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Past Issues

Issue #2

The Umgebung

Bucky McMahon

Sort of a Christmas Story

No one at the Christmas party seemed particularly interested when Bird brought up Jakob von Uexküll’s insight into the mind of the tick. The tick? people said to Bird, eyebrows raised, shoulders turning ever so slightly towards an exit. Are we talking ticks? I wouldn’t think a tick had much of a mind. Exactly! Bird said. As von Uexküll pointed out, the tick’s simple sensory apparatus recognizes only three aspects of the physical world: a sensitivity to sunlight which leads it to the top of a blade of grass; the smell of butyric acid from the sebaceous follicles of mammals, which tells it when to let go and fall; and the heat of blood which guides it through the hair to its dinner. In von Uexküll’s theory that’s the tick’s umwelt—it’s self-world—the specific way in which it is embedded in the umgebung, the otherwise unknowable reality which surrounds us all. Though surrounding isn’t quite accurate…

Title Fight

Janet Marshall Watkins

“How Come We Have to Have the Girl Coach?”

Roadkill

Steve Watkins

Something Smells. Must Be Those Confederate Street Signs.

Issue #1

O, Brother

Steve Watkins

This Getting Old, These Failing Hearts

A Modest Proposal

James Noll

(With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)

Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations

Why Pie & Chai

Janet Marshall Watkins

Expanding Minds, Forging Connections, Sweetening Lives

We’re launching Pie & Chai Magazine for a simple reason: to provide good writers with a place to tell good stories, the kind worth sharing. In these stories—under the broad categories of Deep Dives, Being Human, Prescriptions, LOL, Etcetera, and 22401(ish)—we hope to move, enlighten, and amuse you, and draw you in to a creative community.

We aren’t here to make money. We won’t sell subscriptions, we won’t run ads, we won’t pirate your data, and our contributors won’t get paid. Everything here will exist because someone cared enough to create it. For free.

All Categories

Deep Dives

Off Our Rockers

Mary Batten

From Lies, Race, and Redemption: A Memoir

As a white Southern woman born in 1937, I grew up in a segregated society of “White only” and “Colored only” signs, separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate waiting rooms and schools and churches, separate entrances to the town of Smithfield, Virginia’s one movie theater. “Separate but equal” was the mantra, but it was a lie. You had to be blind, insensitive, and in total denial to believe it. Since I was the privileged color, racism hadn’t threatened my life and stripped me of my humanity, but it had sickened my soul.

Being Human

Off Our Rockers

Mary Batten

From Lies, Race, and Redemption: A Memoir

As a white Southern woman born in 1937, I grew up in a segregated society of “White only” and “Colored only” signs, separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate waiting rooms and schools and churches, separate entrances to the town of Smithfield, Virginia’s one movie theater. “Separate but equal” was the mantra, but it was a lie. You had to be blind, insensitive, and in total denial to believe it. Since I was the privileged color, racism hadn’t threatened my life and stripped me of my humanity, but it had sickened my soul.

Prescriptions

Not Healthy. Not Caring. Not Even a System.

Janet Marshall Watkins

Broken Bad

A few months after he graduated from college, a friend crashed his bike one evening as he raced down a trail near Charlottesville. He suffered a life-altering spinal cord injury, but as those injuries go, he was fairly lucky: He retained full use of his upper body and partial use of his legs, and despite fears that he’d never ride again, he went on to become an Olympic para-cyclist. He was also fortunate in another way: Before his accident, his dad had bought him a short-term health insurance policy.

LOL

22401-ish

It Could Have Happened Here

Steve Watkins

G.O.D. and Country

Brent David Alford was watching hockey the night of June 18, 2022. Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals, Colorado Avalanche vs. Tampa Bay Lightning. The Avs were in the process of smoking the Lightning, 7-0, and would go on to win the Cup 4-2. At 9:45 p.m., late in the second period or early in the third, Alford’s wife Anjelica noticed a car had pulled into their long private drive in rural Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and was idling about 30 yards from the house at a dirt turnaround. Alford grabbed his handgun, a Glock 9mm with a 15-round magazine, and went out to confront the driver and whoever else was in the car. Anjelica and a teenage son, their youngest, stayed at the front door. Anjelica would later tell an investigator that there was so much marijuana smoke filling the car that the occupants’ heads bobbed above it as if they were floating on a cloud–an image she insisted she saw despite the distance from the house, the darkness, the floodlight she said was reflecting off the car windows, and the law of thermodynamics.

Etcetera

Expanding Minds, Forging Connections, Sweetening Lives

Categories

Contact

Write to Steve Watkins at pieandchaimagazine@gmail.com. If you’re interested in submitting something for publication, best to run your ideas by me first. You can do that by emailing me at pieandchaimagazine@gmail.com.

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