Spring 2009
Edited by Jill Craig

Several times these past few weeks, my partner and I have found a little something extra in our laundry. We haul the baskets up from the communal laundry room in the basement of our apartment building, dump the warm clothes and towels on the bed and begin folding and sorting. The first time it was a tiny baby sock - white with blue stripes - and it fit in the palm of my hand. The week after that there was another sock - this one was miniscule and the paw print on the bottom helped us decide that it must belong to one of the tiny, well-dressed urban dogs that have been prancing around our neighborhood this winter.

The next week, it was a little pair of underwear. They were boxer briefs, grey cotton, but scaled down to fit a six-year old. As we stood giggling at the adorable little drawers, it struck me - these underpants belong to a total stranger. And they are on my bed.

The little underpants made me feel a little closer to my neighbors than I'd like. I know the names of only a handful of the people in my building, and of those people, none of them are small enough to fit into the little boxer briefs. While the rural and suburban branches of my family tree tell me that it is disgraceful that I do not know all of my neighbors, I am fine with it. I share so much with the people in my building - I know the sexual habits of the people upstairs, next door has the uncanny ability to start their showers mere milliseconds before I start mine, someone's socks and undies have been on my bed, and the people across the hall make sure to have screaming matches only when I am trying to practice peaceful, meditative yoga in my living room. We are intimate enough already that we need not be on a first-name basis.

The writers in this issue remind us that we do not always have such control over our proximity to others. The routines of everyday life push us into the orbits of family members, lovers, friends, and intimate strangers alike. What binds these characters and these stories may be shared blood (or other bodily fluids), shared walls, shared passion, a shared experience, or just shared minutes during a basic transaction. Though the close exchanges in these stories and poems are not always neat and clean, the pieces in this issue connect the individual points of intimacy to form a constellation shaped something like the human experience. Whether you enjoy them alone, curled up with your laptop, or read them on your Blackberry, smashed between 50 other commuters on a standing-room-only train, these pieces will undoubtedly remind you of your own proximity to those around you.