Cellar Door Fall 2018

Cellar Door

CELLAR DOOR fall 2018 1

awards poetry F I R S T P L AC E A b u e l o m i ra n d a d i a z fiction F I R S T P L AC E H o o k h a n d samuel gee S E C O N D P L AC E Av e r a g e k i ra n w h e e l e r T H I R D P L AC E T h e r e L i v e d a Fe a t h e r e d FlightlessMan kayla rutledge art F I R S T P L AC E T h e C o r n e r natasja brezenski S E C O N D P L AC E T h e B o y d a r b y f a ra c i T H I R D P L AC E Yo n c é l a u re n w i l k i n s o n

judges p o e t r y //

Coco Wilder is a poet and artist living i n No r t h C a r o l i n a . S i n c e g r a d u a t i n g f r o m U N C - C h a p e l H i l l , she has gone on to work at the mall, a restaurant kitchen, get fired from a temp job at the offices of a famous ride-share app, a s w e l l a s e a r n a n M FA i n Po e t r y f r o m C o l u m b i a Un i v e r s i t y.

A w e b e d i t o r a t Fo u r Wa y R e v i e w a n d t h e r e c i p i e n t o f a 2 0 1 8 A c a d e m y o f A m e r i c a n Po e t s Un i v e r s i t y Pr i z e , h e r w r i t i n g h a s a p p e a r e d a t p o e t s . o r g , Vo l u b l e L a b, a n d O x f o rd A m e r i c a n .

f i c t i o n //

Je n Ju l i a n i s a w r i t e r, a r t i s t , a n d t r a n s i e n t No r t h C a r o l i n i a n . S h e h o l d s a P h D i n C r e a t i v e Wr i t i n g f r o m t h e Un i v e r s i t y o f M i s s o u r i , C o l u m b i a , a n d a n M FA i n Fi c t i o n f r o m U N C Gr e e n s b o r o . C u r r e n t l y, s h e t e a c h e s f i c tion and literature at Allegheny College. Her debut short stor y collection, Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, w a s p u b l i s h e d b y Pr e s s 5 3 i n 2 0 1 8 , a n d h e r m o s t r e c e n t f i c t i o n a n d e s s a y s h a v e a p p e a r e d i n Tr i Q u a r t e r l y, B e e c h e r’s M a g a z i n e , T h e G r e e n s b o r o R e v i e w, T h e C h a t t a h o o c h e e R e v i e w a n d C l e a v e r. S h e i s a 2 0 1 6 C l a r i o n a l u m n a a n d a n enthusiast for all things strange, speculative, and human.

a r t //

G e s c h e Wü r f e l i s a t r a i n e d a r t i s t , u r b a n p l a n n e r, a n d v i s u a l s o c i o l o g i s t . H e r w o r k h a s b e e n e x h i b i t e d nationally and internationally; venues include CAM Ral e i g h , B l u e S k y G a l l e r y, M a s s a c h u s e t t s I n s t i t u t e o f Te c h n o l o g y, Ta t e Mo d e r n , G o l d s m i t h s , Un i v e r s i t y o f t h e A r t s P h i l a d e l p h i a , a n d C o r n e r h o u s e M a n c h e s t e r. I n 2 0 0 7 , s h e w a s s e l e c t e d a s o n e o f t h e B l o o m b e r g Ne w C o n t e m p o r a r i e s .

staff E D I TO R - I N - C H I E F A RT E D I TO R F I C T I O N E D I TO R P O E T RY E D I TO R TREASURER A RT S TA F F

F I C T I O N S TA F F

P O E T RY S TA F F

L AY O U T & D E S I G N O R I G I N A L A RT WO R K FAC U LT Y A DV I S O R

tara boldrin taylor lawing grace towery elizabeth beckman ashlyn beach reanna brooks jenna demartino maansi patel sally sasz devyn smith ellen baker ashlyn beach grace karegeannes michelle langlois megan tan ryan vulpis li-anne wright taylor brunson maggie fogle crystal yu tara boldrin wyatt mcnamara michael mcfee

words of thanks To Michael McFee for his continued support to the Door for 26 years To our donors, and to the English and Creative Writing departments for their continued devotion to Cellar Door and for their appreciation of arts education To Bland Simpson for his peristent, generous support To Wyatt McNamara for producing the original art that lines this text To the artists, the writers, and the poets who make art every day for letting us share their art with the rest of campus, and beyond

table of contents poetry Floodplains / aisling henihan / 2 Abuelo / miranda diaz / 3 To w a rd s t h e A l g e r i a n B o r d e r / a l a i n a b a i n b r i d g e / 4 Hu n t i n g S e a s o n / k a t e m e a d o w s / 6 Sometimes in April / hanna watson / 7 My s i s t e r g o e s d o w n t o t h e c r e e k t o c o o k d i r t / k i e r a n p a t e l / 8

fiction Ave r a g e / k i r a n w h e e l e r / 1 2 Hookhand / samuel gee / 16 H i d d e n Pa r t s / k e l s i e q u a / 1 9 Sp i n / m e g a n b u s b i c e / 2 4 A D a u g h t e r ’s C r i t i q u e / a s h t o n c a p o z z i / 2 6 Hero / erin scannell / 30 T h e re L i ve d a Fe a t h e r e d , F l i g h t l e s s M a n / k a y l a r u t l e d g e / 3 3

art The Corner / natasja brezenski / 42 The Boy / darby faraci / 43 Flame / sofia lesnewski / 44 Revival / sofia lesnewski / 45 Articles / niyanta patel / 46 August / jacob yankey / 47 D a d ’s P l a c e / j a c o b y a n k e y / 4 7 L a ye r s 1 / s a r a h c l o u s e r / 4 8 Yo n c é / l a u r e n w i l k i n s o n / 4 9

poetry

AISLING HENIHAN

Floodplain River’s many tongues taste each door she tumbles past on the way to low ground, gathering from headwater to slough, streaming perennial.

Twisting as she piles against herself, millions of gallons, and hungrier by the hour, she licks windows, eaves, recalling flavor nearly forgotten, salt of earth, old lover’s kiss, more sour with time. She gulps streets to satisfy a thirst for soil, reclaiming land which has always belonged to her—she who gives and takes, sweeping in her retreat, the hubris of our hand pulled out to sea on her falling tides, leaving only residue: water line on the wall, scrap of paper in the tree, alluvial muck.

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MIRANDA DIAZ

Abuelo I sat cross-legged on the cool concrete Listening to the harsh mosquito hum Watching ice cubes slowly melt in a glass Of rum and coke, red and orange bleeding Together in the sunshine afterthought Of a late summer, sticky and stagnant.

Libre spelled in liquor, Cuba on ice.

Waterlogged speakers spilled Celia Cruz Into the humid air, clogged with the sharp Sweetness of my grandfather’s long cigar.

Thick around the stuffing of tobacco, Volcanic-dust ash tapped into a tray, A pungent crown of smoke settled on his Not-yet gray head. His mustache was waxed stiff, Royalty enthroned on a wicker chair.

His linen shirt was ironed flat, bright white, But wrinkled with his eyes as he leaned back Into his kingdom of palm trees and bricks.

Libre was in a Miami backyard, And Cuba was held tight between his lips.

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ALAINA BAINBRIDGE

To w a r d s t h e A l g e r i a n B o r d e r Man with a Koran charm on the rearview drives us further into the Sahara. Sandstorms happen midday, most days. Can’t open the windows even though the Jeep smells like mint and sick. Stop for a herd of sheep. Stop behind a truck full of hay, about to tip over in the radio static.

Pull over to wipe up the vomit. Right off the road, a fruit stand. But the olives are rotting.

Nowadays, the good oranges get sent to Spain.

Buy two stones instead.

Turquoise and coral, both from Gibraltar, the man says.

Hands me a compass.

It points six directions at once, but only at dusk.

Keep driving North.

Past a guarded hotel.

Past three blondes, wrapping their hair in scarves, posed inside a broken down Hollywood set: like fish against the sky, stars appear.

Land is flatter at night, windy.

Fire and sparks 4

move in strange ways this far out.

Stop for light stones laid across the road.

A man with a fake gold watch, waving his hands, points down to a single red trip wire.

How much charge can desert stars absorb?

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K AT E M E A D OW S

Hu n t i n g S e a s o n There’s a skinny boy in tall grass. A rifle crack in dull dusk.

The bounds of the trees pull back, wary of bare shoulder blades and bug-bitten rib cage— of what harshness they may contain.

Night-sounds thrum and hiss their caution. The silhouette stumbles on, lungs raw from rabbit chase. Face tilted back, illiterate to stars. A little drunk off moonshine and bloodrage.

In the woods, there’s a white doe hidden beneath laurel shade.

The brambles misconstrue those ancestral words carved into diamond breastplate: Noli me tangere. Split-hooves shuffle: cannot hide, cannot escape. Eyes cut wide with flashlight blade. Leather boots crunch over littered glass, cigarette ash. Dog teeth gnash. Rifle crack. Once, then Twice. There’s a mess of animal in the bluestem and wild rye.

A cluster of broken blood vessels below the collarbone, a knick on the inner thigh— flesh wounds never seen, never acknowledged. The grass will hold the gore instead.

Only the head, still unsullied white, a piece for the wall.

Nailed between other braggish bounties, among other quiet objects.

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H A N N A WAT S O N

Sometimes in April the world turned its back on the rain that fell on rwanda in april 1994. raoul peck commemorated the genocide in his 2005 film: Sometimes in April on still nights or blue moons or saturdays, we tried to make sense of the tails of shooting stars, boyfriends, rain that falls Sometimes in April. this time, the candle waltzed with its shadow. smoke wandered to her room’s corners, hiding from the halo around the dim little screen. as the credits rolled, i sank into the music, reading names, collecting letters: i could piece them together better than dirty bloodstreams, orphans, machine guns. i watched her heart break behind her delicate eyes. lashes stuck together and tears anointed her face like rain that falls Sometimes in April. silence caught my breath before i could ask her if God cried over mangled bodies, war, shattered windows. her head felt lighter on my shoulder, her third piercing less rebellious, my mountains easier to move when i watched brothers rip nation, schoolgirls, tutsi apart. her room’s air knew me. it had surveyed the valleys between my goose bumps before. my pulse mourned in labored flashes; i couldn’t find answers in its telegrams, half-written poems. we wanted to escape, whisper of recipes, libraries, girlish things. but pain crept through cracks in her laptop, visions that return like rain that falls Sometimes in April.

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K I E R A N PAT E L

My s i s t e r g o e s d o w n t o t h e c r e e k t o cook dirt After brushing her teeth, to scrape away the slick, greasy menthol mint with little bits of filth, my sister would sneak between the cool slip of air that guarded her twenties, her thirties, and cook dirt. It was there, where the fingerless grip of a dogwood snag’s roots squeezed the sand and moss against the bank, where she squatted to stir the earth with a long-handled ladle.

She hung the rest of her cookware from the epicormic shoots, and slid her gloves and grammar book in the space between the ground and an arched root recoiled back like a frightened cat.

I watched her swap the ladle for a pair of delicate tongs, and pluck a caddisfly larvae, send him cascading gently through the air to a section of creek where he could architecture a home on his own. When her knees gave her trouble, she would stand, not bothering to brush away any bark shavings or crusts from where they had gathered in the folds of her jeans.

She would go cleave the jewels of the forest. I know this not from seeing her do it, but later from the contents of the stew— jointed fronds of cedar, threads of mycelium, the spit of the earth, the bloom of protista, matte-red fruit of the magnolia— and I never did anything to stop her.

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I watched as she plunged the spoon deeper and deeper into the stew.

Nothing I would ever do could stop her.

Her hand, her arm.

I couldn’t have stopped her.

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fiction

KIRAN WHEELER

Av e r a g e

O

ur story begins with Mrs. Ellie Smith standing on the front stoop of her perfectly average house, which was surrounded by other perfectly average houses, creating an overwhelmingly average cul-de-sac in a repressively average neighborhood.

Ellie’s plain brown eyes were focused on something at the end of the court: a garishly yellow school bus, which had paused to regurgitate high schoolers onto the street. Even from this distance, it was easy for Ellie to tell which two kids belonged to her; Jack and Julia emerged from the bus walking right beside each other, their steps equidistant and perfectly timed, like a metronome.

Jack and Julia were twins, as anyone could see, though they were two different people, which was easy to forget. They had the same dark brown hair, lean frames, and, most extraordinary of all, light gray eyes, like sunlight filtered through a glass of water, or a chunk of quartz crystal. “How beautiful!” everyone always said. “Your kids are so lucky to have such incredible eyes!” Ellie would always smile politely and thank them, but she secretly hated her children’s eyes for the curious stares they elicited.

No one asked Jack and Julia what they thought of their eyes. Although, looking back on it, it’s perfectly possible that someone had indeed asked them, and had only received blank gray stares in response.

“Come on,” Ellie muttered, waving her hand in the universal motion for hurry up, but she knew it was useless. Jack and Julia didn’t hurry unless they wanted to; they didn’t do anything unless they wanted to.

They two of them reached the plain blue front door of their house and stepped inside to the foyer when they were hit with the sharp smell of cleaning products, different from the usual scent of nothing.

“Clorox,” Jack said immediately. “Mom’s been cleaning.”

“Someone important is coming to dinner,” agreed Julia.

Ellie had indeed been cleaning for more than usual; someone important was coming to dinner. “Someone important is coming for dinner,” she told her children, but, of course, they knew that already.

The twins dropped their identical backpacks beside the table, mechanically ate more food than an average person would have thought humanly possible, and

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began on their homework. It really should’ve taken them a few minutes, but Jack and Julia knew that it took their peers hours, so they dragged it out. For them, it was painful. For Ellie, it was blissful.

At seven o’clock on the dot, the garage door opened with a growl, and Peter Smith walked into the kitchen. He placed his leather briefcase on the floor beside Jack’s plain black backpack. “Hello, love,” he greeted his wife, who was standing in front of the stove, stirring something that looked his children had identified as plain white rice. He greeted his kids: “Hello, Jack. Hello, Julia.”

“Rough day at work, Dad?” Julia asked. “I can tell that you didn’t get any of the doughnuts that you were eyeing in the break room.”

Jack’s cold gray eyes zoomed in on a spot of ink on Peter’s sleeve. “Oh, your pen exploded,” he noted, “and someone else was assigned to the project you wanted.

Rough day indeed.”

Peter gave a tired sigh and turned away. He was used to receiving this type of reaction from his kids. It had been irritating at first, but he’d grown more accustomed to their oddness with time.

“When will our guest be here?” Peter asked his wife, removing his jacket and placing it on the back of his chair. Ellie placed the dish of rice on the table, which was set with everything in preparation for a pleasant, if plain, dinner.

“Any minute,” she said, smoothing down her hair as there was a staccato knock on the door.

Behind the door was a woman who was severe in every way: her eyes were a severe blue, staring severely at Ellie above severe, sharp cheekbones, her graystreaked hair pulled back into a severe bun. “Hello, Elliott,” she said.

“Pleasure to see you again.”

Ellie cringed. “Please, call me Ellie,” she replied, ushering the woman into the house. “Elliott is a boy’s name.”

“It’s an unusual name,” the woman noted.

“Exactly.”

The woman nodded and walked into the house, her severe high heels making severe sounds as they clicked against the hardwood floor. “Hello, twins,” she said, eyeing Jack and Julia with a cool, appraising stare. They returned it. “My,

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how you’ve grown since I last saw you.” The woman made a breathy sound that the twins assumed was supposed to be a laugh. “Of course, that was sixteen years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Dr. Fiona Amber Waxwell,” Julia said, her voice completely neutral.

“PhDs in human and animal genetics and pathology, along with biological sciences.”

“Quite obsessed with her work,” Jack replied. “She’s single, never married. Lives alone, without so much as a cat. No friends; too busy with work, and her little ‘side projects.’”

“Us.” “Of course,” Jack said, his shocking eyes never wavering from the doctor’s clever ones.

“Hm,” Dr. Waxwell said to Ellie and Peter, “I see what you meant about their oddness. You know, when I heard about your request, Ellie, I thought that there might be some repercussions. I mean, most parents ask for their children to be extraordinary, not painfully average.”

“I’ve had enough of the extraordinary for a lifetime,” Ellie replied. “Please, shall we sit?” She gestured towards the table, though Dr. Waxwell stared at the twins for another long moment before taking her seat.

“Peas?” asked Peter, handing the dish over to Fiona, who scooped some onto her plate and then handed it over to Julia, who dumped the rest of the peas onto her own plate and began shoveling them in.

The doctor stared for a moment before she blinked out of her stupor. “Are you doing well in school, Jack? Julia?”

Peter intercepted the question with the ease of the long-practiced. “They do just fine in school. Very average.”

“Yes, very average,” agreed Ellie.

“Very average,” repeated the doctor. “You two must be pleased.”

The twins’ parents looked at their children with identical expressions of affectionate exasperation on their average faces. “It hasn’t been perfect,” Ellie began cautiously, watching Jack shovel an chicken into his mouth as Julia looked on

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with approval, a small smirk playing about her lips, “but we’ve gotten more than we bargained for.”

“You know,” said the doctor, “what you wanted, complete mediocrity, it’s impossible.” She fixed her flat eyes on Jack, who stared back, unblinking. She looked away. “Something has to give. I’m surprised the twins are even like this, to tell you the truth. Usually this sort of ordinariness implodes on itself to create something entirely extraordinary.”

“Listen to that. A veritable genius,” Julia said, flippancy coloring her voice.

“Not genius enough to ever truly figure it out,” Jack noted, looking back at his parents with the same expression of affectionate exasperation as they’d bestowed upon him just minutes earlier.

Fiona Waxwell continued to stare at the two of them with fascination. “Do you two know anything about something like what I’m talking about?”

Julia drank her milk.

“Have you two had experiences that might attest to something odd? Surprising?

Perpetually out of the ordinary?”

Jack ate his rice.

“I don’t know why you even bother,” Ellie told the doctor, shaking her head dejectedly. “They haven’t said a word their entire lives. Why would they answer you now?”

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SAMUEL GEE

Hookhand

A

lright. I’ll tell you how it happened. His father did it to him. He saw him take the deaf girl out to the woods and sign to her. They were friends. The boy took the flashlight and through the kitchen window the father saw the boy’s hands moving in and out of the yellow glow between the black trees. The night cold as a Russian sentence, no money for the heat, the liquor bottles empty and the wine the father kept for emergencies missing, and the father’s breath fell into the sink and pooled in the drain. The father saw the flashlight swim under the deaf girl’s dress. She glowed like a lamp with an old shade. Her mouth stretched and her moan powdered in the frigid air and swirled around the boy’s blond hair, and her moan fell around their feet where the boy shivered in his sneakers with no socks, and her moan turned dandelion and jasmine in the light from the flashlight, and where the boy, on his knees by now, drank it up.

The father gripped the edge of the sink with one hand. With the other he plugged a cigarette in his mouth and burned his lips two, three times before he found the end. He stood there smoking, watching them, until the flashlight’s batteries sputtered out and the deaf girl walked back through the woods to the boarding school.

When the boy came back in he did it with a bread knife. The boy was young, his wrist skinny. It didn’t take long. The father was sober. The boy wasn’t. When he was done he tied a tourniquet with the bailing twine he found in the boy’s sweatshirt pocket. The bailing twine was looped around a cheap bottle of wine.

So you got her drunk first, he said. Where’d you put the rest? and the boy went to wave towards the window, and seeing no right hand, sobbed louder, then pointed with the other towards a tarp lean-to he’d built last week with the girl.

The father left, his coat askew on his shoulders, fumbling with the hood. The boy called 911 on his father’s cell phone. He never remembered to take it with him. The boy slipped out the front door and met the ambulance at the end of the street.

I don’t know what happened in the in-between. Institutions. No, not that kind, not at first. The one for wards of the state. Foster homes. Foster home to home to home. Medications I can’t pronounce. At eighteen, first institution. That kind. They kept him for two weeks, then three, then two months. They passed five hundred volts through his brain. He got better. They put him on day leave.

It’s when you’re not all okay, but you’re there enough to walk to the CVS and buy a Coke if you want, or just wander around the parking lot. They don’t call

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anyone unless you don’t come back before eight. On his first day leave he went on a walk. It was summer. He just kept walking.

I don’t know how he got the hook. He never had a prosthesis. They never fitted him for one, he could never pay for it. But it’s not what you’re thinking.

It doesn’t look like that. It’s not that big. It’s no bigger than your thumb to the first knuckle. It’s a fishhook. There’s no black velvet cuff, no long scythe attached to his stump. It’s a fishhook. He tied it around his wrist with fishing twine. The blood came from a trout, they tested it.

I don’t know how he got it, but here’s what I think happened next. He just keeps walking, right? The man just keeps walking all day. He smells, he’s sweating heavy, he sweats through his shirt and he smells like onions and spam. He walks to the park with the river and then walks along the river so far the park ends and the river branches into all these muddy fingers heavy with reeds and plastic bottles. Mosquitoes dip in and out of the bottles, in and out, and iridescent licks of motor oil circle in brown pools of rainwater. Maybe he’s shirtless, it’s a hot evening, he’s humming a song and trying to remember how another one goes, maybe he tosses his shirt up into the air and that’s when he sees it.

Caught on a tree branch, glittering in the light and the wind. He pulls it down and bites the line and ties it around his wrist with his mouth. Laughing a little to himself. He likes how the hook looks and he likes the sound it makes when he drags it behind him, how it jingles on pebbles and roots and sounds like a waterfall made of silver scraps. He likes that, you know. It’s been a long time since he’s heard something nice, seen something he likes and been able to reach out and take it.

He finds them by accident. All night he heard sirens, but he never guesses they’re for him. He’s stayed off the main roads anyway. The noise of the cars scares him. He’s still humming that same song, the hook still dancing off his wrist. He finds them by accident. They’ve left the dome light on, the one above the rearview mirror, and in the yellow light he sees the boy and the girl dipping in and out of each other’s faces. When the boy lowers his head he sees the girl’s face. Her mouth reminds him of something, but he can’t quite place it, something about the way her mouth looks, the way it stretches, and then her moan like water flows through the gap in the passenger side window and he remembers. Her low moan. The deaf girl’s moan that she never heard. Not her nor his father, just him out there in the woods, the only thing in his life that was ever meant for him alone. The man shakes a little, thinking about it. He steps out of the trees and goes for the passenger door. The boy throws the car into reverse.

The hook snaps off the man’s wrist. The police find him four hours later. The man hasn’t moved.

I’m not saying that’s how it happened. I wasn’t there. I can see you rolling your

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eyes, okay? You weren’t there either. I’m saying that’s what I choose to believe.

Look – can you imagine what he must have felt, standing there in the heat for four hours? Have you ever felt anything like that? Has anyone?

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KELSIE QUA

H i d d e n Pa r t s

Y

ou were thirteen when your wings started to grow out. At first you were proud. You showed your mother, your sister, and all your aunts. “Guess who’s finally a little woman now?” they said among themselves, smiling a little sadly at how time had passed them by since their own becoming.

You bragged at school with your friends, complaining about the binders you were forced to wear so you wouldn’t distract the boys. As if the boys didn’t notice, anyway. As if they didn’t stare at your hidden parts while they sat behind you in class, awed by the strange magic of female bodies, hidden from them by little more than taut, taunting bands of fabric.

Some of your classmates were ashamed when their transformations started.

Ella needed a back brace because her tiny frame could barely support her giant wingspan. Jane, the perennial tomboy, was found in her bed one morning surrounded by bloody feathers, because she didn’t want to become anything other than what she already was.

You were different. Every night after you locked your door and closed the curtains you studied yourself in the mirror. The strange little puffs near your shoulder blades, the silver feathers at the tips that had the shape and shine of steak knives. You loved everything about your wings, especially how broad they were. When you spread them fully they couldn’t even fit in your bedroom mirror. This is how big I am, you’d think. I’m bigger than anybody knows, but me. // You were fourteen the first time you heard about sky swimming. One of the other girls at a slumber party had done it on a visit to her parents’ homeland.

She said there were places across the ocean where women flew straight up into the night, only to race down like shooting stars. The thought both frightened and excited you. There was no sky swimming where you grew up. Only reports of men casting nets to catch young girls brave and foolish enough to flaunt their bodies. You’d seen pictures on true crime shows of their mangled forms tangled in webs of rope. Their wings hacked off, their limbs drooping like wilted flower petals.

You tried to imagine a place where that didn’t happen. A place where you would be safe and free to fly. Whenever you fell asleep after that night, you’d take in the soft, strange texture of your feathers with your fingertips, and try to conjure such a place, but it never seemed quite real.

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// You were fifteen when your first classmate began to molt. Her name was Abigail. Both her parents worked full time and neither explained the precautions she needed to take, or the special binders she needed to wear. Little tufts of feather seemed to trail after her for the better part of a month. Health education classes mandated by the superintendent followed. Humiliating hours were spent severed off from the boys talking about feminine hygiene, and looking at disgusting pictures of half-molted women.

You noticed the graffiti soon after. Sarah is a vulture. Elly is a cuckoo. Annie is a chick. The words seemed to appear everywhere: on television, on the radio, in the books you read. One day in a fight with your father you slammed the door and heard him outside muttering birdbrained bitch. You didn’t think he meant for you to hear. // You were sixteen when you met Jacob. He was a friend’s older brother. You flirted at parties, and sometimes you’d find a quiet place on a back porch or down a hill to share his set of earbuds and listen to a new song together. That was as close as your life ever felt to a movie. Even slapping at mosquitoes seemed romantic when you were looking out at the fireflies against the dark fabric of the woods, and his fingers dared to brush against yours.

He asked about your wings near the end of August, his voice stumbling enough to betray the blush you would’ve seen in better light. You were surprised by his boldness, and a little embarrassed when he said the word aloud.

He wanted to know what they felt like.

You tried to describe it—like bird feathers, sort of, but softer, more like liquid, more like darkness. He didn’t understand. You tried to find the words, but knew they didn’t exist, so you took his hand in yours, and guided it beneath your binder. His fingers laid cool and clammy against your feathers, not daring to pet or feel. His face contorted in an expression you didn’t comprehend.

It was only later, when you returned to the house, that you understood. He scrubbed his hands beneath the garden hose spigot for a full minute before returning to the party, and wouldn’t look you in the eye again. // You were seventeen when your friends started getting their wings clipped. Most claimed it was for hygienic reasons, although a few said it was for convenience.

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Designers always used models with clipped wings. Binders made clothes fit funny. That wasn’t even getting into the irritation of molting.

You hesitated to get it done yourself. It wasn’t because you disagreed on principle. It was because of the place across the ocean, that magical place you first heard about as a girl at a slumber party. The place you visited over and over in your dreams.

You told a friend your dream one day, and she laughed. “A place where women fly freely?” she said. “You’ve always had such a strong imagination, haven’t you?” // You were eighteen the first time you showed a boy your wings. He had a silver tongue and a golden body, a quick laugh and a penetrating gaze. On late night phone calls he told you, in vivid detail, the dreams he had where you were flying. He described what your feathers looked like beneath the light of the moon, how they felt beneath his fingertips. You’d never known a man so comfortable with your body’s strangeness, so perfectly at ease with your differences.

You finally showed him on a Thursday night, in his cramped studio apartment when his roommate was out of town. You had to be careful not to knock over coffee cups left on bookshelves, or stacks of paper by the TV. You wished you could shrink down into something smaller and more convenient. An apology played on your tongue, but you didn’t voice it. You were afraid of ruining the mood, which quickly dissolved of its own accord because he wanted pictures.

You said no immediately and firmly, but slowly his disappointment won you over. You tried to smile, but your mouth twitched and hardened when you tried. After he got what he wanted, he grew apathetic and withdrawn.

In the morning, you went looking for your shoes beneath the coffee table and found other polaroids. Bashful, smiling women, dozens of them, with wings that made yours melt into obscurity.

You left your own photograph, but took the other girls’ with you when you went home. You wanted him to remember you. You wanted him to be ashamed. // You were nineteen when you caved. You’d told yourself you wouldn’t answer if he called again, and you didn’t. Not the first time, nor the second, nor the third. But you couldn’t forget that night. The good parts of it: when he’d run his fingers so softly through your feathers, and placed kisses upon your shoulder

21

blades, right above where the wings connected. You couldn’t forget the sweet nothings he’d whispered in your ear. How he’d called you angel.

When you finally dialed his number, drunk and despondent, neither of you discussed the photographs of the other girls. He told you he missed you. He told you how much he thought about that night. About how sorry he was.

When you showed up at his apartment, he asked if you wanted to go to the roof. “Tell me you haven’t always wanted to try,” he said. “Tell me you don’t ever think about it.”

Your palm was wet against the cool metal railing as you walked up the cement stairs. You’d never wanted something so badly, but you were terrified. He had his hand on your back, rubbing slow circles. You couldn’t tell whether it was there to soothe you or to push you.

The city lights made everything too visible. You felt like you were standing beneath a spotlight on a stage. When you peered over the railing, the ground seemed miles away. He started to undo your binder and you began to cry.

He didn’t comfort you. He laughed and called you a tease. // You were twenty when you read about new laws passed across the sea, banning sky swimming so women would no longer be tempted to put their safety at risk. You became aware of your wings as little more than a weight upon your shoulders that made your back ache, and men whistle.

“It doesn’t really hurt that much,” Margot said, when you asked about the procedure.

“It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” Abigail told you.

“I got so high before I went that I thought the doctor was God,” Judy admitted.

You made the appointment on a Tuesday afternoon, right after you called about getting your teeth cleaned. // You had the procedure on your twenty-first birthday. The scheduling was coincidental. They asked if you were certain you wanted it done, and you asked if

22

you could keep the remnants, once they were clipped off.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said, “we’re really not supposed to let you have them.”

You remember the mask, the way they asked you to count backward from ten, and then nothing.

Nothing until you walked home from the hospital, your body aching but light, as if there were nothing left of you at all.

23

MEGAN BUSBICE

Sp i n

“T

ell us about your research,” my father said. I heard David shift in the backseat; he took a breath. And then he began. He explained quantum mechanics and carbon nanotubes and biomedical engineering with the ease of practice and fascination. David’s voice was steady and clever and kind, the voice of a teacher, and I leaned back in my seat, glad to have the responsibility for conversation taken off my shoulders. I tipped my head toward the window and listened.

The evening sky was faded by the sheet of clouds, rain prophesized by the stillness of the leaves on the trees and the silence in the air. I closed my eyes absorbed David’s words. He didn’t seem to mind my quiet attention.

“It’s called a spin, you see?” he said. “Because as soon as one particle spins in one direction, the matching particle spins in the other direction. Equal and opposite.”

Somewhere in the heavens, the Jenga blocks collapsed, and rain dropped pounding on the windshield, sudden and furious. My father listened to David but slowed the car as the visibility smudged to gray.

David didn’t stop, merely raising his voice. I traced the outline of a raindrop on the window.

“It started with my grandmother,” he admitted, “When she died.”

Years ago. I remembered it now. He was smaller then, skinny elbows and big eyes, perfect handwriting that made me jealous. I remember wondering why he wasn’t at school that day. My mother whispered to me, David’s grandmother died. Cancer. Nothing could be done. They were close.

I remember looking away, trite words of sympathy falling and failing, stumbling from my lips. In the end, what can you really say? Words don’t change death.

“The nanotechnology allows you to pinpoint the tumor,” he explained.

My father hummed understanding and I was saved from responding, allowed to remain in quiet existence, trying to soak in this timelessness through osmosis.

The angry cumulonimbi were cottony tumors in the sky, twisted with gray poison, and the world seemed pale and translucent like too-stretched skin.

24

“It’s a bit different front the immunotherapy approach,” he said.

I traced the bump at my wrist, a vein poking out naively from behind the thin veil of my skin. There’s so much hubris in my biology. That vein assumed that nothing will rip my wrists open and expose it to the world and the fury of this cancer-filled sky.

David finally finished, lapsing into silence. My dad’s hands were tight on the wheel as he navigated our North Carolinian monsoon. It was my turn to talk; responsibility once again fell to my shoulders. But it felt less heavy this time.

I turned around in my seat to face him. I didn’t bother to rearrange my facial features; David knew the truth when he saw it.

“You’re going to cure cancer,” I said. The words came easily because I meant them.

David smiled and it was a quiet but triumphant thing. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. The years had worn out this comfortable hollow in the air between us, an appreciation for the subtle and sincere. I didn’t have to pretend to be anything. Neither did he.

My dad turned into David’s driveway and a bright red umbrella came to greet us, a tall woman with pointedly blonde hair waving at the car. David opened the door without a word and stood next to his mother outside, his skinny frame ducking under the cover from the rain.

“Thanks for driving him,” she said.

“No problem,” my father replied.

David and I looked at each other and looked away. The rain traced rivers through the lawn and galaxies down the windshield. My mouth was suddenly both full and empty of words. My lips were embroidered shut with red thread.

I couldn’t decide what to say, because somehow, this felt like an ending, like a goodbye in some uncertain and definite way.

He shut the door and began to walk away, and my dad put the car in reverse.

David’s silhouette, hunched under the red umbrella, faded into the distance.

“It’s called a spin, you see?” He’d said. “Because as soon as one particle spins in one direction, the matching particle spins in the other direction. Equal and opposite.”

We would see each other again.

25

A S H TO N C A P O Z Z I

A D a u g h t e r’s C r i t i q u e

I

wanted to write about spring in Banff. Or ringing in a Colorado New Year with a nudist couple. I sat for hours trying to describe being gay in a conservative family, or the borderline obsessive love I have for my dog. I wanted to write about life, or love, or some other shit that might make someone’s day a little better. I wanted to write about so many things. But I can’t.

Each time the subject changed, I went outside to smoke a cigarette. Nicotine raises the risk for cancer, makes it hard to walk up a flight of stairs, and keeps me company while I piece together the shit show that is my thought process.

I’ve managed to avoid this topic for 4 years. Through all the short stories, admission essays, therapy sessions, deep drunk conversations, journal entries, and fake prayers I have discussed all but this. And that shit worked out just fine for me.

I sit here with two left in what was a new pack of Marlboro Reds, and I’ll write now.

I’ll write to you.

Fucking bitch. // Mom, The timing was less than ideal. December 16, two days before your birthday.

Not to mention...Christmas. Asshole. Certainly puts a damper on the holiday cheer. There is no prime time to commit suicide, but I’d say mid August would’ve been preferable. Sunny and dry, perfect for outdoor memorial services.

No major holidays or special events. You could’ve opened a window and enjoyed the breeze in the process. Listened to birds singing and cars passing by.

Mid December supplied a day that was cold, and overcast. You sat in a dark room, alone, with nothing but your thoughts for comfort.

I would have assumed you wouldn’t have went with the pistol.

You and I both know how fond you were of your looks, and generally bullet holes are many things save flattering. A simple search on Wikihow would have opened your eyes to a slew of other options at your disposal. A suicidal ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’. Of course not everyone can be as memorable as Will

26

Smith was in Seven Pounds (box jellyfish are hard to come by), but for God’s sake, you could have stuck a rag in your Volkswagen muffler, or chased a bottle of baby aspirin with mid shelf Chardonnay. It was your time for creativity, Mother, you could’ve shown some artistic flare.

But whatever. We’re working with the gun.

For swift effects, I personally would have gone with the temple. Thinnest part of your skull, easy access to all that shit that makes you breath, eat, and be. But I can see why you didn’t choose that route. Not the best thing to come home to, not to mention there is a certain irreversibility in that. I’d like to think you chose the chest because a part of you didn’t want to leave. Because there was a chance that it wouldn’t work.

But I digress.

Inside your rib cage, underneath the skin and flesh and bone, is your heart.

Most people believe it’s on the left side of your body (thank you, patriotism), but this is only partly true. Yes, the largest portion of your heart is on the left side, but only extending out so far from your sternum. You, dumbass, aimed at your breast, hitting your lung. And that made things much more unpleasant, didn’t it? I imagine you would’ve lasted much longer if it hadn’t been for the ricochete. Under the bed, Dad always kept a mini safe for tax documents. The bullet travelled through the bed, hit the top of the safe, and turned back to clip your other lung.

Those who are left behind like to comfort themselves with the thought that the dead didn’t suffer during the process of dying. You couldn’t even give us that.

Simple anatomy, Mother.

You should’ve locked the front door. You know Zane always forgot his key.

And you should’ve known that making him go to school with a cold wouldn’t work. The man was 18 but could never suffer through anything with even the slightest sniffle. You should’ve known that idiot could legally call himself out of class.

How did you not hear the front door open from your bedroom?

When choosing a witness, I would’ve advised you to pick your candidate more carefully. Zane is your second oldest, but he has always been the baby of the family. A 6’1 lineman with a poet’s heart. For God’s sake woman, he cried for a week after Steve Irwin died. How well did you expect him to handle the situa-

27

tion after hearing the shot? After walking in on you choking on your mistake?

Age shouldn’t have been a factor in this process. Every night for half a year, I rocked you to sleep. Pried the wine bottle from your fingers and held you until the crying stopped. It would have made no difference, doing it at 11 in the morning. It should have been me.

I was 14, and it should have been me.

My prerequisites were outstanding.

Makeup was always your best friend. You should have never forsaken it.

As a woman who worked as a model for most of her life, you never let a soul see you without foundation and lipstick, not even your family. So I was rather surprised that you chose to face death with a clean face. This turned out to be a mistake. A coroner led the willing into your cooler, one at a time. He had you laid out on a steel table top in the middle of the room. On display for the occasion, before shutting you back in your drawer. Evidently your mother thought you seemed very unlike yourself (I imagine the lack of breathing) and her friend Tonya had done your makeup and hair before any other guests arrived. The effect was comical. Hair in debutant curls, eyelids painted with a thick layer of smokey grey. You looked like the body of a hooker, found in a hotel closet.

Used up, deflated. And so small. I couldn’t get over how you seemed so small.

We were left alone, you and I, for longer than I wanted. We sat in silence for a while. I wondered what you felt like after sitting in a fridge for the better half of the day. I wondered if you would feel like raw sirloin steak, laying on a styrofoam plate and covered in plastic-wrap. You didn’t. I stroked your cheek and the color smudged off on my hand. I kissed your forehead and felt the cold waxiness of your skin as it gave a bit under the weight. I held you against me, and your limbs splayed out in stiff contorted angles. I noted aloud that your shoulder was digging into my side. You didn’t reply to this.

A man in white scrubs found us on the ground. He took you from me without a word, a little bundle of cloth with feet poking out the bottom. The bloom in your cheeks had come off on my t-shirt, and your eyeshadow had bled down your chin in deep rivulets.

I suggested setting powder to Tonya on the way out.

“It’s better for everyone this way. I’m sorry.”

28

What a sorry excuse for a suicide note. Like a sign on a business’ door letting you know the owner will be back after lunch. There is a time and place for brevity. This was not one of those times.

No, I think you should’ve been a bit more concerned with leaving some final words to your loved ones. Telling Cameron that she’ll make a beautiful bride one day. Giving Zane some advice for choosing a college in the spring. Urging Anthony to finally leave that bleach blonde succubus he calls a wife. Giving Dad consent to find love again after you’re gone. Assuring me that my depression had nothing to do with what you did. Some cliche shit like that.

But no matter. I found it written in the planner you kept on the kitchen counter. Marked in the box labeled ‘To Do List’. I almost laughed at that.

We had you cremated. Shutting you in a box deep underground didn’t sit well with Dad. Perhaps he thought you’d get lonely. You now sit in a cardboard box on top of a chest of drawers in Dad’s room. Every time we travel he makes a point to bring a little piece of you to scatter around. One day, he claims, we might not be able to go a single place without you being there.

The idea makes him happy, and that repulses me. Sticking my hand into a ziplock sandwich bag and scooping out a portion of you leaves me lightheaded.

Sifting the bits of bone and grit through my fingers makes my stomach roll.

And the idea of having nowhere to escape from you makes me want to scream.

I sit here with two cigarettes and nothing left to say. It’s 6:00 am and I’m sure there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge that keeps even better company than the Marlboros do.

I wanted to write about so many things.

I wanted to write about anything but you.

Yours Always,

Ashton

29

ERIN SCANNELL

Hero

S

hould I call him? It might be weird, but what’s the worst thing that could happen? I stare at the white, stucco ceiling from where I lie, allowing my body to sink into the 5 inches of foam beneath me.

I hear a knock at my door. I sit up and swing my legs off my bed and onto the floor. My movements seem overly vigorous in this empty, colorless room since I am the only dynamic thing in here besides the pipe dripping water onto the floor in the closet. “Hey! What’s up?” I ask, propping the door open with the wooden wedge beside the rubber trim in the hallway. Edith and Amanda are at my door wearing sleep shirts that hang down to their knees. Right now with their long shirts, halos of stray hairs, and faces washed clear of makeup they look 12 instead of 16. “There’s a bug,” Edith says with a soft laugh.

The girls lead me with my sheet of paper and dixie cup down the hallway to the their room where four other students who are supposed to be in their beds right now since it’s after lights are giggling and screaming at a house centipede scuttling across the grey carpet. I approach the bug slowly and slam the cup down over it with the skill and precision of a capuchin monkey cracking open a palm nut with a rock.

“Hero! Hero!” the students chant as I leave the dorm to go upstairs to release the centipede back into the wild. Not really, but I am pretty sure they were all thinking it. I go outside onto the patio, the bricks damp and shining under the motion-activated lights and release the creature back into the wild. He moves silently off of the sheet of paper into the bushes, and now I am really alone. And now I am thinking about you, because that is what I do when I am abruptly left alone, even if my abandoner is an insect.

I keep wanting to share things with you, and my chest twists up like a mop in the hands of a robust housekeeper when I remember that I can’t. Like when I read something I know you’d love or whenever I see literally any movie. On Tuesday, we watched Space Jam with the campers to introduce them to a cornerstone of American cinema, and I cried because it was the first movie in six months that I’d seen without you.

And when I think about how we’re only broken up only because you wanted to go to college in the most gratuitously hipster city in the United States, I know it is not a good enough reason for me to let go yet.

But regardless of my unresolved feelings, I am sorry I sent you that nude last night. I could tell that it made you a uncomfortable since you responded,

30

“okay... this makes me uncomfortable.”

I need to move on, and I should go inside.

I wrap myself up in my crinkley, grey blanket and turn out the light. Silence.

Should I call him? You’d be mad if I did since we all went to high school together. And I know he likes me since he started spooning me on the couch while you and I were still dating at the beginning of the summer, so maybe I will call him. Okay... yea. I will.

I dial his number. My heart beats faster and faster with each dial tone. Each one seems impossibly longer than the next, until the last tone is interrupted by, “Hello?”

“Hiya, I was just calling to say hello... do you like talking on the phone? If you don’t we can just hang up,” I say, my tongue swelling and arm muscles stiffening with nervous energy.

“No, I like it,” he says, I imagine with a smile.

We talk for thirty-five minutes, and it’s effortless and fun, and I haven’t thought about you in thirty-six minutes, and that’s great.

But for thirty-four minutes I’ve had to pee, and the conversation is going so well, it doesn’t seem like we are going to be hanging up anytime soon. Minute thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight.

I swear this is the most I’ve had to pee in my entire life. But ending this conversation early would be such a shame, and I’d be mortified if he heard me using the bathroom and flushing the toilet over the phone. That’s strictly a closefriends and family phone conversation thing. I spy a water bottle on my dresser, its curves and ridges shining like a beacon in the moonlight. Perfect.

I turn on the lights, put him on speaker phone and take out a pair of scissors from my desk drawer. I cut off the top of the water bottle, so as to make the target a little wider.

Thank god I am so brave and resourceful.

“No, I’ve never seen HunterxHunter...not really into anime,” I say as I squat awkwardly over the half-remaining Aquafina bottle.

“Really? Okay for real you’ve gotta start watching it...”

31

Things are going well.

“Okay yea! I’ll check it out,” I lie.

Then absolute horror. The bottle is too small, and it’s spilling over onto the dorm room carpet.

I’m disgusting. I feel like Bill Buckner in 6th inning of the the 1986 World Series. I feel like a femme fatale outside of a French cafe coughing and choking on the first drag of her cigarette. I feel like a feral animal who has never known civilization or decency.

“Great, we can watch it together and talk about it!” he says.

“Yea! Can’t wait!” I say as I run to the bathroom quietly to grab handfuls of paper towels, silently praying nobody else would see me and ask what I was doing.

I know that from now on this memory of me secretly peeing on the floor while talking to a crush on the phone will flash in my brain, and I’ll be flooded with reminders of all that lies beneath my heroic facade. I’m much more (and much less) than the brave girl with curly hair who can catch bugs and is so full of feeling that she is moved to tears by masterpieces of art such as Space Jam .

But he will never know about this, and neither will you. Which begs at the age old question, why do we tell our crushes we’re going to watch their shitty anime as we secretly sop up our own urine on the ground? Probably for the same reason that each morning I have to bother Edith and Amanda away from the bathroom mirror so they’re not late for morning group, probably for the same reason that Kenneth let out a Spartan war cry before he “passed out” on the climbing tower last week, a limp banana peel bumping into the wooden structure as he was lowered down. Girls rushed to his side once he was safe again on the ground as I stood watching, rolling my eyes.

We want to be seen, not known by those we find attractive. So part of me looks forward to when I’m 87 and I lose control of my bowels shopping at Target with my partner, when it’s all just out there, and so is the love.

32

K AY L A RU T L E D G E

T h e r e L i v e d a Fe a t h e r e d , F l i g h t l e s s Man

A

t the exact moment when every word he has ever written is being thrown out of a window, Herman Griffin Walforth has only one more sentence left to speak. He does not know this of course. He has been going mute for months, but it has been a process of unconscious drowning, the sort of painless, golden crystallizing that bugs slowly encased in amber experience - a warmth, and then a numbness, and then nothing. Someone could have, of course, tried to warn him. To do this, they would have had to meet Herman at the beginning of his story, long before the window, or even the house the window belongs to. They would have to go back to the very beginning. warmth.

Like every good beginning, there was a muse. And the muse was Mia Glass. For years afterward, Herman would tell people they met on a street, or at a play, or in the middle of the squash section at the farmer’s market. Mia knew they met at a conference, one of those goal-setting, creativity-sparking, be-a-better-you affairs that are supposed to inspire but are really used by companies to pacify employees with a weekend away from their regular lives.

The end is found here, in the beginning: all Herman can remember is gold, and then Mia, like the beginning of a world, or the silence before an orchestra. Mia remembers they met in a buffet line, exchanging the sort of pleasantries common to the extremely disinterested. When Herman told her he was a writer, she told him it was wonderful. And the way the word rolled off her tongue, thick and heavy, like a smooth marble across a wooden floor, made him shiver. Words out of her mouth had life and depth, they rang and moved and hummed, and hearing her speak was like hearing a bell being struck.

So Herman didn’t tell her that he hadn’t written anything in months, to the point that his editors were pestering him and the usual royalty checks had started getting smaller and smaller. He didn’t tell her that releasing two popular books didn’t mean success, just a crushing pressure to release a third, the kind of pressure that drove him to ridiculous conferences that were supposed to ‘realign his creative self ’. Instead, he ran back to his hotel room, up the two flights of creaky stairs, jiggled the lock right-left-right and burst into his room.

Among the smell of stale cigarettes and carpet coated in dust, Herman ripped off a corner of the newspaper and wrote a sonnet, right over Page 12C and May 6, 1975, right over -“TROUBLE ON THE NEWPORT CLIFFS: PETTY THEFT FRIGHTENS TOURISTS”.

33

His fingers smudged with blue ink, Herman wrote of Mia, how she was so thin that everything she wore looked like it was meant to drape lazily across her shoulders, like throwing a sheet over a statue, how her cheekbones were high and sharp and set decidedly underneath warm, green eyes that looked as though they were supposed to belong to someone else, and when he had finished he thought the blue fingerprint-smudged scrap of paper really was wonderful, and so was he.

Mia hadn’t been altogether honest with Herman. She thought writers in theory were wonderful, but that Herman was a little scruffy, although endearingly so. She looked appealing in the thick blue ink, but in life Mia would not be immediately recognizable as the great beauty in Herman’s sonnet. She was from a line of healthy, practical women who had gone through countless New England winters, one of them her mother, who had signed Mia up for the conference out of that deep-seated desire parents have for their children to have more well-rounded lives than they did. Mia spent her days as a psychologist for wealthy people whose problems mostly stemmed from a deep nervousness and an excess of wine and time, which worried her mother. Unhealthy, Mrs. Glass called it, a life spent listening to problems rather than having your own, but Mia liked listening to problems that were easily solvable. She often felt a strange sense of disdain for her clients, proud that all the best parts of youth and possibility were still hers to have.

It is no great surprise that Herman and Mia quickly fell into that deep, purple kind of love that makes people talk about soulmates, the kind of love that humans would be better off abandoning altogether. Their courtship went by in a whirlwind of happy summer days, which Herman spent writing short stories and poems that always trailed off three-quarters of the way through. He assured his frustrated editors that he had something truly wonderful on the way and received an advance on his third novel without writing a single useable word.

With the advance, he bought Mia an engagement ring and continued his cycle of brooding in coffee shops and waiting for her to finish her appointments, the sound of her laugh better than anything he could ever write. After finishing her appointments for the day, Mia would pick him up and they would eat sandwiches on park benches and watch the sun sink low over the ocean.

Mia spent those summer nights telling Herman story after story, of her childhood, just her and her mother after her father died, her college days, spent in Alabama realizing the hot, humid South wasn’t for her. She often talked until the ocean turned from blue to navy in the cool night air, and every word made Herman shiver just as it had at first. She read his first two novels, which Herman’s editors told him were most successful among women 30-40 in Southern California, and told him they were wonderful even though he knew they were

34

just alright.

He told her his next novel would be his greatest, and she nodded because she believed him, because he was kind and stable, because her friends told her they wished someone would write them poems. Most of all, she nodded because she didn’t want to be 40 and wealthy with a husband who played golf and a therapist who thought her problems were trivial and she didn’t want to be her mother and spend her days watching the local news and baking casserole, going to bed at 9:30 and calling her daughter for excitement and keeping her dead husband’s shirts hung neatly in the closet.

The rest of 1975 passed like this, in a row of warm, honey-like days that played themselves lazily out, one after the other. Herman woke up every day convinced that his next novel was waiting for him to write it, even though he still had no idea how it would end. He could still speak then, in the beginning. He got deeply into french press coffee and when Mia suffered from terrible insomnia, he would list out her qualities on the phone for hours, stringing together a chain of I-love-this and I-love-that, like daisies strung around her neck, until she slept. numbness.

After the January wedding, Mia and Herman settled into an old cliffside cottage in Newport, New Hampshire so soaked with salt and sea that with every gust of wind it shuddered and shifted like a large, unbalanced wave, and for a while there was the simple happiness of cinnamon rolls in the morning and late night waltzing across the groaning oak floors. This drizzly kind of happiness soaked into Herman’s writing, and he moved from writing unfinished poems to unfinished manuscripts.

Mia made him a writing alcove with a desk she found at a garage sale and no curtains because she pricked her fingers too much trying to sew them. She spent her days listening to rich women complain about their husband’s infidelity and daydreaming about the future, about the imminent success of Herman’s upcoming novel and the vacation they could take when it was finished. Often, she let her mind wander to whatever story Herman had read her the night before. The day she set overflowing pots of flowers on every windowsill, so that from the outside the cottage looked like an oversized greenhouse, was the day that he wrote of a woman who made beauty spring out of her fingertips, whose footsteps grew flowers. When she brought him coffee, he wrote of a man who fell in love with a woman who ran a café in Amsterdam.

Around noon each day, Herman’s newest manuscript would reach the point where it seemed that finally, he had gotten it right, that this was his great Amer-

35

ican novel, and so every day at noon, between Mia’s morning and afternoon appointments, he and Mia took off their shoes and danced, and he lost himself in the movement of her hair and eyes and laughter, thinking that she was truly wonderful. And every night, Mia would listen to his drafts; lose herself in worlds created just for her, in pages and paragraphs that drew breath from her words and footsteps. Herman wrote more and more, until every night found Mia sitting by the fireplace, listening to him read until she dozed off and he carried her to bed.

Despite all this, an underlying uneasiness that she could not have expressed began to fill Mia’s days, a nagging frustration with spending her life caught in the webs of others’ fantasies, taking in words rather than giving them. She was needed often on the other side of town, where the beginning of New England winter left people with nothing to do but sit and worry and ask their therapist for extended hours, and she no longer had time to try to sew curtains or plant flowers. Her days were an endless cycle of running in and out of the house at least seven minutes late with coffee in hand.

This deep uneasiness soaked into the floorboards along with the sand and sea, and Herman reached a point where he couldn’t stick with a manuscript for more than a few days. He had always been erratic, but now more and more of his pages began to be thrown into stacks, never to be touched again. They piled around the house, higher and higher, as he began novels and threw them out again, for each one was a like a chipped piece of a mirror. Mia the gardener, Mia the barista, all woefully inadequate to grasp the full image of her.

That winter, Herman filled more and more of the rooms with pages, until the house’s creaking ground to a halt under the weight. He marked each day off on the calendar on the kitchen wall with a thin, inked line until one day in December when he didn’t, and then suddenly it was February and he couldn’t remember why he had ever thought it mattered. Walking through the rooms began to remind Mia of a wake, as if word after word lay in state, demanding her to bear witness and pay her respects. They had no time to watch the sun set into the sea, and she no longer woke Herman when insomnia struck, but instead snuck out of their bed to arrange the piles of damp manuscripts into new tilting, wild-looking towers and wonder if it was enough of an answer to the lump in her throat that asked her if she had words of her own to say.

The flowers on the windowsill dried up and died, and she began to leave the cottage earlier and earlier, sometimes hours before her appointments, to sit moodily in coffee shops and escape the manuscripts stacked every which way, a hundred different suffocating destinies that asked her what really made her so different from the clients whose problems she thought were so ridiculous.

While she sat, she did Sudoku, or read the business section of the newspaper,

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determined to take up grounded, responsible habits that made her feel more like her mother, an oddly comforting ritual.

Herman’s editors were growing tired of his promises for a third novel. He began to lose weight and no longer had time to stop at noon for a cup of coffee. The more Mia pulled away, the easier it was to convince himself he could do her justice. He began an odd quirk of opening his mouth to tell her he loved her and nothing coming out, and to compensate he took up a habit of writing it on slips of paper laid out on the kitchen counter and slipped into her purse, a thousand small promises that his new book would soon fix everything. He spent more and more time sifting through the piles of manuscripts, trying to piece them together into a story, speaking less and less, and thought all the while that he was falling deeper in love. Mia spent less and less time at home and thought more and more and worried that she didn’t know him at all.

The morning that Mia broke the mug was eerily still. As usual, Herman had risen before her, leaving behind their large white bed for a hot cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal. He had grandiose dreams of writing a novel about a mermaid living in a shell at the bottom of the sea and he was eager to sit down and write. By the time Mia stirred, he had written a few chapters. One sentence in particular charmed him: Under the water, everything was enormously, overwhelmingly quiet, like the world had been dunked in syrup, and Mia floated serenely among all this, suspended in time without a care.

So when Mia awoke, Herman was in a remarkably good mood. The sentence hummed in his head, repeated over and over again, and as he imagined it, it was Mia’s clear, ringing voice that recited it quietly to him. enormously, overwhelmingly quiet --Mia moved around the kitchen, going about the peaceful routines that morning brings, the clink of the sugar bowl and sloshing of the milk as her coffee brewed. As she looked out the window at the ocean, she thought of Herman, of suggesting they both take a day off to spend together and do nothing but make pancakes and watch the waves go in and out. floated serenely -She stared out, absent-minded and somehow saddened by the unquestioning movement of the waves on the shore. She did not hear Herman enter the kitchen. This is how love becomes mundane; Mia, so accustomed to being unseen that she has forgotten how to see at all.

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dunked in syrup -From behind, Mia’s white nightgown fell in soft waves, and she hummed softly to herself. Herman moved to put his arms around her, to inhale her smell and find peace in the silk and shampoo of her, this woman who contained within her all the words he had ever written. But as he reached to touch her, she startled, shrieking -Under the water, everything was enormously, overwhelmingly -dropping the hot porcelain mug of coffee quiet, like -and it shattered into a thousand pieces on the uneven floorboards, splattering her nightgown with coffee and turning her feet brown and bloody. Her sharp exclamations of “Ouch” and “Hot” and “Herman” were high-pitched and angry and Herman’s head hurt from the two Mia’s, the one in his head that kept quietly saying --the world had been dunked in syrup, and -and the one in front of him, who was cursing and glaring at him, talking about how that had been her favorite mug and if he would have just watched where he was going ---Mia floated -Mia knew that she was cursing at him, but inside she felt only a strange, statuesque apathy, as though the cottage and it’s shell-like stillness were moving into her feet, turning her still as porcelain. Something in Herman felt this deathly stillness, and he moved backwards from her complaints and curses, frightened, only to knock over a stack of papers and bump into another, the world and the cottage and the kitchen were crashing down, everything falling, closing in on him, suffocating him -And that purple kind of love turned hot and red, like metal in a fire, the kind of thing that for no reason at all, leaves both people burned. Herman and Mia would both have explained the fight thus: the mug was broken and they were angry. But really, the fight was about that stillness, that creeping sense of death that mixed in with the smell of vanilla coffee and rusty blood, and the horrible, awful dissonance of Mia’s angry voice, intermixed with the voice in Herman’s head, reading the sentence so clear and ----

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‘I love you’ ‘I love you’, then where are you?” ----Herman had a thousand things to say, but they all got stuck somewhere between his throat and tongue. He tried to say “I am a feathered, flightless man”.

He tried to explain that the ability was there, locked in his bones, consuming him with the need to fly but keeping him from it. But he couldn’t say anything.

“I am here, I am here, I am here, are you listening, Herman? I am your wife and I’m not a character” ---Herman tried to say “I am the ocean at low-tide”. He tried to explain that he could see the places on the shore, at once familiar and unfamiliar, that he knew where to go but could not hope to get there. But he couldn’t say anything.

“I thought I was going to be different than those women who sit all day and worry, whose husbands spend their days with mistresses, but I became one after all didn’t I?” --He tried to say “I’m sorry”.

But he couldn’t get the words out. He could only watch silently, as Mia’s face turned, hopeful to anxious to sad to disappointed to angry to hopeless, and he wondered if this was how the sun looked at the moon as it went through its phases, helpless as more and more of it disappeared, watching it waste away from the other side of the world.

And Mia, as she spoke, could only feel that speaking without being listened to was a terribly lonely thing.

“Herman, stop thinking and be here, you’re not here anymore. Do you remember the day we drove to the mountains and I was colder than I had ever been and we talked about what we wanted in life, and you told me you wanted to write and you wanted me? Do you remember, Herman? I always wondered why you put it like that. Art and Mia. Art and Mia. Always second.”

But when he opened his mouth, he couldn’t say anything. And for the first time, he wondered why he could not write endings.

“What do you love about me, Herman?”

He couldn’t answer and it made him angry. She stood silhouetted against pages upon pages and pages of his words, crumpling under her feet, knocked over every time she waved her arms in anger. Wasn’t it enough for her that he had done all this?

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They were both surprised at how much easier it felt to breathe when she threw the first manuscript out the window. It was the one about Mia the opera singer who fell in love with her pianist, and she rejected it in one, enormous, fluid movement, like a slap in the face. She surprised herself, it happened so quickly. The manuscript fell in waves, cascading down the cliffside, and she threw another and another and another, until she was running from room to room, tossing armfuls of paper out the large pair of windows by his desk, a bizarre, destroying freedom.

Herman simply stood still as a man in a blizzard, watching them fall, a thousand pieces of her, a thousands words for her, crashing onto the cliffs, dampening and sinking beneath the sea. When it was finished, she looked at him for a long time, her chest heaving and her hands shaking.

He said, “Thank you.”

She turned on her heel and walked out, the door shutting with a thud.

The sentence hung in the air, the cottage gaping with the emptiness her presence and the papers left behind. Herman Griffin Walforth sat in his newly bare living room and knew he would not speak again. There was a warmth, and then a numbness, and then nothing left to be said. He sat down at his desk, opened his notebook to the last empty page, and scrawled out what would be the last sentence of his third novel.

The world ends in silence.

Then he turned to the first page and started to write.

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art

N ATA S J A B R E Z E N S K I

The Corner

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D A R B Y FA R A C I

The Boy

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SOFIA LESNEWSKI

Flame

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SOFIA LESNEWSKI

Revival

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N I Y A N TA PAT E L

Articles

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JACOB YANKEY

August (top) D a d ’s P l a c e ( b o t t o m )

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SARAH CLOUSER

Layers 1

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L AU R E N W I L K I N S O N

Yo n c é

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contributors Alaina Bainbridge is a senior studying Political Science, Creative Writing, and Social and Economic Justice. She was born in Durham. After graduating in December, she is planning on travelling around the country rock climbing before applying to MFA programs in poetry.

Natasja Brezenski is a Junior Psychology and Studio Art Major, concentrating primarily in drawing. She is from Durham, NC and spends most of her time doodling in her notebooks while listening to her meticulously crafted Spotify playlists Megan Busbice is a first year student from Holly Springs, North Carolina. She’s majoring in English with a minor in Hispanic Studies. Megan loves Harry Potter, writing letters, and road trips.

Sarah Clouser is a sophomore double majoring in photojournalism and history. She is from Charlotte, North Carolina where she has lived her whole life. Sarah loves live music, photography, and plays lacrosse in her free time.

Miranda Diaz is a neuroscience and archaeology major from St. Johns, Florida in her second year at UNC. Outside of class, she spends her time researching brain cancer in a Neurology lab, working on tech staff for Carolina Performing Arts, eating at Hibachi, or FaceTiming her four younger siblings. She hopes to become a bioarchaeologist, see the northern lights, and keep writing way too many poems.

Darby Faraci is a sophomore Pre-Nursing major. She grew up in the small coastal town of New Bern, North Carolina. Since she was young she has always had a deep rooted passion for art, whether it be acrylic painting, colored pencil, watercolor, or other medias. Darby does her best to incorporate her art into every part of life, for it is a big part of who she is.

Samuel Gee is a sophomore from Greenville, SC, majoring in English and minoring in creative writing. Abolish and prosecute ICE. Aisling Henihan is a senior from Wilmington, NC studying art history, geography, and creative writing. She is working towards an honors thesis in poetry and trying not to kill yet another house plant.

Sofia Lesnewski is a first-year English and Comparative Literature major. She has 50

lived in Jersey City, NJ her entire life and is a self-proclaimed “Joisey girl.” Sofia enjoys reading, writing, and tutoring in addition to photography.

Kate Meadows is a sophomore majoring in English. Outside of her studies, she serves as an editorial intern at Algonquin books and blogs for the campus style magazine, Coulture. On weekends, you can find her as a barnacle at Open Eye Cafe. She grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but has yet to get sick of it.

Kieran Patel is a first-year biochemistry major and creative writing minor. When she isn’t studying, she enjoys spending all of her money on Med Deli and biking out of Chapel Hill. She values poetry for its ability to provide an exploratory space for a story to ricochet around, and she tries to write every day.

Niyanta Patel is a sophomore Neuroscience major and Creative Writing minor from Nashville, TN. Their Med Deli order is sun-dried tomato linguine, eggplant squash stew, and peach salad. They are very sleepy.

Kelsie Qua is a senior English literature major from Hudson, New York. She wrote her first novel at the age of sixteen, and has been trying (and failing) to find a more practical way to spend her free time ever since.

Kayla Rutledge is a junior from Charlotte, NC who loves funny videos of babies, writing, and cheese quesadillas. She is majoring in Political Science and Journalism and minoring in Creative Writing. Everything she creates is inspired by and written for her Creator. “There Lived a Feathered, Flightless Man is her first published fiction piece.”

Erin Scannell is a senior studying media production, comparative literature, and creative writing. She grew up in Asheville, NC and enjoys plaing the banjo. Her favorite writer is Mila Kundera, and she thinks the penguin from Wallace and Gromit’s “The Wrong Trousers” is the most frightening villian of all time.

Hanna Watson is a junior African-American Studies major and Creative Writing minor. A native of Wichita, KS, Hanna got her start as a poet performing Spoken Word, which she continues to do as an expression of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Outside of writing, Hanna loves hiking, playing guitar, and enjoying good coffee and bread.

Kiran Wheeler is a first-year from Charlotte, NC with a double major in English and Business and a minor in Creative Writing. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys spending all of her money on shoes and Chick-fil-A chicken biscuits.

Lauren Wilkinson is a senior Media & Journalism major, specializing in Editing & 51

Graphic Design with a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies minor. She grew up in the little town of Oxford, NC and transferred to UNC as a sophomore. Lauren’s loves in life are attacking puppies that aren’t hers, wearing mascara everyday (even if it’s unnecessary), singing very badly while she’s driving and painting when she gets a chance.

Jacob Yankey is a Junior Biochemistry major from Wilmington, NC. He hopes to attend graduate school for pharmaceutical science, to pursue an MFA in creative writing, or to become a trophy husband.

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information Cellar Door, the official undergraduate literary magazine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is published twice annually and welcomes submissions from all currently enrolled undergraduate students at UNC. Guidelines for submission can be found online at http://studentorgs.unc.edu/thedoor. Please note that staff members are not permitted to submit to any section of the Cellar Door while they work for the magazine.

All undergraduate students may apply to join the staff of Cellar Door. Any openings for positions on the Poetry, Fiction, or Art selection staffs will be advertised online. You may contact us via e-mail at thecellardoor.unc@gmail.com.

SUPPORTING CELLAR DOOR Your gift will contribute to publicity, production, and staff development costs not covered by our regular funding.

Contributors will receive copies of the magazine through the mail for at least one year.

Please make all checks payable to “Cellar Door” and be sure to include your preferred mailing address.

Cellar Door c/o Michael McFee Department of English UNC-CH Greenlaw Hall, CB 3520 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520 CONTACT US AT THECELLARDOOR.UNC@GMAIL.COM

FIND US ONLINE: https://cellardoorunc.wordpress.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cellardoorunc Instagram: thecellardoor.unc

The publication of this issue of Cellar Door was made possible by the generous financial support of the UNC Creative Writing Program.

© CELLAR DOOR ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2018

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fall 2018 E D I TO R - I N - C H I E F t a r a b o l d r i n C OV E R A RT w y a t t m c n a m a r a P O E T RY b a i n b r i d g e diaz heniham meadows patel watson FICTION busbice capozzi gee qua rutledge scannell A RT b r e z e n s k i clouser farasi lesnewski patel wilkinson yankey