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 XLVII, printed by Sun Coast Press, is set in Times New Roman.
Cover
Art:
“Offering”
Oil on
Canvas by Sofia De Rossi
COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON MISCELLANY
ISSUE 47 | XLVII SPRING 2025
Editor-In-Chief
Addison Ware
Managing Editor Samantha Barnhart
Staff Readers
Sydney Akers
Mila Lawson
Marley Leventis
Danny McMillan
Lucy Miller
JJ Murray
Mika Olufemi
Eden Shames
Madden Tolley
Table of Poetry q
Brigid O’Brien............................
Jay Moyer............................................
Sofia De Rossi............................................
Rylee Thompson.............................
jpeg Figure Hand Over Your Rights
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 XLVII/47, 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.
Speaking of... submissions for Fall ‘26 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:
The minutes or hours that you spend with this magazine will allow you to see the world through twenty-two undergraduate storytellers, poets, and artists. I don’t think I can express the importance of these voices and the gratitude I have to each and every one for allowing us to publish them. I’ve always believed that art is what ties us to our communities and to our humanity, and may we find comfort in that as our world continues to change. The process of creating this magazine, and working among such lovely people, has been such a joy.
I want to highlight, and thank, all of our wonderful and hardworking editors. They spend hours with the submissions we receive and take the time to fully understand, comprehend, and delight in the work before them each time. Thank you for your dedication.
Thank you to the editors that came before me who continued the legacy of Miscellany for so many years and to Michael Stein for entrusting me with that legacy now.
Thank you to my Managing Editor, Samantha Barnhart, for your support and confidence in Miscellany XLVII; and to the rest of CisternYard Media staff, especially Zina Dawood, for all the behind the scenes support. It does not go unnoticed. Thank you, Reader, for picking it up and spending some minutes or hours with us.
Rylee Thompson No Anesthesia Oil and Chalk Pastel
Intracoastal
George Walton
Sunlight was fading. The whitewash lapped at the shine from the also-white hull which sped over the surface. A long day of fishing had tired the crew, save the captain. He stood behind the wheel, proud of the day, proud of the quiet satisfied looks from his wife and child, the only others on the vessel. As has been said, their day was full of hooks in scaled mouths, cut lines, chopped bait, smelly hands, and the procrastination of heading home. Now was no different. The motley ship tore through the salt marsh, informed only by years of memories. There was a shallow outcropping there, an oyster bed there, and almost always, a pod of dolphins could be found strand feeding on the upcoming beach. A single palmetto served him as a lighthouse. It’s fronds swaying in the breeze like the arms of some airport runway worker. It, along with everything else around him, would lead them home.
His son was looking towards a sunset in the making. The kid had never signed up for sports. Hell, even when the father had signed him up for soccer, the kid yelled and went on and on about how he didn’t want to. Ungrateful. He would never say it. Even thinking it felt strange, but he knew deep down that he was disappointed in his son. His wife had prohibited any sort of “that talk” as she had called it. He was absolutely, under no circumstances, strictly barred, from telling his own damn son to get off his ass and do something with himself. He would never understand how that kid found it more enticing to sit inside all day behind his computer or the TV rather than playing sports, hanging out with friends, or even making money. Of course, these thoughts were not original. Although his escapes to Todd’s house had become less frequent since Todd’s third child and first daughter, they saw eye to eye as they always have ever since grade school. Todd had always said things that just made sense. “Kids just don’t get it. When I was younger and my paw said get me a wrench from the top left drawer in the garage, damn it I would run for that drawer. And if it wasn’t there my options were simple. I get spanked to next Tuesday, or I bike my little ass to the general and get a wrench.” The father had never had a father like Todd’s father. He loved his wife. As she sat, head bobbing from the waves he carved through, he loved his wife. She seemed to love the scenery. She snapped a single photo of the horizon and sunset, seemed to text for a second, and then slipped the phone back under her leg where it would be safe from the tumultuous trip back. There were moments of strife in their relationship but shit, who could say they had it perfect? He had stopped drinking for her, she had stopped yelling as much for him. She stared out at the water, hair flowing towards the center console. The waterway had begun to form an “S” shape and he would now begin to carve his path to match. She was
GEORGE WALTON
gorgeous. In his memory, her pitch-black hair still shone in the bright sunlight of the field they’d first met in. It was junior year of college, the weather had finally changed to open windows and double layers, and he had just had lunch. The walk back to the dorm was long and nearly everyone cut across the green space. They both fell into the category of nearly everyone. They had spoken, exchanged numbers, and ten minutes after they had met, he was in the dorm hall he had gotten stuck in for the third year in a row. Four hours later, after it had grown too dark to be alone, he was in the dorm room that she wouldn’t get the time to hate. By the next year, they had moved in together. Now that same black hair was overlaid by his mind onto the graying hair of the woman he had married as she sat in the fading sun.
A white egret flew over the channel. He wondered quickly if it too was heading home to a loving nest. A dilapidated old tree finally beaten by the salt water below it might be the bird’s home. It would be warmed by the heat of the day, face west, and it would never chill. He overlooked the obvious fact that an egret does not fit in a hollowed tree, that it wouldn’t want to. But the egret, ignorant of the father’s fascination, continued its flight and soon faded from both the scene and the father’s mind. He was instead focused on the water again. How he was beginning to grow impatient for the feeling of sitting down in his truck with the boat hitched behind him as he drove his son and wife home. There was always a turn. Off of Forest Drive and onto Kingston, about a mile from the neighborhood and two and a half from the house. It would always require a certain level of focus that was often difficult to find after an entire day of navigating salt marshes or rigging lines that his family would use to catch nothing more than the occasional toadfish. The concrete curb had grown to know the sound of their truck coming. It would sound heavy and labored, the boat and trailer working towards their maximum tow capacity. The curb would have moved itself if curbs were capable of such. It would’ve done what it could to avoid the near-weekly encounter. Instead, it found itself frequently whittled down by strike after strike from the trailer hauling upwards of five thousand pounds. Always would the wife comment something that dug at the father. Something that would be reminiscent of his mother when he would come home late on Tuesdays in elementary school. Then, they would be home, often before the wife was done commenting on his incompetence. The father always found this almost disappointing. He had given them an entire day of roasting perfection. Then, an ocean breeze to let their skin forget the burns at least until they would curl into cotton sheets in the night and the usual comfort would be transformed into regret for their lack of sunscreen. He would deliver them home safe every single time, but there was always that growing scratch in the hull. A brutal retribution from the edge he had whittled into the curb.
Maybe it would be different today though. At least today he would remember to be careful around the curb. He glanced at his phone tucked into a plexiglass cabinet at waist level. No phones were allowed on trips like these. That was a rule he had made years ago before his son even knew to ask for a phone. It wasn’t specifically a rule
against phones, more so a rule against outside communication. These moments were his family’s and his family’s only. The break from work was nice too. There were few photos of these outings. He remembered one from his birthday one year. About four years ago. He had left his phone, as always, in the boat while they explored a usually popular small island with a view of the ocean, not just the back channels. They were watching the sky, shaping clouds with their imagination when a girl walked up to them and asked if they wanted their photo taken. She reached for a phone, but upon hearing about the rule, smiled and simply removed hers from a hip pack. She took a picture of the three family members, texted it to the father’s number, and thus created one of the few tangible memories the father had of these outings. He was admittedly grateful for the photo that now printed, stays in his wallet behind his driver’s license. He often checked his phone when he felt dejected or down and he knew that the memory of that text was the sole reason why. He had scrolled up to that one image countless times yet every time he did, the feeling of joy shrunk. It was slowly being replaced by some other feeling. But he made the excuse that his mind was too busy focusing on not crashing into oysters to care too much about that now. Maybe later.
A friend’s wedding. She had been invited three months ago. Three months to rent a tux, three months to find some poor sap to tag along (no luck). Three months to prepare for parking the car, stepping out, making her way to the top of the stairs, and put on her best “congratulations” smile. Three months wasted. She was finding herself in a small cracked makeup mirror, hurriedly undoing the small braids that framed her rounded cheeks. A robin egg blue hat lay on the passenger seat and in the back seat, a small go bag sat waiting. “Fuck this”. She grabbed the handle and spilled from the hat-colored car.
After what felt like fifteen too many pleasantries exchanged, she arrived at the sixteenth, and her most dreaded. Her name was Elizabeth. A fancy, refined name for the same girl that had cursed Mack Thompson out in the high school halls for even suggesting she might like him. Elizabeth was standing near the stairs, Elizabeth was staring directly into the terrified girl’s eyes. A light brown that always caught her like the molasses it would remind you of. The light brown that once looked her in the eyes and told her she was as foolish as Mack Thompson.
The girl thought of running, maybe ducking into the bathroom, walking to and greeting the person just behind Elizabeth, she even thought of turning around and leaving. She would drive home, all the way back to South Carolina. She would unlock the door to her Uncle’s house, the one she rented out, and she would stare out at the ocean while some three-dollar meal heated in the microwave. This was the way she spent most nights anyway and while it might sound depressing to anyone else, maybe even to her, anything was less depressing than how the wedding ended.
It ended perfectly. She left before the fireworks Elizabeth’s little brother had picked out painted the sky a billion shades of blues and greens and reds. She had seen
GEORGE WALTON
plenty of his firework shows and while this one assuredly had a higher budget, the tears welling in her eyes around dessert time made her doubt she would’ve even be able to see much more than blurred flares of light.
She had once told Elizabeth’s brother that she loved him. She never knew why that memory would always resurface at times like this. Whenever she was feeling forgotten or down, there it would be. As if she could still reach out and touch his nape, still feel his breath and unshaven upper lip against hers. It was no comfort. Her music began to blast from her car speakers as her key turned in the ignition and the display came alive with information. She had decided over that shitty cheesecake that she would grab her single suitcase from the Hilton and drive back home a day early. Her boyfriend would be excited to get her back a day early, that is if he even checked his damn phone before she was asleep. An alert on the dash and a sigh. She needed gas too.
The father was close now. He was thankful for that. His eyes were growing tired and the gorgeous scene of the crimson sunset had since faded, replaced only by the coldness and darkness that came with going twenty-six knots at night. The dock posts were visible over a little more Spartina and the trip home was about to transform into a landrace.
The docking and hoisting of the boat onto the trailer was nearly masterful. He would give himself that. He’d been doing similar things with boats of all different sizes since he had first gotten a kayak from his parents when they had all still lived in the north together. Maine. The three piled into the truck, silent. He would not get any form of commendation now. Maybe tomorrow morning when the memories had marinated and the wind burn faded. He passed his son’s phone into the back seat, where the son’s hand was outstretched expectantly. Before the father was even able to turn around, videos lit the kid’s screen and noise filled the truck.
The father checked his own phone. Noticed the crack along the base of the screen and promised himself that next week he would get it fixed, maybe at the mall. He could take the family. The crack, as always, led all the way up the screen to where the most recent notification was displayed. A text from a contactless but familiar number told him that they would be back in town early. That he should stop by if he could. The feeling he had on the beach that day returned, weakened, but recognizable.
…
She was about an hour from the city and thinking about herself. Sort of. She was thinking about how her boyfriend saw her, or maybe more accurately, how she wanted him to see her tonight. What dress would she wear? There were only a few in her closet and none of them seemed appropriate for what she knew tonight was. She had long, straight, and perfect dark hair that she was completely disgusted with. It would always sit on her shoulders wrong, looked horrible held up, and the one time she had cut it down as far as she had dared, her mother made sure to express how ugly it was like that as well. Dyeing it had crossed her mind a few times. Around four years ago
she had been planning on finally pulling the trigger on it after her family had left and went back to their respective places in the world. Every year around May, her extended family would all visit and take a rented boat ride to their favorite island tucked into the Intracoastal. It was always rather busy, but that day it had seemed quieter than usual. She was grateful for that. Fewer people that could interrupt her search for shells. Her grandfather had passed when she was in her sophomore year of high school but before then, he would always be overjoyed at the prospect of competing with the girl for the most impressive beach find. Years of competing had faded the lasting tournament into a more relaxed show-and-tell of beauty. The final gift he gave her was a simple bag to be worn around her waist. It had two pockets. One for his shells, and one for hers. That year, she faithfully gathered shells, storing them in the pocket closest to her. She had found a few that he would’ve loved and while it probably should have made her sad, it simply made her numb. It was late and she was wandering back to where their boat would pick them up, where the rest of her family was no doubt already waiting when she saw the three of them. A boy around her age, although she could never gauge age accurately, who reminded her a little of herself at least with how he carried himself, a mother with hair reminiscent of the hair the girl sought to rid herself of, and a man who seemed young for a family. She offered to take their photo. The man made some odd excuse as to why he didn’t have his phone so she reached into the pocket on her waist furthest from her and snapped their photo. She texted the father the photo and smiled as he smiled. He opened his upward-turned lips and complimented her. She never ended up dyeing her hair, even if sometimes, like now in her stuffy car, she regretted that decision.
Sometime later, that stuffy car rolled up the long driveway, waited patiently for the oversized garage door to open, and found itself emptied as the girl walked towards the stairs. She knew it would take him some time to get to her. No use in waiting down here. Plus, the microwave wouldn’t load itself and she was starving.
…
It had taken his wife about ten minutes to get to the bed and fall asleep. There were no words said between them, spare the son giving a brief and inattentive mumbling of a thank you. Even though the boy could’ve fallen asleep in the car ride home, he quickly scurried into his room, closed the door, and let the light from his computer seep under that same door. The only proof of his continued consciousness.
The father thought about crawling into his bed. He thought about showering and then slipping into bed with his wife. He thought about grabbing a beer from the fridge, sitting on the couch, and waiting for them to slip into dreams. He acted out the latter. He hoped they dreamt of him. Maybe of the day he had just given them.
An hour later, he stood. He unhitched the trailer and began driving back towards the water.
He backed up her driveway, snuck under the still-opening garage door, and turned his truck off.
GEORGE WALTON
…
She knew he was here from the mechanical groaning beneath the floor. She knew he was here from the turn of the stairwell’s door knob. She knew he was here by the sound of his footfalls quickly and deliberately approaching her. She turned away and walked towards the living room. Her uncle had a horrible sense of interior decoration, she was hardly better, but she was still happy with how it looked. What about her it highlighted and what about her it hid. In fact, she often looked forward to the day she would host parties and get-togethers at her own place and how it would look like this place.
Before his arrival, she had lit a candle that now burnt on a nearby wooden table. It had been picked up previously from a store about ten minutes from where they stood now. Balsam and Cedar. It reminded her of a summer camp her father had forced upon her years ago. She had loved it. Maybe it was the newfound freedom, maybe, instead, the controlled regimen outlining everything down to where and when she should eat, or maybe it was the pure distance from the coast. Not that she didn’t enjoy the ocean or its many beaches, she still loved them like her grandfather would’ve wanted, but she was quickly outgrowing the place in which she had grown up in. This is all to say, that she wished, deep, deep down, that she had lit more. The man now in front of her smelled like the salt wind. He smelled like sand and sunburn. Regardless of any thoughts of her old camp or the smells of her hometown wrapped around a man, she took a step towards him.
He spoke. Unimportant things about his day. She heard him mention his wife chastising him yet again about understeering around a corner. Apparently she was snoring and he didn’t want to disturb her so he thought he should sleep over at the girl’s house. He told her some other things too. The story of how they met, how her text today made him smile, even how they should probably wake up early tomorrow so he could get back in time for breakfast. He would get hungry on the days he told his family he went to work early.
She often initiated the first kiss. She knew he expected it. Wanted it. So she stepped forward, reached for the back of his neck, and pulled him in. She worried that he would taste the various things she had eaten that day. Like the still-cold-in-the-center Chinese chicken she had heated up before he arrived. He did not. He tasted the overpowering salted crust lining his own lips and he tasted the mucousy aftertaste of shitty beer.
She lay awake on the left side of the bed. Next to the nightstand with the clock on top of it counting down to the alarm he had set before curling up and starting his own snoring. She lay awake with eyes fixed on what would’ve been her ceiling given light, but when this dark was nothing more than another shadow, just as capable of being a wall as it was of being a ceiling. She closed her eyes.
She should sleep. And she would. Soon.
But she was focused not on her blindness, nor her need for rest. She thought
INTRACOASTAL
of Elizabeth. She wondered how her night was going. She wondered if she too was still awake or if Mack Thompson had convinced her body to rest. The girl’s mind began to tire and it latched onto one small sensation before falling into the darkness it observed beneath her eyelids. The funny feeling of the father’s upper lip smiling as it pressed against her own mouth. His unshaven upper lip.
The father dreamt of college.
To Spite a Hummingbird
Brigid O’Brien
is to feed a lone raccoon the remnants of your crust, stroke his tail under power lines on a starry night and declare tomorrow shall be garbage day.
To sprinkle seeds in a pond, and call over the ducks. They’ll touch beaks and blush, peck pepitas from couples holding hands.
To watch two tabby cats sunbathing in the brownstone’s window.
Crack knuckles, bum a light, buy scratchers and canned tea, conjure all the reasons I wish you’d stay.
Watch their feet paddle gently away, Fall in love, let it go.
Spite a hummingbird come first days of next spring.
Inside and Outside, Simultaneously
Sofia De Rossi Oil on Canvas
Cicada Series
Jay Moyer
i.
Here the Earth has a patient heartbeat, cradles the nymphs in topsoil, teen-aged and holding their breaths between summers when they make treetops into screaming-grounds.
They scream with their soft bodies, a friction spell, and the screaming is so wide you find it nowhere, which is the same nowhere you find the soul in a single cell.
How beautiful a compound-eye picture sounds: one trillion fresh-molted wings to make one breath, not a melody, but a sound so huge it turns into a wave again, becomes its definition.
A rhythm so fast it turns to pitch, and so high it falls back to the heart, in beds of those soft bodies, in an old house for the nymphs in wait.
ii.
In the summer that promised two monster broods,
I stood by the wire screen of the kitchen window, tuning in, thinking they were stirring underneath me, a slow heart waiting to become the size of the horizon.
A murmur and the sky shrunk to a stethoscope drum.
One summer I was six years old and had an artery patched up, most nights I would look out for them — to catch them in the act
of disembodying that chitin silhouette
like a film negative of the old self. I dreamt of nights in my backyard:
holding a flashlight and my breath for a secret becoming.
This time around it’s a quiet morning.
iii.
The shell
is a homolog we lost before the great surfacing, that first breath that happens somewhere on the Earth every eight seconds. so we’re left with nothing to shed but clothes in heaps bed covers, familiar walls. is the house show-ready see-through, impossibly bigger on the inside, to keep what grew for decades undisturbed in soft soil, secret, hush, segmented by walls re-touched and bare of portraits.
is temporary, is an airplane with cling-film wings impossibly still on the inside made to fit around strangers, any strangers, so tight inside, only open to the world in two places: there and here.
is in the backyard, in a child’s hands, a hushed secret: this climbing-out, it happens all the time.
Third Southern Harvest Eden Shames
My anger blows in October’s blood orange wind like panties on a clothing line in a suburban backyard, blossoms like the bud of a scarlet rose, or that of a breast, tender and mortal, behind a mask
of affection begging to be held. No one sees me in lace anymore, and no one knows me as a first time girl, as fresh from Northern country girl.
I see that girl running through unripened cornfields, chasing after Southern reeds growing at the bank of colonial lakes where honeysuckle stings the air sharper than cicada tail. She runs forward
from verdant blooming garden, from mushrooms raw and grown, from porcelain moons. I scream to her across the lake, to her arched back, swim to me, let me unfold you, but my echoes fall upon reflections of a hardening sky rippling sorry storms, and my fingers branch out before me like the angel’s oak.
Ode to April
Eden Shames
I will bore myself a thousand sons so I can raise them on mish mish and green garden. Scoop water from the tub with glass jars and use it to feed the tulips so they blossom in season for birth, and when spring rolls around, half of them will grow tired and cry before morning dawn.
I pray to orchid mantis, feet pressed into stilts, hoping the closer I am to the sky the harder I will fall. I will set myself ablaze just to gather my ashes for soil and return to the ground where I was born.
Leviticus 1
how to spell devoted Azi Kynard
The Burnt Offering
1 my pastor said that if she ever met salvation, she’d put in a good word for me. and so each sunday when she called me to the altar
2 i picked up my bones (which were mostly prayers), 4 and my prayers (which were mostly bones), and i ran to her, 3 my legs hot and flaccid with surrender 4a bet lost to a saint 5 i was silent when i hit the ground, my body laid battered and dirty next to a son 6 still begotten. John 1
The Word Became Flesh 1 my pastor was a weaverthreading hymnals into the cracks that lined her palms and led her to glory 2 balming her words with the chewing gum kind of hope and asking me to swallow, 3 in hopes that what i could not digest would stick to my insides 4 and scrub me clean;
5 later that day in sunday school 6 i drew my best sheep:scared desperate, 7 running.
Leviticus 26
Reward for Obedience
1 sitting pretty in waiting, i hear something that sounds like an angel 2 and smells like grief. tears nudge me towards truth until
3 i remember that i am a soldier, tiny feet in size twelve boots 4 searching for the breath I was given before i was old enough to ask for it.
5 i learned then, that age was not an indication of knowledge 6 like how i never could tell the difference between god’s voice and my mother’s
Deuteronomy 6
7 and so when i unclasped my palms after prayer i always put them back up 8 in surrender.
Love the Lord Your God 1 i think the closest i ever got to gratitude was guilt. Genesis 3
The Fall 1 the last thing i discovered was my name scrawled recklessly on the small of my back, 2 not visible until it was broken. 3 i never thought of myself as much of an angel, but as i plummeted downwards 4 falling beautifully and endlessly, 5 i could have sworn i saw god, and he was everywhere 6 writhing and wailing, a small and pitiful 7 reflection. 8 millions of voices calling out to each other the walls covered in blood and oil 9 help me, god! 10 my blood turned to verse my skin to flame and 11 it all stank of afterbirth and bone falling, falling, falling. 12 as the collective agony of being hung all around me i knew i had only the time i could hold in my handsand for a moment, 13 before i took my last breath, i felt someone take me gently in their arms and shear me, one last time.
Anatomically Correct Heart Cheyenne Comitz
“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
– A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I act like a valve, unable for blood to flow wrong. Slightly oxygenless, but pumping still. My plans lean, because I had bigger beats for us since seventeen. Like blood through the vena cava, will I find where we belong? Now to the heart’s bottom floor. I pray to god I do not make you a fool. So close to oxygen, closer to this perfectly imperfect image of myself. And you. Our blood cells once beat together, a privilege I took for granted. I try, but the arteries loosen and pool. Up, up, up, the rate does anything but drop despite the oxygen flowing in. Please forgive me, I made us run so thin. The beats now match the sound of the ambulance.
No more resuscitation. I know. We tried. We were young. But our turbulence has stopped.
Recordings of a Weed
Tatiana Sabin
Cyanotype
Rylee Thompson I Own You
Oil and Chalk Pastel
Blue Light Grey Crotts
a grandiose ordeal it is: the grading and sloping of concrete every laborer up from dawn til dusk,
making the asphalt surface completely flat for years to come.
if i ran my thumb over route 100, would i feel the creases made by drones of travelers?
would i feel the gravel and the sand, minute yet invisibly holding her together?
the road’s expansive tarmac made me want to melt in the sun;
i could mollify its abrasiveness by smiling at the moon.
the sky was akin to paper mâché; made of flour and water,
not the deep blue we’ve come to know-but her unfavorable teal sister.
i was naive to the lush ideals emerald mountains whispered to me,
my phone started to ring and the road was just a road.
Archangel Kara Floyd
An angel followed me on my drive home.
It was dark- a late, southern summer night. My windows were down so the warm blanket of cicada song and sweet-smelling corn could swaddle me as I drove back to town. I had thirty more minutes left in the drive. It was enough time to consider my options. The beginning of my drive was a solitary one. I was the only one driving on the back-country road at this hour, and the only wildlife found itself smeared with blood, ribboned with grooves, and strewn across the asphalt. There was no one to bear witness to my hysterics.
I had a few options: turn the wheel and drive through the fields of corn until I couldn’t go any further, turn off my car in the middle of the road, or pull the wheel and slam into a tree. I thought carefully about each of them and debated their class. They’d need to find me eventually. If I were to trek into uncharted territory, until my car hit a house or a brook or something of the like, it might take longer for my family to know. The closer I was to the main road, to the one we all knew like the back of our hand, it would take a day- max. I’m not sure why I cared so much about them knowing, having closure. It would be childish for me to blame them for everything, but that wasn’t to say that I couldn’t give them some credit.
“Fuck,” I murmur to myself. I had only twenty more minutes to make a decision. Tonight, or never. Until the next time I drove down this road. Tonight, or never.
A blinding flash of light appears in my rearview mirror. I squint as the light fills my car. My hands, tight on my steering wheel, suddenly became visible despite the midnight dark. Without the overhead light on, it was bright as day.
Be not afraid, the light screams- two orbs burning with blinding whiteness as they follow my car. I am here as you are. Avert your eyes; my fire will flow through your head.
I wait for my eyes to adjust, to see what lay in the center of each orb. The harder I focus, the more they burn.
Do not challenge me.
“Who are you?” I ask. I turn my eyes back towards the road, my headlights giving me a brief window into the night.
You do not really want to know. What you want is an excuse.
“I already have an excuse,” I say, my knuckles white on the wheel. “Don’t you know? Didn’t you hear what they said to me? I’m nothing to them.”
Then why does it matter to you if they find your body?
I have no answer for the angel. Instead, I glance once more to the ever-see-
ing eyes of each fiery orb- the spinning, wheeling, heads of light and life and death.
I have come to negotiate.
“Negotiate what?”
If you want, truly want, I can take you. I am here, and I will catch you.
“I do want.”
Do you?
“I do.”
Then put your foot down on the brakes and pull the wheel. I will consume this car and your body. When they find you, you will be nothing but human in its purest form. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
My jaw clenches. I can see my mother pacing around the bedroom, waiting for my text announcing I arrived home safe- even in my fury.
It will hurt.
“I know,” I say, my eyes welling up. My mother used to bathe me, once upon a time. She would cup my eyes as she rinsed my hair, warm water flowing down my head.
The pain only lasts for a moment. Then all is over. Do you know what it’s liketo no longer exist? To truly be nothing and sink into eternity without life, without love?
“I’ve done it before.”
You’ve been given your chance- will you stay, or go? You will cease one day, that is a promise. But do you wish for it now?
“My mom is expecting me.”
Do you wish for it now?
“I didn’t mean to yell at her- I just got mad.”
Is that your excuse?
“Yes- well, no. I don’t know.”
Do you wish for it now?
“Leave me alone. I don’t believe in you.”
DO YOU WISH FOR IT NOW?
“Stop it.”
DO YOU WISH FOR IT NOW?
DO YOU WISH FOR IT NOW?
DO YOU WISH FOR IT NOW?
My foot twitches on the brakes. I don’t remember when I put it there. YOU WILL CEASE ONE DAY.
DO YOU WISH FOR IT NOW?
DON’T YOU WANT IT NOW?
“Shut up!” I scream, foot flying off the pedal. “Shut the fuck up! Leave me alone- I don’t believe in you! Shut up!”
There is nothing but silence.
With my hands weak and shaky, sweat dripping down my neck, I glance once more at the rearview mirror. The car behind me puts on its left signal, headlights turning
KARA FLOYD
down a side road and disappearing into the dark.
I’m left alone. There’s only five minutes left in my drive, anyway. I missed my window of opportunity.
I guess I’ll sleep in my bed tonight. That comforts me more than I thought it would.
hand puppet Azi Kynard
i was born in the middle of a story. cross stitched into existencecontradictory and delicate; i learned quickly to spell my name, and also to apologize for it. i gargled the letters in my mouth each night before bed, spitting shame into the sink; i think there was a small part of me that savored the taste of exclusion, because you can only get to heaven if you’re hurt enough to scream.
my mom says that our people used to eat the leftoversand in some ways we still dothankful to be treated with decency, desperate to prove ourselves decent. but even so, when i approached the table with something new i was encouraged to leave it by the altar, because it was not a blessing to love this way, to dream of the ocean and also the shore; i guess that part of me came from a prayer, whispered hundreds of years ago to the waters of the atlantic and not a verse fixed up pretty before a sermon.
it is important to note that the first thing you ever encounter in life is the hand of another pulling you quickly from a tender darkness to the roughness of light and so naturally, it was the hand in which i found my truest selfor atleast, its finger tips scraping and grasping and threading words into maybes into truths into hymnals; and it was my hand that sat in hers bathed in warm maple light where i learned that stories are lived first before they are written, and in my words live the black waves of the sea and the sand they return to.
Grace Vogt Abstraction - Untitled
Oil on Canvas
To New Friends Perrin Keene
Daryl took another swig from his flask, a metallic flavor on his tongue and a warm feeling in his gut. His eyes began to droop as the sun sank lower into the earth, washing the vast desert world before him into a dark honeyed hue. Red rocks stretched out for as far as he could see, low hills rising against a violet horizon, which faded deeper into a blackened navy as night fell. Pinpricks of glittering white stars revealed themselves at the very top of the heavens, eventually sneaking down to those distant rolling peaks. By then, once the sun had set, it all vanished outside their lone glowing ring of firelight.
The horses slept standing nearby, shadowed steeds tied to a dying bush with no leaves left on its spindly, bony branches. Further from them were the longhorns, gathered in a sleeping herd of massive red bodies. They were settled in for the evening, hooved legs folded neatly underneath themselves as their drunken caretakers sang at the fireside.
“I long for Jeanie with the day drawn smile…” Little John warbled, sat at Daryl’s side in the red dirt. Daryl’s dark reno hat was pulled low over his eyes, and he might have been asleep had Little John not proudly continued, “Radiant in gladness, warm with winning guile…”
“I hear her melodies,” Young Malcolm picked up helpfully from across the fire pit, smiling into his own whiskey flask. “Like days gone by-”
“It’s ‘joys gone by,’” Little John corrected him. He pointed with a wildly swinging arm, a tall brown glass bottle gripped in his meaty hand. What was left of the drink spilled out and onto the ground near his tattered leather boots. “‘Joys,’ ya hear?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Malcolm whined, gesturing broadly with the fire poker, which was a sturdy pointed stick he’d picked up near camp. His dark fluffy hair stood upright from his head, pointed out in all directions, as if a bird had hastily made her nest there, bouncing as he shook his head. “I ain’t performing for no one, anyhow.”
“You’re performing for us,” Little John sat up straighter, his broad shoulders set back. His once-white shirt, now yellowed with age and sweat, was unbuttoned, revealing nearly the entire length of his hairy barrel chest and protruding belly, which he considered a handsome figure. He looked down at Daryl expectantly. “Ain’t he performing for us? What, we ain’t here or something? What-what, like we don’t matter, Malcolm, huh?”
“How you know the words so well, anyway?” Daryl managed to ask, sluggishly shifting his back against the stiff horse saddle he used for a pillow. He was
laid out with his black boots pointed at the fire, the flames flickering so close that they threatened to lick at the worn out soles. He didn’t like his toes getting cold in the night.
“‘Cause if I’m singing a song I best well know the goddamn words! I mean, for fuck’s sake!” Little John threw his bottle into the desert, a sharp shattering sound following after it disappeared into the blackness.
“No need for cursing, now,” Daryl chastised lazily, his voice low with tiredness. “You know the words or not?” Little John stood then, stumbling as he did so. “Hm? Let’s hear it.” He staggered closer and pointed a heavy finger at Malcolm. His fingertips were calloused with years of striking matches and gripping reins, and there were dark orange tobacco stains under his nails.
Malcolm staggered upwards himself, using the fire poker for balance like an old man with a cane, though he was the youngest among them, dark stubble thinly scattered across his round jaw. “I know ‘em to the best of my ability,” he gave Daryl a darting look, but their boss was halfway asleep, their bickering apparently not enough to keep him awake. “Maybe I just ain’t heard the song in a while.”
Little John nodded his big head slowly, seriously. “Piss poor excuse,” he growled. “That right there is a piss. Poor. Excuse!”
“I don’t see what the matter is with not knowing a couple words to a song. S’not like I’m forgetting the bible or nothing,” Malcolm slurred his defense as Little John advanced closer. Little John’s name was, of course, an oxymoron. He towered over Malcolm’s shorter boyish frame, his breath stinking of whiskey and the rabbit they’d ate for supper. Dark drops of alcohol were still stuck in his whiskers and spat out at Malcolm when the large man demanded, “Tell me something from the bible then, huh? Come on, now.”
Malcolm paused for a long time, staring upwards at Little John with a frightened expression, his chin doubling as he sank his neck into his shoulders like a skittish turtle. He was racking his inebriated mind for a verse, any verse. Cicadas screeched their nightly song somewhere in the far distance. The cows moo’d softly in their sleep. Finally, Malcolm took a deep breath and began; “In the beginning, God went and created the heavens and the earth, and-”
“That don’t count for shit! The start of it don’t count, everybody knows the start of it.” “How you certain it’s ‘joys’ anyhow?” Malcolm brought their discussion back to the song in question. “That don’t make any sense, ‘days gone by’ makes more sense.” “I didn’t write the goddamn song,” Little John looked at Daryl incredulously. “This dumbfuck thinks I wrote the song, you hearing this?” He whipped his attention back to Malcolm again, nearly toppling over in the process as his heavy arms swung. “I just know the words ‘cause I ain’t no dumbfuck.”
Daryl heaved a heavy sigh and watched as little Malcolm tried to tackle Little John to the ground, which only resulted in the two pushing against each other where they stood, like drunken stags fighting, every misstep nearly sending them both down into the dirt or the fire. Amidst their quarreling, the shuffle of their boots in the sand,
PERRIN KEENE
and the otherwise peaceful night, Daryl chuckled quietly to himself. He thought about something he’d heard from an old rancher, that cowboys had no sense left in them because all the brains get kicked out by angry heifers.
Malcolm eventually tumbled down into the red dirt, surrounded in a thick cloud of dust that left him coughing, stains coating his already filthy wool pants and the palms of his hands. Then Daryl’s eye caught movement beyond their camp, out in the darkness where a figure was emerging into the flickering firelight. Little John stopped his pursuit of Malcolm, turning instead to face the approaching stranger.
Daryl and Little John had been far enough West to meet people from Asia before. They’d seen railroad workers with straw hats laboring under the pale summer sun, speaking in languages that sounded like sharp gibberish to them. As far as Daryl knew, Malcolm had only ever seen the comics in papers, which he wasn’t able to read, where the Chinese had long snaking braids and scrunched scowling faces. This man didn’t quite match either description. The stranger sat atop his horse with a tense, straight posture. He halted his steed, a gray mare, and in the sudden silence her hooves clicked quietly against stray pebbles in the sand. Through the dim orange haze he looked otherworldly. His face burned amber in the light, and his slender, dark eyes watched them carefully, darting between the three rapidly. He wore clothes like they’d never seen, a faded blue robe-like garment over widely flared pants. Shadows danced across him, like he was a ghost that had rode in from the desert wastes.
Daryl stood then, hands pressed on his loudly popping knees for support, the leather of his chaps squeaking. He took in a deep breath of the cool, sweet evening air in order to clear his own drunken mind for the sake of their new company. Then, to his amusement, Daryl watched a creeping smile attempt to grow at the corners of the man’s mouth, which seemed to pain him.
“Hello,” he began, a thick accent coating his words. “Good evening, gentlemen.” Daryl examined their guest, hands on his hips as he pondered. “You seem a far ways from home, huh, Chinaman?” He gave the stranger a pleasant enough smile, a cocked eyebrow paired with a sly grin that made him look relaxed, unbothered by the intrusion. “Whatcha doing all the way out here?”
The stranger had wrinkled his nose, either at the remark or the thick waft of manure that had drifted downwind from the cows. “I am traveling East. I was hoping you gentlemen could direct me to the nearest town.” His pronunciation was warped by his foreignness, and Little John snorted a deep laugh.
Malcolm had stood again, brushing the dust from his chambray shirt. He leaned down to swipe up the fire poker that he’d dropped in the fighting, ready to hit someone fiercely with it. Though whether he would aim for the stranger or Little John, Daryl couldn’t tell.
Before the boy could make any choices, Little John had moseyed over to the man’s horse, leaning onto her shoulder for some stability. Since he was closer than Daryl was, the cowboy assumed Little John saw no weapons in the stranger’s saddle.
The larger man looked up at the rider with a squinty glare, sniffing loudly before asking, “What you headed East for, boy? Railroad work’s that way,” he pointed helpfully in the direction he had arrived from.
The stranger looked down at Little John with a barely contained sneer. “I am not looking for work.” His horse shifted her weight, forcing Little John to awkwardly correct his stance, though he again leaned onto the mare’s side.
“Huh,” Daryl considered the man’s answer, scratching the short salt and pepper curls of his beard thoughtfully. “Whatcha looking for, then?”
“The nearest town.”
Daryl laughed. “Funny fella we got here, huh? Right to the point,” He gave a meaningful look to young Malcolm, bushy eyebrows raised, but the boy didn’t seem to be in a state to understand his coded message. He cocked his fluffy head like a confused pup given a command he didn’t know. He was still pretty new to their side business. Plenty of lonely, helpless people out West, plenty of opportunities. He was about to learn, Daryl figured. “Where you from, friend?” Daryl asked, turning his attention back to the stranger.
He hesitated, considering his answer for some time before admitting, “Japan.” “Oh, I got it wrong then, you ain’t no Chinaman. My apologies,” Daryl smiled, all friendly and at ease. Thankfully for him, Little John was just sober enough to see where Daryl was headed with these questions. The large man leaned closer still to the rider, remarkably calm for someone containing their excitement. Little John loved a good stickup, especially if he got to toss someone from their horse.
“What’s that on your hand there?” Little John asked, nodding to the visitor’s left hand that clutched his horse’s reins. His pinkie finger was wrapped in a strip of white cloth, stained into a sickly rusted brown.
“Bandaging,” he answered honestly, pulling the hand closer to his stomach, likely to hide the wound from Little John’s peering eyes.
“What’d you do to it?”
“I was injured,” the man said, his gaze cutting back to Daryl.
“That doesn’t sound too nice,” Daryl carefully walked around the crackling fire, his boots lazily drawing long lines in the disturbed dirt. “How’s it feeling? Hope it ain’t too bad. Be a damn shame if you were one handed out here on your own.”
“It is fine,” the man tried to grin again, but it came off as more of a wince.
“What’s your name, anyhow?” Daryl wondered.
The stranger didn’t answer.
“Oh, come on now, you ain’t got a name?”
Cicada song filled the silence.
“Here,” Daryl cleared his whiskey-soaked throat. “My name is Daryl McKenzie. This fella here is Malcolm E. Thomas,” he pointed to the young man using a charred fire poker to keep his balance. “And right there is John Kelly,” he nodded to the tall man at the stranger’s side. “But we just call him ‘Little John.’ See now? We’re all familiar.
So, now that we’re friends, might as well get on down and join us for a drink, hm? S’the least a few friends can do-”
Just as Little John lifted his massive hand to the stranger’s back, intending to rip him from his saddle and throw him to the ground, the man had swiftly unsheathed a long, gleaming sword and put it to the cowboy’s thick neck. Malcolm sucked in a breath from across the firepit, he and Daryl forced to watch from where they stood, horrified. The silvery blade was held against Little John carefully, its thin, sharpened edge pressed into his skin just enough to keep him paralyzed. It was a great effort on Little John’s part to not trip over his own feet and slice his throat open to the night air. The stranger’s eyes darted back and forth between his three would-be assailants, all waiting for someone to do something first. The fire cackled in the eerie silence, logs cracking and stumbling into sparking embers.
“Alright,” Daryl spoke low, hands outstretched at his sides. He wanted to kick himself for leaving his pistol in his saddle bag, now several paces behind him. He wanted to kill Little John himself for not noticing the fucking sword. “There’s no need for all that.”
“Apologies,” the stranger outstretched his arm, the blade pushing Little John further away from him and his horse. “I must be careful out here on my own.”
Daryl’s jaw tightened. Anger replaced his formerly welcoming attitude. “Smart,” he spat. “You know,” the stranger thought over his words carefully, taking his time. He wasn’t worried about losing their attention. “Friends like to help one another, yes?” None of them answered.
“I could use help. You see my shoes?” He flexed a sandaled foot, the straw rope worn thin and frayed. “I hate to part with them, but they are not suited for the desert.” He looked up at Daryl with a far more relaxed, genuine grin, eyes shining in the fireglow. “I think we may be the same size.”
Daryl shook his head. “Now, hold on a minute-”
“It will be a fair trade. I would not leave a friend barefoot,” he looked down at his hostage. “And our friend Little John will keep his blood in his body.”
Malcolm looked ready to spit fire or vomit. Daryl was chewing his lip, trigger finger twitching at his waist, eyes moving fast between his partners and the intruder. Little John didn’t dare move. The cold steel was burning at his throat, firelight shimmering off its surface hauntingly, as if it was set ablaze. The visitor’s smile disturbed him, like he was a snake showing its teeth, coiling to strike. Little John was wondering desperately to himself how this lost Chinaman could have possibly outsmarted them.
Daryl began slowly taking off his boots. The visitor nodded appreciatively when he walked gently closer, his torn, sweaty socks collecting more and more dirt with each step. “Give them to Little John,” the stranger said.
Daryl complied, stretching out his arm so he wouldn’t get too close to the blade. Little John passed the boots along, swallowing hard enough to earn a small, stinging knick in his leathery skin. A thin stream of blood ran down his neck. The stranger
took Daryl’s boots with one hand, his sword kept sturdy with the other as he admired his new, dust-coated shoes. His dark eyes never left Little John for long.
“And the nearest town?” He asked.
Malcolm was backing away then, slowly inching towards his own saddle bag. “Beaumont,” Daryl said, his upper lip curling into a growl. “Two days North East.”
“Hm. Thank you for your time, gentlemen,” the stranger sighed, satisfied with the whole ordeal. He shook off his own sandals, letting them fall into the dirt for Daryl to retrieve after he’d gone. “I must be going.”
He kicked his horse’s sides and gave a short shout, stirring her into an abrupt run away from Little John, who stumbled backwards in astonishment, tripping and falling to the ground. The mare ran directly at Daryl, forcing him to jump out of her path fearfully as the stranger laughed and swung his sword in the air where he had stood. His hat flew from his head in the process, the brim sliced by the silver blade.
At his saddle bag, Malcolm tossed aside the fire poker and produced a thin pistol in his shaking hands. He aimed at the stranger’s back and fired.
The booming sound broke through the air like a crack of thunder, sharp and echoing. Malcolm blinked through his shock, as if he’d forgotten how loud guns were. The stranger’s horse picked up her pace, disappearing into the blackness, and after a short hesitation they could hear his laughter again, a nervous but relieved cackle growing when he realized he hadn’t been shot. The darkness coupled with Malcolm’s trembling, drunken aim had kept him safe. He and his laugh faded back into the night that he’d appeared from.
The animals, though, had been spooked. Their horses reared and whinied, jerking their heavy heads and snapping the brittle branches of the dead bush they were tied to. Once free, they bolted, encouraging the frightened, loudly mooing cows to do the same. The massive beasts rose, groaning with uncertainty as they lumbered away from the campsite, escaping whatever could have made such a terrible, loud noise.
Little John shouted some gibberish from where he sat in the dirt. He scrambled to stand, falling over himself a few times and tripping back to the ground before he got it right. Once standing, he started running after his horse, a splintered branch intertwined with her lead and dragging behind her, frightening her into a quicker trot. The horse, unsurprisingly, was faster than the intoxicated cowboy, but that didn’t keep Little John from trying to chase after her and the cattle, yelling curses at them the whole way.
Daryl, shoeless and horseless, was breathing heavily where he stood, eyes locked into the darkness where their visitor had disappeared. He then calmly walked over to gather up the sandals that had been left to him. They were flimsy and already badly stained, hanging limply in his tightened grip. He marched up to Malcolm next, stopping and snatching the gun from his still-shaking hands, tucking it into his own trousers. He then used his new sandals to smack the poor boy fiercely over and over, Malcolm’s hands raised in defense as he cowered like a punished dog.
Daryl finished hitting him and snapped, “You are a dumbfuck, you know that?”
What Remains of the March Chuck Duke
Here, we together share that glazed over gaze, Transfixed upon that deadly desert sun
As we will, forever aimless, cross that plain, Chasing the freedom promised once it’s done.
But, the years-after tears of a conscience, starved, Will leave us inhuman, shattered or carved. That discharge will not, cannot, save From the burdens bore that still weigh a ton. So, tramp we will onwards towards that deadly desert sun.
We, forced to march one foot before the other, Advance against that bright and brutal foe Astride those who’ve been coerced to become brothers. We’ve forged a bond of love amidst our woes, But love cannot save all against transgression. Especially when, abandoned, they leave us in depression So that some will fire final shots in anguish. Now we, as one, have lost our youthful glow While pale-faced innocence feeds the hungry desert crow.
As it goes, the sun will set on empires, “great,” And red skies at night bring color to the aging face. Temporarily, we return to an earlier state. Only now, cool breezes blow over shallow desert graves Where adolescence lies as we live in malaise, Unstuck without time, without days, without place, Still trudging through the sands with our brothers, now displaced.
Rylee Thompson Battleground Oil and Chalk Pastel
If I Could Give You Some Advice
Gabriella Costa
If I could give you some advice Don’t debate immigration with white people or men who’ve never held their child and their breath, and put their lives in the hands of coyotes or in make-shift rafts;
who have never walked on blistered feet in too-small shoes, worn thin from years in Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua;
who only know seasickness from yachts, cruises, fishing trips—not from crossing oceans on shaky boats, one foot in the Atlantic the other on American soil, knowing what it means to survive—
never buried their hearts in a land that spat out the rest; who have never wondered if their primos or tías were arrested, kidnapped, or drowned on the same journey that’s swallowed so many before they were old enough to speak,
because they will not listen; they will only see you as the scavengers who feast on their “better” nation— the fucking vermin they want to exterminate and spit out, but not before they scrape the work and meat raw from your bones.
Because they will find you exotic and fascinating, but above all alien. Even if they say you’re pretty for a Mexican, you are not like them, just a specimen behind glass. In fact, you’re not even Mexican.
You’re not a debate either, not a statistic, not a policy proposal, not a talking point or some flavor of the month— you are an American, but above all Cuban and a story they don’t want to hear
of a boat crashing against waves, heart pounding, half-knowing. On the horizon, you think you see a dolphin or a child clinging to the currents and you must decide who is old enough to listen.
Rylee Thompson Geometric Venus Oil and Chalk Pastel
Freedom From Want
After Norman Rockwell’s
Gabriella Costa
There is a pig in my yard and he snorts and scoffs and stares.
There is a pig in my yard and he’s invited family and friends to begin construction on his new house.
There are pigs in my yard and they have dinner every night with tablecloths and porcelain just to leave the scraps at my door.
There are pigs in my yard, lounging in their easy chairs, scowling at the newscaster airing images of my house— my pantry shelves thin, the fridge is bare.
There are pigs in my yard, and they’ve planted gardens, tomatoes bursting red and sweet— but nothing grows for me. They’ve fenced off my land with iron locks and send me anything they don’t want.
There are pigs in my yard and they’ve painted those fences white, hung curtains in the windows, and only let me out at night. Their piglets ride bikes down streets while mothers wave from porches set with pie and lemonade. I’ve forgotten that I need to eat.
The Clockwork Garden
Jakub Kaminski
His parents always used to call the Garden a wonder, a miracle of human ingenuity. He never quite understood. If nothing else, Emil could agree it was a beautiful sight. Rows and rows of flowers filled the eye as one glanced from one end of the Garden to the other, a perfect equilibrium of soft colors and tones. They stood erect, stems stunted to exactly match the flower of the neighbor, petals trimmed with mathematical precision. Each blossom, leaf, and plot was designed for the maximum efficiency of space and light. The tops of the flowers formed a plane so uniform that Emil found it quite easy to imagine spreading out his arms and legs as if falling back onto a bed of tender cotton. He furrowed his brow slightly at the thought, his dreams whisked away as quickly as they started, knowing that even the slight weight of his body would create a dent, however miniscule, that would stand out against the perfection like a sore on skin.
As he straightened his back from leaning over the camellia he was inspecting, he made a conscious effort to avoid knocking into one of the mechanical drones whizzing overhead. They softly hovered and jumped from patch to patch, not unlike a dragonfly stopping to inspect a perch before whizzing off to the next spot. They were the main keepers of the Garden, the cause of its beauty. The words of his parents drifted back to him as the drones moved from patch to patch. He supposed humans did make the drones, and yet his brain always got stuck there. Without humans in the first place, the Garden would never have existed. At this point, however, how much was a hand like his really involved in it? The drones hardly ever made mistakes, except when their parts failed or their systems erred. It scared him, in a way, watching them make these perfect calculations; and at some point, he decided to stop thinking about it. It was an endless loop to him, after all: the calculations and algorithms were made by someone who understood them much better, and he never would. So he always kept his head down and zoned out the drones in the corners of his vision.
The humming gave him a sort of comfort, as did his routine of inspecting each and every patch daily. It was predictable, ordinary; nothing ever changed. Things lived according to their design, each element in its proper place. Beauty in order. Beauty in control. And so he was a part of that beauty in his own way. Yet, throughout the two years he had been working here, he couldn’t help but question it. The demands of routine and focus during inspection had numbed his mind’s wandering thoughts, but as the days passed, he could avoid them less and less.
It was a mismatch, him beside the mechanical gardeners. It was normal for him to stumble down the path occasionally, accidentally shave off a little too much of
a malformed stem. Bend a plant a little too far to the right. He knew he had an important role in noting down the small details that the drones couldn’t inspect—he was told they couldn’t fly too low, at risk of catching their sharp wings in the flowers. But with the perfect combination of chemicals, tools, and handiwork that the drones applied, he felt that every mark he made was wrong. No matter how long he spent slowly bringing the scalpel across the stem, he messed up. His hands trembled, his lungs took a breath at the wrong time, his feet slipped just a little. There were days when he considered throwing his tools down in frustration, before quickly banishing the thought for fear of damaging the flowers around him. Surely they must have developed drones that could do his job by now, he thought.
He was shaken from his thoughts when a drone dropped down beside him, its two claws extending as it gripped the stem of a rose in front of it. He watched as the lens of the drone shifted and extended toward the rose, light reflecting off its glass. One claw slowly began to hold the rose stem, and Emil tried to figure out what was wrong with the flower. Perhaps it was beginning to bend slightly? The drone slowly began tilting the stem, a third claw rummaging in its belly full of tools, presumably for a stake. Emil jumped again in surprise: he had not realized he had been so invested in watching when the drone presumably had a malfunction. Its grip on the rose tightened suddenly as its strength was overapplied, and its sharp claws functioned as knives. The entire blossom slipped off the stem, falling to the ground with a rough cut at its base.
The drone hovered in silence, its eye shifting and retracting toward the plant as it did so. If Emil had done this, he would have also had to sit a few moments in silent shock, remorse filling him for what he had done to the flower. From what little he knew, though, the drone had already forgotten completely about the flower; it was now processing how to fix the ugly cut on the stem. It then pulled a pair of snipping tools from its belly and began trimming the cut stem to a more flattering angle.
After blinking away the surprise, Emil reached down to grab the fallen blossom as the drone worked. He knew other drones would come along and clean the path later, but he felt it was a shame to have such a beautiful flower snipped off. It was a soft light pink, and the brightness of the sun almost made it appear white in certain spots. It was a strange malfunction, as Emil had seen it happen to other seemingly perfect flowers before.
His mind drifted from the flower, as did his gaze. There was a spot in the Garden he had never been to, a place he tried not to think about. The other gardeners called it an “experiment” that the nearly century-old owner of the Garden was keeping up. It was an untamed corner that the drones never ventured into. It rose up from one corner of the Garden in an unmistakable blob—trees, bushes, and shrubs, and all manner of plants twisted and tangled over each other. There were random spots of colors where flowers bloomed, random patches of emptiness where new saplings were just starting. In some areas, the paths were nearly overgrown. Several of the gardeners who worked with him—in a sense, as he had never actually spoken to any of them—spent nearly
JAKUB KAMINSKI
all their time in that corner during their working hours. It was easy to tell who worked where: Emil and the other Restoration Specialists (a title given to people working in the normal section by the lead gardener, Caius) were always clean and in order. Most of the work they did was precise inspection, with occasional fine-tuning or instruction of the gardener drones. However, the “wild” gardeners always walked around with dirty boots and aprons, their hair, hands, and faces to match. They would inevitably trek dirt on the paths of the regular section, much to Caius’s chagrin, as they had to walk through it to return to the main gate. Some even joked about how the gardeners who worked in that section lived on the “Wild Side” in multiple ways. Maybe that’s why the drones never ventured there: they were afraid of what they couldn’t control.
The strangest part of it, however, was that there were never really any instructions on what to do with the Wild Side as far as Emil knew. Caius never even mentioned its existence as he trained Emil, but it was a glaring spot in the corner, impossible to miss. He figured Caius simply tried to ignore it, and so Emil followed the same example. Some gardeners, though, after various periods of working in the Garden, eventually drifted over there and seemed to stay. No one ever really told them to come back, and some even stopped talking to them altogether. He never understood the appeal of it, really. It was a lot more work, and many of the other Specialists thought that it would never be able to be saved. No matter what they did or how long they worked, it always looked chaotic and disheveled. No, he never understood, but… as he held that flower, he had to wonder.
During one of his later shifts at the Garden, Emil found himself at the boundary of the Wild Side and the rest of the Garden. It was a strange boundary in reality— the only thing distinguishing the corner from the rest of the garden was a rough line on the path where the drones stopped cleaning the dirt trekked around by the gardeners. His fingers roughly traced the snipped blossom he kept in his apron pocket. The chemicals placed on the flowers in the Garden did a wonderful job of preserving the petals, as one of the main attractions of the place was being able to purchase different crafts from the flowers. He toed the line as he was thinking, glancing back and forth across the patches of untamed life. It was empty at the moment, thankfully, and no one else was watching him as far as he knew. His curiosity battled with... Now that he realized it, he wasn’t sure what was keeping him from entering the corner. It certainly wasn’t against the rules— the other gardeners were never fired or penalized as far as he knew. All the same, something about it felt wrong to him; dangerous, even. Like crossing this little line of dirt on the ground would somehow corrupt him in a way he couldn’t undo. That he would lose the beauty he had spent so long maintaining. He rubbed the petals of the blossom one more time, and with one more cursory glance around him, he threw his feet quickly over the line. He stopped. He looked around and waited. Now that he realized the theatrics of his actions, a small, self-conscious blush arose on his cheeks, and he relaxed his posture. He worked here. This was normal.
Now, with his curiosity outweighing his previous anxieties, he began looking into the wild patches of flowers. To his amazement, as he searched and pried with his eyes through one patch, he found that there was more than just ornamental flowers growing here: there were weeds. Weeds, shrubs he couldn’t identify, the beginnings of some patch of saplings. These certainly weren’t part of the Garden’s regular supply, but here they were. Growing with reckless abandon. A feeling began to sprout through Emil as he looked down on this spot of tangled weeds and plants. He saw their lopsided bulbs, leaves with small cuts dotting the edges. He even saw aphids crawling along the stem of a rose which would have normally been perfect. Beautiful. A frustration grew and grew, until it broke through Emil’s surface and he reached down to grasp the rose. It was too dissolute, sitting there in its own agony.
Emil gripped the rose by the stem, wanting to pull it out and toss it to the side; yet, when he grabbed it, he shuddered and let go. He looked at his hand and found a bubble of blood beginning to peek out, breaking through the surface of his skin. The blasted roses haven’t even had their thorns removed! He watched the blood slowly grow bigger in contempt, forgetting the flowers briefly. He had never been injured in the Garden before, now that he thought about it. Every plant had its sharp edges trimmed, thorns removed. He never realized how it felt to be pricked by one of these beautiful lives. Emil jumped as he heard a voice saying something in his direction.
He looked up to see that a head had peeked around the bush that he was digging through. It was one of the Wild Side gardeners, and he wasn’t sure if he had ever seen this man’s face before. Emil stood and stared as he introduced himself, the previous feelings of anxiety threatening him again. The man went by “Briar,” and a small sound of amusement actually came out of Emil’s throat; surely a nickname.
“So, did the rose get’cha?”
“Huh? Sorry?” Emil blinked, a little embarrassed by how raspy his voice sounded. It had been a while since he had talked to someone else, even on his side of the Garden.
“The rose.” Briar smiled, wrapping around to Emil’s side of the patch. “This section is particularly full of the thorny ones, so I recommend watching where you grab. Or use these.”
Briar held up his hands and wiggled his fingers, despite having a pair of snips in one hand. He was wearing gloves, well-worn and slightly tattered around the hems in certain areas. It never occurred to Emil that the gardeners would need gloves, considering the distance he normally shared with dirt or danger.
“Oh, but this one is a nice one…” Briar remarked, kneeling down toward the blossom that Emil had been threatening to kill just moments ago. “Surprised you didn’t see thorns on her, though!” Briar chuckled softly, evidently gaining a bit of pleasure from teasing Emil.
“Well…” Emil stammered, hovering over him as he began to inspect the plant. “Yes… It is beautiful.” Now, so many questions flew into Emil’s mind as he watched
JAKUB KAMINSKI
Briar working around the plant and running his gloved fingers gently across places he stopped to look further at.
“Are you going to get rid of the aphids?” Emil questioned, as he had a little curiosity about what Briar even did all day—the plants and everything were in such a disheveled state that they looked completely unworked.
Briar hummed, turning a couple leaves over gently. “No. This one should be alright as is.”
“But… You know aphids kill the plants, right?”
This time Briar actually laughed loudly with a short but sincere outburst. “Of course I know that, but there isn’t nearly enough of ‘em to do that. See, we got ladybugs too,” he said, pointing toward one crawling on a nearby plant. “They eat up a good bit of the aphids all around here. So, not enough aphids to hurt our plants, and the ladybugs get to hang out.”
Emil watched in placid amazement as Briar argued for the presence of the pests, something he couldn’t fathom regardless of the ladybugs. The ladybugs were striking in their own way, sure, standing out against the stems and leaves of plants. A sharp blot of reds and whites and blacks on a sea of greens. He had never viewed them as necessary, though; they were just another redundancy that the drones could do a much better job of. Surely in this case, it would just be better to be rid of both of them?
As he watched the ladybug crawl around, though, Emil started to see Briar’s appreciation of them more and more. They were cute in their own little way, almost like doing the miniature job of the gardeners, and living their lives not unlike Emil himself. The aphids, by themselves perhaps harmful and degrading to the plants, gave rise to such a wonderful little thing. Even if they were there, in small numbers they were hard to notice, and too many of them simply meant that the ladybugs got to move in. In the face of all these new thoughts, Emil wondered why Caiushad never told him about the ladybugs, or why he had never actually seen them in the other parts of the Garden.
Emil felt a pressure on his hand and looked up. Briar had grabbed his hand and, lifting it up, wiped the blood off the tip of his finger with a small handkerchief. “Ah, you’ll be fine, of course. I pricked myself plenty before. This definitely won’t be your last run-in with those brambles, though. They always seem to get you without you noticing.” Briar patted his hand softly, and, letting it go, turned to move into another section of the Wild Side. Emil couldn’t help but let his feet follow him. He understood it all a little better, and he felt as if that little drop of blood connected him to the ground of this chaotic corner.
Emil began to find himself more and more drawn to the Wild Side, and many of his shifts ended up being partly or entirely on that side of the Garden. He knew that some of the other Restoration Specialists had to have taken note of it, but they didn’t say anything, nor did he. He talked little before anyway, with his days being entirely absorbed by his normal routine. Now, though, his days felt very disorderly. It was uncomfortable at first. Instead of following the same paths every day, there was a new task
or goal daily. Sometimes projects even lasted over the span of multiple days. He had never had enough work in one day before, but now there was an overload. In this new weight, though, Emil began to feel a lightness. As he followed Briar and spent his days working with him, he realized it was actually enjoyable. Instead of each Restoration Specialist walking their separate paths for maximum daily efficiency, many of the gardeners here clumped together and spent their working hours talking while their hands were in the dirt. He got to know many of the gardeners who spent their days here, and it was invigorating to Emil, as he found something he didn’t even realize he was missing. He was drawn to this patch like a ladybug to a cluster of aphids, he thought with some amusement. He was glad Briar had come up to him that day.
At the start of some shifts, Emil just sat and appreciated it all. How the rigid rows of the clockwork garden abruptly gave way to a tangled, living expanse. Here, the ground was soft underfoot, rich with the scent of damp earth and growing things. The air here was thicker, warmer, vibrating with life in a way that the rest of the garden never did. Instead of the humming of drones and clicking of parts, it was the humming of insects and the sharp sounds of laughter from the gardeners. The plants reached for the sky in wild spirals and tangled webs, climbing over each other with no regard for order or symmetry. Vines wound their way around tree trunks like the fingers of a giant hand, their leaves oversized and lush, dripping with moisture that caught the sunlight in brief flashes of gold and green. Flowers bloomed in every direction—vibrant purples, fiery oranges, deep blues—all mixed together in ways that should have clashed, but somehow didn’t. It was a dance that had no pattern Emil could see, yet it all felt… right. Nothing here was planned, yet everything fit together as if by some deeper, unspoken design. Here, in the Wild Side, the plants didn’t grow according to any schedule, didn’t bloom on command. They followed their own course, bending toward the light when they found it, curling into the shadows when they pleased. It was chaos, but it was real. A kind of life that simply was.
Emil remembered how Briar had once speculated on the patch before they were to head home. “How beautiful it must be at night,” he had said in a sort of lazy way, as if he was complacent with it staying a stray thought. “This side of the Garden, I mean.” At that moment, Emil formulated a plan. In a show of gratitude to Briar, he would take him to see the Garden at night. He knew it was possible; since he had worked at the Garden longer than Briar, he had received different responsibilities and even a set of keys to the gates. Even if it might be against the rules, it would be worth it to see it at least once, he thought. So Emil went out one night, to just test if his plan would work.
As he strolled from his home to the walls of the Garden, he stepped up to the black-metal fence that surrounded it and wrapped his hands around the bars. He peered through the fence, noting the beautiful outdoor lamps that dotted the edges of each path. They shone in a warm, orange glow, each carved out of wood in the fashion of old paper lanterns. Intricate and symmetrical lines formed a variety of dark shapes standing out against the backdrop of light. And the light itself was mesmerizing. It draped over the
JAKUB KAMINSKI
Garden in large swaths, illuminating the flowers and plants in tandem with the moon peering down. The soft colors of each of the blossoms seemed to have a different quality to them in the glow, a new color.
Satisfied with his brief observation, he walked over to the main gate and pressed the key into the lock. He turned the key, finding that it clicked, and slowly began to push open the gate. He was holding his breath without realizing it, but soon found this to be an overreaction as nothing happened, except the slight creaking of the gate as it swung open. He stepped in and began the trek toward the wild patch in the corner with a light heart. He heard the soft hum coming from the Wild Side growing louder and louder, and the chaotic symphony only emboldened him more, his heart already pounding from doing something maybe against the rules.
For all his excitement and anticipation, though, his emotions soon came crashing down in a confusing tidal wave. Where he thought he heard the buzzing of insects, he instead heard the buzzing of the mechanical drones. Where he thought the Garden was completely empty, they had been working and patrolling around. Their quick movements and buzzing wings jolted from patch to patch—within the Wild Side. He saw them as they worked on the twisted and lopsided plants, but they didn’t fix them. They worked to bend them slightly at random angles, to take small chunks out of the leaves as if from insects. They sprinkled seeds in empty patches. He even saw one take small pouches from its belly, and spreading them outward onto the soil, he saw both minuscule aphids and ladybugs. Here the drones were, in the Wild Side. Perfecting, as they had always done. Perfecting a world of imperfections.
As Emil stood frozen on the path and watched the drones work, not even noticing him, he glanced down. In the darkness, he found that the rough line of dirt that separated the Wild Side from the Garden had never been there at all.
Grace Vogt
Abstraction - Untitled 2 Oil on Canvas
diary entry of a wounded animal Azi Kynard
i knew the colour of god once, and sometimes when i think about her i am something leftover but far from ruined. my mother dipped her hands in oil before she hugged me on the days that she wanted my skin to burn when met with grace i used to have chuck taylors that laced up to the knee covering all the scars left over from jumping before i saw whose arms were open to catch me i suck on cough drops because my thumb costs too much to replace, and i seek to know the end of the end of the end;
i am running my hands through my hair maybe subconsciously, to straighten it i am a hunted animal tied loose and bleeding to your body; the carcass of us is still wet with death and i am swinging from your shoulder with teeth as white as snow
pleasure is warm and spiky with regret, and how odd it is to know what comes after the end and still search for the beginning.
yellow browns with age and you are the ghost of my once toothy smile. people seem to really hate it when someone who feels dirtier than what they can wash away with the backs of their eyelids asks them for something they have but can’t seem to let go.
and who told you that diamonds are more beautiful than i am when crushed and flattened into something that goes down easy?
i am left alone, laughing in self defense.
Grace Vogt
IMG_4269 Plaster, Chicken Wire, and Burlap
Lady in the Lake Chase Sarkis
there is a lady in the lake
frail and gauzy with seaweed for bones and eels for braids. her kaleidoscope pleas pop mutely on the surface lost in the fuss of foot traffic on the muddy banks.
you hear her when the humidity is so thick you need a serrated knife to cut through it. she gurgles to you when the windows are closed and the hunger pains loop into zeppelin knots.
she finds you when frustration lights a fire in your tendons. laying awake alone panels of your face illuminated by the sleepless street lights. she tells you to let it go.
the dreams of toothaches
static screams watching him go.
her murmurs ripple inaudibly coming from all things. the creaky ceiling fan the bed groaning when he flops onto his side. your nervous heart beat, beat, beating. let it go. let it go. let it go.
the tedious sounds of life dwarf you reducing you to your knees to pray for sanity to be the girl who didn’t have to knock on wood before bed. you want to exist without weight.
the lady in the lake exists here limbs marionetted by the soft water. nothing to haunt her but her own rigor mortis. and as her flesh washes away she wishes to be you. irrationally alive despite childish haunts and warm in bed.
her tears are bodies of water for us to splash in on warmer happier days. those are the days you live for. those are the days she longs for. she tries to reach you before you go wading soft skin pruning never to be caressed again. you don’t deserve to drown. let it go.
October Tatiana Sabin Oil on Canvas
God at the Front Desk
Lauren Donahue
Today I have chosen to believe in god.
He waves at me from the front desk and we exchange the tired i-just-missed-you back and forth of neighbors who have had too many overlapping vacations.
I am not angry with him today.
I have chosen to not be angry with him today.
Some days, I only choose to believe in him for the purpose of fulfilling my anger; an arrangement that works well, as he gets to indulge his martyr complex, and I get to indulge my nostalgia.
But today I have signed in at the front desk of little miracles. He takes my name and number, both of which he almost remembers and interrupts me halfway through saying. I am given a paper hall pass of belief, which I hang around my neck and flash to the security guard. I walk down the street and catalog all the proof of god I see: a bird lying dead on the ground, a man playing saxophone, a compliment from a coworker, a moment under the moon.
Tomorrow, I will hang my belief in god up in my closet or fold him and stack him with the rest of my clean laundry. I do not know when I’ll take him out to wear again, but he will be there if I need him.
Jan, Again
Lauren Donahue
It is January again and I am slowing
My skeleton is cracking, I do not shake it out I would not ask for a short winter
It is a kind of penance, the knowing and the prediction and the slowing I drift through conversations I ask forgiveness with each blurry exhale
Can you see the cold?
Can you see my blood tread through my body, one heavy footprint at a time I wrench it from my legs into my heart and out again I heave it over my tongue
The copper tastes cold and I am slowing
In yesterday, summer has opened the windows April whispers of her sister May and June flirts with me in the back of the classroom My eyes are itchy with possibility; this warmth cannot be kept I love I love I love I can be loved back
The circuit completes, the interlude picks back up, Conversation flows easy now, ushered into existence by a vapid and amiable wind Can you smell the air?
I can see it in your eyes, in your breath, in the shallow promise of simple affection I can love I could be kind January waits, pressed into my bones
You Will Be Like God
Katerina Krizner
“Listen,” Dr. Phineas cries, his clenched fist banging against the whiteboard, at seventeen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds who have recently learned to tune out the sound of their parents’ voices. “Think about the pear tree. Think about young Caddy climbing that tree and looking through the window to see her grandmother’s funeral. It’s not just about losing innocence; it’s about gaining knowledge.”
You want to listen, you do, but across the room, Juliet Castell is pulling her hair up with both her hands, and you savor the pink of the back of her neck and the sharp angles made by her elbows.
When the ashen curls fall over her skin again like a curtain, you look back to Phineas, who looks at you like he sees through your skin. Yes, he must know and understand, but Juliet’s ashen curls fall over her skin again like a curtain and fall again like a curtain and fall again and fall and, “What’s the first fall into knowledge supposed to be again?” you say without raising your hand.
Phineas squints at you like he should be wearing glasses, but then he remembers, his face saddens, and he says, “Leaving home and being on your own for the first time.”
“And the second?” Your memory is eidetic and obnoxious. You know Phineas’ axioms by heart, but you need to hear him say them again aloud.
“Sex,” he says, “but the order’s a bit outdated.” You wonder who let this guy be a teacher as he winks, stacking two dry-erase markers on top of each other and pretending to smoke them. When asked, he told you, dryly, it’s a coping mechanism.
“And the last is losing your parents,” you finish for him, “then you’re really on your own for the first time, right?” You need him to confirm that your plan will work. “The falls feel more like stairs and less like cliffs when you do them in order. You said so.”
Phineas blows an invisible puff of smoke. “You shouldn’t take what I say so seriously. Whatever happened to doubting the system? Whatever happened to teenage anarchy?”
“So, you’re the system now?”
“I’m no Big Brother, but I try my best.” He sounds nothing like your dad. Maybe that’s why you hear him so clearly when he tells you that the order of falling matters. Maybe that is why he does not stop you when you accept Juliet’s hand and let her lead you out to her red sedan, which is waiting with all the windows rolled down and the sunroof pulled back. No, Phineas goes on with his Benji lecture, which you cannot hear over Juliet counting roadkill to pass the time. You decide to find it
YOU WILL BE LIKE GOD charming.
“Three, deer.”
“Seven, raccoon.”
“Nine, dog.”
“Ten, dog.” Too many of the carcasses are dogs for only a couple hours of driving.
“Thirteen, armadillo,” you join in.
“That’s the spirit,” Juliet says. She’s on aux and hitting the heel of her hand on the steering wheel to the beat of a folk song about leaving. You don’t know it, but you hum along like your mom sang it every night when you were a child.
One of Juliet’s feet is propped up on her seat, which cannot be a safe posture to drive in, but you say nothing. She’s wearing baggy jeans with multi-colored paint stains, but when you ask, she says she’s not an artist. The jeans are her ex-boyfriend’s. You realize you know nothing about her, really. You’ve seen her around since she moved to Tallahassee years ago, and you cast her in your fantasies as you tried to fall asleep: you and Juliet fishing for tarpon with your feet hanging off the side of your mom’s boat, you and Juliet snorkeling over fields of neon coral in Key West tapping each other and overcompensating with gestures to express your awe, you and Juliet kissing at the bottom of your swimming pool.
She does not ask you how you’re doing. Had she asked, you would have answered that you’ve been better because you think you have been better, but you don’t remember much of the person you were before the looks of pity in the hallway and the guilty disappointment of waking from dreams about your mom before her diagnosis. No, she says instead, “Take it from me, Miles, you never want to date an artist.”
“Why not?” you say, glad you are not an artist.
“There are worlds in everyone’s skulls, but most put the real world and real people first. It’s sort of sad, really.” Her once-white blonde hair is grayer than when she first transferred to your middle school, darkened now like trodden snow. She tucks it behind her ear to reveal a triple piercing. Her black t-shirt is covered in cat hair. You think you like her better up close.
“Sixteen, rabbit,” Juliet says.
When the highway bloats into seven lanes of stop-and-go traffic, you know you are close. Twenty miles from Atlanta and the needle is on its way to second base with empty, but Juliet swears she knows this car like her own body and can get you there with gas to spare. You believe her.
You chose Atlanta because it would be hard for anyone to find you in a city that size, if anyone were to look. Every car around you had the same unoriginal idea. You all blare your horns, press your brakes and flash your red taillights in a big stream—endless runaways in all directions, enraged by this standstill.
When you reach the city, the sky above is as clear and vast as an ocean. Juliet points out her window and says she wants to go to the aquarium first, so you buy two
KATERINA KRIZNER
general admission tickets and two for the 2:00 dolphin show, where Juliet convinces you to sit beside her in the splash zone.
“Come on,” she says, tugging your sleeve, “you have to experience this the right way.” You’re staring into a tank of water, lit fluorescent, reflecting the screen above projecting a sunset, flanked by giant plastic palm leaves.
“Hello everybody!” the lead trainer shouts, but once the dolphins emerge, no one is listening to her high-pitched, cartoonish voice spouting facts about training and positive reinforcement. There are four dolphins, and Juliet knows them all by name and how they came to be in the Atlanta aquarium. Rescues, mostly. She’s an avid watcher of the livestream.
One of the dolphins does an extravagant leap out of the water, and the audience stands and applauds as you are drenched. The creatures dance and jump and clap their fins together and wave. Their teethed mouths are open wide like they’re grinning.
Walking out, you and Juliet are both dripping with a sardine stench that brings you back to the slaughter with your mom on the off-duty research boat clutching your fishing poles, bearing equal parts victory and dread as you reel one in and catch its slick scales in your shaking fingers. You always cringed as you smacked it against the deck to stop the violent thrashing because your mom called it mercy as she slit the throat after your bashing. The smell of the skinning would cling to you for days when you got back to school, and the other kids would comment, repulsed, but now no one says anything because the scent hangs over the whole crowd, packed so densely you’re becoming a school of fish yourselves as you shuffle out of the amphitheater towards the neighboring exhibit.
You step, hand in hand, onto a moving sidewalk that conveys you through a glass tunnel. False waves crash overhead, and there is so much to look at, so many people looking at it all, you can only see the abundance of movement in blurs of yellow and purple and orange. You watch Juliet, her head upturned, face colored by translucent blue.
“Look,” she says, pointing up, “every fish is trying to say something,” and it’s true—all their small mouths are opening and closing tirelessly though the glass keeps their sound from joining the dozens of voices before and behind you on this lethargic conveyor belt, all drowning you, drowning you with the sound and the lack of sound. You open your mouth to respond and forget which side of the glass you’re on.
The tunnel spits you out into a large, dark room, and you try to stumble off to find some quiet corner of this place where you can gather yourself.
“Wait, wait,” Juliet says. “This is the best part.”
You turn the corner and see a glass tank that would dwarf a movie screen. Epic music swells to dramatize the reveal as you pass through bleachers to find a place among the children in the front rows, among the children with their noses pressed up against the glass, their mothers calling at them to stop that, as yours never would.
Rays cross the landscape with the grace of a great flock of birds, wings swing-
ing nearly in sync. Gray groupers open their gargoyle mouths, hollow eyes bugging. Horned mantas, massive enough to warrant a place in prehistoric textbooks, bend in backflips. Smaller sharks skidding the bottom are emasculated by the numberless pods of scintillating amberjack. Just as you’re about to tell Juliet that you don’t believe any of this, that you see past the blue-painted backdrop and mirrors and tricks of the eye trying to make you believe it’s endless, trying to make you believe that the ocean can be known this easily, a whale shark enters. It’s so large it’s got to be an animatronic—just watch the way the tail moves, the wrinkle of its skin where the mechanic joints are working to propel it through the water.
“It’s a wonder anyone bothers with aliens,” Juliet says to your mouth which keeps opening and closing without sound.
You can’t take your eyes off the scene before you, even to look at her. You belong here, underwater, with the scuba diver cleaning the tank with bright red hair curling in the water behind her. She waves at you, and you blink a few times before waving back. She is taking samples from the coral below studying the effects of ocean acidification on reefs for her graduate thesis research project. On this expedition, she will encounter a nurse shark that will follow her the whole time and never harm her, white as a guardian angel. She will tell her son about this as proof of God’s existence when he is thirteen and refuses to go to church for the first time. You shake your head and let your heart sink when you realize the diver has no visible hair and is waving at the child in the stroller behind you.
“Come on,” Juliet says as she pulls you toward the exit. “They’re closing soon. Didn’t you hear the intercom?”
You don’t turn around, but you hear the gasps, get the feeling that the diver is drowning behind you. You hear the thuds of dozens of small fists against the thick glass as they watch the body sink, sand detonating under her weight, but still you retreat to the sedan and follow Juliet to the backseat and focus on her head lying in your lap.
She clears her throat and asks, “So why did you want to come with me?”
You can’t bring yourself to tell Juliet this is all just practice, one great, big training montage, so that when you have to look true enlightenment in the face, you won’t flinch. You don’t tell her that for a while you were going to be a marine biologist like your mom. You don’t say how you spent your childhood summers beside her, seasick, and stayed up every school night under your shark-themed covers with a flashlight, flipping through a dog-eared 1989 marine life almanac, memorizing the scientific names of jellyfish to watch the smile on your mom’s face the next morning as you recited them and butcher aurelia aurita and phyllorhiza punctata and phacellophora camtschatica. You don’t talk about how you failed out of AP Bio last year after the doctors found the tumor or how looking at the X-ray and seeing how cancer gripped your mom’s brain with long, spiny fingers you said pycnopodia helianthoides and watched her force a smile.
No, that would ruin the moment, so you only remind Juliet of Dr. Phineas’s theory of falling. You feel smart telling her your loophole to get a jump start on adulthood,
KATERINA KRIZNER
to obtain the wisdom of the first fall early at least.
“What do you think Phineas means, falling into knowledge?” she asks, sliding her hand up under your shirt. “Sounds painful.”
“It is,” you say, “but after, you can see the world as it really is. No more shadows on the cave wall. By the end of it all, you’re staring right up at the sun.”
Juliet smiles big. She isn’t taking you seriously, but she makes you feel like you’re staring at the sun already, and if there is a truth outside of her, it doesn’t matter.
She sits up and takes out all six of her hoop earrings, one by one, and sets them like discarded halos on the center console, saying, “How do you like it so far? Falling?”
You both still sort of reek of fish, but the scent has never bothered you, and it draws you together, still damp and somewhat cold with the car’s AC blaring. As she leans into you, your whole body becomes one big beating heart, which is embarrassing, until she’s kissing you, and she’s taking off your shirt, and you’re struggling with her bra, and her ribs and lungs and heart are all between your hands as your lips fall into her chest. Her eyes are headlights, and her mouth is open, and you rush to fill it with your tongue, and you’re not thinking about how you’re probably doing this all wrong or how she probably knows that. It is only you and her and you’re warm and soaring and sweat-soaked and closer to her than you’ve ever been to anyone, and you’re never going to stop kissing her, never going to stop touching her, you’re never going to let go of her, you swear, until you let go of her, and it’s over, and she’s laughing and trying to soothe the frizz of her curls into a ponytail.
Her eyes glow the grass green saturation of post-heavy rain, and your mouth is full of sand spurs. “Hope you had a whale of a time,” she says pointing at a sign as you leave the parking garage.
Still high and hazy, only half in the car, you ask, “Where to next?”
“I mean, how long can you stay away? Aren’t you going to miss it if we don’t go back?”
She’s right. Your dad’s blowing up your phone asking where you’ve been. He’s been by your mom’s bedside all week. This is the end stage; this is the end, and you ran away to school? To Atlanta? Now that you’ve been on your own for half a day and are no longer a virgin, you’re practically an adult, and you need to go be with your mom as she passes, so Juliet speeds the car back to Tallahassee.
“Two, opossum.”
“Eleven, skunk.”
You’re still running on empty, and there’s no way you’re going to make it in time, but Juliet tells you she knows this car like her own body, and you think you know her body now too, so you believe her.
You push through a blue sea of scrubs, through the successive hallways tightening like throats, past metal instruments clinking like knives on shiny epoxy-painted plywood, past so many medical carts of patients writhing like fish bleeding out on that cold deck, bleeding out in your shaking hands, but your mom is stock-still when you
open the door. Though the whole room is swaying, she is still.
You should be sobbing as your dad pulls you into a tight hug in front of your mom’s uninhabited body. You should be sorry that you weren’t here to hear her final words, weren’t here to kiss her on the forehead one last time. You should be paralyzed with regret, but then you look at Juliet in the doorway. Life is unfolding how it should. This is the way it has to go, and, actually, it’s beautiful. You understand now. Life is only precious because it ends.
Juliet smiles knowingly back at you, though she has only two-thirds of your awareness. You want to tell her your epiphany, so she can feel this peace with you, so she won’t have to pity you, you’re so sick of pity, but before you open your mouth, you rub your eyes, and Dr. Phineas is standing over your desk. “Miles, your dad called.” You shake your head and look around to find your classmates staring at you. They don’t matter, though, what matters is the enlightenment you just reached with your eyes closed, the secret you need to get yourself through this. You had it. You just had it.
As he guides you out the door, Phineas puts a hand on your back. You turn back and look at Juliet, and your eyes meet, and surely she remembers, so you pull away and take a couple steps toward her. You open your mouth and close it.
“What is it?” Juliet asks. Her cheeks are flushed. Her voice, baritone. She smells nothing of fish.
Your bones shift like detached scaffolding. Everyone’s watching you in disbelief like there’s thick glass between you and them, a false infinity behind you, the decorative shipwreck of your life at your feet, a massive predator circling you as they wait and watch in curiosity and horror for it to devour you.
Phineas pushes you out the door and asks if you want him to drive you. It is dark outside, and the sky won’t stop clearing its throat, and your stomach is in your mouth, and you say, “No. Thank you, but I think I need to be alone right now,” which is true until you’re driving and fantasizing about a freak accident, hoping to hydroplane. As you walk from your car, you pray for a lightning strike, but the world has no mercy, so you enter the hospital room, dripping wet.
Mom’s bed is propped up. Her eyes are closed and sunken. Her skin is overripe, sallow. Her red hair is gone. Her head is wrapped in bandages. She breathes so deeply. You can hear it from the door where you stand. Frozen. You try to match her breaths through your mouth the way you did when she first taught you how to breathe underwater.
“Be strong for her,” your dad says, patting you on the back so hard you stumble forward.
When your mom was first diagnosed, he told you he had been through this before with his dad, and the only thing you can do is be happy with her, smile for her. When the end stage began, he brought her a different neon, tropical fish every day for the last two weeks, knowing they would outlive her. He plastered the best photographs she’d taken of coral reefs and marine life on her hospital room walls. He flips on a dif-
JPEG Figure
Sofia De Rossi Oil on Canvas
ferent ocean documentary every night as she drifts to sleep. Your mom is going through so much already, she does not need to worry about your pain.
“If you have to cry,” he told you, “step outside for a moment and gather yourself,” but as you approach the bedside, the tiled floor shifting under your squeaking sneakers, your mom opens her eyes, and before joy or recognition crosses her face, she is seized by pain. She has no more words to give you, no more lies that she’s alright and that she’s glad you’re here and that it will all be okay. You see her, and your breath hitches, and you let the tears come.
The room does not fill with your saltwater like you wish it would. The fish your dad brought her don’t float up out of their tanks. The coral from the posters on the walls does not harden and materialize. You do not drown with her.
Mom dies watching you wipe your eyes. Her mouth is half open. You hope it’s a smile, but you’re not sure. Phineas was wrong. This isn’t like putting on glasses with a prescription you didn’t know you needed. Your tongue tastes no pears or apples. Your arms do not become like wings inches before the ground, and the only epiphany that snakes around you is that Phineas know nothing. You know nothing. Nothing more than you did this morning. Nothing to slow the crunch of your bones against the earth.
Marrying the Monster Caroline Vincent
You lick muscle off the bone and pull at strands of hair until they rip out of my scalp and thread loops through your fingers and I keep laughing (that’s what they tell you to do).
You want to fill my body with spiders and watch them bite at the skin that shrivels up from the sensation of your touch and I keep laughing (even when my body goes rigid)
You place one hand over my mouth, beat my head against the walls of a home made out of sheer glass, until I turn purple and blue and melt into the form of a porcelain doll and I keep laughing (head so heavy).
Your eyes reflect the devils, burning through my skin that stretches sheer and falters underneath the weight of your grip, shattering into nothing but bones and a pile of mush and I keep laughing (that’s what you’re supposed to do).
I cover splotches of bruises with lighter shades of skin, hiding them from the shameful sight of light and run laps till my legs resemble the lean outline of limbs on a tree and I fill my belly with caffeine to keep me stimulated and lean so, I can stay skinny in my underwear and I keep laughing.
I become a bright dead thing, with hollow cheeks dotted with pink blush and carry my weight in the bags under my eyes that turn purple in the line of light and wear wigs to cover up the harsh patches on my scalp where hair used to inhabitant.
I shudder under the lingering touch of calloused fingers, stained with the blood that trickles down the skin of my legs.
You say you didn’t mean it and I keep laughing, laughing, laughing.
At the End of the Pier
Eli Kaufer
The fog was thick and the air dewy that morning by the coast. The old fisherman cast his line over the end of the pier, the same one he had returned to ever since he was young. The pier’s wooden boards were rotten, their once-rich browns having long since turned to sickly grays and greens. The old fisherman had crept past the graffiti-streaked skeletal storefront facades, crowbar and fishing rod tucked tight under his arm, to where he now sat, in a battered old folding chair, avoiding the boards he knew could no longer support his weight. With his line piercing the water’s surface, the old fisherman was at peace.
The sound of creaking footsteps along the pier pulled the old fisherman from his bliss. He whipped around in his seat, nearly toppling over, but saw nothing through the fog. He shook his head, telling himself it had simply been the struts of the pier creaking as they were struck by the lapping waves. The old fisherman returned his focus to rod and reel, and the footsteps continued. He ignored them. The footsteps were so delicately soft that they could only belong to some light footed animal; one time, a deer had slipped through the gate and snuck onto the pier, enticed by the smell of the food he carried—a sandwich in a plastic baggie, stuffed into one of his pants pockets. Ever since, he had made sure to wedge the rusted chain link gate shut behind him. The old fisherman continued in his task as the footsteps in the fog approached softly, gently, until they were at his side.
A stranger unfolded a chair of his own and sat down next to the old fisherman, who scoffed and shook his head, disgusted that this stranger would not only intrude on his privacy, but choose to sit where he did, with a whole pier for the two of them to share. As the stranger got comfortable and reared back a fishing rod of his own, the old fisherman turned to demand that he find his own spot and saw the black cloak the stranger wore, the dark hood shrouding his face, and the hands that emerged from his cloak—emaciated, pale yellow, and each sporting six talon tipped fingers adorned with many rings.
“Oh,” the old fisherman half-said, half-exhaled. The sound had been involuntary. He never believed that the end would come so soon. He always thought that he would have more time. The stranger cast his line.
“Have you caught anything today?” asked the stranger, his voice low, rich, and quite kind. The old fisherman shook his head. His hands trembled and a bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck. “That’s a shame,” the stranger said.
The old fisherman wondered why he had made such a remark, if perhaps the stranger to his left had hoped the old fisherman’s final day would yield some-
thing worthwhile. He supposed that the stranger must not have been watching him all that closely as of late.
“I figured you were onto something, that you had a reason for coming out here every week,” the stranger continued. “But I guess not. So, why here? Why not the nice new pier down the way? There’s more people there, it’s farther from the factories, the water’s clear—” “Am I going to die?” the old fisherman asked, his jaw trembling.
“Well, yeah,” said the stranger. “Eventually.” He let out a soft chuckle. “Everyone’s free pass expires one day.”
“B-but,” the old fisherman stammered, “n-not today?”
“Nah,” said the stranger, lounging back in his seat. It was a folding chair, much like the old fisherman’s but with a brand new price tag still hanging off the side—seventy-seven dollars. “Today’s my day off.” The old fisherman eyed him suspiciously. “Relax,” the stranger said with a laugh, patting the fishing rod clutched in his claws. “This doesn’t look like a scythe to you, does it?”
“No,” the old fisherman said, the firmness in his voice restored, “I suppose it doesn’t.” He cleared his throat, returned his sights to the sea, and quelled the shaking in his hands. “Why’re you here, then?” the old fisherman asked gruffly. With the fear of death smothered, his frustration with the stranger’s over-familiarity and choice of seat reared its head once again.
“To fish,” the stranger said, a quizzical lilt to his voice. “Why else?”
The old fisherman grumbled and hoped for a fish to bite at the end of his line, anything to keep him from a conversation with the stranger. The stranger’s line tugged instead, and he reeled in a long-dead fish, its eyes collapsed and its putrid, gluey flesh barely holding its bones together.
“Oh, that’s unpleasant,” the stranger said to himself, yanking his hook from the corpse’s lower lip and tossing the fish back into the drink. The old fisherman shook his head as the stranger cast his line again. For the next half hour, they sat in silence. The old fisherman caught nothing, the stranger two more dead fish.
“This place is quite beautiful,” said the stranger. The old fisherman grunted, immediately unsure whether he had done so in agreement with the stranger or out of frustration for the silence having been broken.
“It’s such a rarity for a place like this to exist,” the stranger continued, “so full of stories yet so devoid of life. The world as it has become does not allow such places to last, so ruthlessly intent on tearing them down and replacing them with something new.” The old fisherman briefly considered moving his seat, but he quickly smothered the thought. He had to remain here. This was where he belonged.
“For the brief time in which places such as this are permitted to linger,” the stranger trailed on, “they are indeed beautiful, but they are so very lonely. I live among the lifeless; in this way, these places are the closest that I have to a home.” He looked towards the old fisherman, whose watchful eyes remained upon the foggy sea. “An existence of solitude is never pleasant,” said the stranger. “I want to know what it is
like for you, an impermanent vessel of life, to likewise live within a lifeless land.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the old fisherman grumbled irritably. “There’s plenty of life here.”
The stranger turned in his chair and looked back at the pier they had both walked down. He pointed with a talon towards the burned-out remains of a building, its crumbling and ashen face tattooed with graffiti. “That building there,” the stranger asked, “where is the life in it?” The old fisherman glanced where the stranger pointed before returning his sights to the sea.
“That was the restaurant where I took my first girlfriend,” the old fisherman said. “We were both…fifteen, I’d say. We sat and talked and ate for hours that day, till it was closing time and we were made to leave.”
“Hm,” the stranger responded, curling his extended hand and continuing to scan the pier. He stopped and pointed out a corpse-like building at the far end of the boardwalk, a wooden ribcage looming out of the fog. “How about that building? Where is the life in it?”
“That was where my dad bought me my first sunhat,” the old fisherman said without turning around, already knowing where the stranger had pointed. “I hadn’t wanted to get up early that morning, so the fog had already burned off, but I wanted to go fishing anyways, and dad didn’t want me to get burned too.” Despite himself, the old fisherman smiled faintly, the edges of gray teeth peeking out from behind his leathery lips. “It didn’t work too well—came home looking like a damn lobster. Mom screamed her head off at the both of us.”
“This is what I mean,” said the stranger. “What you have told me are stories, memoirs in your impermanent mind, but they are not signs of life.” The smile faded from the old fisherman’s face. “Tell me,” the stranger asked, “where is your father?”
“He’s gone,” the old fisherman said softly. “You took him some years back.”
“Yes,” said the stranger, voice vacant and devoid of pleasure. “I did. Quite a fighter, that one.” The old fisherman nodded proudly.
“And your girlfriend,” asked the stranger, “the one you brought here all those years ago? Do you know where she is now?”
“I don’t,” muttered the old fisherman, his voice rough and raspy. “Haven’t for a long time now.”
“Would you like to?”
“I…” The old fisherman paused, then slowly shook his head, his eyes down towards his feet. The stranger had nothing to tell him.
“Very well,” said the stranger.
The two sat in silence for some time before the stranger asked the old fisherman, “Why do you come here? You never did give me an answer.”
“It’s quiet,” the old fisherman said simply. “I like the privacy.”
“You use a cane in your home and struggle to traverse the stairs, yet you risk your life each and every week atop these rickety planks simply to fish off the end of
this pier, when another is not that far away. If you are sitting on this pier on the day in which it falls, you will not be able to escape.” The stranger sounded perplexed, nearly concerned. “Is all of that worth it just for some peace and quiet?”
“It is most days,” the old fisherman said gruffly.
“I get it,” said the stranger. “I get the hint.”
The two returned to fishing.
After a silent hour, as the stranger reeled in his eleventh dead fish, the old fisherman, who had yet to catch anything, glanced again towards the stranger, catching a glimpse of his knobby yellow fingers curled around his reel, before quickly averting his eyes.
“You’re still afraid that it’s your day,” the stranger said matter-of-factly, having noticed not only the fear in the old fisherman’s eyes each time he had looked the stranger’s way, but how seldom he had sought to do so. “You still believe that I’ve come for you.” The old fisherman nodded ruefully.
“Give it a rest.” The stranger groaned exasperatedly. “Like I told you, today is my day off, and I can’t manage those all too often. I think the last one was before you were around. Would have been six hundred, six hundred fifty years ago.”
The old fisherman did not respond. He had indeed not been around, and neither had been anything that now surrounded them. The pier, the oil that stained the sand beneath it, the factories to the north that had pumped all of it out, the old fisherman’s father or his father, the whale skull that had washed up on shore half a decade ago, the crowd that the old fisherman knew packed the new pier down the way that morning and would continue to do so until late that evening, just as they did every day, none of it had been around or had even been conceived of the last time that the stranger had breathed easy for a day, a lone day, no more than a moment within his ages-long existence.
“So,” the old fisherman asked, keeping his eyes on the water, which had begun to turn a bluer hue as the fog burned away, “what do you want to talk about?” The stranger looked at the old fisherman for a moment, before he too turned his gaze to the sea.
“I want to talk about you,” said the stranger. “Souls are lonely, forlorn. They are seldom talkative by the time that they are with me, and on the rare occasion which they are, their words for me are far from pleasant. I want to know what a life is like. More than that, I want to know what your life is like—as I said, you are unusual for an impermanence, wishing to reside in such a place as this.”
“I…uh,” the old fisherman began haltingly. He had always seen himself as ordinary at best, a festering absence of nuance at worst. He was unsure of what he could offer to the record of life. Why, after hundreds of years, was the stranger wasting time with him? “I come here every week to go fishing. It’s peaceful. Quiet. I like that.”
Another bite tugged at the end of the stranger’s line, and he reeled in a fish. It seemed alive at first to the old fisherman, the orange scales on its flat body vibrant
ELI KAUFER
and whole, but he then noticed the large gash in its stomach. It had been gutted before being thrown back into the water. The stranger plucked it from the hook, considered it for a moment, and threw it over the edge of the pier. He gestured for the old fisherman to continue.
“I’ve been coming here by myself for a while now,” the old fisherman said. “Over fifty years now…nearly sixty, actually. Once a week, I wake up at five thirty and make myself a sandwich.” He gently patted the pocket on his left leg, where a sandwich baggie was stuffed. “For a while, I would work hard on this sandwich. A treat for myself after a long morning of fishing, y’know?” He pursed his lips. He had learned that, jammed in a plastic baggie in his pocket for hours, most sandwiches end up tasting about the same: fine, but a bit like sweat and the inside of a plastic baggie. “Today, I put a slice of lunch meat turkey and a Kraft single on the butt ends of a stale loaf.” The stranger nodded politely, though it had occurred to the old fisherman halfway through his explanation that the stranger likely had neither knowledge of nor interest in food of any kind.
“The pier closed a decade or so ago. Ever since, I’ve brought a crowbar to break the padlock on the gate. Every time that I came back here, someone had replaced the broken padlock from the week before.” The old fisherman shook his head. “Padlocks aren’t too cheap, and for ten years someone’d been burning through them at the rate of one a week, and for what? I could break the lock without any issue, and all the kids who used to mark this place up with graffiti, before they all grew up, would just climb the fence when they wanted in.
“Today, though, the gate was unlocked. The broken lock was still sitting on the ground, just where I’d left it last week. Whoever’d been locking the gate all this time, I think this week they realized they’d only ever kept doing it because they’d been doing it. They must’ve finally realized that was no way to live.” He sighed quietly and said, “Whoever it was that’d been doing it all this time, I hope they don’t hate me.”
“And you,” asked the stranger, “why do you keep doing this?” The pier let out a weary, creaking moan beneath their feet.
“You wouldn’t get it,” the old fisherman said, squinting against the sun’s gleam reflected on the water. Five years ago, when a whale skull had washed up on the beach under the pier, it garnered more attention than the oil in the shoreline sands ever had, even luring the local news cameras to the shoreline. It was unexpected, extraordinary, and a dreadful spectacle. Days prior, when strands of rotting blubber and gristle rode atop the waves and tangled on the pier’s supports, the old fisherman had been the only one to notice. He had been the only one to see how all manner of life swarmed to feed on the fetid remains of the whale, and even as the fish paid his hook and line no mind, he could find no frustration in the fruitless day. Even in a moment of life’s absence, of a whale no longer breaching the water’s surface, the old fisherman had been witness to life at its purest, while the cameras and the crowds would fawn over nothing
more than its distant memory, a skull picked clean.
“You’re right,” said the stranger, “I don’t get it. That is why I ask.”
“I…” The old fisherman closed his eyes and took a deep, slow breath. “My dad brought me here for the first time when I was young. Back then, there were these plastic chairs mounted to the pier.” He tapped his foot against the boards, where four boltholes in a square had once held a seat in place. “They got so hot, it was terrible. I sat in a bright blue one, right here. He was in a yellow one, where you are now.” The stranger nodded, glancing down at the four holes beneath his own folding chair, but did not speak.
“He taught me how to fish,” the old fisherman continued, “and I loved it. We’d come out here all the time. It was a perfect life.” He sighed, shook his head, cleared his throat, and said, “When he died, I told myself I’d move on. There was a whole world out there, past the morning sea fog, and I hadn’t seen it. All I’d seen was the water off the end of this pier.” He went quiet, then looked to the stranger and murmured, “The fog’s burning off. I’ll be heading out soon.” The stranger began to look back towards the old fisherman and he averted his gaze, quickly turning his head to stare out at the horizon.
“What happened?” asked the stranger. “When you tried to find a life out in the world?”
“Oh, I hated it. Every day was a competition—win or lose, live or die. Win and get to the next day, and it was just another competition. You couldn’t just live in the present, you had to keep one foot in the future. It felt pointless. It wasn’t right for me.” The old fisherman stopped and listened to the waves lapping at the struts of the pier. “Here, it’s simpler.” Unable to see stare past the surface of the water in any way that mattered, all the old fisherman had ever needed to do was wait for the pull at the end of his line. His trips to the pier were unambiguous weekly reminders that he had no control over the future, and hardly any over the present. He had no reason to struggle, or to work at all, as he waited for the fish to bite, for the tug at the end of his line would never come from him—it was a question of whether the fish chose to bite, nothing more. On the pier, the passage of time was not a matter of victory or defeat, life or death. There was no need to prepare for the future, only to wait for it. The future, the fish that decided to bite or ignore his baited hook, was beyond his control. So long as his line was cast into the water over the end of the pier, the old fisherman and the sea were bound together in an endless present. Past and future existed elsewhere, past the fog. A few months ago, the old fisherman had needed to dig through an old box in his attic to find a framed photograph of his father, for he was struggling to remember his face. Nobody would ever search an attic for a photograph of the old fisherman, and there were no such photographs regardless. He knew this, and had long since accepted it. The old fisherman did not know quite how to express these thoughts within him—of time and the sea and photographs in an attic—nor did he feel much of a desire to.
“The water’s always going to be here,” he said simply. “So’ll the fish. There’s
ELI KAUFER
no rush.” When the old fisherman was young and sat side by side with his father, their twin lines piercing the water’s surface, that had once been present. In the same waters, of the end of the same pier, it might as well have still been. “Until I can’t, I’ll be here too.”
“I think that I understand,” said the stranger, looking off towards the horizon as well. “Perhaps not why you hate the world beyond, but certainly why you love this pier.” The old fisherman looked to him, curious.
“I am not like you,” continued the stranger. “If anything, I am closer to the sea, an eternity in possession of countless lives ever-changing, lives which will not change me by simply existing. Unless I seek them out, I will not notice someone like you, a lone fisherman at the end of a lonely old pier. To me, you are so brief, so fleeting. The impression you make upon the water is minuscule, the breadth of a fishing line, something the seas will never feel, and would never feel the absence of. And yet, what a story you have to tell.”
Something tugged at the end of the old fisherman’s line. He did not reel it in.
“I think the time is coming,” said the old fisherman, looking to the boards of the pier at his feet. The stranger looked to him but said nothing.
“Not today, but soon. Whatever story my life’s been, it’s near its end.” The words of the stranger sat rotten in the old fisherman’s gut once again, like alcohol on an empty stomach. The old fisherman knew how pitifully meagre the story of his life had been, and at last he understood why the stranger had come to him.
Wordlessly, the stranger reached over and placed a clawed hand on the old fisherman’s shoulder. The old fisherman saw the pier as it once was, felt how his young legs dangled clear of the ground from atop the blue plastic seat. Heard the voice of his father, the fighter, the fisherman before him, in his ear. “You’re doing great, kiddo! Don’t let it get away!” He had missed that voice so dearly.
The old fisherman reeled in his catch. The stranger removed the clawed hand from his shoulder. The old fisherman watched the fish, a flash of silver, a small and desperate life that the ocean had forgotten about the moment he pulled it from the waves, as it bled and danced on the end of his line. He wiped a tear away from his face, pulled his hook from the fish, and tossed the lonely creature over the end of the pier, back into the sea. The stranger withdrew his line from the water and stood from his seat.
“Same time next week?” the stranger asked, folding up his chair. The old fisherman looked up at him, for the first time all morning not averting his eyes from the kindly face of death as it stood patiently before him, and was silent for a long time.
“I’ll be there,” he said at last.
Shadowplay
Cora Dvorovy
To fear is to know, And tonight is to fear. Is he coming now, Is he already here?
Stand at the window, Gaze on moonlight infused snow. Close them hard enough and Your eyes will place you at the bow.
The island’s straight ahead
If you can believe all of that lore. Search the stars for shadows, Ones you waited on before.
Adjust your arms, so you can Feel your age. Wish for a bay. Bear the weight of last fall In another window, seven cities away.
Step back. Leave the window, Make a promise to return. If the shadow won’t come to you, You will simply have to learn:
How to fly —
Lay down now, don’t move. There’s a knock at your door. Smile, this is not the shadow You have been hoping for.
Dreams disrupted, Schoolbooks bleached He took you from the stars, Wrenched you from the beach.
Try to keep your dreams Stow them higher on that shelf. Sing the song of silent sirens They won’t do it for themselves.
Question the shadow, Your beloved second star. Ask them: whose hand is this, How much longer and how far?
Look, look for the window When he sits with you instead. If you didn’t miss the window, Maybe you would own this bed.
With your face deep in this pillow, Maybe you can feign remiss. You said you liked the dark, You never dreamt it quite like this.
Adjust your eyes, so you can Close them and have your fill. You should have traced your finger, Found the sulfur on the sill.
Forget how to fly, Learn how to hide. Soon you will Expect the mornings your nightgown Wake on the floor.
If there are taller beings at this time, Then their height must be a lie. You’ve waited years on those stars, Now you can’t tell your wrong from right.
There is just one shadow left for you to know, Not borne of islands, stars, of dreams or soul.
Wait now without wonder for Every night is one to fear. The devil came, he killed your shadow, Now he’s not leaving here.
He doesn’t knock, knows there will be no fight. He comes, he goes, He always says good night.
Polymelia Amongst the Movie Stars
Brigid O’Brien
Hold on. Right there, let me adjust the brim of your baseball cap. We’ll watch the fuzzy dice swing back and forth over our moving heads. Newton’s cradle à la Cadillac, as we sing in cacophony to your dad’s old cassettes.
We’re driving through Tucson and stop at a gas station across the road for slushies and scratchers. You pop the trunk and scooch over to explain the Saguaros. Why they call the rare ones with exactly two appendages “movie stars.”
Then we sip in silence. Cherry tongues under the gentle green giants. Furrowed eyes Wander through a sea of spines.
We spot one to our right: two perfectly poised arms, destined to a desert’s silver screen.
Do you think it gets lonely for a Saguaro movie star? You laugh it off. But c’mon, all that pressure for two measly arms. Enough for an autograph, far too little in my eyes to sip slushies and fix brims and look up to the sky. I’ll point. “Over there!”
where the wild things went Azi Kynard
at night, i am more animal than woman. breath hot and wild, smelling of dampness, salt, and mud, i am flailing my arms and stomping my feet i am biting my skin and pulling my hair and i am trying to feel everything so that i am the world as much as i am in it.
when the light rests i return to who i was when i knew that the world was only as big as what i could trap beneath my finger and that paint was made of what washed off of me in the bath and that god was shaped like roses and not the thorns that held them up.
i like to rock myself to sleep, slamming my head harder and harder into the pillow trying intently to send my body,which was once made of honey and twine,
and nothing moreback into the wilderness from which i came, back to the dark, where my eyes adjust to seeing children look puzzled when presented with gunpowder, where the earth spins with us and not because of us, where we exist only to make love and not to build the things that hold it and i am growling just to hear the sound that it makes and i am hurting just to see myself unmade and i am running just to feel the blood in my throat and i am spinning just to find something to orbit other than myself; when the sun comes up my growls become questions honey turns to blood and i find myself crawling through and towards the light woman again, as i was before.
