Z woke up to find some white girl in horn-rimmed glasses – and she wasn’t trying to be hip, here – poking at his arm like she was priming a lawnmower. Girl was maybe eight, all freckled up with a bush of red hair on her scalp. Z picked his head up off the table, trying to hold on to some wispy dream, but it was already gone by the time she opened her mouth full of metal and … [Read more...] about The Rise of Waco Bill
The Last Part of the Deer
by Jeremy Lambert * * “Shit.” He dropped the match. “Shit,” he said again, snuffing out the tiny flame with a loafer. Bud struck another one, lighting his cigarette with a faint crackle as he sucked in the smoke. He looked down at the previous one lying on the floor of his porch, right between his feet. The heat from it had felt good until the flame licked … [Read more...] about The Last Part of the Deer
D&D and The American Dream
By David Slagle An array of multicolored dice lay on the table in front of you, serving as makeshift paperweights for the scrawl-ridden sheets of paper that blow in the wind of your friend's basement ceiling fan. The rainbow of dice colors is matched by the variety of dice shapes. There are run of the mill six-sided dice as well as polyhedral dice, from pyramidal four-sided … [Read more...] about D&D and The American Dream
Mass-Produced Masterpieces
By Kathleen Meek In Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin discusses the change that has taken place in art since the invention of mechanical reproduction and the way this change has affected society's interaction with art. Benjamin states that the mechanical reproduction of works of art has caused a "decay of the aura" of … [Read more...] about Mass-Produced Masterpieces
The Silent Messenger
By Bryan Carberry James Lewerke was raised by his mother in Wauconda, Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago. In the summer of 2004, James moved to the upper-middle-class town of Valparaiso, Indiana, 20 miles southeast of Gary, to live with his father. In August of that year, Lewerke, 15, enrolled in the 9th grade of Valparaiso High School, where teachers described him … [Read more...] about The Silent Messenger