Issue 36 Summer Special Edition: Olympia Billiards | Lena Rubin
"I woke up, expecting Lucas to be at Mass, but instead he was just sitting on the edge of his bed in his formal outfit, his black patent leather shoes untied. He was holding my phone and staring..."
Welcome to KHÔRA, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you’d like your work to be considered for future issues.
Issue 36: Special Edition
Do you have more in your inbox than you can read in a day? Us too. In this Issue 36 Special Edition, we’ll send you one piece at a time rather than the entire issue all at once. If you’d like to be considered for future publications, scroll down to learn more about KHÔRA’s 500 Words and KHÔRA’s Images.
Today’s love bite is a short story by Lena Rubin. Lena is a cross-genre writer with work published or forthcoming in Second Factory, Tricycle Magazine, The Columbia Review, and elsewhere. Lena has a BA in History from Barnard College and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Check out the full Issue 36 Special Edition, and if you missed our previous issues, visit our Archive.
Olympia Billiards by Lena Rubin
My college professor drew a circle on the chalkboard. Inside it, she wrote the word story. She held a copy of my story, printed and stapled, in her hands. She looked at me and asked, “what is the center of this story?” It was such a personal question. I felt my heart move backwards.
What if the center of the story (I didn’t ask) is that I'd had a dream so vivid that I woke up and couldn’t get it out of my head. What if it felt like wax; an oil lamp casting a foggy light over the remains of the summer. What if I had been hoping that I could become immune to heat.
That summer, I fought with my boyfriend with increasing intensity, and shaved my head unevenly in the bathroom. I worked in an office, a windowless room in the university library. Sometimes after my shift I bought a soft serve cone, always vanilla and chocolate twist with rainbow sprinkles. My job was to watch promotional videos made by a philanthropic organization. Then, I had to render the video into textual categories which I inputted into a spreadsheet. This was called creating metadata. I worked on one singular spreadsheet; it grew and grew. Metadata yawning into infinite scroll….
Read Olympia Billiards.
Issue 36 Highlights
Issue 36 Special Edition: Strawberry Lipgloss
Issue 36 Special Edition: Lost in Midtown
Issue 36 Special Edition: Olympia Billiards
Issue 36 Special Edition: Gut Feeling
Issue 36 Special Edition: Mother-In-Law
Issue 36 Special Edition: Please Leave A Message
Artists and Writers
We’re looking for features and our future teams! To enter KHÔRA’s collaborative waters:
Writers, read about KHÔRA’s 500 Words here.
Artists, send your artwork to KHÔRA's Images here.
Team-based, collaborative, and curated, KHÔRA is a form that is continually opening. We invite you to join us in sustaining it together. We don't believe in rejections. KHÔRA’s 500 Words is about considering how multiple voices can be heard; how frameworks, traditions, and projects can inform each other; and how new perspectives emerge from collaboration and openness. If you are a visual artist or interested in sharing your artwork or images, ready about KHÔRA’s Images here.
Your words/images will always remain active in KHÔRA’s ocean, and you won’t ever receive a notice of rejection from us. We know this process is not perfect; we wish to stay open to the possibility that at any point, your work will be a fit for a curated issue or team collaboration. This doesn’t need to be a completed piece—think of it like a sample of your work at any length up to 500 words.
Once you send 500 Words, your work will remain in our inclusive and expansive space. You can send 500 Words more than once—there’s no limit to how many times you can send us new work; just no repeats, please. KHÔRA doesn’t publish previously published work, but feel free to share any 500 words you want as a sample (published or unpublished).
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With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad