Antarctica
Matt Greene


I got older and worked jobs that broke me and jobs that didn't. I lived in a studio in Altadena near the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Sometimes I'd look up at night and see strange things—overlapping triangles, blue orbs, a human silhouette. I knew these things weren't real, and yet, there they were. Jake sent me a crate from Antarctica. He worked at McMurdo Station, driving things around. Inside the crate were DVDs and t-shirts he'd found in the ice. He said Antarctica was not what you'd think. He said everyone was an alcoholic because there was nothing to do. He worked seven months and had the rest of the year off, and he said last year he went to Fiji, chartered a boat and found his own island. He lived there for a week, eating mango and crab. When the boat came back for him, he saw that on the far side of the island there was a resort. He said that at McMurdo there was a 24-hour Subway and a 24-hour pizza joint. The pizza was just alright. He said Anthony Bourdain interviewed him and they talked about beer and Indonesia and the lives of prostitutes. In the episode, you can only see Jake for a moment, playing bass in the background.

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Matt Greene teaches writing in Appalachia. Others in this series are in or coming from Cincinnati Review, Cleaver, Spillway, Split Lip, and South Dakota Review.

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