Atlantis Spring 2014

Q&A with

Kc Allison The girl who

played with paper

DEADLY LO-FI

Wilmington’s

Scariest

rock & roll duo Community Spotlight

Michelle Connolly

Lullaby Poetry by M.G. Hammond You must try to be still. Perhaps I can show you: roll onto your back and pretend you are a giant, drowned freighter, redeemed and resurrected from the ocean floor. Imagine the vast spread of your gleaming hull floating upward against the crushing weight of a hundred leagues as effortlessly as the tide reaches for the moon. When the water’s surface parts for you, envision your tired frame impossibly stretched out for miles— if you are patient enough, this is how you’ll dream: your massive body caught on the horizon, its silhouette almost ready to swallow the moon.

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Gold Acrylic on canvas by Karen Clayton

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Editor-in-Chief Aurélie Krakowsky

Layout Editor Daniel Dawson

Web Editor Katlyn Kerns

editor’s note

Art Editor

W

Janina Plascencia

Photography Editor Rileigh Wilkins

Poetry Editor Kent Weigle

Prose Editor Caleb Andrew Ward

Copy Editor Jordan Mallory

Proofreader Abby Chiaramonte

Submissions Coordinator Maddie Deming

elcome all curious minds, art devotees, literature connoisseurs and amateurs, young, and maybe not so young.

It is with great honor and pleasure that I have received the opportunity to fill the shoes of editor-in-chief of Atlantis. To follow in the footsteps of our previous editor-in-chief ’s mission to improve the quality of the publication, a few novelties were incorporated. This issue not only contains the exceptional art and literature of our contributors, but also pieces from two of our talented staff members, which have been grouped into an editors’ section. Our staff has also grown with the addition of a review writer.

The production of this spring issue has not lacked in panicky rushes, long days of hard work, as well as the satisfaction of creating a magazine filled with a variety of excellent work. The content reflects the talent of our university’s student body, as well as that of several students from other North Carolina universities. Upon opening a copy of this issue, you, fortunate reader, will be immersed into a collage of ideas.

This issue would not exist without the meticulous work of the Atlantis staff members, as well as external helpers and inspirations. I am beyond thankful for the dedicated individuals who have helped me bring this selection of student art and literature to life.

Whether you are on your way to class, sitting down for lunch, relaxing after a seemingly endless day at work, or simply enjoying life, get ready to embark on an adventure of various emotions portrayed through artistic images and words.

Promotions Coordinator Mary Kresge

Promotions Assistant Kristen Hutchinson

Feature Writer Madison Roberts

Review Writer Joseph Fletcher

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Aurélie Krakowsky Editor-in-Chief

contents Art 1 4 17 20 32 41 44

Photography Gold by Karen Clayton Diablado by Charlene Eckles La Diablada by Charlene Eckles Carolina Coastline by Erin Tetterton Orange, Lemon, Cherries by Erin Tetterton Sterotype by Kristine Gunhe Shadow Struck by Sarah Horak

6 Featured Band: Deadly Lo-Fi 24 Q&A Sessions: Kc Allison 28 Community Spotlight: Michelle Connolly

Fiction and Nonfiction Mother, You Were a Wildflower by Isabelle Hughes One Night Stand by Maddie Deming Grin by Tyler Westcott Gap by Maegan Mercer-Bourne The Mill by Colin Jacobs Goa by Mekiya Walters

Aaron Islands by Sarah Horak Somnolence by Joanna Tine Self-Examination by Chelsea Taylor On the Way Out by Chad Woody Untitled by Carson Talbert

Poetry ic 10 16 18 33 42

Featured Artists

12 18 20 34 36 40

5 14 32 38 45

Lullaby by M.G. Hammond Forever Can Wait by Alana Baker Turning the Soil by Samuel Fox State Park by Abigail Chiaramonte smiling at suicide by Colin Anhut One Foodie to Another by Alana Baker

Reviews 46 Beyoncé 46 Southern Ties 47 Children of Salt

about the cover

“I took this photograph at the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Florida, a 13,000acre preserve that is home to many diverse types of wildlife. This gateway to the Everglades provides a surreal environment for me to escape to with my old Canon SLR and several canisters of film.”

- Jacob Lynch on his photo, “Towering Over Us”

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Diablado Acrylic painting by Charlene Eckels

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Aaron Islands Photo by Sarah Horak

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D eadly Lo-fi Travis Burdick Burdick Travis Seth Moody Moody and Seth comprise the fatal duo infecting our port city with “trashy� rock & roll

By Madison Roberts

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Photo by Bryan Kupko

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Moody, masked and

playing the keyboard during a local show

Photo by Bryan Kupko

Deadly Lo-Fi

“L

ousy guitar player seeks lousy drummer” is the Craigslist ad that sparked the beginning of the band Deadly Lo-Fi. Travis Burdick, one of the band’s two founding members, was browsing the Internet one day in 2010, when he stumbled upon Kellie Everett’s ad. He had recently bought a drum kit, so he e-mailed Kellie.

After playing together once, they realized they liked the same “trashy rock and roll” as Burdick calls it, and the band took off.

During the duo’s first show at Zombiefest in 2010, Burdick met Seth Moody, a member of another band performing at the show. After watching Deadly Lo-Fi perform once, Moody was intrigued, and later went on to record their album.

Although the band may have started on a whim, they have recently established themselves in the Wilmington area, as well as larger cities, and have been booking shows to play for hundreds of people. They are excited to play in their first festival, Muddy Roots, in June.

“They were raunchy and wacko, and there were just two of them. So we were like, who are these nuts?” Moody says with a chuckle. “But they were great.”

After Moody recorded their first album and was a guest artist on a few tracks, Everett moved to St. Louis, which is when Moody offered to take her spot.

“There was no hesitation,” Burdick says. “I was like ‘hell yeah,’ and we’ve been playing together ever since.”

Since Moody joined the band, they have taken some interesting turns with their sound and their image. During every performance, Moody wears a mask, bringing the sound of grunge and death to life. Burdick calls their genre of music spooky rock and roll, and Moody says he gains a lot of his inspiration from old comic books.

The name Deadly Lo-Fi came to Burdick when he was in high school and searching a local record store in his hometown outside of Jacksonville, Florida. He found a CD by the band Filibuster, and the album was titled Deadly Hi-Fi. He said the name always stuck with him, and as he began to listen to more trashy, lo-fi rock and roll, he created the name Deadly Lo-Fi. During their live shows, Burdick plays the kick drum with his left foot, the snare and cymbal with his right foot, plays the guitar, and sings. Moody switches between the saxophone,

Featured Band

organ, and guitar. Although he is a multitalented artist, Burdick still does not consider himself a real musician. Unlike Moody, he doesn’t know how to read music and didn’t go to school to study music.

“That’s right. I’m the only musician in this crackpot operation,” Moody says.

Deadly Lo-Fi’s material is 95 percent original, meaning their music is written, sung, and recorded on their own. They play cover songs once in a blue moon, but most of the covers are far from mainstream. Because they are not signed with a big label (both agree that they don’t necessarily want to be), this is not a career for either member of the duo. Both work day jobs and play music in their free time, which they say is more fun.

“I’ve done music for a living before, and it turns into something that’s not that much fun,” Moody says. “I was trying to live off just playing and it’s tough. There are no benefits. It’s feast or famine money. You kind of have to be in every band you can all at the same time to get enough dough to cover your normal bills. Some people love to do it, but me personally? No. We both have decent day jobs, so we get to pick and choose what we do, where we play, and what we play.”

Burdick says he enjoys the way the band is set up because it gives them total creative freedom.

“We can play what we want when we want, and I’m discovering that all of these people like the same weird shit that I like, which is awesome,” Burdick says. “We put more love and soul into the songs because we like it and want to hear it, rather than just having to produce music that a record label thinks would sell.”

As far as plans for the future go, Burdick wants to play more festivals and produce a vinyl record. Moody wants to “keep doing what we’re doing,” but make action figures and a Deadly Lo-Fi pinball machine. But no matter what happens to the band, Burdick says he will never quit playing.

“However long I’m alive I want to be playing music. No matter if it’s in someone’s living room or in front of a crowd for thousands of people.” 1 facebook.com/deadlylofi

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Forever Can Wait Poetry by Alana Baker Down lonely highways the Buick traveled a 1970 Centurion fuzzy dice swinging from the mirror hair sticking to slick lips air tickling eardrums as the tears continue to roll their ebb and flow steady as the hum of rubber on asphalt Sleep putting her hands over my eyes to avert my vision from the sorry face that might stare back from the side and rearview mirrors a sorry face victimized by neglect Forty winks and the Centurion fights an embankment crosses trenches and comes out on the battlefield and somehow I stumble out alive Heart pounding in slow motion head racing and breath slow but the car stopped somehow on its own allowed me the courtesy of opening the door Walking out unbruised but not unharmed save for the damage done before I left town before he left town before the pictures were torn off the walls and the mirrors were covered in black cloth as if someone had died besides me Three steps onto grass and I’m down on my back staring at the sky Six feet too high from where I should have been too exhausted to die too tired to live so my lids close once soft like the wings of a butterfly and the world powers down for dreams to take over and I am rocked back and forth acid rolling side to side sickness welling up in my belly as thunder cracks the sky Wind and rain falling over me it’s a boat under my back Slick mahogany boards covered in water

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Movements violent and nothing to grasp nothing to hold on to yet my fingernails grind into the planks Splits and scratches left in the wake of my body dragged from stern to prow in a matter of seconds before some gust catches me by the shoulders pushing me over the black water and I dangle from a rope attached to the mast like a chime in the wind Wet waves of hair slap my cheeks and I see the face of a mermaid figurehead carved into the ship wooden eyes looking skyward water churns below and clouds crash above When a sylph rises from the waves a woman whose skin drips from her face with green eyes that hurt and calm at the same time They howl with the waves ask me to let go but I look away only to notice a shimmering mist lingering in the air calling my name Another frightful face This time peeled like old paint dried too quickly her hair wriggling like serpents their coils hissing at me pressing into the wooden mermaid I cling to the rope and her splintered lips open The carved eyes bore into my own and I finally let go into the ocean my body dives Then there is calm A hand caressing my hair Familiar emerald orbs staring only now in a young glowing face With peace she touches my skin

Her hands like sunlight she helps me stand and there is another equally beautiful as she tall as a tree hair the color of spun gold curling tendrils cascading down her back She presses her lips to my cheek then together we walk through a grove of myrtles where they undress and bathe me in a river place a crown of daisies on my head and sing songs of merriment songs the color of springtime yellow, violet, pink As their hands move over skin theirs on mine and mine on them we dance circles in the water naked in the open breeze surrounded by flowers and mahogany trees until our movements are the same A mirror triptych of beauty and grace One woman in three And happiness touches my lips When I finally see that we are me a daughter of water, air, wood that in myself there is grace and beauty is always there even when I am alone even when he is gone and I awaken in the field beside the old Centurion throw the fuzzy dice out the window and take a chance on life on the promise of fate To look into the rearview mirror and know that I will survive and forever can wait

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Mother, You Were a Wildflower Fiction by Isabelle Hughes

I

n the hospital, as my mother lay dying, I found a gray hair on my head. I was twenty-eight. Without hesitation, I wrapped the strand around my finger and yanked it at the root. It snapped and fell into my lap.

“Don’t do that,” my mother cried. “Now six will grow back in its place.”

It was the first time she had spoken in three days. She was hooked up to wires, monitors, medication pumped through her veins. Underneath all of that, she was still my tiny, superstitious mother, Helen.

I went to her, fluffed the hair that had been flattened from weeks in a hospital bed. Her eyes swallowed by soft, purple bags. The sharp color, brown like mine, was beginning to fade.

“It’s your father’s gene, not mine.”

But Father was gone, and my mother hadn’t colored her hair in months. Not since she was diagnosed. I could see a thousand silver strands on her head.

“I’m not mad,” I said. “I could never stay angry at either of you.”

I needed her to know that, before it was too late. It had been too late for my father. He died ten years ago, but it didn’t feel that long. I found him in his chair. The one Charlie and I bought him for Christmas. Remote still in hand and a slight smile cut into his cheek.

On the table next to her bed was a vase with three gardenias. They were the last of the season. I had picked them

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from her garden. She was too fragile to garden then, and the yard was overgrown. I rubbed a petal between my fingers.

“I don’t want to die here, Rachel.”

She pulled my hand to her heart. It pulsed, rested too long, then pulsed again.

“There’s only so many beats left,” she said. “Take me home.”

2 I called Charlie. He was my boyfriend in college. I shouldn’t have called him, but I had become selfish. He knew my mother.

“Can you come?” I asked.

“I’m sitting on the couch. You left your favorite pillow,” he said.

The pillow was nautical blue with a rope border, a white seashell painted right on the fabric. It was perfect for napping as long as you turned the rough side over. I left the pillow on purpose, so he could think of me, smell me, remember me.

“She wants to go home,” I said.

Just like that, he met us at the hospital. He wore a denim shirt. His hair had grown out, shading his face and chin. We would talk to the doctor, plan it out, take her wherever she wanted to go for the last time.

Outside the room, we talked in a low hush that ran together. The doctor told us that once she was taken off the morphine drip, she would be in excruciating pain. Without

the medical care, she would have anywhere from one week to one hour to live.

We would drive her home in the morning. It would take half an hour to get there. It could be the last thirty minutes of her life, but we would try.

2 In the weeks after my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I dreamt of losing her. There were a million ways for her to die.

She choked on a fish bone in a restaurant. She took the wrong pill and was poisoned. But the worst dreams were ones in which I killed her. Sometimes they were accidents. I ran her over with my stepfather’s truck. But Jim, my stepfather, had moved away to Texas. His daughter was growing a family.

When my mother got sick, he packed his things: a wooden record player, shirts left on the hanger. He thanked her. She had showed him how ephemeral life is, and he was called to be with his grandchildren. That’s when I moved home for good. It’s why, even now, I can’t leave.When Jim left, my mother’s entire life rested delicately in my hands.

This was when the killing dreams began. There is one more vivid than the rest. My mother and I are canoeing in the river just half a mile from her house. We are silent. The water is swift beneath us. There are big pine trees that run thick into the forest. The day is warm, and I can see underneath a layer of soft skin on her face that she is young, my age perhaps. I want to pull the skin away, make her beautiful again. We settle on a bank and she turns to me and says, “Rachel, I want you to drown me.”

I do not protest. We enter the river holding hands. She lets go and submerges herself. I hold her face under the water.

Her heart starts to slow, and I wait until her eyes close forever.

They told me this could happen. The day they told us she had cancer, they said we would all feel extreme pain. We were sitting in a clinic at the university hospital in Durham. She wore a napkin-like robe. The doctor came in with papers and sheets of flimsy x-rays. He was a handsome man, maybe forty.

He had dark hair that he combed and gelled into place.

“Helen,” he said. Then he looked at me.

“It’s okay,” my mother said. “She is my daughter.”

She reached for my hand and wrapped it in hers.

“We’re ready,” she said.

My mother had late-stage endometrial cancer. It forms in the small, hollow, pear-shaped organ in a woman’s pelvis.

That day she wore white. She had a slight tan from working in her vegetable garden. Her freckles and her pink lips made her look healthy, normal. She was alive. Radiation started the next day. It wouldn’t go on long enough for her hair to fall out. She was that sick, enough to stop the radiation and try to live the rest of her days. I promised her that I would cook all the things she used to make when I was a child: stroganoff, white bean soup, chef ’s salad, and pan-fried chicken. We were

naive then; we thought she’d be able to eat.

After her diagnosis, we drove to a fast-food joint and ordered hamburgers. I opened the foil and looked down at the sesame bun. Neither of us could take a bite.

“You should eat now, Mom,” I told her.

“Remember when we used to sneak hamburgers into the drive-in?” she asked.

It was a hot July day in North Carolina. We rolled the windows down and listened for a breeze. I wasn’t ready to lose my mother. I wanted to freeze everything, go back to the drive-in, and see Jurassic Park over and over again every day for the rest of our lives. But it wasn’t our life to live. It was hers, and it was mine, and soon, she would only live in my memory.

“Of course,” I said, “Who wants to pay ten dollars for a burger? You didn’t even get fries.”

2 My mother was discharged from the hospital on a Tuesday.

I was completely shattered. I took a photo of her hospital room. Those last moments were so blurred it felt necessary, proof that this all happened. Charlie and I lifted her into a wheel chair and pushed her down to the front desk. We were greeted by a woman in a bright, pink pantsuit. She wore a small angel broach. She clicked her long, plastic fingernails against a clipboard. When she saw us, she tilted her head and smiled. We were her next job. She would say her practiced lines and go back to the rest of her paperwork.

She sat the clipboard in my mother’s lap.

“So, once you jot down your name there, you’re free to go,” she said.

Most people are discharged after being cured. She didn’t have many cases where the patient who left was still sick.

The file said that the doctor urged her to stay, to keep fighting. Below all the risks and warnings, there was a place where someone had written less than one year to live. It was written in a cramped, pained sort of way. It must have been the doctor’s writing. That morning he had come into the room to say goodbye.

“Helen,” he said, “Thank you.”

She looked up at him, confused. He took her hands in his.

Soon, she would die, and it didn’t matter if he was her doctor.

“You remind me of my mother. No one has done that for me since she passed.”

2 We drove slow. My mother and I were in the backseat clinging to each other. It was our last mission. I twirled her hair around my index finger, scratched swirls in her back. The AC blew fierce through the vents. We put a paper grocery bag in her lap in case she had to vomit.

“Any music?” Charlie asked.

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Somnolence Photo by Joanna Tine

“I wanted her to tell me that I had made her proud, that I had honored her.”

It wasn’t the right time. I shook my head at him in the rearview mirror. My mother lifted her head from the bag.

“Sure,” she said, “Put on something soft.”

He scanned the stations looking for the right song. There was modern rock and top forty, none felt right. How do you pick a song for your mother’s last car ride?

“Keep this on,” she said.

It was a Tom Petty song, “Wildflowers.” She hummed the words. She used to listen to it on cassette when I was a child.

We would swing around the living room, dancing and singing.

“How perfect is this, Rachel?” she asked.

I could feel her weakening. There was nothing perfect about listening to your mother hum between retches into a brown

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paper bag. You want your parents to die in their sleep. After they watch their grandchildren get married. Once they’ve seen that their life meant something. She had no grandchildren.

She only had me and this radio rippling softly through the car.

We made it home in time. I didn’t think it would happen that day. I thought maybe we had a week. When someone asks to die at home, there is no panic to save them once they’re gone. You do not call the ambulance. There is no revival.

I lay with her as she died. Our arms twisted together. I wanted her to tell me that I had made her proud, that I had honored her. I asked her if it was true. It’s strange, but I needed it as closure, as validation, as a last memory. She

turned her face to me. It wasn’t right to make her sad, to make her feel anything but peace.

“Of course,” she whispered.

For a moment we were suspended. I could feel the presence of my mother and also, could not, as if her soul pulled ghostly from her body. Everything illuminated around me. The walls glowed and pulsed in sync with her heart. I thought I saw her soul ascend, but this happens only in my dreams. In my dreams, we are both floating upwards twisting and dancing in our airy state. 1

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Turning the Soil Poetry by Samuel Fox My father works the earth as if his hands were part root and part rain. He erodes the ground with his hands with his tools of former rocks that remember their place in the soil of Carolina clay.

My father turns the soil outside my window nearly every day. He gets new calluses from driving the shovel in, from pulling nuisances, and plucking the fruits of his labor: we eat the salty tomatoes, the leafy kale, the bitter zucchini.

My father, at sixty-two, allows the sun to leather his skin, the wind to wipe his brow, the gnats to drink his sweat.

Turning the soil, my father buries his troubles (along with his triumph); he makes me want to grow in the deep of his shadow like a perennial snapdragon.

The morning is still a child, and my father prays to the God of green thumbs, pumpkins, garlic as the chink of shovel contains his words.

La Diablada Acrylic painting by Charlene Eckels 16

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Editors’ Section

State Park Poetry by Abigail Chiaramonte I lost my virginity three hundred yards from where a dismembered body was later found. He called me Maenad, Nymph. I was fourteen, not a child, but a force that rose through the tangled Spanish moss to crumple the clouds like a newspaper with disturbing headlines. The sky was an unassuming blue that receded from my sounds. His bite burned my loins, rendering me paralyzed but impatient. Cyprus roots emerged from the pine straw and became my knotted cage. The stag offered me his antlers, but as I reached out to touch the velvet bones, he vanished through the trees. I called him Jesus for his beard and his musk—he smelled like incense and fish scales and sacrifice.

One Night Stand Fiction by Maddie Deming

S

erene. I was lying beside you, your arm awkwardly positioned under me. This would only last for so long, until the dizzyingly slow tingles soon crawled up your arm until they popped like tiny helium balloons under the heel of my foot. I wanted to say that our bodies were like puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly, but we all know that’s a load of shit. Our imperfections were what I loved the most though; they defined us.

My exposed back was awkwardly pressed against your unnamed body part. I don’t think there will ever be a word for that specific body part that won’t make me cringe. Soft. It made me a little self-conscious and the more I thought about it, the more my face heated. I wasn’t embarrassed about our nakedness though. No, I loved how naked we were. I was embarrassed at the thought of me not having normal female thoughts. What was I supposed to be thinking of? Maybe the

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fact that I was thinking in itself was female. That was good enough for me. I would take all of the normal I could get.

“What are you thinking about?” you asked.

“Nothing,” I replied. Everything.

“I don’t want this to be a one night stand. I want to get to know you.”

“Okay.”

“Can we hang out tomorrow?”

You grabbed at my love handles to turn me around to face you. I hate when people touch my love handles. You looked at me with this dorky kind of smile. It made me laugh.

“Yes, we can hang out tomorrow. Can we just go to bed now?”

You smirked at me and ran a hand through my hair.

“Okay.”

“

I always thought it odd I was attracted to a boy with such feminine hands. Maybe that was an early warning sign.

I always loved those hands. They were long and feminine looking. I always thought it odd I was attracted to a boy with such feminine hands. Maybe that was an early warning sign.

You also played with my hair. I thought it strange for a boy to play with my hair. I loved having my hair played with though. It reminded me of when I was little. I always wanted the prettier, more outgoing girls to French braid my hair.

When they did, they would talk to me like I was one of their best friends. Even if it was for a little while, I felt like I was a part of something bigger.

It also reminded me of when I would go to Great Clips for a haircut. I would silently chant how I didn’t want the middle-aged Asian woman as if someone could hear me, and by some chance, the universe would grant me this one wish.

The universe never did, however, and every time I said I only wanted a trim, I ended up getting four inches chopped off thanks to misinterpretation. I never spoke up, however. I always walked out with a smile and a shitty sour apple Dum Dum from the heavily picked-through bowl at the front counter. I always wanted lemon flavored. Regardless, I would suck it for an hour straight afterwards, the taste and feel of soggy paper products filling my mouth—more so because I needed to do something with my hands, and usually felt awkward being the only one to get up to throw something away. Because I definitely hated sour apple.

In my drunkenness, I didn’t realize how selfish you were.

My own birthday party and I gave you a blowjob. Why didn’t you give me head?

People always laugh at me in dismay when I say I like getting head. They say that only guys can get head or blowjobs.

But I don’t like the expression going down. There are too many syllables. When I have something to say, I like to use the least amount of syllables to get it out. If I take too long, I notice how people’s eyes glaze over, and they miss the important parts, and I have to repeat myself until I get a delayed reaction. I feel like this always happens to me. People are always not listening to what I have to say.

The next morning I wanted to lie underneath the lights, hidden behind hanging blankets above me all day. It was cloudy outside. But in true drunken fashion, I was up and alert at an ungodly time of the morning. I tensed when I

”

remembered my drunk friend being carried upstairs by you at the house where we were drinking. I shot a text message to my roommate.

“Hey,” I whispered, as if I was trying to break the news of waking up gently to you. You didn’t budge.

“Hey!” I shook you a little this time, trying to laugh away the awkwardness. For some reason I felt creepy being the only one awake.

You turned on your side a little and just looked at me without saying anything. You were always doing that, looking at me. It made me self-conscious. I wasn’t sure if you were examining me, trying to figure me out, laughing at me, or simply just looking at me. That was my problem: I overanalyzed every little thing.

“My roommate’s in the other room. I feel bad. We should let her in.”

You still didn’t speak. You groaned and rolled on your side.

Awkwardly, I sat up contemplating whether or not I should try and maneuver over your limp body. It seemed like a difficult task to do naked. Right as I was about to make my move, you sat up and got out of my bed without making a sound.

I had one of those inner awkward moments, the ones that aren’t shared with anyone but yourself. Like when you accidentally reach for the same plate as a stranger in line for food but retract your hand before they see. Or when you have something to say and you make this strange, grunting noise because the other person talks over you, but they didn’t even hear the noise you made. I despise those memories because they never leave me.

As you pulled up your pants and got your shit together that morning, I was quickly putting on my clothes, watching you the entire time to see if you were watching me. You weren’t.

You didn’t even look up when you realized you had lost your shirt, which I found underneath my bed six months later, and had asked me to help you find it. It was as if I was searching you, trying to make you see me, trying to assess if we were really going to do this, if this was even real.

I read somewhere that the brain remembers some memories better than they were and others worse than they actually were. I still have your shirt. Asshole. 1 Issue 67

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Grin Fiction by Tyler Westcott

“C

’mon, kid. Hurry the fuck up already,” Craig said to his brother. He was tall and pale, mostly legs, and he loomed as he walked back and forth in the hall of his childhood home. He stopped his pacing to bang on the creaky bathroom door, palms open.

White paint chips molted off the warped frame.

“I haven’t got all fuckin’ day! Do you wanna do this or not?” he shouted.

“I’m almost done!” Noah said from behind the door. He flushed the toilet and used the sink stepstool to wash his hands for the exact duration of the “Happy Birthday” song and then bounded out into the hallway.

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“I swear, buddy, you pee like a girl,” Craig said with a smirk.

“No, you pee like a girl. Mom says I should wash my hands longer, so I don’t get pink eye again,” Noah explained matterof-factly.

“Don’t get your panties in a wad. Mom’s not even here to notice. She’s at work. Are you ready to go? I’ve got your juice boxes and some trail mix,” Craig said, holding up a tiny blue polyester backpack. “Where the fuck is your coat? And your Sketchers?”

Craig walked down the hall to Noah’s room and went sifting through the piles of unwashed corduroys and graphic T-shirts, careful not to crush the scattered caltrop Legos

Carolina Coastline Acrylic on board by Erin Tetterton

littering the dusty hardwood floor. No luck. He turned his attention to the musty dresser by the window and started yanking out drawers. Burnt out nightlights, various old coins, and broken action figures rattled in the junk drawer at the bottom as he dug like a hungry rat.

“Fuck! This shit is ridiculous,” Craig muttered under his breath. “If she would take five fuckin’ minutes away from Tom and clean this room I wouldn’t have to dea—” “Craig! I found them. I found my stuff.”

Noah was standing in the doorway with his Sketchers unvelcroed and his coat only on his left arm. Craig stopped rummaging and smiled.

“You’re a real Boy Scout, you know that?” he said, tousling the blonde curly mop on Noah’s head. “Let’s head out.”

2 Grunting with the effort, Craig lifted Noah from his car seat. They had pulled into the gravel parking lot and found not a single other car was present, though this was not unusual. During fall break, most people skipped to the bigger townships with the nicer trails. Craig slipped the backpack around Noah’s arms. Noah shivered.

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“It was black and twisted, contorted in awful ways,

“Woah, bud, you cold?” Craig said. Noah nodded sagely and gave a vigorous sniffle. Craig snatched a blue and gray toboggan hat from the pack and carefully pulled it down over Noah’s thick hair, making sure it covered his ears. Noah looked intently at Craig, his hazel eyes practically shining with anticipation.

“Is this where the body is?” he asked.

“Yeah, I found it not too far from here last time,” Craig said.

“Cool,” Noah said, kicking some pebbles around.

With the car locked, they set off onto a northbound nature trail. The sun flickered dimly through the autumn foliage and pine needles snapped underfoot. Noah munched loudly on trail mix and occasionally stopped to investigate a particularly large beetle or an interestingly patterned leaf or a snake hole.

Craig smoked and thought about the last time he had spoken to his mother.

2 “How the hell do you expect to graduate if you never go to class?!” she yelled.

“Why do you care?! You’re hardly ever home to even check if I’ve gone to school or not. Maybe I only fucking skip because you let me!”

“Watch your language! I would bring Tom around more if you would let me! I have tried so hard to include you in my relationship with him, but you have shown nothing but hostility from the moment I introduced you two. He feels like you hate him.”

“I do hate him! You didn’t give a thought to whether or not Noah and I were ready for this. What the fuck did you expect?”

“Noah loves Tom. You’ve seen that. And I know how hard this has been on you two. Don’t you think it’s been hard on me too? I can’t carry everything myself. How long was I supposed to wait?”

“I don’t know! I feel like you didn’t even bother to ask us!”

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“Honey. You haven’t said hardly a thing to me since he passed. I’ve tried.”

“I’m leaving,” Craig said, slamming the door behind him.

Then he was in the van, driving wherever. That night, Noah was lulled to sleep by the sound of his mother crying on the telephone with his grandmother as he had been so many nights before. When Craig got home, he stopped outside of his mother’s door and stared at the twisted wood grain.

2 “Craig, will Mom be mad that we did this?” Noah said.

Craig looked up from the trail map he had brought along.

“We’ve been over this. As long as you don’t say anything, she won’t know. She can’t get mad at what she doesn’t know,” Craig said. He checked his watch—they still had hours until she would be home. He grabbed a handful of trail mix and watched a squirrel skitter up a tree trunk.

“Craig, do you remember what he looked like?” Noah was looking down at the creek, fingering a mossy stone just barely covered by the rippling stream.

Craig just stood there for a minute.

“Are you having a hard time remembering?” he asked finally.

“Mhm. I used to close my eyes when I was trying to sleep, and I would think about the faces he would make when he read to us. But now, it’s fuzzy. I just remember how scratchy his face felt.”

Noah sat by the creek and gave Craig a glassy stare. Craig turned away and felt his throat tighten.

“Yeah, I remember what he looked like, kiddo. I remember,” Craig said.

“Would he be mad that I forgot?” Noah asked.

“No,” Craig said. “He wouldn’t.”

Craig shivered. They stood in a burned-out clearing of charred stumps. The earth was gray and black, and it cracked dryly underfoot. There was no sound here—no birdsong, no chattering of little teeth, no leaves rustling in the wind. The slightest breeze carried powdery ashes into Craig’s eyes. He

flesh like charcoaled leather. The air smelled vaguely of stale vinegar and burnt meat.”

wiped them as Noah stared at the center of the clearing, mouth agape, absently twirling the pull-strings on his coat.

“So . . . this is it,” he said.

“Looks like it, bud,” Craig replied.

The body in front of them was scorched beyond all recognition. It was black and twisted, contorted in awful ways, flesh like charcoaled leather. The air smelled vaguely of stale vinegar and burnt meat. The head was desiccated and shrunken, but the mouth was open wider than it should have been. And then there were the teeth: sandy, opaque, and lumpy. The arm stumps appeared to be grasping at something—coiled against the empty air like threatened serpents.

“I don’t like this, Craig,” Noah said softly.

“You don’t? I think it’s pretty cool,” Craig said.

Noah just shook his head and covered his face with his mittens. Craig inched closer to the body. Suddenly, there was a small pop. What seemed like hundreds of flies cascaded out of the still-gaping mouth of the corpse, swarming around the boys. Noah screamed.

“Fuck! What the fuck! Jesus!” Craig swatted at his face, trying to drive the smothering swarm away. Waving his arms furiously, he ran to Noah, scooped him into his arms, and ran from the clearing.

2 Back in the van, Noah slept soundly in the backseat. Craig couldn’t shake the image of the flies storming out of the body like so much pollen. The sun had almost set—the colors of the leaves were barely perceptible against the darkening sky as Craig weaved his way down the mountain road once again.

Something in the air changed. The smell was musty, like an unpleasantly damp basement. Craig crinkled his nose and went to roll up his window when a flash of black dashed across the road. He swerved the car hard, and the tires squealed as he slammed on the brakes, and the flash of black was gone. Noah woke with a start and yelled.

“Craig! What—”

“It’s fine! It’s fine! Everything’s fine! Just had to swerve to . . . miss an animal. Yeah. An animal. Just go back to sleep,” Craig said, trying to sound reassuring despite his sharp breathing.

Noah nodded but did not go back to sleep.

That night, Craig walked into his mom’s room.

“Can we talk?”

“That depends. Do you want to talk or yell?” she said.

Craig looked down at the floor.

“I want to talk.”

“I think I can do that,” she said.

“I just . . . I wanted to say I know it’s been hard. For you. All of this,” he said. Mom just looked at him. “I know I haven’t made it any easier. For you or Tom. So I’m saying, I’m sorry. I don’t, I don’t know what else to say.”

“Come here,” she said.

He walked up to the bed and she hugged him.

2 Sometime later, Craig walked into Noah’s room.

“You awake, buddy?” he asked.

“Yeah. Craig . . . do you see that? Outside?” Noah asked, pointing to the window.

Craig walked to the window and looked out into the dark yard. There, to the left, near the tire swing—not ten feet away from the window—a black dog, dripping wet, grinned with teeth dully gleaming in the moonlight. Craig stared into its eyes. They were like black glass, inscrutable but gleaming. Its smile widened, and Craig felt his gut tighten and grow cold.

Noah and Craig both stared. They stared until they weren’t even sure what they were looking at anymore. They stared until their eyes went unfocused. They stared until the black of the dog blurred and melted out into the night sky. It rose in a hazy column out of their yard—up and out endlessly it billowed and dissipated like clearing smog. The grinning teeth left by the tire swing became the ghostly nightlight reflected in the glass of the window. Craig carried Noah back to his bed and crawled in next to him. They fell asleep. 1 Issue 67

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Q& A Sessions:

Kc Allison A Process of Play

A

by Madison Roberts

s part of her senior exhibit at UNCW, Kc Allison experimented with different bindings, pages, and details of books to create a series of sculptures that translated traditional novels and household books into an exquisite masterpiece of its own. After graduating from

UNCW in December 2013 with a degree in studio art, Allison continued her “process of play� with sculptures and other mixed media pieces. Her hopes for the near future are to get involved with the film industry.

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I see shapes; I see potential in certain things, and I’m big on a process of play.

Kc Allison

How did you get involved with art?

It took me kind of a while to figure out. I’m a nontraditional student. I’m twenty-seven and I had taken a few years off to figure that out. I waffled between English and creative writing for a while, transferred schools, took some time off from college, and finally returned to get a degree in studio art.

My mom was an interior designer, and I was pretty much in a workshop with my dad playing in sawdust since I was little.

So I have always been around woodworking and finished carpentry. I think it was always the choice for me. It just took me a while to arrive at that choice.

What is your favorite style of art to play with?

I kind of fell into sculpting, and it really wasn’t a surprise in the end because of my background. Building things and sculpture in general was something I always gravitated to. I took a beginning class at UNC-Charlotte this summer and then I took an intermediate course and did a directed independent study and expanded on all of that. Playing with book pages and their bindings and the way they are cut has been my favorite thing to work with lately.

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Do you have a piece of your own that is your favorite?

I’m an evolutionary artist where one piece will serve as the base for the next piece. I’m big on recycling and up-cycling and re-using. So a lot of times, one piece that I do will serve as inspiration or even the physical base for another, so it’s funny how some of my favorite pieces now, started as something completely different that I was able to develop an idea from. I would say that “Coral” which is one of the piece I did for senior exhibit, is one of my pieces by far because it kind of incorporated elements from previous sculptures. Honestly I want to do a whole installation of pieces like that one, so I’m sure they will evolve even further.

What do you enjoy most about art?

I think what I enjoy most about art in general is how you set the stage or create the sight for interaction with an audience or another person outside of your own experience and watching that unfold. Especially after working with nontraditional objects and things like that, I love how people react and it examines the whole process of how people read utilitarian items, or items they have had their own personal

Quartz Dandelion (detail)

Q&A Sessions

experience with in their lives and how it transforms when they see it differently.

What are your plans for the future?

I love window displays and I love how it’s this isolated art environment and I would really love to do sculptural installations that work toward merchandise displays in window displays for stores like Anthropologie or places like that. But I think in the mean time I will probably work in film and the art department and set dressing and staging.

Tell me a little about your senior exhibit and where the inspiration for that came from.

I had started working with books, cutting them on the bands, folding them, learning about the different bindings and how different pages and different books work, and how they would respond to different folding and other things.

I had started at the end of my semester in intermediate sculpture at UNCW. That’s when I started rolling book pages and interlocking pages, and I made a small sculpture. I was also experimenting with three-dimensional screen printing, so all of the senior exhibit pieces that I submitted, which was five pieces total and four got in, have three dimensions to them. I was just exploring books and what different forms

they could take. I worked a lot on the assemblage and collage artists and making things fit like a puzzle piece. So when I started folding all of these things, I started arranging them in different formations. And that’s basically how I arrived at the sculptures. I really wanted to create a cohesive thing that experimented with books and what they could be beyond their utilitarian use.

From where do you get most of your inspiration?

I get my inspiration from objects themselves. I am a collector. I see things in retail shops or salvation shops or even junkyards and scrap piles, and things people have left on the side of the road. I see shapes; I see potential in certain things and I’m big on a process of “play.” I collect and then I grow acquainted with certain objects and then I position them and play with them and find out what their different properties are and how I can manipulate them and go from there. I love changing those objects into something completely different but at the end of the day still resemble things I see or shapes in nature or things I experience in everyday life. 1

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Michelle Connolly IN THE

Community Spotlight

by Madison Roberts

“I’ve always been in my imagination and able to roam around in it.”

Party Time

by Michelle Connolly (Previous Page)

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Spring 2014

Michelle Connolly

W

hen you first walk into Michelle Connolly’s art studio, you see a collection of paint, water cups, cardboard, finished and unfinished pieces, sculptures, and paintings. It’s all in categorized clutter.

African tribal masks cover the walls, and a large oil painting props itself against another stack of artwork. It looks as though she’s been there all night putting finishing touches on pieces and perfecting each masterpiece with the stroke of a brush or sculpting of clay.

“I’m a bit of a hoarder,” she says.

On the walls, there are paintings of all sizes. The sculptures and figures sit on tables and chairs, waiting to be shown, reworked, or put away. On the other side of the wall, another artist works on a welding project. Connolly comments on the noise, but it doesn’t faze her.

Her studio is located at ACME, an art studio in downtown Wilmington that is home to fourteen total artists of different mediums, including photography, sculpture, installation, fashion design, and film making. According to the website, the studio was founded in 1991 and hosts monthly exhibitions to “showcase the diverse creative output of Acme residents.”

“This place has inspired me hugely. Working at ACME has been such an inspiration because I’m working around artists in different mediums and there is so much creative energy,” Connolly says.

“I’m very focused on energy in my work.”

Connolly is a mixed media artist who works full time on her art. She was born in England, and grew up around art—she used to watch her dad paint. After getting a degree in computer science, her job with an American database company took her to Sydney, Australia for eight years, where she would do her artwork on her kitchen table. So when her husband got offered a job in Wilmington, she was in no hurry to move, until he told her she could do her artwork full time.

“My youngest son was nine months old, but I wasn’t in too much of a hurry to leave Australia,” Connolly says “But then my husband said I could do my artwork fulltime, which has always been a passion of mine. He’s always been very supportive of that, and I knew I may never get another opportunity, so I didn’t waste any time. I packed up the house really quickly and rented it out, and now I’m here.”

Connolly says she has always known she wanted to be a full time artist, but never really knew how dedicated she could be because of her children, and there were a few times when she felt like giving up.

“In the early days, I read a lot of self-help books,” she says with a slight giggle. “I knew I wanted to do it, but I also had in the back of my mind the restrictions of earning a living, doing the right thing for your family, the responsibilities. I never really thought about the fact of having it all. ” Despite having the best of both worlds, Connolly says sometimes she feels like the ancient stereotypes of women as housewives affects her work. Of the fourteen artists at ACME, only five are women.

“I think it’s harder for a woman than for a man, especially if you want to have a family, because you’re juggling a lot of balls. I think

Community Spotlight

even in today’s society there is a preconceived idea of what women are meant to be doing and what they’re not meant to be doing.”

At this stage, she considers herself blessed because she has the support, both financially and emotionally, of her husband and children to do her artwork, and because of this, she has become an established artist in the community. Recently, she was named president of No Boundaries International Art Colony, which has provided her with global networking opportunities and has helped her sell more artwork. She also recently rented out pieces to the TV show Sleepy Hollow and the movie The Conjuring (2013).

Although she is well-established in Wilmington, she still considers herself a humble, down-to-earth artist, who is focused on the enthusiasm that goes into the artwork, rather than where it has taken her.

“I have always had that passion for creativity. If you would speak to my dad about it, he would say that I was always a dreamer,” she says. “I’ve always been in my imagination and able to roam around in it, I suppose. It’s sort of no surprise that I’ve ended up where I am: in my imagination, dreaming away.”

This imagination seeps into each piece of her work, whether it’s an oil painting, an abstract figure, or a sculpture. A lot of Connolly’s artwork is related to other pieces in her studio, and she enjoys switching between oil paintings to sculpting to installation.

Her paintings use mainly cool colors, like blue and green, but she has a few series that incorporate brighter, warm colors. In her sculptures, she uses everything from clay to feathers, and even made one sculpture out of pieces of a wooden chair. For installations, she searches for recycled material, and has used a variety of objects including a piece from a stoplight.

“I think that one piece feeds into the next,” Connolly says. “If we get too happy with one piece, then that’s dangerous. I’m just not precious with it. When I finish with one, I move on to the next piece. None of them are masterpieces, really. They’re just works in progress.”

The fact that each work serves as a piece of inspiration for the next, along with the freedom she possesses with her creativity, is part of why Connolly enjoys mixed media art more than the other genres. Art itself amazes her with each piece.

“There’s an element of surprise, and you don’t know what is going to happen next. I think that’s what keeps me interested in art. You have to be a bit obsessive to be a studio artist. You have to have that drive to come in and work everyday. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I don’t want anyone telling me what color scheme to use because, to me, that’s not what I’m about.”

Connolly’s creative process involves her studio staying in a mess.

It allows her to work on multiple pieces at once and walk away from certain pieces to see what needs improvement.

“A teacher once told me to work on many pieces, and I think I’ve taken her advice to the limit. I have several pieces lying around waiting to be resolved. It just really depends on what I pull out. I let my studio get really messy, and when I tidy up, I find things to work on.” 1

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Orange, Lemon, Cherries Acrylic on board by Erin Tetterton

Self-Examination Photo by Chelsea Taylor 32

Spring 2014

smiling at suicide Poetry by Colin Anhut Bukowski lived in the third dimension but wrote in the fourth when he died he was released back into the ever on and on and down and around a winding whirling rabbit hole to find a stronger whiskey, if you ever witness a suicide, smile, and wonder what they will talk about

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Gap Fiction by Maegan Mercer-Bourne

T

here was that badger again. He had been smack in the middle of the A338 highway since Monday and here it was, Friday. The thing wasn‘t really recognizable as a badger anymore: it was more of a big brown smudge.

“Poor bastard,” James whispered, wondering if it was somebody’s job to scrape carcasses off the highway system. Then he thought about how one went about removing a repeatedly smashed badger, then he thought whoever it was must go about it at odd hours of the night because he had never seen it done, then he thought no more about it because some idiot pulled out in front of him from a gravel drive.

2

As he sat in his unadorned cubicle, he found his mind roving back to the idea of a carcass scraper. He imagined a man pushing a huge wooden cart, full to brimming with dead animals. The man was bedraggled and somewhat starving, but the Ministry of Transportation was kind enough to allow him to take his haul back home to eat. He would tell his wife, “got a great load of roadkill today, darling.” Scratch that. He wouldn’t have a wife. Who would marry a man who scraped dead things off the road for a living? James chuckled; he was having trouble finding a woman who wanted to be shackled to him for life, and he was a respectable business man.

“Hey, Simon,” he said to his friend in PR had just walked past. “Do you know if there’s a person in charge of scraping carcasses off the road?”

He looked at James, seeming to think he misunderstood the question, then laughed.

“Really?” He sobered as he noticed James was serious. He cleared his throat. “I’ve got no idea. I imagine there’s some council or other in charge of things like that. Tax money at work, eh?” He chuckled again before moving down the hall, probably to make copies.

James thought about what the Council of Road Kill Removal office must look like.

2 He rolled down the window on the way home. It was unseasonably sunny and his arms were pastier than usual.

Oh, they’ve restriped the road, he thought, without any real interest, simply an acknowledgement of the fact.

What? He stamped the brake, so he could clarify what he just saw: the badger was still there in the middle of the road. The fresh white paint stopped about a foot shy of the smooshed badger’s tail and then picked up again just past his head. They left a gap, some kind of road kill reverence. There was a woman pulled over just up ahead, and she was taking a picture of the badger. He realized as he drove up beside her that he had slowed to a crawl on the deserted highway, and so, pulled over.

“Hi,” he said. “What happened here?” James felt like a policemen swaggering up to a pulled-over car. The woman smiled at him gratefully and motioned toward the badger.

“Hi, sir.” She had a northern accent that reminded him of Mum. Nail polish remover, old books, Sunday afternoon

“They left a gap, some kinD

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cleaning. Then he thought of her car crash in the Scottish wilderness, her body never found.

“Get a load a that.” She motioned to the road. “Can you believe people? Ha, sorry, I’m Sylvia with the Daily here to do a story on this badger situation. Care to give an account?”

2 When he was back on the road, having told Sylvia all about his encounter with the badger, he felt oddly ill at ease. She had explained to him that the Forest District Council had not removed the badger prior to the restriping, and the Hampshire County council contractors were not trained to remove the badger. The image of the badger lying there with the sticky white paint on either side of him blazed before James’s eyes. He thought about a person lying in the road like that.

If there was a person dead in the road, of course they would move him and paint the lines underneath (and call the EMS).

But there was a badger left untouched. Sylvia said the badger would be cleaned up by Monday, and the striping would be completed “with no extra charge to the taxpayer.” Simon would be pleased.

they would always be found by the roadside, and no one knew what to do with them because they weren’t trained in human removal.

He heard rain lap against his window and felt the heat of his cat beside him. She always smelled faintly of cinnamon.

He thought of Mum. Rain, soft curls, mascara, heat of an iron, heat of an oven. If there had been a road striping crew out on the street, would they have stopped to find her body?

Or, because they were not licensed, would they have left her where she was and forgot to tell the Council for Road Kill Removal.

She stood somewhere in the frigid silence, snow falling around her, melting on her cheeks. Maybe an icy lake shone in the moonlight. She watched enraptured by the ripples as they played across the smiling face of the lake. There was a badger suddenly emerging from the gorse by the roadside.

Mum squatted down and reached a hand out. He sat in front of her, the white stripes on his face made of sticky paint. She heard the distant sounds of mangling metal: steel, aluminum, iron, but she thought it must have been thunder. 1

2 That night, after he had bathed, fed Isabella her senior cat food, watched TV for an hour or so, brushed his teeth, and come to bed, he lay there in a half-asleep stupor thinking about a government agency in charge of removing dead people from roads. There were so many people running wild,

of road kill reverence.”

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The Mill Fiction by Colin Jacobs

E

d Paulson was the first manager. He kept a loaded pistol in his desk drawer. He only lasted for three months before Steve Berkowitz took over. Steve was insane. All the lamps in his office always had to be on the floor, facing the walls—something about the human eye being able to perceive a broader spectrum.

He thought the place was haunted, but nobody had died there yet. Steve was the first to operate the saw. He chewed wintergreen gum and tobacco at the same time and spit in the sawdust pile.

Franz Sherman always complained about this—said it was a waste of raw material. Franz wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but ended up looking after sawmill equipment.

Franz and Steve never really got along. Steve started spitting on purpose. The first time the saw mill ran, it broke. Steve

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was showing it to some bigwig lumber company investors. He got so mad that he burst a blood vessel in his brain and died two hours later.

Gordon Yancey and Steve always used to arm wrestle after work. Steve usually won. Rupert Folsom took Steve’s spot as head operator; he arranged the lights in a more sensible manner. Thomas Yates sometimes brought his truck inside and blasted the radio while everyone drank beer. It was too much work to go all the way back to town to the bars. Sometimes Gordon brought his guitar. He started working exactly two years after Ed Paulson left. He played Johnny Cash and Jefferson Airplane while on break. It boosted everyone’s spirit, especially on those humid days where it looked like someone took an eraser and smudged the trees together in the distance.

Some people sang along.

“It was too much work to go all the way back to town to the bars.”

Gordon dropped a stainless-steel pick one day and Thomas kicked it behind one of the massive gears. It was his favorite—a memento from Pete Townshend. He never found it. Thomas once told Gordon that he had terrible taste in music, called him a stupid hick, and blamed him for not meeting last month’s quota. Thomas occasionally liked to bring his homely attitude to work. They got into a fight and Rupert had to break it up. Gordon was still heated when he went back to work and accidentally sent a piece of scrap wood with nails into the gang saw. The nails shattered on contact and sent a steel shard into Franz’s eye. He was immediately blinded and could never work an industrial job again. He died of alcohol poisoning four months later. Gordon continued working at the mill for six more years. Everyone claimed to see an apparition every so often hiding amongst the blades.

They joked that it was just Franz trying to get back to work because he always had to put in the most hours. Gordon was reading Fahrenheit 451 when the primary gear failed. It broke apart several of the main saws. Everyone got out okay except Thomas, whose legs somehow became caught under one of the clamps. He survived but never walked again. He always claimed that something had pulled him under there. No one believed him. An inspector determined that there was foundation damage and condemned the building.

Three months later, the saw mill was torn down. A demolition worker found a steel pick lodging a torn bit of denim in what was left of one of the clamps. 1

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On the Way Out Photo by Chad Woody Issue 67

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Goa Nonfiction by Mekiya Walters

I

n Goa, things get turned around—turned on their heads—and nothing raises eyebrows. A pack of wild dogs chased a panicked adolescent cow down the beach a few hours ago, and nobody noticed. Before the sun went down, people covered the sand: Indians, Russians, hippies, Christians, sunbathers, families of five, and skinny, exuberant boys selling roasted corn on the cob rubbed in lime, cayenne pepper, and salt. Too much salt. Ten rupees, and I stripped the kernels off with my teeth until they turned my stomach inside out like an unwashed sock.

The only light left on the beach throbs from a bonfire that enthusiastic waiters kindled in front of a restaurant. It’s 8:00 pm in Goa, 11:00 am in North Carolina—what time in San Francisco?

Julian stands in the surf with the restless Arabian Sea coming up to his knees, gazing toward the horizon as though he hopes to chase the sun right around the planet until it comes up on California. He’s bothered. I’ve said something I shouldn’t have, asked the wrong question, and now he can’t ignore the breadth and depth of the ocean that covers his toes. Luv, the young Indian man who befriended us on the bus from Hyderabad, wanders down the beach, unfinished beer dangling from his fingers. “You all right, man?” he asks.

Julian says nothing.

Luv places a hand on his shoulder. “Hey?” “I don’t know,” Julian says.

Luv frowns. “We’ve got the whole weekend ahead of us.”

A Delhi native, he’s just graduated from the University of Hyderabad and taken a job in Bangalore.

“I know,” Julian says, “but after that . . . ” He’s going to graduate, too. One more week in India, and then he and I get on separate planes and return to a land of obligations: deadlines, hurtling at us like 747s coming in to land; jobs, mostly low-paying, demanding that we submit applications; politicians, mostly white, mandating that we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. A land where families split themselves up and spread themselves out as though seeking geographical equilibrium.

“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life,” he says.

“You mean, your career?” Luv asks.

“Career?” Julian asks. “I don’t want a career. Not yet.”

He wants to become a psychologist, he’s told me, to do for others what therapists have done for him—but he’s not ready, not cured. Before he heals other minds, his own must be free of blemishes, of cracks.

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“I don’t want to go to grad school,” he tells Luv. “I need to get other stuff sorted out first.”

“What stuff?”

“Stuff with my family. My parents and my sister.”

Luv shakes his head. “We’re young, man,” he says. “There’s time for all that later. Right now, we should concentrate on work, on building our careers. That’s the most important thing.”

“But that’s not the most important thing,” Julian says. “To me.” This is the irony of Goa. For decades, Hindu nationalists have spouted their rhetoric, denouncing Western influence, calling on Indians to preserve their heritage—yaars and bhaiyas, Sitas and Rams; while in Europe and America, young men and women step into jeans and swarm from their one-room apartments to fill first streets, then monolithic offices. Yet here, tonight, the materialism of a middle-class urban Indian has run aground on the rocky, uncharted shores of an American’s troubled communalism.

Luv blinks, nonplussed. He knows he’s put his foot in his mouth, but he’s still a bit tipsy and can’t explain how or why.

“I’m sorry. It’s just, my sister,” he says, “she doesn’t speak to me. And my parents . . . well, we have our differences.”

(A week later, when we return to the International Hostel at the University of Hyderabad, Charles, a blonde Louisianan, snorts to hear us recount the story. “I know Luv,” he tells us.

“We met at Bharat’s place the week we got here. I thought we had something going for a while, but he kept talking about a fuck buddy . . . . ” Charles wrinkles his nose disdainfully. “Not classy.”)

“But what’s the good in worrying?” Luv continues. “It’ll sort itself out in time, man, and if it doesn’t, then it wasn’t meant to be. Right now, we have to focus on ourselves, our careers.”

Luv makes his case to me. Julian has stopped listening. He stares into the surf and as we watch, turns and begins to trudge up the beach. He wants certainty, security, and a promise, the same one we all want, of unconditional love. But in Goa he’ll find only water, tepid and salty, a rising tide that spills over the edge of the moment and floods the murky space between us and our tenuous future selves. 1

Stereotype Acrylic and newspaper art by Kristine Guhne

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One Foodie to Another Poetry by Alana Baker The taste of red meat, well seasoned, pulls at the corners of my mouth: there is the promise of sweet, sugary dessert to accompany dinner.

If you said it would save me five minutes of life to eat a salad instead, I would tell you to keep those five minutes.

You would tell me that organic is better— meat and sugar will give you cancer.

You, like most people, are afraid of cancer.

It consumes you, that overgrowth.

But regarding the organic, here is my answer: we were made to eat beef, born to eat sugar.

You might offer salad once again filled with imitation meat and serve me “sweet tea” with sugar substitutes.

Organic.

Like farm-raised salmon or sugar made in a lab.

Like a stand-in for you when you’re gone.

Keep on—I’ll tell you what’s natural: the fish on the line and a dripping honeycomb, the sound of you sleeping next to me.

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And cancer.

There is overgrowth inside us all: too many cells or too much blood— too many feelings.

I am consumed with cancer— you infected me with your kiss long ago.

But enjoy your salad with Tofurkey and your tea with Splenda.

Enjoy the delicate hands and lips— that search for you in the dark.

Perhaps you will beat cancer.

Perhaps I will too.

Until then, I will eat my meat and taste my sugar— save my love for you, for I accept no substitutes.

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Shadow Struck Mixed media on paper by Sarah Horak

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Untitled Photo by Carson Talbert

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Reviews A

literary magazine may seem a strange place to see a review of a Beyoncé album—but I can assure you that her new album is right at home beside all the other works published here. Bey’s new, self-titled “visual” album was a surprise release via iTunes on December 13th. It features fourteen new songs and seventeen videos. According to Wired, the album shut iTunes down because of the intense web-traffic, selling over 800,000 copies in three hours.

Beyoncé has always aspired to expand and reinvent both herself and the pop and R&B genres—here she has managed to do so once again. All of her music has carried messages of female empowerment, but on this album, she’s outright

S

outhern Ties is a new music festival based in Wilmington that focuses on hardcore music—a more aggressive subgenre of punk rock.

Shane Harris, one of the main organizers of the festival, states that the motivation for putting Southern Ties together is to “continue building Wilmington’s hardcore scene and to bring something bigger to Wilmington, since it’s a central hub for the East Coast.” The festival was booked and promoted by local New Ethic Booking and Raleigh’s Progressive Music Group. This year’s lineup included Earth Crisis, Turnstile, CDC, Vanna, Betrayal, and Alpha & Omega, as well as local support from Society Sucker, No Quarter, and Vent. Approximately four hundred

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feminist. In “Flaxwless,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian writer and feminist, delivers a brief spoken word piece that illuminates “the ridiculous expectations of women,” to spend their lives pursuing marriage while men are not expected to do the same, ending with a direct definition: “feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic quality of the sexes.” The album features several other artists, including Jay-Z, Frank Ocean, Drake, and Blue Ivy, her daughter. The first single, “Drunk in Love,” features a strong dynamic between Beyoncé and Jay-Z that has been somewhat absent in their music since her debut single “Crazy in Love” in 2003.

people attended the event. Every set was intense—all of the bands received strong responses from the crowd—at these types of shows, this involves violent dancing and singing along to the bands. Having something as fun and uniting as Southern Ties in Wilmington means a lot to me, and I will support it as much as I possibly can. I have been involved with hardcore for about ten years now and really enjoy seeing new people beginning to attend these shows. I foresee this fest becoming a long-running staple for the area music scene, and next year’s fest will only be bigger and better—Harris intends to include a bigger lineup next year and to expand the fest into two full days.

Joseph Fletcher

C

hildren of Salt is a 2013 film created

by UNCW students Caleb Andrew Ward, Ethan Sigmon, and James Martin. Ward, who will graduate in May of 2014, created the idea for the film and originally produced it for his thesis project. During the creation of the film, the students decided to make it feature-length. They intend to release and submit Children of Salt to film festivals around the world. The performances of lead actors Ashleigh Lineberry and Jacob Keohane are very impressive—during arguments between the couple, the viewer can feel the passion and angst portrayed onscreen. According to Children of Salt’s Facebook page, the film is about “the failing relationship of a young couple.” The film is a triptych—it is meant to be viewed on three separate screens at once. The center screen

focuses on the couple together, while the left and right screens focus on the boy and the girl separately. While the film is incomplete, I was able to see a version at its installation event at local venue Annex Surf Supply. I must admit—I was skeptical of the idea initially, but seeing it work and weave across three screens was a moving experience. During an interview with the Seahawk, Sigmon, the film’s cinematographer, states that during filming, “We have to silently work together to get out of each other’s shots.”

Ward, who also works for Atlantis, has invested himself fully into this project—he even put his plans to work on a novel entitled Bevel on the back-burner to focus on this massive undertaking. The film is set for a spring 2014 release and is currently in the final stages of editing.

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Spring 2014 | Issue 67

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art, photography, poetry and prose—there is an editorial staff comprised of a genre editor and several UNCW student volunteers. All submissions are anonymously coded by the Submissions Coordinator before being thoroughly reviewed by the student staffs. The Submissions Coordinator does not participate in the review process, and the submitter’s name is not disclosed until each editorial staff has made final content decisions.

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Thank you

Bill DiNome, the Student Media Board, the student staffs, Cape Fear Wine & Beer, Ryan Geoffrey Smith, yoga, Mary Browning, UNCW’s Art and Creative Writing Departments, The Bourbons, Will Wilkinson, Nina de Gramont, Tim Bass, hot tea on cold days, club music, people who support creative students, the Calico Room, Encore Magazine, goldfish, Mother Nature, Michelle Connolly, Kc Allison, Deadly Lo-Fi, our contributors, Pomegranate Books, TC gin, Adobe, 8tracks, strong coffee, Elizabeth Davis, honey, the wonders of technology, Gene Spear, bees, our readers, fuzzy socks, Grinders Café, Old Books on Front Street, and Beyoncé.

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