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Protégés
Excerpts from essays by Anne Fadiman’s students
May/June 2010
“Operation
Turtle”
by Emily Appelbaum
’10
There was a time when my family was really lacking in
the Pet Department—which is odd, considering the menagerie that eventually
accrued. A llama, two alpacas, the pygmy goat upon whom my father was surprised
to stumble when he attempted, newspaper tucked under one arm, to enter the
downstairs bathroom … then the miniature horse,
followed by two parakeets, two rabbits, two dogs, more horses, and finally,
eight chickens and a poor henpecked rooster named Wendell.
“Googly Eyes”
by Anthony Lydgate
’10
Winner of the
2009 Wallace Prize, administered by the Yale
Daily News
The clock has twelve eyes, one for each hour. Three and
nine o’clock are green, twelve and six are gray, and two is hazel. The eye at
five o’clock looks as if it’s just been on a bender; its iris is surrounded by
a dense network of red veins, and its sclera (the “white” of the eye) is pink
with irritation. The eyes are glued onto a standard-issue square office clock,
black with white tick marks. From their vantage point on the wall of the New
Haven office of Mager & Gougelman, Inc., the eyes can see several chairs, a
small table with a stack of magazines, and two paintings of churches. I am
staring at five o’clock when a man walks through the door to my left. … Introducing
himself as David Gougelmann, he ushers me out of the waiting room and into the
back.
“Distance: A
Definition”
by Alice Baumgartner
’10
Third prize in
the Atlantic Student Writing Contest, 2009
My mother … diagnosed her
patients, but never her family. Two relatives killed themselves, but my mother
thought their deaths too painful to have been suicides. Her aunt had not leapt
from the seventh floor window. She had fallen, her arm extended towards a
balloon, her fingers reaching for the string. Her cousin, a ballerina, had not
thrown herself before a train. It had been an accident, the cousin’s arms
lifted above her head, her toes in a demi-pointe, the horn like a note from the
orchestra pit, the shriek of the wheels like the applause of an audience that
had come to its feet.
“Hurting Enough”
by Cory Finley ’11
[At] Excalibur Tattoo in Shelton,
Connecticut, … in a foyer packed with bizarre
objects jostling for attention (medieval sword mounted on wall, slideshow of
nipple piercings and tattooed private parts running on loop) perhaps the most
eye-catching is a bulky crate overflowing with squishy foam ducks. Each duck’s
chest reads “I GOT PRICKED @ EXCALIBUR.” Every client who gets tattooed takes
one home, and they serve a double purpose: on the one hand, as keepsakes, and
on the other, as yielding objects for those clients to squeeze with all their
might as the store’s owner, using a tiny machine powered by electromagnetic
coils, drives a set of pins into their skin at a rate of 120 to 140 penetrations
per second. Most of these ducks, I’m told, end up decapitated.  |
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