Halia was humming lines from ‘If I was a man for a day’. She walked firmly down the crowded street on the beat of her heels clicking to the pavement like automatic gun fire. She answered the occasional glance from a boy with flattered indifference, responding to the jealous stare from a girl with a friendly face of glass. ‘I turn it on, I turn it off, why? cause I can.’
A high beep vibrated in her black jacket’s pocket. She let it go over twice more before answering. ‘Riding to Bear Mountain on Sunday with our bikes? Yeah, I am down! Sign me up,’ She decisively replied. Halia had just traded her old motorcycle for a new Kawasaki Ninja and was dying to race it. She was perhaps a skinny and petite Asian girl, and made a fragile, cute first impression, but in fact she could stand up to any man on the asphalt, being more fearless than most of the boys and more than ready to burn her rubber.
Today though, although it was Saturday, she was off to a business meeting. She had just incorporated her own startup, having received substantial funding for the first six months, and without hesitation, she had quit her daytime job as business analyst for a top financial firm, and jumped into the pool of entrepreneurs that formed the powerful heartbeat of New York. Today was the first presentation to a board of advisors and she was going to push hard to step to the plate.
Success came like a hard blow and she was set to throw the punches. And as she thought hard about success, parading with a soldier’s step, she did not forget why men love bitches.

He had always avoided making eye contact with strangers in public, but once he looked at them, Artaud knew he had never realized before, the intense river of loneliness that streamed out of people’s eyes, and scared by what he saw he quickly scurried along.

(11) His spiky Asian hair was carefully aimed into random directions, the color balanced by the black framed eye glasses, as the corners of his dry lips hang downward, adding a melancholic but not sad expression to his saggy face.

(9) A halo of sprayed, blond-reddish hair, pale, freckled bony cheeks, under the cover of silver-blue eye-shadow, a black glitter shirt sliding off her round shoulder, legs, and the seductive hard lines of black, five-inch pumps, touched the asphalt, and stepped out of the yellow frame, at the moment the photographer on the pavement captured her on the cab’s back seat. (10) Her black cheeks were full and round, like her double D breasts resting against the table top’s side, on her round but small nose rested the black frame of oval shaped glasses, while the back of her relaxed hair curled in a wide curve around her neck.

“Why?” the little girl asked, sitting on her father’s lap. The father placed his firm hand on her little, brisk shoulder and certain of the persuasion of his answer, he replied with a deep, soft voice that that’s simply how things were. Back then, such an assurance by her father proved sufficient to solve her little worries. But somehow, now that her life seemed to have become so much more complicated, her adult mind struggled to accept any longer such matter of fact evidence. Maybe the questions in her life had become too complex to be solved by a fatherly hand on the shoulder, her life seemed mingled in a web of abstractions, or maybe her mind had become too demanding to settle for the simplicity of a child’s answers, real concerns requiring concrete solutions. Her father was still alive, living a few hours away from the city, but for some reason the effect of her father’s assurances, that still echoed that same paternal simplicity, that’s simply how things are, sounded too distant to be audible any longer, drowned by the boisterous voices of practical concerns. What’s is the matter with me? Am I not attractive? Am I too demanding? Are men afraid of a strong, independent woman, who holds the strings of her life in her own hands? Her father on the other hand had cried of pride when she had graduated from law school. He had never told her directly, but her mother spoke to her about how he told everyone that she was a lawyer in New York now, with her own mid-town office and with important clients working on deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But to Halia, it was not she who lived in an ivory tower disconnected from the world of ordinary mediocrity, to her it was her father who was the one on the pedestal, whom she respected more than anyone, for his strong will, his determination, having come to America as a hard working immigrant, sacrificing everything to be able to send his daughter to the best schools in the country, working mornings to evenings, to sacrifice himself to advance his children. Was it too much too ask then, to just want to be loved?

Halia was intelligent, successful and beautiful, and did not need any man to look after her. Still, men played an important role in her life. It seemed that she suffered not alone from a wider disease of her time that affected mostly big-city professional women, and which had been diagnosed so strikingly in the television hit Sex and the City. Men on the other hand, of all walks of life, class and race, remained immune for this epidemic, or as Halia saw it, they rather leeched off of this disease of women to feed their egos, although technically leeches were hermaphrodites, but like leeches men eat their prey whole. And thus, when it came to men, Halia felt sucked dry. Asked if she would ever sacrifice her career and ambitions to sooth a man to devote himself to her, she answered resolutely no, absolutely not. But at the same time, there was nothing she craved more than a man to worship her, and she wondered if she had sacrificed herself already being without a man who loved her more than he loved himself. She thought of the goddess worship of Cybele in Ephesos, where Halia had vacationed last summer. Later, in early Christianity , the widespread goddess worship was replaced by the cult of Maria as the mother of Christ at the Council of Ephesos. What had happened in three thousand years that she now lived under the firmly established autocracy of men? In this patriarchal status quo, it apparently was too much a loss of face for men to love a woman beyond themselves. Is that what Gogol meant in his story The Nose? Do men really think that a loss of power threatens their success with women? Then how was it possible that all women with power were still single? Halia did not need a man to take care of her, but she did need a man to love her. Yet, she was intelligent, successful and beautiful.

(7) Before him lay an open notebook with black cover and lines written in black ink and a cursive, steady handwriting. His hands with widespread fingers, a slight laugh on his lips, and slow movements of his head, emphasized only the calm of his mind. (8) Her straight hair was bleached and reached her shoulders. The bags under her eyes, her reddish tanned skin, her stretched flat lips, and her coarse, boisterous voice revealed an inclination for addiction.

Felix Krull lived on Roebling street in South Williamsburg. He was an artist. That is, many people believed he was. He made post-Rauschenberg assemblages, which sold fairly well, not enough to make a name for himself, but enough to make a living as an artist, and of course he was a photographer like everyone else. His most acclaimed work, which even was featured in an obscure art magazine published in Oklahoma by an independent small publisher whom he had found through the listing in the 2009 Writer’s Market and later had spoken over the phone for a long-distance interview, was a guitar assemblage of a M249 toy water gun that served as the neck and a speaker box integrated into the iron cover of an old land mower. Of course, most of his shows had been black and white photographs of his neighborhood and portraits of people whom he met at art gallery openings, exhibited at anonymous cafes and a few bars that he would frequent. The biggest question that lately had occupied Felix was ‘Is unhappiness a physical illness?’, a question which had not found its way yet into representation in his photographs, and to which he had not found a definitive question yet, but he fore felt that it would occupy a central place in his next series of assemblages.

(1) Her eyes were fully hidden behind her mirrored Ray Ban sunglasses, her flat nose and her pouching lips, crunched into the shape of a fist’s clasp, as if she was trying to grab my attention, her perfectly dark olive skin gave her a warm reception, but her boxer’s face punched right back in your guts. (2) A white bearded man with a scruffy ball of hair extending to his neck, wearing a baseball cap walked with a stiff torso, but his mousy eyes jittering back and forth, nervously changing and never locking down on any fixed point, seemed to tell me he wasn’t very at ease in the city, but he really was never given the choice, and it was kind of too late now. (3) A table down, a pale woman with tanned sunglasses, with shabby upper arms and scattered sunspots, tears a piece of transparent tape off and tapes another receipt on a letter format blanc sheet of paper, dotting down a note, which she encircles. (4) An Hispanic with dark muscled arms, covered with tribal tattoos, swings his shoulders and hips, hustler style, super fly manner, wearing a small hat with a narrow brim, and in the band sticks a gray feather, while his head marked by a hawk’s nose and wide nostrils, rotates scanning the periphery of his proxemics to catch people noticing his presence. (5) A lanky Chinaman, with a Vietnamese expression, and greasy hair combed backward, his dark blue checkered shirt hanging down to this knees, leans forward to balance the weight of the shiny trash bag on his back. (6) Her dark eyes looked like soft candy rolling down her reddish, girly cheeks, as she bit her thin lips with her canine teeth, and while she straightened her plain red summer dress, I almost melted for her kind impression, until her voice spoke in a deliberate intention and her straight laughter revealed only a shallow confidence, and I deeply disliked her.