The Roar of the Foley Artists
Ari had just learned from the rabbi that the Jews had a concept of the afterlife and now he was expected, simply, to go about his day. The rabbi had mentioned this in passing at the end of Shabbat services, like, no big deal, and then hurried off to some appointment—probably to meet George Soros about the space lasers that turn everyone into a gay Mexican.
So, what did this afterlife look like? Did people have bodies? Or were they just heads with wings sprouting out where necks would have been? What about the Jews who didn’t believe in God or the afterlife—who obstinately rejected what they called ‘all organized religion.’ Well, the funny thing is, the rabbi had said, before she had sailed off into the sunset, you don’t need to believe in a God concept to be a Jew. Once you’re born Jewish, that’s it. You are Jewish. That was just great—let’s see how much traction that argument gets with the secular Jews who worship only at the altars of Irony and History. Like his Grandpa Gideon. Talk about a realist. The old man said the only kind of religious experience he would partake in is eating matzah ball soup. Which is why he only ever ordered matzah ball soup from Katz’s delicatessen, because Meg Ryan had once faked an orgasm there, which had effectively secularized the joint. And speaking of Grandpa Gideon, Ari now had only twenty-five minutes to make it over to Gidde’s house for Friday night chess. Gidde is what they all called Grandpa Gideon, because he wasn’t. Gidde would be annoyed if he knew that his favorite grandson had started going to Shabbat services—you think there’s a man in the sky? So, he’d kept this a secret from Grandpa Gideon, ever since Ari started going a few years after graduating from college because he felt spiritually empty and wanted not to feel that way. Spiritually empty? Maybe you need calcium. Yogurt never hurt anyone. Tell me the war that was fought over yogurt.
There had to be, for now, a placeholder—the beginnings of something toward an explanation. Ari dug around in a closet in the back of his apartment where he kept crates of books he didn’t read often, until he retrieved a book that he’d found on a clearance rack at a secondhand store. Modern Philosophies of Judaism. Maybe he’d get somewhere with this on the bus. Then it was sneakers on, wallet check, keys check, windbreaker on—out the door, but wait—back to grab the bottle of wine for grandpa—and out again.
On the bus, Ari flipped open the book to a chapter, Concept of God. This was a start. Let’s get down to it. Where’s this afterlife, what’s its deal? *Eternity is thus an ever-shifting point in time, which point is apprehended as marking the furthest advance of humanity on the road to ethical achievement, the highest contemporary vision of the ideal society of mankind.
Now who the hell knew what that meant. Not Ari. Messaging really was an issue for the Jewish faith, he’d started to notice. There’s an old story—well it was new to Ari because he’d only heard it last week—but old as far as Jewish stories go—about how two rabbis were debating some interpretation of this, that, or the other, and finally God Himself shows up and says something like, I’ll gladly explain this to you fine people, and the rabbis ask Him to please leave because they are wrestling with an interpretive problem. Of course, they did. Now the Christians really had a leg up on the Jews when it came to making points precise and accessible. This is why one of Ari’s favorite writers is C.S. Lewis. Talk about a persuasive writer. And a dry wit. Where was the Jewish C.S. Lewis? Or the Jewish the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Instead, Philip Roth had written a bunch of things about Jewish male adolescence, which were all introspective (groundbreaking?), but now fucking a slab of liver and the American Jewish experience were indelibly linked in the public psyche. Ari for one had never fucked a liver, hadn’t even thought about it. If only they—maybe Gallup—could circulate a survey among Jewish males asking whether they wanted to fuck or had designs on fucking a liver, and then when the results showed a very low percentage, people would understand that this was a Philip-Roth-specific issue. But then again, maybe the number would be high, and this would not be helpful at all.
As the bus was nearing Grandpa Gideon’s house, Ari resolved to push the question of the God concept into the far recesses of his mind because Gidde was always keenly perceptive as to whether Ari was thinking about something and not sharing it, and learning that his favorite grandson was thinking about the God concept and not, say, lessons for today to be drawn from the Dreyfus Affair, would only upset him. And if Gidde got upset, well, there was the whole evening. In his rage, the old man would liberally apply salt to all his food, flaunting his high blood pressure, as if to say, you have made me lose control over how much salt I am consuming, and now, my veins might explode. So, God was forgotten about well before Ari pressed the ‘stop requested’ button on the M98 bus.
Grandpa Gideon lived in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City on Third Avenue and East 83rd Street, where he’d lived for over thirty years. Why not move, Gidde? The family always asked when they saw the cockroaches and the occasional water bug. He said he liked to be near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, even though he hadn’t been to the museum in nearly two years. But he wanted to be in the neighborhood, he said, in case there were big changes to any of the galleries. New exhibitions came and went all the time—he was talking about other kinds of changes. When pressed on what this meant, he never gave a clear answer. Ari knew that his grandpa had in mind a meeting by members of the museum board, where they were deadlocked, a perfect tie, on the question of whether they should destroy all the Van Goghs, and then a voice would cry out, Someone call Gideon Bernstein, he’ll know what we should do! Don’t do it—Gidde would say—don’t destroy the Van Goghs, and they would all see his wisdom and the error of their ways, how their reasoning had been flawed, a wrong turn there, a misstep here, and that’s how they’d come so close to punching a fist right through cut sunflowers.
Well, what about a nice place without a bug problem, Ari’s mother had asked Gidde, and maybe we could find one in the area. Gidde insisted that he had fought the Japanese in World War II—what was a little bug. It was hard to argue with this, since the Pacific Theater, what Ari had heard about it, sounded like a scary place; and once the comparison between bugs and World War II was conceded to Grandpa Gideon, there was no winning the argument because, all sides agreed—even Cousin Leo—that World War II was scarier. Gidde always rested on the laurels of winning this argument. He prided himself in arguing and said he was like Chief Justice John Marshall, the first Really Major Justice, who won every argument the moment his premise was conceded to him. So, we all know who is going to win the landmark case of Bugs versus World War II: Grandpa Gideon. And the prize—eternal glory and a rent-controlled apartment on Third Avenue and 83rd Street for six hundred dollars a month.
Whenever Ari opened the door to Gidde’s apartment (Ari was the only member of the family with a key, which Gidde had anchored on a keychain of a squishy basketball, big, so it wouldn’t get lost and sometimes they mess up minting replacements), the place sounded with the eternal questions, Who Is Jack Nicholson? What Is Uruguay? That evening, the basketball, tossed in the air, perfected its parabola into Ari’s outstretched fingers to Gidde hollering at the TV the age-old riddle, What Is Mustard?
That was the question. Grandpa Gideon could have answered Dijon, but he didn’t. It was important for Ari to understand this, the fork-in-the-road, because Ari, too, would have to make some difficult decisions in his life. A truly insane person would have answered horseradish. A craven sociopath (is there any other kind?) would have murmured ketchup, a criminal’s notorious last word uttered before he turns off Jeopardy and leaves, probably, to blow up an orphanage.
When this was gotten out of the way—the pursuit of truth runs on its own timeline—Gidde, from his recliner, extended a long arm in the air and jostled his wrist, his silver watch rattling, which meant his grandson should come over and kiss him hello. So, Ari hugged his grandfather and gave him a kiss on the cheek and the old man looked into his eyes and knew his grandson had just been thinking about something, and yet, Gidde didn’t raise this because his grandson would tell him when he felt ready to discuss whatever the thing was.
They turned their attentions to dinner—pastrami sandwiches which were defended by the one with the heart condition as ‘healthy’ because no salt had been added. There was also the token side of broccoli, heralded and kissed lovingly on the bottom for cheap political points, and then ultimately pushed to the side as ‘sinister’ and unfit for consumption. It was around this time that Gidde mentioned that he fell in love the night he tried to figure out if he could simulate the sound of a car chase by grinding celery stalks in a nutcracker and Ari looked at the fridge for the number of Gidde’s cardiologist and Gidde told him to sit down because he was in the middle of a story—not even in the middle because Ari wouldn’t let him finish his sentence and yes his breathing was fine and no he didn’t have a pain in his arm, did Ari have a pain in his arm and how did he like being asked a stupid question—so Ari sat down and eyed the pastrami sandwiches suspiciously and from a safe distance.
Oh, this was the commercial with the man who talked about home insurance with the chicken. It never made any sense. Did it make sense to Ari?
Ari studied his grandfather, who seemed still very much alive. With his eyes on the old man (who, at that moment, intensely scrutinized a small paper cup of coleslaw for, perhaps, its hidden agenda), Ari began to set up the chessboard on a small cherrywood table reserved only for chess. Cradled in a dark rectangular box, lined with purple velvet, the pieces were ornately carved bone, natural white and red-stained. Ari preferred the character pieces to the game itself—the pouting Bishops, whose puffed hats bore an arbitrary indent down the middle (maybe this is why they were so unhappy); the Knights, little men clinging wildly to braying stallions, about to be thrown asunder; the Rooks, stony and indifferent (storm the castle, what do I care?); the King, a tall and bony man, whose stamped face betrayed a kind of stupidity (what—again?); the Queen, a stiff collar, a vaguely distracted look; then the Pawns—the Pawns were his favorite. They had a marching, glib buoyancy about them, like old cartoon characters, revving up to sprint off into a blur. What were they so happy about? Hadn’t they seen this all before? Didn’t they know they were going to be the first ones to die? They were either forgetful, or ecstatic martyrs. Ari pointed this out to Grandpa Gideon once, and even though the old man would prefer his grandson think structurally about the game, sharpen his mathematical instincts, and learn, finally, to anticipate, Gidde laughed because, at that moment, he saw the world through his grandson’s eyes.
They began to play. An opening move; another; a Pawn here; a Knight’s leap—wait, there is ice cream, the good kind, in the refrigerator; is this a move, grandpa, to distract me from the game—no, what are you talking about, it’s Ben & Jerry’s, the kind you like, with all the rocks and roads and whistles.
Eventually the ice cream melted into a swirl at the bottom of Ari’s bowl, allowing Ari to pretend to focus on the project of scraping the remains with his spoon, as he slyly asked his grandfather what he had meant before about the celery and the nutcrackers. This was from when Gidde had been a Foley artist. A what. A foley artist! The people who make the sounds for motion pictures. As far as Ari had known, grandpa had only ever been a civil engineer, and before that, a lifeguard, but that was only to pay for college and to meet girls.
The sound gets put in the movie. At this point, a silent black and white film, with flickering holes in it, like crescent cigarette burns, played for a second in Ari’s mind—an anxious woman gesticulates to a man out of the shot—she looks confused. The scene breaks into a page of titles, What do you mean? The sound gets put in the movie?
Grandpa Gideon explained. The sound and the picture are separate; they don’t go together, even now.
Like a finger snapping. You’d think it would be the sound of your index finger and thumb rubbing together, but it’s not—it’s your index finger hitting your palm, that’s what makes the sound. Maybe you’d infer that you’re seeing the sound at the moment your fingers meet, but that’s not real; the sound comes after. Everything we hear, the hard truth is, we’ve made up in some way or other.
The mental black and white film returned—a white Cadillac drives down a vintage New York City street toward the camera—will it drive through the screen and hit Ari’s brain?—no, the car halts. The door flaps open as an enraged man in a fedora and suit springs out like a jack-in-the-box. Cut to titles: Sir! I have half a mind to call the authorities! Then a different man, also in a suit, walks directly in front of the shot. Titles: Why, hold your horses! just a minute, there, old sport, it’s no use at all getting riled up over matters about which you haven’t an understanding! First man throws hat soundlessly on the ground—he acts mad, the hat, possibly even more so. Titles: Jiminy cricket, you can’t go about mucking up basic facts about life! Society will drift away in a handbasket. Second man is the picture of unfazed; his noiseless lips move with equanimity. Titles: Why, sir, it’s a free country—and I’ve got a First Amendment!
Knight snatched Pawn. Our senses are in constant negotiation with our soul, our personality—the thing that breathes—and a tricky little synthesis happens that makes us think that things are as they are. Sometimes our sensory impressions get overwhelmed by something extraordinary and then the negotiations get halted and it’s pencils down everybody. And Grandpa Gideon had nothing more to say on that point, although he did offer a long look in the direction of the Bishop nearest to Ari’s left hand and Ari didn’t know how to interpret that, so Ari just did what he had planned and moved a Pawn from H-2 to H-4.
Whenever Dracula rises out of his coffin, someone must creak a door hinge into microphone—this is a fact. In the nightly shows, Gidde said, it would be his job to sweep the floor with a broom near a microphone taped to the ground because you would expect Dracula’s cape to rustle when he rises from his undead nap. Originally, it was done without the sweep, but that didn’t work because even Dracula’s clothing makes sound when he moves. Maybe it would work if you wanted Dracula to levitate—that’s an artistic choice, however. For the parts when someone would whip out a crucifix and Dracula would have his horrified, little—ah!—moment, a dozen egg rolls soaked in cherry yogurt would be dropped to the floor.
And no, Gidde clarified, the yogurt didn’t have to be cherry for the sound. Cherry, smartass, was the least popular flavor at the store so it was bought as a courtesy toward the community. Courtesy does matter. Would Ari look at where he just put his Queen. Now Ari knew the fear of Christendom sounded like egg rolls in cherry yogurt. Or a yogurt of any flavor.
Maybe the Crusades were more about dairy than we thought. And seriously did Ari get this, look now, at the chicken and the home insurance. The commercial had reappeared on the muted television; in a silent medium, the chicken appeared more serious. Ari studied the bird’s countenance for the first time—and in it he saw the possibility that the animal may have climbed the highest mountains in chase of those ancient truths and descended, again, forever changed, with a keen understanding that all things pass. Memento mori. First buy some home insurance. Just look at that expression—this bird knows its place in the universe—and yours.
Ari took one of Gidde’s Rooks and this was received with mixed emotions: pride (I taught him; he is me) and resentment (he is better than me; he is younger and trying to destroy me), etc.
One night it had been the premiere of The Revenge of the Parsnip Thieves (trans. La vendetta dei ladri di pastinaca). Gidde had—this was an Italian film, by the way, shot mostly under a Roman aqueduct and inside a department store. The picture had made its way to the United States by route of a promising young Italian actor, very handsome, who, carrying the reel under his arm, had come to Hollywood to make his mark. After scrawling Che fai tu, luna, in ciel, dimmi, che fai? on a dressing room wall, the actor decided he was done with showbusiness and moved to the other side of the Hollywood sign to establish a company that imported pistachios; when he eventually had more pistachios than he knew what to do with, he turned pistachios into pistachio cookies, and within just half a year, he had a pistachio cookie company. Lines snaked around the Hollywood sign and down the rocky terrain—Ari asked his grandfather if he needed a glass of water, which the old man declined, and took his grandson’s Bishop. These stories had to be a way of winning the game. This night—yes, the showing of the Italian parsnip film—was the night Gidde met Mabel, whose name was not Ari’s grandmother’s name.
Mabel stood at the opposite side of the Quack Quack Boom Boom Pit—what they called the orchestra below the film screen where the Foley artists sat. She was standing on a step stool, with her long thin arm raised as high above her as she could reach. Her slender shaking wrist held up a heavy pitcher of lemonade which she tilted downwards and poured onto a birdcage, inside of which was a precocious goose that both desperately wanted a drink of lemonade but did not want to get wet and would flutter its wings in agitation as it lunged to and away from the stream of lemon juice. The reason for the get-up with the goose was that, in this scene, an Italian professor has a stunning revelation by a riverbank, and this is what it sounds like when an idea comes into existence beside running water. The professor’s realization is that all the parsnips in his town might have disappeared overnight not on account of an aggressive parsnip fungus as he had originally hypothesized (this conjecture = seven or eight mice in a pillowcase full of sugar). Instead, there may be another explanation. The professor remembered that he had passed an old woman in the town square, la piazza dei segni misteriosi, and she had raised one long crooked index finger to her lips. Perhaps the old woman had only been licking strawberry pulp off her fingers (she had, after all, been carrying a little wicker basket of the berries). Yet everyone knows, the professor muses, that strawberries are the most ominous of the fruits, second only to pomegranates during the period of March through May, a time that commemorates when St. Fioretta, the patron saint of vestal virgins, had been snubbed by a magic pomegranate that could talk and had chosen not to talk to her. So, when the professor sits by the riverbank, he realizes, at last, that this encounter had been an omen: treachery is afoot. He understands, in this pivotal scene, that the parsnips of his town have not disappeared due to natural causes, but have been stolen by a band of thieves, led by none other than Tancredi and Fufetti, two schoolboys whom he had once capriciously scolded at a post office. They had jeered at him, just recently, that they would exact revenge by stealing all the parsnips in town, and something unrepeatable about his mother. He had assumed, however, that they had been speaking metaphorically, and he completely forgot about the incident until this moment. When the professor, galvanized by the workings of his own mind, leaps onto the seat of his blue vespa parked by the running waters, young Gideon threw a sack of potatoes on the ground to simulate the character’s leap onto his chariot, and simultaneously, Gideon smiled brilliantly at Mabel because he knew she would look in his direction when the potatoes thudded.
Mabel shyly slinked over to him in her long navy dress with buttons down the front and white polka dots all around. She wouldn’t be needed at her spot Quack Quack Boom Boom Pit for another twenty minutes, when she would have to squeeze toothpaste out of tube for the scene where a priest dies blissfully in a vineyard. They whispered their names to each other; and he could smell her hair and she smelled nice and had a nice smile; and they talked about how they came to work at the Quack Quack Boom Boom Pit. The manager, who had been eyeing Mabel, too, came over, and asked Mabel if she knew that Gideon was a real Jew, horns and all, and no, of course, Gideon didn’t have horns, that was a joke, but he did have a nose you could spot from a mile away, and he had a Jew dick, and at this point, the manager whacked Gideon in the crotch and it hurt and it wasn’t funny at all. Mabel got embarrassed as Gideon clutched his pants, and the manager laughed and clapped Gideon on the back, wasn’t it hilarious, and Mabel excused herself and went back to her spot even though she wouldn’t have to make the sound of a priest dying for at least ten minutes. Gideon thought he might die on the spot, right there among cups of playdoh and a box of slugs (car chase), and his eyes smarted with anger and hot tears. Then he noticed Mabel waving for him to come over to where she was, and before you could stir burnt rice into a vat of pea soup (motorcycle overtakes car)—he was next to her. She whispered to him that, in the front row, there was a little boy who was completely deaf, and his mom took him to the silent movies. Did the boy understand now what they were doing with making sounds—the kid must be so confused, what should we do. Gideon liked the sound of that, that he and she were a team now. Gideon boldly swung under the rope line that separated the Quack Quack Boom Boom Pit from the audience and asked the mother if she would let her child come with him into the pit. The mother looked nervously at him and at Mabel behind him, and Mabel must have flashed her a kind smile, because the mother nodded, and the boy, who could lip-read, slid off his chair and eagerly went under the rope-line and into the Quack Quack Boom Boom Pit.
There’s a scene in La vendetta dei ladri di pastinaca that has been the subject of consuming controversy among critics and film historians. Some have speculated that it was cut and then added against the director’s wishes. The professor, in hot pursuit of the parsnip thieves, drives his vespa through golden fields studded with cypress trees, and just as he gains on them, a flock of geese smatter his huffing motorcyle with a downpour of droppings. Unable to see, the professor ultimately drives into a nearby lake. This is the start to the grand finale of the film—in a slow dog paddle through the water, the professor realizes that he is but one man in a large, unpredictable universe. There, in the brown water, in the shadow of nearby lemon groves, he relinquishes the obligation to bend the world to his will. Credits.
Pawn took Pawn. Bishop threatened Knight.
Mabel clasped the deaf boy’s hand and asked him his name. Henry. She showed him a metal trash lid and pointed to Gideon, who was holding a container of eggs. Gideon mimed throwing an egg in the direction of the trash lid. They were almost at the geese dropping scene. Gideon looked at the boy and said that when he tapped on the boy’s shoulder, he should throw an egg at the trash can; Henry nodded to show he had understood. Mabel took three paces back—by now all the players in the Quack Quack Boom Boom Pit were smiling, a little nervously; the audience in the theater peered over their seats to see what was happening and some held their breath. Mabel nodded; Gideon put a hand on the boy’s shoulder; and there! The first goose comes onto the screen; then another, and another; the little vespa surely will be overtaken soon; it huffs and puffs along, but the geese are faster and—tap, tap on Henry’s shoulder—and with athletic precision, the boy threw an egg, and then a second, right at the trashcan lid. The sound of bird droppings echoed throughout the theater. A moment of pregnant silence was suspended over every seat—and uproarious, relieved laughter rang out. Tap, tap, tap—right into the trash lid, again and again—the wobbling vespa is being destroyed by force majeure, Henry’s eager pitches. Mabel and Gideon worried maybe the little boy would think the audience was laughing at him—could he really understand what he was doing? Yet Henry understood—he reveled in the smiling faces; he was in something, as he’d always wanted to be. He intuited that people didn’t know how to interact with him sometimes, so they kept their distance. Now he was entertaining them, and it felt glorious. Henry knew the causes of things. He felt the vibrations of the eggs hitting the lid. He had his own relationship to sound; it was just different that was all. Everyone looked happy.
A smile had broken out on Grandpa Gideon’s face, and the old man’s eyes glistened as his spirit walked right out of his body and into the Quack Quack Boom Boom Pit, back again in his twenty-year old body handing Henry one egg after another and gently tapping the boy on his lonely, miniature shoulders. Gidde didn’t even seem aware that he was smiling because, as Ari saw it, his grandfather had been transported somewhere else, to an undying moment of transcendent joy. He reveled in the look on his grandfather’s face. Ari loved his grandfather, and his grandfather must have felt this love shining out his grandson’s body because his eyes turned back to Ari and he said lovingly you’re going to be okay, Ari, it’s all going to be all right.
Gidde looked down at the Chessboard. Knight still at E-6, where to move. A cloud passed over the man’s face, his nose twitched slightly; his whole face sank, no longer lifted into a state of exalted rest. After the movie ended and the audience had cleared the theater, the manager had gathered all the players of the Quack Quack Boom Boom Pit together and said they needed to stay late because Gideon Bernstein had something to tell them, apparently he thought he was better than everyone, didn’t he, didn’t he, Gideon, that the rules don’t apply to him, that he was better than each of yous, and could do whatever the hell he felt like, and a real shame everyone has to stay late because of Gideon, here—well guess what, Gideon, you’re fired, and we’re not paying you for this week, did you really think you’d get paid after that stunt you pulled, bringing a CHILD into the orchestra, thought that was a great idea didn’t you, pack your shit up and get out of here, sorry you had to see that everyone, Gideon Bernstein thinks he’s better than all of us. And then Gidde said that revenge was a dish best served cold, so a few nights later, he snuck into the theater and blindfolded the manager and locked him in a closet and left him there. What happened, Ari wanted to know, did he die—did someone get him—and Gidde said he never cared to find out and never went back or heard from him or anyone again. What about—no, never saw Mabel again either.
Check. Bishop threatened King.
Check. Queen threatened King.
Ari felt hollowed out. This story felt unfinished. His grandfather, however, seemed the same as he had at the start of the night. Why was that the ending of the story—no resolution, no comment on how Gidde had felt, his anger, his joy, his shame, his sorrow. Gidde seemed to like the unfinished, or maybe he was just used to it. Always living on the edge of festering unfinishedness. Gidde found little puzzles to give him transitory moments of completion. Chess games. Mystery novels. Checkmate. A death, and an answer to the question of who did it.
Ari said goodnight to grandpa and kissed him on the cheek. As Ari stepped out into the street, the cool air nipped at his cheeks and the breeze whistled a psalm from Friday night services. Yiram hayam um’lo’o, yiram hayam um’lo’o. Yiram hayam um’lo’o, tevel v’yoshvay vah. The sea in its fullness will roar, as will the world and all its inhabitants. Yiram hayam um’lo’ohhh. Ari imagined his grandfather spread out like a starfish, floating on the sea, adrift on that swelling power to create and to destroy. Yiram hayam um’lo’o, yiram hayam um’lo’o. He pictured the old man’s eyes closed, his face at peace, smiling at thoughts that amused and delighted him, as his look of contentment flickered to the gentle syncopation of the tossing sea. Yiram hayam um’lo’o, yiram hayam um’lo’o, yiram hayam um’lo’o, tevel v’yoshvay vah. There, on the rocking precipice of life, and beneath the sky, his grandfather heard peace from within and all around him. Yiram hayam um’lo’ohh. Ari knew his grandfather would never be able to imagine this for himself, but Ari would envision it for both of them, and that would be enough.
Jacob B. Agus, Modern Philosophies of Judaism (New York: Behrman's Jewish Book House, 1941), 85.
Copyrights © 2023 by Rebecca Claire Brooks.
About the Author
Rebecca Claire Brooks is a writer and lawyer. She graduated from Harvard College in 2018 and from Yale Law School in 2022. She's written creatively since she was young, and rediscovered writing literary fiction while in law school. Her writing aims to grapple with tragedy through earnest reflection and irreverent humor. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she is working on a collection of short stories and a satirical memoir. The Roar of the Foley Artists is her first published short story.
