The Trinity Review 2020

SPRING 2020

COVER IMAGE:

ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

“BALLYMOON CASTLE AND SHEEP” LOGO:

CAROLINE G. KROGER

2019-2020

Dear Reader, During the chaos of our current time amidst COVID-19, stress, uncertainty, and worry have become prevalent in our society. One way to alleviate this strain is through the enjoyment of the arts.

Now, more than ever, creativity and imagination should not only be appreciated, but also encouraged and supported. This is why the staff of the Trinity Review decided that the 2020 issue of our literary magazine will be available online for everyone’s pleasure. We want readers to relax and take joy in the creativity that Trinity students of all backgrounds have presented in this issue. It is through this relationship that Trinity media and literary arts can continue to flourish during difficult times. We, the editors, hope that you enjoy the following short stories, poems, photographs, and other fantastic expressions of our Trinity students.

We thank our fantastic and supportive staff, Rachel Barnett, Naomi Scheer, and Yasmin Subawalla, for their endless support. We thank Grant Peterson, our Design Editor, who helped us bring this edition to life. We would also like to thank Dr. Kelly Carlisle and Professor Andrew Porter for their invaluable guidance.

We hope you find joy, comfort, and refuge in our 2019-2020 publication.

Best, Robin Bissett & Becca Kroger Co-Editors of the Trinity Review

Table of Contents Photography 1

| Ballymoon Castle and Sheep

Alyssa Machajewski

2

| Summer in the Spree

Austin Davidson

2

| A Living City

3

| Intelligent Design

3

| Night in the Gardens

4

| Auburn Morning

4

| Winter on the Window

5

| Blackrock—Pond House

5

| Blackrock—Sea Bitten Railing

6

| Natural History Museum—Whale Spine

6

| Natural History Museum—Hands on the Ceiling

7

| National Gallery—Mirror

7

| National Gallery—Doorways

8

| Glendalough—PomPom Porcullis

8

| Glendalough—Red Rosary

9

| Howth—Cliffside

9

| Falling For

10

| Blinded

10

| Confess

11

| Warm

11

| Swirlin’

12

| Past

12

| Will You Say Yes or No?

13

| Cadences

13

| In Nature

14

| Free Fish

14

| Shrubs

15

| T.h.I.n.K.

15

| People of Hanoi

16

| Untitled

Alyssa Machajewski

Mai Vo

16

| R.O.S.E.S.

17

| Drops

17

| Sunday Mornings

Kate Nuelle

18

| Untitled

Ryanna Henson

18

| Ghost

19

| A Conversation Among Friends

19

| Hiking

20

| Historic Documents of 1986

20

| Isolace

Grant Peterson

Poetry 21

| The Black Doors

22

| if only

23

| In Action

24

| A Kiss Before You Go

25

| Questions Bigger than You and Me

26

| Forgiveness (Forgive Not)

27

| Personal Faith

28

| Werewolf Memory

29

| One for the Opossum

30

| Ring Around the Lioness

Ana Lee

32

| I chime in the wind

Andja Bjeletich

32

| Cored

33

| The (Incompetent) Lovesong

33

| of J. Andja Prufrock

33

| Loss: A Villanelle

34

| The Penelopiad

34

| Progress and Regress

35

| I Took Her Dainty Eyes as Well

35

| What Sweet-Soft Light

36

| Nocturne in f minor

39

| Hypnotic Cocoon

41

| Spirit of the Shoe that Shrivels

the Stomach of the Vulture

Grant Peterson Tiana Sanchez

Declan Kiely

Kaylee Avila

42

| Ode to the Rosebud

44

| The Price of Living

Adam Toler

44

| String

Danielle Clark

45

| Daisy

46

| My Place

Hannah Hsu

48

| A Natural History of Vacant Lots

Camille Johnson

49

| Quicksand

Raini Huynh

50

| Today

Campbell Burke

51

| Flag

Lindsay Morgan

52

| The Day After

53

| The Virgin

54

| Kindred Spirit

Anonymuse

55

| These Days

Maddie West

55

| El Ayudante

Jessica Garcia-Tejeda

56

| Ode to

57

| Elegy

58

| In the absence of force

58

| Material Memoir

59

| walk to the garden

60

| Layers of island living

Ariana Fletcher-Bai Abbi Bowen

Artwork 61

| Is This What My Body Said?

61

| Anthology of a Perfect Low Day

62

| San Antonio June Storms

62

| Take a Walk!

63

| A Good 8 Hours

63

| It’ll Be Alright

64

| Grandma’s Beach House Donuts

Abbi Bowen

Elyse Andrews

Fiction 65

| Shorebound

68

| Little Rebellions

74

| Doing Long Distance

Kit Cura Kendra Derrig

75

| Enamel

76

| The Anatomy of a Basement

77

| Axiomata

82

| The Cavern

83

| Ride

84

| Short Stories

85

| Awkward

85

| Kids

85

| I felt like a celebrity

86

| The Problem with Nice People

87

| Fear

88

| Dorm

88

| Croatan

Anonymous

90

| Kids

Isaiah Mitchell

91

| Trying

Hannah Friedrich

98

| Lucretia

Rebecca Kroger

102

| A Game of Hope

Joy Umoekpo

103

| If Planets Could Pedal

Kaylee Avila

104

| Painted Mirage

106

| Peach Pit Bullet

107

| Woodworking Water and Blood

109

| Gravel

Elena Negrรณn

112

| Wreckage on the 101

Emily Goll-Broyles

114

| Haunted

Elizabeth Motes

116

| The Unclean

Lindsay Morgan

Thom Van Zandt Johnson

R.W.

Nonfiction 117

| Red, Chipped Picnic Table

Lisbeth Cortez

119

| When We Went to 1989

Abbi Bowen

120

| First Born

Samantha Rodriguez

121

| A Loss Whose Color I Picked

Lutfi Sun

Contributors Our Team

Ballymoon Castle and Sheep ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

1

Machajewski

Summer in the Spree

AUSTIN DAVIDSON

2

A Living City

AUSTIN DAVIDSON

Davidson

Intelligent Design AUSTIN DAVIDSON

3

Night in the Gardens AUSTIN DAVIDSON

Davidson

Auburn Morning

AUSTIN DAVIDSON

4

Winter on the Window

AUSTIN DAVIDSON

Davidson

Blackrock—Pond House ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

5

Blackrock—Sea Bitten Railing ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

Machajewski

Natural History Museum—Whale Spine ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

6

Natural History Museum— Hands on the Ceiling

ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

Machajewski

National Gallery—Mirror ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

7

National Gallery—Doorways ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

Machajewski

Glendalough—PomPom Porcullis ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

8

Glendalough—Red Rosary ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

Machajewski

Howth—Cliffside ALYSSA MACHAJEWSKI

9

Falling For MAI VO

Machajewski | Vo

Blinded

MAI VO

10

Confess MAI VO

Vo

Warm MAI VO

11

Swirlin’ MAI VO

Vo

Past

MAI VO

12

Will You Say Yes or No?

MAI VO

Vo

Cadences MAI VO

13

In Nature MAI VO

Vo

Free Fish

MAI VO

14

Vo

Shrubs MAI VO

T.h.I.n.K. MAI VO

People of Hanoi

15

MAI VO

Vo

Untitled

MAI VO

16

R.O.S.E.S.

MAI VO

Vo

Drops MAI VO

Sunday Mornings

17

KATE NUELLE

Vo | Nuelle

Untitled

RYANNA HENSON

18

Ghost

RYANNA HENSON

Henson

A Conversation Among Friends RYANNA HENSON

19

Hiking RYANNA HENSON

Henson

Historic Documents of 1986 GRANT PETERSON

20

Isolace

GRANT PETERSON

Peterson

The Black Doors GRANT PETERSON

Ever since I was little, I remember the black doors.

Even in my earliest memories, I was surrounded by black rectangles.

24/7, the rectangles were just a part of life, As much as pain is rust-colored.

I never had any reason to think That the world I had always known was wrong.

Once I was older, I realised that they were doors.

They were all sealed; I tried every single one Over the course of years.

And in that time I grew to know those Ornate fractals, those Sharp runes, those Intricate decorations Better than my own fingerprint knew me.

It seems that you had spent much more time on them Than on me.

21

Sometime after my eighteenth birthday and before my nineteenth, The black doors all vanished, and I could finally see beyond.

So many people my own age, Laughing, talking, smiling together, Preparing to leave.

They packed up their things and came through the doorways And all at once the world that had been mine for so long— The world you had created for me alone— Was flooded with crowds moving from point A to point B. The chaos was brief, but I followed a kindly face And when they went through another doorway to join their friends I found myself unable to follow.

Because the black doors still existed, invisibly, But only for me.

These days I’m drifting about, Shifting from doorway to doorway Peeking in on lives I can never reach.

Sometimes they leave one room for another, Crossing through my purgatory in empty silence.

And sometimes they stop and say hi, Acknowledging the sole inhabitant of this in-between place.

Peterson

But as much as they try to convince me otherwise I know that they won’t stay.

No one ever does.

Our conversation is just a comma In the sentence that takes them from one doorway to another.

This is the curse you left me.

I have never seen the black doors again, But the thing I remember most vividly about them Is that not a single one had a doorknob.

I remember it as vividly as I remember the white of your love Splattered with the crimson of my future.

if only

22

if only i hadn’t met you. if only we hadn’t become friends. if only you had hated me. if only i hadn’t noticed all your little quirks. if only i hadn’t found them so endearing. if only you hadn’t been the first to embrace me. if only i hadn’t enjoyed it. if only you hadn’t told me so many times you loved me. if only you hadn’t been with someone else when you said that. if only i hadn’t been so naïve.

GRANT PETERSON

if only time could be reversed, and our decisions made again, would i reverse mine? if only you hadn’t been there for me so many times. if only i hadn’t been there for you too. if only you hadn’t worried about me. if only i hadn’t worried about you. if only you hadn’t smelled so pleasant, even when you weren’t trying. if only i hadn’t fallen for you. if only thoughts could be un-thinked, if words could be unsaid, would i un-say mine? if only you hadn’t been so caught up in someone so far away. if only i had been brave enough. if only you hadn’t offered for me to stay. if only i hadn’t already made plans i couldn’t back out of. if only you hadn’t found someone closer who wasn’t me. if only you hadn’t said you loved me as a friend. if only i hadn’t hoped. if only life could be unwound, retracing footprints left behind, would i unwind mine?

Peterson

if only we hadn’t spent all those evenings together. if only i hadn’t grown to depend on your presence. if only you hadn’t become my normal. if only you hadn’t begun to push me away. if only i hadn’t believed you when you said you didn’t mean to. if only love could be unmade, as if it had never existed, would i unmake mine? if only i could convince my stupid heart to let go. if only i didn’t see you every day or so. if only i didn’t look forward to those fleeting moments. if only i could go a day without remembering in torment. if only you hadn’t ever let me feel your touch. then maybe this wouldn’t hurt so fucking much.

In Action TIANA SANCHEZ

You are afraid to touch me afraid to become dirty because somehow being broken makes me soiled.

So I bleed out before your eyes, and you offer a bandage, a handkerchief, an empty gesture to help you sleep.

And because you can’t bring yourself to touch me, there is more blood on your hands pooled at your feet than inside my body, more blood on your hands than on the battlefield.

The war is at your doorstep come outside look into bloody puddles look at discarded bullet shells formed of disinterest matching the holes in my heart in my lungs.

Look at me!

Watch me choke on blood and bile and depictions of the problems you’ve refused to see, and with every raspy breathe look at what you’ve done by doing nothing.

23

Peterson | Sanchez

A Kiss Before You Go Kisses always mean goodbye with you, because nothing last forever Especially love.

You Kissed me on the cheek at the tender age of monkey bars and cooties, and you ran as if I were a boy, as if you’d catch the cooties.

Or, maybe, you thought you’d done something wrong.

You didn’t kiss me again until the age of locker room and drivers ed.

After track practice behind the bleachers we pressed together until your parents arrived and you ran again.

24

Then you kissed me all the time, and I was always waiting for you to stay but you ran.

After tutoring, when kisses were quick and surprising you ran.

After prom, when they were stretched with longing you ran.

After graduation, after one kiss And a tear filled goodbye. . .

We never kissed long enough, never kissed like young love.

We kissed like we’d be caught, like we should hide, like we were wrong, like goodbye.

Sanchez

TIANA SANCHEZ

Questions Bigger than You and Me TIANA SANCHEZ I have questions about man and women and other, about how the world moves and our heart mimic that movement, around and around in confusion.

I have questions about class and poverty, about war and peace and their necessity, questions about government, democracy, and policy.

So many questions bubbling forth, drops of water in an overflowing well brought forward by stray thoughts and deliberate contemplation.

They overflow because although people see the water rising, they cannot see urgency.

I try to release the water siphon the tiniest drops away my tiniest curiosities, but I am told my questions are too big for me small, frail, fragile me.

25

Let the flood bubble and rise then overflow, and every drop over the edge becomes ink at the tip of my pen smudged on my sleeves flowing between lines on paper to be seen to make these questions heard to demand attention? answers?

To give the world my “too much, too big.�

Sanchez

Forgiveness (Forgive Not) TIANA SANCHEZ

They all say let it go.

“Hate only poisons the soul.”

Keep waiting for me to care; hold your breath ‘til it runs out.

Fuck you!

I’m not the bigger person.

I’m not okay with it.

I don’t have to be.

26

You want me to say “It’s okay” “You didn’t mean it” “Despite this someday you’ll go far” You didn’t mean it?

You did!

For years upon years you meant it all, so when you go far I hope you stay there.

You want me to walk in your shoes, see through your eyes.

I’m trying my hardest to see from your perspective, but my head can’t go that far up my ass.

So never forget I owe you nothing!

Because it was hard work, hard learning to love myself enough to hate you.

Sanchez

Personal Faith DECLAN KIELY

The topic of faith has come across my mind Of late, we search for our fate on the inside We all want to be But to believe That is the question What is the message?

Faith and religion are two different things Religion is a mythological covenant they keep Faith on the other hand, is blind belief The relief found in eye opening wonder Promises kept to the sounds of thunder Pacts sworn on the river Styx Miracles that heal the sick The unexplainable The power to save a soul There are things in our lives that science can’t explain Religion was first, science is just the next phase These are both forms of faith And in the future there will be other ways To believe and achieve an enlightened craze Spirituality is confused with religion One can be spiritual and not identify within You see, it’s a personal decision To pursue your mission In the name of a higher power suspicion It is just a premonition That Yahweh, Allah, or God will ever have existed These are just names for the same thing Faith rooted in similarity You see religion, puts our focus on difference We have different texts that we reference Whenever we need so called evidence To support our lack of benevolence Compassion should dictate our choices Faith shouldn’t silence the voices We see the abuse We strive for the positive truth We don’t desire to be negative youths Just that our societal shackles are loose So we can shout songs from the roofs Because if we do what we love And yearn for the truth We have our covenant and therefore the proof

27

Kiely

Werewolf Memory

DECLAN KIELY

28

Kiely

Claws on a chalkboard I balance teeth on their edges One by one I run towards manicured hedges I wedge myself into a leafy embrace Sometimes in chase You must cover your eyes To conserve your energy To sprint and hide Seeing is believing And brain power depletes batteries Mind weaves tapestries Of lands of plenty No time for mild and honey Or God’s outstretched hand Instead it’s the moon Searing skin like a brand My pain level is normal As yellowed claws retract The air is paranormal It blurs the facts Back hair bristles Wind whistles the moon away In darkness I convulse And skulk from night to day

One for the Opossum DECLAN KIELY

Pour one out for ones you have lost Waste good whiskey no matter the cost The street stained red like drops of wine I think of those that they leave behind Were you a loner or a mother?

Were you a fighter or a runner?

Did you learn to love in your own way?

Or were your guts spilled before your day?

I saw your lifeless body in the rearview Reaper tail lights rounded the road’s bend Rage matched the tears I spilled for you My mind is cloudy with storm’s revenge Oh opossum I never knew you But the twinkle in your eyes reflected me And if it turned out you were a loner Just know you met your end amongst family I grip the cold right angle of a crowbar I see the beatdown play out like a film The house before me glows with evil My liquid rage hardens in a kiln

29

The rage too thin it cracks and splinters Like the ice of spring mountain melts Who am I to deal the justice?

I must remain the sheriff of my guilt Worn boots crunch gravel as a trudge Away from regret and graveyard deeds I would’ve killed for that dead opossum But would they have done the same for me?

The opossum was family only in a figment Rage swelled until the dam inside burst Cold metal slips from my sweaty hands I leave the crowbar laying in the dirt I venture out into the windswept night I spill whiskey tears, the drops go out of sight My gaze flies up to the expanse of stars Now there’s an opossum constellation next to Mars Kiely

Ring Around the Lioness

ANA LEE

6 I have a mood ring shaped like a flower the petals swirl with drops of sunshine the color means I am Pa-shun-ute I don’t know what that word means, but Tía look, my ring says I am pa—SH—e frowns, and says “You can’t wear a ring on that finger, That’s the finger you put a wedding ring on.

One day a man can buy you a real one.”

She slips the ring off, and moves it to my thumb.

I watch the sun set.

30

10 Grandpa, why do people wear rings when they get married?

“Mija, that’s just what people do.

It’s like putting a collar on a dog, so people know the dog belongs to someone, so people know the dog has an owner, that will provide the dog with a house and food.”

I furrow my brow, but nod anyways— 13 A boy tells me I am beautiful.

He gives me a promise ring, says one day he’ll replace it with a real one. we all know how that story goes But I wonder, Why am I the dog?

Why does he get to be the owner?

13 and a half Puppy love grows dogged, as he commands, “Come here!

Roll over!

Sit. Stay.

Quiet.”

I refuse.

He calls me a bitch, but I smile.

Lee

A bitch I may be, I am not his bitch.

I do not wear his collar.

15 Grandma asks me, “So have you found the lucky man yet?

Your better half?” grind teeth—curl fists—slap smile on face—— “No, grandma. Not yet.”

But I wonder, Where is this better half?

Who is he that can split me, make me the lesser half?

A single rib, only part of him.

17

“Mija, so when am I going to get some grandchildren?

I won’t be around much longer” play it off, it’s just a joke, but I can’t help but notice that I’m not laughing, and I can’t help but notice the First sentence my grandfather’s said to Me in years implies My Only Purpose is to Breed.

31

19 Mirror shows me a delicate neck, stained blue.

Hickies and bruises suffocate sunshine.

Instead, the shadow of a collar forced over an animal not meant to be domesticated.

Keep your guillotine of a ring.

I’m tired of roots that try to oppress.

Don’t blame the lioness when she jumps at her master.

A ring you call it?

Perhaps “noose” is the word you were looking for.

Lee

I chime in the wind I am a cactus Glass spines embedded In chlorophyll flesh

ANDJA BJELETICH

Deep in my marrow The wind pulls (I feel it now, Clear and ringing pain, Like teaspoons On champagne flutes) Tears trickle From one Pachinko peg To the next To the next To the next.

I touch my quills I pluck the barbs.

(Like unripe fruit, They do not give.)

32

I swallow and am Chewed alive When I wake, Cautious fingers probe soft skin And I am surprised to find myself Whole.

Cored (You’ll roast my innards Bake them into a pie Laugh and drink while you Consume me) But I refuse to be emptied, I fill myself with golden light Bright and warm, Flickering and beautiful And I will be beautiful and terrifying Hallowed, hollowed.

Bjeletich

ANDJA BJELETICH

The (Incompetent) Lovesong of J. Andja Prufrock ANDJA BJELETICH

Your name on my lips: A Fredericksburg peach, Freshly plucked.

Sun-warm and sweet.

Stinging fuzz and soft flesh, A hint of Danish decay (memento mori)

Loss: A Villanelle ANDJA BJELETICH

These flowers will wilt, these walls cave in.

Recognize the transience of my life, unforeseen.

Your skin is weak, your bones are thin.

33

Remember, I was your little Ragamuffin and you’d sing while we’d clean?

The flowers will wilt, the walls cave in Even now the wind tears down the mountain and rivers leave gashes in between (my mother’s skin will be weak, my father’s bones will be thin) These immutable columns, now just a ruin, There is nothing and nothing and nothing evergreen.

The flowers will wilt, the walls cave in.

Please, I beg, give me time to take in this moment and this one and this one, pristine!

My sisters’ skin will be weak, their bones will be thin.

Your grave is filled, they’ve lowered your coffin.

The mourners are gone, their faces ashen.

The flowers will wilt, the walls cave in, My skin grows weak, my bones thin.

Bjeletich

The Penelopiad No longer Shall I be some delicate thing, Tear stained and beautiful, Gentle curves against the dying sun

ANDJA BJELETICH

No longer Shall I linger, watching The waves lap upon Our barren shore No longer Shall I weave this shroud Only to pull it apart By the light of the moon No longer Shall my limbs protect you, My blossoms adorn you, My fruit sustain you 34

No longer. (but I’ve grown roots on this shore; which is worse, the extrication or the wait?)

Progress and Regress How many stitches have I Knit and unknit?

How many words have I Written and unwritten?

How many lives have I Built and unbuilt? (and still I am here I am whole I am here)

Bjeletich

ANDJA BJELETICH

I Took Her Dainty Eyes as Well ANDJA BJELETICH

Have I the words to describe This brilliant beauty before mine eyes?

I took her quickly, my darling prize And of her scent I do imbibe.

Her dimpled cheeks, so fair and sweet If only she shared that smile with me!

Her cheek, which once caused me to flee, Now turned slack and obsolete.

Her lips, so rosy and so fair Red as the blood that flecks her face But gentle and soft, lovely as lace.

I daresay no one could compare!

Her eyes, quite like a woodland elf Look lovely sitting upon my shelf.

What Sweet-Soft Light

35

ANDJA BJELETICH

what sweet-soft light is this that cries where once a heart beat? this gentle ebb and flow weak and sad and full of love? a warm bath on a cold day a worn book in the rain oh, spiked comfort that hurts in your healing this quiet whisper a mother’s hush answering infant tears what word is there for this? what feeling does this fall under? too fleeting to be named too delicate for examination a snowflake on an eyelash to be looked at but not for long not for long this sweet and soothing balm, already gone

Bjeletich

Nocturne in f minor

KAYLEE AVILA

Fierce salty breeze over the midnight sea, how can something feel so familiar, yet foreign?

So friendly, yet far?

Perhaps through a wider lens.

In the grand scheme of the cosmos: space and time stretch and span for millions of miles on end, far away from my infinitesimal form.

Through this lens, more feasible, yes!

Now I see, you are simply the moon.

Familiar, yet foreign.

Friendly, yet far.

36

I pretend to hold you between my feeble fingers, whether you show me a fragile fingernail, or a full flare— a flirtatious flicker, or a forceful flame— I cradle you in your entirety my fingers unconcerned with the burns you leave Like an Icarus of the night, My favor for the forbidden Brought upon my fate, thus to the ocean I fell.

This night I look up and see a sky Less than bright.

My moon, why do you hide from me, Your precious light?

You tell me you are trying something “new” Per se.

Veiled in darkness, I savor the salt you left behind.

I suck my lip and feel it twice as hard As I fall back to that place far away Where I first waded out upon the waters.

Avila

See, My father raised me with Christian faith, So my fallen footsteps refused to falter, I stepped out in trust.

But Oh moon, La lune, What a funny thing, The Forceful Pull Of Gravity .

Tis no match for a fool full of faith.

Faith abandoned, my flesh then fell, Without witness too, except of course, for You. I floundered beneath The ocean’s ebb and flow Until I surrendered my fight, And forevermore fell, Isolated from my former life.

Afraid I had fallen too far, My moon I could no longer see your light, But then you whispered to me, Darling, don’t you fear...

From deep under the sea, I felt your force lift me, And you made me believe that I could fly…

37

Closer and closer, I flew to the surface Until I felt your light grace my forgiving face, But finessed of my fortune, The Pendulum Keeps Swinging You forced me back down, So once again, Further I fell.

I never told you, but I’m scared of the dark.

No difference that would make, for I still close my eyes thinking Maybe if I can’t see you, This will all go away.

Avila

But still only a fool, Forsaken and with fleeting faith, My flesh cannot escape your force, Flying and falling As the clock goes ticking.

I lose my sense of self, Yet feel myself fuse, Becoming one with the Flavorful salt of the sea, Subject to the reign of the sky.

I bury my heart in the depths Of the sands that contain me, But a speck of dust amongst others, What difference does it make?

From ashes to ashes From dust to dust, the Pulsing beat persists Still surges and swells Flying and falling—

38

Unfathomable, how The strings of my heart, Even from deep beneath the sea, Still stretch up to you, my moon.

You pull them as you please, Fashion me your puppet.

Oh, how my nose grew.

Of course, Anything To please You. And between The sea and the sky, The wind fluttered through And played the strings of my Heart like an Aeolian harp in A lullaby of your force, A flourishing forte for An inescapable dream, An infinite slumber, Forever replaying, Forbidding a Final Farewell— Some say the trick is quick: Just pinch your arm and Easily you’ll wake,

Avila

But even then, I bite my lip and still taste Your bittersweet trace, Like a fierce salty breeze Over the midnight sea, How can something feel Familiar, yet foreign.

Friendly, yet far.

Hypnotic Cocoon KAYLEE AVILA

You are feeling very tired.

When you hear my fingers snap, you shall wake, but for now you shall fall into a state of self-induced sleep paralysis.

Your body, aching in exhaustion, succumbs to sleep but your mind stays wide awake, haunted by living nightmares as you lie in a vegetative state, trying to move, Speak, Scream, Anything…

Just, to be heard...

Your body aches beneath the weight of your—

39

No. Your social skills are not “rusty” they are drowning in your social bulimia the way you isolate yourself from any human connection until you cave from the starvation and purge yourself on attention Avila

because you are unable to resist the the lack of empathy mistaken as lust for validation, yet you shut it all out again when the hunger subsides.

Stop blurring the line between independence and isolation; they are not the same— there is a reason prisons use social confinement as a torture tactic, You are a social creature.

Please stop shutting yourself out.

40

The world has so much more to show you than what goes on inside your head behind closed doors, so open your eyes and See Hear Feel Touch Taste the freedom so long as you Fight to stay awake until life becomes something more than just survival but most importantly Please, forgive yourself and learn to love again.

Avila

Spirit of the Shoe that Shrivels the Stomach of the Vulture KAYLEE AVILA

Skin skimmed still over shards of your fragile bone frame. Wooden, like the dust-skimmed picture— frame of that skip-wreck splinter; yet your soul seeps out in puddles from your feet.

Careful not to prick your finger when your shadow of a nail stirs ripples in the pool of your carcass.

Who would dare disrupt your fractured carcass of splintered knives and spears which once were bone?

But inky black feathers float in a frozen picture above. Their beaks will soon bicker and splinter and peck the rotting flesh off the soles of your feet planted ajar that stoic stone that claims your name. Hands hover flowers over your swallowed breaths. The balloon burst, but left a carcass behind, an ivory cage built of forgotten bone.

Teeth tumble out and fill the frame of a new picture.

They smile pretty in the dirt, but the splinter of a weed sprouts out from your teeth, down to your feet,

41

those feet, the very same feet that used to dance on your father’s feet when your carcass was more than just bone; when the picture was not all splinter— not all bone or wood splinter— but flesh that filled the soles of your feet and inspired that tingle in your toes with a dance that kept your carcass light above the ground; when your bone was a frame for your flesh, but not the full picture.

Can your powdered eyes still see the picture?

Can you still see with that splinter woven in your eye and out your feet?

With the bone and wood and weed that have sewn your shadow to the ground? With your carcass inviting the vultures to gnaw the flesh from your bone?

The dirt around your carcass cradles your ghost, but revive that picture; fill your feet with flesh and dance; splinter Death and fight the Bone.

Avila

Ode to the Rosebud

KAYLEE AVILA

To the virgins, Make much of time Gather ye rosebuds while ye may He loves me He loves me not He loves me He loves me not He loves me He loves me BUT never did I consider, Do I love myself?

42

No, self-love is not a petal easily plucked by curious fingers, but a stem deeply rooted— so far beneath me, that my petals are blind to my roots.

It wasn’t until you plucked me up that I saw the world in a new light: artificial.

The bountiful rains of the sky, replaced with a spray bottle, either drowning me or deserting me.

You say my roots are gnarly and dirty, so I cut them for you.

I fit in your pocket better this way, as an accessory for you to wear in your pocket, right next to your heart.

Its beating, a strange echo of my own life.

But that’s

Avila

okay.

It beats for the both of us, right?

The touch of my mother’s earthly bosom grew foreign.

Instead, I bobbled in vase.

Fish in fishtank.

To the virgins, Make much of time Gather ye rosebuds while ye may But my rosebuds have purpose beyond being plucked by you.

Prematurely pressured into pleasing you.

My rosebuds do not grow and flourish to be picked by you, plucked by you, pulled by you, peeled open by you, No. I, am my Own Entity.

43

My mother did not raise me up out of this Earth for you to pick me.

Don’t you not know that flowers pollinate on their own?

Love me, love me not.

I will no longer pick myself apart over you.

I love myself You? I care not To the flower pickers, Making much of time Cherish ye fingers while ye may, This rosebud has thorns.

Avila

The Price of Living

ADAM TOLER

Tears from heaven interrupt my slumber, And I bare my eyes to a sullen sky, Where clouds weigh heavy with storms encumbered, And the winds whisper a sweet lullaby.

Exhaustion cries out for me to resign, Yet I’m unready to lay down and rest.

Between the boxed borders of black-stained pine, I lie cramped in my suit, bound by my vest.

Distantly I hear a poignant sermon, About the struggles of life, pain endured, And how, once, when all has been said and done, We may finally rest with soul surrendered.

44

At last, they drop the first blanket of earth, Leaving me to find what my life was worth.

String DANIELLE CLARK

Cutting a string is easy.

It is easy to cut a string.

String suspends.

It is easy to cut a string String binds.

It is easy to cut a string String holds tight.

Cutting a string is easy.

It is easy to cut a string. So Fall, Come apart It is easy It is easy

Toler | Clark

Daisy

DANIELLE CLARK I don’t want you anymore but Daisy brings me back.

A familiar smell that will never let me forget an unspoiled day.

The rain had fallen and roads were wet We went to a record store You stopped looking after no time at all Humoring me by staying and watching With a gaze that turned minutes into hours In the car I smelled Daisy I hoped you did too I didn’t ask what it meant when you put your arm around me Until it was too late and I ruined it all

45

But Daisy brings me back Back to everything Back to the drives we took late at night Back to when you were unattainable Back to when you were straight and I thought I could never have you Back to the heartbreak you could never know that your friendship caused Back to the times I drove by your house just to remember.

Back to when it broke.

Everything, all my memories strung together in one scent Tied.

It’s done and that’s ok But Daisy brings me back

Clark

My Place I knew it was home

HANNAH HSU

when I looked back and realized I’d never lived anywhere else.

It’s the smell of spices and smoke from water left boiling on the stove, unattended.

The smell of niǔ ròu miàn, chopped green onions, and crushed garlic; mixed with shouts of, “why isn’t anyone’s helping me cook?”

It’s the sound of shouting across the big, cluttered spaces, and replies of silence between them: from bad ears and headphones in.

The sound of piano, playing well past 2AM when I should be asleep but I stay awake a little longer—just to hear those rhythmic broken chords.

It’s the sandy, textured walls and chipping paint on the white balcony, the smooth, cold, tile floor with crumbs that stick to my feet.

46

The soft, warm, familiar carpet stairs, characteristically stained in certain spots, creaking with every other step.

It’s dusty closets, and the occasional scream of, “Zhāng lǎng!!”—each time a cockroach runs across the living room floor.

It’s not perfect, but it’s home.

But that was then, and this is a different time. . . .

I knew I missed home When I looked back and realized I’d forgotten How to remember It was wonderful smells, and tastes that I’d forgotten That I’d never learned to create for myself Where I remembered the people but not all the dents Dents in the walls All the chipped paint

Hsu

And promises forgotten It’s the sound of a buzzing warm television And people ignoring it with 14 other things It’s the calm, static sounds of a near-empty house Ridden of those responsibilities that immediately matter But that was then, And this is a different time. . . .

I knew It wasn’t (was just a house) What it once was When I walked into a room and remembered far too much These aging walls Have seen more to be broken Than in this old house itself I knew it was just a house When I found the sun many states away

47

And I realized this empty house Couldn’t keep me warm forever And that was the summer I truly realized That people try to keep you warm But never can I have since learned Houses are made to be lived in.

They cannot protect you From what happens inside But they also don’t reflect What happens inside It’ll never be perfect, But it’s still a house Yes, Time marches on.

Hsu

A Natural History of Vacant Lots An anthology by CAMILLE JOHNSON Altar I stand at the ruins of a temple to progress, the ultimate shrine to a nature controlled.

It is an unnatural outcropping of rock, grey, and flat, and perfectly square.

As I kneeled down between the green cracks of the altar, the wind tugged at my coattails and I prayed for its forgiveness.

A lot There’s a lot next to my neighbor’s house, and I spend a lot of time there.

My parents call it an eye-sore a lot, but there’s actually a lot of beauty to spare.

48

There’s a lot next to my neighbor’s house, and a lot of times they say it’s not fair.

I go there and play in the weeds a lot, and I speak to a lot of the plants with care.

There’s a lot next to my neighbor’s house, and a lot of it’s not actually ugly or bare.

Animals stop by to whisper their secrets a lot, but only when you listen, will they share.

Dandelions Dandelions bloom into petals of soft yellow, stout and bright. A valiant effort, but eventually they will all wither into beautiful skeletons and be blown apart by even the softest of breezes. Where their seeds float aimlessly into the sky until by chance they land on the cold, unforgiving cement. It is a place that dandelions were never meant to be. And despite that, they are. Generation after generation they sprout and crack open the rigid concrete, making it a softer, kinder place to exist.

Just by taking root, it is resistance.

Johnson

Quicksand RAINI HUYNH

My soul sinks deeper and deeper As I watch myself interact with others Thoughts become silent shapes My feelings have decided to take a break Passing by friends and saying “hi” With no curiosity for more — “goodbye” Stunned by the pale colors of the future Past hurt feels numb. No sense of hunger Suffocated by all of this emptiness Swallowing grains of melancholy, I need an ambulance “It always passes” is what I tell my friends But right now my mind doesn’t care to see the end My perspective is leaving my body Everything but the present is getting foggy

49

No control, I drift further and further Hours pass, I can’t take it anymore Someone please help, I’m gonna fucking cry I just want this ugliness to pass by Trying to keep my shit together But fuck it I’ll let myself feel the hurt Now tears are streaming, but at least I feel something Maybe I’m still human, I think I feel my soul returning Thoughts begin to morph back into colored sentences that speak The timeline of my life becomes a little less bleak Tears dry on my cheeks and leave stains The fog begins to lift. I begin to forget the pain.

I tell them that “I’m okay” But I’m not sure if that’s fair to say For now I’ll melt into my sheets as I silently pray That I’ll actually be fine the next day Huynh

Today

CAMPBELL BURKE Today we had an active shooter drill.

Today I asked my teacher, “If it came down to it, could we hide in the closet?”

Today he said “Yes.” Tomorrow will it be a drill?

50

Tomorrow will I ask him,” Should we hide in the closet?”

Tomorrow will he say, “Yes?” Next week will I attend a funeral for my friend, my teacher?

Next week will I conduct an interview begging for change?

Next month will I return to school without my friends, my teachers?

Next month will I return to empty lockers and broken hearts?

Next year will I forget?

Next year will I move on?

You will, but will I?

Burke

Flag

LINDSAY MORGAN And the flag waved away, with its ‘x’ mark the spot Its stars that shot their shot. The red of the dead and The blue of those who pled, all come together to form The swarm we dread Their shot remained. The red of the dead unnamed.

It hung from her bedroom wall, landscaped like a view of the fall But behind that view is the swarm we dread The white men who’d wave their gun and take aim It hung from her bedroom wall, as dark as the view of their fall I sat and asked why she had hung it, in support?

The white men who’d wave their gun and take aim And she told me people like me were to blame

51

I sat and asked her why she hung it in support When the men in their white hoods use it even today And she told me people who thought of it that way were to blame It was only supporting a heritage, her father had said When the men in their white hoods use it even today The blue that trickles down the black faces who plea It was only supporting their heritage, they say And so the flag still waves away

Morgan

The Day After

LINDSAY MORGAN

52

Morgan

The sky was upon us, we rose with the moon The pretzel of our time, we tangled together A handshake, the fire in our hands, And when we touched we were burned by our Sun We grew closer as we were lifted A nose for a nose, a light for a light Brushing together in our plight We pass through the clouds Our bodies now dripping with its dew But that doesn’t stop the fire from spreading From our hands it moves And as we rose into the atmosphere We made each other succumb to it Insatiable Burning We rose even higher and met the moon Its glow bouncing off our bodies Entangled Enthralled And then finally the dew begins to drip past us Passing the moon Moving through space Succumbing to Earth’s atmosphere And falling on the grass we’ll wake up to in the morning We float amongst the cosmos, Our bodies beginning to drift back down.

Our souls bobbing, Jerking and twisting Trying to separate, trying to return back to where they once were Until finally we’ve returned It’s worn off And we’re back Back to as low as we can go

The Virgin LINDSAY MORGAN

The ducks waddle along like Victorian children Their lives casual softness as I watch them They, like the rest of the world, Move around me My body frozen Stuck in my own darkness The edge of the black lake Shifts as they file in Even tears can be black in the dark I look down into the lake I see myself reflected back at me The false me The ochre me Darken me The me who embodies all three, Was the only one I could not see.

I jump in to join them My bare body brushing them Brushing me The laughter bubbles of seaweed and tiny neon fish Distract me from those nightmares Those voices haunting me Following me Until I find one of my selves pulled under water They’re drowning me.

Another one is yanked They’ve gotten me.

The third me is gone They’ve found me.

And then I’m under water We sit, we talk. He asks, I tell.

“I can’t help you” “You waited too long” One of me wants to disappear Another me is left out The third me put me here in the first place So I decide To be my own me.

And that was when I stepped out of the water And left those other selves behind.

53

Morgan

Kindred Spirit I found a kindred spirit A gentle soul who holds a birdie I’ve met too many men who would’ve crushed it in their hands I see you kindred spirit In my dreams Or in different bodies I say hello Perhaps with a hug Or a kiss Or tender, longing look.

54

I wonder how our souls can recognize kinship So easily So freely Beyond age, body, or blood.

There is no love left in your heart Your finite heart There is no love left for me Or your family.

After you have finished loving her, Fully and thoroughly, You return to us With anger and engagement, Fists of fury and bloodthirsty eyes.

Like a gremlin and ghoul you stalk this house for The next prey, the next victim of your anger.

Who is she? A princess? A dame?

Someone who drains every bit of kindness I used to recognize within you.

There is no love left in your heart For those who have infinite love for you.

Anonymuse

ANONYMUSE

These Days MADDIE WEST

I wonder how many shades of blue the sky shines?

But questions don’t matter when you’re hyperventilating Reality pressures my chest cavity Pushing me into the cold, hard ground of the truth I want to flow with the waves But I’m drowning everyday My head fights above for a breath I’m holding onto family and friends for what’s next.

El Ayudante JESSICA GARCIA-TEJEDA

El primero es complicado Parafernalia, pasos, y puertas Artificial y temporal Cada hombre condenado a perder Su camino, su mente, su fe Girando y girando, los caminos van Hasta que la puerta secreta se alcanza por un ayudante El creador se marchita, su laberinto no tiene poder Sus paredes caen, su corona es falsa El cautivo se convierte en uno que captura Su ayudante está muy cerca El mejor camino es avanzar Oculto a la vista, el laberinto espera Su ayudante sigue en el desierto El sol mira, caliente y seco Y esta vez, el engaño no es tan claro Sin paredes, sin puertas Igual de facil de perder su camino Mas facil de perder todo Un desierto infinito El sol mira al hombre en el suelo Y el ayudante sonríe Porque el sabe que solo él puede hacer algo tan infinitivo Los ladrillos no se pueden comparar con lo que es real

55

West | Garcia-Tejeda

Ode to

Death You give the heart a break Freeing it from its life as a slave Pumping and pumping

JESSICA GARCIA-TEJEDA

A stiff sir being lowered six feet The loss of warm in a world too hot Rigor mortis tightens floppy muscles into a neat unmoving body You take the green out of the greens You dehydrate them to a point Where your shade of lovely brown in imminent Where the frail shell can be crushed into fine dust 56

The coral invites you in With a single touch you suck the overly cheery colors Out of a colorful creature Leaving it pale pasty and beautifly white You turn the fish upside down And bring his mouth open to be filled with water Drowning him And you bring life To hundreds of right-side up fish Nibbling tide And pain you bring your name to laughter Quieting the annoying sounds Gifting silence Your fingers of acceptance curl around and choke troublesome hope Gifting the world reality These phalanges take the breath out of dreams And bring a fantastic truth to the living

Garcia-Tejeda

Elegy

ARIANA FLETCHER-BAI Elegy for the boy who took my virginity like an organ harvest, who I didn’t speak to for three years, first love, first memorial service without my mom It’s hard even thinking about it If I could I’d write you out of my dreams I don’t want to be haunted don’t want to be listening to the rappers you quoted in your instagram captions, don’t want to have memorized your instagram captions from scrolling through it so many times If I could, I’d go back and follow you in real time one little change, follow you back, what a strange thing to be so hung up on I could have seen you grow up maybe gotten to be there for you I wish I was, I wish I could have been the one to show you the sunshine like that line from that Brad Sucks song you showed me “I want to be in the sun again, the sun again” you know, I still listen to him did you ever see it, the sunshine? did you ever grow up?

57

you went from angst to screamo to emo rap, did you ever heal or were you just an older version of the same scared boy I loved, of the one I would have done anything for?

Or did it get worse, did you hurt anyone else?

I’m stronger now than the girl you used but I’m still weak for you, always will be If I went back and was there for you, there’s a chance you would have changed me, and maybe we would have gone down together black dust together coffins together like I used to dream about.

Fletcher-Bai

In the absence of force

ARIANA FLETCHER-BAI

In the absence of force, There is only silence. In the night, Half question, half answer Half moon bodies like magnets Flipped towards each other, flipped away and repulsed, flipped back again Like contemporary sleepdancing I wake up to look for water, Find your smooth skin behind me like waves Reassuring like the sound of the ocean No nightmares, no dreams

Material Memoir

58

always in motion humans living in a plant-ocean a leaf is not static but emerges the undead reanimated the aches i have queering nonheteronormative joy i am breath here now sunflowers growing in the gutters plastic, hard drive, dead hair and dried plants, mud, vaselinebo birth, my ocean, selfname form defined by its ability to forgo intensification Their precise malleability reinstating leafness, reimagining leafness everything is leafness creating art as intensification fruition

Fletcher-Bai | Bowen

ABBI BOWEN

walk to the garden ABBI BOWEN

i think about the banana peel under the underpass and if the trail of ants a block away will ever find it i think about the way my body gravitates to grass and if you understand

59

i think about the coy poppies and what they’re waiting for and if we wait for the same reasons i think i think i think at times it can be dangerous i think now is so

Bowen

Layers of island living the core: when we fused limoncello with cigarettes the radiative zone: when the merlot boiled in the trunk of the Panda the convection zone: when the current moved through the sand, appearing under you— the chromosphere: like honey under comb but plasma above

60

the photosphere: when i enclosed dirt under my fingernails the corona: when we saw in awe the wild boars cross the dirt road the solar flare: when we couldn’t predict when the dried hills would catch fire or if the bombola del gas worked the hydrogen flash: that brought me to all of these

Bowen

ABBI BOWEN

Is This What My Body Said?

ABBI BOWEN

Anthology of a Perfect Low Day

61

ABBI BOWEN

Bowen

San Antonio June Storms

ABBI BOWEN

62

Take a Walk!

ELYSE ANDREWS

Bowen | Andrews

A Good 8 Hours ELYSE ANDREWS

It’ll Be Alright

63

ELYSE ANDREWS

Andrews

Grandma’s Beach House Donuts ELYSE ANDREWS

64

Andrews

Shorebound KIT CURA Cora stands at the edge of a cliff and stares through wind-narrowed eyes at the hidden ocean.

Somewhere far below her feet, white waves seethe and foam onto the black-rock beach, a destructive dance to which she is a precarious observer. She can taste the water on her skin, too, bitterly cold and salty, burrowing into her bones alongside the heavy dew and drizzle— a second layer of flesh.

She blinks the blurriness from her eyes; blankets of fog stretch lazily outwards, shapeless bodies spilling onto the coast, reaching for her with translucent tendrils. She blinks again, and she sees her mother’s hands on the starched bedsheets, claw-like, white-knuckled.

Cora gasps into the wind and takes a step back, away from the angry sea and the curtains of fog. A hand settles on her shoulder, rough and solid.

“Tranquila. Easy.” Says Tomas Calbo, the hand’s owner and Cora’s four-month guide to the Patagonian coast. “You are fine, I would tell you if you were in any danger.” He smiles through crooked front teeth and sparking gray eyes; he thinks he is reassuring her.

“Sorry,” Cora looks at him, catches her breath, “I was… a little overwhelmed.”

Tomas nods, like he understands. “A little too much for you on your first day here, eh? The coast here tends to have this effect on people,” his accent is strange, not quite English and not quite Spanish; upside-down birdsong, beautiful, if a little jarring. He turns back to the horizon, still smiling, and adds, “I have lived here my whole life, and every time I feel the waters dance like this…” he pauses, losing his words in the waves below, and turns to Cora. “Ven , let us go back to the house. My family is excited to meet you.” ***

65

“Whales,” her mother scoffed from the hospital bed, “you want to study whales.”

Cora shifted awkwardly in the hard plastic chair and folded her hands in her lap. “Not just whales, Mom,” she made sure to keep her voice level, free of any passion, just like she had learned, “marine biology involves many subjects: wildlife conservation, the effects of climate change on underwater ecosystems—” “And you choose to focus on the migrations of slow, stupid whales in Panama.”

“Patagonia. Not Panama.”

“What’s the difference?”

“And they’re not stupid; current research suggests that certain species possess enough emotional intelligence to rival that of humans.”

Her mother crossed her arms, pursed her lips, and narrowed her eyes— a triple threat of disappointment. Her paper-thin and pale skin, the IVs stuck into bulging blue veins, the flimsy hospital gown flung over a too-thin body, they all faded away; for a heartbeat, Cora did not see the breast cancer patient, but the socialite who frowned her way through Cora’s life.

“Have you ever seen a whale run a business?” She said. Her gaze then shifted, focusing somewhere behind her daughter’s head. Cora followed her stare, swiveling in her chair and peering through the viewing window.

Her father stood on the other side, his back turned to her, a cellphone jammed against his ear, his broad shoulders stiff beneath his ironed work suit. He hadn’t entered the room yet, hadn’t so much as looked through the window. Cora couldn’t even begin to guess who he was talking to: one of his endless corporate lackeys, maybe, or perhaps some bushy-tailed acolyte from Oklahoma or Arkansas looking for some proud Texan oil baron to show him the ropes. She heard the rumble of his voice, glacial, carving progress with every syllable, no doubt. She Cura

Kit Cura — Shorebound

66

Cura

wasn’t sure who she felt more sorry for— the poor bastard on the other end of the line, or her bedridden mother fighting for both herself and a scrap of her husband’s time.

“Now that’s intelligence.” She said, her voice dripping with reverence: she saw a martyr, not a man, “Don’t forget all that he’s done for you, Cora. You’d be stupid to throw it all away.”

The door opened. Her father walked in, the cellphone finally detached from his ear. His eyes went wide as he noticed his wife on the bed; Cora blinked, and she saw her mother through his sight, lifeless, with needle-pricked skin and washed-out hair, her eyes scowling even from six feet under. His lip curled— was it fear, disgust?

Not worry. Never worry. He didn’t have time for worry outside of himself.

“Hello, honey,” He averted his eyes from her face and spoke to the floor. One can only look at a corpse for so long. “How are you feeling?”

Her mother’s frown deepened. Creases appeared in her paper forehead. “I’ve felt better.”

Her father’s fingertips twitched; no doubt he’d hide behind his screen again if he could— it’s proved an efficient defense strategy for him. “How do you mean?”

“Your daughter wants to spend her last semester of college studying whales in South America.”

Cora ducked her head; she was a child again, staring at an untouched dinner plate and listening as her mother read out a list of her crimes. Your daughter gave herself a pixie cut with your hair clippers. Your daughter snuck out of the house last night— again. Your daughter kissed a girl in our driveway.

Cora was only a daughter whenever her mother tried to fight it.

Her father turned to her, his face a mask of incredulity. “Really?”

Cora fidgeted. She should have stayed in her apartment today, safe among the walls freckled with Polaroids of her friends, the cluster of succulents lined up on her windowsill, the wooden shelves buckling under English-to-Spanish dictionaries, biology textbooks, and trashy lesbian romance novels.

Her mother had called, and she had answered. A bad habit.

Cora pulled herself back to the present, fought to keep her head above the too-bright lights.

“It was the only thing the program offered.”

She didn’t tell him how, the second she saw the study-abroad flyer posted on the biology department’s advertisement board, she sprinted to the office of the department chair, plopped down in the overstuffed leather seat across from his desk, and refused to leave until he handed her the required paperwork, pointed her to the necessary websites, and sent her on her way with an amused smile.

“But what about your graduate school applications?” Her father said, “Brown, Cornell, Duke?

Are you really going to let all of those incredible opportunities go to waste?”

“I already turned everything in,” replied Cora, and that was the truth, “there’s nothing more for me to do but wait, and I don’t want to spend that time sitting around and doing nothing.”

I don’t want to spend that time with you. That’s what she wanted to say, but she knew better.

The first cracks blistered across her father’s face. Gears turned.

“Still, out of all the things you could do…” Her mother sighed, shook her head, “I just think that it’s a tremendous waste of time and money.”

Her father shifted on his feet, cleared his throat. His body ebbed and flowed; his voice the wave disrupting his wife’s shore. “Let her go, Helena.”

Her mother turned to him, her sea-glass eyes taut with betrayal. “What?”

“She has done all that we have asked her to thus far,” he addressed the empty space directly before him, “maybe she needs this; it’s a chance for her to get this… hobby out of her system.”

Her mother snorted. “Hobby is certainly one way of putting it.”

Her father started patting his coat pockets, glancing back towards the door. Cora mentally started counting down the seconds until he feigned another business call and ran out of the room. “I’ll pay for whatever is needed,” he said, “You won’t have to worry about a thing, dear.”

Cora looked up— the walls closed in around her, silent jaws. She should not have been surprised; this is how her parents’ relationship had worked since she first hit adolescence: her mother had a problem, and her father threw money at it until it went away.

More often than not, said problem manifested in the way of Cora’s five-foot-six, red-pixiecut frame.

Her mother fixed her with a sharp glare— twin hazel daggers, the same shade as her own; her blood, her mother’s blood, they couldn’t fight what they shared, but they’d damn well try.

“Fine,” Helena finally said, conceding defeat, “Fine. Do what you want,” her taunting eyes drew blood, “just don’t expect us to rescue you the second you get homesick.” *** It’s a thirty-minute drive to Tomas Calbo’s house. Cora stares through the window at the retreating coastline cliffs, watching them melt into the silvery sheets of fog; the stunted green shrubs and grasses of the moors writhe in the late afternoon wind, snippets of movement at the edges of her vision. Are they waving goodbye or beckoning her back? She can’t decide.

She’ll be back soon, she whispers to the wilderness, maybe even as early as tomorrow. After all, it’s why she’s here to begin with.

Tomas turns on the radio just as the moorlands begin to give way to the outskirts of Puerto Madryn, her home for the spring— no, autumn, it’s autumn down here, she reminds herself. She made sure to pack accordingly, all jackets and boots— no bikinis for her, thank you very much — but nothing could have quite prepared her for the grey chill that took up residence in her bones the second she stepped off the plane at El Tehuelche airport. Cold reality, cold air: what is the difference, who can say? She’d frozen on the steps and not moved until the woman behind her huffed out a sigh, muttered something in hushed Spanish, and pointedly drove the wheels of her carry-on bag into the back of Cora’s sneakers.

“Do you like this music?” Tomas asks suddenly.

Cora snaps back to reality. “I’m sorry?” She asks in English, then corrects herself, “Perdón?”

“This music,” Tomas repeats in English, again in that beautifully odd accent, “you like it?”

Cora listens. She deciphers cheery guitar strings and a high, warbling voice through the tinny speakers, the words lost in the static and a language freed from the slow, flat-tongued tapes she’d trudged through in preparation for this trip. She can’t recognize any of it.

“Yes,” she hears herself say, “I like it.”

Tomas smiles and turns the volume up.

Cora keeps looking out the window, resting her chin in her hands. They’re turning away from the seaside strip with its shiny tourist resorts and sleek, expensive high-rises; the navy-blue pickup truck bounces along the inner blocks of the city proper. Squat white and grey structures line the narrow streets, pedestrians bustle about the sidewalk, ants but not nearly as hurried; beetles, maybe. She watches them go, wonders if she’ll meet any of them before her time here is up. She’d like to, but she hopes not.

It would be nice to be lost in a crowd, for once.

The truck rolls onward, deeper into the maze. Tomas starts to whistle along with the song.

Cora quashes the urge to tap her feet in solidarity.

Minutes blur; she nods off and opens her eyes to the city’s backstreets. The office buildings and apartments and street-side diners are gone, chased away by simple one-story houses with shuttered windows and pastel-toned wooden walls. They crowd together, peering into each other’s windows, sharing the same sparse front yard space, they, too, need warmth and company.

Little houses for little people, that’s what her mother would say, and then she’d laugh as if she’d just told a particularly amusing joke. Her father would keep driving, his hands choking the steering wheel; if Cora was lucky, she might even hear him mumble something about “underprivileged neighborhoods”.

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Cura

Kit Cura — Shorebound

Tomas makes a left turn onto Cordoba Street, and Cora allows herself to wonder if she misses them.

“Here we are.”

Cora looks up. The street ahead seems a perfect copy of all the others, punctuated by the same pockmarked paths, dull grass, and faded rainbow of homes. Wait— she blinks; movement on one of the lawns. A small figure darts into one of the houses; Tomas follows them, pulling into the bare-earth driveway and beaming like a child entrusted with a secret. “My house,” he announces.

Cora’s eyes roam the cornflower-blue walls, painted by careful, complete hands; the white window shutters are thrown open, flickers of light wink at her through the sheets of glass. The single story, the cracked front steps, the battered satellite dish sitting on top of the roof— she sees this, too, but it all slips somewhere below the surface.

68

Tomas carries her suitcase up to the front door. Cora offers to help him— the bag is easily half his size (her father insisted that she did not pack light), and he is already a rather small man to begin with —but he waves her away with a “don’t worry, señorita, I am stronger than I look.”

Cora gives up after the third try.

She stands at the door, waiting. She hears voices on the other side, a buzzing cacophony poking, prodding into her walls.

“You can go in,” says Tomas, “the door is unlocked. Everyone is waiting for you.”

Everyone. She hadn’t known there would be an everyone.

Cora swallows, hesitates. Her excitement is real. So are her nerves.

Her fingers close around the door handle— cold, rusted, sharp as needles pricking at her hands. The voices stop as one. Waves rumble in the shell of her ears; salt tickles her tongue. She spares herself a single, quick breath.

Cora opens the door and steps into a warm haze of yellow light.

Little Rebellions

KIT CURA

Her mother was going to kill her.

Thea Santos set the yellow safety scissors down on the bathroom counter and looked into the cracked mirror. She shook her head, her reflection echoing the movements; she marveled at how light her body felt now that she’d stripped off at least a dozen inches of hair. Gone were the stifling mornings where her mother’s rough hands would work her hair into twin braids so tight her scalp would sting for the rest of the day, the sweltering afternoons spent avoiding the sunburned neighborhood boys who’d pull on her ponytail and jeer when she ran away. She turned her gaze downward, to the long, dark brown locks strewn across the tile floor, and smiled.

She should clean the mess up, a murmur in the back of her mind reminded her; she needed to dig up the broom buried in the depths of the downstairs closet and sweep away all traces of what she’d done, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t. She’d let it all sit there for everyone to see; she would let herself relish the results of her work.

Thea grinned at her reflection, a victorious flash of bared teeth shining across the fractured surface. She felt something bloom deep in her chest, petals of pride unfurling and reaching towards her thoughts, where they burst into a dizzying sense of satisfaction.

Oh, her mother was so going to kill her, but she had never felt so free.

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Thea felt the screams before she heard them, bursts of heat smacking against the open bathroom door, skittering along the darkened upstairs hallway, groaning under her scuffed boots as she began to tiptoe down the stairs. She hesitated only once, halfway down, her chipped fingernails digging into the painted wooden railing. This wouldn’t be her home for much longer, she thought, she wasn’t worried about leaving behind any marks— the risk was nothing compared to what surely awaited her downstairs.

She swallowed. A pit in the depths of her stomach broiled with something resembling fear, hot and choking. Terrified, she should be terrified, but her body kept pulling her into the downstairs light all the same, even as the shouts grew louder.

She had to do this, she reminded herself, she had to.

She would be damned if she didn’t even try.

Thea found her family in the kitchen. As always, her mother was hard to miss. Both of her gnarled hands curled like claws; one gripped a cellphone to her ear while the other flung open and slammed shut kitchen cabinets just so she could hear the punctuating thunderclap.

“Hijo de puta!” Thea heard her howl, “ungrateful bastard, how dare you take everything from me! How dare you leave without even saying goodbye!”

Thea reached the last step and pressed herself into the evening shadows filtering through the shuttered windows; she crouched among the minefield of tossed baggage and thrown stacks of paper and reminded herself to breathe. She was safe, she told herself, she would be safe as long as her mother’s attention remained with the soul on the other end of the line.

“Selfish, that’s all you are!” Her mother spat and swept an empty beer bottle onto the floor, “Selfish and a coward, washing your hands of us while you while you run away; I hope you’re fucking happy!”

Thea saw movement in the corner of her eyes. Slowly, deliberately, she dared herself to creep out into the light and let her eyes focus on a wire-thin figure kneeling before her mother on the kitchen floor— Rosario, her older sister, her thick brows furrowed as she scooped up shards of the fallen beer bottle with cautious hands. She was seventeen to Thea’s fifteen, yet she’d been forced to become the head of the household even before their father called the family quits a mere three months ago, trading in her sketchbooks and pens for fragile wooden spoons and cleaning rags that never managed to clear the liquor stains splashing the countertops. Even from her hiding spot near the stairway, Thea noticed the hollows slumbering in her cheekbones and the bags drooping under her eyes. In the light, they almost looked like old bruises.

Thea found herself inching closer, her eyes never leaving her sister’s hunched form. She wanted Rosario to see her; wanted her to look up and find her hiding place as if this were nothing more than a childhood game. She wanted to see her dark eyes shine with something, anything for the first time in a week— sadness, surprise, solidarity.

“Get out of my way,” Their mother snapped and shoved Rosario away with an uncaring hand; her eyes were distant, her voice lost. The glass shards tumbled out of Rosario’s palms and scattered across the kitchen floor, their sharp green edges sneering at Thea from under the fluorescent lights. Rosario sighed and shook herself off and got back onto her knees, still silent, still searching.

Thea recalled the discarded hair upstairs, another thankless mess left behind for her sister to attend to. She blinked and felt wetness collecting in the corners of her eyes. Shame sunk in her stomach like a stone, bitter and bubbling. She glanced across the room. The front door waited, still unlocked; a sliver of violet evening light peeked through the open crack and beckoned her forward.

Her mother’s back was turned. Rosario wasn’t looking. The shadows lengthened across the floor, reaching for her with silent fingers.

I have to get out of here.

Thea squeezed her eyes shut, drew in a shuddering breath, and flung herself towards the

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front door. Her boots squeaked against the scuffed floor, the doorknob squealed under her fingertips. She didn’t care if anyone heard.

Her body fell forward, the door obeying and spilling her over the threshold, sending her tumbling onto the front porch. Humidity hugged her skin, chirping tree frogs and crickets settled in the shell of her ears— she had been given up to a Houston summer dusk.

Thea wasted no time in picking herself up, brushing herself off, and running. ***

70

Thea didn’t have to go very far. The broad swath of forest at the dead end of the street was waiting for her; the last touches of sunlight crowned the treetops with golden haloes, the June breeze at her back stirred the quivering oak leaves on their spindly stems.

Thea paused, released a shallow sigh, and ran a hand through her hair. The ends remained choppy and rough, spiking up under her fingertips; porcupine quills, uneven and unfinished.

She turned around, looking back at the way in which she’d come. The street darkened and dimmed with each passing breath; the lights inside the happy suburban houses grew brighter, warmer. Thea swallowed the urge to creep over and peer through their glowing windows. She already had a pretty good idea of what she’d find: families eating dinner as one, commiserating on the living room couches, tucking their little ones into bed. There would be no shouting, no walls dented from a particularly brutal punch, no hiding under beds. Just love and light and laughter. Whole families in whole homes.

Must be nice, Thea thought.

Thea looked back to the woods ahead. The breeze urged her forward, and she stepped up to embrace the verdant depths. Twigs cracked under her feet; branches whipped at her arms, but she did not care.

If she moved fast enough, maybe she could escape the truth nipping at her heels. *** Stepping into the trees felt like coming home.

Pines and oaks and ash trees intermingled high over her head, their twisting branches embracing and forming a living patchwork quilt of fading sunlight and shadows. The earth beneath her feet was as heavy as the air around her, its slow heartbeat thick with life left drowsy after an achingly hot day. Thea breathed in (fresh leaves and rich dirt), breathed out (the promise of a Texas thundershower just beyond the horizon); the wilds pressed in around her, their rippling languages all lost in translation, but she was not afraid.

She had never been afraid of the forest.

She kept walking until the trees thinned and the ground sloped downward; a few quick moments later, she found herself at the edge of a small, circular hollow ringed by pine trees. A layer of soft needles carpeted the ground, silencing her every step.

A girl waited in the center of the hollow. The first threads of moonlight caught in her eyes as Thea approached; the corners of her lips curled up into a warm smile. “You came.”

Thea’s steps and her heart both quickened. “Yeah,” she whispered; she wasn’t sure why— it just felt right, “sorry if I kept you waiting.”

The girl shifted on her feet and shook her head, her every movement outlined in silver.

“Don’t worry,” she said, her voice honey-sweet, velvet-soft, “you didn’t.”

Thea Santos could not remember a time in her life where Newt Larkins did not exist; there was no before, only after. Once upon a time, they were neighbors, little gap-toothed girls who would peer over fences on their tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the other. Each was raised on the other’s front yard, stuffed animals strewn across the clipped grass as they made wreaths out of

Cura

spring flowers and swords out of sticks and pretended to be faeries, or huntresses, or something equally fanciful and impossible. The games continued even after Newt’s family moved a few neighborhoods away to a nicer part of town, a place where the two-story homes came with walk-in closets and a kitchen as big as Thea’s living room. The wide band of forest now proved to be the only separation between them, and so, when Newt’s parents forgot how to give their daughter a mindful glance and Thea’s mother lost herself in drinks and diatribes, they took to the trees.

Together, they matured underneath dappled sunlight and grew into dirt-speckled shirts, running through the same paths and hollows until they were up to their knees in mud and earth and fallen leaves, They stayed out until the stars claimed the sky because Newt couldn’t sleep quite right since her little sister was born and Thea would rather be eaten alive by mosquitos than spend another night watching her parents’ shadows argue.

Thea always found something sacred in these afterlight meetings with her closest and only friend, and she was more than content with this kind of companionship— it’s not like she was going to find it anywhere else.

“You cut your hair.”

“Oh,” Newt’s voice brought her back to the present, reminding her of the discarded inches all piled up on the bathroom floor. She wondered if Rosario had found the carnage yet. “Yeah. I, uh, did it myself. Just now, actually.”

“I like it,” Newt said. The curves of her smile softened, her eyes shone like twin sparks in the night, “I think it suits you.”

A faint warmth crept up the back of Thea’s neck. “Thanks.”

“Can I, um…”

Thea met Newt’s gaze. The warmth snuck into her cheeks, settled in her stomach, buzzed at the ends of her fingertips— the feeling wasn’t at all unpleasant, she thought; she was growing used to it, welcoming it to the point that, lately, whenever she looked at Newt her body would heat up as if she were tinder and someone had just struck a match.

Newt reached out for her, brushed her fingertips over the top of her hair with a light touches.

The world fell away; there was nothing but Thea’s heart beating at a hummingbird’s pace, adding fuel to the fire racing through her veins. Newt’s fingers trailed over the close-cropped fuzz at the nape of her neck, sparking a giggle. “It tickles a little.”

Thea forced herself to breathe. Her skin tingled under Newt’s touch, lingering even after Newt pulled away and reclaimed some semblance of distance between them.

She didn’t know when Newt had first started to have this effect on her, not really. There was no exact day that she could pinpoint on a calendar and write this was the first time I blushed around her or today she laughed at a terrible joke I made and every coherent thought in my brain shut down. The feeling was just there, strands of spider-silk pulling them together in a way that Thea was not exactly equipped to verbalize. All she wanted to do was know more. Know about herself, about this, about them— “Thank you,” Newt said, her voice shyer than before, “for, um, letting me do that.”

Thea swallowed. “No problem.”

A gust of cool air whispered through the hollow, a rare thing for the season. Newt shivered slightly, cleared her throat. “How, um, how’re things at home? How’s your mom handling… everything?”

Home Cold slithered down Thea’s spine. Her muscles tightened, her eyes closed: she was peering through a crack in her old bedroom door, watching shadows argue. She saw her mother throw something— a book, a bottle? Her father dodged, barely, and shouted a string of curses.

The screams never ended— Thea opened her eyes. Newt still stared at her, her smile slanted with what Thea knew to call sadness, a silent sign to speak when she was ready.

“About as well as you’d expect,” Thea said; she paused, gulped around a bitter cry brewing in

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her throat, “Dad’s claimed the house, the money, everything but me and Ro. She’s real thrilled about being stuck with us.”

Newt didn’t laugh. Thea didn’t expect her to. Her ember eyes dimmed, and, when she spoke, her voice was low and mournful. “I’m so sorry, Thea.”

Thea shifted on her feet and stared at her battered sneakers. She spared a glance at Newt’s hands, long and slender. Her fingers twitched, and Thea allowed herself to wonder if she was fighting the urge to pull her into a hug.

You wouldn’t object to that at all, would you? Her thoughts taunted.

Thea knew better than to fight back.

Thea looked up. She met Newt’s gaze and, despite everything, she saw fondness in their depths, tenderness in the slant of her smile. She’d never seen this before— hadn’t she? Maybe— no, she realized, definitely; she’d definitely seen this kind of look from her, and she’d always tricked herself out of recognizing how their wants were the same.

Too late, pobrecita, her mother cackled, too damn late.

Thea swallowed, hard. Newt has to know. “I’m…”

There were so many things she could say. So many things that she had to say, but she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, because the divorce had tainted even her most precious bond, her only chance for a flicker of light, and there was no way she could ever get this back.

Thea had run out of time.

“I’m moving away.”

Her words blotted out the final gasps of daylight. She heard Newt suck in a breath, saw the warmth in her eyes slip away with the sun. Newt opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again.

“What?”

“It’s true. I’m leaving tomorrow,” Thea choked around a sudden lump in her throat; no more need for her to bar the words bubbling over her lips, “I—I don’t know what time, probably in the morning. Mom says there’s no reason for us to keep living here, Dad clearly doesn’t want any of us anymore, so...” She faltered, cleared her throat. “Yeah.”

Shadows settled in Newt’s face, torn somewhere between disbelief and worry. “Where are you moving to?”

“El Paso.”

Thea hadn’t even finished her sentence before Newt broke the final barrier, flinging her arms around her, pulling her close, pressing her into a tight embrace. “It’s okay,” she took a quivering breath, “we’ll still be able to visit each other, right?”

Silence. The earth pitched beneath Thea’s feet; the trees melted into shadowed swaths.

Thea grabbed Newt tight, buried her face into the side of her neck, squeezed her eyes shut.

Maybe, if she had any semblance of luck left in her life, the forest floor would yawn open and swallow them whole and the roots would stitch up the tears in her breaking heart. At least that would provide her a chance at… something, anything that was not the truth.

“Right?” Newt’s hold tightened. The tremble in her throat crept into her voice. “Thea?”

Burning. Her throat burned. Her eyes burned. The spot on the back of her neck, the place where Newt had just been touching her like they were the only souls alive— that burned, too.

Newt smelled of cinnamon. Her mother’s cackle still rang in the shell of her ears.

“I don’t know,” Thea whispered. “I don’t know.”

That was the truth. She didn’t know. She hadn’t known what to do since her parents had first started fighting, since she’d first started locking her bedroom door at night as if that was all it would take to hold the hurricane at bay. She’d stared through the peephole of Rosario’s door, wordlessly watching as her sister declined acceptances from six different universities and sobbed because the fact that their family was unable to pay for a decent college was the least of their concerns. All this time, Newt had been her only constant, and, now, she was going to lose her.

Thea couldn’t let that happen.

She pulled back just enough so that she could look at Newt again; she opened her eyes, fell into pools of liquid amber. She was close enough to feel Newt’s warmth, the rise and fall of her chest. Her every thought urged her to withdraw, warned that she had already stepped over far too many boundaries.

Thea ignored it all.

A teardrop spilled over Newt’s eyelashes, and Thea reached out to sweep it away. Newt’s eyes widened a fraction, but she still angled her head and pressed her cheek against Thea’s palm like it was the most natural thing in the world. Thea felt her own body move like she was in a dream (God, if this was a dream, she never wanted to wake up), felt her fingertips curve along Newt’s cheekbone and settle in the spot between her ear and jaw.

Newt didn’t look away. Neither did she. She was falling into those sweet, sad eyes, a gasp away from drowning, unable and unwilling to ever come back up for air.

Newt’s free arm tightened around her waist; Thea blinked, and they were close enough to share the same breaths. Thea’s lips parted to ask a question, but the words died on the tip of her tongue.

A heartbeat later, Thea realized that there was nothing left to say.

She stood on her tiptoes, tossed her arms around Newt’s neck, and kissed her.

It was a clumsy kiss, fumbling and desperate, but neither one of them cared much. Thea focused on was memorizing every detail of this moment; she wanted to remember how Newt tasted like honeysuckle, the tiny whine in the back of her throat before their lips touched, how she was kissing her back with a longing so strong that Thea could feel her heart ache with the force of it. She wanted hours of this. No, more than that— days, months, years.

The kiss was over as abruptly as it started. Neither one of them moved away. Thea pressed her forehead against Newt’s and heaved in a breath. She shivered, but it had nothing to do with the cold.

“What happens now?” Newt’s voice was hoarse. “What… what do we do?”

Thea closed her eyes, breathed in lavender perfume and the pine trees around them. “I don’t know,” she said again, and she meant it; that was all she could give, “I wish I did.”

Newt shifted, resting her chin against the top of Thea’s head. “It’s okay,” she finally said, her voice still rough and wavering, “we’ll figure it out. We-we’ll text and call and stuff.”

“Okay.” Thea heard her voice from somewhere far away— she was still lost in Newt’s heartbeat, the warmth of her embrace. She hoped that enough of herself was in the answer, “I can live with that.”

A frigid breeze rushed through the hollow, like the forest itself was heaving out a sigh, rustling the pine trees and pushing Thea further into Newt’s arms. Crickets called out from the undergrowth, finding and losing each other as they moved through the darkness. Thea pressed herself impossibly closer to Newt’s chest and let the dam burst, hot and red. She didn’t know how long they stood there, but it wasn’t long enough.

It would never be enough, she thought.

The crescent moon rose and fell. Thea watched it settle on the horizon, a thin silver smudge through her tear-drowned eyes. Soon, far too soon, the sky started to melt into shades of violet, and Thea knew that it was time to go.

73

*** Thea walked home on her own, accompanied by the memories of Newt’s lips on hers, two sets of teardrops on her skin, and her mother’s mocking of her aching eyes and body. The door squeaked open under her touch, but there was no one there waiting to berate her. Rosario must have given into exhaustion, and her mother…

Thea shook her head. She didn’t want to know what her mother was up to right now.

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Kit Cura — Little Rebellions

She crept up the stairs alone, fell into bed alone; the bedsprings squeaked under her body, the only sound she could hear. She could still smell Newt on her shirt, lavender and cinnamon and pine. She would let that scent stay for as long as it could, her final rebellion, a reminder, a secret for her to carry.

Thea rolled over in bed and faced the window; outside, the first touches of rosy light brushed over her eyes, caressed her skin. She remembered Newt’s hands on her body, licks of flame without any pain, and bit back another cry. She closed her eyes, and, for a heartbeat, she was back under those moon-dappled trees, taking Newt’s outstretched hand, following her glowing eyes and birdsong laugh deep into the night.

“Are you still there?” Thea heard herself whisper, “How long’ll you wait?”

There was no answer. Thea realized that she hadn’t been expecting anything different.

Outside, the first stars began to melt into the dawn, winking their own goodbyes.

She wondered if Newt could see them, too.

Doing Long Distance

74

KENDRA DERRIG

I feel closest to my mother when I am 2,000 miles away, stuck inside from the snow, connected only through cell phone waves.

Without seeing her face, I can tell her anything.

I can peer out of my apartment window at the mounting snowdrifts, watch the streetlights come on and split the world into pools of yellow light, pretend the voice on the other end of the phone is a high school friend, tell her that I am not coming home for Christmas this year, tell her that I am not going to go to law school, tell her that I haven’t gotten over my ex and that he keeps texting me, keeps saying he hopes my dog and I are doing good, as if asking just about me would be too personal. I imagine that she, too, is pretending that I am someone else, a high school friend, a bringer of gossip and drama, and that when she hangs up the phone, after several long pauses, in which I wait for her to return interest in what I’ve said, or express interest in keeping me, too, as a confidante, she will hang up the phone and go back to her desk and sort the things I’ve said to her into a file, revived only when I remind her that they exist. And I will hang up, relieved I’ve said these things to her, hoping next time, she will understand how to be the mother of an adult, and that I am not calling to ask her how to do laundry anymore.

Cura | Derrig

Enamel KENDRA DERRIG Katy had chipped her perfectly manicured fingernail when opening a can of PBR. She was sunk deep into her beach chair, draped with a striped towel to keep off the breeze, and wearing a pair of sunglasses for protection against the bright white clouds. It was the first weekend of March and too cold for the beach, but her mother had insisted. To prepare, Katy had done her nails the day before to match the Pacific waters.

“I wish you would choose a more flattering color,” her mother had said when she picked Katy up from her apartment. She’d thought her daughter had bruised all of her fingertips. Katy’s mother’s nails were never more dramatic than a soft pink or nude. Katy was the romantic.

Now, as she sipped her slowly warming beer and flipped through the pages of an overpriced contemporary novel, her gaze was drawn back to the spot of white skin disrupting the onceperfect oval of dark, murky blue.

Katy thought her mother had insisted on the beach retreat to get Katy out of town and away from recent heartbreak, but she hadn’t had the chance to ask, nor had her mother brought it up.

The drive, three hours to the coast, had been mostly silent. Her mother was out of their rental cabin by the time Katy woke up that morning. When she returned, she placed her beach chair next to Katy’s, but not too close, and took out her own novel. Her bare toes, stuck to the ends of bony, white feet, wiggled into the icy sand. Katy shivered.

They spoke very little to each other for the rest of the day, nothing more than was necessary, until, as they packed the car to head back home, her mother took a sharp inhale of breath and said she was dying. It was lung cancer. It was genetic. It would be soon.

“Is that why we’re here?” Katy asked.

“Yes.” Two weeks ago, Katy’s nails had been painted alternating shades of purple and red, this time to match the Valentine’s season and her optimism. Her mother thought she’d painted them that way for attention. She had just gotten a new haircut, and her boyfriend had been hinting at a proposal for weeks now. He invited her to a park after sunset and sat her on a bench under a cedar tree and a bright white street lamp and gave her his coat and told her he had accepted a job offer across the country. She wasn’t invited. When she got home, she peeled back the reds and purples, scratching white marks into her nail that would remain until her nails grew out.

And when her mother died, she did not paint her nails black. Instead, she painted each nail a different color, carefully selected from her cosmetic bag packed with the small glass bottles.

Mauve, taupe, goldenrod, scarlet, muted in the dim light of her bedroom. Then, she slowly wiped the polish off

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The Anatomy of a Basement

KENDRA DERRIG

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I fell in love because he asked a lot of questions and kept nice soap in his bathroom, at a time when most men my age didn’t seem to own a toilet brush.

This happened in his basement bedroom. He was a cave-dweller, a recluse beneath his several roommates whose rooms were second-story observatories with wide windows and evergreen views. His was a wide room with a ceiling low enough to make you feel like you shouldn’t stand up straight. I used to think maybe that was why he slouched so much, even outside. He had three small windows around the top of the walls that looked into the red brick wells dug into the soft soil under blue rhododendrons. On sunny days in summer, when the rhododendron petals had fallen in soft piles against the windows, and when the sun soared high enough, pillars of light came through the leaves, but most of the time, light came from his many antique lamps, in which he placed bulbs of various colors. Once, when we were in bed, he lifted a thin, lightly haired arm and traced the plaster, and wondered aloud what was on the other side. I said probably dirt and bugs. He said maybe an underground tunnel. It sounded hollow when you knocked on the wall.

Most houses here have basements, and most of these basements don’t have unfinished ceilings and piles of dusty furniture, but are very inhabitable. Yet his room was never supposed to be a bedroom, and had a door into the garage, in which there were no cars but instead, his roommates’ homebrew project and an assortment of what he called his “old things.” He was a collector of these old things. They were not necessarily nice old things, but functional ones.

Colorful glassware. Bedside tables made from strong wood. Eccentric light fixtures. One of his lamps was in the shape of an elephant, painted jade green, perched on two legs and holding up a neon pink bulb with his trunk. It was a ridiculously big lamp. I wondered who had made it, and if it had been mass-produced, and how many other basements it’s twins illuminated. On my first visit to his bedroom, I said I liked it, mostly to fulfill the expectation that you should say something when you enter someone else’s living space. When he asked why, I stuttered, and he said he only bought it because he thought he could resell it. It was too loud for this room, and elephant motifs were making a comeback in interior decoration. But he never listed it online, and it stayed in the corner next to the liquor cabinet and his white electric guitar that he didn’t know how to play.

Because of his questions and his soap, the basement bedroom slowly became my own. My shampoo joined his on the bathtub ledge. My sweaters found hangers between his winter coats and button-down work shirts. My hairs accumulated on the floor, each week swept up and tossed in the bin. He asked me why I shed so much that I was afraid to wear black because the shiny blond hairs would cling to my back. I said it was probably a vitamin deficiency. He asked why I didn’t take vitamins. I said I would start.

He got me a key, and added my name to his lease. His roommates cycled in and out — I never learned their names. They were distant male figures two stories above us with no wonders about what was on the other side of their walls. Sometimes, we bumped elbows in the kitchen, on the ground floor, and I would say, “Sorry, excuse me,” and catch my breath from the physical contact with someone who lived upstairs, someone sunlit and fresh. When I asked when we could get a place for ourselves, he asked why I would ever want that.

His collection of old things grew out of the garage, permeating his room. The items cycled through as he resold them, but there were more than before. It felt that each day, he would get home from work a little bit later, each time with a new collectible. The elephant lamp became encaged by a dingy bookshelf and a tall, metal lawn rooster painted too realistically for it’s pointed, sharp body. At one point, a tapestry that hung behind the elephant lamp fell and remained draped over him. His pink light was nearly gone, a dim spot filtered through a dark geometry, and as more lamps joined the basement, and more wires were strung across the room,

and more lightbulbs of many colors bounced beams off the walls, the pink light vanished.

Yesterday, I was wandering through a Goodwill, hand in hand with a man who does not live in a basement, who has a townhome with a fireplace and two big dogs, when I saw a jade green elephant lamp, and I remembered falling out of love with the man who asked too many questions and he kept buying the same nice soap.

Axiomata THOM VAN ZANDT JOHNSON My real landlord back then was not the greasy bald man with the thick New Jersey accent. No, I just paid my rent to him. The true landlord of that place was the damn rat living in the bedroom wall. It used to drive me crazy, back when I lived in that tiny apartment, and was more easily driven crazy by things. When life had just started.

The rat was my obsession. During those years I learned all there was on the internet about rats. I knew about their mating rituals, their sleeping schedules, their diet, their entire society.

Rodents kept no secrets from me. At least, not regular rodents. But that rat, my rat, fit none of the patterns typical of its species. There was nothing regular about it. It did its own thing, all alone. I could tell it was alone by how it moved, and the sounds it made. They were the typical sounds of one who is alone, and likes it that way. Every night, around 9:13 PM, it would start scurrying about. During the nocturnal hours, it spent most of its time on the right side of the wall, on the opposite end of the room from where my bed used to be. It crawled up and down the ledges and pipes in the hollow space between two rooms, almost as if looking for something, a frantic search for a rodential treasure. Then, in the morning, around 6 AM, it always scurried back over to the left side, my side, as if to wake me up. Some folk in the countryside have the cockadoodledoo of a rooster to break their sleep. I had the pitter-patter of the sharp toenails of a rat behind my wall. I don’t know why I didn’t just move my bed. The option must have never occurred to me, or maybe the room was just too small.

I remember, on one especially cold Tuesday morning, I was particularly drowsy and cranky from the rude awakening. The Sun had not quite fully risen in the hard Winter sky, and a thin blanket of mist shrouded the dank alley outside my window. Fractal patterns of frost adorned the glass, like icing on a cake. I rose quickly, my head and toes tingling for blood, and put on a green wool sweater my grandmother had knitted for me years ago. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and ate a simple breakfast of Cheerios and orange juice. It all mixed quite poorly with my toothpastey mouth, but I was all but picky during those years. The all-important morning cigarette was my bitter dessert. I stared at the blank space on the wall right behind my bed as I inhaled the smooth tobacco smoke. It was there. The rat. It had to be. Mustering all my malicious intent, I decided to get my revenge. I knew at this point that in the morning, after it moved back to the left side of the wall to wake me up, the rat would go to sleep, like the nasty nocturnal rodent it was. Indeed, it slumbered. I swear, putting my ear to the wall I could almost hear it snoring. It had decided that its night watch was over, and it was my turn to be awake. I beat the wall loudly with my fist just to wake it up. Three loud thumps. The wall shook a little, and some loose debris and dust fell off the ceiling right above me. I heard the rat panic for a second, and scurry back and forth behind my wall, chittering with fear. Pleased with my rebellion against the rodent overlord of my household, I made my way out the door to get to work.

In the hallway of my apartment complex I ran into my neighbor. She was locking her door,

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Axiomata — Thom Van Zandt Johnson

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leaving for the morning, as was I. We had never spoken before. I knew almost nothing about her. I had never presented myself to her, or asked for her name, where she worked, how she felt about climate change, who her best friends were, her worst enemies, her favorite book, her preferred sports teams, or whether she even liked sports. I did know, however, that on weekends she liked to blast New Order alone in her bedroom (which shared a wall with mine, and a rat), and sing along at full volume, shameless. I did know that she liked to watch old Western films, and that she always wore red on Mondays, and that she talked to herself sometimes, using an impressive array of voices and accents, and that she made an unusual sound whenever she cried, somewhere between a hiccup and a sniffle, and that every now and then, her room turned into a war zone, and the wall between us vibrated with indistinct shouts and insults. I was aware of a lot of characteristics of that woman that nobody else in the world likely knew. And yet, I had never given her more than a small wave in the hall. I didn’t even know her name. My relationship with my neighbor in that precise moment in time was all secrets, absolutely nothing public and superficial.

She glanced over at me while her thin fingers fumbled with a thick tangle of keys. “You sure showed that rat this morning,” she said. Her tone sounded like she would follow up with a punchline. Instead she just looked back at her keys. I locked my door and apologized for punching the wall.

“Don’t be sorry, it serves that little fucker right.”

She had so many keys. She tried one. Nothing. Another. Nothing. A third attempt was successful.

“You should label those,” I muttered, knowing full well that I was not being helpful in the slightest.

“Yeah that sounds smart, doesn’t it? But I swear, I already tried the good key earlier and it didn’t work. I’m pretty sure these only work when they want to. I’ll try asking them nicely next time.”

She held up the shiny metal mess and rattled it, as if to bring my attention to them, show me something I was missing about her perfectly normal keys.

“You know, labels or no, I’m at the mercy of these little guys.” She smiled, a kind smile, more in the eyes than the mouth.

Her smile made me realize out of nowhere that I really liked her face. She had a pleasant face.

It floated above her body with soft, rounded features and a thin nose, upturned at an unusual angle. Her hair was collected in a messy black ponytail, with many inky strands escaping their constraints, curling out of her scalp like crazy worms. Her makeup was light, and somewhat asymmetrical. It gave her a modern aura, not far from the look of a Picasso painting. I found it added to her overall charm.

“Would you be interested in splitting the bill for an exterminator soon?” she asked.

I just stared.

“For the rat,” she said in a slow, dumbed down tone.

“Oh, yeah, for sure.”

“Cool.”

She put her mass of keys in her pocket, gave me a slight wave, and started walking away. She moved slowly, swaying side to side like a tree in the wind.

“I’ll call him later tonight,” I said loudly as she left. I never got to that… ### It was pretty late when I got home that night. The rat had already started its nocturnal activity, walking up and down the right side of my wall. I tried to pick up a book and catch up on some graduate school reading I had been procrastinating on. It was a book by some dusty old German

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man, as most of my readings were. A history of human sacrifice, or perhaps a long theory on the Romantic conception of myth. I don’t remember much about my graduate school years. But I remember that rat, oh so clearly. The pattern of pitter-patters was making any brain activity nearly impossible. Had it been a clear pattern, with regular intervals, my thoughts could have adapted to its rhythm, like a pianist to a drummer. I could have been Bill Evans, and that damn rat my Paul Motian, but no. Zero sense of rhythm. I tried my hardest to silence it out like the tictocs of a clock, or a TV show in the background of the dentist’s waiting room, but that creature knew exactly what beats completely threw me off guard. I ended up slamming my book shut and smothering my own face with a pillow. I let out a muffled cry for help. The rat’s movements, beyond any rational thought, had no clear discernable interval: a being of pure chaos. Had I unknowingly upset some witch when I was born? Was I cursed with the burden of enduring this hellish little thing for the rest of my life? Was this rat the literal empirical proof that nothing in life ever fit together, that there was no logic to any of it? I tried to just shut off my brain, but much like when you are trying to sleep and someone in the same room is snoring, the rat’s sounds were irritating not so much for their volume, but because of the complete lack of any logic or predictability in their intervals.

As I alternated between desperately forcing myself to sleep and hopelessly trying to induct some kind of abstract physical law from the chaos of the rat’s movements, I heard the door slam on the other side of the wall, followed by the metallic, clinking sound of keys on a table. Then I heard the muffled thump of a human body throwing itself onto a mattress. A familiar hiccupsniffle followed, and some wet, teary sighs. I waited for them to die down, then, as if to harass the rat, like I had done that morning, I tapped on the wall three times with my knuckle. Three taps responded from the other side. The rat just kept scurrying, but I could tell it was slightly irritated. I smirked myself to sleep. ###

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When I left the house that morning, or maybe the one after, my neighbor was already outside her door, fumbling with the keys. As I reached into my pocket to lock my own apartment, she spoke without so much of a glance away from the keys in her hand.

“Have you ever been on an airplane?” she asked.

I said I had not, even though it was a lie.

“I’ve been on one, once. Years ago. It was a long flight to the city from the town I was born in. Planes are really uncomfortable, and kinda scary to be honest. And few things scare me! But there are so many people on a plane, and every single one of them wants to be somewhere else. Every single person in the sky is there in that precise moment for the sole purpose of being somewhere else. It’s the saddest thing, you know?”

She said “you know” a lot.

“But,” she continued: “bothered as I was by these thoughts, on that plane ride I saw the sunset from above the clouds on the horizon. It filled the whole Universe. I was little, this was a long time ago, but I have never seen anything like it since. I remember it better than yesterday’s breakfast. It was like peering into the ripped-open chest of our world, and catching a glimpse of its beating heart. It started orange along the horizon and eventually faded into the dark blue of the empty sky above. In between those two colors, though, there were infinite gradients and pigments. In between every small layer of color, there was another, and another. Infinite layers. It was the only time I’ve ever seen something infinite like that, you know? Then and there I decided I would keep that sunset inside of me at all times. I decided I would steal it and make it the core of my being. Mine. So I did. I am that sunset,” she said, fingering her keys.

I just stared at her, as she begged the shortest key on her chain to please please please let her lock the door.

“I’ll call the exterminator tonight,” I lied.

Johnson

Axiomata — Thom Van Zandt Johnson

Her keys finally decided to let her lock the door.

“Sounds good.” She turned and walked away. I never got around to making that call… ###

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That night I kept thinking about that sunset my neighbor had seen. I guess, more precisely, that she had stolen. Had I ever seen something infinite? Had I ever seen a truth like that? Something genuinely true, not just on the outside. My mind juggled memories, truths, and lies, until, around 9:13 PM, punctual like a train in Tokyo, I heard some skittering inside my bedroom wall. And that was the truth of it. That was the sunset in this house, that damn rat. It was the undeniable axiom behind my existence during those years. It was the core of who I was, and who I would have always been. It was my airplane sunset, that damn rat. It was my center, I revolved around it like a satellite: the only thing with some actual transcendental value of truth, that damn rat. I tried to shake it off: an unwanted epiphany, but undeniable. I haven’t been sleeping enough, I told myself. I have been reading too much garbage, too much Vico, and Poe, and Jung, I told myself.

But it was just true, regardless of my horrible schedules and pretentious readings. Everyone has a sunset, or a rat, something with some value of truth that we can make the core of our being.

Something like a small, yet sturdy raft, in the storm of everything else. Something infinite. We make it infinite by perceiving it, and stealing it from the world. Axiomatizing it. Believing and trusting it. I can’t believe the core of my being was that rat. That damn rat. Still is, although by now it’s probably long dead.

The rat just scurried around, as always, completely unaware of my own inner turmoil. Or just ignoring it, possibly even rejoicing in my frightening revelation. To my surprise, however, the sounds it made while crawling around did not bother me as much as usual. The scrapes and chitters and squeaks and rattles that haunted my every night back in those days sounded almost reassuring on that particular night. I figured my brain must have somehow subconsciously rationalized the arcane pattern in the rat’s movements, but I was just deluding myself. There was something much deeper, much more personal going on between me and that stupid rat. I stretched out on my bed, staring at some movie poster on my wall, or some greenish splotch of mold on the ceiling, cherishing that moment of peace.

That’s when I once again heard the door slam on the other side of the wall. I heard the keys drop on the table. I heard a body throw itself onto a bed. I heard someone crying, someone with a very distinct way of crying. I waited. I heard the rat, and crying. I waited. The crying stopped.

The rat squeaked. I tapped on the wall three times with my knuckle. Someone on the other side tapped back. ### That morning I ran into my neighbor again. She was at the door, whispering to a big ball of keys, praying to small metal sticks like a pagan priestess.

I locked my own apartment with relative ease, then I turned to her and told her about my own sunset. She paused her search for a brief moment, never looking at me, and then resumed trying to lock her apartment door without a single word. Her silence made me incredibly nervous.

I felt light-headed. Had I said something wrong? Did I offend her by comparing that rat to her airplane sunset? I felt the eyes of an invisible audience somewhere laughing at me, cackling at my expense. I was about to turn around and head to a lecture, when she spoke: “I’m sorry about the yelling yesterday.”

“I wasn’t home yesterday. Not until late.”

“Oh.” She was just fidgeting with her keys at this point, not even trying to lock the door. All I could hear was the metal clinking, and her faint, upset breathing. Then she continued: “If you do

Johnson

hear it one of these days, I apologize.”

“That’s fine, we have thin walls,” I said.

She said: “Yeah, we do.”

“Yeah…”

“And we have that dumb rat,” she added with the faintest hint of a smile.

Another little silence. Then she managed to lock the door.

“Call the exterminator tomorrow,” she said, walking away.

“Ok.” She turned the corner. I never got around to making that call… ### A couple days passed. Some nights I heard the yelling. The shouting. The fuckyous and the shattering plates. I also heard the rat, of course, at the center of it all, the chittering atom of chaos, the eye of a hurricane. Strangely, the rodent’s movements had a familiar, calming quality.

I had started cherishing its companionship.Then something snapped in my brain. On one stormy night, the rat was driving me to the brink of insanity. It had started scurrying much earlier than usual, and that freaked me out. A couple hours of the rat’s cruel domain had gone by when I heard, as I often did, the door on the other side of the wall slam. I heard the keys rattle, the body drop, the bed creak, and the small little sniffles and sighs. I waited. The rat was practicing for a marathon. I waited. The rat was squealing like a pig. Someone cried. I waited. It eventually stopped. Silence. I tapped, three times.

But there was no response.

I swear I could hear the rat snicker. Moments passed, I felt panic like sticky, black bile surging through my intestines, up my stomach and throat, and out of every single orifice in my face.

It was not supposed to be silence coming from the other side. I imagined the rat, greasy and victorious, squeaking maniacally at my defeat, inches away from my face. I pictured its small, beady red eyes shining with glee. The space between the two rooms, the rat’s domain, had finally isolated me from the rest of the world. It was no longer just my landlord, it was my captor.

Then I heard the three knocks, at my door. The rat fell silent. My ever-expanding anxiety deflated like a floppy balloon. I got up out of bed and opened the door.

“I don’t like airplanes,” said my teary-eyed neighbor in a big ELO t-shirt and cotton shorts, right outside my apartment: “I don’t like feeling like I want to be somewhere else.”

I let her in. She showed me her sunset, and the infinite colors.

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The Cavern THOM VAN ZANDT JOHNSON

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The entrance to the cave was mostly concealed by a sylvan shroud of leaves and moss. It felt soft to the touch, you said, and wet, as you moved it aside, revealing the cavern’s gaping black maw. It smelled like the morning rain, and the loamy autumn dirt.

Inside, the cave was damp and dark. The sharp dripdrops of water falling off the ceiling echoed throughout the underground tunnels. The corridors coiled and twisted like millions of hollow worms, digging far deeper into the core of the world than we could ever imagine. We held hands, a promise to never get lost. You went ahead, more sure of your own footing than I had ever been.

“Watch out, there’s a hole,” you said.

So I watched out. I stepped over the hole. Our footsteps pittered and pattered in putrid puddles.

You held your torch up high. The flame danced about in the humid air. Our shadows danced, as well, like magical moving disco paintings on the rocky surface of the cave.

The sounds of pebbles falling from the darkness beyond. What was that? Then, the fluttering echoes of wings, first afar, then threateningly close. Bats! A storm of them flew by, leathery and free, flapping loudly past our heads, rustling our hair and our clothes. I gasped, squeezing your hand tighter in my clammy grasp. You remained unfazed, your face made of the same stone as the icecream stalactites.

“We are almost there,” you said. Though, as to how far deeper into the cave we still had to go, you knew no better than I. Still, I believed.

We walked, but I don’t know for how long. I could not tell.

On the surface, we see the sun chase the moon. We see the stars spinning, and the plants growing, and the animals eating the animals eating the animals eating the animals. The forevercircles that gave birth to time.

But below, we are misfits. We are too fast for this underground world. Our lives will be over before the caves ever realize we were ever here. We will be mourned and buried by our daughters and granddaughters. Our dead flesh will turn the fallen rainwater into an acidic slime.

The acid will nibble at the dirt, as it seeps lower and lower into the abyss. The acid will eat the world. Then it will drip out of the ceiling of the cave, leaving behind a tiny droplet of calcite, pure, stolen, as it falls. If enough people die, and enough calcite is stored, then a small stalactite might form. Very small. No more than an inch in length.

Lost in those meandering tunnels, cold and wet, weary and sore, we felt crushed by the timelessness of it all.

But eventually we made it.

The bottom of the cave. The underground lake we had seen in our dream. There it was, completely motionless, its black waters perfectly still, like a smooth sheet of obsidian.

“I told you we were almost there,” you said. You looked older. You looked ancient. You looked more beautiful than ever.

A fish, pale as death, jumped out of the water. The surface rippled for a while, and then returned to its natural stillness.

We walked up to the lake, still hand in hand. We looked at each other, smiled, then looked down into the dark waters.

They mirrored us. As we gazed below, our own images gazed back at us. Yours looked at me, and mine looked at you. And again, we smiled.

The universe upside down is still the universe.

Ride THOM VAN ZANDT JOHNSON I was all cozied up in bed when I heard the crash. The big grandfather clock in our living room had just struck midnight, and the crickets were singing their sad sappy love songs in the moonlight.

These were big sleeping hours, especially for us kids. We went to bed much earlier, back then.

But something about those screeching tires and that booming metallic clang just outside my bedroom window felt much more interesting than anything I could have possibly dreamt of on that cloudless night. I got curious. And curiosity got me up, still in my blue-striped pajamas, and led me down the hall to the back door. I put on my father’s old leather jacket, which was hanging on the coat rack like a flayed skin. It smelled like cigarettes and gasoline. I pushed the squeaky door open and stepped outside.

My skin looked blue in the bright night. The stars shot their photon needles right through me, like thousands of tiny laser beams from the heavens. The Moon was a giant portal to a bright world of light.

There I saw him, as clear as in daytime: the man with his wrecked motorcycle, right outside our driveway. He was standing in two big leather boots on the asphalt of the old Country Road, tapping his foot impatiently, stroking his big Wilhelm II moustache, looking pensively at the mess he had made.

He must have seen me coming, because, once our eyes locked, he showed not a single sign of startlement.

“You’re The Kid,” he said. His voice was raspy, like the rocky bottom of the ocean. His tone was not one of recognition. No, he was naming me. Baptising me in the starlight. And it was perfect. Nothing I had ever been called before, not the name my own parents had given me, nor the nicknames I was called at school, not even the secret wordless names I reserved for myself in the safest sanctums in my own mind, no name, never, ever in my entire life mattered in the slightest on that night. I was The Kid, and The Kid was me.

The Kid. I just looked at him.

“Kid,” he continued: “don’t you just hate it when you’re breezing around on your wild hog, and the wind is strong, like a storm… no… like a hurricane. Like a stormicane. Like John Coltrane.

And you hear the beat of the breeze thumping in your ear. One, Two, Three. It’s disco. Real disco.

Kid, it’s the most damn disco thing you could ever imagine.”

He took a pack of Marlboro Menthols out of the pocket of his cherry red racing jacket and lit one. His sleeves were rolled up, and his forearms were covered in scabs and bruises.

Up to that point, I had never in my life heard the word disco, but on that night, next to that steaming pile of wrecked motorcycle, it made perfect sense.

He continued: “The houses flash by, and the moon is chasing you, hard. The light is at your heels, like a pack of dogs. And you ride. It can’t catch you. You gotta ride. You gotta ride into your margarita sunrise, Kid. Your sangria bloodbath. And there you are, just waiting waiting for your moment, you know? Your time to shine. Faster than light, and so, so much brighter. Then you crash, Kid. You crash big. You crash hard, and now you’re still. Still as a puddle of mud.”

At that point, without even noticing it, I had started nodding, my head bobbing up and down like a tennis ball in a swimming pool.

“Let me tell you something important, Kid. If that even is your real name.”

He took a long drag of the long Marlboro Menthol stuck in between his chapped lips.

“Somewhere down this road is a place I really gotta be. Beyond your little cowpoke town.

Beyond the old metal bones of the refinery, to the east, and the sleeping cows under the hard winter sky. Beyond the shack, over that hill, where old Mr. Jenkins is watching his tv. Beyond the big city, and even further out. Out of the state. Out of the country, maybe. Far out, man. There’s

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somewhere I gotta be, Kid. And there ain’t nothing more important than being where you gotta be.”

He looked over at the remnants of his motorcycle and sighed.

“I’m the world’s pimple popper, fasten your seatbelts boys. It’s happening tonight or next month.”

He tossed his cigarette butt on the asphalt. Then he pointed a single, smooth finger gun at me and made a little clicking sound with his mouth.

“I gotta get going, Kid. Ain’t no rest for smooth hearts. Don’t be letting those Tapioca Blues get you down.”

With that, he walked away, into the darkness.

“Keep it coffee, sunshine,” I heard him say, as he disappeared on the dark country road where I grew up.

I went to bed.

I wasn’t able to sleep a single wink that night. Not until the sun sprouted once more from beyond the horizon, and the sky turned the color of Tequila.

Short Stories

84

R.W.

I knew that I could never tell her that I loved her, because that would make everything real.

Besides, she didn’t know me as the serious and sentimental type, so with her I wouldn’t even know where to begin. You know how it is. So, instead I came up with a plan. I started writing short stories, sometimes only a single line long, and sometimes a few pages. I got into the habit of making the titles something like a sort of “punchline,” as I call it, or else writing the punchline in as the last sentence. I don’t know why I came up with this style, but it just happened to stick before long. I’m not nearly talented enough to write actual, sophisticated pieces. Anyways, after practicing writing these stories on my own for a little while, I gathered enough courage to start showing them to her. I think she really liked them, which burped and tussled and teased and Na Na Na Na Na’ed me back to giddy junior high. We would text about life, our dreams, the circularity of time, death, Alaska, distant galaxies, and my stories, of course, and I really was that happy. We never made or kept to a schedule. One night, I would just send her a couple of stories, or three, or four – no context or subject line; just the stories. It became our thing.

And I knew that I could never tell her that I loved her, so I showed her this.

Johnson | R.W.

Awkward R.W. I walked by my ex in the hall yesterday.

We made eye contact.

Kids R.W. I went to college in the same city that I grew up in. My mother brought me some food, but I was in class, so she left it in my car, which was back at my apartment complex, using the spare key. I was in class, so all of this was done without my knowing or consent. Several hours later the shrimp spring rolls and Domino’s hadn’t quite spoiled, but they left a copious odor in the fabric that would last for weeks. There were plenty of leftovers from my own cooking for me to finish, so these new additions would have to go on my roommate’s shelves in the refrigerator.

She always did ridiculous things like that. Later that night I called to give her an angry earful, told her how just much she had inconvenienced me.

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“You should be nicer to your mom,” she said, the hurt breaking her voice. “I won’t be around forever.”

She was right.

I felt like a celebrity R.W. Like, five people said “Hi” to me today.

R.W.

The Problem with Nice People R.W. I would rather fall in love with a tyrant than live alone, but I would rather face the grave myself than fall prey to a saint.

I would never extend a warm welcome to a pretty “Thank you.�

I would not tip a charming waitress beyond the standard amount for the size of a given party.

I would pretend I could not hear over the sound of my music so as to stifle impending conversation.

I would fail my classes before befriending a tutor.

I would refuse your compliments and praise, and in fact omit them entirely.

I would hold open my own doors.

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I would neither donate nor accept food or drink, when I, myself, or somebody else, was hungry or thirsty.

I would leave a neutral evaluation of my contracted, very anxious, very overworked professor.

I would take the last one for myself.

I would forget out conversations into the night.

I would sooner run all of my groceries up eight flights of stairs in a single trip than accept help from a tall, darkly bearded, neatly dressed, muscular stranger.

I would ask no favors, because gratitude is indebtedness and indebtedness is power.

I wouldn’t have any worthwhile advice to give.

I would apologize to no one, for anything, ever.

I make it a point to never associate with nice people; Because the thing is, people who are nice to you, are also nice to everyone else, too.

R.W.

Fear R.W. It’s late. You just got back to your apartment after dropping your roommate off at the airport. As you unlock and open the door, you are surprised to see that a light has been left on. No, that isn’t right. You never use that light; it’s uncomfortably dim and hurts your eyes. Suddenly, sheer shock substitutes surprise when you notice an extra pair of odd, unfamiliar shoes interwoven among your own. You inch forward into the hallway, eyes fixated on the abject black coming from your bedroom. Who is home? Someone is.

There is a forest just outside of campus. It’s only a handful of acres large, if that. You have heard stories about it, but they are myths. It’s past three in the morning and you should’ve taken your car, but it’s too late. You’re exhausted, your head hurts, you need to get home, you have a test in the morning, the fastest way is to cut through the forest. You, an intellectual, pay no credence to baseless rumors. You begin the trek, flashlight app in hand. Well, wait. If there were wild animals or, by some infinitesimal chance there happened to be an axe murderer, the light would be a beacon for them. It’s better to turn it off. Into the woods, further, further. A stillness has settled – you noticed it somewhere back. A certain peace. You made a mistake. Your stomach is deflating into itself, your sweat slithering between your hairs. They were true. You know it in your heart that the stories were all true and you’ve wandered into a place where even the wind knows to pay its respects. You are caught in the web, now. Nothing changes. You couldn’t have felt the tiniest, most insignificant atmospheric disturbance, but for some reason you are sprinting, careening across the broken ground. Somewhere off to the side you here a POP! and break your neck towards it at whiplash speed, pain shoots through you but there’s no time for that. Not ten strides away there is a face peering through the branches.

You wake up in the middle of the night. Why? It was nothing, go back to bed. Sometime later you are woken up again, this time catching the very last traces of a hasty scurrying sound.

It was probably the air vent rattling. Or maybe it was your roommate’s toe nails dragging against the sheets. It doesn’t matter, you need to use the bathroom. You can’t turn on the lights or you won’t be able to fall back asleep for a while. The wall guides you. There, a tiny green dot blinks faithfully. The charging stand for the electric toothbrush. Don’t look at the mirror. You flush; at night, it seems like the acoustics are better than Carnegie Hall. You wash your hands and turn to leave. As you search for the door handle, a low, scratched voice croaks right into your ear, its breath grazing your hairs on end. Your name.

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R.W.

Dorm R.W.

Two sophomore college students—they were roommates—complained to their resident assistant that they had received a warning regarding a violation of a valet trash pick-up rule. Trash bags, the administration wrote, must be left inside of their respective trash bins in order to be taken, not placed directly on the floor. Future violations would result in a $50 fine, billed to each resident. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, said one of the roommates. The resident assistant—she was a senior—not wanting to jeopardize her position of authority, played the devil’s advocate. For instance, liquids could seep out of the trash bags and ruin the carpet, she reasoned. Two weeks later, the resident assistant received a warning from the administration for parking in a spot designated for guests only. She had returned late that night, and the lot had been otherwise full. Future violations would result in a $100 fine. What a stupid rule, she thought.

Croatan

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We used to catch dragonflies at the beach. It was a game to see who had the quickest hands when trying to grab them by their thin bodies, and then hold them by their wings. We’d let them go afterwards, watching them dart across the water like little dancers. My mother would always say, “Don’t grab them too hard, or they won’t be able to fly away.”

My mother was the kind of person who always stayed home when it rained, and read stories to her child about lands far, far away. She would say to me, “think of the largest ocean you know. You have it? Good. Picture it. Now, dream bigger than that.” But she was also the kind of person who never allowed herself the luxury of hope, always carefully choosing her words and controlling the finer expressions of her face, in which it seemed like nothing, not even if waves came crashing down, could reveal just how much she cared.

Almost every weekend, we would go through our backyard and down the walking trail, shaded by sparsely spaced trees until we hit sand and Croatan Beach. It was a perfect beach for people who lived here in Virginia Beach, as it was the locals’ best-kept secret away from crowds of tourists and enthusiastic fishermen. If you wanted crowds, you went to Chicks or Sandbridge, and if you wanted fish, you went to Lynnhaven. But Croatan was just for us.

It was just for us, when my mother laid down that massive, blue and white striped beach towel on the warm sand, and when I went to the shore, hands caked with dark, wet sand that also found its way underneath my nails when collecting shells. Not those shells that were large and bulky, but shells small enough to fit inside the opening of a plastic bottle. Sometimes, looking back, I would see her, but she wouldn’t always see me. Instead, her eyes would be trained beyond the shore, never looking quite at me, but past me. When the plastic bottle was R.W. | Anonymous

full with shells, it was always a signal to go, and we would both walk back hand in hand, with her long steady strides and my quick uneven ones, until we reached the kitchen table and emptied the bottle out. Most where chalk white with grey striations going across horizontally or vertically.

Some were black or beige with chips, holes, or indentations, and the very rare ones made their shimmery, pearly white appearance on thin, glass-like shells. My mother would sometimes paint the shells I collected on those days, and her hands and nails would become caked with periwinkle blue, white, and sand peach paint.

This was routine, and it was one I didn’t know I depended on, until things changed. But that’s the way it is about life sometimes. You don’t notice the clean, well-lighted places and functional pieces in the world. You notice the crooked lamppost on the side of the road or the missing puzzle piece.

Trips down to Croatan became less frequent. The trail less used. Less footprints on sand. Less shells. We sometimes went back even when the bottle was still half empty. We wouldn’t even look at my shells. There wasn’t room on the kitchen table anymore. What used to be cluttered with shells, was cluttered instead with letters and notices with red words. Instead of spending weekends at Croatan, my mother would come home late, with clean hands and shuffling strides, smelling of frying oil instead of salt, and bleach instead of sun tan lotion. She still always smelled fishy, not from the sea, but from sweat.

I remember one day, when she was supposed to head off for work, she took me by the hand instead and said we were going to Croatan. It was the last trip to Croatan I remember with her.

Instead of collecting shells, instead of laying down that blue and white striped beach towel, we walked along the shore instead.

“Want to try catching dragonflies, again?” she asked.

So, we tried. I was always better at catching them than her, but I wasn’t really trying that time. Instead, I was looking at her. She had one by the wings in her hand, its green, shimmery body shaking, and then going still. I waited, but she didn’t let go. I cried and cried, and screamed for her to let it go. The tips of her fingers turned white surrounded by red splotches, until she let it go. I watched it fall to the ground, and it was swept away by the tide.

After that, Croatan was no longer for us.

One day, walking down to Croatan, I saw a large, black mass floating along the shore. I didn’t realize what it was, walking closer and closer, until I saw hundreds upon hundreds of dragonflies all drowned along the tide line, their shiny, green bodies bobbing up and down.

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You don’t notice the clean, well-lighted places and functional pieces in the world. You notice dragonflies.

Anonymous

Kids

ISAIAH MITCHELL

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Mitchell

The ice cream that we just bought from the one grocery store in town has a bite taken out of it. My brother doesn’t want to turn the truck around, so we just head home past the rows of yellow grass, faded hopscotch lines, and sunken-roofed houses bleached like cow skulls in the sun. Somewhere along the course of my childhood, ice cream for the kids at my papaw’s house transcended tradition and became obligation, and now I wonder if being old enough to drive could exclude you from participating. Out from behind the bristled wall of river cane alongside the bridge, my papaw’s stone house emerges.

It’s a beautiful Frankenstein of a house that my grandpa built from the ground up. My dad helped him level the foundation back my grandpa called him Tattoo, when what would become a house was nothing a few planks and Quikrete sacks in the middle of acres and acres of cactus, rattlesnakes, tassajillo, tarantulas, catclaw, scorpions, and other flora and fauna generally deadset on killing each other. Since then, the house has undergone new guest room additions, uncountable tornadoes, and three generations (running on four since my cousin Cauy got his wife-to-be pregnant). I remember coming back for Christmas one year and meeting a chubby young girl with purple hair leaning against a sullen, lankier replica of the freckle-faced boy who used to always ask to play Capture the Flag by the haybales. That was the first time I learned consciously how vastly a new life can change somebody.

When I got old enough to help my papaw work on the ranch but not old enough to ask what we were doing (that is, about thirteen), I was sent with my nana and my cousin Aaron to go kill two baby goats to put them out of their misery. My papaw had found them lying on the ground after he rounded a herd of goats from the pasture into the trailer to move them back to the feed lots—he meant to kill them himself but forgot about it until he got back to the house. There was, apparently, no hope for them surviving. I didn’t learn what our job was until we arrived on the Ranger ATV. “Pop says you can use a rock or something,” my nana said with pursed lips. She was a little snow-haired old woman with teal eyes and the fatty arms of a good cook, and she gave great hugs. Papaw doted on her and got her peacocks and worthless pygmy goats that she bottlefed into adulthood just because they were cute. I couldn’t believe that this same woman was telling me how to kill these two kids gasping out their lives in the red dust.

I found a big white chunk of rock wider than my narrow thirteen-year-old chest. I dug it out of the ground and hefted it up, hoping that it was heavy enough, when I saw a little cave toothed with quartz in the underside. It tunneled way back into the stone. The perse crystals gleamed dully beneath the dust.

I looked back at the Ranger, where my nana and my cousin Aaron were sitting under the awning. The rock dangled from my arms like they were a pair of skinny ropes as I turned to plea with my nana: “Doesn’t Papaw carry a gun in the glove compartment?”

“Nope. He’s got it with him in the truck.” She looked at the sky. I had seen my Papaw shoot coyotes trapped in fence snares and flailing like ragdolls, and I never minded.

I struggled over to two kids that lay on the ground, their silver fistsize chests softly pulsing.

Their amber eyes gazed right up at the sun. I hoped that they didn’t see me. I curled the rock up in my arms and let it fall with a thud on the first kid. The rock bounced off of it with a noise like a squeaky toy. It began twitching its leg. I picked up and dropped the rock several more times until blood began streaming from the kid’s nose. I moved on to the next kid after convincing myself that the first kid was dead. I left the rock on the head of the second kid after repeating the first process a few times and hurried back to the Ranger. We went back and played gin rummy while the younger cousins watched Spongebob. We played Capture the Flag by the haybales and had a BB gun war afterwards and ate vanilla ice cream out of styrofoam cups. That night, my nana

laid out a pallet of blankets on the living room floor in front of the TV’s flickering glow, and I lay awake wondering if the two kids were still breathing and twitching out there in the dust.

Trying HANNAH FRIEDRICH The Missouri heat was damp and strangling, and her mother’s A/C was broken, so Soph spent most of the spring semester of 1L lingering as long as she could in the campus Law library or the nicer houses and apartments of her friends, riding the bus back across town well after the sun had set and the mosquitos had come out. She liked to leave her mother’s house before light, too, and so the morning of Moot Court tryouts, she climbed bleary-eyed onto a nearly empty bus in the nicest skirt she owned and her only pair of fake patent leather heels. Nerves sang in her chest and overrode any ordinary need for coffee or more sleep. She set her ratty purple backpack at her feet and pulled out her stack of notes, wanting to review her argument one last time.

Moot Court was competitive, and it was doubtful that a first year student who did not yet specialize in anything would win one of the few open spots. She knew her case by heart now, knew it so well that to reread it caused nauseating boredom, yet she still didn’t feel prepared.

She clenched her hands around her notes to stop her hands from shaking and stared resolutely out the window at a sweeping empty parking lot.

The bus ride across St. Louis to her law school campus took an hour and a half, and there were only so many times Soph could read the same set of case notes, so she occupied herself watching out the window opposite her as the neighborhoods morphed from single-story shambles to crisp suburbs to slick high rises and sweeping old colonials. She liked watching the people who got on and off the bus. An old woman, who had been seated when Soph got on, departed in between a public library and a grocery store, and was replaced by a man in a gray wool suit who was already sweating as the day just began to light up.

The bus stopped in front of an apartment complex largely inhabited by grad students just as Soph’s phone began to buzz in her skirt pocket. She pulled it out, vaguely aware that there were footsteps drawing very near her. A blonde girl around her age sat across from her. She let the phone go to voicemail, and watched as the message notification lit up the screen. It was early for her mother to be up.

Sighing, she opened the message and lifted the phone to her ear. Her mother’s voice was especially hushed today, and Soph was reminded that it had been awhile since she’d made her go to one of the free group therapy sessions at the community center.

“Hi, sweetie, I see I missed you this morning. I just wanted to remind you to get cat food later, and maybe dish soap. No, wait, don’t. I’ll do the dishes today. I know it’s been awhile. Was there something big you’re doing today? I feel like you were telling me about something. Oh well, if there is something then good luck, I love you— And also, when is rent due? I feel like it’s soon. Should I have asked my manager for an advance? If you do stop by the grocery store, could you pick up—” Something wet hit the floor by her feet.

“Oh!” She leapt out of her seat before she’d had time to process what it was. The blonde girl, who Soph could now tell looked incredibly hungover, had leaned over and vomited on the bus floor. Soph staggered and grabbed onto the bar above the seat as she tried to move out of the way of the creeping puddle, but it was already splattered on the toes of her shoes. In her hand,

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the phone continued to hum quietly with her mother’s voicemail.

She looked from her shoes to the girl, who didn’t seem to notice what had happened. “Are you okay? Hi, excuse me—are you sick?”

The girl turned her bleary eyes to Soph, then to the floor. “Shit.” Without another look at Soph, she stood, made her way to the front of the bus, and pulled the lever to request a stop.

Soph stumbled a little as the bus lurched, and then she was alone again with just the suited man and a handful of other passengers, who pointedly weren’t looking at her. She sighed and moved closer to the front of the bus, looking down at the toes of her shoes as an elegant Georgian floated by the window atop a green lawn larger than Soph’s mother’s block. The last page of her notes, she reasoned, weren’t essential to her case.

Forty-five minutes later, she arrived at her stop clutching a crumpled sheet of paper in one hand, her shoes cleaner but still with the sheen-killing crust of vomit in some places. No one would notice, she knew that, just as she knew most people didn’t notice when she wore the same skirt to every important event and presentation. She wondered if the leftover money from her last paycheck would be enough to buy new shoes. She knew it wouldn’t be.

The sight of campus was as reassuring and intimidating as it always was. Gray stone buildings infused with dignity were shaded with enormous old trees, beneath which lingered clear-eyed people in casual clothes nicer than the most expensive thing she owned. She considered, as she sometimes did on bad days, not exiting the bus, riding to the last stop and then back to her mother’s house and pretending she had never tried to belong here. She considered the neat stack of her remaining pages of notes, which she’d been up for three nights straight preparing, practicing not reading from as she spoke to her reflection in the mirror, trying to approximate the casual self-possession of her classmates. She stood and descended the bus stairs, a fresh breeze from outside soothing her too-warm face.

“Hey,” the bus driver said as she was about to exit. “Is there a smell back there?” *** Moot Court practice was ordinarily held in a large lecture hall on the West side of campus.

Soph had attended all their open practices, noting who spoke when, the cadence of their voices, the subtle shifts in their posture at key moments in their arguments. It was a realm of carefulness and confidence, clean and practiced and imbued with power. More than any of her classes, this realm projected her ambitions onto life.

The lecture hall was used for a class in the morning, so tryouts were held in an empty classroom. Soph took a seat in one of the chairs shoved up against the back wall to wait her turn. A long desk was set in front of the chalkboard for the current club officers to sit; it was to them she’d be presenting her argument. They were all 3Ls, not much older than her and yet infinitely more adult. Behind them, the half-erased board read ‘positive deviancy’ in left-slanting handwriting. Soph fixed her gaze on that, willfully ignoring the person currently presenting his case, the creaking of the other chairs around her, the shuffle of note pages, and most of all, the calm, piercing gazes of the officers.

The door clicked open, and a few more people stepped in to sit. A bright flash of the light caught Soph’s eye, and she turned. It was too fast, a frozen moment, but she was certain that the girl who had just walked in was the blonde who had puked on her. She didn’t have time to check though, didn’t have time to process, because the person ahead of her was done and it was her turn and she didn’t want to look at the girl again. Her knuckles were white around her notes.

“Sophia Esmond?” said one of the officers, the president, Nina was her name.

“No, yeah, I don’t really have notes,” a whisper to her left was saying. It was a feminine voice.

Soph knew instinctively who was speaking, but she didn’t let herself look. “It’s just whatever though, right?”

Friedrich

“Quiet, please,” Nina said. Soph stood and walked to the small desk. There were a dozen pairs of eyes on her back. She was certain her skirt was wrinkled. She placed her notes face up, then flipped them face down, squaring her jaw. “Sophia, whenever you’re ready.” *** If there was anything Soph was good at, anything that had gotten her into law school and kept her there, it was her ability to spin a story; so when she told her best friend Mikayla about her Moot Court tryout and the bus debacle proceeding it, she turned it into a triumphant tale of overcoming indignity, her self-deprecating smile almost erasing her interior discomfort. She had left out the detail of seeing the girl at tryouts, because she wasn’t sure if she really had. Her argument delivery had been a haze; she’d spoken unconsciously, trying to gauge the reactions of the officers and ignore the audience at her back. By the time she’d finished and been dismissed, she hadn’t even thought to look around the room for the girl.

Mikayla rented a house with four other girls a few blocks from campus, so after classes were over, Soph went home with her to study. Her crusty shoes came off as soon as she was in the door. This was a shoes-off house anyways, but she was beginning to convince herself that there was a smell, even as Mikayla repeatedly told her there wasn’t. Mikayla grabbed hummus and carrot sticks out of the fridge, both of which were clearly marked “Heather”, and ushered Soph upstairs before any of her housemates noticed them.

They liked to spend lazy afternoons like this, with the fan in Mikayla’s room turned all the way up, buffeting their books and outlines into a gentle flutter. It was easy to lose time there, so when the descending sun began to shine through the window at an angle that pierced Soph’s eyes, she was startled into checking her phone’s clock.

“Shit, I should head home.”

“Why?” Mikayla asked from the floor. “It’s still early enough. Hang around.”

This immediately roused suspicion; Mikayla only asked her to stay longer when she wanted to go out somewhere.

“There can’t be a party tonight. It’s Wednesday.”

Mikayla groaned, sitting up and entering Soph’s field of vision. She was pretty in an unfortunately Puritanical way, simple features and center-parted brown hair, but her eyes were carefree. “Why do you have to psychic-powers me like that?”

Soph laughed and closed her book.

“Ugh, okay. There’s this guy’s rooftop get-together thing tonight. It’s not a party, it’s just, like, people hanging out and drinking.”

“Give me a definition of party that excludes—” “Okay! Okay, shut up, the counsel rests its whatever. It’s a party, sue me.”

Soph tried to suppress her grin. “I don’t know if there’s a real case there. I mean, what would it even fall under? Deceptive Trade Practices?”

“Will you stop? I’m trying to tell you information.”

“Fine. Explain me the party.”

Mikayla stood and stretched, plopping down on the end of the bed and crossing her legs.

“So there’s this art student guy. He’s really cute, and tall, and he invited me to hang out with some of his friends tonight. You should go with so I’m not a loner weirdo, and also because when you spend every evening with your mom you turn into the loner weirdo. So, in a way, this is to benefit you too.” Her smile was open and eager.

Soph sat up, sighing, her elbows red where she’d been leaning on them. “A stranger puked on me this morning. I kinda just want to shower and sleep.”

“And you’ve responded to that unfortunate situation valiantly. Besides, be honest. If you go home you’re not gonna sleep, you’re just gonna lay around and worry if you were good enough to make Moot Court today. Which you were. Which is beside my point. Or possibly is my point.

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Look,” she said, springing up off the bed. “Just come out for a little while. If you hate it, you can leave.”

Soph’s phone buzzed. She didn’t look at it. “Okay, fine. But I’m borrowing your blue dress.”

Mikayla squeaked and darted to her closet, tossing the dress in question over her shoulder at Soph and picking one out for herself, chattering to her more about art school boy as another voicemail notification appeared on Soph’s screen. It wouldn’t hurt, she supposed, to listen to this one later. ***

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The neighborhoods around campus were a strange mix of law students and art students, which mostly meant a strange mix of sleek fake-marble-and-wood cafes and purposefully messy restaurants that mainly served craft beer and french fries doused in truffle oil. Mikayla’s art student boy lived above one of the latter, in a yellow brick building that looked like it was once a factory but was now lofts. As soon as he opened the door, Soph could tell immediately why Mikayla would like him: he was in fact tall, so tall it moved out of the attractive range and into the comical, and he had messy curls and elegant bony hands. His apartment was dominated by paint-splattered drop cloths underneath enormous canvases laid flat.

“I’m deconstructing Pollock,” he told them, “I splatter the canvases like he did, but I’m aiming for something representational instead of abstract.”

Soph didn’t really know what that meant, but she liked some of the canvases—they mostly looked like the backs of people’s heads, but he’d dripped paint from atop a rickety ladder in the middle of his floor so that the colors composing the images bled outside the lines.

“It looks like her skull’s cracked open,” she said, looking at one with red splattered across it.

The art student boy stood next to her.

“You’re being too literal,” he said.

Mikayla interrupted before Soph could argue and embarrass her. “So I was told there’s a roof?”

The boy led them out into the hall and up several flights of a narrow staircase, which opened onto the roof of the building. Several dozen people were already there, mingling in clusters with beers and plastic cups in hand. Soph recognized a few classmates, but most people there were unfamiliar to her. Beyond the edge of the roof, the wall of a taller building rose up to the side and back, with open air on the other two sides. The glow of a 7-Eleven sign creeped up over one edge. Traffic sounds mostly drowned out the music. A small speaker in the center of the roof was playing The Who as loud as it could, but no one was dancing. This wasn’t the dancing kind of party.

“You want drinks?” the boy asked. “There’s beer and wine, and sodas if you’d rather.” He looked at Soph when he said this last part. Her apprehension must have started to show on her face. She squared her shoulders.

“I’ll have a beer.”

Mikayla nodded, and the boy slouched toward a cooler up against the low wall encircling the roof’s edge. Soph bounced on her toes a little, looking around to find again the familiar faces she’d seen. Her borrowed shoes were a little too big for her—Mikayla had taken them out of one of her housemates’ rooms, but they were still half a size bigger than Soph’s and a little loose around the heels. She made eye contact with a guy she was pretty sure had been in Con Law with her last semester. He waved, and she took it as an invitation to walk over and say hi.

“How’s it going?” she said, trying and failing to remember his name.

“Ben,” he said, sensing her hesitation. “Good, I’m good. Tried out for Moot Court this morning, so, you know.” He held up crossed fingers.

She smiled at the opportunity he’d presented her. “I did too, but, crazy story…” She told him

her refined version of the bus incident, gathering attention from the others he was talking to, and allowed herself to relax as they laughed at her story and started talking about their tryouts.

Mikayla’s art boy appeared long enough to hand her a beer, then vanished just as quickly. *** Soph hated when Mikayla was right, but she was. The night cooled down the longer the roof party went, and Soph felt the tension easing out of her shoulders along with it. She’d lost Mikayla to the boy and a gaggle of art students early on, but Ben was funny and the beer made her loose enough to be sociable with the near-strangers she talked to. The traffic noise crescendoed, then quieted, and the roof was high up enough that she could make out some stars in the cloudless night overhead.

When her second beer was empty, she headed to the cooler herself, accepting Ben’s request for another. On the way there, she thought about turning her phone on. She’d sent a brief text to her mom earlier to let her know she’d be home late, if at all, and had turned it off immediately after. She was halfway to pulling it out of her pocket when a bright flash of blonde hair caught at the edge of her vision.

“No, I already know I’ve got a spot. Megan basically promised me,” said the blonde girl. Her face was clean, her hair brushed and her clothes neat, but Soph was certain this time that it was the vomiter from the bus. “I, like, didn’t really prepare my case, but I do better with improv anyways.”

A few people in the group around her laughed, that too-loud, trying-to-impress-you laugh.

Soph knew she was staring, but it was hard to make herself stop.

“Hey,” said Ben, appearing at her side. “Sorry, I thought you got lost or something.”

She turned and made herself smile at him, handing him one of the beers in her hand. “No, I just got distracted. I thought maybe I knew that girl.”

He looked at the blonde. “Oh, you probably do. That’s Valerie, she’s a year ahead of us. Let’s say hi.”

Soph wanted to stop him, but he’d already caught the blonde girl’s attention and was walking over to her. She followed, cringing in anticipation of the girl’s recognition. Ben was already talking when she caught up to him, about Moot Court tryouts and Soph’s bus ride.

“It’s a really funny story, she can tell it better. Hey, there you are. You two have maybe met, right?” Ben said as Soph walked up, looking between the two of them.

Valerie gave her a once-over. It was a look she was used to getting from girls like this, an already dismissive gaze that only got less interested as she took in the dress that didn’t fit right, the shoes that didn’t fit right, her hair that wasn’t styled. Soph could recognize rich when she saw it, even in something as simple as a black dress and a shiny blowout, and she knew very well how obviously she herself wore poor.

“No,” Valerie said. “I don’t think we have.”

“Uh, just briefly,” Soph said. Internally she kicked herself for not going along, but she was instantly irritated by this girl. “You’re feeling better since this morning, I guess?”

Valerie crinkled her nose like she was confused. “Hmm. So did you try out?” she asked Ben. Soph interrupted the beginning of his answer. “No, we have, because you were on the bus this morning, remember?”

“Oh shit, Valerie, did you puke on the bus this morning?” Ben asked, starting to laugh.

Valerie took a long, slow drink out of her cup, looking only at Soph. For a moment, Soph wondered whether she was about to get hit. “I don’t take the bus. And I don’t know you.”

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*** She stayed for another hour. Mikayla had initiated dancing with the art boy and a few other Friedrich

Hannah Friedrich — Trying

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people Soph didn’t recognize, so now half the people on the roof were crushed together in the middle jumping gracelessly and singing along to the music. Soph stayed to the outer edge of the roof, making idle conversation with the other law students she’d met. Ben had talked to Valerie for a little while and then came back to Soph, but she let their conversation peter out with one word answers and strained smiles. Soon she found herself leaning up against the half wall alone, wondering if she should try to find Mikayla to tell her she was leaving. She didn’t particularly want to go home, but she didn’t want to be here anymore either.

She pulled her phone out and turned it on. Old messages started coming through, the notifications buzzing one after the other as her phone caught up. Eight voicemails. Soph sighed.

She should never have turned it off.

“Do you have a stalker boyfriend or something?”

Soph jumped. Valerie had walked up next to her. “Um. No. It’s my mom.”

Valerie frowned. She was swaying a little, and the way she spoke was slightly too deliberate, like it was hard for her to talk straight. “Why does your mom call you that much?”

Soph clicked on the most recent voicemail, her thumb hovering over the play button. She didn’t have to explain herself to Valerie, she knew that, and she rarely explained her mother to anyone. “She just needs me is all.”

“Why?” “Because she fucking does, Jesus.” Soph started to walk away.

“Hang on, hang on. Shit.” Valerie grabbed her elbow. “I’m sorry, that was rude. I actually came over here to apologize to you. I feel like I was a dick before.”

Soph shook her hand off, but didn’t leave. “You were.”

“I know. It’s just, this morning was like the worst of my life and I just didn’t want to talk about it. But I shouldn’t have pretended not to recognize you.”

Soph looked at her closer, then. Beneath the perfect dress and hair, she actually looked tired.

She remembered Valerie’s earlier confidence, her apparent lack of preparation for her tryout. At the time, it had seemed like exactly the sort of thing someone like Valerie would take for granted.

“You tried out this morning, didn’t you?”

Valerie snorted. “Yeah. And I was garbage. And it sucks because like, it’s not like I need itneed it, I can get internships and shit, but, I don’t know, you know when you’re just trying to do something real? Know what I mean?”

Soph kind of didn’t. She took a moment to respond, sipping her third beer. “I mean, yeah, I guess. I’m worried about getting job offers and stuff like that.” An embarrassed silence hung in the air. Soph wondered if Valerie had felt the wall up when she’d replied, been offended by it.

She didn’t know if she minded.

“I saw your tryout.”

“What?” She’d put it together already that it really had been Valerie at tryouts, but the sudden jump in the conversation took her off guard.

Valerie nodded. “You went a few people before me. I saw you present your case. You’re gonna get a spot.”

“I don’t know. Some of the people who went before me—” “Weren’t as good as you. Seriously. I’m not, like, a complimentary person, so you should believe the nice things I say to you.”

“Are you planning on saying more nice things, or was that pretty much it?” Soph wanted to apologize as soon as she’d said it, the words just snapping out of her, but Valerie just laughed and didn’t answer.

They stood next to one another in silence, leaning their hips against the wall and watching the dancers. Soph’s feet were starting to throb, her ankles protesting all the wobbling she’d done in her too-loose heels. Sighing, she kicked them off and put her bare feet on the cold concrete, wincing at the sting. She felt Valerie watching and turned to meet her eyes.

“What?”

“Sorry. I’m just still wondering about your mom. Just because, not many people I know, like, take care of their parents. Or at least that’s what I assume is… Never mind. You don’t have to tell me.”

Soph stayed quiet for a moment. “She just has bad depression, is all. I live with her to help her take care of herself. And she can’t pay her rent.”

“You pay her rent?”

“Most of it. She has a part-time job.”

Valerie sighed. “Wait here just a second.” She walked off, around the dancers, and Soph couldn’t see where she went after that. After a few minutes, she could see the door to the stairs swing open, and Valerie walked back towards her with a clutch in hand.

“Here,” she said, holding out a few bills. Soph stared for a moment.

“I don’t need help. I don’t need your money. What, you think I’m—” Soph felt her voice go up, wavering on hysterical.

“No, because I ruined your shoes. Take it.” She kept holding it out, then sighed and grabbed one of Soph’s hands, placing the money directly in her grasp. “Look, I’m gonna feel bad if I have to think about you walking around in, like, gross sticky shoes. So just take it.”

She walked away as soon as Soph closed her hand around the bills. It was a stack of twenties, totaling $140. Much more than what she’d paid for those shoes in the first place. In her other hand, her phone buzzed again, a new voicemail.

“Hi, Sophie bunny, I know you’re out and you’re busy, but if you get the chance, we really need cat food. And dish soap. I didn’t do the dishes today—” her mother’s voice broke, a little choked off sob.

Soph felt involuntary tears well in her own eyes. “—because we were out of soap, and I was going to go to the store, but I didn’t, so if you have time. That’s all. I love you.”

Soph wondered if wet wipes would be able to fully clean her own shoes, once she retrieved them from Mikayla’s house. She clenched her fist around the bills in her hand, considered tossing them off the edge of the roof. What would it look like, to watch them flutter down into the darkness below? Sighing, she put the wad of cash into her skirt pocket, knocking back the last of her beer.

97

*** She found Mikayla talking to Ben. They both had their phones out, showing each other something and talking animatedly. Art boy was nowhere to be seen, and Soph wondered if Mikayla had already gotten bored of him. She tapped her friend gently on the elbow.

“This was so fast, I can’t believe. They must have been deliberating all—oh hey!”

“Hey,” she said, offering Ben a smile. “It’s late, I gotta go.”

Mikayla grabbed her wrist. “Have you checked your email?” she said, her voice high and loud.

Soph glanced around. Many of the other people at the party, the ones she recognized as other law students, had their phones out too.

“Uh, no. Why?” “Moot Court sent out decisions already! Look, look now!” Mikayla shook her. She opened her email in a haze, and there it was at the top of her inbox. “Open it!”

Soph stared at the notification. “Uh. You do it. I can’t.”

Mikayla grabbed the phone from her hand, opened the email, and screamed, drawing attention from everyone around them. Before Soph could react, she was enveloped in a hug, the smell of Mikayla’s shampoo and sweat enveloping her. Ben grinned at her over Mikayla’s shoulder. Slowly, she grinned back.

“I gotta go,” she said, extracting herself from Mikayla’s arms. The grin didn’t leave her face. “I gotta catch the bus.”

“Okay, but call me tomorrow! We have to celebrate!”

Friedrich

Hannah Friedrich — Trying

As she left, she caught sight of Valerie, back in her crowd of admirers, phone in hand. She was smiling a dazed, giddy smile. For a moment, Soph thought she would be caught staring, but Valerie didn’t look at her, and she didn’t look at her friends. She tilted her chin back, blonde hair tumbling off her shoulder, smiling up at the stars. Soph looked away. The neon sign of the 7-Eleven caught her eyes. It probably sold dish soap and cat food.

Lucretia

REBECCA KROGER

“One day when the young men were drinking at the house of Sextus Tarquinius… they fell to talking about their wives, and each man fell to praising his wife to excess. Finally Tarquinius Conlatinus declared that there was no need to argue; they might all be sure that no one was more worthy than Lucy” —Livy, “A History or Rome” 98

In 100 feet, turn right onto Helicon Avenue and you will arrive at your destination.

Lucy took a left.

For the next few minutes, Lucy continued to drive in the opposite direction while occasionally sending a heated glare to the GPS unit suctioned to her car window. She watched as the two markers grew further and further apart. As her car slowed to a stop at a red light, Lucy reached her hand out to shut the system off. With a huff and one last scowl, her gaze shifted from the silent GPS to the leather satchel carefully placed in the passenger seat.

The leather was well-used to the point of it looking black instead of brown. It lost its leathery smell years ago and now just smelt of ink and must. The single strap attached to the body of the bag was on its last thread, held on by the duct tape Lucy had put on it a few months ago.

Pete had given her the satchel as a gift when she first entered law school at the University of Texas. He came to her apartment with red carnations, a purple gift bag, and a giant smile on his freckled face. Those few months before her first class were the best days she could remember having. That was fifteen years ago.

A honk from the the car behind her broke her out of her reverie. She took one last glance at the satchel and its contents before stepping on the gas pedal and continuing down the road.

After forty-five minutes of heading straight, Lucy saw in the distance a worn out sign advertising The Republic Bar. Even though it was barely past noon, Lucy quickly turned into its parking lot and turned off her car. She really needed a drink.

The bar’s exterior looked like every other bar in Austin: small, quaint, and made to purposely look tired and well-used. The brick building, which most likely was once a residential home, wasn’t colored anymore, but looked like it was once painted white. The owner probably spent lots of time and money trying to make it look like that.

The moment Lucy stepped into the bar, the smell of cigarettes and sweat hit her. For the first time in days, Lucy’s shoulders relaxed.

Friedrich | Kroger

The room was dimly lit and almost empty except for two men playing pool in the corner and a group of women chatting animatedly in a booth. Trails of smoke could be seen coming from both groups. The walls of the bar were decorated with old political cartoons and propaganda posters; not a single surface was free from it. What sounded like a song by Rage Against the Machine was playing quietly in the background. Lucy thought it was an odd theme to a bar, a little depressing too, but at this point, it no longer mattered to her. With the satchel held close to her body, she quickly made her way to the front and sat down on the stool.

The bartender, a skinny brown-haired man in his early thirties, quickly looked up from the book he was reading when he heard the squeak of the metal stool. His eyebrows raised in surprise at the new customer. After bookmarking his page with the straw that he was previously chewing on, he sat up from his seat in the far right corner of the bar and slowly made his way towards Lucy.

“What can I get for you today?”

At the sound of his exhausted voice Lucy looked up from where she was idly staring at the wooden table. The man was cleanly shaven with his hair pulled back into a loose bun. He had the air of someone who thought his time was better spent somewhere else. It made Lucy want to waste his time further. Instead, she just smiled and quickly glanced at the chalk-board menu behind him.

“I’ll just have a glass of your cheapest whiskey,” Lucy replied.

The bartender gave her a tight-lipped smile and turned to go get her drink. Lucy went back to staring at the wooden table. She reached her hand out and brushed over the worn wood.

Right on the edge of the table was a small engraving of a turtle lying its back. Her thumb lightly swept across the shell.

“Here you go miss, our finest four dollar whiskey,” the bartender smirked. He set it on the table with a white napkin and began to head back to his chair and book.

“Oh wait! Do you happen to have a cigarette on you by any chance?”

“No, sorry.”

He didn’t even turn around.

Lucy went back to staring at the turtle.

“I’ve got an extra cigarette if you want it,” a new voice rasped, coming from just behind Lucy.

Jumping at the closeness of the person’s voice, Lucy quickly swiveled around and came face to face with a young woman. Her bright, unruly, red hair was a stark contrast to the dark background behind her. Freckles were splattered around her entire face as if God had haphazardly thrown them on her, or, as if Picasso placed each freckle individually. It looked way better on her than it ever did on Pete. The stranger’s dark blue eyes watched Lucy intensely, as if she were trying to make out whether or not approaching Lucy was a good idea. Her right hand was reaching out to Lucy, a lone cigarette between her thumb and pointer fingers.

“I definitely need one,” Lucy replied, grabbing the cigarette from the stranger’s outreached hand and putting it in between her teeth. Realizing she didn’t have a lighter, she looked back up at the woman and saw that she already had one lit and was bringing it up towards Lucy’s lips.

Lucy took a big, long hit before sighing and letting the smoke cover her face. She was about to turn around and go back to her whiskey when the woman spoke up again.

“I’m Lemmy. My friends and I are in the booth in the back if you want to join us. You look like you could use some company and the owner over there isn’t the type to provide you with riveting conversations.” She pause for a second to think. “Unless you think paranoid conspiracies about the government are as fascinating as he thinks they are.”

Her voice was the kind of raspy that you only truly heard from someone after they had a fantastic night’s sleep. Lucy was envious of it.

“Seriously, just come on over with me. It’ll be chill.” Lemmy smiled at her, patiently waiting for a response.

Lucy hesitated. She wasn’t planning on talking to anyone here. To be honest, she really did

99

Kroger

Rebecca Kroger — Lucretia

100

Kroger

just want to sit alone and nurse her glass of whiskey, but it looked like Lemmy wasn’t gonna take no for an answer.

“Alright, I’ll be over in a sec. And my name is Lucy” Lemmy’s smile got impossibly bigger. Without saying another word, Lemmy turned around and went back to her friends in the booth.

Lucy watched them for a little bit. They were five women in total, all talking loudly and over each other, but not enough to where she could hear them. She clutched her satchel tighter to her, extinguished the cigarette in the ashtray, grabbed her barely touched whiskey and slowly walked over the the group of women.

As she continued to get closer to them, she began to make out what they were talking about.

“You need to leave him,” one of the women said. She had dark black hair tied up into a loose bun and a nose ring with a golden star. “He’s nothing but a leech looking for someone he can mooch off of.”

A chorus of agreement came from the four other women.

“I would if I could,” another woman responded. This one had long blonde hair. “But the kids love their father, and who am I to take that away from them?”

Another round of agreements came.

Lucy froze. She did not want join in on this conversation. But before she could turn around and head back to the front of the bar, Lemmy spotted her.

“Lucy! Hey! Take a seat!”

Lucy visibly slumped her shoulders. She clung tighter to her satchel and sat down in the booth next to Lemmy. She glanced at the girls around her. They didn’t seem that interested in the fact that she was there. Lucy then turned to Lemmy, expecting an introduction.

“So Lucy, we were just talking about our crappy husbands. We can’t decide which one of us pulled the shortest straw”.

Lucy faked a laugh and took a sip of her whiskey “You married?,” Lemmy asked.

Lucy internally flinched. This is exactly why she tried to leave.

“Umm.. I am.”

“What’s he like? Is he just as bad as ours?”

Lucy thought about what she wanted to say about Pete.

“He is… very good to me.”

The women around the table just stared at her, waiting for more. Lucy shifted in her seat uncomfortably and glanced down at the satchel on her lap. Her hands began to fidget with the duct tape that had slowly begun to unstick.

“He kisses me goodbye every morning before I go to work.” Lucy doesn’t mention that she always turns away from it. “He always has dinner ready and waiting for me when I get home from the firm.” She doesn’t mention that they always eat in silence. ”And later, as we head to bed, Pete will always tell me he loves me.” Lucy doesn’t say it back anymore. Towards the end of her speech, Lucy’s face was expressionless. “Pete is handsome, and caring, and all around the perfect guy. He has a great job and supports me always,” She ended.

So why did Lucy feel so empty?

Lucy peered up from where she was blankly looking at her empty glass of whiskey. She hadn’t even realized she had finished it already.

The women continued to stare at her. But this time, their stares were more longing, with hints of jealousy laced between their furrowed brows.

After a moment of silence, Lemmy spoke, “What does you husband do for a living?”

After some hesitation, Lucy responded. “He’s a writer.”

“Any books I would recognize?” Lemmy asked, taking a long hit on her newly lit cigarette. She casually slid her full bottle of beer towards Lucy.

Taking a sip of Lemmy’s beer, Lucy shrugged, “His most popular book is called Inanis.”

Lemmy took another hit. “Never heard of —“ “I know that book!” The girl with the nose ring inturrupted, “Your husband is Pete Davis?”

Lucy gave a slight nod, regretting she ever told them he was a writer.

“He’s a legend! That book is incredible!

Lucy continued to sip on Lemmy’s beer. Lemmy, meanwhile, had brought out her phone and began typing furiously.

“Aha!,” shouted Lemmy, surprising Lucy enough to have flinched into her bottle.

“Pete Davis,” Lemmy began reading, “born 1985 in Houston, Texas is known for his pulitzer prize winning novel, Inanis, and other small, but nonetheless spectacular books. When he is not honing in on his craft, he is enjoying time with his wife at his current residence in Austin, Texas.”

Lemmy paused there, scanning the rest of the wikipedia article. Lucy began rubbing her hands on the side of her jeans.

The rest of the women at the table were looking at her in what would now be confirmed as outright jealousy. Lemmy looked up from her phone and began to stare with the other women.

After a long silence, Lucy forced a shaky smile on her face, “What can I say, I have good taste.”

The women all laughed. Lucy finished the beer.

After a short silence, Lemmy, in a burst of movement, grabbed the napkin that was under Lucy’s old whiskey glass and began furiously scribbling on it with an eyebrow pencil that somehow appeared in her hand while Lucy wasn’t looking. Before she could ask what Lemmy was doing, the scribbling stopped.

Lemmy paused for dramatic effect. “Ahem. I, Lemmy Fontagne, do hereby present Lucy Davis with the award for best husband as decided by the women of The Republic Bar.” She handed Lucy the napkin that was now covered in reddish brown pencil markings. On it, it said “Best Husband Award,” and beneath that, her name. Lucy stared at in for a long time, while the other women laughed at Lemmy’s spectacle. Lucy wanted to crinkle it up. Tear it. Destroy it.

Instead, she carefully put it inside her satchel next to her phone and a plain manila folder. It was time for her to leave.

Without saying another word, Lucy put some cash on the table and stood up to leave. She could hear some protests coming from the women, mostly Lemmy, but the ringing in her ear muffled any distinguishable sounds. She quickly passed the bartender still reading his book, passed the men still playing pool, and exited the bar. She ran to her car, opened the door and got in. Lucy wanted to scream, she wanted to hit something, she wanted to feel something other than lost and empty. She threw her satchel against the passenger window, the contents of the bag flowing out and onto the seat. She stared at them: The phone, displaying only one message sent 15 minutes ago from Pete asking where she was and why she wasn’t at the restaurant they planned on meeting at over 2 hours ago, the manila folder with the divorce papers all signed and ready to be handed to him, and finally, the newly crumpled napkin.

101

Kroger

A Game of Hope

JOY UMOEKPO.

102

Umoekpo

My teammates and I adjusted our kneepads and fixed our hair. As we stood with smiles plastered on our faces looking at the camera in front of us, we waited for our photo to be taken. It was athletic picture day for both volleyball and cross country. Some had gotten their hair done for the photo while others came as they usually were. I, being one of the people who came as she usually did, was just happy to know that the picture we were taking would memorialize the volleyball season of Fall 2012, my last year in middle school, and prove I was there.

‘Click,’ the camera went.

“Just one more,” the camera man said after having taken three pictures already. ‘Click.’

As my team disassembled from their position to make way for the cross-country students, I could not help but think about one game we had during our final season as I watched the crosscountry players form together more like a cohesive unit than our team of tall and short players with few who could bridge the gap between the two.

That game was the fifth official game in the season and my team was ready to mark it as our fifth official loss, our tenth loss if we also included the unofficial practice games we played in our school circuit. It was a home game, but, even then, we did not have some magical home-field advantage.

The game started as expected. The six players on the other teams had the first serve and consistently got the play over us with our inability to coordinate and send the ball back over that net.

What was not expected was for the other team to also show signs of clumsiness in their occasional poor judgement of where the ball was going or allowing the ball to slip through their fingers onto the floor. Through the combined efforts of their team’s missed serves and our small spurts of good luck, my team scored five points and the other team had just served the ball outside of the court. Just like that, a spark of hope formed in my stomach.

Finally, I thought as Alexis, who was one of our best servers, went back to serve. We had a real chance to win for the first time that season.

Unfortunately, Alexis, who I thought would lead us on our path to victory, also served the ball outside of the court. Alexis groaned. Our coach called to her. “Alexis!”

“Yeah,” Alexis answered back, looking her way.

“Shake it off. It’s okay,” Coach said. Alexis nodded in response.

I looked at the scoreboard. 14-6. We were down by eight points. Nothing was okay about that, but I guess we could use all the positivity we could get. I got back into position as the other team’s server prepared her serve. My team waited as the ball came over. It came towards me in the back row.

“Mine!” I called approaching the ball a little too early and the ball bounced off my arm in a blur of yellow and blue stripes hard enough that I knew a bruise would be there tomorrow. It barely went up into the air before any of my teammates could reach it. The ball hit the floor and the other team got another point. Their team cheered and I swore softly to myself for costing my team a point that we clearly needed.

As the server of the other team got into position, I promised myself that I would get this next serve feeling as though she would target my area again. The girl let go of the ball and it came to me, just as I thought. This time, however, I was prepared. I hit the ball and returned it over the net. They underestimated me and failed to receive the ball. The rubber ball hit the ground as they scrambled to try and hit it. 15-7. After about two minutes, we passed double digits. 18-12.

My hope blossomed further.

Too bad hope couldn’t make up for hours of uncoordinated practices and heavy footsteps.

The scoreboard rang fifteen minutes later and the other team cheered with jumps and high fives.

I looked at the scoreboard and my shoulders drooped. 25-19, Our chances at triumph was gone and all my hope gone with it.

Now, I found myself smiling despite the sting of defeat I felt at the memory. We had given it our best and we had that hope of victory for the game. That was enough in those short moments on the court.

If Planets Could Pedal KAYLEE AVILA When I was younger, I used to lie on my bedroom floor, stare up, and imagine gravity switching directions so I could sit on my fan’s wing and spin around on my ceiling carousel. I didn’t even have to ask mom for quarters. I could just dream in circles, just fall into the whirring sound as the blades spun round and round and lulled me to sleep; though, spinning teacups give me motion sickness now. Now, I can’t stare at my fan for more than a few seconds without saliva coating my throat or the room starting to tilt.

When we first met, you jokingly asked me to walk you home as I sat on my bike, so I pedaled circles around you all the way to your front door. I didn’t feel dizzy for even a second. Something about your pull felt natural. Like I wasn’t spinning in circles but in a straight line that just happened to keep turning into you, trying to get closer to you, but something in the need to move forward created distance between us; an invisible arm holding me out, but holding me still.

It was in a spinning tea cup that we had our first kiss. You said you were aiming for my cheek, but then the cup switched directions and our noses bashed and teeth clashed but it was the most beautiful, bloody kiss I’ve ever had.

Fifth grade science taught me the moon spins around a planet, the planet around the sun, this motion is called revolution, but then my history class said revolution is when you overthrow something, force a new system over the old, when one steals another’s power; revolution is how we get change. Revolution. I didn’t understand why they used one word to mean two things.

The circles I pedaled around you were more like oblong ovals. Ugly, distorted shapes that bothered me at first, but I learned to love because they revolved around you. I was unsure how to keep up though. Unsure how to get closer without colliding. Without leaving a crater behind.

I first started riding my bike because I wanted to get places quicker. My feet were too slow and strangers too friendly and I too shy, so I learned to zip past them, but now I pedal in zig zags and curlicues, get so caught up trying to trace perfect circles—space and time collapse. I haven’t been on time to anything in the past five years.

I still bike in circles without you here. With nothing to pull me in, my oblong ovals grew oblique. Sidewalk slipped out from under me. Tires sloshed and sprayed strangers with muddy meteor showers. My tires’ tread grew so thickly-coated with leaves and muck that they lost traction; spiraling out of orbit, the center of my universe gone. Your gravitational grasp gone weak, I was left free floating, prisoner to the thralls of deep space. An object in motion, slave to motion, there is no outside force in this vacuum void of you. Nothing to ground me, stop me, steady me, hold me, there is nothing tender in space’s infinite embrace of a rogue astronaut.

103

Umoekpo | Avila

Kaylee Avila — If Planets Could Pedal

Once wheel hits water, you hydroplane. Sit back and skid until you stop. Try to steer but jerk too sharply, too foolishly chasing empty silhouette shadows, and you spiral off course. And not a steady carousel spin, but a dizzy end-of-the-world spin, slip, slide, crash, and suck my bloody hand that I busted open while breaking my fall just to taste your lips—just to spiral back to our first kiss. You are no planet, but a wormhole; sucked me into your orbit then spat me out—an afterthought piece of debris, a curiosity, just someone to practice on.

“You should know better than to speed in the rain” said my mom when she wrapped my wounds. I should know better than to spin without learning how to stop. A mothership rescue mission, she kissed my forehead—sent shivers over every inch of my skin. She thought I was cold, so she turned off the fan. The spinning grew slower and softer and then silent. I closed my eyes, and just for a second, everything was still. Just for a second, it all stopped spinning.

Painted Mirage 104

Avila

KAYLEE AVILA.

“Just come on in,” she called out. Her “GO AWAY” doormat told me otherwise, but I entered her home regardless, perhaps against my best interest.

That morning, Silas had told me that it’s not uncommon to walk in on a corpse. I thought he was joking at first, but he kept a straight face and went on saying many of them have heart problems or hearing aids, or selective hearing, and every so often, selective hearts.

I walked in on lime green footprints scattered across a shit-colored carpet. I’m not being paid, but even if I were, it wouldn’t be enough.

Babysitting is easy. Every little minutia of a thing is interesting to a baby. But old people… the elderly are an entirely new species of beasts to sit upon. They’ve seen so much. I was expecting wisdom, tranquility, and perhaps even a lingering nostalgia that could pass the hours with storytelling, but the thing that emerged from around the corner told me that I had severely misjudged what I was up against.

A sleek white bob of hair appeared, hovering over the psychedelic part of the 80s, draped in vomit form with saggy skin on toothpick bones. She struck out a skeleton hand.

“Call me Miraja.”

I shook her hand and flinched at the slick, slimy suction our palms made. She looked frail but felt forceful. Her grip laced my fingers captive in a skeletal grip. Perhaps I was the one who ‘needed assistance.’

“Miraja… nice to meet you. My name is Anne,” I said, glancing down at my new lime-greenlined palm.

“Oh, you don’t mind a little mess, do ya? I’m painting. Here, let me show you,” she said and darted back towards her hall-way cave crowded with towering, paint-splattered antiques.

Silas told me that being shy would be perfect for this program. That it’s better to get them to talk than to force them to sit through your ‘miserable millennial ramblings.’ That they each have their own distinct and interesting personalities just waiting for you to pry into. At the time he said this, I was expecting hobbies like knitting, scrapbooking, crossword puzzles, or on the

crazier side, perhaps something like jeopardy, or water aerobics.

“So what made you decide to paint your… house?” I asked.

Usually people just stick to painting the walls. And even then, lime green was an odd choice.

And now an odd time. Now, that she’s inches—millimeters—away from her deathbed. I didn’t want to be rude though.

She slapped her hand against a wet cat post. “These bad boys was spring duckling before, and mauve ‘fore that, and midnight mist, and I believe there was once even a time they was gray back in thirty-four, but dear, that was a hor-ren-dous-ly dull time, that was,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what to make of her answer, so I turned and faced one of the walls so that my back was towards her. Although she didn’t seem particularly interested in my facial expressions.

She had better things to do. I slid a finger across the shiny wet wall in front of me. Sure enough, beneath the lime green, a soft yellow seeped into sight. Layers and layers left the walls with a cakey play-dough texture. A warm, wet spray soaked into my left sock. I looked down to a hairless cat pissing on my shoe. At this point, I let it.

“Oh, don’t mind Robert. He won’t bite. Wee lad, he’s turning four soon,” said Miraja.

“Human years or cat years?” I asked.

“Lives. Four lifetimes,” she replied.

We stood together in silence for a while.

“Spring duckling was too soft of a color to have in my next time,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“My next life. I’ve gotten the death tarot card every day for two weeks now, and I want a different color for my next life.”

I swallowed my hour of rehearsed ice-breakers and small-talk. I left the Catholic church at the ambitious age of eleven, and although I’m still unsure of what exactly I believe, tarot cards scared me too much to ever look into seriously. They conflict with my hopeful, perhaps naive, but still hopeful notion of free will. I was burning to ask her what she thought about Hell. About free will. About death. Silas said that the elderly make great conversationalists if you can crack them open. Ask them about their hobbies, their past, their interests. Really anything… except for death. Yeah, whatever you do, don’t bring up death. I leaned in closer to Miraja, like a schoolgirl sharing secrets under the pews instead of listening to the Wednesday night sermon.

“Are you scared of death?” I whispered, as if anyone else would hear us on this backroad shack of a home that didn’t even show up on my phone’s GPS. She chuckled and grabbed my hands.

“Honey, death is scared of me.”

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Avila

Peach Pit Bullet KAYLEE AVILA.

106

Avila

The memory of peach juice dribbling down my son’s chin still resurrects itself anytime a thunderstorm makes an especially loud crack of thunder. It’s usually around 3 AM, around the time James used to wander into my bedroom because he wet his bed or saw the missing-face man in his nightmares again. We’d go into the kitchen and have a sleepy peach picnic on his Star Wars blanket until his yawns grew too strong. He lost his first tooth the first time he bit into a peach, ripping through the tough fleshy meat just to strike its pit. He wailed. Shock shot up through his teeth, rattling his jaw. Traitor, he called me. I should’ve warned him.

Peaches have pits. Everyone knows that. At seven years old, James didn’t. He didn’t know that juice just as sweet would be found on the lips of his first kiss, or first time, or first drink.

He didn’t know that watching a lizard eat a butterfly made me sob for hours, but I didn’t shed a single tear at his funeral. When I got the call, my head rolled back and I just stared into the dim fluorescent light of my office ceiling.

He forgot his lunch that morning. I sacrificed my lunch break to drop it off. I scolded him for forgetting it. For making me take time out of my day to take him the sack that I prepared that he couldn’t even bother to remember. A bruised peach soaked through the brown paper sack and left my hand sticky for the rest of the afternoon. I scolded my son an hour before his elementary school flashed on every other local news and radio station, but just for one day.

Twenty-four students, all so utterly lost, dead, that the school didn’t even bother calling an ambulance. The man in a black hoodie was too fast. His pale mugshot was blurred. The missingface man of my nightmares didn’t peek out from closet doors at night but purchased a cemetery plot with a Walmart gift card. Open-carried his broad-daylight afternoon stroll into a school and stole my son’s life.

Acquitted due to a history of mental health issues, he was a good kid, his neighbors said.

I forgot to put tooth fairy money under Jame’s pillow. He never knew the tooth fairy. Or the “tooth fairy.” Or his father. He hardly even knew me, the real me. Nor I, him.

Now, any crack, crunch, or click is the sound of teeth hitting a pit.

After he bit the pit, he cried but said he still loved peaches. Bullet bit my James, but I was told to still love others, their empty thoughts and prayers, and their cough suppressant policies.

I told James that I lost my first tooth in a banana. I ran to my mother and told her I found my first ever banana seed, pearly and banana-colored. It had been dangling from my gums for a week and was so detached that there wasn’t any blood when it finally came loose. When James first bit the peach pit, so did I. Told him I would hurt the peach the way the peach hurt him, I snuck a smile out of his tears, snot, and peach juice spit. He said “Silly mommy. You can’t hurt a peach,” so we made funny faces with the wrinkly wooden pit balanced between the brinks of our teeth.

I bite the barrel once in a while, but it’s not the same. Thunder cracks still shatter the sky, and my bite doesn’t make James smile anymore. My bite won’t calm him down because he’s already fast asleep.

I bite it so that I can lay back in bed.

Woodworking Water and Blood KAYLEE AVILA

It tasted like the tooth she lost last week, but instead of warm and syrupy, it was cleaner. And cold. Like sticking her tongue on an icicle, but no, not that cold. But like an icicle, she couldn’t unstick her tongue from it sometimes. She slid it off and traced its tip over the lines of her palms, but gently, so it wouldn’t poke through her skin. After tracing every crease, she would press it flat into the face of her thumb. Her skin flushed red around it, then puffy and white.

It was the sharpest and shiniest thing in the garage. Papa’s floors were covered in dirt and dust and wood shavings and splatters that were probably paint. The wallpaper was peeling from the top down and picked-at from the bottom up. Papa’s big tools were too high on the walls, too high to reach, and most of papa’s small toolbox tools were too greasy or rusty or blunted to be pretty, but not the small pointy blade of his X-Acto knife. Its lines became familiar to Anne’s, but it never met her blood. She was better than that. She was careful.

With the blade, she traced the blue-green veins on the back of her hand and imagined them into rivers. She built entire worlds around those streams, with freckled people and birthmark buildings, and even a few soft, single-hair trees who were her friends. The tickle of the blade felt like a feather but it was much more powerful than that. Powerful enough to raise all of the trees on her skin to life. They sprouted and towered over the small spotty people and stretched up to the sky until papa opened the door and filled the tiny garage with a shattering roar that the neighbors would question if they were listening.

She dropped the knife and it impaled the ground. There it stood, still upright, just inches away from her left foot. They stared at it in silence.

“Anne... see how sharp that is? You shouldn’t be playing with that. You could hurt yourself.”

“Sorry, papa. I was being careful,” she said through gritted teeth, but her voice cracked, and with it, her floodgates collapsed. His scream was family, but soft words sounded strange coming from his mouth; scarier than his scream in a way. Or maybe just unfamiliar. Like a stranger cooing to a baby.

Adam cursed under his breath but knelt down beside her.

“Here Anne… how about this? You can play with this one.”

Papa handed her a metal spoon-like thing with a thick wooden handle. It wasn’t quite rusted but definitely discolored, and very, very dull.

“It’s called a gouge. See how round the edge is? You can’t hurt yourself with this one. You hold it flat against a wood board––it has to be softwood though––and then you can carve pictures… Sounds fun right?”

He felt strange kneeling before her. Strange to feel so afraid of so small a being. How her tears brought his later that night. And not silent, soft tears like hers, but walrus sobs that he hadn’t heard himself make since Laura left them. Laura was soft too, but Laura had a tough side. An unexpected iceberg side that rarely showed, but crushed Adam when it did. Words that stung because he didn’t realize Laura was capable of thinking that way. Didn’t realize she kept track of all the shit he screwed up. It was always the little things that hurt the most. Shit that she let slide, that she stayed silent about, that he thought was okay, until it wasn’t, and she spat his flaws into his face. All of his flaws, and her regret for falling for them.

This was the second time this week he broke his promise not to raise his voice at Anne, and the third time this week he made her cry. Love does that to you, he decided. Love makes you slip sometimes.

Anne nodded and took the gouge from him without a word.

Her wet cheeks crusted dry and left a tugging feeling that stretched her skin into a weird face. She snuck a block of wood from papa’s work pile and ran to her room.

Later that night, she traced the round blade over her skin, but her soft, single-hair trees

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stayed chopped down. She turned on her fan, but not even wind would make them stand. Anne didn’t want to make a flat picture. She wanted something tall. Something that could poke the sky. She wanted a tree that could stand, that could stretch, that could sway and dance in the wind. We’re safe here, she whispered to her block of wood. Papa never comes in my room.

The woodblock was a pretty color. She picked the best looking one, but she could only chip out little chunks at a time. She tried holding the wood straight, and sideways, and tilted, and she moved the gouge in funny ways that made her hand hurt, but she could never get it to carve what she wanted, so she chipped harder and faster and tried softer but that didn’t work so she tried faster again, and again, and again and––but then, her hand slipped and she dropped the wood and… the dull gouge was planted dead-center in the heart of her palm. She decided the shock hurt more than the stab.

Wide-eyed, she slid the gouge out. Blood squirted. Stained her carpet. She tried pressing the hole. Tried to make it stop. Her hand was shaking, but she didn’t let herself cry. She wrapped a sock around her cracked land and decided not to tell papa. She decided that she would be okay.

That he didn’t have to know. She didn’t want papa to worry about her. She could be strong.

“Is that a sock puppet?” he said the next morning. Soggy cereal spilled from his half-open smile back into the bowl.

“Yes,” she said. That would be a good thing to tell people at school, she thought.

Adam’s mind was racing with what wood he would use for his next project. A commission for a widowed woman, trying to find the perfect coffin for her husband. They were a sweet, old couple that walked the cul de sac together every afternoon at precisely 4 PM. At least until Martin died last Tuesday. Cherrywood, or mahogany maybe, said Ellen, but preferably cherrywood. He would have to chop down a tree if she wanted cherrywood, Adam told her, but she said that’s what she wanted. He shoveled more cereal into his mouth, but then saw, through the lumpy cotton sock, the red splotch flowering on Anne’s palm. She ran out to the bus without breakfast. Was out the door before he could finish chewing. He ran and called after her, but she was already gone.

He stumbled back inside and laid his head on the table. Confused curses slipped out until the whispered words sounded foreign to him. Unintelligible mumbling; words echoed so many times that they only felt farther and less certain than when he first started saying them.

He hated himself for not being better. For being too scared, too stupid, too fucking incompetent to learn how to talk to his own daughter. For not knowing how to tell her that she could––that she should––talk to him. For slipping into screaming like it was second-nature, but struggling to fit his mouth around an I’m sorry, or an I love you.

For questioning whether trying made a difference.

Gravel ELENA NEGRÓN The atmosphere of Benita’s Bar was heavy, as it often was. Heavy with the heat of west Texas in June and the smell of smoke and the grimy sweat of its patrons. The bar was weighed down in the center, so that if you placed a marble on the left end, it would roll to the right. It was frequented by the citizens of Tulia, Texas as the second best out of the three bars that were located directly in the town itself. Walter Fitzpatrick, who had grown up down the street from Benita’s, liked to tell himself that one day he would graduate to being a regular at Main Street Bar, located on Main Street, and would no longer come to Benita’s. But the beer at Main Street was more expensive and the people there weren’t as friendly so he decided that Benita’s would do for the time being.

He had a favorite seat, in a booth near the middle where he could see just enough and watch out for any friends that came in. Walter liked making friends, and he thought he was fairly good at it. He wouldn’t have called himself a prominent figure in Tulia, but he certainly tried to know as many people as he could. He liked to talk and listen and he always left Benita’s by 1 A.M., because if he waited any later he would have to stop for the night train to pass through town.

When Walter ordered a pint of beer, he would hold it up to cheers the people around him, who laughed good-heartedly and in a small town way. Then, almost every night, he would proudly roll up his sleeve to show off the watch that his daughter Angeline had picked out for him when she was five, the last time she had visited Tulia for longer than two days. And everyone always looked at it, because he was proud of it and it was a nice watch and he was a nice guy. A group of three men that Walter had never seen at the bar before clapped him on the back one night when he showed them in his slightly drunken, overly theatrical way.

“Nice watch man. It’s real?” One of them asked, smiling warmly.

“Sure,” Walter beamed back. “Lasted me nearly 18 years.” The men nodded and smiled at him and left with a head shake.

On any particular June night, the parking lot would be crowded with cars, but not many people. Kids liked to park at Benita’s and walk to the movie theater, just a block or two away, because the parking was free at the bar but $2.75 at the theater. When Walter walked out of Benita’s, the parking lot was empty of people, save for the men from the bar leaning against a run-down, orange Jeep. Walter thought about his daughter, who was supposed to be coming for a visit the next day and wondered what she thought of Benita’s. But he knew he would never take her there, because she didn’t like to drink and he didn’t want to see his little girl being looked at the way some of Benita’s patrons looked at young women. Walter felt around for his flannel jacket and pulled one arm on but did so clumsily because he was still feeling his last beer.

He stumbled to the side slightly, into one of the three men, all of which had approached him as he struggled with his jacket.

They all had slight beards and sunglasses and were wearing dark clothes and their shoulders were hunched up, but they looked younger than they had in the bar. Walter had never seen them before, and they suddenly looked not at all small town, but big city, with sharp collars and new looking jackets. They muttered something to him that he didn’t quite catch.

“Huh?” He grunted, then he grunted again, and again because the one on the left had started to punch him repeatedly, until he was on the ground and they were ripping the clothes off of him and rummaging through his pockets and reaching into his hair and moving him back and forth. He felt tiny pinches across his abdomen and the space between his hips and his ribs felt warm. Any drunkenness that had been lingering on him had dripped from his body entirely and he struggled, pushing the men away and kicking at them, thinking about the year of karate he had taken in college. Finally, apparently happy with their work, Walter heard the group run back

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to the Jeep, silent as they’d come, and he heard the car speed out of the parking lot.

Jesus, Walter thought, his head resting on the warm gravel. Jesus. Oh, God, what happened?

He asked himself, not for the first time in his long fifty years. He ran his fingers over his stomach and chest and felt small indentations and a pain shot through him. They knifed me! Oh my god, I’ve been stabbed! He thought, his heart pumping faster, which scared him because, as he looked around, he was losing blood. A lot of blood, and he was tired. Too tired to do anything except just lay on his back and focus on breathing, reassuring himself that someone would come soon.

He tried to sit up but the pain in his stomach was sharp, so he simply stretched his hand back towards the door of Benita’s and cried out softly, “hey!” He looked at his wrist, where the skin on his arm was more pale than the rest because it had been covered by his watch for 18 years, and it was gone. The drop in his stomach hurt almost more than the wounds. He felt a crack begin in his spirit, breaking off in chunks and pieces.

That watch had been the good times of Angeline. They had been the good visits, when she smiled and they played games and got milkshakes. They would walk into downtown Tulia, which Angeline refused to call downtown because she believed real downtowns had skyscrapers. They would go into the little shops and look at the stuff, the random crap the stores had on the counters, and then they would pick one of Tulia’s few restaurants and eat before she had to go back to Dallas. It was simple, and ritualistic, but it kept Walter going.

He paused for a moment, grieving his beloved watch. And then he realized, the sooner he got help, the sooner he could find the bastards that took the watch and the sooner he could get it back. Maybe even before the next morning, when Angeline said she would visit.

“Hey!” He tried to shout, but his voice was hoarse and he felt like he was choking. He coughed slightly. Metallic, he realized, and spit out blood. He groaned and tried to roll over. His head was pounding and the ground was wavering and he felt like maybe he was close to falling asleep. He paused mentally, checking out for a second, not thinking about anything. But he jerked his cut up arms to stay awake.

“Hey!” He tried again, but once more it came out a harsh croaking noise. He could hear the music from the bar bursting out of the doors and windows and he shifted again in attempts to crawl back to the steps of the joint. He found it difficult to reach out his arms, but when he did, he saw that there were cuts all up and down. When had they gotten a knife? He thought, giving up on moving and slowly flipping onto his back.

He was supposed to see Angeline for breakfast. She had just graduated from college, which he had never done, and had gotten back from backpacking across Greece. He wanted her to be proud of him. And she certainly wouldn’t be if she were to find out that he had been at the bar the night before and that he had lost the watch she’d given him.

Angeline had always been disappointed in Walter. He had loved her, never been more dedicated to anything in his life. He’d known her mother, Eliza, since they were children and Eliza had gotten pregnant at twenty and they got engaged. Walter had been in love. Eliza had an air about her, an air of importance and there she had been, right next to Walter. He could see her still, standing on a corner in downtown Tulia with her dress falling down to her shins. She remembered trying to picture her with Angeline with her. Walter had always known Eliza would have a little girl.

But she broke off the engagement when she realized she was in love with Walter’s friend, Sonny. Walter had just gotten back to Dallas after visiting home and Eliza was sitting in the living room of her small apartment and her things were scattered around her frantically and the light was streaming in so beautifully, pooling in her hair and around her feet.

And of course, his first thought was not that she was leaving him. It wasn’t even his second or his third, and even when she said it he believed there must’ve been some explanation that explained that she wasn’t really leaving him. But she was, and she got married and had the baby and Walter sat outside with Sonny, who he hadn’t talked to since the night before Sonny and

Eliza had gotten married and their unbearable silence was only broken by the beautiful sound of, “it’s a girl!” Then, Angeline had lived in Dallas her whole life, attending fancy private schools and etiquette schools paid for by Sonny and it seemed like she never wanted to visit Tulia, so he had never asked her to.

Which, laying on the ground and bleeding out, he regretted sorely. He wished he had begged her, hands and knees, pleaded for her to come stay with him, just for a week or two in the summer instead of the day trips she took with her mother. And he should’ve asked Eliza, too, to stay with him instead of letting her leave the Dallas apartment only to go one floor up, where his friend Sonny lived.

Walter never could’ve given Angeline the life she’d had with Sonny and Eliza. He was only an oil field worker, and he knew that, but it hurt to see them cultivating their perfect life in the big city. He clutched his stomach and tried to reason with himself.

Walter heard the door to Benita’s swing open and hit the side of the building, making a rattling noise that sounded to Walter like beautiful music.

“What happened, Walter? Did you fall down? Get up,” someone slurred, or maybe everything sounded washy to Walter. He tried to croak something out but found his throat was too full of tears and memories and wants.

He turned to look at the bar and the light from inside fell across his face, burning his eyes.

Something trickled out of the side of his mouth. He could hear the waves.

“Oh, god, somebody, hey, someone help! Connie, hey, call 911! Walter’s out here, he’s on the ground, he’s coughing up blood, hey, guys, I think Walter’s been jumped,” he heard someone shouting. He knew deep down that it wasn’t, but it almost sounded to Walter like Sonny.

He didn’t want Sonny to touch him, the asshole who got his family and his job and his future.

He didn’t want Sonny to see him like this, small and crumpled in the gravel of the second best bar, where he had spent many nights in the lonely town.

A shadow came towards him, looming, Sonny-like and overpowering and Walter couldn’t feel his legs but his torso began to squirm. Another shadowy figure walked over, a woman, and to Walter it seemed like it could’ve been Eliza. Even worse. He’d spent his whole life making sure she regretted leaving him, taking his daughter from him, he couldn’t bear for her to watch him struggle this way. He began to squirm more.

“Stop, calm down, stop moving. We called an ambulance. Who did this? Walter? Can you hear me?” The Eliza-like shadow asked him. He tried to spit the liquid that was filling his throat on her, on her impeccably clean, white blouse and whichever color pencil skirt he imagined she would love to wear to watch him die, on her large diamond ring that she liked to shine at him, on the tall, white heels she wore even though she had hated heels when she loved him.

Finally, Walter, though he had never been a religious man, prayed. He prayed that Eliza and Sonny would go away, away from the bar and from his mind, and that they would forget that he had ever bled out in the Benita’s parking lot in front of a growing crowd. He was praying hard that everyone would just leave him alone to take a nap when Angeline appeared, blocking the light from inside the bar.

“It’s ok, we’ve called an ambulance. The police are coming. Who did this? Who did this to you?” She asked, but there was no warmth in her voice. There was nothing to soothe Walter, to take back all of the ballet performances and boyfriends and birthdays that he had missed.

Nothing would put him at the altar with Eliza or give him the big break in the oil business that Sonny had gotten or get him out of his stifling town. Angeline looked down at him, her face blank. He began to cry softly, just with small moans, and she leaned down and stroked his hair away from his face.

“The ambulance is coming,” she promised. Her mouth was the only thing that moved.

Everything else began to melt.

I’m sorry, Angeline, I’m sorry, he begged her, tears streaming out faster, something in his stomach pulling, a pull that indicated this was where he was he must have expected his life

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would end up, a feeling that regret would live with his soul wherever it went, no matter where it would be. He distantly heard the night train, which meant it was past 1 A.M., and he wouldn’t be getting home any time soon.

Wreckage on the 101 EMILY GOLL-BROYLES.

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Just as the butter was beginning to brown, Oliver laid the steak down in the swirling pool of fat and garlic. The sizzle as it hit the cast iron was music to his ears. He spooned the butter over the meat, treating it with the care that a $50 cut deserved. The smell of rosemary, garlic, and browning meat filled the kitchen and wafted through the screen door. Oliver’s cat, Pickles, turned his nose up to the air in interest. The aroma was not enough to coax him off the sunlit patio, however. Oliver lifted a wine bottle out of the cellar and brushed dust off the label. The bottle was from their last trip to Napa. They had spent the weekend tasting wine and cheese in between walks through the sprawling hills. The sunsets were particularly memorable—Oliver flashed back to the light grazing their entangled bodies.

Oliver sniffled and breathed. He was not going to cry tonight. With a sigh, he turned back to the counter and began plating his dinner. One plate for him, one for David. Pickles finally decided to leave his perch and leaped through the cat door as if he knew exactly what time it was. Oliver sat down and poured himself a glass of wine.

“Cheers my love,” he whispered.

The morning sunrise felt cold, lacking its usual warmth. This morning marked one year without David by his side. They had plans to get married and had planned the perfect honeymoon. That all went to shit after the accident. They were driving down the 101 near Malibu and decided to stop at a scenic overlook. David stepped around the back of the car to get his camera out of the trunk when a car flew over the median and hit him.

Somehow the other driver lived. The wreckage was horrific.

Oliver snapped back into his bed and he tossed the unwashed sheets aside. The nine steps he took to stand in the shower were agonizing; each one proving further that today was not a day to get out of bed. Oliver turned the shower on as hot as it would allow and peeled his sweat soaked boxers off of his body. Every movement took too much effort and Oliver resigned himself to a day of greasy hair—the shampoo bottle just wouldn’t open. After sitting wrapped in a towel on the bathroom floor until all the steam had disappeared, he threw on clothes and made his way to Cynthia’s house.

With a sad, knowing look, she opened the door. No words were appropriate for this day. The two mourners embraced. Cynthia smelled like him, she was his mother after all, and as Oliver inhaled his mind flashed back to nights spent curled up on the sofa. He remembered their first meal together and the countless shared coffees. He remembered a last look in David’s amber eyes before falling asleep. Cynthia held him, and together they cried.

David’s mother had an assortment of flowers, chocolates, and casserole dishes piled on the

Negrón | Goll-Broyles

kitchen counter. Each gift came with a note that invariably said something like, “We’re sorry for your loss.” Strangers’ apologies. They meant so little when confronted with the enormous hole left where David should have been. Cynthia sank into her worn leather armchair and motioned for Oliver to join her. He perched on the armrest of the couch where he and David opened presents every year for Christmas. It felt impossible to relax.

“Do you remember that?” Cynthia asked quietly.

“Sorry, what?” Oliver had been in a sort of trance and Cynthia’s question didn’t quite register.

“Do you remember when David brought you home for the first time,” she repeated, “and he spilled pasta sauce all over his shirt?”

“Of course,” Oliver whispered, “how could I have forgotten meeting you and his dad for the first time.”

Cynthia nodded with an understanding look.

“I knew how much you loved him when I saw how you cleaned his shirt up and gave him a kiss when you thought his father and I couldn’t see. It was beautiful. That was the first time I saw David’s eyes light up in that way,” she choked out, holding back tears.

Oliver remembered that night fondly. He had finally felt at home with David’s family and with David. Startled by the memory, he stood and went to the kitchen as if retracing the steps he and David took that night. Oliver filled a glass of water from the tap and swallowed it while pacing around the island. Cynthia was waiting. He needed to go back out to her. With a sigh, he put the glass in the sink and returned. Out of habit, he sat down on the couch and pulled David’s old crocheted blanket over his lap. He sat back in the couch daydreaming about David’s laugh and his smile. They laughed so much together.

“He was such a happy boy,” Cynthia remarked, as if she could read Oliver’s mind.

“I loved that happy boy,” Oliver choked out with a fleeting smile. Then the tears returned. He pulled the blanket up over his shoulders like a little kid and imagined it was David hugging him.

David was gone but so many memories lingered and Oliver hoped he could find respite in those fleeting flashbacks. David would have hated to see him stuck in bed.

“We should head to dinner soon,” Cynthia said as she patted him on the back.

Oliver nodded solemnly.

“Okay.”

He shrugged the blanket off of his shoulders and stood. Day by day the weight on his back felt lighter, but was still far too heavy.

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Haunted ELIZABETH MOTES

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Victoria Ben first appeared to Victoria when she was twelve. It was during recess, and he was standing across the field next to a tree. He wasn’t translucent like in the stories, but something about him was off, as if he didn’t match the rest of the world. Vic stared at him for a moment, but he didn’t move. Feeling brave and lonely, she approached him.

His age was unclear, looking anywhere from thirteen to fifteen. His face was pale, and he wore a plain white shirt with black pants. Only his blue eyes stood out, striking and sad.

“I’m Victoria,” she had introduced herself. “I go by Vic, though.”

He nodded. “My name is Ben.” She nodded back at him and then left. Her bravery only went so far.

That afternoon when Vic arrived home, Ben had appeared again—right before her eyes this time. He startled her so much that she had almost screamed.

But she calmed down. He was just standing in the middle of her room, appearing lost.

“Are you some kind of ghost boy?” she had demanded.

He looked down. “I guess so.”

“Don’t you know?” Vic took a cautious step forward.

“I—yes, I am. I died and now I’m here.”

“Why here?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “You seemed nice.”

It was the start of a very long friendship.

Ben wasn’t always around—he gave Vic space, but he popped up about as often as a normal, living friend would. Not that she would really know. Ben was her only real friend.

She was grateful for his presence throughout the years. He calmed her as she was starting high school, helped her through her grandfather’s death, and he was there for the little things, like when she didn’t want to do her algebra homework.

Her reliance on Ben scared Vic a bit. She didn’t know the rules of the afterlife, and neither did Ben (so he said). She wasn’t certain he would always be around.

“Why?” Ben had questioned when she had told him this. “It’s not as if I’m going to die.”

“I know,” she’d replied. “But what if you disappear when I turn eighteen or something?”

“Death doesn’t know numbers.” Ben was thankfully pragmatic.

“You promise you won’t disappear suddenly?” Vic confirmed. “Swear on your life?”

He sighed at her usual joke, but still agreed, “Yes, I swear on my life.”

At least Vic had that reassurance.

Ben

Most of what Ben told Victoria was the truth.

He did die at fifteen, leaving him in that permanent age. However, he did not die a few weeks before meeting Victoria.

He died fifty years before meeting her, and he’d been looking for someone like her since then.

That was another lie he told Victoria—that his only ability as a ghost was to make himself appear or disappear for people. He could do that, as well as inhabit a living being. But only one that trusted him, one that loved him unconditionally. It was the only way for him to live again.

He’d gotten close a few times. The young woman, the little boy, the old lady. Each time, he’d simply left them dead without inhabiting them. They hadn’t loved him unconditionally.

Ben had spotted Victoria a few weeks before appearing to her. He had studied her. She thought she was alone, which was much more powerful than her actually being alone. And she Motes

was the right age.

He’d let her approach him, making her feel in control, as if he needed her too. Which was true, in a way.

The rest was history.

Now Victoria was a few months away from leaving for college. He had to act before then— she was likable and would surely find real friends once she left. And slowly detach from him.

He wouldn’t feel any remorse at ending her life. Yes, she was young, with her whole life ahead of her, but he was young once, too.

“What would you do if I disappeared?” he asked that afternoon.

Victoria turned around from her desk with a raised brow. “Are you going to disappear?”

“No,” he assured. “But if I did?”

She shrugged. “I’d be really upset since my best friend would be gone. And it’d be worse since no one but me would know what happened.”

“What about later on?” he prompted. “You wouldn’t have any photos of me. Nothing to remember me by.”

Victoria fully turned to face him. “Are you asking if I’ll forget you?” She made a face. “Of course I wouldn’t. I don’t have any photos of you, but I’d never forget your ugly face.” He frowned, and she smiled. “Ben, you know how much it would suck if you disappeared? I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Her expression darkened. “You’re not going to disappear, right?”

“I’m not,” he said. “As long as you don’t.”

Her smile returned. “Swear on your life?”

“I swear on my life.”

Victoria was silent as he took her life, as if she wasn’t even afraid, because it was Ben. They were always silent, but it was more startling with Victoria—she was always talking, always so animated. But now she was gone.

Ben held up his hands—Victoria’s hands. Real, human hands.

It worked.

He slowly walked around the room. He felt her soft blanket, smelled the food from downstairs, felt the ground beneath his feet. He was truly alive again.

And then he looked in the mirror.

He jumped, because it wasn’t him looking back, it was Victoria. Of course it was—that was the point of this.

Vic stared at him. Haunted.

“Vic!” Her mother called from downstairs. “Dinner!”

Ben didn’t respond. He couldn’t bear to hear Vic’s voice come from him.

What have I done?

This wasn’t right. He tried to bring Vic back, tried to channel the same energy that had taken her away, but he found that it was gone. He was stuck.

“Vic?” Her mother again.

He tried to cry, he wanted to break down into sobs, but he couldn’t. As if whatever produced tears had come from Vic. You swore.

Ben punched the mirror. Once, then again. He ignored Vic’s mother’s calls.

He was hurting Vic, technically, but the real damage had been done—there was no more Vic to hurt.

He picked up a shard of broken glass.

A minute later, Victoria’s mother came upstairs, but when she arrived she found that there was nothing left of Victoria or Ben.

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The Unclean

LINDSAY MORGAN.

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The teapot whistles violently on the stove as the woman removes her toenails one by one.

People used to go to podiatrists to get rid of their ingrown toenails using the ‘barrel roll’ method in which the doctor would cut the nail vertically to roll the piece that stabs into the skin upward and outward to remove it. The process left fresh wounds on both sides of the toe that had to be cleaned so that a new, correctly shaped toenail could grow in from that point forward. The woman had never had an ingrown toenail and the full, unpainted nails that were being placed into a bloodied trash bag looked like the toe version of the acrylic fingernails that people used to wear before The Cleaning. Getting rid of her pinky toenail was the hardest, and she struggled to remove as much as she could of it as the pot began to overflow, water splashing onto the hot coils underneath—exacerbating the hissing. With a final yank, she had gotten the nail off in its entirety, though she had nicked the fleshy part of her toe. Blood quickly pushed through the skin and she quickly cleaned the wound, making sure to avoid getting blood on her gloves so she wouldn’t have to go through the process of taking them off, sanitizing her hands, and donning a new pair of gloves before being able to continue. She exclaimed, “And people go to the Cleaners for this? It’s done much easier at home without the hoopla!” The robot home helper cleaned up the kitchen spill as she hobbled onto her feet. The television turns on and blares as her favorite television show comes on just in time for her to catch the latest episode. The show is live footage of people picking Cleaners, and the Cleaners are clad in matching uniforms, effortlessly gesturing to one another with their fingers smooth, fleshy, and nail-free, trying to predict who will take the next client. A young man wearing slacks, a long-sleeve button-up, and the ceremonial mask walls to the chair of the oldest looking Cleaner, who had been in the business since the beginning.

The old man dons gloves as the youngster sits in his barbershop chair, officially picking him as his Cleaner. From there, the full hygienic process was done to him and he left the shop transitioned from that of the Unclean to the Clean. Finally, the woman couldn’t stand it anymore and ran over to stand in front of her full-length mirror to see herself after her self done transformation. She stared in a sort of happy shock at her reflection—not a fingernail, toenail, eyelash, eyebrow, leg hair, arm hair, facial hair, or strand of hair on her head remained. She squirts the final component into her hands and rubs them together before moving on to sanitize the rest of her body before she is finally able to be accepted into society as one of the Clean. She steps outside of her home as the cameras scan her from head to toe—searching for any of the remnants of her Unclean past. The cameras turn red as an alarm goes off. The woman says into the camera, “They say only the hygienic are right. I am clean. I have been fully sanitized.” The sidewalk becomes a conveyer belt underneath her, and she tries to grip onto the grass on both sides of it so that she isn’t forced back inside. Her arms give out after a while as her newest Unhygienic report sits waiting for her in the living room. It’s never enough.

Red, Chipped Picnic Table LISBETH CORTEZ From my comfortable spot on the red, chipped picnic table, I could sneak a peek at the small, washed out brick house enveloped in long, snaggly vines. But I had to squint. Hard. My view was obscured by tree foliage and the obvious red bridge that ran over the San Antonio River.

This building is rather small, often overlooked compared to the rest of the park, but I have been running at the park long enough to know that it exists. In fact, this small, house-like building has existed for a long time, so long, that it is considered the oldest industrial building in Bexar County1. At one point, the 1878 Pumphouse #1 pumped water into a 5-million-gallon 1 reservoir that served the entire city. However, the pump house is no longer in use, and is now being consumed by nature itself.

That is not what is on my mind right now though. I see it every time I run, every time I take a walk, every time I feed bread to the ducks. (I know. I am not supposed to, but they won’t eat anything else I give them.) A single entity, a tree, takes up every ounce of my attention. I watch it as I sit on the isolated red, chipped picnic table on the other side of the San Antonio River. I watch the long, knobby branches sway back and forth. I listen for the rustle of leaves, the weak hum of the wind, and the soft beating of my heart. I ignored the smell of burning charcoal, the faint but ever-present smell of meat. Grilled meat. I can’t imagine what it would taste like: steak, beef, barbacoa. All the things that I don’t eat. Ever. It was probably barbacoa, a staple in any San Antonio meal. I have heard stories of natives in San Antonio growing up with Sunday get togethers completed with Big Red soda and barbacoa. I always wondered what it would be like to grow up in this culture. My Sundays consisted of church and whatever random restaurant we felt like eating at. I felt the urge to find the source of the smell and ask, “Are you grilling barbacoa?” Anyways, what I miss is the smell of dirt after a recent rain. It smells like what you think it would, earthly. But after a heavy rain, it smells fresh, almost clean, unlike the usual burnt particles that stings your nose every time you take a whiff under the hot, summer sun. It rained the night before, but I guess I came to the park too late. All I could smell was meat and smoke.

The good thing though was that the skies opened just enough to replenish the deprived trees, dying bushes, and overheated grass. My footsteps were soft, barely audible, as I made my way to my favorite red, chipped picnic table. The usual crunch of leaves, twigs, and shifting of loose, dried up dirt was nonexistent. Instead, my black Nikes squished into the ground where the water had not dried up yet. I stared at my footprints in the mud, memorizing the pattern that was left behind.

I sat with my back to the magnificent tree, which is why I didn’t notice it until I was ready to leave. For a few minutes, I sat in silence. The soft, high-pitched whistle of the train pervaded the wide, open space of Brackenridge. The whistle disappeared, but twenty minutes later, it caught my attention again. I wondered how many people would be riding the train at 5:00 on a Wednesday. When the train didn’t occupy my attention, the birds did. There were all kinds of birds chirping distinct but incoherent sounds. They were so unfamiliar to me; I couldn’t even put a name to the sound. I did notice one bird in particular, only because it was the loudest. The grackle. Or as most people know it, the black bird. They are everywhere, common, as their name puts it. However, they aren’t just plain black birds. If you look close enough, their wings gleam purple, blue, and green when they flutter. They are beautiful in their own way, when they aren’t croaking. Every once in a while, the birds would stop chirping, the whistle silenced, and the faint bopping of music stopped, and when it did, you could hear the faint rushing of water. It was so calm.

1

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https://www.brackenridgepark.org/about/mission-history

Cortez

Lisbeth Cortez — Red, Chipped Picnic Table

118

Cortez

When I first saw my tree, I thought it was a bush. A tall oversized, overgrown bush in the shape of a Christmas tree. That was what caught my attention. I love Christmas. I noticed an opening in the branches, a tunnel that took you inside. It reminded like Narnia, so naturally, I went through the opening. I maneuvered under and over branches. Some snagged my jacket; others poked and prodded my arms and legs. Eventually, I found myself standing under the foliage of the tree, so close as I could touch the trunk of the tree. I had to stop the urge to hug it, to see if my arms would wrap all the way around it. Long, thick branches hung low on the trunk. They were thick.

So thick, that some of the branches ran into the ground before bending upwards again, almost like it was too heavy to hold itself up. Smaller, skinner branches extended out like arms. Others stuck out in no apparent, uniform direction. My fingertips brushed against the branch closest to me, the bark darkened from the recent rain, but you could still see little spots of patchy, bright green moss—kelly green. I pulled on a random leaf. It was waxy. And smooth. It didn’t feel real.

I reached for another leaf. This one was scratchy and rough, like sandpaper. I grabbed another and was startled by its softness. Little microscopic hairs covered the leaf, giving it some fluff. I imagine this is what a caterpillar feels like. I felt bad for pulling so many leaves. Habit, I guess. I pulled all sorts of plants when I was a kid.

I inspected the leaves and the tree one last time before realizing that I was looking at leaves from different bushes and weeds. The bushes and weeds grew close to the tree. Close enough that they intertwined with one another to create a single unit. I had an epiphany. This is what happened to the pumphouse. It was not just enveloped by nature, but it became a single unit with the trees and the vines just like the bushes, vines, and weeds became a part of the tree I spend so much time admiring. The pump house wasn’t dilapidated or run down. It wasn’t something that needed to be torn down or distinguished or set apart for tourist purposes. It is simply one with its natural surroundings. It has become a part of Brackenridge Park just as much as the weeds, vines, and bushes created a single tree.

When We Went to 1989 ABBI BOWEN I remember when Julia and I hopped a wall by the river to recreate her parents’ wedding day. The only thing between us and that convent courtyard was a three-foot stone wall with spike-wired bars. We were bored and sad and talking about the moments we remember, even if they didn’t happen to us. I told Julia about the time my mother found out she was pregnant with my brother a week after she caught my father cheating on her with her best friend and she just cried and cried as she vacuumed the hallway in the house we could not afford in 2008. Just moments ago, my wrist was at the steering wheel and our seats were leaned back a couple clicks too far. My head was propped on my hand, elbow resting on the open window and a strand of hair tickled my ear. Julia was playing punk from her California days with the wind whooshing and she told me about the time her mother and father got married at an old convent on the San Antonio river, “They had a mariachi band and everything, I can even hear it.” We wanted to live it, we wanted to know what it was like to be in love in 1989 San Antonio.

It’s 2am and we get a head rush when McCullough becomes Downtown, look there’s an open spot to park on the bridge. The gear strikes P and we start running down the stairs, we can hear the band beckoning us, maybe this is what it’s like. Once we get down the concrete steps by the river, we notice the way the lit windows flicker like the chills between our shoulder blades, as if we struck the lighter and nothing happened. We sense an in between-ness with our toes tucked under the metal bars on top of the stone wall, our heads just hovering over the top spikes.

In a steady and soft voice, Julia says, “This is it. Look, right there under the gazebo was the dancefloor and over there under the trees was the mariachi band and I bet my mom couldn’t stop dancing.”

“Let’s go in,” I say while pointing to a broken chunk of the wall, snug by a thick tree trunk.

Julia helps me hop over first since we both know I’m the least coordinated one—she holds my ass while I swing a leg over the spikes, ignoring the sharp pain on my inner thighs. I wrap my arms around the tree and hop down onto the stone courtyard. I look around if anyone saw, then hold Julia’s hand while she does the same. Swing, wrap, hop.

“It’s so quiet,” she says as she floats her feet to the gazebo. I stay by the edge of the courtyard by our tree to watch her go back to 1989. Now that we hopped the wall, we can see the convent more clearly. About fifty feet in front of us, the convent hovers over the courtyard with lights coming through the trees behind us, dancing on the stone walls. The courtyard is littered with trees, stones circling their bases to create patches of flowers; some with vines climbing up the trunks. I found myself weaving through the trees, giving hello’s and how are ya’s to Julia’s uncles and Abuela and Meemaw while Julia made her way to the dancefloor in the gazebo. I can see the outline of her lanky body pacing on the wooden floor.

We both feel a tug that brings us to the middle of the courtyard where the mariachi band is playing. I know Julia’s eyes are damp even though her face is turned from me as she circles the large tree in the middle of the courtyard. I press PLAY on my phone and manifest the mariachi band that Julia’s mother loved so much.

Julia whips her head to me, “Thank you.”

“Ai, ai,” I start popping my hips side to side with the rhythm of the band, snaps daring Julia to smile. We cha-cha to the gazebo, her mom summoning us to dance with her. A sigh pounds out of us as we fall to the ground and look up where the beams meet in the middle, holding a delicate lantern. Our sweaty skins are sticking to the pollen-coated wooden floor, but all we can feel is the lace of the wedding dress rustle by after every click of her heel.

119

Bowen

First Born SAMANTHA RODRIGUEZ

120

The cold showers in Nicaragua upset me instead of the crippling poverty, corrupt police officers, and unstable “democratic” government. I teeter awkwardly between a tourist and a local, having been born in the United States while my family’s roots are still driven deep in Nicaragua, but I’m not here to just visit family. I’m here to witness birth.

The room smells like a concoction of chemicals that would kill any potential bacteria that unfortunately find themselves in here. I lean against the only pillar in the colorless room as I constantly remind myself not to sit down because the nurses and doctors around me might suspect my exhaustion for idleness. To the left is a metal desk, sprawled with mountains of paperwork, with a nurse quickly filling out one of the forms for the patient in front of me, who is about to give a natural birth.

She’s alone and lays on the first of three low set hospital beds lined up against a wall. She rocks her head side to side as she grimaces and groans, her pelvis flexing and stretching. She draws in quick breaths with forceful exhales as she clutches her slightly swollen stomach. Her feet fall short of the end of the hospital bed and her face has yet to show signs of sagging or marks of time, but her bottomless brown eyes present themselves differently than the rest of her outside appearance. They do their best to withhold the pain.

“Let’s move her to the back,” Dr. Rodriguez, my thirty-five year old cousin and the only reason why I’m able to be here, says as she walks in and puts on her blue shoe covers. The nurse quickly jumps from behind the desk to help move the patient who can barely walk.

“Grab this side of her,” the nurse calls to me before helping the patient up. I recoil myself against the pillar to where the nurse and patient are. I arch my back to wedge my shoulder underneath the patient’s armpits while she winces and yelps from the sudden movement, her body yelling at her to stay still. We swiftly drag her to the birthing room.

“Can you get on top of the bed?” the nurse asks once we finally reach the waist high hospital bed in the birthing room. The patient nods her head and closes her eyes in a silent agreement and gradually lifts her leg to get on to the bed. At the foot of the bed are two large metal foot rests that keep her legs raised and spread apart while she lays down so that the doctor can monitor everything.

My job is to hold her hand. I hold on tightly while caressing the side of her hand with my thumb, the same way my Abuela does. I imagine the baby coming out with a head full of slick black hair with skin that will bronze to the same deep caramel as the mother’s. Maybe the baby will go by the name Suhyla, Marta, Yesenia, Joveli; or if its a boy, Humberto, Jeffery, Jackson, or William. I can imagine the baby all grown, the first of many other siblings to come. Their house, I imagine, will be filled with warmth and laughter over the dinner table — a barrier against the reality outside.

It takes 20 minutes of agony for the baby to finally make its way out. Silence. That’s when the mother starts to cry. Her first born is blue. The baby can easily be cradled by the nurse with one hand. It’s body is flaccid with roughly formed facial features and fingers. It’s eyes are shut, never to be opened. It bares resemblance to the horse fetus in a jar I saw at adventure camp when I was eight. The blood drains from my head and I get light on my feet. My hands are still tightly intertwined with the mother’s but I forget who is really holding whose hand.

Rodriguez

A Loss Whose Color I Picked LUTFI SUN I lost a journal, a milky coffee colored journal that I kept in the 10th grade. She had a name, “the notebook whose color I picked.” Now, thinking about her name, I guess making that decision at the time meant to me that I was a grown up. I had the money and the freedom to go to a kirtasiye (stationery store) and choose and buy a journal for myself. She was the first journal that I kept my promise to. I filled almost all her pages with countless memories, poems, feelings, conversations, stories, shopping lists, prices, my first trip to America, the long silences I had with my brother in that trip, my thoughts about the Turkish government, our Machiavellian president and his fascist cronies… She even knew about my dreams and prayers. I guess after seeing all my dirties, she decided to run away. Or maybe she just didn’t like her name. I looked around and made some effort but didn’t lose myself over losing her.

Two years passed by. I graduated high school and took a gap year. By the time I moved to the United States, I had already forgotten about her. Unbeknownst to me, she had followed my family when my father was removed from his position in Istanbul and transferred to Konya.

She did not remain lost and decided to come back, though not to me. She opened her veil and revealed herself to one of the five police officers who came to our house with a search warrant five days after the July 15th coup attempt. He skimmed through her pages, taking long pauses now and then; he saw my most personal feelings and once caged rages. His eyes were wide open. He looked deeply satisfied for finally having found something tangible, three hours into the house search. I was behind the door, unable to touch anything. The more I thought about what she knew about me, the more scared and lost I felt.

I couldn’t stand there, seeing him looking at her. I went to the living room, which they had already searched. I laid down on the couch, pushing my face as deep as I could into the cushions.

I thought about how the government would use her as evidence for my family participating in the coup attempt. I thought about the labels: traitor, enemy of the state, criminal… We were already called those labels before. I did not care about other people calling me criminal or traitor.

But now it felt real. I betrayed my family. I couldn’t calm myself by calling it just selfish, stupid, careless. I was a traitor to my parents, for not following their extreme care that kept us safe all those years from the claws of this government. I was an enemy to my brothers, for separating them from our father. I was a criminal to my thoughts, for not being able to contain them, for letting them slip away.

I thought about my father going to jail, all because I wanted to fill the pages of a stupid journal, all because I wanted to tell myself. I wanted to be known and discovered as candid as possible. I wanted to see myself unclothed, through her eyes and on her pages. I felt like Adam, when he touched the apple with Eve and was cast on Earth, naked. I imagined seeing my father in prisoner’s clothing, skinny and alone. I felt cold. I imagined my mom crying. Every sob of hers put more pressure on my throat. I felt fear. I imagined my brothers looking at me. Their gazes locked onto my eyes, waiting for the moment I would look up. I couldn’t. I thought the never ending darkness behind my eyelids was more bearable. I chose black.

My journal was found. I was lost. A loss whose color I picked for myself…

121

Sun

Contributors Elyse Andrews is a senior Art, Communication, and Spanish major. She is passionate about illustration and design, and she specifically loves to draw armadillos. Her website is www. elysedraws.com.

To not cheapen the art that Anonymuse makes, they’ve chosen to leave their name unattached.

‘Muse writes the best poetry sitting next to lakes, sipping coffee, paid-in-full, with dirty cash.

Kaylee Avila (she/her) is a sophomore English major and Creative Writing minor. She is currently editor-in-chief of the literary magazine High Noon, but this is her first creative writing publication.

Andja Bjeletich is an eldritch horror who hoards pronouns like gold and can often be found prowling the top floor of the Coates Library. They are a Junior Russian and English major, and enjoy writing poetry, knitting, collecting the tears of their professors, and watching overly pretentious films.

Abbi Bowen is a creative writer who loves to talk about plants and science fiction. They are a senior English and Russian major at Trinity and enjoy writing about their experiences in San Antonio.

Campbell Burke is a freshman from Cincinnati, Ohio. She plans on majoring in History and minoring in Education. She loves to write, color, and watch true crime documentaries!

Danielle Clark is a 3rd year English major and Spanish minor who likes to write bad poetry and edit it into decency. She hopes you agree and is excited to be a part of this year’s Review.

Lisbeth Cortez is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor at Trinity University. She plans to pursue a career in book publishing as an editor and hopefully continue to spread her love for books. If she is not running, she can be found reading a Joyce Carol Oates novel.

Kit Cura is a senior English Major and Creative Writing minor. Lately, they’ve spent their time juggling a myriad of writing projects, baking carrot cakes, and marathoning nature documentaries.

Kit is a strong advocate for diversity in the literary world, and, writing aside, their interests include road trips, wildlife photography, the supernatural, and girls. You can contact them at catacura@ gmail.com.

Austin Davidson is a Senior English major from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has always wanted to photograph a dragon but hasn’t found the time. He hopes to travel to New Zealand one day and visit Hobbiton.

Kendra Derrig is a senior English and computer science double major. She hails from Seattle, Washington, and she will not stop talking about it. Someday, she will own many houseplants.

Ariana Fletcher-Bai is a Trinity University Senior poet and fiction writer currently quarantined in Houston, Texas. She has been previously published in the Trinity Review and High Noon.

Hannah Friedrich is a junior English major and a tutor in the Writing Center. She enjoys coffee, sweaters, and staring at her phone for a good thirty minutes before getting out of bed in the morning. She is only capable of writing when avoiding something important or facing down a deadline.

Jessica Garcia-Tejeda is a sophomore majoring in Computer Science. She is a Colorado native, likes to do photography, and is fluent in three languages.

Emily Goll-Broyles is a rising sophomore and Psychology major from Houston, Texas. Most of her creative time has been spent focused on photography, but she recently started writing to accompany some of her photo pieces and fell in love with the craft. Her work focuses on themes of relationships, beauty in the mundane, and grief.

Ryanna Henson is a Sophomore Urban Studies student. Her passion for photography has gone back to the beginning of time. She sees it as a way to save the moments people may otherwise forget.

Hannah Hsu is a rising senior from Houston studying Choral Music Education and Creative Writing.

In addition to being a movie-talker, video essay enthusiast and painter, Hannah enjoys biking, eating carbs, and curating Spotify playlists copiously. Aside from writing songs, plays, poems and essays, she is a mezzo-soprano, an active member and leader in Intervarsity Christan Fellowship, a member of TU Chamber Singers, and Founder and Music Director of Soli Deo Gloria a cappella.

Raini Huynh is a junior, majoring in Computer Science. He has no middle name and is open to suggestions.

Camille Johnson is a junior Anthropology major with minors in African American Studies and History. Growing up in Oregon, Camille has always had a passion for the natural world. She has always loved the creativity of writing, and she hopes to continue this hobby throughout her life.

Thom Van Zandt Johnson (he/him/his) is a senior Communications and Classical Languages double major, and a Creative Writing minor. In his free time, you can find him on Wikipedia, or in his kitchen trying to bend silverware with the sheer force of his mind, in hopes of discovering latent psychic powers.

Declan Kiely is a senior Environmental Studies Major with a focus in Policy, and a Creative Writing minor. He got his start in poetry while participating in the SLAM poetry scene of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

These three poems are Declan’s third, fourth, and fifth poems to be published, with previous publications in This Land literary magazine and the Trinity Review, and another coinciding publication in the High Noon literary magazine spring 2020 issue.

Rebecca Kroger is an incoming Senior who is majoring in English and Classical Studies. One of the two co-editors of the Trinity Review, Rebecca also tutors for the writing center and is captain of the Ultimate Frisbee team. She loves adapting Classical stories into a modern, more applicable setting.

Ana Lee prefers to remain anonymous but they hope you enjoy their poem. They want you to try to be kinder to yourself and they encourage you to write some poetry, even if only for yourself.

Alyssa Machajewski is a junior Anthropology major. She’s always loved photography because she read too many National Geographic magazines growing up. She wants to thank her dad for getting her started and trusting her with his camera.

Isaiah Mitchell likes to play with his dogs and build things. He’s a senior English major who writes sometimes for fun, and though he’s a good shot he hates country music and is very bad at riding horses.

Lindsay Morgan is a senior English major, creative writing minor. She loves to write flash fiction, poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction, but her favorite thing to write is poetry. She hopes to continue to write in the future.

Elizabeth Motes is a freshman English major and Creative Writing minor. She’s been writing fiction for three years now and is thrilled to have her work published for the first time. Find her writing Instagram @eliz.writes Elena Negrón is a sophomore from Houston, Texas currently studying English and Communication.

She loves to write about family, her Puerto Rican heritage, and sunsets.

Kate Nuelle is a junior art and art history double major. She is a photographer for the Trinitonian and the Mirage Yearbook. In her freetime, she enjoys painting and embroidery.

Grant Peterson is a junior comp-sci major/art minor from Boulder, Colorado. He sometimes writes poetry and short prose for fun, and enjoys photography as well. His motivation to create tends to rise at inopportune moments, so he occasionally finds himself neglecting classwork—or much more often, sleep—in pursuit of exploring sudden and immediate ideas.

Samantha Rodriguez is a sophomore, majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology while minoring in creative writing. One of her go-to spots off-campus is Brews Lee Tea Station, so that she can satisfy her boba addiction.

Tiana Sanchez is a senior English major who currently draws inspiration in her writing from a professor here at Trinity. She tries to write with the raw honesty and emotion that Dr. Carlisle displays in her book We Are All Shipwrecks. Her preferred genre to write in is poetry.

Lutfi Sun is an international student from Turkey. He is majoring in Economics and Mathematics.

He studied abroad last year in London. He wants to get a PhD in economics and teach for the rest of his life. He likes all animals and is especially in love with praying mantises and snakes. He is a passionate tea brewer server and drinker.

Adam Toler is a senior Religion major, Chemistry minor from Austin, TX. He will be attending Yale Divinity School’s MAR program in the Fall as his next step towards attaining a PhD in Religious Studies. Adam enjoys exploring conceptions of relatable divinity in comic books, and if he were to suggest one comic book to you, it would be Mister Miracle by Tom King.

Joy Ekponoudim Umoekpo is a senior psychology major at Trinity University and this is her first published story in the Trinity Review. Joy is from Houston, TX and has enjoyed writing stories since she was in elementary school. She hopes you enjoy her story and wants to thank you for taking the time to read it.

Mai Vo is a sophomore from Hanoi, Vietnam, double-majoring in Piano Performance and Communication with a minor in Film Studies. In her free time, she practices the piano and the organ, but she also likes to compose short piano pieces and collaborating with other students to make music. Her inspiration comes from the thought that “everything is enough just the way it is”

and from her family, whom she loves dearly but can only visit once or twice a year. She likes to take pictures because it is so much more than focusing and pressing a button, it is showing the world in a different way that makes people think deeper and giving others insight to her perspective.

R.W. is a senior, majoring in Wumbology with a minor in Memes. For creative inspiration, R.W. often looks to the happenings of everyday life, in addition to movies and TV shows. Outside of professional life, R.W. is a fan of birds, nature docuseries, and ice cream.

Maddie West is a freshman from Arlington, Texas who is intending on majoring in History. She enjoys cats and existentialism.

Our Team Staff Members Robin Bissett, Co-Editor Rebecca Kroger, Co-Editor Rachel Barnett Grant Peterson Naomi Scheer Yasmin Subawalla Special Thanks to Ruby Contreras Stephanie Velasquez and Creative Writing Faculty Kelly Gray Carlisle Andrew Porter

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