Inkstone
autumn 2009
Inkstone
volume 13 issue 1 autumn 2009
Inkstone, the literary magazine of the English Department of Northwestern College, is published twice during the regular school year. Current students are eligible to submit poetry, short stories, personal essays, and two-dimensional artwork. All written entries must be typed in twelve-point, regular-style font. All correspondence should be sent to the following address:
Judith Hougen Department of English Northwestern College 3003 Snelling Ave. N. Saint Paul, MN 55113 651-631-5291 inkstone@nwc.edu
Copyright Š Inkstone 2009 Northwestern College
Inkstone Creative Staff Editors Sophia Madsen Jordan Madson
Associate Editors Caitlin Johnson Rachel Grammer
Advisor Judith Hougen
Graphic Designer Kyle Wyatt
Art Editor Charity Straszheim
Cover Artist Maysa Vang
Creative Writing Contest Inkstone would like to congratulate the winners of the 2008-2009 creative writing competition. All pieces published in the fall and spring issues of Inkstone were eligible for the contest. Winners received gift certificates to Barnes & Noble. The competition was judged by Jaidyn Martin, who graduated from Northwestern College with a degree in English–Writing. Martin later received her MFA at the University of London, Birbeck College, and is featured in the “Fifteen Minutes” section of Inkstone in the spring issue, 2009.
Poetry 1st Place Haley Swope’s “Today an ATM Gave Me a Lung” 2nd Place Maysa Vang’s “After Dinner” 3rd Place Ashley Beck’s “Summer in Myrtle Beach”
Prose 1st Place Caitlin Johnson’s “Diversion” 2nd Place Hannah Eshelman’s “A Childhood of Pots” 3rd Place Sarah Lysaker’s “In Search of Symbol”
Editor’s Note Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. –Oscar Wilde In good literature I find immense beauty in the sounds and arrangements of words. I know that each phrase is specifically crafted, that every word is chosen to compliment those before and after it. I am made aware that ugly circumstances exist, but I also see that beauty can emerge from them. I can empathize with the pain or struggle, but I can also celebrate the joy that follows. This careful construction is, in my opinion, what makes a piece of writing excellent. When I finish reading an excellent piece of writing, I feel older in a way that is different from years. I feel attached to the book and its author and that in some way a secret has been revealed to me. There is a deep, long-lasting connection between art and literature and their audiences. There is a sort of spiritual unveiling for the spectator in the appreciation of their beauty. In this issue of Inkstone, many fellow students have made themselves vulnerable through sharing their talents in art and writing. As a writer, I understand the fear of sharing one’s work, but I am so impressed with the talent I have interacted with as a student and Inkstone staff member. As spectators of this issue’s submissions, we are privileged with an opportunity to seek and resonate with their aesthetics and meanings. Let’s take the time to adequately appreciate every one of them.
Sophia Madsen
Table of Contents Poetry
Firmament................................................................. 1 Brianna Tongen Luke is Sleepwalking................................................ 2 Ashlee Jordan Missing.......................................................................3 Caitlin Johnson Dawn.......................................................................... 4 Kaleigh Walter Southern Israel..........................................................5 Rachel Grammer Driving....................................................................... 6 Tousher Yang White in Rural Uganda........................................... 13 Lacy Barker Bridgett Eir Daniels.................................................14 Michael Daniels When Girls Watch Scary Movies............................. 15 Caitlin Johnson My Life as a Green Tree Air-Freshener...................16 Emily Hoyt I’m Still in Town...................................................... 17 Ashlee Jordan 10th and Burnett...................................................... 24 Charity Straszheim When I was Young.................................................. 26 Cassandra Lund
Virtues of Vaseline.................................................. 27 Brianna Tongen Family Pictures........................................................ 29 Tousher Yang
Fiction
Kismet.........................................................................7 Heidi Lindgren Brothers................................................................... 30 Sophia Madsen
Personal Essay
I’m Not a Mannequin..............................................19 Elyse Coleman
Visual Art
Troubadour................................................................ ii Lydia Russell Untitled (glass, ink, and sheet rock).......................12 Levi Budd Untitled....................................................................18 Jenny Kubat Untitled (spray paint)............................................. 28 Levi Budd How Classically Dull ............................................. 36 Lydia Russell
Contributors' Notes.................................................... 34
Brianna Tongen
Firmament
The firmament has waited to fall apart. It will be in November. Then, when I am scuffling over sleet and concrete, when my fingers are too weak to write, when the sun gasps for air at five-hours-from-noon, I will glance up sharply. Something in our atmosphere has ripped. Only enough to let time slide out and dissolve in the boiling pressure of infinite things. Didn’t I cry out then? Didn’t someone say we are fragile? Far too fragile for something like real space. Especially since my spirit has been crumpled like the ultra-thin papers of ancient writing all crammed into clay; the Qumran cave that waits for a hurtling rock to interpret its insides. If the rock never comes, the sea will.
(but paper is no match for water)
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Ashlee Jordan
Luke is Sleepwalking Who you are When you’re sleeping scares me, The way those posters of cities scare me Because they all look the same, especially at night. New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Who can tell? I’m awake and thinking about the lists That are dangerously left in my head. We need to pick up some eggs, pancake mix, and milk, finish painting the window trimmings, Actually plant all those herbs I bought, And remember to schedule us for the dentist. It’s been a while. Before midnight you start whispering vicious And strange things I hope you don’t mean, Subconsciously. Turning, I prepare myself for someone that isn’t you. But, I can only hold you for so long Before you break free to walk into the darkness And become a child, The night your father, And me crawling out of the warmth Chasing you, bathing you in light, rocking you in my arms. Your beard is rubbing my chest raw While I sing “I’ll Fly Away,” reassuringly, The closest I’ll come to Being a mother.
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Caitlin Johnson
Missing
Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. –Austin O’Malley i’d like to tie kites to my beltloops dive off the nicollet and be carried through partly cloudy skies. i would hurdle chicago, the piedmont mountains, and free-fall into your backyard. i’m losing you. memories are thinning like brushed hair. decay comes quickly between visits. you’ve faded into souvenirs in a suitcase, patches torn from a favorite blanket: naked feet on irish pebbles and rolling over in the wild grass. submerging into cold pacific water lips on mouths of glass soda bottles fingers turning pages of isaac asimov. i want to see you and sew things together but the sky is blue and barren and the kites on the rooftop are limply scattered like confetti, thrown and forgotten.
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Kaleigh Walter
Dawn
The blue grass ran against the deepened sky as the stars began to fade. The darkness stretched like an arc above me, holding the earth together, an intricate spider web, like black lace. Each stitch deliberate. The cotton stuck to my skin, soaked with the damp earth from the hours I’d spent counting the stars. Steadily, the sky dimmed like a flickering flame seconds before the wick disappeared beneath the waxy pool. And the freckles of light were lost like old pennies forgotten in the pockets of washed jeans. I stood, leaving my mold in the grass, as my shadow followed me, rippling over a shape on the hill— a tree, growing so slowly it was impossible to see.
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Rachel Grammer
Southern Israel The wind spits sand and limestone skin. Horizon lines—dehydrated earth, colorless brown punctuated by aluminum shacks, goats, upturned, outstretched hands— wilderness. It’s common, the tour guides say. “One shekel?” Just ignore them. Ignore the boy with dust shoes caked on bare soles, dirt creased in lines on his palms. Ignore the girl with ash streaks, unkempt ponytail wisps, fingers stripped of fullness. Listen. I hear the mirrors in their eyes of brethren—olive-skinned children kneeling, bowing to aching music as it compels from winding minarets, riding bareback on donkeys, camels, savoring light between limestone hills, clinging to the drench of dawn, farming the dust.
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Tousher Yang
Driving
The sky above me hides in the thin clouds that filtered it gloomy. Stars vacant, they have escaped that murky blanket. A blobbed yellow replaced the moon like a smeared thumb print against a sandy plane of sky. My thumbprint, actually. Reaching from the steering wheel, through the wind-filmed window of the moon roof. Highway 61. North. Keller Lake puddled in my driver-side mirror. Everything extracting from me, avoiding me. The A/C breathed past my ten and two hands and the thick August humidity lingered still. A week. Maybe two. I forget. I drove in a trance, like the bugs of summer. Lights telling me what to do. Green from afar, yellow floats above me, red staring behind me. A slim shine of light stretched and imprinted me. A transferred glow. The moon is always alone.
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Heidi Lindgren
Kismet
I ran across Atatürk Boulevard, dodged an oncoming dolmus whose driver only sped up at the sight of us pedestrians, and reached the other side safely, out of breath, just in time to be sprayed by the green double-decker bus that slid through the growing river of rain flowing down the side of the street. The polluted water crept up the bottom of my pants, and my socks were soaked, my feet cold. Since when does Ankara get this much rain in July? I pulled my wet hair from my eyes and glanced up and down the flooded street, not knowing which way to go next. The crowds of people who usually walked the sidewalks of Kizilay had swarmed into the small department stores and çay hane’s that lined Atatürk Boulevard and were waiting for the downpour to pass. On any other day I would have scampered for shelter along with the rest of them, but today I didn’t care. I walked on, aimless, no umbrella to hide me from the sky. A taxi pulled out of rush-hour traffic to the side of the road and drove slowly alongside me, so close I could hear Hande belting out her latest single on the radio inside. The driver honked the horn and motioned for me to get inside the dry cab. I laughed. Tempting, but I had only four lira crumpled up in my wet pocket, and where could he take me, anyway? Nowhere. I walked on, my mother’s worried voice playing in the back of my mind as I imagined what I would face when I went home. “Where were you? Why did you leave without telling us? Why are you so wet?” There would be so much explaining to do. For now, I walked on carelessly, trying to forget about my angry parents at home. I breathed in the rainscented air and soaked up the rain like the freedom that was not mine to enjoy. Empty hopes that had fogged up my vision of the future for so long were finally clearing away now, just like the blanket of smog that hung over Ankara would be washed away by this rain. I welcomed the rain, the clouds, the gray. I’m seeing clearly now. The first time I failed the ÖSS, my mother tried to comfort me with her quiet words. Only a minority of students get to go to university, she told me, and maybe Allah’s fate for my life did not include passing the university entrance exam. “Her sey bir hayırdır,” she said— there is good in every situation. Easy to say, impossible to believe, especially after I wasted one year of my life preparing for this test. All the cramming, the nights with no sleep, the endless hours in class—for nothing? I begged my parents to give me another chance, and after much discussion and arguing, my father agreed to pay for another year of dershane so that I could retake the test a year later. This would be the last time, he assured me, and I knew it was the truth. We didn’t have the money. On June fourteenth, a year later, I was ready to pass the test,
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ready to close the textbooks, close this chapter of my life and move on. Nothing could keep me here another year. My reflection walked beside me in the store windows, and when I looked over I almost didn’t recognize myself. The rain had dyed my hair a darker color and sent mascara streaming down my face, like forged tears on a day that called for them. Today had been a rerun of that day one year ago when I first checked my scores online, only today it was raining, and today there would be no second chances. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and decided it was time to go home. The 413 bus was packed with people on their way home from work, some of them dry, holding dripping umbrellas, and others looking almost as disheveled as I. The thirty-minute ride seemed to take forever as I stood there in my wet clothes, clinging to the pole above my head, trying to keep my balance on the swerving bus so that I wouldn’t fall into anyone standing around me. When we finally reached Aydın Sokak, I barely squeezed my way to the door in time to jump off. I took the short route home, cutting through Barbaros Park, where a few middle school boys, who had been kicking a deflated soccer ball around in the mud, stopped and stared as I walked by. My clothes were still wet, I had mud splattered up my left pant leg, and my curly hair, which had started its drying process on the bus, was a frizzy mess. Inside our apartment building, I flipped the light switch, and nothing happened. Electricity off again? I climbed the four flights of stairs to our apartment in the dark and blindly felt the wall for our doorbell. Its obnoxious Für Elise melody resounded in the hollow building, filling the halls with its phony music. Seconds later the door opened, and my father stood there, blocking the entrance. My mother stood behind him, silent. I could still see traces of worry on her face, and I almost regretted not calling earlier. Her head was covered; I must have interrupted her prayers. “Allah Kahretsin,” my father swore when he saw me. “Gir içeriye,” he muttered, and I obeyed, stepping onto the dry carpet inside after slipping off my wet shoes at the door. I was standing right in front of him now, waiting for the eruption, so close I could smell the tea and cigarette smoke on his breath. He was breathing heavily in his anger. “Where have you been?” he barked, his voice echoing off our empty walls. “You know better than to leave without permission, running off like that without telling us where you are.” “I’m sorry,” I lied. “I was in Kizilay.” I studied the pattern in the carpet beneath my feet, feeling his eyes on me. It felt strange, having him look at me. On any other day I was just another body in the kitchen, another person to serve him his çay as he watched the evening news. He was more like an angry boss than a father. The expectations were clear—I was to do 8
only what he told me to do, and I was to go only where he knew he could find me. He turned to my mother, and for the first time she spoke up. The worry was gone from her face now, and her voice was shrill. “Kayra, what is wrong with you? Do you know how many people we’ve called, trying to find you?” She waited for me to reply, but when I didn’t, she continued, “Did you check your scores? Answer me, Kayra, did you pass?” “I didn’t pass,” I whispered, and looked up to see their faces. Saying the words did not make me feel any better, and my own disappointment was magnified in their eyes. A strange silence fell down on us, and suddenly I felt very uncomfortable in my wet clothes. My face was hot. Say something, anything. The silence was unbearable; I left them in it and breathed only after I had softly shut my bedroom door behind me. At seven-thirty I was dragged out of my room by the ringing doorbell and my mother’s voice in the kitchen. “Misafir!” Guests. At the door stood my Dilek Teyze and Mehmet Amca, and Aylin, my cousin. With her dark curly hair and smiling brown eyes, Aylin looked a lot like me, and people usually assumed we were sisters. But tonight when I greeted and kissed her at the door, I could tell there was life in her eyes and in her smile that was not reflected in mine. She passed. I turned away from her questioning look and busied myself with trying to find a pair of slippers for each of them. The adults sat down in the salon, but Aylin followed me to the kitchen, where I started the water boiling for tea. We stood there in silence, watching the blue flames flicker on the gas stove. She finally spoke. “I’m applying to Gazi University in Izmir.” “Really?” I asked, trying to be excited for her. “That’s what you always wanted.” That’s what I always wanted. I pulled the tea glasses out of the cupboard and arranged them perfectly on the tray, to escape her eyes. “Kayra? Are you going to be OK?” She was staring into me. “Yeah.” I didn’t trust the lump in my throat, and even if she wasn’t convinced, Aylin left it at that. That evening I kept myself busy filling plates and tea glasses, running back and forth between the salon and the kitchen, feeling my family’s unspoken words hanging in the air. They didn’t know how to talk to me. I was relieved when Mehmet Amca swallowed his final glass of tea and announced that it was time for them to leave. I lay awake in bed long after they left, staring at the ceiling, trying to fix my mind on anything but the future. The couple next door was arguing again, and their angry words drifted into my quiet room, unfiltered by the thin walls between us. Normally I could fall 9
asleep to the sound of their voices, but tonight something felt different. I crawled out of bed and put my ear against the cold wall to listen. He was yelling at her now, so loud that I wondered if everyone in the building could hear. She answered only in sobs—sobs that shook me almost as if they were my own. I listened intently as if something were at stake, as if I were listening in on some future episode of my own life. I knew I would see her the next day and everything would be fine, her wounds covered up with a smile and a headscarf. Back in bed, I grabbed my mp3 player and put the music in my ears to drown out the noise, but it was too late. My tears were the dreams, leaking out of me. Kısmet. I mouthed the word and fell into an unhappy sleep. Six weeks later I was hurrying through the ASTI bus terminal, rolling Aylin’s suitcase behind me, trying to keep up with my mother, who was weaving her way through the masses of people coming and going from other cities in Turkey. Aylin’s bus left for Izmir at two, and we were running late. Around us ticket salesmen were shouting out names of cities, trying to lure travelers into buying tickets at their booths. “Ekisehir! Istanbul! Antalya! Bursa!” Their voices seemed to mock those of us staying behind. One of these men stepped in front of me and asked me where I was going and whether I had bought my ticket yet. He had the best deal for me, he assured me. The man was shorter than I and balding, and held a cigarette in his hand even though “no smoking” signs hung all over the terminal. I ignored him and walked on, scared to lose sight of my mother who was now far ahead of me. The bus station came to life around me—the hum of suitcase wheels, the clicking of hurried high heels on the platform floor, the voices of anxious mothers trying to keep track of their scared children in the mob. One nervous man sprinted through the crowd, clutching his ticket in his hand, paranoid of being left. Families and friends all around me were embracing, crying tears of reunion or goodbyes, I couldn’t always tell. I felt lost in the excitement, out of place, as if I had suddenly landed myself in the midst of a great production in which I had no part. We arrived at Gate 23B, and the bus was there waiting for us—for her. Aylin and I loaded her heavy bags into the bottom of the bus and then climbed onboard to find her seat. 18A. Window seat. She forced her backpack into the small compartment above and then plopped down on the cushioned seat. “You’ll have a great view of the sea when you get to Izmir,” I offered, to break the silence. “Yeah.” She stared out the window, and I could tell she was imagining the endless Mediterranean blue stretched across the horizon. Here I was, handing her my dream, my 10
future. Had it been too much for me to ask for? To be free from my over-bearing father, to leave this suffocating city, to get the education I dreamed of? Kısmet, my mother would tell me. Fate. The word belonged to her, and she used it to explain everything—her arranged marriage with my father, the accident that took her brother’s life, the daily drudgery of dishes and housework—it was all Kısmet to her. Allah’s fate for her life. Maybe one day I would learn to accept His fate for my life. The driver had taken his seat on the bus now and was starting up the engine. “I should probably go,” I told my cousin, and she stood, with tears in her eyes. Our goodbye was only a formality—we had already parted ways weeks before. She promised to study hard and to tell me about everything when she came home for Ramazan. I was the last person to step off the bus before it pulled out of the terminal. I found my place beside my mother, and there we stood, along with the rest of the people left behind, waving at our loved ones who waved back through the dark windows of the bus. My eyes followed the bus down the ramp, past the parking lot, past the line of taxis on the side of the road. I didn’t look away until the bus disappeared into the sea of traffic in the distance. I followed my aunt and my mother back inside the station, through the crowds of people, past the men shouting out names of cities I would never see. None of them stopped me this time because without Aylin’s suitcase I no longer belonged. The station was still crowded with people bustling around, some trying to find their gates, others looking for relatives. I was looking for nothing. I left the station’s excitement behind and followed my mother down the escalator, through the dark underpass, to the underground Metro station where the subway would take us back to our lives.
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Lacy Barker
White in Rural Uganda Being white never really mattered until I’m sifting rice next to women in a village called Kadama, a place white people don’t go. Men rush to bow in red dirt circling around my toes, children jump and beg for a picture as I take a camera from my backpack. Send us photos, send us money, send us emails, the women plead, wrinkles like canyons carving foreheads. I’m a marbled goddess regal beside an altar and my hands are like the wicker baskets in the hut they call a church, or maybe like the sky they are waiting on to rain. I’m not sure how to give them things, but they know how to give me things and they expect extravagance from people like me. Hey, I want to yell, I’ve only got a dollar bill and a few wrinkled receipts in my purse, so you’re better off letting me scrub your pots and play with your bare-bottomed children. But they butcher me a turkey anyway, and serve it with a real fork. Shouldn’t that earn them an email from America?
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Michael Daniels
Bridgett Eir Daniels Now she’s bounding into her bedroom, bare feet flapping on the floor, Bouncing back into my lap, book in hand, her book from kindergarten, ecstatic That I would listen to her read About Bob and his cat; she reaches a word, a hard word, Struggling through it like her first breath in the hospital, Like in that dirty apartment on Alderson, alone, Except for the sordid filth of her mother’s misplaced affection Wafting up from the basement, Pot smoke to hold her until she cried so loud Her mother couldn’t hear her but the government did and they took her. “Mook,” she calls me, the name she gave me When she still lived in that apartment, just learning to talk. “What is that word?” “Brother.” She starts over; we all started over when we decided to adopt, Decided to love her As one of the shards of the shattered sheet of glass we call a family, To give her the life her father could never give her from prison, The life her mother, Holly, my sister, failed to give her From her own prison. Mom smiles from the kitchen and Bridgett keeps on reading, Her words ricocheting off the warm walls of her new home; One of those words is jammed in my mind: What is that word? Brother.
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Caitlin Johnson
When Girls Watch Scary Movies We aren’t as afraid as you think we are, clinging onto your shirtsleeves as we peer over your shoulder, eyes squeezed, jaws tightened as a group of oblivious teenagers fumble around in the dark. We pretend that the monster or unshaven criminal might suddenly jump from the screen, that we are the prey and you, our defender. But while you set yourself in marble, seemingly unfazed, we are closing our eyes, picturing a full moon on a clear summer evening, werewolves replaced by Romeo, Saint George slaying for princess and honor, Indy with a whip blazing in hand, Tom Hanks on the top of the Empire State Building. You see us not looking, pull us in closer to console us from this thunderous nightmare. But rain is splashing onto our eyelashes, and we are soaked in Austen’s old England, riding on the backs of gentlemen’s horses, while a far off voice is assuring us, none of it is real.
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Emily Hoyt
My Life as a Green Tree Air Freshener Factory-born in Pennsylvania, wrapped in plastic and sent with sisters to a convenience store near you. You are a smelly teenage boy whose mother told him his car stunk like a baking swamp. You saw my pine tree shape on the convenience store shelf. I am your favorite color and I am labeled with the word “FRESH.” Good-bye to my fair sisters of blue and pink, of yellow. Scents of Fresh Air and Strawberry and Lemon. You break my plastic and hang me from your rarely used rearview mirror. My only friends are a lace garter and a soccer ball keychain. Together we swing back and forth, to and fro. I bake in the sun as my scent negates the odor of your cleats and your socks. A half-eaten pizza in its box melts in the heat. I watch as the sun bleaches the black pentagons on the soccer ball. 16
The lace garter was hastily cast aside when a new pair of pretty eyes sat in the passenger seat. Sometimes I will see a sister through windows and windows. I quiver in joy from my faded green string. One day your mother needed to drive your car. She sat behind the wheel and sniffed. She gave ME a reproachful glance. I swung back and forth. She sniffed me and her eye twitched. She drove your car to the convenience store and bought three others. Now I swing with my fair sisters of blue and pink, of yellow. Scents of Fresh Air and Strawberry and Lemon. You add more odious items to the backseat of your car. Because you think it’s okay. I don’t mind, but I am sure your mother will.
Ashlee Jordan
I’m Still in Town I pull my brother’s Camry into the driveway Next to your trailer, The new house. You answer the door wearing plaid, Your bony knees naked in ripped Levi’s and The hemp bracelet your favourite customer made you Dangling off of your crystalline wrists. I’m wearing a black cardigan, like I always do, And, what you call, my Little shoes. We eat the brownies my mother sent over With milk you pour into Mason jars. You ask to keep me for the night. I never answer, letting only Vaseline onto my lips Instead of words. I just let my arms rest Between your hips and your ribcage, Where they fit perfectly, like the groove in your guitar That rests on your thigh, And Bob Dylan is filling the silence As my hand fills yours. We walk to the navy-coloured woods That so envelop your house It feels like the womb. Our feet are such strangers they trip On loose spots of sand, Or crippled Coke cans now and then. You stop to climb a tree, nearly glowing Against that black skeleton, The moon refulgent but allowing us cover still. Suddenly a star falls, And our eyes meet in the middle instantly, Confirming that God really is in love with us. 17
Elyse Coleman
I’m Not a Mannequin I didn’t understand identity when, as a junior in high school, I attempted to write my first novel. It was science fiction—vampire literature. It’s what I was “into” those days, the black, white, and red, mostly the red. I wrote about a vampress walking around in a skin of shiny black leather, round breasts, emerald eyes. I named her Alicia. I used to lie in my bed, laptop on my knees, sometimes after trying to read Ecclesiastes, but more often after staring at that book, frustrated at my parents’ attempts to make me a happy Christian girl. I thought the novel was my escape from the identity my mother desired. Now I realize Alicia was me, struggling with loving an abusive man enough to conform to a new identity. I clicked on the novel today. It usually sits alone in a folder in My Documents called “writings.” Dropping into the mansion where at least thirty vampires live, I watched Alicia dress, curling her hair, strapping on stilettos. She found three diamonds to dangle from her pink lobes. Cipheras, the vampire lord, liked her neck accented with dangly earrings. And of course, baby blue corset and black gauchos. Her confidence stemmed from her sexuality, her physical appearance, and yet, Cipheras found another vampress at the party, one in a red lace dress slit up to her hip. Chad liked my wearing baby blue. For his class of 2005 senior banquet during my sophomore year, I wore a baby blue lace tube top, black slacks, and strappy heels. And while the baby blue was the prominent article of clothing, I knew the heels would be the most luring accessory. Chad loved me in heels. He had an ankle fetish. He told me on a bus ride home from a retreat that he loved every curve on a woman’s body, especially the ankle, the most distinctive curve. I remember tying the black leather straps around my calf, thinking maybe if I accented my features, he would notice me again. The desperate attitude of my sixteen-year-old self embarrasses me now. I shouldn’t have tried so hard. Chad had made it clear by the end of the year that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be with me. I think his words were something like “I don’t see a purpose in our relationship.” But I’m not sure. I blocked out the criticisms of my actions, my wardrobe, my ideas—my identity. They hurt too much and cut even deeper in light of the past. The security from the beginning of our relationship evaporated, and I was trying to grasp the mist. Chad and I started dating the spring of freshmen year. I still remember the conversations we had in the lobby at Grace Church Roseville after the contemporary service. We’d talk about my dramatic love life. Chad would push his lips together, tilt his head to the left and let his ebony hair fall across his eyes. He knew how Josh’s hands went places I had
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said were off limits. He told me that I was pushed too much, made to do things I shouldn’t have had to. I hid behind excuses, even true ones. “He’ll kill himself if I break up with him. He’s already cutting.” “He shouldn’t put you under that kind of pressure, but it’s your decision, not mine,” Chad responded, taking my hands, his fingers snuggling between my own. I’m sure the memory of those hands was what I thought about when I was sliding on my earrings for the banquet. That is, until my mom’s critical comments jabbed at my ears when I came downstairs. She hated my outfit. She thought I should have at least an inch-anda-half strap over my shoulders and cover my chest up to my collar bone. I wonder what she would have thought if she knew that Chad liked the “u” my collar bone made in the center of my chest. Mom’s argument was that I should dress modestly, as Paul tells a young pastor that women should in 1 Timothy 2:9. She wanted me to be an example to our church members of a good, modest girl who relied on faith to solve her issues. By that time, I didn’t care what Paul said—nothing that came from that book helped me regain my friends. Her cramming it down my ears only produced a headache. The biggest frustration with my parents was the contradiction of my mother’s advice. Mom wanted me to tell her when I was angry or depressed, but I hated the result, the lectures about Chad negatively influencing me. My parents would sit on the blue suede couch across from me in the family room. I sat against the cold white and green tile, creating a fortress of tearless eyes. Silence was my weapon after Chad encouraged me to be real about my emotions toward my parents. Mom cried enough for me anyway, saying, “I didn’t start seeing these expressions till you started dating Chad.” I remember thinking, “You’re right Mom; before, I was scared to show how I felt.” I hated being treated like a mannequin—like an object my parents wanted to dress up and put on display. The ironic thing is that I fought hard against my parents’ desired identity for me but embraced the identity of Chad’s dream girl when he started to wander away. Once Chad decided that Christianity wasn’t for him, he told me that we should break up because he was going on “a downward spiral.” He didn’t want to pull me down with him. That was the last shred of love that came from his mouth. It was enough to keep me fighting. That’s why I won him back during the winter retreat my sophomore year. I still have mixed feelings about that weekend. It’s frustrating and sweet at the same time. We were sitting on the wooden benches in Camp Forest Spring’s café. The gas-station-style hot chocolate our fellow youth group students were sipping two tables over permeated the air. I tapped at my own Styrofoam cup, wishing I could see the corners of his lips soften while 20
I talked to him. I told him how my parents thought I was changing because I was chasing after him. They wanted me to stay strong in my faith because it was “the only way to bring my friends back.” “Maybe you should listen to them,” Chad said, tapping his guitar pick against the table. My eyes shot at him. I had never heard him tell me that I should agree with my parents. Was it a test? “I don’t want anything to do with God,” I spit out. “Why are you going to Mexico again?” His eyes softened the way they used to when we would sit in the lobby a year before. I knew he was cornering me to be authentic, not to change my skin to gain his attention or respect. “I am going so my parents don’t freak out at me,” I confessed. If you had asked me then, I would have denied what I was truly confessing: that I would have given up anything to achieve Chad’s affection—even my faith. I was willing to redefine myself to be the atheistic, disrespectful, seemingly independent mannequin that Chad desired. It worked. Moments later, I was close enough to Chad’s lips to slip a kiss while we were sitting in the tunnel between the canteen and cafeteria, Chad’s Gibson SG echoing against the cement walls. I remember the feeling of bliss during the last thirty-six hours of that retreat before cuddling on the bus driving through Highway X. I loved the feeling of Chad’s breath fluttering like a feather against my ear, the way it did when we were on the plane ride home from Mexico. His fingers slipped between mine, still warm, as I leaned against his chest. My heart did a victory dance, assuming a regained security. If only I knew how deeply my denial of Chad’s actions had wedged. Giving up my faith didn’t keep Chad around very long, as I had wanted to believe. Actually, he ended up in a psychiatric ward the night we came home from the retreat. My mom freaked out. She told my worship leader to make sure I didn’t talk to Chad on the phone. I guess my pastor found some letter from me to him, talking about running away together. I thought it was funny at the time, probably because my mom often freaked out when it came to Chad’s and my relationship. I remember her finding out I was on the phone til two a.m. one morning. She brought the phone bill up to my room, sat on the end of my bed and mentioned how she was “concerned.” Mom thought I was giving too much of my heart away to Chad. I know now that she was right. It was the way she went about telling me that made me angry—angry at the fact I had pretty much given him my whole life, not just my heart. A few months later, I experienced how attached I had become to Chad. He had liked my outfit at the banquet, even complimented me, taking my hand and sitting next to me. I 21
thought that maybe I had finally regained his affection. It was only a few days later that the dreaded conversation reappeared: “I don’t see a purpose in our relationship.” Chad left me for good that day. My mom was pretty happy. She stopped nagging me about Bible study and clothes. She let me go out with my girl friends three times a week, not really caring when I got home. Of course, I always came home at a decent time, to avoid the hassle. I think she assumed life would start to get better after Chad and I broke up. The world she didn’t see should have shocked her much more than my relationship with Chad. I didn’t know who I was after Chad broke up with me. I felt like a ripped piece of clothing, a shred no one wanted to use. So I went out with my girls, driving that 1988 Chevy Celebrity and flirting with every guy that crossed my path. I boosted my ego by wearing my sensuality on my sleeve, much like the vampress I began to write about. My identity began to morph again. Soon I was seeing myself through the eyes of Alicia, believing that I too was a vampire, metaphorically, who merely used humans for my own pleasure, while feeling void of that life-giving blood of security. As embarrassing as it is to remember how I decorated all of my notebooks, blogs and profiles in vampire pictures, quoting from Atreyu’s “The Curse,” there is one good feature of identifying myself with Alicia in my novel. She provided a door to honestly evaluate my relationship with Chad. I wrote a passage one night that completely changed my opinion of myself: I felt the deep pain of reality. I would never look on that face as Steve’s ever again. He was dead, he died a long time ago, and I would never again see him. I would only see Cipheras. A crimson tear slid from my eye to my neck. A vampire’s curse, the reality of death with no hope for return. My companion stirred, and I felt my heart neither skip a beat nor acknowledge him as it used to. I still loved him, yes. I had to; I gave up my life for him. He was now the only item to hold onto besides my pain. I could not release him without becoming nothing. He owned my identity. I can’t explain the sense of shame that dripped from that passage. Memories of my mom’s crying about how I wasn’t smiling spilled into my mind. The sensation of that desperate kiss on the bus ride home from the retreat tingled against my lips. The arguments of how Chad and I needed each other to keep sane. My refusal to dress modestly for my parents but expose my ankles for Chad. 22
I had allowed myself to become a mannequin. But I was too ashamed to believe it. It took me years to be able to admit to defining myself by Chad’s standards. It’s easier to blame him for messing up our relationship—to forget about me. I still felt that way last night, reading those old passages about Alicia. But this afternoon, after church, I am Christmas shopping at the mall. Romans 8:15-17 is repeating itself, harmonizing with the pastor’s voice, “We are heirs. No longer seen through our mistakes, no longer defined by shame.” I remember resisting the “no longer defined by shame” statement. Having identified myself by shame after breaking up with Chad, any new, respectable identity seemed impossible. I walk by Charlotte Russe and see her, the mannequin dressed in a black dress, open at the neck, silk covering her knees. Her dark hair swoops to the side over her glass hazel eyes. Eyes that stare right at me. She’s the kind of mannequin that should be emotionless, fakely human. But as I stare back at her glass eyes, I see a reflection. A fleshy, dirty, crying human being. My eyes focus on the image. There I am. Human. I am not a mannequin.
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Charity Straszheim
10th and Burnett I try to fasten my guilt a little more modestly with a tug at my hoodie, standing useless as I watch her strip the white fitted sheet from the black-cushioned futon and heave it upright, creating a living room. I tread carefully and take my assigned seat on the right of the black cushion and she takes hers in the cramped kitchen behind a black curtain. Behind me, rows of sterile moving boxes, two deep and six tall, stand guard as they have for the past three years in this three-room, no-door apartment. Each box bears my mother’s pencil marks, tall and deliberate, like the posture she wishes I had, and I’m waiting for the lamp to light more than its iron stem. She brings me a 6 oz. bottle of orange juice and a plastic Mason jar lid to serve as a coaster—to protect the cardboard box lid below, which also houses the large print Defined King James and a magnifying glass. Again she’s gone, whispering to a voice I don’t hear and to the skillet that shushes the humming air conditioner. I cast furtive glances at her books: Dickinson, beekeeping, Art Nouveau, scared she’ll notice and invite me to take one home, inciting the sludge within to thicken at her generosity.
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I have to remind myself of the address every time, and my mind dutifully recalls the cell phone screen from the night she moved: 10th and Burnett, an electronic plea as I grabbed another white box from the U-Haul and tread through a darkness similar to that which I now sit in. I have plans (conveniently timed). She urges the eggs with her spatula, and they meet a glass tea tray. Thanks Mom. Please call me Linda.
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Cassandra Lund
When I Was Young When I was young I crawled through a hole in a hay mow and curled, face in knees, so my back felt cradled, and the heat swelled like a bruise, dark purple in autumn and I heard them in the loft tilted and wind-creaking saying, “fire” and felt the heat, but it wasn’t that. The bees under my child’s foot were met with the same urgency in a cloud they levitated, stung, dispersed. I soaked in cold tub-water while mother fed me Saltines and out the bathroom window rose my sincerest regrets for not noticing existence. In winter, Aunt Sarah fed the cat, opened all the windows and let the frost meander the walls and floorboards wrap her ankles and neck in lace casts, she lay on a bare mattress thinking this was it and no one would be coming home. She was found with the deaf, dumb cat curled up on her stomach breathing. Did we think we were cheating God? the way we snuff out a flame with our fingertips something we make and manipulate Were the flames singing in my ears when I screamed for help and dad pulled me out with linen arms into the doorway, the dirt, and beat my back until it stopped turning and I looked at the sky and watched it absorb my smoke. 26
Brianna Tongen
Virtues of Vaseline It takes movement to lift a child. Awe to watch him sleep. I am no physician, but my father is. That seemed to be enough. Thrust into a closet with metal cabinets. Prescriptions. Medicine, expired, in Hindi, in German, in Spanish. A bottle of clean water. The train station kids came in one by one. Presented their battle wounds. The battle of living on a crowded and careless earth. Vaseline. Gauze. We can use those for anything. Most of the kids still wanted a bandage. I had nothing to make them not hurt. Glue, they said. That is another thing we can use for almost anything. They were exhausted at mid-day because guards catch them at night. Make them leave, hit them with sticks. My sister sat on the floor, instantly had three heads on her lap, the children wanting to sleep just once under benevolent hands. I knew that if she would simply wash her eye in decent water, the infection would fade. She said she would not. I used Vaseline. One of the kids was trying to choke the other. Had him flat amid the scarred building blocks, I shouted because a child was in my arms, and my brother pulled the aggressor away and fell to his knees before him, murmuring, “Oh no, no don’t be this way. Please.” I prayed for a visual gift of tongues to read the medicine bottles. Checked again. No good. Excuse me; did they by chance have antibiotics? No. Vaseline then. I prayed for God to make it sting. When I had heads in my lap like that, nestling into my legs, I would have disarmed a mad Calcutta taxi. I would have done it without waking the darlings.
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Tousher Yang
Family Pictures Captive in a wooden frame, a picture. An average family of nine hung on a wall vacant of decorations. The children’s faces fissure out smiles. They in matching outfits, arms hung stiff as if held straight, only mom and dad smiling. The backdrop, gray like storm clouds Thick and heavy. Needing to escape. Children stood tall on their own supporting blocks. Taller than they should be. Taller than their father. Edging toward the top on their own. Two more photos on that same self-painted purple wall, once white. The children in one photo. Parents—the other. Separate they were, out of frame. Strained from the corners of the original photo like breaking up two kids fighting, Slowly splitting through the tension. Harmony invisible. Now, mother poses in her own photo, the father’s picture transparent, not even on the wall. The children in their own yet, holding onto one another. As much we can. 29
Sophia Madsen
Brothers
Blood runs thick down my older brother’s arm, bright pools of red collecting on the rough table beneath his elbow. I am watching Tony carve out chunks of his right bicep with a hunting knife, and we are smoking pot together for the first time. “Don’t you even think about stealing my stash, Trent. I’ll take this knife to your gut if you do.” He pretends to swipe at me with the bloody blade, smiling wildly. I am twelve years old, and today I know I want to be just like him. Curling posters of half-naked women and classic rock bands cover his bedroom walls, samurai blades sit glinting in a glass case on the sticky carpet. He clenches the roach in the corner of his lips as he cuts, and he doesn’t even cry. The smoke is thick, and Tony swats a fat hand through it to clear the air and watch his work as he fills each bloody gap with a dab of India ink, talking about our dad and why he left us, gritting back his hate and almost biting his joint in half. It’s been three years since Dad took off. The five of us, Momma, our two sisters and us, just a mirage in the dust trailing behind Dad’s Ford pickup as he speeds down the gravel away from our leaning farmhouse, away from the dry dirt yard and cattle, away from our voices begging him to take us too. It was the drinking, the beating, that made Momma take a gun to him the night before. Now he’s too scared to face her, even more scared to put down his bottle. “Good riddance,” Momma says. Just that, nothing more. She remarries to Carl the next year, and I guess he likes us enough to give us his last name. No talk about it. It just is the way it is. But Tony cannot let go, and he can still taste the dirt, feel the grit of abandonment in his teeth. “Little Brother, how many times do I have to tell you? Hold that smoke in. Hold it till you think you’re head will pop off.” “I don’t know if I can. I can’t even hold my breath for ten seconds, Tony.” My lungs ache already. I cannot keep up with him. “Just try it.” He waits until I take a drag, jumps up from the table and onto me, plugs my nose, and covers my mouth. “Hold it in, Trent. Way down in the pit of your lungs till it feels like everything inside you will explode.” After what feels like minutes, he lets me loose, pounding my back as I choke and cough the white vapor from my mouth. “Let it out, Little Brother.” Smoke snakes out from his nostrils, slithering and writhing like the bull snakes in our backyard down his hollowedout face. My head is light, floating off my shoulders and bumping the ceiling like a forgotten birthday balloon. My hands are twice their normal size, eyeballs on each fingertip blinking dumbly at me. I have never felt so good. 30
“Are you done with your tattoo?” I sift the words through the gnarled roots in my throat. “Why an upside-down cross?” But I don’t hear his answer, something about God I think. I ask again. He ignores me, says it’s not important, but deep down I know it is. In front of his mirror, Tony gauzes the tattoo and looks deep into his own face. He is a full head shorter than me, though he’s five years older. When the tattoo is covered, he flexes his bare milky arms and back, runs a hand over his shaved head. “Why you gotta be so big, Little Brother? I thought ‘big brother’ meant I was supposed to be bigger?” I shrug, my head still in flight. “And you got three testicles to boot. Life just isn’t fair.” My laugh sounds warbled as I rewind through three months. It’s another suffocating day, and we have already sweated through our flannel shirts attempting to rope a sick calf, to calm the momma, to be men and do the job ourselves. After finally getting the calf down, we don’t know what to do. Carl isn’t around to help, our sisters can’t do anything, so we agree after a half-hour debate to loosen the rope and let the calf go. The big wood-fenced pen is cloudy with dirt, and when the afternoon sun hits it just right I pretend that all the little specks are gold swirling right in my face and sticking to my clothes, that all of our troubles are done and over, that Tony and I can pack up and leave like we’ve always wanted. We don’t see the momma charging, and before I know it I am on the ground with 900 pounds of Black Angus beef standing on my gut and left testicle. I remember my girlish shrieking, remember the pain that ripped my body in half. What I don’t remember is Tony shooting the cow, carrying me to the house, calling the hospital and riding in the back of the ambulance with me. When I wake up, I’m ashamed of how dirty I am. The nurse stares, disgusted that the once-white hospital sheets are now brown from my filth. My brother stands in the corner, bare-chested, his exposed skin and jeans smattered with caked cow blood. The doctor says my testicle is split in half and that “it isn’t wise to remove it,” so they just load me up on painkillers and call it good. Neither of us knows why I have to keep the broken nut, but that’s how I got three. And Tony pretends to be jealous, trying to make me feel better. “It isn’t fair at all.” Tony says it softer, and looks at me in the reflection. The words are quiet, which makes me listen harder, because he talks big and loud to make up for his size. In this minute, I am scared. I am scared that my brother’s eyes are shifting behind a glaze of water, that he is wiping his cheeks fast so that I won’t see. The room stops moving. My head is suddenly reattached, my hands once again familiar, the air tight and sobering. My brother straightens his back, tenses his shoulders, and turns to me. “I’m joining the army, Trent,” he says, “I’m leaving. Tomorrow.” 31
I can’t believe him at first, and I laugh dumbly, still high and unsure of my brain. I remember our promises, our plans. Tony wouldn’t break these. We are brothers, and brothers stay together. No matter what, no matter how desperate, no matter who else leaves, no matter how big the damned cow. Brothers stay together. I simply nod. I feel like vomiting. Tony takes another long drag of a new joint. There is nothing I can say but “Okay.” The next day, I watch Tony drive away, leaving five people behind in a billow of red dirt and pot smoke. He doesn’t say a word or glance my way. He does not look back. Over the first year he sends letters from Kuwait, a few pictures with them. In every one he smiles big and holds up something dead in his fists, a rifle strapped to his sweaty chest. He wears the same fatigues we bought at Salvation Armies as kids. Then it was all we had. Now it is all he needs. He doesn’t call me “Little Brother” anymore, and I hang one picture over the still-bloody table in his bedroom. In the picture, he pumps up is right bicep for the camera and growls, showing off that homemade tattoo. It’s faded now, but the meaning still pricks my memory. I cannot remember what he said that day. I hold the smoke in as I look at the photo, way down like Tony taught me, but the highs aren’t as good with no one to share them with. I have that same cross on my right hand, cut the skin out with my brother’s hunting knife and filled it back in with dark sloppy ink. It is fresh, only two days old, and hurts like hell. But for the life of me I do not cry. I will not cry.
‡
After three years of service, Tony is home after a dishonorable discharge. He’s thin and jittery, every movement electric, eyes large, teeth and nose crooked and broken from fights. He has a new stash, coke this time, and he is withdrawn, content to clean his guns and ramble about twisted, drug-induced philosophies in his old bedroom, which we now share. The posters hang where he left them, only now they are sun-bleached. Many of the women are forgotten or outdated, the bands gone their separate ways. The samurai blades disappear with Tony one night, and the next morning he shows up with a big bag of pot. The dust settles on him as he coughs and ambles to me, and for once I am glad the specks aren’t really gold. If they were, Tony would only be holding a bigger bag. “Can you believe after all this time I am still choking on this damned dust? I swear
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it follows me every place I go.” He squints towards the sunken roof, the empty sky, and continues to absently mutter. I meet him on the steps of the house, tilting more than ever, and follow him through the door and to our room. I am now two heads taller. We are passing a joint back and forth when he notices my right hand. He grabs it, pulls up his right shirtsleeve and presses my tattoo to his. Suddenly he is crying, making no attempt to hold back the snot and tears, as I hold my drag in to keep from pulling away. “He left you too, then?” Tony says it blankly, distantly, to nobody. After a second, he drops my hand and wipes his face. “God,” he laughs, embarrassed, “Are we brothers or what?” But I am floating through a different day, watching Tony gauze a fresh tattoo. I ask, “Why an upside-down cross?” “Because, Little Brother. God left me a long time ago.”
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Contributors’ Notes Lacy Barker is a junior English–Writing major from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She likes cooking for her roommates, walking in the snow, and getting lost in the city.
Levi Budd is a junior who is currently double majoring in Art and Graphic Design. His future plans consist of grad school, most likely for art. Levi is going to continue to follow his heart and live one day at a time.
Elyse Coleman is a senior English–Writing major who enjoys heavy rock and country music, bold colors, and deep conversations. Her goal is to minister to women through creative writing, but she looks forward to a career in grant or technical writing.
Michael Daniels was born and raised in Billings, Montana. He is an English–Literature and Writing major who enjoys hiking, camping, writing music and poetry, and being cynical.
Rachel Grammer is a senior English–Writing major who enjoys singing loudly in her car, taking goofy pictures, and laughing with her roomies. After graduation she hopes to work in some field of international communication and see more of the world.
Emily Hoyt normally passes her time by creating movies in her head by reading a book and listening to a movie soundtrack simultaneously. Unfortunately, being a freshman who is majoring in English has severely cut back on her time to do this.
Caitlin Johnson is a senior Interdisciplinary major (writing and graphic design). She enjoys thrift store shopping, speaking in accents, and watching Star Wars and terribly cheesy Kung Fu movies with her soon-to-be husband, the very dashing Thomas Willard.
Ashlee Jordan is a senior Communication Studies major from the lovely small town of Staples, Minnesota. She loves colour and words and hands and walks and private conversations in the most obvious spots. And coffee.
Jenny Kubat is a junior Elementary Education major.
She loves trying new things and going to Tea Garden with friends. In her free time she reads, takes pictures, goes on adventures, and spends time with friends. 34
Heidi Lindgren is a senior CALE major with a minor in Music. She grew up in Ankara, Turkey, where she learned to speak Turkish playing on the streets with her friends. After graduation, Heidi hopes to teach English and music in an international school overseas.
Cassandra Lund is a senior English–Writing major who spends her time teaching piano, working in a chiropractic clinic, and playing mandolin/singing backup in a folk/indie group. She hopes to move to Nashville in the next couple of years to pursue music and graduate school.
Sophia Madsen enjoys good literature, foreign films, all kinds of art, tea, folk records, sweaters, kitschy stationery, and personal space. She does not like chick flicks, lazy writing, loudmouths, or crowded public places. She is a senior English–Writing major.
Lydia Russell is currently a junior Art major with a focus on/passion for illustration and portraiture. When Lydia is not doodling and scribbling the hours away, she enjoys watching silent films, reading Billy Collins, and making peanut butter sandwiches.
Charity Straszheim is a senior double major in Studio Art and Visual Art Education.
Her
heroes are Joan of Arc, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ghandi, Dr. King, César Chávez, and other activists. She enjoys knitting on cold days.
Brianna Tongen is a junior English–Writing major.
She owes everything she is to the people who befriend her and teach her things. She is very thankful that God gave us a moon to look at when it is too cloudy to see any stars.
Maysa Vang is a nerd and a noun. She loves a good cup of mocha coffee and pumpkin pie with whipped cream while listening to A Fine Frenzy. Maysa is a senior Art major.
Kaleigh Walter is a junior English–Writing major.
She spends her free time reading and someday hopes to master the whole “time management” thing.
Tousher Yang is a senior English–Writing major.
What a life it would be if he could break dance, write, watch sports, and eat ice cream. He is excited to etch his words into the world. 35
Lacy Barker Levi Budd Elyse Coleman Michael Daniels Rachel Grammer Emily Hoyt Caitlin Johnson Ashlee Jordan Jenny Kubat Heidi Lindgren Cassanda Lund Sophia Madsen Lydia Russell Charity Straszheim Brianna Tongen Maysa Vang Kaleigh Walter Tousher Yang