2019-2020 Student Literary Award Competition Winners Anthology by Cuyahoga Community College

LEAGUE FOR INNOVATION IN THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

2019-2020 Student Literary Award Competition

Winners Anthology

HOSTED BY

LEAGUE FOR INNOVATION IN THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

2019-2020 Student Literary Award Competition

Winners Anthology

HOSTED BY

FORWARD Cuyahoga Community College is extremely proud to have hosted the 2019â&#x20AC;&#x2018;2020Â League for Innovation in the Community College Student Literary Award Competition. As the leading driver of innovation in the community college movement, the League for Innovation in the Community College provides several annual opportunities for board member colleges to showcase the diversity of talent and creativity of students from community colleges throughout NorthÂ America. Each year the Student Literary Award Competition highlights student literary achievement in fictional short stories, one-act plays, poetry, and personal essays. Please join me in congratulating those individuals who have their work featured in this publication as well as all the community college students at your institution who continue to innovate, inspire, and achieve. Dr. Karen Miller Provost and Executive Vice President Cuyahoga Community College

INTRODUCTION When we began this journey, our theme Once Upon a Time was about memories and imagination. We wanted participants to think about the possibilities, past, present, and future. We wanted them to consider the seemingly banal and benign concept of Once Upon a Time and reimagine it in new and interesting ways. How do the past, present, and future work together to create a coherent and meaningfulÂ now? We had no idea how prescient this theme would become by March of 2020. The world changed literally overnight, forcing us to reconsider the now of our existence. Who we are as individuals, citizens of the nation and the globe, is being tested, contested, and reimagined every day in this constantly changing environment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the chaos of moment, artistic expression continues to thrive. Dreams are dreamt. Stories are told. The juried creative artifacts showcased in this anthology represent a nationwide collective of student voices. Here, our theme, Once Upon a Time, is deftly reimagined in exciting ways that reflect our current times. On behalf of Cuyahoga Community College, we would like to thank you for your participation in the 2019-2020 League for Innovation Student Literary AwardÂ Competition. We are excited to share this anthology with you. Enjoy! Gayle Williamson Associate Professor, English Michelle Rankins Assistant Professor, English

TABLE OF CONTENTS ONE-ACT PLAY Judge Bio: Terrence Spivey............................................................................................. 7 First Place: “Three Thief River”......................................................................................................... 8 Troy Bernardo, San Diego Community College District, CA Second Place: “The Bridge”.................................................................................................................. 14 Hannah Watson, Richland College, Dallas County Community College District, TX Third Place: “I’m Sorry, Carrie”........................................................................................................ 20 Misty Yarnall, Monroe Community College, NY

POETRY Judge Bio: Daniel Gray-Kontar.....................................................................................28 First Place: “’41 Cadillac”................................................................................................................ 29 Tanner Boutwell, Seattle Colleges, WA Second Place: “Mojave Girl” ................................................................................................................ 30 John Guinta, Moraine Valley Community College, IL Third Place: “Mother III”................................................................................................................... 31 Kate Bruce, Sinclair Community College, OH

PERSONAL ESSAY Judge Bio: Wendy Beth Hyman, Ph.D......................................................................... 32 First Place: “On the Coast of Zuwara”............................................................................................. 33 Keanna Vogt, Valencia College, FL Second Place: “Lost Sailor” ................................................................................................................. 36 Nicole Dela Rosa, Moraine Valley Community College, IL Third Place: “Errands”....................................................................................................................... 40 Somtochukwu Nwadike, Valencia College, FL 4

FICTION Judge Bio: Karen Long.................................................................................................. 42 First Place: “August Is Over”............................................................................................................ 43 Lucy Behr, Monroe Community College, NY Second Place: “Lenny”......................................................................................................................... 49 Alex Dodt, Mesa Community College, Maricopa Community Colleges, AZ Third Place: “J & D”........................................................................................................................... 54 Jill Zaiser, Kirkwood Community College, IA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.......................................................................................... 56 LEAGUE BOARD COLLEGES.................................................................................. 57

ONE-ACT PLAY

Terrence Spivey has a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Prairie View A&M University in Texas. After graduation, he resided in New York for eighteen years, appearing in soaps, indie films, and music videos. He is the former Artistic Director for Cleveland’s Karamu House. Since leaving Karamu, he has directed critically acclaimed plays such as Boodycandy, Objectively/Reasonable: A Community Response to the Shooting of Tamir Rice, 11/22/14, Live Bodies for Sale, and MAAFA, which he also wrote. Spivey was Scene 2017 Best Director, Alan Schneider Director Nominee, and a member of the HistoryMakers. He is a board member for AUDELCO in NYC and has appeared in the media, including the PBS documentary Karamu: 100 Years in the House. Spivey is the founding director for the theatre company Powerful Long Ladder.

Three Thief River by Troy Bernardo Fade in: Three men are in their cabin. Butch and Will are shooting dice in cups at the dining room table and Tom is staring out of a window. Tom looks at his watch. TOM: He’s late. BUTCH: He’s always late. Especially lately. So, no, he’s not late. TOM: Not like this. BUTCH: Yes like this. Trust me, I’ve been comin’ here a lot longer than you. TOM: You’re only three years older than me. BUTCH: And guess what? That’s three more years Pops took me to Three Thief. TOM: So, what? BUTCH: So, shut your goddamn mouth and stop worrying about it. TOM: There’s a blizzard out there, Butch. Butch looks at Will, and smiles confidently. BUTCH: Will, what did Pops say before he left? WILL: He said to stay put in the cabin. BUTCH: What else? WILL: He said if we left and we managed to survive, which is unlikely, he’d take us out back and shoot us. Butch smiles at Tom and shrugs his shoulders. TOM: Butch, it’s gotten worse out there. I can’t even see the big spruce in the yard. BUTCH: I’m aware of the whiteout, Tom. I’ve needed to piss for two hours and I haven’t left because I can’t see the outhouse. TOM: Then we need to at least talk about what we’re gonna do. BUTCH: Fine, let’s vote. Who wants to listen to Pops, so we stay put and stay alive? Butch and Will raise their hands. BUTCH: Who wants to die outside? TOM: You can’t word it like that. That’s a leading question. BUTCH: Shut up, Tomboy. TOM: You know I hate it whenWILL: Everybody relax. Butch, stop being an asshole. Tom, we’re not going out there. Pops knows the land and he knows what to do. TOM: I just feel like we should do something. WILL: Do what? Wander into a blizzard? Our car is parked over two miles away at the dead end. Pop’s only hope is to hike and pray he finds Three Thief River. It’ll lead him right to us. Pops knows that. 8

TOM: That’s not the only option. BUTCH: Are you insane? TOM: I’m just sayin’. We could get a ranger to search for him. We can radio the station. Tom motions to the CB radio in the corner of the cabin. WILL: Tom, have you forgotten what we’re doin’ here? TOM: Findin’ a ranger and paying a fine is better than having a dead Dad. BUTCH: No, it isn’t. Pops knew what he signed up for when he went out into the snow. He likes that it covers his tracks and it puts him at ease knowing that underpaid rangers aren’t insane enough to go out after him. So, sit down, stop looking out the window and play Polar Bears with us until he shows back up like he said. Tom moves away from the window and sits in the chair between the two brothers at the table, begrudgingly. He takes money out of his pocket and Butch gives him a stack of chips. Will shakes the dice cup and rolls. WILL: Two Will hands Tom the cup of dice, and he rolls. TOM: Eight. Tom hands the dice cup to Butch. BUTCH: Did you know this cabin has a lot of history? WILL: Quit tryin’ to avoid beatin’ the eight. BUTCH: I’m serious. Did you know it, Tom? TOM: No. Hurry up and roll. BUTCH: I’ll roll when I’m good and goddamn ready to roll. Butch looks for more interruptions. He confidently continues, in a hushed, almost secretive voice. BUTCH: Pops told me Grandad McCarthy used to use this as a stash house for liquor during the prohibition days. TOM: What are you talkin’ bout? BUTCH: Pops used to come out with him when he was a boy to help haul the Canadian whiskey from this abandoned cabin to Grandad’s truck at the dead end. Once prohibition ended, the cabin sat empty for a decade or two until Pops started coming here to hunt wolf pelts. TOM: Wait, this isn’t our cabin? Nobody ever told me that. BUTCH: What difference does it make? TOM: A big difference, a very big difference. BUTCH: It don’t make too much of a difference now. 9

TOM: Why’s that? WILL: We haven’t trapped shit here in months. Pops said it’s like the land swallowed up all the game. TOM: You think it’s hunted out? BUTCH: No. We find the tracks, but then they vanish. Pops finds scat, dead animals, dens, all the normal signs. But nothin’s there. TOM: Maybe it’s time to move on from Three Thief. BUTCH: Have you met Pops? He doesn’t adapt well to change. Uncomfortable silence falls over the group. WILL: Tom, when you’re working in the city, do you ever prosecute people like us? TOM: Criminals? Yes. WILL: No. Poachers? Bootleggers? TOM: We prosecute normal crimes in the city, Will. WILL: What’s a normal city crime? TOM: Robbery, assault, murder, drugs. City stuff. BUTCH: Jesus, Tom. What we do is illegal, but at least we don’t hurt no one. TOM: Maybe. I guess you could rationalize it like that. Will you roll the goddamn dice? Butch takes the dice out and puts it into his own cup. TOM: What the hell is that? BUTCH: It’s my lucky dice cup. WILL: Is that a new lucky cup? I thought it looked different. BUTCH: Yeah. The luck ran out of that last one. Butch takes the dice in his cup and rolls. BUTCH: Ten. TOM: Bullshit. BUTCH: Count ‘em yourself college boy. TOM: You know I don’t like it when you talk to me like that. BUTCH: Then maybe you shouln’t’ve gone to college. WILL: Butch. TOM: No, he’s right, Will. Maybe I should have just stayed here to poach full time with you two. BUTCH: Will, can you please just roll before I beat our brother to death? Will and Tom throw a chip in the direction of Butch. Will takes dice and puts them in dice cup. He shakes it up and rolls. WILL: Eight. 10

Tom takes the dice cup and rolls. TOM: Shit. Six. WILL: Boys, did Pops ever tell you about Louisiana? TOM: When was Pops in Louisiana? WILL: Pops got drunk off hooch a few months back and told me about some money he stole from a lady out in Louisiana. BUTCH: We’ve all heard Pop talk when he’s been drinkin’. Remember his alien abduction story? Or the time he was on the front page of The Nashville Tribune because he rescued a family from a burning building? It’s all nonsense. TOM: What did he do? WILL: He said he forged some checks. Swindled some lady out of her home. BUTCH: That’s not true. TOM: We don’t even have the story. How can we know it’s not true? BUTCH: Because, we’re poachers and bootleggers, we’re not thieves. TOM: Someone could argue both of those are kinds of thieves. BUTCH: I could argue what you do is thievery. TOM: How exactly? BUTCH: Doesn’t the law take things that aren’t theirs? TOM: We confiscate illegal things, if that’s what you mean, yes. BUTCH: Things like cars? Money? Even houses? TOM: If those things were gained illegally, yes. BUTCH: Well, that’s stealing. Even if you have the right to do it, you’re taking something that isn’t yours. TOM: It’s more complex than that. BUTCH: No, Tom. It’s not. WILL: That’s not all Pops said about that lady in Louisiana. BUTCH: What, did he knock her up too? WILL: No. He said he killed her. TOM: Excuse me? WILL: He said he killed her. TOM: How? BUTCH: Will, shut your mouth. We’re criminals, but Pops isn’t a murderer. TOM: I thought everythin’ Pops said when he was drunk was fake anyways, Butch? What difference does it make to you? Will and Butch look worried at each other.

WILL: Pops said she was a witch. The Blind Lady in Black, they called her. She lived out in the bayou, alone. He said her eyes were milky white and her face was all scarred up from some sort of big animal. The kids would tell ghost stories ‘bout her. They’d say how campers would have kids taken from their tent in the middle of the night. They’d just be gone like they was swallowed whole. One night he was over for dinner trying to get more money out of her and she told him she had been watching him. She told him money didn’t mean nothin’ to her. She told him that once she met with death, she wouldn’t leave this place until she saw his way of life extinguished. Parasites, like him, had no place and sucking the life from others. It was a sin that she would make right. She said if he didn’t stop doin’ what he was doin’, livin’ how he was livin’, she would find him in the woods and hunt him down. BUTCH: How can a blind lady watch or hunt anything? TOM: How did he kill her? WILL: He didn’t say. BUTCH: You guys aren’t buyin’ this are you? You think some ghost from Pop’s past is out huntin’ him in the woods? I expected this from Will, but not from you Tom. The lights flicker. The boys look anxiously at one another for a few seconds. Butch takes the dice out of the cup and slowly puts it in his. He rolls, confidently. BUTCH: Two. TOM: Luck run out? BUTCH: All of these negative conversations must’ve thrown it off. Butch throws the dice cup in the corner of the room and goes to the kitchen to make himself a drink. As he pours Will takes a chip from his stack as Tom tosses him one. WILL: I’m worried. BUTCH: My dice cup is fine. WILL: That’s not what I’m worried about. BUTCH: ‘Bout what then? TOM: Butch. BUTCH: Oh, hell, we’re all worried about Pops. But there ain’t nothin’ we can do ‘bout it. WILL: We need to at least start talkin’ ‘bout the possibility ofBUTCH: Don’t you say it. WILL: Tom might be right, Butch. Butch downs his drink and turns to Tom. BUTCH: You see what you do, Tom? You see what you do? And Will, you believin’ some drunk ghost story Pops told us? You think some Lady in Black is out there killin’ Pops? WILL: Butch, relax.

BUTCH: No, I wanna hear what college boy has to say. Tom looks around at Will and then Butch, sadly. Butch only meets his gaze with anger. TOM: I’m sorry, Butch. I’m just not like you guys. Somethin’ seeped into you, and Will, and Pops that I don’t have. Just like the history of this cabin or your lucky dice cup. Something has leaked into it. And, somethin’ has gotten into me. I’m different than you. BUTCH: Then why even come? If you’re so different, why show up? TOM: Because if I don’t, I never see any of you. BUTCH: And whose fault is that? TOM: Yours. All of yours. WILL: Listen, I don’t care whose fault it is, I just don’t want Pops to freeze to death, alone at Three Thief. This place is no place for a man to die. TOM: That’s two against one Butch. Butch unsheathes his bowie knife and brandishes it. BUTCH: Shut your goddamn mouth. TOM: What are you gonna do? Stab your own kin? BUTCH: No, Tom. I would never kill my own blood. I’m not a traitor. Butch walks to the CB radio, and cuts the mic cord. BUTCH: There. No more talkin’ ‘bout it.

The Bridge by Hannah Watson CAST OF CHARACTERS LUCY:

A 20-year-old woman. Everything about her scream’s hopelessness. Her matted hair, the dirty sweats, the uncut nails, and unkempt face.

CHARLIE:

A businessman

SCENE

Curtain opens on a bridge. Lucy sits on the edge, feet dangling precariously over.

The distant sounds of traffic are the only thing that breaks the silence.

TIME

The Present – 11:00 AM

Scene 1 LUCY: (leaning slightly over the edge, peering down below) I…can’t. I can’t. Time passes-11:15 AM CHARLIE: (Man enters stage right. He walks with purpose but hesitates when he sees the girl.) Hey! (pause) You! Are you ok? I mean, that doesn’t really look too safe there… LUCY: (ignores him, no response) …I can’t do it anymore… CHARLIE: (Walks closer to the bridge) Ma’am! What are you doing?! LUCY: Go away. (lets one hand free of the edge of the bridge) CHARLIE: Hey! Stop! (he runs to the edge) What are you doing?! LUCY: Leave me alone. You don’t know me…you owe me nothing…Please go away. Please…. CHARLIE: What is that supposed to mean, ‘I owe you nothing?’ Come-on! Get down from there! LUCY: I told you, go away. I’ve made up my mind. You won’t be able to change it. Just leave. CHARLIE: Not a chance. (climbs up to sit with her) LUCY: What are you doing? I told you to leave! CHARLIE: Sitting with you. LUCY: Why? CHARLIE: (sways a bit, looks visibly shaken) Because. Look, I’m just going to sit here with me. You don’t have to talk, but I’m here if you want to. Ok? LUCY: Ok. Time passes: 11:20 CHARLIE: Why do you think…this…is necessary? Can I ask? What happened?

LUCY: No one understands…you won’t either. CHARLIE: Try me? LUCY: (sways slightly from the weakness of crying) What’s the point? I already told you I wasn’t going to have…change my mind. CHARLIE: Call it a selfish thing, if it makes you feel better. I’d like to know for my piece of mind, why you are attempting to kill yourself. After witnessing this, I think it should give me some sort of closure…. LUCY: My life…it’s fucked up. CHARLIE: Isn’t everyone’s? At least to some extent… LUCY: I guess… CHARLIE: Well you have to start somewhere…and well, I’ve got all the time in the world. (he holds out his hand for her.) LUCY: (gingerly takes his hand) I guess if I had to say…to pinpoint…where it started…I guess it was when my Grandpa got sick. He has Alzheimer’s…or, I mean had. CHARLIE: (squeezes her hand) I can imagine how that must feel. I watched my father go through the same thing. It’s a terrible thing to watch the people you love suffer. LUCY: It was like watching someone die, from the inside out. He couldn’t…see… or, I mean, remember us. It hurt, to watch him struggle…it was like, he knew… there was something he was forgetting. (she wipes her face with the back of her sleeve with her free hand) (silence for a few moments) CHARLIE: Ok, so your grandfather passed away…then what happened? LUCY: Why do you care? CHARLIE: It’s like I just said, it’s a terrible thing to watch people suffer. I am clinging to a tiny bit of hope, just talking it out…may make you feel a little better. If not, I’ll leave. I’ll let you go…I promise. LUCY: …that’s nice, I guess… (deep breath) The same year, my dad’s aunt died. She had cancer…and I guess…well, I didn’t know her very well, but it was still a blow. You know? CHARLIE: Yeah…people die all the time, that is a fact that everyone knows…but when it hits so close to home, its always a harsh reminder of…the fragility of life. LUCY: …Or the fragility of myself… CHARLIE: What you have gone through would make a football player cry…its not about weakness or strength. Its about learning to cope with…the…well, curve balls of life. LUCY: …My dad used to love baseball… CHARLIE: Used to?

LUCY: No one expected it…it was… (lets go of the bridge with her other hand) …a heart attack. He just passed away…one morning…he was eating pancakes; he was fine and then…. CHARLIE: There was no way you could have prevented it…it’s not your fault… LUCY: We knew he had high cholesterol…it was a cheat day…I thought…pancakes wouldn’t hurt… CHARLIE: Hey, it wasn’t your fault! One cheat meal wasn’t the culprit. It takes way more than that to cause…a heart attack. You can’t…you shouldn’t blame yourself for that. LUCY: I really miss him…I used to always feel safe when he was around. I don’t know that I…ever feel safe anymore. (silence for a moment) CHARLIE: That is a lot of death to go through in such a short amount of time… how did you manage to deal with it? LUCY: Numb…I was just kinda…numb for a while…My big brother left, and I had to grow up. Bills to be paid and all that. CHARLIE: That’s a shock. Why did your brother leave? LUCY: He said, he couldn’t ‘handle it’… CHARLIE: I’m the youngest in my family. I’m pretty sure I would have been broken hearted if my brother had ever left me all alone to take care…of things I never had to before. LUCY: We lost everything. Our money, our house, our friends…everything… Mom was falling apart, and I failed at trying to keep us together. CHARLIE: That wasn’t your job. You did the best you could. If the pilot of a plane dies, and a passenger takes over, no one expects a smooth landing…right? LUCY: I guess…I should have… CHARLIE: I honestly can’t begin to imagine what you are feeling. LUCY: Everything…I feel everything. Excruciating pain. Everywhere. Everything. (scoots further forward on the bridge letting go of his hand) I can’t do this…I can’t do this. CHARLIE: (reaches forward and pulls her back just as she is letting go for good) No!!! We had a deal, finish the story and then I leave, if you still want me to. LUCY: It hurts too much, I can’t! CHARLIE: Well, I’m not leaving unless you do. (silence for a few moments) LUCY: You know, I thought I was ok for a while, I thought I had it under control… I even met someone! CHARLIE: That’s amazing! And so healthy! Where is he?

LUCY: …I thought he understood me, I thought he loved me. But he wanted me to leave my mother…he said we were going to get married…but he told me to leave her behind. He said, he couldn’t handle the drama. After all we had been through…I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t leave her behind…(pause) I…. CHARLIE: Wow. On behalf on my entire gender, I apologize. That was a real shitty thing to do…I can imagine after everything you have been though a breakup was… terribly heartbreaking… LUCY: It really was…I…don’t understand. CHARLIE: Can I ask though, where is your mom? LUCY: My mom…. CHARLIE: Yeah, you said that he wanted you to leave her…but you couldn’t, right? LUCY: Yeah…I did say that… CHARLIE: So, where is she? LUCY: (pause) at home… (pause) (Silence for a few moments) I…couldn’t leave her. (pause) I can’t leave her…I…She can’t lose two children. She needs me. CHARLIE: She needs you. So, what are you doing up here? (few moments of silence) If you go through with this, you are leaving her. She has been through everything you have…she feels the pain you are feeling right now…and she is about to lose her daughter. Are you willing to put her through that? LUCY: …no CHARLIE: Then, let me help you down. LUCY: don’t know…. CHARLIE: It’s your choice…I just want you to think about what you are doing…not only to yourself, but to the people who love you…I’m not leaving you. When you are ready, I’m here. (he holds out his left hand for her to hold) LUCY: (hesitates, pauses then finally takes the hand offered) CHARLIE: Are you ready to get down from here? LUCY: (nods) CHARLIE: Ok… (he climbs down carefully, never letting go of her hand, and offers his other hand to help her down) (Down on the ground) CHARLIE: Better? LUCY: (laughs a little) yeah…better… CHARLIE: Hey, I’m Charlie…

LUCY: I’m Lucy. CHARLIE: I’m really happy to have met you, Lucy. (pause) Look…I know I can’t make it better, but I wish I could. Everyone goes through hard times in life. Some, harder than others, and it seems unfair sometimes. LUCY: It is unfair. CHARLIE: It is unfair…you’re right. But this… is rock bottom…it doesn’t get worse than this Lucy. So, you know what that means? LUCY: Ugh, the ‘It can only get better’ bullshit? (giggles slightly) CHARLIE: You know it…(pauses) Lucy, the fact that you were willing to come down from there makes me think that you are so much stronger than you think you are at this point. But even through that, you can’t do this alone. You need a friend. You need to talk to someone, when you feel this hopeless… LUCY: I don’t feel strong. (pause) I feel broken…shattered… CHARLIE: Then you have more potential for great beauty… LUCY: What? CHARLIE: It’s a Japanese thought…called Wabi Sabi. Things that are imperfect, or broken, have more potential for beauty. LUCY: How? They are broken… CHARLIE: It’s like this…A broken piece of pottery can be glued back together. It is still broken, and it may be ugly, for a moment…but then they cover each one of the cracks with gold, and it becomes a work of art. Even more beautiful than, it was before… LUCY: What does that have to do with me? CHARLIE: Your life may be broken…your heart may be shattered…but Lucy, all that is? Those broken pieces of your life? It’s potential for beauty! Don’t you see, one day you will be a work of art. LUCY: Me…a work of art? Are unicorns real too? CHARLIE: Yep. LUCY: (pause, then laughs) CHARLIE: Your life is falling apart right now. I can see how much you have been struggling…but that doesn’t mean that it is over. LUCY: I know…I just can’t see how to move forward. I feel so…stuck…I guess. Although, to be honest with you, I can breathe a little easier since getting down from there… CHARLIE: I’ll agree with you there…(laughs) I really do hate that you have gone through so much, death is heartbreaking…and the people who left you? Good riddance! I don’t understand why a person would leave when another is hurting. LUCY: I know, me neither. It was shocking…and that hurt. My mom really fell apart. I guess its naive to expect anything from people…

CHARLIE: Unfortunately, it can be sometimes…but I still do, even though I’ve been given plenty of proof otherwise…Good people are few and far between though, believe me I know. LUCY: What are we, a bunch of sad, lonely sacks? CHARLIE: Absolutely! (laughs, pauses) Look, I don’t want to give unwarranted advice, but maybe you should see a doctor…you have been through things that would break anyone. I don’t want you to be alone. LUCY: I’m not one for shrinks, Charlie…I don’t care for people reading my mind. Besides, I’m not alone…you’re here with me. (she nudges his shoulder) CHARLIE: Or I am a figment of your imagination… LUCY: Entirely possible… CHARLIE: (rummages through his pockets) Here. Here is my number. If you won’t go see a doctor, at least talk to someone when you feel like this. Night or day just call…I promise I will answer. You have to remember; you are not alone. (pause) and at least promise you’ll think about seeing a doctor? Please? For my peace of mind, if nothing else… LUCY: (takes the number) I promise…I just don’t understand… CHARLIE: What? LUCY: Why you care? Are you even human? CHARLIE: Lucy, I’m not just going to look the other way when another human being is hurting. I want you to be ok. I want you to have the quality of life that you deserve. You are so young, and even though your life is falling apart right now, you have so much to live for. LUCY: I don’t know if you are just super naïve…or stupid…or you are just a really emotional person…(pauses)…but thank you…you saved my life… CHARLIE: Lucy, the world is a better place with you in it. You were put here for a reason…you belong… LUCY: I belong…I belong…

I’m Sorry, Carrie by Misty Yarnall CARRIE:

Woman in her early 40s

MOM:

Woman in her 70s, Carrie’s Mom

Scene 1 Carrie and Mom are sitting in Mom’s living room. Carrie is showing her pamphlets of retirement homes. CARRIE: Look Ma, this one has a pool. MOM: I don’t need a pool. When am I ever going to go in the pool? CARRIE: We used to put up a pool every summer when Jeff and I were kids. You always went in first and skimmed the water. MOM: Yeah, because you were terrified of every little bug. They were dead, Carrie. CARRIE: Well, I bet there are no dead bugs in this pool. It’s indoors. MOM: Nope, just half-dead people. CARRIE: (beat. She looks sternly at her mother.) Ma, I’m not sending you here to die. MOM: I know. I know. CARRIE: I’m not. MOM: I don’t know how in the heavens we’re going to get this whole house packed up though. I’ve still got all yours and Jeff’s art projects from elementary school in bins in the attic. CARRIE: That’s the easy stuff, Ma. We’ll just toss ‘em. MOM: Like hell you will. CARRIE: Ma, what are you going to do with all those projects? MOM: Smile at them. Remember them. Remember you. CARRIE: (beat) The whole house doesn’t have to be cleaned out yet. We can work on that. I just don’t want you living alone anymore. MOM: I’m not alone. I’ve got Mindy. CARRIE: (shows her mother another page of the pamphlet) And this one accepts dogs. Mindy can come too. (Beat) Ma, it’s just me. MOM: I know. CARRIE: I see you at least twice a week. I know you’re having trouble getting around since you fell. MOM: I’m getting’ around just fine. CARRIE: Then why are you always cursing at your hip every time you get up to use the bathroom? MOM: I’m fine, Carrie. 20

CARRIE: What if you hadn’t had your phone on you? MOM: I didn’t. CARRIE: Yes you did. You called me. MOM: I scooched across the kitchen floor to the phone. It was on the table. CARRIE: Well, what if it wasn’t on the table? MOM: What if it wasn’t? CARRIE: How long would you have been stuck on the floor? Three days? MOM: You would’ve noticed when I didn’t call. CARRIE: The point is, Ma, that I can’t always come to your rescue. And Mindy’s not gonna get you off the floor. (Beat) I’d feel more comfortable if you had people close by who could check on you. MOM: The way you checked on your father? CARRIE: Yeah. Like that. MOM: I called your daughter yesterday. CARRIE: Oh yeah? What’d she say? MOM: She didn’t answer. CARRIE: Michelle didn’t answer last time I called either. She texted me later that she had a migraine. MOM: She needs to get out of the house. Spend time away from that baby. CARRIE: No, she doesn’t, Ma. She’s doing just fine with Sophie. MOM: You and I know more than anyone. You can’t be a full-time MOM without a break now and then. CARRIE: We both managed. MOM: You and Jeff used to drive me crazy. One time, you took all the spoons out of the silverware drawer and scotch taped them together. I spent two hours untaping silverware. CARRIE: You loved it. MOM: What? CARRIE: You loved being at home with us. You didn’t want a job. MOM: I didn’t have many options. CARRIE: I have an interview tomorrow. MOM: An interview? CARRIE: An interview. Like for a job. A job interview. MOM: A job interview? That’s terrific! What’s the job? CARRIE: It’s an assistant manager at a gallery downtown. MOM: Assistant manager, eh?

CARRIE: Yeah, why? MOM: You think you got what it takes to be an assistant manager? CARRIE: Well, yeah, why not? I went to art school, didn’t I? MOM: You’ve never managed anything before in your life. CARRIE: I have so. MOM: Have not. CARRIE: I’ve managed tons of things. I managed a divorce. I managed raising two kids. I managed dad’s medical bills, and medication schedule. Sponge bathing him. What do you mean I haven’t managed anything? MOM: When you were a teenager, you complained about all your managers at that diner you worked at. CARRIE: Yeah, because I was a teenager, Ma. Teenagers complain about everything. MOM: (bitter) Well, I hope you get the job. CARRIE: (Beat) You know, Ma. I’m gonna get going. I’ve uh… I’ve got some Christmas shopping I want to get finished. MOM: When can you take me Christmas shopping? I still haven’t gotten anything for Sophie yet. CARRIE: Later in the week, okay? MOM: Fine. Not like I’m going anywhere. CARRIE: Alright. (She stands up and kisses Mom on the forehead) Bye Ma. MOM: Bye Carrie. Carrie exits. Mom waves out the window. MOM: (sighs) I’m sorry, Carrie. Lights dim. Scene 2 There is a skimpy, old, fake Christmas tree center stage. Mom is sitting in her chair next to the tree. Carrie is decorating the tree. CARRIE: I think it’s about time we got a new tree. MOM: What’s wrong with this tree? CARRIE: Look at it. There’re hardly any needles left! MOM: Your father and I bought that tree the year your brother went off to college. CARRIE: Jeff went to college like thirty years ago. MOM: It looks fine to me. Nobody’s coming for Christmas besides you and me anyway. CARRIE: You don’t know that. 22

MOM: Jeff hasn’t come home for Christmas since your dad died. And I doubt your children will come. CARRIE: Tyler probably not. Michelle said she would stop by with Sophie. MOM: The baby’s the perfect excuse for her to stay home. It’s a far drive. They’ll spend all day with Mr. fancy lawyer’s side of the family, then Sophie’s cranky and tired and they’ll want to go home and put her to bed. CARRIE: Well, I would hope my own daughter would come see me for Christmas. (Beat) Ma, look at this one. Carrie lifts a handmade ornament out of the box of decorations. CARRIE: Tyler made this one in Kindergarten. And look at these. Carrie lefts small baby shoes out of the box. CARRIE: These were Tyler’s first shoes. They’re so tiny! MOM: How is Tyler? CARRIE: He said he’s taking some additional courses. MOM: He already finished law school. CARRIE: I guess it’s always good to keep studying. MOM: With all these wackadoos in power, I guess you’re right. (Beat) Is he happy? CARRIE: He sounds happy. MOM: Has he found a girl yet? CARRIE: Ma. MOM: What? I’m just wondering. Isn’t a grandmother allowed to wonder? Maybe I’d know if he gave me a call every now and then. CARRIE: He’s busy. Kids these days keep busy, Ma. MOM: Where are Michelle’s ornaments? CARRIE: She asked if she could have them. She took her box over Thanksgiving. MOM: She did? CARRIE: Yeah. She wanted to make her tree feel more homie. MOM: You let her take her ornaments? Don’t you want those? CARRIE: I liked having them, yes. MOM: Then why’d you let her take them? CARRIE: It’s Sophie’s first Christmas. She wanted to make everything perfect. MOM: And seeing her mother and her grandmother for Christmas doesn’t fit into that plan? CARRIE: Ma. MOM: What? CARRIE: She never said she wasn’t coming. 23

MOM: (rolls her eyes) Mhm. CARRIE: I always came home every year for Christmas, didn’t I? MOM: Because you moved ten minutes away from the house, Carrie. Michelle’s over an hour away. The roads will be icy. It gets dark early. She’ll tell you she’s nervous to drive and you’ll tell her not to bother, and she won’t come. CARRIE: You think I don’t want her here? MOM: I think you don’t understand what it’s like to have people leave yet. To outgrow being their favorite place to visit. You can help them build gingerbread houses and decorate Easter eggs every year, but next thing you know they’ve got a whole new family to worry about. CARRIE: Ma. MOM: What? CARRIE: Stop. (beat) It’s Christmas. This is my daughter we’re talking about. MOM: (beat) Do you still have your father’s ornaments? CARRIE: Of course. CARRIE opens another shoebox of ornaments and hands it to Mom. Mom pulls out a tractor ornament. MOM: Your father was a farmhand when he was a teenager. This ornament has to be at least sixty years old. CARRIE: I remember that one. (beat) Look at all the #1 dad ornaments in here. MOM: You and Jeff bought most of those at the Christmas sale at school. I sent you each with ten dollars every Christmas and you came home with #1 dad ornaments every year. CARRIE: Well, he was a great dad. MOM: He was. CARRIE places the ornament back in the box. MOM: What are you doing with that? CARRIE: I wasn’t sure if you’d want it on the tree this year. MOM: It’s in the box, it’s going on the tree. CARRIE: Okay. CARRIE stands up and hangs a #1 dad ornament on the tree. CARRIE: He was a great dad. Fade out. Scene 3 Christmas morning. Mom and Carrie are both wearing bathrobes. They are still sitting by the tree. There is crumpled wrapping paper surrounding them. CARRIE: Thanks for the pots and pans, Ma. 24

MOM: Why act surprised? You knew you were getting them. CARRIE: Yeah, but I’m still thankful for them. They weren’t cheap. MOM: I wish I could’ve surprised you. It was so much fun when you and Jeff were younger. When you had no idea what was in the packages before you unwrapped them. CARRIE: At least this way I know I’m getting something good. MOM: Yeah, but you shouldn’t have had to go to the store for me to purchase your own Christmas present. CARRIE: Ma, it’s okay. MOM: If Tyler or Michelle were here, I would’ve had one of them pick it up for you. You know? Just so you wouldn’t see the box before you unwrapped it. CARRIE: Ma, it’s not a big deal. Everything worked out fine this way. MOM: Did you mail Tyler his presents? CARRIE: Yes. MOM: And Jeff? CARRIE: Yeah, Ma. MOM: Should I call them? CARRIE: Yeah. I think you should. MOM: I didn’t get Jeff anything as expensive as your gift. CARRIE: That’s okay. MOM: Do you think he’ll be upset? CARRIE: I don’t think it will bother him. MOM: I thought he would like that new drill. Thank you for picking it up for me. CARRIE: No problem, Ma. MOM: You deserved something nice. CARRIE: Thanks, Ma. MOM: After all you’ve done to help me. All you did for your father while he was sick, and after he was sick. CARRIE: It’s my job. MOM: No, it’s not Carrie. That’s not your job. You just have a good heart. (Beat) Jeff didn’t do nearly as much as you did. CARRIE: I managed taking care of dad just fine. MOM: Yeah, but it would’ve been nice for you to have help. CARRIE: It’s over now, Ma, okay? We don’t need to talk about it anymore. The phone begins to ring.

CARRIE: Hi Michelle. Merry Christmas. (Beat) Oh yeah? (Beat) Oh, I bet she looks so cute. (Beat) Oh yeah? (Beat) Well, that’s okay. (Beat) No, no, don’t worry about it. I don’t want you to drive tired anyway. (Beat) I’m over at your grandmother’s now. Want to say hi? (Beat) Yeah. Yeah I can let her know. (Beat) Okay now. I love you. Bye. Carrie hangs up the phone. She looks at Mom. CARRIE: Michelle says Merry Christmas. MOM: She’s not coming. CARRIE: (Shakes her head) MOM: I told you. I knew she wouldn’t come. CARRIE: Ma. MOM: Just you wait, Carrie. Neither of them will come back. Not Tyler. Not Michelle. They’ve got their own lives now. There’s no time for grandmothers. CARRIE: We always made time for you. MOM: You made time for me. Your children would’ve rather gone out with their friends or stayed with their father than come over here. CARRIE: They didn’t want to see dad sick. MOM: Well your dad’s not here anymore, Carrie. CARRIE: I know. MOM: Then what’s their excuse? CARRIE: They’re grown up. They’re figuring things out for themselves, Ma. And they’re both doing great. It’s hard to ask them to come back when they’ve got their own lives to live. MOM: Then why don’t you go visit your children for the holidays, eh? CARRIE: I don’t want you to spend the holidays alone. MOM: Don’t worry about me, Carrie. You’ve got your kids to think about. I’ll just go sit in a home and wait for the carolers to knock on my door. CARRIE: Ma. MOM: Just do me a favor and call me on Christmas morning. Just so I can hear a familiar voice. CARRIE: Ma, stop it. MOM: Stop what? CARRIE: Making me feel guilty. MOM: I’m doing no such thing. CARRIE: You can’t tell me that I don’t feel guilty. I’ve been here every Christmas since I was born. MOM: It’s fine, Carrie. Really. I’ll be fine. Just like you say. CARRIE: I can’t take care of you the way I took care of dad. 26

MOM: I’m not asking you to. CARRIE: I can’t watch you die. (Beat) Ma, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… MOM:It’s fine, Carrie. It’s fine. CARRIE: Can I get you anything? MOM: I’m not hungry. CARRIE: I made mincemeat like you asked me to. Are you sure you don’t want any? MOM: I said I’m fine, Carrie. CARRIE: (Beat) I got offered the job. MOM: You did? CARRIE: They called a few days ago. Said I could start right after the holiday. I said yes. MOM: That’s terrific. CARRIE: I haven’t worked since before Tyler was born. MOM: You’ll do fine. Besides, it’s just managing. CARRIE: Yeah, you’re right. MOM: So, with this new job, will you still have time to help me find a retirement home? CARRIE: I thought you didn’t want to move. MOM: I think I’ll ask Jeff if he would come help move things out of the house. Then you don’t have to do all that heavy lifting by yourself. Maybe even Michelle’s fancy lawyer husband would help, too, and Tyler if he has time to travel this far. Think that’s something they’d do? CARRIE: It’s worth asking. MOM: You shouldn’t have to do all that lifting by yourself. CARRIE: You can ask. MOM: Then I can spend next Christmas sitting poolside with Mindy on my lap and a mimosa in my hand. CARRIE: (smiles) I don’t know if they have mimosas in retirement homes, Ma. (Beat) I’m going to have a mince pie. CARRIE stands up and begins to exit. MOM: Carrie? CARRIE turns around. MOM: Can you bring me one, too? CARRIE: Yeah, ma. Whatever you need. Carrie exits. Mom watches Carrie walk away. She sits in silence for a moment. MOM: I’m sorry, Carrie. End of play. 27

POETRY

Daniel Gray-Kontar has worked as an advocate for social transformation in the city of Cleveland for more than 25 years. Gray-Kontar is an education consultant for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; the former chair of the Literary Arts Department at the Cleveland School of the Arts; and a former graduate school fellow at UC Berkeleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s College of Education. His work in arts education has been showcased on PBS Newshour and NPR and in The Guardian and Christian Science Monitor. Gray-Kontar has lectured at universities, public schools, arts organizations, and scholarly conferences across the U.S. His Ted Talk discussing youth leadership in public school education has affected the ways public school administrators think about the inclusion of youth and their families in the process of remaking school cultures and curricula. He is the founder and Executive Artistic Director of Twelve Literary Arts.

'41 CADILLAC by Tanner Boutwell Just like that ‘41 Cadillac he had towed from house to house he’d hold onto something broken but in a way that hid its scars. Quiet photographs filled his wallet and they remembered the way we were. Most days when he was lost within the blankets of his bed he would thumb through their innocence as if the years were still right there. But I’d grown out of 4th grade class, it wasn’t halfway through the fall. I hadn’t felt like a child since 6 years from my birth, when it took more than one hand to count that awful age. My fingers thin as straw in the palm of papa’s hand. One day as he lifted me to the top of grandpa’s tree, I was so high in the branches that every plum just hung surprised. They said now look how fast you’ve grown, you’ve eyes beyond your years, and as they leapt into my pockets I scattered pits along their roots. But what my eyes couldn’t see was the length of papa’s arms, how with a shotgun in his mouth he couldn’t reach the trigger. All they saw were the holes that, from a fully loaded 9, winked at us from walls when we couldn’t afford much dinner. Those pictures in his wallet too small to patch em up. Soon enough that Cadillac wouldn’t run in his sleep. He buried it in memories of rust and gasoline. And death remained his muse sitting shotgun through it all. Said if you can will yourself to live then can’t you will yourself to die. How it begged a kind of silence one takes years to understand. 29

Mojave Girl by John Guinta Black is the night Across the land We danced hand in hand Out of the neon carnival Into the starlight From miles above The world is sand All around, horizons So full the moon Above the land Her eyes of blue Reflect the moon We were a two-person parade A wild rodeo We waltzed on the desert floor Salt from the ground Kicking from her black boots Nowhere to go Nowhere to be We waltzed upon the ground And spun like a carousel Outside the carnival Nothing but the stars and the moon Looking at her and me

Mother III (from a series of poems about my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death) by Kate Bruce Months later, alone on the patio Playing with a brush fire Stoking with my poker, an old rake handle Remembering Your love of flame How we sat on the old Couch, threw all things combustible onto the Grate, topped it with Logs, staring we sat and sat Only I, only you, together we felt Warmth, watched as smoke rose Coals formed, lights and shadows moved about our Lined faces. Howl I heard how dad hit you in dark Morning bruises told the truth Not to mention your mouth a Seething smile Smoldering I tried in vain to Smother my ears. Near black, crackles and sizzles sounded Ghostly smoke flew, Below, thin streaks glowed for a long, long time Then suddenly the cave burst in Orange and blue Light Consuming, perhaps, a Loving silence. It comes as no surprise You wanted Cremation.

PERSONAL ESSAY

Wendy Beth Hyman (Ph.D. Harvard University; A.B. Smith College) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. She is the author of Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford, 2019), co-editor of Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh, 2019), and editor of The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate, 2011). She has published over a dozen essays on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, lyric poetry, and the history of science and technology in the early modern era. She is an editor for the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, and is writing a book on optics and Renaissance drama called Shakespearean Romance and the Ingenious Machine.

On the Coast of Zuwara by Keanna Vogt In August of 2015, a boat carrying more than 400 Libyan migrants capsized off the coast of Zuwara, Libya. The death toll was 183 people, with many more reported missing. In November of 2017, CNN reporters detailed the continuing plight of Africans fleeing their countries for the coast of Libya. Seeking refuge in Europe, migrants paid hefty fines to board small boats and travel the perilous waters of the Mediterranean. On the coast, however, smugglers often capture, kidnap, and sell migrants into slavery. This crisis is ongoing. There is turmoil in the freedom we seek, life in the deathly waters of this artery of Earth. Here, resonances of human life are drowned by the deafening crashes of the sea. The remnants of hope are scattered along the shoreline of this gateway to refuge. Nothing is still, hundreds of brown bodies fight tirelessly for that distant horizon, that unforeseeable land of hope. The vessel is rocking incessantly, and I am reminded of the sea of bereavement beneath me, the many empty shells of men these waves carry. The vessel is packed with wayward souls, men shouting, children crying. Though my breath continues to escape my lips, Almawt lingers for miles below and smiles at me from the approaching shores. A chaffed elbow scuffs the back of my head, another jabs at my ribcage. The salt air is cruel, a harbinger of fear that constricts my chest, tightens my airways. With each breath that fear draws nearer, and I am reminded of Almawt, waiting on the sandy shores ahead. I cast my leg over the side of the boat, the cold, wet metal raises my skin. My foot is left bare and calloused when my slipper falls, swallowed by the abyss. A man much older than I collides with my shoulder; I quickly grab hold of the rusty edge of the boat. The wind blows sharply, bites at my nose and the tips of my ears. I glance, frightfully into the crowd, searching for the face of the unknown man but he is gone, lost in another kind of sea. “Shab,” a voice calls gravely from behind me. It is the old man. I do not know how, but I know him. I recognize the deep, wrinkled lines, which stretch tightly around his eyes as he glares at me. I recall the familiar yellowing of his eyes, the way his mouth lengthens when he frowns deeply at me. “You ought not to cast yourself off the boat so carelessly. There are too many people on this boat. You will have not been the first to fall in, you know. You mock Allah with your foolishness,” he scolds me. Casting my eyes downwards, I apologize for my carelessness. I swing my leg back over the side of the boat; my bare foot meets the floor of the vessel. The old man laughs, “I see you’ve lost your shoe, Shab. What happened to it?” “It fell,” I say softly, “into the ocean.”

This amuses him. He holds his stomach, and throws his head back in a coughlike guffaw. “It must have seen what lies ahead and fled while it had the chance.” I smile. The old man takes two steps towards me, shuffling past a shivering woman and a young couple. He rests his weathered hand on my shoulder, groans loudly as he reaches down and retrieves a pair of brown sandals not much younger than he is from his hairy, blistered feet. He gathers them in one hand and shoves them into my aching chest. “Is there something wrong with your feet sir?” I ask him. “Not at all, Shab. They are yours.” He is kind, too kind, but I could not deprive an old man of his only shoes. “Amo, no. I could not take them.” “They have been mine for quite some time,” he fiercely interjects. “It is about time thye had a new friend don’t you think?” “Amo,” I say, gently pushing his hands away from my chest. “Take them, Shab. Do not say no to me,” he scolds, again. I look at the slippers. Though they are battered and torn, they would be quite useful during the journey ahead. “Thank you,” I mutter shyly. “You are welcome,” I hear the old man say. I look up and he is gone, swallowed by the wayward sea of travelers. I did not expect kindness here. I expected only treacherous waters and the grotesque smile of al mawt, staring down at me. I smile to myself, knowing that here, on the precipice of all that is bad, light still seeps through the cracks of our never-ending darkness. There is noise, much louder than the cries of the small, wet children shivering in fear. A fight has broken out only inches from me. The brown sea parts, and I can see two men wrestling over a tattered cloth bag on the wet floor of the vessel. They punch and claw at one other, their altercation dangerously rocking the boat. Panicked, I cross to the other side of the boat, but I am pushed back by the blockade of people who have already moved as far away from the fighters as possible. I look around frantically for an escape, eyes darting between blue and brown seas. The vessel rocks violently, and I stumble, chest-first into its metal side. The fighters aren’t the only ones screaming now. Men are falling overboard into the icy waters below. I look toward the sound of the screams, but I am met by a horde of passengers, rushing away from the tilted edge of the boat. My naked chest meets metal again; old friends meet briefly. The boat tilts again, and I am cast into ice-cold infinity. I drop the shoes. Frantically, I reach up, searching for metal, for skin, for safety. When my hands clasp around the nothingness of the sea and I know that I am sinking. I swim, dear Allah, I swim and swim until I am out of breath. 34

I pause. The boat is but a dot in the distance now, upturned. Far away, I hear the cries of lives lost, of loves lost. My arms give out and I am sinking again, into that icy abyss. I close my eyes when the water passes over my head. It rushes into my nose, fills me. There is no floor beneath me. I sink into the abyss. I do not know what waits for me in the depths of this never-ending blue; I do not know what waits for me beyond the still horizon of life. On the coast of Zuwara, the line that separates life and death blurs and fades.

Lost Sailor by Nicole Dela Rosa Like any responsible parent, my cat’s mother abandoned him on a ship. My cat, the biggest of the group, would mewl at anyone who tried to steal away those remaining in his family. To no avail. The little furball with his sailor blue eyes and his classy gray coat were no match to the protruding hands of a passerby. Me, being a child, would daydream of all his adventures. “Unhand me, filthy pirates! And leave my gentle sisters alone!” he cried. “Aw. Look at how he flails, Vivienne!” “I will tear you apart like a butcher with meat from the slaughterhouse.” “I will give you the most loving home. Vivienne, let’s call him Beans!” Beans. To his dismay, they called him “Beans.” A rather, condescending title. If anything they should have named him Captain as respect for his past life and zeal. No mother, a sense of bravery, and a stunning coat. How on Earth did these two eggheads come up with Beans? Wasn’t placing him in a prison already hard enough? Whatever. Coming up with clever escape plans takes time and he needed a nap. Meanwhile, unbeknownst of my soon-to-be furry companion, I hopped and bounced around my home. That day was THE DAY. THE DAY to request my first dog. THE DAY I established my three main points of credibility: I did well in school, I’m a certified watcher of Animal Planet, and because I wanted one with all my heart. So, I asked my mother as gently as I could. “Mom, give me a dog! Please! Pretty please! Pretty please with an espresso, a ticket to Disneyland, a life’s worth of hugs, and a cherry on top! Please!” “Honey, maybe when you are older.” A tough nut to crack, I noticed. Perhaps if I turn it down a notch. “Mom! I want a dog!” “Nicole. Do your math homework.” “I want a dog.” “Who’s your favorite teacher at school?” “Dog.” “How much homework do you have?” “Dog.” “What is twelve multiplied by twelve?” “Dogs.” “Sweetie, I love you.” “I love you too, but dogs!”

At that moment, my mother knew there was no stopping me. The dog-thirsting demon within me has already possessed my body. The only way to get her daughter back was to succumb to its wishes. She sat down and prayed. “God help me,” she whispered to the heavens above. After all, God spelled backwards is dog. No coincidence. He made dogs in his honor, not man. The apostles got it all wrong. She knew deep down that a generous angel would bestow upon her God’s gift. She smiled to herself and laughed at her profound wisdom. Mom is a lunatic, I concluded. My dog arrived. Profoundly curious, tiny, and meowing. Yeah, definitely not a dog, but I loved him already. I honestly would have settled for a hamster but no way was I telling my mom that. The moment that I looked into his intelligent eyes, I knew we were destined for each other. I loved him and he loved me. By that point, we were practically siblings. Immediately, he ran away into the kitchen and stared at his reflection on the fridge. “Sister, it is I! Run with me and we can escape together,” he demanded in my imagination. “Sister, it is I! Run with me and we can escape together.” his supposed sister echoed back with sheer panic. “This is no time for games, dear sister! We’re in big trouble here-” Vivienne picked up the cat adoringly. “He’s the biggest of the group, but he knows how to hide just about anywhere. Do be careful, love.” I reached out to hold my companion and he flailed in my arms. I cradled him like a mother with a baby. Wonderful, my mother does not have to worry about giving our new family member baths or having to take him out on walks. She shakes Vivienne’s hand and mentally thanks God for the new dog, er… cat. God works in mysterious ways as they say. As if on cue, my mother snatches my cat away from me. “This darling needs to get checked. Dress up. We’re heading to the vet. Think of a name while you are at it.” I nod, launching into a tornado of new clothes. After all, this was a special occasion in my eyes. Quality clothes for a quality cat. My mother informed me about his stories overseas, and I knew that I was not going to disgrace his presence like that. No, I will accompany his journey to the vet with the nobility of a princess. Behind that tough exterior must have been a poor lad missing his family. As I entered my mother’s van, I turned over to see what my cat was thinking. He faced away from me, and hid his face beneath his paws. Not a single meow came out of him. Not even a whine. Not even a cry for his lost family. Not even a compliment on my carefully picked clothes. I slumped in my seat and gazed out the window. Just grass and dull suburban houses. Boring. The sea is a long way from here.

When we arrived at the vet, she greeted us with a smile. She gently handled the small animal. I could not tell if she had the hands of a goddess or if the cat was too exhausted to even lift a paw. My mother turned to me. “Oh right! A name,” I gasped, half-forgetting that she trusted me with a task as important as this. “What about B-,” I paused. The cat glared daggers into my soul. No Beans. Great, a couple hours with a cat and I am already failing my role as caretaker. I shifted my eyes around the room for help: Mother’s coat, the vet’s hair, and the most generic name known to all cats. Of course! “Fluffy!” I answered, sweating. “That’s perfect! The cat of my niece is also named Fluffy. Fluffy, it is!” the vet squealed. Thanks, I hate it, Fluffy seemed to say with his eyes. Well, so much for first impressions I guess. No other name came to mind, and I felt rather disappointed in myself for not having the guts to change it. Fluffy is a domestic shorthair with literally no hint of fluff. How could I mess up that badly? I sighed. My vet twirled around with the enthusiasm of a drunk ballerina. At least she’s happy. By the time we were home, my mother decided to hit the hay. No way would she stay awake for someone with as stupid as a name of Fluffy. Nor will she nag me to do my homework for the umpteenth time. That left alone time for Fluffy and I. Unfortunately, he ran under the couch, behind the fridge, and on the top shelf of the closet: Anywhere away from me. “Leave me alone,” he hissed with his back turned. “That’s boring,” I retorted. The chase began. I followed him everywhere, hoping that he’d give up after a long while. To my surprise, he never tried to bite or scratch. Instead, he mastered the art of stealth, precision, and fitting into small, child-proof spaces. It would have made my life so much easier if he were claustrophobic, but no matter. I was a cat whisperer. At least, I liked to believe myself as one. I peered under the couch. “Please come out with lots of cat treats on top when I actually have some?” “No.” “Please with love and hugs?” “Definitely not.” “Twelve multiplied by twelve equals 144?” “No.” So I waited for him to come out. He waited for me to leave, but I’m one step ahead of him. I hopped onto the couch and waited for him to come out once he believed the coast was clear. Gotcha.

I petted his head and stroked his back. Rather than running away, he collapsed onto the floor with a yawn. His outstretched paws reached for a deck he once called home. The swish and sway motion of my hand remind him of the waves at sea. He reminisces the haunting melodies of sirens and white feathers of the seagulls that once flew above. His tail finally stills as he drifts off into a quiet slumber. I knew invading his personal space would make him like me! “I miss my momma,” he almost whispered. I knew the reality of his situation. On the surface, his aloof nature hid something away from me. Cursed with a bark worse than his bite, people must have ignored him all along. Wait, never mind. He is way too cute to ignore. Blue eyes plus gray fur is the best combination, and I will stand my ground on that. Still, deep down resided a sailor with a heart of a captain. He protected his sisters and now he is never going to see them again. His own mother decided it best to live her own life than nurture the children she was forced to have. Perhaps she wanted to have her own adventures too. Maybe one day, after completing her journey, she will once again reunite with her children. “Your mother sucks,” I told him. His ear twitched and he gives me a look of minor annoyance. Rude. Okay, first of all Captain Fluffy Beans. Mothers do not abandon their children. Cowards abandon their children. Second of all, I would make a much better momma. At least, that’s what I would have said if it wasn’t for the fact that he was purring on my lap. My eyes welled up in happiness. I’m a momma.

Errands by Somtochukwu Nwadike We lived in a bungalow, in an estate that was almost always too quiet, save for the constant hum of generators. Signs and announcements for residents were posted on the gates of the streets. I liked my street. It was named Purple. My best friend lived on Red, and the girl who had told everyone about my crush on Tomiwa lived on Brown. It was fitting. Brown was a horrible color, like her. After school, we had a routine to follow. We came home, showered, ate, washed our uniforms and helped with the chores. If I was lucky and there was electricity, I would enjoy a bit of peaceful TV before everyone came home. The living room had the best TV in the house and the home theatre, so it was always sought after. When my aunts came back, we would make dinner and then eat together. Our dining table was wooden and had been since my brother Collins and I had broken the last two glass ones. It had six chairs and the rest of us sat on the couches in the parlor. Usually, this was when we talked—other than dinner, we mostly argued. We usually asked Mummy about her day and vice-versa. Mummy wasn’t home that day. She had gone on a work trip to Abuja and was coming home later that night. Dinner wasn’t the same, and we got back to arguing. It started when Uncle Emeka asked, “So, Collins how was your tennis match?” “I didn’t have a tennis match,” Collins replied. “Ahan, wasn’t it in this house that someone was crying because no one was sure they would have time to come see him play?” “That’s table-tennis, not tennis, Uncle.” And then I was grilled on my French test. I didn’t pass the tes,t and I didn’t want anyone to know, so instead, I asked when Mummy’s flight was landing. I was especially excited about this because I hoped she had gotten me what I asked for. We always asked for things, but we didn’t always get them. This time I had asked for pizza. I loved pizza, I loved what I saw on television and what I read in books. It seemed like a “slice of heaven”—I read that somewhere. My friends talked about how amazing pizza was and the girl who told everyone about my crush had made a huge deal of her father getting her one from a popular shop in a different city. I had wanted that pizza even more after that, so I had ganged up with Collins, the baby of the house, and succeeded in guilt-tripping Mummy—I hoped—into getting it for us. Uncle Emeka left after dinner, and a few more arguments ensued over what channel to watch and Aunty Chidinma’s jobless ex-boyfriend showing up earlier in the day. After a few hours, while we are all in the living room, Uncle Emeka calls. I don’t hear what he says but everyone starts to pray right after. Junior tells Collins and me to go to bed, and Aunty Chidinma starts looking for the deed to the house. The news comes on and everyone is so focused on it that Collins and I are forgotten. They’re all holding hands and whispering prayers, even crying. But Collins and I are left out. Do we not matter? We understand soon enough, though. A plane has 40

crashed. “Do we have enough fuel to leave the generator on overnight?” Aunty Nneka asks. “We do, but with the scarcity, we’d better not risk it,” Uncle Ugo answers. Minutes later, the news reporters mention the confirmed crash of Dana Air flight 992 that was en route to Lagos from Abuja. The olive walls jeer. I see Junior standing so very still staring at a picture of Daddy on the wall above the TV. I want to ask him what is going on; he always has the answers. Always. But I can’t find my voice, or my lungs. It’s my nightmare all over again. Aunty Chidinma shouts “Chim o E gbuo m!” My God, they have killed me! “It might be a mistake,” Uncle Ugo says, and then Junior finally speaks, in a voice void of everything that is my brother: “What happens from now on?” I remember staring at the tiled floor and thinking of nothing, but lost in thought. Everyone was some variation of angry, sad, scared, devastated, hopeful, hopeless and empty. When Collins points to a plane in the sky and asks if Mummy might be there, it’s easy for me to lie and say, “Not yet” immediately. I take Collins to bed and try to fall asleep because I know I’ll ask God why, even though I’m not supposed to. At about 3am, Uncle Emeka comes home and even though I know there will be a meeting, I don’t come out because I want to be hopeful for longer. When I hear screaming, my hope shatters, thinking they’ve already found the body. I force myself even harder to sleep. In my nightmare the most horrible thing happens. I hear Mummy’s voice and her laugh and the same nickname she always called me when she woke me up the middle of the night for my anointing oil, but this time she’s telling me to come eat pizza. I don’t want stupid pizza. I want my mummy. I want the woman who told me I was beautiful, who laughed at my nightmares, who said I was better than Tomiwa, who cried when I fell from the tree in the house and then beat me for falling. Why must life always rub salt on fresh wounds? Aunty Nneka shouts from somewhere, “Somto, your mother is here! Wake up and join us in thanks before I slap you!” So I do wake up, and it is her, in the same clothes as when she left and not a speck of dust on her. She had a box of pizza in her hand. I had thought of pizza for a long time. It always looked so nice on television and in the books I read. The one we had that morning looked like an alternative to vegetable regurgitation; I ate it anyway, with my runny nose, swollen eyes, hiccups and Collins’s tears spilling into it. So I hate and love pizza now. Mummy had missed her flight because she was getting the stupid thing. We’ve never spoken of this story, of how we rejoiced while others mourned. I am eternally grateful to stupid pizza and to God. We all are.

FICTION

Karen R. Long manages the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the only juried prize given each year for the best books to confront racism and contribute to our understanding of rich human cultures. She supports the jury deliberations and celebration of the winners, and works to bring the Anisfield-Wolf canon â&#x20AC;&#x201C; stretching back to 1935 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; into the lives of more readers each year. Long came to the Cleveland Foundation in 2013 after eight years as book editor of The Plain Dealer. She continues as a literary critic, writing for Newsday, Kirkus Reviews, and the Los Angeles Times. In 2016, she finished a seven-year stretch as a vice president for the National Book Critics Circle, where she was a judge for its six annual prizes, awarded each spring in New York City. In addition, Long served The Plain Dealer as a science writer, investigative reporter, and a religion and ethics writer, and served her coworkers as a Vice President of Local One of the Newspaper Guild. She won a Penny Missouri award for best magazine feature and an Associated Press award for best feature writing. A voracious reader since she wore her cat-eye glasses to kindergarten in Seattle, Long was educated at the University of Washington and Oxford University in England. She raised three children in Cleveland Heights with her husband Joe Frolik. In 2015, Cleveland Magazine named her one of the most interesting people in the city.

August Is Over Lucy Behr When the last washer bows out, Myra and I are sent to stick our skinny arms under soda machines, between the bed frames of vacant rooms, and in bedside drawers beside a bible. Together, we manage two dollars and sixty-one cents. Rudy and Jonas fetch laundry baskets close to bursting. Vi starts the van. “We’ll get those washers fixed in a jiffy,” says Ivan. He shakes the men’s hands. “Our kids’ll run your loads to the laundromat,” Jane says, and the young mothers tap their bare feet a little faster on the blacktop. “On our dime,” Ivan says. 1987 was a different kind of year, and even the sweet veneer of Myrtle Beach was beginning to give with the weight of it. Yes, the ferris wheel still turned, never seeming to stop. There were still as many half-eaten sticks of cotton candy in the sands as cigarette butts left by stick-thin women. Motels see the first of it though, the cracking. Sick men wear spots on their skin and roam the shoreline like stray cats. Needles in sinks. Kids vanish from the beach. Motels collect foster children for the monthly allowances we bring. Hoards flee New York. They swarm and stay if they can stomach the sun. People are afraid. Jonas sits shotgun, the rest of us making seats from clothes baskets in the back. Vi flicks on the air conditioning to a chorus of cheers, amplified by the walls of the van and the knowledge that this is not allowed. Rudy draws with a finger in the dust and claps his hands to get Myra’s attention. Even deaf, he is louder than she’s ever been. I turn to the baskets and turn out each pair of pockets. Four dimes and two pennies. A lighter with a naked lady on it. Her eyes are scratched out. In the last item - a plain pair of khakis that smell like smoke - two polaroid pictures. They are glossy and reflect my face in their shadow-filled corners. In them, a girl. Her hair is long like mine, but brown like Myra’s. She is in a motel room. That much is clear from the twin lamps fixed to the wall between two beds, the nondescript notepad on the nightstand, the cheap blinds off to the side and what little light they let through to illuminate her. This is not one of our rooms. No, the floor is plush and green where ours is hard and brown. The bedspread is a bright yellow instead of pink. She is sad in one, and smiling in the next. Or, maybe it’s the other way around. She wears a red swimsuit. Her feet don’t touch the floor. “Everyone grab a basket,” Vi says, cutting the engine and cool air. “Two if you can.” Myra shows me the dollar she’d scavenged on the way. The front door is covered in the gap toothed smiles of kids asking in big block letters: HAVE YOU SEEN ME? I hide the polaroids in my pocket. Rudy and I race to the gumball machine.

August is over. A year passes. I step in sea glass. I fracture a small, important bone in my hand. I shave my legs for the first time and stare too long at the blood that spills when I nick the skin. I dump Jane’s jewelry in the Atlantic and return its box, now filled with sand, snails, and seaweed to her closet floor. They bleach my black hair to look for lice. I get two inches taller. I turn eleven. Jane calls me Calder. I tell her it’s Callie. Ivan calls me Callie. I tell him it’s Calder. A storm breaks on the beach. Rain pierces the roof like the tinny rattle of a thousand prisoners, each dragging their cups across the bars of a cell. Water, they begged. Water, answered August. Vi dabs the paintbrush twice against the towel. It tickles where she drags it along the underside of my arm. An animal is born from the bristles. Reds, yellows burst, popping from my summer-browned skin. The animal has horns. The animal has a tail. The animal has two eyes that slant. “Eyes like ours,” Vi says. It has a stripe down its face and spots on its hands. Fur stands between its toes. Its tongue, blue and wavering, wriggles out from its mouth as if attempting an escape. The room is black if not for the small yellow beam of Vi’s flashlight. Jonas and Myra are closed off within the white walls of the bathroom. They have a habit of hiding. It must have been easier in the long halls of their long-lost mansion on the hill. They’re a little younger, a little smaller than me. Vi is halfway through creating another creature on Rudy’s leg when the door whips open with the wind. Vi curses once, but Rudy is already springing up off the bed, a red streak of pain abandoned, dripping down his shin. Rudy slams his scrawny weight against the door. The wind screams, whistling through the gaps where his ninety pounds can’t cover. One of its hinges flies across the room and slams into the far wall. The door wobbles dangerously over Rudy, his face and deaf ears sprayed with rain. “Stay here,” Vi says as she squeezes her way out into the storm. I fumble for the polaroids under my pillow. I clutch them and will the wind away. I stare at the squares, and even in the lightless room, can see them clear behind my eyes. I make patterns in the print of the comforter, watch it warp and turn. I see her blank blue eyes that don’t crinkle like they should when she smiles. I call her Wendy. I don’t know her story. I can only make my own for her. She’s an only child, or she has two brothers. She’s on the soccer team, or she’s never set one delicate foot on an athletic field in her life. She loves the ocean, but hates the sand. I bet she’s never been to Myrtle Beach. I look for her everywhere I go. It isn’t much more than I know of Rudy, Vi, any of them, really. 44

Rudy is long and lanky, deaf and deafening. He lets his mouth hang open like he’s gasping for air. His clothes hang off him like sheets left out to dry. I don’t speak his language. Vi’s black hair falls straight down her back. Her fingers smell like smoke. Her parents were Korean immigrants. She was taken from them at ten, separated from her six siblings. Jonas and Myra are a mystery. Twins. Once rich as all hell. Their parents’ arrest was the talk of the town. I wonder if they sit in the same prison as my mother. I see and don’t see Rudy’s straining shape battle the door closed, the trailing red of his unfinished animal, and the too big shirt now soaked against his skin. I hear and don’t hear his teeth grind with the effort, his small throat struggle against his closed mouth, and his shadow’s sneakers squeaking as they’re forced backwards. My hair’s gone untended since Vi aged out and split town. Jane shaves it one day when she can’t get the knots to break. I watch long, bleached locks fall to the bone-dry bottom of the bathtub like the toy soldiers Rudy sends falling from the balcony to the blacktop. Jane rakes the razor over my head again. Its buzzing, bug-like sound swarms in my ears. Ivan stands in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. He spits out the familiar lecture, Jane interrupting now and again to recite her lines. How they took us in when we had no one, rescued us from group homes, from rich, terrible parents, from city streets and prison blocks. Jane likes to imagine I’d be charged for my mother’s crime, locked up in her cell by virtue of my being born there. You’re so unhappy, one of them says, just try and make it on your own. “I’ll give you right back,” says Ivan. He points a finger in my face. I think about leaning forward and biting till I see blood. “One of you.” “Who?” I say. “You choose.” “Me.” He might say you wish. He might say not an option. He might slap me once across the cheek so it stings. Either way, he retreats to the office for a smoke, leaving me with Jane, my hair slain at my feet, and the buzzing teeth still gnawing at my neck. I stare down at the befallen hair. I wonder how Wendy would look without hers. I wonder if she would still think I’m pretty. I search for some other similarity between us. Her light brown hair, her round, blue eyes, her milk-white waist are my opposites - a negative of my shaved head, my dark, crescent eyes, and my skin browned by summer and my mother’s Malaysian blood. I’m picking up some sign language now that Vi’s not there to translate. Rudy points to my head when he sees me. Boy, he signs. I chase him down the beach with my lighter.

A couple is here to see Rudy. The good kind - young, smiling and birdhousebuilding. The Carpenters. They’re not deaf, but they took American Sign Language as an elective in college, or they grew up with a deaf sibling, or they just want a kid with a story. Rudy stands between Jane and Mrs. Carpenter up in the parking lot. Jonas, Myra, and me are on the beach, hurling stones and shells into the sea. “You kids are so lucky to live on the beach,” says Mr. Carpenter. “When I was young, I would’ve killed for this view. The sand, the sun, the sea.” He is tall and blonde, tanned like leather and just past thirty. He wears sunglasses atop his head and red swim shorts. Myra nods. Jonas ignores, now pushing scavenged sea glass in circles with a thin stick. The man pets Nadia from next door on the head. He smooths her hair. I watch him from between the twins. Nadia’s swimsuit is the same bright red as Wendy’s. My palms itch. I shove them in the sand. “I grew up in a big, old house in Illinois. You know where that is?” he says. “Nowhere good. There wasn’t a beach like this for miles. Snow taller than you.” He sighs. He puts Nadia on his lap. He smiles. “But we spent our summers here. And I met my first love. We were probably your age. She kissed me at the top of the ferris wheel and we swam naked in the ocean. Don’t you love the feeling of warm water on your body?” Jonas was looking at him now. “She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen,” he says and looks at Myra. “She looked a lot like you.” I shake the sand from my hands. The man’s words turn my stomach with some familiar, unnamed nausea. I want to kick sand in his face. I want to scream until he runs. I want to break his thumbs. There are people all around. Sunburned kids and their lotion covered mothers. College kids and their hand-rolled cigarettes. Vacant women. I only take Nadia’s hand and drag her up ro the Shady Seashell, trusting the twins to follow me. When I turn to check, they are in tow, in silent agreement if not understanding. And there is the man smiling like a shark back on the beach. Jane paints the place, its outside at least, and it returns to its original sky blue. Myra stops talking altogether. Jonas is stung by a jellyfish on their birthday. Rudy stays on with us when the Carpenters go back on their offer. Wendy keeps me up at night. I feel her burning holes in my head when I sleep. Jane tells Myra and I to top off the shampoo bottles with water to keep them full. The bathroom is a would-be white which comes closer and closer to the yellow of Ivan’s teeth every year. In the tub, dolls’ heads circle the drain. Glitter 46

litters the sink. Globs of nail polish stick like tar to the tile floor. In the corner sit scorched magazine covers, failed science experiments, and a box of baby teeth. The sink hisses out a small stream of lukewarm water. The pipes whine with effort while we work. Myra, without looking me in the eye, says her first words in four months. “Do you think I’m beautiful?” Girls like her always are. Their eyes are round and shining. Their skin is smooth and white as if there were no blood running under it. Their wrists are slim. Their necks belong to pearls and precious stones. Myra and Wendy could be sisters. “You talk now?” I say and screw the lid back onto a bottle of scentless shampoo. She only shakes her head, and tops off the next bottle. Rudy turns twelve the day I turn thirteen. It’s a dark night in August and we watch fireworks explode off the boardwalk. I jump and wave my hands in time with the explosions to help him make the sound in his head. He laughs like a dog, and takes one of my hands over his heart. Feel, he signs with his free hand, and there we stand, feeling the fireworks echo in his small and screaming chest. Back inside, my legs are like jelly. I am thirteen. I wonder if Wendy would be able to tell. I wonder what’s changed. One of the lamps in mine and Myra’s room is busted. It coats the room in a dingy light like dusk. Rudy returns with a brownie for us to split and a single cigarette, each snagged from the front desk downstairs. We take small, awful puffs off the cigarette, and cough it back up like tar. Wendy calls from her place beneath my pillows. I don’t remember leaning over, or moving the pillow back to reveal two polaroid photos, or taking them in both hands back to Rudy. I only remember looking her in those familiar eyes, and turning them toward the boy I’d never called my brother before that night, and his hungry hands reaching for Wendy. We each hold a piece of her. He has the smiling square held carefully at his fingertips. I hold her blank stare. His face relaxes. His eyes take her in. His hands almost shake. I watch blood rush to his cheeks. I watch him run a thumb over her dangling legs. I swear I heard her howl from under his fingers. “Give her back,” I say. Give, I sign. He doesn’t hear me. He won’t look at me. I wave both hands in front of his face, but he’s somewhere I can’t go. I punch him in the leg. I scream his name an inch from his ear. With shaking hands, I sign every word I can remember, the curse words he’s taught me. 47

Give, please, back, want, shit, mine, mine, mine. Behind us, a gun is shot on screen. The bullet hits no one. Beyond us, fireworks burst against a purple sky. I wish he would feel them in his chest again, look up and call me some name I don’t know the sign for. I don’t remember the reaching, I only remember the ripping. Sideways. Torso snapped from her legs like a Black Dahlia. She drifted in pieces to the floor. Still, she smiled. She didn’t scream. She didn’t beg. She didn’t cry or crawl across the floor on her arms to me. Rudy looked up, but I didn’t recognize him anymore. “Get out,” I said. “Get out!” I screamed when he just sat there, his eyes wide and lost. I didn’t think before pulling out the lighter I nicked along with Wendy. Rudy’s mouth was wide open when I put the lit cigarette to his cheek. It shook between my fingers. It left a red crescent in the pale baby fat of his cheeks. I forced it further, my angry eyes on its burning end. I wish I could say the look on his face was one of betrayal, or disbelief. It wasn’t. I wish I could say the building was up to code. I wish I could say he didn’t cry out, that I didn’t drop my weapon at the noiseless gasp of it, that the still burning stick didn’t produce a flame that ran from the harsh carpet to the curtains. It swallowed what was left of Wendy in one bite. It licked up at Rudy’s legs as it spread and he ran for the door. My eyes prickled and watered like faucets. Outside was cool and unfeeling and unable to mute the roaring fire started in room 201. Is it obvious? Is it clear my fire burned its way through three rooms before it could be stopped? That I told Jane and Ivan it was Rudy who set the blaze, who stole the cigarette? How Rudy, unable to speak in his own defense, ran away before they could think of what to do with him? How he must have cried? How no one ever found him? Until someone did. Find him, I mean. Eight miles up Cape Fear River three years from our last summer. He never let Vi or Jane or anyone teach him how to swim. His mouth was wide open when he hit the water. I know it was. Sometimes I see his shape on the Atlantic. Sometimes I see his arms, flapping on the air like the bug he was while he falls to the water. Sometimes I see those wings take him two miles higher and up the coast. Sometimes I hear his sneakers slap the pavement and stop before my door.

Lenny by Alex Dodt You know the story: a stranger comes to town, and the stranger is your widowed and soon-to-be-joining-her-in-the-grave father-in-law. “Maybe you’re the stranger in this one, Len,” Marg liked to say to me, and then she and Pops would laugh at her twisted version of the story. She was funny like that, always telling tall tales. When we first met, she said, “I don’t date fishermen,” and stood totally still in the doorway, a hand on her hip like an imbalanced teapot I could tip over with one wrong move. I wasn’t really a fisherman, I was a dockhand, but Marg knew that. I told her, “I haven’t caught one in years,” and we both laughed. We went on dates anyway. If I had been the lost and lonely traveler and not Pops, our house wouldn’t have been the first I looked to for refuge. It was the only two-story house on the street, possibly by accident. The second story stood less than half the height of the first and they were stuck together like a disemboweled wedding cake, its middle layers thrown away and the top layer, still imprinted with the feet of a bride and groom statuette, slapped down cockeyed on the wide bottom. Other strangers had passed through before Pops. Not many, but enough. Children passed through. Not mine, but Marg’s at least. The first two, from her first marriage, came to visit once after I moved in. Sometimes, in conversation with a stranger, Marg will mention their names and remind me she hasn’t made them up as part of some trick she’s playing. Olive, from her other marriage, was only 10 when we all moved into the two-layer cake. Marg was working overnight then, so I would drive little Olive to school. The first morning, I dressed up for her in a chauffeur hat and a black tie, tipping my cap as I opened the door to the backseat. She pulled a finger out of her Rudolph nose and said, “Thank you, Lenny.” Even after Olive moved to Anchorage, Marg kept all of the kids’ rooms just as they had left them in case they came home unannounced. That left only two rooms for Pops to choose from. Our bedroom was out of the question. The bed was perfectly-suited for Marg and I. Years of lifeless bodies had molded it into a home, two miniature homes really, two human-like figures impressed in deep relief on opposing sides of the mattress. I converted the den into a bedroom. A necessary sacrifice, Marg called it. The night Pops moved in, Marg and I stood against the door of the den and he sat on the mattress I had dragged in from the garage that morning. We talked about the room. There was nothing to say about it, but we found ways. We could have been standing in Olive’s dorm room again, Olive fidgeting on her bed, staring at the door Marg and I held onto, Marg more firmly than I, hoping it might not open again and we’d be stuck in there forever. Marg was good like that, closing doors and only opening them when the time called for it. I asked Pops what he wanted to do on his first full day and he pursed his lips like he wanted to whistle a response. Marg asked about the new curtains instead. 49

He liked them. We talked about the mattress too. Tomorrow wasn’t always proper for conversation. That was easy to forget. Even days already past weren’t always proper. Before Pops moved in, I asked how long he would be staying and Marg responded like I had asked what we should watch next, hiding her mouth behind a glass stained on both sides by her pink lips and suggesting a Judy Garland movie. “Can I smoke in here?” Pops asked, pulling a plastic bag of thumb-shaped green stems from his pocket and placing it on the mattress. I knew we weren’t in Olive’s dorm room anymore; only adults asked that question: Am I allowed? Once they received their allowances, it was time to consider forgiveness and was it all worth it. But Pops could have never asked. Marg wouldn’t know better. Her nose had been molded by 35 years of Marlboro Reds and had never zeroed in on that smell seeping into the kitchen. I indulged sometimes when I had spent a long afternoon building boats in the garage. When I came inside, Marg never asked about the smell, only about the boat and whether it was seaworthy, holding it in her palm like it had already weathered a storm. Before Pops was Marg’s father to me, he looked less like a dying man. Whenever I came into Arlo’s, he would be behind the bar, telling jokes that made the dog tags around his neck bounce across his chest like lottery balls. After a whole crabbing season had passed, he finally let me drive his only waitress home. Marg wore her fingernails long then, and by the end of a shift she’d have peanut scraps packed beneath her nails. When she wanted to emphasize something, she tapped her nails on the closest surface twice like ashing five skinny cigarettes. Most nights, her knowledge of Hollywood was enough to carry us all the way to her house. By the time we got there, the dashboard of my car would be covered with semi-circles of brown dust. I made sure she got in the front door before I drove away. She always did. I kept the window down and waved. “Paul Newman or Robert Redford?” she asked as we pulled out of the Arlo’s parking lot for the first time. “If you could only choose one.” “What am I choosing for?” She tapped her fingers on the dash. I chose Redford. She kept going. I listened. Voted when it was my turn. Chose Donny Osmond on our first real date and regretted it. Marg had an opinion on all of them, accumulated from years of doing hair and makeup in California. None of the names she asked about ever had their hair in her hands, and it was probably better that way. She might have never let them go. Sometimes we chose the same star. When we did, we could talk about it all night. On our first anniversary, we ate seafood and agreed on Bob Hope. I could watch him forever, Marg said. She would prepare him backstage and then come sit next to me and watch him perform. Our own slice of heaven. I didn’t imagine Bob Hope’s idea of eternity was singing and dancing for some old couple on their couch. But they were just dreams, that’s what Marg would say. Bob Hope could sit on his couch or do whatever he pleased in his own dreams, and he could perform in ours. Everyone could have what they wanted, and at the same time too. That was the logic of all of her dreams. 50

The three of us rolled ourselves into airtight balls of arms and legs and tumbled around the house. Routines changed. We began adjusting to each other. I moved to the loveseat, so Pops could sit with Marg on the couch when we watched our shows. I spent more time in the garage. Christmas came, at last, and brought order; Marg’s carefully- scripted traditions from a childhood spent with Pops and Jean on Air Force bases across America. Frank Sinatra’s voice replaced the hum of the heater as our background noise. Holiday cookbooks were unboxed and laid out on the kitchen counter like a missal stand. Every act was a gesture toward a previous year and so on, backwards in time, until we could reach somewhere unknown again. Olive came home for the holiday. Pops stuck around. I gathered everyone around the dinner table. We held hands and prayed over the food. Our unmoored daily movements were becoming fastened to the ground again. On weekends, we piled into the truck and drove around town, marveling at all the lights and the heights people had gone to just to line their roofs with them. We strung a line of red and green blinking lights across our windshield and plugged it into the dash whenever we stopped to gape at another house. Sometimes, people appeared in their window and stared back. We would sit very still so they couldn’t see us and the people would point as if to say, Look at their house! Marg hadn’t agreed yet to move Pops into a nursing home when the flyers started arriving in the mail. She would throw them in the trash can in our bedroom and say we’ll talk about it later. But sometimes we ran out of things to say after dinner was finished. Pops and Olive would sit on the couch and Marg would be in the kitchen bent over a yellow legal pad of Jean’s recipes scribbled in blue felt pen, studying them like scrolls. One nursing home flyer was designed like a before-and-after ad for a weight loss program. The man forking green beans into his mouth in the first photo looked like a younger Pops, and the second was a close-up of a spartan kitchenette with two slat back chairs around a corner table set for dinner. Become this stainless steel silverware set, it seemed to say. Pops laughed when I showed it to him. He always kept a sense of humor about him. Marg didn’t agree. “You weren’t hired to deliver that message to him,” she said, pouring another glass of Tennessee Honey and spinning two fingers in it until a pin-sized whirlpool formed amid the circle of ice cubes. There were so many delicate messages to transmit in a marriage. Often, Marg and I could exchange them without speaking, sometimes even breathing wasn’t necessary, just a kind of withholding. There were bound to be breakdowns though. Who could avoid those? Middle-age marriages required extra care. There were the usual turnabouts to navigate—decisions of whether to sleep or get up, whether to take clothes off or leave them clinging to your horrible flesh—and there were also family parties where an aunt or someone who must be a grandparent would toast to the family but mostly to the kids; the beautiful, beautiful kids brought into the world by someone whose memory still squatted at the end of the table apparently. “And we’re so glad Marg found Lenny,” the toast ends, and I raise my glass to life as a rescue. 51

Marg put the flyer in the trash and walked with her drink to the couch and sat with Olive. I wasn’t hired to deliver the message. That was true. I was selfappointed, hiring myself off to anyone with a life to explain away, a messenger sometimes of even my own thoughts. That’s what I wanted, today’s me says of yesterday’s. He meant every word, I report of myself. Knowing when to give in was nothing new. The search for a Christmas tree was my most well-versed tradition. One of the first trees Marg laid her eyes on and asked, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” would be the one we’d end up taking home. But we had to be drawn back to it. That was the process. We visited a second, a third, and a fourth lot, and I played the skeptic along the way, shooting down her latest suggestion, waiting for the right moment to concede. “Tree is a monster,” Pops said and spun a tight figure in his wheelchair like he wanted to dance with one of those towering over him, maybe the tango or the jitterbug, something quaint that required a partner. “It’ll fill up the whole room,” Marg said in the direction of the same row of trees we had begun the night with hours before. She ran her fingers over Pops’ head, between the plush brown antlers hanging over his ears like bent antennae. No one asked for clarification. He was excited and couldn’t be bothered anymore with the detail of this or that tree, his singular things becoming universal and unrecognizable. I gave my best ambiguous shrug and kept moving. The afternoon’s snow was hardening over the morning’s asphalt-stew, and we moved across it slowly, like it was Opening Night again and Marg and I were limping to center ice to try a slap shot for $50. At the end of the row was a flattop yellow tent. Outside it, a bearded man stood next to a rusted barrel like something was burning inside. He watched us without cheering. When Marg’s eyes got wide at the sight of a heavyweight near the end of the row, I called over the man by the barrel. The tree was a Douglas Fir; just getting near one felt like dunking your face in one of Jean’s mint juleps. It was tall too, taller than Marg when she’s had one too many Honeys and stands on the couch to try and jump on my back. “That one’s already been sold,” the man from the barrel said, pointing to a tag that was tied on the backside of the tree. The man’s hands looked familiar, his fingers gnarled at the tips like he had worked at the docks. I told him about the season I had spent crabbing. He told me how he got into trees. Fish in the fall, trees in the winter, retirement in the spring. It was impressive how he found ways just to get through the seasons. We could choose a different tree, I told him. What mattered was that we got one. Marg didn’t say anything. Her face looked stalled by the cold. The fisherman had a bewildered look. Even when people used the best words they could come up with, there was still interpretation to be done. Without words, anyone’s guess was as good as mine. Marg turned and walked to the next row of trees and Olive followed. My guess then was that traditions only remained traditions until

something severed them. Then they became just a curiosity, indexes of how time had been passed before. Once the fisherman left, I grabbed the trunk of Marg’s chosen tree and placed the other end on Pops’ lap. My guess then was that tradition shouldn’t be ceded easily. From the look on his face, Pops agreed. I began to push and Pops held on, and once we got going momentum carried us toward the exit. For a moment, there was no one around. Rolling backwards, with his hands gripping the branches like handlebars, Pops soared across the ice, his chest rumbling as he laughed. He hunched over in his wheelchair as though he could exist below the wind. I imagined he had never gone that fast before. We almost made it to the truck. The fisherman would have had no idea. It was the sound that brought everyone running. Pops fell out of his chair when we hit a pothole and the tree fell with him. By the time I reached him, he had rolled out from under the branches and was still smiling. The fisherman stood over the tree and shook his gnarled fingers like fish out of water. Olive helped Pops into the truck. Marg wasn’t impressed with our defense of tradition. She told her version of the story. In it, tradition was ruined. Tradition never involved getting kicked out of a Christmas tree lot, she said. When we died, would Olive and her kids want to repeat this night? If it couldn’t be repeated, it wasn’t worth doing once. I knew that. Pops was happy though, happier than I’d seen him before. Jean would have been glad for that, I thought. But Marg didn’t share my interest in interpreting the feelings of dead people. I started to imagine that when I die, people will ask Marg, “What would Lenny want?” and she might not have any answer. The three of them crammed into the backseat together, Olive wedged in the middle. I wiped the mud off my pants and plugged the string of lights into the dashboard. We drove like that for a while. At the first road that branched off the highway between the tree lot and home, I turned. It dead-ended at an opening in the forest that in the summertime must have been a meadow filled with knee-high purple fireweed. A short walk from the truck, I found a grizzly bear of a tree at least as big as the one from the lot. Lying under it, I could feel slivers of bark hitting my cheeks as I moved the saw through the trunk. Olive waited just beyond the range of where the tree would fall. Pops had left his wheelchair at the truck and walked out to where the trees gave into meadow and propped himself up. Marg stood nearby. Behind her, I could see lights flashing in our windshield. Then, the tree wiggled free. Olive raised her hands to her head. I couldn’t tell if she was cheering or shielding her face from the storm. The tree yawned around the saw’s teeth and landed in an embankment, spraying a burst of snow up into the air. Through the falling snow, I could see the outline of everyone, but no one was moving toward the tree. I felt like I had been placed inside of a snow globe, unwrapped on a fireplace mantel somewhere unknown. The sphere of glass must have been big enough to contain Olive too, and Pops and Marg. We were all inside of it, standing in our places, and on the outside, in someone else’s hands, we were shaking. 53

J&D by Jill Zaiser Jenny looked perfect. She looked so perfect one may not have noticed her burgundy eyeshadow matched her casket almost exactly until they got close up. All I had seen when I was walking down the aisle was her black and white uniform with a giant logo that I had been seeing most of my life. We’d begun our journey as “Trinity Tigers in Training” when Jenn and I, in pigtails and matching butterfly barrettes, had made a PowerPoint presentation with three clipart images on every page and transitions (star in, star out, fade in, swipe right) between every slide to convince all four parents that letting us try out for the then boys only mini basketball team was a good idea. Thus began years of joint vacations to Disney world, a secret language, hundreds of homemade bracelets, and sports dominating our lives five days a week. “J & D forever so long as we may be” doodled in our notebooks. Without looking, I knew below her jersey was the itty-bitty black cloth that the volleyball team dared to call shorts. The first week of eighth grade we had been meandering into Hot Topic when Jenn made her announcement, “I’m quitting, Dani.” “Quitting what?” I stood on the tips of my toes to reach up for a My Chemical Romance t-shirt, a foot above where my 4’11 body could reach on the t-shirt wall. She slipped over next to me and retrieved the gray shirt with ease, “Basketball,” There was no eye contact as she handed the size XS shirt over to me. “But you love basketball!” “I know, but Olivia wants to do volleyball and I don’t have time for both.” A display of keychains with mini stuffed animals caught Jenn’s eye and she walked past me, “Plus, we’re starting high school soon, so we need to try new things! Speaking of new things,” She grabbed a mini stuffed panda keychain for herself and threw a black cat over towards me. My hands were shaking to such a degree that I dropped the cat as soon as I caught it, “But we do everything together. We’re best-“ “And we still will be even if I try new things. Don’t you trust me?” “Well, yeah.” “Then stop being so whiny, Dani, oh my god.” I reached near the front of the room, past the thirty rows of pews with a ceiling that seemed that seemed go on for infinity, I slipped into one of the few available spots next to a wandering toddler and someone I thought I recognized from Geometry. Jenny had been so perfect that our district had cancelled school so everyone who wanted could attend Jennifer March’s funeral of a lifetime. Instead of the normal simple black attire customary at literally every funeral, those attending had ordered new Trinity Tigers sweatshirts with the senior’s name and number (2) on the back.

Silence gave way to the usual stuff: a priest talking about Jenny being an amazing girl who everyone loved, a perfect Christian, and now “Home.” I’d started to glaze over until a heard a loud tap on the mic as Henry Washington took the stage and proclaimed as tears dripped down his face that his girlfriend of three years was now “Playing v-ball with J-dog in the sky,” The captain of the football team’s hair followed no clear style and he was wearing the same ratty sneakers he wore to school every single day. Around the room everyone’s eyes were on him and tissues dabbed eyes as he spoke. “He thinks you’re creepy,” Jenny had texted me when she started talking to her knight in shining armor freshman year. Two weeks into dating she had the day they started dating in her Instagram bio, and by week three she was wearing his varsity jersey. “You have spiked collars and I don’t think I’ve seen you wear anything but black since 5th grade.” “You never cared before,” I responded. “That was when I thought it was a middle school phase, not a lifelong commitment. You’re embarrassing.” I’d never responded to that. “And we’ll find the monster that did this to Jenny,” Henry ended his speech to a crowd of applause. “It’s just such a tragedy,” The mom of the toddler shook her head. “Oh, it’s a real shame,” I made my way into the swarm of people exiting as soon as I could and got out of the building. As I leaned against the railing everyone talked as if Jenny had been a saint. As if she hadn’t sent Olivia out during study hall to slash my tires. As if she’d never spray painted my garage and made fake accounts online. They didn’t know that she had threatened me when I tried to turn her in. They really didn’t know the truth about her boyfriend. Henry walked down the stairs of the church and put his arm around my shoulders, “Let’s get out of here.” “Finally.”

Acknowledgements Thank you to the League for Innovation office for your technical support. Thank you, Kelly Dooling, Managing Editor, for serving as our liaison at the League for Innovation. Special thanks to Lisa Angelella, Ph.D., assistant professor of English, Kirkwood Community College, for your guidance before and during the competition. As the previous host coordinator, your timely advice and willingness to answer questions throughout this competition were greatly appreciated. Thank you to all the board colleges and your talented students who participated in this competition. Without you and your students, this competition would not exist. We would also like to thank both the local and the national judges for using your expertise to adjudicate in this literary competition. Although your task was challenging, we do hope you enjoyed reviewing our students’ work. We must acknowledge our fantastic Integrated Communications Department at Cuyahoga Community College. Special thanks to Mary Gygli for your seamless coordination of the poster and this anthology. Eric Wheeler, your poster design is wonderful. Finally, we would like to thank our sponsor, Dr. Karen Miller, for your unwavering support despite the challenges caused by a global pandemic. Although the pandemic closed our campus, we never felt disconnected from college resources. With that in mind, we would like to acknowledge Emily Tidball and Maria Mitchell from Dr. Miller’s office. We thank you for your professionalism, creativity, technical assistance, and humor from start to finish. You’re appreciated.

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