Category: Prose

Confit

An Unctuous, Slow-Cooked Love


“Do you wanna get wings after class?”

They weren’t the first words I spoke to Stephen, but they were the first marinated in mustering up the courage to ask him out and bump uglies already.  We were seated in the back of Mr. Duffy’s classroom, me having just royally failed my senior AP History midterm, due largely in part to already being accepted into art school and also because I was distracted by my first real, bawling-in-my-car-outside-Kenny’s-house teenage breakup. I had turned 180 in my seat to face him and breathily proposition an afternoon date: You. Me. Voracious ripping of meat from bone. Red hot smacking of lips. Guys like girls who can eat, I read in a Cosmopolitan once and had inferred from those “didn’t age well” mid-2000’s burger & beer commercials starring chesty bottle blondes and a firehose, inexplicably.

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Posted on by Andrea Festa

Out of Body

Reminiscing on My Time Dabbling in the Occult

“That was the fun of the unknown, after all, the anticipatory ‘What if?'”

The name of the store was “Possibilities,” which I frequented with my friend at the time, Kara, the only Pisces in my life I’ve ever befriended. It sat next to a therapist’s office right off Pittston Avenue in Scranton, a therapist I visited only once at my mother’s urging after my parents divorced, but that’s not what this is about (although the timing of traumatic childhood event and thinking I was a witch pairs nicely, like spicy red wine and a good cut of meat.)

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Posted on by Andrea Festa

Baby Shoes, Never Bought

The Choice for Childlessness, Explained

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

“When I see children, I feel nothing. I have no maternal instinct…I ovulate sand.”

-Margaret Cho

To say I don’t like children is an understatement. As my boyfriend so aptly put it when explaining to friends, “You know that face you make when you take a sip of water and find out it’s vodka? That’s her face around kids.”

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Posted on by Andrea Festa

Rolling Out the Mat

How Yoga With Adriene Changed My Life

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

“No judgment, no frills, no body shaming. Just a welcome mat on which to plant my barking dogs.”

It was October of 2019 and I was reading A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, the first installment of the All Souls Trilogy. There’s a particular scene in the book when Matthew (vampire) invites Diana (witch), a yoga aficionado (and professional rower and alchemical historian and skinny blonde…groan) to a late night yoga session with a room full of other witches, vampires and daemons. It was a bit tedious, with a lot of subtextual dialogue in between descriptions of yoga poses with far too much detail. After the class, Matthew steamily tells Diana something about her being able to “twist your body into all sorts of shapes.” I don’t know why, but that stuck with me. I was suddenly jealous of this character (not super dimensional, I might add) in this just okay fantasy series. Why does Diana Bishop get to have it all? She has looks, smarts, witty comebacks to Matthew’s advances, AND can seamlessly align herself into a sideways fucking headstand? What CAN’T this bitch do, really? (I promise, I’m going somewhere with this.)

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Posted on by Andrea Festa

Future Star

Reflections on Pipe Dreams and Self-Obsession

“You’ll never reach the center of an only child’s Tootsie Pop, the layers of narcissism run so deep.”

The hankering for fame like no other started as early as I can remember. I was an only child, so the center of attention simply by default, and I thrived most in climates where I was the focal point of the room. By four or five, I was already destined to be a Rockette at best, a groupie at worst, always discovered by my parents moving wildly in the center of some dance floor filled with drunk adults.

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Posted on by Andrea Festa

Gringa

A True Story of Culture Shock, False Promises and That Time I (Almost) had a Sugar Daddy


“You have a nice figure, Gringa. But you could still get a little more meat on your bones.”

That’s what Jim matter-of-factly suggested to me, right after gesturing his big, expensive gold watch in front of my face towards the passenger seat where I clutched my cell phone with a sweaty palm and frowned down at said bones, the knobby knees and bony thighs I had since childhood. He was shaking his head, craning to leer at the petite females we could see through my window, blonde ponytails swinging as they jogged Kelly Drive, headphones in, oblivious to his judging stares. “Why do white girls like to work out so much? You see so many of these pretty little things running and it’s like girl, you don’t even have an ass, why you tryin’ to get rid of the fat you don’t even have? I don’t like that. I like girls with curves.” Then that chuckle of his – that infantile giggle like he just got away with doing something he shouldn’t have – followed by an emission of cigar breath. I didn’t agree nor refute. I sat there silent and dumb, as I always did and always would in his presence, only this time I had the unwelcome thought that I really should have learned how to jump out of a moving vehicle if it ever came to that. It didn’t, but the reminder tingled at the base of my skull as I checked my phone for the tenth time that minute.

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Posted on by Andrea Festa