Welcome to The Gallery at darkcoastpress.com!
Think of The Gallery as an art gallery of great writing from a variety of writers in prose, poetry, essay, and experimental work. We diplay the best of submitted work openly, more like a gallery than a journal, magazine, or review. Come in off the street, read a bit, take its impressions away with you. The menu to the left is arranged by latest published edition, and all authors and featured pieces organized accordingly. Check back monthly for each new edition. Thank you, and enjoy reading!
If you are interested in submitting work to appear on The Gallery we would love to have you. Send submissions by email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and please, please, please read our Submissions Guidelines, all the good stuff’s in there.
Jennifer Natalya Fink is an award-winning novelist, literacy activist, and hell-raiser. She is the author of three novels: BURN and V (Suspect Thoughts Press) and most recently, THE MIKVAH QUEEN (Rebel Satori Press 2010), which won the Dana Award for the Novel. She is the founder and Gorilla-in-Chief of The Gorilla Press, an organization that promotes youth literacy through bookmaking. She is an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. She lives in DC with her partner and daughter.
THE MIKVAH QUEEN tells the story of how Jane Schwartz, a lonely, hair-sucking eleven-year-old girl, comes to build a mikvah (ritual Jewish bath) in the porta-sauna of her middle-aged Christian neighbor, Charlene Walkeson. Jane, growing up amidst the assimilationist culture of early '80s academia, seizes upon the traditional Jewish ritual of mikvah as a means of making sense of her own burgeoning sexuality and identity. Out of disco hits, Talmud fragments, feminism, hippie rabbis, Christian notions of salvation, the biblical story of Leah and Rachel, and Holocaust kitsch, Jane constructs her own theology and makes a mikvah in order to 'cure' Mrs. Walkeson's cancer.
Winner of the Dana Award for the Novel and a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, THE MIKVAH QUEEN is a hilarious, inventive, and engrossing novel that challenges the conventions of the coming-of-age story, the cancer novel, the spiritual transformation narrative, and more.
Jennifer Natalya Fink
(Forthcoming from Rebel Satori Press, 2010)
So Leah, how did we get blood? Huh?
Well, it all started after God made that first Adam.
Soon, there were many Adams. Only Adams, no Eves. Just a bunch of Adams, running around buck-naked, building tree houses and breaking out in chicken-fights.
Everyone was happy, except God. Sick of singing “I Feel Love,” He swam to the shore, and walked to where the Adams were gathered on land, hoping some of the Adams would feel like hanging out with Him. But they were all too busy building tree forts and having chicken-fights to even notice stinky old God.
However, one of the Adams stood apart from the rest. This Adam was a particularly puny one, only five feet tall or so, and his nose was bleeding like crazy. Adam sat on the shore, watching the ocean’s tides come in and out while the others built, bleeding and crying. He had terrible posture. “You’ll get a back-ache, hunching over like that,” God thought as He watched him. Adam’s nose bled down his neck, onto his chest. Mucus and blood spilled out of his nose, clinging to the hairs surrounding his nipples.
God sniffed the air as He watched. A new smell: hair grease, gasoline, ethanol, blood, and something God couldn’t quite place. God knew exactly where the smell was coming from, but was too polite to say anything to Adam about it. Besides, Adam was ignoring God. All Adam did was bleed from his nose, let the blood catch on his nipple-hairs, and stare at the ocean. The ocean ran up to his toes, but never touched him.
“Why doesn’t Adam just wash off in the damn water?” God thought to Himself, but He was brought up not to say such things in public. The air stank with Adam’s nosebleed.
Four days passed. Adam’s nose was bleeding even harder now, the two nipples were covered with the stuff, and the whole globe reeked. God just couldn’t take the smell anymore. He strode over to Adam, puffed out His chest to look all scary and tough, and yelled, “Adam, would you give it a rest? You’ve been bleeding for a month. It’s starting to really stink around here. Could you, like, wash off in the ocean, at least?”
Adam ignored Him. He didn’t even acknowledge that God had spoken; he just kept bleeding onto his nipples and staring out at the ocean. If I pretend it’s not happening, Adam thought, it’ll go away. God will get off my back, the bleeding will stop, and everything will go back to normal. Maybe I’ll even build forts with the other Adams.
But it didn’t stop. In fact, it got worse. “Adam, this is really a problem. I can’t take the smell anymore. If you don’t do something about your, er, nose issue, I’ll have to, I don’t know,” God fished for an appropriate threat. There were no rules, and no punishments, so God wasn’t quite sure what to do. Then it came to Him. “I’ll have to curse you!” God was excited by the thought: a curse, yeah, that’d be cool.
Adam kept bleeding, and kept ignoring Him, keeping his gaze fixed on the ocean. This is not happening, Adam told himself.
Hmm, what kind of curse should I make up? I could put some flimsy paper wings on him, and turn him into that ugly girl with the horsy face who always has to be the smart one on Charlie’s Angels, God thought. Or I could put him in a dress and throw him down to hell, where all the other naughty Adams would beat the shit out of him for being such a damn sissy. Nah. Too easy. I’ve got it! God was excited now. He had the perfect curse.
So God, in His deepest, loudest God-voice, cursed: “You think bleeding is so great? Okay, I’ll let you bleed. But not from your nose. From your crotch, for four days out of every thirty. And that’s not all. No siree! I freeze you here, with your nipples mounded up with mucus and blood and God knows what other crap. No matter how much you wash, you’ll have two mounds sitting on your chest, until you die.” And in a huff, God marched back into the ocean, never to return.
The other Adams suddenly noticed Adam bleeding. “Gross!” cried the leader of the pack, pointing to the blood trickling from between Adam’s legs. “Look, the sissy is bleeding down there! Eeeewwe!!” The other Adams thought this was Adam’s name: Ewe. But God, that old codger, misheard the ewwee as Eve. And so he was called Eve, from that moment forth.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Eve?” the Adams asked, but she just kept bleeding, still staring at the ocean, refusing to tell about the nosebleed. This isn’t happening, she thought, ignoring the Adams, ignoring God. If I just stand still and don’t respond to them, it’ll go away and eventually I’ll be an Adam again. But she kept on bleeding from her crotch, the mounds on her chest grew into two fleshy breasts, and the hair congealed to cover it all up. And there were lots of rules, to make sure it stayed all covered.
Okay, I’ll buy that bit about the blood. But that doesn’t explain the mikvah.
I’m getting to that.
Do you know the way to Santa Fe?
What?!
Do you know the way to Santa Fe? I’ll blah blah blah blah, dooby dooby...
As her eyes open, Jane sees her father at the foot of her bed, singing along with her clock-radio, I know the way to Santa Fe, dancing to the music in a herky-jerky version of the Hustle. Holding a spatula, he points up to the right, down to the left. In his other hand, he carries a jug of maple syrup with a fat black lady in some kind of turban smiling out on the label. “Do you know the way to French toast-a-fe? French toast is only for the healthy,” he sings, turning down the clock radio and humming the way to Santa Fe all the way back to the kitchen.
I’m not going to school, she thinks as she pulls off the covers and pulls on an old, raggedy plaid bathrobe of green, red, and black. I’m wearing all red today and I’m starting a shul with Mrs. Walkeson. Or maybe I’ll just build a mikvah. Or maybe I’ll throw up.
She puts on a pair of flip-flops, plastic yellow flip-flop sandals designed for sandy beaches and aquamarine swimming pools that she’s been using as slippers around the house all winter. Or maybe I’ll just stay in bed in my flip-flops. But no school, she decides. Absolutely no school. Shul, not school. She rolls the word around on her tongue. Shul shul shul.
I want to make a shul, she thinks clearly, as the clock-radio blasts on again, this time a high-pitched series of buzzes blaring instead of the radio and Santa Fe. She crawls back under the covers and clenches her eyes and rubs and thinks shul shul shul.
After all, before Jane knew about mikvah, before she really understood what her was, she wanted shul. From the beginning, way back in fifth grade, when her parents first sent her off every Sunday “So you can make your own informed decision,” as her mother said, never specifying what it was she was supposed to make an informed decision about, Jane loved shul.
She refused to call it “Sunday school,” resolutely ignored how the air of the Ithaca Progressive Jewish Union was suffused with the delicious scent of bacon frying. Even though the Jewish Union held its classes in small meeting rooms in the balcony of the Cornell University Student Center on Sundays, despite the fact that the teachers were mostly ex-hippies who had just themselves rediscovered the coolness of Judaism, its mystical rituals and wailing music, regardless of the bacon frying up for student lunches below, Jane insisted that this was shul, and that Mike Silverstein, the self-appointed director of the whole enterprise, be called Rebbe. At dinner on Sunday nights she would correct her parents if they slipped, if they dared ask how Sunday school was, or what nonsense Mike was pumping into her head. “He’s a rebbe and it’s a shul,” she’d interrupt.
From the start, Jane demanded to be placed in the class with the older kids because the guy who did real Talmud and modern Hebrew, Mike someone with thick black sideburns not a rabbi but a true rebbe teacher, Ph.D. in maybe Yiddish, Mike did older kids only.
Eventually, Mike took her on as a private student, a privilege granted only the smartest kids. We’re resurrecting an ancient practice, Talmudic pairing, in which a teacher and a student learn by reading together, every day, four eyes glued as one to the page, he told her when he first asked her to consider one-on-one Torah study twice weekly, on Sundays and Wednesdays, to be held in his house. You’ll read at home, then read with me, a small Torah portion, along with all the rebbes’ commentaries, every week. Side by side. In Hebrew and English. Like a boy in a Warsaw shul would study before the war. It’s serious stuff, not this pre-Bat Mitzvah, add a little mishnah and stir, instant Jew crap. Can you handle it?
She stopped going to the group classes, since it was too much driving for her parents to tolerate, and instead went twice a week to Mike’s house, Wednesday and Sunday afternoons, for three-hour sessions of close Talmudic study.
“This is the real thing, Jane,” he said the first time they met alone in his dark study, eyes burning into her, marking her pale brown stare with their charcoal black. “Only a few kids can really hack it: all the Hebrew, the endless laws, the crazy quilt of commentaries radiating out from the central text on each page. Can you handle it?” Her father hates all the driving, but as her mother says, “Hey, David, two shots of hippie Jewdom a week should inoculate her against Christmas trees and local boys with bad teeth and snowmobiles.”
Her father grumbles, “I can’t believe I’m allowing my own daughter to learn all this mishegenah Jewish nonsense; the next thing you know she’ll be demanding they buy separate dishes for milk and meat and all that other crap: candle lighting on Fridays, no driving on Shabbos, no lobster even, the whole crazy megillah.” But each session, they just talk. Mike and Jane, side-by-side, reading a page of Torah together, or debating the law, sitting directly across from each other.
Now she’s in the big time, the private pre-Bat Mitzvah three-time-a-week only-for-the serious sessions. Can you handle it?
Each week begins with a series of questions. “So what does this week’s portion tell us?” Before her coat was off, before he led her to the little windowless study between the bedroom with the ancient lace coverlet and the white bathroom, before she dissected the portion or learned some bit of ritual or history or Hebrew, they would talk. And sweat.
Even in the subzero chill factor upstate winters, Mike Silverstein always seemed to be sweating. Sweat and talk: the words pushed moisture through his black hair, soaking through his yarmulke, his mustache. Jane had never seen a mustache as black and thick as his. They started at four on Sundays and Wednesdays and talked Torah until one of her parents remembered to pick her up around seven. Sitting in the car on the long, hilly ride home, she’d find her own clothes soaked through, clammy against her skin. In the beginning there was shul. And sweat.
As she rolls around under the covers, rubs the soft cloth belt of the old plaid bathrobe between her legs, rubs out of time to the even, loud electronic blasts of the clock- radio, the flip-flops wet with sweat, slipping off her bare feet. She tosses herself out of bed, strips off the bathrobe, and decides: I will wear all red today. I will make my own private shul. She imagines a great big brick shul, with Rabbi Loewe leading her and Mike in secret prayers. The sweat is cooling now, drying on her legs, arms, thighs. Ugh.
Who wants a stinky old shul, anyway? It’s no better than regular school, really. Regular school, full of loud kids and math problems and games of soccer. Double ugh. School, Caroline Elementary, full of ugly metal desks, loud soccer games, and the smell of lemony disinfectant. I’m not going to school and I’m not making a shul, Jane decides.
Instead of getting ready for school, she picks at a scab on her arm and sucks a piece of overgrown hair, an ex-bang that her mother hasn’t made her trim yet. Jane hates getting her hair cut. Hates anyone touching her hair, arranging it. She likes it like this: uncombed, damp, frizzing up in her mouth. She pulls another piece of bang in and sucks hard, her mouth alive with the hairy taste of it.
The image of the brick shul fades. Instead, she imagines her neighbor, Mrs. Walkeson, a huge curly red wig on her head, up to her neck in water. She doesn’t look sick anymore. Mrs. Walkeson, smiling out of a big bathtub. A mikvah, built inside the empty, dry portable sauna sequestered away inside the dank cluttered world of the Walkeson’s basement. A mikvah would be even better than a shul. Cleaner, less sweaty. Yes, they should definitely make a mikvah instead of a shul.
Jane pulls the hair out of her mouth and sits up in the bed. “Dad,” she calls out. “I’m sick again. I just threw up again. I’m staying home today.”
