Cellar Door Fall 2014

cellardoor

FALL MMXIV

FREE

F

A L L MMXIV I

ART

FICTION

Spivey Ali Azam Hall Conrad Rawlings Clarke Kinder Bhandari

Martin Shaw He Dixon

POETRY Brown Hall Bryan Feddeman Pless Kelley Howze Pincus

COVER: FACTOR XIII, Ash Conrad

CELLAR DOOR FALL 2014

STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Karina McCorkle FACULT Y ADVISOR

Professor Michael McFee POETRY EDITOR

FICTION EDITOR

ART EDITOR

Charles Perkins

Aisha Anwar

Olivia Br anscum

FICTION

ART

Kenneth Lee

Arianna Ray

Taylor Noel

Ansley Foster

Shelley Catherine-Leazer

Emma Biggerstaff

POETRY

Li Zhang Cameron Bynum Isabel Hagood Ryan Herrera Katherine Frazer Alexa LaGrand

Anuradha Bhowmik Mason Boyles Mariam Baaj Anza Abbas

TREASURERS

Li Zhang Anuradha Bhowmik

WEB EDITOR DESIGN & LAYOUT

Karina McCorkle

Aisha Anwar

CONTENTS VISUAL ART Replication of the Latter I’m not related to him The Concert Southern Gothic Francesca In Search of Lost Water Poke::Prod Buy Ice Birth Feelin’ So Fly Mosque

Sarah Spivey Hamid Ali Farah Azam Jackson Hall Jackson Hall Ash Conrad Noah Rawlings Lily Clarke Kelly Kinder Arpan Bhandari

7 12 17 21 22 27 28 31 36 39

FICTION Checks and Balances Elephant Summer Tiger Meat Oak Wilt

Alice Martin Sophie Shaw Xingyue Sarah He Still Dixon

8-13 15-18 25-32 34-35

Blanche Brown Jackson Hall Sarah-Kathryn Bryan Mary Alta Feddeman Mackensie Pless Anna Kelley Candace Howze Anna Kelley Nan Pincus

5 6 14 19 20 23-24 33 37 38

POETRY Another Part of the House Omi ties a white bow Blind old age The Calendar Anesthesia Eggplant Two People Can Fit In a Casket Legs Saddle Shoes

COVER : Factor XIII, Ash Conrad

JUDGES

POETRY

FICTION

David Huddle’s most recent book of poetry is Blacksnake at Family Reunion (Louisiana State University Press, 2012). He has written poems, essays, and short stories that appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories.

He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Vermont and the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. He has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A. Nicole Kelly is an inaugural Kimbilio Fiction Fellow who received an MFA from UC Irvine, and the co-founder of Summer Commune, a diverse temporary intentional community happening in North America biennially. Her fiction has also appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Drunken Boat, and is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA.

VISUAL ART

Laura Ritchie is a curator and arts organizer in Durham, North Carolina.

She is the Director of The Carrack Modern Art and the Education and Outreach Coordinator at the Durham Art Guild. Laura received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2010.

VISUAL ART

AWARDS 1 st

Poke::Prod

2 nd

I’m not related to him

3 rd

Southern Gothic Francesca

POETRY

Hamid Ali

Jackson Hall

1 st

Eggplant

2 nd

Anesthesia

3 rd

Saddle Shoes

FICTION

Ash Conrad

Anna Kelley Mackensie Pless Nan Pincus Two Can Fit in a Casket

Candace Howze

1 st

Checks and Balances

2 nd

Oak Wilt

3 rd

Tiger Meat

Alice Martin Still Dixon

Xingyue Sarah He

ANOTHER PART OF THE HOUSE Blanche Brown Heat-hush looms like wisteria

over a southern spring, carries a sweetness that catches me home— toes on simmering porch wood and nails.

Mother or father or someother off searching bathroom shelves for iodine. Or standing still in the kitchen, dishes obediently drip-drying in the sink: teasing out a memory of bodies

young

from the endless honeycomb of afternoon,

rooms within rooms.

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OMI TIES A WHITE BOW Jackson Hall Around her back bone, So her apron will hang Pristinely from her hips. Her hand Around the plastic neck Of a Sears-Roebuck vacuum, Sucking up clandestine colonies Of nasty dust-mites and filthy little crawlers Huddled inside carpet-tufts, clusters Of insect corpses swallowed by A metal mouth and throat, she enacts Her role of early ‘60s American Housewife, mother, homekeeper.

Tom Jones attests it’s not unusual To be loved by anyone. Omi sings along In imported English, her German Accent slipping between the dissonance Of a vacuum cleaner and a record player, The vortex of Tom Jones And dead bugs.

White noise generated by A cleaning-woman’s routine.

Omi smiles every time The record skips at it’s Not unusual. She kills The vacuum after ten Minutes, undoes Her butterfly knot As if she were Pulling the wings off a moth In mid-flight. “It’z not unusual To be loved By any-vone.” English lyrics Lilt on the notes of her German tongue. But she’s Always practicing.

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Sarah Spivey, Replication of the Latter

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CHECKS AND BALANCES Alice Martin

+ $150.03: The balance of Delaney’s bank account at the beginning of the day.

- $6.10: A bottle of fifty 200mg Advil tablets. Delaney has swallowed an Advil every morning for the last sixteen years that she chases with a cup of black coffee. She wakes up with headaches. An Advil bottle always sits beside her coffee maker in her small two bedroom apartment. Recently, she started choking down three at a time. Her joints ache as she shuffles around the kitchen in the mornings, as if she has grown so old since her daughter Marni left for college seven years ago. She turned forty last week.

+ $1000.60: Last month’s paycheck from her job at the Chuck E. Cheese in the suburbs of Atlanta. In high school she thought she liked kids. On applications, she listed “children” under interests. Maybe she would be a kindergarten teacher, or a daycare provider. She pictured the chubby-cheeked, thin-haired babies who smiled out from television diaper ads. Never mind that those diapers, in reality, were filled with shit, and those cheeks were coated in drool. Having her own kid dispelled those fantasies. Now, she sits behind a glass counter with a smile wallpapered onto her mouth, watching exasperated mothers lean against a whack-a-mole machine, their faces melted as if all of the muscles in them have been worn thin, drawn out too far, like the elastic in Delaney’s waistband that grew six sizes after her pregnancy. She used to be a size 2. A hot piece of ass, the guys used to say. Since then she has held more jobs than she can remember off-hand.

Sometimes she would have two at a time, when Marni was young, to help them get by. Waitressing, retail, grocer, all service positions. That’s something the guys used to say, too. She was good at servicing people.

- $300.00: Last January’s speeding ticket. This is Delaney’s third one in the last two years and she has to take a class on reckless driving next month. It isn’t surprising that Delaney drives fast. She does everything fast, at least that’s what her mother used to say. “Fast” was the word the kids in high school used to call her too. She’d grown into a D-cup fast, learned how to do her makeup fast, had sex fast, got knocked up fast, dropped out of high school fast. Grew up. Lost her childhood. Lost her future. Fast.

- $8.50: A bottle of Moscato wine. She wants it to celebrate Marni’s homecoming tomorrow. It will be the first time Marni has been home since she graduated from college and moved to Chicago two years ago. Delaney doesn’t know what Marni likes to drink so she got a sweet wine. Maybe Marni will be able to sip it, like the tart grape juice she drank as a child, while Delaney will swallow it in gulps, licking around the glass rim for last drops. The bottle is cheap, because she can’t afford better. She hopes Marni won’t notice, won’t inch her arched right eyebrow a centimeter higher, an expression that normally people wouldn’t notice but that Delaney never misses. The expression that tells Delaney what Marni really thinks of the dumpy apartment and Delaney’s dwindling bank account, of how Delaney raised her. An expression of pity, concern, disgust.

- $7.23: A bouquet of fresh flowers. She wants to have them sitting out around her apartment for Marni to see. Tulips and baby’s breath, wilting a little at the lips, but cheaper that way. Marni has always loved flowers, even as a toddler. When they took walks at the park she

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would totter over to a cluster of them and stick her face in, as if she could smother herself with the perfume, die choking on something beautiful. That’s how she got her first bee sting. She didn’t cry at the pain, even as Delaney pulled the stinger out with a pair of tweezers back in the apartment. When Delaney told her that a honeybee only stung once, that the sting would kill it, that’s when Marni cried. She didn’t stop for days. She insisted on holding a funeral for the bee. They left tulips in a vase of water for it. It’s things like this Delaney remembers. Things that keep Marni innocent.

+ 500.00: Money from Delaney’s mother. It comes in the mail, the bills crisp and new and folded over exactly into a square, tucked into a cream-colored envelope embossed with the family’s return address, to their Georgian home in Savannah. There is no written note, no card, no greeting. Just the money, cold in its exactness, its sharp edges. Delaney doesn’t expect any different. She moved out of her mother’s house when she was nineteen. Delaney didn’t want Marni growing up in that house, so pristine and untouched that it could have been a museum.

It had been enough that Delaney had grown up in that air, so thick and stuffy it felt like cotton balls in her mouth, and with her parents who expected so much that Delaney could only ever disappoint them. She knew that wasn’t how she wanted to raise her daughter. As upset as Delaney’s mother had been when she’d heard that Delaney was pregnant at age sixteen, she was even more upset that Delaney was taking her granddaughter away. She continues to send money monthly to support them and cards on holidays to Marni, but all communication with Delaney stopped years ago. Money was always how Delaney’s parents showed affection and now with it they make it clear that their affection for Marni is everlasting, but their affection for Delaney has passed its expiration date.

- $3.04: Clorox disinfectant wipes, lemon scented. Delaney hasn’t cleaned her kitchen in months and she wants to scrub the linoleum clean before Marni comes. The last time Delaney visited Marni in Chicago, a year ago, she was struck by how clean the kitchen was, how good it smelled. Marni is earning enough money at her new job, a position at a bank that she landed right out of undergraduate school, to afford a reasonably nice apartment. A much nicer apartment than Delaney has ever rented, that is. Before Marni arrives, Delaney resolves to clean enough that Marni will notice. That way, Marni might be surprised and say something vindicating, like, “It looks nice in here,” or “I love what you’ve done with the place,” or “I love it here,” or “I love you.”

- $505.47: A couch, the vintage one from the nearby consignment store, with the curling wooden armrests and shiny silk cushions. It isn’t real silk, of course, but Delaney likes the antique look, how it seems casually refined. Delaney’s apartment is cramped with hand-me-down furniture from her mother and she wants to show off something of her own. Delaney’s old couch was the same one from her mother’s basement, the one she had her first kiss on, the one she curled up in to nurse Marni when she was first born. Her mother had sent it and other handme-down pieces in a moving truck to be delivered by strangers when Delaney first started living on her own. The couch was unraveling now, the stuffing poking through the holes in the arm rests. Delaney has been meaning to replace it for a long time and with Marni coming to visit now seems like a good time. The furniture in Marni’s apartment is from IKEA, sleek and modern and Swedish and matching. Beautiful, that was the word Delaney kept using to describe the apartment when she visited. What she really meant was sterile. Too much like Delaney’s parent’s house.

- $53.13: Groceries to cook dinner for Marni. Normally, Delaney always orders in: greasy Lo Mein noodles or thick crust pizza stuffed with cheese. She raised Marni on takeout

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food, the two of them sitting criss-cross applesauce on the crusty carpet, eating out of cartons and cardboard with their fingers. Now, at twenty-one and living on her own, Marni cooks everything herself. Last time Delaney saw her she was on what she called a “health food kick” and she nibbled on spelt bread and fruit salad, like a bird. Marni has a good job now, a good education, a good apartment, good judgment, good looks, a good life. She has the future Delaney lost when Marni came into her life. So for Marni’s homecoming, Delaney decides she will cook too.

Something healthy, like the glazed salmon recipe she cut out from Southern Living or the steamed spring vegetables dish she found by Googling diets online. Something that Delaney isn’t even really sure how to cook. At least that will show that she is still the mother. She will always have that over Marni, if nothing else.

- $45.75: A pair of red stiletto heels with an open toe, size eight. Just for herself. She can’t think of any opportunity for her to wear them. But she buys them anyway. Just because, sometimes, Delaney still likes to play dress up.

- $0.99: A movie rental, Sixteen Candles, from the Red Box outside Harris Teeter. Last Friday, when Marni told Delaney she was coming home for a visit, Delaney immediately panicked. What would they do together? When Marni called, her voice seemed hollow, like a large hall with no echo. Delaney wondered if something might be wrong, but she didn’t want to push her daughter. They don’t ask each other things like that anymore. They ask each other very little at all. Sometimes, if Marni mentions a bar she likes to go to or a new drink that she tried after work, Delaney makes excuses to hang up the phone. She doesn’t want to hear things like this.

They aren’t parts of the Marni Delaney knew, the girl that she had raised on Disney movies and handmade bracelets. That girl had been innocent and tender, still new and untouched by the world. Maybe, if Delaney doesn’t let Marni tell her about the new world she is discovering in Chicago, it isn’t actually happening. Maybe, when Marni comes home they can curl up together on the old couch and watch a movie together, a movie with a happy ending, and they can pretend as if nothing has changed and that new world doesn’t exist.

+ $15.00: The money Jake owes her from dinner a week ago. It was the first date she’d been on in two years and he is her manager at Chuck E. Cheese. She spent hours before he was supposed to pick her up deciding which dress made her boobs look big without accentuating the belly she still hasn’t lost. She pulled so many dresses over her head that her blonde hair frizzed and stood on end by the time she picked a black one with cap sleeves. Jake arrived in a Honda van, what she used to call a soccer mom van before she became a mom herself. He took her to a pizza joint that she was overdressed for and then claimed to have misplaced his wallet. She paid for their dinner but insisted every day at work since that he pay her back. In high school, if a date was a bust, the girls would joke that at least they got a free meal out of it. Delaney wanted to be able to claim that at least.

- $250.00: To fix the apartment’s A/C. It has been out for the last week and Atlanta’s summer heat fatigues her. Delaney wakes up every morning with a thin layer of sweat coating her hairline and tracing down her back. She lies there and squints, watching the heat waves shimmer around her, and in her half-asleep state she lets herself think she can see a man sleeping next to her. Not Marni’s father. He had just been a too-thin, too-tall senior from her high school, a boy she hadn’t even considered seeing again before the pregnancy test she took in an Exxon bathroom turned positive. He wasn’t interested in being a father, especially not after he got a scholarship to play college basketball in Virginia. After he moved away she never heard from him but she never pursued him either. Like with her parents, she decided he wasn’t good enough to be

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in Marni’s life. Marni deserved more than any of them could give her. No, in the early mornings Delaney imagined a man she’d never met. He didn’t have to be particularly attractive, or particularly rich. Just gentle, and soft-spoken, someone who would ask her things more often than demand them, who would look at her face instead of her ass, who wouldn’t touch her unless she asked him to, who gave more than he took. Just one that could fix the things inside her as easily as she could hire someone to fix the A/C. She knew that believing that kind of thing was what got her here in the first place, but she held onto the idea anyway. Deep inside, in a place she often denied existed, she still thought this was possible.

- $3.38: A box of Bandaids. She gathers blisters on the backs of her heels from standing at work. The most recent ones rip against the back of her flats as she shops and soak sticky pus into her shoe. When she takes her shoe off, it protests, sticking to the back of her heel and nipping at the angry, red flesh there. She considered buying the princess-printed Bandaids or the ones with Snoopy on them. Those were the ones that Marni used to like most. When she was young, she would take a whole box of Bandaids and cover her face, neck, and ears with them, decorating herself even if she didn’t have a cut. A part of Delaney, a part that remembers she is still young, wants a princess Bandaid too, something to cover up her other scars. In the end, she purchases the neutral Bandaids because they are a dollar cheaper.

- $60.00: This month’s Verizon phone bill. Delaney hates talking on the phone. She hates how few people she has to call. The last time she spoke to her mother on the phone was years ago when she needed more money to help pay Marni’s college tuition. She talks to Marni, but not often. They spoke more when Marni first went off to college, when she was still vulnerable and scared and needed a mother. But since then the phone calls have lessened and become almost nonexistent. The two of them have never had an official falling out. The distance comes from a wall that grows between them every time Marni has a boyfriend, gets a job, receives another honor. The wall is built by the things that Marni gets that Delaney never will. Delaney tells herself she’s just proud, but the resentment still bubbles up every time she and Marni speak.

Maybe that is why they only speak a few times a year. Sometimes, with how little she uses it, Delaney wishes she could just destroy the damn phone. But then, what if Marni really needed her?

- $5.25: A pack of Newport cigarettes. Delaney smoked her first cigarette when she was fifteen and has been smoking two packs a week since, except during her pregnancy. When she was young, she liked to strike poses in her full-length mirror in her bedroom at her mother’s house, practicing how best to hold the cigarette between her twig fingers, studying how her cheeks looked sunken in as she took a drag, mastering just the right smoldering look. Now, sucking on her cigarette feels like sucking on a pacifier, something soothing and instinctual, but not at all attractive. She has nightmares of breathing in embers that catch fire and set her insides aflame.

In those dreams she watches herself burn from the inside out, her eyes and mouth wide open in silent terror, smoke billowing out from between her lips and squeezing out around her eyeballs, stinging her tear ducts. She keeps telling herself she will quit. This is her last pack. Really.

- $20.23: An airplane charm for Marni’s charm bracelet. Delaney gave Marni the bracelet for her tenth birthday with only one charm on it. A single red heart, shiny and swollen. Marni was thrilled. She tackled her mother with hugs and kisses and the two wrestled like teenagers at a slumber party instead of like a mother and daughter on the floor of a dingy apartment. In moments like this, the world melted away and Delaney could believe everything was going to be okay and that she could be happy. Marni made that possible. Marni made everything possible.

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Hamid Ali, I’m not related to him

12

Marni made it possible for Delaney to have a family again. Marni made it possible for Delaney to feel loved again. So Delaney gave Marni a new charm for her bracelet every birthday, every holiday, every time she got a good grade. A fish to remember their trip to St. Augustine, Florida.

A dress to remember shopping for prom. Delaney still buys Marni charms even though she can’t remember the last time Marni wore the bracelet. She continues to buy them because, these days, she doesn’t know Marni well enough to get her something she actually wants.

+0.01: A penny she finds on the sidewalk on her way into the airport to pick up Marni.

It’s a shiny one, 1988, the year Marni was born. Delaney doesn’t believe in much, not in superstition or religion or magic. But even Delaney can’t deny that this must be good luck. She picks up the penny, the late afternoon sun gleaming off its copper surface and slicing light into her eyes. She holds the warm metal in her palm and, for a second, allows herself to hope. She hopes that Marni hasn’t changed too much, that when she arrives the distance between them won’t be as noticeable as it has been over the phone. She hopes that she will have her daughter back forever, that with Marni she can reclaim a family, that someone will love her again. She hopes that Marni will never leave her, that she doesn’t have to be alone anymore. She hopes for things that she knows are beyond hope, but only for a second. Then she pockets the penny and pushes into the air-conditioned airport.

- $15.61: A pregnancy test that she buys for a tearful Marni after Delaney learns the real reason for her visit. Delaney buys her this one despite Marni insisting that she is sure, that she has already taken three in Chicago, that trust me Mom, please. Delaney buys her another one because she can’t believe it until she sees tangible proof. She has a hard time understanding that they aren’t as different as Delaney hoped.

- $20.38: Takeout from Chow Palace, the Chinese place down the street they used to order from every Friday night when Marni was in high school. When they get back to the apartment, Marni can’t touch any of the health food that Delaney bought to make, so Delaney orders takeout. Marni curls into a shrimp on the old couch like she used to after she got a bad grade on a test. She hugs the takeout container to her chest like a teddy bear, lets Lo Mein noodles hang from her quivering lips. Delaney asks her questions, so many questions, about the father (a man she barely knows that works on the eighth floor of her office), about what she was thinking (she doesn’t know), about how she feels about it (she doesn’t know), about what she is going to do (she doesn’t know). But after an hour of questions, Marni becomes unresponsive and Delaney curls up on the couch behind her, a bigger shrimp, cradling Marni’s tiny body between her chest and legs, as if Marni is still safe in her womb. A baby inside a baby inside a baby. Delaney whispers soothing words to her, because, Delaney tells herself, this is what mothers do. She tucks promises into Marni’s hair that may never come true.

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BLIND OLD AGE Sarah-Kathryn Bryan some mornings I wake what wakes me the television is still on and has grime on its teeth but what a sweet film I watched when I woke in the night watched in the night his voice, asound in air

did it open, the door Clark Gable’s voice, pulling trouble into tiny proportions. some mornings I wake, the television played two films back to back

no one’s face in the night and I heard the women quarrel who’d pause to listen to Mr. Gable, as if

he sang to the line of sunlight behind the window-drapes he were a strain of music.

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ELEPHANT SUMMER Sophie Shaw

I was eleven when I bought an elephant from a circus man for $200. That was the summer my mother had to take a job at the shoe store because my father was resting all the time.

Nineteen-fifty-seven was the year he began to suffer from depression and the year the board of directors had to run the bank without him. The elephant I bought was cheap because she was only a baby. That was part of the reason I wanted her--that and the fact that I thought the circus man was abusing the elephant. I stood watching them for a little while then walked over to him and said, “You shouldn’t be mean to that elephant.”

He was standing outside the big tent and pushing the elephant into a tiny cage, a cage that smelled bad and was made of hard metal with no soft straw on the floor or anything. The elephant did not want to go so he was smacking her with a stick and I felt myself fill with a calm and controlled fury. I repeated myself but realized quickly that the man was not listening.

“Look,” he said, “come back tonight for the show, you hear?” I was so angry I could have cried, but then I thought of something.

“What if I bought her from you?”

So that was how it happened. I told him I had two hundred dollars, and he said if that was true I could have the elephant. I could tell he didn’t believe me, but I knew I had exactly that much money because I had gotten an allowance for years and never spent it. My friends who did not get allowances were always envious and wished I would buy them ice creams, but I used to say to them, “Why do we have to go out for ice cream? My mama will give us some if we ask.”

As I ran down Main Street I thought how it was like I had been saving my money all my life for this elephant. My feet got sweaty inside my stockings and I slipped in front of the barber shop and fell to my knees. My right stocking ripped and Mr. Allen, who had been standing outside, bent to help me up. “Grace, honey, what you in such a hurry for?” he asked. I muttered something then continued running. My mother was not home to ask questions so I took all my money out of my bank and slid it into a paper bag. I stepped over to my mother’s vanity and re-tied my white hair ribbons. Then I strolled back up Main Street trying not to look like I was in a hurry.

When I got back to the elephant the man was gone, but the elephant was still there. She had finally gotten into the cage, and stood there swinging her trunk nervously. I reached my hand through the bars and touched the trunk. The feel of it, so tough and dry but also surprisingly warm and alive, gave me shivers up my arm.

When the circus man came back the hair on the back of his neck was dark with sweat and he looked angry, but I showed him my money. He counted all of it three times while I stood on one leg waiting and running my finger up and down the baby elephant’s trunk. Finally the man placed the money into his pocket, walked over to the cage, slid back the bar in the latch, and led the elephant out. She had a rope tied around her neck like a dog leash and the man gave me the leash and walked away. He turned back once to shout, “Feed it hay and grass. And water.” Then he continued, drawing the bag of money out from his pocket and looking at it as he walked.

I stood watching him for a minute, then pulled up some grass and offered it to the elephant, who grabbed it with her trunk and stuffed it into her mouth greedily. I tried pulling gently on the rope, and she took a few steps. I felt dizzy for a moment then, like this was a dream that I could not make sense of. I realized that it would not be a good idea to walk the elephant down Main Street. It would take longer going on the side streets and vacant lots but ultimately it would be necessary.

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For a while the elephant was willing to follow me if I fed her grass every few yards, but about halfway to my house she got tired of walking and began pulling up her own bunches of grass to eat. I could not think what to do then. The elephant was huge for a baby, and I guessed then that she wasn’t as young as I had originally thought.

I pulled on the elephant’s rope, but she was much stronger than me and did not even look up from her eating. I stood with my eyes very close to her eyes and my nose almost touching the dark, heavy skin on her face. She had brown eyes with clear goo in the corners like she had been crying.

“You-need-to-walk-home-with-me-now,” I said in a very stern and deliberate way as I looked the elephant in the eye. She took a few steps away but did not go back to eating. I began walking briskly through the lot where we had paused. She followed then, until I was within two blocks of my house.

Now, though, I was in a neighborhood where everyone knew me and I started to wonder about what I would say if someone saw me. I sat down in the grass for a minute, crossing my legs beneath myself and leaning back on my hands. I remember the dry grass scratching my palms. The elephant walked over quietly and touched the top of my head with the soft tip of her trunk. My mouth fell open a little and I thought, An elephant is tapping me on the head! I shut my eyes and tilted back my a head a little, then kept perfectly still. After a minute I stood up, brushing stray hairs from my face. “Come on, come on,” I said, as if the elephant was a little dog.

The elephant came, and I said, “Good girl!”

I walked backwards then, so I could face the elephant and speak coaxingly when necessary. Now my house was in sight and I began to think about what I would do when I got home. Most likely my father would be asleep on the wicker couch in my parent’s room. He would not say much about the elephant, I assumed. Lately he had stopped being surprised and stopped making himself do things he did not want to do. He was quiet and sad and tired all of the time.

My mother would not be home for an hour or two. If she had not been there when I went to get my money that meant she was working on a Saturday and would not get home until four. Then I had a thought -- the elephant, I understood suddenly, might have just given up if I hadn’t rescued her from the circus. I had heard people say that so-and-so had “just given up.” I understood what they meant in the way that a child understands things -- a way that is deep but that cannot be put into words. But I felt that I could not let this elephant just give up.

I led the elephant around to the back yard since, I thought, she probably could not climb the steps to the porch. It was shady there. I tied her to a tree and ran inside for a quick drink of water. I popped into the bedroom on impulse to give my dad a kiss on his rough, unshaven cheek. “Hey sweetheart,” he said as I ran out. Once outside again I quickly untied the elephant and led her over to stand beside me as I sat on the back steps and drank.

I held the cold glass to my forehead like I had seen my mother do when it was hot and looked at the elephant. Sitting there then, I admitted to myself that I would most definitely have to take the elephant back -- that I had known it all along. The thought of letting the elephant go back and live in a place where they would ruin her, make her just give up on herself, made me feel like I could never be happy again.

Suddenly my father came walking around from the front of the house. His eyes widened and he hurried to reach me. “Mrs. Smith called and said that she saw you walking down the street with an elephant,” he said softly. His hair was tousled and the cuffs of his shirt were unbuttoned.

“Yes,” I said. I explained what had happened.

“But you can’t keep him,” he said, and sounded more awake than he had in a while.

“Her,” I corrected. I paused a minute, then, remembering, said, “Oh, I know. I know.”

Both of us were silent while I tried to gather my feelings into words. “I’m just afraid,” I said,

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Farah Azam, The Concert

17

“I’m afraid they’ll make her sad, and make her give up.” My father was looking at some point above my head and I thought he was not listening.

But then he said, “Maybe not, sweetheart. Maybe now that you were nice to her she’ll stay strong and not give up.”

“Do you think so?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said again. “But either way she has to go back. I’ll go with you.” He reached into his pocket like he was trying to find something but then stopped. He used to do that when he was getting ready to go somewhere -- reach into his pocket, identify the loose change or folded-up note or box of cigarettes -- before he was ready to leave. This time there was nothing in his pockets.

Years later, when he was well, I would visit him and my mother after a long semester teaching kindergarten in North Carolina. It was Christmas vacation and I was twenty-seven. My mom had some gifts she wanted me to take to the store and exchange, and my father said to me, “I’ll go with you.” He reached into his pocket and to touch his wallet, and I had the feeling that that had happened before. It was not until that night that I remembered the time he prepared to go with me somewhere, and could find nothing in his pockets to hold onto.

“Grace?” my father said, as I stood waiting with my glass in one hand and the elephant’s leash in the other.

“Yes?”

“You might not get your money back.”

“That’s alright.” I put my glass down on the bottom step.

“I’m sorry you can’t keep her,” he said.

“That’s alright,” I repeated. And it was.

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THE CALENDAR Mary Alta Feddeman Below a photograph of old docked boats, waiting in harbor, it marks moving in on the first of the month and an X for ovulation: the echo of tidal pull, moon’s language for belly and womb.

The empty April still hangs in September, no additions in ink for weeks, nothing about the hospital beds or the tear-torn touching of two feet the size of a thumb like pale, packaged blackberries, fluid wrapped in a thin skin: out of season, about to burst red and open.

All the balloons tethered to the metal bars, a woman waiting empty above the Lucite box for a pop—the plummet that will surely come.

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ANESTHESIA Mackensie Pless Going under—it sounded like drowning in the details, like the time a riptide swept me past Oak Island Pier’s pilings until my arms, pinned and needled with effort, were heaved from ocean to safety that still tasted like saltwater.

Coming up, the nurse called me Love so much, I wondered if it was my name.

A string of butterflies hung flightless like specimens in amber, the sterile air awash with the dense musk of sickness: antiseptic metal, threadbare linens, things cleaned so often that no one remembers when they were new.

Skeleton pines against sky, veins beneath the window’s skin, an aesthetic winter I wanted to shatter, then what would the nurse say?

Look at Love, her wings unstrung, trying to fly.

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Jackson Hall, Southern Gothic Francesca

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Jackson Hall, In Search of Lost Water

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EGGPLANT Anna Kelley More organ than vegetable. Rich-skinned. Pitted deep with alveolic seeds. Robust, filling your hand like a heart. Song of purpled blood—when the pulse of Robert Smith flickered out in an Indiana cell, he died fatted with fried eggplant, his final meal until the poison drip. The savory tang haunting his tongue when he spoke his last chain of words: “I hope the angels are flying close to the ground.”

He had stabbed a man thirty-seven times, a man who was also a killer. And thus death begat death, which in turn sired death. Human instinct in reverse.

The world gone mad. Mala insana, German botanists used to say, since the eggplant was second cousin to nightshade. Villagers only grew it in their gardens for the strange weight swaying like pendulums, the spiked flowers, the calyx. It feels new even now— the bloated gem of the produce aisle, the most living of the unliving things in your kitchen; sliced open, that shock of pale flesh beneath the pure dark peel.

Early folk must have been even more entranced by the plant, the fruit, the stories it swelled with. Tales of a traveler: conceived in the heat of Bengali summers, nourished by the Mekong and the rains over Yamato-no-Kuni, where men and women sowed their farmlands with fire to cleanse the earth. The pulp that my Ecuadorian neighbors baked with cheese and Ají peppers came from an eggplant that came from an eggplant whose ancestral eggplants rode down the Silk Road in weathered saddlebags and up the Atlantic as provisions for West Africans packed tighter than cigarettes. One girl hid a core between her breasts, fed by the reverie of planting gilo wherever they landed, as the seas rocked her in and out of fevered sleep. Meanwhile, a Turkish imam

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fainted in ecstasy after twelve days of feasting on patlican baked in olive oil, inspiring legends and recipes. Robert Smith’s mother had learned to fry eggplant with her mother’s cookbook, never expecting that she was setting the menu to her son’s foray back into the waters she’d fished him from— a gurney for a raft. He’d asked the guards to sell tickets to the event. A thousand dollars apiece, proceeds for a children’s hospital. They laughed and he died with no audience except a finger on his wrist. The first night of the new year, families in Shibuya hope for dreams about Mount Fuji, hawks, and eggplants; some go so far as to bring the bulbous fruit to bed with them for luck— knowing the depth of it, hearing the infinite buzz inside this sooty hive coursing with soured honey, this drumbeat. This muscle. Anansi’s severed tongue.

A wineskin, stained and stretched from the inside out.

Robert exhaling, a hungry peasant finally daring to taste the reputed mad apple, desert merchants haggling, a girl opening her blood-filmed eyes to shoreline and gray skies, your Sunday stew about to boil over.

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TIGER MEAT Xingyue Sarah He

Ever since Sophie Chen was dreaming of princess weddings and matching clothes on her dolls, she knew she never wanted to become like her mother. Every night before she fell asleep, she made a mental list of her mother’s offenses and vowed she would be different. She would never force her child to play piano or violin, especially if he or she had no talent, and especially not for hours a day. Never say to her child “just do it and don’t ask why.” Never force her child to study on the weekends or go to Chinese school at 9 a.m. on Saturdays. Never threaten to kick her child out of the house, even if he or she gets a B in school. And never, never, ever tell her child that he or she is a worthless, pathetic excuse for a child, or wish he or she was never born. She spent eighteen years living under a tiger mom, and she was fed up with feeling like tiger meat, constantly chewed up and tossed around.

When she started to vomit at the slightest smells and missed her period by three weeks, she couldn’t contain her excitement for her chance to make things right. She would show her mother, who was no doubt watching on the other side, that she could do it and do it better. She planned how she would say “no,” how she would “gently chastise” but still show her love, and how she would move her eyebrows to show her firmness in decisions just as she planned her baby shower, the color and pattern of the wallpaper for the baby’s room, and her maternity leave from the hospital. ***

Even though her husband was recently laid off, Sophie cuts her nursing hours to parttime because her back is hurting from standing and walking eight hours a day. In their free time, she and her husband take walks along the gravel trail behind their house to a nearby lake. They take care to avoid stepping in the tall, spikey weeds, which weave together like a web, and keep to the narrow, snake-like trail. The mosquitos hide in the tall weeds and silently attack their bare legs as they brush by. The sunlight turns a dusty red around 7 p.m., but the heat lingers on into the night. Her husband always places one hand behind her back to support her spine and the baby, and when the walk is over, the warmth from his hand leaves behind a large sweat stain.

When they reach the lake, they sit on the old wooden bench, careful not to get a splinter from the frayed wood. Sometimes they bring whatever bread has molded to feed the ducks, other times they sit quietly and watch the waters break the last of the sun’s remaining light into little pieces of twinkling glass. Then they return to their plain, white suburban house.

In her free time, Sophie collects baby clothes and toys, browsing the store windows, rejoicing at that perfect giraffe onesie for 75 percent off and a giant, beanie teddy bear she knows her baby will love drooling on when small, but cuddle with when older. After many trips to the mall, Goodwill, garage sales and friends’ houses, she collects a set of Dr. Seuss books and big colorful, wooden blocks, plastic rattles and a rubber duck, and even a train set with a battery-powered motor and three different-sized dolls. She wants her baby to have it all. Because the only toys she had as a child were two second-hand Barbie dolls from the neighbor’s teenage daughter, who had felt bad for her and gave them to her despite her mother’s refusal. The hairs were already cut into an unevenly short crop and one doll was missing a leg, but she loved them like she knew she would love her future baby. ***

The obstetrician notes that the baby’s forehead protrudes irregularly and that his eyes are set too many inches apart and schedules Sophie for multiple follow-up appointments.

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Between visits, Sophie spends weeks in and out of pale-blue rooms, white rooms and sterile rooms for screenings, ultrasounds, blood tests and medical advice. Despite her years of nursing, she becomes sick of seeing scrubs, smelling rubbing alcohol and hearing the crinkling of sterile wrappers. During each trip, in each waiting room, she spends more time thinking of four years ago: the last time she was at the hospital outside of her profession. The more she thinks, the more nauseous and guilty she feels.

For seventeen years after she had left for college, she didn’t have a real conversation with her mother until she got the call. Then once a week in the last two months of her mother’s life, she sat in the armchair by the bedside and watched her mother’s body tinge yellow and waste down to skin and bones. While she watched the nurses change her mother’s chemotherapy and intravenous nutrition bags, she couldn’t say what she wanted to say to her mom, so she said to the nurses, “the IV lines aren’t primed right,” or “the IV pump is set at the wrong speed,” because those were the things she knew how to say. But when the pain became a constant reality and death was only a few days away, her mother, through a morphine-induced haze, grabbed Sophie’s hands and gave a light squeeze.

“When I was your age I was so poor I only ate meat once a year,” she said through a whisper. “I came to this country so you wouldn’t have to suffer, to give you better...”

Before she could finish, she fell into a morphine sleep with her hands still grasping Sophie’s hands.

When a nurse in pigeon scrubs leads Sophie to a treatment room, she grips the edges of her seat while the obstetrician places one hand on her shoulders and tells her the baby has a severe form of autism. Instead of understanding, she thinks about is how she wishes her mother would have just once, in all her time by the bedside, said “I love you. I’m proud of you.” Because she had worked so hard to live up to that standard she now knows her baby can never achieve. ***

Sophie’s husband begins a programming job at a local bank and works overtime. She spends her evenings alone with the baby, on the trail to the lake, watching the fleeting vibrant yellow, orange and red leaves quickly turn brown with decay. She often sits at the bench with her arms wrapped around her stomach, back bent, murmuring softly to the baby.

She sits on the bench thinking of how her mother’s reacting if she’s watching from the other side. What kind of future does she think her grandson, who will never get straight A’s, be on the top of his graduating class and go to a top-ten university, will have? What kind of opportunities does she think he, who won’t be able to speak properly, tie his own shoelaces or function independently, will have? What kind of life does she think he, who no one will want to marry and will always be alone, will have? And what does she think it means for her daughter, who came in second in a class of five hundred, went to University of Pennsylvania and got a Ph.D. in physics by twenty-six, to give birth to a retarded grandson?

Sometimes she will walk up to the edge of the lake and squat down as low as she can and skims the surface of the opaque water with her hand. The water is the fuzzy dark-green of decomposing algae. Often, Sophie loses track of time and thinks until the cold, round moon veils her and the lake in a ghostly pale light. Then the water turns into silver glass and she sees her reflection but she sees her mother. Her mother speaks through her memories.

“This boy is no good,” she had said when Sophie’s then-boyfriend first showed up with a bottle of expensive pinot noir on a college dropout’s paycheck. “Wasting money to keep appearances. But when the appearances don’t matter anymore, he’ll just run off and leave you alone.”

“Don’t date this boy anymore,” she had said when Sophie put aside her Ph.D. and went to nursing school instead. “He is a bad influence.”

“You shouldn’t marry a white boy,” she had said when she saw the engagement ring.

“They will never understand us. You should find a Chinese boy. It’s not too late.”

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Ash Conrad, Poke::Prod

Noah Rawlings, Buy Ice

On late nights by the lake, Sophie’s husband comes out to the lake to wrap her in a warm jacket and walks her back home, so she thinks her mother is wrong yet again. But she still feels uneasy and spends the nights waking up in cold sweats. ***

Seven months in, the obstetrician finds an irregularity in the baby’s heartbeat and recommends Sophie to see a pediatric cardiologist for a fetal echocardiogram test. In the cardiologist’s office, after the test, she finds out that there’s a hole in one of the baby’s heart cavities. The cardiologist says something about heart problems linked with autism, and that the baby will need surgery once he’s born. Sophie sits in the office long after the doctor leaves.

Three and a half weeks later, she finds herself in the emergency room pleading to see her obstetrician because her baby has stopped kicking. Within the night, she is in the delivery room, lying on a lumpy, plastic hospital mattress. Her husband comes right when the Pitocin’s full effects leave her heaving and moaning through her contractions. There are screams and yells and crying and whispering, and then after nine hours, the baby comes out. His flesh looks purple and bruised, his eyes wide-set and closed and his lips dark and puckered. He does not cry. The doctor cuts his cord and the nurses wash him up, but he does not cry. Her husband stares at the baby and doesn’t move.

Everyone in the room is on their toes. They measure, weigh, and wrap the baby in a plain, white onesie as if he could ever feel anything besides cold. One nurse lifts the body and walks over to Sophie’s husband, who only looks at the baby while backing up a few steps.

“Please, please let me hold my baby,” Sophie says but stares at her husband. He’s standing in the corner of the room, avoiding eye contact.

The nurse places the baby into her hands and the doctor clears the room to give them a moment. She holds the child close to her chest and looks down at her very flesh and blood. She bends over and kisses the child on the forehead, and leans over to one ear and says, “Why did you leave me? You know, I would have loved you no matter what. I would have loved you despite everything.” A few drops of her tears fall from her eyes, anointing the baby’s forehead. She lightly wipes away the tears, feeling with her fingertips the fading warmth beneath his skin.

Then the doctor brings in a death certificate rather than the birth certificate. Sophie holds the baby in one arm while she signs the document. She gives the baby a name before she yields his life. When she’s done, she looks at the baby and says, “She would have loved you too.” ***

The Christmas tree is still up even though the branches are limp and the needles are lying in clumps across the family room. The door to the baby room is shut. Sophie is on maternity leave but she has nothing to take care of except for a gold plated box with Seth Shaoping Wright in black script and the ashes of her cremated baby. At first she stashes the box away on a counter in the farthest corner of the kitchen and spends most of her days in bed. When she runs out of tissues, she uses the bed sheets.

Her doctors tell her to rest well the first few weeks after birth. She remembers her mother telling her that in the first month after birth, the most crucial month, a woman needs to supplement her body with nutritious foods, like bird’s nest soup.

“When you have a baby, I’ll make it for you,” her mother had told her.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to,” she had said. My husband will do it for me, she had thought.

But her husband doesn’t make her bird’s nest soup; he doesn’t even know what that is.

He doesn’t make anything for her, because he’s too busy tearing down the baby room and turning it into a private study. He buys materials from the Home Depot one at a time, so he makes many trips. Now he’s too busy to walk to the lake. He’s too busy to talk. He’s too busy to even glance her way. She becomes as foreign to him as bird’s nest soup.

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Now her breasts are sore, her back and hips hurt, and her heart twists in pain with every solitary minute without her husband to comfort and take care of her, because he cannot deal with the reality himself. Without her baby in her arms to satisfy her years and years of longing to make things right. Without her mother to chastise, lecture, and guide her on what to do next, how to handle such wretched despair. ***

Sophie flips through all the boxes and wrappers and papers cluttered on her countertop for a chocolate bar when she sees the golden corner of the box of ashes. In the corner of her eyes, she see through the kitchen window small, white flower buds along the trail, way back in her backyard. She fixes her eyes on the small, white buds, and wanders out onto the trail, unaware of the cuts on her bare feet and ankles from the tangle of razor-sharp weed until she’s standing by the old, wooden bench. She hears a loud, high-pitched cry from across the lake, and the sound pulls her towards then into the lake. She’s a few inches in when she sees crying gulls circling the opposite shore. The sun’s rays cut her vision into little jagged angles, so she sees them through a blinding kaleidoscope.

For a moment, she remains still as the cold water crawls up her pant legs and sinks through her bare feet to the bone. The cries become more frequent, echoing off each other. She runs back to the house, grabs the golden box and runs back to the lake, but the gulls are gone.

Along the trail back to her house, she holds her baby and she sings a song. A happy, upbeat tune that she remembers her mother singing to her when she was a child and was too scared of the dark to fall asleep. She hasn’t heard the tune in decades and she’s surprised she remembers. And then she remembers her younger years, when she followed her mother around as if she was following her superhero, her safety blanket, all she had ever wanted to be. Her father was always away on business trips, but her mother made up for it by taking her to the park, the farmers market, the laundromat, and on the rare occasions when her mother had collected enough spare coins, the dollar-fifty movie theater.

Sophie returns to the lake the next day, with her baby in her arms, and sits on the bench. She waits for the gulls. She can see the whole lake’s reflection on the golden box. When she hears the cries, she looks to the sky, squinting her eyes from the brightness, and places her hands on her baby’s box.

She feels a welling of words coming from her heart up her throat. Words she should have said to her mother but now it is too late. So she says them to her baby.

“I hated her. I had said I wished I didn’t have her as a mother. I had said I wished she were dead. But I never got to say I was sorry.”

Her words bounce off the golden box.

“And now I’ve got you, and now I’m a mother. But I’m not. And I’ll never be a better mother than her. I can’t. You never gave me a chance.”

The gulls are now calling to her as they approach and circle around the lake. ***

Sophie comes back every day with her golden box. She talks to her baby and the gulls reply. Once she tells her husband that there are now gulls at the lake. He doesn’t offer to go with her. Instead, he gives her a funny look and says, “Why would there be gulls at the lake. What are they doing here?” Then he goes back into his study where he’s laid out a mattress on the floor.

She takes her baby with her to bed, to fill up the empty space, but she knows she can’t hold onto him forever.

One day, she sits by the lake with her baby in her lap, but before she can speak, the gulls are circling above her head and they are singing. Their shadows dance at her feet. She looks at the lake and imagines her feet as wings gliding harmlessly over the twinkling glass.

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Lily Clarke, Birth

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She realizes she no longer feels like tiger meat, all chewed up and tossed about. She is the flesh and blood of a tiger mom, a strong woman who made her own fortune despite all odds.

She is tiger flesh.

So when the mosquitos are back, the sunlight turns a dusty red at 7 p.m. and the heat lingers on into the night, Sophie takes a garden spade and her golden box, and she makes her last trip to that bench by the lake, and she digs and digs as the singing gulls circle above.

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TWO PEOPLE CAN FIT IN A CASKET Candace Howze Joan and I looked at each other when cousin Alice said this.

We stood on our tip toes and peered over the white lace lining the wood to see if someone—anyone— was wedged between the soft sides and grandpa George.

Joan, my younger sister, continued to inspect the coffin, her face puzzled, small hands gripping the sides for support, white at the knuckles. She glanced at me but I was uncomfortable and no longer searching.

Alice had sat down hard in the front row, fanning her wig with a funeral program, sweat gathering at her collarbone. “We don’t know who we are without somebody if they’re always there.”

She shook her head and searched her purse for a tissue, grief controlling her face from the tears glossing her irises to the ugly turns of her mouth. .

I watched my cousin, too old to comfort, and thought about Grandpa George, how he must have taken Alice fishing and shopping more times than he had taken me, how Alice and grandpa knew the words to every Elvis song and how his favorite book was Take Someone With You to Heaven, a small softcover, which used to sit on his nightstand, that Alice now held tightly on her lap.

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OAK WILT Still Dixon daylight rolls nocturnal and the bright tips over to dark, a tilted globe on a wooden desk settling through its last momentum the girl is thinking of the word pen•um•bra because she has heard it in language arts class, not this year but two years prior, sixth or seventh grade, from a floppy paperback vocabulary workbook, words-to-learn arranged in lists and puzzles and crosswords, terms that sounded unnatural and unusable when she studied them (she imagined calling Kayla Copeland her ad•ver•sar•y or her younger brother’s behavior wan•ton and could not picture a bul•wark or a•per•ture) so when the heaviness of night begins to descend this time, its air seems not of earth but of neptune, probably, yes: a pen•um•bra belongs on neptune and a bul•wark lives there, too she is lying on the ground and her stomach has warmed the soft soil it is pressed into and she is wishing the heat would spread to the ground below her face, because when she relaxes her neck her chin touches cold, damp dirt, chunks of brown picked up by the skin of her jaw, lumps that break apart easily when she brushes them away with her gloved fingers and they seem bound weakly, like sand if sand were dark brown, almost black the rifle in her hands is made of metal painted pink, even the trigger is pink, a shade so light and feminine that the girl feels embarrassed to hold it but does anyway because her father gave it to her for her birthday or christmas or easter on some year that she was certainly too young to use it, too young to even recall if the day was her birthday or christmas or easter, and she often wonders during these hours of waiting, waiting for something anything some animal any animal to walk by, what it would be like to be a buck killed by a bullet shot from a light pink gun, but she always remembers that a buck does not see pink as a girl’s color, and maybe does not see any color at all, because dogs are colorblind, right, and how different could the eye of a buck be from the eye of a dog she starts to feel like she is sleeping with her eyes open, the ground ebbing in russet swells jagged with the points of dead leaves rolling boundless and infinite, small but mounting unending tides of auburn that will never reach her and cannot they fall when the man coughs and lays his rifle on the canvas sack on the tarp and stands up and when he turns to the girl she does not see him, or does not see his eyes, because he is wearing a cloth mask of camouflage that is too green and alive to match the brown autumn of the woods behind the house and the black netting of the opening in the front make it so that he can look anywhere, watch anything, hidden and when the girl remembers not to stare because staring is fearing and fearing is delicious she looks away and swipes another clod from her cheek and the man says ya know i brought one for ya and the girl does not respond, only looks through the sight on her gun and aligns the ring with a shrub far enough away to fit perfect and round i know ya said ya dont like em because they make yer hair messy but i brought one for ya the girl does not shoot and says the dirt keeps gettin on my face the man is already rummaging through the sack on the tarp and stray bullets have gathered and jingle communal well it’ll cover yer face and neck and probly stop the dang moh skee toes too he hands her the mask and he is wearing gloves too but she knows that the palm in the glove is calloused and creased rough and the knuckles in the glove have tiny brown hairs that curl into each other and the fingers in the glove taste of marlboro on her lips and salt on her tongue and she holds the mask open and looks down into its crown, which is dark but of a finite black that bares folds and wrinkles and a depth that has an end the man brings a plastic soda bottle full of whiskey and gatorade to his mouth and gulps once swallows twice gulps again swallows once and the girl has put on the mask backwards so the black-netted opening is stretched across the back of her head and the man whoops and snorts before quieting quick and walks over to her in the dark the girl thinks of last week when she was at kay eff cee and saw a white husband and chinese wife and a black baby dressed in a tiny tee shirt with little blue jeans and the smallest sandals she had ever seen the man pulls the mask off her head and her hairtie comes loose, the fake blond splaying over her eyes and falling into her mouth and the man is chuckling with hot whiskey breath so the girl clears her face and smiles halfway, even now still hating her turquoise braces, pulls her hair back into the tie in a motion completed a hundred thousand times before ah’ll do it he says and flips the mask over her head and pulls the cinch in the back so she is transported, enclosed, her exhalations warm on the cloth and her inhalations cold on the cloth, imagining ether on a rag, wishing to smell

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whiskey on her own breath, as it would make her nearness to the man dead and unobstructed and blameless, but now she feels sick as he grips soft the side of her neck, thumb behind ear covered in crinkled cloth he is starting to speak of trees and how new trees are made and how slow it is for seeds to fall and blow away or be carried and land in a spot chosen by god to become its own, that many feet beneath the ground the roots of older trees already lived, spiraled and tied and running past each other, trees born of seeds from trees close by, but that in a tree’s world this is all fine, to grow and twist with the tree that dropped the seed martin luther king junior was a pro•po•nent and the news anchor’s rise to fame was me•te•or•ic, yes, the nightly news broadcast from a flaming asteroid (this story and more, tonight at eleven) her world is darkening and gravity feels zealous so she sits first on the tarp, neptune is this and she is here with it, and then she rolls onto the ground, the mask catching the soil so that no more dirt touches her chin

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Kelly Kinder, Feelin’ So Fly

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LEGS Anna Kelley His legs are alabaster columns, set upon bases of gold.

—Song of Solomon, 5:15 It’s not a romantic sentiment, but yours are the funniest things I’ve seen. How can they be kin to the dusky snake-veined limbs in wartime epics, or the oceanic grace of a mad lover’s muscles?

Their only charm is in their truth to the ungainly gutturals of that name: a word hocked up with all the dignity of the first cousin to lugs and eggs.

Heed the pathway my eyes take once a sweat-seasoned night has passed into cool morning, when we construct a makeshift table from lank pillows and eat cheap cereal from salad bowls with a spoon we pass like a baton…

Catch my gaze straying to your legs.

Perhaps, darling, you will guess how I’m thinking about drinking straws or the stalks of gigantic moonflowers and wondering what on earth those togaed poets who praised the scar-laced calves of heroes would do with your appendages— pale as pancake batter, and knees like the undersides of saucers, goosebump-stippled in brisk air.

Laid out beside mine, they recall two wrung-out chickens ready to be fried and eaten off the bone.

Please don’t be rankled. If only you knew how entirely those noodly bearers of your body have won me over—now, I wouldn’t think about blinking away the last crumbles of nighttime with Aeneas himself sprawled by my side unless he sported broomstick thighs and ankles that could put out someone’s eye.

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SADDLE SHOES Nan Pincus If there’s one black-and-white frame that for me paralyzes and then keeps still the feeling of disillusionment that came and grew during that period of spilling and sputtering called seventh grade, it would be the cover of Lolita, filling the whole of my movie-screen eyelids.

That front, the one of the 1976 Vintage Edition, is of immaculate little kid legs, little girl legs, about to curtsy for the stage.

They model a skirt, bobby socks-- and saddle shoes that were shined till they glistened on the page.

I was twelve when I saw it, read the one-line review: “Brilliant, intensely lyrical and wildly funny.”

And as glasses nodded on my wriggling nose, I knew what I was going to do. With a pocketful of crumpled money I walked to the register, in burgundy plaid and shoes just like Lo’s, no one stopping me to say: “Honey, it’s not what you think it is.”

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Arpan Bhandari, Mosque

CONTRIBUTORS Blanche Brown is a senior American Studies major with a double minor in Creative Writing and Women’s and Gender Studies from Tallahassee, FL. Jackson Hall is a sophomore American Studies major with a minor in Creative Writing from Montgomery, AL. Sarah-Kathryn Bryan is a senior Women’s and Gender Studies and Comparative Literature double major with a minor in Creative Writing from Raleigh, NC. Mary Alta Feddeman is a senior Journalism major with a double minor in Women’s and Gender Studies and Creative Writing from Chapel Hill, NC. Mackensie Pless is a senior English major with a minor in Creative Writing from Southport, NC. Anna Kelley is a senior English and Political Science double major with a minor in Creative Writing from Willow Spring, NC Candace Howze is a senior Communications major with a double minor in English and Creative Writing from Creedmoor, NC. Nan Pincus is a senior Comparative Literature and Linguistics double major with a minor in Philosophy from Pittsboro, NC. Alice Martin is a senior English and Communications double major with a minor in Creative Writing from Pfafftown, NC. Sophie Shaw is a junior English major with an Italian minor from Hillsborough, NC. Xingyue Sarah He is a junior English major with a double minor in Creative Writing and Writing for Screen and Stage from Cary, NC. Still Dixon is a first-year English and Linguistics Double Major from Winston-Salem, NC. Sarah Spivey is a junior Studio Art and Religious Studies double major with a minor in Math from Jacksonville, FL. Hamid Ali is a sophomore Computer Science major from Audubon, NJ. Farah Azam is a Studio Art major with a double minor in Biology and Chemistry.

Ash Conrad is a senior Studio Art and Biology double major from Athens, GA.

Noah Rawlings is a first-year Comparative Literature major from Cary, NC. Lily Clarke is a junior Religious Studies major with a minor in Creative Writing from Fairview, NC. Kelly Kinder is a Studio Art major with a minor in Music, Editing, and Graphic Design from Durham, NC. Arpan Bhandari is a junior Political Science major with a minor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Charlotte, NC.

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 THE 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 Geenlaw Hall, CB 3520 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520

CONTACT US AT THECELLARDOOR.UNC@GMAIL.COM

FIND THE ONLINE ISSUE AT http://cellardoor-unc.tumblr.com/

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

© CELLAR DOOR ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2014

The Bull's Head supports literature.

The Bull's Head supports Cellar Door.