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**PRINT: Our 30th broadsheet, GIVES BIRTH TO MONSTERS, by Chicago-based Spencer Dew, is a tale of one man's small heartbreak, the backdrop to a contemporary landscape of well-meaning but ultimately shallow political activism, fractured communicative lines, and more ultimately enduring drives toward total inebriation. In classic Dew fashion, he'll have you laughing all the way to brink of the void. Dew is the author of the short-story collection Songs of Insurgency **WEB: THE LIARS Heather McShane
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THE LIARS
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Heather McShane
McShane is currently pursuing an MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She'll be opening our show this week Friday, Jan. 9, at Quimby's with broadsheet 30 author Spencer Dew, Jill Summers, C.T. Ballentine, and Y.Z. Chin. See the events page for details. This piece is after the Brothers Grimm's "Ditmars Tale of Wonders."
Let me just tell you this. I witnessed two girls in sexy chicken costumes, wearing push-up bras, rushing for the door to one of the bedrooms. Two drunk blockheads swam through the smoky air after them. A girl dressed as a frog stood near the snack table with a clear plastic cup of only ice in one hand and a brown guacamole-covered chip in the other. Three monkeys, who were eyeing a Playboy bunny, stumbled all over the place; one of them was deaf, the second blind, the third mute, and the fourth refused to move after spending most of the night with the mute one on his shoulders. Do you want to know what they did? They placed themselves strategically in the hallway. First, the blind one saw the bunny and pointed at her, the mute one yelled to the immovable one, and then that one put his arm across her shoulders and around her neck and whispered in one of her ears.
Now there were a few of us who were ready to leave the party and drive away in the big-as-a-boat car, into the wind, on the roads with the night space beyond. We were drunk and poetic. But, in this state, I couldn't negotiate a mountain while driving a car nor did I want to continue drinking and miserably drown. So I delayed leaving to sober up and then was distracted by an old, crabby man -- complete with pasted-on bushy eyebrows -- chasing a different bunny who ran at full speed. To get out of the way, I stepped on the bottommost stair and then, out of curiosity, proceeded to climb the staircase to the roof where a Holstein cow lay asleep. (I remembered seeing big flies hang around cows in the Netherlands.) But then, there on the roof, I heard a loudspeaker announce the police. From above, I saw a window open. Out the liars flew.
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BERNARD'S MOTHER
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