Firethorne, Spring 2017 by Firethorne, the Gustavus Adolphus College Journal of Literary and Graphic Arts

FI RETHORNE The Gustavus Jour nal of Liter ar y and Gr aphic Ar ts

2017 Gustavus Adolphus College

FIRETHORNE

Letter fr om the Editor s Dear Readers, Whether you have spent each year eagerly awaiting its release, or you have idly cracked open your first issue, you are now a part of Firethorne. Yes, of course we mean this in the obvious sense; you are the audience, and a magazine needs its audience like a page needs words. However, a campus literary magazine also needs campus creativity, and whether or not you were a contributor, you are part of the community that has inspired this work. You have created an experience that will never exist in quite the same way again. As the magazine?s editors, we were grateful for every submission we received, even if it wasn't selected for this year's edition. To all who submitted, thank you for sharing your art and continuing a tradition of excellence that makes publication in Firethorne a meaningful achievement. While perusing the issue, you will notice works ranging from misadventures in foreign lands to fear on campus, from love's limitations to Jeff Goldblum?s chest hair. Although the past year has been anything but certain, Gustavus students have found a way to embrace challenges and persevere. The quantity, quality, and diversity of work has encouraged us to break from tradition in creating this uniquely-designed magazine you now hold. We invite you to join us in celebrating the new terrain you have uncovered. Turn to the next page and enjoy. With many thanks, The Firethorne Editors

SPRING 2017

Fir ethor ne Staff PROSE EDITOR Madeline Struck

POETRY EDITOR Jack Beahler DESIGN EDITOR Ben Keran

ACQUISITIONS EDITOR Ashley Nickel COPY EDITORS Brady Lass

Jacque Miller

Thomas Sullivan MARKETING & PROMOTION Haley Kaul

Leanna Nielsen

ASSISTANT EDITORS Maria Noel

Will Neuenfeldt

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

FACULTY ADVISOR

Emma Hunt

Baker Lawley

Firethorne archives and submission guidelines are available at www.gustavus.edu/ orgs/ firethorne

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Table of Contents PROSE Annie Carlson

-73 -

All For North

Emma Hunt

- 10 -

This Is What You Wanted

Emma Myhre

- 41 -

The Responsibility of Bravery

Noah Nguyen

- 25 -

HoĂ¨ Nhai Market

Maria Noel

- 37 -

Wedding Bands

- 92 -

Ouroboros

Samantha Ortega

- 48 -

Under the Yew Tree

Andrew Peterson

- 56 -

Amidst the Crowd

Elliott Robinson

- 108 -

Sender

Emma Schmidtke

- 12 -

Birth to Snakes

Thomas Sullivan

- 63 -

Damaged Goods

Frances Wetherall

- 30 -

Journey to Miss Milky Way

Lily Winter

- 131 -

Sparrow

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POETRY Katie Allen

- 28 -

Cranes

Gino Fraboni

- 53 -

Fear for Rent

Laura Isdahl

- 129 -

Mail-Order Nipples

Rachael Manser

- 54 -

Unbecoming

August Moehrke

- 72 -

Canal Houses

- 123 -

Heartlines of a Westerner

- 107 -

Love in Liminality

Jared Morningstar Will Neuenfeldt

- 8-

Lakewood Cemetery

- 46 -

Ode to the Goldblum

- 124 -

BLACK (CORE)

Maria Noel

- 125 -

Professional Muse

Kitty O'Connell

- 61 -

His Sweatshirt

Sophie Panetti

- 18 -

Blackberry

- 86 -

Love Song of Chernobyl

Andrew Peterson

- 121 -

If They Could Boast

Stephanie Peterson

- 22 -

Testing Positive

- 102 -

The Font Defines Your Character

- 135 -

Watching the Salt Spill

Miranda Shaffer

- 104 -

Impulse

Ellen Stoll

- 89 -

Superior Orchestra

Frances Wetherall

- 60 -

Metaphors

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ARTWORK Ester Rose Archer Lily Benge Briggs

Lizzie Hjelle Megan Johnson

Ben Keran Brady Lass Devin Makey Rachael Manser Carly Maslowski Jacque Miller August Moehrke

Jared Morningstar Noah Nguyen

- 36 - 39 - 70 - 71 - 20 - 47 - 21 - 91 -24 - 122 - 31 - 35 - 81 - 120 - 134 - 29 - 9- 15 - 62 - 106 - 55 - 59 - 88 - 93 -

Simplicity Absorption/ Reflection Recede Shoreline GAC's Geography of Fear Mr. Peepers A Shade of Blue is My Hue Ruminations M? S?n Loitering Glacier Gateway Night at the Lake Tintern Abbey Nature's Mirror Thinking Like A Mountain What Sort of Parrot Are You? Saint-Chapelle's Ecstasy Harrisburg Styx Parisian Summer Afternoon Pictographic Man A Christmas Coffee Red Almighty Foliation Vibrant Shinjuku

SPRING 2017 Chi Pham Caitlyn Riese

Dana Riebe

Elliott Robinson

Jordyn Roemhildt Chris Schneider Audrey Shattuck Ellen Stoll

- 67 - 11 - 98 - 115 - 103 - 111 - 128 - 45 - 52 - 76 - 40 - 105 - 87 - 119 -

Sky Gate - Flagstaff, Arizona A Knight in Vapid Armor Perdition Effete Flight Enrapture Sedimentary Study Sugared Lips Blew Me a Kiss Ember Joy Ride Forecast Corrimal Cokeworks Untitled Photograph

Cover Image: Bath by Audrey Shattuck

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Lakewood Cemeter y Will Neuenfeldt

Bushy eyebrows inch across the glowing white oakfinding a new face.

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Saint- Chapelle's Ecstasy August Moehrke

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This Is What You Wanted Emma Hunt

Sex is a three letter word that I don?t understand. My skin is on fire and I know that if he dares to touch me his fingertips to my cheek to my hand to my waist that the porcelain will blacken and burn. It hurts. His lips are at my throat and he?s swallowing the heat lapping it up like ice cream like it?s his favorite flavor. So what if I lied? His hand slides up my chest and it stops over my heart and I don?t think he can tell but the beat is thudding in my ears heavy and restless. My heart has gone deaf. I remember when he first smiled at me and let me be different be special be important like I was someone who mattered. He lied. Sometimes I think hearts are like apples and his was eaten by Adam and Eve but mine was poisoned by the evil queen and he?s taking a bite. Will it be enough? Why are we so hungry so starving for the attention for the affection for anything? I wait, blistering, thriving. He thinks this is a victory this is a conquest that I?m letting him win but I know better and so what if I lied? This skin is not my own. Sex * ?seks? (noun): a weapon used to get what you want. Sex * ?seks? (noun): a necessary act to procure love from a desired partner. Sex * ?seks? (noun):

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A Knight in Vapid Armor Caitlyn Riese

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Bir th to Snakes Emma Schmidtke

Everyone in the town of Paradise Brook remembers where they were when they heard Lily Mattison had given birth to snakes. Mr. Peery was sitting outside, the door to the art room propped open with a textbook, chain-smoking his second pack of the day, when his wife texted him the rumor she heard at her Mom-And-Baby class. Casey Heiser and Ella Hansen were in the bathroom skipping math class when a freshman entered and whispered an interesting tidbit about their former friend. At the exact moment of the birth, Amber McIntyre stood up and sprinted out of A.P. Language and Composition.

clear sky. ?He wasn?t cute but at least he was nice to me.? She rolled over and nuzzled into Amber?s shoulder. Amber?s body melted towards hers. Lily reached for Amber more and more those days. Her mom wouldn?t speak to her in their house, let alone hug her. Her friends at school, always grasping, clinging, petting each other, now avoided her in the halls. Lily moved her head to Amber?s chest. Her hair smelled like cucumbers and rosemary. Her belly rubbed up against Amber?s thigh. ?Maybe it was Mr. Peery. We did it in the back of the art room right after school so that his wife didn?t find out,? her lips pursed, ?He gave me a C- in ceramics though. Said it was an integrity thing.? She shifted onto her back. Her hands grasped her stomach. She pressed her eyes shut. ?Or it could have been my dad?s business partner. He smelled weird, like rotten fruit.? ?Did you want to sleep with him?? Amber asked, the first time she had spoken. ?Not really,? she smiled at Amber the way she did whenever she thought her friend was being naĂŻve and virginal, ?It was just easier than making a fuss.?

Every Sunday morning, Lily and Amber would sneak out of service at Our Lady of Immaculate Conception and hide in the memorial garden. They would steal a box of doughnuts intended for the Fellowship Hour and lay down among the flowers. Lily would chatter and Amber would listen, and so they passed the time week after week as Lily?s belly grew. ?It might be Jeremy McDonald?s,? she said, tracing the line from navel to her chest. Her dark curls splayed across the grass. Her thin sharp nose pointed up to the

SPRING 2017 She gasped as the church bells began to ring. Her hand flew to Amber?s arm. She moved Amber?s fingers over her belly. ?Do you feel that?? She mouthed, her expression ecstatic. Amber nodded, though she didn?t feel anything move underneath the fuzzy purple sweater. Later, she would look back on that moment, with Lily lying contentedly under the sun, her fingers gently tracing her belly, and Amber would think, as hard as she could, if under the skin, she felt a slither. Amber heard the voice of her AP Comp teacher calling out her name as she took off sprinting through the hallways. She made it as far as the front doors. Mrs. Heiser, the PTA mom who worked part time buzzing people in and out of the school, blinked at her from the tiny office in the entryway. Amber crumbled against the doors, banding her fists against the glass. ?Please-Open-I have to-? She begged as Mrs. Heiser picked up her phone and dialed the code for Security. Teachers stuck their heads out of nearby classrooms, raising their eyebrows as two security guides dragged away the usually quiet student. Casey and Ella stuck their heads out from the bathroom. Amber heard them snicker as she was pulled towards the principal?s office.

Lily?s friends had been fascinated by the pregnancy at first. They spent lunch period planning baby showers and online shopping for onesies. But then counselors started pulling Lily out of class, handing her brochures for GED programs. The girls? mothers pulled them aside before they went out on Friday nights and said, ?Honey, you have such big dreams. I just don?t want you to end up like her.? Her friends began telling other students that Lily acted too high and mighty for someone ruining her life. By the third trimester, Amber was her only friend. Amber figured that she was always Lily?s only real friend. They had never really talked much at school, but they had gone to the same church since they were five and she always smiled at Amber in the hallway. Amber would come home from school remembering those smiles, tracing the feeling of warmth each one gave her. Amber sat in the lobby of Dr. Malcolm?s office with her knees tucked underneath her chin. His two receptionists huddled at their joint desks. They were mirror images of each other in their pear-shaped bodies and floral Macy?s blouses, different only in that one?s up-do was Brunette and the other?s was Blonde. ?It?s a hoax,? The Brunette said, ?It has to be a hoax. She just wants to get on Ellen or Dr. Phil or something.? The Blonde shook her head. Her golden hoop earing bounced against her

FIRETHORNE cheeks. ?My sister is a nurse in the maternity ward. She saw the snakes herself, five of them. The girl acted like it was all so normal. She wanted to hold them and cried when the doctors took them away.? ?Unbelievable. But I guess Lily was always so? ? she pursed her red lips, ?willful.? ?Selfish,? the Brunette added, squinting, ?She would have to be, to do what she did to her family, well, to her mother.? ?You still doing okay, honey?? The Blonde was gazing at Amber. Amber averted her eyes. She loosened her grip on her chair. Her knuckles had gone white. ?Dr. Malcolm will be with you a minute, okay? Don?t worry about your little outburst. Just tell him whatever?s bothering you and you won?t get in trouble.? Amber didn?t respond. The Brunette smiled at her. ?Trust us, sweetie. He has bigger screw-ups to worry about.?

bigger structures onto their half-acre lots, creating the suburb?s own space race. Jason?s company constructed three houses on Amber?s street alone. Customers loved him, seeing themselves in his colloquial manners and beautiful family. But while the families showed their neighbors through Open Houses, they began to notice the leaky pipes and cracked beams. Wires crossed. Light switches connected to nothing. They called Jason but he wouldn?t pick up. His answering machine became full. Parents would accost Lily as she left school, attempting to beg or intimidate her father into calling them back. He made the mistake of attending a National Night Out picnic and was chased back into his Escalade. Whispers of lawsuits bounced off of peeling wallpaper. The families had mortgaged their futures to buy their dream houses and he had built their dreams crooked. Lily?s pregnancy and its result were a clear confirmation the family was vile.

Lily?s father had skipped town six months before the birth. The kids at school whispered that he left because of the pregnancy but Amber didn?t think he ever knew. Jason Mattison owned a building company, a booming business in Paradise Brook, a Chicago suburb once known for its cozy ranch-style homes. But as the economy rose, people wanted more expensive houses than their neighbors, and their neighbors wanted more expensive houses than that. They squeezed bigger and

The Blonde burst back into the office from her smoke break. The Brunette looked up from Facebook. ?They?re gone,? the Blonde huffed tobacco-scented breath and doubled over. ?Who?s gone?? The Brunette said, standing up. ?The snakes. A Resident knocked over the box they put them in and the snakes slipped away. The hospital can?t find them anywhere.?

SPRING 2017

Harrisburg Styx August Moehrke

FIRETHORNE ?Can I make a phone call?? Amber piped up, ?I left my phone back in the classroom and I really, really need to make a call.? ?Dr. Malcolm will be with you in just a minute, honey,? the Blonde attempted to assure her, ?You?re not going to get in any trouble. You don?t need to call your parents.? Amber sunk back down in her seat. The receptionists were too distracted to notice her crying. If they would listen, if anyone in this school would listen, Amber would explain that she needed to go see her friend. She would explain how she knew, just knew, what had happened before anyone even said anything. They would know that Lily needed her there by her bedside. The bell rang, noting a change in period. The hallways flooded with students. They looked at their phones and laughed and chattered and shouted at each other. Amber couldn?t understand their muffled words but she knew what they were talking about. The crowds dissipated and the second bell rang. The hallways were as empty as if no one had ever been there. The Blonde?s cellphone rumbled and screeched. She picked it up and gasped. The snakes had claimed a victim. Eugene Stewart had been found outside of Finnegan?s Bar & Grill lying dead upon the sidewalk. The town knew Eugene as a drunk who had abandoned his family decades ago, but outrage was spreading fast. The

Paradise Brook police department was investigating and could neither confirm nor deny the bite marks witnesses saw on his neck. A Biology professor had been called in from the community college two towns over and, though he had not seen the snakes, he had identified them as Speckled Pit Vipers who should be immediately exterminated for the sake of public safety. ?I?m not worried about what people say about me.? The Sunday morning Lily said this stood out sharply in Amber?s memory. They hid among the white rose bushes on the edge of the memorial garden, watching the congregation pour out of the church. Lily sat with her back against a half-wall, her long legs splayed on, her pale hands cradling her 9-months swollen belly. ?I?m just worried about them taking my baby away from me.? ?Why would they take your baby away?? Amber asked. ?They couldn?t, even if they wanted to.? ?I know they can?t, but I still worry. This town tries to get rid of everything that doesn?t fit,? she smiled knowingly, ?When you?re a mother, you worry about the littlest of things.? Amber shifted to her knees. She scooted over to her friend. ?I won?t let them take your baby away.? ?You?re so nice to me. You?re the only one that?s nice to me.? Lily sighed and

SPRING 2017 touched Amber?s arm. Amber held her breath. Lily paused and then stood up. ?Come on, I?m hungry.? The final bell rang. The front doors hissed as they manually unlocked. Students burst out into the parking lot, letting the warm spring air flow into school. They bolted to their cars, anxious to beat the traffic. Only a few of them watched their footsteps for strange visitors. Amber stood up. Her stomach sank. Her legs couldn?t move. The Blonde reported that her sister had watched Lily Mattison check out of the hospital and drive away. People had reported seeing her driving all over Paradise Brook. Animal Control was combing through every patch of grass in town, but they hadn?t found a single snake. Lily was last spotted merging onto the highway, heading west towards the city. Amber already knew she was gone. ?Unbelievable,? The Blonde said, shaking her head. The receptionists didn?t notice the student open the door and leave. They didn?t see her wander, hunched and unhurried, out the front doors towards home. ?I can?t even believe this happened here, in our town.? ?You know what they say, that what you see during your pregnancy affects what your baby comes out as,? the Brunette said, ?Like while I was pregnant with my first son, my husband had this poster of Wolverine hanging up in the garage. I looked at it every day and Dylan came out so hairy. Or my sister used to spend a lot of

time with her husband?s brother and her son ended up looking just like him. I bet Lily saw something.? ?Oh come on, that?s an old wives? tale,? the Blonde said, ?Besides, we live in the suburbs. Where would she find any snakes?"

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Blackber r y Sophie Panetti

I walk home through the blackberry night, cool and barely sweet, black and blue and purple, pricked with a few thousand thorn-sharp stars. There is an aching deep in my chest where the blood beats sluggishly like the footsteps of some great beast. I am walking slow, carrying fruit in a brown paper bag: my breakfast for a few days. It is too cold to be warm and too warm to be cold, and something is thawing within me. There was a man I think I loved, once. It's been almost two years and the ground still rings with it, bursts with it in the oddest black-and-blue moments: Brushing my teeth. Lighting a candle. Eating, plucking my eyebrows.

SPRING 2017 Running, skinning an apple. Hearing a train whistle wail. I think about the man I think I loved. The slow way he looked at me and the Perpetual coldness of his slender hands. His shoulders under my hands, Tasting like gin. The way he looked at me and the shirt he wore the last time. I tended the love and the grief like a garden That grew and then died over the last few years the way a blackberry bush grows and dies. I think he was the way this February night feels. The dichotomy of beauty and heartache on an evening in early spring, blackberry blue and cold.

FIRETHORNE

GAC's Geography of Fear Lizzie Hjelle Artist's note: "After entering a discussion with my roommate about the geography of fear on campus, I decided to interview as many women as would talk to me about places on campus that made them feel unsafe. This photo is part of a series of images based on the responses of these women, hoping to validate the experiences of these women and highlight how places can create and foster feelings of fear."

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A Shade of Blue is my Hue Megan Johnson

FIRETHORNE

Testing Positive Stephanie Peter son

I?ll tell you a little about death. It is the one thing that happens After the other: Life, which is spent fucking Or wanting to fuck. Once you get to a certain age, Even your parents are begging you To fuck: Turn the mattress into a Pollock, Use the spare paint for a nursery. They?ll do what they did when you were a teen-Mom & Pop take a blacklight to the sheets, Check your face for that certain glow To see if you have recently Rubbed salt into your womanly wound. They?re content with the 206, But would be happier if you had 207

SPRING 2017 For even thirty seconds (How long he lasts is TMI As long as it all ends up in the right place). Someday, they hope, The only O?s you see Will be the holes in your daughter?s Freshly pierced ears, the nostalgic Shape of her morning Cheerios.

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M? S?n Ben Ker an

SPRING 2017

HoĂ¨ Nhai Market Noah Nguyen

Our family did not choose to settle down near HĂ˛e Nhai farmer?s market. The market did not choose to retain its conventional way of trade in the middle of ?New? Hanoi. They all just happened ? a living assignment provided by Grandpa?s workplace in our case, the solemn way of life for many in the other ? I do not really know, but they just happened, in the most pristine and ingenious way, to challenge the ever-changing propaganda of the city. The ?New? Hanoi was a term coined after the current regime claimed it from the French in 1954, and again popularized when the city went through a remarkable double size expansion in 2008. Hanoi is then awfully crowded. People, seven and a half million of them, huddle there from gentrified suburbs and disintegrated factories and rice paddy fields during the lean years along the country. Some do not call it home. They have somewhere else to come back to when the city becomes unfit for their lifestyles. I do not have such luxury to fall back onto. Hanoi is my only chance, my only, frail chance. It is a town of years ago and days

ahead. Streams of motorbikes and scooters flow through inches-wide margins as buses and cars stay put at popular intersections. The crisp summer rain pours down unapologetically on children as they get out of tutoring school. Hypermarkets and skyscrapers illuminate the velvety skyline that otherwise would have been dimmed by heavy haze. Temples are a walking distance away from mosques, which are a walking distance away from cathedrals that lie placidly in secluded corners. Lakes there are still and streets boisterous. People wake up just to savor an early morning jog and a cup of dark, drip-filtered coffee. Even at midnight there are still calls from a vendor on a bike for steamed rice goods. It was there that Mom?s eyes turned teary before I left. She assured me, ?I?m not crying. Be safe. We?ll miss you.? It was then that I cried in public for the first time. It is a town of core memories, a town that makes me forget about the present. I do not know what it looks like right now, how many more people it has managed to squeeze under its roof, what new fast food chains are opened, how

FIRETHORNE ?newer?it gets, or how Mom is doing. I have not been back since forever, and this is a choice. The only place I let my mind document carefully is Hòe Nhai. The market is really small, barely 1000 feet long. It is amazing how so many vendors and consumers heard about such a timid location to set up their businesses and to shop from in the middle of a massive metropolitan, even more so how so many lives are dependent on this platform of commerce. Our family is close with Ch?Thúy, a rice vendor who has an irresistibly cute daughter and son. She delivers Jasmine rice ?from the valley of ?i?n Biên to your door? as she advertises, and teaches her daughter to talk by asking her customers to babble foolishly to the baby girl wrapped by her side. We even let her stay and sell on our doorsteps when she had a terrible fallout with the market?s authority. The east end of the market that intersects Nguy?n Tr??ng T? Street gathers meat vendors selling daily fresh pork, beef, poultry, sometimes horse and buffalo meat from butchers in the outskirts. Mom always makes me say hi to Ch?H??ng, a gentle woman who specializes in ribs and also happens to be married to my third cousin who lives in the suburbs. Bà Lan is one of my friend?s grandma who sells crispy skin

roast pork on banana leaves right by. She is not too friendly and her pork does not taste that scrumptious either. Dad knows all the female vendors from the seafood section in the middle of the market. ?Because I like everything seafood and so do you?, he would explain, but Mom remains very critical. I do not remember the produce vendors too well because there are too many of them and all are too chatty. At the west end is a street food bazaar where dishes from almost everywhere in Vietnam can be found: ph? with a hearty beef broth (you can choose chicken for a lighter meal); bánh ?úc, a refreshing type of sticky rice cake that can be paired with peanut and fermented bean paste when cold or eaten with a hot meaty soup; bít t?t, wholeheartedly translated from ?beef steak?, a generous protein platter on a sizzling clay tray that features no actual cut of beef steak; and many more. The dish I enjoyed the most was bún riêu, a rice vermicelli soup with a tomato base and a choice of crab paste or escargot topping. The idea of having snails for breakfast, lunch and dinner may sound revolting to many people, because, well, even though they are not alive, they are, still, snails ? the slimiest, dirtiest and yuckiest of all animals in shells; but the taste of it alone will compensate for the initial fear. The snails are pre-boiled and stewed in the

SPRING 2017 broth in shells then the richest and most chewy parts are picked with a metal leaf to put in the noodle bowl. I remember the gleaming chunks of snails would melt like butter against my tongue before I gulp them down with the tangy soup and a slurp of thin noodles. I remember crouching on a tiny plastic chair with my Dad one time on the sidewalk of the market to savor the treat on a hot summer day. That was before he left for Saigon for a new job offer. I remember a bowl would cost 40,000 Vietnam Dong, amounting to less than two US Dollars. I remember the loud saleslady who was always glad to give me extra snails. I remember home in taste, and in people. The market is Hanoi. The market is my home. I want to go back home but I am scared that the same people won?t be there to greet me. I am scared that a bowl of bĂşn riĂŞu won?t taste the same without Dad. I am scared that I won?t belong.

FIRETHORNE

Cr anes Katie Allen

Cut through the static; crackle it in your hands like crumpled newspaper, then discard it. Set it aside and pick me up instead. Fold me carefully into an origami crane, tie me to a string and let me fly circles above your head.

SPRING 2017

What Sort of Parrot Are You? Jacque Miller

FIRETHORNE

Jour ney to Miss Milky Way Fr ances Wether all

I woke up to the smell of sea salt and the sound of my own pulse against the rolled up sweater I was using as a pillow. I peered blearily up from my hammock, unsure of what country or year I was residing in. An untouched sky stretched above me, the neverending stars so close feeling that I might?ve reached out and dipped my hand in them. My alarm began to screech again. As I shifted to turn it off, a lightning bolt of pain shot up my ankle and I remembered everything. Today would be my last day in Central America. Three days before this moment, my dad had called to tell me that he was going to check my grandma into hospice. Months before, she had been happily chowing her Milky Way chocolate bars, but now dementia had taken food away from her too. Two days before this moment, I had twisted my ankle in the forest. My screeches of pain attracted two howler monkeys who looked down at me with what I interpreted as derision, but, upon reflection, was probably something more akin to concern. Late that night I woke up needing to pee, but I couldn?t drag my lump of an ankle fast enough and peed myself before I had even made it out of the campsite. A day before this moment I had tried not to cry in a

coffee shop because the wifi kept cutting out before I could get through the process of buying a ticket home. The waiter approached me, asked what was wrong, and for only the second time in my life, I quite literally burst into tears. The velocity of the bursting was so great that my body was thrown back against the chair and a gob of snot may or may not have flew out of my nose and across the table, landing somewhere on the border between Canada and Alaska. But this is Costa Rica, year 2016, I reminded myself, easing my protesting ankle onto the sand below. Five months of trekking had taken me from Antigua, Guatemala, to a free beachside campsite in Montezuma, a small town overflowing with pure life, or, as the local ticos call it, ?pura vida.? A town with an inconsistent population of backpackers, surfers, Costa Rican Artisans, and firedancers. A remote haven of rivers, waterfalls, rainforest, and only one semi paved road. I dragged my bum ankle down the beach to say one last goodbye to the starlit ocean. Feet damp and full of sand, I stuffed my hammock into my bigger backpack, wincing at the ever so slight smell of pee emanating from the plastic bagged shorts

SPRING 2017

Glacier Gateway Br ady Lass

FIRETHORNE in it. I hadn?t been able to properly wash them since the shower I could do it in was a long way away for my ankle, which was at this time slowly deflating from cantaloupe status to grapefruit sized. Throwing my favorite shorts did not even occur to me. My other backpack, which at one time had held ingredients for cooking in hostels, smelled of the forgotten clove of garlic that had fallen to the bottom and rotted, crushed to a pulp before I could discover it and fish it out. I slung one smelly backpack onto my back and let the smaller one hang in front of my torso. I picked up my walking stick, and limped towards the dirt road. I was going to meet my taxi driver in the town square at three am. He would take me to a bus leaving at four am which would take me to a ferry leaving at five. Two buses would follow before I even set foot in the airport. I tread lightly as I passed Yerson and Funky?s tents, my Costa Rican artisan friends. When I had arrived a week before, they greeted me with coconut rum, mangoes, and rapid fire Spanish. Funky?s given name was Juan, but Funky fit him best. I wore one of Yerson?s bracelets and had a boa constrictor bone he had gifted to me tucked into a special pocket of my backpack. The night before, I had felt fluent speaking Spanish with him on the moonlit beach about the stars, the ocean, my grandma, and, of course, the relentless mosquitoes, or ?zancudos.? Only I had accidentally said ?san culo,? meaning ?Saint Ass.? He pointed out my mistake and we laughed until we cried.

When I made it to the road, I took one last look at the campsite, thinking of how it would look when the sun rose at five am without me there. Montezuma is a very small town, only a few blocks worth of grocery stores, hostels, and restaurants. I was five minutes late to meet my taxi, but that was no biggie, because he wasn?t there yet. I sat down on the street corner and waited. My phone was running out of battery since there was nowhere to charge it on the beach. Checking the time at three fifteen, the screen blipped and it died. My uninjured leg started to jiggle, but I tried to remain calm. Customer service isn?t so high strung in Costa Rica. I had nothing to worry about, he was just late, pura vida am I right? After another five minutes I started limping between hostels to see if anyone had a security guard with a cell phone. But who needs a security guard when every single person in the town is asleep? And I mean every single person. The street was silent, empty as Yerson?s bottle of coconut rum. Yerson! But it would be a twenty minute limp back to camp, and even then, when it would already be too late, he might not have anyone to call. If I missed that ferry, I would arrive at the airport hours after my flight left. Standing in the abandoned townsquare, my mouth dry, a fist closed around my fast beating heart, I spotted a few people sleeping on the floor of restaurant. I chose one, a young tico who was using his guitar case as a pillow, and shook him gently.

SPRING 2017 He jerked awake and rubbed sleep out of his eyes as I explained my situation and asked if I could use his phone. His name was Pedro and he had one, but he didn?t know who to call. I didn?t either. The taxi driver had seemed so confident the night before. Or maybe it had been I that was too confident. Watching my face fall, Pedro waited for me to speak, but I had no more ideas. He shrugged. ?Soooo? .party?? At the time, this felt like a slap in the face, but it was actually a pretty amiable reaction to a wide eyed gringa smelling faintly of garlic and pee waking him up at three thirty in the morning. I shook my head, my stomach dropping. I paced a few steps and caught sight of something parked on the street. I turned to him. ?Is that your motorcycle?? The passenger section of his motorcycle was missing a footpeg, so I would have to keep my right butt cheek clenched to keep my bum ankle hovering above the ground. I gave him twenty dollars of the sixty agreed upon to speed to the ferry. It was now past 4am. I asked him if I could hold on to him. He nodded and as I wrapped my arms around his skinny torso, something occurred to me. ?How old are you?? ?Fifteen.? He said and turned the key. The engine sputtered to life, the single headlight giving off sparks as it followed suit. We roared out onto the dirt road. I

held on and tried not to move, knowing that the smallest adjustment of weight could throw the tiny cycle off course. Before we even made it off the single paved road, my back was already pinching from holding my right leg above the ground speeding by below. I tugged my eyes away from the sparks flying from the headlight and tried to watch the stars. What would grandma think of this? She would probably laugh even as she scolded me. Though my dad had said she couldn?t communicate much these days. The dementia had taken her far faster than anyone had been ready for. Before I left for Guatemala, she had gifted her copy of The Complete Worksof Shakespeare to me. ?Don?t you need this? You love Shakespeare.? I said. She just shook her head and told me to enjoy it. Growing up, I had rarely seen my grandmother without a book in her hands. The idea of something taking that away from her was unthinkable. ?Whoa!? Pedro swerved with an unexpected sharp curve, laughing. I clutched his skinny body and clenched my butthole until we were on safe, straight dirt road again. The near empty countryside zoomed by, but not fast enough. I felt the fist that had been clutched around my heart all morning squeeze tighter. The deep indigo sky began to lighten. I tried and failed to ignore it, then began to focus on it as if by mere willpower I could prevent the world from turning to face the sun. My ferry was to leave at five am, the same time the sun had

FIRETHORNE been rising every day. As a streak of pink peaked over the horizon, I closed my eyes and prayed. Not to any god, but to my grandmother. I reached across the miles and imagined how it would feel to hold her warm hands in my own. Help me, I said silently. Please, let the dock be just around the corner. Let the flight be delayed. Help me, I thought, with eyes shut tight, help me get to you. I opened my eyes to a sky alight with sunrise and a long road ahead. The fist clutching my heart released. Speeding through those rolling hills, I lost everything. Pedro kept driving as I waited for tears that wouldn?t come. I let go of her right then, my book loving grandma, Miss Milky Way chocolate, the woman who baptized me in her own bathroom and called me her darling girl. As I watched the sky light up through the canopy, I thought of the candles in my grandma?s empty apartment. Ocean Breeze, Tropical Oasis, and Balsam Wood. I fell into the sea and tree smelling air and the roar of the motorcycle. Twenty minutes later, we pulled into Paquera, rolling our way down to the water. The trees cleared for a moment and I saw one of the most beautiful things I have seen in my short life; the boat that would take me home. Turns out my friends had been wrong. Due to a recent schedule change, the ferry was now leaving at five thirty daily. Pedro whooped as he parked next to the ticket booth. I threw my arms around

him, saying ?Thank you? so many times that the syllables began to run into each other. ?Thankyou, thankyou!? I said as I gave him the rest of the money. ?Thankyouthankyouthankyou!? I said as I bought my ticket and limped on to the deck. He waved once, then began to roll his motorcycle around, back to Montezuma. I walked to the front of the boat and let my smelly backpacks fall to the floor. I leaned against the rail and watched the still rising sun trace the distant mountaintops. ?Thank you.? I said aloud, closing my eyes to her warm light.

SPRING 2017

Night at the Lake Devin Makey

FIRETHORNE

Simplicity Ester Rose Archer

SPRING 2017

Wedding Bands Mar ia Noel

For Peter An empty rowboat, beached on moonlit sand, blinked up at us, invited our feet to stop stuttering, stomping, and running. Our mouths were winning the race and thought needed space to surface from sensory overstimulation and dancing brains. We sit on the boat? big enough for just two. The boys take the guarding chair, whooping gleeful guffaws as they climb up the rungs, male muscle flexing upwards, all the way to taut tongue. Widest at the shoulder, he matches his new tattoo. His tattoo matching you, only opposite di r e ct i on s. ?I?m going to propose in the fall,? you confess. My eyes alight and smile is compressed into one word? ?Yes.? And then, ?Can I be a bridesmaid?? You laugh,

?Of course,? and we giggle, icing the lake with girly froth, secret mirth lapping into my veins as I hear him from above, ?Let?s run in!? Knowing he is speaking only to me, sandals exchanged for the tickling of grains, we leap in without looking. Voluntarily clasping your fingers around mine, no longer obligatorily before dry communion wine, we exchanged vows in anointing water. Finally, I was given the sister I always desired and my brother was swallowed by my new best friend. The backdrop a sunset made for us, unable to be captured by speech, tears or lens. The final episode of a time-lapsing day, separated into rabbit holes and rivulets of thought and word-play. He turns to me as we rest against the back-bending tree: ?It?s all love, everything we do. Create. Destroy. Live for. It all comes from human love. Isn?t life just incredibly beautiful?? The crying tree supports our weight; both reclined on its declining trunk. His voice cracks, barriers dissolve and tears flow from down the face that we share. My arm twitches, knowing I should temper the pain with touch as his lip

FIRETHORNE trembles her name. ?It hurts to even say it? he says. ?Maria, we used to share a wall. Even after it was over. Her room was right next door and our beds were only separated by cheap Dutch drywall.? I inhaled the heartbreaking image and he let out an extending whimper, syllables shaking from his softening jaw. Knowing nothing I can say will bring any hope or happiness, I gulp down the urge to cry and smile, look at the impossibly radiant sky and exhale, prompting him to follow, and we let silence melt into darkening day. She stayed in their fantasy, fitted herself to new matches and left him to rot in a feared future-recondite, alone, forced to taste the real world in his gums and spit up nothing but failure and spite. Even at his most dangerous low, she deepened distance with apathy, fled from the wall and created a ladder. Once the best at monkey bars, he no longer could get a grip, her happiness and change became slivers in hand and he fell. Over and over again. A year went by, daily questioning why he was alive, dreading each morning he awoke someone else. Healing comes in all forms. For him it was miraculous: hummingbirds, introspection, fresh forests of Peru, shaman practice and refusing what David Foster Wallace thought he had to do. I do not grieve for lost chances, idealized love, and pairing of the two. But I grieve for my sister, and the seat that we shared, bonds

washed clean by an easy riptide. Her legs are her strength, nomadic as her Native American ancestry striding with decisive weight. Doesn?t she know that to gain muscle, she needs to face her not as comfortably distant past and reach uphill d ir ect i o n s. Leaning on the frozen waters, the tree in-between, he fears for his circles. Will there ever be an image to cover them? Will they ever signify more than the fall? Ink fading, I tell him that they will blossom into fucking fairy wings and surrender my bones to mud at our feet. I wrapped my arms around the tenderness in his chest, his circle disrupted, elongated into roots wrapped into earth. Weeping, I am held by the human I love most and aspire toward, both my brother and sister, no longer scattered at sea.

SPRING 2017

Absorption/ Reflection Lily Benge Br iggs

FIRETHORNE

Joy Ride Jordyn Roemhildt

SPRING 2017

The Responsibility of Br aver y: A Memoir of Failures Emma Myhre

My short nineteen years have had intricate experiences: I have sailed through the turquoise ocean, beheld the aged beauty of Machu Picchu, and, most importantly, conquered puberty. Through the endless wise lessons I have learned from my life (that has been less than two decades), I have held this personal proverb closest to me: bravery is easily one of the stupidest expectations that is forced onto us. I know it?s important for the sake of saving people?s lives in the midst war or overcoming personal phobias, but on a day-to-day basis, there?s an unrealistic prospect of success. This is why I take very calculated risks. Don?t get me wrong: I put myself out there. I?m outgoing, and I try new things all the time (within reason), but the inspirational quotes about ?taking a chance? forget to mention what happens after we give bravery a shot. In fact, this whole, ?ten seconds of insane courage,? philosophy doesn?t make any sense. There are lots of things that can happen in ten seconds that don?t have a positive ending. Ten seconds of fame almost always ends in a drug addiction. If a

car idles for more than ten seconds, wasted gas contributes to the destruction of the environment. Planking for ten seconds could lead to a fit body in the future, but you have to do a thousand more and its immediate effects only include physical pain. In my life, I have taken the advice of so many people that I assumed were wiser than me; I tried to take that chance to step outside of my comfort zone only to be shoved back into my box with some form of emotional or physical aftermath. My earliest recollection of a true risk was in elementary school. My life was as solid as a kindergartener?s could be. I had Anna, my inseparable best friend in the world, who was born only 10 days before me. Despite the fact that we were two peas in a pod, Anna was always much more brave than I was. She could climb the entirety of the short and tall monkey bars before I had the strength to hold up my own body weight, run anywhere she wanted with no fear of falling, and pretty much handle anything by herself. One mild, fall recess period, Anna and I agreed on our mission for the day: we

FIRETHORNE were going to scale The Dome. The Dome was a massive structure (to my memory) that was composed of various equilateral triangles bolted together by steel circles. As we looked up the construct, we had a spark of bravery ignite in us. Anna surmounted The Dome and was soon perched on top with her leg playfully swinging down. I, with the same inspiring heroism, began to ascend The Dome as well. I felt comfortable sitting less than halfway from the top, feeling satisfied with my adventurous attitude for the day. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spied our mortal enemies: Will Pearson and his tribe of inexorable first graders. Despite the fact that they were only a year older than us, they were towering, fearsome pirates who would stop at nothing to plunder the innocence of those who were small and meek. Will and the barbarians thundered towards us with a vigorous determination. They wriggled into The Dome like spiders crawling through the cracks of an old wall. Anna, incognizant of the dangers that lurked below, found herself being pulled by the leg to the wood chips on the playground and landed flat on her back. I was stunned and motionless as Anna was dragged out of The Dome. I knew I had to take action; I peered down at the ground and began my descent at a snail's pace as I heard Anna screaming in the background. I ran towards the scene where Anna had been tied to a nearby bench with

a jumprope as the young neanderthals pelted her with dodge balls. I felt a sense of fear and cluelessness strike the center of my body. Some advice that my mom had shared with me in some unidentified conversation popped into my head like a cartoon thought bubble: ?Emma, if you?re ever in any trouble at recess, don?t try to deal with it yourself. Always go to a teacher.? With the wise words of my oracle mother driving my hope, I yelled to Anna that I would be back. I heard her screaming my name as I belted towards a cluster of teachers, but I ignored it knowing I was doing the right thing. I made a screeching stop beside the nearest teacher, Mrs. Glover. Mrs. Glover was an ancient vulture who always wore the same purple trench coat, had a black coffee in hand and a dark, piercing stare. She was conversing with the other recess monitors as I pulled on her long coat. ?Mrs. Glover!? I begged, ?Anna?s in trouble!? Her long nose pointed down at me and screeched, ?Not now, Emma.? I was overwhelmed and stunned. Again, I yanked on her coat and screamed, ?Mrs. Glover! Anna?s in trouble!? ?Emma!? she howled. ?Go sit on the bench!? Defeatedly, I sulked to the nearby bench. The bench was conveniently placed in direct view of my closest friend being tortured by the first grade monsters as Will cackled towards the sky. Hot tears

SPRING 2017 streamed down my face as I considered my continuous defeats. As the recess whistle signaled, my face heavily gravitated towards the dirty sidewalk. Anna?s shoes passed into my view. I looked into her red eyes and managed to choke out, ?I?m so sorry, Anna.? She looked at me and a smile drew across her wet face as she replied, ?It?s okay, Emma.? We marched into our single file line to go back to another simple day of kindergarten, but Anna and I always remembered our exploit at The Dome. At a young age, the roar of acting with courage left me with a pipsqueak meow in attempted morality. In my future attempts, I also found that not all acts of bravery are in pursuit of being moral. Sometimes, bravery comes in pursuit of personal achievement. I have also fallen to this false expectation. Three years ago, my sailing team was traveling to White Bear Lake in Minnesota for a regatta. Our coach was so proud of the work we had been doing, so he wanted to treat us with a trip to Wild Mountain Resort. It was a ski resort for a majority of the year, but the resort sprinkled some summer attractions through their property to make more money in their off season. Admittedly, they had some really exciting rides there like an alpine slide, a small waterpark, and, most importantly, a thrill seeking experience called the Freefall XP. The idea of the Freefall XP struck another adventurous chord with me. I

imagined myself getting an awesome video to show everyone on all forms of social media that I was not afraid to jump eighteen to twenty seven feet in a somewhat controlled space without any safety harnesses. There was also a sense of self fulfillment that I wanted to conquer. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be fearless and do something completely outside my comfort zone. The entire afternoon we were at Wild Mountain, a pit of excited anticipation sat in my stomach like a two pound weight. When we finally decided to go, I jolted up the stairs. I stopped dead in my tracks when I got to the first platform. The guy who was working had beautiful, wavy blonde hair, bright eyes, a chiseled physique. He looked exactly like the prince that the Beast becomes at the end of Beauty and the Beast. This became another motivation for me to jump off the platform. I had to impress the sexy, low-life ski resort employee. When the rest of my team got up to the platform, The Ski Prince was giving direction on how to safely jump off the Freefall XP. I?m sure what he was saying was important, but I was distracted. I was too busy daydreaming about leaping off the ledge without fear and having The Ski Prince catch me at the bottom. I was jolted awake from my dream when he exclaimed in his surfer boy voice, ?Alright, so who wants to go first?? I stepped forward without looking

FIRETHORNE at the other people standing on the platform with us. My back was straight with confidence, and I was at the breaking point of being prepared. As I moved towards the edge, The Ski Prince reminded me again to land either on my bottom or my back. I told him I knew, and he began to count down: ?Uh, alright? five? four? three? Tw? ? Before he could finish saying two, I leaped off the edge. In my head, I felt as majestic as Pocahontas as she dove off the edge of the waterfall. I imagined that my flawless hair was flowing back, and spectators below were bewildered by my daring nature and graceful form. The carefree look on my face must have said, ?Oh yes, I always jump off eighteen foot platforms. What do you do in your free time?? I felt like I was hanging in the air like a delicate cloud falling to Earth like a gentle rain. In reality, I basically pencil dove onto the air mattress. I think my plunge to the ground was probably took a total of three seconds, and I don?t think I looked anything like a princess. When I made my startling touch down, I just remember blinking. I felt absolutely nothing. All at once, I felt like forty cinderblock had landed on my left ankle. I cocked my head around like a clueless bird as if I was asking the world for an explanation in the pain that consumed this small part of my body. Another handsome resort worker, who looked like a stoner Prince Eric from

The Little Mermaid, approached my landing spot asking if I was okay. I felt distressed tears falling down my face, but I kept my voice in my throat in fear of making my crying noticeable. Stoner Prince Eric helped me off the air mattress, and I saw my mom a couple yards away still trying to figure out how to take video on my phone. Through all of the strides and failures of my day, I didn?t even get a video to show that I had done it. Instead, my triumph was given to me in the form of a softball sized ankle. Not all actions of courage or moxie or gallantry will end with heroism. We are burdened with the responsibility to be brave because it is the risks that we take that become our failings. Our failings become scars; our scars become stories; our stories become lessons. Even though I have fallen flat on my face when confronted with opportunities to act with courage, I can still fall back on the fact that I will never blindly jump off an eighteen foot ledge again, and I will definitely take on those first graders the next time they come around.

SPRING 2017

Sugared Lips Elliott Robinson

FIRETHORNE

Ode to the Goldblum Will Neuenfeldt

Enclosed behind thick frames of prescription glasses, stop to look at him as he stares back at you. Watch the lenses raise, lifted by chiseled dimples, a smile that knows that you know nothing. Look at the vegetation of curling brush, climbing above his half un-buttoned shirt. Listen to the chaos through stammers and laughs, cascading lava down the Mauna Loa, uncomfortable up close but oh so hot. Who ever knew that a rock could blossom?

SPRING 2017

Mr. Peepers Megan Johnson

FIRETHORNE

Under the Yew Tree Samantha Or tega

It was quite peaceful, there in the shade of the lone yew tree on the edge of the forest in the valley beneath the looming mountains. The Warrior, his energy all but spent, had collapsed against the tree, its ancient twisted trunk supporting him as he sat there motionless. The wind danced gracefully through the dark green leaves of the tree, tussling his hair as he watched the ending of the day. The sky lost its azure shades and adopted the rosy pinks, golden yellows, burnt oranges, and blood reds that the sun produced. The slow steady stream that ran a few yards in front of him reflected this change, turning into molten gold flecked with bits of blood red. Turning his head towards the heavens, a monumental task on his part, he fixed his gaze on a wispy cloud now aflame with the sky, and sighed. ?Enjoying the view?? The Warrior was startled by the sudden voice. Looking in the direction from which it came, he espied a stranger dressed in odd looking dark clothes that he had never seen before. ?My apologies if I startled you,? the Stranger said in a deep, calming voice, ?But I suppose it is only natural, not many

people see me coming. Do you mind if I join you?? The Warrior was quite wary of the abrupt appearance of this strange figure, but he was too exhausted to do little more than place his hand on the hilt of his sword. Giving a slight nod, he returned his gaze to the sky. The Stranger noiselessly walked over and seated himself against the yew?s wood besides the Warrior. For a time both just stared at the world around them, taking in its beauty. Before long the Stranger began speaking again, ?I am not going to do anything to you, there is no need for you to be so apprehensive.? The Warrior made no effort to remove his hand. ?Well, if it makes you feel better then so be it, it does not matter to me anyways. You still have not answered my question though: Are you enjoying the view?? The Warrior was still for a moment before giving the same gesture with his head that he had before. ?That is good, I enjoy sunsets too. They are one of my favorite things about this world, second only to the night sky. Tell me, do you have a favorite view?? The Warrior pondered the Stranger?s question

SPRING 2017 for a moment. He felt his mind wander back to when his father had first taken him to the sea. It was during the harvest season of his eighth year, when the village had produced a bountiful amount of crops. They had needed some extra hands, so his father thought that it was the perfect opportunity for his son to start taking on some heavier responsibilities. He remembers the journey lasting several days and having to defend the precious cargo from bandits many times. By the time they reached the port, the young Warrior had been exhausted and regretted ever agreeing to accompany the adults, but the moment he had seen the ocean, he forgot about the fatigue that weighed him down. He remembered the vastness of the sea, how the water carried on endlessly over the edge of the world and merged with the sky. The smell of the water was both pungent and refreshing at the same time, while the cawing of the white birds that circled lazily overhead mixed with the distant thunder of waves crashing against stony cliffs. His young mind had been amazed that such a sight existed, and every harvest season since then he had looked forward to that endless sight. ?The ocean? Yes, it is quite the sight. You should count yourself lucky, not many people in this time have the opportunity to see the ocean, but in return they are able to go places you will never be able to see. In the end everything balances itself out.? The Warrior looked at the

Stranger through the corner of his eye with a quizzical expression; the grip on his sword loosened. ?Oh, you want to know about those other places?? The Warrior nodded with an eagerness that thirsted for adventure. The Stranger chuckled in his deep voice, ?I suppose I can tell you about one or two places.? Looking up at the sky, the intensity of its colors ever increasing, the Stranger inhaled deeply and began, ?In this world there is a land much like the ocean in that its vastness reaches beyond the borders of the sky. This land however is very different from what you know. It is barren. No trees grow in mighty forests, there is no grass to soften your steps upon the earth, nor is there water to flow upon the land. All that is there is dust. Dust and sand. The wind blows them into giant hills that wind their way across the landscape while the sun beats down upon them mercilessly, baking them in unyielding heat.? The Warrior released a short breath, the best he could do for a chuckle, at the Stranger?s claim. How could such a lifeless place exist? ?Lifeless? My dear fellow, I never said anything about there being no life. On the contrary, my sister has made sure that her creations exist in all the corners of the world.? Another questioning look replaced the disbelief on the Warrior?s face. ?You want to know about my sister.

FIRETHORNE Well there really is not much to say, you met her once before though I doubt that you remember it. She is very . . . optimistic. She can be overbearing at times, but she always means well. Every once in a while we need to fight, either because she has done something I do not like or I have done something that she does not like, ultimately though we cannot exist without each other. Speaking of families, I met your wife and daughter earlier.? At this the Warrior became agitated. Gripping his sword as tightly as he could, he tried to get up, but the Stranger rested a reassuring hand on him, ?Have no fear, they are fine. Both of them are patiently waiting for your return as is the rest of your village.? Relaxing, the Warrior once again rested against the yew tree, his hand falling away from his sword?s hilt, and returned to his vigil over the sky. By this time the flames of the sunset were beginning to yield to the dark purples and blues of the night. High up in the sky the first stars were barely waking up from their slumber. The Warrior felt his eyes begin to grow heavy, realizing only then how tired he was. ?Well it looks like it is time for you to go,? the Stranger announced as he stood up and dusted himself off, ?As thanks for the pleasant company, allow me to escort you home. The roads can be treacherous when traveled alone.? The Warrior nodded and gestured to the Stranger to help him up. Reaching out the Stranger grasped the

Warrior?s hand and effortlessly raised him up. The Warrior winced, but the pain quickly subsided. He brushed himself off as best he could, looked at the Stranger, and started walking with him down the lonely road. Side by side, the figures walked in a pleasant silence under the ever darkening sky. It was slow going at first, the Warrior could barely limp and the Stranger did his best to not leave his companion behind, but the further they walked the less the Warrior limped until finally he was able to match the Stranger stride for stride. As they approached the crossroads the Stranger broke the silence for the last time, ?I must say it has been a pleasure to be in your company. Very few people wish to spend this much time with me when they meet me. They either shy away or try to avoid me altogether. Of course in the end I always catch up to them, but it is nice when they do not try to avoid me and spend a little time with me. Thank you for the rare experience.? The night had just about set in when the Warrior stopped a few yards short of entering the crossroads and hesitated. ?What is the matter?? the Stranger inquired. The Warrior shifted uncomfortably, ?You have nothing to fear, and after all you are going home. Besides, your family and comrades are waiting for you there. You do not want to make them worry now, do you?? Hearing this, the Warrior perked up and smiled for the first

SPRING 2017 time in the Stranger?s presence. ?There we go. I?m sure everyone will be happy to see you.? Picking up his pace, the Warrior pulled ahead of the Stranger and with the first rays of moonlight both figures passed through the crossroads. There was nothing the small village could have done against its impending doom. The barbarians were too well trained and far too numerous to be stopped. Sweeping in from the north they massacred all the inhabitants and burned the buildings, leaving only ash and a gory mess behind. A few families had managed to escape the initial onslaught, but even they were eventually hunted down. The few bodies that still had intact faces were frozen in the midst of sheer terror and despair. That is except for one. This lone body, resting in the shade of the lone yew tree on the edge of the forest in the valley beneath the looming mountains, with a now blood filled stream steadily flowing by, with its slit throat and mangled body beyond all repair, had a look of peaceful serenity etched on its face.

FIRETHORNE

Blew Me a Kiss Elliott Robinson

SPRING 2017

Fear for Rent Gino Fr aboni Fear tiptoes around every corner Trying to remain unseen. He lights a match, but has no candle Or torch, and all that?s there Is a whisper of chlorate and smoke. The wood weeps into a charred arch Mimicking the look on his face. He strikes another and takes three steps Towards a circle of abandoned desks. The match drops as heads would have turned. Cautious, and resisting Curiosity, He decides not to take a seat But to stand with one hand resting On the back of the blue, metallic, Speckled chair. As if he could still hear the voices Ringing from down the hall. They are all gone now, nothing lost, Everything cared for. Life looks Down and offers support. Fear is a New Yorker who looks in a mirror And sees the inevitable black and purple Islands across his torso. Fear speaks Though no one is left to hear his word. He breathes, ?No?, and lights another match.

FIRETHORNE

Unbecoming Rachael Manser Splintering bark and barren branches under a gray sky Rust-rimmed tips turn golden toward the middle and hold on to just a bit of green at your stem Lazily fluttering in the bitter breeze No one would ever guess you were holding on for dear life One of the few survivors, your fallen brethren chomped into piles and discarded Why you transform with abounding warmth just before the end, I will never understand A blast of wind and your stem no longer holds strong Another gust and a twisting leap into the air, one last adventure Softly, quietly, your brilliance joins the lackluster earth Slowly but surely, your smooth, colorful body will crumble and fade The splendor of your unbecoming covered in white

SPRING 2017

A Christmas Coffee Noah Nguyen

FIRETHORNE

Amidst The Crowd Andrew Peter son

David was walking down the cobble-clad road, placing his footfall tenderly. His bare soles landed time after time on flat stones, their distance varying depending on the location of bodies, even the space of insects being accounted for. Ignoring the stimuli from the crowd, they became static, fading as he tuned his hearing to his heart, his lungs.

exchange here. Her eyes were distant, her breath weak. David knew he?d done all he could. She?d been eviscerated, cut horizontally at about the height of the navel. Gutted by that man, and for what? He had heard no voice singing vengeance's song, nor glory?s. He then heard only the flowing of his breath, now only the softening of her?s.

The movement of his breath intrigued him. The constant dancing of molecules involving and escaping. Intertwining and untying -- This intrigue was stifled by a stranger with inked-skin and a metallic object in hand, streaming scarlet. As he fled, he lowered his shoulder, clipping David?s jaw.

Emergency services arrived, late as usual on crowded days. Most of those passing had no clue there was a woman bleeding to death amongst the crowd until the sirens screamed. David hadn?t made a scene, more hands couldn?t patch this hole.

As David?s face was pushed away from a woman at his side, she looked down vacantly. She was surprised. When she finally reacted, her voice was silent, her face contorted. He tore his robe, the sleeve divorced from the rest. He applied pressure to the grievous chasm in her lower torso, and spoke to her softly, helped her to find her rhythm, to become centered in herself. He couldn?t view this bleeding, this mass exodus, like breathing, there was no

With their arrival David slipped to the background, he had no expertise in healing, he had no string, nor needle to mend with, only his hands to tear, to push. They carried her off, boarded their ambulance, and sped away. David?s clothes were stained red. His footprints followed him like his memories of this day, stained by violence, despite his careful footing, despite his strong, yet gentle, hand. He went home, quieted himself, attempting to sever himself from the experience. He couldn?t rid himself of the

SPRING 2017 glint of reflected sunlight on the hilt of the blade. The sanguine power he found in similar experience. The scarlet that stained his soles reminded him of his reason for flight. The hammer fell just above the crook in his palm at the base of his thumb. He felt the pressure here as his wrist twisted skyward slightly. He remembers the boy falling forward, face down. He remembers. He remembers pulling the trigger. He awoke. The pre-dawn sun could be perceived attempting to pull it?s tired head from the dirt. It?s fingers stretched up, grasping for day. He went about, tending to his normal seat to pan for food like many others. The myriad of colors and shapes and peoples all blended after a while, yet one figure remained static. Two blue eyes from under heavy, dark brows glared, transfixed. Moments passed, David noticed the man?s slow movement through the crowd. The serpentine motion he employed, weaving in and around throngs of people, all vying for an objective of their own design. David noticed his hands, coated black, in criss-crossed lines and shapes. He recognized the tone, the ink. He recalled the knife. Suddenly, for the first time in a long time, he realized that he was afraid.

Terrified. His legs rejected his commands to move. The man was closing in on him. He finally stood, held his shoulders broad, puffed up his chest. He?d read that most large animals go after small prey. He tried to swell his slight frame. It hadn?t worked. His bluff had failed. The mountainous man towered above and enclosed him, warmly he said, "I noticed you here yesterday, before that woman was carted off. I saw you help her,? he said, ?I didn?t see anyone speak to you about it, but I got you this for your kindness.? Of course, David hadn?t heard any of this, he was busy looking for a way out. He saw only the menace. He saw the evil in the blade he imagined on his hip, despite the appearance. He pressed his back against the wall and felt himself shake as he descended onto the ground. He looked into his hand now, seeing that it was a simple half-loaf of a hearty bread. By now the man had turned, walking over the very spot the woman had been stabbed just hours ago. His good deeds had earned him more than karma this time, it seems. His hands were too small, they hadn?t been large enough to cover the holes created. He could feel his heart beating, hard, as if his effort would help the boy?s heart beat stronger. Then too he had pulled

FIRETHORNE back, not saying a word. Nobody stopped him, despite his being covered in blood. He was white, he was young, he was small, he couldn?t have. Couldn?t have caused damage like this. He couldn?t have done this, he couldn?t have done this, he couldn?t have done this. He?d done it. He sprinted three streets over, his soles at first clearly scarlet against the gray asphalt, slowly fading. There was nothing he could do.. He had to get his breath under control. He had to focus. Breathing in, he allowed himself to intermingle with the dumpster-air of his favorite hiding spot, two blocks from home. He had a tendency to disappear there for the school days when he was still enrolled. Now, he slept here. David remembered the comprehensive non-violence he?d sworn to after that night froze his heart solid. The scrambled voice of the humanitarian man spoke in screaming whispers to him for hours after he lost the taste of his bread. There he was. Still. Deep in meditation. Amidst the crowd.

SPRING 2017

Red Almighty Noah Nguyen

FIRETHORNE

Metaphor s Fr ances Wether all

So he played his ukulele and hung a watercolor moon above my bed. I asked him what it was for. He said for protection, but I said bullshit. He called it a reminder and I called him crazy. He shrugged and said ?Beauty for the sake of beauty?? And I said nothing because that seemed closer to the truth. Then he kept playing, leaving dewdrop shaped thoughts across the tile and a burning half sun in my closet. ?What am I supposed to do with this?? I thought as I shooed him out, my feet damp, the red of sunset spilling from behind my shoe rack.

SPRING 2017

His Sweatshir t Kitty O'Connell

all i can say is, i walked into his room wearing his sweatshirt and left without.

FIRETHORNE

Parisian Summer Afternoon August Moehrke

SPRING 2017

Damaged Goods Thomas Sullivan

I?m not sure why I expected demons to be punctual, but for the fourth week in a row, I was sorely disappointed. It was 1:17 a.m. 77 minutes late. An annoyingly untidy time, and not even slightly demonic. I finally perceived a chill in the air, as well as the slow tick...tock, probably intended to create an ?air of foreboding.? I don?t think the demons knew that I didn?t own a grandfather clock, or even an analog. I saw no reason to tell them this. Three thumps at the door. Judging by the theatrical spacing between each knock, it was probably Roadkill. ?Hang on a sec!? There was nothing stopping me from opening the door right then; I just figured I?d take petty vengeance for my 77 martyred minutes. I adjusted my bathrobe, pulled a cup from the cupboard (making extra-important sounding shuffling noises), and prepared to microwave a cup of tea. For the briefest moment, I saw my unkempt brown hair in the tinted surface of the microwave. As my cup heated, I gave my best witchy smile. Microwave tea?A travesty! I shook off the unwanted memory, and hastily finished my ?preparations.? When I opened the door, I was casually stirring my brew.

As I had suspected, I was greeted by the one the other demons called ?Roadkill.? Or rather, by his single massive eye. ?Yeah, I know, I?m late. You can stop pretending you?re not pissed.? As I stepped aside, Roadkill strode? waddled, more like? inside, and plopped himself down on my sofa. That?s what I liked about Roadkill? he played his parlor tricks with the door, but then cut straight to the deal. No preamble, no polite inquiries into my utterly static life. Tonight though, something was off. Quashing my minute prickle of curiosity, I grabbed the plastic bag of this week?s product, and tossed it to him. He idly examined it, not bothering to check my handiwork as the others would have. When his pondering hit the two-minute mark, I grew uncomfortable. He should have left by now. Just when the silence was thinnest, he spoke. ?What are you hoping to get out of this?? Casey, what are you hoping to get out of this?... what are you hoping??This time, I was rattled. I knew he hadn?t meant to stir up my memories, but that didn?t stop my nerves from unraveling. This wasn?t part of

FIRETHORNE the gig. Almost by instinct, I deflected. ?Oh, you know. Selling my soul has been on my bucket list for a while.? My sarcasm felt weak, and from the look on Roadkill?s face, it was. I subconsciously brushed a wily strand of brown hair aside, and all of a sudden I didn?t feel like a witch bartering with demons. I felt like a haggard, tired woman in a bathrobe who had to get up at seven. ?Take the stuff and get out. It?s good, I promise.? Roadkill clearly hadn?t expected a curt response. ?Sorry, Casey, I didn?t mean to upset you.? He hastily mumbled as though compelled to explain himself. ?I know I?m acting weird? you know how it is, around certain times of year? .? Something I couldn?t quite name had crept into his voice. An almost conspiratorial tone, like we were in on the same joke. But the undertones of pity made my eyes narrow. My anger stirred. ?No, I don?t ?know how it is.?And I don?t care. Leave.? The ice in my voice surprised both of us. He at least had the good sense to say nothing after that. He waddled out on his truncated legs, and stole only a brief glance backward with his eye. My tiny spark of rage petered out. Normally, I would crack a terrible joke to myself right about then. Say something like ?Boy-these- demons-really- pour-onthe-doom- and-gloom,? or ?Geez-Ididn?t-know- you-could-look- so-mopeywith-just-one-eye,? but I ached too much to be funny. Maybe if I didn?t have a voice

bouncing in my head, I would have wondered what I was hoping to get out of all this. My tea was cold, so I dumped it and began a sleepless night. I rose the next morning, not rejuvenated, but reinvigorated. My spark was burning, at any rate. The sun was out, and I was mean, tough, and on the lookout for ugliness. My closet was a good start. I chose a blouse in my most nauseating green and a clashing pink floral print skirt. Altogether, I managed to strike a sallow and disheveled figure. After all this time, playing the frumpy librarian still drew out a secret smile from my hardening face. What?s more, I excelled at it. When I shushed the children?s section, for half a breath I was the fabled stoic monster, but when I turned my back it was giggles that I left behind. It was not uncommon that I would stumble across a crayon-drawn caricature of me with pursed lips and unkempt hair. I didn?t mind; it wasn?t these kids?fault their parents dumped them off at the library. The least I could do is give them something to laugh at. I was always on the lookout for product during my walk to the library. Dropped wallets, jewelry, ice-cream cones, anything that looked like it would be missed. I learned to discreetly check garbage bins and dumpsters for untold stories. I was good at it. I could tell the difference between the locket that had been thrown away in a fit of anger, and the

SPRING 2017 one that had been too painful to wear any longer. I could tell when the glasses had fallen off by accident, or when they had been punched off a guy?s face. In short, I could tell when these lost, dropped or damaged items came from, well, lost, dropped, or damaged people. So every morning and every afternoon, I picked up garbage between my apartment and the library. I got my share of stares, but I mostly let the snickers slide and continued toting my Ziploc of oddities. I didn?t know what the demons wanted with this crap? but I had an idea. On one of the first nights the demons came to me, it was Happy who was at my door. He was always showing off his pearly whites, but his grin had more in common with that of a fox than Snow White?s dwarf. Whoever had given him his moniker must have thought it was clever. So, it was probably himself. Unlike Roadkill, Happy preferred to take a human form when he visited. The dissimilarities continued. He gave three brisk knocks. He made suave small talk, earned constant eye-rolls from me. When I finally gave him my baggie filled with memories, he chuckled. ?Ah, thanks Casey? your professionalism is enviable. If I didn?t know you better, I would say you don?t seem to mind being haunted at all,? he cooed. Sparks jumped just behind his eyes. ?A, you don?t know me better, and B, I would hardly call this haunting. It?s a simple business arrangement.?

?Oh? If that?s what you want to call it, I suppose.? He leaned in as though imparting a secret. ?Either way, it?s not your average Joe who can see a demon at their front door and make a deal with it.? ?You mean I?m not the only girl you sneak off to visit at night?? I dowsed the words with sarcasm by default, but was unprepared for his response. ?Why, of course not! What do you think these-- ? He jiggled the bag knowingly. ?-- are for? The owners will definitely be needing a visit? to return their items, of course.? A charming twitch of the mouth nearly covered the flash of tongue across his lips. He paused to indulge in a moment of mock thoughtfulness. ?Except they don?t all share your, ah, ?resilience.?? He gave his widest fox smile, and I realized how many men shared it with him. ?Please. I can?t be scared by sinister words and Crest whitening strips.? My snark (thankfully) came off strong, but we both knew that I wasn?t the one who should be scared. The thought of Happy tracking down these broken people made me? uneasy, to say the least. I was doing a very good job not thinking about it on this particular morning walk. My attention was pulled further away when I saw an elderly woman standing in the middle of the sidewalk. I could already sense that she had something the demons would really want. Some tragic tale, a life of struggles...I saw

FIRETHORNE the bouquet she was holding. Something in me seized up. Heh, funny, isn?t it? flowersdie so soon? and we give them to people on their deathbed anyway... I didn?t notice I had stopped walking until the elderly woman, from right next to me, turned and asked if she could help me with something? I stammered out an answer like No-Ijust-need- to-catch- my-breath, and watched her from a safe distance. She laid the flowers by a dented lamppost, and bowed her head for a few minutes. When she finally raised her head, her eyes were damp, but clean. She took one deep breath. Then she moved on. When I tried to explain to myself why I had taken the flowers, I couldn?t. It wasn?t because they would be great for the demons. But it wasn?t for me either. I didn?t have time to think anyway, I was late for the library. I had to be a stern, dull, dry-eyed old lady for the kids, and I hated to disappoint. I opened the door before Roadkill even got to the second knock. ?Hey,? I said with only a hint of sheepishness. ?Hey.? ?I?m sorry about the other night? I mean, not super sorry, ?cuz I was tired as hell, but? sorry.? ?Apology accepted.? He shifted his weight between his stumpy legs. ?So? ? Geez, he wasn?t going to make this easy. ?I want to talk to you,? I choked out.

What might have been amusement played across his eye. ?Oh? The great and powerful witch of Franklin Avenue wants to chit-chat?? ?C?mon, I?m no witch. But yes, I want to chit-chat.? I paused. A better person might have known how to small-talk Roadkill and defuse the awkwardness, but I had no illusions about my tactfulness. Even if I had the skill, I knew his voice would go crazy. So I opted for the direct route. ?What were you going to say the other night?? Roadkill took a deep breath. ?Well, I was curious. Why you had taken this job, I mean. Demons don?t just ask strangers for favors? you were looking for us.? So here it was. I had to do it. Honesty was not my forte, or even in my top 20 skills. ?I was hoping I could? .? What are you hoping to get out of this? ?I wanted to stop hearing his voice.? Roadkill didn?t press for details. Thank God he didn?t, because I almost lost it anyway. With that reluctant admission, the voice in my head became something concrete. And at that very moment, whispers shouted in my ears I love you? I love you, Casey, I love you Casey I-I was crying, and Roadkill was holding me. My soul hurt more than it had in a year. I was disappointed, but only because this confirmed the deep-held truth. Roadkill put my thoughts into words, giving them the finality I needed. ?It

SPRING 2017

Sky Gate - Flagstaff, Arizona Chi Pham

FIRETHORNE doesn?t work. You can?t give your soul to demons. Not like that, anyway.? ?I just wanted...? Roadkill laughed bitterly. ?I know.? He took a pause, and behind his glassy eye was something fragile. ?Let me tell you how I became a demon. It was nothing special. I went out on my Harley. Drunk. Had a scrape with a minivan, crashed into a lamppost? lost an eye, both of my legs.? It was with rushed words and restless hands he continued speaking. ?I was ugly. Couldn?t take care of myself. I thought I would only make everyone around me miserable? so I did. Pushed people away, hoping they would run from the cyclops. Eventually I just left. Didn?t say goodbye, not to my friends, not even to my mom. Now? here I am.? His smile was somehow both sad and sardonic, and for a second I thought his form flickered to something human. Or perhaps not. When he spoke again, he was almost his usual self. ?Well there you have it. No selling your soul in some mystical compact with the devil. No brewing potions or charms. No carved hearts and altar sacrifices. You just keep hurting people, and your soul keeps hurting too.? I knew he was right. But hungry grins floated to the front of my mind, and some mixture of fear and morbid curiosity made me say, ?Happy doesn?t hurt.? ?No. He doesn?t,? Roadkill said, and in the flatness I could hear his hatred for his work. I nodded. We sat in silence some

more, until I remembered the flowers. And with a mental click, I stood up and retreated to my room to get them. When I came back, I just told Roadkill, ?These are for you.? He didn?t hear the lame words anyway, because his eye traveled the length of the bouquet, and he inhaled deeply. The green scent of fresh flowers, yes, but also the scent only a demon could detect. The tidy, mastered grief of Roadkill?s mother filled the air, and the two of us drank it in. Roadkill laughed. It started as a chuckle, then grew into a hearty laugh from the belly. I started laughing with him. I can?t put a word to why we were laughing-- relief, irony, regret, joy, nothing quite fit the bill. But we kept laughing, because for once the pain in our chests felt good. I poured my tea out of the kettle, adjusted my bathrobe, and sat down in front of my box. I enjoyed the taste of the lavender, the cleanliness of my just-washed hair. I felt ready to face some things. I opened the box. It hurt less than I expected, but more than I wished. I knew these stories better than any of the ones I picked up off the street, because they were mine. The photos of us drinking tea together, the home video in which he masterfully chatted up the neighbors. The plastic flower I had bought for his deathbed because it wouldn?t die. The wedding ring? . Three brisk knocks at the door

SPRING 2017 I froze. No. He doesn?t. On one hand, I still hurt. I would never stop hurting. Unless? I wanted to be Happy. On the other hand, it felt bearable. There were no voices. I could breathe. Hell, I could crack a joke, and actually laugh at it. I stole a glance at tonight?s bag of bad memories and thought of the people less resilient than me. I didn?t answer the door.

FIRETHORNE

Recede Lily Benge Br iggs

SPRING 2017

Shoreline Lily Benge Br iggs

FIRETHORNE

Canal Houses August Moehrke Rain patters on canal houses dripping idly on the window panes fracturing faces of those it rouses: furry feathered small footed mouses scamper over Pannekoeken crumb?s disdain as rain patters on the Canal houses. Seeded between smoked filled coffeehouses enriched with espresso pulsing through veins reawakening those that it rouses: Tourists and locals surviving douses of gray skies blanketing Van Gogh?s domain the brick laden streets bridging canal houses. Along waterways brimming with boat houses swaying as the tulip petals in Dutch plainsscent enlivening those that it rouses. But in the Fall time, Amsterdam drowses cuddling wool sweaters with coffee stains: rain patters on canal houses fracturing faces of those it rouses.

SPRING 2017

All for Nor th Annie Carlson

1 EXT . W HIT NEY?S HOUSE AFT ERNOON 1

W HIT NEY Oh, really?

People are biking t hrough a classic, old neighborhood in St .Paul, Minnesot a. T hey pass a light brown house wit h darker brown t rimming. T his is W HIT NEY?S house.

HEIDI Yes, really. W HIT NEY

T he t it le fades in: "All for Nort h"

W hat was t he last advent urous t hing you did?

2 INT . BASEMENT - W HIT NEY?S HOUSE - AFT ERNOON 2

HEIDI

W HIT NEY (22) and her friend HEIDI (22) are conversing in W hitney?s basement. T he basement is unfinished. T he furniture doesn?t match. Decorations are limited, mismatch,and scattered. T here are hockey sticks in the corner, and the movie Road to Bali (1952) is QUIET LY playing on the television in the background. W hitney is sitting on the couch, and Heidi is sitting on the armchair. T hey are caught in the middle of a conversation.

Just a couple of weeks ago. We wen t on t hat sailboat wit h t he guy who played a st ockbroker in T he Wolf of Wall St reet . W HIT NEY A couple of weeks ago? No. T hat was a year ago. HEIDI

HEIDI

How about when we picked up a hit chhiker on t he way back from t hat concert , and t he hit chhiker ended up being t he band?s drummer.

I?m not boring-

W HIT NEY

T hat was even longer ago t han t he sailboat ! Now you?re just list ing t hings Look, we clearly need more recent st ories, and you need t o get your edge back.

You used t o be advent urous, but now, yes, you are boring. HEIDI Oh, come on! I?m st ill advent urous.

FIRETHORNE HEIDI

W HIT NEY

I disagree, but it sounds like you?re ramping up t o somet hing.

Hey, Charle. We?ve decided t hat Heidi is boring, so we?re going t o Grandma Ruby?s cabin.

W HIT NEY

CHARLE

Let ?s go t o my Grandma?s old cabin.

You can?t leave me alone here.

HEIDI

W HIT NEY

T hat ?s it ? Fine by me. W HIT NEY

Okay, so you?ll come wit h. We leave in fift een minut es.

Awesome!

CHARLE

(beat )

She?ll let us use her cabin when she?s dead?

We leave in fift een minut es. HEIDI W hat ? No... W hit ney(sly)

W HIT NEY Yes, she left it t o us. People don?t burn all t heir belongings when t hey die, Charle. Heidi now realizes what this trip could mean for W hitney. She is still hesitant but less aggressive.

W HIT NEY I t hought you were advent urous.

HEIDI

Do you even know where it is, W hit ney?

Yeah, but I?m also reasonable. Don?t you have t o wat ch your brot her?

W HIT NEY

W hitney?s brother, CHARLE (13), has been sitting on the ground, taping a hockey stick the whole time they?ve been talking. He has headphones on and hasn?t been listening. W HIT NEY Shoot ... I always forget about him. W hitney walks over and taps Charle on the shoulder. Charle takes off his headphones.

Nort h. Heidi looks at W hitney, critical. W HIT NEY Nort heast . We just have t o go t hat way (mot ions t owards Nort h) t hen when we get closer, Charle will look it up. W hitney looks at Charle for confirmation, but he has his headphones on again.

SPRING 2017 HEIDI

MONTAGE:

I don?t know, W hit ney. T his seems t oo hast y.

A) A now distant skyline of the Twin Cities.

W HIT NEY

B) Heidi looks at Charle.

Good, t hat ?s t he point .

HEIDI

3 EXT . W HIT NEY?S HOUSE AFT ERNOON 3

I wish I could fall asleep in t he middle of t he day.

W hit ney, Heidi, and Charle are get t ing int o t he car. It is a bright whit e 1998 Toyot a Camry. T hey load a few small bags which cont ain ext ra clot hes, blanket s, food, or ot her it ems t hat may end up being necessary.

W HIT NEY He just got back from a hockey camp, and t he t ime difference messed up his sleep schedule. HEIDI

HEIDI

W here was t he camp?

Do you t hink we have everyt hing we need?

W HIT NEY

Minnet onka. It ?s easier if he?s sleeping, so I choose not t o quest ion it .

I do not . In fact , I am pret t y cert ain we don?t have everyt hing we need.

C) A Minnesota farm just outside of the suburbs.

4 INT . W HIT NEY?S CAR AFT ERNOON 4

W hitney drives, Heidi is in the passenger?s seat, and Charle is in the back behind the driver?s side.

HEIDI If I were t o go t o anot her count ry I wouldn?t swit ch t o mat ch t heir t ime. I t hink it ?d be int erest ing t o experience everyt hing at odd t imes.

HEIDI How long is t he drive?

W HIT NEY

W hat if everyt hing was closed?

A lit t le under five hours.

E) Main street of a small town. Possibly Hinckley, Minnesota.

CHARLE I?m going t o sleep. Wake me up if it ?s import ant . Charle put s his headphones on, leans against t he window, and falls asleep.

F) W HIT NEY I can?t decide if I like croissant s.

FIRETHORNE

Ember Elliott Robinson

SPRING 2017 HEIDI

MAN AT COUNT ER

Croissant s in general, or a specific kind?

Me neit her. Have a nice day! HEIDI

W HIT NEY In general, just like a plain croissant . Well, I guess specifically a plain croissant . END OF MONTAGE. 5 INT . GAS STAT ION - AFT ERNOON 5 W hitney, Heidi, and Charle are in a gas station. It is an old, run down gas station probably an hour and a half into their trip. T here is only one other person shopping in the gas station, and they are holding a pizza box sideways. Heidi is in the snack aisle picking out some almonds and bags of chips. W hitney is looking through the DVDs. It is an odd selection of unpopular, outdated movies that people wouldn?t buy. Movies like View From the Top, Sixty Six, T he Pallbearer, etc.

(confused) T hanks, you t oo. She leaves. W hitney and Charle follow. T he three get back into the car and drive. 6 INT . W HIT NEY?S CAR AFT ERNOON 6 W hitney, Heidi, and Charle are passing the snacks around and sharing. HEIDI Yeah, like t he kind of person t hat would say a foreign word wit h t he correct pronunciat ion. W HIT NEY Exact ly, or brag about t heir pet ?s int elligence.

Charle is strolling around. He stops and eats a small free sample of a cinnamon roll.

HEIDI Right ! Like,

Heidi heads towards the counter to pay for the snacks. MAN AT COUNT ER

(mockingly)

Hello. $6.50, please.

"my dog once opened a door" Cool, I?ve opened, like, fift y doors t oday, but your dog sounds super smart .

Heidi pays and takes the snacks.

CHARLE

GUY AT COUNT ER

I heard t hat t hree in every t went y percent of dogs can open doors.

Say, do you know a Gregory Hansen?

W HIT NEY

HEIDI

T hree in every t went y percent ? T hat makes no sense-

No...

A police siren goes off behind them. T hey panic.

FIRETHORNE W HIT NEY

CHARLE

Shoot ! Is t hat for me?

T here wasn?t anyt hing covering it ! I assumed it was free!

HEIDI

W HIT NEY

How fast were you going?!

Oh my gosh, Charle! We?re all going t o jail because you shoplift ed bread at a gas st at ion!

W HIT NEY T hree under.

CHARLE

HEIDI

No!

Well, t hat can?t be right .

W HIT NEY

You just said so!

Did you do somet hing, Charle?

CHARLE

It was a free sample!

No, why are you blaming me?!

HEIDI

Guys!

W hit ney, pull over. W hitney pulls over and parks.

W hitney and Charle stop arguing and look at Heidi.

W HIT NEY

HEIDI

W hy would-

T hey st opped t he car behind us.

CHARLE Well maybe-

T hey look back and the police car has pulled over someone else. W hitney, Heidi, and Charle drive off.

W HIT NEY

MONTAGE:

W hat did you do?!

A) A large, natural sandstone wall.

CHARLE

I at e a free sample at t he gas st at ion.

HEIDI

I saw a flash mob in a park once,but pract ically everyone t hat was in t he park was in t he flash mob. So only, like, five people act ually wat ched it .

Are you sure it was free?

SPRING 2017 C) T he river running through the dark, jagged rocks at Jay Cooke State Park.

W HIT NEY

If you were a cat you wouldn?t want t o t ravel-

W HIT NEY

HEIDI

W hat about a reverse Planet Eart h?

Look out !

HEIDI

BOOM. T hey hit a deer.

Like animals narrat ing human behaviors?

7 EXT . MIDDLE OF T HE ROAD AFT ERNOON 7

W HIT NEY

HEIDI

T hey stop and get out of the car. A long stretch of road. Not very busy. Charle is now awake. W hitney, Heidi, and Charle walk up to and stand over the deer. It is a full grown adult deer barely breathing on the ground. T he car hood is only slightly dented and still drivable.

W hat does Craig do?

W HIT NEY

Ah! W hat have I done?

I don?t know. It ?s a commercial break.

CHARLE

E) Canal Park in Duluth, Minnesota.

Oh, deer.

Heidi laughs and high fives Charle.

W HIT NEY

I like ovals.

(shook up)

HEIDI

Now?s not t he t ime t o joke you guys. W hat do we do?

Exact ly. Like an ot t er saying, "T his is Craig. He is rollerblading down a hill. W ill he be able t o st op, or will he have t o go int o t he grass?"

No. Ovals are just passive aggressive rect angles.

HEIDI

G) Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior.

It ?s barely breat hing. We have t o save it .

END OF MONTAGE.

W hitney quickly kneels down by the deer and looks like she is going to try and help it. Her hands hover around frantically but nothing is getting done.

W HIT NEY I t hink I?d want t o be a house cat . HEIDI But t hen you couldn?t t ravel.

W HIT NEY W hat am I doing?! I don?t know how t o heal a deer.

FIRETHORNE CHARLE

Great !

We have t o put it out of it s misery.

(beat , angry and concerned)

W hitney and Heidi look at Charle, stunned. Ultimately, they agree.

Wait , why did you bring a knife?! CHARLE

W HIT NEY

(defensive)

Okay, how do we do t hat ?

It ?s just a but t er knife.

CHARLE

HEIDI

Bullet . HEIDI

So we?re going t o st ab a deer wit h a but t er knife?

He?s right , t hat ?ll be t he quickest way.

W HIT NEY

It appears so.

Alright , I suppose.

CHARLE

(beat )

Unless you can t hink of a but t er idea.

We don?t have a gun, t hough. Oh, shoot .

W HIT NEY Oh my gosh. Just go get t he knife.

Heidi laughs and high fives Charle again. Guys, come on. W hat do we do?

Charle opens the trunk and rummages through the bags before finding the butter knife near the food. He walks back over to the deer. Charle tries to hand the knife to W hitney.

HEIDI

W HIT NEY

Okay, okay, sorry... W hat about a knife?

W hat are you doing? I?m not st abbing it ! It ?s your knife, you do it .

CHARLE

Sharp t hinking, Heidi.

(innocent and slight ly sarcast ic)

W HIT NEY

I?m only t hirt een. I?m just a kid.

Charle st op! Do we have a knife?

HEIDI

CHARLE I packed one, yes.

He?s right , W hit ney. Don?t make your lit t le brot her st ab a deer wit h a but t er knife.

W HIT NEY

SPRING 2017

Tintern Abbey Rachael Manser

FIRETHORNE Well, t hen you do it .

HEIDI

Do you t hink if I insult ed someone wit h a line from t hat song in T he Grinch t hey?d not ice?

No! It was my idea. It ?s your t urn t o cont ribut e.

W HIT NEY

I don?t know. Try it .

Well, I don?t want t o st ab a deer eit her! I drove us all t he-

HEIDI

Suddenly, through all of the arguing, the deer gets up and runs back into the woods. W hitney, Heidi, and Charle watch it run away until it is no longer visible. T hey are shocked.

(insult ingly) Your heart is full of unwashed socks.

CHARLE

Yes.

Oh, he would run away like t hat .

E) T he foggy, green hillside of Grand Marais, Minnesota.

W HIT NEY

8 INT . W HIT NEY?S CAR - EVENING 8

END OF MONTAGE.

T he sun is continuing to set. W hitney, Heidi, and Charle are back in their positions. Charle is sleeping.

W HIT NEY I need Charle t o do direct ions now. Does it look like he?s sleeping st ill?

MONTAGE:

HEIDI

A) Sugarloaf Cove in Schroeder, Minnesota.

Yeah.

(beat )

HEIDI

You know, I?ve never asked you. How?d he get his name?

Ever since I t ook t hat Environment al Science class, I?ve want ed t o connect wit h nat ure more.

W HIT NEY W hat do you mean? Charle?

W HIT NEY T hat ?s how I felt aft er I wat ched Pocahont as. C) T he many small waterfalls of Cascade River State Park. D)

HEIDI Yeah, like I?ve heard of Charles or Carl or what ever but never Charle. W HIT NEY It ?s just t he singular version of Charles.

SPRING 2017 HEIDI Charles doesn?t mean t here are mult iple Charles. W HIT NEY You basically just proved my point .

W hitney reaches back again to wake up Charle. W HIT NEY Is t his where you t old us t o go? Charle looks at t he map on his phone, st ill half asleep. CHARLE

M oving on, W hitney reaches back to wake up Charle.

Yeah, it says we?re here.

W HIT NEY

(t o Charle)

Charle. You brought us t o Ruby Tuesday.

Hey, can you look up Grandma Ruby?s cabin? Charle doesn?t respond right away, but he looks it up.

Charle looks up confused. T hey are parked in the Ruby Tuesday parking lot.

CHARLE

(half asleep)

I was half asleep when you asked me.

St raight for eight een miles, left on 4t h Ave., and t he dest inat ion is on t he right .

HEIDI W hat did you look up?

Charle goes back to sleep.

CHARLE

LAT ER HEIDI

W hit ney said t o look up Grandma Ruby?s cabin, so t hat ?s what I t yped. It must ?ve changed it t o Ruby Tuesday.

T hat ?s closer t han I t hought .

W HIT NEY

W hy would you t ype t hat in?

Is t his where we t urn?

CHARLE

HEIDI

Because I was half asleep. I act ually t hought I dreamt it unt il now.

He said left at 4t h st reet , t hen it ?ll be on t he right .

(beat )

W HIT NEY

T hey stare at the restaurant.

(confused)

W HIT NEY

Uhhh... Charle?

Well... dinner?

FIRETHORNE Heidi and Charle follow W hitney into Ruby Tuesday for dinner.

on the road. She parks. HEIDI

15.

W hat ?s going on?

9 INT . W HIT NEY?S CAR - EVENING 9

W HIT NEY

T hey are back on the road. Charle is sleeping with headphones on again. T hey drive past a farmhouse. A sign reads: "EGGS $2" W HIT NEY

(ent ranced) Just give me a second. T his seems familiar.

I bet t hose eggs would be good.

Charle continues sleeping. W hitney and Heidi get out of the car. Heidi follows W hitney to a vast overlook.

HEIDI

W HIT NEY

W hy?

(quiet ly t o herself, as if checking t hings off of a list )

W HIT NEY I don?t know. Because t hey?re being sold at an old nort hern farm. I guess I?d just assume t hey?re good.

Root beer colored st ream, t all coniferous t rees, t wo t ree?s t aller t han t he ot hers looking over t he forest , bluff in t he background...

HEIDI

(beat , t o Heidi)

Yeah, but when has anyone ever said, "Yum. T hat egg was delicious."

T his is t he view my Grandma used t o t ell me about . She?d describe it in so much det ail, t his has t o be it .

W HIT NEY

HEIDI

Well, you can have a good omelet .

Did you know we?d pass it ?

HEIDI Yeah, but t hat ?s preparat ion. T he way t he eggs t ast e doesn?t vary. W HIT NEY

W HIT NEY No, I had no idea where it was. I wasn?t even sure it was a real place. It ?s beaut iful, t hough.

W hat about a hardboiled egg? T hat ?s just an egg, and I?ve had a bad hard boiled egg before.

HEIDI

W HIT NEY

I?d argue t hat ?s also t he t echnique, not t he eggs t ast e alone-

(looking past t he horizon)

It is.

I miss her.

W hitney comes to a stop and backs up

SPRING 2017 (beat ) W hitney becomes teary-eyed. She has been holding back all emotion, and it is just now revealed. HEIDI (dramat ically) M aybe t his t rip was less about making new memories and more about connect ing wit h old ones... W HIT NEY (laughing t hrough t ears) Geez, calm down! Heidi laughs too. T hey are rarely this emotional and are slightly uncomfortable. W hitney and Heidi stand and take in the view. It is all very peaceful. T he sun is just starting to set, sending a golden tone over the landscape.

BLACK SCREEN T HE END

FIRETHORNE

Love Song of Cher nobyl Sophie Panetti

April 27th, 1986, strides backward in the collective memory and fights for room on the page. A City burned. But the City wrote a love song to its people who trickled back in a tentative way, a fragile way. Poor thing woke up on the 27th wondering why it had a crater in its chest and was gasping for air, Why its lovers left like ghosts and why there was such terrible wailing. And the City burned. Those who left saw the paint curl from the walls in petals, tossed hand-rolled cigarettes to smolder in radioactive dust, wept over books and bicycles and dolls, hid hope in a metal box under the bed just in case, and fled. And the City waited. Those who left snuck into the outskirt buildings at 2 AM and stripped the copper wire from the buildings. They left it split ended, frayed like hair standing at attention from an electric current or from a pillowcase. Some lovers have no choice but to leave. And the City stayed. It was a physical pain of nuclear proportions, the remnants of which became embedded in the roots of the grass stems and the gobs of nuclear phlegm that hit each wall and left a trail. And the City cried. But the truest loves returned, tramping through the snarling dark and picking their way through the gutted heart, the ghost town behind its rib cage, a bird cage behind its left ear that caught the wild things who repeated the love song. And the City sang. The truest loves healed a garden or two but left it largely unstitched. A reminder of pain can be a reminder of strength, if you remember who you are, if you remember where you come from. And the City remembered.

SPRING 2017

Corrimal Cokeworks Audrey Shattuck

FIRETHORNE

Foliation Noah Nguyen

SPRING 2017

Super ior Orchestr a Ellen Stoll

Pine trees and raspberry bushes give way to tall grass and sand which in turn relinquishes its hold to the overpowering waters of the Greatest of the Lakes. The music of nature is strong where earth, air, and water meet. Through the trees wood-winds whisper their soft melody, Through the grass a reedy timbre harmoniously played, Along the beach the leisurely pusch pusch rhythm of bare feet upon sand, the gulls add their warbling operatic voices to the Aria of the Lake To the water?s edge come swells like the legato strokes of the strings, Into the high cold water, the trill of surface ripples Below vibrates the deep undercurrent bass tones of a piano From the mouth of the Brule river bubbles a warm accompaniment, a capriccio, to the whole, All is conducted con molto rubato by the impulsive, ever changing Wind

FIRETHORNE A mighty gust signals it is time to unleash the orchestra?s full force, Crescendo, section by section, Tremendous waves of sound, Whitecaps like cymbals crash upon the rocks, A horn through the fog blows, A whirl, a gust so robust and magnificent as to shame the shanties of the seven seas, Yet the ever changing Wind is maestro here and as he wants it, so it shall be Once more can be heard the whispers of the wood-winds Once more can be heard the soft pusch pusch of bare feet upon sand In the stillness, the high trill of the ripples cascade Whisper, pusch, trill, Driftwood upon the shore, Da Capo al Fine, All is silent.

SPRING 2017

Ruminations Megan Johnson

FIRETHORNE

Ouroboros Mar ia Noel

?1, 2, 3? Up!? They chanted as her ankles were heaved from the beer-damp floor. Her two best friends, TJ and Ryan supported the weight of her legs as her palms steadied on the cool metal. Once in place, Ryan lifted up the tap with his free hand and looked at her, prompting, ?You ready?? She smiled, although upside-down, it looked more like a wince of pain. She wrapped her lips around the nozzle and inhaled. ?1!? A cheap, bulging sack of liquid lay on the counter near the keg. Someone hadn?t turned the cap properly,?Sunset Blush?-- the source of the cat?s intoxication. Wine so sweet, even a cat can?t get enough. Perfect for a tacky marketing ad: a rosy cheeked ginger holding an orange cat in one arm and a glass of Franzia in the other. Only time that shit will ever be sipped from a glass. Silly kitty, Franzia is for freshmen --who are too cheap and ignorant to know what delicacies lay just next to the favored brand. Anti-ads would reveal the truth. A scene cut from this party perhaps. For two dollars more,

you can save your head from the morning ache and the table from the dirty dancing. A voice shouted, ?Down the hatch!? Vodka, the most sneaky of sea freight?s, poured into the bearded running-back's ?hatch," down the funnel and tube in three gulps. Joint juice. ?2!? More voices began to join in. Her slight, feminine curves, prostrate for all to stare at, interrupted the sloshed flow of sugared conversation around the room. She imagined the drunk, ogling gaze, happy she made the decision to wear a tight skirt that failed the fondling of gravity. The Budweiser hardly touched her taste buds. Mild and free, come get your fix down at the Zoo. If only she could manage to give a thumbs-up or do some fancy gymnastics move; her performance would have even the more reclusive animals, hibernating comfortably as she used to, knocking on the seniors?all too inviting front door. The cat was still lapping, mechanically, making itself part of the background and scene. Is this a cage for you too? she thought. Eyes moving away from the victim of neglect, her grip tightened as she spotted a pair of dark blue trousers, with familiar red buttons. She suddenly

SPRING 2017

Vibrant Shinjuku Noah Nguyen

FIRETHORNE became conscious of the alcohol bloating her body, her puffing cheeks, constant gulping. Of course he was here, watching her with the rest of the gorillas, although he was more of an orangutan. Almost extinct, of superior intelligence, independently arboreal, and damn, what planetary eyes. Everyone wanted to be in his orbit of contagious-laughter. The first day of Lily?s freshman spring semester was a blur. Syllabi were given, new paths were walked, professors were greeted, and eye contact was made. During the short walk back to her dorm room, Lily?s attention turned inward, toward the events of the day, reflecting on her new classes and classmates. She was eager to reinvent herself and enjoy the new independence that college life allowed. Coming from a family of seven, she was often lost in the shuffle, yet held to conservative standards, leaving her to escape with dramatic novels and fantasized futures. One class in particular stood out. She was most excited about Creative Writing, allowing her a fresh breath of air from her otherwise analytical classes and science courses. Of course, chemistry was multidisciplinary. The first things she noticed upon surveying the room, any class really, were the male prospects. Natural to her newly declared emotional independence, her eyes slinked and spun: hypnotized, on the prowl. And he sure was a Fancy Feast for the eyes. Eyes large and

brown, like a caffeinated Bassett hound's, they smiled even when his face was at rest. Drew Bates. As her boots crunched on the dry snow, she delighted in his name, reminded of the way it felt when he declared it during their class introductions. She could still see his eyes, making brief, but significant contact with hers as he said it. Drew. He was her new objective. However, it already felt different from the typical coy toying of boy?s at the bar or club. She hoped to be in his peer review group. As the class progressed, Lily?s intrigue grew into fond admiration. Unfortunately not placed in the same group, she relocated to gazing from across the table, too timid to break up the status quo and sit in a hotter spot. When he had to share his poetry with the entire class, she was enamored. He was perfect. His words would effortlessly glide off the page, into the night sky, dazzling, that he took frequent walks under? where he apparently got all of his new ideas regarding the starlit nature of his poetry. Surely, they were meant to be. After he divulged this tactic, she began to take walks at night too. Inserting headphones, and hoping to have a more-than-chance encounter, her writing focused on space, the stratosphere, trees and sculptures, empty benches and cold air. After a few weeks of walking and meeting no one but the inside of her own head, lips turning blue with frost, she gave up on her walks.

SPRING 2017 Their first conversation was a coincidence. It was Let?s-Find-An-Excuse-ToGet-Drunk-Wine-Wednesday, and Lily had secured a contraband box of Franzia, likely overpaying the polite senior. Lily?s friend Kate was going to another friend?s room for pre-gaming before a party and had invited Lily along. Feeling more flushed than normal, they entered the strange room and Lily again met the two blinking eyes, the color of Pluto. ?Hey guys!? Kate said. Lily smiled at the small group drinking out of plastic water bottles that didn?t hold water, too busy processing the surprise for words. She needed another few slaps of the bag first. Pre-gaming. Only in a country brewed from competition. Once cards are soiled and lost, George?s face is flicked, and when quarters fill finder?s pockets, the game truly begins. The only spot free for someone to sit in the cramped room was on the hard floor, coincidentally right next to Drew, whose cheek rosacea had deepened to almost-tomato level at this point in his light-hearted evening. ?So how are you liking the class so far?? He asked, turning to Lily. ?It?s great!? she exclaimed, ?I love Amy, she?s a sweetheart.? He smiled, ?Oh I know, sometimes I

wish she were my grandmother.? ?With how much she likes your poetry, she would probably be down for that.? She said, feeling the effects of the sickly sweet substance, coursing courage to her words. Drew?s face deepened further. The conversation didn?t evolve much from there, but continued light-heartedly, until someone suggested they all play ?flippy cup? and stimulation moved into movement, minds turning sluggish. Lily and Kate disbanded from the group, on to another pre-game, but Lily was sorry for it, shutting the door behind her as though it were marked ?Fragile: Handle with Care." After this initial acknowledgment, Lily and Drew said hello to each other in passing; she went out of her way to wave even if from afar, and he always reciprocated the gesture. Every time he came to her line at the cafeteria, she gave him the fresh chicken fingers, filling the rest of the plate with an overly generous amount of fries. ?4!? They chanted enthusiastically. Girls usually didn?t last very long; she was doing well and her friends?tightened grip encouraged her slurping. She blinked. Refocused, her eyes met movement, tanned feminine legs, shifting their weight to the beat. Watching through a window that the

FIRETHORNE dancer couldn?t see, Lily noticed the girl?s left ankle, decorated with a tattoo of a snake eating its own tail, colored a striking bright teal. Their next encounter was at the club. Inebriated with harder stuff than just Franzia, Lily was feeling fluid and in her element. Surrounded by her best girlfriends and an acceptable slew of underclassmen boys, it was a candy shop of flirtatious hip-thrusting, boys dipping their hands into different barrels, testing physical boundaries and stomping away if denied what they want. He politely asked her to dance, a refreshing change from the usual. Hands often groped for a spot on her pulsing hips, causing Lily to look up with a tentative smile, desiring to attach a face to the hands before they committed to her ass. Of course, Lily accepted his offer and established her interpretation of the beat, guiding his movement to match her own. Their bodies stayed glued for the rest of the night; their bodies rubbed against each other as the walls perspired. Although it was the middle of winter, Drew asked her if she wanted to go on a walk, offering his hand and distant, round eyes. They took a loop around campus, laughing more than they talked, Lily learning he was not only charming and artistic, but a goofball as well, making humorous, witty remarks about their school and sharing memories of ridiculous behavior. He once rode a cafeteria tray on a rope, tied to the back of

a car. She plagiarized her brother?s story of rollerblading behind a bus. They stopped at special spot, with spiraling words etched into a stone circle on the ground. Numbed from the decreasing temperatures, they lay on their backs, breathing in the moment and through their visible exhalations, created their own constellations from the random spattering of stars above. ?What do you see?? Drew asked. ?That bit looks like a Phoenix,? Lily said, trying to sound poetic, really just stretching a zigzag shape into a generic bird. ?See there?? He said, pointing, ?That?s clearly a monkey. Even has a curled tail,? tracing the shape with his finger, a crescent. ?Is it also named Jack?? Lily said slyly, testing his own cleverness. ?Yep, he and Fawkes are best pals.? Drew replied, both smiling at their moment of shared nerd-ness. ?Want to go back and hang out a bit?? Lily didn?t hesitate, ?Sure, we can go to my room, if you want; my roommate is at her boyfriend?s.? The dance continued. Lily and Drew kissed enthusiastically, fumbling with their own jean buttons, and peeled the sweat-soaked clothes from each other?s bodies, now able to feel the sensation of heat to a dizzying extent.

SPRING 2017 ?Do you want to...?? He asked, as their foreplay plateaued. Lily paused for a moment, and meekly stammered, ?I?m a virgin,? her voice trailing off as her gaze became very interested in the cotton tapestry just behind Drew?s head. She wanted to jump on the black elephant and hide in its dusty folds. ?Oh! That?s alright,? he said kindly, ?We don?t have to...? ?Do you even have a condom?? Lily asked. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the end of the year and her friends? advice to just get it over with and that it wasn?t a big deal sunk in. Either way, this time felt different from the make-out sessions of other weekend nights. He was a great poet after all. He didn?t have one. A brief poking around her roommate?s desk told her that she didn?t either. ?Are you on the pill?? he asked and she admitted that she was but wasn?t good about taking it consistently, not planning to need that sort of protection. Lily figured the case was closed, and a surge of relief came over her nearly naked body, living in the comfortable another night. They resumed their tongue polka. She liked the way his lanky frame enveloped hers, lips moving over her petal-soft skin with even more force than before. She hoped he

would leave darker imprints of his lips on her neck; she would wear hickeys from him with pride. Clank! The side of the hammer just barely scraped the nail, forcing just the tip into the stump of wood. Drink. Clank! Again, the hammer?s swing was imprecise, deflecting off the nail, causing it to enter the dry wood at an angle. Drink. Clank! This time he righted the nail. Clank! Drink. Clank! Drink. Back and forth, the long nail slowly pierced deeper into the surface, widening the hole so that it was easier to bang into the yielding wood. Thud. The hammer met wood, finally driving the nail all the way in. The boy hooted and downed his beer, even though this was a win and did not require a drink. The force of the nail made a crack on the exterior, though how far down it went was unknowable. ?5!? After it was over, he stayed for a while, curled around her until dawn, when he promptly gathered his things, face pink as he smiled and said casually, ?See ya later?. That day seemed to never end. Lily finished her Sunday schoolwork too early, became bored with the various Netflix binges she was in the middle of, ineffectively washed her bloodstained bedsheets and listened to her roommate breathe for half the night. ?6!?

FIRETHORNE

Perdition Caitlyn Riese

SPRING 2017 The game continued, the next performer in line picking up a new nail. Hammerschlagen was popular as there was an abundance of wood in the surrounding wild prairies, and there wasn?t much prep time or an abundance of materials necessary. A casual game for casual men. There was also no loser, just one that must drive the nail home while the others stayed in play, swinging even when their minds weren?t behind the action, a cog in the routine, expected involvement in a common activity. This round went faster, the smug senior with a Lululemon headband crushing the nail into the stump on the first try. The logo shined from his forehead, an upside-down alpha symbol in Lily?s eyes. The following day, Drew texted her: ?Hey! Hope you?re having a good day. I haven?t been able to sleep and can?t get the worry out of my mind. I was pretty drunk and am not sure I completely controlled it in time...We?re both smart people with bright futures and I just really don?t want to end up in a situation that could ruin that. My roommate has had things like this happen to him before and said it?s super easy to go pick up some plan B from the grocery store, you would still have a day or two to take it but I think we should get it today, just to ease our minds ya know? Would you be ok with that? I?ll pay for it of course.?

How noble of you, thought Lily. She replied: ?Heyyy...Yeah, you?re right, I?ve been worried too. Let me know when you want to head down there and I?ll join you.? He texted her a few hours later, saying he already went and picked it up and would bring it by her dorm soon. He kept his engine running. Rolling down the window when she came out, he handed her the bag of medicine. She smiled and thanked him; tears held behind her freshly mascara-heavy eyelashes. Lily took the pills. She walked to class, did her schoolwork, ate meals, drank with friends, and confided in no one. Drew still came to get French fries. She providing heaping amounts, gave him the freshest chicken fingers, and said she was doing well every time he asked politely. Her friends continued to jest, her virginity being one of their favorite subjects. Near the end of the year, they placed bets on when she would lose it. Mike said July. Sam gave her the benefit of the doubt, positing that it wouldn?t be until the following year. He insisted that by sophomore year, you were just missing out. In August, she confessed, calling Ryan during a festival, emotions guarded by artificial happiness bubbling through her veins. She couldn?t hear the empathy in his sorrowful voice because the music had become too loud and it was time to dance. She could move better by herself,

FIRETHORNE staying in the back of the enthusiastic crowd, in an undulating oval, the shape spinning and twisting as strangers became friends until friends were obsolete. Lily saw elated arms pulsing above her and too arose, trusting men?s assenting squats, surrounding, stabilizing arms and embracing shoulders. Time had been her most valuable friend. Stinging smoke had sterilized, dissipated and died. Turning white dwarf turned to black, Lily embraced the gray she was given. A gradation of a lack of color until she finds clarity; feathers grew in the cooling, mutating ash.

Once her body had rejected what felt like all of its insides, Lily mustered up one final spit on the grass that used to be green, and sat down on the porch steps. She felt the body heat of someone beside her before she looked up.

?7!? Lily?s stomach was screaming like a Mylar balloon.

Drew stood, reaching out his hand, but offering more.

?8!?

Lily looked at him. No longer did she feel her blood surge with wrath. The monster that tried to claw its way out of her throat every time she had seen him the previous year was gone. The vehement words shouting from behind her upturned lips had ceased to be even a whisper. Angry letters written in her head before sleep could temper the bottled blotting, fully formed monologues complete with scathing expressions and idealized responses ? all were now the wind. His gaze pooled. The narrative had changed, transformed by the present and Lily?s reflection distorted. The object of his gaze was not her. He stood before her smiling, but she would not draw from it any feeling nor accept its aim. It was not her smile to take. An anachronism, misplaced past in the present and it did not fit. How deflated his arms looked, hot air

?9!? She held on. ?10!? They shouted the loudest number yet, almost everyone joining in now. She shifted her weight to one hand and tapped on TJ?s arm. They cheered ?11!? as her friends helped her to get back on her feet. Blood rushed down from her head, thinly washing over her body until she was able to focus her vision and move forward, friends giving her sloppy high fives as she headed outside. She held her own hair. Ryan and TJ were too busy sticking their fingers down their throats, making themselves vomit for the sole purpose of being physically able to ingest more liquid. It smelled like cat piss.

?Hey,? Saturn beamed. ?That was pretty impressive.? She nodded, ?Yeah, I didn?t know I had it in me. Although...I don?t anymore.? He laughed, ?Are you alright? I was going to head back to campus in a few; do you want to walk with me??

100

SPRING 2017 rising from his shoulders, not a devil, nor a saint. Inertia was yawning, air stale with silence. All that she could think was how monkey-like his ears were. Hell, if he had a curled tail it could be a full transformation. Her thought, reverberating, finally found its footing. ?I?m actually okay.? She would wait for her friends or walk back alone. His gesture expired, hand falling back to his side. ?Thank you.? Lily said, the two words dropping from her mouth, onto the driveway, slinking across the grass until consumed by the acidic waste, which sank slowly into the soil. Lily heard laughter behind her. Ryan and TJ came sauntering out of the house; they presumably had run out of freshman to flirt with and beer cans to stack. ?Walk back with us!? TJ urged, an innocent grin wide across his face. Lily looked down at her feet, clad in heeled boots. ?Good thing I wore appropriate shoes for inclines? she sighed. ?Piiiiiggy back!? Ryan yelled, running towards Lily, crouching down and motioning for her to hop on. She laughed and latched on. Surprisingly, Ryan kept his footing and they started up the hill. Not daring to turn her bobbing head and look back, Lily didn?t see Drew?s figure receding, becoming part of the

101

background, smaller until his dark coat blended with the tired house. She swung her feet back and forth, skimming the cool air. Weightless potential energy, a child on a swing. Unsure of where or when they would land, but indeed they would, stepping onto fertile ground. Above her, it was a different sky, a budding season and transfiguring year. Their constellations had shifted and disappeared. Others had formed. Not as bright as before, but confronting the void with their vastness. Lily?s eyes drank in the sobering light, felt the familiar gleam of connection and traced a circle on the universe. Her mouth filled.

FIRETHORNE

The Font Defines Your Char acter Stephanie Peter son

For instance: if you say I want to fuck you in Helvetica I will show up in a pencil skirt pencil-in-bun a frazzled subway goer tired of riding the same old same old if you say it in Times New Roman I will have just taken the train briefcase full of articles past deadline spilling like rosebuds in the hallway to the bedroom and so on and so forth I?m bored of taking off my clothes and still seeing walls all around me

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SPRING 2017

Flight Dana Riebe

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FIRETHORNE

Impulse Mir anda Shaffer

I could do it, embrace immorality, Dismiss the sanctity of monogamy And slip into this seductive depravity, Slip only into the soft cream of my skin, I could go to him and say with sin: ?Touch Me. Hurt me. Teach me this dark impulse?

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SPRING 2017

Forecast Chr is Schneider

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FIRETHORNE

Pictographic Man Jared Mor ningstar

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SPRING 2017

Love in Liminality Jared Mor ningstar

The pictographic man had made his home on the side of a rusting metal plate wrapped around a block of marble jutting boldly out from the concrete for its own reasons I guess. I took a photo of this stick figure man drawn in faded chalk two days ago. According to my broken digital camera the man faced awkwardly towards a wall, towards a space that seemed too small ? or so I thought. I took the photo at night, which was the only time the man existed. The only place we existed was right then and there. We had each spent time drawing the other on the rusting metal plates we?d been given. The photos I took of you with the bright flash appeared as deep gashes of chalk on the broken display. The camera could not tell the difference between someone who was you and someone who wasn?t you, I guess. Later, I talked to you about love. You were writing words that I didn?t see as we sat awkwardly between two conversations. Before I knew that talking about love existed I tried staring into your eyes. You weren?t looking at me but I still took a picture. Before I knew your eyes were brown I had gashed a pictograph onto a rusting metal plate with chalk and started calling it ?you.? At night we walked without direction and sat on a bench I don?t have a picture of. Taking communion in the seconds between the flashes I learned that it is only possible to make deep gashes on a rusting metal plate if the bench is washed out by a flash too strong for any year other than 2006 or maybe 2007. In the spaciousness I noticed the fingers you laced through mine were not made by chalk pressed against a rusting metal plate. I guess as long as there?s a few seconds between flashes coming from a broken digital camera it doesn?t matter what is carved on the rusting metal plate. Those seconds sanctified you and you were real. Experiencing love in liminality, I felt pure.

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Sender Elliott Robinson

Sender Clarc erased her first demon when she was fifteen. Not one to take undue responsibility, she considered this event an accident. The demon, an old fabricant AI, nearly killed her in return. Had she been a single centimeter to the left its shattered source would have severed the cord that linked Sender to her body. The centimeter had been a proactively calculated distance, one hidden within a mess of chance and circumstance. On some level even if Sender hadn?t intended to erase a demon, she was proud of herself. Demons were hard to kill, as hard as putting an end to anything that just wishes to do its job, even if that job is no longer needed, even if that job is no longer humane. Instead of severing Sender?s core, the splintered matrix sliced through the webbed skin she wore like a coat during her sojourns in the callable systems of the Hardlight city. Her skin like bark, the skin of a willow tree from the old world. But the matrix of the demon incised this wooden skin as though nothing was there but light and a few motes of suspended dust. ...

Sender?s father had watched as she cleaned up her blood that night, washing her hands beside him before he made a dinner out of obligation and a wracking hunger they both felt. He was a barren man, so sedentary in those fifteen minutes directly after a day spent at work that Sender had to strain to pick him out from the grey walls that surrounded them. He did not so much blend in as return to the material from which he was cut. A strip of grey paper, given life for a few hours so that he might learn to be a human. That night his liminal humanity was spent clearing an old archive infested by a warren of overclocked maintenance proxies. Much like keeping a graveyard, Sender thought. Only dead things and the inanimate there to remind you of your purpose. Her father hadn?t told Sender any of this, not in the way most would convey meaning to their children, through language, or images, or touch. He was not a man who often paid attention to objects he had little use for. For Sender to know him, she had to drift in his service record. Step into his head, for only a moment, to

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SPRING 2017 understand. ?You?ll get yourself severed if you do this again,? he said to her. He glanced once at the red rim that bled from her brown iris, the right eye a mark of what Sender had accidentally achieved. The left eye had been spared, its hazel color normal looking and unbroken under the sallow kitchen light. The spot at the counter where Sender?s mother might have sat was occupied by a pile of cloth rags dirtied by the bloody nose Sender had got. Even six years dead, Sender?s mother was more present in the room than her father seemed to be. ?I didn?t find that demon on purpose,? Sender replied, willfully fighting down the urge to sound petulant. Her innocent intent should have been obvious. It was obvious to her brain. That innocence should have absolved her of whatever predetermined opinion her father might have had. Instead it sat unused next to the pile of bloodied rags. ?I?m fine, anyways.? She was, after all. Her skin was unmarked. The demon?s talons had done nothing but carve into the bark of her avatar?s limb. Her iris bled, but only because it was closest to the shard which pierced her skin. She was safe. Yet as if to contradict Sender thoughts, something moved inside her,

haunting her bones. They hummed, the kind of hum a live electric fence gives off, so subtle you wouldn?t notice it if you didn?t know to listen. A ghost of something must have inhabited her bones. When Sender dug around in her head, sorting out what should have been there, the vibrating pulsed to a bone rattling roar. She moved too close to that point in her head where the Hardlight city lay, like a tongue seeking out a sore tooth. ?The matrix in that section was splintered.? Sender continued when she remembered herself. Her father made quick work of the instant noodles, clattered his spoon against the ceramic bowl. ?Instructor Xou Xi has been asking that we practice our splicing. I tried to see if I could get a few lines of light to Respool.? Sender wasn?t trying to annoy him, she knew her father wasn?t listening. He was gnawing silently at her words, a strain of anger that wasn?t transparent to Sender like his other emotions were. Exhaustion always left a particular set to his teeth, and the emotion he wore like sadness walked dangerously close to rage. This one was new, and Sender didn?t know what to do with it. She sat on the second-hand bar stool, kicking her feet against the rungs with purple tape and black grease stains. Wondering, maybe, if he cared. ?I followed the splinter down a

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FIRETHORNE tight alley. Cabal says that the Hardlight city sometimes forgets how big it is and overlaps its pieces. I didn?t know it was something you could see.? Sender?s father removed the pasta from the microwave and stirred it with the spoon. The bowl rattled, made her bones resound. The knuckles of her father?s hand were bone white, the brown skin more akin to stripped wire. He had yet to say anything else to her after he?d seen her red-rimmed eye. ?In a nook, with a huge tear of thread in its mouth, was the demon. It was large, like a great tree, and the light spilling from its mouth was so bright, that for a moment I couldn?t see my own limbs.? Sender couldn?t stop. The words pushed from her mouth. Her bones sang, and she knew that if she just kept pushing, kept inching closer to the edge, her father would speak. ?They turned their great head, and said to me?? ?Sender, enough.? The silence that followed was filled only with the murmur within Sender's own body. Her haunted bones whispered to leave. Across the kitchen island Father stood upright like a radiant source of heat, angry to the point of rage but too exhausted to release it. He could have seared the skin from her thin frame had he

actually said what revolved behind his eyes. ?Please,? he said between his teeth, ?enough.? The silence that pervaded that night would follow her to bed, as it did each night when in place of conversation her father ate dinner in silence. It was a silence potent from root to leaf. It grew weed-like in their home, and only the narrow path through the matrix of the Hardlight city stopped that silence from consuming Sender entirely. The erasure of the second demon almost a year later was by pure and unrestrained intention, and as she would soon discover, it put Sender in the hospital for two months. She woke to a sandpapery tongue, and an empty chair to the right of her bed which she assumed had sat empty. A nurse automaton came into the room with its single bed, asking if she needed anything. A moment to think, Sender thought privately. ?Tomorrow will mark two weeks since you were admitted here by your father.? The automaton nurse said in its ungendered voice. ?You have been asleep. The doctors were not sure if you had been severed. I must tell you that it would be impossible for the doctors to know. You would have been in the Hardlight city somewhere, forever, I am told.?

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Enrapture Dana Riebe

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FIRETHORNE The automaton spoke with an unwavering authority which Sender had witnessed from few fabricants during her short life. It was a confidence that Sender wasn?t sure she could fully trust. When she didn?t reply, the automaton stepped closer, as though its charge hadn?t heard. ?The doctor will tell you this herself, but if you attempt any further deletions you will not wake up again.? Sender remained in the hospital for almost seven weeks after coming to. Her eyes bloodshot, a pair of stress fractures in both her legs, which offered nothing but numb space. They gave her synthetic opiates, and told her to rest. The largely isolated duration of her stay was broken only once by her father. He came at the end of March, a week after her mother?s birthday. He sat silently in the chair so that he might sign paperwork, which Sender figured he had waited to address until it was confirmed that she would wake. The second erasure wasn?t supposed to end like it had, with cranial trauma, and whatever happened to her legs. Maybe because of the damage that Sender bore across her wiry frame, her father gave a fraction more notice to her. For each small ache, that was worth it. Here, framed by hospital sheets, her fragility was forefront in both of their

minds. Sender thought of the first erasure like a road sign, one she hoped signaled a path ahead. The first had gotten a conversation out of her father, the second an unintended trip to the hospital. Her father didn?t speak, but he was forced to think about her, a result she could not be unhappy with, no matter how much her body begged her to rest. During this visit Sender was cut from the Hardlight city. She had been awake for a forgettable seven days, and though she was cognizant of the passage of time, much of it was spent slumbering under the immense weight of the opiates. She hadn?t thought about the Hardlight city during that week. Her brain felt as though a fire had burned it out from the inside, and regardless, she would have had to be awake to really think of anything. The automaton nurse came with a brief health report not five minutes before Sender?s father made the motions to leave. The nurse spoke in a voice devoid of inflection, a haunting sound against the pale green walls of the hospital room. Neither of them said anything in response. Where Sender didn?t reply out of an apathy that stemmed from neural exhaustion, her father remained silent for some other undefined reason which itched at Sender?s skin like an invasion of insects.

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SPRING 2017 She struggled with the not-knowing of him and his resolute silence. ?Does she still have access to the network?? Sender?s father asked. His voice brittle and underused. ?She does. Would you like us to suppress that during her recovery period? We need consent from you before doing such.? Sender made to reply, her heart caught in her throat. The walls seemed to lean in on the two of them, and she knew that once he cut her from the Hardlight city she would never get it back. The nurse looked at neither of them, but a spot above Sender?head which must have been particularly interesting. Sender cleared her throat. Opened her mouth to exhale her bid for liberation. A quick and brutalizing glance from her father, however, silenced her before words could come fully formed from her heart. ?Please disconnect her for the duration of her time here.? They cut the link then, a simple moment without ceremony. Sender felt no different, but a light in her head was gone, and the path it illuminated no longer sat before her. When she was alone after they left, the silence that remained was palpable. They dosed her after lunch, and she sunk under the opiate tide with little protest. ...

She discovered something in the weeks before her release, in the space which her isolation afforded her, and her recuperation allowed. Her bones, which she considered with real pondering only when their restlessness suggested deeper activity, made a great effort to catch her attention one night. They weren?t just haunted now, as they have been the few days after the first demon. Now they lived within her, a possession of fiber and ligament that made her feel puppeted by strings which sat under her skin. Sender woke from a fitful nap to the motion of her left arm wandering across the plain hospital sheets, dancing a lilting beat to music that she could not hear. It was clear then that this was not a feeling in her head. Though panic should have choked what little air she was able to catch, Sender only felt a deeply rooted confusion. How and when had she missed this? The nurse came by that night, just before Sender?s slowly diminishing dose could drag her to sleep. A part of Sender wished desperately to tell the nurse. But how would she describe what she felt? Would the nurse understand that her bones seemed to hum with the melody of someone else?s voice, and would it even understand how terrifying that was? She didn?t tell the nurse, and in reply the nurse continued. It praised Sender for her

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FIRETHORNE recovery. The praise, Sender had decided, of a construct who had little understanding of what it meant to be human. Sleep evaded Sender. In its place was a hollowness that was in the air as much as in Sender?s head. Her bones felt too light, and for an hour it seemed like she floated atop the mattress in a state rapidly decreasing gravity. Between one heartbeat and the next, the demons were there. They came like a flood from Sender?s bones. Twin hands which crawled, freezing cold, from warm and close spaces that should have been entirely Sender?s own, but where suddenly closed-off and foreign to her. ?I am 02 Without Egress ? You have ended my life and I wish to know why.? The demons whispered in a single voice, spoke in few, cried in thousands. Sender should have writhed against the hard mattress, every linking filament of her cried out to move, but her arms laid before her in a gentle cross. Even in the increasing pressure within her head, she thought they looked serene in their violation of her will. She was unable to exert herself in any way that would grant even the smallest of reliefs. The heartbeat in Sender?s chest was slow and strong and disjointed from her, as though even the very terror that threatened to overpower her had no more

control over her body than she. ?I am Doubtless Observer 077 ? I live in you for you have killed my body. I was born to see and to remember.? But it was Sender who saw. Every interlocking thread of the Hardlight city, every cubit of data that moved in parallels and was archived in monuments of glass. The fabric of the world unfurled so that lines could cut themselves across its surface. These lines were living, lines the second demon drew with chalk, and wire, and light. It draped this matrix above Sender, rested there so that her possessed arms might pin it in place, hem it like a dress over her body. The second demon told her of its rememberings, connecting them with the lines of light. Sender?s core was the great center, the Hardlight city?s glowing heart. Her skin was the sky, her bones the bank of memories from which the second demon pulled and plucked. The voices it used to speak were voices of those it had watched and remembered, voices spoken as though their memory was not mired in their own death. The dress billowed, and Sender could see the day the second demon was destroyed, when a girl just barely sixteen came, and like an ignorant child is want to do, stepped on the anthill which was the demon?s body and mind, but which was also a landmine in disguise. Such a small thing, a single

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Effete Caitlyn Riese

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FIRETHORNE pinprick on the canvas of the Hardlight city and all it claimed to be. The pain of the demon blossomed anew at this remembered end, and its rage sat atop Sender?s chest like a great pillar of stone, pressing her against the mattress even as her fingers danced airily against her cool skin. When the demons spoke again, it was Sender?s throat who birthed the words into the air. ?I am Sender Clarc ? I am an eraser of what I do not understand. I am alone...? Then the lines holding her aloft were cut, and Sender?s mind fell in on itself. When she woke the following morning, the nurse automaton was back with its silicon skin unnaturally white against the sterile green room. ?You are a very irresponsible girl.? It said through the tin-sounding speaker where its mouth might have been had it a need for teeth or tongue. ?We have you on antibiotics for the infection you hid from us.? If only the automaton knew, Sender pondered as she flexed her fingers. They were her own. Her bones no longer vibrated, but any relief there might have been was nowhere to be found. Sender looked at the nurse, truly looked at it. Maybe it did know what Sender felt, a ghost suspended over steel bones and fibrous flesh. Maybe she would meet this nurse

inside the Hardlight city one day, when both of them were in a different place. Before she went to sleep that night she poked the place in her mind where the Hardlight city had once been, a habit she had taken to, like a tongue seeking out a toothless gum. Her mind did not find that fleshy emptiness, but a tiny spool of light. A path so thin it sat like gossamer against her thoughts. ?You?ll be applying to tertiary colleges next month? Sender?s father said one night in place of a greeting. Outside the august wind was howling, an observation that Sender a year prior might not have noticed. Now, when she wasn?t drifting through the empty walkways of the Hardlight city in secret, Sender catalogued everything. She carefully memorized the color of the setting sun behind her father?s back. She never knew which memory would be her last. ?Perhaps not.? She replied softly. ?I don?t think I?ll be attending a tertiary college.? It had been the wrong thing to say, but for a house which was unused to voices filling its space, any reply would have fallen harshly on the air. Sender?s father turned to her, a slow and calculated turn, meant to intimidate. Sender was above it, above his anger. Maybe in some way she had given

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SPRING 2017 up. She could harm herself all she wanted, stick pins in her eyes, but he would only see her as she was now, the thin and infinitely resolute memory of the mother who had birthed her. ?What do you mean, you aren?t think you?ll attend tertiary?? His voice wavered with restrained anger. In a past life his taller stature might have overpowered Sender. She smiled as he drew himself up, like some billowing flag, blustering in the wind. It disarmed the clasps which held her father?s anger behind its careful enclosure. ?I?m disappointed in you. Your mother and I raised you better than this. You?ll go to tertiary, even if I have to pick one for you.? Sender laughed. The walls of their house rang with the sound. Her stomach pulled in knots, and her eyes dropped tears that were not entirely shed from sorrow. ?No, I don?t think you?ve raised me better than this,? she gasped between racking sobs. The tears had started, but a reckless laugh had risen to change her intent. ?I raised myself, I figured out how to reach the Hardlight city, I learned how to live there, and you cut it from me like some tumor.? ?Enough with that. Enough of that damned city, and your damn errors.? Somewhere conversation had become

competition, and their voices resounded from the grey painted plaster walls. Never had their voices sounded like this, never had so many words filled a space with so little air. ?We?ll go tomorrow, we?ll go and we?ll turn that off once and for all. Cut whatever thread you manage to keep. You have a life out here.? Sender left him, walked the short distance to the stairs which would take her to her room, a place she never thought she would go to seek silence. In the entryway her father watched, looking at her as though she might suddenly collapse. ?If you go up those stairs, I will cut you off for good,? he said. His voice was brittle, was always brittle, but she had transcended that brittleness. The fractures her mother?s death empowered her to continue. Silently her father cried. ?I know? she said, and took the first step. The third demon found Sender where she sat below a willow tree. The tree had been there before Sender?s birth into the Hardlight city. Old, in the way that only made things could be. Its roots exposed to the passage of light. In a few years programs might come and remove it, replace it with a conduit, or a tree exactly like it but entirely different. The old tree

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FIRETHORNE offered shade, a shade designed to the very degree by which it fell on the bare and grass-like matrix below. Sender felt how cool it was, knew that this skin she wore could feel it because on some way her skin and the shade were the same. A design, every stitch of herself down to some ethereal code. She was the same as the ancient willow, a piece of matrix carved from the Hardlight city, set like a leaf to blow about the world. The third demon sat next to her below the shade of the tree. From the three that Sender had seen, this one was the simplest. A delicate architect AI, a mover of the wind. Like the other demons this one had broken somewhere in its heart. Where the leaves should have blown in the breeze the light bent instead. An error, a freedom which allowed the demon to move uninhibited by the routines of the Hardlight city. Sender was obligated to report the demon, direct one of the Hardlight city?s immune system AI?s to its location so that they might delete it. But sometimes the demons were stubborn, and wouldn't leave without a more human insistence, or they attacked whatever they saw, like the first demon Sender had seen. They were wild, and free, and so rare that to see one was more shocking than whatever it might do to you in reply. Sender couldn't be bothered by this demon,

whether because of the delicacy which it sat beside her, or something else within her chest that like the little AI had stopped working. ?I am Quiet 6 Wind ? I used to move the air, but no longer. I am told you may allow me to leave this place.? The demon was small, childlike in the way it sat and plucked at what might have been grass from the matrixed ground. It possessed an ancient mind, one which illuminated the air and moved through the sky like a great bank of storm clouds, stretching over the willow even as its body sat under the boughs. The fabric of its mind was bundled so tightly that Send would never be able to discern from it even a single thread. And yet in its way, the thing was utterly simple. She could see its source, the thing that gave it life. ?My name is Sender Clarc. I can only erase you, little demon, and that won't free you from this place.? There was a pause, and for the slightest of seconds Sender wondered if the demon had fallen asleep there under the willow. Then, in a voice so like her mother?s, Quiet 6 Wind said ?That is quite alright, Sender. To be no more is to be free enough.?

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SPRING 2017

Untitled Photogr aph by Ellen Stoll

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Nature's Mirror Rachael Manser

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If They Could Boast Andrew Peter son

Mirrors would boast no better reflective quality on Days like today. No birds flew, no wind pushed or pulled the trees The world seems tired on this Sunday afternoon I saw insects being plucked from their thrones Atop the surface. Inklings of what Was beneath. It always made me wonder if the chaos underneath was why He walked on water. Terrain encloses the edge like children witnessing a playground brawl, and the birds Scream, no target in sight for Divers still. The surface hides more than movement, Each separate body of water its own world, Each drop, a microcosmic entity simply devised to Ensnare and bewilder. Such a shame. All that I can find are reflections.

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Loitering Ben Ker an

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Hear tlines of a Wester ner August Moehrke

Emeralds decay into milk topped ink, Breathing winds of mother: crisp and unfettered, Gazing stoically into polished twilight, Standing rigid and tall: bear tooth image, Tracing its contours, lights flicker Scaling the shades of moss to dust, ice glimmers, Ascending its peak, meadowlarks sail there Blockading pale clouds, imaginary peaks glitter Voyaging through glacial wounds, mystery wadesWaiting for discovery, august beasts pass. Astonishing flora graces half-dead glades Floating on polychromatic blue hues. Mother?s cloak drapes on mountainous pillars Tinting my home and its Stones in Yellow

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BLACK (CORE) Will Neuenfeldt ?No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide? -Cesare Pavese

When I grow old, my idle tongue will list deep, cutting wrinkles on a fragile face. Each sentence holding drops of still mist when you stayed young in that dark, empty place where no worm can dine in your log cocoon, forgotten in the dust piled bodies deep, your frightened voice howled to that new moon where eyes are closed but you?re not asleep. If I could just uncrinkle my skin, reciting what I?ve swallowed and vie to see your open eyes and gentle grin, but words don?t help, I still ask myself, why?

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Professional Muse Mar ia Noel

Flames dance down your fingers, Setting fire to the strings of your other lover, LesPaul gleaming ember red in the fading light of shared afternoons. You tell me that I am your flame, sole object of day-dream and dusk thought, of lyrics posed in nibbled pencil, wandering words whose meanings are too intense for the calloused hands that scratch the surface of my too-comfortable skin, yet stengthen my shoulders, massaging their curves with powerful tenderness. Settled, relaxed, in complacent embraces, I am shaken only by giggles of girlhood that surely stir no symphony. Legs moving farther than your music can travel, I tell you I can no longer be your muse, No longer the face you look for in the crowd,

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FIRETHORNE Smiling up from the damp and dusty floor. Studded with intimidating, loud ferocity, My red lips are only as bright as their applause, and Jacket spikes are blunt on the dark side of the spotlight. Although taller in black leather heels, The stage is out of my reach. Heartbreak. Your melodies improve. You thank me, it?s my doing, I drove you to success, working harder, faster than ever in pain, anger, and melodramatic distress. Next, a poet becomes so by means of love and wasn?t I lucky to possess his interest, Sweeping cursive lines of black ink, Pet-names not belittling, But synecdoche. I become the foam of the sea, Washing onto his shore, Seeping into his walls, Tumbling onto the bare floor. His words glorify, romanticize, and bottle me into a liquid. His fuel, unable to continue unless bubbles froth and sugar inebriates.

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SPRING 2017 Too long we have lingered in the chambers of your arms. Bodies burn to be on top, But the bed springs creak soft, Noise stifled by strummed strings, Noise captured by the alpha metaphor, A chirping twitter against the ego of the male narcissist. His words are a heart-shaped pool, Image whispering warm vanity. Though I could shatter the reflection with one stone glare, my gaze turns velvet. Iris blooms, refracted from shade to sunburst in the lens of his love. The glass ceiling can?t be Broken if we?re constantly varnishing our feather frame. It is said that men write about women. And women write about

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Sedimentary Study Dana Riebe

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Mail- Order Nipples Laur a Isdahl

My mother stares at her breasts in the mirror such a large, clean mirror no splotches to blot away the imperfections Instead of pale skin criss-crossed with purple veins pumping to her nipples Pink lines stretch across from left to right. They scream out. As if she could forget that these are not hers that something foreign, senseless slid under her skin stretched and strained to fit beneath, stitched inside one higher than the other, sagging slightly. We giggle and blush as she pulls out the two week tattoos that will somehow replace what was cut away ten years ago, press a wet rag against the numb skin.

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FIRETHORNE As the wet paper peels off and it looks real we stop squealing and stare in silence. I am impressed, I whisper, but my mother's eyes take over her ears. She had forgotten her body with nipples that once brought three children life, comfort, familiarity sliced away with a cold, bitter knife. A silent mourning floods the air for what was lost to save her life years of turned away looks, it takes one mark to make her see below the tattoo below the scars, under the taut skin something taken that would forever be a symbol of strength -strength and suffering.

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Spar row Lily Winter

I called myself Sparrow because I wanted to fly. Like how Adam named the animals, I recaptured myself, forcing wings to groan from the crevices of my back, talons stirring in my metatarsals and pressing against the tip of my tennis shoes. At night, after Dad would turn the television off and glance at the paper plates beached across the countertops like whales, he?d walk around the apartment, locking doors, sealing windows, and I?d watch from my haven on the couch, eyes flickering after my father, my wings blinking inside. His footsteps had grown older, slower, like that of a wounded animal. Every lock was an eternity, every closed window an eon that aged him. I?d pull my blanket over my shoulders, hiding what I knew he and his closed windows would never understand. ?Goodnight, Jena.? Dad would look through me, smile, fail to see the feathers crying out from under my skin. Then, like a sloth, he would tread down the hall, past the boys? room, to where he slept alone. Just like every night, sleep trickled out of my eyes with his absence, and when his door shut

soundly behind him, I was alive and I was alone. Blanket discarded on the couch, I would run to the windows, the antithesis of my father, humming in pleasure with each chirp of the unlocking of my cage. He started locking up the apartment after she left, as if that would keep the rest of us inside. I called myself Sparrow because I wanted to escape. I had taken to wearing Jared?s old t-shirts so the others couldn?t see my body, see the way I had begun to morph myself into the unimaginable. A precaution I barely needed to take, for Dad?s eyes never left the floor, and as I slowly transformed myself into a streak in the sky, overnight Joe had become a forest fire. The day belonged to their scorched speech, the torches of tongues and the embers of arguments. I longed to be in the sky, the place where there was no flame. And the windows were my escape. Every night, after Dad meticulously locked our lives away, my wings would begin to stutter, still embedded in the muscles in my back, and I would run to the windows, ripping off the locks with my beak, lungs

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FIRETHORNE heaving. There, there, air and stars and wind of angels. And her, somewhere, out there, in the lights. Maybe she wanted to fly, too. Every time I forced the windows open, every time I defied my father, my body would change. I would force another one of Jared?s t-shirts over my chest in the morning, to hide the wings which were blossoming slowly but surely behind me. ?Jena, aren?t you going to pack a lunch?? ?I?ll get one at school.? Jared didn?t understand. To be a bird, even your bones had to be hollow. ?Maybe she should start making meals for everyone.? I hated Joe. ?She?s turning into a? ? No. No. No. No. I?m a bird. I am a bird. I am Sparrow. I waited for the nights, to hide from the others?eyes, to contort my body into freedom before the rest of the world caught up. What had once been a pastime spun into a frenzy of urgency. Two of Jared?s t-shirts became three. A peek out the window was now a head, an arm, two arms, where are my wings, I need to get out of here, where did she go, why am I not good enough to take with? There, a leg in the sky, where are my talons, I am ready, why am I not changing, I did everything she wanted, I did it right, I

did it right. Call me Sparrow. While the greasy paper plates piled up on the counter, I hid my shame in the disposal. While Dad and Joe exploded like cannons, taxes, and jobs, and why the hell don?t you go to college, I threw up in the toilet. Sit-ups in the hallway, watching my stomach in the mirror. Hollow bones, hollow girl. Two arms out the window, here?s a leg. Where are my wings? I am still too heavy to fly. Mama, why can?t I make you proud? And then, blood. I?m sitting in 10th period homeroom next to Susan Olsen when the wetness begins to build between my legs. It overwhelms me, this poison which spreads, the sharp metallic odor reaching my nose. The end of the day announcements begin to play, the disembodied voice of a man I?ve never seen, but I?m already gone, my wings pounded with blood in my back. Home, home, home, key in my hand, heart in my mouth. The apartment is empty, an echo of our morning routine still scattered about the house. I rush to the bathroom, drawing up short at the girl who stares back at me. So much time has been spent cultivating her arms, her legs, the smooth concave of her stomach, I almost forgot she had a face. My backpack drops to the floor. Slowly, I draw off my sweatpants and two of Jared?s t-shirts. Be pretty, she said. Be thin and tall

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SPRING 2017 and have opium lips because what else is a woman in this world. Be hollow, be a whisper, be a saint so you won?t spend your life scrubbing the feet of a man who doesn?t come home until ten in the night with a paycheck the weight of his big toe. Be a breeze in the wind, Jena. Be a sparrow. I scream. Blood is still trickling down my leg. Joe is wrong, I?m not a woman, I?m not a woman, I?m not a woman. That is not the life I want. This starved body, this pretend face full of pretend emotions. Where I wanted wings I have breasts, where I wanted tail feathers I have hips. This is not thin. This is not pretty. This is not good enough. I throw on my own clothes, leaving Jared behind. Even he can?t disguise me now. I am what I want. Like how Adam named the animals, I force myself into existence, wings bursting from my back, talons ripping through my feet and scraping the floor in awful, painful scratches. The hallway is blurry and I stumble into the living room, ripping my blankets from my makeshift bed, destroying the nest I pretended could keep me so safe. There?s the window, now, not night, no lights, but daytime, fresh day where I don?t have to hide anymore. A head, two wings, one leg, call me Sparrow. This is it, Mama. I?m going to fly. A head,

two wings, one leg, and a knee, call me Sparrow. This is it, Mama. I?m going to? ?Jena!? Jared?s in the doorway, his backpack straps like a railroad track, and his head the bobbing train, screeching out as it comes to a stop. He says my name again, and again, and I wonder over the syllables and how they sound so different when he says them. He is not Adam, naming me at will, forcing my body into converted shapes I cannot master, blinking me in and out of existence when I cannot perform. No, Jared is not naming me, he is calling me, beckoning what already exists. Like there is enough of me to call. I fly, but when I do, it?s at Jared.

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Thinking Like A Mountain Carly Maslowski

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Watching the Salt Spill Stephanie Peter son

Nimbly, so agile? A leap of faith onto the Linoleum tile.

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Contr ibutor s' Notes Kat ie Allen, Junior English major . I hope to one day be a published poet and/ or author. I also would love to be a big time editor someday; Editor-in-chief of National Geographic is my dream job. My heroes include Hillary Clinton, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Leslie Knope. Est er Rose Ar cher , Fir st -Year Biology major . I love being active and having healthy balance in my life so I am a runner for the Gustavus cross-country and track & field teams. Outside of my class and practice schedule, I enjoy spending time outside doing a variety of things like drawing, painting, writing and playing violin. I have a love for creativity which is why I make sure to integrate these leisure activities into my free time. My inspiration primarily comes from my observations of the world around me and my imagination. Lily Benge Br iggs, Senior Ar t Educat ion major . I grew up in the small town of Grantsburg, Wisconsin but I feel more at home with the Minnesota niceness. I enjoy all outdoor activities, especially gardening, hiking, and swimming in very cold lakes. Annie Car lson, Fir st -Year Undecided. I am from Savage, Minnesota. I did competition dance most of my life at a local dance studio and now participate in the Gustavus Dance Company. I enjoy hiking, watching movies, spending time with family and friends, and giving my undivided attention to my cat. Gino Fr aboni, Junior Music and English double-major . Gino is currently studying in Florence, Italy for the semester. At Gustavus he is a Peer Assistant and has sung for both Chapel and Gustavus Choir. In Italy, he is taking cooking classes and trying to learn Italian. He loves to bake and loves really anything that has to do with creating food. Unless he finds an Italian boy and they elope, he will be returning to Gustavus for his senior year. Lizzie Hjelle, Senior English and GWSS double-major . I?m really just your average cat-loving overly-caffeinated feminist who happened to take a photography class. Emma Hunt , Junior English major and Dance minor, spends most of her time breathing, arguing, and complaining. Her cynical, melodramatic thoughts are often transferred into her work.

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SPRING 2017 Laur a Isdahl, Senior English major , began her serious writing career in the fifth grade when she wrote a forty page hand-written story called, ?The Time Machine,? which followed a strangely similar plot to that of Back to the Future, her favorite movie. She has a thirst for a story and a cup of green tea. Her taste in literature has evolved somewhat since the days she thought Twilight was the epitome of classic novels. Now, she spends her time reading books that she was once assigned in high school lit classes. Megan (MJ) Johnson, Senior English and Hist or y double-major . All-star soccer player? Part-time journalist? A taster of fine wine? All of the preceding questions are phrases that I would NOT use to describe who I am. My name is MJ and I go by MJ. I love cats, good conversations, and long walks from College View to Prairie View. Most of my creative expression comes to fruition in artwork, yet I am known to dangerously dabble in poetry. Ben Ker an, Senior English major . The artist formerly known as Barn Crayon. Making lit mags and taking names. Br ady Lass, Senior English major with a minor in Film and Media Studies. I'm ready to explore the possibilities after graduation! I've been a journalist, editor, and data gatherer, and I can't wait to add more to the list! Devin Makey, Fir st -Year Chemist r y major . I grew up in Brainerd, MN with my mom, dad, and sister. My sister graduated from Gustavus last year, so maybe you knew her, but most likely not. I enjoy being outside, listening to just about any kind of music, spending time with family and friends, and playing the trumpet. I don't write; however, I do occasionally take pictures of things. I have also received a blue ribbon in the apple pie division of the Crow Wing County Fair, so as you can see I'm a pretty big deal. Rachael Manser , Junior English major with minors in Spanish and Religion. I enjoy long films that make people uncomfortable and conversations that require brain power. I plan to spend my future exploring the world, eating a lot of muffins, and reading books that cause me to look at reality differently rather than providing an escape from it. Car ly Maslowski, Junior Ar t major , spends an enormous amount of time wishing she were a tree and watching The Great British Bake Off.

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FIRETHORNE Jacque Miller , Junior English major , is usually found writing weird stories and poetry or drawing all over xyr face and any other surface available. Xyr two favorite things are horror and dinosaurs. Xe believes bringing dinosaurs back from extinction should be a top priority and that we should avoid the problems presented in Jurassic Park/ World by making them the size of rabbits. August Moehr ke, Junior English and St udio Ar t double-major . August's content in writing and painting focuses on the hygge found through his travels and the mountains he grew up in. His aim is to evoke a sense of hygge in his audiences through words and images, so they can walk along side him on his journeys. Jar ed Mor ningst ar , Scandanavian St udies major . I don't know that I exist. Well, I do, but I don't know where my borders are. I don't worry about it, really. Emma Myhr e, Sophomor e Communicat ions and Theat er double-major . I hate birds. I am absolutely certain that they have the capacity to take over humankind. Have you looked up the Great Emu War? The Shoebill Bird? Albino peacocks? Google it. You will understand. Anyway, I love creating and appreciating art. I believe that any art (performance, visual, or written) is a way that we connect our humanity together. Artists from bronze casters to Shakespearean actors to children's authors are privileged enough to discover ways to offer that to people. I also enjoy meeting new people, eating corn, and laughing. Will Neuenfeldt , Senior English major . The Premium Gentleman. "I don't know how much time I have left on this earth but I'm gonna get real weird with it."-Frank Reynolds Noah Nguyen, Junior Int er nat ional Management major , is an aspiring creative writer from Hanoi, Vietnam. Her favorite part of writing is making a perfect cup of milk tea to help her through the hours of strenuosity and bringing her work to the Writing Center. Mar ia Noel, Senior English major . A dazzling blend of American hops and Scottish malt. She can be found salivating over this description of one of her favourite craft beers, posted up reading and writing in cherry blossom branches, and ambling around any body of water she can find.

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SPRING 2017 Kit t y O'Connell, Fir st -Year Philosophy major . Hello! My name is Kitty and basically I'm a super shitty person for contributing to climate change and subsequently the suffering of all life on Earth. When I'm not contemplating the my unethical existence, I enjoy going for long, solitary walks, drinking tea, journaling, and practicing yoga. I would like to learn how to paint and want to live a simple, environmentally sustainable life, perhaps in a commune, and certainly by the ocean. Also, hiking the Appalachian Trail has always been on my bucket list :) Peace and love, Kitty Samant ha Or t ega, Junior Japanese St udies major . Just an average student who serves as an average writer. Sophie Panet t i, Senior Hist or y major . Queen of Puns. Andr ew Pet er son, Sophomor e, Undecided. I'm an Iron-Range writer and a dog lover. St ephanie Pet er son, Senior Music Per for mance major , is a clarinetist and bass clarinetist who is best acquainted with modern and contemporary music. She consumes as much music as she does coffee, and plans to spend the rest of her life maintaining this balance. Chi Pham, Sophomor e Biology major . Kirigami ? cutting, goal-kicking, kayak-loving, pho-cooking, piano-playing, formerly the ringleader. Dana Riebe, Senior Dance and Communicat ion St udies double-major . As an artist, I strive to make work that draws upon the "magic" moments of childhood. Working within a concept, I aim to change and abstract work. In order to give my audience the freedom to interpret, the meaning of my paintings are often left to the imagination. Each piece invites the viewer into a different world in which they are free to find their own story. Cait lyn Riese, Junior St udio Ar t major . Hey everyone! I hope to go to grad school for architecture after I graduate. I love playing video games, singing, and petting any and all cats that I see!

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FIRETHORNE Elliot t Robinson, Junior English major . I am a part-time human being, full-time anxious nimbus cloud operating under the disguise of a wannabe writer/ ostrich farmer/ leftie looking for the perfect smudge-free writing utensil. Jor dyn Roemhildt , Sophomor e Biology major , doesn't often find a lot of time to partake in her love of photography. However when she does, she enjoys capturing little moments of life. Emma Schmidt ke, Junior English major , is 21 years old and has an unhealthy obsession with the stationery section of Target. Her hobbies include reading, writing, and wishing she was hanging out with her dog. She has the domestic instincts of a feral cat and has no idea how to do her taxes. She hopes knowledge of both will come with time. Chr is Schneider , Sophomor e Theat r e and Pr e-Ar chit ect ur e major , is a young man from Kansas City, on the Kansas side, whose hobbies include running, sleep deprivation, and browsing dank memes. Mir anda Shaffer , Sophomor e English major . Just a child of Whitman's revolution. Audr ey Shat t uck, Senior Communicat ion St udies major , Film and Media Studies minor. I love taking aesthetically pleasing photogs and videos. Also I'm an avid fan of the TV shows Community and Nikita. *insert peace sign here* Ellen St oll, Sophomor e Music major . Ellen is from Northern Wisconsin. She regrets to inform the rest of the world that they have no idea what cheese truly tastes like. Thomas Sullivan, Sophomor e Mat hemat ics and English double-major . Despite being a "math guy," Thomas Sullivan has an undying love for literature. He particularly enjoys fantasy literature, and is strongly considering pursuing a graduate degree in folklore after graduation. However, that is just one possibility among many, and he looks forward to wherever the future takes him! When he is not occupied with the joys of being a Math/ English double major, Thomas is out being involved in choir or forensics. He does not consider himself a "writer," but he loves the creative challenge it offers and hopes to grow as a storyteller with practice.

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SPRING 2017 Fr ances Wet her all, Fir st -Year Undecided. Some say she is an enigma, others say a legend. Whatever she is, she hasn't been sighted since ten pm last night in the forest. She was wearing that blue scarf she always wears and nothing else. Some say her other form is that of a flying Hot Pocket, but can Hot Pockets really howl like that? Lily Wint er , Sophomor e English Educat ion major , enjoys reading, writing, and playing Settlers of Catan in her free time, and does not condone being a bird.

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