A Mashup of Jobs You Could Have Had Growing Up in South Central Pennsylvania

By Andy Brown

You’re sitting on a low wooden stool picking celery plants from the starter bed while asking the guy beside you for a minute of his time, but he’s hungry, so you brush the dirt from your hands and grab a tray with plates of banquet chicken and the kind of mashed potatoes you could use to plaster a ceiling, a ceiling that will last for decades until you climb this ladder and start busting a hole big enough to climb through, so you can wiggle into the crawlspace and cut the ties that hold it, except of course that means when it falls, you fall too, but then again when you land it’s like landing in a public pool that hasn’t been cleaned, which is to say there are floating turds and dead mice that someone has to scoop out with a net, and that someone is you – today, tomorrow and every day until something different comes along, something that pays a little more or offers more hours, such that when you fall back into the pool and drown, you wake up driving a forklift in reverse, moving a pallet piled high with bags of crushed stone, and you’re so careful not to crash that you don’t notice until it’s too late the fledgling bird leap from the nest hidden in the overstocked lumber, leap only to discover it’s not ready to fly, to discover that it’s not even agile enough to flutter away before a solid rubber tire turns it into a stain the rain will wash away later, and maybe that’s when you could say you witnessed something real or had a life-changing experience or learned a valuable lesson or all the above, but you still have to wake the next morning and drive to work, where you flirt with a purple dragon and guard the entrance to a roller coaster, and when a child begs to be let on the ride, and the parent says, “Ask the man,” you don’t hesitate to say, “No, you have to be at least this tall,” because your childhood ended years ago, and it’s not fair they look to you for an answer, and it makes no sense, since you’re not even old enough to buy cigarettes or join the army, but you’re the man nonetheless, the man with the blue polo shirt sporting a castle logo and wavy font that says Dutch Wonderland.

Andy Brown is a full-time freelance writer who left south central Pennsylvania 20 years but still considers it home.

Art by Andy Brown.

Sweat

By Jason Harris

I’ve never understood moderation—I run three miles a day four days a week to save my life, to lighten the pressure my blood applies to the arteries in my heart; the treadmill breathes beneath my feet and every time the last mile taunts me, its barb similar to the barbs that hooked me as a child: picked on as a kid for my dark skin in class photos, mocked for the tremble in my Black lips when my mother kissed me goodbye and drove off, reprimanded in fourth grade for axin the teacher a question instead of asking–I spend a lot of time now decentering the white gaze from my psyche; I spend a lot of time now running twelve miles a week to extend my time here, to live in my Blackness and rejoice in it, to not be silenced by medical maltreatment; I’ve only now discovered my purpose: to be alive and to tell you about the birds dreaming of a cleaner planet, about how the birds and I dream the same dream, about how we are neither innocent of destruction nor calculated action; if God stretches a blue finish line across the sky, I hope I’m the last to cross it because this is a race I don’t care to lose; I’ve spent the latter half of my life rebuilding my identity and daily it slips from my hands like bird seeds; it drips from beard in beads like sweat; look, no machine ever made me feel less human than the one holding me in its lung—if a thing keeps me alive I devour it.

Jason Harris is an American writer.

Photo by Jason Harris.

I stole your wife in the middle of an IKEA

By Helena Pantsis

or, okay, I understand the implications of saying I stole her, as if she is an object, as if she is your property to be stolen, but now I fear I might've done just that—so maybe what I mean is when I saw her across the way, wandering down the aisles between the TÄRENDÖs and the LAGKAPTENs, the tension was palpable—I saw the MALMs glistening in the halos of her eyes—and maybe it was one-sided to begin, me standing across her in the kitchen, her eyeing a stray FULLÄNDAD in the LÅNGUDDEN, and I pictured us there together inside our home, staring between our BORGHILD curtains and readying to start the day, but when she reached for the same TRÅDFI as me I knew it was serendipity, or destiny, or the Swedish word for lovestruck and all things meant to be (FÅGELHUS?), so I asked her to the dining hall to share an ALLEMANSRÄTTEN in the cafeteria with me, where the queues are long and the trays are never full, so I could stare into her eyes and refill her endless cup for eternity—but it wasn't until her fourth refill (I don't know how many hours it'd been; time in IKEA exists in a void) that I noticed the wedding ring, that the notion of my perfect woman—not mine in the possessive context but in terms of subjective evaluation (not that she is an object to be evaluated, or that she exists to be perceived from any given gaze but her own)—as a married woman made itself solid and possible in the goo of my mind, still when I asked her about it she said she hadn't seen you since the DJUNGELSKOGs, which might've been hours ago, or months, or maybe years, and so perhaps you had ceased to exist, or had walked into a KLEPPSTAD and found your way into another world, but either way she was ready to move on—“it happens,” she said, and even though she shares my SONGESAND now, and makes love to me nightly, and looks so sweet standing by our LÅNGUDDEN in the mornings with a hot UPPHETTA ready for pouring, and after supper time when she clears the OFTASTs from the JOKKMOKK she smiles at me so lovingly, last week she noticed that the BORGHILD curtains were fading, so now I'm afraid of losing my wife in an IKEA too.

Helena Pantsis (she/they) is a writer and student from Australia's south-east majoring in Psychology and Creative Writing—more of their work can be found at hlnpnts.com.

Art by Jeff Kallet.