Bennington College – The End of the World Journal – January 2025

T H E E N D O

January 2025 Bennington College

F

T H E WORLD

The End of the World STORIES AND ESSAYS

by the 59th Graduating Class of The Bennington Writing Seminars

JANUARY 2025

Managing Editor Cristin White Nonfiction Editor Rebekah Pahl Fiction Editor Catherine M Schuster Journal Design and Cover Ayla Graney © Copyrights retained by all respective contributors.

Acknowledgements “The question is not who influences you, but which people give you courage” – Hillary Mantel Our cohort has called ourselves many things, from “The B-Side,” to “The Renaissance Cohort,” but most of all, we’ve been a writing family. From our Dark Night readings to supporting each other and celebrating writing accomplishments on and off campus, we are better writers because we are a community. We hope to spread the joy of community to future cohorts. Everyone around you is a friend and a resource, not competition. These two years at the Bennington Writing Seminars have challenged us to become better writers, and when we graduate, we’ll carry all the wisdom we’ve learned. The pieces we’ve submitted to this journal represent our growth and passion for writing.

Thank you to the MFA staff for your support, enthusiasm, and encouragement. You’ve inspired us to become better writers and kinder people.

Thank you to our fellow MFA students for your kindness and friendship. We hope your experience at Bennington continues to help you grow and blossom into the best writers you can be.

Finally, a special congratulations to our cohort member Aurelie for the publication of her novel The Paris Understudy. Here’s to many more publications.

– Madeline Feehan

Contents FICTION | Aurélie Thiele The Defeated of Madrid

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NONFICTION | Cameron Price Avatar

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FICTION | Catherine M Schuster Excerpts

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FICTION | Cristin White IRL

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NONFICTION | Daniel Noah Moses Fragments from a World on Fire

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NONFICTION | Elisa Wouk Almino Snapshots: 1997–99

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NONFICTION | Elisabetta La Cava Memorizing Roman Roads

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NONFICTION | Eugenie Dalland Iridescence

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FICTION | Jenea Havener Inflicted

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FICTION | Jonathan Lindberg I Am Jasper Johns

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FICTION | Kaija Matīss Jeffrey Like a Giant

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NONFICTION | Kaleigh Merrill The Girl Child

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FICTION | Madeline Feehan Shadow Mother: A Novel in Progress

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FICTION | Maria Finitzo The Heron

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FICTION | Marnie Aulabaugh Four Widows Kill the Internet

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NONFICTION | Morgan English Radium, Herb Salad, and Outer Space: Eugenie Dalland in Conversation with Morgan English

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NONFICTION | Rebekah Pahl Leaving Bethlehem

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Biographies & Recommendations

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FICTION

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The Defeated of Madrid AURÉLIE THIELE

March 1939 Alicia wrote the poem on the chalkboard while her eighthgraders played in the courtyard, although she knew she should’ve picked something else. It was the last afternoon before Franco’s troops entered Madrid. She’d debated with herself whether she should teach her students another poem or perhaps an excerpt of a novel less likely to get her into trouble, but in the end she stuck with her first choice. She felt an odd sense of pride while she was drawing the letters in white chalk despite the gloom of the defeat—one last small act of defiance to alleviate the pain that her side had lost. Outside, children were playing a game of tag and squealed when they tagged a classmate or were tagged. They weren’t tied to the Republicans’ side. What say did children have in such matters? Alicia wrote the poet’s name at the bottom of the last verse, and the span of his life: 18981936. She underlined the year of his death. Her chalk shrieked on the blackboard.

On this day three years earlier, Garcia Lorca had still been alive. The civil war hadn’t yet broken out. Spain had been ruled by a democratically elected Popular Front government Alicia had voted for, amazed she’d gained the right to cast a ballot. She’d hoped the Second Spanish Republic would live on

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forever, after the long reign of King Alfonso XIII. How naive of her. She’d underestimated how ferociously the church and the military would seek to rule for anyone else. Now the Second Spanish Republic was living its last days.

Schoolchildren filed back into the classroom after recess— some children Alicia knew and some she didn’t, because her friend Maria hadn’t shown up for work that morning after promising to Alicia she’d never flee to France. Someone had needed to take on all those kids for the day and Alicia had volunteered. They were confused because their teacher wasn’t there, scared because they’d heard things from their parents. But Alicia had stayed in Madrid and she felt her presence anchored them somehow. Things would be alright. Franco’s goons would never bother with people as insignificant as them.

Alicia pasted a big smile on her face while children sat down.

There was still time for Alicia to change her mind and pick, for her last lecture before the Republicans—the side that had been for democracy—laid down arms, a work of literature that would only draw indifference from the new rulers. The beginning of Don Quixote, for instance. Her husband Vicente, who’d worked as a history professor at Complutense University before penning speeches for the war ministry, was an expert in it. But Alicia felt no interest in discussing the masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes, who’d been dead for over three hundred years. The present cast too long a shadow. She peered over the poem on the chalkboard and made sure every letter was drawn perfectly, easy to read from the back of the classroom. She wouldn’t change her mind now.

The poem was Ballad of the Moon Moon. Alicia could’ve chosen another poem by Garcia Lorca that she liked better, but she’d picked that one because it was dedicated to Lorca’s sister

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Conchita. This way, she could argue she’d planned to highlight Garcia Lorca’s family values, if her little act of showmanship came back to the headmistress—Clara, who’d inspired Alicia ever since she’d started working there. Without Clara she’d never dreamed of becoming a headmistress herself. Of course, Clara would openly disapprove of discussing in class, the day before Madrid had fallen to the Nationalists, the work of an author murdered by those same Nationalists, but Alicia didn’t think she’d mean it. She thought Clara would be proud, even if she couldn’t admit it.

The children were all seated now and Clara’s daughter, Pilar, stared at Alicia from the first row with a pen in her hand. Maybe she would tell Clara and maybe she wouldn’t. Alicia realized then that she hoped Pilar would. Clara couldn’t relish Alicia’s defiance to the new authorities if she didn’t know about it.

But counting on others’ approval was a risky scheme and Alicia knew it too.

Alicia decided to read the poem on the chalkboard. She was more intimidated than she’d expected. It helped to say a few words about Garcia Lorca first. She was careful not to mention his possible killers, and of course she said nothing about Lorca loving men—perhaps the reason he’d been murdered. If Clara confronted her later, Alicia would insist she hadn’t known. She’d just talked about “this great author, the pride of Spain” and then moved to praising Lorca’s spirit: how inspiring that he’d thanked his dear sister. The Nationalists focused on traditional values, especially keeping women in the kitchen and herding them to church on Sundays. Clara couldn’t blame her for emphasizing Garcia Lorca’s dedication to Conchita, even if she held the choice of the poem against her.

Alicia knew she was treading a fine line, but she wanted to

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salute the Second Republic on its deathbed. She put a hand on her stomach and rubbed her thumb where she thought the baby was. It was still early and she’d had miscarriages before.

This time she hadn’t even told Vicente yet, because he’d been so shattered the last time.

If Clara didn’t absolve her of any wrongdoing, Alicia would point out, in the most matter-of-fact manner possible, that she really liked the moon, and she’d wanted to teach her students a poem about it. Clara would roll her eyes but let her get away with it. Alicia was sure of it. Clara had been like Alicia in her earlier years—daring and forward-focused.

Alicia read the poem aloud and analyzed every stanza as if she were lecturing a crowd of university students—the choice of the words, the rhymes, the musicality. She used expressions like “surrealist mystery” and “mesmerizing symbolism,” to impress her audience, although half the school children looked willing to believe any new word she used and the other half looked extremely bored. Not every parent would be a Republican, although this was not a neighborhood that Nationalists typically set their sights on. But wouldn’t every neighborhood become Nationalist now? She had to be careful not to get denounced.

Alicia read aloud each stanza twice, supposedly to let students enjoy its effects after she’d explained it, but really because there was no telling when she’d be allowed to recite a poem by Garcia Lorca in public again.

“Las cabezas levantadas y los ojos entornados,” she said, and listened to the silence afterward. This was the last gift she could give her students: beautiful words on a page, a balm for the torment ahead. They didn’t know it was a gift, but she’d given it to them all the same.

Then the school bell rang.

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Alicia started. How had she lost track of time? To her, it felt like yet another Nationalist victory over hard-working folks attempting to improve the country. She hadn’t cried when it’d become obvious the war was lost—had spent the night sitting on the floor with her back to the wall instead, ignoring Vicente’s pleas for her to come to bed—but now she wanted to curl into a ball against the teacher’s desk and howl.

The children, in their winter coats because of the steep cold unusual for the season, stared at her and remained still. They must’ve seen something in her face. When she noticed their frightened eyes, Alicia got ahold of herself.

“Let me finish,” she said. “It’ll only be a couple of minutes.”

Outside the room, students from other classrooms scattered into the corridor, their heavy shoes stamping the floor. The mood was subdued, even downright somber. Alicia read one more stanza of the poem, her voice gaining intensity because she’d run out of time, just like the Republicans had—in their case, to convince foreign governments to send arms, although all of Europe should’ve been rooting for them. Somewhere in the Salamanca district, her husband Vicente’s father was surely popping a bottle of Cava. How she’d hoped to defeat his side.

Defeat him, even, after he’d shown her the door and disowned his younger son.

She didn’t like to think about that.

Alicia’s voice choked with emotion. “Pilar, please read the poem to the end.”

Pilar sat taller on her chair, looking pleased to have been singled out, and read in an assured voice. She appeared serious but not distraught. Alicia, though, felt her cheeks had caught fire and she could barely take a step without worrying she’d lose her balance. Perhaps the children didn’t fully understand

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what was happening to the country. What had their parents told them? What had Clara told Pilar?

While Pilar read the last verses, in that classroom with broken windowpanes and a moldy ceiling near the Puerta del Sol, Alicia paid attention to every detail surrounding her: the rays of lights through the windows, the long straight lines that the children’s desks drew in the room, the cold air seeping from the street although the janitor had tried to patch up the windows.

This was her last lecture in democratic Spain. Her hands felt numb, yet she picked up a piece of chalk and underlined “luna” in the poem written on the board, to move behind the lectern before her entire body froze. Then she underlined “mano,” and if she’d had more time she would’ve discussed surrealism in that poem, out of spite for Franco—she’d pegged him as someone who only cared about conservative themes—but there was no time at all. Pilar was already reading the last stanza.

Dentro de la fragua lloran…

Children were stirring in their seats. They didn’t know who Federico Garcia Lorca was. They wanted to go home—the home they still had, because their parents had stayed in the city.

Alicia still had a home there too, whether it’d been the right decision to stay or not. She and Vicente had argued about it.

They would’ve argued even more if Vicente had known she was pregnant. She would tell him when she was farther along.

And if she lost the baby again, she wouldn’t tell him anything.

She felt inadequate enough already.

Dando gritos, los gitanos…

She looked at the children in her classroom—she would always remember their eyes, even the eyes of the children she hadn’t known until this morning, when Maria hadn’t reported for work. It was already such an accomplishment, that they’d

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reached eighth grade. They knew how to read, they could think for themselves. The lower classes thinking? The Nationalists wouldn’t let that happen again.

El aire la vela, vela…

Maria had loved the poetry of Garcia Lorca more than Alicia had. She’d introduced Alicia to his work at a time when Alicia only cared about strengthening unions like her father had done for the Trabajadores at the shoe factory before his murder. Vicente… Alicia wasn’t sure what Vicente thought, but he’d been raised by a very wealthy Nationalist family and she worried things between them would change, now that the side she’d converted him to had lost. Maybe she was thinking wrong.

Thinking hadn’t been her strong suit, before she’d met him— she’d always been the obedient foot soldier in her Communist cell. In her defense, she’d been very young.

Maria had been a Communist in the same cell and it bothered Alicia that her friend hadn’t said goodbye. She wasn’t sure if it reflected badly on Maria’s character or Alicia’s oblivion of the danger she was in. But no, Vicente’s last name would protect them.

El aire la está velando.

Pilar’s voice was as steady as an actress’s.

The poem said: the wind watched, watched the moon, and then the wind had watched the moon and it was all over.

Alicia wiped her eyes. It wasn’t about the poem but about the circumstances, the defeat certain, friends headed for exile, some murdered already.

Alicia wouldn’t go into exile. She’d worked too hard to get to where she was now, after starting from nothing—a mother dead in childbirth, a father who barely knew how to read but realized a bit of education could make a difference in his daughter’s life.

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Pilar looked up.

“That was beautiful,” Alicia said. She wanted to say something more profound for her last words to her class in free Madrid, in case her students remembered what she’d said for years afterward, but didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound trite. Then, a flash of inspiration.

“Don’t forget that in the darkest night, the moon bright in the sky will light your way home.” Alicia choked on her own tears just as she realized it was the wrong thing to say—Franco and his goons would argue it was dawn after years of darkness.

She added quickly: “Keep in mind, no class until Monday, we’ll all attend the parade tomorrow and celebrate the victory!”

She brought her hands together and beamed as if she’d never looked forward to something more than watching Franco’s tanks rumble into Madrid. Her smile must’ve looked astonishingly false, but children wouldn’t point out she’d only smiled with her mouth and not with her eyes. Yet, she had to develop better acting skills fast—at church, at the meetings of the Female Section of the Falange. How excruciating it’d be to sit in the same room as Falange women eager to listen about God telling their husband how to treat them and their main purpose being to breed babies. That’d require really good acting on her part, to pretend she belonged. But she’d chosen to stay and that was part of the deal.

Was it? She wasn’t sure she’d thought it through. She’d just refused to leave, despite Vicente’s pleas. If she carried the pregnancy to term, she wanted their child to be born in Spain—have stood on that soil, even if she had to prop the child up. What happened afterward was of little concern to her. It was such a big if, for the baby to be born alive. At least this time, if she miscarried again, only her heart would be broken. She’d

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tell Vicente once the curves in her body wouldn’t allow her to lie anymore—if things ever got to that point.

The children filed out of the room after the bell rang. Pilar was among the first to saunter out, but she’d sat close to the door, so that wasn’t surprising. Alicia wondered what Clara had told her about the Nationalists, the Republicans, the defeat.

Alicia wiped the chalkboard, erasing any proof she’d discussed a forbidden writer. She packed her satchel with notebooks and a copy of the Garcia Lorca poems. She took her time; she wanted to remember the moment. Next time she’d stand in that room, the dictatorship of the hombrecito would’ve begun—she couldn’t even bring herself to call him Caudillo or Franco, let alone General Franco. She most definitely wouldn’t be allowed to teach Garcia Lorca again.

At the door, Alicia glanced back at the empty desks and chairs. How proud she’d been when she’d first stepped into that classroom, fresh out of teaching school. She’d made something out of herself, when her parents hadn’t even gone past seventh grade. No one expected Alicia to amount to anything. That was before she’d met Vicente.

Alicia couldn’t even put what she’d felt at that first meeting between Vicente and her father into words, but when she tried, the word that came up was: respectable. How much she’d wanted to feel respectable also in front of Vicente’s family. And how determined they’d been to make her feel like she was a slut Vicente had picked out of the gutter in a moment of insanity.

And now their side had won.

Yet she’d chosen to stay, because she didn’t want her baby to be born stateless and because she didn’t want to lose what she had—what she hadn’t had before she’d met Vicente, what would allow the baby to have a nice life: an apartment, a job,

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people who viewed her as middle class, which was a step up for her and a step down for Vicente. If she’d fled to France like Maria, the only job available to her would’ve been cleaning toilets in a hotel. No, whatever was to come, she’d been right to stay. Her baby would know their country of origin even if they didn’t remember it: would breathe the air, play with the dirt, listen to the sounds, and perhaps know the last days of the summer heat. The doctor had said the baby was due in the last days of September. Vicente had mentioned Franco would pilfer the country from day one and Europe expected a war sometime in the summer, so Alicia thought it’d be easier to slip out of the country then. They were such unimportant people.

Alicia gathered her students’ booklets, to be graded before Monday. Then she rubbed her hand against the doorknob for good luck and stepped into the school corridor.

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Avatar (AN EXCERPT)

CAMERON PRICE

When I was in the 6th grade, my dad would go into his office on weekends to play video games on his company computer.

Unable to wrap my mind around it—adults played video games?—I begged him to take me to his office and show me. It was 2003 and we didn’t have a home computer yet. I stepped through the front doors of his office building one Saturday and was enveloped in the adult aromas of stale coffee, printer paper, dry erase markers and rubber bands. Breathing in the musty formality of the corporate air made me feel chosen, like I was stepping through a portal into a world governed by arcane rules and magic. What happened in this adult world while I was at school? I imagined the other grownups who inhabited these offices on weekdays behind their glass doors, moving to the rhythm of quests foreign to me against the backdrop of stark white walls, black and white photos of mountain peaks and seascapes, and disintegrating electric blue urinal cakes in the men’s bathroom—worlds away from the noisy, bright chaos of middle school.

My dad pulled up a swivel chair for me next to his, and booted up his chunky desktop iMac G3. I marveled at its sleek

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design—far more elegant than the computers I was used to using at the public library or in the computer lab at school. After the computer flickered to life, flames erupted on the screen and a hooded skull with hellfire burning in its eyes loomed back at me. Chilling, ambient music spilled out from the computer’s speakers into the room, accompanied by the tinkling of a cold, hard rain. This was my first taste of Diablo II. I was in love.

My dad’s Diablo II avatar was the Paladin, a knight of the faith, imbued with holy magic to subjugate the powers of darkness. Glowing with a soft heavenly light, his sword tore through the skeletal legions of the game’s dark dungeons. I adored the Paladin—his strength, his steadiness, his righteous confidence. All qualities I also saw in my dad. Over subsequent weekends, I pleaded with my dad to take me into his office so I could watch him battle the forces of evil, as the Paladin.

Beside him in the office chair, I sat on my haunches enthralled, curled close to him, breathing in the amber sweetness of his clean-shaven face. I perched on his shoulder, like his familiar, telling him to look out for a pack of dire wolves emerging from the forest or to grab the horde of gold dropped by a zombie. I relished disappearing into this world with him, an accomplice to his victories and failures.

Eventually, the seductive forces of hell came home with me when we got a home computer. Now it was my turn to try my hand at being a hero. I requested a copy of Diablo II of my own.

Soon I was spending my weekend mornings rotting in my PJs and slashing my way through waves of red demonic imps. The home computer was out in the open in the kitchen, adjacent to the dining room table. As I lost track of time in Diablo II’s virtual, cursed landscapes, my family swirled around me in the real world, bright mornings shriveling into claggy afternoons.

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As I explored the universe of Diablo II, I tried on its different characters: the Barbarian with his luscious pecs bursting from the screen; the Necromancer with his sinister confidence, raising golems from the earth to do his bidding. I got to put part of me into these men, these avatars, as we navigated the dangerous wilds of forests, deserts, and jungles, slaying monsters and collecting treasure.

After moving through the men, I took turns playing as the Sorceress and the Amazon, women with steady eyes and unhesitating hands, casting spells of vengeful hellfire or showering her foes with poison-tipped javelins, respectively. I came to adore the Sorceress more with every new elemental spell she learned. She donned a spotless turquoise tunic, a glowing staff, long black locs, and golden bangles adorning her neck, wrists, and ankles. The Sorceress was both beautiful and deadly, the embodiment of a new, captivating fierceness I’d never glimpsed within the awkward, narrow world of middle school. I fantasized about what it would feel like to have her feminine power coursing through my scrawny, barely-pubescent boy body. This body of mine was beginning to betray and run away from me, my voice changing in unseemly squeaks and squawks, my limbs feeling ungainly as if I were learning to run for the first time. My lived reality was a far cry from the presence that the Sorceress commanded with her self-assured voice and fearless command of magic. I felt powerless at school when, day by day, it became obvious that I was different from the other boys. I thought about the group of boys in my grade who singled me out, and taught me the word fag and what it meant, hurling it like a stone.

You talk like a girl.

You walk like a girl.

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You sound hella gay.

You got dick-sucking lips.

In the danger-filled dungeon of middle school, I couldn’t afford to be perceived as feminine. I would have done anything to be a target out of range, but in the eyes of these boys, my effeminacy was a fatal weakness. I wanted to not be afraid of roughhousing. I wanted to not have to raise my voice and be crude in order to command respect. Instead, I wanted to hang out with the girls who were smarter and funnier, gentler and kinder, than the 6th grade boys. I watched and studied what was required to level up and become a boy in middle school, but I couldn’t do it: my voice refused to drop, but instead would lilt and flutter; my heart thumped and skin prickled when someone would toss me a basketball at recess or in PE. Every expression of me was a dog whistle, attracting monsters—calling attention to my differences like the red demonic imps of Diablo II, emerging from the shadows to devour me.

If only I could be the Sorceress, strong in her femininity.

Within the walls of my parents’ kitchen at the family computer, I was the embodiment of fierce power, able to fry my enemies effortlessly with a roiling, gruesome fire. I didn’t dare articulate to myself who I wanted to be: both gorgeous and formidable, sensitive and capable of treachery. Instead of letting myself want what I wanted, I froze in mortal shame without an arsenal of spells at my disposal and the confidence it would bestow.

Jolted rudely out of the comparatively simple childhood of elementary school and into the jagged edges of puberty and inscrutable social rules, I looked outward to the world to tell me who to be. This looking was not a conscious, measured observation; I was fueled by frenzied survival. I feared being harassed by the boys at school. Faggot, I would hear hissing

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through the halls like a dart, the sharp edge of the f tipped with poison. Name calling could become a rough shove, could become Hot Cheeto breath bearing down on my face as I flinched away. What’re you gonna do? Nothing. There were more of them than there were of me. Away from the cloister of Diablo II in my parent’s kitchen, I was left to be my own imperfect protector with no spells to punish the monsters that were middle school boys. School became a dungeon. I didn't have the right map or weapons to navigate it, and worse, there was no logic to this world; the rules were always changing. When I walked the mile to and from my house to middle school, I pictured myself floating over the sidewalk detached from my body, watching myself from above. I was a character, an avatar, moving through the world except I didn’t know how to wield my powers, or if I even had any at all. Being in my body hurt. The yearning to know myself, and the rejection of who I was felt uncontainable, spilling from my seams in unseemly pools. I was desperate to run anywhere but towards myself. * Outside of the family life I knew, outside of the fantasy world of my books and computer, there were other new worlds emerging: the cultural portals of MTV, VH1, and Abercrombie & Fitch. It was through these portals that I was first dazzled by Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love,” crass and scintillating reality TV like Room Raiders and Next!, and the deity-level hotness of ripped male bodies looming against the darkened walls of A&F at the mall—they gazed back with heavy-lidded eyes as I stole furtive glances, tendrils of shame and arousal curling in my stomach.

As I began to feed on a steady diet of pop culture, I changed my wardrobe. I begged my parents to take me to the mall and let

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me pick out my own back to school clothes: They have to be from PacSun; I needed a studded belt and a pair of Etnies. Did I skateboard?

Absolutely not, but it was more important to look like I could.

The style was to buy them one size too big and then wear an extra pair of socks to make the tongue of the shoe puff out just so. Had I made even a feeble attempt at a kickflip, they would have flown off uselessly. The look to achieve was SoCal Casual, as if I could effortlessly transition from the skatepark to surfing in an afternoon, Yellowcard’s “Ocean Avenue” echoing atmospherically, broadcasting my generation’s aspirations: We were both sixteen and it felt so right / Sleepin’ all day, stayin’ up all night.

As I grasped at new ideals, my mom was still making all my meals and picking me up from the mall by 9:30pm. One of the most insulting things you could be called in middle school was a wannabe, though that was precisely what I was. I wanted to be so many things.

The TV show Next! was a rapid-fire reality dating show where the contestant could jettison any new date as soon as they got on the Next! date bus. When a date got on the bus, they had to have the right look, and exude attractive confidence; they had to know what their powers were and how to use them. If they didn’t, they would be dismissed. If the potential date was a guy, they had to be fit, muscles rippling coyly underneath their tight polo with the collar flipped up. The decision to keep a contestant on the bus was made almost instantaneously by way of numerous, lightning fast, mental calculations. I watched shows like Next! to understand the calculus of these mental calculations. What kept one date on the bus and not another?

Most importantly, how could I apply these insights to myself, and my own image? If I couldn’t be the Sorceress, I needed to build an avatar from the cultural materials around me. On

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Next!, without fail, all conversations between contestants were vapid and substanceless. No mention of hopes, dreams, and fears. Each contestant was a cutout, a caricature. The singular pursuit of being chosen for a date was the only true motive each set of contestants shared. To be chosen was to be worthy.

Despite craving the fierce confidence of the Sorceress (and her saucy turquoise outfits), the avatar that I was unwittingly creating was that of the People Pleaser. Subconsciously, I was already identifying my special powers: good at school (I could always bag A’s), cheerful, and compliant. Add nearly eliminating the word no from my vocabulary, and the People Pleaser began to grow magnetic and powerful. Never getting sullen or angry about my desperate internal confusion? Add it to the list of powers the People Pleaser could wield—people loved not having to interact with complex emotions. My avatar thrived by having as few needs as possible. A formidable persona was rising from the rubble of middle school angst, popular culture, and raging hormones—just like the Necromancer’s golem in Diablo II. Traversing the dungeon of middle school as my avatar, and not as myself, bestowed an intoxicating power. As the People Pleaser, I could quickly assess the moves and needs of those around me (studying Next! paid off), intuiting what they might want from me without them having to voice it. I could join a group of friends at recess and discern the invisible social order— who had power and who did not—and then align myself accordingly to benefit my own standing. The People Pleaser’s strongest spell was the chameleon-like ability to become the person that was needed to navigate any social situation. The cost was to my sense of self, but the power and protection of my avatar was always worth it. The alternative felt like exposure, and therefore annihilation. Game over.

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* However, the People Pleaser—for all his strengths—had limitations to what he could accomplish. Though he had mastered the spells of shapeshifting and social awareness that allowed him to scan any environment quickly for danger, his armor wasn’t impermeable. Even as the People Pleaser, I felt every slight, each minor act of exclusion, acutely and with heightened sensitivity. My avatar was more fragile than I had hoped; I felt as if I were constantly working in double time to ensure my creation didn’t fall apart. Despite my efforts, I would sometimes still get shoved at recess, would get singled out as the only boy standing amongst a group of girls, would still feel my face flush with shame-heat when faggot would be mumbled in my direction. These incidents made me want to bear down on my commitment to the People Pleaser, making my avatar more formidable. I was obsessive. I had to level up. If I could fully become the People Pleaser, I could be a new self, my weirdness and too-girliness outshined by the blinding charisma and agreeableness of a character who could take my place.

I was not the only middle schooler building avatars. David Zimmerman was the kid teachers loved to hate, because he was atrociously obnoxious. Smart, deceptively cute, and willing to do anything to get away with everything. He was powered by attention. Where I used all my avatar’s faculties to be everything to everyone, David’s audacity to take up space whenever and wherever he wanted was revolutionary. He used his guile to befriend anyone—and most strategically for me, all the girls in our class liked him. If I could get close to him, maybe some of his magnetism would rub off on me. I wondered if he was working as hard to develop his avatar as I was; he made it look

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so easy.

With David, the People Pleaser got to explore being a little bad. We smoked ditch weed from a bong made out of a Red Delicious apple from the free middle school lunches, and I learned what a MILF was. David’s mom was a MILF, I was informed by the other boys in my class. Some part of me could sense this when I first met her: She did not look like a mom in that her wardrobe did not include capris from Talbot’s and sensible clogs. David’s mom was tiny, fit, and tan. She wore tight jeans and platform sandals which made her barely taller than the rest of us sixth graders. Her perfectly coiffed hair sported bold, blond highlights, a la the early aughts. Where is my David?

She said in a thick Italian accent as she burst into our afternoon English classroom with gusto. She reminded me of the Sorceress with her bold femininity. I wondered what powerful spells she must know. David’s mom has got it going on, the boys in 6th grade would sing to the tune of The Fountains of Wayne hit about Stacy’s mom.

David’s other power was the gift of carnal knowledge. Going into 6th grade, my reference point for everything related to sex and the body came from a “family life” class that both boys and girls had to go through separately in 5th grade. It was all very clinical: this is where a baby actually comes from. Your armpits will stink soon so here’s a mini Old Spice deodorant. You will grow hair in embarrassing places. Wet dreams will happen— the concept of which sounded sinister to me. In middle school however, a new kind of sex education was happening around me by way of crude jokes heard in the hallway and debates as to whether a blowjob meant you really blew air on a dick. That doesn’t sound right, my friend Ginny would say to me under her breath at recess. How does that even feel good? I had no idea but now

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I wanted to find out. This kind of sexual curiosity wasn’t part of the People Pleaser’s programming; I felt like I shouldn’t want to be interested, but I was.

One day, David pulled up porn on my family’s computer after school. He had come over while my parents were still at work, saying he had something to show me. When he booted up the monitor, instead of the Diablo II’s flames of eternal hellfire and ominous music, frenzied moaning spilled from the speakers and dewy female bodies bounced and writhed on the screen.

This was a corner of the internet I didn’t know existed. Until now, my entire internet was Neopets and Ask Jeeves. I watched (feeling both sick to my stomach and morbidly fascinated) as David typed hot lesbians big tits into the search browser and pulled up images and videos of… just that. You just gotta clear the search history each time, he said. He showed me how, clicking a few things from drop-down menus. Soon, the browsing history was empty, and I had learned a new spell. No one will know. This was powerful dark magic—and it had its claws in me.

When I was next home alone, I booted up the computer. I typed two fateful words into the search bar—dick gay—and just as David had done last time, an endless stream of pixelated flesh in the form of images and thumbnail videos erupted forth. I forgot about the People Pleaser with his persona and his armor and his cunning skills. In that moment, I was just me—a scrawny, eleven year-old boy looking for evidence that he was not the only one who felt different and alone. I had heard the term gay in middle school thrown towards me and others who didn’t belong, and instinctively I knew that I was, though I couldn’t have told you what it meant. But when I clicked through endless sweaty torsos and hard dicks, I knew I was onto something. I shouldn’t have liked what I was seeing, but I couldn’t look away.

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Even the People Pleaser couldn’t protect me.

I began to collect images and videos I liked on the porn sites that I browsed euphorically and maniacally during the hour and a half I had before my mom returned home. I spent those ninety minutes studying muscled men making out and ejaculating onto their washboard abs, and clicked through an inexhaustible amount of erect penises, their proud owners brandishing them for the viewer. I wanted to keep these men, but I knew better than to save them digitally on the desktop of the family computer. With the precision and focus of a surgeon, I opened a Word document and dragged my most prized finds onto the blank page, adjusting the aspect ratio, image after image, to fit as many smutty man photos onto a single 8.5 x 11 inch sheet as I could. When I was satisfied, I would hit print, mindful to leave enough time for the entire image-laden page to inch its way out of the printer before I heard the garage door go up, signaling that my mom had returned home. When the page was done printing, it was nearly sopping wet with the amount of ink required to produce each image. I would lay my fresh, wet sheets of DIY porn collage on the dining room table, allowing them to dry, crinkling anciently like the magic scrolls the Sorceress would sometimes discover in Diablo II. As soon as the sheaves were dry, I enclosed them in a nondescript, hard case folder that my mom had intended for me to use for homework at school.

Since it zipped closed, it was the perfect secure container for the products of my new hobby. I stored the folder, slowly growing heavy with porn collages, innocuously under books and folders on a shelf in my bedroom. This way, it could be any folder, nothing special. I always cleared the browser history—my skills of secrecy growing stronger while adding an unintended trait to the People Pleaser’s persona: shame.

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FICTION

Excerpts CATHERINE M SCHUSTER

Sammy (Chapter One, The Antidote to Joy) I never expected to be the kid who shot his father. Nobody grows up expecting that.

Before everything, if I thought about it at all, I thought disasters and hardships happened to other people. Bad stuff happened in my mother’s case studies, in exposés on the Department of Children and Family Services in the LA Times.

Shitty public schools. The forgotten, discarded kids in the system, juvie, foster care, group homes. Kids murdered by their moms and moms’ boyfriends, after enduring years of abuse.

Kids who died in foster care. Kids who were raped or tasered in youth correctional facilities.

Then, because of what I’d done, I could lay claim to misfortune, living at the Bright Directions group home in Lancaster, north of nowhere in the graveyard of Los Angeles County, with misfits and murderers-in-the-making. Lancaster boasted the worst of everything, too hot (except when it was freezing), always windy, dust-covered, a patchwork of strip malls, box stores, fast-food restaurants and housing for people who worked in L.A. but couldn’t afford to live there and endured four-hour commutes.

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There were a couple of positives. Jamal, for one. Still my best friend. Nor am I the scrawny kid I used to be. I may never win any Mr. America competitions, but I’m okay. I’m taller. Probably as tall as my father, if I could remember how tall he was. * I’ve gone over what happened so many times, with the police, my lawyer, various social workers, the judge in juvenile court, my mother. I talked about it in group and with Dr. Gabe.

Even now, I get stuck in the loop of “what if,” which single event I could have avoided that set me on this particular, disastrous path. That if only another choice had been made—by me, my mother, my father, if I’d gone to a different school—everything might have been different, a fork in the road leading to a different future.

In that ideal before, I would have been a normal kid. No ADHD diagnosis, no stimulant meds. Teachers wouldn’t complain about me and I’d never be sent to therapy. My parents would still be married. My father would never have lied to me.

My mother would never have cheated on him. The cat lived all of its nine lives. I never fell for Emily, never even met her.

Though now, the idea of never knowing her seems just as wrong as everything that happened. * Emily. The last time I’d seen her she was lying in my father’s bed, screaming and covered in blood. She looked better now.

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Sister (Flash Fiction) When she was a kid, she overheard an argument between her mother and her older sister, one of many that raged between them almost every night. Staying out too late.

Smoking. Dressing like a slut. Drinking and drugs. Skipping school. Bad grades. Boys. Her mother would pick any or all of these, but it was usually about boys. Tonight it was about the older boyfriend, though she didn’t know if older meant twenty or thirty. She was only a kid, but certain words were fixed in her memory (statutory rape, whore, worthless), and she knew she’d remember this fight for the rest of her life. Later, she read about her sister in the newspaper, the interviews with all kinds of people who didn’t know a thing about her sister, didn’t know anything at all. The high school English teacher who said “I always suspected something was wrong at home.” The police chief who said “We can’t save them all.” The candidate who said “Some people shouldn’t have children.”

She had stayed in her room, listening by the door, until it got late and she got sleepy. Eventually the back and forth turned into a background drone differentiated only by the shift in pitch: her sister’s high and outraged, her mother’s raspy with despair.

She was nearly asleep when she heard the slam of the front door. She didn’t know which of them had stormed out. The sister to spend the night with her boyfriend or her mother to visit the local bar. Either way, she’d see them in the morning, puffy-eyed and mumbling, still seething, nothing resolved. A detente that would last most of the day, both of them too tired and discouraged to go at it again so early.

This is the image that stays with her. Not an image she saw, but the sound of the slam, the hard bounce of the screen door

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swinging closed, somebody crying. She conjures an image of her sister walking out of the house, not taking a coat, maybe barefoot (since they never found her shoes), no wallet, purse, or backpack, no ID, no phone. She tries to unremember, to make it not happen, to make her sister come home, but it can’t be undone.

The girl already knew she’d be telling this story years from now, about the night her sister walked out of the house and never came back, the call from the police three days later when her body was found, the death of her mother two years later from a toxic combination of grief and alcohol, going half way across the country to live with cousins she’d never heard of. She’d tell it to people who never knew her sister, had never been to her town, who thought she was trash too. She’d tell it to people who would tell her over and over that it wasn’t her fault, she was only a kid.

It’s the End of the World When You’re Sixteen (Flash Fiction) Everyone has their worst-ever moment. The party last Saturday night was mine and I could feel doom creeping up on me, like the shadow of death. It was one of those parties when the parents are out of town and your parents trust you enough that when you tell them, of course the parents will be there, they believe you. Word got out, of course, and kids from other schools and kids who’d already graduated showed up, and suddenly there were like fifty people there, up from the original fifteen who had actually been invited, and they brought more of everything: tequila, Red Bull and vodka, boxed wine, cases of beer, red Solo cups, a few bags of Doritos. And someone

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brought some really wicked weed. It was the weed and the tequila that did me in, though mostly the tequila because weed didn’t usually make me puke, though the puking wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me. From what I remember, it was the dancing and I wasn’t the world’s best and normally I would never dance, except by myself in my room and only with the door closed. From what I’ve been told—and what I later saw—my dancing hadn’t improved but that hadn’t stopped me from twerking my heart out, and then a bunch of the older guys started yelling striptease, striptease, and I guess I got into it, because hours later, when I woke up in the bathroom and everything smelled like puke, I was naked except for my thong.

My head throbbed, my mouth felt like sandpaper, and when I looked in the mirror, someone had written slut in lipstick across my forehead. I wiped it off with toilet paper, leaving a smear of red, and splashed water on my face which didn’t do much for the lipstick which was water-proof or whatever, but my head cleared enough for me to start freaking out about what had happened that I couldn’t remember. Maybe I’d been roofied. Maybe I’d been raped, thinking rape was just another way to have sex when you didn’t really want to. It would really piss me off if some guy I didn’t even know had devirginized me and I would never be able to remember my first time. Just thinking about that was sad and pathetic, and then I wondered if people watched or something and how gross would that be, if I had provided all the evening’s entertainment. But my thong was intact and there was nothing gross on my legs, like come or blood, so I thought probably not, plus I’d been a virgin yesterday and I think I’d know if my status had changed. Maybe writing slut was just a bad joke because everyone knew I’d never had sex, not that I was some kind of goody-goody prude, it just

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hadn’t happened yet; I should probably have a boyfriend, you know, someone I really liked. I went to find my clothes and my friends, if anybody was still here. If Aaron or Tish had left me here, nearly naked next to the toilet, and just gone home, that would be really low and just thinking that made me feel super lonely and I thought might cry. I walked through the house, surveying the wreckage of the party: trash and empty beer cans and bottles everywhere, a big spill of something orange soaking into the beige living room carpet. The kitchen was gross too, with something sticky almost gluing my feet to the floor. Somebody’s parents were going to be really pissed when they saw this mess. Oh shit. My parents. My parents were going to be really pissed because I looked at the kitchen clock and it was three am and I’d totally blown it because they weren’t that strict except for if I was going to be out later than one I had to call them, that was like a law in my house, and this was the first time I’d broken it. They’d kill me for this. I’d probably be grounded forever and I could only hope they hadn’t called the police or any of my friends or my friends’ parents because the party wasn’t even where I’d said it would be, I couldn’t even remember whose house it was. And here I was, nearly naked, and obviously a lot of people knew what had happened, because they’d been here, watching it all unfold. My real friends would support me. Aaron, for example, he’d cover for me, downplay everything, and Carolyn and Tish and Abby would surround me with sympathy and we’d talk about it for hours. They’d tell me it wasn’t the end of the world, they’d minimize the damage to my reputation. Except they weren’t here, I didn’t recognize anyone among the kids still asleep on the sofa and chairs, in the bedrooms, or on the floor, and I felt so alone I did start crying and that made my headache worse, and then I thought about

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my ex-boyfriend Steve. He’d been here—I remembered seeing him with his sister Hilary and her bestie, Laura—and they all hated me, ever since I dumped him last year, and were probably already laughing about what a fool I’d made of myself, looking at the video Hilary had undoubtedly taken on her phone. And if she posted it on Insta or TikTok and it went viral, because, I learned later, that’s what happens to videos of teenage girls doing their best, drunken imitation of exotic dancing, then my parents would find out. My parents. I found my phone on the kitchen table, under a half-eaten bag of pretzels and it had just enough battery left to text them, apologize for waking them and not checking in sooner. I said I was fine, I was sleeping over at Abby’s and prayed they hadn’t already called her parents trying to track me down. Wandering back to the living room, I found my clothes, my bra on a lampshade, like I’d flung it there and I probably had, my t-shirt and leggings were in a pile on the floor; at least no one had puked on them. I shimmied into the leggings and put on the shirt. And then I had to lie down, I was little dizzy and I was afraid I’d start throwing up again. I needed to sleep. I found the den and a phone charger, collapsed in the La-Z-Boy and woke hours later and sure enough, there were like a thousand messages with links to the horrible videos, because at least seven kids had their phones out, recording me, each one revealing the spectacle from a different angle, and about twenty voice mails from my parents, starting at 1:30 when I was late, and continuing all night long, every hour or so and they sounded worried, well my mom sounded worried but my dad was just really, really pissed. By nine a.m. they’d seen one of the videos because Abby’s mom had sent it and they wanted to know what the hell I was thinking and where the hell I was and also, was I okay? I wasn’t okay, but maybe it didn’t

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matter because they’d know everything soon enough and draw their own conclusions, that I couldn’t be trusted, that I’d been slut-shamed, and had possibly had group sex or been raped or something worse, gang-raped, and they’d probably make me get tested for STIs or go to rehab or see a shrink. They’d be disappointed because they knew that I’d behaved badly enough that even my friends had left me behind. I hated disappointing them, anticipating the look on my mom’s face, that sure she’d always love me, but she’d never see me the same way, and my dad wouldn’t even look at me, or he’d look at me and his eyes would tear up. I thought, even half-hoped they’d send me away, to boarding school or one of those schools were they kidnap you in the middle of the night because the idea of going back to school on Monday and being that girl, I don’t think I could face it and almost anything else would be better, even living in one of those super strict places in Utah or Idaho where maybe the teachers are in some kind of cult, and they made you survive in the wilderness with nothing more than a Swiss Army knife, that was what I’d heard anyway, and maybe that’s what I deserved.

I was dead dead dead. And that might be a better alternative because what was my life worth now.

Low Residency MFA, a Lamentation Everyone arrives with a fantasy, a dream of recognition, inspiration, completion. Everyone thinks they are the real thing, better than the others, most of whom are no better than hacks. Those who are older believe they have the requisite life experience, which should make all the difference, except that they are nearly invisible. Those who are younger think everyone else is out of touch; hopeless if you don’t Insta, well, who could

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you possibly be, what could you know? Those who are white fear their moment has passed. Those who are Black or bi or trans, queer, or gay, are still broken-hearted by the years, the centuries, of marginalization, bigotry, and hate. Their broken hearts are real, as devastating as a hundred hundred-year storms.

And if you are the real thing, it’s possible nobody will notice, not the faculty, with their awards, their Iowa credentials, their publications, their marginalized, non-tenured status worn like well-deserved badges of honor. They mean well, they encourage, they nudge. At the same time, they destroy, destroy, destroy. They use all the words: point-of-view, interiority, dialogue, backstory; white space, villanelle, rhyming or otherwise; braided or linear, investigative or personal. Whether you meander and make mistakes on the way to discovering your own path or adhere to the hallowed Freytag pyramid, feedback will follow.

We may have embarked on a hero’s journey, our personal quests insisting that our stories are worth telling. The loves, losses, and traumas that “really happened,” are “true stories,” that mean so much, at least to us. They may be stories we never tell our mothers or fathers, our lovers or our children.

We compose fiction, poetry, or the elusive creative non-fiction which may be a short cut for saying, I need to write about myself, myself, myself, and my story is important. I write therefore I am.

At the end of a week of workshops and craft lectures and readings by writers famous and less famous, we ache. Many of us leave questioning the investment of time, effort, and dollars; most of all, we mourn the loss of hope.

It may take weeks to recover, to dig inside ourselves, to find the hidden spark that tells us we have something to say, an idea worthy of pursuit. We go deep and eventually reanimate the flash of inspiration, the turn of phrase, the image we can’t

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shake. We return to the source and read the writers we can’t get enough of, thinking, yes, that’s where I want to go too.

If we’re lucky, we silence the critics, the ones we carry inside ourselves and the other ones too, faculty and classmates, agents and editors, the entire byzantine publishing pipeline.

Then we get back to work.

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FICTION

IRL CRISTIN WHITE

Walking down the long hallway to the elevators Olivia thought: in two minutes I will have met Jared. She would have been less nervous had a celebrity been waiting at the door.

At the front door to the building she saw him leaning against the scaffolding, his back to her, just as she had imagined. She leaned out the door and said, “You’re real.”

He had all the characteristics she knew he would: tattoos, short scruffy beard, hip clothing, but there was something startlingly off about all of it. His face was rounder than she expected, his body softer. The proportions were all off, his torso was too big and round, his limbs too skinny. She wondered if he was making the same assessment of her.

“I’m real,” he said. They hugged.

“Do you want to come upstairs?”

He followed her to the elevators. “I can’t believe you thought I was short,” he said.

She forced a laugh, not knowing how else to respond. When they talked earlier that week the matter of height had come up. She had thought he was around her height—five-foot-seven, and he’d eagerly straightened her out, clarifying that he was five-eleven. She had been surprised at the clarification; even in photos he had the compact, square build of someone shorter.

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She was right though, she could see now he was hardly an inch or two taller than her. The only reason he could be bringing it up now was that he had noticed the same thing, and was trying to compensate for the lie.

Once in her apartment, he greeted the dog in a performative way, making a big show of how much he loved dogs, without paying much attention to the dog before him.

“So, how far ahead am I of these other little boys you’ve been seeing, in terms of looks and personality?” he said in his fast, Appalachian accent. The dog was up on her hind legs, looking bored, as Jared pet the top of her head. Olivia had never cared for Southern accents, but on him had expected to find it charmingly at odds with his leftist politics, his hipster persona. But no, it reminded her of an auctioneer.

He used to text things like this, and she had found it charmingly cocky. Via text, she would have responded with something explicitly sexual. In person though, it was clear the confidence was a façade. The question seemed insecure and disingenuous; validation-seeking rather than sarcastic. She didn’t know how to respond without mimicking his artificiality, so told the dog to get down and leaned in to kiss him.

He was a good kisser, but timid. His beard was soft against her face. They went on making out for a few minutes, and she kept waiting for him to lead her to the bed or tear of her clothes or touch her breast even. Eventually he pulled back. “We have all night, no need to rush,” he said.

He stepped back, putting a few feet between them. “Do you want to smoke weed?”

She’d hardly gotten high in a couple months, half-heartedly trying to quit. “Ok,” she said.

She retrieved the vape and flower from the cabinet stash.

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While she packed the bowl, he examined the vape. “Wow, look at this. So fancy. I bet this was expensive. Where’d you get this?”

“Internet,” she said, sprinkling the ground plant into the capsule that would go inside the vape. “An impulse purchase one night when I was stoned.”

He laughed loudly, in a way that felt condescending. “Do you go on a lot of shopping sprees when you’re high?”

She only took a few hits yet was immediately too high.

Jared hopped up to sit on the kitchen counter, kicking his heels against the lower cabinet. He was wearing a green polo shirt, with big rings of sweat in the armpits. His hair was stiff with gel.

She couldn’t figure out a way to tell him to get down without embarrassing him.

“Do you want to go for a walk? I love to walk when I’m high,” he said.

The dog looked betrayed as she closed the door behind them, but Olivia was too high to manage another living being.

She noticed Jared didn’t suggest they take the dog either, and judged him for it.

Out on the street, she felt as though she were walking through a dream. Jared talked and she tried to listen, but holding on to each thought long enough was challenging. “Tell me about your town,” he said. “What’s it known for?”

“Um,” she said, watching the walk signal. A big white car blasting funk music drove through the intersection. An older couple, the man walking with a huge walking stick, turned the corner. The woman was wearing a Daffy Duck shirt, and walked side-to-side, as if her hips hurt. They appeared to be arguing.

On the opposite corner was the abandoned downtown mall, all broken glass and plywood. Focus, she chastised herself. What was his question? “Well,” she said. She was living full lifetimes

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between words. “We used to, uh, make a lot of gloves.”

The signal turned to walk, and they crossed the street.

“That’s all you’ve got?” Jared laughed. “Gloves?”

“No,” she said, though she couldn’t think of anything else.

“I’m not from here.”

She nearly tripped on an uneven strip of sidewalk and he laughed. “Be careful, darlin’. First day on new legs?”

She grabbed his hand, not out of any romantic inclination, but to avoid falling over.

“So what’s your plan to prepare for the zombie apocalypse?”

He didn’t comment or even seem to notice the hand-holding.

“What?”

“You mean you don’t have a plan?” he said, feigning shock.

“That’s what we’re doing as soon as we get back to your place.”

“Okay,” she said, because what else was there to say?

He began talking about digital marketing, which he apparently did for a candy company. He was a manager, and a very good boss. At first it had sounded like an important corporate job, but now, from the words she clung to, it sounded like he was one of those people who drove around to different grocery and convenience stores, arranging the candy in cardboard displays.

The walk seemed to last forever. She realized she was leading them on the route she walked the dog every morning, which usually took fifteen minutes. If asked to guess she would have said they’d been walking for an hour.

Back at her apartment, she said, or maybe just thought, “Don’t you have to go to that work dinner?”

She draped herself across the sofa, no longer concerned with looking sexy. Logistically she wanted to get rid of him, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He had told her that he and his

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wife hadn’t had sex for ten months by the time they separated.

Could his ego really handle more rejection? Especially when it had been so heavily implied that they would sleep together?

Why was she always so worried about the male ego in the first place? She would have made a great secretary, if only she could stomach it. She wished for her journal, but knew Jared would insist on reading it, and would tease her for it. She let her head loll back over the arm of the sofa, closing her eyes. She was floating along, letting her mind wander where it wanted, unconcerned with entertaining Jared for the moment. She felt skin against her lips and opened her eyes to see nothing but pale, white, hairy skin. “What the fuck,” she said, shoving the mass away. Jared stumbled forward, laughing and pulling his pants up over his bare ass.

“Got you,” he said, zipping his fly.

“Why would you do that?” she said.

“Don’t get bent out of shape, it was a joke, honey.”

Now she was thinking about Honey, who may have been humorless but at least would never rub his ass in her face as a joke. For the first time in weeks she missed her old life. The comfort of that big, stupid house and knowing how things would unfold. She used to hate how pre-ordained everything used to feel, when she thought about the future stretching out before her, how no matter what either of them said, she and Honey would never buy a new house, would never actually hike more. She missed him and her old life in the same nostalgic way she thought about elementary school. All the sweeter because she couldn’t go back.

Jared sat on the opposite end of the sofa, looking at her with a sleepy, leering expression. How high was he? Certainly less than her, but beyond that it was hard to tell. Then, without

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warning, he was kissing her. She hated him now, she decided, but she let him. And when his hand slid between her legs she let her knee fall open, let his hand pressed against her feel good. He grabbed at her breast over her shirt, and even though the force of his squeeze hurt a little, she let out a little moan as if she liked it. Compliance was so much easier than resisting. She had never understood women who wanted to be submissive in bed, but now surrendering didn’t sound so bad. He could do whatever he wanted to her and she would float around in the outer space of her mind until he was done and enjoy the sensation and they would both feel happy after and she could go to sleep for as long as she wanted.

But he didn’t move his hands under her clothes, they just kept making out until her jaw ached. They stopped kissing and he laid across her lap so that his head was on her chest, like a baby. She hated how he looked up at her, and she felt like maybe she was his mother. Maybe she should lift her shirt and let him suck on her nipple. Maybe that’s all either of them needed. She felt his phone buzz in his pocket pressed against her leg.

“Shouldn’t you get that?” she asked.

He rolled his weight off her and pulled the phone out.

“Fuck, I have to go,” he said.

“I told you,” she said, or thought.

He stood up, adjusted his jeans, patted his pockets. “Don’t worry, I won’t be gone long. Wait, I have a crazy idea. What if you came to the dinner with me?”

She made a vague laughing noise, then realized he was serious. “I’m too high to meet your coworkers,” she said.

Once he was gone, the dog jumped onto the sofa in front of her, in the little spoon position, and sighed loudly. Olivia petted the top of her head. “I’m sorry, baby.” She ran her hand down

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the dog’s bumpy spine. “I know you miss your old life.” After a few minutes she got up and locked the door, changed into her pajamas, and ordered enough takeout to cater a dinner party.

That wasn’t how any of this was supposed to go. She had spent the weeks leading up to their meeting fantasizing in great detail how it would go. When she opened the glass door to her apartment building and said, “You’re real,” he was supposed to turn to face her and his eyes would light up with desire and he would say, “You look even better in real life.” They would kiss—briefly, tastefully—right there in the doorway. Upstairs, he would compliment the décor of her apartment. She’d tell him she just needed a big photo print for the blank wall, and he’d laugh and say that for her, she could have a print of whatever she wanted. They would stand close to one another, by the back of the sofa perhaps, and after a minute or two of conversation he would cup his hand around the back of her neck and kiss her with the hunger of their pent-up desire. He would say something like, “God, look at you,” and she would feel like the sexiest woman on earth. The scene faded to black after that, though the implication was they’d go straight to bed and have sex three or four times, both insatiable. In the morning they’d get breakfast and discuss the logistics of a long-distance relationship.

Back on the couch she tried to stay awake long enough for the food to arrive. Unbelievably, Jared was still planning on coming back. All the forced laughter to come, the strange things he would surely do, and she would react to them as if they were perfectly normal to avoid making him feel bad. The orgasm she would surely fake. All of it sounded impossible. His return felt impossible. She could soldier through it, tough it out until morning.

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That was the thing about the future though, it wasn’t preordained. You built it minute-by-minute, any way you wanted.

She opened the text thread with Jared and was faced with the last selfie he’d sent, in his hotel bed right before he came to her apartment, the confident, fuck-me eyes he always made at the camera. When would she get to meet him? But the Jared from her phone was a person she’d constructed in her imagination, to her preferred specifications. The store-brand Jared who showed up at her apartment was the only version of him that existed.

She typed a message in the text box, then hit send. The door buzzer rang. Her food had arrived.

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NONFICTION

Fragments from a World on Fire (EXCERPTS)

DANIEL NOAH MOSES

Eva Hesse Was a Sculptor Who Died Young Early in the spring of my father’s death, the two of us went down to The Village to see a documentary film about Eva Hesse, a “post-minimal” sculptor who died young of brain cancer. Born in Nazi Germany in 1936, the same year as my father, she was one of the last to escape on a Kindertransport, the organized effort to get Jewish children out of Germany before what turned out to be The Holocaust. Her mother later killed herself by jumping out a window.

It was my father’s idea for us to see that film about Eva Hesse’s life. He suggested it over our breakfast of steel coat oatmeal at his 17th floor apartment on 123rd Street, off Amsterdam Avenue, after seeing the listing that morning in his hard copy of the New York Times. His second wife, Anne, was away for the weekend at a meditation retreat. I had to google “Eva Hesse” to see who she was.

My father told me that he worked as Eva Hesse's busboy at a hotel in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York (in an area known at the time as “The Borsht Belt”). This was

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before he and my mother met. It was before my father worked at The Arrowhead Lodge, the hotel in nearby Ellenville that my mother's mother owned and where my mother grew up.

He must have been in high school. Or perhaps he had just graduated. It was before he went to Israel to live on a kibbutz.

Some time after he bussed Eva’s table, my father and Eva Hesse went out on some kind of date.

After watching the film about Eva Hesse, my father and I ate at a little vegetarian place a few blocks from the theater. Once a passionate hiker, decades earlier, he got frostbite while trekking in Nepal because he wasn’t wearing warm enough socks. This led to neuropathy. Because he could no longer walk far, we agreed to stop at the first place that looked promising. I had the spanakopita; he had the Buddha Bowl.

On our slow walk to the subway after dinner and on the subway going uptown, he kept returning to his memories of Eva Hesse.

She worked in plastic, fiberglass, and other synthetic materials.

This might have contributed to her death at 34. My father was no fan of "post-minimal" art. Later that spring, he was putting his shoes on one foot at a time, while standing in the lobby of his accountant’s apartment building. He lost balance.

He fell down the steps and landed on his head. The trauma to his brain was made worse by the blood thinners. He died on a Friday morning in May. We buried him that Sunday at the North River cemetery in the Adirondacks. By the gravesite, before we shoveled dirt on his casket, we read an excerpt from one of his favorite poems, Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Over dinner that night, only a few months earlier, when my father talked about Eva Hesse, I remember thinking of how I had not

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seen him so happy in such a long time. “How beautiful she was," he said. “How beautiful she was.”

A Rough Sketch of Two Artists During my eleven years living in Jerusalem, working across lines of conflict, I often went up to Jenin in the north of the West Bank. I’m thinking about those times today, as Jenin once again makes its appearance on the front page of the New York Times.

According to one of the articles, “Jenin, a focal point of Israel’s wide-ranging raid into the West Bank on Wednesday, is a potent symbol of rebellion and militancy for Palestinians after decades of fighting against occupying powers” (this article, by Erika Solomon, one of several, was published on August 28th, 2024).

I first started spending time in Jenin late in 2006 when recent memories of the Second Intifada still burned. Only a handful of foreigners made it up there those days. Most activities for Palestinians funded by international organizations took place in Ramallah and Bethlehem. Because of security concerns and convenience, the north was neglected. On one of my early trips, I met a Palestinian English teacher from Jenin, a man in his early forties, burly, sleeked back brown hair full of gel on his head, a sculpted beard on his face. Wherever he went, a halo of cologne followed him. He opened the trunk of his car to show me something: a machine gun. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You are safe with me around.”

When he said this, we were in the parking lot at Haddad Village, a fantastical amusement park and resort behind high walls in the hills outside of Jenin. Ibrahim Haddad, a local metal smith in his seventies with uncommon imagination, created

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Haddad Village during the Second Intifada. “Haddad” means “smith” in Arabic. Haddad’s family has probably worked for generations as metal smiths. Behind those walls, he designed and built a roller coaster, a ferris wheel, a fake life-sized ship that oscillated back and forth in the sky, bumper cars, and a diverse range of other rides and games. He conjured up animal sculptures from ceramics, from bushes and flowers. He called into existence gardens with trickling fountains. He designed and built an amphitheater and a museum of Palestinian culture with dioramas of figures made from paper mache. Haddad Village was a paradise in the original sense of the word—a walled garden, a refuge. If you drove past it on the road, you would have no idea of the beauty inside.

My Palestinian colleagues—volunteer educators from across Jerusalem and the West Bank—loved Haddad Village. I did, too. It was our favorite venue for the educator workshops, the model schools initiative, the seasonal camps for children that we organized together, and for any other event or meeting we wanted to do near Jenin. Ibrahim Haddad and his son, Bessam, the manager, always went out of their way to welcome us. They were variations on a theme: short, stocky men with full heads of reddish brown hair and quiet confidence. Ibrahim had the intense eyes of a prophet or an artist. Ibrahim and Bessam, along with their extended family, lived like lords in mansions with pillars within the walls of Haddad Village.

The staff at Haddad Village loved our group. A few of them sent their kids to the seasonal camps. The waiters smiled and talked with us when they brought lemonade with mint, hummus, babaganoush and various other salads, barbecued meats, fresh watermelon, and cups of Arabic coffee. I have an

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especially clear memory of the sweet, sad face of the wrinkled mustached head waiter with dyed black hair and rough hands.

My Palestinian colleagues, the Haddad staff, all of us, through the years, developed the easiness of neighbors and friends in the kind of village one might find in a well-worn parable.

During those same years, I used to take visiting Americans on “listening tours” to meet Palestinians “on the ground.” Jenin was a regular stop. We would drive through Jenin Refugee Camp and stop at The Freedom Theater before a lingering meal with local Palestinian educators at Haddad Village. When he was at The Freedom Theater, its director, Juliano Mer-Khemis, would greet us and show us around.

Visiting The Freedom Theater always made an impression: Juliano’s charisma; the improbability of young Palestinian actors on stage in the midst of a refugee camp rehearsing plays like Orwell’s Animal Farm; the palpable sense of purpose displayed by everybody there; the busy European volunteers, young men and women in loose casual clothes; the plaques on the walls honoring donors from around the world. The relief we felt later in the quiet gardens behind the walls of Haddad Village.

Juliano’s mother, Arna Mer, was a Jewish woman born in 1929, the same year as Anne Frank in what is today Rosh Pina, Israel, under what was then The British Mandate. She served in what Israelis call “The War of Independence” and Palestinians call “The Nakba” (“The Catastrophe”). Later, she married Saliba Khamis, a Palestinian citizen of Israel from a Christian family.

They lived in Nazareth, in the north of Israel. They became human rights activists, political activists, and members of the Communist Party. During the First Intifada, in the late 1980s

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and early 1990s, Arna established The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp.

Arna and Saliba raised three children. Juliano, their second, who took the last name Mer-Khamis, became a well-known Israeli actor and director. Arna died of cancer in 1995. During the Second Intifada, in April of 2002, the Jenin Refugee Camp was the site of “The Battle of Jenin.” This included a massive military Israeli incursion and heavy fighting. Roughly 52 Palestinians were killed, 38 armed men, 14 civilians; roughly 23 Israeli soldiers were killed and 75 wounded. The Refugee Camp was decimated. The Freedom Theater was destroyed. Two young men who had been participants in Freedom Theater activities, Yusseff and Nidal, carried out a suicide attack in Hadera, Israel, in 2001, that killed four civilians. A number of young men who grew up active in The Freedom Theater took part in the Battle of Jenin. Two of them, combatants, were killed.

After the fighting stopped, Juliano, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, devoted himself to rebuilding The Freedom Theater. He poured himself into the production Arna’s Children, a documentary film about The Freedom Theater. He raised money from Europe and America. By the time I started visiting, he was training new generations of Palestinian actors and other theater people to resist the Occupation through art.

From what I understand, there was talk of Juliano playing King David in an Israeli movie. Being in his presence, this was understandable: he carried himself with regal authority. The last time I saw him, he was standing outside of the theater when our white Mercedes mini-van pulled up beside him and parked.

He was a powerfully built man, ten years older than me, about

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fifty at the time—with a full head of wavy brown hair and stubble on his face. He had an unusually strong handshake.

“You are here to visit the zoo again?” he said with what sounded like a sneer. He turned to the visitors I had brought with me.

“Welcome to the zoo. Take a look around. The animals are here for your viewing.” Then, before our eyes, he transformed into a different person. His tone of voice changed. He visibly shrunk and became gentle. He smiled. “It’s good to see you,” he said.

“Welcome back.”

A few months later, in April of 2011, while leaving the theater, Juliano was shot to death by masked gunmen. He was in his car, a Citroen, his baby on his lap. Before he was killed, he joked in an interview that he would be killed by a “fucked up Palestinian” for “corrupting the youth of Islam.” It seems he was right.

With Jenin again in the newspaper, I think of Juliano at his theater and how he conjured up new worlds for people imprisoned by their realities. I think of Ibrahim Haddad walking around Haddad Village—the paradise he created. I remember sitting at one of those tables in the gardens of Haddad Village with water from the fountains trickling. We could hear the camp kids playing in the background. We sipped glasses of fresh lemonade with mint and small cups of Arabic coffee. We hatched plans for the future. I wonder about the power of art.

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Snapshots: 1997–99 ELISA WOUK ALMINO

During my years at Bennington, I’ve been digging through my childhood diaries and notebooks. Snippets have found their way into my writing—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, as they have sharpened my ideas around identity and belonging.

These are some excerpts from those journals, ranging from when I was 7 to 9 years old. * I think dolls are real. And these are my best friends: Melissa Elanna Angelena Hannh R Hannh M Adinne Mila Galinn Aarran *

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Bone Hunt. March 6, 1997.

I looked for the bone. I found the bone.

I told Karen where I found the bone.

I cleaned my bone in the water with a toothbrush.

I rinsed my bone.

I put my initials on a sticker on the bone. * Poem: Light and dark Light is as speshal as dark. Light gives us Light and dark gives dark.

Light shines and dark is dark as black. dark is speshal because it makes us sleep. Light is speshal because it helps us see.

7 ears old November 14, 1997 * Saturday 27 February 1999 The wind softly pushes the flowers.

A nice calm breeze, I quietly sit next to the fire reading a book while my mother is cooking something delicious.

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Memorizing Roman Roads ELISABETTA LA CAVA

In the front yard of my grandmother’s house in Venezuela, behind a four-foot fence, stood a white metal pole. She didn’t hang a flag on it. I was eight years old and didn’t care about the heaviness of bodies. I often inchwormed myself to the top of the skinny mast where I could study the lay of the land.

Concrete walls separated us from the neighbors. Topped with broken glass, they zigzagged between homes. The view was foreign, and didn’t loop me to anything I knew.

Even the trees were different here. They grew untamed— níspero, mamón, tamarindo, guanábana—they appeared to grow fruit overnight. Next to me, the mango had leaves as big as my hands. I tried bending one to see how far it would curl before snapping. It felt like plastic compared to the foliage that scrunched all over the ground in Rome.

Mamma made it sound like we were under attack, that trees could hurt me. Don’t stand under coconut trees, she always said. Or, stay away from manzanillas, I heard her scream. I was tired of her warnings. I couldn’t even get in the shade. How was I to find home here, when even the trees conspired? From the top of the flagpole, I absolved them, entertained myself watching neighbors come and go from their homes.

Cumboto Norte was a newish neighborhood in 1977,

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packed with European immigrants. There were scattered Portuguese families on our five streets, and of course there were Venezuelans. But so many of our neighbors came from Italy or Spain. All the white stucco houses were solid brick and concrete, fronted by green lawns, edged by hibiscus and bougainvillea.

The backyards were manicured gardens shaded by fruit trees.

I learned how to climb branches to get over the walls. I could almost always eat the fruit, except the guayabas from the Vargas home. They were full of worms that looked like seeds. I’d once bit into one then realized the leftover part was moving.

I spotted Signora Torretti three houses down the street.

She was always there it seemed, watering her Bermuda lawn.

Buongiorno, she said whenever I walked by her one-story quinta.

She’d lift her sunglasses and wink, return them to the top of her nose. Something about her eighty-year-old body in a two-piece bathing suit made me smile. Her skin was leathery little folds that crinkled over each other.

Across the street from her lived an old sailor by the name of Antonio who’d built his house in the shape of a ship. He didn’t have a family. Every day he spent hours clutching the helm on what he imagined was the upper deck of his vessel but was in fact the flat roof of his house. He wore white, and a sailor cap on top of his bald head. I envisioned his escape, where his roof turned into a sailboat and carried him to his faraway home on the Ligurian Sea. A breeze carried the scent of ocean, but I could not see the ocean. Puerto Cabello was exactly what my parents had promised—an endless summer and a town on the beach. But it was foreign to my senses, I could not take it in. I did not appreciate, not even a bit, the giant, dish-sized crabs crossing neighborhood streets. I could not love them. I could not love

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anything, not even the starfish.

Nostalgia—a term people use to discuss melancholy, the pain of longing for a place in time. My father had removed us from Rome. After thirty years of longing, he’d returned to Venezuela, the place he left when he was ten years old. Maybe he had cured his longing and transferred his pain onto me.

I strolled the neighborhood, talking to anyone who would listen. They all said the same thing. They said that in the end, I would forget Rome. How could I forget home? I promised myself not to, even when the whole place was pushing in, sound and scent, with people who crowded me with their perspiration. There’s a certain feel to the skin of the tropics.

It’s in a constant state of moisture. There’s stickiness, the fog of bug spray, mosquitoes that fly like helicopters, choosing a single person to torment. Crickets take over the night in the tropics, with incessant chanting, and my grandmother’s house smelled of dampness. The lights in her living room shone incandescent and turned the night beyond into a black box that threatened to yank me out, to cast me into the void.

Something that in Italian transfers no meaning, malattia di casa; that holds no good translation in Spanish, enfermedad de casa.

Homesickness—it’s like trying to catch words echoing in the room next door. It would have served me to know the meaning of nostalgia. But in my family, we didn’t talk about these things.

Maybe we were too close to the pain to name it. We’d all left home at some point, losing ourselves in parts along the way.

To remember was my cure for forgetting. Every night, I lay on a twin bed under a rectangular air conditioner. The steady hum sucked moisture from the air, filled my emptiness with sound. I rested my head on the pillow and could see above me—two flying red ribbons tied to the vent.

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I lounged under the window unit memorizing Roman roads, and committed to memory those streets, the way from one place to the next, from my home off Via Fani, to the ballet on Viale Angelico. Sycamores—they muffled the honking of hurried drivers, led to my father’s job, to those wide, crowded sidewalks facing one thousand glass stores. We bought pizza al taglio, wrapped in thin brown paper. Under the window unit, I closed my eyes and thought of the hillside, the observatory under a night sky, as the golden Madonna stood caring at Don Orione. The mechanical hum became the buzzing of Vespas, and I fashioned an atlas paved in cobblestones, sketched my way to the most sacred place. I climbed the steps to the Cupola at St. Peter’s Basilica, much higher than any flagpole, and gazed at my Eternal City of Angels.

To be sick with nostalgia is to exist in mourning, in selfimmersion of a looping sorrow. My Roman roads are my home pain. They’re drawn in chalk. With each sketched path, I reengage a state of re-feeling, of risentire, of becoming ill. My mind and heart produce a loop of hurt that touches the familiar, something I bring with me no matter where I go.

Nostalgia—I’ve spent most of my life living in this word. *First published in Cleaver Magazine, Issue No. 46, June 2024.

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Iridescence EUGENIE DALLAND

It was February 2020, and I was barreling down Broadway in lower Manhattan, late for a meeting. I paused on a street corner, waiting for the light to change. My heart pounded in my chest, and as I caught my breath, I watched a bus go by with an advertisement plastered across its windows. It featured an image of a robot in a vast sea of red sand. The tagline read, “Freedom isn’t free.” I knew that it was for a television show’s latest season, but for some reason it made me uneasy. It felt like a public service announcement, though I didn’t know why.

A little over a month later, the message would have a far more definitive meaning. I had just arrived in New Orleans for a wedding and a residency at the home of my friend Lucia, who picked me up from the airport in an old, beat-up Jaguar sedan. The weather was beautiful as we drove by an abandoned construction site on Canal Street that had collapsed in October 2019. The top floors looked like concrete pancakes, with two massive cranes dramatically frozen in mid fall. Something about the destruction was perversely fascinating, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the remnants of this sad and avoidable accident.

One of the construction workers had alerted his bosses to the buckling braces of the upper floors, the result of substandard

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supports and rushed construction by shady developers. They threatened to fire him for speaking up, and three days later the building collapsed, killing three people.

As usual, the city had neither the funds nor the propriety to organize the site’s dismantling. The dilapidated building sat untouched, an extraordinary vision of catastrophe that, as the months passed, became just another feature of the landscape.

The extent of the city’s handling of the incident was a large tarp secured over the front of the building to mask the rubble from the multitude of tourists on Canal Street. As if on cue, the wind ripped the tarp off one day in late January, exposing a decomposed body whose torso was wedged between two collapsed walls. Its twisting legs dangled in the breeze above throngs of horrified sightseers below.

Lucia recounted this macabre denouement as we made our way back to her sprawling French Quarter home where I was to spend three weeks writing. The air was pleasant and warm, a stark contrast to the biting cold of New York City. In March, New Orleans is threaded with jasmine that grows in heaping bundles over fences and up walls, as common as a weed. The blossoms look like tiny white propellers nestled within dark foliage, and their scent is almost as intoxicating as the gardenias that bloom a month later. Solemn visions of the rotting corpse and its swaying legs arose in my mind as I inhaled the jasmine’s unavoidable perfume.

The wedding was canceled the morning after my arrival due to the spread of the virus. Boarding a plane back to New York seemed unwise, so I decided to stay with my friends in their home until further notice. I figured I’d get tons of writing

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done—maybe even enough for a book. The tides of panic were rising daily, but we had wine. A lot of wine.

I stayed in a spare apartment behind their house, built in the mid-19th century. The walls were made of twelve-inch stone, which kept the interior rooms cool and slightly damp. Narrow French doors opened on to a large courtyard laid with mosscovered bricks. Tropical foliage climbed up the walls of this enclave, and the trickle of a small fountain provided a kind of lullaby at night. Two sleek cats prowled in the shadows of the garden, hunting lizards.

Each morning I sat beneath a canopy of palm fronds whose pointed fingers cast shadows on my hands while I read. An enormous magnolia tree stood in a dark corner of the courtyard, carpeting the ground with its waxy leaves and cream-colored flowers. Despite the fact that I’d spent much of my childhood in New Orleans, I’d never before realized that a magnolia blossom, before it has bloomed, smells faintly of lemon.

The moment I left these confines, however, the world around me filled with terror and uncertainty, as piles of the dead mounted outside hospitals. Even the air seemed different when I ventured outside: neither warm nor cool, but rather an impossible kind of temperature that felt like the temperature inside of a dream.

The streets of the city were apocalyptic in their barrenness of human activity. I did not miss the throngs of tourists, but the immaculate silence that replaced their chatter was deafening.

Gargantuan cloud formations sailed serenely across cerulean skies, but on the ground, there was little movement aside from the stray cats that sat like talismans on top of fences.

While I was free to enter and exit this dreamscape (wearing blue

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plastic gloves and a flimsy mask), that movement constituted my sole option of physical engagement with the outside world.

My sense of want grew to proportions I had not known were possible. The mundane actions of my public life, such as kissing a friend goodbye or pressing up against strangers on a subway now appeared to me like sumptuous liberties. I felt barred from living my life, in all of its minute exchanges, when I stepped out on to the street, as though straps had suddenly been cast around my arms and legs, and buckled tightly.

I made it as far as City Park one day, a fair distance from the French Quarter. A group of ducks rested on the surface of a wide, shallow lake, and I stood there staring at them for several minutes. Sweat pooled in my plastic gloves, puckering my fingertips as though they’d been immersed in a bathtub.

I suddenly had the nerve-wracking impression that my entire body was wrapped in that thin plastic, unable to move. My mind strayed to thoughts of the ocean. I remembered swimming illegally in the Hudson River’s dark, choppy waves the previous summer, behind the skirts of the Statue of Liberty. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to jump into the lake with the ducks. I fled, instead, back to my perfumed cell.

That freedom should not be taken for granted was something I could not understand until now, when the sensation of restraint flooded my body the moment I left the house. The jarring concurrence of my emotional experiences—pleasure and terror, freedom and confinement—created in my mind’s eye a strangely flickering effect. Inside the courtyard there was laughter and beauty and wine; outside, there was a hushed silence as though the city was holding its breath as a demon passed by. It was in this way that delight was woven into the

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same cloth as terror.

I found a name for this effect—iridescence—in a book I was reading. Of Gwendolyn, George Eliot’s anti-heroine in Daniel Derona, Eliot wrote that “those who feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her character—the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies.” As I sat beneath the palm fronds in the courtyard with the book in my hands, I wondered what my visceral impression of the corpse would have been like without the near-obscene sensuality of the jasmine’s fragrance. Would the small, pristine flowers have seemed so alluring without the grievous vision of rotting flesh?

Do the details of life, I thought, have deeper meaning when presented in concert with some version of their opposite? The advertisement’s injunction came back to me and I rolled the words around on my tongue. “Freedom isn’t free, freedom isn’t free.” They tasted like something forgotten.

Spring gave way to the heat of early summer, and I went on rides throughout the empty city on Lucia’s ancient bicycle.

The day before I left to return home, I strayed further than usual and got lost. Many of the street signs throughout the city were blown off during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and most were never replaced. I stopped in the middle of a block beside a derelict house, its Greek Revival facade obscured by a dusty-looking cumquat tree. I squinted to see the names of the streets ahead and behind me. “DESIRE” was written on one of them. I turned to look in the other direction, barely making out the letters of the other thoroughfare. “PIETY,” it read. I laughed into the brightly lit silence, the sound going nowhere.

It felt like the universe was winking at me. This wasn’t quite

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the same “iridescence” that Eliot wrote about, but perhaps it was an extension of something it implied: the distance between “contrary tendencies” is sometimes shorter than we assume. In my case, at that moment, it was only a few strides.

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Inflicted JENEA HAVENER

Jed’s left arm felt like lead. Like it alone was drunk, and the rest of his body sober as hell. The bullet had gone straight through the front, near the elbow, and out the back side, splintering the wood of the barn door as it busted a hole through the flaking red paint. It had happened so fast he thought he’d been stung.

By a bee whizzing a million miles an hour. The quick zzzp, then silence, then pain, then nothing.

Jed leaned against the barn door, his boots digging into the dirt and blood oozing from the wound down onto his t-shirt and jeans. He looked up into the night sky. The air was balmy and the stars were bright—exactly the wrong kind of night to get shot by your best friend.

Incongruous, his mama might say—she who loved words more than people and always won at Scrabble, her calloused hands nimbly pushing the white squares around the board, despite her arthritis. “This here’s a triple-pointer,” she’d gloat. Then she’d take a swig of her bourbon and sigh with satisfaction, knowing she’d beat you no matter how hard you tried. Even his daddy, before he’d taken off with Jed’s aunt, couldn’t figure how to outword that woman. “She’s diabolical, that one,” he’d say, as he walked away from her smirking face and out the front door to his shed. Better to tinker with the baler than deal with her smart

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mouth. She was surely asleep now, a People magazine splayed on the bed and her graying hair shoved under her pillow the way she liked, reeking of booze and Colgate. Unaware that her son was bleeding on the ground outside.

Troy had done it. Plain and simple. He’d shown up with his daddy’s Dan Wesson and shot Jed clean through, nice and tidylike, from fifty feet away. He always was a good shot. From the age of five he could knock Bud Light cans off the low stone wall in the back of the house with a slingshot. Just phhhht, one, two, three. Gone. Jed admired that about Troy. He’d looked up to him all his life, really. Like a big brother, though Troy was seven months younger, just making the fall cut-off to be a senior this year, and Jed did better in math. Troy knew how to skin a deer, how to tie a bowline, he knew when the weather would turn just by feeling the breeze. Jed didn’t know anything of actual use in the world, only in books.

Which is why Troy shot him, in the end. Over all those book smarts. And Jessie Ryan’s big blue eyes.

Jed slid to the ground, a small cloud of dust billowing around him, wincing at the pain that now made itself known. He looked at his wound. Better to see it for what it was than hope for it to be different. It was an oval. Must have come in at an angle; not the bullseye he’d assumed. Dirt had already clung to the spot, turning the tissue, which was sucked inward, a muddied brown.

Blood dripped from the hole down his arm, brighter red than he imagined it would be.

Of course he’d seen fresh blood. You couldn’t get around it on a farm. Calves were smothered in it when they flopped out of their mothers’ backsides. Sheep were bound for nicking when they got sheared. Even his own blood had been witnessed more times than he could count. A chunk of wood stuck in his

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side from the chipper, a gash in his left leg from an angry horse’s hoof. It was an almost daily sight, though usually because he’d done something wrong. Because he was clumsy, not good with his hands.

But this wound felt different. This was no accident. Not the result of negligence or everyday doings. It was inflicted. An eye for an eye. An arm for a girl.

Jessie Ryan had long red hair and freckles splashed across her nose. The rest of her was creamy white. Like milk before the top is skimmed. Smooth and soft and cool against Jed’s skin when they touched. He’d seen her first in her daddy’s truck bed, sitting on a bale of hay with her arm around her hound, Bubb. Her hair hung in a long braid down her back and her lips were pink as an apple blossom. How he’d never noticed this girl he couldn't fathom, even if she was from a county over. Her daddy’d stopped the truck to run into the feed store and she sat waiting, humming to that dog and looking it in the eyes. She was that kind of girl. Seventeen, but already full of empathy.

Jed walked up then, brave beyond his imagination, and said a simple “Hello.” Not the more casual “hi” or “hey” like other kids did. He took the time to mean it. And she’d looked back and smiled. And that was that.

Troy hadn’t even run after he shot Jed. He just holstered his weapon, like he’d taken care of a lame horse, his face sullen but set firm, and climbed into his Dodge Ram. Troy refused to drive a Ford—no matter what the commercials said, he knew they were shit. Then he drove away slowly, headlights off, no music coming from the cab. Jed wondered what Troy was thinking now. Whether he felt bad at all, any regret.

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Jed noticed the wound was still oozing and gingerly pulled his t-shirt off over his head, grunting at the pain that began to flow in waves over his arm, spreading out and away from the wound. He took the shirt in his teeth and ripped a long strip off the bottom, Kenny Chesney’s name torn in half. He grabbed the other end with the hand of his good arm and wrapped the strip around the bad one, peeking behind to make sure he covered the exit wound, too. That one was a little bigger, a little less ovate. The skin looked blasted out on the sides and there were dirty bits of it hanging onto the edges. He was gonna need a ride to the hospital.

He thought of Jessie in her yellow dress. The gauzy fabric flowing around her knees. He had touched her that day for the first time, his hand on her back as he helped her climb into his truck. She’d needed a ride home from the lake—a church picnic in June with lemonade that matched her outfit. He’d noticed it while she drank, and wished he could be the glass, cold and wet against her cheek as she cooled herself from the summer sun. She was talking to Katie Bell, who worked weekends at the library and caught him looking through the poetry section one day before he realized someone was watching. Katie had stared with a curious smile, then pushed the book cart on as Jed stood stock still, a book of Whitman open in his hands. Katie and Jessie turned to see him staring then, his own lemonade untouched, and he spilled some in his fright at being discovered.

They giggled and turned away, and he gulped down a large swig of bitter sweetness.

But as the crowd thinned and evening came on Jessie found herself without a ride. Katie had gone already, and her parents left before pie was served, Jessie assuring them she could get a lift. She stood by the towering honeysuckle near the shore,

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searching the crowd for someone going her way. Jed had known this was his chance. She was in need, and he could help, so she might just say yes. Which she did, with a bashful grin. The goodness of this, along with the sweet warmth of honeysuckle on the breeze made Jed dizzy, and it took him a long moment to say “alright then” and start walking to his truck, hand out, like he was leading the way to a banquet. She scooped up her purse and walked beside him, her pink toenails peeking out from her sandals.

When he helped her into the truck he felt a tingle in his belly, then down his legs which seemed to shake inside. She smelled of lemonade and sweat and shampoo and he thought he might die of delight.

But Jessie couldn't give him a ride to the hospital now, gone to her Grammy’s for the weekend. Troy, the one he would call first, was the one who’d done the harm. His cousin had enlisted in the Navy the year before, far away in Southeast Asia somewhere. His daddy was off with Aunt Trudy, gone to the Keys for “a little respite” which Jed figured would be forever.

And his mama was boozed up for sure, asleep, and mean to boot, so that was out.

Mama. The one human a kid should be able to depend on had never felt safe to Jed. When he was three—his first real memory—she’d slapped him full in the face for grabbing a cookie off the counter. He’d reached up on his tiptoes, fingers fluttering along the countertop to see what he could find, and come back with a warm oatmeal-raisin, soft and gooey in his chubby hand. She’d batted it away, then hit him so hard he fell back on his cloth-diapered ass. He hadn’t cried at first, so

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amazed. Once the tears came she said simply, “You ask first, boy,” and picked him up off the floor by one arm.

On his twelfth birthday she was kicking her legs on the porch swing like a girl, her bourbon in a big gulp on ice, petting the tabby cat Jed fed scraps to when Mama made something worth eating. He’d come running up the splintery steps carrying a hunting knife with a gut hook in a hand-tooled sheath—a gift from his daddy—and she’d started laughing. “What?” he said, smiling, eager to share a moment of good humor. But he could soon tell her laughter was directed at him. “That,” she snorted.

“Too nice a knife for someone who don’t know how to use one,” slow and slurry, and turned her smirking face toward the yard.

And just last week, after he’d come home from a date with Jessie, her breath on his, he’d found his notebook of poems— the ones he’d written for her, and no one else in the world— open on the dining room table, red lines through words with others written in. Behold instead of look, plethora instead of many.

He picked it up and tucked it under his arm, his mama nowhere in sight, walked into his room and stuffed it under his mattress.

To be re-written later, and this copy burned. He did not take her notes.

It was a wonder to him how anyone could be so mean at the core. How a human could look at another—breathing and warm, with feelings, same as her—and want to cut him down first thing. He knew her own mama had been awful—slapping her silly when she mouthed off—but at some point, everyone was responsible for their own actions. Culpable.

You couldn’t say she was uneducated either. She knew about the world, read constantly, got her GED after she married his daddy, when everyone said it was a waste. She was history repeating itself and she didn’t give a damn. At seven years

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old Jed had decided he would be different. He’d sat in the hay field—fists clenched to white after being kicked out of the house for throwing a football—watching the sun go down. The sky had turned a hazy pink, then purple as night came closer; it was so beautiful he stopped breathing for a moment. And as the sun dipped below the line of trees in the distance and the sky got dark, he felt it leave. The anger. The desire to do something mean to someone else. Like it got sucked down with the sun, beneath the earth. Gone. He looked down at his hands and saw them open in his lap.

He pushed himself up off the ground and staggered, catching his weight on the barn door and cursing at the pain.

He wondered if he could drive with his left arm. Put the truck in gear, turn the wheel…sure he could. He just had to get the keys. He walked over to the old Ford, the F and D worn away on the edges from years of hard work, and opened the creaky passenger door. He leaned inside the cab, lifted his tackle box off the floor, a stack of papers off the seat, grabbed his jacket off the cracked vinyl of the seat back as if the keys would be up there somehow. “Shit,” he said out loud. The memory of the afternoon came back—he’d thrown them to his mama standing in her house dress, saying she’d left her purse in the truck and needed it quick so she could order something off the TV. He’d thrown the keys, then walked back into the house to finish packing, and hadn’t seen them since.

“Well then,” he muttered and sat back down in the dirt with a groan, leaning against the front tire, suddenly sucked dry of all the energy he had left. He’d have to wake her up, ask where she’d put the keys, maybe get back-handed for it. Jed looked at the house where Mama slept and shook his head; shutters

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pulling from their hinges, paint long gone on the trim, the screen door that hung crooked and slapped two times before settling down when you ran through. It was a shame of a house, like nobody cared one bit, but all that could be overlooked if it was full of something good inside. If the people who lived there were better than it seemed on the surface.

Jed turned his eyes up to the moon and thought about the night he knew Troy was good. They’d been walking in the creek looking for crawdads, ten years old each. The bucket was half full when Troy had found a small one under a rock and grabbed him up in his hand, quick and precise behind the pinchers. He looked at that thing and said, “He’ll do.” But when he dropped him in the bucket with the rest Troy stood still, the creek flowing around his legs, carrying away all his assurance. Like it poured out of him through his feet. He teared up then and grabbed the crawdad back out, threw him in the water and walked on. They were quiet for a long while, the two of them stepping slowly, the creek bed fluffy with silt around their boots. Troy pretended to look, head down toward the murky water, but Jed knew he was done. “What happened?” Jed finally asked in a hushed voice.

Troy said simply, “It wasn’t his time,” and Jed knew Troy had seen in that crawdad the immense sanctity of life. That you didn’t take it without reason. He had seen it in those wandering eyes-on-sticks and he’d let him go.

Walking back home in the moonlight, the sun having gone down while they pretended to keep looking, Jed carried the bucket. Troy didn’t look into it again. They fried up the others, throwing hot sauce on their meaty tails before popping them in their mouths, and Troy didn’t flinch. Didn’t say another word about it. But Jed knew. Troy had a heart.

Jed looked down at his torn shirt, his belt buckle jabbing

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into the bare skin of his belly. He’d taken Jessie to that Kenny Chesney concert, and Troy had been there, too. After Jed had dropped Jessie off, the night of the picnic, the night he felt her slim body under his hand, he’d stopped by Troy’s to tell him. Jed had acted like it was no big deal, but inside he’d been bursting to pop. Troy had grinned great big and punched him on the shoulder. “Dj’ya kiss her?” he asked, his eyes shining.

“Naw. I just said goodnight. But she said it, too…And she said my name.”

She knew his name. She had remembered from when they’d met at the feed store, or maybe Katie had told her. But the sound of it rolling off her tongue was like honey. With her soft drawl. It was enough to make his insides quiver. “Think I’ll ask her to see Kenny next week,” he said casually.

“Yeah?" Troy said, grinning so big Jed thought his mouth might rip open. “Think I’m goin’, too!”

And she’d said yes. He’d picked Jessie up and met her mama, who smiled at him and winked when he took off his ball cap to say hello. “Back by midnight,” she called to them as they walked down the steps of Jessie’s porch. Jed could feel her eyes on him, different than his mama’s—kind and curious. Jessie had hummed a little as they drove, her arm out the window riding the breeze, then threw her head back and sang out “…livin’ life with no sense of time…” and turned to grin at Jed. He smiled and nodded; he knew all the words but kept his mouth shut, tapped his leg, felt like he was flying.

Troy came to the concert, he said later, to watch his friend be in love. By the time he got there, Jed had already been with Jessie for an hour, but as soon as Troy looked at Jessie’s face, Jed could see it in his eyes. They’d gone blank—his smile washed away—and longing had crept in. He watched Troy soften as

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he studied her, the wisps of hair that curled away from her face in the heat, her long neck that looked soft as silk. Troy watched Jessie and Jed watched Troy and he knew then things would turn bad. He knew then he had a choice to make—they all did.

And he knew what everyone would choose.

The world had always chosen Troy. When they were freshmen Jed had liked a girl named Candy—the dumbest name of all names, his mama said when she caught on and teased him for weeks. Candy was tall and thin and played on the volleyball team. Jed told Troy maybe he’d ask her to the homecoming dance. But she asked Troy before Jed could muster the courage, saying didn’t he know it was girl’s choice this year.

Saying she’d had a crush on him all fall. Troy felt bad but said yes, then had a horrible time.

“She hung on my arm the whole night, asking ‘You havin’ fun? You havin’ fun?’, making me crazy,” he said afterward. “I won’t do that again, Jed. I had it coming, saying yes to her.”

Troy was better looking, his dark, curly hair and broad shoulders like something out of Dukes of Hazzard. Jed looked average. A farm boy with no distinctive characteristics: sandybrown hair that laid flat, grayish-green eyes, average height, tan but not muscled, in fine shape but nothing to speak of. He was quiet. He read all the time. His fishing skills were sub-par. He didn’t blame the world. It was just so. And he didn’t blame Troy for looking at Jessie that way. It couldn’t be helped. From the start he knew his time with her was ticking. He knew eventually she’d go for Troy, and that she should.

“I had such a good time, Jed,” she said as they stood at her front door after the concert, her hand in his, his hand sweating though the air was cool. The smell of lilacs floated up

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from the yard.

“Me too, Jessie. I hope…” he said, his voice quitting on him.

“What?”

“Nothin’…I did too. Can I take you out again?”

“Definitely,” she said with a smile, and they heard the front door creak, someone waiting. “Goodnight,” she whispered and squeezed his hand, walking inside. He could feel her watching him from the front window as he climbed in the cab of the truck and turned away to hide his grin.

On the drive home he thought hard about what to do.

He was hoping for a scholarship to K-State next fall, and his counselor said his chances were good, but there was also the service. Get some living in and help pay for college later, get away from his mama, get away from here. Probably join the Navy like Cole. He stared out at the fields whipping by in the moonlight, the soybeans just coming up, corn stalks getting started. He thought of new, hopeful things, and his old, cranky mama. He felt torn up inside and smoothed out all at once. He could still feel Jessie’s hand in his.

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I Am Jasper Johns JONATHAN LINDBERG

I asked, Why do we wear aprons at work? The Museum Manager looked at me with a sideways expression. She said, Aprons are just part of the uniform. This was always her answer. The apron I wore was bright blue and had long strings on each side. There were two deep pockets in the front and during those long empty hours pacing through those gallery rooms I would put my hands down deep into the pockets and feel the empty space inside.

One morning, the Museum Manager came to tell me there was vanilla cake. She whispered to me in the first gallery. She said I could go down to the breakroom and eat a piece. She said, I will watch the galleries while you’re gone. Just go fast and come back when you’re done. I went to the breakroom and with a plastic fork I scraped cake and frosting off a Styrofoam plate. I ate over a metal sink. When I returned, the Museum Manager seemed pleased. She hurried off so I could return to the empty galleries, looking out the large window at the street below. Outside was a large bronze statue which I was told was of two dancers bending over each other but the sculpture looked to me more like two large macaroni noodles in a large bronze bowl.

I had interviewed for this job. The Museum Manager had sat with me in a white room and had asked, How do you deal

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with boredom? She asked, How do you handle long stretches of empty time? She nodded while I answered. She smiled and wrote down what I said. She asked, Are you okay with being alone for long periods of time? She asked, Does silence bother you? I told her about all the times I had worked in silence and what I thought of being alone. After a while she stopped smiling and writing. She said, That’s enough.

I thought I understood silence until I stood in those empty galleries. There were days I would not see a patron for hours and I would pace the floors and consider the walls and the sculptures and paintings and how many fat and skinny women had been captured and how artists were always painting food.

There were paintings of fish with their heads and scales and their dead eyes looking out of the painting watching me walk through the galleries. I thought how boredom and silence were often mistaken. These paintings were made in silence and hung in silence and when we all became extinct they would remain in silence.

One day, a mother and her daughter came into the galleries.

The mother looked at me and my apron then whispered to her child to keep quiet. She led her daughter through the galleries.

She tried explaining to the child what they were seeing. I heard her ask, What do you see in this painting? It was all the colors and lines of a Gorky before he killed himself. The girl said, I see a giraffe. The mother did not respond. I watched them walk into the second gallery. The young girl looked up at the ceiling and I swear in my three years standing in those galleries that child was the only one who ever noticed a small Museum Visitor sticker stuck on the ceiling. There were days I would stare at the sticker and wonder who had put it there and why. The ceiling

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was twenty feet high. They would need a ladder. Or maybe the ceiling had a hidden door. I spent many days wondering what sort of person puts their Museum Visitor sticker on the ceiling and more importantly why had no one bothered to take it down?

The mother stood in front of a small painting by Jasper Johns.

She asked her daughter, What do you like about this painting?

The girl did not answer but instead she stepped forward and with her open palm she reached up and pressed her hand right onto the wooden board and held it there. I remember thinking, This isn’t supposed to happen. Then the mother, with this look of horror, as if her child had just reached into an open casket and placed her hand on the face of the corpse, reached forward and yanked the hand of her child off the painting and dragged her out of the room and down the stairs and out of the Museum. I went to the gallery window and watched as the mother pulled her daughter past the bronze statue that looked like macaroni, toward their parked car.

It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen within those Museum walls. Much more exciting than eating cake. I stood there and thought of the shock on the face of the mother and the calm expression on the face of the child. I knew why she did it. I had felt it too. There were moments in that gallery with the emptiness of the white walls and the stillness of those paintings and the sadness of those painters and sculptors all around me and those double-paned windows with constant motion outside but no sound inside that it sometimes felt like too much and just once I wanted to put my open hand on a painting and feel some sort of connection to something other than the fabric at the bottom of my apron. I had often walked past this painting

by Joan Mitchell with those wild strokes of pinks and whites

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and streaks of blues and the absolute chaos of the canvas that felt nothing like my life and I wondered if I touched the canvas would I feel the same madness she had felt when she painted it in some empty warehouse space in Paris. If I let my hand linger on the canvas, would I feel any kind of warmth?

I suppose I could’ve said something to the girl. I could’ve told her that we are not all alone and yes there was oil on our hands but that oil is not evil. I could’ve told the mother it was all okay.

I should’ve reported the child. That’s what I should’ve done.

The girl had touched a painting. The mother had uttered an apology as she dragged her daughter toward the stairs, but was that enough? And to whom was she apologizing? Me? The Museum? To Jasper Johns? I went back to the painting and noticed that a small chunk of paint had come loose from the board and was now resting on the floor. I picked up the chunk of paint. I turned it in my hand. Someone should be told, I thought. Someone should tell Jasper Johns that his painting was falling apart. I turned the chunk of paint in my hand. It was heavy and dense. It felt like a hunk of dried cheese.

I imagined telling the Museum Manager. I would go down to her office and we would sit there and whisper to each other. She would ask me to describe the mother and the girl. She would nod and write things down. Then I would show her the chunk of paint. This is not good, she would say, shaking her head. Or, How could you let this happen? I imagined she would ask for my apron and tell me I was no longer able to stand in those empty galleries because boredom was something I could obviously not be trusted with. I replayed the conversation several different ways and then decided it would be best to say nothing. I put

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the chunk of paint in the pocket of my apron and took it home.

For several days, the chunk of paint sat on my dresser. I thought again of the mother and her daughter. I thought of Jasper Johns.

What would he say if he knew I had kept the chunk of paint?

Would he ask for it back? Would I be charged with a crime? I wondered, Can you glue a chunk of paint back onto the wooden board? It seemed unlikely. I considered writing a letter to Jasper Johns. I would explain to him everything. I thought of sending him the chunk of paint with a handwritten explanation. But then, at night, I thought, Where exactly is Jasper Johns?

One day I took the chunk of paint to the kitchen and with one of those flashlights you wrap around your head I began to look closer. I took a magnifying glass and looked deep into the layers of buildup and color. I put the chunk of paint under a cheap microscope and zoomed in as far I could see. I saw pigment. I saw texture. I saw the passage of time. In that moment, I started to see all the tricks of Jasper Johns and I wondered if I could do the same thing. I thought of that girl with her open hand and how when she touched the painting she must have felt something special. I was standing in my dark kitchen with a flashlight around my head. I thought, I want to feel something too.

That week, I went online and read everything I could on encaustic paint. Online, I bought a bag of damar resin. I put a virtual jar of encaustic gesso into a virtual shopping cart and clicked a button that read CHECKOUT. I drove to a thrift store and bought a used hot plate and a pink hairdryer with an image of Minnie Mouse on the side. That night, I searched the words PURE REFINED BEESWAX and was met with an ocean of articles about honeybees and wax cakes and endless videos on

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how to make your own. I found a site for a farm in Vermont and I ordered a box of PURE REFINED BEESWAX and marked the box that read RUSHED DELIVERY. When the box arrived, there was also a handwritten note from someone named Cliff who explained to me just how his honeybees were sourced.

I started mixing. I followed the encaustic recipes I had saved on my phone. I melted beeswax on the hotplate and used the hair dryer to keep it malleable and soft. I added small amounts of damar resin. For a moment I wondered what kind of hair dryer Jasper Johns had used. I took some old wooden shelves and laid them on the kitchen counter and began applying what I had melted, then stood back to watch it dry. Nothing looked right.

The paint was soupy and the colors were wrong. The paint spilled off the boards and hardened in strange ways. Within a week, I had gone through the first batch of beeswax. I emailed Cliff and ordered more.

During the day, I paced the galleries and wondered if the girl and her mother would return. I thought of my chunk of paint at home and how it connected me to Jasper Johns and the wooden boards in my kitchen and I wondered just what I was doing wrong. I would look out the window at the macaroni sculpture and the cars whizzing by and teenagers in trench coats on motorized scooters and how the world looked so alive but it was all still silent because of the double paned glass. Sometimes, I would stand in front of the small Jasper Johns painting and when no one was looking I would reach out my open hand and hold it an inch from the painting. I never touched the painting.

I was not that brave. But there were times I swear I could feel its warmth.

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One day, I dipped into my savings and bought a monocular microscope that used polarized light. I read how this would allow me to see deeper into just what Jasper Johns was up to. I could better analyze ingredients. I could see deeper pigment and color and hue. That night, I did not sleep. I lay in bed holding the chunk of paint wondering just who was Jasper Johns and what was he feeling when he had made that painting and what was his thing with flags. I imagined Jasper Johns was also lying in bed on some island in the Caribbean with the windows open and the sound of the ocean on the shore and his bony hands and the covers pulled up to his stubbly chin. I imagined in that moment we were both doing the very same thing. We were both thinking of color and time.

When the microscope arrived I began experimenting with ultraviolet light. I spent months reading everything I could about paint analysis and infrared spectrometry. Each day, I looked deeper through the monocular lens until soon the object no longer resembled a chunk of paint. I entered an entirely new universe. I saw strange new creatures – objects that looked more like bacteria or star constellations or those squiggly things that float in your eye. I felt closer to Jasper Johns. I looked at what he had done.

Soon, I began mixing larger batches of encaustic paint. I made new colors. I started drawing endless stars and stripes and I practiced the signature of Jasper Johns with those two wild J’s and that h that looked like a mountain in a Dr. Seuss book. I went through so much material that I burned through most of my savings. I ordered enough PURE REFINED BEESWAX that one day Cliff called me on the phone and we talked for an hour about the lifecycle of the honeybee and the shortcomings

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of his ex-wife. I worked at night with my hotplate and the pink hairdryer. I used an eye dropper to apply pigment to what I had made. I applied color to wood and when it dried the next morning I would take the board to the museum and wait for the gallery to empty and then hold up the scrap of wood next to the Jasper Johns painting until one day the board I held matched the color of the painting on the wall with such perfection that for a moment I forgot where I was. I let out a whoop so loud it echoed through the galleries and down the stairs. The Museum Manager ran up the stairs to see what was wrong and when she got to the gallery she found me standing alone. She looked at me and then at the Jasper Johns. Not knowing what to do, she whispered, We have cake.

After that, I worked like mad. I bought a postcard of the Jasper Johns from the Museum Gift Shop. I taped the postcard to kitchen counter and began painting on so many wooden boards that soon my kitchen floor became a maze of drying beeswax.

I spent the last of my savings on more bags of damar resin and several large boxes of PURE REFINED BEESWAX. I started going to construction sites to find small scraps of odd-shaped wood. I wore flannel shirts as I worked. Some days I called Cliff and he would tell me about the guy his ex-wife had married and about his new hives and I would tell him about the empty museum and the daily routines of Jasper Johns. One day, I told Cliff I was out of beeswax and that I would not get paid until the end of the week so he sent me a box of wax cakes overnight with a note that read On the house.

Sometimes I stood in the gallery and when no one was looking I would hold out my hand an inch from the board but I no longer felt any warmth. I began to tell myself, That painting is not

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real. I thought, That painting is just a reproduction. The real painting is being constructed in my kitchen. I whispered, I just need more time.

It all happened the week I got sick. It was winter. I was always cold. I called in and the Museum Manager told me I would have to use my vacation time. I protested. I said, I need my paycheck.

I said, Damar resin is not for free. I tried to reason with her but she would not listen. I told her, You don’t understand, I will still be working from home.

I had enough supplies in my apartment for another batch of paintings so I went to my kitchen in orange sweatpants and without a t-shirt and I worked for hours each day. On the third day, midafternoon, I finished a small board and when I stood back and looked at the colors and the lines and the shape of the stars it all looked as it should be. I stood back further and placed the postcard next to the painting. The picture was just right. It was a perfect match! Suddenly, I felt something well up.

I shouted with joy. I began marching around the kitchen and as I did I ripped up the Jasper Johns postcard into a dozen pieces and threw the pieces into the air. I shouted, I am Jasper Johns.

I am Jasper Johns! Then I reached into the box from Cliff and grabbed a handful of beeswax and crumbled it over my head. It felt like some sort of baptism. I marched around my apartment.

I was no longer alone.

The next week I went back to the Museum. I was still sick but I needed to stand in the gallery and see the painting on the wall.

I took my own painting and kept it in my apron pocket. I had watched workers install many paintings. I knew how they were hung and just how they were taken down. I stood in front of the

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Jasper Johns and waited until the gallery was empty. Then, with great care, I lifted the painting off the wall. I reached into my apron and took out my painting and hung it on the wall.

I waited for several days. I watched anxiously as patrons stood in front of my painting. A couple stood close and whispered to each other about color. An old man leaned in and examined the lines on the board. One day, I watched as the Museum Manager toured a donor through the three galleries. I watched as they stopped in front of my painting. I stood close and listened as the Museum Manager explained everything Jasper Johns was up to.

My heart was racing. I was sure I would be found out. But then the manager said, This piece is the highlight of our collection.

They both smiled and approved. Then, I watched as the donor stood back from the painting and nodded.

When they left, I was all alone. I went to the painting, heart racing. I reached out and with my open palm I pressed my hand onto the wooden board. I thought of the girl and her mother and suddenly I felt all the warmth of the beeswax and the damar resin and I thought how the mother had yanked her hand from the painting and how no one would yank my hand from the painting because the painting did not belong to the Museum or to Jasper Johns. It was mine. I thought of Cliff in Vermont with his hives and bees and the Museum Manager somewhere down below and Jasper Johns in the distance listening to waves on the shore. I kept my hand pressed to the painting and I did not care.

I felt the warmth. I whispered to myself, I am Jasper Johns.

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Jeffrey Like a Giant KAIJA MATĪSS

Mom and Dad throw parties. Big ones. One time they get a pig.

String it up in the barn and leave it there till the next day, when they get up at three in the morning to put a stick all the way through it and hang it over a fire.

We love it. Run around it on bikes and legs, screaming our heads off, chasing each other. Gleeful and high off the sheer obscenity, the novelty of a carcass hanging from the ceiling. Horrified and giddy at being able to see inside a thing, the ribs splayed open.

We’re thinking, maybe it’s a sign the parents have decided to hang up all the phones dangling in all the kitchens and come out and join us in the woods. Thinking, maybe nobody has to brush their teeth anymore.

Dad and his friend Lou eat the pig’s eyeballs halfway through the party, and we don’t like that part. All the adults scream and throw their Coors up in the air so we’ll know it’s really bad. No one meant for them to go that far. We just wanted them to throw their wallets over their shoulders and grab a stick and join us.

We've got a great thing going on in the sandbox and could really use some help. No one meant eat an eyeball.

Dad and his friend Lou crack open new beers and laugh about

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it. Dad describes how it popped in his mouth like a grape, and I hate the way dad acts when he’s around Lou. He’s loud and talks tough. Makes fun of me for telling the other kids what to do and calls me “Admiral Anya” to get a laugh.

Dad’s not tough. He’s soft and likes to gently pull earthworms out of the ground and place them in my hands, his palms like a cup around mine. Shows me how to hold the worms without hurting them and tells me how they can’t see but are good for the flowers. He’s basically in love with flowers.

The pig gets wrapped in tin foil and is now a space pig. Looks like it’s flying with the way it’s splayed out along the spit, its arms and legs tied out in front. More of my parents' friends arrive. Latvians, Hungarians, farm people, some of my mom’s murder mystery theatre company friends. Even the Cabots, the rich people my dad works for and whose land we live on come by. Well not “The” Cabots, but their kids, who love to sneak over to our end of the property and see what Dad’s cooking.

Everyone wants a bite. Young mothers in high-waisted shorts with belts and pastel tank tops. Men in faded blue jeans with mustaches and buzz cuts. Some in blazers. They gather up outside the barn, resting on plastic chairs and milk crates. Our house, warm and empty, sits back behind the maple tree that drapes over the sandbox. The woods begin in the not-too-far-off distance, just past the cow fence.

It’s not Lou, but probably the beer plus Lou, that turns the dial on Dad up from “Crying Because a Song is So Good” Dad to “Eating an Eyeball” Dad then sometimes, eventually, “Who is This Guy?” Dad, when he sits there staring off into the distance.

Mom too, as more of her girlfriends gather around her and

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more plastic wine glasses get shoved into bangled hands, begins to change. Her face shifts in degrees of familiarity, from afternoon to sunset to night. I try to keep up.

I dance wilder as the night goes on. I get louder as they do. Spin out as they spin out.

The night of the pig party, I discover a great trick. If you shine one of the MEGA flashlights at the barn wall and dance in front of it, your shadow gets huge. You are so big, you’re almost as big as the barn. You’re buoyant. So humongous, you could step off the wall and hulk around the property, pulling up trees from the ground like broccoli. You could step over the gravel drive you’re not supposed to cross to get to the Cabot’s house in just a hop. You could peer inside the windows like their old mansion is merely a doll’s house. Peel their Picasso off the ballroom wall like it’s a postage stamp. If you sat in their pool, you’d take the whole thing up, like a bath.

No one has ever seen me so big so I scream my head off at them to look and watch me dance like crazy. It is primal, and easy. I throw my hands up and demand the others join me.

Jeffrey, Lou’s only son, comes and idles up next to me. We’re about the same age but I’m a little older. I try not to rub it in.

He’s a boy and I’m a girl though so it kind of evens out. He’s allowed to do things I’m not, like sit in a tractor and even drive it. Sometimes this gives him ideas though, like the time no one was watching, he got into his mom’s car and dove it straight into a shed. His feet didn’t even touch the ground. No dogs were harmed.

In front of the barn, Jeffrey starts to move his body like mine.

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He and I have been friends since forever. I’ve been throwing sand at him for years. He got me back though when he kissed me in my bunk bed and our moms walked in and screamed.

They haven’t stopped telling us we’re going to get married ever since. His parents and my parents have been friends since before forever when they rode over to our house on a four-wheeler to say hello. Jeffrey's mom was hanging off the back, swelling and pregnant with her hair blowing in lines over her mouth and sticking to her lipstick. Clutching a 24-pack between her thighs and hollering. Lou driving, red-faced and wily, the name of some other woman tattooed on his arm.

Jeffrey isn’t as good a dancer as I am. Generally he’s shy, but tonight he’s committing to it and I like it. We’re both giants on the barn now. The music pumps through our veins. One thing we have in common is that none of the other kids know what it’s like to be the oldest like Jefferey and I do. All that responsibility.

For a moment, we’re free.

Hot from dancing, I throw my jacket off and spin it away in time to the music. My mom shouts, “Look, Anya’s doing a strip tease!”

I don’t know what a strip tease is but by the sound of the laughter it elicits, it’s no good. I stop dancing and retreat from the light. Jeffrey watches me go, the music still blaring from the barn behind him. The MEGA light gold, on his already golden hair.

The best part about a party is all the food. We can have as much of it as we want. Watermelon, chips. All the dips you can think of. Coolers upon coolers packed with beer and double wine bottles and sodas. Big, heavy bags of ice we get to help with by

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stomping on. Pretzels.

After a while, when a party’s been going on forever, we get bored and tired and move inside to watch a movie. It’s hard to concentrate though because the grownups outside are too loud.

The little ones start to fall asleep on someone's coat and we feel strange watching them, thinking they should be in their beds.

Grownups sporadically come in to check on us and their hair looks crazy. They try to tell jokes, but they’re never funny. If we’re up for it we can sit outside with them. Maybe grab Dad’s denim jacket and find a lap or a lawn chair somewhere and watch the sky for satellites.

Blankets in the Radio Flyer wagon are a great option, too.

There won’t be much left of the pig by then, mostly just a face and some feet.

Jeffrey will learn how to fix engines and join the military and get a motorcycle. One night at a party he will meet a woman who is older than him but who doesn’t rub it in, and he’ll ask if she wants to go for a ride.

They’ll speed down the highway and the wind will feel good on their faces. Tractor-trailer lights will speed past them like stars.

Strip malls will look like space stations.

Something wrong will happen combining metal, tarmac, space, and time and they will end up splayed out in a parking lot. The woman will die of sepsis after months in a coma, Jeffery will survive.

He will not be the same. The military will give him a job painting over lines in the base's parking lots. Jeffrey will stand

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there watching the line painting machine push out bright smooth white lines over the faded cracked ones.

Jeffrey will blow his face off with a shotgun.

At the funeral, no one will know how to feel: first, inside the church, because of all the God stuff. The church will look unfinished, everything covered in a layer of sawdust. The white ceiling, blank and empty with thick wooden beams running across it. A single heavy cross on the wall, offering no comfort, just the threat of falling down.

Jeffrey’s body will lay in a box right in front of us, daring us to try and not imagine what his face looks like.

Then outside the church, the military will shoot guns in the air and everyone’s shoulders will tense up an inch. We’ll all throw sand on him and apologize to his mother.

Afterward, Lou will invite all of us around Jeffrey’s age to join him in the driveway. He’ll pour us shots of whiskey and hold one up, tell a joke, and cheers to Jeffrey. We’ll laugh and drink and hope that’s what we’re supposed to do. The parents will shake their heads and eventually everyone will fall out of touch.

Five years later, Mom will be at Mel’s Bagels with Pam, her 85-year-old friend from Alcoholics Anonymous, and they’ll run into Lou. He’ll get too close and wrap his arms around them and say Mom is his “sister-in-law” even though she’s not. He’ll have been drinking since seven a.m. and be red all over.

Some time before that, not long after the pig party, I am standing outside with my bike, in my raincoat after a good rain.

A fat green caterpillar is on the slate under The Cabot’s lilac

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tree. I stand over it for a long time and watch, curious about what I or it is capable of.

I run over it with my bike tire. No one sees.

It makes a horrible sound I don’t forget. No one will believe me when I tell the story for years, until one day I’m sitting on a toilet somewhere reading National Geographic and it describes a new kind of caterpillar that’s been discovered in the Northeastern United States.

When in danger, it will let out air from a blowhole on the top of its head to ward off predators. It will sound like a scream.

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The Girl Child KALEIGH MERRILL

I probably didn’t need to call the police, but I wanted it on record. Not really sure how I had the wherewithal at two-thirty in the morning to think that far ahead, but I’ve always had an instinct for that sort of thing. The dispatch agent repeated my statement back to me twice. Once, for protocol. The second time, I think, because she was perplexed at my composure.

Sometimes I think my equanimity makes me look like a bad mother. Sometimes, I wonder if maybe I am.

Now, I’m sitting on the cold cement steps of the porch, phone in my hand. Adrenaline or temperature—I’m not sure, but I shiver as I wait. Not for the police—for her.

My breath comes in delicate puffs. It’s uncharacteristically cold for Florida, even in January. The hush of a neighborhood, the low drone of air conditioners and pool filters and a highway in the distance— it sounds just the same as it did when I was a teenage girl sneaking out of the house. I can almost feel the echo of goosebumps I’d get as I stepped from my air-conditioned second story bedroom window onto the roof of the garage, the sticky weight of Florida after dark. First my purse dropped down onto the lawn, then a friend shimmying over the edge. I remember watching her stumble a bit as she hit the grass before taking off into suburban darkness. I’d slid my body down behind

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her, first my legs and ass, then my upper body, until I dangled there like a Halloween decoration.

The neighborhood I lived in when I snuck out had streetlights; proud sentinels guarding the houses, offering just enough light that my Mom would be able see little else but the lock of blue hair I’d cut from the back of my head and carefully arranged on my pillow. I eventually let go of the ledge, felt the wild tilt of the world for a momentary fall, but I can’t seem to conjure that now. Can’t seem to bring back the feeling of bolting down the street to the waiting car, cutting through the watery street lights like a minnow, glinting as I passed through each fluorescent pool. My mind is stuck on the bite of the shingles against the pads of my fingers, of being on the precipice.

My neighborhood now only has streetlights in front of the houses that pay for them. It’s mostly dark. Winter-dry palm fronds clatter when the wind picks up, and I tremble against it as I squint at what horizon I can make out in the murk. My Mom never called the cops on me for sneaking out, and by that I mean she never had the opportunity. She only ever knew I’d been gone because I never bothered to sneak back in, choosing instead to walk in through the front door. We both laugh about it now, my Mom and I, but at the time it really chapped her tits.

It never mattered to me whether or not I was busted. Freedom was the only thing I wanted. It didn’t matter what happened after I got it.

I liked the feeling of easing the door open, of snort-laughing when I dropped my keys on the Spanish-tiled floor and heard her wake up. I wanted to make my presence known as much as I wanted to make my absence felt. I wanted her to see how it feels when someone shirks the expectations you set for them. It felt better than hating her, better than loving her.

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This is different. It’s not about autonomy or identity. It’s not about fun or revenge or sending a message. I would know if it were—or at least, I think I would. I thought I would. I thought I had an instinct for this sort of thing.

It was when we were screaming at each other in the kitchen, separated by the butcher block counter, 18 years, and something else I couldn’t quite place, that I realized I didn’t know what to do next. It was when she was standing there, telling me to stop asking her what’s wrong—she’s fine—that I was just overreacting because I didn’t like that she’s growing up. It was when she was acting like I didn’t know her, like I didn’t know that she’s been moody and dramatic since the day she was born and this new version of her, secretive and sullen and hateful, isn’t who she really is. It was when she looked at me like I’m fucking crazy, like I’m an idiot. It made me feel like an animal, hackles raised, growling at something no one else can see—it’s then that I started to doubt myself.

I had my daughter before I met my husband, so it was a coincidence that I’d given her a name so similar to his, only one letter off. People get them confused all the time, so I’ve taken to referring to her as “The Girl Child.” Naturally, my son became “The Boy Child.” It’s kind of funny now, to think how I painstakingly chose gender-neutral names and avoided pink and blue when they were babies to end up referring to them this way. Mommy. Daddy. Kitty. Doggy. Boy Child. Girl Child.

Oh, god.

I can’t tell if it’s getting colder or if I’ve just been out here too long. It’s all weighing on me. Mortgage. 401(k). Meal plans.

Textbooks. Outlook notifications. My face is going numb and I’ve learned to recognize this as panic, but I could just be cold. I start to sweat and I’m grateful we don’t have a doorbell camera

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to document the time and date if I start to lose it. If I’m starting to lose it. Dyson vacuum. Trader Joes. Spreadsheets. Parent/ teacher conferences. Sometimes people see me with my kids for the first time after knowing me as a colleague or a friend and they say “Wow, Kaleigh, you’re like a whole Mom!” and it makes me wonder how the biggest part of my life can be so invisible from the outside, but I can’t seem to reconcile it either.

Mall Santa. Annual physicals. Orthodontia lifetime maximums.

Braces. She just got her braces off, my Girl Child, and I’ve been on her case about wearing her retainer. She likes to toe the line of her school’s uniform policy and I’ve added “retainer” to the things I need to check before we leave the house. We argue through the checklist each morning—the sweater has to be school-issued and not some random hoodie. The shoes and socks have to be the right color. The retainer. Most days I have to send her downstairs to change and then search her for contraband clothes before we leave. She rolls her eyes when I ask for her bag and even has the nerve to look annoyed when I find tank tops and skirts crumpled in the bottom. I swear she must think I’m an idiot.

Three days ago, Wednesday, she couldn’t find her retainer. We were running late, the four of us all jockeying for the bathroom when she asked me to help her find it. The orthodontist gave us two, and she’d already lost one when the dog chewed it up.

I was passing through the living room when I saw the handle of a toothbrush poking out from the front pocket of the tote bag she left on the couch. It would have made sense to put her retainer in the same pocket as her toothbrush, so I stood up, pulled it out.

I got her this tote bag for Christmas. The Girl Child loves Christmas. She starts talking about it immediately following her

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July birthday. It’s been like that since she was old enough to understand the calendar. This year I bought her and some other kids gingerbread house kits. They all sat at the dining room table and assembled their houses but halfway through she gave up. She said she just couldn’t make the cheap frosting stick, but I saw her look at the boy across the table as she said it.

The boy. That boy. Her boyfriend since the beginning of the school year. There’s something too easy about his smile.

Something about his face that makes my head screech. To my face he’s mannered and genial and entirely too smooth, but I can tell he’s annoyed that I won’t allow them to be alone.

When he speaks his words are complimentary but there’s an undercurrent of condescension. I know better than to tell The Girl Child that I don’t like him, but she can tell I think this sudden personality shift is because of him. What she doesn’t understand is that it’s not him I’m taking my cues from—it’s her. I have an instinct for this sort of thing.

What I thought was a toothbrush handle from afar was a dab pen. The way my head got fuzzy when I pulled it out—if I didn’t know better I’d have thought just touching it could get you high. I took it to my husband, held it up behind his back as he brushed his teeth so he could see it in the mirror. I don’t know why I always need him to confirm what I already know. I don’t know why I don’t trust my own instinct.

When she sees me outside her bedroom door she asks me if I’ve found her retainer, and it feels like a scene from a movie when I say “No.” It’s a tight camera angle as I pull the dab pen from my pocket and say “but I found this.” I want to believe her when she says she was just holding it for a friend, but I’m not an idiot. The camera closes in on my face as I register the lie.

After I dropped The Girl Child off at school I called her

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therapist, the one I hired when this all began at the start of the new school year. Of course, The Girl Child says it’s school that’s the real problem, not the boyfriend she started dating around the same time. The Girl Child hates going to therapy. Says she doesn’t need to go because she has me to talk to. I didn’t say “but you don’t really talk to me, not anymore.” Instead I told her that it’s always a good idea to have someone besides parents to confide in. When I told the therapist about the dab pen, explained what The Girl Child’s excuse was, she said she believed her. I think about the hours I spent researching child psychologists, how I chose to pay the small fortune even though she was out of network, and still somehow managed to end up with an idiot. Maybe The Girl Child had condemned drug usage like the therapist says she did, but I know that while it may have been the therapist The Girl Child was speaking to, it was herself she was trying to convince.

As I sit here on the porch, I try to remind myself that the boyfriend is also just a kid, but I can’t help hoping that the cops find him, search him, find the weed I know he has, know he gave The Girl Child. I can’t stop hoping he gets arrested. I want definitive proof that this kid is Bad News, because then I won’t have to try to explain to the Girl Child that I have an instinct for this sort of thing, because then she can’t say I just don’t want her to grow up, can’t dismiss my intuition. I know something is wrong. I’m not an idiot.

I don’t know how it’s possible to always be right and still never trust myself. I understand, rationally, that this is some sort of bullshit trauma response. I want to open my skull and run my neural pathways through the dishwasher. Hang them up like spaghetti on the wooden tree I bought when I went through my pasta making phase. Put them back in an order

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that’s correct. I’ve explained neural pathways to The Girl Child.

Tried to help her understand that negative thought patterns can be reengineered with practice.

Practice. I used to coach the Girl Child in gymnastics. I thought it was important for her to have a community outside the home. Comradery. Something to help her feel a sense of accomplishment. I helped her learn how to fall safely, explained that if she was going to try a flip that bailing in the middle would be worse than seeing it through even if she didn’t land on her feet. I taught her to trust that she could catch herself, and that if she missed the bar I would be there before she hit the mat. Am I standing here with my arms outstretched to catch her or is she already down and I just missed it?

I hardly outright lied to my Mom, but I was never just telling the truth, either. If she asked me directly what I was doing, I’d puff up my chest and throw it in her face. I loved watching her lips pull back, the way she’d hiss at me through her teeth before she wheeled back to slap me. I loved slamming my bedroom door in her face, even if it meant she’d kick a hole in it. I’d stand there while the door shook in its frame, trying to decide if I should stand my ground or escape out the window. Her acrylic tipped fingers, always a French manicure, would claw through the hole like something out of a horror film, curling to unlock the door from the inside. When she finally got through, I’d be waiting.

Until now, I didn’t think waiting could be worse. Someone’s dog barks across the neighborhood. I unlock my phone to check the Girl Child’s location before remembering I’d confiscated her phone on Thursday—yesterday. Or is it the day before yesterday now? It all feels so far away. She’d been grounded for the dab pen. Not allowed to leave the school campus after

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dismissal. When she didn’t respond to my texts after school, I called her Dad and asked him to find her. He found her purse and phone abandoned in the parking lot, but she wasn’t there.

When he found her just off campus, she was sitting on a bench with the boy, the boy she was grounded from seeing. The boy it seemed she’d do anything to please. She’d left the phone behind so I wouldn’t be alerted.

Tonight, I ordered junk food delivery to ease the sting of being grounded a little bit—even let her cousin come spend the night as long as she left her phone with me. What sort of trouble could they get into on a Friday night without phones? I wouldn’t normally bend after setting a consequence, but I knew she was going through it and I didn’t want her to have to be alone.

The girls took the French fries downstairs to the Girl Child’s bedroom. I was half asleep when I smelled something weird. I thought it was the sheets at first, the smell was so faint. Maybe something earthy the dog had brought inside.

But then the smell registered. I wondered if the dab pen was potent enough that the smell could reach me from the dresser drawer I put it in, because there was no way the Girl Child would dare to smoke weed in the house after the trouble she’d been in this week, not after I let her have this freedom in spite of everything else. She wouldn’t do that.

But with each gentle step down the stairs, the smell got stronger. I paused on the landing, the same landing I stood on two days ago when I confronted her with the pen. I opened the door.

She would dare. She would do that.

Then, less than an hour later, she would dare to sneak out too.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. The boyfriend, the boyfriend.

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Oh, I know what kind of man this one will grow to become.

That under-the-surface condescension will boil over. That easy smile is just one degree from a sneer. The invisible bar he’s measuring her against will rise ever higher, and when she’s finally had enough he’ll tell her she’s crazy and make her think she’s the one who isn’t worth anything. I know it. I know because I always know danger’s face when I see it and now I’m afraid the Girl Child and I will share this.

I’m so tired. I tried letting the Girl Child come to me, demonstrating in small ways that I could be trusted. I tried asking direct questions, being a hard ass and demanding she tell the truth. I tried crying and begging, mother-daughter dates, therapy. I even invited her father to a family meeting even though he’s a fucker, to show a united front. I try to remind myself that it’s not really about me, but it’s hard not to take it personally. I don’t deserve this. Not the way my Mom did.

It's a weird feeling for me, wanting to call my Mom. I want to tell her I can’t do it. That it’s obvious now that I don’t have what it takes to be a mother. That I’m scared, I don’t know what to do with all this love. I’m an idiot for thinking I’d have what it takes because I should have known that no amount of love can make someone a good parent. Maybe I do deserve this. Why did I ever think I could be good enough? My neural pathways are dead ends. They all lead here. But it’s not about me. It’s not really about me. I know better than this. I’m not an idiot.

Water filter. Yearly evaluation. The bitch at work who hates me for no reason. My Girl Child. My girl, my girl.

Why is it always just when you think it can’t get worse that it does? Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Busted. Busted. Busted.

Weed and sneaking around and more weed and now…

I only heard the back door open and close because I was

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lying on the couch and not in the bedroom. I was lying on the couch because I didn’t want to wake my husband up with my trembling after confiscating the joint. I laid there for a moment, listening stupidly, but I knew it the second I heard it. Knew it before I ran frantically down the stairs and burst through the bedroom door. I knew she was gone, knew she was with him.

A yellow rectangle of light spilled into the room, framing my niece where she sat on the bed.

“Where is she?” I demanded.

My niece stared back at me, wide-eyed and stunned, her cheeks ruddy as if she’d just come inside. She made to reach for the school-issued laptop on the bed next to her before thinking better of it. Then she opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out.

“Where is she?” I demanded again.

“She’s down at the lake,” she answered shakily, hands twisting in the blankets.

“With him?” I asked as I walked into the room and snatched the laptop off the bed.

She nodded as I looked down at the screen.

They’d been communicating through a shared Google doc.

The cursor blinked at me the same way the Girl Child blinks at me right before she lies.

How could I have anticipated that?

My hands shook as I dialed the non-emergency line. My voice deceptively calm as I told the agent that my daughter was missing.

“Your daughter?”

“Yes,” I took the stairs two at a time, nearly colliding with the dog at the top of the stairs.

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“Your daughter is missing?”

“Yes. I think her boyfriend came to the house and they’re down by the lake in our neighborhood,” I replied as I walked toward the front door and slipped on my shoes.

“How old is she?”

“She’s only fourteen,” I said as I stepped out into the night.

The door closes behind me.

“How old is he?”

“Sixteen,” I said.

I’ve been clutching the phone to my chest since I hung up. A bunny bounds across the lawn, its tail bobbing like a tiny ghost as it goes. A plane passes by overhead. I wait for the Girl Child.

Months ago, I’d asked her what she thought made him special. I always ask questions when I don’t like something.

I want to see if I can get her to explain it to herself. If she didn’t have an answer, would she question if he’s worth it? The questions, I’ve asked so many. Why are you acting this way?

Why don’t you hang out with your friends anymore? Why don’t you spend time with us? Why did you cover up your mirror?

Why won’t you just tell me what’s happening?

“What makes him so special?” I asked.

She said something I can’t remember. Some weak justification, but I saw her eyes change, saw it land like a stone thrown into a pond. It was the first good sign I’d seen since this all started. I thought maybe I was getting somewhere, but that was months ago. Months before the gingerbread houses I knew she wanted to make but felt embarrassed to do with him. Weeks before her skin turned sallow and she stopped coming out of her room.

The Girl Child, she thinks I don’t know what it’s like to have to beg someone to see you. She thinks I won’t understand that

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it’s yourself you hate when someone who says they love you treats you like they don’t. The way it makes you feel like you’re not even a person. She doesn’t know yet that it gets worse. That self-loathing could grow into something sentient. Something that stalks behind you, always whispering, croaking in the background, you’re an idiot, you’re not worth it, you’ll never be good enough. She doesn’t know that I know how it feels and I can’t tell her. Not now.

Her teachers have been calling. They say things to me and I can’t listen. She’s skipping class to talk to the boyfriend on the phone, she isn’t turning in any work. She thinks the rules don’t apply to her. This isn’t right, it’s not who she is. She’s always had an attitude problem but they’re speaking to me like the Girl Child is a delinquent. She’s not, she’s not. I won’t let them write her off. She’s a good girl, I know she is. I won’t let her forget that, won’t let those teachers let her go. I’ll go there and I’ll beg them not to give up on her like all my teachers gave up on me.

She’s just a baby, she really is. She’s just a kid.

She didn’t even know how to light the joint. When I’d snatched it out of her hand and asked her what the fuck she was thinking, I noticed. She couldn’t get it started. She didn’t even know that I’d be able to smell it from all the way upstairs. She doesn’t know anything. She’s just a kid, my Girl Child. I’m so mad. I’m so pissed. I want to shake her until some sense knocks loose. I want to squeeze her until she understands how scared I am. Is this a big deal? It feels like a big deal but it’s too close to home. This is different, right? It’s different, right? Am I an idiot?

Birthday candles. Team calls. Homecoming shoes. I’ll wait out here all night if I have to. I’m going to delete all her social media and make her hate me. I’m going to hold her until she remembers who she is. Science projects. Health savings account.

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Junk mail. Gas for the lawn mower. I’m never going to let this happen again. I’m going to buy a camera for every entrance— even a doorbell one so it can catch her leaving before it catches me out here breathless and violently trembling. Vaccination records. Hand sanitizer. Amazon returns. I took her photo for the school dance standing right here on this porch.

I braided her hair for homecoming the same way I did for gymnastics the same way I did when she was just a little thing.

Back when I used to think getting her to sit still long enough was the hardest thing in the world. I miss the way her head smelled like baby shampoo. I miss how white her hair used to turn in the summer, before she stopped playing outside. Before she stopped playing right here in this yard. I look up from the stairs and I can see her there in the grass, but she’s not little anymore. She’s walking toward the house, and I notice that she’s barefoot at precisely the same moment I remember that it was control I felt when I finally let go of the roof.

I stand up, take two or three trembling steps onto the lawn, the frosty grass crunching beneath my feet. I stop. Put my hands on my hips, just like a Mom, I suddenly realize, and wait for her to notice that I’m here.

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Shadow Mother: A Novel in Progress MADELINE FEEHAN

Chapter One A mother sits outside on the porch of her house with her daughters. The sky is dark and the stars are out. The only sound is the bullfrogs’ twanging bass and the chorus of cicadas and crickets. The girls have wrangled their way out of her lap and are mesmerized by the sky. They chatter all day until the sound fills her brain, so she is thankful for this rare, unexpected quiet.

Her younger daughter, Lily, hovers close to her still. Lily follows her sister like a shadow and is afraid of most things. Lily listens to her mother’s rules and often whispers to Luna, telling her the right thing to do so she doesn’t get in trouble again.

She’s the quieter one, the sensitive one. She worries about Lily sometimes. She hopes this submissiveness fades when she gets older. It’s okay to be a mousy child, but she will not let Lily grow into a mousy woman.

Her older daughter, Luna, is just out of reach, standing on her tiptoes at the edge of the porch. She was the first to speak, walk, and dance. She is the wilder girl, the louder and more curious one. She is the one who makes her own rules and jumps into the water as if she used to live there in another life. Lily’s

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first word was “mama,” and Luna’s first word was “more.”

She’s always wanting more. She worries about Luna, too, but for different reasons. She worries that someone will knock all of that bravery and self-expression out of her. She knows because she was just like Luna as a child, and will never get that back.

She can’t waste time worrying. She doesn’t want to ruin moments like this, where her daughters are free from harm and happy. They’re still so young. They are still surrounded by a bubble. She wants to swaddle them inside her own body, but she knows they will have to grow up someday.

For now, they are her babies, and they are out on the porch because she is going to teach them how to wish upon a star.

The first step, she tells them, is to pick one. “Pick wisely,” she says, “because once you choose a star, it is yours forever.”

Luna picks out a white-hot star that shines like a diamond in the sky. Lily chooses its cold blue twin, equally brilliant. Their stars are brighter than her own. It's dimmer now, but it brings her comfort like an old friend.

The next step, she says, is to close your eyes and think about what you wish most in the world. She tells them to hold that wish inside themselves.

She watches Luna and Lily, their little faces scrunching in concentration.

“When you’re ready,” she says, “Cast that wish out to your star.”

Lily does this, opening her eyes and smiling once she’s done.

“I wish…” Luna’s voice cuts through the night.

She runs to her daughter, quick as she would if she saw Luna walking headfirst into a sharp corner. It is a motherly instinct, a reflex. She forgot one of the most important rules, and she doesn’t want them to lose out because of her mistake. She cups

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a hand over Luna’s mouth gently, as if she can catch the words in her palm.

“Don’t speak your wishes aloud,” she says. “If you do, they lose their power and are less likely to come true. Keep it inside yourself, a secret between you and your star.”

She places a hand over Luna’s heart in case she doesn’t understand all of her words. Her gloved palm feels cold against the warmth of her daughter’s skin. Luna copies the gesture, mirroring it by placing her hand over her mother’s heart.

Luna’s fingers brush the locket she wears around her neck.

Inside, there is a picture of Luna and a picture of Lily. Two halves of a whole. Girls who were meant to be twins, but were born a year apart.

The children are satisfied. Lily ventures over to her sister, forgetting her mother for a minute. The two talk in quiet voices, trying to find constellations. They don’t know the names besides the Big and Little Dipper, but they try to connect the stars regardless, just as they find shapes in every cloud.

Their mother looks up at the expanse of sky and thinks of the crane woman. She was the central figure, the protagonist turned antagonist of one of the stories her mother told her growing up. A crane who turned into a woman once she got married.

She plucked her feathers out every night, so her husband would still love her. Eventually, she was tired of keeping up that act.

She let her feathers grow, and watched her husband’s love fade.

The story ends when she reverts to her original form and flies away, leaving her human life behind. Her mother told it as a cautionary tale meant to discourage flighty behavior. It seemed like a poorly disguised effort to prepare her daughters for marriage. All her stories featured women who failed to live up to society’s expectations and faced terrible consequences. Her

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mother was repulsed by the crane woman’s ability to shapeshift, but most of all, by her decision to abandon her husband and leave the comforts and privileges of human life behind.

She never let it show, but unlike her mother, she admired the crane woman. She imagined what it would be like to leave everything she knew and start fresh in a different form. It felt brave and transgressive. It felt like an impossible dream.

Although she loved Richard and had been married to him for the last ten years, she could imagine leaving him. He would be heartbroken and angry, but he would get over it. He would do fine on his own. She could imagine leaving him even now when there was still so much love. Soon, the unspoken would come out of the shadows, and resentment would grow in the place of love and choke it. But for now, she held most of her differences inside; Richard had only seen the cracks in the facade her mother had created. She had been molded into a good wife, a respectable woman, but beneath, she would always be a wild girl. A howling pit of longing, a force that couldn’t be tamed, just like Luna was shaping up to be. If Richard was the only thing holding her back, she would spread her wings right now.

But he wasn’t. What stopped her from fulfilling that fantasy was Luna and Lily. Those two precious girls, catching fireflies together, laughing in their own secret world. She didn’t mind if it didn’t include her, if they spoke a language she wasn’t always able to translate. They were the best thing she had ever created, the legacy she was proud to leave. The love she felt for the two of them was incomparable to anything, even total freedom.

Even if she had been born with wings, like that woman in her mother’s story, she would pluck them out, feather by feather, to be their mother.

She twists her wedding ring. It’s a habit, not even a nervous

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one. It’s snug, the exact size of her finger. Ever since she’s been married, she’s worn silk gloves that fit her like a second skin so she can wear her ring over them. Before, she had gloves in many textures, but now, she chooses from a drawer of silk ones, identical in size but varying in color. Tonight they’re ivory, the color of bleached bone, of a wedding dress. She thinks of another phantom from her mother’s stories, the bride who died on her wedding day. Dead because she hid in a trunk during a party game, and couldn’t get back out. She was found years later when her body had already decomposed. A new bride opened the trunk and found a skeleton immersed in lace, corseted and ready for a future she would never have. Bones and ivory silk were all that was left.

Sometimes, the old craving comes back and she longs to tear the gloves off. She imagines flexing her hands, letting them feel the cool night air without any fabric holding them back. She imagines running her fingers through the hair of her daughters, tangling in Luna’s red curls and Lily’s strawberry blonde strands, cupping their round cheeks, touching the bows of their lips tenderly. But she doesn’t dare take the lid off of that box.

The gloves have served her just fine; they’ve protected her from her base instincts, from trouble. They’ve prevented her from ending up like Anais, unable to contain herself.

She remembers Richard’s initial hesitation when he saw she wore gloves all day, in every season. Her mother had told him all about her and Anais, and their shared hysteria. “Twins,” she had said. “One does something, and the other one copies.”

The gloves, her mother explained, stopped her from imagining things. Stopped her from running away, from being crazy like Anais, the sister who had started the delusion. The gloves made her stay, made her life easier, made her husband happy, and

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almost made her feel like a normal woman. Sometimes she wondered if it would be better to have been Anais, who had first seen things, and made her realize she was not alone. What did it say about her that she was the one who ‘copied,’ that she was the one who stayed?

“Did you wish yet, Mommy? What did you wish for?” A child’s voice cuts clear across the night, a blanket smothering her dark, sharp thoughts. The blades start outwards, at her mother, at Richard, but they always turn inwards in the end.

Luna is looking right at her, mouth open so she can see the gaps of her missing teeth.

“Thanks for reminding me, honey. I forgot. But remember, I can’t tell you my wish,” she says.

“Or else it won’t come true,” Lily repeats. She is a girl who likes rules and order.

At this moment, she forgets she’s a mother and feels connected to the girl she once was. The girl she has always been.

She closes her eyes, but she doesn’t wish hastily. Instead, she takes her time, ruminating, knowing she only has one chance every night. She has wished for the same thing for so long that it feels wrong to wish for anything else. She is no longer a child, but it still feels like a superstition.

She’s only human, of course; as the years have gone on, she has broken the tradition. She has wished for her daughters to be healthy and successful. For her husband to make more money when she thought they would lose the house. For their dog Clementine to live another year when she fell ill. Most of these wishes have come true, whether it was her star or luck. Each time, she has wondered if there will be a price, some cosmic consequence. She’s tired of feeling guilty for wanting things for herself and her family.

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Every time she veers from that original wish, it feels sacrilegious. She feels drenched in a wave of sickening guilt.

She doesn’t want to feel that way tonight, the first night she is doing this with her daughters by her side.

So tonight, she finds her old friend and makes that same wish she first made at twelve years old, tears streaming down her face. It has never come true, not in the way she hoped, but she wishes for it anyway.

Elizabeth wishes for her sister Anais to come home.

She doesn’t want a wish half granted, a mockery, like the one week Anais did return. She doesn’t want to see that sickly leech ever again. She turned up on her doorstep like a bad omen a year after Luna was born. She still remembers being disturbed by her sister’s pregnant belly and childish mannerisms, her whining voice as she insisted she needed to get back to “the Land of Dreams.” She chanted it like a junkie, feverish and sweating out her withdrawal from something, a drug she wouldn’t name.

“The Land of Dreams” is what she called the place she ran away to at age twelve, the place she had been for the past fifteen years. Elizabeth had asked so many questions, but Anais never elaborated. Elizabeth never knew where this place was, what it was, only that it had eaten her sister like a great big beast, and those were the remains it had spit up. Despite Elizabeth caring for her and nursing her back to health, Anais left at the end of the week presumably to return to the Land of Dreams. It was the first time she knew her love was not enough.

Yet she still wishes. She wishes that this time, her love will make Anais stay.

When Elizabeth opens her eyes, her dimming star gleams as if to signal it has gotten her message. It blinks once, twice in warning, as if to say be careful what you wish for.

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The Heron MARIA FINITZO

I First light ended the night. The incoming tide flooded the shore with a vengeance. The ocean pounded against her eardrums. Salty water flowed up her nostrils and down her throat. She woke coughing up sea and sand. Dania struggled on to her hands and knees. Waves battered her body as she shivered uncontrollably. Give in. She collapsed in the frothy soup of the ocean and waited to die.

The only fate she deserved was to drown in the depths of the sea, pulled under by the weight of her sins. There was no absolution for what she’d done to Luna Genovese. No absolution for how she’d wronged her husband, and even worse, for abandoning her daughter, when Giuliana needed her the most. She had sinned against love. A willing supplicant to the bulging tide, she offered no resistance to the current. Gently, as if she weighed less than an empty seashell, the rushing water lifted her body from the sand and carried her out to sea.

She was pulled under by the waves like tiny pebbles caught in the surf along the shore. Her lungs filled with water and for a moment she struggled for breath. This is what you wanted. A swell slammed against her body with such force, it spun her around.

She floated on her back, arms outstretched to the sky. Shafts

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of sunlight saturated the ocean, splitting into many colors. A rainbow appeared just out of her reach. She rose quickly to the surface, gasping for air, as another wave took hold of her and flung her further out to sea where she floated aimlessly with the current. No matter how many times she dove into the dark, fighting to stay submerged, her body resisted, choosing instead to ascend to the light, as if something or someone was pulling her upward.

II As the sun crossed the horizon, a soft rain greeted the colors of the dawn. Cesare Cercatore readied his small fishing boat. He took no notice of the weather. It rained every day in Calandria. He wasn’t an old man, but he moved like one, slow and methodical, worn down by grief. The pain of his loss stubborn, like the sharp point of a dagger, a stark reminder of how easily life changes. His sorrow wasn’t the heaviest burden he carried. The shame he felt was merciless. He leaned his shoulder against the stern of the boat and with all his weight, pushed it through the sand to the water’s edge. His son, Nicola followed behind.

“Can I come with you today?” he asked.

“Not today.” Cesare looked at his son, barely seven years old, five years without a mother. He wondered if he even remembered her. “Your studies are more important. The priest is waiting for you.”

“I want to be with you. I can help.”

“I need your help most getting the catch to the market.” He kissed his son on the forehead. “Go back to the house before your grandmother discovers you’re missing. We don’t want

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her to worry.” He watched his son climb the dunes to the path leading back to their home, a house that had once belonged to his father.

Except for the distant sound of the breakers hitting the rocky shore, the morning was quiet. And yet, Cesare felt uneasy.

The sea looked angry, sullen like the storm clouds obscuring the sun. Raindrops pestered the surface of the ocean making the water boil. He gave his boat a final push, letting the tide lift it from the sand, and quickly scrambled over the gunwale, settling in between the oars. He turned to wave to his son, but he’d disappeared in the tall sand grass. Holding fast to the oars, he began to pull against the current. He wanted to escape the dangerous breakers rolling towards the shore. The sea was dark, impenetrable. No matter how many times his oars cut into the waves, a seemingly endless surge of water sprung from the depths threatening to obliterate his efforts. When he was far enough out beyond the undertow, he paused to rest. As he did every morning, he glanced back at the high cliffs overlooking the cove, searching for his wife. A lone seagull called out in excitement as it flew overhead, laughing at his folly.

There’d been nothing special about the day. That morning before he’d left for work, his wife, Rosalina, whose eyes were the color of amber, told him she was going to her weekly confession, and that his mother had agreed to watch Nicola until she returned. She’d be back in under an hour, she assured him. Then she kissed him passionately, and told him she loved him, and he believed her with all his heart.

Instead of coming home that day, Rosalina vanished. When word of her disappearance reached him, he rushed home.

Waiting for him upon his arrival were several villagers, mostly old women, who claimed they saw the exact moment poor

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Rosalina—and this they emphasized—willingly hurled herself off the high cliffs above the sea. Her arms and legs splayed open as she flew, her body burned against the dark overcast sky. She must have been very unhappy to do such a thing, the old women insisted.

Although, even as unhappy as she surely was, nothing justified leaving her son. What kind of a mother did that!

Rosalina’s body was never found. Most likely taken by the sea, was all anyone had to say. Cesare refused to believe she was dead. Bodies don’t just disappear. The old women were wrong.

It was a large bird they’d seen, not Rosalina. He insisted to all who’d listen that his wife was a happy woman who loved her son and never would have abandoned him this way. She was alive, and he intended to find her.

Leaving Nicola with his mother, Cesare traveled miles up the coast looking everywhere for his wife. Climbing to the top of Mt. Pellegrino, he searched the Sanctuary of St. Rosalina, the small chapel built into the walls of the cave where St. Rosalina had lived her life as a hermit. Eventually dying alone. His wife was named after the saint. She’d often told him how much she admired Rosalina for giving up her earthly wealth to live a solitary life devoted to God. Cesare didn’t believe in God, but he knew his wife did. He was certain she was in the chapel most likely praying. Only except for an old nun kneeling in a pew at the front of the altar, the sanctuary was empty. He stood there for a long while watching the elderly woman. Her eyes closed, her body bent over, she mumbled on and on, spellbound in prayer, as rosary beads slipped through her gnarled fingers.

She took no notice of him. In a way, he envied her. If only he was a believer. He turned away from her devotion. Just as he reached the doors of the chapel, he heard a voice, still and small say—You’ll not find your wife here, or there. He spun around. The old

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woman had vanished. The chapel was empty.

He climbed back down the mountain to search the many caves and grottos beneath the cliffs. Except for a few scattered animal bones, the caves were empty. He took a boat to Isola delle Femmine, a tiny island known to be a refuge for women fleeing their husbands. No one he encountered on the island had seen or heard anything of her. Finally, after many months of searching, he gave up and returned home. A man without his wife. A man with nothing left but despair. Her death was ruled a suicide, a mortal sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Cesare pleaded with the priest to have mercy, if not for his wife, then his son. But the priest refused, saying he had no choice but to condemn Rosalina to everlasting hell.

As time passed, the villagers mostly stopped talking about his wife. That much was a relief. But Cesare understood well enough that tragic stories die hard in small towns. Old women kept them alive. He heard their voices everywhere. Whether they were sitting outside the town bakery in the afternoon sun or gathered on the steps of the church after Sunday mass, they gossiped endlessly about poor Rosalina and how she had jumped. Every time they retold her story, tiny lies were added, colorful threads embellished into the fabric of the narrative, until finally the mystery of why she’d jumped was revealed, at least as far as the old women were concerned. He didn’t begrudge them their stories, they had little else in their lives, but he did envy the naïveté with which they rose every morning, blissfully unaware of what the day might bring. No matter how beautiful the sunrise, Cesare now understood that life was overripe with the casual cruelty of fortune. No matter how many times Cesare replayed the last moments he and his wife were together, he remembered nothing that might have warned

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him of what was to come that day. He would never understand why had she done such a terrible thing.

As the years passed, Cesare kept to himself, taking comfort in raising his son, who he loved very much, and oddly enough, from the very place he’d once avoided at all cost, the sea.

Despite having grown up in Calandria and with a father who fished, Cesare had never been drawn to the sea. He was terrified by what he imagined lay hidden beneath the waves, and so when it was time for him to go to work, instead of becoming a fisherman like everyone else in the village, Cesare became a stone-cutter known for his skill. After Rosalina died, he woke every morning drawn to the sea.

The ocean was bountiful for him. He became a fisherman, a very good fisherman. Alone in his small boat far away from the judgement of his neighbors, he traveled between sea and sky, the horizon his much–needed vanishing point. Only there, adrift on the ocean, drowning in the nostalgia of recollection, did he allow himself to believe in the infallible rhythm of the waves—certain that one day the sea would return what she had taken away.

The sun remained hidden beneath overcast skies. With strong confident strokes, Cesare dipped the oars into the water and pulled, moving the sea backwards, and his small boat forward. He fell into a rhythm, a meditation, over and over he rowed, the boat rising and falling between the waves.

A harsh, explosive noise broke the morning calm. As always, he heard her before he saw her. Searching the skies, he saw nothing but storm clouds, then he heard her again. The sound was closer. She appeared out of nowhere—an apparition from the heavens. Her enormous wings were outstretched, her graceful neck tucked back, her head rested on her shoulders,

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and her long straight legs extended behind her. She flew with strong deep rhythmic wingbeats in time to a cadence as ancient as the world. A dark silhouette of saintly grace, illuminated against a hazy palette.

“There you are,” he said as if greeting an old friend, which in fact she was. The heron circled the boat before silently landing on the stern behind Cesare. Her golden eyes blazed like shafts of wheat in the morning light.

The first time she came, he knew immediately she was a female. Females were smaller in size, delicate. And her white plumage, although beautiful, lacked the colorful ornamentation of the males. He assumed when she landed on the boat that she was injured, unable to hunt, and therefore starving. He threw her a fish, which she stabbed with the sharp point of her bill, and then easily swallowed. Followed by another and another.

Facing the morning light, she’d dropped her wings to her side and begun to sun herself. It was as if she’d always been with him.

She remained that first day for an hour. Content to watch him fish. Then, as unexpectedly as she’d appeared, she disappeared.

Watching her ascend into the heavens, Cesare was overwhelmed with a terrible loneliness, afraid she was gone forever. Only, the next day she returned. And the day after that, continuing to come to his boat every morning since. His constant companion for five years. Why she came remained a mystery. For Cesare, it was enough that she came.

Fishing was always better after she arrived. Tracking her as she flew overhead, he’d follow behind in the boat until she began making large circles in the sky. That’s when he knew she’d found a school of fish, usually sardines. Casting his net into the moving brilliance of thousands of silver fish, he’d encircle the school, cinching the net closed before hauling his catch overboard. As

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preposterous as he knew it sounded, the heron was helping him fish. He was sure of it. He also believed his wife had sent her to him. He told no one about the heron.

When the day’s fishing was over, he often talked to the heron. In the beginning, he told her about his son and what an extraordinary boy he was. He was smart, like his mother. He wanted to educate his son so that one day, he could live a better life than his own. Eventually, the day came when he revealed to the heron what had happened to his wife.

He had just pulled in his last catch of the day. The heron had already flown away. Cesare was headed home, when without warning, the wind increased sharply. A squall began to rage, lasting for several minutes. A burst of lightning broke open the clouds, releasing a downpour of rain. It was urgent he get off the sea. Seeking protection in one of the small coves along the shore, he pulled the boat from the water to the safety of the beach and took shelter in the entrance of a nearby cave.

Exhausted from the day, he lay down to rest and promptly fell asleep, dreaming about Rosalina. Over and over he watched as she leapt from the cliff, and over and over he watched himself try to catch her. Each time he was certain he held her in his arms, she’d vanish, like vapor rising from a boiling pot.

When he woke, he was crying. The heron had returned.

Perched on the bow of the boat, her shoulders shrugged against the rain, she took no notice of the storm, focusing her gaze instead on Cesare. Her eyes, two golden orbs, shone upon him like twin suns. He began to speak, telling her how much he loved his wife. Her eyes were beautiful, like yours, he said, only hers were the color of amber. Then he told her about the day Rosalina died. A horrible thing! She threw herself off a cliff. He hadn’t been there to save her. He’d failed to recognize her pain, and now she

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was damned to everlasting Hell, forever alone. Her beautiful body tangled in rags of seaweed. Nothing left of her eyes but two dark pits. He was haunted by this vision—day and night—a just punishment. He wept deeply, lamenting, if only I’d known.

If only I’d known. The heron stayed with him that day until his sorrow was spent. Silent and unmoving, she was at long last a witness for his pain.

Despite the feeling of unease that had troubled Cesare at the start of the day, fishing had gone well. One of the best of the season. He was eager to return home. The heron, now perched on the stern of the boat, gazed intently at the distance before her.

He’d offered her fish, but she didn’t seem interested, choosing instead to wait as if she expected something was coming.

Ancient Romans believed herons were birds of divination, able to foresee the future. He didn’t believe in any of that, yet he followed her line of sight anyway, curious about what she was seeing. But he saw nothing except the empty expanse of the ocean. The heron remained focused, never altering her gaze, until with a loud shriek, she bent her legs and jumped into the air. Spreading her powerful wings, she flew off within a few wingbeats. Cesare rowed hard, hoping to stay with her, but it was no use. He trailed far behind the heron, now a dark silhouette against the clouds.

The boundary between earth, sea and sky disappeared.

Dania lost all sense of time and place. Cold and delirious, hurled about by the waves, her teeth chattered so much she bit her tongue several times. She fell in and out of life, dreaming of her garden. Walking along the stone path she felt the warmth of the sun through the soles of her feet. A swarm of white bees appeared, encircling her. She stood perfectly still, believing they

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were divine messengers from the underworld. They covered her body by the thousands. In her delirium, she felt her flesh fall away, as her soul rose, carried aloft by the frantic beating of their fragile wings. Higher and higher she soared, while far below, skimming the surface of the ocean, small silver fish, too numerous to count flashed through the light as they leapt over the waves.

Her daughter called her name, pleading for her to come home. She was falling now, plummeting back to sea, waking from her dream just as a wave swallowed her body, pulling her under into darkness. She sank. There was neither up nor down, only black. Her lungs seared with pain. This is my death, she thought. Then a flash of silver light shattered the gloom. Then another one, another, and another, until there were countless bursts of light surrounding her body. Silver fish, thousands of them, pushed and pulled her upward. The rays of the sun ignited the water. Following the light, she broke through the waves just in time to beg for breath. As far as she could see, the ocean shimmered with a moving river of fish bearing her forward. A heron circled overhead, calling out urgently. Two large globes made of sea green glass, lashed together with a long, braided cord, appeared before her. Twin worlds—life or death. With the last of her strength, she reached for the rope, gripping it with both hands and held on for dear life.

Cesare’s small boat was now flying through the waves, inexplicably driven by thousands of sardines. They must be fleeing from a predator, he thought. Sunlight broke through the gaps in the clouds. The heron circled above, calling out anxiously. At first, all he noticed were two large round fishing floats, made of green glass, bound together by rope, most likely anchoring

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a fishing net below the surface. But then a rainbow appeared in the sky, and stretching above it, was a second rainbow, much brighter. He’d heard from other fishermen, these stories of unexplained happenings, but he’d never imagined anything like this. It took his breath. The arc of the second rainbow was reflected not in the sky, but in the water below. The ocean undulated with streaks of red, gold, orange and green, that glistened as far as the horizon erasing the boundary between sea and sky. It seemed to Cesare that the entire world burned with incandescence. This must be the light of grace. That’s when he saw—what the heron had seen—a woman barely alive, clinging to the floats, her hands gripping the rope.

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Four Widows Kill the Internet MARNIE AULABAUGH

MEMORANDUM TO: Marnie Aulabaugh, Commander of The Office of The Sky 1.0 FR: GSS (Codename GSS) CC: Paula Martin, Benevolent Minister of The Internet 3.0 SUBJECT: Survey 45 Results from the Investigation Into The Great U.S. Internet Outage Respondents to the survey titled “The First 45 Minutes of the Rest of Your Life” answered the question, “What happened to you during the first 45 minutes of the Great U.S. Internet Outage of 2024?” Herein follows personal stories from members of the community edited for clarity, accuracy, and entertainment value. *All names have been changed to ensure the safety of the respondents according to the Rules of the Internet set forth by the document “Genesis of the Internet 3.0.”

1.

Brittney continued to hang her sheets on the line outside of her thatched farmhouse on the outskirts of her sunflower field.

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2.

George blinked at his screen, screamed inside his head, yanked off his Beats headphones, and headed to the kitchen for his fifth espresso of the day.

3. The red button labeled “Oh Yeah?!” flickered near the refresh button on Caroline’s browser. She finally mashed it in the name of all women when she read a tiny blurb at the bottom of a news page that said, “27 Ways to Look Hotter to Men!” 4. Francine noticed that the little blue dot on her map wasn’t moving with her as she drove on one of the Peachtree Streets through Atlanta and thus, she had no idea where she was.

5. Error 408 file not found.

6. The goggles on Patrick’s VR headset darkened then brightened to reveal the blank walls of his studio apartment in Bakersfield. After removing his gear Patrick was embarrassed to be caught in a superhero three-point landing by his guinea pig Billy Budd.

7. Without warning all the cameras on set at the filming of The Bachelor dinged simultaneously and lost focus. A grip tripped on an untaped cable. Twelve women giggled. One cried.

8. Josie tried to post. Then tried to post again. Then dragged her finger aggressively down the screen of her iPhone to update and refresh once more. Nothing. She stomped her feet and screamed. Her 78-year-old neighbor called 911, not for the first time.

9. “You Are Not Connected to the Internet This page cannot be displayed because your computer is currently offline.”

10. “Nem csatlakozik az internethez Ez a lap nem jeleníthető meg, mert a számítógép jelenleg offline állapotban van”

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displayed itself on Josh’s screen because, in a fit of linguistic hubris, he decided to learn a new language by changing his computer OS to Hungarian. He had no idea what it meant.

11. Oona heard an absence, which caused her to pause as she slowly rubbed the cat ears of Romeo who lounged just far enough so that he didn’t seem needy but close enough that her hand could reach him.

12. 5G, bursting with hotspot and cellular activity, downgraded numerically through all of the previous Gs to manage the traffic until it died as well from the bandwidth overload.

For every carrier. This time it didn’t matter that you had Verizon.

13. Andrea said, “Did you hear that?”

14. Clara pulled her head out from underneath her hoody in a huff when ChatGPT failed to deliver her essay on Homegoing for her 10th grade honors English class.

15. Bridget, discovering that “her WIFI was out,” realized that she had no idea where or when her appointment with her client was taking place. Or what would happen the rest of her week.

16. Everyone tried to tweet about it and could not.

17. Wolf stepped onto the porch of his Silver Lake house and howled. He paced the front yard. He tried the WIFI again.

It still didn’t work. Now he could not work. Life was over.

18. People on TikTok stopped dancing. Congress cheered.

19. Baxter, the Portuguese Water Dog, knocked his human’s hand away from her trackpad as she repeatedly mashed the refresh button on her browser.

20. A semi-truck, plowing through the grapevine on I-5, pulled over to the nearest rest stop because its driver needed

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to take a piss and do his “20-minute yoga for long haul drivers” on YouTube. He was denied. Instead, he practiced from memory. He lasted six minutes which seemed like an hour.

21. No one posted a cat video on Facebook. Ditto inspirational quotes with pastel backgrounds and short focal length daisies and hateful comments on ex-lover’s earnest gender reveal photos.

22. The rocket engineers in the SpaceX launch control room in Cape Canaveral leaned carefully back in their Aeron chairs and stared at their triple screens that read Please Cancel all Lauches because there is too much space junk and it is your fault, Sincerely Maureen and Moses 23. Nadia, of her eponymous French bakery in Des Moines, tapped repeatedly on her keypad, furiously trying to reload her croissant orders for the day while her colleagues, unaware of her distress, kept making pan brioche with love in their hearts. She would not let them know the Internet was down.

24. It was about to rain in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and no one knew.

25. Someone in master control restarted the machine. Minutes later, they unplugged it and plugged it back in. Then they turned it off. After counting to 60, they turned it back on while simultaneously pressing the option, command, P and R keys. They then walked out to the electrical box on the wall and after shouting “on the count of three” shut down the breaker to the World Wide Web, counted to 120, and flicked it back on.

26. Mostly, no one noticed.

27. On re-entering her home to find that her room had been

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trashed and her jewelry had been stolen, Ava grabbed her cell phone to call 911. She did not have a signal. She opened several windows to get the burglar’s energy out of the house (she had been robbed!), grabbed the hall phone connected to a land line which was to remain activated forever, she insisted, every time they switched internet providers, rotary dialed 911 and waited as a busy signal sang through the wires and into the heavy handset.

28. A golden retriever named Butch ran after his tennis ball, followed a butterfly, sniffed the butt of a cocker spaniel, found a different ball, then ran back to his human, sans ball, joyful that they were finally outside.

29. The two astronomers formerly gazing at the Tarantula nebula turned towards each other and chatted about their day while sharing a bag of pistachio nuts.

30. 6,754 humans put on their running shoes and went for that run they had been meaning to get to all morning except for emails.

31. The entire staff of Blackstone in New York silently screamed and feared for their jobs when they couldn’t answer their managing directors’ last 47 Slack messages.

32. An employee of a call center in Minneapolis stepped out of his cubicle, walked into his neighbor’s cubicle, and confessed that he’d been in love with him since three weeks ago when he overheard him tell a customer to “fuck right off if he didn’t like his accent.”

33. Miss Martin’s lunch duty was so lively that she hoped the WIFI and cell service would be out forever as she witnessed everyone in the 8th grade lunch line speaking to each other with their mouths and not their phones.

34. A middle-aged middle manager sighed and said to her

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74-year-old mother, “Mom, is it plugged in? Are you sure?”

35. Martha realized that she could not check her feed and that she really was feeling good about that. So good that she wanted to post about it so that the world and specifically her followers would know just how good she felt. And then she realized she couldn’t, and she spiraled into a gallon of Chunky Monkey.

36. Robert pulled out his oil paints for the first time in 15 years after pacing for 35 minutes in frustration when his smart TV blinked off in the middle of the Westminster Dog Show Terrier Group finals.

37. Not one Uber order was placed on the Friday the Internet died (17:00 MST) and an estimated 1,247,000 people drove home drunk.

38. Dinner was contemplated.

39. Georgia, in Mississippi, was experimenting with state names for her child who was due any minute.

40. Ralph stood in the photo booth at the Edendale Grill in Los Angeles (author’s note: the best in the city), for his 99th session. His hair had changed.

41. Four thousand hospitals across the US switched to generators as the local municipal digitized smart grid ground to a halt after failing to activate its own backup generators. Thick files were pulled out of basement cabinets and healthcare went on with more empathy than in recent years.

42. All flights in the U.S. were grounded. Everything else was delayed or canceled. The travelers mobbed the book and magazine stores. Some talked to strangers.

43. A lone hiker in the Rocky Mountains tossed her iPhone into a gorge when she realized that her GPS app could not map her route, and she was hopelessly lost which serves

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her right as she didn’t have and didn’t know how to use a paper map. She watched her phone disappear and sighed with relief.

44. A surprise birthday party for Ben went off without a hitch.

45. I didn’t know where you were. *Author’s Note: Honestly, some of these answers were completely rewritten as they did not make any sense as returned.

In additional to those edits, some were created entirely from anecdotal stories that the author (Hi! Me!) overheard in line at Whole Foods when the invariable question came up as a shopper placed their frozen spinach on the conveyor belt, “What were you doing when the Internet went out?” I definitely made up the one about the astronomers. Good one, right? Plus, there were actually only 37 completed forms returned via the postal service. Many of them were handwritten. I threw those away. Who does that anymore? I find that the most interesting people never fill out questionnaires or surveys anyways. They are too busy writing manifestos or going to the market for frozen spinach, knitting sweaters, or writing complex code to deliver things people need not want. Whatever interesting people do during the day; I have no idea. Admittedly, I did elaborate on some of these the sake of the document. No one likes a boring memo. Let’s meet for coffee tomorrow, I am so over this job and need a pick me up. Documenting the aftermath of the dead Internet is not as fun as killing the Internet. IMHO. Perhaps we can organize another Kill the Internet coup? Nah, I’m totally kidding not kidding but really, I am kidding. It would take longer than a coffee date to do that. Not much longer, though. But seriously, I am kidding. Want to go to the place on the corner, near that one place with the vegan donuts? Please remember

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to delete this “author’s note” section before submitting to the council. We want to keep up appearances, eh? Before I forget, if you’re ever in Iowa again, go to Nadia’s. Her croissants. I die.

Signing off, love you Marnie Aulabaugh mean it, Ginny Your Humble Servant,

GSS (Codename GSS) Keeper of the History Office of the Investigation Into The Great U.S. Internet Outage Aftermath

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NONFICTION

Radium, Herb Salad, and Outer Space: Eugenie Dalland in Conversation with Morgan English MORGAN ENGLISH

Look, I'm all buttoned up. You look fantastic. I’m taking this seriously, Eugenie. I reread your thesis pages today, and looked at your website for the first time ever. Damn. Okay, I know you grew up among artists, which you talk about sometimes. Your mother is a painter, and your godfather is a prominent art critic, but you've never spoken to me about writers you grew up around, and I'm wondering, who or what, in your childhood, made you want to be a writer? Oh, that's a really good question. My mom trained as a painter, and before that, trained as a photographer, but she has always written as well. I'm trying to remember the earliest things of hers that I saw—probably letters. I think it was my mom's letters to people, from people, to me and my brother. You know, if we were at summer camp, she would send us letters all the time. She was an English major in undergrad, so her breadth of knowledge about American literature and British literature, and especially Southern literature, because she's from New Orleans, was and remains expansive. She read to us constantly as children. I'm trying to remember some of the

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books…The Wind and the Willows. That's what I was going to ask, if she read you The Wind and the Willows! Because you’ve mentioned that book to me! That, and the Angelina Ballerina series. All of the Eloise books. Then as we got slightly older, she would read us chapter books like The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I love that book. I've only just read it this year. I actually put it on my official MFA reading list, because I never read it as a kid, and my friend Matt, who works in children’s and YA publishing—it’s one of his favorites. She read us all of the Greek myths, and lots and lots of fairy tales from all cultures. Storytelling is such a huge component to life in the south, and especially New Orleans, where oftentimes the line between real life and fabrication is blurred enormously. Yes, I know something about that. Yes. It's really special. What happens when that line gets blurred? I think it makes us realize that our stories are part of many other stories, or that the stories of our lives are somehow, I don't know, it creates an interesting parallel between fact and fiction. I think it was my mom and her encouragement that turned me into a writer. I was writing from a very early age, or storytelling from a very early age, because I didn't read until quite late. I was in special ed classes for reading for quite some time. But even before I could write, I was dictating stories, which is something that Priscilla [Posada, MFA '24] did as well, I think. You publish book reviews, film reviews, and write about art and culture extensively, including a few collaborations with Elisa [Wouk Almino '25] for the Los Angeles Times. But the most recently published piece of yours was a personal essay about living in New Orleans, and your thesis is a memoir about a specific time in your life in your early 20s.

How does it feel to be at this juncture where you're gearing

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up to bring your creative nonfiction into the world? Does it feel different, emotionally, or, I don't know, in any way?

That's a great question. It sort of feels as though I was circling around the act of creation by looking at what other people were creating—–musicians, fashion designers, visual artists, poets, whatever art form I was really interested in. I will, you know, hopefully continue to write cultural criticism for the rest of my life. It is interesting to think about potentially—–hopefully—– being the person whose work is the focus of cultural criticism.

I sort of see it as: I was behind the camera for a really long time, and now my writing is going to be in front of it, which is terrifying. That's a terrifying thought.

Your thesis primarily takes place in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but also in Brooklyn, where you lived, and the Upper East Side, where you worked. This piece has been described as a work about power, about selfdetermination, and as a kunstlerroman, but in this most recent version that I just read, I kept thinking that it's also very much about place. I was like, damn, Eugenie is one of my favorite New York City writers! Would you consider yourself a writer of place? Writing about New York City is something that's very important to me. So thank you for bringing it up. I think it's only been recently that I have realized how much I am a product of that city. I was born in Brooklyn, in Lefferts Gardens in the mid 80s, and then left in the mid 90s. I have always felt like a child of polar opposite places, both geographically and, for lack of a better word, spiritually. You know, I love the forest, I love the countryside. We've talked about how we both feel about nature, and a love of nature is something that defines me. But I also have this profoundly

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urban New York City experience. You know, it’s like a strain in my DNA, it’s in my blood. I think part of the power of your perspective is that you’ve lived in other places too, because sometimes it's hard to write well about what we take for granted as reality, without the juxtaposition of something else, or the clarity of absence. You know, I love that. That’s a really good point. The fact that I’ve, like, sort of ping- ponged between upstate New York and the city. Yeah, the distance has allowed me some perspective that, had I not left the city, I might not have now. I want to talk about The Lover a little bit.

I love that our friend Fabienne [François Keck, MFA '24] told you recently, “Eugenie, you are Marguerite Duras!” In France, they don't make as much of a distinction between nonfiction and fiction as we do. It's just prose, which is wonderful, but I think The Lover is generally considered a memoir, right? It’s about young adulthood, but written from the narrator’s more mature perspective. There are some major similarities between what Duras is doing with The Lover, and what you're doing with your memoir—– looking closely at power between men and women, and considering class, and of course, both books are about an affair. One of the most beautiful experiences a writer can have is when they feel like they are seeing themselves almost perfectly reflected in a book, or maybe not seeing themselves, but seeing their priorities and their desires and their hopes for their own writing in another person's writing. And I have felt that way about a number of specific books. Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, which I just gifted you, is, obviously, one of them. A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux is another. Also Simple Passion

by Ernaux. Oh, Thomas De Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. That book made a massive, massive impression on

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my understanding of how meaning can be conveyed, in a text, through far more impressionistic and dreamlike means. And, God, there’s so many other ones. But anyway, when I reread The Lover three weeks ago, it was as though I was seeing all of these things crystallized into this ultra pure form. It's like The Lover is pure heroin. Maybe that's a bad metaphor, but I had this sort of explosion of recognition and permission when I read The Lover. There are so many of us who never get to see ourselves represented in literature, so we never know what’s possible. Yeah, exactly. It's incredibly important. Yeah, it's super, super important. Permission is a beautiful thing. Do you think what Duras does formally, structurally, with the book, is one of the things that makes you feel seen?

Yes, 100%. The Lover, structurally, thematically, and then, on a sentence level, because of her syntax and the rhythm of her sentences, and then the brevity and economy of her sentences… well, I just want to understand how she’s doing it, because it's really mystifying. And I love being mystified by writing. When I sit down and I look at a sentence or a paragraph over and over again, and I could read it a thousand times and still not fully understand what's going on, that is the type of writing that excites me the most, and that's what I want to try and emulate.

One of the things she’s doing structurally is she introduces the major themes of the book within the first ten pages in a really unexpected way. From what I understand, those themes are: memory, the act of remembering, the idea of time, and how time, in writing, can become very malleable and nonlinear and in certain ways more reflective of things that astrophysicists say about time. They’re discovering that time is something that actually bends around massive bodies in space like planets and black holes. And I love that something that astrophysicists

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study in outer space also happens to be what certain writers are interested in. To me, that really speaks to the transcendent power that writing can have and that I see from time to time in books like The Lover.

Something she does in the first pages is to regard her own appearance in this hyper- objective way. And the objectivity comes through in the content of the sentence but also in the form of the sentence. She totally fucks with time in this way too, right? She ages in a way not in accordance with how we normally age… Right, there are those early lines: “It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen.” She’s looking at this story that our society normally deems unimportant: a very young woman having an affair with an older man and how the experience changes her. I mean, that’s such a reduction of the book’s narrative. But, yeah, you could say that’s what the book is “about.” And she makes it seem like outer fucking space. I think that kind of writing can only be born out of an extremely keen capacity or passion for observation. And observation is the act of seeing. It’s the act of seeing, with a very powerful effort to see things very differently, to look at things we might consider to be mundane, or obvious, or normal, or enter whatever word you choose, and to then see it as though you’re an alien who’s never encountered it before.

You made this delicious herb salad for us this summer.

I'm usually kind of intimidated by recipes that have a ton of ingredients, but you sent the recipe after, and it was actually pretty approachable. Most of the measurements were approximate, like a ¼ cup to a ½ cup of such-andsuch. I thought: I could make this. It doesn’t intimidate me

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so much, this recipe for herb salad. What would you say is the recipe for Eugenie Dalland? And if you get shy about this, you can just talk about what ingredients you think make for a good writer. What are the ingredients in terms of a creative practice and ways of moving in the world that can lead to this kind of galaxy brain, this mystifying, outer space writing? What are the ingredients? Well, I like that.

What's funny about this recipe is that the amounts are abstract, and there's flexibility, but it's a very specific dish and unusual. It's a very specific melding of flavors that are by no means unusual together. You just wouldn't normally think of them. It combines the bitterness of herbs with a sweet tang of vinegar, and there's mint, radish, fennel, parsley, cilantro, cucumbers…I forget, there's a bunch of other stuff too. Oh, pickled onions! Yeah, there's a lot of shit in there. But, yeah, I think as it pertains to the writer at large, or me as a writer, I think it's helpful to think of it as grabbing a handful of something from this experience or that experience that interests you, and to keep it with you, to put it in the pantry of your brain. I think it's about moving through life and holding onto specific feelings and ideas and experiences that really made an impact on you, regardless of what they were. My mom cooks a lot, and she's from New Orleans, and food is a very big part of the culture there. Her main thing with cooking is flavor, and really strong flavors, and maybe in a strange way that is actually something that I carry over into, not only my own cooking, but my writing. I'm all about strong emotions and strong feelings (and obviously ideas and thoughts and abstractions and things that pertain more to the intellect), but I'm very much about feeling and emotion and these things are a little bit more tied, as we say, to the body.

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Tell me about Riot of Perfume, which was an arts and culture magazine that you started in 2011, with your friend Marco. It was only published in print, right? And because I've never seen it, can you describe what it looks like? Was it kind of like BOMB? That’s kind of what I'm picturing.

Oh, my God, I can't believe I didn't bring you any issues. All right, next time I see you, I'm bringing you a bunch of copies of Riot of Perfume. Oh, my God, what was our format? A-10? A-8? I can't remember the printer’s jargon definition. When we started off, it was only in black and white, and it was only matte paper.

We started doing color by the second issue, but we kept doing matte paper until Issue Five, when we had an art director who wanted to make the first half of the magazine in matte and the second half in gloss. Whenever I show a copy of the magazine to friends, after telling them about it for a long time, they see it and they're, like, very surprised, I don't know, by how polished it is. I guess the way that I talk about it often leads people to think that it's more of a zine. Or wide format like old issues of BOMB, like almost more of a guerilla style publication. And that was the whole point, was that it would feel like a guerilla style magazine, but we…we didn't want it to be polished per se…but certainly we wanted it to have the feel of a substantial magazine. But the content, the content is where you… Yes, that's exactly it. The content was where we put all of our effort into a more guerilla style vision. We wanted to publish work that we were not seeing anywhere else, and to give artists from literally every genre carte blanche to pursue an idea, like a weird, wacky idea, and take creative risks and try to execute that idea. And the really cool thing was that more often than not, it worked out. Because sometimes you have a crazy idea, you take risks, and it doesn't always work, but it is so fucking important to take those risks

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and to try and make something that does not look like every fucking other thing. Homogeneity is so, I mean, it's the name of the game today. Obviously, there are countless people, and we know many of them, who are doing their own thing, but God knows it is fucking hard to do that. It is so hard to have integrity.

Can I read this one quote that I have returned to many, many times over the years? I came upon it after we had been doing Riot of Perfume for a long time. But it kind of encapsulates a lot of the sentiment that we all had about Riot of Perfume while we were there. It's a quote by a fashion designer named Charles James who is mostly known for these super structurally engineered ball gowns from like the 1940s and the 1950s but he had this really interesting career in the 60s and 70s when he was penniless and had fallen out of favor with Vogue and all of the super important, you know, tastemakers, or whatever, in the fashion industry. But he found this really interesting crew of artists in the 70s, and he started creating really innovative clothes that had never been made before. Literally dozens of other designers copied what he was making during that time, and he died totally broke. Here’s the quote: “There is no shortcut to creation. There may also be no profit in it, but the search for the idea itself found. After a long, exhausting struggle, the idea, which stands on its own merits throughout time, that is radium.” He really liked radium, he just thought it was, like, the coolest thing ever. I like that, because there's a danger to radium, right? And making art is dangerous. Art might ruin your life, at least a little.

Yeah. Very, very true. Yeah, totally. I mean, again, this is an even bigger tangent, but I have been thinking a lot about June Jordan, and because there’s sort of a renewed interest, or the beginning of what I hope is a renewed interest, in her prose and her importance as a Black feminist thinker and writer

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and poet. She had this illustrious, phenomenal career that was then totally sidelined for about a decade because of her art, specifically her activism and her incredible poems that were in support of Palestine and Palestinian struggle. Two in particular stand out in my mind, called “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” and “Moving Towards Home.” She was a very, very vocal activist, and she paid for it. She stopped receiving invitations to lecture and to teach, publishers refused to work with her, no one would do interviews with her, nothing. So yeah, I mean, standing up for your art and what you believe in can, as you say, be a very dangerous thing. Oh gosh, now I want to talk about June Jordan for an hour. But, I think we need to talk, at least briefly, about poetry within the context of Riot of Perfume. Can you tell me a little bit about the poets you published, and about your relationship to the genre, because I have always suspected you have a very strong relationship to poetry. I should have mentioned this earlier, but the title, Riot of Perfume, comes from a Rimbaud poem, “Morning of Drunkenness,” or “Matinée d’Ivresse,” and my friend Marco, who I co-founded the magazine with, came up with the title. Marco always called it a bad translation of the final line of “Morning of Drunkenness.” I actually looked it up and the line is fucking amazing, something like “it began with a certain disgust…it ends in a riot of perfumes.” Yeah, it's a fabulous line. And we were really born out of, as we saw it, what Arthur Rimbaud was all about, sort of approaching language with a truly, genuinely iconoclastic, you know, hammer bludgeon. He really bludgeoned language.

That's not what I mean. He was so…what's the term that we use all the time now? Galaxy brain. There’s something very intuitive and impulsive about his work that we wanted to

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emulate. Part of that pertained to this idea of giving people carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, because that's what he did. Poetry has been an important pillar of Riot of Perfume.

And I'm really proud to say, or, you know, not proud, because it's not my accomplishment alone, but I'm very, very happy to say that we published almost exclusively poetry in translation.

Many of the poets that we translated had never been translated into English before. One was Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, a Mexican poet who co-founded the Infrarealism movement and was writing from the 1970s through the late 1990s. He was very close with Bolaño and inspired one of the main characters in Savage Detectives. God there were so many other poets, let’s see…

Olivier Larronde, Dennis Novikov, Shūzō Takiguchi, Paul van Ostaijen, Stefan Döring, Hsia Yü. Some more well-known people too, Alejandra Pizarnik. Mary Ann Caws translated a few poems for us once. But we also published a ton of very young poets, obscure poets, poets no one had ever heard of.

I've always read a lot of poetry. It’s certainly an art form that collates, or crystallizes, a lot of artistic sentiments and ways of thinking. I’ve always felt that there is something about poetry that is deeply intrinsic to the act—the art—of writing anything.

It won’t do any harm! No, it won’t do any harm. Poetry’s part of the recipe then. Hell yes it is. Mix well.

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Eugenie’s Herb Salad: Fresh purple lettuce, butter lettuce, arugula, or whatever you like most! I think for the amount I made for the three of us, I used almost a whole plastic box of baby lettuce. Spinach could work, but I think it’s too thick. parsley–½ cup packed cilantro–½ cup packed basil–¼-½ cup packed mint–¼-½ cup packed (herbs you can use in whatever measurements/proportions you like! that’s just how I made it last week based on what we had available) radishes–about 4 or 5, thinly sliced fennel–one quarter to half the head of fennel, thinly sliced red onion–one small red onion, thinly sliced (you can use more or less based on personal preference) cucumber–I use the smaller ones that are very crunchy, maybe about 4 of them, thinly sliced pine nuts–optional! maybe a couple tablespoons

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NONFICTION

Leaving Bethlehem (AN EXCERPT)

REBEKAH PAHL

“It’s easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.”

—Joan Didion 1 Looking back on it now, I find it strangely poetic that I can trace the origins of my spiritual unraveling back to Bethlehem.

In Christianity, Bethlehem holds mythical status—the place where Jesus was born, where God made Himself incarnate. In the summer of 2009, Bethlehem was where I came to see how unexamined faith is prone to overriding more urgent truths, and is now emblematic in my mind for different reasons entirely.

I grew up in a small East Texas town, and lived there until I was nineteen, when I moved to the Chicago suburbs to attend Wheaton College, which I more or less chose because my mom idolized it. (She had read somewhere that Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, legendary missionaries of the 1950s, had both attended, a detail she relayed to me often.) But perhaps my truer reason for going was that Little Women was my other Bible; Jo March

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had to venture far from home to pave her place in the world.

My subconscious was also taking notes from her.

I stayed close to home my freshman year of college to save money, but by the end of the first semester, I was restless, itching to leave.

My housemates were both in serious relationships, planning impending weddings—and while I wouldn’t have said this at the time, I feared that if I stayed too long I might unknowingly slip into the narrative grooves entrenched all around me. Jo feared this, too, confessing to her mother that she just needed to get out of here—her “here” being Concord, Massachusetts. Lindale, Texas, was my Concord, and like Jo, my insides shrank at the thought of staying put. The idea of changing around people who knew me felt embarrassing; I needed space. Something in me knew that a change in geography was essential to finding my own path, even if that meant moving to a place where I didn’t know anyone. The ache of ambition just barely eclipsed the loneliness.

At a Subway adjacent to the Walmart in town, I divulged my discontentment to my mom. Moments earlier, I had called her out of instinct; I’m sure she detected something in my voice the way only moms can. Now sitting in a sticky booth, this is where she tells me that she thinks I’m right, that it sounds like I do need to leave, and revives the idea of Wheaton in my mind. I return to this moment often, like the beat in a movie you identify later as the point of no return—the unassuming, quiet shift of the axis that alters the trajectory forever. But of course there’s no way of knowing that then.

The following August, I left for Wheaton. My sister Jill moved with me to study acting at Columbia College, also in Chicago.

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My entire family squeezed into two cars and all six of us (my parents and two other siblings) drove up together, the furthest blind faith had taken me thus far.

Chicago was colder than I anticipated, but my mind was on fire.

Running to classes through Wheaton’s quaint, Ivy League-esque campus in the snow, I felt like Jo making her way through New York, bustling through sidewalks, her arms full of books. On weekends, I’d take the train downtown to see Jill, who was living the antithesis of my sequestered experience. While Wheaton was nestled safely in suburbia, Columbia sprawled downtown Chicago; I envied Jill’s evolving street smarts. We’d cram into her twin bunk in the apartment she was splitting with four other art majors and try to fall asleep amidst the L train’s incessant rumbling. While my resident assistant had handed out candy at the all-dorm meeting and asked how she could be praying for me, Jill’s RA was tossing out condoms.

Wheaton heralded itself as “the Harvard of Christian colleges,” making up in academic rigor what it lacked in social freedom (dancing was forbidden except for campus-sponsored events, and students were required to sign a Community Covenant, committing not to drink while enrolled.) I declared a major in rhetoric, but found myself increasingly intrigued by the theology class descriptions. The theology department was undoubtedly Wheaton’s main selling point: every student was required to take a core set of Bible classes. I had grown up Evangelical, but had never known to call it that—the brand of Christianity I grew up in was more charismatic than cerebral.

While I knew Scripture inside and out, the realm of theological tradition was new to me; everyone seemed echelons ahead in terms of being able to articulate a cohesive doctrine of faith. To

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borrow David Foster Wallace’s metaphor, I had been swimming in Christianity my entire life and had no idea how to describe the water. The debater in me was thoroughly turned on by the idea of learning the intricacies of theological arguments. The feminist in me noticed that most of the theology majors were men, by an overwhelming degree. It all felt like a dare.

I had seen brochures for “Wheaton in the Holy Lands” floating around the Student Center, and I slowly became convinced that I needed to go. Entranced by the possibility of retracing Jesus’s steps, I justified the trip to my parents by saying that I wanted to double major in theology. By enrolling in the six weeks abroad, I would be fulfilling nearly all the degree requirements. My parents didn’t need much convincing; I could hear the longing seeping through their excitement—the pilgrimage of every Christian’s dreams.

2 The concept of “Holy Land,” or “Promised Land,” depends on where you’re standing. In both Christianity and Judaism, it traces back to Genesis, where God told Abraham, one of the Fathers of Israel, that “the whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you…” At the time of the promise, Abraham was essentially fresh onto the scene; we know little to nothing about him other than God’s plucking him out and planting this seemingly impossible dream.

It would be centuries before this promise was realized: after almost 400 years of slavery in Egypt, once the Israelites finally made it to Canaan, they were understandably intimidated by

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seeing that the land was already occupied (by giants, deduced by some translations.) As punishment for their doubt, God sent them back to the desert, essentially waiting for an entire generation to die off so a fresh set of followers could pick up the promise. In a sense, the entire narrative arc of the Old Testament is a revolving door of Israel’s wandering, eventual arrival, exile, repeat. And God’s promise to Abraham is still read like a deed to the land.

For the first three weeks of the trip, our group—around 30 students total—stayed at a university in Jerusalem. We spent mornings in the open-air classroom, listening to lectures in preparation of the historical sites we’d visit in the afternoons. Two Wheaton faculty doubled as both chaperones and professors— one of them, Dr. Johnson, was a Texas transplant like me, also in his first year at the college. In his mid-thirties, he presented more youth pastor than professor, weaving pop culture and self-deprecating humor into his lectures. He quickly became a student favorite, entertaining our qualms about predestination during long bus rides to the next ancient site—a seat next to him was the possibility of having your deepest theological knots untied. “Saint Augustine is great, but sometimes I just want to talk about Diet Coke and the Cowboys,” he said jokingly, plopping down in the seat next to me.

The trip was highly curated, tightly planned. From a latenight, private tour through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (containing the speculated locations of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection) to a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee (where Jesus walked on water), each day was the surreal manifestation of places that until then, I had only highlighted in my Bible. Words were becoming flesh right in front of me. Watching the sunrise

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over the Temple Mount from the Garden of Gethsemane—the place where Jesus prayed moments before he was betrayed then ultimately crucified—I felt the gravity of geography. I stayed up late in the computer lab posting to my blog, attempting to render it all for friends and family back in Texas. As my parents were helping pay for my trip, I felt a self-imposed sense of duty to send dispatches from the vantage points they would give anything to experience themselves.

I made friends with a group of three girls, with whom I shared overlapping interests, including a favorite professor. Dr. Burge taught in the theology department and had a reputation for leaning more progressive than the majority of the faculty— specifically on the topic of Israel-Palestine. His classes were famous for filling up within minutes (his were the course descriptions I mulled over); students described his classes as one would a conversion experience. While I hadn’t yet taken a class with him myself, I had heard him speak at a campus chapel where he openly argued against the widely held belief that Christians had an obligation to support the modern state of Israel. I suspected that his popularity on campus enabled his doctrinal divergence from the mainstream, or perhaps it was the other way around. I definitely had no idea just how contentious his pro-Palestinian views were in the larger Evangelical world, outside of the Wheaton bubble.

When Evangelical Christians read the Old Testament now, most of them—however unconsciously—interpret the storyline of ancient Israel as a metaphor for the modern-day church.

God’s promises to Abraham, to Israel, are now the church’s promises; God’s faithfulness to Israel, amidst all her wanderings, demonstrates God’s faithfulness to all believers. It’s common to

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refer to the Old and New Testaments as the two covenants: the old covenant being the one God made with Abraham, and then Jesus representing the dawn of the new. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus often upended Old Testament prophecies, landing their traditional interpretations in surprising places: “you have heard it said, but I tell you…” Burge drew explicit attention to what most believers reflexively assumed: a sense of discontinuity between the covenants, that Jesus’s mission was to expand the message of redemption for everyone rather than Israel alone. While Burge agreed that Israel did in fact play some mysterious and even sacred role in history, contrary to popular Evangelical belief, he didn’t believe it held the key to ushering Christ’s return or that Christians had an obligation to support its now secular state.

The prospect of the End has always contended with the urgency of the present. One of the most compelling arguments against Evangelicalism is that its obsession with heaven, the new Promised Land, obscures the more burning needs here on earth. I remember how the Trinity Broadcasting Network, a Christian TV channel, featured programming with kid-friendly shows during the day and took a hard turn to a more ominous tone at night. I’d catch glimpses on my way to bed of sweaty televangelists like John Hagee yelling at the TV, shouting that what was unfolding in Israel was directly tied to End-Times prophecy, unlocking some cryptic roadmap to Armageddon.

Sweat dripping down his temples, he’d point at the camera, imploring the scared-shitless human on the other side of the screen to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” reinforcing this mysterious link of fates. Given the long-held Evangelical perception of the United States as a “Christian nation” combined with the merging of the Religious Right with the

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Republican Party, this theological mandate to protect Israel— whatever the cost, at whatever bordering nation’s expense— eventually infiltrated foreign policy.

Dr. Burge had connected the girls and me with a Palestinian friend of his in the West Bank, who offered to show us around Bethlehem on our free day. We had already visited Bethlehem, located in the West Bank, just a few days before—with the larger group. Walking through the courtyard just outside the Church of the Nativity, the supposed site of Jesus’s birth, I perused the booths manned by people I assumed were Palestinian. Wooden manger souvenirs, Christmas ornaments—it all felt eerily sanitized.

While I didn’t actually fear that going back into Bethlehem unsanctioned would get us in trouble with Wheaton, I also couldn’t shake the feeling that we were trespassing somehow. In retrospect, that feeling was both misplaced and true: while we weren’t breaking any spoken rule, we were venturing beyond very real ideological lines, and the stakes, I’d later learn, were high. Once we made it past the checkpoint in our cab, the lowgrade panic set in. Clusters of Palestinian drivers congregated smoking cigarettes, waiting to win their next ride. I realized that all we had was a name.

“Don’t tell anyone who we’re looking for,” I said. “That’s the only way we’ll know it’s him.”

The girls nodded in agreement, and we stood close together, vulnerable in our blonde-haired, seemingly European features.

I suddenly felt something I had been shielded from the entire trip: the fear of being a foreign, unknown woman in a crowd of foreign, unknown men. We had willingly left our guides. A

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man emerged from the crowd, walking determinedly toward us.

Elias. The girls and I swapped looks of relief as we followed him to his car.

“I’m so happy to meet you!” he said, smoothly weaving through swarms of traffic. “Any friend of Burge is right away, one of mine.”

We spent the afternoon together, stopping first at the church he attended. A small congregation filled a room with thinly carpeted floors and rows of plastic folding chairs, the lyrics to worship songs projected onto a white sheet at the front.

While I was familiar with the songs, words like “freedom” and “deliverance” hit different when you’re singing from inside of a wall manned by armed soldiers.

Over a lunch spread of olives, pita, figs, and tabbouleh, Elias answered our logistical questions about maneuvering in and out of the West Bank: Did every Palestinian need a permit to leave and then come back in? Yes. How long had it been like this, with the wall? Since the early 2000s. It’s even harder living with the memory of what it was like without it. How long do you have to wait in line at the checkpoints? While the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem only takes half an hour, because of the checkpoint, it could easily take two hours a day.

Elias drove us to Beit Sahour, Shepherd’s Field, the place where the angels had announced to the shepherds the night Jesus was born, that they would find him “wrapped in cloth, lying in a manger.”

I remembered a sermon I had heard about how shepherds at the time were a despised, outsider class, so choosing to appear to them foreshadowed the sociopolitical upending Jesus represented. The field wasn’t far from the Church of the Nativity, where we had been only days before. Standing in the

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hot sun, limestone and sage green bush underfoot, I had the sense of being closer to the real. I squinted at the all-white, apartment-like structures in the distance.

“Israeli settlements,” Elias said, preempting my question.

“They’re popping up everywhere.”

“But how are they getting the land rights?” I asked. “What about the Palestinians who owned it originally?”

Elias scuffed the ground with his shoe, shaking his head, his answer.

Wanting to get us back to the other side of the wall before sunset, Elias said he had one more place he wanted to take us.

The entrance to Aida Refugee Camp is shaped as a keyhole, with a large key resting atop it. The camp was established in 1950, in response to the Nakba, or “The Catastrophe,” the war that erupted after Israel became a state in 1948. From 1947 to 1949, more than 726,000 Palestinians were displaced, and around 15,000 were killed in a series of Zionist-led massacres.

Many of the 6,000 Palestinians living in the camp now still hold the keys to their original homes.

The U.S. was the first country to recognize Israel as an independent state on May 14, 1948. Harry Truman—an Evangelical—was president, and in sifting through past speeches and press releases that might signal some clue to his thinking, it’s hard to dismiss how Scripture was the key to his foreign policy. During a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, just a few months after his presidency ended, Truman was introduced as “the man who helped create the state of Israel,” to which Truman responded, “What do you

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mean, ‘helped to create?’ I am Cyrus. I am Cyrus.” In the Bible, Cyrus was a Persian king who helped lead the Jewish people out of exile, returning them to the Promised Land. Nestled beneath Truman’s presented, justifiable motivation of helping Israel rebuild after the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust, was a more hidden, yet powerful driver.

Wandering off from the group, I walked through the cramped housing units, sealed off from the sun. I grazed my hand along the staccato-punctured walls, the remnants of bullet holes now tiny openings. I thought of the seemingly unending cycle of exile and oppression, oppressor and oppressed. I thought of how easy it was for my American brain to hold a sense of place loosely—to the point of rootlessness—and how I still couldn’t help but wish for a loosening here. I wondered about the stories that keep us gripping tight. I wondered about the truths I was gripping, how I’d never thought to consider them as stories I’d simply been taught to believe.

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