Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 9

“Welcome to the Torture Chamber, Now with a Juice Bar!” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse

I have a short humor piece up at Queen Mob’s Teahouse.

After months of rigorous planning, we are proud to announce the opening of our new juice bar. We use only the highest quality organic produce, delivered each morning from a locally-owned family farm. So once you’ve finished being stretched across a wagon wheel or scorched with searing hot branding irons, we invite you to cool down with a healthy and refreshing beverage. 

Joy Williams’s 9 Qualities of Great Short Stories

(Courtesy of Green Apple Books)

Ngaiire - The Less I Know The Better (Tame Impala Cover)

Joanna Scott

“In a daguerreotype I have of her as a girl she is beautiful, with her tight curls framing her face like a bronze helmet, her lips forming a thin, unusually long strip, her eyes, copper-colored here, as blue in life as melting iron. Indeed, my mother was made not of bone, flesh, and fluid but of fire and metal, so her cancer seemed unnatural to those who knew her, and she fought against the intrusion with astonishing fury. She had always believed strictly in justice: moral justice, social justice, the justice of race and genetic destiny. She was humiliated by her decline—she had assumed that she would follow a logical course through life toward a particular, predetermined end and would die a correct death. During the day she behaved like a rich, petulant woman at the dressmaker’s, as if her pain were a poor fit, the wrong size, as if a mistake had been made in the measurements. At night, when the morphine wore off, she would claw at her body that had become a stranger to her, a traitor in complicity with the darkness.”

- Joanna Scott (from Arrogance)

“Oglers” in Wigleaf

My story “Oglers” is featured at Wigleaf. Here’s how it starts:

The stranger from whom I was estranged was a painter. The painter called himself my brother. Me, I considered him a bother. 

“Introducing Curtis” at CHEAP POP

I have a very tiny story (list?) at CHEAP POP. 

Read it here.

The Arcs - Outta My Mind

Thomas Ruff

- Thomas Ruff, Interior (1982)

Heidi Julavits

“Every situation with a child that irks me, I try not to be irked by thinking: How many more irksome moments like this will I have? My son is four and a half. My hours of rubbing his back while he weeps are numbered. I moved my hand from his shoulder blades to his tailbone, and then I swooped it in reverse. Down up, down up; it was like sharpening a knife, or polishing a bowl. I tried to commit the movement to muscle memory. Whenever I am trapped in a situation, I think of how this entrapment might qualify as work. I am so worried about ever wasting time that I cannot let any small amount of it escape without defining for it a use or a purpose or extracting from it a lasting lesson. I tried to think of how this motion might, in the future, come in handy. I thought, If my son dies, I will sit at the shore, and swoop my hand like this back and forth over a smooth rock that has been warmed in the sun and feels humanlike as a way of remembering him. Then I thought this was melodramatic and gruesome. I thought instead: Maybe I’ll write a story in which a character’s son dies, and she could, as a means of coping, go to the shore and do this. Then I thought this was melodramatic and stupid. I thought instead: I must remember to do this when I am seventy. I must remember to find a rock that feels exactly like my son’s four-year-old back. I must remember to close my eyes and imagine that I am me again, a tired mother trying to teach herself how to miss what is not gone.”

- Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock

“The Secret History of Jaywalking” at Salon

I wrote about the criminalization of jaywalking over at Salon. Here’s a quick excerpt about the origin of the term:

In early America “jay” was a pejorative used to denote a rube or rustic, someone unacquainted with the niceties of urban refinement. To be called a jay was to have called into question your very sense of belonging, your right to exist within the city proper.