Image by Caitlyn Murphy
HAZLITT
The World We are Losing
The next night we camp in Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland habitat in the US, where the Atchafalaya river delta meets the Gulf of Mexico. Our tent is a thin membrane between us and the wilds. If we touch the tent wall, water will leak through. We lay with our eyes open listening to a chorus of unidentifiable nightlife singing through the velvet black. The swamp is like nowhere I have ever been. The night is alive and wet.
Illustration by Hudson Christie
HAZLITT
The Disneyland of Death
I took the bus to Forest Lawn Memorial Park after waking up on a blow-up mattress in my friend’s tiny Koreatown apartment. I had fallen asleep to the sound of a pastor preaching in Spanish at the storefront church across the street, my first Los Angeles lullaby.
HAZLITT
Secrets Are a Captive Country
My grandfather had never told me about his trip to the Soviet Union in the sixties, but I don’t know why I was surprised. He never told me anything, not even my grandmother’s name.
BRICK: A Literary Journal
Mirror Land
After eating dinner F and I made the plan to sneak into Cinecittà. Five of us sat on a balcony above a soccer field, watching teenagers in neon cleats warm up for the game. A Sardinian man with black eyes rolled a ball of hash between his thumb and forefinger as he explained the linguistic geography of Italy. He had just fallen in love and was eager to articulate his world to us...
PAPIRMASSE
Falling is Relational
James (not his real name) is the kind of man who wears his wristwatch backwards so he can tell the time when he’s aiming a rifle, who is going home to California for a palm tree, jello-soaked Christmas with a Mother that has more to say to a chocolate lab than her husband. He is the kind of man who buys Lego Christmas gifts for boys and Barbie coloring books for girls, who goes for the weekend to a displaced persons camp...
JOYLAND
Cheekbone
I told you over lunch, where Kaiser buns seemed to sprout cucumber through a sheet of spinach, what I thought about Alec Melnyk, the man who measured headstones with a candy coloured yardstick and took the dead out of their tombs...
Image by Viki Nerino
“The death of all symbols, the retreat of all guarantees”
—Nadia Bou Ali
TWO PHOTOS
After talking about bats over dim sum last summer, an artist I met texts me two viral photographs. In one of the photographs, a woman holds a bat by its feet. It’s the size of a small dog. She is barefoot in a denim skirt, smiling down at the bat pup in her hands. Sun pools in her blond hair, over her high forehead, and around her sunglasses. Light glows through the membrane of the bat’s wings, revealing what look like veins stretching between the bones. Its wingspan is about three feet. That’s a juvenile, the artist wrote. Its face is in shadow, but fox-like ears are distinguishable in the silhouette. It’s unusual to see a creature that looks like it is swaddled in membrane, wrapped in skin, its skeleton trapped in leather, its wing like an encased hand.
In the second photograph, a man stands stiffly in a white button-up and suit pants. Next to him, a bat hangs by its feet from a wooden beam, pieces of banana in its mouth. The two subjects are on a highway or a bridge. If you look over the railing into the valley below, everything is lush and green, fertile. The hanging bat looks disorientingly like a human wrapped in thin black fabric. Its similarity to the man is unsettling. This is an adult, the artist wrote. The frame of the photo has cut the man’s head off at the nose, so it’s impossible to see what emotions he might be trying to repress as he stands next to it: Joy? Fear? Disgust? Curiosity? Reverence? The man is only meant to serve as a metre stick to measure the bat by, but the photograph is still a game of surreal perspective. It is difficult to tell the actual size of anything.
The bat in these photos is the golden-crowned flying fox, a megabat, with an adult wingspan of five feet. It forages alone for figs at dusk. It disperses seeds as it shits, a crucial act for the ecosystem, and returns at dawn to its community of many hundreds, all hanging upside down together in the trees. The population of flying foxes has declined by 50% from 1986–2016 due to deforestation and poaching. They are considered endangered or likely to become extinct in the near future.