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editor’s letter Fellow friends, readers, and aesthetes, Helicon literary magazine comes to you once again in the fullness of the season, continuing its 31-year tradition of accompanying the flowers as they effloresce on our springtime campus. Our humble magazine showcases Northwestern’s not-so-humble undergraduate student art and literature. Happily, we are able to include videos and music in our online supplement, which you can (and should!) see at www.nuhelicon.com. As always, it is our honor here at Helicon to bring you the very best and most diverse examples of what Northwestern’s creative minds have to offer. Helicon is deeply invested in Northwestern’s artistic culture and we’ve been as busy as bees lately. Since our winter web issue, we’ve contributed to NCDC’s ArtsFest, co-sponsored open mics with Niteskool, co-hosted a write-in with PROMPT, displayed some of our contributors’ art in the Norris Galleria, and hosted our own Open Mic to celebrate our contributors. We’ve also begun our preparations for next year, doing some spring cleaning and stocking up on the great necessities: books, films, and museums. Thus, as I and my peers prepare to leave our great undergraduate alma mater, and as we prepare to release this issue upon the credulous masses, we also call for those who share our interests to join us and carry on our long-lived and widely-heralded tradition! If you would like to know more about being involved or submitting to Helicon, please let us know at nuhelicon@gmail.com. Just one more thing, if I might delay you a little longer, eager reader: some sincere words of thanks, slightly bittersweet as I prepare to leave the roost. John Barton said, “A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.” I am nothing more than the bearer of good things—the true credit goes to Helicon’s executive and editorial staff, who have all put in so much of themselves, and especially our designer, Mackenzie, for her Hermes-like speed and unfailing good humor. Moreover, without the direct financial and emotional support of Nancy Anderson, Director of the Residential College program, Helicon could not exist or prosper as it does today under the direction of Garth Fowler, Assistant Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology, Master of Chapin, and the Strongest Man in the World. So long, fans, it’s been fun! I’d like to leave you with nothing more than one tiny request: read on, read on, read on; and if there’s a little time in there to write, draw, paint, or create something, send it our way. You know where to find us.
Your ever-lovin’ Editor in Chief, MJ Scheer
Editor in Chief MJ Scheer Managing Editor Alina Dunbar Operations Manager Alisha Varma Art Editor: Minna Zhou Staff: Claire Potter Jasmine Jennings Irene Kearney Madeline Amos Prose Editor: Simon Han Staff: Russell Busse George Elkind Francis D’Hondt Corinne White Alex Bergstrom George Stoichev Poetry Editor: Alana Buckbee Staff: Ben Weinstein John Rossiter Jen Curtis Alexandra Zaretsky Matt Zeitlin Ryan Jenkins Chief DesigneR Mackenzie McCluer Faculty Advisor Garth Fowler
about helicon HELICON was the brainchild of three students in Mary Kinzie’s 1979 poetry sequence. Lisa Getter, Christina Calvit, and Michael Steele wanted to provide Northwestern with a regularly published literary magazine that could showcase the artistic work of the student body. Helicon began and still resides in Chapin, the Humanities Residential College, and is funded by the Residential College Program through the Office of the Provost. The first issue appeared in the Spring of 1980, and included contributions from Northwestern faculty including Joseph Epstein and Mary Kinzie. The works published herein are the sole property of the writers and artists who created them. No work may be used without the explicit permission of the author or artist.
art, film, music 6
QuiltQats by Taylor Johannigman
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Age by Shelly Tan
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Untitled by Hallie Liang
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Untitled by Hallie Liang
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Self-Portrait by Angela Wang
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Broken by a Beast by Cathy Gao
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Partial Self-Portrait by Angela Wang
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Time Talks by Shelly Tan
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Untitled by Rachel Koh
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Dropped by Dana Pavisich*
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Changes by Patrick O’Malley*
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Golden by Eric Seligman*
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Catsleeves by Harrison Atkins*
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Untitled by Doug Kaplan
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Gust by Harrison Atkins
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Candid Catch by Taylor Johannigman
*Full versions of these pieces are available at www.nuhelicon.com. **These pieces can be found at www.nuhelicon.com.
poetry 19
7.12.2010 by Karlyn Murphy
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A Young Man Makes a Serious Error in Judgment by Joe Drummond
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Supernova by Jon Ayala
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A Day on a Page by Emily Anderson
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The Covered Meeting by Emily Anderson
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I Killed a Spider by Hayley MacMillen
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Hubble Ultra Deep Field by Jon Ayala
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A. Flanders, by Jon Ayala
prose 20
Face Mountain by Harrison Atkins
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In Situ by Laura Jok*
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Satellite by Tom Hayden
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Piano by Tom Hayden
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The Ghost by Katherine Defliese
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Mangos by Ashley Darnall
QUILTQATS by Taylor Johannigman
UNTITLED by HALLIE LIANG
AGE by SHELLY TAN
UNTITLED by HALLIE LIANG
SELF-PORTRAIT by ANGELA WANG
BROKEN BY A BEAST by CATHY GAO
PARTIAL SELF-PORTRAIT by ANGELA WANG
TIME TALKS by SHELLY TAN
UNTITLED by RACHEL KOH
dropped
a short film by DANA PAVISICH view the full piece at NUHELICON.COM
changes
music for alto sax, violin, and cello by PATRICK O’MALLEY listen to the full piece at NUHELICON.COM
golden music for trumpet by ERIC SELIGMAN
listen to the full piece at NUHELICON.COM
catsleeves
a short film by HARRISON ATKINS view the full piece at NUHELICON.COM
UNTITLED by DOUG KAPLAN
7.12.2010 WE ARE YOUNG AND ALIVE! by KARLYN MURPHY I am watching razor-white ribbons crack the sky. They are far too fast for my photographic memory to snap. They disappear even as my brain begins to focus. I will never capture any of it, because I cannot anticipate this seemingly nonsensical display. But this doesn’t discourage my captivation. I am still trying to translate this array into anything that I can hold. “What are you doing? Are you trying to communicate something? And how many are you?” The sky schisms don’t speak my language and I am not quick-witted enough to learn theirs. I will never know who or how many they are. I will never know whether they play or battle between the clouds. But still I watch, wonder, and feel grateful that they are there, because it means acceleration. Watching and wondering means acceleration. The world screams, “Enough! Enough!” and she rips herself open. She’s blasting my body with monsoon rain and I am laughing with a wild kind of joy. All of India was hazed and restless in the heat, but the earth has cut us open; now our souls are gushing out in words. CARTHARTIC HEALING; WE NEEDED THIS.
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face mountain by HARRISON ATKINS
Professor Haruga said that you wouldn't stop masturbating no matter what she did. How she threatened you with expulsion from our prestigious university but you just ignored her and continued masturbating and laughing. She said it was like a dream. She specifically described it as dreamlike. How the walls of the locker room seemed to cave in and you wouldn't make eye contact with her. She described you as menacing. I'm only telling you this, being so candid with you, because we're cousins and because honestly I still consider you my best friend, even though we don't talk anymore like we used to before everything went to shit. My mother agreed that you have a problem, and I think we ought to get you help somehow. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, which is to say that I hope you don't think that I'm berating you or trying to get the best of you. I believe that all of us have the capacity to be ruled by negative emotional forces and that being a human being and interacting with other people means making a constant decision to keep these forces in check. I'd be interested in talking to you about Face Mountain. Have you heard of it? Not very many people have heard of it, but I can't help but hypothesize that you've heard of it somewhere, that that big brain of yours has contained within its tangled recesses some obscure knowledge of it, or perhaps an inherent awareness of it, a certain understanding of it that you cannot explain, a yearning to seek information about it, or at least a tendency to remember information
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about it that you've heard in passing. Correct me if I'm off base. And I hope it's not inappropriate for us to talk about it here, so close to where you work. The thing about Face Mountain, I hope you can understand, is that it isn't for everybody. There's a certain allure that it has because of its majesty and its divine nature. But it's true that few adventurers have lived through their attempts to climb it, to make it to the summit. Indubitably this is due to the sheer amount, the sheer number, a gross number of treacherous pitfalls and precarious ledges sequestered underneath what seems like your every step, how the air seems to heat up as you get up closer to the top, and how there seems to be, at least according to the dozens of testimonies I've collected, a sort of malicious edge to it, an almost subjective sense the mountain has, like the mountain itself is a sentient being that can monitor and control the trajectories of the brave climbers that attempt to scale it and, exercising what feels like a will of its own, effortlessly kill off the ones it finds unworthy of it, like a person squashing a bug. But the other thing about Face Mountain, and this is the stuff that I don't doubt you've heard about, is the kind of I guess you could say hallucinogenic experiences the people have had who've made it to the top. They say there's nothing like it. That there's no drug experience that could possibly compare to it. I've heard it described and I've done my research about it and supposedly the sort of stuff that happens at the top of Face Mountain is just out of this world, like, just, like, absurd stuff, like, consciousnesses overlapping, multiple timelines type stuff, you know, like, I don't know, like, complete comprehension is a phrase I've heard used. Bill was in a situation where he felt controlled by certain sexual urges that wouldn't let up, that wracked him day and night and he couldn't control them even though he tried, (just really, just really tried, tried) so hard not to let them affect his daily life. But of course they did, as sexual urges are wont to do. There was the occasion when he was spotted in the locker room fulfilling a certain urge by a certain professor. It was embarrassing, and personally very disheartening for Bill as he had specifically taken numerous precautions, various measures to ensure that the locker room was utterly deserted, completely evacuated, like walking all of the rows of lockers and peering around corners, voracious with his verifications, eager to ensure emptiness before, finally, withdrawing his penis with a sort of bizarre, vaudevillian flourish and waggling it about. But Bill had forgotten to examine the ceiling of the locker room. He didn't 21
notice Professor Haruga perched like a harpy until far after he had reached a certain point-of-no-return, until far after he had committed fully to the neuroses of his dark and idiosyncratic sexuality and had allowed himself to sink into an impossibly pleasurable abyss of loathing self-stimulation. He had heard about Face Mountain but had never seriously considered making the climb. He had had dreams about it. There was one dream, a very specific dream, where he found himself floating toward the top of it through low cloud cover, his umbilical cord inexplicably attached and dangling behind him and down all the way to the ground thousands or tens of thousands of feet below him. And how as he continued to rise and float toward the summit of the mountain, he felt tension in the cord and noticed that he was screaming and sweating, that the cord would snap if he progressed any closer to the top. And how terrible the pain was. And how he yearned, in those dreams, for something that he couldn't ever describe, how he couldn't ever stop feeling a feeling like being stuck inside himself and clawing at his insides to release himself from himself. And how always the cord would snap and he would awaken without ever being able to prevent its snapping. Bill lived with Jeanine. They'd had an on-again-off-again relationship that was currently very off. Together they were trapped in the lease of their twobedroom apartment, secluded from the rest of the students at their prestigious university, and for the most part secluded from one another. They stayed in their bedrooms and avoided communication whenever possible. Jeanine never did the dishes. Bill cleaned up after her. She was an actress. Bill had seen her perform and had approached her, demurely, after a show, an evening of short and evocative plays, and had complimented her and somehow or for some reason she had been impressed enough with Bill to allow him to awkwardly court her. And as they became more intimate with one another and revealed more of their vulnerabilities, Jeanine suddenly and conclusively came to the realization that she was incapable and unworthy of being loved by anyone. Unfortunately Jeanine's epiphany occurred after they had moved in together and signed a year-long lease, and these days she sensed that Bill despised her, and presumed that things would be better for him
22 | face mountain
in the long run if she ignored him, and so she did. Because Bill and Jeanine both existed within separate emotional quagmires, and because Bill and Jeanine both experienced said quagmires most acutely whenever they were entombed within the walls of their shared apartment, they spent as much of their time as possible out of the apartment, and because neither of them really viewed the apartment as their HOME, Bill and Jeanine neglected decorating, and upon the consideration of hanging a thing on the wall or placing a rug on the floor, tended to slip into states of profound personal apathy. And so the walls were blank and bare and the apartment was cold and quiet. The most important memory that Bill had of Jeanine was when they went on a sort-of-date at a sushi restaurant and neither of them had ever tried sushi before and thus had no idea what to order. And so they randomly pointed at various dishes on the menu and tried to guess to what sort of dead animals the names of the dishes corresponded, and had ended up just ordering whatever, and being surprised when their dishes were delivered to their table because they honestly couldn't recognize a single one of them. And had, therefore, laughingly evacuated the restaurant, leaving wads of cash on the table, seeking any sort of fast food anything within walking distance, and had found nothing, and had taken a train back toward campus, and kissed for the second time on the train on the way. And Jeanine bit Bill's lip and made a joke about how she was so hungry that she was going to devour him. She had looked him right in the eye and said that. There were nights recently when, falling asleep in his bedroom, Bill would think about Jeanine and get so sad and wonder what if he just went and knocked on the door to her room, what would happen if he just up and did that. But he never did. It was when his relationship with Jeanine was first starting to get kind of whacked out that Bill first discovered that he had a propensity for masturbating in bizarre places. He would pass an alcove or cranny or nook and just know that he had to masturbate there as soon as possible. It felt like playing a game of Monopoly and drawing a card that said GO TO JAIL, except instead it said GO MASTURBATE OVER THERE. He just had to do it. He couldn't even pass Go.
harrison atkins | 23
It was a Friday morning when Bill cut class and caught a train out to Face Mountain and stared up toward the peak of it, obscured by fluffy clouds, and wondered how long it would take to climb it, and then wondered whether he wanted to climb it at all, whether he had it in him to climb it, and why he had even come out here in the first place. The mountain was the most intimidating physical object he had ever seen. It was impossibly tall, extending indefinitely upward, craggy and rocky and sharp and varied in its textures, like parts of it were on a different planet than other parts, and the air around the base of it was warm and humid and thick and smelled vaguely sulfurous, or maybe the smell was something else. There was a little chain-link fence running around the base of it. Bill climbed the fence and was making his way up the initial incline of the mountain before he even really realized what he was doing, kind of half-sprinting before he even realized that he was running, and soon he was arm-over-arm climbingshimmying onto legitimate ledges, cavorting quasi-vertically and with a sort of preternatural simian finesse that must have been borne from some animal part of him, a part long closeted underneath more pertinently evolved layers of his psyche. Bill didn't even really truly actually consciously process the fact that he was climbing Face Mountain until he was already about twenty feet off the ground, and by that time he might as well go the whole way. There was a sort of generalized anxiety. Something about climbing made Bill's stomach hop up into his throat and his eyes bulge out and his heart race. But it was easy to ignore. He found himself drifting in and out of meditative states, his arms and legs carrying out their regular and repetitive tasks without requiring any conscious input. As Bill climbed higher, the floaty feeling intensified and he felt more removed from his body. Soon, he was floating outside himself, drifting along with, watching. Bill thought about the way he was constructed. His elbows and knees. Layers of skin. He found himself hypnotized by his own breathing, falling pleasantly in and out of his own lungs, slipping up through throat and nostrils. He felt liquid. Swimmy. He fell into to a meandering awareness of himself, a kind of disinterested contentment; he would occasionally remember his situation and find himself rooted into motion, progressing up the mountain, looking out of his eyes like defogging a windshield and realizing, each time, that he was higher 24 | face mountain
up and higher up and higher up until, at some point, a presence like a sifting blanket, a passing and warm wetness and a fog. Bill was miles in the air. He came to clouds and plunged upward and into them. Inside the fluff was fog and nothing. He palmed rock and made hands at crag and continued, continued. A dim thought surfaced like a ghost. Something about altitude. Oxygen and high up. But continued. Then became a real and physical hotness that cut through Bill and rendered him into his own body and aware. A warmth like waking up and he found himself in himself. A distant and dim thought magnified and brightened, calling out. Bill thought, suddenly and clearly, what if Face Mountain is volcano? what if at the top is lava pit? what if at the top is eruption? Bill thought about this for a long time. He kept climbing. Until and out of the clouds and so that he could see the top of the mountain. The summit of Face Mountain was a perfectly flat surface that seemed to have been carved from the stone, as if the mountain had long ago come to a peak and the peak had been cleaved off, leaving only this perfect flatness, maybe a few yards in diameter, a round smoothness. Bill felt his way up to the top and pulled his body up and stood at the top of Face Mountain and looked down at the layer of clouds that extended in every direction for as far as he could see, rounded along the contour of the surface of the Earth and pink pink pink pink pink orange orange yellow purple red red in the waning sunlight like a sideways bonfire, and he couldn't even believe how pretty it was, it was impossible, he couldn't even believe it. There was a sense like needing to be somewhere but not remembering where he needed to go. There was a sense like holding a door closed and not wanting anybody to be able to open it, and not wanting to let go of the door because he knew that it would burst open and reveal a something that he didn't want to look at, didn't want to think about. And then there was a PRESENCE, like a GHOST of SOMETHING with him on the summit of Face Mountain. Jeanine was there. She was standing in his bedroom.
harrison atkins | 25
SUDDENLY Bill's mind went WAKE UP and he became AWARE. The epiphany was like spending an eternity underwater and then everything gets dried up and he was standing there, naked on the top of Face Mountain because he had taken off his jacket and his shirt and his shoes and his socks and his pants and thrown them off of it, listened to them as they billowed out and fell down, whistling, eternally falling, destined to perpetually fall. The IDEA was to be ALONE up here and nude now on Face Mountain, the tallest point in the whole world and the most alone point in the universe, everything converging on it, intersecting where he stood at this singular place and nothing now between HIM and IT, this PRESENCE, this GHOST of whatever he hadn't been looking at. Bill let the ghost in. Bill let go of the door and felt it all fall out of him. The presence of something floated into Bill's soul, and Bill let it in and felt it enter, felt it fly in through the open doorway and become a part of him and there was suddenly within Bill a true yearning and need like nothing he had ever felt. The desire was there and it said GO TO JAIL. And now Bill was vaudeville and waggling and withdrawing deep from the summit of the mountain and into darkest depths of himself, one with and watching himself, but now without and having lost himself in himself, ethereally emptied of himself and flying outward, outside, out and back and into the ether.
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a young man makes a serious error in judgment by JOE DRUMMOND
-Review session is tomorrow at 11. Only a week until the test. -A young man makes a serious error in judgment. Consequently, he projects liquid vomit (assume continuous density) out from his body through the air. -Area of vomit puddle dependent on mass & viscosity of vomit and gravitational constant. (look this up, why does blood splatter?) -Number of flies hatched dependent on the area of vomit pool (f of x and y) and time derivative (get a calc book) -What good is all this information to the young man's friends who have to clean his puke up? -Do they deduct points off the test for smart-ass answers?
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supernova by JON AYALA 1. Palm the roundest star you can reach and bring it back down while your mother tells you the story of your birth, armor you need to reflect against the moon. Wash the star beneath a metal spigot and let the icy current slick its surface. She tells you to be proud of the star you’ve picked. It is not the fattest, nor the sweetest, but it is fine. She is not a bad mother. You have stayed away from the panicky feeling you get at home that makes you think you are like everyone else you grew up with, only waking in a different bed. 2. Slice the star in halves, in eighths, in pieces so small you can snort them and have the bits live in you forever. It must have been ten, twelve, thirteen million degrees the night you were born, your mother says. Drop the bits into an empty Mason jar and pour formaldehyde over them, like milk over berries. She reminds you of the elements that swim in your blood and this confounds you and you feel the metals of your body hardening like a shell.
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3. Close the lid. Infinity runs through your veins, you hear, and distant explosions have made life possible for you and for the first time you are grateful for everything that has been given to you because you realize just how much that actually is. And your mother remains humble, cleaning the sides of the jar where formaldehyde has spilled. Watch how the stars begin to smoke. 4. Watch the bits crackle as they thud against the lid until they penetrate the seal. The sulfuric gas of luminous Venus fills the kitchen as the star bits take the moment to escape back to the sky and you cry for them to take you with them. You will look down at your feet and see that everything is stardust and you will look out at your mother and the Sun and see that you, too, are them.
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in situ by LAURA JOK
In the November that she turned fifty, Claudia Herrick, mother of two and retired nurse anesthetist, underwent surgery to remove a small Stage 0 cancerous tumor from her colon and decided that she would host Thanksgiving. Her parents, she told her brother on the phone, were getting too old to do it, and all the cooking and shopping was a burden on their mother, who had a bad knee. Carcinoma in situ was hardly even cancer. She was recovering well. Her prognosis was good. There was a good chance that the cancer wouldn’t even return. Claudia felt good, great, perfect; and yes, she was sure this was a good idea. She purchased both a turkey and a honey ham, blended pumpkin pie filling to the perfect consistency, and enlisted her teenaged daughter to remove the fallen needles from the cotton skirt of “snow” around the newly acquired Christmas tree. The tree had been Claudia’s husband’s idea. It was early, but James wanted to select and decorate the tree as a family when their son Ethan, a college freshman, would be home. If they waited for when Ethan returned for winter break, all of the good Douglas-firs would be picked over. Claudia hated real trees. She arranged her own artificial one in the dining room and decorated it with Swarovski Crystal collectible ornaments, a new one of which was released every year. In the four garbage bags of laundry he had brought with him, Ethan had neglected to pack a single pair of nice slacks. Claudia’s frantic spelunking
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expedition in his closet, on Thanksgiving morning, turned up only the spring clothes he had left behind: khaki shorts and a kelly-green striped golf shirt that would no longer fit him, but even if shorts had been appropriate, the khakis sported a large slash across the right hip pocket. Most of Ethan’s pants were like this. His right pocket was where his cell phone, and thus his hand, always resided. Meanwhile, the cat puked twice, and all of the spoons from the nice silverware set went mysteriously missing. Claudia had no recourse but to force Ethan into his father’s clothes, from dress shoes to belt to tie, all of which Ethan had also forgotten. The fit was passable, if imperfect. Although Ethan was stouter than his father, James was broader across the shoulders, so while Ethan’s neck and shoulders were shrouded in a cowl of excess material, Claudia could discern at a casual glance where his belly button was. Claudia would have fretted over this, but it was exactly the kind of avoidable stress that the oncologist had advised her to eliminate from her life. Ellie laughed when she came into the kitchen and saw her brother. “You know what you look like?” she said. “What are those things called? Those stand-up cardboard people at touristy places with a hole you can stick your head through and take pictures? That’s what you look like, Ethan. Dad’s body, your head. You know?” The more extroverted Ethan could withstand the holiday’s chaos casually, but it overwhelmed Ellie until she was wound-up and giggling at everything. Claudia was glad to hear her laugh though. After she was diagnosed, Claudia had found an online article about colon cancer and holistic healing entitled, “Understanding Your Tumor,” and shared it with Ellie, thinking it was just the kind of thing that her daughter would find funny: To understand your tumor, it helps to think like one. You open your eyes and find yourself in a fleshy tunnel (a colon) and the only thing you know is this: You must dig out of that tunnel. Escape. Spread. That's what you were born to do, and that's what you'll try to do until someone stops you. Instead of laughing, Ellie had perched on the other side of the computer desk, hugged her elbows, and tucked her lowered head against one shoulder, her feet dangling. This has been an excerpt of Laura Jok’s “In Situ.” Find the rest at www.nuhelicon.com. 31
satellite by TOM HAYDEN No point in leaving any kind of record of my existence up here. It would never be found by anyone. They’re all gone. Every day I scan the sandy meadows and barren forests. The ash clouds obscure my view sometimes but they always pass to reveal nothing new. The land is as lifeless as it was before, nothing moving, nothing shaking. The cities are empty, the streets strewn with blackened shapes that might have been bodies or shadows burned into the concrete. I can’t tell the difference anymore. I’m circling a thousand kilometers above the Earth and watching it slowly die. The radio static crackles and slowly comes into a signal, the station playing the last few moments of some song. I punch in the coordinates to find Charlie. Charlie is awake. He’s up early. The candles aren’t lit. Maybe the wife is sleeping. They alone are the only ones alive down there. The others, the few survivors, I saw stumble around crumbling city streets aching and dying. Charlie and his wife are healthy. I’ve been watching them, the last remnants of humanity. I see them for ten minutes every 105 minutes. Two months ago there was one brilliant light and a tiny cloud in Los Angeles. Another light over Seattle. China lit up too, then Europe and Russia, and I saw long smoke trails spin a web across the skies, crossing oceans in sulfuric arcs. The whole world was peppered with the most brilliant light and the radio went silent. I saw the other satellites fall and burn up in the atmosphere, but I was too high up. Houston was wiped out entirely. The clouds of dust lingered over the surface of the Earth and I was far above Texas, watching the pretty lights make the world go dark. I was in geosynchronous orbit high above the other satellites and the Earth itself. For a few weeks I trawled the radio channels trying to find another voice. When no one responded I lowered the satellite’s altitude and began scanning the 32
Earth with the weather imaging apparatus as I spun around it. It was destroyed. No more green, no more civilization. Every so often I would find a lone survivor struggling to stay alive. I would mark their location and revisit on every orbit. On every pass they’d move less and less. I would watch them retch and fall over. They were in Poland, in England, in Missouri. They all died within days while I watched their last moments from a tin can far above. Except Charlie. It’s been two months since the catastrophe and he’s the only one still here. He’s chopping wood in the grey dawn while his wife sleeps. I watch him swing the axe and split the wood into meager, half-burnt slices. There aren’t many trees in his part of Kansas that haven’t been destroyed by the wildfires. He swings slowly, his thin, sinewy body strained, stopping now and again to add the pieces to the bonfire. He needs to keep it going to combat the encroaching cold of the nuclear winter. He’s tired. My arc passes and I can’t see him anymore. I push away from the screen and float to the supply chamber. I don’t have much left. Two packets of freeze-dried lasagna. A meat slurry. Crackers. Apricot powder and chocolate for dessert. Dwindling water. It isn’t much. I was only supposed to be up here making repairs to the imaging satellite before returning to the International Space Station. I only had enough for the two weeks I would have been here if the world hadn’t blown up. I stretched it out over two months. I know I’m going to die up here. I wish I’d died with the lower satellites as the pressure from the bombs sucked them in from their low-Earth orbits and burned them alive. Shortly after the bombs fell, I searched frantically. I had too much hope. Maybe one of them could have a radio. Maybe they would hear me. I could tell them it’s all right, that they could live if they struggled just enough. I didn’t sleep. Every minute I was awake I hardly ate or did anything except search the ground as I passed over the charred landscape. The massive craters, the melted buildings, the long stretches of burning trees. Something had to have someone in it. Someone I could talk to, who could get me down. How stupid I was. I scanned my hometown. It was gone. I saw animals for a few days before the dead forests were littered with their bodies. I only hope now that Charlie survives and spreads our humanity. And so I watch him. I push over to the window and watch the sun disappear behind the ravaged Earth. The radio spouts static again. In a half hour it will play country music. One station survived somewhere in Mexico. It plays a list of songs on repeat, left behind by some DJ who died while the bombs lit the horizon ablaze. I don’t 33
know how it’s still running. I suspect the power plant will collapse soon, but until then I use the station to remind me when I’m about to pass Charlie. The radio clicks on and I hear the singer croon some words about a hard rain falling and I turn myself towards the console to look for Charlie. There he is. He’s digging. Maybe he’s looking for groundwater. He has a bottle by him. Is it for the water? Is it whiskey? I guess it’s due time for celebration, Charlie. Two months, you’ve only got a lifetime to go. He digs for ten minutes straight while I watch him. I wonder how long he’s been at it. Groundwater’s pretty deep, Charlie. It’ll take a while. I pass out of orbit and return to watching the world out the window. From afar it looks like it’s just sleeping. Dormant, peaceful, not at all in its death throes. It twists around the sun in docile silence. I watched a Russian girl die in the radioactive snow. I returned to her, to see her body, the last person I thought I’d ever see. Her skin was pure white. Any blood she had left was frozen in rivulets down her neck and chest. After a few days, her weakened bones broke in the harsh wind and stuck out like jagged white pins in the snow. I kept coming back. She withered slowly into the scarred Earth. Eventually she blended in, and I couldn’t even see her outline anymore. She became the snow. I imagined her eyes facing the sky and seeing only the infinite nothing between us. I didn’t find Charlie until a few days later. Between them I’d thought it was over. All life on Earth was condensed into some unlucky chump on an imaging satellite, doomed to endlessly circle what he left behind. I spent those days poring over the Earth but not seeing anything. The computer screen hummed softly, dim light pouring into my eyes. Bodies and death. It was all so distant, some pixels flashing on a screen. If I watched the screen I’d have to believe that the world could end that way, frozen eyes staring up at the muted sky. I don’t know why I kept searching. I could crack one of these windows and die in a few minutes. I could float outside, end everything and let the world languish without me. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I found the Russian girl once, I’d find another. I told myself I’d look for one day before opening that window. I did the same the next day, and the next. I kept saying there has to be something, there has to. I knew I still had supplies. I could still look. It seemed like I’d be happier if I had someone to root for. If I could make sure the Earth was safe, that it would still go on without me. I could die and leave behind a future. Somehow the fallout has missed Charlie’s home. Maybe it’s because he’s in Kansas, away from the big cities. Maybe the volatile wind has pushed the ash 34 | satellite
mostly around his house. I can only guess how he’s still walking. It’s dreary out. The skies are grey, the trees are dead and little sun gets in, but he is unaffected by radiation as far as I can see. I look forward to seeing him every two hours. When I can see him. Sometimes the clouds are too thick for the weather imaging and I can only see faint heat signatures. Rarely is it completely clear. I’m coming around him again. The radio is spouting something about a Duchess, holding up a candle. I don’t like this song. I spin myself and float to the computer terminal. Anne is awake and watching Charlie now, sitting on the chopping stump with her head in her hands. I wonder what he’s doing. Plywood. Building something? It looks like he has a saw. A box. A chest, maybe. He’s prepping for the cold I think. Everything’s going to get colder. It was summer two months ago and it was cold then, Charlie. Maybe he found insulation on a trip while I was around the bend. I’ll find out next time. 105 minutes. Time in a satellite is nonexistent. The sun encompasses the Earth, no morning, no night. It rises and sets at the same moment for me. Night is when I fold into a suspended cocoon and stay there until I can’t. I don’t have much to do besides wait for Charlie and sleep. I used to have protocols. Before the bombs my schedule was planned. I checked temperatures and equipment status. I read gauges. I got 2.5 hours of exercise so my bones didn’t dull. I ate a calcium-rich diet of liquids in tubes. I would analyze images and calibrate the camera. If I didn’t know what to do, Houston would tell me. That’s all pointless now. It’s all Charlie now. For a while I had pictures. My family. My friends on the crew. My girlfriend. They were in my wallet. I looked at them and wept because I loved them and they are gone. Them and everyone I’d ever known. Those people on Earth, I loved them all. They didn’t deserve this. They were innocent, they played and breathed and laughed and grew together in love. Those pictures I had, they were all I could look at besides the console. Happy faces framed in the cold sunlight of my window. I couldn’t take their smiles. Not after the fires I saw. Not after the Russian girl. One day I put the pictures in the airlock and let them tumble into space. A person would decompress. Get the Bends. Burn up in the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Their tongue would boil and they would suffocate to death. But the pictures just floated gracefully away, smiling still, and I never saw them again. I don’t know why I expected something different. I decide to occupy my next hour by spinning in place. With my eyes closed it feels like what space should feel like. Graceful and infinite. I know I’m tom hayden | 35
going to spin forever unless I stop. I know it’s uncomfortable. Nauseating, even. I might hit my head and split it open, gushing smooth weightless jets of blood all over the useless satellite. But I spin anyway. And I wait. Charlie would like this. The radio plays a song about a boy named Sue and I’m back at the console to await Charlie. He’s sitting on the stump. He has the bottle. Is he drunk? You can’t drink, Charlie, I was kidding. There’s always wood to be found or supplies to be gathered. The fire is dwindling, Charlie, you need to cut the wood. You need to stoke the fire, Charlie, you need to live. You’re the hope for the next eon of human existence. It’s only you. Anne is on the ground laying on a blue blanket. She’s shivering. No, she’s shuddering. Crying. Charlie, what have you done? The scene continues for the full ten minutes, Anne crying and Charlie taking occasional swigs from his bottle. I don’t know what he could have said. I understand, though. These times are stressful for him, I’m sure. Living is not a privilege, but a chore for them. I’m going to revolve around the Earth in my tomb forever while they have to repopulate. It’s stressful. I saw a rat king on the subway once, back before I’d even become an astronaut. It was a writhing mass of tails and mangy fur. It was beautiful, both dead and alive, some parts rotting and others, legs and spines, wriggling, desperate to be free. They moved as one, without any direction, rolling and clawing in their futility. Charlie and I, we are connected. We roll together towards our bleak future. I might die but he will live on while I circle for eternity, connected only by the tail we shared once. To pass the time I search the ocean for boats. They remind me of myself. I used to love fishing. Maybe there’s someone out there spending his last remaining days scooping up the dead fish. The ocean’s likely completely irradiated. No, there can’t be anyone. But the boats float on, alone in the water, surrounded by floating fish carcasses that make the ocean swirl in a strange chunky grey. 105 minutes pass. Just banjo and some screeching old bluegrass this time. Charlie is around the corner. I check the screen. They’re still outside. Charlie has another blanket. He’s putting it over Anne. Charlie is patting her on the back. Anne lies on her side and curls up in the blanket. Charlie looks up into the sky with his hands behind his head. For a brief second I swear he catches a glimpse of me. He must know I’m watching him. Maybe he’s looking for the stars, waiting for the thin clouds to give him a break and just let him see those 36 | satellite
stars completely. Maybe he needs a break. He can’t have a break. He sighs. I can’t see his face in much detail but I can feel the sadness. This is a miserable world you live on, Charlie. I have maybe a week left at best, and then I’ll starve. I think about how easy it might have been to just open up the airlock and toss myself out like those photos. In two minutes I’d be dead. Just another satellite circling the Earth, my expression frozen in place like those photos. It would be too easy. I want to see the Earth move on. When I run out of food, in the time between starvation and death, I’ll still have Charlie to see on my screen. I’ll count the hours I spend hungry, waiting for him. I’ll see him prosper, growing crops and fixing the planet. He’s the new god of this world and I’m watching him build it again. I remember when I first found Charlie a few weeks ago. I was scanning the striations of the tundra that Kansas became. Violent winds kicked up the snow and drew patterns of vast lines across the land. I almost didn’t notice him. He was lying on the ground, taking a rest. I thought he was dead. I watched the thin lines stretch out around him, another pile of bones dotting the freezing Earth. Then he stood up. I couldn’t believe it. He moved. He was skinning a scorched carcass he must have found. Cutting up the dead animal, using it to push onwards. I felt hope again. He became my friend. I named him. His wife, too. Anne. He was a genius, Charlie the genius, leading the world to its bright and peaceful future. I decide to sleep in my blanket cocoon. I’ve been floating for so long it almost feels like a real bed. I remember my bed at my apartment. I remember my girlfriend in my arms on a sunny Saturday morning. The room is lit yellow by the sunrise. The ocean swells outside my window and I hear the waves churning and her heart beating and I close my eyes, it’s summer and we’re in love and I’m going into space and nothing can stop me. The only respite I get up here is to sleep and to dream that I’m somewhere else and the world is still whole and life is wonderful, the skies vivid and clear. I’m fishing in my dreams sometimes. I’m happy. I’m awoken by the radio telling me I’m a poor wayfaring stranger. It’s right. I need to find Charlie. I pull myself out of the cocoon and hurl myself towards the console. Anne is still splayed out on the blankets. She must be sleeping. Where is Charlie? Charlie? Here he is. He’s kneeling by the house with a rifle in one hand and a rifle in the other. You’ll wake her up if you shoot that thing, Charlie. There’s nothing to shoot anyway. No. Charlie what are you tom hayden | 37
doing? He strokes Anne’s hair, but she doesn’t respond. The blankets around her head are dark, like they’re soaked in something. He drags her into the box and pushes it into the grave. The grave. It was a grave he was digging. A coffin he was building. He takes one deep breath, puts the barrel of the rifle in his mouth, and a mist of blood sprays out as the last breath on Earth is blasted through Charlie’s head in a pink frothy syrup. I slide away from the console. He didn’t even cover her with dirt. I float for a while. They gave up. God damn it, Charlie. You were the last hope. You were it, god damn it. Did she tell you to do that? That’s why she was crying and you were drinking like a fool. You spent your time building those things. A coffin, a grave. This is what you were doing when I was watching you, telling you to live for me and for the world that was vaporized in seconds? You were digging a grave. I’ve been floating here for nothing, for you and for nothing. I pull my legs into my chest and I float. I stay there for hours. Thoughts of the vacant crumbled cities down there and the fact that I have the last beating heart in the whole vast cosmos come and go. The radio clicks on and off, over and over. I have nothing left. It’s night. It might be night. I get into the spacesuit and step into the airlock. I connect the air tube and push myself out into space. It still astonishes me how empty it all is. The world was a dot with a moving living surface in an enormous, mostly empty vacuum. It was filled with giant rocks and burning balls of gas, nebulae and spinning dust, but we had trees and art and lonely country music, that old high lonesome. We were bright blue and green and vibrant. We were everything. I float in the emptiness. I am Charlie. I am the static on the radio. I am the ocean. I am the rat king. I am the last living being suspended on a wire and floating in the great galactic sea and the universe is emptier still.
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a day on a page
by EMILY ANDERSON
An old man at a tiny café table: He waits with iced tea for a late friend. He calls her and she answers from a beach. “My memory,” he says. His skin is yellowed, wrinkled, like a page In a journal whose author is long dead. His clothes are clean, but losing shape with age. As I walk by, I see his schedule scrawled On paper smaller than a slice of bread.
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the covered meeting by EMILY ANDERSON
I see backs of graying heads on benches before me. Above, the ceiling paint cracks into distracting illustrations. The image of my folded hands fades on the backs of my eyelids. I watch aging in a stop-motion film of weeks, see Eyes start large and spend a lifetime closing up. I heard a man speak often, delivering the messages that come to him reliably as daily
mail.
I saw a woman stand trembling against infirmity, mouth open, eyes closed to shield
against eyes seeing herself,
Saw the old dividers permanently propped open, moving parts rigid under blue-gray
paint.
I’ve watched children stream into Meeting from play, the bounce of the toddlers, plod of
adolescents.
I’ve seen faces emerge from baby fat, jaws elongate, noses bridge, figures insist on a
shape in the world.
I’ve seen a little sister grow too large for a lap. I’ve squirmed when the silence was maddening as held breath, when Children point at their wrists, widen their eyes at their mothers, wanting to know how
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long is left.
Silently, the mothers shush. A baby’s hair begins light as the blending edge of an aura, gaining color, gaining
structure, dividing from the air.
A woman guards her heart as if holding a child to her chest. I see a central hub of light into which I’ve thrown worries, doubts, threats like trash into a
bonfire and
Heard answers to questions I had not known to ask. I have seen a woman sit with a smile curved up to the side, closed lips, closed eyes, a
gentle expression of knowing.
Sometimes, a few sweep away tears furtively at Meeting’s rise. Always, there is the weeping cherry through the window, pink blossoms buffeted on the
breeze, green leaves trembling on the breath of day, black branches waving in the
emptiness of air.
Strength stiffens in a sitting woman, as if a man made a staff of her spine and leaned on
her to stand.
Legs remember how to stumble. Absent souls return in a brightening of light. Voices speak; I know them without looking. One sobs behind song. Infants murmur elemental ministry. A man stands, and sits again, wordless. Controversy finds patience. Minds unfasten burdensome memories. We find ourselves in silence particular as meeting in a dream.
Author’s Note: A “Covered Meeting” is a Quaker term for a Meeting for worship that achieves a feeling of being inwardly gathered, all minds united under the presence of the divine spirit.
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piano by TOM HAYDEN
Keyes sat at the piano in his apartment rolling a new cigarette between his fingers. That night was the night of his comeback concert and he had only been able to smoke cigarettes and play a few notes since the Bluebird. His agent was ecstatic about a comeback 20 years in the making, and got him a prime spot at the Riviera, a popular concert hall that all the hot jazz bands of the 60s played at. It had been two months since he’d seen the bored kids at the Bluebird, and Keyes had spent most of his time lighting cigarettes and watching them burn, taking drags and thinking about how he’d show them the importance of music. They were wasting their time, these kids, ignoring the beauty around them to go on dates and look at bright computer screens and tap their toes though they don’t know why. There was so much to hear and feel, and they were only drifting along while Keyes played music for them. He laid his hands on the keys, feeling their weight give way to play clean notes for him. He loved the piano but there was nothing it could do for them. They’d hear about an old jazz guy coming out of retirement. They’d come to the concert in droves. They’d play their dads’ records, they’d invite their girlfriends, they’d sit in the audience and clap and the piano would pass over them. They’d be concerned about their suits, their dates, they’d fiddle with the radio on the ride over and play their loud new age music and be completely unaware that what is important is right in front of them and around them, filling their ears with the beauty they’d been missing. They needed to be completely absorbed in the music, to feel and understand the art and know that it’s for them, it’s always 42
for them. Half an hour before the concert Keyes walked to a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Standing outside, he lit one and stared up in the sky. He wondered what it would be like if all the stars were sucked up suddenly into the darkness of space. All the brightness and grandeur of the night sky, blotted out and gone forever. Who would notice? Who would care? He exhaled a chimney of smoke and settled his eyes on the yellow gas pump. He filled up a 2-gallon canister and ambled on to the theater. He snuck into his dressing room and quickly slipped into the tux he’d rented for the evening. His agent had told him that the show was nearly sold out. Nearly. This is a big moment in his career, he’d been told, the biggest since his last concert in 1968. It could only lead to great things in the future. Keyes thought of it that way too and smiled as he poured the gasoline all over himself, soaking his clothes and slathering his skin in as much of the caustic junk he could possibly hold. Keyes left the dressing room, heading to the stage. On the way he saw his agent at the catering table, holding a bottle of champagne. He smiled and waved, holding the champagne up and looking for a sign of affirmation. Keyes nodded and gave a quick thumbs up. The agent smiled some more, likely dreaming of money signs and gold. He sauntered onto the stage. It was bare, except for his piano which had been brought in that afternoon. The audience was expecting an intimate concert, or at least that was how it was marketed. Though his skin was starting to itch, he still had that instinct about stage presence. His entrance was subtle and captivating, commanding their attention. Hundreds of people lined the audience, dressed like they were at a wedding, mulling about and taking their seats. The men were showing the ladies to their seats on their arms. Keyes went to the microphone. He was a bit early, but the stagehands knew what they were doing and made all the adjustments for sound and lighting. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I’m Franklin Keyes,” he said, addressing them like a king to his subjects, “and I’m here to show you everything beautiful and sublime.” A loud round of applause, with intermittent cheers and whistles, rose up from the crowd. Keyes felt exhilarated again, every muscle twitching, his heart aching to get it all out right there. This was the most important moment in his life. It was the meaning of his life. “Not many people nowadays really know what jazz is or what it’s about. 43
Some can’t even name a song.” The audience chuckled collectively. Keyes hadn’t planned this speech much. He reached for his pack of cigarettes. “Now I’ve got quite a concert lined up for you today, and you won’t forget it. You’ll finally see what’s real in this world, what’s perfect and immutable, and – you all don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” The audience chuckled again, this time with a couple of approving hollers from the back. Keyes pulled a cigarette out and held it in his mouth. He sat down at the piano and felt his fingers up the keys one last time. He stopped at the high A-flat and pressed it into the battered wood. It sounded nice. He thought about “When Sunny Gets Blue”. He could have played a perfect rendition, going on for hours, pouring lilting mournful tenderness from the piano that could have stopped the stars from retreating into the cold black sky. But the audience wouldn’t have known. No one would have known but him. And he had decided that afternoon that the audience would need this night to hold fast in their memories, so they could think back on it forever and know he was there and his death was beautiful. The crowd was beginning to murmur at the pause on that note. Keyes took his finger off the A-flat and lifted the lighter to the cigarette. A flick of the flint and he erupted in flames. In that instant, he watched the crowd. He saw their faces contort from their expressions of careless joy into pure horror and shock. As the flames licked upward, projecting from every inch of his body and burning in a long plume above him, he watched them stand and scramble in their seats. He watched them fill with disgust, framed by fire, averting their eyes. Those who were wide-eyed and could not look away were seeing the truth. Soon the flames were obscuring things, making the stricken faces twist and ripple. He felt the heat and the pain but he smiled because through the flames burning his eyes in the third row he saw a bar he saw a pretty young thing in a yellow dress he knew long ago and he was sure she was ordering a Manhattan. She winked at him and smirked and he felt like he was rolling his fingers along her back playing silent notes on her smooth and perfect skin again and her eyes lit up blue and filled the whole room and wrapped him in the softest gaze until there was only blue and screaming and heat and he felt the chair collapse and his knees drop but he was gone, gone into everything beautiful and sublime of those lost old days in the jazz clubs with the yellow dress right beside him at the beat up piano playing simple lovely melodies and laughing and laughing that they would live forever they would live forever they would live forever.
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I killed a spider by HAYLEY MACMILLEN
Between my thumb and forefinger, carapace collapsed. The crunch was unexpected. It echoes through me still.
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hubble ultra deep field by JON AYALA
Whenever I hear ‘impossible’ I think of Mrs. Loy’s third grade class and the time she said it’s impossible for one person to count to a billion, which I wasn’t sure I believed until I learned that a billion dollars could encircle our planet four times. The universe is almost fourteen billion years old and my professor shows us a picture of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which is twelve billion light years away from the place where some man’s hands are, which is up my shirt, and I feel like meat but let him anyway because being touched like that, here, is very flattering and the instant his icy hands touch my stomach I remember trying to spot my eyes in a photograph of a relative who was long dead.
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Then I think of the Hubble photograph and how the darkest part of the sky can become the deepest humanity has ever looked back. The picture looks unimpressive but it holds the universe as a toddler and the only thing it reminds stupid me of is the patch of park we pass on the way back to his place. The snow, like the patch of Space, is pure and unimpressed by soles and I imagine the possibilities such a thing holds: that the past has never happened and I have the opportunity to mold it, stepping in any direction, marking the snow with only my own steps. The photograph is in me. I’ve consumed it as my history and walk forward to his apartment, half-assured that I will know what to do the days after.
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contributor bios Emily Anderson is a senior Theatre and Creative Writing major. When she tells people that, they say, “Oh, neat!” but their faces say, “I am a little concerned for your future!” Harrison Atkins is interested in evolution. He is a filmmaker and a junior at Northwestern. Jonathan Ayala is a junior English major. Ashley Darnall is a junior who enjoys creative writing, editing, and screenwriting. Her script “Fresh Studios” was chosen as one of six finalists for the 2010-11 Sprite Refreshing Films Script Writer Competition. Katherine Defliese is a senior Creative Writing fiction major from Mercer Island, WA. Joe Drummond is a quiet Classics major. He studies in cow pastures and bars. Cathy "Clover" Gao studies Genetics, Molecular Biology, and Creative Writing. Sometimes she'll post on her photoblog, applevase.com, if she's not too busy playing Starcraft. This publication is the most important thing tom hayden has done in his entire life, up until he dies drunk and worthless, breathless and alone in a motel in South Carolina. Taylor Johannigman is a freshman in WCAS, where she studies (Defense Against the Dark) Art(s) and whatever else strikes her fancy. She spends her free time reading Harry Potter, daydreaming, and indulging her long-held obsession with wolves. Laura Jok is a junior Creative Writing major in Fiction minoring in Linguistics. Once, as a junior in high school, Laura experienced a rare and terrible flash of insight into what she must look like from the outside when a friend's mother accused her of "talking like a character in Jane Austen novel."
Doug Kaplan make music make pictures ♥ Brian Eno Rachel Koh is a senior Anthro major from Sacramento, California. She likes candid photography because it's just a glorified form of creeping. Hallie Liang takes pictures and knows English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Hayley MacMillen is a Philosophy major and aspiring journalist. It's okay, though, she might not have to live in a cardboard box, as she has a lot of econ major friends. Born and breed in the fabulous Chi-city, Karlyn Murphy transfers from the murderous Houston heat at Rice to the moderate midwest seasons at Northwestern. She wants to put in a plug for her rockin’ ultimate frisbee team, Gung Ho, that has welcomed her to the campus. Karlyn tries to say ‘yes’ more than she says ‘no’, and while it can get her into some sticky situations, it gives her lots to write about. She is flattered to be chosen for this year’s Helicon publication. Patrick O’Malley is a junior Music Composition major. Dana Pavisich is a junior studying Radio/Television/Film and World Literature. She loves hip hop music equally as much as bikes and often pairs the two together during long rides. ERIC SELIGMAN is an active composer and performer in many different areas. His main projects right now include writing music for films and working on his reggae-rock/hip hop band Fuzzy Moon, in addition to his Trumpet Performance degree. Eric hopes that you enjoy his contribution to Helicon, and sends a ton of thanks to Helicon for such an admirable effort to promote the art that is happening now. After winning an art contest in 2009, Shelly Tan had a day named after her, with June 22nd officially known as "Shelly Tan Day" in Cherry Hill, NJ. Ever since that announcement, Shelly has tried to use her "fame" to get free meals at restaurants. She has yet to succeed. Angela Meiquan Wang prefers things that are not what they seem.
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