Non-Fiction | First Folio

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NON-FICTION

Selected
Pieces

This is where you'll find a lot of JEC regulars, a foray into the lives of real people, a spinning, twisting, wobbling version of events that permeate this reality.

Note from an Extinct Species of PNF-404

—I’d call it either ‘rugged sentimentality’ or ‘a subtle taste of cheese.’
—isn’t that like ‘the shock of your life or a piece of cheese’ from that one puppeteering showcase? Myrna and Tyche?
—Oh, you’re talking about the Oyeyemi story?
—Yes, “is your blood as red as this?”
—Exactly, it is like that. And of course it is...

128 Times

I lived in the Red Room. It’s a small bedroom on the second floor of 128 Manhattan Ave., and it gets its best light in the morning. The window and door granting access to the cloistered terrace face not the city but the trashed courtyard of a church, once the tallest building in New York City. You can hear the church bell chime in the daylight hours, always a minute late to the hour, God busy playing cards with the liopleurodon...

Remembering The OA in Prague

Wouldn’t you like to know why August 23rd, 2019 is the best day of my life? If we trust in our calendars, then it may also have been the longest. I remember the first moment of it: I was standing in front of a notable clocktower in Prague as it rang midnight. What arrested me wasn’t the architecture of the tower nor the fantasy mechanism mounted on its face but the ogling crowd gathered around the civilian timepiece, paying attention as it gives us the new day...

A Rest

As a child, I never understood what a rest was for in music class. I didn’t even like the recorder. I think it may have been part of the reason I never picked up an instrument. A rest didn’t have song-value, and I also feared the implication that if I were going to rest, then eventually I was going to keep going too...

Ode to a Morning Star

The three of us sit around the lamppost’s pedestal where we set the box down. It’s Friday morning in a park in Santa Monica two days succeeding Kim’s birthday. We open the box of Sidecar doughnuts Oleg treated us to in celebration of this turning, and, while we talk in and about short stories and tore chunks of different flavored doughnut from the box, a funeral is taking place across the street inside the chapel. We only know because of the pipers, men wielding bagpipes, standing outside. They’re dressed in button adorned black coats and red tartan kilts. A signal of mourning, I suppose. Meanwhile, in this park there are sleeping homeless, family picnics, tennis players, wanderers, trash, and, well, us...

Year of the Fox Travelogue: Airborne & Earthbound

They told me I must be losing my mind; those mountains I love could never be seen from inside Berlin.
“The airfield,” I told them, “Tempelhof at sundown. I saw mountains whittled by lightning, lullabies by thunder. They were there. Hinson saw them too, right?”
Hinson nodded, though they did in a way I had never seen them move their neck before.
The elusive they: “shh…don’t wake the angels.”
Hinson: “Hey, let’s get something to eat.”
The elusive I: “But the mountains—Berlin has another axis no one believes in. And if no one believes it, it doesn’t exist, does it?”...

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