The . Hours . Festivals

installation with blown glass cup (featured at event) by Dan Mirer

Skipper Madison Roberts had been trapped inside her sister’s camper since 1977. Emerging from the time warp required a period of reorientation to a world that had aged forty years in the flick of an eyelash. How had she gotten here?

Barbie’s younger sister, Skipper made her own friends, Skooter and Ricky, because Barbie spent more time with Ken and grew more interested in making babies than babysitting her tween sister. That June in 1977 they had gone to the beach on Lake Michigan near Manitowoc and spent a weekend playing inside Barbie’s camper.

Skipper, Skooter, Ricky, Ken and Barbie and their beachcomber recreational vehicle belonged to two sisters, Jane and Julie. As the elder sister, Jane had acquired her Barbie dolls new and Julie got her hand-me-down dolls when Jane was ready. When Jane and Julie went with their parents on a summer vacation to Wisconsin, they played in the sand dunes along the western shores of Lake Michigan.

They brought their Barbie dolls and camper and dressed them in summer fun outfits and seated them around the formica table. Jane pulled back the draperies. Julie rolled up the window screens and let the summer breeze come through the mosquito netting. Jane laid Skipper on the sofa without putting an outfit on her. The midcentury modern design of blond wood cabinets and lineoleum floors gleamed in the bright sunshine.

Julie and Jane went swimming, and for ice cream, rode their bikes with Skooter and Ricky in Julie’s pockets and Ken and Barbie in Jane’s. They forgot all about the camper and Skipper on the beach. Without realizing it, they left Michigan without picking up all their toys on the beach.  
​
Forty years later, Skipper woke up. Back in her body made of flesh and bones instead of molded plastic. She didn’t have any clothes on but her eyebrows were perfectly applied.  Auburn hair hung to her shoulders. Perfectly shaped red lips. Bendable knees. Proportions of bust-waist-hips that weren’t like those of a fake Barbie doll. She was a real woman. In a trailer park filled with other midcentury pre-manufactured ticky tacky homes in a row.


by Jill Swenson

by Alanna Newkirk

The Secret Life of Trains​



Janelle didn’t want to look down.
As she half-smiled weakly at the faces peering up at her in shocked silence, she wondered why she always had her face on. It seemed completely unlikely under the circumstances that she would be fully made up, but she always was: brows filled in, undereye shadows scrupulously concealed, lips her usual shade of “Juicy Revolution Red.” The moment passed and the silence gave way to whispers and giggles. Soon it would be outright laughter among her classmates, resounding off the chalkboard that framed her torso. Another naked-in-front-of-the-classroom dream, Janelle thought. How original.  She glanced down at the desk; this time, the report was on the recent discovery of ancient Etruscan pottery shards and their implications for modern reconstructions of the civilization’s demise. She sighed and gripped the report to her chest as she dashed for the door, assaulted by the tide of derisive hoots.

:::::::::::::::::

Waking up was a relief when it happened. Janelle dimly remembered the naked dream, which had gone on to involve a horse and a dog and also, confusingly, chocolate mousse and someone named Kara. That name felt familiar. She heard it often, lately, echoing in her head. Was it outside her head, though? Something felt slippery about the name. But there was no one here called Kara. No one named Kara was on this train.
There were plenty of things to wonder about the train: where it was going, who had chosen the terrible yellow color of the curtains, why the tables in the dining car were still Formica as if it hadn’t been updated since the 1970s. Janelle was sure that it wasn’t the 1970s, but there weren’t any calendars in the train to check. Perhaps the conductor had a calendar, but he was also a mystery. Janelle corrected herself: perhaps he or she had a calendar. She wondered the most about the scenery outside the windows: it faded a little with the days, and if you moved to a new car and a new window, it was different. But if you looked too closely out a window, you could see the tree-ish mountains not-moving very stolidly. They were not-moving all day, every day. They looked as if they were made of brushstrokes, or dots of ink from a stamp, but that wasn’t right. Janelle knew that scenery moved by, when one stood at the window of the train. And that landscape wasn’t made of paint. It couldn’t be right that they were not-moving. She unsnapped the clip holding the blind up and let it roll to the base of the window so the scenery could move or not-move on its own, out of sight.
The main thing Janelle could do was to walk up or down the train and seek out the others. They weren’t always there, but she could often find Cleo or Pony or Eric hanging out in another car, passing the time. Sometimes they were having tea, or at least, sometimes they had a tea set. She got ready to start the day of walking. Walking and seeing the others was, so far, a lot more interesting than wondering about the train. They didn’t know any more than she did, but at least they moved more than the scenery outside the windows. And anyway, if she made it far enough down the train, she had other window scenes to look at, even if they were not-moving. No one else seemed worried about the scenery, but Janelle couldn’t quite forget about it.

:::::::::::::::

It is strange to find yourself in a location other than the place where you fell asleep. But Janelle woke up in a different car, slumped over one of those Formica dining tables. She shook herself slightly, wondering if she’d had the naked dream again. What would a psychologist say?, she wondered. Always naked in front of everyone, and that girl named Kara again. Maybe I have a problem. There wasn’t a psychologist on the train. Janelle wasn’t sure why she knew about psychologists, but like the tea set and the dim sense of how scenery should behave, the knowledge seemed to have been a part of her forever.
Yesterday, the others hadn’t been available. It was hard to say where they went when they weren’t in the other cars. Janelle wondered if sometimes, she wasn’t in any of the cars either. This was one of her least favorite things to wonder about; it made her mouth dry and interfered with her breathing. Wherever “there” was, outside the train, it seemed like a long way off. And how would she get there? Pony might know, but Pony was the hardest to talk to.
Janelle wasn’t sure she was ready to wake up, after all. She settled her head back on the Formica; even the naked dream, which probably meant she was disturbed, was better than wondering what was outside the train or who was running it. She drifted quickly into the twilight of her sleep, where she realized once again:
The whole class is staring at me. Why would they be staring?
The giggles started to drift across the classroom.
Not again.
She tipped her head slowly to check. No shirt. She sighed.

:::::::::::::::::

“Kara! It’s dessert! I’m not calling you again!”

She fumbled with the doll’s clothes, trying to pull them off quickly so she could pull the pretty cherry-patterned dress on before she had to go downstairs.

“Kara! NOW! I’m going to give your mousse to your sister!”

“I’m comiiiiiiiiiiing!” she yelled back. She gave up on dressing the doll, propping her instead against the little slate chalkboard on her floor. “Sorry, Janelle,” Kara whispered. “I’ll be back soon. I’ll get you dressed up so you can look nice.” She scampered towards the door, glancing back at the toy train where her My Little Pony was standing on a tiny built-in Formica table while another doll was having a tea party with a half-cat, half-woman action figure she called Cleo. Kara smiled and shut the bedroom door behind her.


by ​Tyler K. Cassidy-Heacock

multimedia piece including necklace that was given to Tyler during the event in June
​by Jennifer Green Fais

THE USUAL​


Her inky-black pupils, suspended in rings of glossy hazel, dilate as she enters the dark interior of Del’s Tavern. She’s assaulted by the pungent odor of stale beer fused with shelled peanuts, like rancid lager saturating a vat of greasy peanut butter.  It’s a fragrant reminder that she’s about to break the promise she implemented over a month ago.

She scans the cheerless room, hoping Ricky’s lanky frame will be hunched over a tumbler at the bar. That for once, he’ll be waiting for her.  But all she sees is the perpetual assemblage of random barflies.  Lit by flickering neon, they’re anchored to the same seats they always use. As if Butch, the portly and bulbous-nosed proprietor, assigned a seating chart that none of them have the courage to disrupt.

Not seeing Ricky, she makes her way to the bar. A few steps in, the soles of her heels begin to shatter peanut shells strewn across the floor, a result of Del’s only source of sustenance.  For a dime, Butch will dip a soiled plastic flowerpot into a mammoth bag of cut-rate peanuts and send them across the lacquered bar to those that need sodium to accompany their musty brews.  After sucking out the insides, the barflies discard the shells onto the floor, creating a carcass-laden landscape of tawny husks that are crushed under the oily-bottomed work boots of Del’s clientele.

She walks up to the bar, and pulls out a broken-down stool, vinyl seat held together by frayed duct-tape.  She sits and crosses her legs, causing her jean cuffs to rise, which reveal her meaty ankles, one of the many despicable things she inherited from her mother.  

As she tugs her jean cuffs down, Butch approaches and cracks a monstrous grin, lips parting way to nicotine-stained teeth.  He tells her that it’s been too long. She smiles and agrees, about to order a drink when Butch waddles away, saying he’ll get her the usual.

She hasn’t wanted the usual, Butch’s sugary and watered-down take on a Boston Sour, for over a decade.  But she’ll accept it, not wanting to offend him if she declines.  She’ll wait for Ricky to arrive and order her something else, not giving Butch a chance to dislike her, even for a moment.

As Butch prepares her drink, Wallace, one of the barflies, shuffles towards the pinball machine.  He fishes around in the pockets of his threadbare coveralls, coming up with a grimy quarter. He pops it into the slot, causing the game (Card Whiz, if she remembers correctly) to quiver to life.  Flaxen lights glow, illuminating Wallace’s craggy face, nose riddled with broken capillaries.  His knobby fingers, stained with oil and grease, pop the buttons on the side. His hips undulating with each ding and rattle inside the machine, willing the pinball to hit combos and kickout holes to rack up points.

Butch winks as he plops down her cocktail, causing a shriveled maraschino cherry to rock in the golden liquid.  Off his wink, she flashes a crooked smile, tilts her head and emits an overzealous thank you.  Even before the words emerge, right when her cheek muscles contract to create the off-kilter smile, a wave of self-hatred washes over her.  Anger rises, causing her milky-white skin to redden at the fact that she smiles and complacently whispers words of gratitude to any flirtatious glance, wink, or nod.  She knows it’s happening, can hear the small cry from the back of her mind trying to quell the instantaneous reply.  The inner shriek attempting to calm her crooked smile and cheerful response but it spews forth, unchecked whenever someone of the opposite sex engages her.  

Like her sturdy ankles, she blames this inherited trait on her mother, another constant reminder that she holds the physical and emotional attributes of a weak woman she hasn’t seen since her and Ricky started dating. Whose hair parted to the same side as hers, who is to blame for her pale skin breaking out into red, scaly rashes, and whose lack of self-respect allowed one of many stepfathers to shower down abuse over the years.  She inherited the worst from a woman she left in a crippled and tear-filled wreck, bawling into the shag carpet the color of rotten plums, when she was sixteen. Vowing to never return. To never become her.

To calm down, she hoists the Boston Sour to her lips but notices the grimy fingerprints that plague the scratched tumbler. She looks at the soiled glass and wants to throw it.  Hurl the cocktail she never wants, but never has the courage to refuse, at the potbellied man who made it. She fantasizes the drink sailing past him, smashing into the tarnished and greasy mirror. Causing the dollar bills taped up to the burnished surface to come crashing down, shards of glass piercing the green-inked portraits of presidents long since passed.  

But instead, she sips the weak and candied drink as Wallace curses at the varying chirps and whistles emitting from the pinball machine.   Knowing that as soon as Ricky’s whip-thin silhouette appears in the doorframe, she’ll straighten up and smile. Relying on the knee-jerk reaction she just cursed to bring him into her arms.  Not caring that the promise she made to herself was broken the moment she agreed to meet him here. Not caring that Ricky will utter excuse-riddled apologies that are disguised as requests for her to be the warm body he crawls into bed with after a double shift.  Not caring because underneath the tavern’s familiar odor of ale, Jiffy, and despair, Ricky’s pleas are the same as hers – he doesn’t want to be lonely, and neither does she.

​
by David Ebeltoft

Special thanks to Vinnie for letting me film this at Volo on Market Street in Corning, NY.

The summer I got my driver's license, I was going through my actively-embracing-white-trashiness phase. At the time, I was

styling my hair every day.
sunbathing at the gravel pit a mile from my house.
working 3 part-time jobs.
disregarding my curfew.
wearing obnoxiously bright lipstick.
sporting jelly shoes, a fuck-ton a bracelets, overly distressed light wash jeans, barely-there tops. Sometimes just a swimsuit.

While unintentional, that's how it came to be that I appear naked in my driver's license photo. The pale pink edge of my tube top, barely visible, allowed the exposure of
​
bony shoulders
care-free cleavage

Since then, I've been through nearly every cycle of emotion toward my driver's license photo

ironic pride
actual pride
light embarrassment
deep shame
dread
joviality
aloofness
denial
nostalgia
longing

I've seen every type of reaction to my license photo, from friends, family, bartenders, judges, law enforcers and store clerks.

Glances: furtive, cautious, incredulous, creepy, mirthful, blank
Whistles: sexual, surprise
Gestures: Hand-over-mouth, raised eyebrows, held breath, blushing, laughter, choked laughter, adjusting glasses.
Verbal responses: Well now. I see, I see. This is you?
New licenses have been printed, with the exact same photograph because of
addition of organ donor status.
name-change due to marriage.
replacement for pick-pocket incident in Madrid.
state-wide changes to license design.
name-change by way of divorce.
​
Today, 15 years have passed since the license was issued. I am

waiting in line at the DMV.
applying obnoxiously bright lipstick in the reflection of a laminated "NO SMOKING" sign.
sporting jelly shoes, overly distressed light wash jeans, and a pale pink tube top.
ready for my closeup.


By Willa Rose Vogel

Images by Arlie Sommer