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Illustrated by Kat Barr - katbarr.com
Illustrated by Kat Barr - katbarr.com
Greetings! I am so pleased to present our milestone 50th issue of carte blanche magazine. This online literary journal of ours has been chugging along for a remarkable twenty years since 2004.
Andrew Field is a librarian and cartoonist who writes and draws mostly about mental health. He recently had a cartoon published by Bluestem Magazine, and reviews books for Graphic Medicine.
When we were young, we loved the Mulligan sisters. There were two of them and two of us. If we could have been a pop band we would have been the Supremes, except there were four of us and we were white and two of us were boys. The Mulligan Sisters wanted to marry us and were the same age. A joint wedding was secretly planned.
He gave her a library so she’d know he was the sensitive kind of Beast – not one of those monsters who’d kidnap a girl, blackmail her into staying, brutally ravish her then eat her for dinner without a second thought. This, clearly, was the romantic kind of hostage situation, the type of abduction that was a prelude to romance.
Freddie was hiding in the shower when I got home. Steam curled to the door, greeting me, damp and warm like a dog panting on my face. The train ride was long. Ice and snow smothered the tracks, strangling wheels intent on trudging through. And at every station, a strange parade of orange vests would receive us, lugging industrial sized shovels, fixed on digging us out.
I’m not saying Sarah wasn’t my friend, but she pissed me off. Always going on about things. Her parents. A man. There was always a man.
Leah sat behind the counter of the café looking at her phone while Melike rummaged through their work cubbies.
“Do you want all these flyers?” Melike called, all earnestness, as if Leah somehow didn’t know the tidying was a pretext and that Melike was hoping to find another of her sketchbooks.
This series of memories was mostly taken on an expired Fuji ETERNA 250D in Wuhan (2020), where and when the first case of Covid-19 took place.
The word Nankoweap is Paiute and the phrase carries differing meanings, such as “place where people were killed” and “place that echoes.”