spring 2014 vol. 17
Quality Fiction
Stork Magazine is a fiction journal published by undergraduate students at Emerson College. Submissions are discussed with the authors and we determine which stories are accepted based on the quality of the author’s revisions. The process is designed to guide writers through rewriting and provide author support and an understanding of the editorial and publishing process. Stork is founded on the idea of communication between writers and editors — not a simple letter of rejection or acceptance. We accept submissions from undergraduate and graduate Emerson students in any department. Work may be submitted at stork.submishmash.com during specified submission periods. Stories should be in 12-point type, double-spaced,and must not exceed 4 pages for the “short-short” issue or 30 pages for the longer issue. Authors retain all rights upon publication. For questions about submissions, email storkstory@gmail.com. If you are interested in joining the staff of Stork, contact us at the above email address and we can explain our application process. We accept staff applications at the beginning of each fall semester. We are looking for undergraduate students who are well-read in contemporary fiction and have a good understanding of the short story form. Cover image © Tom Smith www.eberhardtsmith.com Copyright © 2014 Stork Magazine Printed and Bound by Shawmut Printing Danvers, MA
Editors-in-Chief Becca Pollock Jenna Greenberg Managing Editor Allison Singer Prose Editors Chloe B. McAlpin Sierra Lister Gabriella Balza Senior Copyeditor Talia Rochmann Copyeditors Sierra Lister Michael Moccio Melanie McFadyen Designer Rose Tawney Readers Bennett Graves, Benjamin Nadeau, Casey Walker, Christopher Calhoun, Daniel Tehrani, Erinn Pascal, Kaylan Scott, Maria DiPasquale, Melanie McFadyen, Michael Moccio, Richie Wheelock, Sarina Clement, Tyler Powles
Appetizer Letters from the Editors
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Entrees Color Wheel Talia Rochmann
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For Jade Chloe B. McAlpin
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Sisters Ben Storey
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Kindling Briana Burton
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Bed Sheets Rose Tawney
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Songs for GaĂŤtan Dugas Jamie Hovis
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Dessert A Note About the Type
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Four years ago, I was a young naïve freshman with wild dreams about being a writer. I decided to submit a staff application to Stork because it seemed like the “literary” thing to do. My application featured a southern themed story about peach pie and a joke about how my mother thought my gap year meant I wanted to work at the Gap for a year. God only knows why I was accepted but somehow I ended up here, as Editor-inChief and I couldn’t be more grateful. Stork has shown me that a love for the written word can transform into so much more than simply writing and now I can say that I don’t think my heart was ever in being a writer. Thankfully Stork helped me find editing and taught me that a passion for typography can be a very real thing. Stork has truly helped me shape how I see my future. It has also introduced me to some of the brightest and most creative writers, editors, and designers that Emerson has to offer. For my eighth and final issue I am proud to present six stories, all extremely different, that represent the diversity and depth of talent that I have had the pleasure of experiencing these past four years. I hope you will find these “bites” as satisfying as we did. Jenna Greenberg, Editor-in-Chief
This marks my sixth and final issue on the staff of Stork. It only seems appropriate that it should be our short-short issue—a genre noted for its brevity— because certainly my time with Stork has been too brief. In just three years I have seen all aspects of the magazine, from editorial through to finances, design, and production. While the work has been rewarding and I have learned countless skills, it’s the people— staff and writers—that make me wish I could stay here just a bit longer. That said, I present to you, Issue Seventeen. This is a read as quick and tasty as a diner meal, but one, I think, that will keep you around the table in discussion, long after the bill is paid. Becca Pollock, Editor-in-Chief
Talia Rochmann
dawn came in a pale yellow that wheedled and clawed and leeched away his color, his white skin turning whiter, turning clearer so the blue veins shone through the flesh, making him a gray beast, his shadow blue against the hanging tree. The hanging tree stood stubborn in black, thick branches garlanded with rough strands of browned rope, knots never undone streaked with green mold. Easier to cut the rope than untie it when the body stilled, when the fingers and face turned purple and gray. Dawn’s teeth gnawed but could not suck from his flesh the deep red slick on his arms, red wet up to his elbow. Nor could it lap the smear of it from just beneath his flat blue eyes, the constellation spatters from his sea-green and sea-tossed clothes. He thought of dawn reaching out past the town and the docks with their barnacled boards and pillars. He thought of dawn reaching out, then recoiling, at
the seeping red flesh laid open in the bogs, the pale body torn and bruised, fresh bones stripped and splintered. Teeth knocked out. Teeth smooth and brownflecked in his pocket, sharp ends hungry for blood from his own fingers. Dawn saw and became shy with pink. He’d watched the other monsters hang, tears running down their faces, wetting the rope that rubbed their necks raw, their legs and swinging feet. Shrill voices pleading pale misunderstanding. No misunderstandings here, between the hanging tree and him. Red dripping from his hands, red on his face, red deep in his nose and the pockets of his lungs. Red completion, red satisfaction. After living like the others, feeling thin and gray, to feel the searing sunset heat thrill of the blood and the bone crunch made it hardly worth living gray, living safe. Living. Again he hears the ringing screams, warm tones in his mind, warming heart and fingers, warming like the rough shanties of the docks, soft orange songs of friendship, soft songs always in retreat. At the end he had always known there would be the hanging tree, dark against the lightening sky. He’d brought his own rope. He began to climb. He would be blue and gone before the town woke to the whispering of the sea, whispering of sun-tanned skin peeled and stretched amongst the trees, of sockets gaping red and empty, of wind through smiling ribs. Better he be gone before the people woke with murmuring as low and blue and strange as the gnarled shadows from the
hanging tree, before he saw the recognition in their eyes, the satisfaction of a rumor fulfilled. Him crouched against the rising sun, dark with purpose. Him tying the knot with the other knots, him slipping from the branch with a sound like a high, golden laugh. Stolen teeth chattering in his pocket, his own teeth clipping shut on his tongue bursting red and
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Chloe B. McAlpin
after he won that round of the poetry slam with a beaming score of 27.2, he sat down next to me in the audience—his eyes shining like galaxies, his arms jittery—and he said, “I wrote that about you, Jade! I wrote it for you! The way you make me feel… You’re my muse, Jade.” In the pocket of my jeans I’d folded a short free verse poem I was going to read, but I decided to keep it there because it was about my mother and hardly worth a 27.2. He looked at me like he was expecting something, so I fell back on a grateful smile and said, “Thank you.”
Ben Storey
“you must be sisters,” the man says as Beverly and I are walking home from school, and I tell him we are, even though my hair is brown, and Beverly’s is blond. The man thinks this is real neat, and not only that, he has something real neat to show us as well, but we’ve got to close our eyes and hold out our hands, so we do; and as I’m waiting my turn, Beverly yanks my arm real hard and pulls me down the block like I’m a dog that’s in trouble, but my eyes are still closed, so I bite my tongue and it hurts so bad that I start crying, and I hate Beverly for making me cry, but when I try to speak, what comes out is a wimpy “What about my surprise?” Then Beverly tells me I wouldn’t want it anyway, but she’s only saying that because she saw it and I didn’t, which makes me stop crying and gets me mad—Beverly always acts smarter than me since she’s twelve and I’m eight, even though she can’t climb trees and cries whenever she sees a weird-looking bug, but as Beverly tugs me around the corner, past the dry cleaners and the pizza place that smells like a swimming pool, I see
fat tears roll down her cheeks, and even though I’m still angry at her, I get scared. Beverly hates getting her clothes dirty, but she lets go of my arm and sits down on the grass and she keeps crying, so I sit with her and cross my legs, pretzel-style. “Don’t tell Mom,” she says quietly, and I nod because mom hates it when we talk to strangers, and then I look at my arm and the marks that Beverly’s fingernails have left on my skin—they look like smiles or frowns, but I’m not sure which.
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Briana Burton
last week, the fire fighters came to my house late at night. My mother woke me. She said, We have to leave the house. It smelled like redwood burning: bark like shredded newspaper. Mulchy, earthy, red. I said, Is there a fire? The neighborhood was tightly packed. We would fall like dominoes if one house went. She didn’t answer me. I followed her out to the back porch. She thumbed the coffee stain on her bathrobe, baby blue. The sun rose on the other side of the back fence, past the garden and lawn where the yard backed up to a church’s parking lot. A personal sunrise, a threatening corona, a neighbor no one wanted. The slats in the fence burned yellow; I could see every knothole, every defect in the grain of the wood. The firemen came in heavy suits, trampling through the garden. Then they were silent, standing around, boots sinking into the soft ground, leaving their weight behind for the green bean shoots to curl around. I asked my mother, What’s on fire?
It’s coming through the roots, she said, The whole root system is burning. A fire fighter put out his cigarette in a paper pouch, placed the blackened pouch in his breast pocket. He gestured to the garden we’d spent years coaxing out of the ground, to the neighbor’s lemon tree and the church’s elm. He said, The bigger the tree, the deeper the roots. Many trees, deep roots—it’s a knotted tumbleweed down there. Everything goes down arm in arm. He thought I couldn’t hear him. Where’s Dad? I asked. Mom didn’t answer. She didn’t want me to know that she didn’t know. She said, What if the garden goes? Oh, I couldn’t bear it. She touched my shoulder and her wedding ring caught the light. The firemen stood around waiting for the trees to catch fire until early morning. I must have fallen asleep at some point. I must have dreamed of the cherries bursting like fireworks, of the plums emptied of their pits but sweet as sugar, because none of this was true when I woke. It was Dad who woke me, saying, You’ve got things to do. I had fallen asleep on the couch, with that redwood pitch smell in my nose. I said, Are the fire fighters gone? Is the fire out? He said, Root fires can burn for months, and there’s not a lot to do about it. That night, Dad stoked the fireplace with a solemn face and we all knew why. We let this fire into our
house. This one was tame, it was fed well. I thought of fires without families. Forests that burn from the inside out. Mom rubbed little circles into my father’s back. I could hear her say, It’s okay. I thought, aren’t all our roots flammable, isn’t calamity crafty like that. We always unravel from our start. When no one was looking, I stood where the fire fighters stood, in the footprints they left behind, with the green bean shoots curling around my feet. I stood on tiptoe and looked over the fence, hoping to find evidence. I couldn’t see the fire, but the garden was warm that day.
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Rose Tawney
she gave her virginity to the man she married. She loved the sound of “monogamy” but couldn’t prevent the question, What if I missed something better? He was the first man to say “I love you,” and her heart had throbbed with such electricity that she never doubted one day she would marry him. But when the doubts crept in, days into her matrimony, she wondered if her heart throbbed with love or with the pain of simply settling. Then, after only three years of marriage, he died. An accident in bad weather, the police told her over the phone. Instantaneous; didn’t feel a thing. Alive one moment and gone forever the next. A year later, she slips off her clothes for a man she meets in a bar. She peels away her layers slowly, self-conscious of her freckled breasts and loose skin. Even after she lays herself bare, she keeps her arms protectively across her chest and presses her legs together. She kisses him, but it is short and unconvincing. He tells her to turn around because he doesn’t
like the way her eyes look into his. She climbs onto all fours and tells herself not to feel unfaithful; you can’t betray someone already dead. She stares at the white wall and tells herself to enjoy this, to pretend this is the better she’s been missing.
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Jamie Hovis
go to the zoo on a Thursday afternoon at feeding time when it’s cold—not raingng, but wet. You are in a city far from home. Your next flight is not until tomorrow morning. This is your gift to yourself: it’s your birthday and you’ve just received some big news. Nod when the woman at the ticket counter hands you a copper token, telling you to drop it in the slot of your choice. Stand by the row of plastic boxes, each full of tokens. One protects the migratory paths of storks; one establishes refuges for endangered wildlife; one restores the polluted reservoir just outside the city. Overwhelmed with options, leave the token in your pocket, go pick up a map. Trace your finger along the dotted lines that crisscross the safari map and set off in the direction of Tropical Asia, Elephant Forest, and Willawong Station. Stroll to the end of a building containing Komodo dragons. Scowl at the enormous lizards and murmur something to the zookeeper about not envying her job. Ignore her comments about how in reality the creatures
are quite docile and, contrary to popular belief, incapable of spitting poison. Instead, speculate as to how long it’s been since someone’s bothered to fuck her. Make your way toward an exhibit marked with a gold star on the map. This exhibit is NEW. Watch the NEW African small-clawed otters paddle around their NEW enclosure. These otters have decided they’re safe as long as the children are smiling and pointing. These otters will seem NEW even when they’ve been showboating in circles in the same water in the same enclosure in the same zoo for ten years. Last year you were in a taxi outside of Seattle and an otter darted out into the road ahead. Its spine was severed under the tires of a red Ford Cherokee, but it was a common river otter, not a NEW one of the small-clawed African variety. A young couple passes you, holding hands. They look at you sideways, as though it is a sin for you to visit the zoo unaccompanied by a child or lover. They don’t stop to wonder who you are. They’re too focused on the possibility of mixing bodily fluids. Follow the signs toward a popular attraction for which the zoo is famous: SLOTH BEARS THIS WAY. Clench your fists as you scan the enclosure with its wooden play structure and tattered volleyballs and come to the understanding that said sloth bears are nowhere to be found. It is midwinter. Too cold for sloth bears. Perhaps the bears are sick; perhaps they were left too long without food and ripped each other apart. Feel worse than disappointed, feel cheated.
Look at your map again; confirm that, yes, this is the place where sloth bears should be, yet are not. Pass a hungry-looking woman pushing a child in a stroller toward the bear pit. Neglect to warn her of the coming realization: she will find no bears here. Watch a male elephant defecate impossibly large, weighty turds, then jet buckets of frothy urine over the ground. Watch the urine stream into the pool from which another elephant, a young female, supposedly of the same herd although she is of a different species, drinks. Watch the female scuttle away as the male approaches. Remember a time when you were four or five, a day at the Montreal Zoo. All of the little children were led by the hand into the enclosure and allowed to ride on the elephant’s back. Think about all the times you’ve pronounced this story to strangers at dinner parties and whispered it to them in hotel rooms. Realize for the first time that it seems impossible and probably never happened. You probably made it up. Make eyes at a teenager with a wispy moustache walking his elderly mother past the giraffe exhibit in tight flared jeans. Imagine that this is the first time you are seeing a giraffe. They seem strange, outlandishly slender and spotted. The teenager looks back at you and smiles. You hear a great roaring. Pause at the entrance to the African Safari as young couples and women with baby strollers hurry past, following the crowd toward the sound. The lioness has just birthed cubs. The male lion is alone in their enclosure while his mate rears
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their young behind savannah-painted walls. Watch parents lift their children by the armpits so that they may view him. He roars; the lioness roars back from the other side of a wall. The crowd gasps. Roaring lions are a Spectacle: they will make the zoo profit. The proud lion does not know this. He is a dumb animal. He will continue to roar, like Lucifer freezing himself in place at the bottomo of Hell. The wild eyes of the children terrify you. They aren’t the slightest bit afraid of the ferocious, alien beast before them. You want so badly to be among them, or rather for them to join you; but they remain, as you once were, separated by thick glass. You feel the profound urge to toss a little boy in a blue windbreaker into the enclosure. You arrive at your favorite exhibit: the chimpanzees. Because of their position on the evolutionary ladder, chimpanzees must be given the largest enclosure, with both an indoor and an outdoor section. An elevated boardwalk and elbow-high fence run the perimeter of the outdoor section. Large glass windows give a 180-degree view of the indoor section: an elaborate pegged wooden structure designed to imitate a chimp’s natural habitat. You are not alone here. A pair of Japanese tourists is standing before the glass taking pictures of a child chimp picking through the bristling hair on his father’s back. The child looks up at the three of you through the glass. The Japanese couple snaps countless pictures. The child waddles away. He returns, wearing a burlap sack as a shawl. He nestles against
his father’s side as if for warmth and pulls the sack up over his own head, hiding his face from view. He lifts the sack, trying to cover his father’s head as well. The father shrugs the sack away. He doesn’t yet realize that you are watching. The Japanese woman laughs behind her hand at the funny clown show the child puts on, trying to hide his father’s face from you. Stand your ground as the child looks up at you, pleading, trying to cover his father’s face again. Again, the father shrugs the shroud away. On the third attempt, the father rolls over, exasperated. His gaze meets yours. This moment, when you make contact and you can see his tongue working behind his lips as though he would speak, is worth the exorbitant admission fee to the zoo. The Japanese woman taps on the glass, trying to get the father’s attention. Shake your head at her. Doesn’t she know it’s rude to tap on the glass? Her husband notices your disapproving glance and pulls his wife away. The father tugs the sack from his child and pulls it over his own shoulders. Follow him as he swings through the doorway to the outdoor enclosure. Watch him for ten minutes as he pulls up fistfuls of grass, huddled in the driest corner of the pen. Once you’re sure that the two of you are alone, reach into your pocket and pull out the token. Toss it over the fence into the enclosure. Watch him lift the token and press it into his gums. Wonder what copper would taste like to him, warm and damp off the dewy grass. Wonder what he would taste like to you, raw.
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The running text for this book was set in Adobe Caslon Pro. Originally designed in 1722 by William Caslon, it became instantly popular throughout Europe and the colonies, being Benjamin Franklin’s font of choice and the original printed font for the Declaration of Independence. Caslon was designed to be set between 6 and 14 points, making it ideal for books and magazines. The display types for this book are ITC Lubalin Graph, District Pro, and