The Literary and Arts Journal of the College of Charleston
Miscellany is the College of Charleston’s student-produced literary and arts journal, founded in 1980 by poet Paul Allen and his student, John Aiello. Miscellany is dedicated to showcasing the creative writing and visual art of the College of Charleston’s undergraduates as well as undergraduates across the nation. Miscellany’s staff of students invites all undergraduates to submit their work for consideration each year. Miscellany strives to be a publication of inclusion and integrity.
All submissions are read and reviewed anonymously. The ideas and opinions expressed therein do not necessarily reflect those of Miscellany or the College of Charleston.
Miscellany is published each semester and uses one time printing rights, after which all rights revert back to the author. Miscellany XLIX, printed by Sun Coast Press, is set in Times New Roman.
Julia Claire Cooke......................................
Steadfast
Jessi & Alexander
Teddy McMillan...................................
Frozen and Lost
Thank you for picking up our journal and taking the time to read it cover to cover. We couldn’t be happier with the outcome of Edition XLIX/49, and we hope you think so too. Thank you to all of the students who submitted. We look forward to seeing more great work from you!
Submissions for L/50 are NOW OPEN. We are accepting poetry, prose, and visual art of all kinds.
Find more information at www.substack.com/@miscellanycofc
Letter from the Editor:
As the world becomes more uncertain, and the doors opening in front of us become more vast, creating art becomes a way for us to put our hearts and our minds on display. We are able to choose our futures by reflecting on our work, and the work of others. Art of all kinds is an act of resistance in a world that wants you quiet. By creating art and submitting it to the world, you make your voice known and appreciated.
To all who submitted their artwork, regardless of whether or not your work made it into the journal, thank you. It has been an absolute pleasure spending time with your art. If you are still an undergraduate, we hope you will grant us the opportunity to review your works again, and if you have graduated, we hope that this journal will serve as a reminder of who you were and who you still are in the future. You all are the heart of this operation.
I would also like to thank my managing editor, Savannah Bell, for putting her absolute all into making this journal alongside me. Without her persistence and care, this journal would not be possible. I look forward to continuing working alongside her for Miscellany’s 50th edition and to see her potential shine as Editor-in-Chief for the 2026-27 school year.
To our staff readers, thank you so much for putting your all into reviewing over 100 submissions. Creating a literary and arts journal takes time and patience, and you all have gone above and beyond in making this happen.
And to all readers who pick up this journal, thank you for taking the time to read this. Spend as little or as long as you’d like with us. You are the ears that our voices yearn to reach.
Mila Lawson Miscellany Editor-in-Chief
Margins for Another (A Correspondence)
Chloe Glynn
Letter I - Cambridge, 1996
To A.L, somewhere possibly warmer than here
My most persistent nuisance,
I’ve read your essay on “The Sentimental Fallacy in Early Romanticism,” and I cannot decide whether to commend or condemn you. It was as exhausting as it was excellent.
I’ve annotated the margins, of course. You’re welcome for the corrections.
Your argument was so infuriatingly elegant that I found myself scribbling counterpoints in the margins with an admiration I refuse to confess anywhere but here. I’ve also inserted some notes about your tendency to conflate inevitability with lethargy; consider it a friendly intervention, though you’ll probably ignore them as you do most things that threaten your certainty.
I hope Paris is treating you with the reverence you demand. Cambridge is grey and overrun with tourists. I spend my afternoons in the library pretending to study, though in truth I’m only waiting for distraction to arrive—preferably in the form of your next misguided essay.
Cordially (and with mild exasperation), C.
Letter II - Paris, 1996
To C.W., still insufferably at Cambridge (& whose handwriting should be studied as an act of violence)
Dear creature of critique,
I received your letter along with what appeared to be a massacre of red ink and ego. How comforting to know that even across the Channel, you remain ungovernably self-assured.
You misunderstand me, as always. You accuse me of distrusting emotion, but I distrust only yours. I have read your treatises on moral imagination.
Paris is beautiful and insufferable in equal measure. My lectures are dull; the pastries are not. I’ve begun keeping notes for an article on rational aesthetics — perhaps you’ll find that sufficiently frigid. Do tell me what you’re working on; I need new material for mockery.
Your annotations were indeed insufferable. I’ve saved them anyway.
Yours in academic hostility, A. p.s
Determinism is not despair — it’s simply an admission of limits. You, of course, never admit to any.
Caught-Up in Capri
Julia Claire Cooke Photography
IN STEP LESBIA
Danny McMillan
i.
Catullus takes a piece of lapis lazuli to put into his Lesbia’s mouth, nestled in between her teeth. It costs 14 million dollars in today’s currency and makes her smile like the ocean waves. Lesbia thinks it’s extravagant and unnecessary, like most things are, but it’s fun to tease a boy. Especially this one, with his shy glances and crooked nose. Lesbia thinks he’s fun to play around with. Catullus thinks she shines like the midnight moon. They move in together to save money and Catullus pretends like he doesn’t want to fuck her every night of the week. She makes orzo in her bra and panties, and grins at his pomegranate face.
ii.
Lesbia’s local library has a scriptorium, where dozens of hooded holy women gather and talk shit about their men, their lives, how God still hasn’t responded to their IMs and how men sign their names next to their finished manuscripts. It’s not fair, Europa gripes, her ox eyes angry and dark, He didn’t do shit and his name blots out my work. Everyone agrees. It’s bullshit, the nuns nod, and keep on scribbling.
iii.
Lesbia doesn’t visit the library very often, but she haunts the claustrophobic corner store a block from her apartment. It’s run by an old man the locals call Chickpea– his nose has a bump right down the middle. He forgets to card the teenagers and makes sure to laugh at Lesbia’s insistence that she just turned thirty four. Impossible, he tells her, you shine like gold. Twenty two! She buys a bottle of wine and leaves before Chickpea can slide his hand over her
DANNY MCMILLAN
breast. A man burns like fire when he touches her. Lesbia’s mother thought she was a whore, and she was probably right, but these days Lesbia doesn’t want men to touch her. She doesn’t want anyone to.
iv.
Lesbia comes home some nights to Catullus’ door closed and locked. These are the same nights Caelius comes over (a friend from uni, Catullus insists, and nothing more). He texts her every time, asking her not to knock, not to play loud music in the living room like she likes to, not to exist in her own space so he can keep pretending he knows what love is, like he does in his poetry. She can hear noises behind the closed door, and ignores it every time. Lets her Catullus fuck other people and gets on with her vegetarian meal prep.
v.
Lesbia likes to write articles in her free time. She gets published in the Atlantic, and she’s so proud of it she tells all her friends and family to read it, but she forgets her work lives behind a paywall, so no one really ends up reading it. She gets coffee with her childhood friend Helen and they talk about how literature is disintegrating and how they don’t read books written by men anymore. Helen’s eyes glint with laughter for the first time since her divorce. It makes Lesbia want to start a war for her. As if that ever solved anything.
vi.
When Lesbia was twenty three, she lost her voice. Completely mute. Instead of teaching her sign language, or something helpful, Catullus wrote all her words for her with his poetry;
Made her voice smooth and sultry, her sentences sensual and perverse, and her desire all consuming. She got it back on her semester abroad in Roma, after weeks of meeting unfamiliar eyes; browsing the aisles of a convenience store, Ice cream dropping down her wrist in sticky rivulets. She licked them up with a soft, pink tongue and remembered to say grazie as the bell Jingled on her way out. Catullus was nowhere to be seen. Still isn’t when the door is closed. But neither is she.
At least her voice is back, though. At least she remembers to thank the clerk.
Author’s note: This piece was inspired by an article I wanted to read about how a female monastic scribe with lapis lazuli in her teeth was found, and how that article was behind a paywall. It’s also inspired by the poems of Catullus, the only depiction we’ve ever gotten of Lesbia (or Clodia, if you believe that). There is nothing in her own words. Both of these topics made me think of how many myths and stories and histories are written entirely devoid of women’s voices, but there is so much scholarship written about them by men. I hope I was able to give Lesbia, as well as a few other figures, something of their own voice.
Come over and love me, Mary
Olivia Lytle
I’ll wait for you here, beneath the howling moon moving over our acquiescent bodies, swaying and spreading in this October heat. It’s warmer this time, and it sticks to your throbbing throat like the grassy burrs of July. I still feel the wet and sticky heat of you in those late summer months. When I’d fast for you, so slowly so I might love you all the way, and I want it like that. The flesh-between-teeth feeling of you entirely, suffocatingly sweet within me. Mary,
I need you like this. I need you beneath my fingernails like you were last summer, the sweet sycamore of your body hanging from my jaw. I need you warm and in my fist like the nape of a rabbit, so I might hold you inside me forever.
Italians Unite Against Sun
Julia Claire Cooke Photography
Letter III - Cambridge, 1996
To A., Whose detachment remains a professional hazard
My dear adversary,
I can’t decide whether your last letter was meant to provoke or console, so I’ve chosen to let it do both. You mistake my passion for disorder, which is as lazy a critique as it is accurate. But I’ll grant you this: you make me question my own certainties, and I resent you for it in the most productive way.
I have spent most of this week watching students debate endlessly about Plato’s shadows. You would approve of the chaos, or at least appreciate my subtle attempts to provoke it.
I’ve been revisiting some of the German Romantics — you’d hate them, which makes me love them all the more. I miss our debates in person.
Your postcard from Lyon made me laugh — the line about pigeons “conducting themselves with greater grace than half the faculty” is now pinned above my desk.
Yours, with reluctant admiration, C.
Letter IV - Vienna, 1997
To C., who cannot stop being right by accident Dear menace,
I’m writing from a café that refuses to serve black coffee on Sundays. I’ve ordered something unpronounceable and far too sweet. It feels like penance.
I visited the Belvedere today. The Klimt was smaller than I imagined, though the gold made the air seem louder. You’d enjoy it — very sentimental.
Still, I keep your line about beauty being “a form of precision” close to me. Perhaps I am beginning to understand it, though I will deny it publicly.
Yours, in begrudging admiration, A.
Life Cycle
Sarai Winkler
My grandmother’s backyard was a place where things often lived and died. Though no one ever said it that way. It was big enough to feel endless to children, divided by two large, rusted gates: the brick one at the front and the metal one in the back, which leaned deep into the woods. Between them lay sticky aloe vera plants, tufts of scattered poison ivy leaves, ripe red tomatoes we picked and ate (never washed), and the shadows of snakes, squirrels, and frogs that lived closer to a more natural living than we did. My grandmother said that if you left the animals alone, they’d leave you alone too. But we never believed her. The yard was a system, and systems never stayed balanced for long.
In the small patio area, our family used to gather with chairs dragged out of the kitchen and living room, as if the indoors couldn’t hold us forever. My uncle, who sold clothes with legs so skinny you wondered how he carried anything, would man the grill. Mostly fish—shrimp, tilapia, salmon—fried until the smell clung to anything and watered your eyes. He doesn’t grill anymore. The black pit rusted shut, becoming a living ecosystem, rain pooling in its belly. The playground we once enjoyed became rusted too. It became a graveyard marker of our childhood, the swing set rope splintering, the monkey bars coated in thick, yellow spores, with fat toads nesting underneath the slides. We had once believed the playground was ours. However, when we stopped using it, nature reclaimed its share. Everything became a habitat for something else. The things we thought were ours never truly belonged to us.
My cousin and I would often wander the yard like explorers. Our legs, shielded with doubled, saggy pants on our little bodies, socks ruffled high, as we stomped in Walmart flip-flops and shoes twenty sizes too large. We scoured the area for snake berries, crushed them into a pink paste with sticks, and pretended to eat them. Thicklegged rabbits carved holes in the dirt deep enough to swallow our ankles. And when we stood in them, it was as if our bodies had already been claimed by the wild. We loved that danger—that feeling of almost disappearing.
But what we remember most is the fence. Always the fence. The metal gate at the back, where the woods began and swallowed everything. That was where the deer got caught. Always the deer. Sometimes other animals—dogs, raccoons, cats—but they slipped out eventually. The deer never could. The wire would cut their legs raw, their sports pressed into the sharp, tricky loops until blood drew. Sometimes we would hear their bodies thrash against the metal before we even saw them. My cousin and I were the ones to hold the gate apart, our arms straining against their volatile panic, as the deer
kicked their way out. I have the memory of being kicked on the calf, the bruise appearing a darker shade of brown against my already black skin. I liked the bruise. It meant I had proof that deer were calling to my home. That they were real. That the fence wasn’t just a story, but in fact a myth.
My grandmother warned us not to touch them. She said rabies, scratches, and disease. But we were stubborn. We didn’t want the deer to die. She said we shouldn’t get close to the woods, that Black children had no business pressing their hands into places where death hid, waiting. But we left bowls of cut, old strawberries and leftover pineapple rings and water out as if our generosity could cure nature. We imagined the deer in daydreams, thanking us, fortunate to live a better life. But they always came back, always stuck and frail again. And it made us wonder: maybe we weren’t helping. Maybe we were only resetting the cycle.
The worst was the baby.
We came home one afternoon after middle school and saw it familiarly stuck, legs tangled in the wire. At first, we didn’t help. We were tired of helping. We figured it would free itself eventually, or it wouldn’t. And maybe we told ourselves that we were too busy as children, but the truth was that we didn’t want to carry an unfulfilling burden anymore. The mother deer was on the other side, pacing, throwing her lithe, speckled body into the air. She watched us from behind the gate, her black eyes impossible to read. Fear, accusation, rage—they were all there. And she ran in circles, then stilled, as if waiting to see what we would do. For days, she lingered. Her presence was an empty reminder. We stayed inside, watching from the laundry room window as the arches of our feet and our faces pressed against the fogging glass. The smell of detergent and mildew in our noses. We knew the deer was still there. We knew it to be suffering. But we did nothing. By the time we went out, it was too late. The baby’s eyes had been eaten out. Just hollow, red sockets. My younger cousin, three years my junior, knelt to look for them in the ground, as if maybe they had fallen out whole and could be smothered back. She searched frantically, like the mother deer, disgust mixing with determination. I didn’t search as hard. I stared at the carcass, as if my eyes could undo it. But nothing moved. It was grotesque in a way that was too real, too unsanitized, the kind of grotesque that only comes from neglect. Not a clean death. A death from waiting too long.
That’s what marked us—the waiting.
We could have saved it. But we didn’t, and now it was ours in a way that all the other deer hadn’t been. They had run away into the woods, or maybe to the road where we saw bodies later, mangled under tires, legs bent backward and unhinged. Those deaths didn’t feel like ours.
But this one did. The backyard had become somewhat of a crime scene. The playground, the aloe vera, the tomatoes–all haunted by the ruined innocence of what we didn’t do.
The carcass decayed from the window for weeks. Sometimes my cousin swore she saw it twitch, and I let myself believe her. Because belief was easier than the guilt of certainty. When it rained, the smell grew stronger, seeped through the grass and air. Visibly, became a horrible, messy sight. So, we didn’t open the back door. We lived with it as though it were another family member, silent but present. At night, I’d imagine the lonely mother deer still waiting at the edge of the woods, staring at the house, knowing it was us who failed her.
Because nothing was supposed to die in the backyard.
That’s what we kept saying to ourselves. The yard was for life, for play, for a fruitful harvest. Death belonged to the woods or the road, not here. We saw ourselves between those crossroads. But the deer’s body rotting in the grass proved otherwise. And once it happened, it continued to happen in our minds. Every deer that got caught afterward was another chance to relive that guilt. Every time we hesitated, every time we stayed in our bed instead of helping, we thought of that baby. And even when we did help, even when we pulled the gates wide and let them kick their way free, we wondered if it mattered. They would only come back. Or they’d run to the road. Or die in another way.
It made us question whether intervention mattered at all. Even in life. Maybe we weren’t saving anything. Maybe we simply delayed the inevitable. That’s when I realized the backyard wasn’t a sanctuary. It was a stage where all these cycles played out—birth, struggle, waiting, death. We were just players, sometimes with power, mostly without.
And yet I can’t stop thinking about the way we stood at that window, side by side, watching the carcass decay. Two Black kids in the South, raised on warnings about sin, staring at something that looked like punishment. Staring at something that asks us: what do you do when you can help, but you don’t? What kind of people does that make you? The backyard was no longer neutral after that. It was a mirror, and in it, we saw ourselves as cowards, as bystanders, as creatures too weak to save another creature.
But still, life kept moving.
The mushrooms multiplied on the oak trees. Frogs nested in the grey puddles under the swings. Rust continued to thicken like bacon fat on the grill. We outgrew the yard, moved into other lives, but sometimes I still think about it. I think of the fence, the way it divided the woods from the house, and how fragile that boundary really was.
And I think of the baby deer. How its death became ours, too. A reminder that sometimes the cycle isn’t natural. Sometimes the cycle becomes you.
Face
Cherry Hybrid Mixed Media Collage
A Busy Street in New Orleans
Tojuan Gordon
The noise is perhaps the enduring and prevalent force here
You hear music, Jazz, R&B, Rap, Gospel, to put it simply, the sounds of Blackness in a Black city
You hear the brief snippets of a thousand conversations
Quarrels, deals, and other words best not mentioned here
The accents of so many disparate tongues and experiences seem to be in harmony, at least for tonight, on this busy street
Everything looks like chaos, but it is ordered chaos, a chaos borne of uniqueness and other histories that have been forgotten or at least ignored, on this busy street
It seems so strange that a place like this, which has been the setting for so many miseries of its people, seeing glow as it does now, is immensely strange
But the whispers of those hurts still hold a place in the veritable open-air market of noise that is New Orleans
The sounds of the original people being forced from their only home, the sounds of whips on flesh, the sounds of dogs, the sounds of raging fire, the sounds of rushing water coming too quickly, the sounds of wind whirling so fast that it sounds like the fury of some God
These sounds of anguish seem to mingle almost harmoniously with the sounds of joy, the sounds of Jazz, the sounds of old friends meeting, the sounds of a Super Bowl win after the biggest heartache you can imagine, the sounds of children at play
It would be common to think that these sounds should be at odds
But New Orleans has always dealt with opposites and contradictions
That’s just New Orleans.
Letter V - Oxford, 1998
To A., who mistakes honesty for rudeness
Dear A.,
The department is as tedious as ever. I gave a lecture this morning that half the students slept through and the other half challenged for sport. You would have enjoyed it. Your last letter arrived with a pressed violet inside. You didn’t mention it. Was it deliberate or an accident? Either way, I’ve kept it.
Yours, C.
Letter VI - Berlin, 1999
To C., whose ego is both terrifying and fragile Dear tyrant,
The violet was deliberate. I wanted to see if you’d notice — and if you’d overthink it. Congratulations on proving my thesis yet again.
You’ll be pleased to know my paper was rejected for being “too theoretical.” I took it as a compliment.
Affectionately irritated, A.
Letter VII - Berlin, 1999
To C., whose letters I secretly anticipate
My dear contrarian,
I write from a room that refuses to cool, where the light falls sideways and the desk feels like it is leaning toward me in judgment. The archives are absurdly quiet today, though I could hardly say I noticed—I have spent the last hour staring at my own margin notes, trying to summon the illusion of thought.
I’m sleeping poorly. Or perhaps I am sleeping too much. One minute I am feverish with exhaustion, the next I am awake, tracing the veins in the ceiling.
You would call this melodramatic. You might even be right. And yet, to stay sane, I keep thinking of the argument we had in Oxford, about whether beauty is a discipline or a distraction. It seems all arguments have become both, and I cannot decide which applies to my own mind.
I am enclosing a photograph I took of a café I could not enter. The owner looked cross; I was too weary to care. Perhaps you will find some philosophical significance in it, though I doubt it.
Your most exhausted adversary, A.
The Night My Mother Died
Olivia Lytle
The night my mother died, I built a kingdom under my sheets. I started with the castle, snow-capped and slanting against the weight of the consuming blizzards that came at night when our dreams were the only comfort besides the warmth of one other and the crackle of the fire in its hearth. My mother and I would hold hands and whisper stories and I’d beg her not to tickle me just so she would, just so I’d feel the warmth of her fingertips once again. We’d giggle and it would echo across the whole of the kingdom, over its greatest peaks and lowest valleys, inside our very own writhing bones.
My mother and I slept in the castle’s tallest spire, well past the purplish cloudbank, under blankets of the softest white and heapings of butter-yellow pillows. We’d watch our subjects in their little village from the ledge well below with a telescope taller than me. She’d lift me to watch as the children spun in circles in the morning light, as the baker placed fresh sweets in the shop window, as the farmer herded cows of every color into the pen, their bells a cacophony of clangs the dogs yelped at as they snaked through the hooves of the towering creatures.
At dusk, I’d leap from my window and fly to greet the villagers, would feed them grapes from our table and tell them stories of my travels across the lands. I’d let the young ones silk my wings and braid my hair into impossible knots. We’d dance beside the firelight until the braids unfurled, until my wings hung low on the floor, and the bottoms of my feet were ravaged and caked in blackened dirt. My mother never liked it when I’d trail the earth inside, so I’d wipe my feet on the village’s forever-damp garden and gather her the brightest poppies and sweet peas I could find. I’d clutch them to my heart when I flew to her, careful not to let a petal loosen from its stem and give way to the betraying winds. She awaited my return every night, forever patient, from the moment she taught me to unfurl my wings, the moment she let me fly from that ledge. Some days, I’d visit my friends who lived in the creek out back. I’d bring them a basket spilling from its sides with cheeses and breads and sweets. The snakes would slither up my legs and arms and whisper stories of their journeys around the stream, of the particularly exceptional rock they found to sleep under while I was away. The bees, who were uniquely difficult to understand with their quiet voices and wild buzzing, would lead me up the mountain to where the honey was the sweetest. The forest spirits would follow, too, yet from a distance that made them impossible to see. They’d whisper my name into the wind, their voices light as air yet as full as a flooded lake.
We’d lounge there for hours, me and the bugs and the lizards and the wolves and
anyone who found themselves wandering near us, eating from the basket and the orange flowers that dotted the little meadow. They liked to hear stories from the village, and I enjoyed watching their faces while I told them. Mine were no wonder compared to my mother’s, though, she who would find me wherever I wandered and answer my friends’ pleadings for another story. She would tell us stories of the deepest seas, of kingdoms far above the clouds with birds for kings. She’d tell us about her first love, a boy with cornflower hair who had hooves for feet, and how she liked him only because he could run faster than her through the narrow valleys that lined their village. She told us of the dragon she found curled in a cave, a mother, guarding an empty shell, and how she caressed the monster’s vicious jaw until she stopped growling, until she invited the warmth of a child to fill her again.
The nights after my mother died were spent in this kingdom, with our hands clasped and us unbound, flying through the sweetened air, letting our fingers dance across glittering ponds and our hearts beat to the rhythm of the wings on our backs. We’d spend our days languid in unending meadows, our fingers out as an invitation for the stainedglass butterflies who fluttered by. She taught me that trick, she taught me it all. We were both, together as one, nothing, yet everything in the world. Under those tattered sheets, we were everything.
La Lune
Anonymous Photography
summer of sleepless bedrooms
Susie Carns
At night you don’t find my elementary school notebook sufficiently interesting and I scream-cry until I turn into a child and you lay with me in your arms In the morning I watch that video you found funny when you were twelve and the sun rises gingerly
The grey walls soak in all of our energy and they radiate back all the time
Neither of us is leaving and both of us are incapable
We live here and probably always have and likely never will again
We claw at each other daily and by night let the wounds be healed by cooler air
The moon is cruel and the sun is taunting and we could not care less about either
Voices are heard on occasion past the window and door but always they fade I think when I was born I had met you
Maybe in a past life or in a dream or in a grocery store
And I remember the day it was only green or grey and I gave you a costume jewelry ring
You remember it too because we always knew this anyway I do not need to have a name and neither do you
All we will ever say is you or me or I and us
Before we were two field mice and now we are this and both hate it
So long as we never leave we will manage
Letter VIII - Oxford, 1999
To A., whose chaos I am beginning to feel responsible for
My dear lunatic,
You write as though the room itself conspires against you. Perhaps it does. Perhaps that is the first thing I should have warned you about: rooms are subtle tyrants (not me).
I read your letter twice, then three times, and eventually just set it aside to stew. Your photograph is absurd. The café owner’s expression is catastrophic, though one imagines he would have been cross even had you been fully composed.
You are frighteningly exhausted. I see it. You keep writing as if endurance were a measure of intellect, but endurance is rarely elegant. Obviously.
Go to bed. Drink water. Stop trying to argue with ceilings. I will not apologize for ordering you to care for yourself.
Yours, in reluctant guardianship, C.
Supervision Necessary
Julia Claire Cooke Photography
Ghazal for the North Oliva Lytle
We’re deep in the scratching brush, 40 miles north of the Potomac where the snowy leaves fall in a cracking heap. The blue jays sing their whisper songs, and Daddy needs me to leave
You, I love you in the Northern morning air, in Oswego farmers markets, in oak trees, feeding the snowy-nosed barn cat. We bleed here forever, and no longer than that. Even still, we leave.
Smell these decomposing evergreens, it’s been years since the great fire that took us all. And I’ll burn too, if you leave it up to me. I’ll be the ash that covers you, the kindling leaves.
Sometimes, I think about Tennessee, the mountains that smelled of cigarette smoke as we threw our hopes over the cracking cliffs. The gently bleating fawn whose mother we watched leave.
Take this olive branch from my cleaved palms, take it all. I was only ever the fireweed that grew near your pillow. The wandering, hungered barn cat, the one who needed you to stay.
Letter IX - Berlin, 2000
To C., who continues to insist on logic in a fevered world
Dear infuriatingly composed one,
I am sleeping in fits, which is to say not at all. My notes resemble a murder of syntax; I am not certain even the words recognize one another. Yesterday I almost submitted a paragraph about Kant as if it were a recipe. I considered including it anyway, but the spellchecker mutinied.
I have begun to think that everything I have ever written might be meaningless — or at least misdirected. The lectures, the deadlines, the essays — all of it a distraction from some deeper miscalculation I cannot identify.
I know you will scold me. Do so anyway. You always make nonsense feel like a solution. Happy new year. I find it pleasant to have entered it before you, even if only by an hour.
Yours, A.
Letter X — Oxford, 2000
To A., whose discomfort I can help through only words
My dear troublemaker,
I received your letter in fragments. It is alarming, though not entirely unfamiliar — your brilliance always carries the threat of implosion.
You are not meaningless. You are not misdirected. You are human. This may sound simplistic, and you will likely refute it with a treatise on metaphysical responsibility, but I am writing anyway.
Do something small today. Feed yourself something that does not require thought. Drink water. Leave the pens idle for an hour. Watch the light fall and record nothing, not even a photograph.
I’ve enclosed a page from one of my own half-finished essays. It is unremarkable. You may annotate it with scorn if you like. Happy New Year.
Yours, C.
Letter XI — Berlin, 2000
To C., who has not abandoned me yet My dear steadfast irritant,
I am awake past midnight, as usual, but the fever has receded enough to allow for thought that is less erratic. I read your letter twice — perhaps three times — and even considered that it might be possible to survive without complete destruction.
I am returning to work slowly. Slowly enough to notice the light on the ceiling without it collapsing my mind. Slowly enough to realize that in all these letters, all these absurd, scrawled, nonsensical attempts at connection, I have been tethered. You are my tether. I say this in words that feel wholly inadequate — mostly because I still feel the need to argue.
Tomorrow I will attempt coherence.
Ever your unfinished thought, A.
Sedimentary Anonymous Photography
Cold Warmed with Life
Danny McMillan
A woman is living in her apartment.
Elisabeth does not know what this woman’s name is, nor why she is here, in this place that is hers and has been since she died. She herself has been hiding behind the billowing of lace curtains and the dull flicker of dim fireplaces for two hundred and twenty-three years, and has never become used to having company in her apartment, despite the many people that have passed through its walls and meandered through its hallways. She is more familiar with clusters of spiderwebs and the glint of the spiders’ arachnid eyes, empty and shining; with the dull fuzz of tacky dust and the hush of voices long gone. Things with pulses and things that breathe and think have become foreign to Elisabeth; they are no more friends to her than sunlight is to squinted eyes adjusted to darkness.
The woman’s presence is unwanted beyond measure, and she should know this. She should feel it in her bones that she is not supposed to be here, that this is the only mortal thing Elisabeth has left, and she does not want to share it.
It is a change, and a wildly unpleasant one at that, that there is now a lilting voice and a thrumming heartbeat interrupting Elisabeth’s silence. That instead of the dust and rotting wood and crumbling plaster that she has grown friendly with over the passage of two centuries, there is banging and knocking and the mumbled assertions of a creature supposedly used to her solitude.
This intruder knows nothing about solitude; it’s almost laughable. Modern people rarely do, though they may fancy themselves divided and insular. They have devices with their ringing lines and tinny voices, and their indulgences of overpriced cafes and vanity stores to satisfy an itch in their burning wallets. They have empty calls brimming with pleasantries; they waste time like it’s a passion and then tell their friends how busy they’ve been.
Elisabeth had none of these things when she was alive. Days passed by wandering the quiet streets of Bath, passing women in their swirling dresses and handsome couples twining their arms together. She envied the doll-like women, their cheeks flushed and their laughter ringing out in the streets like bells. None would ever speak to her, an Irish girl who had moved into an elite neighborhood with her mother and single housemaid, missing both a respectable British surname and a father to establish it. The neighboring women laughed when she introduced herself as Elisabeth Byrne, fervent with travel and the desire to fit it. They had bowed like swans over her outstretched hands as they mocked her accent behind their fluttering wings of tulle and lace, giggling and giddy with money. Elisabeth’s mother had enough money left over from her absent husband to get by on the appearance of wealth, but the aspect was all she could finance; Elisabeth never had new dresses, desperately behind the constantly changing fashion, and their housemaid was paid scraps to cook and clean a little, mostly for appearances. Her mother spent much of her time in London, awash with riches and suitors, or
DANNY MCMILLAN
back in Ireland visiting her family, twelve packed to a home, and Elisabeth would spend days as the only occupant of a sprawling, empty four story townhome without talking to a single soul, hard, clacking heels pacing back and forth across the hardwood floors as she entertained herself with whatever she could.
It was good for her, though, this loneliness. It made her imagination more vivid, and her desires shrink down to a needlepoint. Elisabeth learned many books by heart, could quote plays and prose with ease, and began to imitate French from a secondhand textbook she’d found at a used bookstore, just to show that she could be sophisticated like the other women of the neighborhood. She did not truly want to be associated with the people who scorned and mocked her, however. She only wanted to show that she could. Attending their balls was out of the question, though she was scarcely invited; and the baths and salons never held any interest for her, with their tittering circles of gossip and their inane diatribes. Elisabeth was above them, those silly, insubstantial people. Elisabeth is above this woman as well, this silly tenant so desperate for communication and society but too afraid to reach out into the real thing.
Though, Elisabeth supposes, she can recognize and respect the beauty of modern interconnectedness, though she finds it illusive. The tenant plays movies on a small laptop every so often—Elisabeth had slowly learned about modern technology as previous tenants floated through her walls, and was somewhat familiar with the glow of a phone screen, or the tinny noise of music through miniscule speakers—scrolling on her phone while a romance plays on in front of her; answering a call from a persistent relative, sending a half-hearted message to a friend, or responding to a helpful tip given by her well-meaning but obnoxiously persistent mother. The closeness with which the tenant can reach anyone she can conjure is alarming and sends unwanted shocks of envy through Elisabeth when she is being particularly indulgent; though she would not have anyone’s phone number to type in, the mere idea makes her wriggle with jealous.
This woman is doing terrible things to her afterlife, but Elisabeth cannot quite decipher her feelings about the intruder. The first day she meets her is filled with anger and confusion; shooing the tenant from room to room, translucent arms swinging through the woman’s torso and shoulders as Elisabeth tries to grip her and steer her away from what is her home, just as she’d done for the other interlopers trying to claim dominance over her home.
The woman takes no notice of her fury, or her shrieks, or her harsh scoldings save for a quick furrow of the brow—Elisabeth is never as loud as she would like to the living. She cannot feel Elisabeth’s anger or hear her cruel words, and only continues to unpack her suitcase and claim this place as her own.
There is something missing from this woman, though, something that Elisabeth willfully does not want to understand. She makes instant mashed potatoes in the kitchen’s tiny microwave and goes to bed with her hair still wet, waking with it tangled and matted. She takes calls in her two-day old pajamas and sometimes will forget to brush her teeth in the morning. There is a forlornness, a sadness to the tenant, and Elisabeth cannot
see past it. She recognizes the sadness from herself, in the last few weeks of her life, her body stricken with illness in an empty house with no one to care for her, left to slowly fade away into the stonework as her mother entertained herself on platitudes and cheap champagne.
She learns the woman’s name after a week, and it sings on her tongue like honeysuckle: Virginia, sweet as molasses, just as slow and sticky.
Virginia sings in the shower as she suds up her chestnut hair, with her scratchy voice and off-key humming, and she answers the phone with a quiet “Yes?” instead of a warm “Hello, this is Virginia!” as the previous tenant used to. Everything she does is defensive and sparse, like she cannot quite take up space in her own world without feeling like she must fight for it; and often, she does not have the will to battle.
Elisabeth can understand this feeling. She barely took up enough space in her own life when she had it. ***
Unhappily, she finds that she is beginning to tolerate Virginia’s presence, as the weeks stretch gradually and boxes are slowly unpacked and dismantled, trinkets and baubles decorating any clean surface. Virginia has begun to settle down, place her roots in the barren soil, and the space brightens and sings with new life. Spiders are sent fleeing into dusted corners. The curtains are drawn and replaced with bright linen panels Virginia tells her mother were picked up from the collection of an old Bath estate. From an antique store, she tells her, though the fact that these curtains, ones that look identical to the new, starched sheets of fabric her mother once bought and had shipped new from London after her father had sent a payment, are considered vintage to Virginia is just one of the dozens of oddities that being dead since 1801 brings to a young woman. There are piles and piles of books that Virginia trips over every morning, grousing to herself that the need to buy a bookshelf grows more imperative each passing day. Packages and post arrive on the doorstop, and though Elisabeth cannot leave the flat and examine who brings them, she watches as Virginia signs for them, bringing lights and photo frames and throw blankets into the steadily filling home. It is fascinating to watch just how easy it is for Virginia to decorate the space, and how unlike it is from Elisabeth’s own experience, with sellers and horse carts and settees that would take months to arrive once the order was placed. The process certainly entertains her, watching Virginia flit back and forth from this thing to the next, arranging all her niceties just so.
Virginia still has not noticed that there is someone else in the flat, though she suspects something; she wrinkles her nose at Elisabeth’s attempt at scolding, and physically recoils when Elisabeth’s corporeal body passes through her own, solid one. But she does not truly acknowledge Elisabeth—not even the smudges of fingerprints she leaves behind on the foggy mirrors after Virginia steps out of the shower, or the cups she’s managed to tilt over. Virginia is not afraid of old houses, or ghosts, Elisabeth hears her saying one night into her phone, a dry laugh in response to someone’s astonished query as to whether she was afraid, living in that big flat on the Royal Crescent all alone.
“It’s old, and it’s falling down around my ears,” Virginia says into the speaker,
DANNY MCMILLAN
poking at a bowl of leftover spaghetti she is failing to heat back up to the right temperature, “but my godmother left it to me, and I can’t just get rid of it. For some reason I feel like there’s something still lingering here, trying to keep it alive.”
Elisabeth barks out a laugh despite herself—how little the living know! Would Virginia respond just as nonchalantly as she does if she knew she was not alone in her new residence? Elisabeth doubts it; it would be fascinating to see how this alleged heroine would react to the ghost in her attic.
Despite the fact that Elisabeth still does not like that Virginia is in her flat without her permission, she resolves here and now to alert Virginia, however she can, to her presence. She’s become fascinated with the tenant, with her drooping shoulders and her long, straight hair; she finds her exhilarating, a breath of fresh air to lungs that haven’t been used in centuries.
What she had been doing before was child’s play; she wants Virginia to know whose house this truly is. Elisabeth thinks it could make her afterlife a bit more interesting. It has been so long since there was another person in her house, though, truly; a person who made plans to stay and settle down. She should like to be known to this woman, who does not go outside and who talks to herself. Perhaps Virginia would like it if someone talked back.
Elisabeth makes real, physical contact with Virginia for the first time; Virginia sees her for the first time when the tenant is cooking eggs on the short-circuiting stovetop. She’s sitting astride Virginia as the woman stands with one cocked him clad in pajama pants, shaking too much pepper into her egg whites. Elisabeth’s translucent legs are kicking through the cabinets, back and forth with anticipation as the smell of breakfast fills the kitchen.
She wants a piece of egg, a stolen bite of golden hot deliciousness—Elisabeth can almost remember the jammy, salty tang of it, and her want multiplies so intensely that all the dusty air left in her ghostly lungs pushes out into a heaving gasp and she reaches out, out, out, touches the handle of the pan, and knocks it down from the precarious burner it sits sizzling on.
Virginia gasps when the pan hits the floor, splatters of almost-fried egg flung every way imaginable onto the hardwood floors. She curses, something inspired and vulgar that Elisabeth has never heard before, and which makes her cackle at its impropriety.
“You’re not funny,” Virginia scowls and says without turning her head, and the words make Elisabeth’s body freeze and her heart stop—well, what would it have felt like, if her heart still beat.
You can hear me? Elisabeth asks from the counter, shell shocked. For all her two hundred and twenty-three years of afterlife, no one has ever understood her voice; not the real estate agents, not the construction workers, not the dozens of people who had lived in and left her home over the centuries.
“Only sometimes,” Virginia responds, crouching down and beginning to collect egg from the hardwoods. “Most of the time, no. But I can hear you talking now and
again. You’re very loud, for a ghost. Especially your laughter. Do I make you laugh?”
No, you don’t, Elisabeth responds, her cheeks burning, her hands firmly planted on the countertop. She is flushed with life and excitement for the first time in a very long time, burning with it. That is entirely untrue. You’re rude.
No one has ever heard her, not truly. Not only can Virginia hear her, she is talking to her. She’s responding.
“Okay, sure,” Virginia responds, a cluster of egg and debris in her cupped hand. She stands and turns to the sink to switch the faucet on, brushing off her hands and watching as the sad bits of egg swirl down the drain.
“That was meant to be breakfast,” Virginia says, sadly looking into the sink. “Now what am I going to have?”
There is a certain novelty, now that Elisabeth has not had the pleasure of breakfast in so long, of the choice of what to eat. She remembers slices of toast coated in butter and marmalade, oatmeal with a handful of dried fruits and nuts poured in to sweeten it. Bacon where the fat still sizzled and popped. Eggs—oh, eggs!
Elisabeth is suddenly and exceedingly jealous out of nowhere, the envy barely overshadowed by a large and incessant want of life that has been weighing down on her chest even before she died. Conversing with Virginia through fingerprints and whispers, teasing her like she’s in some sort of haunted house, is no longer fun for her, no longer amusing. Elisabeth wants to be able to tease Virginia physically, like how her mother used to make her howl with laughter at a touch to her sides.
She will never be able to speak with Virginia like the living, not like she speaks to people through her phone or how she brushes hands with the mailman. All the fun she’s stirred in her mischief is vacuumed away, all the amusement whisked from her grasp, until all that is left is the fact that she is a girl who has been dead and stuck in the same place for too long.
“How long have you been here?” Virginia starts to ask, but there is a pop that makes her jolt before her sentence finishes; the light flickers in its bulb, and Elisabeth disappears to wherever the dead go when they are outside of the world of the living, when their hauntings are finished for the day. It is a warm, encompassing feeling Elisabeth equates to her mother’s religious stories, sinking into the soft darkness. It is not beyond the apartment, but as far as she can get from it.
She is used to being half shadow after having been dead for so long. It is more familiar to her than whatever it felt to be alive. There is some bit of comfort in knowing that she has a place to belong to. The world of the living cannot be called as such; the silence of the dead, hesitatingly, can.
***
Despite the unbecoming anger and longing she continues to battle with, Elisabeth does not stop following Virginia around. Nor does Virginia stop talking to her, whether she is listening or not; now that she knows she has an audience, Virginia talks out loud to the air, muttering little comments that make Elisabeth blush, or barely-there jokes that make her giggle.
DANNY MCMILLAN
It may be that Virginia is truly growing on her these days. Elisabeth almost looks forward to her presence; she enjoys the morning rituals Virginia keeps, and appreciates the space she leaves for a figure she cannot see. Virginia will have a mug of tea every morning; Elisabeth watches her leaf through teabags, scowls when she puts the mug in the microwave, and swallows with her when Virginia takes a sip, as if she can taste it for herself.
Virginia still does not leave the house very regularly—or, as Elisabeth notices, much at all. She takes her calls indoors, or out on the small terrace of the balcony window. She eats hastily made meals, as though she cannot quite keep up with what her body demands of her.
On her worst days, Virginia doesn’t eat anything and won’t call anyone at all. The demands of her body that have not been kept up with are entirely disregarded, traded for a day spent lying on the plush couch and sleeping through mindless TV shows. There’s a small bottle of pills for clinical depressive episodes on the bathroom counter that Elisabeth likes to rattle around, and they go by faster on days like these. Elisabeth watches at a distance from the room’s corners on these days, half behind the doorway, unable to understand what plagues Virginia. The tenant never tells her, and she’s too proud to ask; Elisabeth is not entirely sure what is going on with her these days, why exactly Virginia feels the need to remove herself from society entire and waste the days away, but she can understand some of it. With her books and her French long ago she had attempted the same thing, hiding away. But trying to disappear from her own life was never an option.
There is one of these days that is worse than the others, sometime during the sixmonth mark of Virginia’s residence; and it is much worse. Elisabeth comes back—wakes up, she likes to say—from the abyss she dissipates to instead of sleeping, to the sound of sobs. Virginia doesn’t cry loudly, but the noises are all the more heart wrenching by the attempt to stifle them.
Elisabeth does not want to come closer to Virginia, with her noises like a wounded dog. She would rather clap her hands over her ears and run to the highest point of the house, singing and chattering like a magpie to drown out the sound. Crying, even this long after her death, pierces her heart and makes her skin crawl. She is reminded of things held too close to her chest, memories that she would like more than anything to forget—hours of crying out in pain, alone, sick, heard by no one.
But Virginia is so sad, most of the time but especially now, and Elisabeth does not want her to be—wants nothing but—so she slowly forces herself to the door of Virginia’s bedroom.
It is a room that once acted as her mother’s guest room, lacey and pale blue, but now with cream wallpaper and curtains pulled tight against the windows. The lights are dim, barely there. As her eyes adjust Elisabeth is able to make out a woman-shaped lump snared within layers of blankets and sheets of the double bed shoved to the corner in the room.
Virginia, she says, putting all her energy into being heard. She sees Virginia
twitch, the blankets pulling tighter around her.
“Not now,” Virginia says, trying to level her voice. Elisabeth can hear the sob behind the clipped vowels. “I don’t want to talk right now. Please leave me alone.”
We don’t have to talk, Elisabeth replies, and slowly rests herself on the edge of the bed. She doesn’t say anything more than what she has, but lowers herself to one of the overstuffed pillows and rests her head beside Virginia’s, shaping her body around the contour of the other, trying to feel its warmth. Perhaps dislodging some of her own. This close to her she can feel Virginia gasp, can feel the shaking hand that cups her shoulder with a burst of heat.
“I can feel you,” Virginia says, her voice shaky. Amazed.
I know, Elisabeth says, surprised by it herself; but really, she isn’t too shocked that Virginia can. Because of her, she is becoming more corporeal with each passing day, drawn into a web of humanity, the warmth of the woman beside her leeching into her own body, the heartbeat in her ears thrumming sporadically in her own chest. Almost as if she’s getting a second chance, to live the life she was robbed of.
Can we rest? she asks softly, Would you like that?
“Yes,” Virginia says, pulling Elisabeth closer. “Yes, please.”
They lie in the bed for hours, Elisabeth’s body feeling warmer than it ever has.
She feels differently about Virginia, afterwards. Less sure and steady, less aloof than she once was. The feeling is disconcerting, like somewhere she’s missed a step and is stumbling down the stairs. She thinks it might be love.
Her heart is a strange, corruptible beast, susceptible to any mode of fleeting fancy. Elisabeth thinks it has started beating again, and its skips and stops startle her.
Virginia behaves differently, too. She’s stopped treating Elisabeth as a concept, something that could be thought of but never conceptualized, and more of a real person. Elisabeth finds herself more solid, too. Her form flickers in and out of Viginia’s sight, unsteady as a candleflame, but it is there.
“I want to try something,” Virginia blurts out one day, ten months having passed by like a hurricane, just as quick and reckless. She’s halfway through a book, glasses she hated but that Elisabeth found endearing slipping low on her curved nose. She had purchased a bookcase for all her books, finally, and the piles had migrated neatly to their new homes with great joy. Elisabeth had tried to go with her to purchase the bookshelf, had wanted to see what the world looked like these days, what anything looked like outside of the rose-colored lenses of television; and had gotten as far as the street corner before disappearing, yanked forcibly back into the clutches of her own domain. Virginia had laughed, cackling loudly, and Elisabeth could hear the noise all the way back home. It had warmed her like a fire’s flame.
Okay, Elisabeth responds, her hands wrapped around a book of her own, one Virginia had bought specifically for her; something modern and lewd. Elisabeth loved these sorts of books, ones that used foul words and described in various terms how elaborate the sex lives of modern people could be. It was endlessly amusing to Virginia. What
DANNY MCMILLAN
is it?
Virginia had turned pink, the color going all the way down her neck. “Never mind,” she backtracked, twisting her dark hair around a finger. “Never mind, it’s silly and you won’t like it. I don’t want to take advantage of you. You’ve just become—well, whatever you are now. I don’t want to force you.”
Elisabeth leans forward on the couch, long locks of strawberry blonde hair cascading over her shoulders. You won’t hurt me. Won’t you tell me?
She doesn’t know what Virginia is thinking, but the way her face reddens and scrunches as her glasses slip further down her nose is so endearing that Elisabeth thinks she might do anything if Virginia asked it nicely enough. Humanity is doing terrible things to her willpower.
“I just—” Virginia starts, then stops. Nerves thrum in her ears, twitching through her fingers. “Would you, maybe—you don’t have to, of course—”
Won’t you just say whatever it is you want? Elisabeth says, impatient. Ghosts have infinite patience—they have to—but she has become less and less spectral with each passing day, much to her shock and delight, and with that comes an impatience she had forgotten from her life. Virginia—
“I want you.” Virginia blurts out, face hidden in her book. “I want to kiss you, I’ve wanted to for months, I just didn’t know if it was proper or if you even wanted to, or if it was possible, but now, you’re more…” she gestures at Elisabeth, making a dent in the overstuffed couch and holding a book in her hands. She’s no longer see-through; she hasn’t been for weeks. Something has been happening to her, something that has never been a possibility, and it’s all because of Virginia.
Virginia’s words bubble up through Elisabeth, sparking pops of heat in her chest. Ever since Elisabeth has become more material, Virginia has been better, happier, and it does Elisabeth’s head in to think that she may be the catalyst to it; that after so long as nothing more than a whisper, a murmur in the dark, she has gained substantial form in someone’s life.
Is it possible? Elisabeth muses, considering. It sounds so ridiculous, like two schoolgirls pretending marriage. She was never told that there could be anything between two women stronger than friendship. She finds, however, that she’s not opposed to it; at least, with Virginia.
Virginia breaths out a laugh, nerves still taking the reins. “Yes, of course it is. I only like women like that. Do you?”
I don’t know, Elisabeth confesses; she’s never known enough women her age to say. Unbiddenly, she thinks back to the feelings of rapturous envy she suffered when girls would pass her, intertwined with their chattering husbands. She always thought she envied the social standing that courtship and marriage afforded—but now, thinking back to where her glances focused, the long curls of hair and ribbons adorning the heads of beautiful women, she’s not so sure. I’ve never kissed a girl.
“I’ve never kissed anyone.” Virginia says. “I’m twenty-five and have always been too shy to do anything. But you, Elisabeth… you’re something special. I feel some-
thing about you I haven’t felt about anyone else. It’s cliché and stupid, but—there it is.”
Elisabeth laughs, and the sound is light. A weight lifts off her chest. I’ve been twenty three for two hundred years, and the closest to love I’ve ever had was when the neighbor’s boy kissed me on a dare. But I’d like to try.
“You would?” Virginia says, and there is a vitality in her voice that wasn’t there when she first arrived, that has grown since she placed her roots down in Elisabeth’s haunted house and let something beautiful flower.
A smile widens Elisabeth’s face, emotion that has not been felt for centuries flooding her chest. Yes, Elisabeth says, A thousand times yes. You’re special to me too, Virginia. I am what I am because of you.
“I am too,” Virginia says, happier than she’s hear her. Elisabeth likes to see Virginia happy. Affection—love— is something she has never felt much of, but she thinks it would be like what she feels about Virginia. “I’m going to kiss you now, okay? I think it will work.”
I hope so, Elisabeth says, and closes her eyes, lashes fluttering shut. There is a soft press to her lips, and breath floods through her calcified lungs as Virginia kisses her. It’s nice—it’s so nice.
Virginia pulls back after a moment, eyes searching Elisabeth’s for any response, any rejection. Elisabeth just grins wide and wild, and says, “It worked.”
Virginia smiles back like the sun, saying “It did work, it did,” as Elisabeth grabs her face and goes back for another kiss. Now that she has felt the high heat of humanity, she doesn’t want to let go. Not after so many years having been so cold.
There are two women living in her house, these days. Elisabeth finds she likes the company.
A Quiet Moment in Myrtle Beach
Julia Claire Cooke Photography
Steadfast
Julia Claire Cooke Photography
Letter XII — Oxford, 2001
To A., somewhere between Berlin and everywhere else
My dear itinerant scholar, Your latest note arrived folded with train schedules and what looked like crumbs of something you’d intended to eat. A croissant, perhaps? The evidence of a life being lived — shocking.
Your talk in Berlin sounds as disastrous as you predicted, though I’m certain you charmed them regardless. You always do.
I sometimes wonder why we persist in this exchange. Yet each time I receive your handwriting, I feel my mind sharpen.
Do you ever think of the beginning? Those graceless first letters, all claws and citations. I miss their arrogance, sometimes. We’ve grown too careful.
With disciplined fondness, C.
Letter XIII — Vienna, 2001
To C., whose modesty remains theoretical Dear overthinker,
Yes, it was a croissant. Almond. I regret nothing.
You asked why we persist. Because there’s mercy in being witnessed by someone who knows your particular brand of madness. You see the part of me that obsesses, revises, devours. Others find it tedious.You wouldn’t cause we are the same.
I saw a play last night in German and understood every tenth word, yet I felt the rhythm in my ribs. I think that’s how we communicate, too — sense first, meaning later.
Your essay is beautiful now. It made me unreasonably angry.
Ever your unwilling accomplice, A.
Litany for the Animal Mind Chloe Glynn
Last night I dreamt I was shedding fur. It came off in sheets, slick with milk and apology. The bed smelled of winter and something learning to die. When I woke, the moon had nested in my stomach. She was small and trembling, and every time I breathed, she bit. The mind lies— it calls this transformation. But what is worship if not the wish to devour what you cannot become? I smell you before I see you— your salt, your sleep, the faint rot of sugar left too long on skin. I pressed my ear to your chest.
Inside: a small forest, leaves breathing, something with teeth moving slow. It smelled like wet wool and anesthesia. I wiped it away and licked my fingers clean. You move and the walls breathe with you. The light folds itself in half. A pulse in the floorboards mutters, goes quiet, Returns.
I think of the saints, their mouths filled with feathers, their bones bending toward sky.
I think of how every hunger is a kind of faith, every touch, an altar built from the dark. There are moments I can’t tell if I am kneeling or eating. Both feel holy. Both feel wrong.
My body keeps inventing new ways to pray— through ache, through ache, through ache. I once saw God in the dark mirror of a spoon. He looked like me, mouth open, mid-bite.
Jessi & Alexander
Julia Claire Cooke Charcoal
Letter XIV — London, 2002
To A., who insists on staying abroad just to spite me
Dear exile,
The city is rain again. I’ve taken to leaving the windows open at night just to hear it. It reminds me of that absurd conference in Geneva when you spilled coffee on my notes and claimed it improved them.
I finally lectured on your theory last week (properly credited, stop smirking). The students were enthralled. One of them asked if I’d ever met the author. I said, “Far too often.”
Write soon. Or better — come home for a while. I find I argue less convincingly with the empty chair across from me.
With exasperating sincerity, C.
Letter XV — London, 2003
Left on the kitchen table
My dear,
You’ll find your notes in the second drawer, alphabetised badly. The tea’s gone cold — I suspect we both forgot it. I’m due at the archive, but I wanted to leave something, a letter for the sake of tradition.
The morning light makes everything unreasonably golden. You’re upstairs, probably rearranging the books again. I can hear the floor creak above me.
Yours, in argument and affection, C.
In the Fraying Seams of Time
Meredith Burley
My legs stand tall behind the register exchange of Ulta Beauty. Fluorescent lights hum overhead and the perfume-saturated air clings to my throat.
“Hello, please enter your phone number for your rewards,” I hear my voice drone for the hundredth time this hour. My voice is frayed; my throat now parched. My professionality is assembled by the repetition of the same eight words. Eight words that flatten me into column three of my resume.
She appears then; a woman of meticulously-composed beauty. Her silky, grey hair and polished coat whisper of accomplished femininity. At register four she selects a Clinique full coverage foundation, CN 40 Cream Chamois, and a honey moisturizer for tired hands. She pauses at the ‘grab and go’s–scanning to confirm she hasn’t neglected the latest deals. The POS blinks a whopping $116.34. She opens her mouth to speak, but only a single word–both ordinary and unforgettable–catches my attention.
“Pockabook.”
The sound startles me in the form of overwhelming déjà vu; nine letters I had once dismissed with an instinctive roll of the eyes. I focus back onto the silver-haired customer standing before me. “I’m sorry, let me take my wallet out of my pockabook,” she says, her voice diluting as her ringed fingers search through her bag, filling the space between us with sounds of cough drops and trinkets rattling like figurines in a china cabinet.
Listening to such familiar sounds, I blink and I am no longer in Ulta Beauty, but in the back seat of a gold GMC SUV–the leather hot against my pale skin. My grandmother sits in the front passenger seat, kindly asking me for her pockabook. I laugh, certain she is testing me with nonsense words, but to a woman like my grandmother, a pockabook was anything but.
She had one in every color for every season. A deep blue for winter, a soft pink for summer, and a mellow yellow for fall. Still, her red pockabook–despite the accumulating scuffs across the leather and the increasingly frayed seams–held the most life. It stood tall and quiet: faded in color, but red in persistence. Seventy seven years of her life were stitched into the seams of that well-loved red pockabook.
Now, her beloved red pockabook sits slumped in the corner of a walk-in closet, a closet that remains dark and unattended, bereft of the life that had once filled its contents. The customer smooths her receipt and carefully folds her proof of purchase as a keepsake. I bag her Clinique foundation and the honey infused hand lotion. She thanks me, then swings her pockabook over her shoulder, not noticing how the word had reset my tired, rehearsed script.
The line moves forward. Another face, another transaction, another phone number for rewards. The word replays in my head.
MEREDITH BURLEY
Pockabook.
Pockabook.
Pockabook–like the sharp mimic of seagulls breaking the hush of a gentle tide.
I see the frailed seams, the limp handles, and the wrappers left inside a wellworn, red pockabook. My grandmother lingers there, as though she is waiting in line too.
Letter XVI — slipped between the pages of a notebook
My dear catastrophe, You’re probably laughing already, imagining I’ve hidden yet another note. But there’s something delightful in the idea of you finding it years from now, mid-sentence.
I remember that summer in Oxford — we were too young to argue gently. You said truth was a blade, I said it was a mirror. We were both right, of course.
I don’t write to win anymore. I write because, in addressing you, I remember who I am.
Yours, A
Letter XVII — grocery list, 2004
My dear,
We’re out of salt again. You always think we have enough. Also, I borrowed your pen. Again.
— C.
P.S. The tomatoes are ripening unevenly, but beautifully.
The Miller Logan Miller
there’s a collapsing rot of wood sunk in generations of pregnant grain
ain’t no one been milling these fields ain’t no one been living in that house
there was a collapsing rot of wood in my grandmother’s bedroom
he’s the Miller. he beat her, stuck her with needles. she married him
she took his name. branded the name on my father mother brother
everyone calls me his name my surname is not my own …
I’ve inherited a collapsing rot of wood and oceanic fields of dead husks each stalk a legal ancestor.
but the sun rises, steaming the land I stand in the heat and smoke off my old skin I tell the insects to return to the fields
I tell the rivers dry bosom to fill up and when night falls, I build a new home with so many lights – its own galaxy. and with young wood, with clean stalks I mill this grain And we will eat from it.
The Sailor’s February Chloe Glynn
I think...
I think I have lost myself among the tide.
Oh, the sea was speaking again last night— low and restless beneath her breath.
I thought I might answer her, but my voice was small.
The gulls were only ghosts in the gray, but I cast out my arms as they do to greet them, white flags against the waiting dawn.
The ship sighed, waves moved gently through her ribs, and the salt remembered me; called softly through the mist— a name I hadn’t used in years.
I think I found you in the foam, your face breaking through like morning, a promise made of brine and ache. And when the sea grew quiet, the world was all pearl and hush. I saw myself again in her cold reflection— not whole, but home.
Letter XVIII — back cover of a borrowed book Love,
I found your annotations — furious, elegant, impossible to ignore. You still make me want to argue, even when you’re right. Especially then. Yours in gentle affection, A.
Letter XIX — on a napkin, folded into a coat pocket
Dearest contrarian,
I dreamt we were lost in a library with no catalogue — only shelves of our handwriting. You laughed and said, “At last, an archive worthy of us.”
Remember how I made eggnog last night. The milk burned on the stove. Worth it.
With all of my love, A.
Letter XX — between lecture notes
My dear,
You left your notes in my study again. I pretended not to notice so I could read them. You wrote: “Understanding is not love, but its rehearsal.” Please don’t edit it. Let something remain unfinished.
