i am bad at this

Pile o' watercolor critters! :)

I am bored cubicle rat!

Hello, hello -- Felix Little checking in here. I just had a pleasant lunchtime art-viewing session with Eliot and another one of my friends, and suddenly my little cube seems terribly drab. Eating dry sandwiches at the desk and breathing in the scent of new printer paper and Accent highlighters -- my oh my, it doesn't get much more exciting than this, now does it?

Thus, I am going to use this post to gush about my favorite new anthology, which I discovered months ago and have been in raptures about since.

This is kind of my admission that I am secretly a huge sap and I adore love stories more than anything else. But!!! This collection is so, so shiny and beautiful and unexpected. It's edited by Jeffrey Euginedes, and though the only thing I've read of his has been The Virgin Suicides, but his command of language is just breathtaking. Middlesex is definitely on my list of must-reads though... And this lovely Valentine's Day anthology comes to us from McSweeney's, which is just about my favorite online lit mag to check ever, so I'm not surprised that it is a gem of an anthology.

A couple amazing stories that must be read:

"The Moon in Its Flight" - Gilbert Sorrentino

So pretty, so heartbreaking. Pure teenage love, plus some nifty literary tricks. The use of metafiction here is so very well done and it never distances you from the emotion in the story.

"First Love and Other Sorrows" - Harold Brodkey

There are two stories by Brodkey in this anthology -- this one and "Innocence," which chronicles a very persistent narrator's attempts to pleasure his college girlfriend. This one - the story of a boy watching his sister fall into a socially/financially desirable marriage and leave the family - definitely won me over though. Emotionally complex and exploring different types of love (first crushes, marriage-seeking and also familial love), this was a lovely choice for first story in the book.

"The Hitchhiking Game" - Milan Kundera

What happens when we pretend to be other people. Do we lose our sense of self? Do we lose our connection to each other? A perfectly angsty little addition.

"The Lady With The Little Dog" - Anton Chekhov

I was trying to decide which classic short story I was more excited to see in here -- this one or "The Dead" by James Joyce. Though I'll always adore Joyce, I really love the simplicity of this story and the way that Checkhov paints his adulterous characters so sympathetically. Really, really nice story to read and reread.

Andddd YEP. I could probably provide an OMGZAMAZINGILOVEIT synopsis for almost every story in here, but I'll leave it at this.

Expect a creative post soooooon! I'm feeling inspired.

<3, Felix

8. old stuff, again. starring eliot small

see here, none of this stuff is new. I'm incredibly out of practice that I will be put to shame when I start my illustration classes on August 25th. I'm shakin' in my boots here. Wish me luck! :)

Here's some old unused character design:

watch out for hipsters! or scenesters, or whatever you call them.

fail.

7. cupcake costume and schoolgirl legs

this is eliot posting today.

i hung out with felix and a friend one friday and i drew this:

and here is something old (2o07ish):
y'all should expect some more posts in the next few days. i'll post some stuff from my sketchbooks that hardly anyone has ever seen, so yehhh.

6

Felix here again... just posting some new writing tidbits that I wrote from my cubicle job. Yet untitled and also unfinished... Maybe I'll get to it someday.

1.

The girl in the purple room is too, too lovely. The walls are deep, plum, like your grandmother’s old sweater set. Against the startling darkness, the girl stands pale in a white nightgown like an open window set against the night.

“Hello,” she says without showing any teeth. The girl has her hands clasped in front of her – they too are white and soft-looking, like the backs of knees and elbows. “Welcome.”

The house is not one that you have entered before; the address came to you on parchment paper one day in the metal mailbox that sits at the edge of your property. You have not received a request like this in years, not since the days of your boyhood. It unnerves you that anyone remembers your boy detective days, that anyone would address you with, “Dear Sir, I may be in need of your assistance in solving this most distressing mystery…” but there it is. Sealed in an envelope the size of a postcard; how singularly bizarre.

You approach the girl and you take off your hat. “Hello Miss,” you say, and the words roll around in your mouth like marbles, strange and cold. “I believe you needed my assistance?”

“Ah yes,” replies the girl, unfolding her hands and reaching out for yours. You take her hand and shake it; it feels dry and soft like a freshly powdered cheek. “Yes, please come this way.”

You follow her down a hallway lined with glossy mahogany panels punctuated with runny watercolor paintings, and you must wonder, what are you getting yourself into?

xxx

It has been a dozen years since you read mysteries under the covers at midnight and traversed the town with your homemade business cards -- “boy detective,” they said, and your aunts and uncles would chortle and shake their heads at your hopeless ambition. Young Johnny, fourteen years old, living in a small town – what kind of mysteries were there to solve, anyway?

But sometimes you get a strike of luck, like that one lost little girl, the one you found while picking smooth stones by the creek bed for your slingshot. Eight, maybe nine years old, dressed in that tragically torn up pair of overalls. “Mister, mister,” she said, tears streaming and hands balled up into fists. “Mister, can you help me?”

You knew that she was lost, that there was some reason her clothes were ripped, her hair asunder. She was dark-haired, slender, quiet and not too troublesome as you took her by the hand and walked her towards the fields.

“I live over there,” she said, pointing at a distant house. There was a dark copper smear near the pocket of her overalls. The left hook was undone. “Thank you, thank you so much.”

You watched the girl run towards her house; her gait was lopsided, she moved with her legs farther apart than necessary. She did not ask you to, but you watched until she reached the door, watched for the unnatural movement of grass or strange silhouettes on the horizon.

Afterwards, you walked home with your slingshot in your hand and stones in your pockets. Each step brought the clinking of some heavier truth closer to you.

xxx

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Not really.”

A pause. You are in what seems to be a large study with the girl in white; she is standing next to an imposing black leather chair. Her face is turned away from you.

“I was afraid of that.”

xxx

You never saw the little girl by the creek ever again, though you came back almost every day for the entirety of that summer. You would sit on the banks with your feet ankle-deep in the cool, gushing water as you waited for the sun to set. You never even got her name. You thought it must have been something pretty and simple like Sarah or May. You fantasized about saving her from whatever it was that had sullied her on that warm evening.

It must have been a man, you thought, though you don’t know why that crosses your mind first.

A big, unshaven man with rough hands and hot breath.

One day, you thought you saw her out of the corner of your eye, dressed in a yellow sundress with her hair loose. But when you turned, there were just fields of dried out grass, golden and brittle.

“Hello,” you said, your voice cracking as it carried across the field. “Hello, are you there?”

But there was no answer but the oppressive hush of a summer day.