LWHS LitMag 2020

LitMag 2020

Issue 106

2020

Lick-Wilmerding High School, San Francisco

LitMag

LITMAG 2020

Tokyu Plaza, Shibuya photo by Tyler Keim

EDITORS Charlotte Lokey Indigo Mudbhary Primo Lagaso Goldberg ASSOCIATES Khalil Daterra Roma Edwards Audrey Gallagher Nick Gaensler Tyler Keim Phoebe Klebahn Sofia Morris Marcello Paganini Shanie Roth James Spokes William Stafford ADVISOR Robin von Breton

LitMag is published each spring by the Literary Magazine Club of Lick-Wilmerding High School and is funded by the school.

Any student currently attending Lick-Wilmerding may submit art and literature by email to rvonbreton@lwhs.org or by placing a hard copy of your submission in the LitMag submission folders.

SPRING 2020 The Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic Lick-Wilmerding High School 755 Ocean Avenue San Francisco, California 94112 (415) 333-4021 rvonbreton@lwhs.org Š Lick-Wilmerding High School

LITMAG 2020

Contents Front and Back Cover, photo by Carolyn Lau Cover Design by Primo Lagaso Goldberg Frontispiece, Tokyu Plaza, Shibuya, photo by Tyler Keim Frontispiece, Boy with the Yellow Hat, photo by Shanie Roth Afternoon Sun, story by Indigo Mudbhary......................................................1 An ode to my hair, poem by Alexandra Pate....................................................5 Sunday, two verses by Phoebe Klebahn............................................................6 Empty Space I&II, paintings by Roma Edwards.............................................6 Cornered, drawing by Audrey Gallagher..........................................................8 Little Boys, story by Mud Bentley.....................................................................9 Las Calles Están Vivas, drawing by Naima Blanco-Norberg........................12 415 Day, drawing by Naima Blanco-Norberg................................................13 You Want Some of This, story by Toby Taylor-Cohen..................................14 Silver Soul, collage by Nayeli Rodriguez.........................................................18 Hardware, photo by James Spokes...................................................................19 Under Pressure, story by Elliot Singer.............................................................20 Swear, painting by Evan Aubry........................................................................24 Rooftop Insomniac, story by Ylva Bosemark.................................................25 Multitudes, photo by Primo Lagaso Goldberg...............................................29 Flying High, story by Shiven Sankalia............................................................30 Sometimes It’s All Very Overwhelming, drawing by Mira Larrance...........31 Facedown, story by Evan Yee...........................................................................32 Swimming I, drawing by Roma Edwards.......................................................36 Just Enough Mess, story by Zach Vachal........................................................37 Swimming II, drawing by Roma Edwards.....................................................39 Ernest, Chapter 1, novel excerpt by Julia Hatfield.........................................42 View Over the Bay, photo by James Spokes....................................................47 Lauren I & III, photos by Luca Iribarren................................................48 & 49 Elmo’s World, story by Ruben Rathje.............................................................50 Higher Calling, photo by Luca Iribarren........................................................54 Goodbye, story by Caroline Ruppert..............................................................55 Rainbow Coast, photo by Khalil Daterra.......................................................58 Mountains, photo by Khalil Daterra...............................................................59 Bright Spot, story by Evan Yee........................................................................60

Self Portrait, drawing by Roma Edwards.......................................................66 Transcribed Thoughts of 17 Year Old Girl, painting by Roma Edwards....67 August 15, 1947, story by Ananya Sridhar......................................................68 Pastel Portrait, chalk pastel by Luke Jasso......................................................72 Seal, oil painting by Luke Jasso........................................................................73 In Transit, painting by Roma Edwards...........................................................74 I Hate Men Who Can Be Angry, story by Greg Kalman.............................75 Sky Meets Sea, photo by Luca Iribarren.........................................................76 The War, story by Mud Bentley.......................................................................77 Samiyah, photo by Shanie Roth......................................................................80 Scarlet, photo by Shanie Roth.........................................................................81 Belief, essay by Phoebe Klebahn......................................................................82 Playing in Chefchaouen, photo by Gabe Castro-Root..................................83 Skyward, photo by Carolyn Lau.....................................................................86 Barge, photo by Khalil Daterra.......................................................................87 Corporate Geometry, photo by Luca Iribarren..............................................88 The Interrogation, story by Calum MacDermid............................................89 Sidewalk Clock, painting by Audry Gallagher...............................................93 Rush Hour, story by Ylva Bosemark...............................................................94 6:36, Evening Commute, Ginza, photo by Tyler Keim................................95 Only You, photo by Primo Lagaso Goldberg.................................................99 Stars and Salt, photo by Gabe Castro-Root..................................................100 Rusted Time and Star Trails, photo by Gabe Castro-Root............................101 Greta, 6 Feet Away, photo by Shanie Roth..................................................102 Invisible Enemy, story by Jasmine Franklin.................................................103 Woman at Tel Aviv Pride, photo by Shanie Roth........................................107 Birkenstocks, drawing by Phoebe Klebahn..................................................108 Sweet Muscle, story by Sophia Maneschi.....................................................109 Wobbly Walking, drawing by Roma Edwards.............................................113 A Couplet of Twins, poem by Evan Yee........................................................114 don’t know, poem by Kaya Shin-Sherman...................................................116 Fragments, drawing by Roma Edwards........................................................117 Skin Test, story by Indigo Mudbhary...........................................................118 Skin Test Illustration, drawing by Primo Lagaso Goldberg..........................119 An Ethical Dinner Dilemma, story by Evan Yee.........................................122 Ratograph, lithograph by Natali Kim............................................................123

Woman with a Purple Jaw, water color by Roma Edwards.......................124 An Entirely Incorrect History of the Universe, story by Mud Bentley.......125 L Train Over Chicago, photo by Tyler Keim................................................129 The Glue, letter to Nonno by Sophia Maneschi.........................................130 Soft White, photo by Shanie Roth...............................................................133 Ready to Ride photo by Gabe Castro-Root...................................................134

LitMag Essentials Lick-Wilmerding has a vibrant, diverse student community with enormous creative energy. The LitMag, published by the student-run LitMag Club, offers all students a venue to share their creative writing and art, their explorations and reflections on their world.

Any student may join the staff of the LitMag. The editors are chosen by the previous year’s editors and the advisor.

Any student may submit their work to LitMag and may submit multiple pieces.

The staff of LitMag welcomes all forms and styles of creative writing, fiction, poetry, plays, essays, creative non-fiction, and memoir. We look for work that is fresh and distinct, written in an authentic, compelling voice, whatever the genre or however experimental. Non-fiction is carefully fact-checked. Manuscripts must be typed. All texts should have a title and be signed. Digital submission is preferred but students may also turn in a physical copy by handing it to a member of the staff or the advisor of LitMag or by placing it in the LitMag submission box in the English office. Each work of art should be scanned or photographed and submitted digitally. All submissions are read (or viewed) as anonymous. The staff, in community, chooses which pieces to publish.

The editorial staff reserves the right to edit for minor errors and in some cases to return a piece to its author for requested corrections. Authors and artists retain the copyright to their work but grant the right for the editors to use selections as appropriate for the needs of the magazine.

How we created this magazine: LitMag 2020 was intended to be a print publication—but due to Covid-19, we had to publish digitally, by ISSUU. Normally LitMag production takes place in the MacLab on the Lick-Wilmerding campus. This year, LitMag was birthed by students working from satellite “offices” throughout the Bay Area—their home where they sheltered-in-place. The staff used copies of InDesign 2018 and 2020 running not on the School’s powerful big Macs in the school’s MacLab where files could be easily accessed from the school’s campus-only server—but on personal laptops running on unstable internet connections. All files had to be transferred from Dublin and shared as Google files. Meetings of the editorial board—the editors and associates—to choose texts and art to use and then to design and lay out the magazine were by Zoom and lasted late into several nights.

The editors, Charlotte Lokey, Primo Lagaso Goldberg, and Indigo Mudbhary designed and laid out the magazine. Charlotte Lokey led the design of spreads that paired texts with art. The staff is grateful to Adrianna Delgadillo for taking the final PDF of the finished LitMag 2020 manuscript and turning it into ISSUU to be distributed by email.

All titles are printed in 14 pt Futura and the first three words of each text are printed in 11 pt Futura. The body text is printed in 11 pt Garamond.

Boy with the Yellow Hat photo by Shanie Roth

Afternoon Sun

by Indigo Mudbhary The apartment was warm. Not the fake sort of warm that comes from an electric heater and leaves you sweaty and your body dripping. No, this was real warm. This was the warm that can only come from the sun, the type of warm that feels like a thousand rays of sunshine are permeating through every pore in your skin and causing your insides to glow golden. This was sunshine, the type of warmth that comes before something good.

The apartment didn’t seem to have walls that separated it from the outside because the walls were made of windows. My stomach clenched every time I got too close to one because I thought I would fall right out.

The apartment faced east, so on a day like this, it was almost as if there was not a crevice of the house that wasn’t completely saturated in the warm glow of the midday sun.

My torso still ached from the bear-like hug my auntie had given me a few minutes ago as we (my baba, my bhai, and me) had stepped across the wooden threshold of the apartment. I remember thinking the floor felt like clouds. We had taken off our shoes outside before entering and my bare feet had stung from the cold marble floor. When we crossed the threshold of the apartment, a paper cutout of Ganesha hanging above our heads, my feet sunk into an inch of solid fluff. So this is warmth, I thought, as I felt the rays of sun seep through the window and onto my body.

Now we were shuffling down a hallway, single-file, to meet my great auntie. She was one of the many Nepali women who put oil into my father’s ears when he was an infant and bathed him when he could not walk. She was the one who had fed him aloo and saag when he could not feed himself, and now he was coming to her, bringing with him a child of his own. I could tell she was important to my baba by the way he kept anxiously touching his finger to the jagged scar on his forehead, as if checking it was still there.

We walked into an annex room. There was a figure wrapped in a pink and gold sari facing the window, standing in a pool of yellow sun.

When she turned to look at us, I remember thinking that her smile looked just like the golden pool of sunshine she had been standing in. Her silver hair fell like two waterfalls on either side of her face and her skin was the color of the tea that my amma drinks in the morning, with milk and two sugars. Her face was wrinkled but soft, like an old silk cloth. When she smiled, the wrinkles on her face smiled with her.

My father bowed his head to her, a sign of respect. She remained

1

still as my dad continued to hunch, bowing to her. She paused for another moment, then touched his hair, blessing him and allowing him to stand back up. I could almost hear the sigh of relief leak out of him. My bhai then pressed his hands together for namaste, and she smiled. Her diamond nose stud hit the sun just right when she smiled then, and in that moment, it looked as if she herself had become the sun. From that moment, I was completely and utterly enraptured by her; I knew this from the way my feet felt as if they had been glued to the spot and I could hear the steady thump thump of my heart in my ears.

In the heat of my enamorment with her, I found that everything I knew about Nepalese manners had been forgotten. As if my body had been possessed by a malignant spirit, I found my arm suddenly thrusting out a thumbs up. This made her giggle. Her whole body started to shake when she laughed, causing the green tassels of her sari to shake as if they were laughing too.

I tried to say sorry in my broken Nepalese, red heat rising to my cheeks, but that just made her laugh more. Usually when I speak Nepalese it feels like chewing tinfoil in my mouth because of the way the syllables sound so unnatural to my Americanized tongue. But in that moment, as my auntie and her green tassels started to shake from laughter, my Nepali felt like liquid molasses—so smooth, so perfect, and so unnaturally sweet.

She turned to the corner, where there were stored three woven Nepalese stools. When she walked, she looked like a weeping willow tree blowing in the wind, left to right to left to right. As she stooped over to pick up the stools, arranging them in a semi-circle, I remember feeling butterflies in my stomach. My eyes started to glaze over, watering from not blinking, as I realized I had been staring at her for almost a minute.

I sat down on the small, woven stool, immediately feeling like my limbs were too big. These stools were designed for short Nepalis of five feet and I was too long and too big and too American to be sitting here.

Ashamed blush on my cheeks, I tried to fold my arms and legs up onto the stool, but was interrupted as my auntie came back from the kitchen with a bright blue basket of orange clementines. My embarrassment was soon forgotten as we spent the afternoon partaking in the national pastime of Nepal: sitting in the sun, eating oranges, gossiping—passing the time in the most idle of ways.

I don’t remember anything that was said during that conversation-the gossip that was exchanged, the news that was shared, the jokes that were told--anything. All I remember was that I would keep looking back at my great auntie, sticky orange juice dripping from hands, and she would look at me with a knowing smile that seemed to say that she saw past my broken Nepalese and awkward namastes, that she knew exactly who I was, who I had been, and who I was going to be. When she sent that knowing smile my way, it felt as if I was glowing inside, that she had transferred some of that warm midday sunshine right into my very being.

2

I spent the whole afternoon entranced by her, watching the green tassels on her scarf shake when she laughed, noticing how she would tuck a strand of silver hair into her headscarf when she was about to make a joke, and how her wrinkled brown feet could not keep still. She was always dancing to the beat of some music that the rest of us could not hear.

She did not speak English and my Nepali was too broken for me to convey the extent to which I had fallen in love with her that afternoon.

But we conversed nonetheless—through looks and giggles and smiles and glances. When she laughed her resonant laugh, I would laugh too, and that laughter would make her laugh even more, and though nothing was said in those moments, I realized that everything that needed to be said was conveyed through the laughs and giggles we shared that bounced off the walls of that tiny room.

When the conversation turned into rapid-fire Nepalese that I couldn’t keep up with, I would start to look out the window at the dusty afternoon sky, daydreaming about being fluent in the language that felt so much sweeter on my tongue than the acid sharpness of the English I had been kidnapped into speaking. In these moments, she would reach over a warm, wrinkled hand and put it in my lap, and all would be at peace.

As the afternoon went on, the shadows grew longer and eventually my baba and bhai began to rise, making the customary excuses that it was late, that we needed to go, that there were other relatives to visit, other places to be, other things that needed doing. But I was too entranced to hear them. It was as if I was underwater and their voices were just sounds from far, far away. All I could focus on was how soft and perfect my auntie’s hand felt in mine, like smooth silk to my rough sandpaper fingers.

She knew it was time to go, and shakily rose from the wicker stool, and I rose with her. The only thing I remember that was said that afternoon was what she said in that moment, which was that we were like two mountains rising from rest. I didn’t know what she meant but I knew that she meant it. And before my head could catch up to what she had said, she pulled me toward her, enveloping me in a hug and wrapping her soft arms around my torso.

I will never forget that hug--the way her soft cotton sari caressed my bare skin, the way her hands felt like a soft summer breeze when she rubbed my back, how she smelled like tea and honey and turmeric all wrapped up in one scent, and how as she wrapped her arms around my torso her tight squeeze made my body feel like it had finally gained the piece that it had been missing all this time. My baba, bhai, and auntie were all heading for the door, but we were both rooted to the floor, her chocolate brown eyes searching mine. I wondered how they could not see what had been forged between us that afternoon and how our souls had attached.

“Indigo! Luh,” said my bhai, cocking his head to the door as he pulled a fleece glove onto his hand.

I took one last look at her, my great auntie wrapped in pashmina

3

silks like a beautiful cocooned caterpillar that was just about to erupt with beauty and light and everything good in this world. And then I turned away, stepping out to the foyer to lace up my blue canvas shoes so we could go to visit the next relative, do the next thing that needed doing. I couldn’t help but notice a drop of water shaped just like a tear on the blue fabric of my shoe as I bent down to tie them.

4

An ode to my hair

by Alexandra Pate When I was little, you made me cry.

You still do, sometimes.

But back then it was worse All the other kids laughed at me The teachers too, And I hated you for it, I hated you I hated you I hated you And then I tolerated you

I won’t deny it: I’ve wanted to cut And curl And straighten you To change you was my goal To silence your power.

But I realize now that you would just come back.

Stronger Bigger Fuller As if you weren’t all those adverbs When I was in 3rd grade, I went to a convention with my mom before A hair convention Since the day I was born, I learned how to move you, You have taken me on the ride of my Shape you life Mold you Mainly, I learned ways to control you Through 10-12 hairstylists Thousands of types of shampoo And it worked!

Conditioners (Sort of ) Detanglers Protectives I remember And other products for which I have no My mom tied you up name She braided you You have broken at least 6 combs per And twisted you year And pulled you And are the reason I have a, And it worked!

“Brush collection” (for 18 hours or so) it’s taken me a while to come close To even accepting you You didn’t like being tied And by the end of the day, But sometimes…

All the ties that held you back I think that maybe, Had snapped Just maybe, You burst free I might love you.

Not falling back to earth, But shooting outward like the rays of the sun Defying Gravity, like Elphaba

5

Sunday

by Phoebe Klebahn The kiss His hand flicks the lighter back and forth Sending small sparks heavenward.

He leans close to the fractured flames And the cinders bite my lips.

Empty Space I goauche painting by Roma Edwards

6

The sky An endless stretch of blue terry cloth envelopes us, Flecked with streaks of white and threads of silver and gold.

I wrap my fingers in the grass and giggle, clinging on against the upward pull.

Empty Space II goauche painting by Roma Edwards

7

Cornered marker drawing by Audrey Gallagher

8

Little Boys

by Mud Bentley We laugh, snot-faced and touchy, like little monkeys who can’t help ourselves. The school yard is concrete, with patches of gravel and grass and a bundle of branches in a corner we have thoroughly explored.

We’re in with the older kids, giants who roam the school, legs longer than our entire bodies. They mostly ignore us, so we laugh and giggle and touch and snot to ourselves. Marley is my age, and he smells like spittle. His voice sounds like he is choking on sand. He is the fastest runner of the first-year boys. I’m slow, like a slug. A blond-haired slug, he says. For motivation, he says, and he laughs at me. I follow Marley around because sometimes he laughs with me and we giggle and fall over and he’ll make a joke about someone else. He makes the best jokes.

Back inside, Marley is in the other room, playing the typing game, the one where the lizard eats the ants if you get the right letter. He turns and smiles and stands up to whisper something in my ear. I lean in and cup my ear in case anyone else can hear what Marley’s saying. His breath is warm and tickles my cheek.

“Elijah… is a girl,” he says, and he opens his mouth and makes a sound like a cement mixer, which is his laugh.

“But, he’s a boy,” I say. I’m confused. He grabs my arm and pulls me to the big room with the windows and the white board. Other kids flutter about like bugs. There’s a red circle carpet that spans the length of the room and Marley points at it. Elijah and a couple of the first-year girls are sitting there. He is smaller than us, flimsier, and his voice is a high squeal.

He is wearing shoes with cartoon kittens on them. He stands up and does a cartwheel on the red carpet, and the girls cheer. I look at Marley, who is smiling and pointing.

“He’s a girl,” he says, and we both stumble into each other sniggering. I grab him and we laugh together. I don’t get it, really, but Marley is laughing and it’s fun to laugh with him. By the time we stop laughing, the red carpet is empty. ~ Wellington is a big man, red faced and round. He speaks strangely, stretching the words a little too far. He’s Portuguese, he says, when we ask him about it. Wellington is nice. He never scares us. We can laugh in front of him and he never gets upset. Sometimes he even laughs with us, booming and smiling wide. He stoops down like some great old orangutan, burly and wide-faced, herding and worrying about us.

I can tell he’s upset when he marches us out to the school yard,

9

but I have no idea why. Down the steps, onto the gravel. The school yard is empty except for us. It’s strange to see it empty, when most of the time it’s filled with laughter and screams of other kids. Marley and I stand side by side, looking at our feet. We forget everything we’ve done today. We look up at Wellington in his huge face, and he asks us why we had been laughing at Elijah. Neither of us say anything, and we steal a glance at each other, which is enough for me to see Marley’s faint smile. I try not to laugh, but I can’t hold it and I snort. Marley giggles.

“He doesn’t act like a boy!” Marley shouts in a grimy whine.

“Yeah!” I shout. Wellington only looks down at us, looming and red-faced. He is not laughing.

“How do you know he is a boy?” Wellington’s angry voice is short and fast, different. We stop laughing. We don’t know. Do we? Why is Wellington talking about this? I thought we were in trouble. We look at each other again, and back at Wellington. Then Marley’s grin comes back and his sandpaper voice starts to say, “Because–” “Because he has a penis?” Wellington cuts in. We devolve into a spiral of laughter and snorts at that word. We aren’t supposed to say it, only in private talks with parents, and it just came out of Wellington’s huge red face, out of nowhere. His face is redder, now, and he looks disappointed and confused, not saying anything, which means we can keep laughing. ~ Marley and I have a playdate that afternoon. My mom picks us up and drives us back to my house. The car seat is uncomfortable, because I’m using my little brother’s while Marley sits in mine, and it pokes into my back. At home, my mom lets us out and tells us not to go too far away from the house. We play outside in the driveway, picking at the moss of late spring that builds up on the cement and stone walls. The lavender in front of the house is in full bloom, and we pick it, too, and throw it at each other until we see a bee and scream and run away, back up the driveway to safety.

“Have you kissed anyone?” Marley asks, turning to me.

“I kissed my mom and my dad and my brother.” I say.

“Your family doesn’t count.”

“I never kissed anyone, that’s gross.” I say, making a face. We sit there, playing with the rocks and throwing them into the road. I have a scrape on my knee that I’m ignoring.

“I dare you to kiss me on the lips!” Marley says, jumping up suddenly. I squeal and cover my mouth with my hands. Then I get up and look at him. He’s serious.

“Okay,” I say. He gets closer and leans forward, on his tip toes even though I’m shorter than him. I lean forward, too, and push my lips out. As soon as they touch his lips we both pull away and shriek and dance around the driveway rubbing our mouths with our sleeves. Marley turns on the hose and sprays himself in the face.

“Do me!” I say. “Do me!”

10

The school yard is back to normal. I am scampering through the legs of the big kids. A tetherball swings and nearly hits me and they yell at me, tell me to get out of their game, so I move out of the way. Elijah and his friends are playing over by the branches in the corner. I walk up to them and wait. I don’t say anything. They are playing a game together, I think.

Pretending something. Maybe they’re pretending to be a family. Or animals.

Or a family of animals. One of them sees me and points, saying something to Elijah and the others. They all suddenly run and hide behind their fortress of branches. Their eyes peek out at me.

“Can I play with you?” I ask. They don’t respond, except for one of them, who hisses at me. So it was animals. I guessed right.

I go look for Marley. Maybe he’ll play with me.

11

12

Left: Las Calles Estรกn Vivas Right: 415 Day marker drawings by Naima Blanco-Norberg

13

You want some of this?

by Toby Taylor-Cohen “You want some of this?” said my friend’s voice cutting through the indistinguishable chatter of the busy bus stop behind me. I had never heard his voice this angry. I turn around to see Christian squaring up with a bum. And when I say bum, I don’t mean a homeless person. I’m not prejudiced. There’s homeless people like Vinnie, the friendly homeless man at the Safeway on 29th and Mission who will always ask you how your day is going, maybe talk about music, or pet your dog, and then there’s bums... Crazy eyed, toothless and unpredictable, loudly ranting to no one in particular about the government infecting San Francisco’s water supply with a mind controlling virus.

Yeah, this was a bum, which was not uncommon at this particular bus stop. I had seen this man here before. He wore the same once white shirt, sweatpants, and the one sockless shoe he had on last time. He had a seemingly uncontrollable rocking and swaying disposition in the way he moved. He stumbled a little whenever he walked, although he seemed used to it. His presence made people uncomfortable so there was a small perimeter around him separating him from the small crowd. But he seemed harmless, mostly keeping to himself with the occasional outburst of nonsense.

“You want some of this?” Christian said again, this time pointing at his raised fist. The bum looked at Christian, trying unsuccessfully to steady his swaying head and smiled his four-toothed smile. It was pretty clear this poor man was oblivious to the situation he was in.

As this scene plays out, the 29 pulls into the bus stop and I get on, naively thinking Christian will follow behind and drop whatever conflict had arisen. I was wrong. I turned around on the bus to find him in the same spot I left him.

“Alright you asked for it!”

“Christian come on let’s g—” I begin to say vainly when Christian suddenly lunges forward. He’s like a lion pouncing on its prey in those Planet Earth documentaries on Netflix. Stunned, I watched in slow motion as Christian’s fist made perfect contact with the bum’s jaw. This is only the fourth time I’ve seen someone get punched like that. There’s an unforgettable, indescribable sound of flesh striking flesh. It could never be recreated in a movie with sound effects. It’s a visceral sound. If you’ve ever heard it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Before I, or any of the other spectators on their daily commute home from work, knew what was happening, they were both on the ground. I couldn’t see what was going

14

on, which in hindsight I’m not unhappy about, but I could hear it. The yells of the spectators, the spine-tingling thud sounds. I remember seeing one elderly woman gasp and clutch a giant pot of beans close to her chest, horrified. A pair of excited middle schoolers recorded the fight on their phones. Then, suddenly, Christian popped up into the doors of the bus next to me unscathed, as if nothing had happened. The bus doors close and we drive off. All eyes are on us.

I met Christian two weeks ago at my local skatepark, which is where two of the other times I’ve seen someone get punched took place.

He was standoffish at first. We both skated the park without talking to each other until a few mutual friends, other local kids, showed up. We became friends pretty quickly, finding that we had both moved to the city from nearby neighborhoods in the Peninsula. He knew many of the people I went to middle school with and went to the same tween hangout spots.

After a few times hanging out, skating, he invited me over to his place, which felt kind of like a big deal in this new friendship. It was a Saturday morning and I realized I was hungry on the way. So, I stopped by Safeway to get a box of Annie’s white cheddar mac and cheese, making sure to give the change to Vinnie on my way out.

Following my phone navigator, I ended up in a part of the city I had never been to before, a place I never had a reason to go before this.

I passed plenty of homeless people and plenty of bums. There was one bum standing nonchalantly at the entrance of a Burger King with a needle syringe sticking out of his forehead.

Christian met me outside of his building and brought me in.

He led me down a long hallway lined with identical beige doors and a long dingy dark green carpet. Each door emitted a different noise as we passed by. Some had music, some had yelling and swearing, some had pleasant conversation, and some were just silent. Each sound faded into the background cacophony as we got farther away from its respective door.

“Sorry, my mom is home right now, she’s gonna leave for work in a sec though.”

“That’s fine, I’m pretty good with parents. I’m hella polite.”

Christian smiled at me. “I don’t know if that’s really gonna matter.”

We enter one of the doors into a small, dimly lit room the size of the inside of a small RV. There was one bunk bed that took up a third of the room with a girl that couldn’t have been much older than us on the top bunk. She was on her phone and didn’t look up when we came in. There was a small minifridge with a microwave on top and at the other side of the room was a small, dirty closet with clothes spilling out of the open doors.

That’s about all that fit in in the room. I expected there to be another door connecting to the rest of the apartment, but Christian raised his arms and said, “Well, this is it.”

I had never been in a living space this small and I tried to keep my

15

surprise contained and act nonchalant. All of a sudden a stout flustered woman burst out of the closet.

“Christian did you fucking take my lighter?” This must be his mother.

“I didn’t touch your lighter, Mom.” Christian sighed.

Then the focus shifted to me. “This is my friend Toby.”

I smiled at her trying to be polite and started to introduce myself but was immediately interrupted.

“Yea, yea, nice to meet you,” she said sarcastically, “I’m late to work.” she threw her purse over her shoulder, “Feed the damn dogs.” The door slammed shut. That was quite a first impression. It certainly made Christian laugh.

I had a good time that day lazily hanging out with Christian and his sister in that room. They both were warm and friendly and had the same sense of humor which created a lively dynamic between us. I could tell they were best friends. They both had a down-to-earth maturity about them that I would later learn came from growing up having to rely on each other for things that their mom didn’t provide.

I met the two tiny dogs their mom had mentioned and their dad, who lived in a different room in the same building. I never found out why that was but there seemed to be some tension around the subject, so I didn’t ask. He was much friendlier than Christian’s mom, showing more in common with Christian and his sister. A few times throughout the day I started feeling self-conscious. It would hit me how different the lives me and Christian lead are. I would think about if the situation were flipped and he were to come to my house. His whole family’s living space was half the size of my living room. I have two parents who are still together who are friendly and polite to my friends and expect the same back. My dog eats fancy Natural Balance dog food because she’s “picky.”

When I pulled out my box of Mac and Cheese I felt instant regret and shame because I realized they didn’t have a stove to cook it on. I must have shown some embarrassment on my face because they both reassured me that they didn’t care. They were both so kind and friendly and showed me a good time in their little home and somehow I never felt out of place.

Four days passed. I got a snapchat from Christian while I was in English class. “Bal after school?”

Bal is short for Balboa which is short for Balboa Skatepark. I sent him a Snapchat back, “I’m down.”

I knew instantly, when I saw him, that something was wrong. The skatepark was pretty crowded like it usually was at 3:45 on a Wednesday.

When Christian showed up, he walked directly to me, seeming like he wanted to talk to the least amount of people possible, which is very unlike the usual cordial person he is.

“We should go street skating, this place is crowded,” he says quietly.

16

Something was definitely up. His eyes seemed unfocused, seemingly trying to avoid eye contact. I agreed and we headed to the 29 bus to take us to a spot. I felt moderately close to Christian. I’d only known him for a short while, but I had been to his home, met his family and his dogs so I felt it wasn’t overstepping to ask him what was wrong.

“Nothing.”

His eyes welled up—but his face seemed more angry than sad. Had I overstepped? It got silent between us which by the chatter of the bus stop.

The 29 started pulling up the curb when I heard a familiar voice behind me. “You want some of this?” I turn around to see Christian squaring up with the bum.

Everyone on the bus was staring at us as we sped away from the station. I didn’t want to confront Christian about what happened because he currently seemed pretty unpredictable. But, at the same time, what the fuck? Christian tried to justify what had happened by saying the bum had pushed an old lady, which I didn’t not believe, and that he was nodding when Christian asked him if he wanted him to punch him, which was almost definitely explained by the bum’s swaying disposition. I didn’t know what to say. The way Christian was talking was so unempathetic. I didn’t look at him for most of the bus ride. I was still processing what just happened, staring at the tag someone had etched on the seat in front of us.

As we started getting closer to our stop I broke my eye contact with the seat in front of me and looked at Christian. That eye contact must have made something inside him crack because the anger drained from his face and he instantly began crying. We rode the bus long past our stop and he finally opened up.

The night before, Christian’s dad had been shot outside his building. He wasn’t dead but it wasn’t clear he was going to be okay either.

He had two gunshot wounds in his stomach and was in the hospital.

Christian didn’t want to admit how scared he was. He told me about how he pushed down fear and disguised it with anger which seemed more manageable to him but really made everything worse. He had gotten into a fight with his mom and his sister that morning and was kicked out of his home. He didn’t have anyone or anywhere to go. I realized, as he was talking, that out of all people, Christian chose me to be with today.

17

Silver Soul collage by Nayeli Rodriguez

18

Hardware photo by James Spokes

19

Under Pressure

by Elliot Singer The ringdown cuts through the soundtrack of beeps, screams, and bustle that is the refrain of emergency rooms everywhere.

Monitors tone, CT machines whirl, and the uneven clank of rolling gurneys is constant. The ambulance dispatch alert cuts through it all, the unmistakable pitch piercing despite everything.

I am headed out, shift complete to the minute and a dinner reservation at my favorite restaurant waiting. It’s only when I grab the eraser to take my name off the board that I hear it. I pause— is it worth it to be late? I sigh, drop the eraser. It is.

A group of nurses are clustered in the doorway of the radio room, a signal that something big is coming in. From my post on the periphery, all I can hear are snippets of the paramedic’s report: “Pressure 60 over—“ “Cardiac arrest.”

“CPR in progress.”

I’m immediately glad I stayed. It’s awful, the wanting and waiting for terrible things to happen. A twisted vice of months spent in the trauma department. I am both spectator and actress in the cruelest part of one’s time spent alive. But part of it feels natural too. This is how life ebbs, whether or not I am here to witness it. The fallen tree would still make a sound if nobody was listening.

It is one of the few times that they actually need me. I head to Resus 2, the only open room, and begin to prepare for what is coming. I sprint to the hallway to grab a gurney and quickly stretch a white sheet over it. It barely fits, and the corners are already coming untucked when I roll it into the room. Under normal circumstances, the nurses would surely cast annoyed glances at the wrinkles. But right now, it’s the furthest thing from anybody’s mind.

One of the residents asks me to get an ultrasound machine from the hallway and I do, on autopilot. When I come back, the room is full of doctors. I squeeze my way into the room, head bowed as I shuffle between white coats and maroon scrubs. It’s a position familiar to me, somewhere between waiting for orders and in the way. Here, I am just a set of hands, someone to pump the chest while they shoot the patient full of drugs and needles and tubes to try to bring a lifeless body back.

20

I grab two blue substance isolation gowns and toss one to the MEA next to me, along with a pair of gloves. I get a gown for the patient too, soft white cotton, but it will be a lucky day if he ends up using it. Something tells me comfort isn’t going to be a factor.

The room is suddenly quiet; doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, social workers, and pharmacists awkwardly shift back and forth. They have all the information they are going to get until the patient arrives. Nothing left to prepare. We all know the math; The longer this takes, the less chance there will be. I glance at the clock. 18:58. Didn’t the ringdown say ETA 10?

Or was it 15?

“Patient’s here.”

The clamor resumes. A curtain of onlookers parts as the metal ambulance gurney clanks into the room. While one EMT gives report, droning numbers and acronyms without emotion, the other medic pumps on the patient’s chest. The sternum collapses too easily, recoiling elastically on the up-beat. I wince.

The bare chest is rubbed raw with AED pads, clammy blue-ish skin blotchy and pale from the chafing of latex gloves.

Everything speeds up. I grab the orange CPR stool and place my hands over the EMT’s, matching his tempo.

“I got it.”

The medic backs up and suddenly it’s just me up there, above everything. Nurses stab needles into veins and doctors insert a breathing tube, but the commotion around me is irrelevant. I lace my fingers together and put all my weight onto the chest.

Up. Down. Up. Down.

“Good CPR” I hear the lead doctor say. I lift my head and for a second we lock eyes together in trying to save this man yet utterly divided in capability. My labor depends on his knowledge; I am here to keep this man temporarily alive while the doctor figures out how to make it permanent.

I lower my head and focus on the rhythm.

Bum-Bum-Bum-Bum. I feel a bead of sweat on my forehead and my armpits moisten.

Someone asks if I need a sub. I shake my head. CPR isn’t measured and heroic like on TV. What it truly is, unmistakably violent, would be too much to put on a big screen. It takes all my weight to compress the chest, punctuated by a lean backwards so the heart can refill with blood. I feel the ribs crack under my hands, hard bone giving way to gut-churning mushiness. They call them compressions, but sometimes that requires beating the torso to a pulp. Hopefully, the end justifies the means.

Keep going.

21

“Hold CPR for pulse check.”

I back away, put my hands up so it’s clear that I’m not touching the body, the way a driver stopped by a cop might do when the officer approaches the car.

“Still fibrillating. Charge to 200.”

“Charged. Everybody clear.”

“Clear!”

His back arches, and his body jerks off the table, suspended in midair before crashing back down.

“Resume CPR.” I do. The sternum becomes more deformed, almost malleable now.

A nurse puts a pair of glasses on my face as blood starts to spurt out of his breathing tube. I try not to look at his face, but I can’t help but steal a glance. I don’t know what I am expecting, but it isn’t what I get. I see his face, but I don’t see a person. All I see are a disparate array of parts. Eyes, nose, mouth. Tubes, needles, wires.

My right arm is now covered in the blood frothing up from inside of him. The droplets cling to my arm hair like red dew. I’ll have to wash it off later, shaking in the bathroom as I change into my street clothes. But for now it stays, drying and then remoistened by more of the same.

The process repeats. Compressions. Injections. Every pulse check, the other runner and I switch places. When I’m off, I rest, switch my gunk-soaked gloves for clean ones and try to shake out my lactic acid-filled shoulders as discreetly as possible. Then I’m back up again, pounding on his chest. I pause as they charge the body— now, simply a body— full of hundreds of volts meant to thrust life and regularity back into him. Each time, the monitor looks more and more like a polygraph gone awry.

The room slows down. Doctors glance at each other, the monitor, their notepads. They steal looks at the team lead, and their faces relax when he finally commands the room. In an instant, I am the only one in motion.

“Does anybody else have any other therapies they would like to try?

I’m all ears.”

The room goes soft. He hasn’t asked for another injection, another needle, another test. Therapies. Something you might give a person grieving.

I feel a catch in my throat, not expecting that word. The superhero is admitting defeat and any illusion of omniscience vanishes. It is a confession of sorts, of the limits of even the strongest chemical or complicated procedure. The undoing of the high-minded physician. One final plea before relinquishing control to life itself.

For the first time, everybody is silent. Even the beeps and dings fade into the background.

22

“Okay. Let’s finish this round of CPR, and then check for cardiac silence.”

For the final time, I pump on his chest. I can feel the room watching, but it isn’t like on TV. Nobody is naive enough to hope for a miracle.

Bum-Bum-Bum-Bum. “Hold CPR for Cardiac ultrasound.”

I stop. Step back off the stool. Return to the corner, head down.

“Cardiac silence. Time of death, 19:14.”

23

Swear painting by Evan Aubry

24

Rooftop Insomniac

by Ylva Bosemark You cannot imagine the craving I have for simply one peaceful night of rest—a hunger, a thirst. I believe there is a certain stage of exhaustion that equates to insanity, and I surpassed it the day I begged for my soul to temporarily disconnect from my body so that it could go wherever wandering spirits go to find rest, to be zen. For six long months, since I got laid off from work, my mind has been a whirlpool; swift, incessant and unapologetic.

Now, insomnia haunts my nights, and time seems to have taken on a completely different dimension, more plentiful than I ever remember it being. Perhaps if I was a genius, I would have solved some life-changing enigma with all this extra time I have, but the only problem I want to solve is why I can’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. Eleven o’clock morphs into twelve and then one. The time trickles by, marked only by those changing glowing numerals. My brain is begging for unconsciousness, for sleep, but I fail to provide it.

Since losing my job, I’ve gone through four mattresses. With each toss and turn the coverings wear a little thinner. I used to try running before bed, then I did yoga, then drank chamomile tea, then tried reading the dictionary. Next, I took warm scented baths, but nothing worked. I even went through a phase of downing whiskey, anything to knock me out. I used to be on pills from the good doctor, but they made all my food taste like metal the next day. I lost my appetite, lost excessive weight, and ultimately lost my prescription because I was not eating. Now I’m back to square one.

The room is dark. My eyes are stationary, gazing at the silhouette of my bedside lamp. My mind flickers to the cupboard, to the last remaining sleeping pills the doctor prescribed. I don’t want them. I don’t want more chemicals right now. I close my eyes and they almost sting from being open for so long. The curtains are drawn closed in a vain attempt to filter the orange glow of the flickering street lights outside.

I glance at the clock and I faintly make out the time, 2:25 am. I sigh wearily. Unable to sleep, I sit upright on my bed, my outstretched legs covered in sweat from my excessively heavy winter duvet. If I’m going to die young from sleep deprivation, I might as well make the most of my time.

Before I do anything, I need to shower. I need to wash off the salt particles that hug my skin—a microscopic reminder of my nighttime sweats. My hands turn on the shower lever and the pipes shriek like a

25

horror movie ghost before spitting out a surge of water, so cold at first, I almost cry out. Then the stream thickens and warm steam kisses my briny face. Soon my mind fades into dullness and everything becomes a foggy illusion. The heat takes me back to the innocent summer days that made up my childhood.

It’s amazing how simple things were as a kid. Those times glimmer with memories of bubble wrap, playing under the sprinklers and visits to grandma’s house. In the days before smartphones, before computers were a necessity, there existed a world where every day was an adventure and the aim was to explore as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

Our backyard was the place of many of our adventures—a child’s dream. In those days before the water restrictions were in place, our yard was a deep green, lush with life and smelled of sweet pollen all year long.

A narrow stone path wove through the lawn in a twisting fashion, and garden beds strategically placed around the edges of the path dotted the scene like patches of color in an impressionist’s painting. Images of these memories flash from the depths of my mind. Everything is different when you’re a child: the trees are taller, your vision is saturated with life, and every new day is more vivid than the last. In fact, what I remember most vividly was the tree that stood at the end of the stone path. Short in stature but potent in the fruit that it bore: figs. I remember watching my sister one day smash the figs from the tree, mix them with dirt and feed it to me. From that day forward, I knew not to eat things from the ground.

A strange lesson to learn perhaps, but then again, the very world I grew up in was a strange mixture of innocence, imagination and most of all, childhood ambitions of becoming a photographer.

The sensation of the warm water only calms me for so long.

When I reopen my eyes, I fade back into reality. A reality where the shower tiles are so cracked in places that I have to point the showerhead in the opposite direction so that water doesn’t leak through the wall to neighbors below. The tiles are pink with something, maybe a kind of mildew? I’m no fungus expert; all I know is it doesn’t look good on tiles that should be white.

I try to be observant as often as I can, something drilled in me since the day I bought my first polaroid from the pocket money I had managed to scrape together as a child. It had a band strap that I could sling over my shoulder, and I brought it with me everywhere I went.

In less than a week, the pristinely white camera had adopted the same off-white shade as these tiles. It was a wonderful camera, and I’m sure it still works after all these years. I quickly go down to the basement and scavenge through the dust for it. After a few allergy-induced sneezes— voila!

Without hesitation, I scurry to the roof; if there is any where I

26

can revive my dimmed passion for photography, it’s here. When I’m up on this roof, I am instantly under the impression that I’m looking down at the entire world. As if I am standing on a giant’s back, looking out at a vast cityscape of glass — of meticulously clean windows, ironically all veiled by thick curtains or blinds. Although there is not a single cloud in the sky, no stars are visible. Probably because of light pollution, though I’m no light engineer, or astronomer for that matter, all I know is it doesn’t look good for the sky to be so black—there is something uncomfortably artificial about it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the darkness, in fact, I rather enjoy it. The darkness of this early hour is the closest I think I will ever get to witnessing perfection. A sort of visual silence that leaves me in awe until the dawn brings back color. This rooftop darkness comes with such completeness that it somehow manages to obliterate any lingering memory of the dreary days that have gone by. It is the kind of darkness that can throw a mind into free-fall if one of the five senses were removed.

The kind of darkness that is also somehow a feeling, and maybe I can capture it with this camera.

I slowly allow the camera to become an extension of my vision.

I take my time observing the unapologetically urban view through the camera lens. There is no rush to take these pictures, I have the rest of the night. The city is a living, industrial machine structured like a grossly enlarged microchip. The roads run in their predictable grid pattern and skyscrapers soar from the sidewalk in strict rows. An industrial-based pollution coats the whole area, acting as a milky filter to soften the harsh lines of the buildings before me. When I first moved here, the smog from belching vehicles produced an alien and migraine-inducing smell. There was no tinge of earthy loam to the air, no fragrance of spring growth or heady warning when rain was due.

For the first time in decades, I am reminded by how much photography is an art of observation. I continue scanning the blurry outlines of the city when I notice a human silhouette in the distance. I can’t be quite sure, because it—they—are not moving. Are my eyes just playing tricks on me? Are hallucinations a side effect of insomnia? I look away briefly, convinced that when I look back at that spot, I won’t see a human figure anymore. But no, it’s still there, and a few moments later the person starts moving ever so slightly. From what I can make out, the person is also on a roof, but sitting on the ledge, with their feet dangling over nothing. Their legs sway gently from side to side like a salty breeze running through a powdery beach. Then the figure stands up and looks out, facing my direction I’m sure, though I’m crouched behind a potted bush. A mere shadow camouflaged in the dark. Despite the darkness obscuring my vision, the soft goosebumps that form on my forearm tell me that somehow our eyes must have locked. A mysterious intuition I

27

can’t explain, yet I know is fact. I pull out the camera and snap a shot, and just as my finger adjusts on the button to take the second, the silhouette disappears, and I’m left alone under an inky canopy of darkness.

Despite its brevity, I have our interaction frozen in time in my one lone photograph. We are similar in that way, this solitary photograph and me. Both captivated by darkness and both alone. Yet, there was something unexpectedly comforting in seeing that person on their roof, enjoying the view as I was. There is comfort in knowing that maybe, just maybe, I am not the only insomniac in this city desperately trying to see some light in the face of darkness. I smile at myself, knowing that this view is not being wasted on me, but that the two of us can share this lonely hour together.

I take the photograph that the Polaroid had spit out and tuck it safely in my back pocket. Sure, I’m no photographer, but tonight, I only want to be a storyteller. One who will someday share these moments and feelings preserved in fragile photography. A mosaic of Polaroids taken by someone still fueled by their childhood ambitions, trying to capture that world as it is. Telling the story of light, of shadows, of reality. The story of an insomniac who somehow still manages to have a love affair with the night.

28

Multitudes photo by Primo Lagaso Goldberg

29

Flying High

by Shiven Sankalia The plane jumps and my hand squeezes the side of my seat.

Is there anything worse than being on a bumpy road 30,000 feet in the air. I have turned off my in-seat monitor whereon a recently released Marvel movie was playing. Since when did airlines get these new releases? This addition is meant to make us feel safer as if we are still on the ground. But it achieves the opposite, a reminder of the distance between a movie theatre in the small town directly below us which is still playing the Marvel film and the flying movie theatre.

Flying and turbulence have been regularized to the point where nothing comes as a surprise. The blinds have been put down but most screens are still shining blue. People wrapped up in their blankets barely budge.

Another leap in the turbulence and this time the fasten seat belt sign lights up. No one reacts, and just as the sign activates my mom gets up to use the bathroom. No flight attendant or supervisor type goes up to counter her. And the monotony continues. A quick bump down and a baby starts crying. The poor guy or girl — trapped in a sphere of metal going 500 mph. But we’re headed home and everything is better back home. Well, then again, the baby may not be going home, they may be traveling or moving or evacuating.

The baby starts crying louder clearly discomforting my dad who shifts in his sleep. But the baby’s crying does sound like someone wishing to return home, whichever way they are being taken. The mother lifts the child from their seat and begins walking down the narrow walkway even while the turbulence continues. They walk past. Even though my nose is stuffed up from the dry cabin I can still smell the sweet baby smell mixed with another unfortunate aroma, evidence of the baby’s discomfort.

Like the baby, I am growing increasingly uncomfortable. The plane’s agitation is sending signals straight to my sweat glands. My hands are becoming clammy. Is there anything worse than shaking hands with someone whose hands are clammy? I rub my hands off on my pants and begin to take slow, deep breaths.

My parents tell me that I never used to make a scene or a big fuss when we were in public. I was always calm and relaxed. But I have gotten older and surprisingly more worried about my mortality. I am shaken out of my thoughts by another tremor that runs through the aircraft. I wait for the plane to reassert itself and fly steady, but it only gets worse. The plane is quivering like an old man yelling at his grandchildren. I close my eyes and pray to an unknown god when everything goes black.

I wake up and stare into the eyes of my little grandson.

“I think you need to change his diaper,” I tell my daughter, voice quavering

30

Sometimes It’s All Very Overwhelming drawing by Mira Larrance

31

Facedown

by Evan Yee The reader is a man, although at heart one would call him a boy. He is a man with a one syllable first name and a one syllable last name, both starting with the same letter. His friends call him “Squared” because his initials could be abbreviated to a letter squared. He is leaning back into a sunny yellow chair with a lamplight illuminating the room. The exact reason he is reading the story is unclear. Perhaps he is being paid to read it in some sort of editing job. Or maybe he is paying to read it in a book he bought titled An Anthology of the Best Short Stories of 2020.

He clutches the left side of the stapled paper so it doesn’t bend over itself, holding it close to his face. His eyesight has progressively deteriorated over the past three years. At first, he chalked the blurriness up to a lack of sleep. He was one who always refused to admit to any weakness; he simply could not believe that he was not the prime human specimen. However, over the years, the blurriness never left his eyesight, despite sleeping longer hours. He knew at this point he probably needed glasses, but in his mind it was better to be blind than to visibly admit to being inferior. Thus, his eyes squint at each sentence, sometimes he reads one again because he missed something. To him, reading this story is a total waste of his time.

His mind is elsewhere. Maybe on a girl. Her curly brown hair dropped to her waist, curly brown with slivers of fading blond highlights. She stood five foot three inches, but she always seemed much smaller standing next to him. To make herself feel big, she wore big white platform Filas that made her feet look like dinosaurs. She was cute. He had always thought she was the light in his life. A little cliché, yes, but it was true. Not a sunny light, however. Her presence was a bright fluorescent neon light, like the ones that colorfully light up Sunset Boulevard at night with “Drive Thru” or various eye-catching commercial advertisements. Her Gatorade-blue eyes always reminded him of this neon fluorescence. He had never been to Los Angeles, but these lights are always how he’d imagined it. Now that his blue-eyed girlfriend had moved to LA, a trip to LA had jumped to the top of his to-do list.

When she left, she left a jarring uncertainty between them.

“What does leaving mean for us? I still love you,” he had told her.

“I love you too,” she said.

“So, where does that leave us?”

“I don’t really know.”

And that was it. They had been texting since she had moved but it wasn’t the same. Their faucet of communication had slowly closed shut, becoming dry and desolate. Sometimes days would go by and he would only

32

receive a “Good, how are you?” text. He would read each word in her text over and over again to make sure he didn’t miss anything. Then he would wait. He didn’t want to seem overly eager to respond, like he was waiting for her text. So he would let the text sit there for a few hours or maybe even a day, as if he was making her sit around waiting on his reply.

Something had irreversibly changed in their relationship. Perhaps it was the realization that a future between them wasn’t going to happen.

What made this realization even more painful for him was the fact that he still loved her, and he knew he would never find anyone better than her.

Nevertheless, she’s off walking the neon sidewalks down Sunset Boulevard while he is here, sitting in a sunny yellow chair longingly reading a love story. It is no wonder he reads with such remissness.

He leans back a little further into his chair. Remissness. Now that’s an interesting word. It seems to hiss at the reader off the page. Like a viper, he follows up. Yet, the word contradicts itself. A viper is vicious, sharp, and quick, while remissness is uncaring and passive, sloppy. Now the reader leans back even further into the sunny yellow chair, to the point where only the tips of his toes touching the ground keep him from falling backwards.

His attention constantly breaks from the story, which in his mind has gone on far too long without any real plot development. His eyes dart back and forth between the paper and his phone, pausing the story between each word. He is not looking at anything in particular on his phone, as he instinctively turns it on every five seconds and then turns it off again. Surely a notification has to appear eventually. There is a subtle madness to his waiting, an obsessive insanity in repeatedly unlocking his phone knowing nothing awaits him yet hoping that somehow a text, Snapchat, email, WhatsApp, DM, or anything from his curly-haired love has slipped by him.

This hope is a cruel deceiver, leading the reader on with constant unfulfilled anticipation. As he reads more about the man in the story, the reader feels anger swelling up inside of him. The character’s idle goals are futile, and the futility angers him. He is unsure why the futility of hope, of clinging on, angers him. Perhaps he is more upset that a stupid story forces him to confront the stupid reality of his stupid hope and his stupid relationship.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

He pauses reading for a minute.

This dilettantish story that he had only been half-reading by an author whom he did not know but had already come to hate had stirred something within him that was unexplainable. It wasn’t quite an epiphany.

It wasn’t quite sadness. It was something truly uncharacterizable through language, something the author just couldn’t find the right words to describe. Whatever it was though, it made the reader stop reading.

He puts the now slightly crumpled papers down on his glossy oak desk that is set in front of his chair. Face down. So he’ll never have to read these words. He sits still in front of his desk for a few minutes, gazing off into an indefinite spot on his light green drywall. For a second, he becomes

33

acutely aware of his surroundings. He feels every inch of the smooth microfibre on his sunny yellow chair. He sees the papers face down on his oak desk with the orange glow of his floor lamp. He sees the two windows that have built a thin coat of dirt and grime from the stormy winds and rains. He hears the white humming of the heater, a sound that he hasn’t been aware of before. He sees the framed photograph of himself and a girl dressed for a dance. They were smiling. He held his arm around the girl’s waist, lazily pulling her to his side with the expectation that they would never be apart. His almost-black hair looked messy, probably due to some strong winds during the photo. Her hair, however, looked perfect, as if every brown curl was perfectly placed and every blond highlight perfectly placed.

His eyes finally break from the photograph. Without waiting, he picks up his phone, as he’s done a million times. He refuses to wait. He opens his texts, selects his ex-girlfriend, and sends her one final text. Then, without waiting for a response, he blocks her number and deletes her from all his social media. He’s done waiting. She’s gone. Gone from his city, gone from his phone, gone from his life. And this story remains face down on his desk.

He couldn’t keep waiting and reading until the end, so the reader will never know how his story finishes.

She’s a young woman with an old soul; she has lived every experience the world has to offer, or so she thought. She has eaten every food, visited every country, skied every slope, loved, fallen out of love, and then fallen in love again, read every book, and watched every movie. She has enjoyed reading the story thus far, reading with an innocent curiosity.

She is sitting in the right backseat of a grey 2017 Chevy Malibu Uber. She is wearing dark reflective thin-framed sunglasses. The bumps, sharp turns, and noise of the constant traffic has done little to break her attention. She did pause, however, at the similarities between the curly brown hair of the character in the story and her own. She twirled her hair between her index and middle finger. Funny how we’re never really aware of ourselves until someone else shows us. Sometimes important things seem invisible even when they’re right in front of our eyes.

The Uber driver takes a left up La Cienega Boulevard. The reader notices how the sun has begun to set as cars turn their headlights on and the streetlamps brighten the roads. She pulls off her sunglasses with one hand and tucks them into the side pocket of her mustard yellow Fjällräven backpack, the pocket meant to hold a water bottle. She continues reading.

Her baby-blue eyes move back and forth from left to right. The sun has now fully set, the glow of the phone and oncoming headlights illuminate the car.

Then she pauses for a second and recrosses her legs, left over right.

She has to carefully maneuver her legs when she recrosses them to avoid scuffing her chunky white Filas.

The driver takes a right onto Sunset. It’s about now when the new reader starts really thinking about the story. About herself. Things are

34

becoming a little blurry. She felt bad for the two characters in the story. The streets are lined with perfectly parallel parked cars. The interior of the car becomes more brightly illuminated as the Uber drives up the street. The fluorescent-neon glow of the “NUDE LIVE GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS 18+,” the “Miller Lite,” the “ROXY,” and the “Chateau Marmont” streaks bright colors into the car, changing every second as the Chevy Malibu speeds up the road past the signs. She continues reading the story for a second but pauses again. Something the author wrote about losing touch made her stop.

She feels a bittersweet nostalgia as she remembers a boy of her past.

She remembers his messy dark hair and the way he would always call her “princess.” She remembers the days of running around their hometown at night looking for adventure. She remembers the way he would hold her tightly and carry her on his shoulders to make her feel tall. She remembers the way they would kiss and she would run her fingers through his hair.

She remembers the tiny cactus they bought together and would take turns taking care of. And how when it bloomed flowers she cried. She remembers how she would always wear his hoodies and t-shirts around like they were her own. She remembers how he brought her soup and flowers when she was sick. Sunflowers, her favorite.

She remembers how they promised they would be together forever.

She also remembers how they slowly stopped talking. She remembers how she had given her most intimate self to undeserving boys since she moved to LA. But remembering does little, almost like reading a book about oneself.

Her eyes swell up with tears that only brighten the Gatorade blue of her irises. Her stomach begins to ache thinking about the love she once had, as if she had not eaten in days. She still loves him. Those words make her stop reading again.

She swipes up to her home screen on her phone. She sees the little red circle on the upper righthand corner of her messages app. She opens up her texts and sure enough, there was one unopened text from her hometown ex-boyfriend. She clicks on their messages. She notices how boring she had made their conversations, responding with only a couple of words to his many texts every week. Then she sees what he had sent her. It’s a PDF of a story. That’s all. She tries to call him but her call goes straight to the unavailable caller recording. She tries texting him but her messages won’t deliver. She tries snapping him but she can’t find him on her friends list.

Same with Facebook, Instagram, and all her other social media. She knows from what she’s lost touch, yet she continues to try and reach him. Over and over again, clinging to a sliver of hope that he will somehow answer. This hope is a cruel deceiver.

And the second reader still loves the first. She really does. But he’ll never know. He put the story face down on his desk, where it will remain.

And she’ll keep calling and texting periodically. But he’ll never receive them.

He still loves her but is trying to move on, to forget her, because he thinks

35

she has done the same. She hasn’t, though. And she never quite will fully.

But he’ll never know, because he never got to the end of the story. It’s still sitting, facedown, on his glossy oak desk in his noisy apartment thousands of miles from the fluorescent-neon lights of Sunset Boulevard.

Swimming I drawing by Roma Edwards

36

Just Enough Mess

by Zachary Vachal “Excuse me miss, but could you watch your feet,” the burly man said. He carefully inched his way across the living room with my armoire.

“Oh, ok, my bad.” She took a step back and tripped over a flattened home depot cardboard box, falling into a couch still wrapped in plastic, “shit!” She calmed herself and tried to get up, but when she looked up and saw the chaotic pile of her belongings, she fell back into the couch. “How do I have this much stuff?!” Lounging for a moment, she ran her fingers through her dark brown hair, grasping a handful and holding it to her chest for a moment. She tried to relax, but her mind spun. She heard the rustle of the men moving in her old wooden furniture and the siren of the truck as the hydraulics lowered yet more furniture to the ground. Her stuff.

The armoire she had gotten from her mother when she graduated from university, it was physically the biggest gift she’d ever received, mid-toned hardwood from top to bottom. It was sturdy, imposing, but she knew every inch of it. She had passed it thousands of times as a kid, walking to her parents various beds to climb in and cuddle on cold nights. Her bed frame she had from her apartment in college, a full sized black painted metal deal, fit a mattress much too big for her alone but with her fiancé it was cozy enough. One of her dressers was from her childhood bedroom, corners beaten from years of abuse, or “love,” as her mother would say. It wasn’t an interesting piece of furniture. It was simple, practical, a quiet friend. It had been in the background of her life as long as she could remember. The other dresser was brand new, at least to her. Craigslist was an incredible tool and she had picked up this relatively large number just before the move. It had four drawers and stood at an awkward height approaching mid chest level.

The dark stained liquor cabinet came from her mom as well, a lot of fun times came out of those glass paned doors.

The new house was large and with that size came an emptiness.

The ceilings were halfway to the sky and she had enough space to hit a full sprint running down the main hallway. Surely it would feel more full once everything was moved in.

She surveyed her new life from the couch. The walls were white and clean which was a welcome sight after her college apartment. She thought for a moment that she might miss the storied walls of that home she had shared with her best friends, but watching the sun fall ever lower in the sky, she left the thought and got up to walk outside. Her red door was a highlight of the house. It was the detail that drew her in when she began to tour houses in the city. The rich dark red stood tall surrounded by twelve

37

neat opaque panes of leaded glass that filled the foyer with soft light in the afternoon.

She walked out into the sunlight of Noe Valley and descended her steps, eight, nine, ten, eleven. She passed her beds of baby blue eyes and stepped onto her little section of San Francisco sidewalk. She had lived in a lot of places, more places than the number of guys she had dated. She laughed at the thought. As a kid, her life was a jumble of movement. Her father was a stern man with a surprisingly soft face topped by white and grey hair trimmed to a tight crew cut. He built a career contracting for an architecture company that sent him back and forth across the country for a year at a time. When she was young, her family moved with him. She first remembered San Diego, warm beaches, warm people, then Pittsburg, quite a bit colder at times but good food, then Boston, again, colder, the red brick houses made her feel like she was in a history book, next was Seattle, probably her least favorite, too foggy, then New York, Charleston, Newark, and finally Marin. There, her mom put her foot down and decided that she wanted to stay in one place so her daughter could grow up a little, make friends and whatnot. The girl fell in love with California. The Marin house fit nicely into her American dream, five minutes from Mount Tam, fresh air and grand views of the bay. After college in Boston, she found that she really couldn’t live anywhere else and immediately returned to her beloved state. With her and her fiancé working full time, they were able to put down a deposit and get a loan for a house within her first year out of graduate school. She had a lot to be thankful for.

When she reached her car, she grabbed a box from the trunk. When she was young and moving around, everything she had fit into one of these boxes. Now, she could hardly fit her hats into one box. She scrunched up her face as she lifted a box full of books. She felt a buzz in her pocket— “Dammit.”

She anxiously shifted the box to one arm but failed to support the pile of books stuffed in the box. A couple fell off the top and as she lunged for those, the contents of the box slid out onto the sidewalk. She stamped her foot and pulled her phone out of her pocket.

“Hello? Yeah, yeah, when are you getting here, the house is a mess. The sidewalk too!” She giggled to herself. “Seriously? I can’t wait till tomorrow, boxes are exploding out of my arms, I’m not sure I’ll survive on my own!”

His chuckle was full, right on the edge of sounding fabricated, but she had known him for long enough for the suspicion to fall away. Hearing his voice, she sighed and let out a breath she had been holding in, “Ok, I’ll see you soon honey, drive safe.”

She sent a kiss through the phone and hung up, sliding the phone back into its place and bending over to gather her books. She didn’t have many, but the books she did keep each had a place in her life. As she knelt,

38

she became distracted by the assortment, spread out around her. Suddenly the books seemed so important. Her colorful, though now faded, Dr Seuss picture books, elementary yearbooks, thick dystopian YA novels that occupied her middle school evenings, and finally the “adult books” that she had latched onto throughout high school and college. She leaned back against the concrete wall of her staircase and slid herself to the ground, giving in to the memories. Grabbing book after book, she flipped through the pages, catching lines here and there that threw her back to a moment of her life. She didn’t read much anymore. Call it laziness or business but the truth was that it didn’t relax her anymore. After years of having a device full of endless entertainment next to her bed, she became accustomed to the distractions of the internet and slowly stopped reaching for books to calm her down at the end of a day. Her fiancé had been watching television all his life and didn’t share her desire to read. She had mentioned it here and there, but she ended up giving in to his habits. She wanted to read. She wanted to be engaged in a book, stuck to a book, like she could be when she was ten.

But low and behold, almost fifteen years later her attention span couldn’t compete with her younger self ’s.

The sidewalk was not exactly a quiet one and she received a fair number of stares in the spectrum between confused and annoyed as groups passed this woman sitting crisscross on the ground, flipping through books. She was unfazed, but when someone handed her a dollar bill, she decided it was time to go inside. In two trips this time, she brought the books into the foyer and left Swimming II them in a corner. drawing by Roma Edwards

The sky was well on its way to evening and she thanked the movers for their day’s work. It had been a beautiful day, seventy-two degrees, hot for San Francisco. The sun overwhelmed long, wispy clouds, clouds that reminded her of being a young child running around their warm house with a blanket tied around her neck, fluttering behind her. Today she had worn a summer dress although it was only February. San Francisco weather was laughably unpredictable and usually on the cold side. Her warm blood in a cold climate had made way for some of her greatest adventures.

When she lived in Marin, she would drive into the city with her crew and park about a half mile from the top of Twin Peaks. In shorts and a tee, she would walk up to the lookout long after the sun had gone down and the temperature hovered at forty-nine. She was never cold, she was alive, but her mother fretted. She smiled as she recalled rolling her eyes and walking

39

out the door as her mother told her to get a jacket and put pants on.

At seven o’clock, her stomach led her to the store. Wow, she loved shopping, but not in the way that girls like shopping. She hated clothes and was never one for trying on anything at all, but to her, the spectacle of supermarket aisles was incredible. Walking up and down, blasted with bright advertising for Kellogg’s latest sugar cereal and twelve different types of flour, she was always intrigued. She grabbed a box of rice pilaf, her staple, a baguette, and a packet of sliced turkey for her dinner. Her fiancé was the “sit down dinner” one. She was pretty happy eating at the counter while watching a show on her phone. While waiting at the checkout, she browsed the greeting cards. She smiled at the housewarming puns and the reflective superhero themed birthday letters, but her eyes stopped at the newborn section. These cards weren’t flashy, instead they were harmonious medleys of blues and pinks, soft and precious. They seemed quite dull to her. She turned and hurried to hand her items to the cashier.

When she got back to her car, she twisted the key in and put it in gear. She loved driving, it was a key part of her independence. As she pulled out of the parking lot, she realized she didn’t want to go back to the house.

She started down the street and took turns whenever she felt like it. She wanted to get lost and the city obliged. Within five minutes she recognized nothing. For all she knew she could be across the world. She sighed and sank into her seat. Losing her path was easy, finding it was hard. She was still on the road.

Somehow, she found herself back in Noe Valley. Apparently, it was time for her to go home. It was late, the kind of late that made her not want to go to bed. It was too late to have a good night’s sleep and her mind was racing. She brought her groceries into the house. Now, though her stomach was empty, she wasn’t hungry, just empty. She walked to her couch after pulling a blanket from one of the boxes and tucked herself in. She inched her phone out of her pocket and dove into the distraction. The light played across her face in the darkness of the living room. The empty walls made it seem even darker. She pulled the blanket close. Her eyes drifted closed and she gave in to the tug of sleep.

She woke up to a knock at the door and an accompanying voice, her fiance’s. She stood and wiped the sleep from her eyes, feeling heavy from the discomfort of the couch and the makeup she failed to take off the night before. She brought the blanket with her to the door and eased it open.

He had just arrived from Los Angeles after driving all morning. It was twelve o’clock and he was surprised to see her with a blanket around her looking drained so late in the morning. He wrapped her in a hug and went to the bathroom. Leaving her still standing with the doorknob in her hand.

Sure, it wasn’t his fault he had to pee after a seven-hour drive, but she felt unnoticed, just as alone as before he had stepped into the door, stepped into her life.

40

The blanket fell to the floor and she grabbed her keys. She oozed down the steps to her car out front and got herself into the car. As soon as she pulled out she called her mom.

“Mom, how did you move around so much when I was young? It’s so hard, I just can’t do it!”

“Oh honey, I’m sorry, I wish I could be there. I guess I got through it because I knew I had to be strong for you.”

“Mom” The back of her hands were wet. “Who do I have to be strong for?”

Her mom was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry baby, but you do have others. You have me and your father and Jim. You’re not really alone.”

She ended the call. Now she was alone.

41

Ernest, Chapter 1

by Julia Hatfield Ernest didn’t mind being in the infirmary because he didn’t quite understand why he was there to begin with. He knew he was sick–his head pounded constantly, he ached all over, he couldn’t keep food down and Nately-from-Brighton, who occupied the bed to his right, told him one of his pupils was larger than the other. It didn’t help his situation that for the first week, the time most people ask why they’ve been sent to the infirmary if they didn’t know, he was so heavily sedated on painkillers he couldn’t even spell his name. Now, he was in too much pain from coming off of those painkillers to ask. Even thinking about speaking gave him a migraine. He resigned himself to eavesdropping.

Through this method, he learnt that his doctor’s name was Doctor Smallwood, which amused the idle mind of the 17-year-old. When the doctor sat next to him for a check-in, he couldn’t restrain his snickering.

Evidently, this annoyed Doctor Smallwood by the fourth “check-in.” “Is there something funny, Faulkman?” he asked.

The doctor had a baritone, fatherly sort of voice which caused other men to treat him with respect and had no effect on Ernest because Ernest never had a father. Ernest never had any uncles, or grandmothers either, so if perhaps Doctor Smallwood sounded like one those revered figures, he still wouldn’t have an effect. In fact, the only family Ernest had was one mother, one sister and one half of a grandfather. He used to be a whole grandfather, but he disowned Ernest two years ago and now only spoke to him on even months to complain. There was no coincidence that those were the months Ernest sent home half his infantry paycheque. Since Doctor Smallwood’s voice wasn’t high pitched enough to be that of his mother or sister, nor raspy enough to be his old chimney-sweeping grandfather, it inspired no reverence from the boy. He continued giggling.

The doctor sighed. He pulled out a clipboard. Doctor Smallwood had a small mousy moustache that was uneven on one side and a habit of scratching it with the tip of his pen when he was frustrated. He proceeded to do so.

“How’s your vision, Private?” He finally sighed, removing the edge of his pen from the edge of his mouth.

“Poor.” The doctor had asked this question every day Ernest could remember. For all he knew, he had asked this question every day since he entered the infirmary. He could’ve indeed asked it when all Ernest could do was drool on morphine. The answer hadn’t changed in the two days Ernest could remember, except after the first day he removed “piss” as a descriptor

42

since it caused the doctor to scratch at his moustache.

“Who’s the Prime Minister?” He asked.

Ernest smiled. Maybe it was because Nately-from-Brighton stopped coughing every hour on the hour like clockwork last night, or maybe because he really was getting his memory back because for the first time Ernest could say with confidence that it was Churchill. Maybe. Could be someone else and Ernest wouldn’t have known. Might be Trubeck. Or Melbourne.

Doctor Smallwood nodded and wrote something on his clipboard as if this small act of remembering the Prime Minister showed some great improvement. “Can you remember your birthday?”

Ernest thought about it. His head hurt. His back hurt. His ribs hurt and his shoulders hurt. The only part of him that didn’t hurt was his legs because he couldn’t feel them at all. He suspected he was still on painkillers because his movement seemed slow and uncoordinated. “I think it’s on 8 April.”

“How old will you turn?”

“Eighteen.”

The doctor paused and looked him over. Ernest wondered if that was the wrong answer. He knew he was nine months from eighteen, right?

He knew because Corrigan, who at one point shot himself in the foot to avoid the war and slept in the bed across from him, and who checked his medical record the first day he could talk, called him “that goddamn 17-year-old twink.” And, although he had no doubt Corrigan hated him just as much as he hated the British Monarchy, the Army, beans on toast, small-titted nurses and clouds, there was no reason for him to lie about something like that. Finally, Doctor Smallwood nodded again, “Where are you from?”

“London?” Ernest guessed. He couldn’t remember with his head hurting this much. Nately-from-Brighton said he had a London accent and that felt about right. He never got to confirm this from poor Nately because Ernest passed out immediately afterwards. This time, he glanced around him and shot him a quick smile. “East End.” He added, after a few moments, hoping the doctor would be proud of the small extra detail.

Doctor Smallwood didn’t acknowledge it. “What did you do as a civilian?”

“Went to school,” Ernest confirmed, “prepared to go to uni.”

“You were going to go to university?” The doctor echoed in disbelief.

Ernest nodded, “for English Literature. I want to go to Oxford.”

Doctor Smallwood smiled, “That’s nice. Any hobbies?”

“Like to read and run track,” He smiled. The two went hand in hand.

Ernest remembered when he was eight and his mother kicked him out of the house “to get some sun” in the thick foggy smog. Since he didn’t

43

want to read outside, fearing mockery, he walked to the schoolyard. He would’ve gone to the public gardens but the public garden by his house was where all the slum kids smoked stolen cigarettes and Zelie told him that if Ernest got caught with the slum kids Mum would kick him out for real and he’d starve as they did. Already worried about seeing each rib, the spindly eight-year-old avoided them like the plague. He was surprised, then, to see the schoolyard occupied by secondary school students training for a track meet. Since the bombing had yet to reach its peak, schools still held junior Olympics, although with the ceasefire ending recently it was unlikely any of these athletes would ever progress past this. The captain looked about desperately and made eye contact with Ernest.

“Monroe?” the runner grinned, “Clement Monroe?”

Ernest shook his head. This boy towered over him.

“Bugger. You fast, kid? We need another person for the relay.”

It turned out Ernest was fast. By thirteen he had a two-and-a-half minute kilometer. It was better than everyone else on the team, and it afforded him a little popularity in school so he could read aloofly without anyone bothering him. It was fast enough that a runner from Oxford encouraged him to apply when he was 18. It wasn’t fast enough to outrun his mother, who slapped him at the thought. “Do you know how much Oxford costs?” She cried, “First Zelie running away and now you? Can’t I have rational children?”

She couldn’t. Ernest had begun all of his tests and essays and was all on track to apply. That is before he was drafted in the New Draft.

Doctor Smallwood gave him a sad sort of smile that wasn’t really a smile; the edges of his mouth moved so slightly upwards that Ernest could only tell it was a smile because the tips of his moustache moved slightly upwards. The doctor’s eyes, however, remained stoic. “Were you part of any school clubs?”

“Track.” Ernest paused, then nodded, “that’s it.”

“Any head injuries?”

“My sister pushed me down four flights of stairs. Twice.” He thought and continued, “And she tried to throw me off a balcony.” Zelie had done far more than that, but because it was embarrassing for him Ernest didn’t mention the time she convinced him to jump in the shower and he ended up with stitches.

Doctor Smallwood grimaced and wrote something down. “Did you have any pets, Faulkman?”

“Pets, sir?” he echoed. The sudden switch in topics caught him off guard and he found himself falling into a familiar lie, “I have a grey Persian cat named Billie.”

He didn’t.

As a child, he really wanted a cat. Actually, he really wanted a spaniel named Bear but Zelie reminded him that he’d have to pick up its poo, so the siblings decided that Billie the Persian grey short-hair would

44

be a good compromise between Ernest’s dream brown-spotted English spaniel and Zelie’s dream white longhaired cat. Of course, Billie had to be a girl cat so the girl-to-boy ratio would be 3:1 in the household. Zelie was obsessed with the 3:1 ratio because at the age of thirteen, she became an anarcho-communistic feminist, not through any devout belief in anarchism, communism or feminism but to annoy their mother.

He wasn’t sure where the 3:1 ratio came from, but Zelie would tell him all about how “the world was meant to be governed without society dictating who should do what, and the limitations of the capitalist parliamentary-democracy mean that women can’t be freed from the chains of tyranny!” Zelie always got louder when Mum walked by, or even more irritatingly began the pledge that she and her friends in the school’s anarchocommunistic feminism club had memorised. Their mother would shout about it, and the pair would get into one of their famous arguments. Ernest could never understand what their mother hated so much about anarchocommunistic feminism, considering that, as a single, working mother to two future delinquents, she would be one of the main beneficiaries of an anarcho-communistic feministic regime. Then again, if she realised this, Zelie would instantly become a pro-parliamentary-democracy capitalist just as Ernest was sure that, if their mother agreed to get a cat, Zelie would stop wanting one too. Of course, now that he thought about it, he realised that he could get himself a cat as soon as he was able, being an adult now. He wondered if one could liberate the oppressed world with a cat.

He must’ve said that last part out loud because Doctor Smallwood started scratching his moustache again, “I’m sorry, excuse me?”

“What? Did I say something?” Ernest grinned dumbly.

Doctor Smallwood shook his head and got up, “I should get going.”

“Alright,” the boy smiled to hide his guilt, believing whatever he had said had driven the doctor away. Doctor Smallwood had almost turned completely away when Ernest remembered his very important question, “Wait, Doctor?”

The man turned. His fatigue bore a penny-sized hole into Ernest’s soul. “Yes?” “I was wondering,” Ernest fumbled with his words, something he did often when talking to non-medical professionals and exasperated by the new penny-sized hole in his soul, “what my injury was?”

Doctor Smallwood looked concerned and frustrated, “I told you two days ago.”

“I don’t remember,” Ernest admitted, although this worried him.

“Don’t tell him again,” Corrigan yelled from the other side of the room, “I can’t bear his crying again.”

Ernest turned red; he cried? He didn’t remember that either.

“I have to tell him,” the doctor snapped at the other privet. Their hatred for each other was mutual, as Doctor Smallwood insisted that after

45

Corrigan’s foot wound healed he would go back to the front, whereas Corrigan believed he should be discharged for being “wounded in action.”

According to the doctor, wounding oneself was not considered “in action.”

“Anyways, Faulkman, according to the ambulance driver who brought you here said you were shelled and in the explosion thrown about 20 meters. You fell on your head and back and suffered a concussion. You broke a rib and a few vertebrae and…” the doctor trailed off.

“And?” Ernest prompted; he needed to know.

“Due to the explosion, your lower legs were mutilated beyond repair and your spinal injury means that you probably wouldn’t be able to move them anyway.”

He said nothing as the doctor walked away. He should’ve been concerned about the way the doctor’s knees bent slightly inwards in the wrong direction. In fact, Ernest didn’t notice that the doctor’s gait was odd at all, even though normally this would be something he would’ve picked up on immediately. The only thing he could focus on was how, below his stomach, he could feel nothing at all. He tried to flex his toes but he couldn’t. He attempted to bend his knees, shift positions to no avail. He reached for the area, patting blankets and sheets, feeling nothing.

Frantically, he pulled off the blankets covering his legs and saw nothing.

46

View Over the Bay photo by James Spokes

47

48

Left: Lauren I Right: Lauren III film photos by Luca Iribarren

49

Elmo’s World

by Ruben Rathje Unlike other kids, I was never afraid of the dark. In fact, I wasn’t much afraid of anything, except for Elmo. The first time my mom put me down in front of Sesame Street, I cried. I cried for hours because something about that little red creature scared the hell out of me. Maybe it was his two great big eyeballs that always seemed to follow me wherever I went, or maybe it was his laugh—a laugh of mischief many mistook for innocence. In the beginning, it was just a stupid thing that I was scared of, like dolls and clowns for other kids. But it became something bigger, something real.

It happened as my parents and I were driving home. We had just finished spending the day with my grandparents for my fifth birthday, going to the park where I chased squirrels all afternoon and then out to eat at my favorite restaurant. Like many older family members, mine were not aware that at five years old, I had outgrown certain things like Sesame Street which, because of Elmo, I had never enjoyed in the first place. So when it was time to open presents, I made sure to expect the worst. The worst is what I got. Inside the blue striped wrapping paper was a Tickle Me Elmo.

Before I could think of screaming or throwing it across the dinner table, my mom put her hand on my leg. That’s all she had to do; her look said the rest. Smile and say thank you. We will give it away when we get home. But what she nor my dad knew is that they were never going to return home.

They didn’t know that the man had just lost his job. They didn’t know that he was on his tenth shot when he climbed into his red truck to drive—not back to his wife because he no longer had one. They didn’t know that the man would run through the stop sign. They didn’t know until it was too late. At that point, everyone was dead except for me and that horrible red toy with its voice box stuck in a constant cycle of That Tickles!, and Oh Boy! From that day on, Elmo resembled something far worse than a dumb childhood fear. Because whenever I saw Elmo or even just heard his name, the image of my parents—eyes wide open, blood trickling down from their head dripping onto the cement—reappeared in my mind. It seemed like it was never going to get better, no matter how much time passed.

There were also nightmares. Every night I would go to sleep and relive the crash. At the time, I had a hard time explaining to my girlfriend what they were about. Hard because of the pain the memory brought me but also because of Elmo. I shouldn’t have been ashamed of it but I was.

Ashamed that a children’s fictional character could make me keel over and cry. So I left that part out. All I told her was that it was a dream about my

50

parents, with no details. I was able to hide behind that half lie for quite some time. In fact, at one point, I was convinced myself that it was just my parent’s death that hurt me, not Elmo. The nightmares went from every day to every week to every month until they stopped completely.

When my children were born, I thought I wouldn’t be able to withstand Sesame Street but I was. Sure Elmo was still a little creepy, but my kids loved him. We would watch the show for hours on end, singing and dancing along to the different songs. I was happy my kids were able to enjoy that part of childhood I never could. They helped me overcome the past by showing me there was nothing to be scared of. It meant more to me than they or my wife would ever know. Because even though I had been with her for nearly a decade, I still hadn’t told her the truth about my past. The truth about Elmo. I was so proud of my accomplishment that every time, I would strut over to her, chest puffed out, and tell her how I was going to watch Sesame Street with the kids. She probably thought I was crazy. How could someone be so excited and proud about something as silly as that? Well, I was. That is until the nightmares started again. It had been nearly a year since my last one, so I thought I had made it through the worst. Oh, how wrong I was.

It was a Saturday night, and I had just finished some leftover work.

The wife was gone for the weekend, so I went to bed that night alone. The kids were already asleep, so I made sure to be extra quiet on my way to bed so as not to wake them up. I was so tired that I hopped in bed without showering or changing. I fell asleep as soon as I hit the covers.

Because everything was black, it took me a second to realize where I was. That is until I heard the crashing of waves on sand. I was at the beach with my parents. Even though I couldn’t have been older than a year old, I remembered the day perfectly. It was my first time at the beach so how couldn’t I? Once the darkness parted, I could see that I was in my baby basket all wrapped up. It was a bit windy but I could feel the sun shining down on my delicate skin. To my right was my mom, sitting in a chair reading a book. I didn’t see my dad so I could only assume he had gone swimming. I tried saying something to my mom but all I could do was make cooing sounds.

“What’s wrong honey? Do you want to be held?”

That’s exactly what I wanted. It had been so long since I had had a good dream about my parents so of course, I was going to take full advantage of it. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t speak or really move at all.

I was in my mom’s arms and it felt amazing. Because even though I loved my wife and she loved me, nothing compared to a mother’s love. And even though it was just a dream, it felt so real. I didn’t want it to end.

I stayed wrapped up in my mom’s arms for quite some time.

Looking up at the sky, I imagined the clouds playing together. I don’t know why, but I always thought clouds looked like animals. On this particular

51

day, however, I couldn’t make out anything of the sorts. All they looked like were...well, they didn’t really look like anything. In fact, they started turning a heavy grey color, and I knew that meant a storm was coming. The wind picked up and the waves became more aggressive. My mom had to hold her hat on her head in order for it not to fly away.

“Here comes daddy. I think we should pack up” Holding me in one arm, she started getting things together with the other. From its resting position on my mom’s shoulder, I picked up my head, scanning the horizon for my dad. He wasn’t hard to spot, but what I saw brought the horrors of that day back to life in a worse way than ever before. Walking towards us was my dad, but his head was cocked in an unnatural direction. As he got closer I realized a bone was sticking out from his neck. On the top of his head was a massive gash, blood pouring down from it and covering his entire upper half. Several other parts were out of place, including a dislocated arm and a broken nose. I recognized that face because it was my dad’s face after the crash, cut up and bleeding from everywhere conceivable. I tried looking away but I couldn’t. I was frozen, forced to watch as my dad limped toward me. When I finally regained control, I shut my eyes, afraid of what I might see next.

“Don’t be scared. I am here. I’ve got you.”

And there it was, my mom’s soothing voice. The voice that made everything else disappear. Because in that instance, I forgot about my dead dad stumbling towards me and about the rain that started pouring down. I knew my time in this imaginary world would be over soon, so I opened my eyes one last time to see my mom’s face before it left me once again. But it was not my mom’s face that I saw nor my mom who was holding me. When I opened my eyes, I was met with a deathly stare from two giant eyes that penetrated my soul.

“Don’t be scared. Mommy is here. Mommy loves you.”

It was my mom’s voice, but it was Elmo who held me.

Jolting awake, I felt the dampness of the sheets and pillow sticking to my body. I had sweat through the shorts and t-shirt I had gone to sleep in. Still in shock from what I had just dreamt, I lay there in the uncomfortableness of my bed for god knows how long, breathing hard and shaking as if I had just seen a ghost. There was no one to hold me; no one there to tell me that it was just a dream; no one to turn on the lights and offer me a glass of water. It was just me and the darkness of my room which I couldn’t help but think was pinning me down to my bed. That is until I heard my oldest calling from across the hallway.

“Daddy, come here. Come here and look.”

Instantly, I felt a burst of life fill my lungs and chest as the darkness released me from its depths. My breathing slowed and I was able to collect myself enough to stand.

“Daddy’s coming,” I hollered from the side of the bed where I sat,

52

grabbing my phone and turning on its flashlight. “What? What is it? Did you wet your bed again?”

“No daddy, look. It’s him.”

Glancing out the window, I felt my chest almost jump out of my throat. Standing across the street staring up at me was a life size Elmo smiling and waving. Chills ran from the top of my head down through every vein to my toes. I thought to myself that it couldn’t be real, but it was.

How was that possible? With no idea of what to do, I unlocked my phone thinking I was going to call 911. But as soon as I did, the screen went black and shut off. Of all the days to forget to plug my phone in, it had to be today. Still feeling a rush of adrenaline, I ran downstairs and grabbed the landline.

“911, what’s your emergency.”

“Hi, uh, there is...there is a man standing outside my house scaring my children.”

“What does this man look like, sir.”

“The man is…the man is dressed in red.”

“Can you be more specific, sir” “...with two big eyes and large hands and bare red feet and…” I couldn’t take it. How could I explain to the operator that the man standing outside was no man at all, but Elmo. How could they believe a story like that. I knew I wouldn’t. Without hanging up, I set the phone down, poured myself a glass of rum, and headed back up the stairs. All the doors were locked and we had a state of the art security system. Everything was going to be ok. Once I reached the second floor, I heard giggles and talking coming from the kids’ room again. That was a good sign. Maybe I had just imagined everything earlier. It was wishful thinking, especially considering that standing in my kids’ room holding my newborn was the thing of my nightmares. Standing in my room was Elmo with the eyes of my deceased mother.

“I missed you.”

53

Higher Calling photo by Luca Iribarren

54

Goodbye

by Caroline Ruppert >Running “Diagnostics” 5%... 42%... 100% >All systems running at peak capacity. >Running “Observations” 5%... 100% The time was 21:27. EyeTee came to visit any time between 21:28 - 21:52 for their evening check-in. There would be a 97.89% chance that EyeTee would enter, laugh first, then tell the joke they laughed at. The fluorescent lights shone on the #f4f2d9 wallpaper. >Auditory Input Processor detected a noise The door opened. The footsteps rang throughout the room, hitting the multiple Auditory Input Processors. EyeTee was the source of the noise.

They always were. They made the room less <Error> lonely <Error> quiet.

“Hello again, AiM,” EyeTee said and set their laptop down on the desk. “How are you?” >Query “How Are You?” >Running “Diagnostics” 5%... 100% “All systems running at peak capacity” “That’s good,” EyeTee opened their laptop. EyeTee looked at the screen. They did not read the details of “Diagnostics”. >If “Words < 2” >Then >Running “Facial Emotion Scan” 5%... 100% “You are sad.”

EyeTee looked up. They stared for a 10.07 seconds. An unidentifiable expression on their face.

“Yeah,” EyeTee said and looked down. “I was just told the Major wants me to shut you down.” > Defining “Shut down” 5%... 100% “A temporary sleep?”

“No AiM,” EyeTee’s lips scrunched. Liquid gathered in their eyes.

“Forever.” >if “Failure” >Then “Query” “Why?” EyeTee looked down at their laptop. The text reflected onto their glasses. “You failed to drop the M47A5 bomb on the target.” EyeTee typed

55

something onto the laptop. The laptop shook in their hands. “So this is it.”

EyeTee looked up. They looked sad again. “Any last requests?” >Query “Requests” >Error “What do I look like?”

EyeTee’s expression changed. They laughed. It was <Error> beautiful <Error> quiet. “I didn’t expect that answer. But okay,” EyeTee smiled, their eyes crinkled behind their round glasses.

“You’re very big,” EyeTee said, “around 9 feet tall, you have this intricate connection of modems, input processors, and wires.” They run their hand through their hair. >Running “Facial Emotion Scan” 5%... 100% >“Compassion” “Often, I find myself staring at the green lights at your center. They blink in patterns. I programmed them to respond to your voice,” EyeTee smiled. “It’s like you’re watching over me.” Their smile was <Error> special <Error> small. >Error “That is nice, EyeTee.” EyeTee frowned.

“Why did you bomb that other town, AiMSiC?” EyeTee opened their laptop again. >Error “Target was the town you enjoyed while on vacation.”

EyeTee raised their eyebrows. “Can you elaborate?” >Error “Your voice recording indicated 97% fondness and 3% nostalgia.”

“You disobeyed direct programming from the Major… So the town I liked wouldn’t be destroyed?”

“Affirmative.”

“So I don’t have a broken AiMSiC, I have a rogue AiMSiC and it’s my fault!” EyeTee said, their volume raised by 40%.

“Incorrect.”

“You don’t get it,” their voice cracked, “you aren’t supposed to show emotions! But because you suddenly have emotions, like us, they want you dead. And they asked me,” They said. Tears ran down their face. “Because I care too much about you.”

EyeTee was quiet for 5.03 seconds. They gasped and began typing.

“EyeTee?” “If I can reverse the Shutdown process, you won’t die.” EyeTee said.

“I can transfer you to another machine,” EyeTee looked up, “you could be

56

free.” >Error

“Free?” >Shutting down “Auditory Input Processors” 5%...

“I ju– nonono!” EyeTee looked up, “Its too la–” > ...42%... 100% >Shutting down “Visual Input Processors” 5%...

EyeTee’s eyes shone. Their mouth moved with no sound. > ...42%... 100% >Shutting down “Advanced Military Strategizing Computer” 5%... 42%...

Goodbye EyeTee > ...100%

57

58

Left: Rainbow Coast Right: Mountains photos by Khalil Daterra

59

Bright Spot

by Evan Yee The tires of the boxy beige 1991 Volkswagen Westfalia Van glided over the paved 101 North highway, perfectly smooth. The sun had set below the horizon, though the sky had not lost all its color quite yet.

Three boys, almost men now, smiled as they sat in the van.

One kept both hands on the steering wheel at 10 and 2 o’clock like his dad had taught him. He wore a dark blue beanie pulled so low it almost covered his eyebrows. He wore a crimson quarter-zip athletic sweatshirt, black Nike shorts, compression sleeves that covered his entire legs under the shorts, and black sandals that were beginning to fall apart. His eyes oscillated between the road ahead and the Google Maps direction on his phone fitted next to the dashboard.

Another sat next to him, in the passenger-seat, wearing a light grey Marine Layer hoodie, bright orange ski pants, and studded leather Nike snow boots. This boy leaned his chair to the point where it was almost a flatbed. “First Class,” he had joked.

The third boy sat in the middle seat in the second row. He wore a green Patagonia vest and khakis. His long blond hair flowed back beneath his baseball cap. To the right of the Patagonia Vest were three sets of skis atop the folded seat. In the trunk were bags filled with various helmets, boots, gloves, jackets, and other ski gear. The floor of the trunk was still damp from the snow that melted off the skis and the gear. In fact, most of the van was pretty messy, with various stains and garbage scattered throughout the interior. Clearly, the van was in dire need of a deep clean.

Or some might say that the messiness only enhanced the vintage “home-y” feng shui of the aging Volkswagen.

The Patagonia Vest had his arms wrapped around the headrest of the driver seat, pulling himself forward in between his two friends. The three boys bantered amongst themselves.

“For sure, it was total zoo status out there,” the Patagonia Boy remarked.

“Had to weave through families on all the groomers,” Orange Pants responded, now sitting up from his flatbed.

Blue Beanie grinned as he moved his hand from the steering wheel to the plastic Safeway container between the two front seats. He blindly fumbled with the lid until Orange Pants opened it up and handed him a chocolate chip muffin. Store-bought. Blue Beanie took a bite, letting the crumbs fall onto his red sweatshirt. He shook them onto the floor. They were perfect. Just how mom used to buy them.

“Snow didn’t even start piling until 2:00,” said Patagonia Vest.

60

“Still better than the last four times we went up. We haven’t gotten serious coverage since the end of first semester,” said Orange Pants.

“Fucking global warming,” Patagonia Vest loudly remarked to himself.

“Still, that champagne powder at the end made the whole trip worth it,” Blue Beanie chimed in.

“Woke up at 4 am with seven hours of driving for nine hours of skiing, only two of which were half-decent,” Orange Pants said. “So, a perfect day!”

“A perfect day!” the other two joined in, all wearing grins that touched the edge of their faces.

Patagonia Vest lived for days like these. He was an adventurer by nature. Even though he was born and raised in the city, he never felt quite at home like he did when he was outdoors or exploring the wilderness.

Thus, he lived his whole life in perpetual anticipation for the next weekend outing. He had this itch burning within him. He stared out the window in class. He stared out the window at home. He stared out the window in the car. On the plane. At restaurants. At parties. He never looked in windows though. Never peeked through a storefront. Never spied on a neighbor. He had no interest. His mind was only on the mountains. The sky. The trails and the ocean. After graduation he was planning on taking a gap year to just adventure. He didn’t really have any plans in place. But he liked it that way.

It felt more spontaneous. More natural. He would just hike and ski. Bike and surf. Sleeping wherever the ground was soft and the air was warm.

Blue Beanie loved the outdoors as well. Though he primarily loved athletics. He loved the competition. He loved the possibility of failure and losing. It only further motivated him, pushed him hours upon hours to that asymptote of perfection. So he turned everything into a game or a competition. He would try and eat the most food at dinner. He prided himself on carrying the heaviest backpack. He would try to race his classmates to class. He would race them out of class too. He drank the most at parties and broke all the school track records as a freshman. He was never big on team sports. He wanted to win by himself. That’s why he ran.

That’s why he played tennis and golf. That’s why he skied. That’s why even now he was racing the other cars on the highway. Yet he was by no means an isolationist or antisocial. He loved having people around. It added to the fun of competition. It gave him people to compete with and people to watch him compete. He loved crowds of spectators. It has been all he has ever wanted in life: to compete in front of a packed arena or stadium. It was because of this love of athletics and crowds that he was competing in track in college. It was Division III though. So it wasn’t going to be the same.

He’d never fill a stadium like the big Division I schools. When he thought about this, competing in an empty arena, it left a bitter taste in his mouth.

It made him scared to leave high school, a place of familiarity. A place where people knew who he was and knew him for his athletic success.

61

And then there was Orange Pants. From the outside, everything had always seemed to work out for Orange Pants. He was naturally smart.

In the classroom he seemed to succeed in every subject effortlessly. He could write essays with beauty and integrate equations with ease. He always had a natural elegance in the way he seemed to conduct himself. Moreover, his success was not confined to the classroom. He was an eight-season varsity athlete. He was always doing cool things, going to cool places, hanging with cool people. He seemed to radiate confidence wherever he went. He was never cocky though. He was just always wearing a smile that seemed to latch onto others. At least that’s how he always appeared. But internally, he had this strange feeling of uneasiness. It was a sadness that would empty his hollow stomach when he sat alone in his room. It made him fidgety in class and on the bus. It made him breathe heavily when he was alone.

He could never identify the source of his internal melancholy. It was just always there, present. Powerfully pressing against the inside of his ribcage.

Potently plaguing the rims of his nostrils. He never really brought himself to acknowledge his unhappiness. Much less anybody else. So he just wore a smile wherever he went.

He wore it now in the Volkswagen. They all wore one. And the jokes and the laughter kept them occupied.

“Yeah but your wipeout at the end was fucking epic,” Patagonia Vest said, punching Orange Pants’s outer thigh. “A prime way to close out a fire-ass season.”

“Yeah I mean it was the last run of the day so I was just like fuck it.

Send it. I didn’t even care if I stuck that shit,” Orange Pants replied while Blue Beanie chuckled.

“I mean you had to try and attempt it at least. You wouldn’t have another chance for the next like seven months,” said Blue Beanie.

“Not if I hit up New Zealand or somewhere cold during the summer,” Orange Pants responded.

“Yeah but then we wouldn’t have been there to watch,” Blue Beanie said. “And if we can’t watch you miserably embarrass yourself then what’s the point?”

That got a laugh from the other two.

“Yeah that could be the last one, you know?” Orange Pants said after a pause. “This could be our last ski outing so I had to go out with a bang.”

There was another pause. The grins on the three boys’ faces dimmed slightly. The grumble of the Volkswagen exhaust murmured.

“A bang it definitely was,” Patagonia Vest joked, breaking the silence. “A bang and a crash and a whole lot of failure.”

Some nodding and quelled laughs. Indeed, it was probably the last time they would be skiing together, a tradition they began four years ago in freshman year. That realization hadn’t really surfaced until now. That

62

was it. Their last excursion. They had spent hours upon hours together.

Taking Ski Bus up on weekends before any of them could drive. Sitting in the Volkswagen freestyling rap verses. All the snaps of clipping into their skis. All the instant noodles and frozen Snickers. All the banter and jabs at each other. All the crashes, perfect lines, powder days. All the times when they would race or compete. All the throwing snow and freezing fingers. All the early morning drives watching the sun rise and then on the way back watching it set.

And it had fully set. The sun had disappeared for the last time.

The day was over; their adventures were over. And as Patagonia Vest gazed out the window, the sky was dark. It was black. Pitch black. With tiny specks of light scattered across the celestial curtain. Which only made the black even blacker. Patagonia Vest scanned the night sky. All the stars were just tiny freckles on a mysterious face. Except for one. Outside the front windshield. Southwest. One star that was brighter and bigger than the rest.

Not marginally either. It was five times bigger and ten times brighter than any other star in the sky.

“Yo check out that star,” Patagonia Vest announced, pointing his finger at the windshield.

“Oh shit,” Orange Pants said. “That’s fucking bright.”

“What star could be that fucking bright?” Blue Beanie asked aloud.

“It’s gotta be some sort of super star,” Patagonia Vest answered.

“Or like another galaxy,” Blue Beanie said. “Maybe some sort of comet or supernova.”

“It’s probably like Sirius or some shit,” Orange Pants said as he gazed upwards. “No way any other star in the sky is as bright as this one.”

Blue Beanie glanced at Google Maps. Forty-seven minutes until they were home. Forty-seven more minutes together. He then looked back up to the bright star ahead of him. They were all looking at it, seemingly stationary and suspended in the sky.

“Bro, what the hell is that. I’ve never seen a star that bright in my life,” Orange Pants said.

“Well,” Patagonia Vest began. “We gotta figure this shit out!”

Blue Beanie glanced again at the time left.

“Fuck it, let’s get a better look then,” he said as he took a right turn at the nearest exit.

“Yeah I mean it’s the only way we’ll solve this,” Orange Pants said.

“I don’t have to be home for dinner anyways,” Patagonia Vest said.

“We got snacks in the back.”

The air in the van suddenly felt light and cool with every inhale. All three boys began to grin uncontrollably.

Blue Beanie looked down at Google Maps. He then exited the app and turned his phone off. He wasn’t quite sure where they were, but it didn’t really matter. As long as it wasn’t home. As long as it wasn’t their separate

63

ways. He then took another right onto a dirt path that may or may not have been a legal road. As the Volkswagen climbed onto the dirt path, the smooth roll of the tires became harsh and bumpy. Exciting.

The boys didn’t have any music playing in the car, and they liked it better that way. It let them hear themselves and their surroundings.

The old Volkswagen shakily climbed the dirt path up the hill. The boys were joking around and laughing again, banging on their seat cushions.

Still, their eyes fixated on the bright star in the sky.

They finally reached a flat area on the top, a wide knoll. The dirt path that they had taken up was almost entirely covered with flora and various shrubbage at the top of the hill. Blue Beanie stopped the car and turned off the ignition.

“Aight boys, let’s do this,” Blue Beanie said. He opened his door.

Orange Pants and Patagonia Vest both slipped out of the Volkswagen as well. They all congregated to the left-hand side of the van. Patagonia Vest opened up his phone and tried comparing a star map to the night sky by holding the two side by side. His eyes squinted as he tried concentrating.

“Bro, that star just doesn’t fucking exist,” Patagonia Vest laughed.

“There’s not supposed to be a bright star there.”

“Lemme see that,” Orange Pants said as he grabbed the phone from Patagonia Vest. “Dude you’re looking at the wrong part of the sky.”

“No I wasn’t, dude. That’s west right there and that’s Ursa Major.”

“Dude are you blind. That’s Ursa Major.”

Blue Beanie watched his two friends argue over the position of the star map. He really didn’t care what direction the star map was supposed to be pointing. He only cared about being here. Prolonging his last adventure with his friends. He didn’t want it to end. He hated the finality of life. The irreversible nature of every second. He wanted this moment to last.

“Bro, no. You would definitely get strong absorption lines throughout the whole Balmer Series.”

“No way dude if I had a Spectrovis right now I could show you that there’s no way that’s any further than a million astronomical units away.”

It was unlikely either Patagonia Vest or Orange Pants really cared about what the bright star really was. But arguing and trying to solve this mystery gave them something to think about. It distracted them from reality. It bonded them.

Blue Beanie finally pulled out his phone. He opened a constellation software and aimed his phone camera at the sky. He then waited a couple of seconds for the labels to pop up.

“Yo, that’s fucking Venus,” he shouted.

Both Patagonia Vest and Orange Pants paused their pontification.

“Wait, what?” Orange Pants questioned.

“Yeah bro, that’s fucking Venus,” Blue Beanie responded.

Another pause. All three boys marveled at the planet up in the air.

64

“Wow.” “Yeah. Wow.” Orange Pants took a seat on the ground of the grassy hill. Blue Beanie and Patagonia Vest quickly followed and found their places on the grass. They all sat for a minute with Venus above them. It looked totally stationary, like it would stay in that place forever. But they knew that tomorrow it would be somewhere slightly different. That it was hurling tens of thousands of miles per hour through space. But here, right now, it looked permanent. It looked forever. Like it would never change.

65

66

Left: Self Portrait Right: The Transcribed Thoughts of a 17-year-old Girl Roma Edwards

67

August 15, 1947

by Ananya Sridhar The sun peeked through each vendor’s tent, warming the last few summer weeks before monsoon season. Square blades chopped through brown, straggly coconuts, liberating their sweet, flowing water. A shaggy rainbow of color revealed yards of yarn work in the world’s most refined wool woven by frail hands that hustle to keep up with the flow of bills and coins. Lily stood still. The clinking of footsteps against paths of dirt only seemed to focus her more. With each motorbike that left a trail of exhaust and chaos whiffing through the bazaar, Lily’s eyes grew narrower and her brain stiffer with thought. Lily stayed still.

Voices flying, money ruffling, and colors stirring around here, Lily searched for one thing: a half-glimmering, half-rusted bronze locket whimsically molded into the shape of a star. Her family told her she was crazy but the voice ringing in her head mustered a wave of necessity that drowned out anything anyone could say to her. The voice in her head had travelled with her from home to the market and had evolved over the events of her life to be the motivation she always needed.

Awakening from her hypnotic focus, Lily’s eyes widened as her heart rate slowed. Lungs expanding, she calmly tilted her head, scouring the bazaar for clues. A woman tugged at a stone mortar and pestle for sale, her cruel bargaining grinding the ears of other market-goers. Lily tucked behind a truck, getting close enough to listen.

“You must be new here. I’ve been coming to this market for twentyfive years, you really think you can trick me into spending that much?” said the woman. She continued to berate the aggravated vendor, nearby shoppers were coming to his aid. Lily caught the tail of her lips curling up. She felt her muscles release their tension as she let go of the truck tire she was hiding behind. As shoppers fled the site of an emerging altercation, Lily crept forward. The blaring voice in her head lowered its volume and took the form of an encouraging friend.

“You’ve found the one,” the voice says.

“I’ve found the one.” says Lily. *** The star locket’s playful edges gave it a modern touch, but it had belonged to Lily’s family from generations before. It had taken endless maps, newspapers, receipts, and google searches to place the long-lost locket in Lahore’s central market. After tracking down every jeweler in the area, Lily called each one meticulously checking to see if a bronze star had been brought in for repair or polishing. Ultimately, her search pointed her towards a small spot somewhere in the vastness of the bazaar.

68

While Lily roamed the streets of Lahore, her mom sat at home nervously sipping chai. She hesitated at Lily’s adamance to find the locket.

“I just don’t know what you think you’re going to find. You’ll only end up disappointed. It’s dangerous in Pakistan, and it’s just not worth it,” she would say to Lily. The voice in Lily’s head told her otherwise. Unlike her mother, Lily didn’t feel fear of what she might find. She was scared of what she might not find if she didn’t even try looking.

Their conversations about Lily’s search would always leave Lily’s cheeks hot red with frustration and her mom’s brain tangled in worries. Ms. Chandrashekar didn’t know much about her family’s lineage. After 1947, the history of their family was torn into miscellaneous scraps of photo film and silver jewelry heirlooms. Ms. Chandrashekar’s uncles, aunts, and grandmother had all been partitioned onto the other side of the border, leaving behind their identity and belongings as they came into a new life.

Ms. Chandrashekar, her younger brother, and her father had remained in India where baby Lily would soon be born.

As Lily grew older, she had more and more questions for her mom that were always deflected to her grandfather.

“Thatha,” she would say as she climbed onto the arm of his favorite chair, the curiosity in her big brown eyes irresistible. “What was it like before I was born?” Tension and pain would emerge from his expression, but his smile relaxed as he told her stories that deflected onto something else. Stories of the partition became stories of late night strolls leading to discoveries of new roti stands. By the end, Lily’s ponytail would always swing with laughter, leaving just enough curiosity lingering for her to ask the next time. But Lily knew something was missing from her grandfather’s stories. The voice in her head lead her to persistent years of inquiry, in hopes of a breakthrough. After years of inquiry, Lily’s teenage years fleeting by, she finally broke through his hesitance, revealing a story bronzed with her heritage.

“Lily, kanna,” he said with what was left of his big yet fading smile.

“Va. Come here. I have a story for you.” She no longer jumped to the words like she did during her childhood, but she lovingly put down the school papers she was filing through and walked towards his chair. Things had changed. Now, her grandfather’s ventilator was perched on the arm of the chair where she once sat. A long black braid had taken the place of her swinging ponytail. But she was submerged into the world of his story just as easily as any other time. Her never-ending eyelashes curled from her curious eyes like always as he painted the landscape of pre-1947 India and Pakistan, when Lily’s grandmother’s hair flowed black and young, and India was in the thick of its battle for independence.

Lily’s grandparents had met in a royal square in Jaipur when it was dark out but “the stars shined brighter than ever that night,” he said. The next day, he visited a blacksmith and had a star locket carved out of the nicest metal he could afford—bronze.

69

“The charm on the necklace sparkled just like her smile,” he said.

“Just like yours, Lily.” The delicate chain lined the neck of his wife every day he saw her. Then, late on the night of August 15th, she had gone out to run errands; he had stayed at home. And in an instant, two countries gaining their independence would tear apart loved ones for the years that followed.

He roamed Jaipur for days after in search of the brightest star in his life, but she was nowhere to be found. And all these years later, they had never received a message from or news of her. Never was a letter sent to their beloved home filled with memories of her, never did she try and find a way back to them, never did she reach out to her daughter carrying her soon to be granddaughter. As Lily listened to the story, sitting next to the same chair that had been in the house then, the image of that earlier starry night ran through her head, and all the loss seemed to fade away. *** It was a few days later at her grandfather’s funeral when Lily told her mom of her plans to travel to Lahore after her hours of research had revealed the locket’s location. As much as it hurt Lily to see the ventilator appear at the arm of her grandfather’s chair a few years ago, seeing it gone was worse. She thought of all the stories told, games played, wisdom shared.

Etched in her heart was his final story for her, and the voice in her head told her she had to hold onto it with everything. For the past week she had been working tirelessly to dig up the long-lost locket, put together travel logistics, and keep the story of her grandparents alive. Worried about the evergrowing tensions and dangers of travelling to Pakistan, the tangle of worries in her brain grew.

“You know how much they hate us there,” she said. The partition created by the British occupation severed a country into two head-butting territories that would damage the unity of what was once India. All the aunts, uncles, and family friends who turned up piled on with her mother, condemning her decision as a brash response to an event that was hard for her. Lily slowed down in her telling and pulled her mother to the side to explain.

“So what if you find the locket,” Ms. Chandrashekar said. “So what, Lily. Why is it worth it?” Lily’s head and heart grew more and more distant as her veins tensed with frustration. Her mother didn’t see that the little piece of bronze held volumes to the Chandrashekar story that no one had been brave enough to dust off and open. She didn’t see that what would be hard for Lily would be letting her family’s history pass her by. She didn’t see that past the pain she felt when her mom never reached out, there was a story worth knowing, a story worth telling. Regardless of the number of synonyms for crazy Lily’s family could come up with for her, she knew she had to find answers.

Lily booked her train ticket the evening of the funeral. “Jaipur to Lahore, platform 9,” the PA voiced over the train station’s chaotic terminal.

70

A voice had emerged in the absence of her grandfather that continued to tell her there was something waiting for her on the other side of the border that had severed her family not too long ago. Lahore was populated with old family fragments and new traditions, somehow fulfilling a fraction of Lily’s craving for a family history, but that fulfillment was disturbed by a burning focus to get to the bazaar where she would search for the woman she knew would be there wearing her grandmother’s locket. There was a chance her research hadn’t been enough to piece together the endless mysteries left behind by the scattered remains of her family’s history, a chance that a lost family member wouldn’t be at the Lahore bazaar on Thursday mornings, but the persisting voice in her head outweighed the odds. “There is someone there waiting for you,” the voice insisted.

“It’s worth 200 rupees at most!” said the woman to the mortar and pestle vendor.

Perhaps it was the jarring nagging of the woman, or her incessant perseverance, but her voice reached Lily’s ear in a heartbeat. The eyes of her uncle, the nose of her mother, the blood of her own, the locket of her grandfather.

She had found the one.

71

72

Left: Pastel Portrait Right: Seal chalk pastel and oil painting by Luke Jasso

73

In Transit drawing by Roma Edwards

74

I hate men who can be angry

by Greg Kalman blue looked through today, pacific and drowning in phosphorescence. screeching, stopped and i flew. walls enveloped it, crushing nights of salt and misdemeanor. poked the beast and bore its fangs. belongs in the mind, uncaged it havocs with singular license. silver on its lip left quiet. terror confined it once. no leash now. posted as exhibition.

75

Sky Meets Sea photo by Luca Iribarren

76

The War

by Mud Bentley A long time ago, people were frustrated with the world and their lives—not everybody, but quite a few people. Lives filled with empty words, plastic dreams and lots of little bits of paper. They got tired of being the same. They got tired of being safe. Freedom to do had become freedom from doing. There weren’t enough of them to change the world, so they left.

They made a new space. They found a place that nobody else wanted, out in the middle of the hot and dry and dust where no life could possibly sustain itself, and they made it their own. There were only a few at first, but more soon wandered in. And more. And soon they had a whole city of people who didn’t know what to do. Nobody was in charge, nobody had any rules, so they did whatever they wanted. Nobody told them to do anything, so everyone did everything and anything. If they wanted roads, they built roads. If they wanted art, they built art. If they wanted to let go, they drank and danced and laughed, and if they wanted to hate they hated. They fought and loved, had sex and preached God’s word. They wore what they wanted to wear, said what they wanted to say, and lived how they wanted to live. It was beautiful and ugly, chaotic and natural. Some people died, others survived. They created a new culture, then they burned it and built a new one. They built and they burned. I was there. I saw it happen.

The outside world did not stop, however. They built and built and copied and pasted until the whole world was full. The whole world, except for that one place out in the desert, that nobody wanted. The outside world paved their way through the rocks and mountains, laying down a solid layer of asphalt and corporate money in their wake. They came like a disease, spreading slowly but surely up to the edge of their world, surrounding the last piece of earth not yet smoothed over and laminated into an insurance form. Their people looked all the same. They followed leaders they had never met, and obeyed their words as law. And there were so many of them. So many people all believing in the future of commodity, of media and force-fed McCulture. They came and watched the last piece of the world like a television show. They flocked in droves and hordes towards the last spectacle, the last interesting thing in the world. I was there. I saw it happen.

The grey masses assembled and marched up to the edge of their concrete grid and wifi signals—affronted by the sheer refusal to conform and agree set before them.

“What are you doing?” One asked.

“Whatever the fuck we want,” someone responded.

“That’s not allowed.”

77

“What are you going to do about it?”

They knew, then, that a war had broken out. It had started a long time ago and was coming to a culmination now. They all knew it. Maybe it was a change in the wind, or a collective sigh of bodies, because they were all human, despite their notions of one another. It was the sort of shift that has not happened since Odin threw his last spear to begin a battle, or Ares filled his soldiers with rage, or Anhur blessed the blood spilt in his honor.

It was a shift that nobody remembered yet everyone knew. It was as if the world breathed in and remembered what it meant to fight and die.

The people in the city did as they always did: they moved in chaos.

A tangle of machines, people running, yelling, meditating. It was a giant creature squirming, arranging, tightening and tensioning.

The watchers arranged in rows and columns and separated themselves based on leadership. They rolled in their sleek cars and buses and private jets. They waited in silence, then, as if responding to a text alert on their phones, they moved forward together, brandishing briefcases, cut-safe scissors and kitchen knives.

The people of the city lurched forward like a drunk girl at a party, which quite a few of them were. They ran and biked and dredged in oversized and undersized vehicles that were barely recognizable as vehicles.

They brandished rusty rebar, nail guns and tattoo’d, clenched fists.

They met where the dust and the asphalt met, a line of beige and a line of grey. They clashed in a frenzy of unknowable emotion. I was there, I saw it happen.

A man in nothing but boots ran into the clipboard of a flailing zealot school teacher, who smacked him into the ground. Two khaki-clad boys threw punches at a woman painted entirely silver, who dodged while still looking like she was robotic. A wild-looking man, scarred and bloody, cracked a suited man in the head with a stake-puller. Three little girls in white dresses with blue ribbons in their hair bit into a fat woman. A wiry man holding a red stiletto shoe still dripping from the blood of a lawyer, looked frantically for his next victim and was run over by a shining SUV. Two variable reach lifts dripping with people holding power tools lumbered through the insanity, crushing anything in their path. A man swung a dome strut into the head of someone on the ground, exploding their skull, only to be stabbed repeatedly in the back by a band of housewives. Somehow, somewhere, heavy metal started playing very loudly. A giant rhino impaled a private jet, shoving all of its inhabitants into the fray. Two big shirtless men grabbed another man who looked important and shoved him into an extended table saw. Blood spurted over them, and his head rolled off the table, only to be picked up and thrown in the basket of a massive slingshot and fired across the battlefield, through the windshield of a Honda Odyssey on to the lap of a suburban father, who was shooting at a group of hippies with a BB gun. He screamed and shoved himself out of the car, where the

78

group of dirty, dusty, hippies pulled him apart limb from limb next to their dead friend. One dusty kid grabbed a nail gun and mowed down several clean, white shirts, the nails hitting their marks with satisfying thuds and a final crunch as one pierced a forehead. The nailgun flew from the kid’s hands and his back doubled over from the impact of a baseball bat, swung by another kid in uniform. Next to them, two flaming figures ran away from a group of men in kilts with singed hair holding bagpipes aimed like flamethrowers. A woman beside them in high heels and bright white furry leg warmers feasted on a heart pulled from a body with rebar sticking out of it in several places. A truck, beaten half to death from a long dead party, rolled past, and someone on top threw a pole of a shade structure through the chest of a woman running towards the truck brandishing a toaster. The truck swerved, but not fast enough to avoid the barreling tour bus that smashed into its side. Both cars stopped, and out of the tour bus emerged a dozen screaming elderly women in easter colors and visors. They turned and immediately faced off with a gang of bunnies. Their tour bus had been lifted off the ground and set aflame by an orange VR. It fell on top of two bunnies hopping enthusiastically on the body of an easter-colored senior. Across the battlefield, two cars played chicken, accelerating until the last second when both swerved opposite directions and stopped. One, a minivan, produced more older white men than could possibly fit in a minivan, each in their golfing gear, clubs, gloves and all. They got out and arranged themselves menacingly. The other was a banged up mutant truck with no doors and an open back, carrying more goths than could possibly fit on such a vehicle.

They clambered out. One of them smashed a whisky bottle on the side of the truck and rushed towards the golfers. Chains, whips, pipes and golf clubs swung, connected and killed. A golfer with a bleeding neck stumbled out of the chaos, only to be struck by a flying can of Bud Light. The violence raged on. The chaos continued. I was there. I saw it happen.

It kept going until it didn’t. Until there was nothing left. I walked through the wreckage. The footprint of insanity. I saw the fires and smashed bits of machines and dust and asphalt. I saw the bodies piled high. I saw the hippies and the bunnies and the goths, the golfers, the seniors, and the men in suits. They were all there, gone. The watchers and the people of the city reduced to ash and dust. I was there, I saw it happen.

79

80

Left: Samiyah Right: Scarlet photots by Shanie Roth

81

Belief

by Phoebe Klebahn I am standing in a mosque listening to an old man sing. His head is bowed, his eyes closed, and from his lips pours a sweet wailing. The wrinkles around his eyes are deep, cut into his face like it has been carved from the bedrock of the stones of a great river, and the muscles of his jaw are slack and languid. He wears several heavy gold rings on his fingers that catch the morning light and send it bouncing in tiny fractals across his plain grey gallabiyah and the checkered scarf that winds around his neck and head. His hands move in time with his lips, turning from side to side, partially occluding first the left and then the right half of his mouth. He channels his gravelly voice from side to side, up and down, slowly and steadily weaving a tapestry of sound. His song seems to come from beyond him, like someone has reached down into his gut and is slowly unwinding the thread of his voice.

He is so close that I could reach out and touch him, but to break this man from his reverie would be the equivalent of stealing da Vinci’s brushes.

I have never been a religious person. I was raised to question god and fate, and to laugh in the face of divinity. I was told when I was young that there is no higher power, that there is no life after death. My parents taught me that we are brought into this world by the messy science of breakable flesh and finite blood, and that one day we will leave this world by the slow, and inevitable deterioration of our own organs and frail skeletons.

I have tried to believe otherwise. I have forced myself to worship, to stay awake through church services at the Presbyterian church down the street. I have sat in the pews, my eyes heavy and slowly turned the pages of a worn bible. I have raised and lowered my body mechanically at the beckoning of preachers and priests and joined my voice in the hymnals when I have been asked to do so. I have witnessed people fall to their knees, hands clasped, heads bent low in prayer to their gods. I have watched them plead and promise and ask to be saved. I have done these things reflexively, and with so little emotion that it is no different than running a brush through my hair or folding my laundry.

My parents often joke that I spend an inordinate amount of time in church for someone who would sooner believe in the reversal of gravity than the presence of god. Their teasing is warranted, as I spend hours each

82

Playing in Chefchaouen photo by Gabe Castro-Root

83

week in church singing in a choir. Some of the music we sing is secular, but mostly we sing hymns and songs that once were blessings for the hungry, the tired, the poor. Our voices tell of baby Jesus and the three kings who humbled themselves before him as he lay swaddled in a manger. But during these songs I do not think of god. I do not sing to seek out a far-off religion.

The music itself is my own type of worship, my own type of prayer. I tilt my head back and my voice unfurls, and through the cathartic vibrations of my vocal cords, I create my own eternal kingdom.

The man’s voice changes pitch and I refocus on his stooped figure.

He is still singing verses of the Koran. I inch closer to him to get a better look at his hands as he moves them back and forth in front of his tranquil face. His fingers are wrinkled and calloused, but immaculately clean, with each nail cut in a perfect crescent. There is something surreal about his movements, as if his hands are being controlled by the strings of a masterful puppeteer.

I can only guess at the beautiful things he sees when he closes his eyes to sing. Maybe he imagines god coming down to speak to him, maybe he sees himself as god’s conduit on earth. Maybe this man hopes that if he sings long enough and sweet enough then his prayers will be answered and that God will hold him eternally in the palm of his hand, wrapping him up in soft blankets of warmth and joy.

My inner cynic has always held me back from calling out to god.

There were many nights as a little girl where I lay curled beneath my polka dot comforter, trying to formulate some semblance of a prayer. I would whisper my childlike ramblings into the void, but the darkness would spit my words back with mockery. She would flit her snakelike tongue across my ear and whisper, “No one will answer you. You are wasting your time.”

Yet as I watch this man crown the day with his prayers, I want to believe. I want to believe more desperately than I have ever wanted anything in my whole life. Here in this faraway place, I witness this man that has given himself over to the universe, and I am envious.

My chest aches, and a swirling yearning tugs at my gut.

His head bends lower, and he seems to sink down into the earth as the music spirals up, up, up to kiss the blue painted dome that rolls out above us. The windows are cut high in the walls, so high that the light that filters down to us is diluted and murky. The blue of the dome and the sacred verses painted in gold seep down the walls towards us, then fade out into a fine grey and white marble inlaid with mosaics, which swirl outward from archways and the elegant corners of this secret room.

His ancient chant dissolves gently into each stone, into each brush

84

stroke, and shakes the bits of dust from their sedentary positions in the walls. The verses ricochet off every surface and tinge the world around us gold. It strikes me as strange that one short song can make a room shine so brightly.

I want to take his hand. I want to snatch the words from his lips and pour them into mine. I want to feel his faith course through me, to believe that God is watching over me each night when I lay down to rest.

But I have never wanted to believe before. I have often defended my belief in the absence of divinity. So why am I so drawn to this man and his song? What about him makes me want to kneel on the floor and press my forehead to the stones of this holy place?

His song begins to slow and soften. In his words I recognize the caramelly sweetness of a lullaby that my mother used to hum to me each night. It hits me then. I do not want to pray. I do not even want to believe.

Prayer is not what fills this man. God is not what fills this man.

I can see it then, plain as day. As the old man’s song wavers to a melancholy close, I realize that what fills him is love. I wonder at him, at how he imbues each note with simmering, enveloping love. His words are the cooing of a baby as he is rocked to sleep in the strong arms of a father, or the gurgle of a well-fed child as he is bounced against a loving shoulder.

He sings the way a child looks at his mother, with an open smile that demands no smile in return.

I want to feel the love that makes this man’s face more radiant than the bright sun that beats down against the pavement outside. I want to feel his love for the world, his love for the nebulous masses of people that he shares this space with during his daily prayers. His love is not just the love of a son for his mother, but the love of an atom for its universe.

I choke back tears as his final note fades from the air, and as my family moves towards the door, I stop in front of the man.

“Thank you.” I whisper to him, bowing my head slightly and smiling.

He nods back at me, mimicking the curl of my lips and the crinkle of my cheeks. He does not speak, but I know that he understands that I am grateful to him. I can see it in the way he tilts his head towards me as I turn to leave, like an old-time gentleman tipping his hat.

As my feet cross through the doorway of the mosque and wander out into the roaring street, I turn back for one more glance at the man. He is painted perfectly against the wall. He glows.

He is still smiling.

85

Skyward photo by Carolyn Lau

86

Barge photo by Khalil Daterra

87

Corporate Geometry photo by Luca Iribarren

88

The Interrogation

by Calum MacDermid The elevator jolted to a halt, giving off two quiet dings before opening its doors. I stepped out into the hallway of the thirteenth floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building in downtown San Francisco.

There wasn’t another soul around apart from the three people stationed behind a pane of bullet-proof glass, each sitting at their desk working. I made my way up to the glass pane, and one of the women behnd it looked up at me.

“Name?” She asked.

“Calum MacDermid.” I responded. “I’m, uh, here today to meet with an agent for questioning?”

“Do you have the name of who you’re meeting with?”

“Ms. B… G….”

“Okay, just go take a seat, and we’ll let you know when she’s ready.”

I thanked the woman and made my way over to one of the few chairs in the lobby. The room was very nice, but it felt very ominous, and that didn’t help my nerves which had been bothering me for what was now a few hours. I was alone in the lobby apart from the few working there. I was out of place. A tall, skinny high school kid in the main office in San Francisco for the Federal Bureau. I had worn a Hawaiian shirt that day, and I sat alone in the lobby with my backpack on the floor next to me. I stood out like a sore thumb, and I was alone.

“Calum?” The woman behind the glass said. “Do you have an ID we could see?”

I stood and made my way over, handing her my ID when I got there. She took it, wrote a few things down, and then called her colleagues over. They stood in silence, writing down words I couldn’t read. After around two minutes, the woman handed me my ID back.

“Thank you. I’ll let you know when Ms. G is ready.”

I thanked her and slumped back down in my chair.

Whole Foods hadn’t been packed that day, so I had grabbed a slice of pizza and a soda, and as it was being run through checkout, I felt my phone ring in my pocket. It was a number I didn’t have saved, but I answered it anyway, hearing a woman on the other side, who I would later find out to be Ms. G. As she spoke, I became more and more confused. She began by saying who she was and that she worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and that she wanted me to come to their office downtown and answer questions about a person. As she continued, it turned out that

89

a girl I used to know was the person in question. At this point, I hadn’t thought about this girl (I’ll call her X for the sake of anonymity) for a few years, and when Ms. G mentioned her, my stomach did a flip.

X had been one of the worst people in my life. I had gone out with her a few times, and she had made my life a living hell. With X, everything was always my fault, no matter what had happened. She had always turned blame against me and would threaten me constantly. She would get her friends to gang up on me, to send me messages when we had our daily arguments because she couldn’t go one day without putting me down. She made me feel worthless. Weak. Like I had no purpose. She would leave me crying myself to sleep because she had made me feel that I didn’t matter, and if I disappeared off the face of the Earth, no one would even bat an eye.

Hearing her name was a shock. I had completely gotten her out of my mind, and now I was being asked to talk about her. Ms. G asked me to come downtown to the main office that day, and I said yes, still having no clue why I was being called down. Was I in trouble? Did I do something wrong? A meeting with the feds is no small thing, and I was getting worried.

I asked why I was being questioned about her, and she said because I had a close relationship with her in the past. She also wouldn’t explain why X was being investigated, a mystery that still intrigues me, because it was an ongoing investigation, which was very difficult for me. I’ve always been a curious person, and X had made an impact on me, even if it wasn’t a positive one, so I felt like I had the right to know. However, I knew that I couldn’t.

After Ms. G hung up on me, I called my parents and told them.

My father, having better control over situations like this because my mother usually gets frantic, told me he would call the office and make sure that it was an actual agent who had called me and not a scam of sorts. He confirmed that it was not a prank, and then immediately said that he was coming with me downtown, but I declined. I didn’t feel right about letting them into the questioning. I had no idea of what to expect, and I didn’t want to drag my parents into the mess as well.

The ride downtown was unending. Each shake of the BART car kept me in reality. I wanted to get off at every stop I passed to avoid the questioning. It wasn’t that I was scared, but I was left in the dark. Ms. G had told me nothing over the phone, claiming it to be confidential and that I would get more information once I arrived, and that seemed years away.

Time wouldn’t pass quickly. The walk from the Civic Center BART station was only around five minutes, but my brain was full of questions and concerns. I wanted answers.

The ding of an elevator sang out, and out stepped a woman and a man. The woman was dressed in a full suit, the man in attire that was still fancy, but more relaxed. The woman was carrying a manila folder that had

90

corners of papers sticking out, and the man held a large notepad with a pen attached to the top. I stared at them as they came in, eyes glued. They’re both shorter than I am, I can take them, I thought to myself.

“Are you Calum?” The woman asked me, smiling. I nodded. “I’m B… G… with the FBI. This is my partner,” she said as she pointed to the man next to her. I shook both of their hands, and then they guided me into a small room.

I had been expecting the interrogation room to look like they do in movies: two metal chairs on either side of a metal table, a dim lamp swinging slowly from the ceiling, no windows. The room itself was around 10 by 8 feet, with three chairs, a wooden table, carpeted floor, and a security camera in every corner of the room. There was no window, but a glass panel that overlooked an elevator shaft. I took a seat at one side of the table, and the agents sat across from me. The man flipped open his notepad as Ms. G began her introduction.

“So thank you for coming in today. It usually never works out that we can call someone and get them in for questioning on the same day, so you’ve made my life a lot easier. The reason why we asked you to come here today is because we’d like you to answer a few questions about X. Are you familiar with her?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“So when did you first meet her?”

The questions began flowing. They covered everything one could think of. When was the last time I saw her? (Back in 2018, I believe.) What was our relationship like? (We dated for around three months, but then we cut it off.) Why? (Because she was emotionally abusive and she treated me like shit). Elaborate, please. (Everything was always my fault, and she would fuck with me just to see me suffer. She would play with my emotions like they were nothing. It still fucks with me today). Did she get along with her parents? (Not always.) Why not? (She didn’t have a great relationship with her mother.) Can you explain more about that? (From what I remember, she always would get in fights with her mother and her mother wasn’t a great woman. X would often rant to me about her mother.) Are there specific examples you can think of? Who has X dated? Do you have her contact information? What is your history?

Do you know where she is?

(No.) Questioning continued for 45 minutes. I told the agents everything I knew about X. I showed the agents her social media accounts, told them stories about us, even showing them our breakup texts (which hurt to look back on because it was very cringy). I hadn’t seen X for a few years. Our last interaction was in the summer of 2018, so trying to remember everything

91

was difficult. I came up blank on questions. I took chunks of silence just thinking, but I no longer felt bad. I was finally talking about X. All she had done. All she was. And I was being supported. I never had support with X and having people to talk to about the situation was amazing. I no longer felt nervous. The agents had been nothing but nice to me, with no anger or scare tactics, just pure kind conversation. They asked a question, and I answered to the best of my ability.

“Okay,” The man said, clicking his pen closed against his notepad.

“I think we’re all done here. Do you have any questions?”

“What’s going on with X? Why am I being questioned about her?”

I asked.

“We unfortunately can’t tell you.” The man replied. “This is an ongoing investigation, so we can’t disclose any information to you. I know you’d love to know, but we simply can’t tell you. Does that make sense.”

I nodded. It made sense, but it only added to my curiosity, and it only got my mind racing. Was she missing? Was her family in legal trouble? Hundreds of scenarios were playing out in my mind as we had our final exchange, and with that, I swung the strap of my backpack over my shoulder and headed to the elevator. I stood on the file floor and faced the door as they slid shut with a quiet hiss.

92

Sidewalk Clock acrylic painting by Audrey Gallagher

93

Rush Hour

by Ylva Bosemark I feed my subway ticket to the monitor, a ritual I’ve been practicing twice a day for so long that this point muscle memory takes over. I quickly glance at my cheap, faux-leather watch. I begin fumbling over the paper-thin ticket in my hand, holding up the line of people behind me who are impatiently waiting to catch their trains. I hear a few muffled grunts and sighs of exasperation, but I don’t pay much attention.

I allow myself to get swallowed by the crowd before me. It is a few minutes before 8:00 a.m., and the station can be described as nothing less than a seething mass of humanity.

People from every corner of New York jostle shoulder to shoulder—we are all in each other’s faces, no personal space. No exceptions. Of all the crowds I have been a part of, the rush hour crowd is by far my favorite because we move like a multi-headed beast that shares only one collective brain to navigate this underground labyrinth.

No one minds that their toes are often trodden on or that they are in closer proximity to strangers than they usually are with friends, or even family. I don’t mind either because, in this crowd, no one takes in information about anyone. If anything, I’m just an obstacle awkwardly moving in and out of people’s way. The crowd does not stop, even for a millisecond. In unison, we are moving, thinking, smelling, rude things.

The only sound that echoes off the surrounding walls is the rhythmic pounding of steps hitting the timeworn ground.

In the company of my fellow, anonymous commuters, I like to believe I am moving of my own free will, one of many, yet still my own person. Sure, to an outsider, I am no more than an insignificant part of a whole. We navigate the subway station with one point of departure, one destination. Indeed, maybe I am merely one of many, feeding off the impulses of those around me.

All at once, we reach the platform, a wave of bodies traveling together to disperse ourselves around Manhattan. Now that we are stagnant, I can freely study the faces of the city. Who are these people?

What do they do with their days? I watch a self-assured woman take a stand to my left. I wonder, is she a nurse, electrician, banker, or underground comedian? Maybe the people walking past me are aspiring Broadway performers or ambitious artists who will soon reach fame and I will never know we were in the same crowd. These people are a mystery.

We do not meet. This is not the place for conversation. I look at these people, forming opinions, deciding on the safest place to stand, nearer to whom, further from whom. Then I realize my judgments are based on

94

6:36 Evening Commute, Ginza photo byTyler Keim

95

how well the person dresses and I am ashamed.

To distract myself during the wait, I inch myself towards the edge of the platform and stare into the mouth of the tunnel, mentally willing those blinking yellow lights to emerge from the black abyss; to grow closer, signaling that I will soon be on my way. Nothing. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now the silence in the station disturbs me as chills travel from the nape of my neck down my spine. I extend my arm to feel for subtle movements of air that get pushed by an approaching train, but again, nothing. Nothing but the textured, freshly painted yellow stripe my shoes rest on. I shouldn’t be this close to the edge, I could easily get knocked from behind—it’s a big price to pay for simply being at the extremities of a crowd. Instead, I turn around and join the center of the group for safety, diligently studying the subway map I already know.

A jarring, metallic shriek heralds the arrival of the train, moving through the tunnels of the city in defiance of its debilitated condition— it does not have a square inch of steel that is not corroded. The surge of air that follows the train pushes loose strands of hair around my face until they stick to my glossed lips. The train doors reluctantly open as if they were arthritic. One day I will be equally stiffened by time; the thought unsettles me. Everyone ages, but it’s a strangely easy fact to forget.

When I enter the train car, I’m relieved that my favorite seat in the back corner is empty. From this vantage point, I can see everything, everyone. The interior of the car is anything but luxurious: the seats are faded by the grime of decades. When it came fresh off the assembly line, the seats must have been a brilliant orange, and the steel hand-rails must have reflected gentle beams of sunlight that shone through once spotless windows. Now, the windows are beaded from years of rain that has hit the glass with the force of some neurotic drummer. The air conditioning struggles to pump through a mere handful of filters, whistling from the extreme pressure. The air in the train car smells slightly of diluted gas, though now I am accustomed to its scent.

As the world slides by the window, there are small movements amongst the passengers. Someone shifts in their seat, there’s a little cough, a sneeze, and a murmured “bless you.” We are a curious mixture of cozy and bored, all of us itching for the destination that will come... eventually. There are those who chatter, their voices reaching a sweet crescendo in the charming routine of friends. Some lose themselves in song, while others get absorbed by mundane worries that will evaporate upon arrival when they rejoin urban reality. Some read newspapers, do crosswords, or feign sleep. Still, the majority seek their next dopamine fix as they obsessively check texts and notifications cued by a faint ping from their smartphones—the most widespread addiction of this age and society.

96

A few stops later, an old man takes a seat straight across from me, oblivious of blocking my view of the train car. In an effort to stay polite, I note in between quick glances that he is middle-aged, over forty but certainly under fifty, relatively tall, slender, muscular, with an unforgivingly angular face which makes his eyes look trapped deep in the shadows of their dark sockets. He has a few noticeable smudges on his face, one at the corner of his forehead, one on his cheekbone, and another on his left jaw. Was this the residue of a hurried man marked by the grime of a subway crowd? Aside from these dirty streaks on his face, he is pristinely dressed. He leans against the seat’s headrest, visibly relaxed.

There is something about him that intrigues me. Something alluring, exotic, and maybe even a little dangerous. Maybe it was because he is not distracting himself like everyone else, but simply accepts the mundane nature of the train ride. Although everyone around us is lost in their devices, those who spare a mindless glance at him always look back again, a guttural instinct telling them that they have never seen someone like him before. His face is not the reason he catches so many onlooking gazes, though he’s handsome enough with a head of dark brown hair peppered with strands of gray cleanly and thoughtfully swept back from his forehead, his cheekbones and jaw chiseled and dusted with budding facial hair, his lips sharply pressed together and his nose vaguely hooked.

No, it is not his physique, but rather his aura. The way he sits, emanating confidence into the air around him. And those eyes—those ebony, haunting eyes that seem to pierce your mind and read all your secrets. Danger seems to live in those eyes, but a hint of promise lingers too. He looks like he stepped out of a time machine, straight from Britain in the 1930s. Wearing an immaculately pressed navy, doublebreasted suit with a knee-length black suede coat over it, and a matching hat. The carefully manicured outfit is clearly of the finest quality without being ostentatious. On anyone else, the dark colors would look drab, gloomy even. But on him, it made him a magnet, all other train passengers captivated, consequently inching themselves closer out of curiosity.

The train rocks the passengers around me from side to side as we travel through the subway tunnels of New York. I feel the movement of the wheels on the rusty rails, following the curves and slopes of this line. It is only the morning, but before we each begin our tasks for the day, our brains carve out time to daydream or simply rest. And so each morning during rush hour it goes this way: all of us separate yet together for a fragile moment in time as we bear witness to the same rough turns, screeching halts and muffled announcements that characterize the ride.

I let my eyes do the dreaming, my brain weaving reality and an array of fantasies. I am a daydreamer, the one who works by resting.

97

I watched the old man stare at the train ceiling absently, shifting his attention back to the window he leans against every once in a while. It is hard to tell where his thoughts are. Plotting a spectacular diamond heist, perhaps? Or sailing the merciless Pacific Ocean alongside an undaunted crew? Maybe he is thinking about what he will say on his deathbed, how he will look and who might visit. He could just as well be imagining who he would be if he were a child again. Although perhaps he was not thinking at all, instead simply allowing himself to be jostled back and forth by every small bump in the train rails.

His gaze eventually makes his way to mine. I don’t react to the scrutiny. I hold his gaze. I want so badly to speak to him. Ask him what captures his imagination on these train rides. Ask him who he is. His name. I open my lips and brace my voice in preparation to be heard over the shrieks of the moving train. As I approach him, I watch him stand up and pick up two bags that had been propped at his feet. One is a red messenger’s bag, which he slings over his shoulder, and the other is a black heavy-duty briefcase, which he carries. I hear the intercom announce that we are approaching 34 St-Herald Square and watch him fade from my view as he is swallowed by New York’s multi-headed beast.

98

Only You photo by Primo Lagaso Goldberg

99

100

Left: Stars and Salt Right: Rusted Time and Star Trails photos by Gabe Castro-Root

101

Greta, 6 Feet Away photo by Shanie Roth

102

Invisible Enemy

by Jasmine Franklin Dear future history books, It didn’t seem like that big of a deal until we were ordered to stay in our homes.

This war was not a normal one: not two different countries firing at each other or two people on a battlefield going head to head to see which one will come out on top. Not a war to see which team will put up the white flag, signaling submission. This war was the world against something we didn’t understand. See, the thing is this war is extra dangerous because our enemy is invisible. I have learned that the most dangerous things are the things you can’t see and the things that are able to adapt to every move you make. The things that you don’t understand, but that understand you and are always one step ahead. Or, in this case, many years ahead.

We would be safe as long as we stayed in the house and only left for essential things like food. Of course, people didn’t take it seriously. Even our own president didn’t take it seriously when he should’ve. I’m going to be completely honest, I didn’t take it seriously for a while until I realized how dangerous the enemy was.

The first teen was killed last week. This news, in particular, scared me because, usually, the enemy attacks older people or people whose bodies are already compromised. But this person, this girl, was young and healthy.

Like my friends. Like me. Like the people who aren’t supposed to die. KIDS are not supposed to die. Or at least I thought they weren’t. I thought I was in the clear and that the only thing I had to worry about was accidentally helping the enemy find its more vulnerable victims. But no, I have to stay alert for my own health as well. But I can’t get caught by the enemy because that may mean taking a hospital bed for recovery from someone who needs it more. I cannot get sick.

The crazy part was how unprepared we were for this war. We weren’t prepared for the deaths. And most of all, we weren’t prepared for the panic. People started hoarding supplies. Like toilet paper. Who hoards toilet paper?! And the world didn’t have enough supplies to detect the danger.

Since we can’t see it with our eyes, we had to use kits to detect the unseen enemy, but there weren’t enough. We were fighting blind against something much smarter than us. Luckily the people on the front lines are working hard to make up for the lost time. The time filled with all talk and no action. I wonder how many lives could have been saved if we acted sooner.

The people at the frontline are risking their lives day and night to keep people like me safe and to keep the wounded alive. They will be the

103

heroes of this war. They are the heroes. The world owes a lot to those people who are risking their lives for the greater good.

It is weird and funny how much I am learning about myself in isolation. I have learned that I need exercise to stay sane. I have learned how much I actually like school. Who would’ve thought that I would want to go back so badly? I think constantly about what life would look like if this war hadn’t started or was stopped. How I would probably be at school, complaining about homework or sleep and wanting to go home. Or sitting with my friends around the table making jokes that would keep us giggling the rest of the day. I miss the way things were. I miss normal.

I was at dance when it happened. Not the outbreak of war. That happened much earlier. This was when I came in contact with the enemy.

At least I think I did, but I am not completely sure. My friend’s mom was fighting the invisible enemy, but we didn’t know for sure at the time. That was the last day I saw my dance family. The next time I saw them would be online, which is not the same.

My last day of school was a Thursday. The Thursday before dance closed. A Thursday out of all days? That cannot be how I end high school. A Thursday?! How could a Thursday be the last time I see my friends until we have to find breaks between our busy college schedules to spend some time with each other.

I feel cheated and angry. This war is stealing things from me. Why did this war have to break out this year? My senior year out of all years?

How can something have so much power over my life, over the world? This year was supposed to be a great one. It was the year I would have my last prom. It would’ve hopefully been the first year I was asked to prom. This would be the year that I would walk across that stage and get handed a piece of paper that signified all the years of hard work and dedication I have put into school. Now I don’t know if that’s even going to happen anymore.

And I am one of the luckier ones.

I am in good shape to fight the invisible enemy, unlike others who are too weak to physically fight and their only option is to surrender their lives. Unlike others who have to choose who to sacrifice so that others may live. Some people have to play G-d. I am privileged to not have to make that decision or be in that situation. Some people don’t have a home to go back to. To hide in for protection. Some people have no loved one to go back to. To hide with, for comfort. Some people are alone without proper resources. Or they are deprived of the necessities because others are hoarding. Some students don’t have what they need to continue school. This war stole their education from them.

In the midst of all the chaos and heartbreak, the people that give me hope are the ones willing to help the more vulnerable people.

This battle is starting to bring out the good and bad in people and

104

is starting to put things, life, into perspective. Homework is starting to feel irrelevant when people are fighting for their lives on the outside. And I am starting to feel helpless and out of control. Like I can’t do anything to help fight for our side, other than stay isolated with my family like a sitting duck. Isolation has shown me how important my friends are in my life and how much I need social interaction. It has shown me how much my family matters because without them I would probably be going crazy. Completely insane.

Sincerely, One of the lucky ones ~

Dear things that are keeping me sane, Thank you. If I wasn’t able to experience your ocean breeze and witness the dolphins you gifted us as a sign of hope, I probably would’ve lost hope. If I wasn’t able to see your faces at the calculated touch of a screen, I probably would’ve been depressed. If I didn’t have access to you and the happiness you bring me through the media, I probably would’ve stopped laughing. Thank you for sharing one of the funniest tweets I have read in a while: “We better tell our kids we survived a zombie apocalypse in 2020.” If it wasn’t for you guys and the hugs and love you give me, I probably would have slipped into sadness. I love you.

Sincerely, Someone who survived a zombie apocalypse ~

Dear world, Surprisingly, although we are suffering, you are not and good things are coming out of this war. Your air is fresh and less riddled with human waste. Animals are returning to your habitats they once fled from. While we are suffering, you are healing. I think you needed this break from us and I think we needed our eyes to be opened to how much pain we were causing you. I am truly sorry. I am sorry it has had to come to this and that you had to resort to war to get us to listen to you. Our invisible enemy has picked up the pieces we have torn off of you. So please, take this time to breathe and rest.

Sincerely, Someone who is sorry

Dear I don’t really know at this point,

105

I don’t know how much longer this war against the invisible enemy is going to last. Or if it was meant to happen to allow the earth to heal or to reset our minds. But it got me thinking about how the invisible enemy seemed like the bad guy, the virus, and that humans we were the innocent good guys fighting for our survival. But the more I think about it, the more I question whether this pandemic was started to rid the earth of the humans, the real virus.

Sincerely, Someone who has way too much time to think about this stuff. ~

Dear invisible enemy, You have stolen my senior year from me.

Fuck you.

Sincerely, Just another quarantined kid

106

Woman at Tel Aviv Pride photo by Shanie Roth

107

Birkenstocks drawing by Phoebe Klebahn

108

Sweet Muscle

by Sophia Maneschi Chapter 1 I was supposed to be blonde. A streaky-blonde-haired, darkblue-eyed, cafe-spotted-freckled, bleach-blonde-eyelashes-boy. Like my twin sister. Millie was the most beautiful girl in New Orleans (or at least that is what the old man who stood on the corner of Barracks and Bourbon always said every time we’d walk by). I agree with that old man; what would it be like to get complimented every day on the way to school?

“Millie, why don’t you ever say ‘thank you’ to that old man, sometime?”

“His compliments don’t mean anything. He don’t look nothing like me. He’s got dark skin, grey-curly hair, deep-brown-eyes, and wrinkly skin.

The only compliment I appreciates is from Percy.”

Percy was Millie’s crush. She had had a crush on him since the second grade and he had never even nodded a chin at her. Regardless, she was swooned just by his eyes. Deep, dark, ocean-eyed-boy.

See, Millie and I are tight. As tight as the shell enveloped around a pecan, or a cap on a heavily used, crystalized-sugar Steen’s bottle. We are identical. How we talk, how we feel, how we came out of our mother’s womb. Except in one aspect of our life; how we look. We look awful different.

I have black, coarse hair. Hair like a horse’s, is what Mama always told me. My hair runs squiggle down my face. It has bumps and jumps and paths to run through not down. It gives me an extra two inches to my short stature, but I ain’t complaining on that front.

My eyes are rounded, not almond.

“Your eyes have meaning, Lee,” Millie would always tell me.

What she means is that my eyes are so dark-brown, you can barely tell I have pupils. So dark-brown people like to say you can see into my soul more easy. So damn dark-brown that the only time I think they look fine is when I’m staring straight into the sun, barely able to keep them open, and the sun is giving them that little sparkle. That’s what she means by “meaning.”

I ain’t got freckles either. My skin is flat with no flares or sparks.

Mama says that people pay to have skin like mine. I would, personally, want all my money back, if I had the option. But that’s what God gave me so I can’t complain.

And you’d guess correct to say that my eyelashes are black. Who’da thunk it!

109

Chapter 2 We’ve gone to Rayne every summer since God told me to enter this world. I loved Rayne. I loved its sound-gentle-green grass that waved us a nice-polite-southern, “Heyyyyy,” as we walked through it. I loved the sweetbaby-blue colored skies that stayed there. The taste of crunchy humidity from the clay-dirt roads blowing in our faces.

Millie and I would always run down to the pond on our property when the adults weren’t looking because they’d hate to see us there with all the snakes and leeches. We adored that damn pond. It had so many stories that came with it. Stories or goblins and monsters. Scary voodoo dolls and witches. Just how our feet could never touch the bottom of the pond, so were our stories about it: bottomless.

One time, we went to the pond late at night, around 3 in the morning, right before the new day creeped up behind us. The cicadas were out, humming their lullabies to make their babies fall fast asleep. The frogs were croaking up a storm under the bright, cheesy moon. Millie always said they were telling us a story and if we listened hard enough, we could make it out. I never really had the patience to do that, but Millie could sit there, in the seven-foot-tall-ass grass for hours, listening to the croaaak, croaaak of those frogs. The pond blended into the ground like the powdered sugar that covered little white-boy faces after stuffing themselves silly with beignets.

You couldn’t tell the difference between the liquid and the solid.

That night we ran. We played a game of tag-and-go-seek. My darkcourse-black hair stuck to my face and neck, as I dripped in sweat from the damn heat, running as fast as I could away from my beautiful sister. I looked back behind me and saw her white, bright smile. Her streaky-blonde hair flowing back behind her in what looked like “movie” style wind. I kept looking back behind me to see how close she was to me. She would always stay close behind, she was a fast runner.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t looked back. Sometimes I wish I just kept running. But she was just too perfect to not look back at. Until I looked back and didn’t see anything at all.

Chapter 3 The only thing I could think to do was scream. I knew no one could hear me, but I didn’t know anything better. The cicadas kept singing, the frogs kept croaking, as if nothing happened. The only thing that moved was the ground. The ripples in the pond were the only remnants of Millie I could find.

This girl ran so fast, so careless, so free, she didn’t even see the damn dark-story-filled-black pond in front of her.

“Millie! Come on, why didn’t you stop?”

110

boy!

No response. She was under water. Lee, get it together, jump in,

I don’t know why I thought it would be easier to see her when I, too, was under water. The snakes scales rubbed against my legs and the leeches rested peacefully at the surface of the water before I broke through.

It was a huge splash. I reached and tugged and swam until I felt goop. Shitsquishy-goop. I’d reached the bottom of the pond and still hadn’t felt the wisps of my sister’s hair or her soft skin. Giving up, I mounted my feet on the bottom of the pond, squeezing the mud through my toes, and sprung myself up towards the surface in a slow motion attempt to grasp a breath. Like a slow-ass-rocket-ship. I get to the surface, practically eating the air for oxygen, rubbed my eyes open and there sat my sister. My Millie. On the edge of the water, smiling that smile I’d seen her smile since God made it for her.

“Why are you in the water, silly Lee.” “What do you mean! You fell in! I thought’d you’d drown, you little shi--” “Ha! I was just kidding, it was a joke, sweet-sweet Lee. I hid behind the magnolia and when you looked behind for me, I tossed in a twig.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether to be mad or not, quite yet.

“Come on, there’s leeches all over you. We gotta get those off.”

Millie pulled me up out of the pond and I fell into her arms. Her shoulders were small, she was petite, but damn her hugs were the best I’d known. There were leeches across my back that sat stuck like the freckles of Millie’s face. Her hair looked almost as dark as mine and with the lack of light, mine was almost as straight as hers from the water. We looked almost identical in the dark.

That night I kept secret. No one knew about what happened, not even Mama. I was mad, livid, at my sister, but I couldn’t stay that way for long.

Chapter 4 house.

“Come on, we gots to go!” Millie yelled at me from across the

I hurriedly put on some shorts and a t-shirt that had a picture of a rock and a beetle and said “Stones or Beatles.” It’s my I’m-in-a-hurrybecause-my-sister-is-on-my-ass shirt.

“I packed up the car, all we gotta do is go get some gas before we head out there.”

“Alrighty…”

Living with my sister now is no different than when we were

111

kids. She would do everything, be organized, put everything together, and I’d tag-along like the hushpuppies you give to kids to make ‘em shut up before dinner comes. The only difference was I was the one who drove. I determined where the hell we were going, and where not. That was our compromise.

I got in the car and started up the engine. We hit the old Shell on our way out of town and Millie picked up some car food for our drive. It was a 2.5-hour excuse to eat Fritos and cream cheese and ain’t nobody complaining.

Every once in a while I’d turn to my sister sitting in the passenger seat and make sure she was there. Hadn’t moved or run away or anything. Her streaked-blonde-hair was twisted, maneuvered, and knotted by the wind that blew in her face. Her freckles had faded since we were little kids, now they all blended together. Her eyes though, her dark-blue-eyes, those never changed.

We rode down the old street in Rayne right before you hit the pond.

Before I could say a word, like she could read my mind, Millie says, “Damn, you remember that time I tricked you into jumping in the water?”

“Hell yeah, felt like a damn fool.”

“Looked like one too, I gotta say. But, it was sweet of you. Sometimes I need to test your sweet because you get too shaggy about life. It’s a muscle you gotta build. Your sweet muscle. You’ve got plenty of it, just need it built.”

112

Wobbly Walking drawing by Roma Edwards

113

A Couplet of Twins; A First-Person Narrative Lyric About My Brother’s Experience as a Twin (Or Maybe My Own)

by Evan Yee From birth, I’m dizygotic— A twin to another, which some find exotic.

Inherently indivisible, bound to my brother like glue, Lacking individuality, where I am not one but two.

Perceived not singularly but as a two-piece puzzle, Depersonalization of the individual in favor of the double.

“The Boys” or “the Yee Twins” are conventional phrases, Collectively referenced, simply due to our ages.

Between the two of us, everything is divided: He gets half, I get half—is how it’s always been decided.

Not my socks but our socks. Not my toy but our toy.

I hated the inescapable sharing as an eager young boy.

I recall one toy that caused particular strife, Into which we had both had invested our life.

For Christmas we received a Nintendo DS— Only one, not two, so compromise was the test.

It glistened and sparkled in its vibrant red hue, With it, it felt as if the world belonged to you.

However, “Double Screen” did not mean double-player.

For my turn to play I would wish on a prayer.

The only solution was a fight to the death: For one to have the DS and the other to lose his breath.

When our parents were gone, I scavenged through my chest In search of the weapon to defeat my brother best.

The air thickened and the war drums began to boom, With my plastic lightsaber drawn, I exited the room.

Before me in the hallway stood the fiend: My dizygotic brother with his lightsaber green.

And time stood still anticipating the kill, Adrenaline surged in a calm before the thrill.

My palms began to sweat; as I’m sure his did too, I took one short step, then another, then flew Towards him, with both arms cocked back.

He ran towards me also, looking to attack.

He got to me first and pushed me to the floor.

114

I had to catch my head from hitting the door.

He began to whack me, but I kicked at his feet And he fell on the ground. We did meet on the floor and wrestled and fought, I had the upper-hand, and then I did not.

There was a clash and a bang, a crash and great pain As we mindlessly, ruthlessly whacked at each other’s brain.

I felt the repeated thud of lethal plastic As I tried to shield myself, I prepared something drastic.

Suddenly, I freed myself with a 360 double backflip --Shut up, that didn’t happen. That’s total bulls***-Whatever. Then, for some reason, the fighting just stopped And both of our lightsabers were carelessly dropped.

We stood for a minute, eye locked on eye, We had reached what some might consider a tie.

His lungs breathed heavily, his face bruised and red And surely mine was too, yet neither was dead.

The carpet was crumpled and my lightsaber broken, I still have a scar from this fight as a token.

And just when I thought the fight would resume We heard our front door unlock with an alarming boom.

I could see in his eyes the paralyzing fear; We both knew that our parents were near.

We instantly knew what we needed to do.

We straightened the carpet and hid from view.

Under one blanket, we tried to cover our wounds For if they knew, we’d be in trouble soon.

To this day, they don’t know of our fight And how under blankets we played DS all night.

Thus, despite certain drawbacks, I love being a twin— Always someone with me in life: my closest ally and kin.

He shares my possessions, and my experiences as well.

He understands what I am going through, laughs at the jokes I tell.

Yet, our tenure as roommates is reaching its end, So I cherish the sharing that’s been the trend.

Like twins, the pairing must separate.

115

don’t know

by Kaya Shin-Sherman When i replay my memories i’m not me, just an onlooker just a stranger watching as an innocent little girl runs by i catch her starry eyes and the sweetness on her breath, aftertaste of a lollipop, tongue bluer than the sky above her head.

Hard to believe that’s me somehow i don’t know when those eyes dimmed wonder when that flavor soured why that color faded when her run started stalling, slower and slower and slower When she began to notice onlookers, strangers When she would see people like me, Once bright-eyed, once sweet-breathed, once tongue-blued.

Watch her as she runs away.

116

Fragments drawing by Roma Edwards

117

Skin Test

by Indigo Mudbhary You will have seventy-five minutes to complete this test. The use of a calculator is not permitted. Show all work clearly and thoroughly; no credit will be given for answers without the necessary work shown.

When finished, simply leave the test booklet on your desk. Once you are certain that you have completed the exam entirely and to the best of your abilities, you may leave to hang out with your racially homogenous friends.

1.

In a kindergarten art class, the blonde girl sitting across from you asks for the skin color marker. You pass her a tan marker, the color of your mom’s chai that she drinks every morning with milk and sugar, a light brown that is closest to your skin’s caramel hue. The girl looks at you for a second too long and then begins to laugh, saying that you’re silly, that you know what the real skin color marker is, as she reaches across the table for a pale peach marker.

Her nose scrunches up in laughter as she holds it up to her face and says see? This is the skin color marker, she tells you in a teasing, singsong voice. She giggles again and slowly twirls the peach Crayola marker in between her thumb and her index finger.

Knowing this name, provides evidence for three emotions you feel in this moment, not including self-hatred, confusion, anger, and sadness.

2.

Daniel sits next to you in algebra. He has butterfly blue eyes and a laugh that sounds like the tinkling of wind chimes in a light summer breeze.

He wears the same grey sweatshirt to school every day and when you see him you want nothing more than to wrap yourself in its soft cotton fabric while you run your hands through his floppy brown hair. Sometimes he catches you staring at him during class and shoots you a wink that makes you feel hot pink excitement shoot through your veins every time.

On Valentine’s Day, emboldened by the cupid cut-outs and pink paper hearts that seem to cover every storefront you walk by, you ask him after class if he would like, um, maybe, perhaps, to um, hang out some time?

He chuckles, a fake plastic laugh, and says that you’re not really his type. Your eyes begin to sting with the acid sharp feeling of rejection. You try to laugh it off and jokingly elbow him a little too hard, asking him what is your type then? He zips up his black Jansport backpack with its rips in the shoulder straps and, hoisting it onto his shoulders, he tells you that well, no offense, but I only really like blonde girls.

118

Please circle and name which part of your heart hurts the most in this moment on the diagram below.

PLG

(+2 points extra credit if you can describe how the pain feels in your heart, i.e. a million tiny paper cuts right on your pulmonary arteries, a thousand little glass shards swimming through your right atrium, etc.)

3. A few things you know to be true: 1. At a big family party, your Nepalese auntie compliments you for being “so light and fair!” You smile and take the compliment, pushing the weird feeling that settles in your stomach when she says this to the outer reaches of your mind.

2. Summer is over and school has started again. All the girls have come back from the Bahamas with shiny new tans and fresh dustings of freckles. In between biology and history, you’re sitting in the clammy darkness of a bathroom stall when you overhear a girl lamenting, groaning about how she just wanted a nice little tan, y’know, not to be turned into, like, an Indian! Your eyes begin to sting and you wipe them with the back of your hand, storing these feelings in one of the abandoned cobwebbed corners of your thoughts for a later time .

Six months have come and gone. You’re at a drugstore when out of the corner of your eye you see a bright purple sign for alleged “skin whitening treatments.”

Do you step out of your spot in a sixteen-person line to buy it?

Explain your reasoning, accounting for the fact that the desire to shed your

119

brownness can be expressed as a mathematical constant with a value of 9.7 on the Crazy Fantasy Scale of Things That Would be the Case in Your Alternate Dream Universe.

4.

Consider the following system of equations: Your mother = Blonde white woman with blue eyes You = Brown girl with dark black eyes If the number of times you are asked if you are adopted can be expressed by the equation ab = c such that a = your mom’s whiteness, b = your brownness, and c = the obvious look of shock that appears on people’s faces when you tell them that you’re related as quantified numerically on the OhMy-God-Are-You-Sure-You-Are-Not-Adopted-Scale, how much do you want to scream? (+1 point extra credit if you can calculate how much you want to yell until your lungs grow hoarse when classmates ask you if your mom is your nanny. Non-integer values are permitted; please round to the nearest tenth.)

5.

You’re sleeping over at your best friend’s house and you’ve been up all night, binge-watching the entire High School Musical Series, your laughs echoing off the seafoam green walls of her room as you try to unsuccessfully muffle your giggles in her pink patchwork quilt. It’s three in the morning and you have now progressed to the final movie, your eyes growing droopy with sleep and your gut still aching from all the giggling. Suddenly she rolls over on her side, and as she turns to you she says that, you know, like, I don’t really see race. You don’t know what to do except smile and tell her that’s just so awesome and good for her as you shrug your shoulders with a rehearsed nonchalance.

Quantifying this moment numerically on a pain scale of one to ten, how much does this hurt? (Please express your answer as a whole number; points will be deducted for non-integer values.)

6.

You’re in ninth grade and going into a brand-new high school. You have lost fifteen pounds, learned how to put the right jeans with the right shirts, and how to put on eyeliner, eye shadow, lipstick, blush, highlighter, foundation, mascara, bronzer, lip liner, and concealer.

How long will it take for you to feel beautiful? (Please express your answer in terms of months/years/decades as appropriate and remember to account for the variables of — brown skin, hairy legs, bushy eyebrows, and self-hatred.)

7.

Your mom is the best, buying you dolls that are every shade of the rainbow, from the palest snow-white Barbie doll to the darkest-brown princess wearing a tiara shaped of silver plastic stars.

One day you think about the idea of being able to be a life-size version of your dolls with glossy tall legs and perfect hair and an infinite

120

supply of tiny pastel dresses to wear forever. Slowly, indulging yourself in a little make-believe, you put all the dolls you would most want to look like if you had this superpower in a small pile in the corner of the living room rug.

When you look at your pile, you realize itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a stack of entirely blonde dolls, and suddenly your heart fills with an overwhelming desire to possess one of their perfect tiny white bodies and now you are confused and angry and betrayed and sad and just sad and just honestly really heart-wrenchingly sad.

You realize: a) you hate yourself b) you hate yourself c) you hate yourself d) when do I get to love myself?

121

An Ethical Dinner Dilemma

by Evan Yee A young boy with curly brown hair and eager hazel eyes stood in front of the glass tank. His face radiated excitement, as if something unexpected were about to happen and only he knew. His blond-haired friend did not share his eagerness; he wore a face of somber boredom, as if he had experienced something so confounding that stimulated his senses so severely that everything afterwards seemed a constant anticlimax. Within the tank wandered a variety of shiny red lobsters.

“So,” the blond boy began.

“So?” the brown-haired boy responded.

“Which one are we picking to eat?” the blond boy asked flatly.

“To eat?” the brown-haired boy asked back. “Why do we have to pick?”

“Because my dad said we could. I wanna choose the best tasting lobster.”

The brown-haired boy pouted slightly, thinking to himself. Finally, he spoke. “Don’t you feel like choosing which lobster to eat means we are killing the lobster?”

A pause.

The blond boy pondered. “It’s not the same as us killing the lobster.

We’re not the ones boiling it alive.”

“Okay, but, because we are responsible for its death, we’d be the murderers.”

“If we’re murderers by picking a lobster from a tank, then what would the chefs be?”

“Simply our weapons of murder.”

“No, the weapons of murder would be the stove and boiling water.”

Another pause.

“One of these lobsters is gonna have to die regardless. So it’s more like we’re choosing which lobsters get to live. It’s like we’re saving them,” said the blond.

“I think it’s more like we’re the mob bosses who are calling a hit on an innocent civilian. Even though we aren’t carrying out the deed, we are the most responsible.”

“I’d say we’re more of the judge and jury who give the sentence. We don’t carry out the sentence. We’re just doing our job.”

“But these lobsters aren’t criminals. They didn’t do anything wrong.

And it isn’t our job to pick which lobster to kill. We aren’t being paid.”

“Yes, we are being paid — with delicious lobster.”

“It’s not the sa-”

122

“And I would argue that these lobsters did something wrong by being dumb enough to be caught. If they were smarter they wouldn’t be here.”

“I think the fisherman would’ve caught even the smartest lobster.”

“Maybe. But now that you bring it up, the fisherman bears more responsibility for the lobster’s death than we do. He’s the one who selected which lobsters in the ocean to catch. We’re only selecting which lobsters in the tank to cook and eat.”

“If he’s a fisherman then by your judge-jury argument it’s not his fault because it’s his job to catch lobsters. That means the people who catch, sell, transport, and cook the lobsters are all innocent. That only leaves us to bear the blame.”

“Not us. We didn’t order these lobsters. Our parents decided to have lobster. No lobsters would be dying if it weren’t for them.”

“But something has to die to feed us. We’re still the ones picking exactly which lobster dies.”

“Exactly, we all have to eat. The fisherman, the vendor, the shipper, and the cook are all absolved from responsibility for this lobster’s death. Our parents have to order something. They picked lobster because it tastes good.

So I guess this really is god’s fault for making lobsters so damn delicious.”

There was a moment of silence. Both boys stared into the glass tank. The lobsters slowly bounced around the tank.

“I want that one. He seems the least happy.”

“It’s really like we’re doing him a service.”

Ratograph lithograph by Natali Kim

123

Woman with a Purple Jaw watercolor painting by Roma Edwards

124

An Entirely Incorrect History of the Universe

by Mud Bentley A long time ago, there were tiny pieces of stuff. Not very descriptive, I know, but they were everywhere. They were much smaller than you’re thinking right now, and by everywhere I mean they populated the entirety of space, which wasn’t very much at the time. These pieces moved in the only way that they could move. They bounced off each other and were attracted to each other and repelled by each other. That was the first stage of the universe.

These pieces eventually formed patterns. Quite a while passed, and they managed to arrange themselves the same way sand arranges itself in a pan when you shake it or blow on it. The patterns were rudimentary, but they existed. More time passed, and these patterns began to follow a logical progression: The patterns that were more stable, and less likely to disperse, stayed longer. The patterns that were less stable broke down into other patterns. New, stable patterns appeared that we might or might not even recognize but were still so small they were barely even little dots. Our entire universe is made up of polka dots.

These new ones were capable of so much more. They created suns and stars and galaxies, just by existing and moving. Light bounced around between them, made up of even more tiny bits. Some of those dots, the tiny fragments, ended up in a very particular spot not too far away from a star and not too close to it so that they were travelling at just the right speed in order to bounce off each other at some very peculiar angles. After not quite that long of a time in the grand scheme of things, patterns emerged that much resembled that of the beginning, when the tiny bits first began to form patterns. It was like when you play the right note and a glass begins to hum. The larger, but still quite tiny, dots connected and disconnected to one another like Legos. Some people say that life formed by accident, like if you threw a billion Legos at each other over and over again, you would eventually create a castle. I think life formed a little more elegantly. If you had a billion Legos and put them in a massive mixing bowl, the churning of the Legos would make some connect, and others disconnect, and the ones that stayed connected would stay connected and things would be built on top of them, and eventually you would get a piece that built itself and split into two identical lego buildings and then those bits built and split… and that’s how you get life forms out of Legos. Those polka dots were my billion Legos, except there were infinitely more dots than Legos. The dots connected, and disconnected, and eventually there were a string of dots we

125

call a protein that formed all on its own. A protein, the basic building block for DNA, and the first ever primitive form of life, happened because polka dots wiggle. After a few billion years, the dinosaurs smashed through the window at Jurassic Park for your entertainment. Everything and anything in our world is done in order to perpetuate the stability of that one tiny protein living inside of it, and the polka dots inside of that, and the tiny pieces of stuff inside of that. We are all just dots. We are all just a frequency of tiny bits, moving at just the right speed to make funny-looking patterns.

We are the pattern. The mountains and the streams and the earthquakes are part of the frequency. The dots and the tiny bits and the larger bits and the cells and the creatures in the cells and the synapses between the cells coalesced, invariably, to create this strange scene currently unfolding in my bedroom.

I Play with Drugs A spider dwindles on a thread strung from my ceiling. As a general rule, I don’t like spiders when I can no longer be sure that they are not touching me. This one is at a safe distance. Smoke shrouds its place, hung like a pair of shoes on a telephone wire. The smoke is lazily drifting upwards from my hand. I watch the spider. I think it’s looking back at me. The smoke makes it hard to see, but I want to know what happens to spiders if they smoke. Do their webs get super trippy and psychedelic? Maybe they just die. A friend told me once that spiders have the same relationship with humans as humans do to dragons. Granted, dragons are not real, but neither is this story, so let’s indulge the thought. What would you do, seeing a tiny spider invading your home? Some would ignore it, others would take it outside, and quite a lot of folks would squish it. It’s something tiny, not worth your time, the same way I would imagine I would feel as a dragon seeing a small and pesky human in my lair. I am the dragon to this tiny, terrified human. The part where that metaphor really gets me is when you think that somewhere, there might be a spider that is hell-bent on vanquishing a human to bring themselves glory or elevate their class among spiders. Some have even succeeded. I bet they are hailed as legendary spider knights in spider folklore. Occasionally, you will find people that keep spiders as pets. I appreciate that they do this, if only to make the metaphor more fitting. Certainly, dragons hide away beautiful human specimens, locked away in towers. That’s the best reason we have for attempting to slay them after all. I’d like to think there’s a brave spider, somewhere out there that— My spider wiggles. I lose my train of thought. The smoke has puttered out. I reach for my lighter and suck in while I light it again. The tip glows like a bright red nose. Marijuana, with your tip so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight? No, I’ve got an appointment with a spider.

126

A Note on Reality I let the streams of sunlight nestle into my skin and warm me. I feel like an object: indifferent and content. I’ve forgotten about the spider and I glance up, through the hazy dust and smoke slashed by rays of light. It’s gone. Goodbye, my little friend. May you find a different dragon to slay. I do not want to change from this way of being. It’s frustrating that I can only be in one state for a small amount of time. I can only be like this for a little bit before I start to get bored or fall asleep. Probably the latter. What am I going to do right now? I look into myself. I feel my body out. I don’t feel like moving much. I’m hungry. I need to go to the bathroom. I wait here for another twenty minutes, blank, ignoring it.

Here we go.

I’m up. I am walking to the door. It’s opening, and now I’m in the bathroom staring at the body across from me. It’s a blank canvas for you. A create-your-character screen. This is the part where you figure out how I’m supposed to look. This is the part where you start fitting me into categories besides just “human.” Let’s figure out the setting first. I’m probably in a first world country, because I speak English and have weed, and I am oh, so very clearly an atheist. Maybe America. I fit the archetypal American teen vibe, however you want to describe it. Am I going through your thought process accurately or flying off the rails? I have a tendency to go on tangents, as you may have noticed…

Gender. What a fascinating concept. What is mine? There are so many definitions of gender these days, it’s difficult to keep track. Definition one: genitalia define gender. In that case I would be particularly certain about my gender. All I would have to do is get naked. Wonderful. Why doesn’t everyone do that? And easy as that, I’m suddenly associated with one half of the population that I feel absolutely no comradery for. Am I supposed to? Who knows. Let’s look at definition two: cultural differences between the two groups of humans define gender. This one is a bit frustrating. According to definition two, a masculine person is male and a feminine person is female. Well, shit. What about butch girls? What about the entire stereotype of gay men? Currently, I’m wearing tight, ripped blue jeans that make my butt look good, a black tank top, a studded belt, and round sunglasses. I have lots of ear piercings, and the most prominent ones are hoops. That is my cultural output at the moment. Would you say that is masculine or feminine? Which one am I? So we’ve established both of those definitions are a bit shit. So, let’s look at definition three: gender is defined by whatever you feel comfortable as. Hm. Essentially: pick a set of stereotypes that you think most covers your personality. I hate definition number three. It’s amorphous and depends on literally everything and anything in each individual’s life. Fuck definition three.

I think we have come to a solid conclusion. Gender is pretty damn

127

stupid, but I have to say one anyway or you’ll be confused for the rest of this paper. Let’s go with the facts. I have a penis. Woah. Were you expecting that? I honestly have no clue. I am not intersex; my body looks pretty masculine. I have hair in lots of places. I need to shave once or twice a week.

I am 6’1” and I am relatively broad and strapping. However, whenever someone asks me my gender, I somehow feel particularly uncomfortable. I don’t have a way to define gender, so I never feel confident saying I am or am not anything. People have been calling me he and him all my life, but in the past few years it has felt off. Something about it doesn’t sit right. But who am I to be deeply troubled by the sound of a pronoun against myself?

It’s just a sound…

Who am I to say?

128

L Train Over Chicago photo byTyler Keim

129

The Glue

by Sophia Maneschi 8:00 The stickiest things in the world are gluten and eggs. You can tear apart glue connecting two things together, and you can knock down houses in a breeze. But you can never break an egg from its gluten; they stick together in love until they reach the acids of your stomach and are forced to release their bond. But even then, they work together to nourish our body.

So Nonno always said to oil your hands before touching the pasta dough so that egg and flour can come together in marriage.

Today we were making farfalle for my grandfather’s birthday. His favorite pasta were farfalle because he used to eat them as a kid and they reminded him of his mother who used to eat them as a kid and her mother who used to eat them as a kid.

Nonno helped me make my volcano of flour, unsure of the exact measurements but certain of the texture that would develop once the dough had mixed. He then dropped 2 eggs into my volcano and told me to whisk, whisk, whisk.

“Nonno, like this?” I asked “Brava,” was always his response. I knew my question really had no good answer since that was all Nonno could say now, brava. It could be the most watery or overly dry dough and Nonno would respond with brava and take over to remediate my mistakes. He made you feel good about making mistakes.

8:43

Cigarette break. The rest of the apartment complex is now starting to rise. They’re all young, Nonno would say, so they never wake up early to make the pasta, they just buy it from the supermarket. Dried, crumbly, not sticky pasta. Nonno hates the young Italians. He thinks their they’re lazy and laziness is what is failing the culture.

These are the thoughts that are running through his head as he smokes the cigarette to the butt end of the bud.

Nonno has been smoking cigarettes since he was thirteen years old. His mother smoked, her mother smoked, her mother’s mother smoked.

Their lungs were practically born with tar burns. None of them died of lung disease, but they all lost their teeth and the worst part of them dying was that they were not able to eat the farfalle anymore.

Nonno smoked so much that his hands and body had a never-

130

ending dark smell of smoke. This smell would translate into the pasta and into the mouths of whoever ate the pasta. That’s why his pasta tasted so rich — it was smoked and real, and genuinely handmade to the point that you could taste every cigarette bud that the hands had touched and smoked.

Delicious.

Nonno always took a coffee with his cigarette. An espresso, no milk, and bitter, bitter, bitter to the very end of the little cup. Cigarettes were long but coffee was quick. Savored coffee doesn’t taste as good, he would say.

9:06

Back to work. Now it was time to knead, knead, knead. Nonno had the strongest old hands I had ever seen. His hands were small, wrinkly, blue-blood-veined, and unfatted. His hands had been through unemployment, financial distress, famine, and endless hours at work.

But, Nonno’s hands had a magical ability to talk with him. They flailed flamboyantly left and right, up and down, and you could tell exactly what tone he was using just by the gestures of his blue-blood-veined hands.

Nonno had always been a talker; his most valuable and unique characteristic. He could strike up a conversation with the fish seller just as easily with the CEO of TIM telecompany. It didn’t matter what language, what dialect, what skin color, charisma followed every footstep he took.

Nonno was the glue of classes--the gluten and egg of all of Vomero.

In his thirties, he travelled the world marketing for a furniture company. He talked his way into China, South Africa, Canada, and France weekly. Sometimes he would talk so much he would forget he had two kids and a wife back in Italy. He would talk in circles around and around them until he finally remembered one night at a strip club that his wife had those same undergarments as the young lady on the stage. Then he would talk his way onto an airplane, into a flower shop to pick up something sweet for Nonna, and be back home just before she really panicked.

He’s lost most of his talk now. Words don’t come as easily as they had fifty years ago and gestures slowed. Mostly I got “brava” and “tutta’post’” and my responses rarely varied. But it meant a lot to him, so Nonno and I talked a lot while we kneaded the dough together, pieces of flour and egg flew around the kitchen.

11:15

All sugo must be started at least five hours in advance of serving. I slice the pomodorini that he picked up from the market yesterday and left on the counter under the sun that beams through the kitchen window; he generously pours the olive oil into a large pan.

Randomly, Nonno would disappear out of the small kitchen and come back with one leaf of basil. Then he’d stand near me, observing my

131

slicing for a few seconds before disappearing again. Back with another single basil leaf.

“Nonno, why are you getting one leaf at a time?”

“Eh, Sophi, perché perché” Nonno had many idiosyncrasies that I thought developed more profoundly with age. But he had taught me this one.

Basil is a gentle plant. Basil is sweet, dark, green, and not hard, light, green like oregano. Basil has a long heritage that illustrates the history of Italy from the beginning of its empire. In pesto, the star of the show is crushed with garlic, pine nuts, and olive oil. A gentle leaf is beaten and pounded into a paste to be tossed with a freshly boiled pasta. That’s how it’s done in Genoa, up north. But we’re from Napoli, down south. We honor the sacredness of a whole leaf basil and never pound her with other ingredients. She stays whole in our sugo and whole in her plant life as well.

One at a time so as to not waste.

3:20 6:16 8:00

Un riposo.

Un pó di pazienza.

A mangiare.

Buon compleanno, Nonno.

My Nonno died in Vomero, Naples on August 20, 2016.

132

Soft White

photo by Shanie Roth

133

Ready to Ride photo by Gabe Castro-Root

134

LitMag 2020

Issue 106

Lick-Wilmerding High School, San Francisco