Reviews, and can also be found on http://southernweirdo.wordpress.com.
Craig lost his way and we never saw him again.
***
Frank was one of the seven. He swooped through the empty tunnels seeking out life. He refused to give up. To give up would be to concede defeat. To give up would be to accept that there had been no point to his struggle.
His wings ached, but he fought the urge to rest.
***
Charles lounged in his hidden chamber. The revolution raged far outside, but he was protected from those sights and sounds by ten feet of stone wall covered by thick carpets of elaborate design. Here in his underground kingdom he was safe at last, safe from the chaos and insanity erupting in the world above: the world he had left behind, the world created by his own youthful neglect.
***
Sharice sat on the stoop watching the dealers drive by in their luxury sedans. Only two kinds of folks drove cars like that: dealers and old folks. The men driving by were not old. She heard the thump of bass blaring from their car radios. She knew she could pull over any one of them and score. Her hands shook. She wrapped her arms around her knobby bare knees to stop her legs from performing their restless dance. She watched the cars go by and felt something similar to hunger, but knew she could not indulge that appetite.
Last time she nearly lost herself.
***
Craig had left us all behind.
It was a simple overnight canoeing trip, no different than the others we had shared together that summer after high school. While sitting around our campfire, we had talked about what we were going to do next. Jim was heading off to community college, Gary to the military, and I was planning on taking my chances in New York and hoping to form a band. Craig sat silent listening to us talk. He drank a little more than normal, inhaled a little bit longer, and popped an extra Oxy, but he was no more messed up than the rest of us.
When asked his plans, he shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about the future.” He laughed, but his eyes looked unhappy. Looking back, those were prophetic words. We were just too messed up to understand.
***
The muscles on Frank’s wings stiffened. He glided through the shadows, listening to the water drip all around him into the thin flowing aqueduct below. His ears twitched, the tiny hairs on his earlobes standing on edge, searching the air for any new vibrations.
Other than the rats and cockroaches, he appeared to be all alone. The other seven had told him there was no one left, but he didn’t believe them. He refused to accept such a disappointment.
He locked his wings and glided.
***
Charles wondered where he had gone wrong. The people had loved him. He remembered his childhood coronation: the applause, the jubilation. He remembered how they had hailed him, and he had bowed to them. He had felt so proud of that humbling gesture, thought of it as such a treat for his subjects. But they appreciated nothing. No amount of formal humility would appease them. The world had fallen apart and they blamed him.
Didn’t they know he had no power? Didn’t they know he was not at fault?
Still they battered at the doors high above his hideaway. No sound made it through the insulation, but he could feel each battering of the iron doors like the beating of his heart.
***
Unable to watch the parade of cars any longer, her cravings growing unbearable, Sharice walked back inside. She walked up the stairs and down the hall that led to her apartment. She heard couples fighting and babies crying behind the closed doors on either side of her. One of the doors opened and a woman wearing only a nightgown and rollers in her hair yelled profanities after a scrawny white boy who ran out in front of her. Sharice smiled as she sidestepped and watched him run down the hall in nothing but his birthday suit.
She walked into the apartment she shared with her mother and sat down on the sofa, being careful to avoid the spot where she could get stuck by a spring poking up through the fabric. She turned on the television but only got static. No one had paid the cable bill. That bill was the least of their worries.
She picked up a pillow, a thing made out of scrap fabric she had rescued from the garbage can at the local craft store. She fingered the stitches holding the patchwork pillow together. Her handiwork made her smile. A whole made from many.
She rested her head on the patchwork pillow and dreamed.
***
We called his name over and over, again and again. Craig never answered. Our voices echoed off the granite canyon walls. The river roared, raging with white froth, angry and swollen after the recent storm.
We knew he had decided to tackle it alone. His canoe was gone. He was the type to ride the waves where they took him, even if they crashed him against the rocks.
***
Frank got a cramp in his wings. He tried to shake it off, and when he did so, a joint locked up. He crashed down into the fetid water. A viscous torrent poured over him, cementing his feathers together. It wasn’t water flowing over him. The other Seven had not told him of this, but they had warned him of danger. Fighting the current, he was upset he had not listened.
Thankfully, the pool was shallow and he was able to stand. He worked his way against the current to a concrete walkway and pulled himself out of the water. Weak, he lay gasping, the side of his face touching the concrete ground. The floor felt gritty against his smooth skin. He tried to lift a wing, gave it his strongest effort, strained until tiny blue veins throbbed on his forehead, but he was unable to make either wing move.
Hardened by whatever fluid flowed down here in the basement of the world, his wings cracked off, fell to the ground, and shattered.
The light that had been emanating from him, the light he had carried with him as long as he had memory, went out. Darkness rushed around him. Tiny follicles on his ears announced something unseen rustled in the distance. The rustle became louder until a throng of starving rats swarmed and devoured him.
***
Charles listened to the gilded golden music box as it played a song. He remembered the song from his childhood and sang along. In his mind he saw his mother, beautiful and young, holding him in her arms. He could hear her voice in his head singing this song the same way she had every night when he was a child. Those were the happiest days — the days before the crown.
His father was never around so it mattered little to him when he died. What mattered more was the inheritance left behind: a nation in shambles. Peasants revolted, warring kingdoms attacked, and being just a child, he didn’t know what to do about any of it. He had trusted the wisdom of his mother’s manservant at her urging. Charles was king in name only, but this served him fine. He was free to play on the royal grounds hidden from the chaos outside. But all that changed once the castle came down.
He had watched from the shadows at night as they held his mother and her manservant under the guillotines. The scene was lit by a spotlight suspended under a metal aeroship with a flashing sign announcing the revolution was a success. Her execution was displayed on the massive video grid of the aeroship. When her head rolled to the ground the world erupted in cheers.
In tears, Charles ran and hid. He made his home underneath the rubble in this hidden shelter. It had always been his favorite play-place, but now he was not playing and this wasn’t pretend. His food stores were long gone, his stomach so hungry it ceased its rumble.
The room shook and the music box fell to the ground. The tubes inside the machine popped and there was a small explosion. A tongue of flame licked up the carpeted walls setting them ablaze.
“Viva la revolution!” an angry mob shouted as they crashed into his hidden sanctuary.
Charles had nowhere left to hide. He smiled, thinking that this was all right. He had nothing to hide from. In fact, the desire to hide had fled from him altogether.
The flames warmed the chill he had felt in his bones for so long. The chill had crept in once his mother was gone, once her arms were not there to hold him any longer.
***
Sharice slept on her pillow until the sky grew dark. She awoke and walked over and opened the kitchen window. With pillow in hand, she stepped out onto the fire escape and sat listening to the sound of the city around her: cars honked, sirens blared, gunshots, a scream. She had heard it all before.
She looked around at the building across the alley. Most of the windows were curtained, hiding the occupants and the dramas those apartments contained, but other windows were open. Pinpricks of light and shadow. She looked inside these portals and could see a dozen versions of herself. She looked inside a window near the top of the building, saw a man and woman dancing to a song that she could not hear, saw herself in that woman, fingered the stitches in the pillow on her lap, and smiled.
MY PRETZEL HAS EYES, by Pitchfork Battalion (Henry Ronan-Daniell, C.T. Ballentine, Todd Dills)
The writers debuted this piece at THE2NDHAND’s 11th-anniversary celebration at East Nashville’s Portland Brew Feb. 12, 2011.
The listenership of the Pretzel Eyes show remained small. Pretzel Eyes himself, otherwise known as Martin Tanager, had done his best to create the most avant-garde radio program Cornell University student radio had ever known. It was difficult for him to predict how many more hours of crawlspace field recordings the greater Ithaca area would have to hear before it realized the greatness of his show, but he refused to give up. If he threw in the towel now, all he’d have to do with himself as a biology major would be to study the organ systems of creatures which seemed to have evolved solely to bore and infuriate him.
One man had called in last week, attempting, it seemed, to reach another number, and said he’d just been bitten by a dun-colored scorpion. Martin told him to put some ice on the bite and relax, though he did not really know whether this was wise. He’d not yet studied scorpions. Aside from that, though, the phones had not rung. Perhaps the show was still insufficiently avant-garde, Martin worried. He began to monkey with the tone controls in hopes of finding a combination which would further unsettle the philistines, but eventually he turned them all back to the way they had been in the first place.
Perhaps he needed a partner. He’d seen some potential in the Panamanian with whom he shared a lab table, though he did not approve of that fellow’s haircut nor his familiarity with canals. Access, after all, was not what The Pretzel Eyes Show was all about. No, the Panamanian would only louse things up. Better to fly solo. Just as he reconciled himself to this sad necessity, the light on the telephone flashed. Martin answered it.
“Is this the Pretzel Eyes show?” a voice asked.
“Yes, it is,” Martin said.
“Well, I must say I greatly enjoy your recordings, crawlspace and otherwise,” the voice maintained, “and the satisfaction engendered thereby has ennobled my once haggard spirit. You do Ithaca a service.”
“Thank you so very much,” Martin said, and wiped away a tear. –Ronan-Daniell
***
Winsome McKenzie brought his own fat ass onto that elevator. There were his many guts and faded tiger tattoos reflected in a cascade hallway of ornate glass. Throwing a towel over his shoulder and (hopefully) his emerging splotch of ringworm, McKenzie rehearsed vague pitches to potential players. He decided “ancillary artifacts” sounded smarter than “ancillary accessories,” more modern and probably less redundant, although really…
The doors opened for a lanky teenager in a hooded sweatshirt. He bobbed his head in cut time, averting his eyes from the awesome power of bare male flesh.
McKenzie’s eyes swam beneath burst capillary waves of nostalgia — his own youth — nights on the mountain with Syl and Simone. Simone, who’d spent the last month studying formalized logic under the auspices of a nervous young man in khaki shorts, was pulling her legs beneath herself — a heel grazing the boundary of buttock — from which position she lectured through a marijuana haze on the meta-mutations of mathematical conception: circles with negative radii, the name of Yahweh perhaps hidden in algebraic permutations of the Latin alphabet, parabolas turned in on themselves until they became like pretzels, the formula for which had some bearing on the particular trio’s camaraderie. Winsome couldn’t recall specifics, being lost, as it were, in the buttery plane of Simone’s exposed thigh.
“May we have pretzel eyes for brains that our hearts might see them coming,” Simone intoned, drunk and silly. They’d felt on the verge of something then, togetherness defined not by physical boundaries but by an allegiance to ideas so patently obvious that they defied definition. Simone was in Berkley now, working on a farm and spending entire months in self-imposed silence. About Syl, Winsome had no idea and here; here was he, old and fat and ready to swim.
McKenzie realized he’d been staring at the teenager, whose face shone from beneath its hood with a mix of disgust and discomfort. Embarrassed, he jerked his head upward, fixing his eyes on the numbers whose steady decline was nearing its end.
CT, don’t lose that number.
I think it might be killing the blackbirds
I knew this hacker in Chicago long time ago was a big steely dan fan, sat around his house singing dumb deacon or whatever. I mean, assuming you mean those kinds of blackbirds…
Never can tell with hackers, as they are always casting one thing into another thing.Hackers can build programs that cast blue jays into blackbirds or can, for that matter, convert into blackbirds: sandwiches, lollipops and vague feelings of encroaching ennui. I’m not interested in where the blackbird’s been only in where it’s going. Did that hacker have a handlebar mustache? I’ll bet.
He did. Above a very large and unruly beard. I think hackers are killing the blackbirds.
He’s hacked into my YouTube, so i can see what you’re saying And why doesn’t this happen every July 5th? It certainly ought to.
But it is not July 5. Oh if it were. Seeing what you’re saying might be less necessary.
You’re right. It’s like one of those dreams where having to pee turns into a storm cloud.
my pretzel has eyes.
I’m tired of hearing about your pretzel. I’m hungry. Can’t you see that I’m hungry? The pretzel sees what you are up to.
I was a hell-raising shit-talking son of a drunk from a very land of such. Course I knew more than one man my near equal in hubris. But it was Harry Wright who made me tempt the river, not that crazy old preacher.
Harry was a veritable manufacturer of useless ornamental padlocks fashioned from pretzels, grouped in threes and hung upside down — he thread string through the eyes to sinch them together. I don’t remember what the fuck the point was, he needed something to do with the cast-offs of the awful pride he held in his ability to beat a spinning master lock, common for him to demonstrate if you hung around the bar long enough into the evening, which I did. His method? Well-placed hammer stroke, brought down hard on the lock’s face. The dial would pop right out, along with the U, making, the dial, quite a nice little focal point sandwiched among the pretzels he used for the ridiculous ornaments. Maybe he figured he could make money punting them off around Christmas to the few redneck housewives down at his place, where I bellied up most days. They weren’t what I was paying him for.
Another weekday, another three hours in front of me with news for Harry Wright nothing outside the ordinary, which was fuck-all boring. I mean without all the mud on the jobsite and a little drama involving dump driver Willy One-Eye’s stuck shoe I guess I didn’t have nothing at all to say to Harry Wright. Which is exactly what the man told me toward the end of the godforsaken night, almost got in a fight with a useless little bulldog of a Memphis boy who brought his girl in there to prove he could get it up, I guess. He caught me staring at her chest. Don’t tempt me you useless little cobblestone, I told him.
“Don’t you ever change anything up, Grantham?” Harry Wright bellowed to break up the impending altercation, I guess you’d say, then pounding his hammer down, popping open another of his locks on the bar and grinning to eat all the adulative shit that now rained down on him. I kept it up, got a fiery drunk on had to be half a fifth of Evan Williams.
“Call a car for you, Grantham?” Harry said near the end of it.
I don’t guess I was planning to go, but to spite the old man I said nah, I was OK, would be OK, and wobbled up off my seat and I could feel the eyes of every Harry Wright idolator in the place on me as I left, chancing just the glance back to the bar, where an old man had now spun on his stool and grabbed me by the forearm, pulling me down onto an empty seat next to him.
Harry’s eyes peered down on me through his bushy eyebrows, daring me to make a move, telephone out of its cradle and in his hand like he was planning on using it to smash my skull. He shook it with each word, then: “Don’t tempt the river, old man.”
But I wasn’t half as old as the guy who’d sucked me down next to him. I would have knocked him out had it not been for his age and Harry’s dexterity with the hammer, and the phone, I guess. I’d seen him use it.
The old man quickly ordered two beers and then slid one over to me after Harry put them both down in front of him. “He’s OK,” the man said, a little nod of the head to Harry Wright. He didn’t waist no time in what he was about. “You got the Lord, son?”
Oh boy. “You ain’t going there, old man,” I said.
“You need him. Like Harry said, Don’t tempt that damn river.”
I turned my beer up at that, banging the empty down hard on the bar, where it clattered and rolled over down into the trough on Harry’s side. I told them all where they could shove their Lord.
“Jesus, Grantham, the man’s a preacher!” Harry roared.
The eyes.
“Is that right?” I said. “Preachers should not partake. Nor curse. It’s in the goddamn book.”
The grizzled old graybeard just shook his head. “You mind what I told you.”
I had to cross the big muddy 10 minutes later back to my Arkansas home, whine of the tires in my Ford rapping in succession across its sections and, man, I don’t know what the hell happened but next thing I was struggling to get my seatbelt off as the water poured in through the open window, in a matter of seconds up to my neck and over my head and, then, silence.
I was back on the Tennessee bank imagining the truckstops way out across the river, muttering thinking laughing clear to the diesel pumps and dog track about just how Harry Wright wasn’t a scoundrel, wasn’t a pure devilish evil thing of a grandstanding impairment engine. I loved the man, I did, more than booze itself. One of them pretzel padlocks half stuck in the mud beside me getting soggy, couldn’t really feel my left arm. I might have better done to consider the kid at home, the wife, but it’s unlikely in a moment so fleeting. None eyes have seen this glory, a shame bigger there hasn’t been. Death comes quick, louder than a bomb. A quake, a stiff breeze, a howling wind and rain so strong it snaps your scalp. And I was gone. –Ballentine and Dills
MAYBE MAYBE, by Brian Warfield
Warfield lives and writes from Philadelphia.
1) Xavier sat in his room, the uncurving walls wrapped around him like a prism. Something clawlike was reaching down at him, talonless but grasping. He looked at his watch and realized he was going to be late. He dived gently, a controlled dive, out from the clutches of the claw and rolled beyond its reach where he got dressed and left the apartment. He got to the posture night school 15 minutes late.
“Sorry, everybody,” he said. Everybody looked at him. Were they angry? He looked at the teacher. His teacher had immaculate posture and well-defined calf muscles. He felt obligated to fall in love with her, though he didn’t want to.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, gazing directly into her eyeballs, which looked back at him full of forgiveness. She did not love him. Her name was Monica.
He had really bad posture. It was true. At the posture night school they did not balance books on their heads. They carried buckets of water to and fro, they placed orders for Chinese food and walked down the block to pick it up, they watched Marx Brothers movies. A student once asked about the teacher’s methods.
“What does walking your toy shih tzu have anything to do with good posture?”
Monica arched an eyebrow. “Good posture is not arbitrary. You cannot sit up straight in the movie theater and then slouch on the bus ride home. It is essential that you be consistent. Who has straighter posture, you or me?”
“You do,” the student said.
“And between the two of us, who gets paid to teach proper posture professionally and who is paying because he doesn’t have good posture?”
“Um, that would be you and me, respectively.”
“That’s right. So why don’t you get back to programming my VCR and straighten your back.”
Xavier spent the evening cutting coupons out of the newspaper and sneaking looks at Jalinda, who had gotten the privilege of painting Monica’s toenails. Malibu Pink.
Everyone milled around the exit after class was over. It was almost midnight and some of the students were making plans with each other. No one invited Monica. Xavier’s sweat was wet and cold in his armpits.
“Would you care to possibly…” he formulated the words in his brainbox. But there was nothing that he would care to possibly do with Monica. Couldn’t they just spend the rest of their lives together without having to get to know each other?
The post-midnight air on his walk home, alone, was like the skull of a squirrel. Returning home was like denture sores, an oozy chafed hole where the prosthetic of his life wore down on him. He batted at his inflatable punching doll, which fell to the floor and then rolled back upright.
There were only 32 installments of the class, after which he would walk tall but perhaps still alone through the garlanded arches of night school graduation. The time in between threatened to be a minuet of anticipation and dread.
2) Xavier thought of pizza. He paced his apartment contemplating the efficiency of the pizza pie. He yearned, longed for the pinnacle of pizza consumption. It was all too easy for pizza to be sullied. For it to be a rushed and hurried affair eaten in conjunction with watching television. Xavier pined for a transformative pizza. He would ask Monica if she had any recommendations.
In the pocket of his winter jacket, Xavier found a $20 bill. He would use it to purchase pizza for himself and Monica.
A millennium passed and Xavier took a time machine back to the past, to this moment, and killed his past self and replaced him with his future self, himself. He still forgot to set the alarm clock. Was it his future self that had put the $20 in his pocket?
Xavier walked outside and remembered the smell of nitrogen as he experienced it. He walked with a confidence and posture that he should not possess yet. He arrived early to the posture night school. Monica was alone, slumped over her grade book. The classroom door banged against the wall. She looked up at him. There was a mist of fog that was something else filling up the room, emanating between them. He unclasped his hand from the doorknob. He could sense her pulse; she had one. There were tigers and pumas fighting each other in her eyes. He wanted to eat an apple.
They didn’t move. They were unmovable. She started to say something. His finger was on her lip. He kissed her. But mostly he kissed his own finger. It tasted like dirt and skin.
Two eternities passed and then were rescinded.
“The best pizza I ever had was at Calvino’s,” Monica proclaimed breathlessly.
“I know. I ate there about 400 years ago,” Xavier gloated, staring straight into the pores of her face.
“I had to give you an incomplete,” she apologized, gesturing at her grade book.
He wanted to say something witty like “I’ll give you an incomplete.” But instead he just shrugged. Awkward silence erupted all around them. It bit at their lapels.
“Let’s get out of here,” Monica almost said.
“Let’s get out of here,” Xavier almost remembered her saying.
Xavier went back to his apartment, where the other Xavier was still lingering, dead and sprawled on the floor. Xavier wondered if it was even possible to change the past. He remembered what had happened, what now would happen, and he had no idea what he was doing, what he was going to do, what he had done. He stared at his prone body and decided maybe he should just go back even further into the past to when he was still alive, before he had met Monica. Maybe maybe. He smoked a cigarette. He ordered a pizza, but it wasn’t from Calvino’s so it was only mildly awesome.
He thought that maybe instead of killing himself, he should have made friends with himself and kept himself company so he would have someone to talk to. Oh well. Next time, maybe. Maybe maybe.
3) He went to the posture night school. There were only five classes left. Monica was sick. This hadn’t happened the first time. Or had it? He couldn’t remember. Everything was clouding over in a cumulonimbus of forgetting. What had he come back here for, to aright? What decision had he wanted to undecide? The new teacher was more strict but also more traditional, not having them do her laundry but instead kneel on rulers and grasp for golden rings.
Time was fraudulent. He was an embezzler. He couldn’t make any two things co-align. He read in the newspaper that Monica had died. Had that happened? Was he happening? Xavier felt unmoored, like a flour-coated hound. He would wait a millennium and come back and fix this. Somehow it had been his fault, his meddling from the future. He would come back and kill his future self and leave his past self alive. But, of course, he hadn’t done that, had he? Or had he?
He stood up straight, the posture night school was dissolved, he wandered the streets trying to locate a smell, he cried himself to sleep, he woke up with regret.
And then one day he saw her. Monica. He wasn’t dreaming. She was clad in a trench coat. She looked him in the eye. There were calliope horses racing against real horses in his eye. She’d come from the future. She’d killed her past self. His heart beat like a wax model of a heart.
She took his hand. It felt like plaster. He understood everything. Everything was understood.
They went to Calvino’s and had the best pizza in the world.
Monica looked achingly into his eyebrows. “Is it possible for two people from the future who have killed their past selves in order to be with each other, to be with each other?”
“Yes,” he intoned with a resounding s. “It is. It might be. I’m not really sure.”
‘Leak’ is the new ‘press release’; AHO in Nashville Feb. 12, Rob Funderburk’s ils and more
This year’s Chicago snowmageddon, I’m happy to note, didn’t outrank my personal midwest winter initiation. After moving to the Chi in the fall of 1998 from the humid climes of Rock Hill, S.C., come the holidays I was back in S.C. but left early. A blizzard was predicted, see, and I was to start a new job Jan. 2 in Evanston, of all places. I motored back to Chicago in time for New Year’s Eve, as the snow began sometime early the next morning, not stopping for the next 24 hours. I was at that new job the following day, a near-four-hour public transit nightmare (never been so damn cold in my life, standing hopping foot to foot on the platform at Diversey, running in place, etc. etc.). That, friends, still sits in the history books as the No. 2 biggest Chicago snow, hell of an initiation rite for a Southerner. I have nerves of steel. Nah, but ’twas a great time to pretend.
Fortunately, in 1999 THE2NDHAND was just beginning to rise in my brain — we wouldn’t launch for another year — and there were no readings to cancel. Our Nerves of Steel event last Tuesday coincided directly with the worst of the recent white torment, and we unfortunately had to cancel as participants, well, faced travel nightmares to and from the Hungry Brain. We’ll be featuring all — Tomorrow Kings, Mairead Case, Marc Baez and more — in upcoming installments of the event, we hope, the next one to take place March 1.
Meantime, disheartened by the decidedly un-nervy cancellation, Chicago writer Mason Johnson reportedly had his own “Mason Johnson has Nerves of Steel” extravaganza at Moe’s on the northwest side (Central Park and Milwaukee). Check out the partial results.
ALL HANDS ON
The final day to preorder a copy of All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10 (our 10th-anniversary reader) via our Kickstarter campaign is Feb. 16. Reserve your copy. Sometime on the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 26, we hit the funding goal, so barring a disaster the project’s a go. Among features will be special-section author illustrations, some of which are leaked below, in process, by former THE2NDHAND design man Rob Funderburk — my favorite working painter, no doubt, and one of my favorite illustrators 
(he’s also a longtime and great friend, of course). Working from photos in many cases (most of the subjects he’s trying capture in portraits he’s never met), he’s been experimenting with all manner of techniques on these, as you can see. The technique behind the Michael Peck il Rob describes this way: “Laid paper over source photos on a lightbox, used flat side v. pointy corner of a graphite stick to render.” Makes it sounds simple, right?
Pretty stunning preliminary results, I’ll say. Find more from Rob’s illustration, painting and mural work, as well as framed watercolors and maquettes and a screen-printed study of the Chicago Rookery building, at robfunderburk.com. Or read his blog.
MICHAEL PECK
AND NASHVILLE, TAKE HEED
ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION THIS COMING WEEKEND.
THE2NDHAND anniversary celebration | 11 years to the day after our first-ever release party
Saturday, Feb. 12, 7 p.m.
@ Portland Brew, 1921 Eastland Ave., Nashville, Tenn.
THE2NDHAND AFTER 10: A NASHVILLE READING Four days before the end of ourKickstarter.com campaign to raise $2,000 to print our 10th-anniversary anthology, All Hands On, THE2NDHAND’s editors and contributors gather at this event to present new writing and work to be published in the book, with performances by:
*T2H shapeshifting collaborative writing crew of the Pitchfork Battalion
*T2H Louisville, Ky.-based coeditor C.T. Ballentine (whose “Friedrich Nietzsche Waits for a Date” novella is featured in its entirety in the All Hands On book)
*Birmingham-based Nadria Tucker, a frequent T2H contributor, with a special section in the book
*Nashville’s own Matt Cahan, whose “Coyote Business,” a short exploring the cultural connections between Mexico and the United States excerpted from his “Straight Commission” novel in progress, via the tale of a group of would-be Mexican migrants and a U.S. chemical salesman, is among new work featured in AHO
*Susannah Felts, Nashville-based author of the novel This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record
*Nashville-based Henry Ronan-Daniell
Nashville-based wood-block printmaker Martin Cadieux will be on-hand showcasing his print work for THE2NDHAND’s Kickstarter campaign, among other work.