The series is featuring occasional works of fiction. This is one.
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When the world ends, you and the handful of other survivors are going to fight each other for what’s left. There’s going to be a little food and potable water, and a bit of inhabitable space. Maybe people speak the same language, or maybe they don’t, but words don’t matter anymore. It matters who is lucky and cunning and ambitious and strong. People eat things that you, here and now, would never dream of touching. Ultimately it doesn’t matter because the world is about to end, but if nothing else, you have a strong survival instinct. This is why, when you see something that appears to be edible, you don’t know whether to starve to death or risk being poisoned. They’re two means to the same end.
It’s not that you want to die. But to disappear would be so nice.
That’s what every meal feels like to you. Someone offers you a cracker and all you see is processed flour and cancer. They offer you fruit, and all you see are pesticides and E. coli. And forget about organic. Everyone lies. Everything is tainted.
A few months of this obsessive compulsive thinking has you wearing the J.C. Penney pants you wore in ninth grade. You’re tiny. Everyone tells you that you look skinny and you don’t know how to respond. Thank you seems inappropriate because it’s not a compliment, but what else are you supposed to say? There’s poison in my food and we’re all dying?
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Once upon a time a friend told me about a retreat house in the hills of California. I drove three hours north from my mother’s home and came upon an 800-acre spread, with golden pampas grass tumbling down to a great expanse of blue 1,200 feet below. The place was radiantly silent — save for bells tolling three or four times a day — and I was so far from telephone and laptop that I could lose myself for hours in anything at all, or nothing. At dusk, deer stepped into my private garden to graze; an hour later, I stepped out of my room and found myself under an overturned saltshaker of stars.
Rachell Sumpter The retreat house was the rare place where it seemed impossible to be fraught. All my worries of the previous day seemed about as real and urgent as the taillights of cars disappearing around headlands 12 miles to the south. I started to go to this place of silence more and more often, and one spring day, on my way to two weeks of carefree quiet, I told my old friend Steve about it. Much to my delight, he booked himself in for a three-day stay that would coincide with my final weekend in the sanctuary. Read more…
Five-year-old Miriam huddled in the back corner of my Lower East Side yoga classroom, wrapping herself in a spongy mat like a blanket. She was having another panic attack, screaming so loud others could hear down the hall. I was scared by her anxiety yet it was familiar. At 28, I was the charter school’s first full-time yoga teacher. A product of upstate New York and family with Methodist roots, I’d been a student of Buddhism since college at New York University and, more recently, yoga. I now taught 200 inner-city kids from ages 4 to 12 how to use the tools of mindfulness all day. But secretly, I was having my own panic attacks, at night.
When I first met Miriam she was new to kindergarten, both of her parents were in jail and she had just moved in with her grandmother. A small Hispanic girl, she had recently converted to Islam along with the rest of her family and sported a new dark blue hijab around her serious face. Read more…
The series is featuring occasional works of fiction. This is one.
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Some years ago my husband and I rented an apartment in Paris to celebrate our twentieth anniversary. On the morning of the afternoon we were to leave I packed, putting our clothes and books into two suitcases. I stashed our money and other documents in a leather wallet with many compartments, some hidden within others. I dropped this clever wallet into a quilted backpack. Then, wearing the backpack, I went out for a last stroll on the Boulevard Saint Michel. There, at a kiosk, I bought a lacey shawl for my adored aunt and some oversized hoops for my ears. I came back. I threw the backpack on the bed. And discovered that the clever wallet and its contents, including, God help us, our passports, were gone.
I peeked into the living room at the kindly man I’d married, who was patiently making his way through Le Monde. Was the kindly man to end the vacation, not to mention the marriage, by strangling me? Leaving the backpack on the bed I ran back to the kiosk where I had bought the lacey shawl for my accursed aunt and the hoop earrings for my ridiculous self. I’d paid with money from the clever wallet – I’d had it then. I begged the proprietor to return it. He retorted that he didn’t have it. “Those gypsies,” he shrugged. “Perhaps this is yours,” handing me a red scarf. I tied it around my head, knotting it at the nape. Perhaps this disguise would encourage the gypsy band to accept me as one of their own, and I could filch my clever wallet from them. I retraced my steps to the apartment, my eyes on the sidewalk. No clever wallet. No gypsies either.
“Oh, dear,” murmured the probable strangler when I told him my – our – plight. A moment earlier I’d thought I couldn’t feel worse. His kindness was my undoing, and I burst into tears which for the next several hours I never quite burst out of.
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I’ve been feeling freshly conscious of an aspect of being human that’s so constant and fundamental it seems weird to me that it isn’t a subject of everyday conversation. It’s simply this: that at the background of all my activities and interactions, behind all the containers I pour myself into from moment to moment, is my awareness of the boundless ocean of awareness itself.
They huddle in the back room, waiting to seep through some hidden cat-door and flood the room I live in.
I feel it as an amoeba-like latency, an unruly sea of infinite possibility, lurking in the back room — exciting, ominous, darkly beckoning. It conjures up the image Jonathan Franzen uses in his novel “The Corrections” of an impending thunderstorm: “big spiders in a little jar.” Only the jar in this case is infinitely vast, the spiders correspondingly enormous. They huddle in the back room, waiting for the lid to come off. Waiting to leak or seep or sneak through some hidden cat-door and flood the room I live in.
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In the spring, Edvard Munch’s 1895 work “The Scream,” one of the artist’s now-iconic depictions of terror, sold for $119.9 million at Sotheby’s, setting a record for any work of art sold at auction. This was no “Water Lilies.” We obviously put a high price on our sense of dread.
Artists depict and describe what haunts them.
Munch’s screamer — set in a swirling landscape, elongated hands holding a face distended in horror — is not so much a portrait as an embodiment of an inner state. Raw fear made flesh. A sort of monster.
Monsters serve a purpose in every age. They confront us with qualities in the world, and in ourselves, that we find difficult to face. And without artists to create them — from Gorgon to Godzilla — there would be no monsters at all.
The editors asked eight artists to draw a monster that embodies their deepest or most irrational fear — a creature that belongs not to the monsters of history but to their private horrors.
This gallery is haunted by a range of fears — of financial ruin, cancer, the abduction of our humanity and even the intimidating haircut. But it also raises perhaps the most frightening specter of all: the monster is us.
It’s flu season, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But don’t worry — just follow these preventative measures to ensure a healthy winter!
Cover your mouth when you cough. Sneeze into your shoulder. If you sneeze again, sneeze into your opposite shoulder. If you’re one of those people who always sneezes three times in a row, you’re really annoying.
If someone you work with exhibits flu-like symptoms, refrain from shaking his hand, avoid his cubicle in human resources, and spread rumors about him and the redhead from accounts receivable at the September company retreat.
Wash your hands immediately when you enter the house. Use toilet paper to turn on the faucets, even in your own bathroom. Use another piece of toilet paper to extract the faucet-turning toilet paper. Whatever you do, never touch the toilet-paper spindle. After two such uses, build a new bathroom.
Inspect the heads of your school-age children for lice hourly. When they complain you’re checking them too often, respond, “Hey, maybe I have lice,” and give them a comforting parental wink before tucking them into bed. In the middle of the night, give them lice. To prove your point further the next day, hide the lice shampoo. Read more…
The series is featuring occasional works of art. This is one.
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This comic is from a series I’ve been working on since 1999, when my son was born, which has slowly been shaping itself into a book. My father died shortly before I myself became a dad, and both those events started me thinking about relationships and history and the responsibilities of parenthood. There’s all the baggage that one picks up from personal, family connections that you want to filter out for your kid. And then there’s the rest of the world — you want to be optimistic for the future, but if you’ve looked at history and are paying any attention at all to how things are going now, it’s a tough prospect. Really, about all I can do is stay alert and keep a sense of humor!
David Sandlin is an artist who teaches printmaking, book arts and illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His illustrations and comics have been published in The Best American Comics 2012 and 2009, The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere. His most recent book is “Mort-Gage,” a visual meditation on the American economy.
The series is featuring occasional works of fiction. This is one.
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I was sitting alone in a booth in a local diner when a sense of profound, almost paralyzing lethargy came over me. I’d finished dinner and paid the check, but somehow I couldn’t summon the strength to rise from the table. I ordered another cup of coffee and contemplated saying to the waiter, “Excuse me. I’m feeling ill. Could you please call for an ambulance?” Then, finally, with considerable effort, I managed to lift myself from my chair and return to my apartment, where I felt so weak I was barely able to undress.
The following day, I saw my doctor. My blood was drawn and an M.R.I. was scheduled. A week later, I returned to my doctor’s office. He told me that blood tests had come up negative, but an M.R.I. revealed a small cluster of nodules at the base of my spine. Holding the picture to the light, the doctor said, “I’m going to schedule you for a brain scan and a spinal tap.” Startled, I asked him why these tests were necessary. He said he wanted to check my spinal fluid for cancer cells, to determine if the nodules were malignancies that had traveled down through my spinal cord from a brain tumor. I left the office, stunned. When I returned home, my apartment seemed weirdly and imperceptibly altered. Was this my furniture? Was that my photo collage on the wall? Were those my clothes in the closet? I went into the bathroom, stared at my reflection in the mirror, and tried to make sense of the image before me. I felt like a character in a film, oddly removed, and at the same time terrified.
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In September 2007, at the age of 22, I jumped from a moving freight train and landed on my face. The train had originated in Worcester, Mass., and was headed west toward Buffalo, but the path leading up to that event had begun six months before, in Long Island, where I was double-majoring in English and secondary education at Hofstra University, interning at a high school, taking two extra classes and dating a guy who liked to self-medicate. Bulimia and anorexia had reduced me to a skeletal 92 pounds, and I’d developed an addiction to diet pills that filled my small off-campus apartment with plastic bottles and bubble-wrapped packages hidden in drawers and crevices where my roommate wouldn’t find them. Every flat surface was home to a stack of celebrity gossip magazines full of articles about beach bodies and diets.
I would never be beautiful like I had striven to be. Like I didn’t want to want to be.
I had a few friends, but they seldom visited me. I rarely slept and would spend long nights anxiously staring into the vacuum of my living room, feeling the walls breathe around me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, searching for the peaceful center of my hunger. The day I finally hit bottom, my mentor at the high school found me crying in the supply closet of the teacher’s lounge with bits of tear-soaked tissue all over my face. I hadn’t slept in days, and had just finished throwing up a lunch of edamame beans and Red Bull. As was my ritual, I followed this purge with two Hydroxycut pills to “burn off” whatever remained in my stomach.
I told my mentor that I had just been given a diagnosis of a thyroid disease, hoping, though he never asked, that it would explain why I was so skinny. I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he gave me permission to leave for the day. I called my father in Florida from the parking lot, crying hysterically, my mouth tasting of metal and stomach acid. Two weeks later, I checked into an inpatient rehab facility in Tampa, where I would spend the next 60 days trying to learn how to eat properly and how to speak candidly about my feelings. Read more…
