A former professor of art history who has lived many years in several countries, Julia Ballerini is now settled in Manhattan where she is devoted full time to writing fiction. Several of her stories have been published in print and online.

Painless

         The dog was licking her face. A furry black dog. It was dark. How long had she been lying on the pavement? It had been daylight when she fell. That she remembers. She crawled over cobblestones and gravel, the dog ahead, barking. That she remembers. Then whiteness. Space of no memories. Ambulence. Her mother bending over her. Can you hear me, hear me, hear me!

         Was it the next day that someone brought her two orange fish in a round bowl? She remembers them swimming in and out of her mind’s whiteness as she lay cranked to a tilt on a bed as white as her mind. Watery black eyes stared, slithery mouths gulped open. Did she scream? The orange fish were soon disappeared.

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         Her mother was folding clothes into a suitcase, a suitcase that smelled of newness. She was fourteen and being packed away to boarding school, disappeared like the gulping goldfish. It was then, seven years after the fall, that her mother, smoothing a new blue sweater into a new brown valise––it was then that her mother said, stop crying, you’re lucky to be alive, you almost died in that accident.

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         Now she watches her own child scrambling up a slide in the playground holding tight its silvery edges. She has a startling memory of having not having held on to the rusty rails of that long-ago fire escape, of having leaned into the fall, of having given herself up to it. Not because of a will to die, but because of an absence of a will to live.

         She closes her eyes trying to conjur a memory of pain. The pain immediately after the fall or the pain that must have sliced its way through the drugs in the hospital. Nothing. Her breath comes in and out of her lungs, her belly expands and subsides, but she can’t remember the pain, only the horror of the staring, gulping fish.

         Back home from the playground, her little girl tucked safely in bed, she goes to the computer. She types: memory and pain. Site after site is about the short-term memory of pain, not the long-term forgetting of it. The newsletter of the International Association for the Study of Pain is no help.

         Yet the search has its rewards. She learns about nerves that carry pain signals to the spinal cord and brain to excite the cells that make memories of pain––a cellular excitation that produces an hightened reactivity to pain that can last for months. Her cells must have been revved up, excited, sensitive to a pain she can no longer recall.

         “Excite” a technical term. Yes, but she pictures a nervy little creature bringing a message of pain to a nebbish looking cell.

         “Yo man, belly just sliced open like a sausage. Blood spurting everywhere. What a scene! Hurts like hell.”

         “Wow! Cool. Tell me more. Hold on, lemmy grab a pencil and paper.”

         She learns about molecules called ERKs­––extracellular signal-related kinases––that can change the memory of cells in the spinal cord and brain. Molecular psycotherapy! She reads up on the marine snail Aplysia that is very attractive to neurobiologists because of large brain cells that are up to one millimeter in diameter. One millimeter! What is the size of a human brain cell? She hasn’t a clue. She logs out, shuts down her computer.

         She calls her friend Richard whose store of knowledge is phenomenal and who was once married to a doctor. “Memory is not intended to be an archive,” he tells her. “We have an automatic extinguishing mechanism that remembers having the pain but not the pain itself. Otherwise we could not go on.” That makes sense. Except for certain phobias and an intense dislike of oatmeal Richard usually makes sense.

         It is reassuring to know that, even if her brain cells turn out to be smaller than those of a mollusk, her pain extinguishing mechanism is working in full force.

         Tomorrow she and her daughter will make up a story about a brainy snail named Aplysia. A snail who feels no pain. A joyous snail with a will to live.

Daniel de Culla is a writer, poet, and photographer. He’s member of the Spanish Writers Association, Earthly Writers International Caucus, Poets of the World, (IA) International Authors, Surrealism Art, and others. Director of Gallo Tricolor Review, and Robespierre Review. He participated in many Festivals of Poetry, and Theater in Madrid, Burgos, Berlin, Minden, Hannover and Genève .He has exposed in many galleries from Madrid, Burgos, London, and Amsterdam. He is moving between North Hollywood, Madrid and Burgos.

NIGHT MUSIC THAT DOES NOT SHUT UP

With good or bad music comes Night
When the Sun is below the horizon.
Black cloak as clerical cassock
It’s covering the city
On their roofs of houses and blocks
Referring to Mozart’s music
To Strau’s waltzes
To rock or rap.
The Moon flies over the clouds
With his head peeled and a scarf around her neck.
Little by little, night is singing its music
That does not shut up
In harmony or melody of sounds
Or both combined
And, when it’s quiet, butterflies leave the clouds
And come towards the light to burn their wings
Introducing more or less deeply
In the lovers’ bedroom
With vain talk, stories, gossip
Where one organ enters the parts of another
Adhering to its surface
Like the cat at the snout very thin
The very long tail
And the very gray hairs of the mouse.
Mischiefs, traps, perfidies
Coronate musical notes
From a nocturnal dream that soon begins.
Stigmas, infamous notes, like Bingo’s cards
Are coming out of a sack, from an urn
Or of any other similar deposit.
Tokens, balls or any other similar objects
With the names of the people
That they have to leave with luck.
Later, to the point, Dream
With its sad or gentle serenade
Between handfuls of cotton
Jumps without rhyme or reason
In corners and between sheets
When networks are building
For unsuspecting flies to produce sounds
On string instruments, wind instruments
Percussion, keys, and so on
That makes them boast of themselves
Making march to the melodious Night
At its dawn
With music elsewhere.
-Daniel de Culla

Christian Bot is a happily disgruntled writer from Ontario, Canada with a passion for poetry, short fiction, and essays (all while juggling two jobs.) A graduate of the University of Western Ontario’s history program, much of his work contains historical and philosophical themes. He has been published in The London Free Press, southwestern Ontario’s leading daily newspaper, and Areo magazine.

I awoke one morning inexplicably consumed by a rather curious obsession. I desired to become a nude model for art classes at the local university. I paid little attention to the origins of this desire, insofar as there can be said to have been any beyond the vague suggestions of a dream. I cared only to fulfill my new ambition. I craved to bare all in a manifesto of contempt for the tyranny of clothes. I wished only to be free, and openly so, feeling the exhilaration of a lion released from the zoo and left to roam at will. I fantasized the crisp air of the air conditioner breathing on my flesh unhindered by stifling raiment. I longed to return to the state of nature that triumphed before Adam’s fall.

To that end, I snatched my laptop from the jungle of clutter in my bedroom and visited the university’s online job board. I was not yet finished scanning the first page when I struck the coveted gold vein, encountering this listing: “Now hiring: art models, male. For nude posing in undergraduate art classes. Must be willing to shave most body air. Part-time, $35/hour.” My good luck left me euphoric, perhaps more elated than some people will ever be. I began to fill out the application without a picosecond’s hesitation. I scarcely even questioned the demand of a topless photo, presumably to verify the metrics of my anatomy. Several more mundane fields followed, and my application was complete in fifteen breezing minutes. I celebrated with a banana milkshake (enhanced with whey powder, obviously) as I treated my hulking biceps to a tender, Mediterranean kiss and pounded on my pectoralis major with all the vigor of a certain colossal Hollywood ape.

The call for an interview came three days later. I dressed for the occasion in a semi-formal uniform consisting of a white dress shirt, deliberately and unmistakably tight, a tie, and black dress pants. I was met in the inner sanctum of the department of visual arts by a dour-faced gentleman of about sixty. His hair was ghastly white, having long since neutered its last remaining trace of gray, and parted at the middle. His face, hardly less pallid, bore a pair of wide-rimmed glasses. His appearance and demeanor attested to a disgruntled, sexually frustrated bachelor whose last recourse was to the tedium of academia. I found his pessimism a tad intimidating, but I was able to resist the full force of his powers. Externally, at least, my virulent optimism was not dented in the least.

“This way, please,” intoned the professor with a clear motioning gesture. When we were both seated, he began to read from a prearranged list, as if he were stammering through an early rehearsal of a Realist play. “This position involves posing nude. Are you comfortable with that?”

“I find nudity quite liberating,” I confessed, really quite unembarrassed about my distaste for clothes.

“Good,” the professor murmured more or less nonchalantly, so fixated on his formulaic script that he seemed unbothered by my bohemianism. “Now you may have to work with female models, also nude of course. Is this something you can handle?”

“There’s little that I’d find more delightful,” I beamed, still shamelessly risqué in my responses.

“I don’t doubt that,” the professor quipped, jolting his head back up at me and breaking the spell that the script had cast upon him. “But the fact of the matter is that the students deserve to focus on the contours of your shoulders rather than the girth of your erect penis. If you find a dangling pair of breasts so titillating that you can’t focus on your work, there’s no point in having you here.”

I had to suppress a laugh at the professor’s stunning bluntness. More to the point, his honesty filled me with appreciation for him. He was right, of course, but I was not prepared to let his manifest rightness dampen my ambition. As the infant inklings of amusement marked my face, I replied, “I admit it, sir. I’m just as lustful as the last man you’ve interviewed and the ones you’ll interview after me. I’m weak against the allure of naked women, and I won’t bother to deny it. But you see, that’s not why I want this job. I want the liberty of unencumbered skin. I want to feel freer than I’ve ever felt before. It’s emancipation, not copulation that inspires me.”

My words left an indelible impression on the professor. He was frankly startled by my honesty, but still more impressed by the purity of my ambition. It was apparent that he had seldom come across an applicant encouraged not by the allure of money or the pleasures of women, but by the thrill of nudity itself. “That’s something I’d really like to hear more often,” he confessed, and as we stood up to shake hands in parting, he endeavored to conclude the matter quickly and offered me the position on the spot. I accepted unhesitatingly, and was promised shifts beginning in a week. As I departed, I shot the professor a jovial smile, supremely satisfied that my sudden but genuine impulse would soon yield a rewarding harvest.