Tag: writing

The Insult

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

This ran at Six Sentences, one of those experimental journals that thrived online about about a decade ago. Editor Robert McEvily really did a great job with the project and with fostering a sense of community. 6S also put out two print volumes, one of which included one of my pieces.

This is a recollection of a recollection. My understanding of a family folk tale about the Old Country.

The Insult

There are no bakeries outside San Marco in 1968, no fish markets or butchers, only tobacco fields and salted meats between Carmine’s and the piazza. Dirt roads spread like long brown leaves from my cousin’s to the church-square and we ride to town on ox carts and warping wooden wheels. I give my aunt a big roast in the cool dirt kitchen where summer meats are hanging. At dinner there’s a small piece cooked and I ask about the rest. Three quarters of my trophy is cured above the table. Flies land on my see-through slice greedy and don’t notice.

So We Had a Wake

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

This is a story about a dream, or a memory of a dream. It was published years ago at another ghost town called Slingshot.

I think these pieces leant themselves very well to the the kind of online writing that was emerging in the late 00’s. It’s a shame so many of those venues, many of which were very good, are no longer around. Pour one out for each of them, I guess.

So We Had A Wake

You came over in red high tops from a yard sale and your old bandana with a Rubbermaid trunk of things for me to keep. Your Junior Legion plaque. Records from the bank you worked at one summer, but you never worked at a bank. You worked in a furniture factory and a Bible software company. There were toy baseball bats that I thought I might let my son play with but would maybe keep wrapped forever, a baseball with funny faces, binders from Seminary and records. “Have you heard any news of any kind?” I asked, afraid of why you were doing this. “I haven’t heard,” you said and I tried to remember how I felt when you were given back to us. I don’t remember what I said when I found out, like I’d missed the news but still knew it, like I coveted the chance I must have had to jump and yell and strip and beat my chest. I should have bruises there like butterflies, their brown shadow wings spreading from my sternum. My knuckles would be burger meat, my lungs would break my ribs, my throat would cut and chafe on the impossible proclamation, would scab and petrify, vanity, I’d bleed the truth out in a dribble. If you hadn’t really died, once, if I found out they had been mistaken, a clerical error, even a resurrection. What they can do with medicine, now. But I don’t remember. 

I think you better leave me with the trunk, too, so I have a place to keep this all just how it is, you know, and I don’t say just in case because just in case is doubt and doubt kills t-cells, eats your organs. You have been so positive. You smile at everything you show me. “I probably shouldn’t have taken these,” you say about the jump drives from the bank that are branded with Jerry Dior’s batsman. “They might be interesting.” 

I wonder if you were lucid all those mornings you slept through class, if you were conjugating Greek declensions, parsing Hebrew in your dreams. I wonder if you parse me now, if first and second person are constructs of the living. If your Thou to my I is only feltboard Jesus. 

I understood that you were private, but I understand now, after our visit is consumed by things I don’t sleep through — my wife calling after church to wake me up for lunch, my son in the background saying “Hallelujah, Daddy!” — why you didn’t want a funeral. You couldn’t say goodbye and wouldn’t let me, either. And so when you visit in the morning, as often as the intervals in which I’d always seen you, we don’t have to talk about how we miss each other, I don’t have to ask if the end hurts or know how scared you were to go. The night is hypothetical and it seems we both are only sleeping.

Evensong

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Another early piece. This was published at elimae when Cooper Renner was the editor. It was a very good journal. This story is 100 words long.

Evensong

Thaddeus, age 3, set the Evensong in shallow water. Small waves rose and fell, and, retreating, carried Thad’s small ship further from the shore. Squealing and on pigeon toes Thaddeus retrieved it, and, safely back, he cast the tiny schooner headlong into the sea. His father’s strides were long and easy and for a moment Thad was sorry for the rival ocean and the fight he’d picked. His father bent low and pressed Thad to his chest and from tall grass on the bluffs above, they watched a red sun sink behind the green and Thad said, “Bring it back.”

The Doogie Howser Portion of the Evening

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Doogie Howser was the first person I ever saw use a computer as a journal. Ricky from Silver Spoons was the first person I ever saw IMing with his crush.

Gains today: Quite a few words written. A few stories read.

I reread “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” for the first time in many, many years. I must have been very young the last time, because I don’t remember it being so short. I also read “A Day’s Wait,” which, I mean, isn’t very good. You have to really be into the code hero and all of that to delve into the scholarship, and I’m just not that interested. I’m too old for that side of Hemingway, at least right now. I also read “The Killers,” and have decided that “Fifty Grand” is much better. Though I do like the sparse description of the lunch counter.

I also learned that George Saunders was a young Objectivist, which reminds me very much of Andrew Sullivan’s explanation of his youthful Thatcherism. I can relate to both of these experiences. I got into Rand because of a girl. There were weird tracts in the Rand books at the public library, and that could probably make for a decent story. Not right now, though.

I did get some good words down and out. But they were divided between two stories, and none went toward the story I planned on adding to today. So I feel a little scattered, but that’s okay, because the ideas are really coming. Depending on who you listen to, control is a myth or a must. The more you sort of whittle down, the more you tend to know which claim is most helpful in the moment.

The Ursinus College Lantern, Fall, 1998

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Earlier today, I shared a piece that I said was the first thing I had published in a print journal.

Later, I was working on a story partly set at a sort of proxy for my undergraduate alma mater.

When I came to campus in 1998, the website was in very basic html, and the college email ran on DOS (I think. It was text-based at any rate). 21 years later, there’s a fairly robust digital history of all kinds of things Ursinus.

I went down the rabbit hole.

Regarding the venue from this morning, what I should have said was it the first print journal run by people I didn’t know or go to school with to publish my creative work.

Of course, I hadn’t forgotten about the Lantern. Of course it was the first print journal to ever publish my creative work. (Alright, here again I’m wrong. In sixth grade, I was co-founder, co-editor, co-publisher, and staff writer for zine called ZAP! In middle school, we briefly considered relaunching as The Jolly Rancher, but it wasn’t meant to be.)

The Lantern piece, which you can find here, was written a few years before I got to Ursinus. I was about 16, broken-hearted, and listening to a shit-ton of Beck. That it was published alongside things written by 22-year-olds, and that it won the yearly prize for creative writing, has always meant a lot to me.

I Love You When You’re Pretty

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

This piece was published maybe 10 years ago at a venue that no longer exists. When I first started publishing short fiction, there were many new, experimental web journals. Many of them were very good. Many good ones still exist, but many are, as David Thomas might say, now ghost-towns.

This piece also appeared in the first edition of my chapbook, What Other People Heard When I Taught Myself to Speak. That manuscript is going through some new revisions with a second edition coming sometime in the spring.

I Love You When You’re Pretty

When you said hi, I didn’t see you in her fitted polka dots and your hair like a USO girl and your legs in heels. Everyone is beautiful in your grandma’s pictures but we dress with conscience now, buffing out your curves or the square cut of my shoulders with fair-trade cotton. What right do you have, anyway, in eye shadow and stockings, wearing lipstick I can only see close? What right do I have, now, to closeness, to feel like cigarettes won’t kill me and sex is not transaction? What right to be pretty? And to love you when you are?