The Colton Review: Volume 18

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COVER ART HANNAH SCHNEIDER details of Untitled

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

“Fantasy—and all fiction is fantasy of one kind or another—is a mirror.

A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at fortyfive degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see.” – Neil Gaiman Creating a journal of art and literature like The Colton Review is an active process for its staff, and yet each year we are surprised and excited to discover which themes will emerge from our publication. It is an almost magical experience for us to watch commonalities unfold in the writing and art we receive from the Meredith community. This year, we are excited to publish an unprecedented amount of genre fiction; many of our writers have created a beautiful escape from reality through the use of fantasy, myth, science fiction, and magical realism. Perhaps it is the lingering effects of the pandemic’s isolation, sickness, and uncertainty that have prompted this yearning for worlds outside our own.

To say that our writers and artists have taken an interest in fantasy solely for the escape it provides, however, is an incomplete statement. Many of this year’s works—fantasy and realism alike—provide windows into identity and culture, exploring the very core of who we are as creators and pursuers of art. As Neil Gaiman states, all fiction is fantasy in a way and all fantasy is a mirror. We all have our personal myths—the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our identity and the world around us—and so, although not every piece

in our journal is fantastical, our publication is united by its use of art to explore mysteries of the self and the world we inhabit.

It was a joy for our staff to watch these themes emerge and to do so in person for the first time in nearly two years. As we returned to on-campus production meetings, we were delighted and grateful to see our staff grow to include more students than ever before.

Having a large staff from a variety of disciplines has allowed us to discuss each submission more deeply and from a wider variety of perspectives, which is always our goal. We were also honored to once again receive dozens of art and writing submissions from the Meredith community. We thank each and every person who submitted to the journal for trusting us with your creativity and passion—without you, our publication would not exist.

Lastly, thank you to our art team, our judges, and our readers for the integral role you play in our creative process. We hope that you find in this edition of The Colton Review a mirror through which you can see yourself and the world in new ways.

Sincerely, The Colton Review Staff

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HANNAH SCHNEIDER

Awakening Series photograph

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ART Awakening Series, Hannah Schneider late winter afternoon over the lake, Deb Laube Metamorphosis, Sara-Rose Spann Life/Death Series, Death is Peaceful, Kristin Morin God’s Fingers Series, Madeline Ostrowski winter 2022 series, Deb Laube Awakening, Destiny Eudy Something Greater, Dora Fromer Woman or Vessel?, Kasey Vandenboom Anchored to Ghosts, Kasey Vandenboom Keraunos and the Diadochos, Camille Duncan Untitled, Arianne Gonzalez It’s All Too Much, Kristin Morin Three Sisters Coiled Vessels, Caroline Vanyo Personal Identity Suite, Hannah Schneider From Below Series, Destiny Eudy Polly the Pig Series, Abbey Butler Lucy, Sydney Nelson Argo Adventures Ads, Leah Jensen Transformation, Leah Jensen Self Portrait, Karlie Mullis Untitled, Rachel Jebaraj The Elements of Storms, Jordan Fulk Body Series I: Viewed, Body Series II: Comparison, and Body Series III: Freedom, Kristin Morin Mind and Body, Kasey Vandenboom Moss Weaving, Leah Jensen Young Desert Big Horn in the Valley of Fire, Paige Ryan Corinthian Column No. 7’ (“Bloodbath”), Emma Fry Kingdom Come Shoes, Lydia Gunn Beyond This Cage, Lydia Gunn Dear Today, Madeline Ostrowski Sunset at the Sutro Baths, Paige Ryan Not So Merry Christmas, Candice Lillard Aesthetics Series, Candice Lillard Decay of Nature, Hannah Schneider Nomad, Lydia Gunn Long Distance, Lydia Gunn Lake Jordan Sunset, Julia Gray Untitled Series, Hannah Schneider Delicate Taboos, Kasey Vandenboom Burning Queen of the Night, Karlie Mullis Mushrooms and Shadows, Oranges and Shadows, and Spinach and Shadows, Sujaya Venkatesan

02 04 07 08 11 14 17 23 24 29 30 33 35 38 45 46 48 53 54 55 57 59 63 65 66 69 75 76 83 84 87 89 91 92 99 100 103 104 106 114 117

LITERATURE 05 06 09 15 16 24 28 29 30 32 33 34 38 47 48 56 58 67 68 76 84 86 88 90 92 99 101 102 105 107 115 116

Daybreak, Lizzy Andrews A Feathery Lesson, Alaire Donofrio November Swine, Krista Wiese Cold Love, Amelia Cin Winter, Mada Brown Durham, Valeria Martinez Sí Lo Soy, M.J. Solorzano Ariza Tapestry, Krista Wiese Atop the Walls, Kate Polaski Too Young, Karlie Mullis On Your Chain, Karlie Mullis Tea Leaves and Tiles, Bridget Gable Witch’s Brew, Olivia Slack A Neighbor That I Always Pass, Kate Niemi Olive and the Rotten Rabbit, Cameron Garcia This is Not a Fairytale, Erin Wendorf Violin Lessons, Krista Wiese Fall Out, Caroline E. Bell My First Days Without You, Sadie Rounds Moving, Sophie Lee 9 Month Rehabilitation, M.J. Solorzano Ariza A Day in the Life, Kate Polaski The World Kept Turning, Elinor Shelp-Peck Pyre, Tamar McMahon It’s the Thrill, Sophie Lee My Body, Layla Davenport The Feeling of His Touch, Layla Davenport Vanessa, Shelly Whitmire What if We Told Them?, Elinor Shelp-Peck Strangers, Sarah Page Free Dog, Emerald D. Swenson After the Fire, Olivia Slack

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late winter afternoon over the lake photograph

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by Lizzy Andrews

DAYBREAK The lane lies quiet, hushed, and still. Crickets, gentle and chirping, have long since been drowned by the blackening twilight. The horizon has buried the sun, stamping her out, trampling her underfoot until she sank in a graceful heap into the void. Silky and lush, the night curls over the grass, a silent, reticent fog.

She curls there, huddled and still, her fiery glow muted by submission and shrouded by serpentine darkness. The paints that erupted across the heavens as she succumbed have faded into a satin veil, draped across the shoulders of the earth. Light has become little more than a reverie.

Hours pass. Crystalline dewdrops freeze against the foliage, cold and icy. A stealing sigh of wind sends leaves quivering soundlessly to the ground, their movements stiff and jolting. Nothing moves or breathes, all remnants of life retreating into the dusky, velveteen gloom.

Entombed underneath the sphere of the earth, the sun slowly begins to awaken, groggy and drunken. She sluggishly gathers her senses, piece by piece, until faint recognition finally begins to dawn on her. Another eternal sleepover. Time for the day to spout through the threshold.

Stretching, the sun quietly reaches upward, fingers searching for the sill of the skyline. It takes a moment, but when they finally clasp, she inhales with finality before hoisting herself over the ledge and trimly commencing her ascent up the slope.

With the first blush of daybreak, the world takes a breath.

Something stirs, unseen, as the darkness begins to recede. It is not quite happiness, nor refreshment, but all the same tastes of consolation and relief at the survival of another obscurity.

She keeps climbing, bits and pieces of the realm below coming into view ahead. Slowly, carefully, the terrain begins to revive in her wake.

Huddled in the treetops, a bird lifts its head from beneath its wing and is greeted by the rich rays of dawn. It twitters in delight, falling from its perch, as buoyed by the morning breeze in its feathers as the song in its voice. The lyric of the morning resounds through the air as she mounts the summit, rising above the earth, surveying the view.

The sun stands on top of the world, her empire stretched before her, doused in golden light. This is a monarchy that will not fall. n

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by Alaire Donofrio

A FEATHERY LESSON Before I became human, I was able to indulge in delicacies like insects every day, but now such a luxury is only imparted onto me once a month. Sometimes I miss being able to fly or the presence of my old feathered friends, but I suppose being around the people I have come to hold dear to me is worth every sacrifice.

We live in the countryside where the people are scarce and the crops are abundant, away from the cities I used to dwell in. There is not a season that I go hungry. Occasionally, however, I remember the reason for my seclusion.

When the moon is ripe, I venture out onto my humble lawn, pluck each writhing creature between my talons, and watch as it squirms, unable to withstand my power. Then, I guzzle it down my esophagus until I feel it settle in my stomach.

Some have seen the sight and go on to tell the tale of a feathered monster they once knew, who no one else knew, which swallowed insects one by one until its stomach was heavy and its hunger was satiated. I am not bothered by them. They have all been perturbed by my treatment of bugs, but I assure you of a universal truth.

Did you know that bugs want to be eaten?

Petulant humans look at me with disdain, as though I have no regard for life, while they continue to stay ignorant of insectual experiences (a term bugs have coined themselves).

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You see, bugs spend their lives in the heaps of trash, the remains of the earth, and places of utmost desolation. Few attempt to trespass onto the highly advanced infrastructures of humans, though some make feeble attempts. The cockroaches, for example, spend their entire lives training to become unbeatable warriors, surviving even the most unlivable conditions and avenging their fallen forefathers so they can taste the tiniest bit of luxury. What do the humans do?

They kill them.

My first roommate was a very eccentric individual. He was very fond of bowling, avocado wraps, and obsessively cleaning every inch of our apartment. He was not, however, very fond of the cockroach that would skillfully maneuver his way into our kitchen, and he was most definitely not fond of any other bug that would invite itself into our abode. His name was Gregory. Unfortunately for Gregory, my roommate was not aware that they had much in common. They both enjoyed fitness, avocado wraps, and even cleanliness (hence why Gregory came to visit so often).

One humid day, Gregory came in for some respite from the heat. He never left that day.

Death by Raid.

The mosquitoes take a different approach.

Mosquitos consider humans to be one of the most unforgiving, merciless, annoying pests to ever roam the earth. They are not afraid to show it. They risk their lives every day for the

sake of insects across the globe and they are held in the highest regard, as martyrs.

The worms are the cruelest of all. I’m not very fond of worms, which is why I’m always happy to devour them, despite my typically well-meaning intentions. Their minds are plagued with thoughts of revenge and spite, and their only satisfaction comes from watching as humans slowly die, spending their whole lives waiting for their lifeless vessels to succumb to the bacteria that so constantly envelops them. Pretty morbid stuff.

Many bugs are not fortunate enough to be cockroaches or mosquitoes or worms. Many of them barely get by. Flies, dung beetles, ants, the like? They get the brunt of it, and so they would much rather die by the likes of myself than some ungrateful human. After all, it is my people that soar across skies, swoop down below, and see or hear of every event that takes place in every ecosystem. We are symbols of knowledge, revered across the animal kingdom, and therefore, what is one judgemental human if not uneducated? n

SARA-ROSE SPANN

Metamorphosis, 8in stone carving

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KRISTIN MORIN

Life/Death Series, Death is Peaceful subtractive print on paper

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H ONORA B LE MENTIO N, PRO S E

by Krista Wiese

NO V E M B E R S W I N E She stood in the doorway of her greenhouse overlooking the lake. A serpentine tabby wove its way between her ankles. In the distance, one loon wailed to another, and she pretended the loon was her only neighbor. Often, Isla imagined that the snowy hill upon which her cottage was perched was an island, surrounded on all sides by the frigid waters of Michigan.

The other lake properties—with their manicured gardens and towering façades— faded to mist and her little wooden cottage, with its hedge of evergreens, remained. She and her beloved tabby and the man who filled her nights with stories remained.

She savored this daydream for as long as it lasted and then returned to her duties: plucking rosemary, chervil, and thyme and placing them into her basket with the quick movements of a hawk swooping toward mice at nightfall. She knew upon touching each individual stem what greater form each desired to be: the rosemary would become a rub for the turkey, the chervil a delicate vinaigrette, and the thyme seasoning for roasted potatoes and stuffing. Having reached the plant with the purple leaves and coiling stem, she paused. Its small, glistening berries beckoned. They spoke to her of what they were planted for long ago, and she fondled them, yearning for the unused magic within.

Never one to reject nature’s voice, Isla plucked a single stem. In the pocket of her wool coat, it seemed to thrum.

In all the years she’d lived on the lake, there had been no trespassers on her family’s property, save her lover, who she’d forgiven eventually for the intrusion. This was fortunate, for no young girl, not even one who matured as quickly as Isla, ought to witness the fate of trespassers on her family’s land. These are sacred acres, where nature still speaks her truth, and the Ayia women were born to protect them—Isla and her mother before her and her grandmother. Isla had a father at one point, of course, and a grandfather too, but she’d never met them.

“Did they leave?” she asked her mother once. “They tried,” she answered. Isla never understood why anyone would choose to leave. What was more perfect than the place she called home? To want more than the land provided seemed a crime to young Isla. The Ayia women treated it as such.

Isla’s lover arrived at her door when she was still a young girl, 17 or 18 at the time, her mother not yet so shriveled that she’d ceased to exist in the world of man and become part of nature. He was a college boy. Through the

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barely cracked front door of the cottage, he’d explained that he was studying American Literature at the large university a couple hours away, completing his undergraduate thesis on his favorite author. “Did you know Hemingway had a summer home here on this very lake?” he had asked, blue eyes brimming with an unfamiliar emotion she later recognized as hunger—hunger for discoveries, for victories, for conquest. Before his arrival, she had only known contentment.

On her little make-believe island, she had all that she wanted: a well-tended garden, brimming with fruits and herbs, a mother who taught her to see the unseeable magic in nature, and a guardian cat who hunted mice and birds with the ferocity of a lioness and then fell asleep in her arms at night.

Isla’s eyes were yellow like a hawk’s, and she saw as narrowly as one.

But as this college boy began to speak of his dreams—of the stories he planned to write about the place she called home—she too began to feel a sort of hunger. She knew that this boy with hair the color of the fire in her chimney and eyes the color of the lake could be hers, and she wanted it to be so, one way or another. She invited him inside. He told her stories of her beloved lake that she’d never heard, and in return, she showed him the pleasures that could be had on its shores.

It was a fair trade and one they’d continued since. He’d been the first trespasser during Isla’s time to barrel through the evergreens and brambles that shielded her cottage from the others on the hill, and she’d thought— prayed—he would be the last. Together they were content, hungry only for the things that could be fulfilled by the land and the mouths of each other. He graduated and moved into her

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cottage where he wrote stories and essays for a living, and this was the way things were. He was hers, and she would have it no other way.

But each November brought the threat of invasion. The dusty black wall phone in the kitchen that Otto had insisted on installing, much to Isla’s frustration, would ring, and the voice of a woman who was used to being heard would fill up their home with aluminum tones.

“It’s her,” Isla would say and hand the phone to Otto, who would morph immediately into someone she didn’t know. Someone who bore his mortality like a burden rather than a sail.

He looked tired.

“Not this year, Mom,” he would say. “We’re just getting settled,” or, “We don’t like to make a big fuss of the holidays.” He would hang up and Isla would give him ginger tea to erase the headache and the thoughts of a world outside their own.

It wasn’t that Isla was a reluctant host.

To those who gave to her she also gave; for her cousins who came with stories of their own land, for the neighbor who shared his trout with her when the fishing was good, for the red-headed college boy who promised himself to her forever, she would gladly fill a table with fresh fruits and ornate displays of breads and cheeses. But those who came to take from her and her land had no place in her home, and Ms. Svinka was one such woman.

When Otto spoke of his mother, it was always of her demands. “She’s asking for grandchildren,” he would say, and, “She wants me to repair her oven.” His favorite story, though, was this: “Once, she took all my money for college.

I’d been saving for a year. I was young—16—but I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and I

MADELINE OSTROWSKI

God’s Fingers Series – Country Rides (ABOVE TOP) Bark with Snow (ABOVE BOTTOM) Bee Happy (RIGHT TOP) Water Droplet (RIGHT BOTTOM) photograph

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For the first few November phone calls, ginger tea had been the punctuation mark to the ordeal, but this year was different. “Can’t we just have her over once and be done with it?” Otto had asked, rubbing his temples as though it would relieve the pain.

“I feel no obligation to do it ever or at all,” she’d replied matter-of-factly.

“She’s my mother.”

“She gave you nothing.”

“But it’s the holidays.” His eyes said do it for me, which was something he’d never had to ask. Their language was not one of favors and debts but fair trades and contentment.

She’d never been told that she owed someone something that felt unnatural to give, and she immediately despised the feeling. But she wasn’t ready to lose Otto over a woman she’d never had the opportunity to fight. She’d been taught to defend what was hers.

meal all week. There was to be nothing green as the woman apparently detested vegetables of the color. There was to be nothing generously spiced. Pumpkin and cloves were to be done away with as well, which seemed a tragedy given the beckoning ripeness of the gourds in her garden. The woman was what her lover called picky. To Isla, ungrateful seemed a better word.

She arrived a half hour late, forcing Isla to perform a sort of kitchen dance in order to keep every item on the menu warm. This frustrated her to no end, but she put on a smile she knew would soften the glint in her hawk-yellow eyes and greeted the woman at the door.

“You must be Isla—it’s so good to finally meet you!” the woman gushed with an insincerity Isla was wholly unaccustomed to.

When she smiled, her cheeks—red with too much blush—barely moved, and her small eyes glistened in deep sockets.

“And you as well, Ms. Svinka.” The lie came easily, though her stomach churned with uneasiness and desire. She’d spent many hours watching foxes hide their amber coats in the sunlit snow before pouncing on their prey.

“Well,” Ms. Svinka proclaimed, stepping inside and past Isla. “Why don’t you show me around?”

It was then that Isla noticed the suitcase clutched in Ms. Svinka’s swollen fingers. She’d not intended nor invited the woman to stay the night; she lived a mere 30 miles away, close enough to make it home after an early dinner without a single star ascending. There was no doubt in Isla’s mind that the woman’s misunderstanding of her invitation was intentional; she recognized an invasion when she saw one. Isla fingered the berries in her pocket as she led the woman to her guest room.

With her herbs and spices gathered, Isla proceeded to perform her kitchen rituals: peeling vegetables, brining the meat, humming along to symphonies on the radio in her shrill and birdlike way. Despite her reluctance, she took a certain degree of pride in her ability to procure a feast and had been planning the

It became abundantly clear as the dinner progressed what Isla needed to do. She watched the way Ms. Svinka ate, tearing her food apart and leaving it like roadkill around the edges of her plate, serving herself items she seemed to have no intention of eating. The roasted potatoes and thyme Isla had plucked

knew I needed money to do it. I got a job pushing shopping carts for a big-time store, eight dollars an hour. In the snow, I’d be sliding around the parking lot trying to get those carts into the corral, but I’d get it done somehow. ‘Otto gets the job done,’ they’d say about me—‘He sure works hard!’

Saving money was harder than pushing carts.

Ma stopped buying groceries and cooking once I started working, so I was on my own. She’d go out to eat with friends and I’d eat noodles or rice or nothing. Even after starving that year, I’d only saved a couple hundred. That summer, she told me she’d run out of money to pay the mortgage. I paid it, and my money was gone. Just like that.”

He was a master storyteller, and Isla came to fear the villain in his tales. Never again, she thought. Never again would he have to give his mother anything.

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from her garden that morning sat decaying in a pile at the center of Ms. Svinka’s plate.

Her small eyes flitted around the cottage, and everything they landed on she seemed to claim: the antlers Isla had found in the marsh by the lake one day while kayaking, the shelves of stones and crystals her family had collected through the centuries, the spiral staircase leading to the loft where she kept her armory of indoor plants. She would tell her friends about Isla’s valuables as though they were hers to share. She has the strangest choice of décor—dead plants hanging from the ceiling?

How perfectly bizarre.

Isla had not bothered to put away the piles of books that Otto left in his wake, nor had she disturbed the heap of jackets by the door of the sunroom. Ms. Svinka eyed these things in glee. “Well I declare—it always takes a while for a new couple to settle in,” she chortled.

Isla denied the accusation. “We’re perfectly settled, thank you,” she replied.

But it was the way Ms. Svinka looked at Otto that made her realize the danger she was in. Her eyes became fingers, poking and prodding at him, reaching and grabbing.

“You know, you ought to stop by and see what I’ve done to the kitchen some time,” she said, tearing the biscuit on her plate into strips of dough. “I could also use some help getting stuff up into the attic.”

“Sure, Ma,” Otto replied.

“Maybe this Saturday?” She shot Isla a look that anyone less calculating would have missed.

“I told you I’m repainting the cottage Saturday.”

“I’m sure Isla can manage. Her mother raised her to be an independent woman, did she not? All alone on all this acreage?” Isla felt the thorns of the quip.

Otto turned down her request, but Isla knew that one day he wouldn’t. One day Ms. Svinka would demand he visit home and he would comply. Back and forth, back and forth he would go between women until he was no longer Isla’s, no longer tied to her land. She would lose him and a piece of her home to a woman who gave nothing in return.

Isla could not allow it. Her island begged her to protect it. Nature begged to be released. Alone in the kitchen, she crushed a single purple berry from her pocket into the woman’s blueberry pie and then placed a slice in front of Ms. Svinka, praying she would devour it. Her prayer was heard, and the blueberries released their sweet, earthy scent into the air where it traveled in a thread of steam into the wide nostrils of Ms. Svinka.

The woman took one large bite of the pie and became what Isla had always recognized her to be. The transformation was loud and painful, for Ms. Svinka fought it, screeching that she did not deserve such a fate, that she’d always known Isla to be an evil witch. Her screeches turned to grunts as her fingers swelled and hardened into hooves and her blouse tore open to reveal a pink, hairy chest.

Isla watched with satisfaction as she buried her snout into the plate of food she’d refused an hour before. But when she turned her eyes to Otto, she saw a face red with horror. He looked at her as though she was the one who had been turned to an animal.

“Turn her back,” he said, voice trembling.

She stood up from the table quickly so that she towered over both man and pig. “How dare you tell me how to treat my guests,” she spat. But she did not mean guests. She meant trespassers.

And the man who’d once filled pages with his stories had nothing to say. n

MADELINE OSTROWSKI detail of God’s Fingers (Water Droplet)

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winter 2022 series – indigo dye project 1 (ABOVE) indigo dye project 2 (ABOVE CENTER) indigo dye project 3 (OPPOSITE) fibers

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by Amelia Cin

COLD LOV E The cold is a gift given to me wrapped with chilling winds, early nights, and blue mornings.

The trees shed leaves and the animals are tucked away as a gentle silence settles, making a home among the cold.

We walk bundled in layers of coats and hats and scarves while the wind tangles my hair in hers, side by side on an icy road.

Side by side like the icicles lining the roof to hide my hand in her pocket where our hands lie entwined, looking for warmth, and every time people pass us by her grip grows tighter but never lets go.

Her warmth that sticks with me all year round can only be on open display when it’s cold.

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WINTER

by Mada Brown

It was cold again this morning. It didn’t help that the house seemed to be slowly leaking out any warmth and allowing frigid air to seep in at every window and doorway, even through the walls. Every blanket I had was layered on top of my little Walmart comforter.

At night I’d sleep layered up in socks, leggings, sleep pants, and sometimes a hoodie just to keep warm. Dad said he’d paid the heating bill, but the cold made me wonder.

It was weird waking up in this house as an adult but still a “child.” I laid in the blankets for a few minutes, gathering up the courage to leave the warmth of my blanket cocoon.

Flinging my blankets aside, I rolled myself off the bed to stand, quickly looking around for what I wanted to wear for the day.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Dad was sitting at the table looking at some papers with his morning coffee. This was the new regular. Dad had gotten more and more stressed out over incoming bills. Three years ago he’d taken a hit when multiple crops failed. No one knew why he did it, but Dad had taken out a couple loans and used them to fund the next year. Since then he’d just barely broke even each year.

This year was the worst yet, not because of the money or the mounting bills; it was the winter. It came early and hung over everything like a smothering blanket. We all were suffocating under its weight, especially the local farms. The cold and snow seemed to linger unnaturally long, and we were all desperate for it to break and spring to come.

“They keep sending ‘em like I’m missin’ ‘em,” Dad said to himself.

Next to one of his bills was a letter addressed to me from the University of Kansas, the big KU and jayhawk on the front.

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I glanced at it from the corner of my eye as I grabbed a couple fried eggs and strips of bacon from the middle of the table. I still hadn’t decided if I was going or not. It’d been almost two years since my high school graduation. If I did apply and get accepted, would I ever come back here? Would I ever want to?

Dad tossed down the letter in his hand and cleared his throat, looking up at the TV across the room. A news anchor was talking about some robbery in Salina, nothing we really needed to worry about, but then it switched to weather and there was no tearing Dad away from that.

Mom fluttered in and set a basket of laundry down on one of the kitchen chairs.

She seemed to be gathering it all up since she’d have to go to work soon. Mom did that a lot, fluttering around the house, never really sitting down and actually resting. She’d do one thing and then as soon as her butt hit the chair, she’d have another to do. Did we have to eat everything from scratch? No, but she said Dad liked it that way. Did we have to hand wash all our dishes? No, we had a dishwasher, but Mom preferred to stand at the sink after every meal and not really be part of a conversation.

“Dale up at Casey’s said nobody can tell when it’s gonna let up,” Mom yelled out to Dad. “Said they think it might last into late April.”

“Shit,” Dad cursed. “If that’s the case then I don’t know what John Elroy’s gonna do.”

He started prattling on about what kind of crops John Elroy had chosen and why they wouldn’t work this year, never mentioning a word about himself and how he’d done the exact same thing.

There was a break in that droning. “Laying down new hay tomorrow?” he asked, never once looking at me, although the question was

to me. He was uncomfortable with me, had been since I’d hit 12. I’d been too mouthy, too wordy, too much for him to like anymore, and now we could barely speak to each other.

“Yessir,” I said quietly. “Tomorrow morning.”

He just nodded and pushed back from the table, chair scraping on the floor. He went over to Mom and gave her a kiss on the cheek before going out, grabbing his hat as he went.

He’d probably be gone the rest of the day.

“I’m going,” I said, standing up too. I tried to make sure I didn’t scratch the floor like Dad; the floors could only take so much.

“Babi’s waiting.”

She wasn’t.

Only one person really talked to me anymore.

Babi talked to me. Well, maybe not to me, but she talked at me. She didn’t look at me, like Dad, staring out the window when she spoke, recounting stories of her family and where they’d come from. Her English was still thick with an accent, melodic and full of s’s. When I was little, I couldn’t understand why since she’d lived here so long. Maybe she was too isolated in the middle of nowhere with just my grandfather for company. He seemed just like Dad: silent and unbending. They called him the Wooden Indian for a reason, so why would he help his wife learn English?

I know she’d taught her children her language; she had to. How else would a mother communicate with her own children? But never had I ever heard Dad utter any word of it.

He never seemed to speak to her, just at her, and not often. The closest he came to using her language was when he taught me to call her Babi. It wasn’t Babichka, but it was close enough. The Wooden Indian, when he was

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still alive, never seemed to care what anyone called her, simply took the coffee she placed in front of him and sipped it, nodding along to someone else’s voice. Did she miss hearing Czech every day? Did she miss being in an older place, steeped in history instead of cow shit?

Babi sat in the overstuffed chair in the Golden Days parlor room. There were only a few other people in the room: one old man sleeping in the corner, another reading the newspaper, some old lady knitting next to him. Babi was the only one that seemed…animated. She didn’t look at me, but she was full of life when she told me about Týniště nad Orlicí. I still couldn’t say it; I’ll never be able to say it, but I still listened.

“This cold will not go easy,” she said, gazing out the window. “We had few winters like this when I was girl.”

I shifted in the chair next to her, turning my head to look out the window. All I could see was the field behind the retirement home.

It was covered in a dense layer of snow, and the little vegetation I could see below was dead and brown, void of life.

“How did you all live through those winters, Babi?”

“If it was bad, Otets would go to pray in the church. That is when it was very bad.”

I nodded, still looking out the window, but swung my head back around to her when I felt her take my hand. She never touched me—no hugs, no kisses, no physical affection my entire life—and now she clasped my hand in hers and leaned close to me with a conspiratorial look on her face.

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“Those were the times Mama would pray, too,” she whispered loudly. “She would make the doll, give her flowers, and then drown her in the river.”

“Drown who?” I whispered back.

“Morana.”

“Who is that?”

Babi was looking at me now, and it was difficult keeping my eyes on her; the eye contact was just too much. She didn’t seem to notice and kept talking: “Death and winter. She brings the dark, long winters, sickness and disease.”

I couldn’t understand why Babi would want to do anything with a death being.

“Babi,” I started.

“I was frightened of her, when I was girl.”

She talked over me. “But Mama would tell me Death is always around us—better to treat it as a friend than as a knife in the dark.”

“Babi, that’s…that’s creepy.”

“Mama would always look so happy when she’d make the doll,” she continued, as if not hearing me. “She’d gather up the straw and carefully make its body. Then she’d give it clothes and jewelry she’d made. We would take it to the river. Other people would, too, but they would burn their dolls first. Mama never burned hers. She would drown it and let it float away.”

“Why?” “To let the spring come.”

The barn was a quiet, lazy place today, unusual with the couple cows, calves, and one bull packed in together. They seemed contemplative, watching me walk through the doors to look around for what I needed.

Finding the straw was easy; we had a store of it in the barn for the livestock. I had to look a little harder for a good string to use but was able to sort of make a small, human shape out of it. I used a little more straw to make a long skirt to wrap around it before taking fake flowers from Dollar General and decorating it.

I twisted them around my fingers and made them into a little flower crown, a hint of a smile spreading across my face. Part of me wanted to just keep the doll and hang it up somewhere, but I’d already decided on the stream I’d drown her in, and that couldn’t wait any longer.

Dad caught me on the way out of the barn, holding my little straw doll. I thought to hide it, but too late; his eyes were looking right at it. He said nothing for a minute, then looked at me.

“We don’t do that here,” was all he said.

The shock of his clear and loud voice rang through me. It took a moment before I could reply.

“Do what?” I asked, trying to feign ignorance. Maybe he really didn’t know; he never showed any interest in anything to do with Babi besides her health. I’d never heard him speak to her in that gibberish language. I know I had heard Aunt Linda say a little once before, though. He had to know it, but he just refused and locked that part of him away from the world and me.

“That doll shit,” he mumbled. He looked stiff, just as he always did, uncomfortable in his own skin. “No one ever did that here. It’s not right.”

“Why?” “That’s not who we are,” he replied. “We’re Church of Christ.”

I couldn’t stop the laugh from coming out of my mouth. “That’s grandpa’s side. This is Babi’s side.”

“That was left behind when they came here.”

“Was it?” I asked. For once he actually looked me in the eye, like he was seeing me for the first time. “Would it really hurt anything just to try it?”

“Don’t give me that shit. She never did that here,” he said, jabbing his finger towards the ground.

“But she did it before! She did it with your Babi, and it was their tradition, but you don’t care, do you?”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me.

He was squinting but I couldn’t tell if it was confusion or the sun in his eyes. I could feel tears forming in my eyes, but I couldn’t really understand why. I wasn’t sad, more upset over the whole situation. Why did it matter to him?

Was Babi supposed to just exist as Grandpa’s wife, becoming an anecdote in a story about the family as a whole? Someone would talk about how Grandpa married an immigrant: “She barely spoke English, had to have a lot of help.”

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“Do you really care?” I was breathing a little hard and rubbing the tears out of my eyes, embarrassed that I could even do this in front of him. Dad just stood there in the awkward silence of my sniffling before he shrugged and moved past me to the barn, swaying side-to-side on his bowed legs.

Grandpa had had that same problem.

A strong wind blew one of the doors shut with a bang behind him. I was left with an empty ache inside, like I’d been purposely left out of something. I shook my head, shaking that feeling away and ignoring it, willing myself to forget it and keep going. I didn’t need his permission to do any of this. I wiped the last tears out of my eyes and started walking towards the back fields.

The stream was on the side of our property.

We had a few cattle, and along the side of the field was a small stream, little trees sprouting on its edges, providing much needed shade in

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the summer. It was just deep enough to come above my knees.

I stepped down from the cut edge of the bank into the dark water, clear and biting cold.

I wasn’t sure if going in barefoot would have been better. It was probably better to have something protecting my feet from this cold.

I felt stupid standing there, holding this straw doll that I’d tied together, but then I thought of Babi. I thought back to the one picture we had of her mother, standing stern in a dark, thick dress with an apron over it.

I could almost picture her before me now, glaring at me while I made her stand in this freezing stream. She’d always looked stern and unfriendly in that picture, but no one had told me anything about her. Was she actually friendly and loving, laughing all the time like Babi had mentioned, or was she normally a hard woman, scraping through her life and trying to survive with her family?

I imagined this familiar stranger holding a doll of her own, better looking than mine and decorated with real flowers. She was speaking to it, but in that gibberish only Babi and maybe Dad knew. While she spoke, she slowly submerged the doll into the river and held it down before letting it go as she finished speaking. I don’t know what she would have said, but I thought I should say something.

“Morana,” I started, voice uncertain and shaky. “I guess you might be listening, maybe.

It’s been a long winter and we need spring.

Please take your place in the underworld and let this winter end.”

I slowly pushed the straw doll into the stream as I spoke, the biting water climbing up my fingertips to my knuckles. I wasn’t sure what else to say, so I kept going until the doll

was completely submerged, and then after a moment, I released it, watching it bob and float along the gentle water.

I thought maybe I should feel something, some kind of feeling within that showed I was truly connected to my own family. Something that would give meaning to this quiet, boring life on a piece of land that seemed like nothing to the outside world but that my family had worked their whole lives for.

Sighing, I figured that was it. I climbed up the bank and out of the stream and looked down at my dark, wet jeans. The walk back home wasn’t going to be fun.

Feeling frustrated with myself for believing this might change anything, I kicked a rock into the water and turned, ready to go. I wasn’t expecting the woman standing behind me. She wore a dark red dress with a white undershirt and a white apron brightly decorated with little flowers. Her hair seemed to flare out and move in waves, but I could only see it out of the corner of my eye. How old was she? She seemed ancient, with her graying hair and weathered face. The face that was glaring at me was so much like the imagined face of my Babi’s mother.

“Would you really leave before speaking to me, child?” she asked in a tired voice. “You called me, after all.”

“You’re, you’re…” I tried to speak, but my brain couldn’t seem to understand what I was seeing. She looked almost identical to the picture of Babi’s mother. “Babichka?”

She let out a raspy laugh and shook her head. “I am not that woman.”

“Morana?”

“You called me but you’re not sure of my name? What do you want, girl?”

I shifted on my feet trying to think of how to ask a being like her for something. I finally decided to ask like she was anyone else. “Can you make spring come?”

She regarded me for a moment, her eyes roving over me, taking in my layers, ugly old hoodie on top of my flannel. I had bought it at the one concert I went to with a friend in my sophomore year. I’d driven all the way to Mulvane and back and the hoodie was the only thing I’d spent money on besides the ticket. My jeans were dirty now, wet from the knee down. I knew as she looked at me that I wasn’t what she wanted to see.

Her face turned up a bit, and she sneered at me. “Why should I? What have you done for me?”

“What should I do for you?” I asked, confused. Babi had never mentioned anything. She’d simply talked about the drowning.

The figure jabbed out a finger at me. “No words or prayers! No thoughts or dreams!

Why should I do anything for a girl who means nothing to me?”

“My, my Babichka,” I stuttered, starting to breathe harder, trying to fight off tears. “She told me you bring the spring. She didn’t tell me about anything else.”

“You should have asked someone else!”

“Who?” I yelled at her, feeling a bubble of anger in my gut. “Who should I ask? Everyone that believed in you is dead or has forgotten!

I’m the only one trying!”

She didn’t say anything. Had her clothes changed? Her dress looked like something an old grandma would wear today, covered in red flowers with a more modern apron over it. No white undershirt now but a white collar. Her

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hair seemed to be waving more tightly around her head, almost resembling the little perms the old ladies in town got. Helmet hair.

“Do you want to remember me, girl?” She asked more gently this time and took a step towards me. I wanted to step back, could feel my body tensing up to stagger backwards, maybe fall over in an attempt to keep my distance, but my feet didn’t move. “Will you make sure not to forget me?”

“They might remember you in Týniště nad Orlicí,” I replied softly. If they remembered her, then what was the point of me trying?

“There is another one already there,” the woman, figure, thing said. “That one is older, unchanged by the time or by distance.”

“You’re not the same?”

The figure sighed at me and put her hands out, palms up, as she spoke. “Why should I be the same as that one? Someone brought me here and made me into something new. I am… disconnected from there. I don’t belong there anymore—maybe I never did. You made me something new.”

“I did?”

“Of course,” she grinned at me, almost warmly. “Do you think I always looked like this?”

I just shrugged at her. “I mean, if you want to look that way, I guess you can.”

She let out a bark of a laugh, an icy sound that made me want to recoil. “I look the way you want to see me. You are the only one here, you are the only one to believe, so you are the one that decides.”

“But I don’t know anything, the language, the traditions, anything! How can I decide?”

“Do you think I would come for just anyone that calls?” the figure yelled back. “You are one

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of mine! Your blood knows what your head does not and that is proof enough for me.”

“My blood?”

“If you have a child and they called upon me, I would recognize them as well,” she said.

“They are mine, just as you are, just as your Babichka was.”

“What can I do? My dad’s farm won’t survive another long winter. We need spring to come so he can start planting this season’s crops. Please, I don’t…I don’t think he can do anything else but this. He’s only made for this.”

“Are you praying for your father or for yourself?”

Did it matter? Dad was the only reason we still lived on this land. The oldest son and the only one interested in staying. Aunt Linda had gone to college and then left the state, going east and only visiting maybe every couple years. Uncle Richard had gone west and never looked back. There were a couple phone calls here and there, but he never stepped foot back in the state. I still hadn’t made up my mind if I would stay or not. I could leave and never come back, just like Uncle Richard, or visit occasionally like Aunt Linda. Mom and Dad would stay and eventually have to sell the farm to someone else if I didn’t take it. I could stay—stay and become hardened and weathered like Dad or beaten down by life like Mom. Both options were awful: one would cause me to lose my family, the other to lose my choices.

“Can’t it be both?” I asked her.

“No,” she said sharply. There was a finality in her voice that told me this was it, no more questioning. “If I do this, you stay on this land. You must stay for me to survive.”

“Can I think about it? At least tonight?”

“I will wait this one night.” She gave a nod. “When you decide, I’ll know.”

“Alright,” I said, more to myself. I turned my head back to glance in the direction of the house, thinking about what I should do now.

“How will you kn—” I turned my head back to her, ready to ask a question, but she was gone. It was like she’d never been there and I had been talking only to the wind. I twisted my body around, trying to find any trace of her, but there wasn’t one. I ran my hand through my hair, sighing, before I turned and started walking back across the field.

“Babi, Babi, I want to ask you something.”

Babi was laid up in her bed now, the wheeled one with the back up so she could recline and still watch TV. She was covered in ugly old blankets, ones she’d bought herself.

The TV was playing some news show and Babi seemed to be paying attention to it. She’d probably be no help to me, but her room would be quiet and nice to sit in. I decided to go and grab a pop from the vending machine before settling in with her and the silverhaired news anchor.

When I came back to her room, the door was almost closed, but I’d left it wide open.

Someone else was in the room and speaking to her. Whomever it was, they were speaking Czech and fidgeting in a chair. Peeking through the crack, I saw Dad in the chair next to Babi’s bed, not looking at her but at the TV, and speaking low and quiet in that language he never spoke.

I pushed on the door and creaked it open, and the conversation inside paused. Dad looked up at me from the chair, and I stepped

inside. For a moment, no one said anything.

Dad just looked down at my dirty clothes then said something in Czech to Babi. She laughed at whatever it was he said, and the two started up again. Dad used his foot to push the leg of the chair next to him, moving it toward me.

I sat down and listened to this language I didn’t know but maybe could learn. As the time passed, they switched to English, and I was able to join in.

Eventually, I went home, riding with Dad in his pickup. We stayed quiet the whole ride, but something about it was better than before. I didn’t need to look out the window at the side of the road to know there were little bits of green starting to show beneath the snow. n

DORA FROMER

Something Greater photograph

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DURHAM Durham, North Carolina.

Durham is rich in culture, history, and stories. Black Wall Street was formerly located on Parish Street, surrounded by Roxboro and Main. The busyness of business has undoubtedly changed. In front of tall, brown-brick buildings, two men walk down the street, telling tales of girls and guys, their friends and lovers, of a past they cannot leave.

They’ve just left the office in which they work, a pristine one where they earn respectable money. Money that can help keep their families afloat, that fuels their dreams

KASEY VANDENBOOM

Woman or Vessel?, 13in x 13in quilt

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by Valeria Martinez of the future. They begin to talk about meaningless things such as the weather and reports of the politics that surround them.

They talk about the future, how things are changing—their places rundown and abandoned, replaced with high mortgages and entertainment. They talk about their dreams, their aspirations, some of them drowned in the petty system of misinformation and others lost with the lack of affirmation. They turn the street corner, ignoring the stranger once again pleading for money, just enough to get something to

eat, another day to live since he no longer has the ability to make ends meet. They avoid the man, not wanting trouble, not wanting the consequences that come with it if they take the time to greet him. They continue walking, past the stranger, past the parking lot that always seems to be full no matter what time of day it is. A lull in the conversation makes it easy to get distracted, to look above and notice the towering apartment buildings, fancy bakeries, tea and coffee shops, and bars and restaurants, and other pricey establishments. Each day brings about another one, and another, and another.

They shove each other on the shoulder, wrapping their arms around each other as they talk about what to eat. Should they get some burgers, some chicken, some tacos, or maybe some of that new Asian food down the street? They know that all these shops sell good food, items that are scrumptious and appetizing. However, they’re not filling. No, these shops can never fill them up, can never remind them of a place they can call home.

The wave of smoke circles them, enticing them towards a shop, a new burger joint with a brewery. People are bustling around the entrance; they catch snippets of conversation as they try to peer inside.

“It’s a business that focuses on sustainability. They believe very much in farm to fork.

Isn’t that great? I know you’re trying to be more sustainable these days,” one woman says, scrolling on her phone, her diamond ring standing out from her all-black outfit.

“Well, yes! I’ve started to use beeswax wraps and these neat little towels instead of paper towels. I’m glad you chose this place.

I’m sure it will be good,” the woman next to her says, leaning over to rest her head on

her friend’s. Interested, they peer into the building to see tables filled with people. One of the men at the door looks over to them, giving them a nod before walking inside. They wonder, in their minds, if they would do the same had they not been wearing their pristine suits. They linger for a second, a glass wall separating them from the others, before one of them faces the street ahead of him with his head held high.

“Let’s get something from the truck,” one of them says, and the other agrees, being careful of each step he takes. One step after the other, they pass by fancy businesses, county offices, non-profit offices, and everything in between. They pass by a mother and her child, speaking a language they do not speak yet is familiar to them. It is the language of some of their peers, friends, family members, and past partners. It is one that is spoken no matter where they find themselves—sometimes loudly, sometimes softly, but it is always present. The language has cemented itself in Durham, which was once theirs but has now become the home for others, too. They hold their heads high, not stopping for anything or anyone as they reach Liberty Street, nearby Holloway, and Fayetteville Street.

Two men are walking down the street, but the street gets darker as night comes. The street lights dwindle with each step they take.

The orange lights no longer illuminate the cracks in the streets, the tape on the trees, the gravel and dirt that sticks to their shoes.

Some lights flicker, still fighting to keep the streets lit, some have given up, and some are broken. But the two men have been here their whole lives. They know how to navigate the streets; they need no light to shine upon them.

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They just need to watch out for the potholes, the cracks, and the slippery parts so that they don’t fall and scrape their knees.

Because they’re men now, not clumsy kids looking for a place to call home, they can’t afford to slip, to be hurt. They keep their heads high so that they won’t fall and won’t cause any damage to themselves and others by landing on the rocky, cold concrete. They pass down the street, by gravel driveways and patchy lawns, near people smoking and dogs barking. They pass by houses, some new and bold, some falling to pieces, others growing mold. They get to the food truck, discreetly handing out food in the back parking lot away from the front business where people can see. They order their food and listen to the language they don’t speak, waiting for foreign yet familiar food that fills their stomachs and sets them at ease.

The smell of meat, tortillas, and cheese fills the parking lot. They lean against a picnic table, set with a Dollar Tree mantel for people to set their plates and eat. They listen to others come and order, some who wander back into their cars and others that linger around.

“Las cosas están cambiando. En unos años todo lo que ves aquí se va ver diferente; los precios de las casas se van a subir, ¿y uno de paisa? ¿Con lo poco que ganamos? Nos van a correr si no nos ponemos listos,” one woman says nearby, speaking with annoyance.

“Ay ma, no digas eso. Las cosas no nomas cambian así,” the man beside her scolds her, leaning against the woman as he speaks. It seems that everyone has their struggles; they wonder how similar theirs can be. Unfortunately, they don’t have time to ponder. Their order is ready, and so they

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must take their leave. They take their food with them, eating it along the way. They move away from Miami and Holloway, past the beauty store and toward the place they liked to go as kids.

Before they reach their destination, they pass by the elementary school they used to go to as kids. This place had its own stories, its own history, but by this time almost all glory has been washed out. Eventually, it too will be replaced by the new—to fit the new Durham, not the old. They feel the ache in their shoes, the tight fit of their suits, the strain of their muscles, the fake smiles and laughs. They eat their food, throwing the leftovers away in one of the trash cans beside the street; it’s not theirs, but it doesn’t matter. They doubt anyone would care; not even the city would care. They tell each other stories once again, of the good ole times when they were kids— reminiscing on the past, but never going past the certain age when things began to change. They never reach that point in their conversation because that would be too new.

They celebrate the old, not the new, of places they knew, and not those they must come to know.

So when they finally get to their destination, a run-down park that needs desperate upkeep, they can finally let go.

It is the only place that hasn’t changed, a place that holds the scars and marks of their childhood memories. A place for the old, not for the new.

“When we were kids, this place was lit.

Remember Roco? Heard he got a new place up

by Cary. Don’t know how he got it since shit be too expensive to live out there,” one man says, his head looking up at the night sky.

He remembers the times where the park was

full; his momma and the other ladies of the street would gossip on the bench. Meanwhile, some of their uncles would use the grills to start a cookout, a nice place with music booming down the block. No one called the cops because no one cared about how much noise there was. It was just another Saturday afternoon for the neighborhood.

“Man, how else you think he got a place?

He had some side hustle when we were still in high school. But man, how’s Jonisha? Heard she got into some argument with her man’s side piece, she should’ve been locked up by now,” the other man says, fiddling with his necktie that is too tight on his neck. Nowadays things are different. There’s still the booming music, the gossiping aunties, and the talented uncles, but it’s not the same. There’s less of them since people are leaving and others are replacing them. The cops were called last week.

They wonder who called them.

The first man sighs. “She in jail right now.

It’s not her first time but it sure is her last.

She ain’t getting out of there anytime soon.

You going home now, or you heading down to visit your family?”

“Nah, I saw ‘em yesterday. I’m just ready to go to sleep, got to get my ass up right at six to take the bus. My car got broken into the other day, remember?” the second man says, looking down at the broken shard of glass and trash on the street floor. They stay in silence, each of them smoking a few before they get up to go home for the night—before they must leave because they must leave, they cannot stay.

So they don’t. They don’t stay for that long, only enough to enjoy the wind biting at

their ankles since their pre-made suits don’t fit quite right. They get up and face the street once again before they say their goodbyes and separate. One man goes south and one man goes north, but their time apart is sure to be short. They’ll wake up tomorrow to a new day and open their eyes to the future. For as much as they want to, they cannot stay in that park, eat at the truck, pass by the woman and her child, and ignore the stranger for the rest of their lives. That is just the way things go in Durham, rich in culture, history, and stories.

The roots run so deep. So much so that even the cracks within the foundation, the streets, and everything in between cannot avoid being pierced by a common understanding. The old and new are always clashing, always fighting for space. Yet its residents will not budge, its roots will not be uprooted, its foundation is impenetrable. This is Durham, NC, where its residents, its history, its culture, and its stories allow for bonds and diversity to grow and bloom free. No matter the change, no matter the new, and no matter the old. The people that live within the city limits will continue to live, to walk, to try to fit in. n

Appendix: “Las cosas están cambiando.

En unos años todo lo que ves aquí se va ver diferente; los precios de las casas se van a subir, ¿y uno de paisa? ¿Con lo poco que ganamos?

Nos van a correr si no nos ponemos listos.”

“Things are changing.

In a couple of years, everything you see here will look different. The prices of houses are going to rise, and our people?

With the very little that we earn? They’re going to run us out, if we don’t pay attention.”

“Ay ma, no digas eso. Las cosas no nomas cambian así.”

“Mom, don’t say that. Things don’t change like that.”

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H O N O R A BLE MENT ION, POE TRY

SÍ LO SOY

by M.J. Solorzano Ariza

Desenfrenada is what my uncles call me when I serve myself food at a family party before they do.

I guess I shouldn’t eat when I’m hungry.

Irrespetuosa is what my aunts call me when I openly disagree about the way they call me a slut.

I guess I need to learn how to keep my opinions to myself.

Rebelde is what my mother calls me when I go out twice a week and wear what makes me comfortable.

I guess I should only do as I’m told.

Loca is what my family calls me when I laugh too loud and sway my hips “too sensually.”

I guess my sanity is dependant on the way I enjoy myself. ¿Y qué si soy así?

Soy desenfrenada because I refuse to wait on a man.

Soy irrespetuosa because I defend who I am.

Soy rebelde because I do what makes me happy.

Soy loca because I love life and would like to keep it that way.

Desenfrenada: uncontrolled, unconstrained Irrespetuosa: disrespectful Rebelde: rebellious Loca: crazy ¿Y qué si soy así? : So what if I am like that?

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TAPESTRY

by Krista Wiese

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and so we weave until our pierced skin stains our needles blackberry red and our voices appear as colorful threads on the tapestry before us.

We weave the way we screamed when ripped from husband and homeland, when raped by your bravest heroes, when traded between your men like goblets or cattle— silently, painfully. The only sound in the hall: the whirring of our fingertips tying loose ends, knotting rainbow string. In colors, we said what we wanted to say—we mothers, daughters, wives, widows. We said it with a picture so that maybe our words would have some worth to you, the ones who keep us quiet while wearing the clothes we weave.

KASEY VANDENBOOM

Anchored to Ghosts, 27in x 15.5in x 7in ceramic with string

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by Kate Polaski

ATOP THE WALLS

1S T PL ACE, PRO S E

Trigger warning: suicidal ideation I am standing atop the city’s walls, looking out at the sea. In the distance, I can see a large fleet of ships approaching, getting closer every moment. I can tell almost immediately by their hulls and sails that they are of Greek origin. Scornful women in the marketplace may whisper that there is no substance behind my doll-like face, that I understand nothing that happens around me, too absorbed in my own reflection, but one does not spend years as queen of the military center of the

CAMILLE DUNCAN

Keraunos and the Diadochos colored pencil and mixed media

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Mediterranean without learning a few things about sailing. I am sure that if I were on deck, I could identify the different knots, help to raise the mainsails, perhaps even sit on a bench and take responsibility for my own oar.

Not that they would ever let me. If my pale, gentle hands were to become crusted over by calluses, if my long, shining hair were to frizz up with the humidity, if my jasmine smell were to be replaced by that of sweat and salt water, then all of my value would be gone, washed away in the waves.

People call me beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the world, or at least the men do. They sing praises of my face which launched a thousand ships, covet the soft skin of hands that they would believe have never worked a day in their life, and stare greedily at the curves hidden only slightly by my chiton.

But if I were to try and speak with them, to offer advice on how to fight the very armies I watched my former husband train, they would just laugh. “Helen, you beautiful fool,” they would say, “go back to your castle. Go fix your hair in the shining reflection of the serving girl’s silver trays or bed your husband. Even the Gods know that’s all you’re good for.” In their eyes, I am meant to sit in throne rooms, surrounded by servants waiting on me hand and foot, painting my portrait, styling my hair, even peeling my grapes for me. I do not belong on the deck of a ship, or in the fields among the farmers, or on the battlefield, despite all the fighting that seems doomed to follow in my wake.

I look out upon the ships again. I know what is coming. I have known it since the day I launched my daring escape from my homeland. It seems that even an ocean of distance cannot shield me from my husband’s grasping hands.

I will return to the throne room, allow myself to fit the niche the world has carved out for me, praying to my father Zeus that for a little while longer I will be allowed to sleep peacefully in my bed, touches coming only when I desire them. Please, father, I beg, let me stay here with the man that I freely chose of my own volition. Let me live my life for love and not just to please you and my countrymen. Nothing happens. There is only silence. I do not think Zeus is listening to me today. I climb back down from the precipice, taking great care not to allow the stone to scrape my soft skin, my most valuable resource.

Many years later, I scramble up onto the edge of the walls again. They feel coarser than I remember. It may just be my imagination, active as it is these days, but perhaps 10 years of war and constant siege have worn down even the “impenetrable” walls of Troy.

I feel my knee rake against the rough stone and a part of my dress tear away. My first thought is that I am going to get blood on my sandals. Oh well. I have spent far too much time being well put-together. Far too much time being beautiful. There is no time or place for beauty now. It was beauty, my beauty, so I am constantly reminded, that has brought the Greeks across the sea and spurred them to ravage the country of my new husband for whom I abandoned my whole life. Every death, every wound, every burnt field and razed village, has been the fault of my foolish heart, yes, but most importantly, it is the fault of the seductive way my hips sway and the tempting nature of my thick, batting eyelashes.

I think that in my next life I would like to be simple. Plain and unbecoming. With nothing in my face or hands or curves to garner the attention of men and the spite of women.

Or better yet, ugly. Yes. I would like so badly to be ugly. Perhaps one day soon I will be.

I gaze down over the edge of the wall.

It’s a straight drop down to the grass below.

I think it would be enough. If I died, here and now, would it put an end to the fighting?

Would the Greeks drop their weapons and go home, now that their quarry is truly unattainable? Somehow, I think not. I do not know how or why; I only know that a choice made by my foolish heart in a moment of weakness has birthed such hatred in these men that they will not rest until they see their enemy destroyed fully.

And if I died here, on Trojan soil, would they allow me to remain? Would I be buried and mourned as “Helen of Troy”? Would the Trojans even mourn me, or would they be glad to see me go, after I cost thousands of their countrymen their lives? Or would Menelaus not rest until he dug up my grave and dragged me home, his desire to possess my body still aflame even while my flesh rotted and ripped away, so that he could bury me as “Helen of Sparta”?

Right now, I do not think I am either. I am not of Troy or of Sparta. I am only Helen.

Foolish, beautiful, cowardly Helen.

I do not do it. I do not jump. I just stand there for a long time thinking about it. There are stories that say Zeus curses those who choose such a weak end to their lives. That he commands his brother Hades to punish them in death, with everlasting pain and suffering.

Have I not been punished enough, father? I think desperately, raising my face to the heavens.

Has this body, the body that you gave to me, not granted me sufficient suffering? Or do you forgive the groping hands and covetous hearts of men, so like your own, but condemn your own daughter for being what they sought? Part of me hopes that my father will hear these words, these treacherous thoughts, and strike me down right now, propelling me off the side of the wall. Nothing happens. There is only a growing dread pooling in my stomach, a foretelling of doom still to come, and a long bloody scratch down the side of my leg that is slowly dripping onto my sandals. In the end, I think I have already been cursed: cursed too beautiful to die a simple death. n

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by Karlie Mullis

TOO YOUNG Trigger warning: implications of sexual assault Don’t you think I was too young to be touched by you, to have everything taken by your greedy red hands that left marks in places only you’ve seen?

Don’t you think I was too young to be emptied so thoroughly, to have nothing but a dark echo rattling inside the skeleton of my garden, reliant on water withheld?

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by Karlie Mullis

ARIANNE GONZALEZ

Untitled, 9in x 7in acrylic

ON YOUR CHAIN You hold my heart on a chain, a glittering jewel just for you, and each day you run your fingers over the ridges of my shape as you decide if my color suits you enough to display me around your neck.

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by Bridget Gable

TEA LEAVES AND TILES Trigger warning: death of a family member, homophobia, disordered eating

“It’s a shame, really.” A sniff from Loretta, her cup of tea slightly shaking in the saucer. She sat at the edge of a threadbare sofa, as if she was afraid to touch it. Her body was a shaking cliffhanger—would her old age be the catalyst that caused her to fall off the sofa or her husband poking at that cabinet behind her, unaware of the space he took up?

“Yes, she was so young. I certainly didn’t see this coming.” Frederick poked a rubicund finger at the keepsakes that hadn’t even collected dust: a green-haired anime girl singing into a microphone, a copy of The Little Prince, and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg figure that appeared to be giving him the stink eye. He frowned back and gently rotated her so she faced the opposite direction.

“No, I meant the tea. It’s dreadful. Who brewed this?” Her milky blue eyes peered into the cup. A soggy Lipton tea bag waved back.

“Oh. I believe that was…Leaf’s girlfriend.

She ran to the store to get us some before we arrived. In fact, she went back out, though I forget what she went to get…” Frederick took a seat next to his wife, accidentally bumping his leg into hers. Lukewarm tea sloshed from the saucer and onto her hand.

A scoff followed by another sniff. “Don’t call her Leaf. Her God-given name was Emily.

And it’s not her girlfriend, it’s her friend.”

Loretta proceeded to wipe her hand on the chunky knit blanket behind her. This place

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was hideous. Everything was secondhand, homemade, or idiotic. In the gray light of an overcast Thursday afternoon, it looked even more dreary. A matted cat bed rested in the corner next to a lamp that had been haphazardly painted with cow spots. Not a coaster was in sight, and journals and graphic novels littered the coffee table, taking up the space that should’ve been reserved for Better Homes and Gardens. Loretta shook her head.

She remembered the day Emily sent a picture of her kissing a girl, blonde hair mixing with brown, captioned with a mere “I met someone!!!” She had received the text right after Mass, as the congregation chatted in the narthex, ready to stick their geriatric noses into her business. She threw her phone into her purse and dragged Frederick out by the elbow.

“Loretta, hey, what’s going on?” he had finally asked once she was sure they were in their car, windows rolled up and the doors locked.

“Look!” she hissed, holding up the photo.

Frederick blinked and gave her a little smile. “Aw, looks like our little baby found some love!” Anxiety sat in the corner of his lips.

“Love?” Loretta had been nearly shaking with rage but still turned to wave at the priest with a smile. “Love?! And what happens when the congregation finds out? Father Lee? We’re

living in sin!” She tore out of the parking lot, minivan wheels screaming against the pavement.

Now, with a cold cup of tea in hand, Loretta pursed her lips. “This never would’ve happened if she had gone to Hollins like I insisted. But no, she had to travel across the country and take Gender Studies and Psychology.” Loretta flipped through a journal, wandering across poems and sketches of bodies. Her eyes drifted across a pencil drawing of an old woman’s body—the breasts sagging, the stomach stitched with stretch marks—the caption reading “Aphrodite, Hera, Athena: They never had her golden apple.” A light pain blossomed in her heart.

Dammit. Forgot the Tums again. Loretta slammed the journal shut.

“I suppose, but we also never would have been able to visit California. UCLA has a lovely campus,” Frederick added, twisting his wedding ring in circles around his finger.

Loretta sighed, staring at her husband. Emily looked just like her father. The towering height, the golden blonde hair, the dimple that surfaced with every laugh and smile. She looked even more like him when she decided to cut her hair her senior year, shaving it all off days before prom. Her date—a lovely young man, what was his name? David? Davey?—had stared at her bald head in shock, dropping the corsage. Loretta remembered the profuse apologies she had given as her daughter had slipped away, laughing in the rain. Loretta had slunk back inside, staring at the trash can in the corner, filled with blonde hair. She ran a hand through her own hair in that moment—a thinning, graying mass that she had constantly attempted to tame with hairspray and three different brushes—and almost wept. Why? It was her daughter who would be grounded the next day, her daughter whose hair sat in the garbage can. So why did it feel like hers?

“I suppose.” The tea was set down on the table as she glanced around the room: the green, cat-tattered curtains, the movie posters and random pieces of art hanging from the walls, the striped flag resting in a mug with pens and pencils. The room was

filled with memories that weren’t hers. They were her child’s. What did Emily see—what did she experience when she left? Did they remember summer days at the pool? The board game collection they had built together, a shelf packed with boxes, towering to the ceiling? The days they would spend writing short stories? Even now, Emily’s work littered the floor: typed manuscripts and paper scribbles of new works and writing.

12 years ago, her daughter’s manuscripts fell to the floor, white and bright against the pink tiles like snow. Emily, who had been grinning a gap-toothed smile, stood in the doorway in shock. Loretta was curled around the toilet, the stench of vomit wafting through the cheerfully colored powder room. “Momma?

Why are you sick? Grandmother is going to be here soon.”

At the mention of Grandmother, Loretta’s stomach had lurched and she continued to vomit into the toilet. Loretta wiped her mouth with a shaking hand. “Emily, dear, go get ready; don’t worry yourself please.”

KRISTIN MORIN

It’s All Too Much oil on canvas

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“It’s because of Grandmother, isn’t it?

She isn’t very nice to you. Is she making you sick?” Emily’s eyes began to well up with tears. Loretta felt another pang of panic as she realized her daughter’s face had smudges of dirt. She had cleaned the entire house top to bottom, had prepared special dishes for her mother, and it still wouldn’t be enough.

There would be lectures on weight-loss, on parenting, on how marrying was the best thing Loretta could have done because she finally gave her mother a son. The worst thing was that Loretta knew she would believe it.

She would have no proof for her mother that she was doing better, and she would be filled with shame.

Loretta shakily stood up and gave her a weak smile. “Don’t cry, Emily, it’s alright.

Your grandmother knows what’s best. She always has. Be a dear and get cleaned up now, alright?” Loretta turned to the sink but was suddenly surrounded by her daughter’s waiflike body.

“Mom…don’t listen to Grandmother, okay? You’re the best! You make lemon bars and you sing really nice sometimes and you make Daddy laugh! I’ll fight her if you want— my friend Johnny taught me how to punch!”

Her seven-year-old daughter stepped back from the hug and mimicked some punches, tears streaming down her face.

“Emily…” Tears welled in Loretta’s eyes, and she pushed them back down. “Do not punch your grandmother, but…thank you.”

And later, when Grandmother’s purse was mysteriously filled with frogs, Loretta hadn’t batted an eye, and Emily giggled quietly to herself.

His blue eyes drifted to hers. They didn’t well up with tears—they were already filled with sorrow—but he closed them, nonetheless.

He had been the one to answer the phone Friday night. They had been in the middle of preparing for bed, drawing curtains and brewing chamomile tea. The house was quiet.

It was like a dream—her cheerful husband answering the phone, his red face suddenly draining of color. But his voice never wavered.

Even though his hands shook as he told his wife that Emily was in the hospital, his voice never quivered, never changed. She wasn’t sure to be grateful or terrified.

She remembered years and years ago, when she had gone to the hospital, nine months pregnant and ready to burst. She had detested being pregnant despite Frederick’s support. Every day she was reminded more and more of a body that was no longer hers, that would be forever foreign as time and weight and pain ravaged it. She had been rolled in, puffing, ready to claim her body again if only for a second. But when that baby had been placed in her arms, all that pain melted away. There was no scoff, no sniff. Only a gasp of joy as she drew her baby close.

“Are you sure you want to know, Lots?”

His arm was suddenly around her skinny shoulders. Lots. The name only Frederick ever called her. She had always detested

For a while, the room was filled with silence.

The cat—a fat ginger fellow—stalked in but left quickly with his hair raised. He knew Leaf wasn’t there, either.

“How…did she die, Frederick?”

KRISTIN MORIN detail of It’s All Too Much

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public displays of affection, finding them unseemly: a way of proclaiming to the world that you were on the verge of sin and villainy at all times. However, she realized that they weren’t in public. They were in their dead child’s empty apartment. And even if they were in public…

She turned, hiding, throwing herself into her husband; she was hoping she could bury herself in his mothbally blazer, in his skin. Her child was no longer in this world, they were gone, and all that was left was this room. A museum of her child’s joy, a testament to every fight they had over clothes and appearances and boys and girls and neithers. There was an emptiness in her body, in her heart.

“No, I—” “It’s okay—” “I miss them, Fred. I wish I had called them. I wish I had called Leaf.” Tears are welling in her eyes. She had not cried since her mother told her at the ripe age of eight that she was ugly, that she needed to lose weight.

She had buried that part of herself long ago, putting her tears in a grave with a shovel as her mother nodded with grim approval.

And now her child—the person who used to collect cicada skins and turn cartwheels in the house, the person who had covered her freshly painted walls with crayons and her bed with short stories, the person with the bald head who had always called her mother beautiful—

was standing above that grave with a gaptoothed smile.

And suddenly—a burst of laughter.

Frederick was shaking beside her, tears stuck in his mustache.

“What’s so funny?” Loretta allowed herself to poke him in the stomach, to crack a smile.

“It’s just—” A loud laugh interrupted him, turning into a cough. He grinned that same gap-toothed grin at her. “Leaf always said you would accept them, you’re just slow. They said it was one big game of Rummikub.”

“Rummikub!” Loretta leaned back into the couch, her voice high like a songbird. “I had to be slow in Rummikub! I had to make sure I got my tiles all neat. I mean, have you ever won Rummikub?” She wrapped her husband in a hug, planted a mauve swatch of lipstick on his cheek. She sealed the past behind her with a kiss.

Later, Leaf’s girlfriend, Sabina, came in, and Loretta embraced her. Apologies were given and tears fell onto the carpet, where the cat sniffed at them curiously. The three, dressed in black, climbed into the car. Light finally broke through the window, streaming past the patchy curtains and onto the sofa. It jumped along the tea-stained blanket, it slid along the figurines and journal and wandered toward the plants. If you looked closely— there, on the mantel, next to the family photos—was a Rummikub tile. n

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WITCH’S BREW

by Olivia Slack The children in the town all pretended to be brave. When Halloween came around, they would all dare each other to go near my house.

They dared each other and double dared each other, but when it came down to it, Halloween came and went every year without a single child venturing up to my door, near though they came.

The house was made of stone, and the parents whispered to each other that it was from sometime before the witch hunts. The red tile on the roof made it stick out like a sore thumb, others complained. Why couldn’t it have shingles like the modern houses?

The backyard was overgrown so that the shrubs were more like trees and the roof hid

CAROLINE VANYO

Three Sisters Coiled Vessels (Dogwood, Orchid, and Hydrangea) ceramics

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underneath their leaves. Although the sun shone on the house like any other, it never seemed to quite reach it. It was as though someone had burnished the edges of the house so that anyone who walked past would be drawn to it and yet absolutely repulsed at the same time. Whether or not that was by design was unclear to my neighbors.

The front walk never had any leaves or dirt on it, and the stones were always the perfect sort of mossy, not the falling-apart sort of mossy. If one were to look down the hill at the front of the house, they might be able to see inside the warped windows to where I, a woman of what my neighbors described as an “indiscernible age,” might

be hanging herbs, stirring a pot, or arranging crystals.

My house was too old to exist, and yet it sat on the outskirts of town, unmoving, untouched, unbothered by the passage of the seasons and the blustering winds that should have knocked it down a little more each year.

I took great joy in watching people speculate about my place of residence, judging its appearance even though, to me, their own homes were distasteful—gaudy and overdone.

As a woman of such age, I was afforded very few joys in life because almost everything was old to me. However, the people of this town never ceased to entertain.

One blustery day in late August, I was trimming my front hedges when I saw Shannon, the nearest neighbor to me— situated catty-corner about a half mile down the road—marching toward me.

Her fluffy gold hair was bouncing up and down madly, looking as though it might fly off her head and attack me like a rabid Pomeranian.

I could tell by looking at her that she was pissed off.

“Oh god,” I mumbled.

“Vanessa! I’ve got to talk to you,” she said, still too far away to be able to talk at a reasonable volume, so her words came out in a weird little out-of-breath half-shout. I knew she wasn’t going to venture onto my property, so I walked up to meet her. I tried to keep my distance from her and her blue paisleypatterned sundress, but my steps forward appeared to embolden Shannon enough that she met me in the middle.

“Sure, what’s the matter?”

“Listen—” she wagged her finger in my face “—you’ve been scaring the kids. You’ve

got to quit all this spooky crap. It’s not funny anymore.”

“Which kids are scared?”

“Mine,” she huffed. “They come back crying about weird noises and wind tickling their ears! It’s too early for Halloween decorations.”

“Hmm. It’s not meant to scare them.”

“So you’ve said. Why do these things happen, then?”

“Personal reasons. Maybe they shouldn’t play close to my house. It’s private property, you know.”

Shannon threw up her hands. “You know how kids are. They don’t understand private property.”

I laughed stiffly. “You should teach them.”

“Just—just—I’m calling the HOA about this!”

“I don’t live in your neighborhood. I’m outside it.”

Shannon let out a strangled little grunt and marched away.

“Nice talking to you,” I called after her.

I walked back down my front path. I had intended to do some sweeping after I finished the bushes, but after that conversation, my interest in yard work had been rather dampened. In the trees lining my front walk, little ribbons of white cloth hung down. I stuck my foot off the path and they leapt to life, suddenly whirling around me, more like ghosts than white cloth. Still working, clearly. I never thought the kids would get this close to my hexes, but if I backed down now, well, Shannon would be winning, wouldn’t she?

The wind howled in my ears. It would be a shame if the kids got hurt, but trespassing is trespassing. If they wandered into my yard,

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worse things would happen. I’d found my magical deterrents highly effective against childish curiosity in the last few years.

Shannon had found herself more and more irritated by her neighbor in the past few months. When they had first bought their home, it had not been advertised to them that the seemingly abandoned house down the road was in fact inhabited. She and her husband had thought the “abandoned” house a quaint little feature of the early-American town. But after a few months of Vanessa’s unmown lawn and scraggly trees clashing horrendously with her lush, bright green (two-and-a-half inch exactly) lawn and her American flag windmills gently spinning in the wind, the old house had become less quaint and more of an eyesore.

Shannon thought she could deal with it and had in fact promised her husband not to start anything with the neighbors this time.

However, she had developed quite a severe dislike for Vanessa and fully intended to follow through on her promise to report her to the HOA. Jaden and Evan, her two sons, had wandered into Vanessa’s yard earlier that day and immediately come sprinting back into the house. They were at the age where they didn’t like to cry, but they were doing so then.

Shannon was taken aback.

“What did you see? What happened?”

Her boys sputtered about ghosts and scary noises and feelings of dread coming from Vanessa’s house, and Shannon decided that day would be the first of her official crusade against her neighbor.

“We’ve got a real problem here, everyone,” she said at the HOA meeting the next night.

All the usual suspects were in attendance— Jenny, the treasurer and Shannon’s rival to ultimate HOA presidency; Kevin, the current president; and Conroy, the neighborhood

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busybody. Shannon was only the HOA secretary now, but she had big plans. The HOA meetings weren’t well attended, but those who showed up got a lot done out of nosiness and boredom.

“It’s the woman who lives near me in that damn messy house,” Shannon continued.

“Vanessa something-or-other—I don’t know her last name.”

“She does weird things in that house,” Conroy said.

They all glanced at him briefly. Shannon assumed he was just repeating hearsay as usual, although she found herself agreeing with his words.

She cleared her throat. “Is there anything we can do? She’s been scaring my boys.”

“My daughter walked by that house and got the living daylights scared out of her the other day,” Jenny said. “She’s got some creepy dolls hung up in trees or something.”

“They’re pieces of fabric,” Shannon corrected her. Of course Jenny had her facts wrong. “I think they’re meant to look like ghosts. They act like ghosts when you get near them. That’s what the boys said.”

“No, there were dolls, too,” Jenny insisted.

“Ladies,” Kevin said. They went quiet.

“Vanessa is out of our subdivision. I’m not sure there’s anything to be done.”

“Can we sue her?” Jenny asked.

“On what grounds?” Conroy scoffed.

CAROLINE VANYO detail of Three Sisters Coiled Vessels

“Conroy, I thought you were on our side,” Shannon said.

“I am. I don’t like her. But suing her will never work.”

“Do you have a suggestion then?” Jenny looked like she didn’t expect him to.

“We should investigate that house,” Conroy answered. “Something no good is going on in there. It’s August. Who puts up Halloween decorations in August?”

Shannon nodded slowly. “You’re saying we should go in there and see what’s going on?

If she’s up to something…distasteful?”

“I’m just saying, why else would she be hanging dolls and ghosts outside her house, and why do we never see her? In my experience, shut-ins like that are almost always doing something illegal.”

Kevin frowned. “Like drugs?”

“Could be,” Conroy agreed. “She could be producing or selling.”

“Here in our neighborhood!” Jenny gasped.

“Someone in my last neighborhood had a grow house,” Conroy added.

“That would explain why she wants to keep the kids away,” Shannon said grimly. It all made perfect sense—something illegal, something Vanessa didn’t want kids around in case they’d tell their parents. “I think you’re right, Conroy. We have to do something about this. The kids could get exposed to something dangerous.”

“Oh, I know.” Conroy shook his head.

“It’s just a shame. People like that ruining neighborhoods like ours.”

In the middle of a rather nice game of cards with my pet bird, I was alerted by the guard cats that the neighbors were up to something questionable that evening. They had a particular name in their thoughts: Conroy Phillips.

I sighed to myself and went into the kitchen. After centuries of living here, I’d learned that threats were best dealt with quickly. When I had been more naïve, less willing to take the necessary steps in these

sorts of situations, it had nearly ended in my death. The witch hunts had killed most of my relatives and allies in the craft, our own neighbors and friends turning against us once they discovered our habits. It wasn’t that we were doing anything vicious—simply mixing in a bit of magic when a child needed to heal or adding some much-needed nutrients to the little food we had when times were scarce.

We had considered ourselves to be helping. It wasn’t seen that way by our neighbors.

I had laid low here, waiting until the puritanical craze had passed and people were more trusting—or at least less likely to kill you on the spot. After several near misses, though, I’d discovered that really, people were the same everywhere. It wasn’t safe to let anyone get close, and being the quaint, helpful witch I’d fancied myself before wouldn’t get me anywhere except a grave. I was the last of the practice, at least that I knew about, and if I was gone, the art could be lost.

In no time, I had mixed together enough of my herbs, potions, and gelatinous tinctures that I knew it would be fatal. The pot simmering on my stovetop was a creation of death, and I considered it to be one of my finest yet.

I crouched down and scratched my favorite cat Vilithea’s chin. She had been observing me this whole time. “What do you think they’re up to, darling? Shall we find out?” I hung a tiny vial of the poison mixture around her neck. She would get it where it needed to go.

She returned with her helpers a few hours later. This time, they had not just one name in their minds but several, and a motive: breaking and entering, discovery. Enough of a crime that Vilithea had indeed dropped the contents of the vial in Conroy’s evening tea.

I tidied my kitchen, adjusting the bundles of herbs until everything was as it should be.

Every potion was capped, every mixture was sealed. Nothing was a centimeter out of place.

The pot with the poison soup, though, was left on the kitchen stove. After considering it for a moment, I pulled a small vial out of volume

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the cabinet, poured a drop into the soup, and placed it back. An irresistible scent quickly filled my home, but I popped the lid on the pot, stifling it instantly.

Two hours later, sirens wailed by my house. From her position, crouched on the arm of the chair I sat in, Vilithea purred.

Shannon heard the news before anyone else.

She immediately rang Kevin.

“Kevin! Conroy is dead. He ingested something horrible—they don’t know what yet. They think it was an accident, some poisonous mushroom or new plant species or something.”

“That’s what all those sirens were last night?”

“He was dead before they got there,” she said grimly.

“Why are you calling me about it, Shannon? Conroy wasn’t my friend.”

“Kevin—isn’t it obvious? It’s that witch.”

Shannon wasn’t sure whether she meant the term literally or metaphorically.

“Vanessa?” Kevin repeated incredulously.

“I’m calling Jenny. Just get to the clubhouse as soon as you can.”

The three of them gathered together, far less somber than one would think. Conroy had not been well loved, and in fact had not even been married. Shannon had been told when she moved into the neighborhood that he might have had a brief romance with his cousin before he was shunned by his entire family. By a stroke of luck, he was found that night when a neighbor checked on him because of a stray cat. It had scratched on her door and then led her to Conroy’s.

“Animals have a sensitivity to the supernatural,” Jenny said. “They know when death is about.”

“Shannon thinks Vanessa is behind this,” Kevin said.

“Way to lead into it.” Shannon pressed down her irritation. “Isn’t it a coincidence to you that the very day after Conroy convinced us to investigate her house, he died? From

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some mysterious poisoning? You heard him.

He thought she was up to something. If she’s really making drugs or doing something else in that house, there’s no telling what lengths she might go to in order to hide it. What if this is a cover up?”

“A government cover up?” Jenny’s interest had been piqued. Shannon knew she was a conspiracy theorist, one of those people who kept her blinds shut during the day in case anyone was watching. For her part, Shannon highly doubted that Jenny was doing anything interesting enough in her house that someone would want to look in her windows.

“No,” Shannon said. “Maybe. I’m not sure.

The point is, we have to check out that house like Conroy said. It could hold a clue to his death. I mean, come on, ingesting poisonous mushrooms? That man was obviously murdered. He was poisoned.”

A silence followed her bold proclamation, and Shannon could tell she was losing them.

“She’s ruining our town. That hideous house and her behavior toward our children, and now Conroy is dead. No one liked him, but he was a staple in our community. She’s disruptive.”

If there was one thing Shannon knew, it was that the people in this town hated a disruption.

“Fine,” Jenny said. “I’m in. I never liked Vanessa anyway. Kevin?”

“You’re both going to get me arrested.”

Kevin pushed his glasses up his nose. “But if the subdivision is at risk, I’ll do it.”

“Alright.” Shannon nodded. This was a good sign—the HOA president agreeing to her plan surely meant that the neighborhood trusted her. “Tonight, we’ll look around in her yard, and if we can, we’ll look in her house.

Besides evidence of any drug making or coverups she’s a part of, there might be a murder weapon or something else she’s hiding. If we find poison or chemicals or a written-up plan, we need to turn it in to the police.”

“I wonder if she’s got anything to do with the chemtrail cover up,” Jenny mused. “You know, if she poisoned Conroy, that’s similar.”

Shannon tried not to look at her too severely. She thought a government cover up was far less likely than drug activity, but she couldn’t risk losing Jenny. “Maybe. We’ll just have to see tonight.”

At the window of the clubhouse, the group might have seen a cat’s tail bobbing away into the grass. Unfortunately, Shannon was too busy thinking about how terrible of an HOA president Jenny would be, and Jenny was too busy trying to figure out whether Shannon had been patronizing her. Kevin was too busy considering whether, after outing Vanessa as a neighborhood value-destroyer and tearing down her house, the home prices in the neighborhood would go up.

It was decided that nightfall would be the best time to try to investigate the house.

They weren’t sure of Vanessa’s schedule or if she ever left the house, so they supposed they would have to organize a stakeout. Shannon and Jenny convinced their husbands to watch the kids, and Kevin didn’t bother to tell his wife where he was going. He didn’t usually, so he wasn’t concerned.

They crouched behind the bushes across from Vanessa’s house, resisting the urge to turn around.

“Do you guys feel considerably more nervous now than before?” Jenny asked.

“Conroy would have said this feeling is something suspicious,” Shannon said. “All our kids have felt it, too. What if it’s magic?”

Deep down, they all knew this was silly.

More likely Vanessa was making meth, or helping hide some conspiracy like Jenny had said, and her house was just creepy.

Before anyone could say anything else, the front door to her house opened, and its owner walked out. She didn’t have a car and never seemed to go anywhere far away, but she started to walk down the street.

“That’s lucky,” Kevin said.

When she was far enough down the street that they couldn’t see her, the three of them walked up to the house, teeth chattering and skin paling. The door was unlocked.

CAROLINE VANYO detail of Three Sisters Coiled Vessels

When they walked into the kitchen, Shannon immediately noticed that it was quite different from the rest of the house.

The entry and living room had been cluttered, filled to the brim with objects of all sorts: vases upon vases of drying flowers, a bucket of what appeared to be pond water, all manner of boots and waders and long walking sticks that curved and bent in unexpected ways.

Whatever the floor of the house was made of—wood, maybe—it was completely covered in overlapping rugs, many with strange patterns on them. The walls of the living room had vines creeping all over them, and what little of the dark green walls were not covered by plants held paintings. The paintings were mostly landscapes of places Shannon didn’t think really existed—meadows with purple grass, mountains that glistened ruby red— and some were in gaudy gold frames while others were bare and stuck to the wall with God-knows-what. A small gray bird squawked in an ornate cage in the corner.

The kitchen, though—it was pristine.

The counters, all made of thick, durable wood, had been scrubbed so much they nearly shone, and there was minimal clutter atop them. What few sprigs of dried herbs hung above the counters were neatly bundled, and all the utensils were held inside a prim little water pitcher. Inside the drawers, knives of

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various shapes and sizes were slipped into knife blocks. Upon inspection, they were perfectly sharpened and clearly well taken care of. The kitchen looked as though it had been freshly swept, and the only thing that was not in its perfect place was a large black soup pot, bowed out at the middle, almost like a cauldron. The lid was fitted firmly onto the pot, but a light simmering could be heard coming from inside.

“She probably uses her kitchen most,” Jenny whispered.

Shannon looked at Kevin. “What if this is the poison she used to kill Conroy?”

“Could be,” Kevin said noncommittally.

Shannon got the impression he was regretting coming in here.

Jenny looked at Shannon expectantly.

“What do we do?”

Shannon could feel herself becoming the leader of the situation. If she acted now and became the brave one, the one who could do the right thing and uncover Vanessa’s obvious insanity—her plot to murder Conroy—she could cement her status as leader and finally have her place in their subdivision. Becoming head of the HOA within a year of moving to the neighborhood was nearly unheard of, but Shannon was confident. She was made for this.

Shannon lifted the lid off the pot.

Immediately, the smell of cloves, cinnamon, sugar cookies, and a fireplace rushed through the air. It smelled exactly like Christmas had at her parents’ home. The scent was irresistible.

Jenny and Kevin were both staring at the contents of the pot. They appeared soup-like, and though Shannon was unsure how soup could smell like Christmas morning, she knew that she needed to find out. Jenny held out

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a spoon to her. How had she found one so quickly?

“It smells like my mom’s minestrone,” Jenny said. Kevin just blinked slowly, not taking his eyes off the soup and swaying on his feet ever so slightly.

Shannon did not take the time to process Jenny’s comment before she dipped the spoon into the pot and lifted it to her lips.

When I left, I had only gone around to the back of my house, so when Shannon, Jenny, and Kevin all dropped to the floor, I saw from the window.

The cats followed me inside. “Safe again, Vilithea,” I said as I considered my neighbor’s bodies. “Too bad, though. They were very entertaining.”

Vilithea meowed and hopped up onto the counter.

“Well, I tried to be fair,” I told her. “I left the lid on, you know. They had a chance.”

I’d dealt with women like Shannon before.

It was women like her, and men like her friend Conroy, who had murdered my friends and nearly killed me all those centuries ago. I had suspected that she would never have been able to resist lifting the lid off my pot and that I was right was proof that she had to go. Her friends were simply an unfortunate casualty.

Vilithea purred. “What will we do with them now?” I smiled at her. “The same thing we always do, dear.”

The cats crowded around me. They knew that within the hour, they would be getting three newly reborn family members. It was a shame that I couldn’t have included Conroy in the family, but sacrifices had to be made. Life couldn’t be all entertainment anymore—not after so long living it. n

HANNAH SCHNEIDER

Personal Identity Suite graphic design

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DESTINY EUDY

From Below Series digital photography

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1 ST PL AC E, POETRY

A NEIGHBOR THAT I A L W A Y S P A S S by Kate Niemi Every day along my route through jack-knifed roads that drop into wooded byways, a certain neighbor I always pass has erected a modern morality play. I’m mesmerized by the display, searching for hidden mysteries within the careful placement of unknowing actors. I observe a skeleton, splayed across a stake, skull sagging to his shoulder blade.

With tearless eyes he turns his face away from lightless days. Dark and flimsy fabric feeds the wind like ghosts of thought enveloping the tenebrous, embittered form. Tatters point to Calvary behind. There, three solemn crosses tilt in front of a screen of trees that overhang the clearing. Perhaps the neighbor reveals philosophies that will unshadow the cycle of salvation for me. To the side, a mourner wrapped in stone gray encroaches on my certainty. Like a sickly form of death it crouches, besmeared with rotten green. This introspective spectator gawks in callous mockery at the misery of the hollow man. On either side, sanguine azaleas frame the scene. Will their branches embroider a shelter for the hollow man and me to deliver us from prying eyes imparting wrath? Between the flowered shrubs, fence posts have rooted, each blossoming with sun bleached domes despised by the eyes. While I still demand a reason for this show, I lose my grip on time. Summer shifts to autumn and the trees cough up mildewed tears.

Then a prophet returns, noiseless in the night. I watch him plant his post and shake dust from faded clothes and burlap skin. In solidarity he climbs the perch to spread his arms like those cross-bearers, gone from the empty three. A leather hat shields his gritty form from blackwinged fiends that scorn them all. These sights develop behind a single house staged upon a grassy clump. Cut through a field and past the woods, then the road straddles the dwelling poking out of the trees.

Every day and night I pass along and sneak a glimpse into the timebound drama. My private mystery play unfolds for the neighbor alone and my own secret curiosity, one as detached as a watcher high in the heavens. n

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OLIVE AND THE ROTTEN RABBIT

by Cameron Garcia Liberation from the shackles of suffering was the catalyst for millions of mortals’ pilgrimages into the Unknown Forest, a treacherous land filled with unholy wonders that even the darkest of souls could not fathom.

Olive Revanche fumbled to smooth his trousers as he craned his sun-beaten neck to examine the den that lay before him. A creaking wooden sign that read Maurice Marigold’s Magical Menagerie shrouded him with a stilling horror. He had put all of his hope for salvation into this shop, a place brimming with enchanted creatures. With shaking hands, he rapped upon the cedar door.

Tap, tap, tap.

“H-hello? Is anyone home?” Within the blink of an eye, the door was thrust open with a force far too great to be human.

“Why hello there, little one! What is a fragile little plaything like you doing in the Unknown?” an excitable woman said, peering through the doorway.

The woman was none other than Maurice Marigold, a collector of fantastic beasts from all over the world, a thin woman who could be blown over by the lightest of breezes. Orangestained freckles littered her pale cheeks like constellations twinkling in the midnight sky.

These sun-gifted stars were accompanied by wisps of apricot curls that encased her delicate frame. A bright red nose stretched from her face, and her eyes sparkled in silent mischief.

“I…well, you see…I have come to beseech the aid of one of your creatures,” Olive replied.

“There is an illness that is threatening to take the life of the one I love. I was hoping that you might possess a creature that can heal her affliction.”

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“The issue is not whether I have what you seek,” Maurice declared. “It is whether you are willing to pay the price.”

“Well, you see, I…I have a precious ring that was gifted by my mother that I am now willing to part with for the sake of my darling Gilda.”

Out of his leather satchel, Olive snatched a gleaming dollop of amethyst artfully woven into a delicate gold band.

“My dear child, it will take much more than gems and gold to obtain what you seek.”

“Whatever the price may be, I have resolved myself to pay it. Please…please do not let my beloved die,” Olive stammered, collapsing onto his knees.

ABBEY BUTLER

Polly the Pig Series (ABOVE AND OPPOSITE) digitally manipulated photograph

“Your determination is admirable.

Come in, come in,” Maurice commanded, watching with glee as the young man crept into the shop. Shrills and shrieks from various creatures filled the menagerie as Olive followed the shop owner’s lead. Each animal was more atrocious than the last.

Olive’s eyes remained glued to the squeaking wooden floor. He hoped he could escape this nightmare with his life.

“Now, my dear, perhaps we can discuss your predicament over a slice of my raspberry galette,” Maurice declared.

Olive lowered his eyes.“Well, I do believe that would be most lovely, Miss Marigold. I

greatly appreciate your hospitality towards a waste of space such as myself.”

“My, what an awful thing to say,” she replied, ushering the young man into the kitchen. “Take a seat and I will be sure to cut you the slice with the ripest of berries. You are my cherished guest after all,” Maurice said, summoning the kitchen cutlery to do her bidding. In an instant, saucers overflowing with cream and jam flew over their heads and onto the table, while forks and knives paraded onto their assigned placemats.

“One slice, or two?” Maurice asked. “And perhaps tea is in order as well.”

“Your power is truly inconceivable! Would

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you be able to educate me on how to control the world in such a way?” Olive gaped, hungrier for the woman’s abilities than for her dessert.

A howl filled the kitchen in response.

“Teach you how to do magic?” Maurice chuckled. “Why would you ever dream of possessing such a skill?”

“Because I live a life of shame and cowardice! I just thought…I thought that perhaps if I had power such as that, I could make something of myself.” Olive hung his head until his wine-colored mane nearly touched the table.

“My dear pet, magic alone is not enough for you to make something of yourself. Now come, eat your dessert, and tell me all about how Miss Marigold can make your wildest dreams come true,” the freckled woman replied.

“Well, just as I said before, the plague has reached my village. My beloved fiancée Gilda is on the verge of death. As I was giving a young woman a ride home a few weeks ago, she told me a little of her time in the Unknown Forest,” Olive said. “I was able to learn that a mighty animal deep within the confines of the woodland could grant the truest heart’s desire of any creature for a great price. You see, I am far too destitute to afford the healing mermaid potion that the merchants and magicians are selling in the kingdom square. The woman said the creature wants more than just cupidita, so my assumption is that the price is something of value to the customer. When Gilda fell ill a few evenings ago, I recalled what the young woman had told me and traveled into the forest straight away in hopes to find this marvelous creature.” Olive finally sipped the amber liquid from his chipped cup, which danced its way over to his trembling hands.

“I see…that wee passenger cares little for your well-being.” Maurice plucked fallen dust bunnies from her velvet seat and grated them between her fingers into silvery powder.

“Although, before I send you away, I am quite curious about this life of cowardice you claim to have lived. Go on boy, tell me all about it and you may sway my heart to reconsider,” Maurice commanded.

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“Very well, Miss Marigold. When I was drafted into that troll war years ago, I was elated at the prospect. I desperately wanted the opportunity to prove myself and create a life worth living. A life where I possessed power and glory. And yet, when I got onto the battlefield, I froze. I hid under the dead bodies of my comrades in battle after battle.

When the other soldiers discovered my grave sins, they reported me to the lieutenant. He was so disgusted by my wretchedness that he said I was unworthy even to execute. He sent me back to the mills the very next day. I was the laughingstock of my entire village.” Olive nibbled at the raspberry delicacy before him.

“Where does this Gilda come into play?

Does she make your life worth living?”

Maurice asked.

“I love her dearly. We were playmates as children, despite her father’s distaste for his precious daughter playing with a parentless child. Yet, she would continue to sneak pastries from her parent’s bakery every nightfall and hold me gently as we whispered secrets late into the night. When I returned from the troll wars, she was the only one to welcome me back kindly.” Sniffles filled every inch of the room as tears left Olive’s lips.

“When the others would force me to eat from the pig trough, or push me into the ravine, she was always there to pick me up. Once I accepted her romantic advances, I promised myself that I would become strong enough to get us out of that dreadful village and into a life of luxury.” The tears cascading down Olive’s dismal expression were wiped in haste.

“Such ambition and passion! What are you doing now to make such a dream happen?

Do you like your work?” Maurice queried as she nibbled. “……”

“Oh, I’m sorry dear, I didn’t quite hear that. What did you—” “I said I loathe it. I loathe the smell. I loathe the customers. I loathe the working conditions. I loathe the way people mock and scorn me as I pitifully drag my three-legged wagon across the market, feebly attempting to make ends meet. All that I have is my Gilda,

who waits at home for me with a loving embrace despite my pathetic excuse for an occupation,” Olive replied through gritted teeth.

“I see! I assume you did not dream of being a flour miller as a boy.” An amused grin played on the magician’s face as she cut herself an additional slice of pastry.

“Well, I do not believe anyone dreams of such an occupation. It was one that I was born into against my will. My mother was a mistress and was abandoned by the man who sired me as soon as I was born. As opposed to caring for such a useless, squirming little larva, she sold me to the flour mill. All I have of my mother’s existence is this ring and a note recalling the tale I have just told you. Gilda and the mills are all I have known since I was a wee babe. That is why I must do whatever possible to restore her health.

It is the least I can do after the kindness she has shown me.” Olive gripped the cup tight, awaiting his counterpart’s reaction.

“Such bravery to beseech the aid of a treacherous creature such as myself on your bride to be’s behalf,” Marigold replied.

“I would do anything to keep her by my side.” Olive sat tall and leaned forward at this assertion.

“Anything?” the magician questioned.

“Of course,” he promptly replied, wringing his scarred hands together in silent promise.

“Would you stay with me forever and do my bidding to ensure her health?” Marigold giggled.

“I would stay by your side until the end of the age,” he reciprocated.

“Would you die for her?” Marigold pressed a slow kiss to his temple.

“Happily,” he agreed, desperately clawing at his skin to cease his infernal shaking.

“Would you give up your conquest for riches? Stay by her side just as you are, and allow your love to be enough to fulfill your aching heart?” Maurice asked, curiosity enveloping her cerulean eyes.

It was at this request that Olive paused.

“Miss Marigold…how could you make such a cruel request? I work diligently so that one day we may leave the decrepit hole we are

forced to call home and live the life of luxury we deserve!”

Maurice cupped Olive’s trembling face with slender hands, grinning widely.

“Well, I must say that your spirit has touched my very soul! We shall go to Rotten at once.” Maurice shuffled from the kitchen table in haste. “Come along pet, there is not a moment to lose. Gliva’s life is on the line, you know.”

“Her name is Gilda, Miss Marigold,” Olive corrected.

“Never mind the drivel, boy.”

An ivory door with gold lettering stood before them, reading ALL THOSE WHO ENTER THROUGH THIS PASSAGEWAY MUST ABANDON ALL HOPE. Despite the rather cryptic message, the two pushed forward.

The scene before Olive could only be described as hollow. All that the chamber encompassed was a large nest filled with golden fodder.

“I have just the thing for you, my dear boy. I introduce to you, the Rotten Rabbit.”

Olive scoffed at the sight before him.

“But…but that’s just a simple rabbit. How on earth can he aid my quest? The girl said he was a great beast of unimaginable power!” Olive proclaimed. The ghostly rabbit with golden eyes lay peacefully in a woven basket full of blankets and fresh straw.

“Not everything is what it seems, my dear pet. This rabbit has the power to answer the deepest heart’s desire of those who call upon his aid, just as you said.” Marigold smoothed the wrinkles of her customer’s shoulders in an effort to prove her honesty.

“What must I pay to obtain his help?”

Olive hesitated.

“Not quite sure why you’re asking me, my dear boy. The one whose services you seek is before your very eyes,” Maurice chortled.

“He can talk?” Olive puzzled, reaching to pet the twitching ears of the animal before him.

“Of course I can talk, you blubbering fool,” a new voice squeaked.

“I will leave you boys to it,” the menagerie

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owner chirped, strolling out of the barren chamber.

“Hello, Mr. Rabbit, sir. I’m in desperate need of your help,” Olive choked out, falling to his knees in reverence, in hopes to gain the sympathy of the supposedly spiteful creature before him.

“Of course you are, imbecile! Otherwise, you would not be so idiotic as to disrupt my rest,” the Rotten Rabbit spat. Now wide awake from his deep slumber, the sadistic beast took in the full view of the town coward.

“The one I love is going to perish from a deadly illness that is ravaging the kingdom.

She is all that I have left in my dismal existence. Please…please name your price and I will do all I can to repay you for your help.”

Tears began to drip down Olive’s crimson complexion once again.

“Stop whining this instant, you blubbering nitwit! Besides, what on earth could the town miller give me that I would be interested in?”

“H-how did…” the dastard questioned.

“How do I know about your pathetic excuse for an existence? I could hear that miserable mortal Marigold shrieking from the kitchen.

The town coward attempts to save the one he cares for? What a pathetic excuse for a love story. Nevertheless, it does appear that you have something I might be interested in,” the wicked rabbit replied while hopping forward.

“I will give you anything! Please, just name your price!” the man exclaimed.

“You shall relinquish half of your lifespan to me,” the rabbit hissed.

“My lifespan? Whatever could you mean?”

Olive pondered.

“Allow me to illuminate as monosyllabically as possible. I am dying.

With each passing day, I grow weaker and weaker, all the while forced to be chained to this miserable form. You selfish humans suck me dry and slowly watch me perish without any regard. I am simply returning the favor.

Relinquish half of your miserable life, and perhaps your decrepit heart may truly heal

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the woman you apparently hold so dear.” The animal spoke with disdain.

“How can I be certain that this is my heart’s truest wish?” Olive sobbed. His throat felt as if it would leap from its confines any minute.

“You can not. You must pray that your wretched soul holds pure intentions,” the rabbit cackled.

“If that is the only way, then I renounce half of my life for my truest heart’s desire,” Olive replied.

“Then it appears this abominable exchange was not a waste of my invaluable time. I fail to comprehend why you are becoming so emotional over this arrange-ment. You continually failed to bring delight or monetary value to any of the buffoons in your life. You will be doing them a tremendous service of goodwill by bisecting your destitute existence,” the magical creature spat, kicking decayed excrement onto the miller’s tearful expression.

A putrid green smoke filled the room as the rabbit raised his paws to the sky and began to snatch the payment from Olive’s despondent soul.

“What is going on?” the miller questioned in agony.

“Do not fight it, boy. Allow the life to slowly slip from your feeble body. It will all be over soon,” the rabbit assured. Olive doubled over in pain, as every fiber of his being felt as if it was ablaze, slowly burning every inch of his body until his soul shriveled into a crisp.

He attempted to cry out and beg for the pain to stop, but he was too weak even to beg for mercy. He silently pleaded that his dreams would come to fruition.

“Wake up…I SAID WAKE UP YOU INSOLENT CRETIN!!!”

Olive attempted to shift toward the sound of his insulter, only to be met with immeasurable pain. Every ounce of his corpse felt as if it had been torn apart and put back together by a blind butcher.

“Where am I?” he croaked.

“There is a band of men claiming that you are to be the next king of Wistress. I suggest you collect your putrid body from my floor and leave this place,” the rabbit replied, attempting to create a burrow of comfort in his haven of herbage.

“King?” Olive stuttered. “No, they must be mista—” “Alright, rabbit, we have waited long enough. Is the one they call Olive in your possession or not?” an unfamiliar voice boomed. A troupe of highly armed knights assembled into the once empty room at this question.

“Are you the one named Olive Revanche?” the voice demanded.

“Yes sir,” Olive squeaked, slowly attempting to shift away from the group of intruders.

“Your highness, it is an honor to be in your presence at last.” The knight knelt to the ground in an instant. The others followed suit, all refusing to meet the miller’s pastoral hued eyes.

“My good men…you must have me confused with another gentleman. For I am but a humble flour miller, with only twenty cupidita to my name. I am not fitting of the term ‘your highness.’” Olive refused to look upon the band of bowing men.

“Please forgive my insolence by disagreeing with you, your highness, but King Evans personally requested that you ascend to the throne before he passed,” a new soldier argued.

“King Evans has passed? How?” Olive demanded.

“The plague took hold of his soul and ravaged it before the moon hid his face from the sun. As you know, King Evans and his queen failed to produce male heirs to ascend to the throne in his absence. He begged all of his knights to search the ends of the ten realms to find you and ensure that you ruled all of Wistress before he took his last breath.

Please, your highness, return to the castle so that we may discuss this dawning of a new age,” the man pleaded.

Olive sat in silence at the bewildering claims of the royal guards. He could not fathom how such a man as the king could know the name of a bastard miller, let alone beg his knights to ensure that he became king once he departed the world. Yet, the delicious taste of power sat on the tip of the coward’s tongue, and though he would never proclaim the dastardly words out in the open for the ears of man or beast to hear, he never wanted the addictive flavor to cease.

“Well…I suppose if King Evans picked me personally, I have no right to refuse,” Olive replied. As the knights began to help the young man to his feet, he heard the final cackle of the Rotten Rabbit.

“Peace be with you on your new journey to power and glory. Give Gilda my best when you see her at the burial.” n

SYDNEY NELSON

Lucy digital art

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LEAH JENSEN

Argo Adventures Ads, series of 3 ads graphic design

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LEAH JENSEN

Transformation digital drawing

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THIS IS NOT A FAIRYTALE

by Erin Wendorf

There is no princess in danger or servant girl who wishes for freedom; there is just an ordinary girl, living an ordinary life.

There is no castle, or evil stepmother, or magic mirror who gives advice.

This girl has two parents who love her and only want the best for her.

They pay for her college and cook her healthy meals instead of locking her away in a tall stone tower.

There is no curse, whether by poisoned apple or spinning wheel.

She is not deterred from prom and saved by birds and squirrels.

In this world, women are wary and don’t marry men they have only known

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for three days; they freeze their own delicate hearts to protect themselves.

In this world, women have their voices stifled by something far more powerful than a sea witch.

We are trapped in a kingdom that isolates us like an ivory tower.

What are we waiting for?

Prince Charming?

No. Our perceptions of the men we meet are distorted by our rose-colored glass slippers.

Prince Charming is nothing but a beast.

In this world, we save ourselves, and if that makes us less feminine, so be it.

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Self Portrait oil paint on canvas

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by Krista Wiese

VIOLIN LESSONS It became clear to Kansas midway through the symphony that she simply had to learn to play the violin. There was no way around it.

The instrument called to her from across the concert hall, sometimes soft like whispered promises and sometimes bold with fulfillment.

And there was this look of concentration and dreaming on the musicians’ faces that Kansas had never seen before. One second, they appeared to be deeply angry, enraged by the bounty of notes on the page, and the next second totally at peace, swaying like myrtle trees, shiny heels planted firmly on the stage.

Whatever it was that made them feel like that, she wanted it.

She told Mark when she got home. He, of course, had chosen to spend the night at home, chipping away at a work project and downing espresso shots from the machine he’d spent a fortune on the previous month.

Kansas understood completely. Symphonies weren’t for everyone—especially not busy, in-high-demand men like her fiancé. He always had some big deadline to meet, some blueprint or building proposal due that would somehow determine the course of his career.

If Kansas had that kind of pressure on her shoulders, she didn’t think she’d be able to sit through a symphony either.

“I think I’m going to learn to play violin,” she announced after plopping her purse and keys loudly on the kitchen counter to inform Mark of her arrival. He hadn’t seemed to hear the front door opening and closing behind her. At the sound of keys on granite, however, he turned around at his desk and greeted her with that dazed look of his that always made it seem he’d been interrupted mid-thought.

“So it’s violin now, is it?” he replied and smiled slowly.

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She brushed off the faint tang in his tone.

“Yup. I think I’ll start looking for a teacher tomorrow.”

She waited for him to ask her whether it was really a good idea to start a new hobby so soon. Hadn’t she just quit pottery last week?

But he just shrugged as if to say whatever floats your boat, which was something he said a lot, and then turned back to his desk. Kansas wondered why she even bothered to run anything by him anymore. It’s not like he’d ever said no. When she’d needed a place to stay that one rough year after high school— the year her mom had kicked her out for good and she hadn’t yet gotten the job at Ida’s— he’d said yes, first to a month and then a year and then forever. When her car broke down that same year, he bought her a new one, and when she needed help with tuition, he pitched in. Ever since they’d started dating five years ago, he’d made sure she never had to fend for herself the way she did growing up. Kansas knew she was lucky. Not every college dropout from a crappy family ended up with such a supportive partner.

Indeed, it seemed that luck was on Kansas’s side. A week after she’d set her sights on the violin, a man about her age—maybe 24 or 25— with a curly head of hair and a gray sweater vest sauntered into Ida’s Coffee House during the morning rush and asked her permission to hang an advertisement on the bulletin board.

“I teach violin lessons,” he explained, leaning against the counter so that Kansas could feel a sort of anxious energy tightening the air between them. The man did not look nervous with his firmly set jaw and questioning eyes, but Kansas had a gift for sensing what others

were feeling. At least, that’s what her mama told her. You got a gift for feelin’ others feelin’s but not much else. Barbara Johnson was one of those people who never had anything nice to say and still said it, so growing up, Kansas took whatever compliments she could get.

“Hello?” the man said, politely reminding Kansas of his presence.

“Yes, yes,” she said as though she had been present all the while. “I was just considering your request.”

“My request?”

“To put your flier on our wall.”

“Ah yes,” the man replied. “And your decision is?”

“Hm, I dunno. We got a lot of violin teachers up on that board right now.”

It was true, but also it wasn’t. There were indeed a lot of fliers for music lessons up on the wall, but that wasn’t the reason for her questioning. Today, Kansas had her own agenda. Ignoring the growing line of suits and shiny watches behind the man at the counter, she placed her hands on her hips and asked what exactly made him different from the other teachers.

“Well, you see,” he replied, seeming more comfortable by the minute, “I’m not actually a violin teacher. I don’t have any students.”

Kansas raised her eyebrows.

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“Yet,” he added quickly. “I’m actually a grad student up in Greensboro working on a research project. I’m studying techniques for teaching adult beginners, and I’m looking for adult students. See?” He pointed at the flier he’d placed between them on the counter.

In a smart looking font, it posed the question, Older than 21 and want to learn to play the violin?

That was Kansas to a tee. She couldn’t help but grin.

He smiled back, tentatively. “So is that a yes? Can I hang my flier?”

“Go right ahead, sweetie.” She waved him away with her customary endearment, and he thanked her.

If Kansas hadn’t had her mind so fixed on the violin, she might have noticed that he lingered a second longer than necessary before backing away from the counter. She might have spent her downtime between the morning and noon rush wondering about that interaction and whether he’d been flirting and whether she wanted him to be and whether it was okay for her to want that as an engaged woman. But seeing as she had bigger things to worry about, like how to get ahold of a violin and how to ask Mark for the money for the instrument and lessons, she had no need to think any further of the young violin teacher with his curiously green eyes and warm voice.

There had been no need for Kansas to worry about the $50 per lesson. Mark readily supplied the money as he had done for pottery classes and sailing lessons before that and community college when Kansas had a momentary change of heart toward further education and decided she wanted to give it a try after all. She lasted one semester before declaring college to be not for her. “Everyone hates each other there,” she complained one exasperated afternoon. “They get a group

project and you’d think they’d been damned to hell. Haven’t they ever had coworkers at their jobs before?”

Mark just smiled. He’d been through it all—a five-year undergraduate degree in architecture, a cutthroat job hunt, and finally the daily grind of a job he said he loved but seemed to hate. Like most, he’d attended an in-state university immediately after high school graduation and earned his degree by the age of 23. Kansas, however, had made the endlessly controversial decision to take a job as a barista and manager at Ida’s Coffee House after dropping out of college. It was a job she loved at the time—a job she still loved. Aside from stingy old men, rowdy teenagers, and middle-aged women with an attitude here and there, her job was a haven for her—a place where people told her all day long you made my day and she told them in turn to have a nice day and everyone all around felt like friends. People wouldn’t expect it, but she made good money, too. With tips, she had plenty to afford a small apartment, though she’d never needed to.

When her mother had kicked her out the day after high school graduation, she had told her to find someone else to take care of her needy ass.

And she had, almost right away. That someone else had been Mark, of course: her boyfriend of one year who, at the time, was nearly finished with undergrad and living well on a sizable trust fund.

Kansas hadn’t opted out of college because she loved making coffee; she’d dropped out

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because she hated her college experience and had been told her whole life she was a ditz, but it all worked out in the end because it turned out she did love making coffee and she was good at it too, so good that her customers almost never threw their drinks in her face.

It was at Ida’s that she’d experienced for the first time the feeling that she belonged, that she knew exactly what to do at every moment. With caffeine swirling in her chest and endless orders to fill, she knew exactly who she was. But the feeling never lasted longer than the drive home. Though she kept herself busy at home—baking and reading romance novels and chattering away to Mark on the days he worked from home—it never felt the same. She had to be doing something wrong, she reasoned, in order for work to feel like home and home to feel like work. Why did she feel so lost in the cozy rooms of her own house? When she brought it up to Mark, he’d said it was because she hadn’t yet found her purpose, the thing she really loved doing.

“I love making coffee,” she’d argued.

“C’mon Kansas. Does anyone really love being a barista?”

“I do,” she said quietly, but he was right.

Something was missing.

And so she took pottery classes. And tennis lessons and sailing lessons and second jobs. She hired personal trainers and nutritionists and tutors. She ran marathons and taught herself German. She was bad at most things she tried but enjoyed them all. All the while, Mark supported her, funding her ventures and asking no questions. To Kansas, that was trust—never asking any questions.

Mark trusted her more than anyone ever had.

The $50 dollars for violin lessons was an easy ask. His only questions were whether she’d really done her research on teachers and whether she’d considered piano instead since he’d heard it was easier. Insulted by the second question, she’d replied, “I played violin in middle school, you know. It’s really not that hard.”

“That was like, 12 years ago, Kansas,” he pointed out and laughed as though he’d said something funny.

She almost reminded him that she was capable of doing the math, but that seemed like something her mom would have called darn petty. “They’re beginner lessons,” she explained instead. “It’s impossible to fail.”

He dug the money out of his wallet and handed it to her in a way that said if you say so.

She took it from him, wondering why she’d even asked for money in the first place.

She didn’t need his help. She supposed it was because it felt wrong not to need it. And anyway, he liked to help. It was a win-win.

And so, with $50 bucks in hand, she drove an hour to Greensboro after her shift that Friday morning because she was over 21 and wanted to learn to play the violin. Perhaps all along it had been music that was missing.

She was simply one of those adult protégés who got a late start but wowed the world with late-blooming talent. She would perform on stages and audience members would throw roses at her. A man in a sweater vest with curly hair falling to his jaw would hand her a bouquet. Say, I knew you could do it. Blushing to herself in the car, she declared this to be a preposterously silly image and wondered how it ever got into her head.

When Kansas had called the number on the flier to schedule a lesson, she’d been given the address of a large university and the number of the classroom where the lessons would take place. She couldn’t help feeling a swell of anxiety as she stepped onto campus and joined the crowds of students meandering up the sidewalk toward the tall, rounded building she knew to be the music building.

The students walked with such purpose, as though each had received a paper upon graduation telling them go here and do this and you will be happy. Kansas had received no such paper. Perhaps her mom had torn up this hypothetical paper, she thought to herself somewhat sardonically. It would be like her to do something like that.

Barbara Johnson wasn’t one of those mothers who expected their daughters to

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do incredible things, but she also wasn’t one of those mothers who supported their daughters no matter what. She was that perfect storm of a woman who expected nothing of her daughter and yet was disappointed by everything she did. When Kansas told her she was joining her middle school’s orchestra, her mom responded with a look of exaggerated shock. You? But you don’t have a musical bone in your body. Kansas recalled feeling pleased to see her mom in the audience at her first concert. Here was her chance to prove that she did have a musical bone in her body. She nailed her mini solo in “Jingle Bells” and only missed a few notes in “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.” After the concert, she smiled shyly at her mom, awaiting the praise she thought she’d earned. Instead, her mom asked about the boy who sat first chair. He must have played violin a long time to be that good, she said, giving Kansas a sideways look. Those things take time.

Kansas had known for a long time that it was impossible to please her mother. If you didn’t want a kid in the first place, it won’t make a difference whether that kid plays violin or not.

Kansas knew that, but it didn’t make it hurt any less when she looked in her mother’s eyes and saw the absence of the thing she’d wanted since the day she was born. She quit violin soon after that first concert. It was too hard. That’s what she told her mom.

By the time Kansas arrived at Room 305 she had pushed all thoughts of her mother aside and had talked herself into her usual positivity.

Violin could be it. The thing that made her feel right. The thing that made her feel like she belonged in this world. The thing that made her feel at every moment the way she felt when she handed someone a perfectly frothed latte and said have a wonderful day, sweetie. She wasn’t in middle school anymore. She didn’t need her mom’s applause. She just needed to find the thing that made her happy. And violin could be it. With a light smile on her freckled face, she lifted her arm to knock on the door.

A voice from inside the classroom stopped her. It was a woman’s voice, strained with age

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and raised in frustration. “How am I supposed to play this stuff if I don’t even know what it sounds like?” she complained.

This seemed like a reasonable question to Kansas. She stepped back from the door and—though she’d been taught all her life that nosiness was a sin—glanced through the large classroom window to see exactly who was speaking. It was indeed an elderly woman, small and hunched around what looked to be a very old violin. Beside the woman stood the man from the coffee shop. She’d learned from the flier that his name was Archer Lin, but when she’d called to schedule the lesson, he introduced himself so quickly that now his first and last name were all mashed together in Kansas’s mind so that Archerlin was the name that popped into her head when she saw him.

The other thing that popped into her head was that she’d forgotten how good-looking he was.

He had on a corduroy jacket today instead of a vest, and it hugged his lanky frame in just the right way, bringing out muscled shoulders and a broad chest. His expression was easy and open, and that nervousness she’d sensed in him at the coffee shop was gone.

He smiled at the old woman and shook his head slightly. “You’re going to have to learn to read music eventually, Debbie,” he said. “You can’t keep copying everything I play.”

“I’m 70 years old,” she barked. “I do what I want.”

He seemed amused by this but nodded as though her argument had been sound.

“Alright then. I’ll play it for you one time. But it’s ‘Ave Maria.’ You know what it sounds like.”

“But I need to hear you play it.”

Kansas did not know what the woman meant until Archerlin began to play the piece and she suddenly realized that she too needed to hear him play it. That was exactly what she needed.

Though the song had clearly been pared down for a beginner, the richness and warmth that he drew from that simple page of music caused goosebumps to pop up all over Kansas’s arms. He closed his eyes partly when

he played and leaned into the instrument as though it was the hollow of a lover’s neck, a place he never wanted to leave. Every note received equal focus, equal attention so that each sang the song of the well-loved, and not even the glass separating Kansas from the music could dampen its beauty. With his long fingers arched on the bow, his jaw cradling the chin rest, and his left hand curved gently around the fingerboard, he played the piece as though it was something sacred and not an exercise from a book for amateurs. She’d seen violinists perform before, but there was something about the way he played this simple melody that awed Kansas. There was something about the way he turned toward the old woman at the conclusion of the piece, eyes bright with puppy dog excitement, and exclaimed, “Do you see now? It’s about feeling the music. You can do that!”

And the woman did. She played the piece as though the notes had been inside her head all this time. It wasn’t a beautiful performance by any means; Kansas grimaced at more than

one sour note. But the woman’s grin when she reached the end made all the missed notes seem okay. “I’ve still got it,” she said, a reference to the years she’d spent playing violin as a young woman.

“Of course you do,” Archerlin replied, and it was at that moment that he glanced over and spotted Kansas spying through the window. He smiled and waved her inside, explaining to Debbie that her time was unfortunately up for the day.

Kansas entered the room and introduced herself again to the man and to Debbie, who just scowled at her as though she was trespassing. “I’m Kansas Johnson,” she said and waved her hand once for no reason.

“Yes,” he replied warmly. “I remember from when you called earlier.”

“Well, now we’re in-person so it’s different,” she reasoned stupidly. Talking to people was so much more challenging when one was not behind a register.

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After introducing himself as call-meArcher, he gestured for Kansas to unpack her violin on a row of chairs off to the side.

She did so gently, considering the cost of the violin, though Mark hadn’t batted an eye when she asked for $2,000. Once again, she could have used her own money—she had plenty saved—but part of her had wanted to see Mark’s response to the request. She was surprised and somewhat disappointed by his lack of reaction; it was as though she’d planned a prank and it had failed.

“Don’t you want to know what the money is for?” she had asked.

“It’s for that clarinet thing, right?”

She figured he was teasing so she laughed and took the money.

Archerlin nodded approvingly at the violin. “That’s a nice beginner instrument,” he said, taking it from her hands and pulling the bow across the string a few times quickly.

“Is it really?” Kansas beamed. “I had no idea what I was doing when I bought it.”

“Well, it looks like you did your research,” he said as he handed it back to her.

She had done her research. Hours of it.

She was pleased that he could tell.

And when she picked up the violin and he asked if she’d played before, she couldn’t help but grin. “I played in middle school,” she said, then quickly added, “but that was like, 12 years ago so I don’t remember much.”

He smiled and boyish dimples appeared.

“I bet you remember more than you think you do.”

The lesson went on like this: him demonstrating, encouraging, guiding, Kansas fumbling, blushing, watching. All the while, an image of Archerlin’s face as he played “Ave Maria” stayed stuck in her head. The way he looked at that simple page of music—had she ever looked at anything that way? She knew she had. That was the way she looked at a perfect piece of latte art and the customer who received it. No, she realized. This was different. The way he looked at music was the way she looked at Mark. She supposed at one point she’d looked at her mom that way too.

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It was a look of caring, of hoping, of devotion.

Had anyone ever looked at her that way?

Halfway through the lesson, a single tear rolled down Kansas’s cheek. Her face turned red and blotchy the way it always did when she cried, catching the attention of the watchful man in the room who paused the lesson to ask if she was alright. “Are we moving too quickly? We can take a break,” he said with a tenderness that burned in Kansas’s chest.

“No, it’s nothing,” she sniffled. And then, never one to keep her thoughts to herself even when the thoughts were barely formed, she added quietly, “I’m just going through a breakup.”

Realizing it was not his place to question her further, he suggested they continue the lesson another day, and Kansas agreed.

“I’ll see you again next week,” he said as she left the room, and for some reason, those were the words that replayed in her head as she sobbed to country music the whole drive home. He expected her to come back. No one ever expected anything of Kansas. She’d forgotten how good it felt. n

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KASEY VANDENBOOM

Mind and Body, 16” x 20” acrylic, collaged paper, and gold leaf on wood panel

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FALL OUT

by Caroline E. Bell

I sat and watched the leaves fall.

I sat and watched as you sat by my side and I explained that I didn’t know if I loved you anymore.

I have a strange desire to rip my skin open until stars pour out of my chest and constellations dance between my eyelashes.

I wonder if you’ve ever been in love with yourself.

As the leaves combat the gentle breeze I wonder if I have gotten lost in the way I understand and cherish my mind.

I question my motivations for being attached to someone other than myself and feel defeated.

How am I to love after I have already found such a perfect companion within this skin?

What happens after I lose her too?

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MY FIRST DAYS WITHOUT YOU

by Sadie Rounds

Trigger warning: death of a family member Walking through the front door of our house had never felt so difficult. I hesitated at the doorknob, almost dropping my keys as I attempted to unlock the door with my shaky hands. The last time I had come through this doorway was with Jenny, my right shoulder perched under her left arm as she tried her best to breathe deeply in between shouts of pain. As I finally stepped inside after a few moments of struggling, it was eerily quiet.

The weight of holding up my wife at nearly 10 months pregnant just a few days prior was nothing compared to the grief-filled gravity that was trying its hardest to pull me down.

I struggled to lug the carrier that held our newborn baby girl into our small house under the pressure of seeing everything just how we had left it, even though my life couldn’t be any more different.

The room was bathed in soft gold, the warm glow from the lamp light shining in the living room distantly covering us in the kitchen. All the lamps we forgot to turn off when we left in a rush to get to the hospital.

All the lamps I jokingly made fun of Jenny for purchasing at various thrift stores because we had a perfectly working overhead light.

The fullness and warmth of the glow our house gave juxtaposed the cold vacancy in my heart that Jenny’s absence left. I glanced around slowly, noticing the little traces of life left behind: the half-drunk mug of green tea sitting on the table, the chairs still pulled out from their rightful spots, Jenny’s favorite cardigan hanging from the back of one.

I hadn’t been allowed to bring our baby home until a few days after she was born. I was immensely relieved when the kind nurse who had helped me through the last few days had finally told me to go home. At the

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hospital, I couldn’t stop looking through the window of the room, my focus pulled almost magnetically to the bed where I had last seen Jenny. The room still felt like her, smelled like her. Or maybe that was some psychological trick. Everything that had occurred that day felt like something out of a nightmare. At first, I couldn’t tell if I was in a conscious state or not. Logically, I knew that they had cleaned the whole room and washed the sheets. They might have even switched out the whole mattress. I had never seen so much blood in my life. I allowed myself to believe they hadn’t, though. I held onto the shred of hope that there was still part of her there. She was supposed to be okay. I couldn’t remember what the doctor said had happened to her.

He had given me an informational packet; it was in the bottom of the bag that rested on my shoulder, crumpled slightly from my tense grip and the drying tears littering the pages.

I vaguely remembered the nurse reminding me about future check-ups, but recalling the information was beyond what I could comprehend right then. The nurses could all tell that going home might be best for both me and our baby. She had cried the whole way home, and I felt myself getting choked up as I tried to calm her down. I pulled over three separate times just to rock her and feed her the bottle that the nurse had made for me already, her tears running into her collar as she calmed down while drinking. But as I started the car again each time, she had gotten worked up and began screaming again.

I tried not to think about the fact that if Jenny were here, she would sit with the baby in the back seat and make sure she was okay.

By the time I made it inside with the door closed and locked behind me, she had calmed

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down a bit, seeming to have worn herself out a little. I set the carrier and my bag down on the ground as gently as I could, careful not to stir her too much. Her eyes were struggling to stay open, in part from the puffiness of her eyelids, and in part because she was exhausted. I bent down and unclipped her seatbelt before picking her up with the greatest amount of care I could muster. I took a deep breath to calm myself, worried that the baby would be able to sense any lasting anxieties I had, and decided to give her a tour of our home to distract myself from the pain I was feeling inside. I held her up slightly to give her a good look at every room. “This is the kitchen, and over there is the living room.

There’s the bathroom and Mama and Daddy’s room…and right here is your nursery,” I said

quietly, turning on the lamp next to her crib before glancing down at her for the first time in a minute or so. She was fast asleep. I held her close, rocking her for just a moment and giving her one last kiss on her head before placing her in the crib. Looking at her fondly, I felt my heart surge with more love than I had ever felt in my entire life.

I would never be able to forget the first time I laid eyes on our baby. The same nurse who had helped me through my time in the hospital had led me to the large window in the wall separating us and the babies. I instantly knew which one was ours; second row, third crib in. I remember vaguely hearing the nurse say, “Mr. Perez, meet your healthy baby girl,” but I was too wrapped in admiration to fully comprehend what she had said. I remembered

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tears pooling in my eyes again, or maybe they had never stopped. Our baby was here, and she was healthy. Our baby.

“Jenny,” I had whispered, stepping closer to the glass. “Look at our baby.”

“Would you like to hold her?” the nurse asked, breaking me out of my state. Unable to form words, I nodded and followed her into the door next to the window. She led me to the crib and gently picked up the baby, placing her into my shaking arms. I watched as the drops falling from my eyes fell onto the blanket wrapped around her. She was so small, so perfect. I choked out a laugh, my tears interrupting the sentiment.

“You look just like your mom,” I said quietly, rocking her slightly, careful not to wake her. Sniffling, I ran my thumb gently over her cheek. Her nose scrunched up slightly, and I could feel a swell in my chest at the sight. Jenny would always scrunch her nose when she was happy. I couldn’t say how long I stood there, just staring at her.

For those moments, I remembered feeling nothing but love and happiness. This baby girl in front of me was my whole world. I had only known her for a few moments, but I already knew that she was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

Looking back at her now, I couldn’t help myself as I placed my thumb gently on her cheek once again. Her nose scrunched up just as before, and as the tears filled my eyes and began to fall, I couldn’t bring myself to look away. I was scared that if I turned my back for a single second, my only source of happiness, the flicker of light in this endlessly dark tunnel, might disappear. I imagined Jenny next to me now, watching our baby sleep for the first time in our home. It hurt, God, did it hurt, knowing that she was only a figment of my unattainable daydream. However, watching our daughter now, sleeping soundly in front of me, I knew that it was my duty as a husband and father to be there for the baby in every way possible, despite how heart-

wrenching it was to imagine doing it without Jenny by my side.

Deciding it would be best to let her sleep for as long as possible, I turned on the baby monitor that we had set up a few days before, turned off the lamp, and stopped in the doorway.

I turned around and looked back at the nursery we had begun putting together a few months back. I could see Jenny in her long sleeve shirt and overalls, baby bump poking out just enough to be noticeable. She held two paint samples up to the wall, one light green and the other lavender. She was so excited, she said, to finally put her art degree to use.

As if I was watching a movie, I saw myself walk up behind her and wrap my arms around her waist, my hands resting on her stomach.

She dropped her arms gently over my own and leaned her head back to lay it against my chest. Standing here now, staring into the dark room, I could still feel her somehow. I laid a hand over the spot on my chest, closed my eyes and sighed, and shut the door behind me as quietly as I could.

I walked out to the kitchen to pick up the rest of my things when the small whiteboard magnetized to our fridge caught my eye. I walked toward it slowly, seeing the words “BABY NAMES” written across the top in Jenny’s handwriting.

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Alexander January Oliver (Jenny’s favorite boy) Cornelius Mariposa/Posie (Grammy’s favorite girl) Noelle (Jenny’s favorite girl) I had gotten so used to the list on the fridge that, until now, I had stopped noticing it. It was only a week or two after we found out Jenny was pregnant, and I remembered how excited she was at Target looking for a white board. We had gone through every possible name for the baby before narrowing it down to those six. I could still hear her next to me, laughing as I wrote down the most outlandish names I could think of. I could almost feel her, too, placing her hands on my shoulders as she looked into my eyes with a fond annoyance and stated plainly, “Austin, we are not naming our child Cornelius.”

I remembered myself chuckling and placing my arm over Jenny’s shoulder, pulling her as close to my side as I could. “And why should we pick one of your names?”

“Well, for one,” Jenny began, looking up at me from the side as she grabbed the hand that was on her shoulder. “I thought we had agreed on Oliver. And secondly,” she added quickly, noticing that I was about to jokingly retort to push her buttons, “I always dreamed of naming my daughter Noelle.”

“I know, I remember meeting your baby doll the first time we visited your parents,” I had responded, shuddering dramatically as I remembered the terrifying doll who was missing an eye, donning a tiny Christmas sweater that had the words “The First Noel” stitched across the top with an embroidery of an angel underneath. Jenny clearly recognized my reaction as a familiar discomfort at the memory of seeing the doll for the first time, and she started laughing quietly as she leaned her head on my shoulder.

Pulling myself back to the present, I raised my shaking hand up to the board and touched it lightly, careful not to erase any of the words. Hand still shaking, I picked up the marker attached to the board and put a star next to Noelle. Our daughter’s face flashed

briefly in my mind as I stared at the name on the board, and I could picture Jenny leaning over the crib early in the morning, softly saying, “Good morning, Noelle,” a fond smile on her face.

Exhausted, I made my way numbly to our room, recalling what I had said to Noelle when I gave her the tour: Mama and Daddy’s room.

I dropped my bag on the floor and stepped into the bathroom. There she was again, the figment of my imagination. Jenny was sitting on the floor, holding a pregnancy test in her hand, crying with a bright smile. I crouched down next to her, and she showed it to me, the two lines strongly contrasting with a blank background. I turned to her and kissed her with more affection swelling in my heart than I knew was possible, and I could taste the saltiness of both of our tears in the corner of my mouth.

Reality caught up to me, and the bathroom remained empty in front of me.

I turned back around and didn’t bother changing. It wasn’t fair. I couldn’t figure out how to feel. What was supposed to be the best day of our lives had turned into the worst day of my life. Why…why did she have to die? Her pregnancy was extremely difficult and painful, but I thought that was normal. The doctors always said we would be able to manage it.

Why wasn’t she okay? How was I supposed to do this without her? How was I supposed to do anything without her?

As I walked toward the bed, ready to fall into it and forget everything that had occurred that day, I tripped over my disregarded bag. As I went to move it out of the way, I remembered the packet the doctor had given me that was filled with answers to the questions that were killing me slowly.

I sat on the floor next to the bag and pulled out the papers. The first page informed me of what she had been through: Placenta previa occurs when a baby’s placenta partially or totally covers the mother’s cervix—the outlet for the uterus. Placenta previa can cause severe, possibly life-threatening bleeding during pregnancy and delivery… volume

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Reading any more became difficult as my eyes once again filled with tears. I dropped the paper and shakily stood up before immediately falling into bed, landing face-first into Jenny’s pillow. It smelled like her shampoo. I felt a sob building up, and I did nothing to diminish it. I couldn’t say how long I laid there, crying and hoping that this whole day had just been an elaborate scheme by the gods above and that Jenny would be there if I ever woke up. I was pulled back into reality by the crackling sound of Noelle’s crying through the monitor on my nightstand. I turned over, half-expecting to see Jenny sound asleep, breathing peacefully, as if the worst parts of the day were just a nightmare. She wasn’t there.

I took a deep breath before willing myself to get up. Noelle’s screams seemed to be coming from every side of me as she came through both the monitor and the walls. I walked to her room and opened the door slowly, turning on the lamp next to her bed before picking her up gently. The sight and sound of her misery was enough to bring back my own, and I struggled to figure out exactly how to help her.

“It’s okay, Noelle. It’s okay,” I repeated quietly. It took me a minute, but I remembered what the nurse had told me earlier that day about feeding the baby whenever she woke up. I continued to rock Noelle as I made my way to the kitchen. Trying to make her a bottle while keeping her and myself from breaking down even more was a stress more overwhelming than I had ever known. I knew deep down that if Jenny was here, I wouldn’t be making a bottle since the baby would have probably been breastfed. I tried to suppress the thought, making the bottle as quickly as possible with my one free hand, trying to measure the formula accurately through the tears blocking my vision.

As soon as the bottle was in her mouth, Noelle was silent; the whole house was

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silent. I closed my eyes and leaned against the counter, breathing out a heavy sigh while holding the bottle in place. How am I supposed to do this all night on my own?

I walked into the living room with Noelle as she continued eating, looking around more intently at all of the frames that we had accumulated over the last few years covering the walls. Many were paintings that Jenny had done in college for her final art show; pictures of us with various friends and family filled the spaces between. Thinking about having to tell all the smiling faces in these pictures about what happened to Jenny caused a panic to begin rising in my chest, and I looked away as soon as I noticed it.

My gaze fell on the portrait we had done at our wedding. One of Jenny’s best friends from college, also a bridesmaid at our wedding, had a small side business of painting wedding portraits during the reception. She had painted Jenny and I during our first dance; the portrait was Jenny’s and my most prized possession. Looking at it now, knowing she would never experience the joy of looking at it again…

I couldn’t help it this time as the same panicked feeling rose in my chest, causing me to suddenly let out a sob. Realizing Noelle was still in my arms, I looked down at her and noticed she had finished about half of her bottle and was staring up at me with blind curiosity. I drew in a shaky breath and felt the warm tears pouring over my cheeks. I pulled Noelle closer to my chest as I sunk down to the floor, my back against the front of the couch, one arm supporting Noelle, the other holding up the bottle. My body shook with convulsive gasps as I struggled to come to terms with my grief, tears running as freely now as they had first done when the doctor told me that Jenny…that Jenny didn’t make it.

I looked at the ceiling and did my best to calm my breathing to almost no avail. I knew

if I had continued on, Noelle would get the same idea and lose interest in her bottle, but it was too difficult to envision a life without Jenny in it. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Her laugh rang through the deepest depths of my memory, matched perfectly with her bright smile and eyes. Her fond eye-roll when I told her only two weeks earlier that I was going to grow a mustache and call it my Dad-stache. Her pout in the bathroom mirror when I couldn’t take it anymore and shaved it off. The excruciating look on her face in the rearview mirror as she screamed in the back of the car while I rushed to the hospital just a few days before. She was in so much pain.

God, Jenny. I would do anything to take the pain away. I wish I could take it back. I would rather have her in pain if it meant she was still here. I guiltily tried to push away the selfish thought, even if it was the truth.

I screwed my eyes shut as more tears fell down my face. How was I supposed to be the good dad that I needed to be without the

woman who I had always considered to be the better half of me by my side?

I took a few long, shuddering breaths as I wracked my brain for any possible solution for how to help Noelle have a fulfilling life, at least this early on. I hoped that any problemsolving I could do would help distract me from the pain. I knew that my parents were going to get on the next possible flight to make their way here, and despite not really liking Jenny at first, my mom had grown to love her and had been looking forward to having a grandchild since we announced the pregnancy.

She would be happy to help, I knew for sure, but there was no telling how soon they would get here. Maybe Val would be able to come? No, I couldn’t possibly call her at this hour. Thinking about my sister brought a slight sense of relief to my wired mind. I would call her as soon as it was a more reasonable time.

I looked back down at Noelle. Her eyelashes rested perfectly against her soft skin. I could hear and feel her tiny gulps as

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she devoured her meal. Somehow, looking at how serene she was in this moment helped calm me down as well, even if in that moment it was only a slight reprieve. We seemed to be each other’s anchors. Looking down at her, at our perfect child, I realized with a start that Jenny wasn’t completely gone. She was here, in Noelle’s steely blue eyes and her button nose. I knew deep down she was in her smile, as well. I had just gone through the worst thing I could possibly imagine, and I didn’t know if there would ever be a day when my grief would subside. Looking at Noelle, though, I saw that I did have something worth living for, something worth smiling over even at the lowest point in my life. I didn’t know exactly how to feel, but I didn’t need to know.

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“Jenny,” I whispered, pulling Noelle impossibly closer to my chest. “Our baby, Noelle,” I breathed out, worried making a sound would cause an imminent breakdown.

“Will we be okay?” I asked, not expecting a response, but hoping for any clarity nevertheless. The only thing that I knew was that I had our baby girl, our baby Noelle. I knew Jenny wasn’t completely erased; parts of her were still here. Noelle would grow into an amazing woman, just like her mother was; I was sure of that. It might have been too much pressure to put on her, but in that moment, Noelle was the only thing keeping me from being dragged down to rock bottom. Maybe someday, I would be able to see that she was all I really needed. n

PAIGE RYAN

Young Desert Big Horn in the Valley of Fire photography

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M O V I N G

by Sophie Lee

I laid back against the cool leather of the car seat, trying to gather my thoughts as cars whizzed past my window. The sun was setting, and the light was almost directly shining into my eyes, but that was the least of my problems. Next to me, my dad gripped the steering wheel steadily. His eyes were focused on the road, but I knew that his mind was somewhere else like mine was. A glance to the right gave me a glimpse of his graying hair, and I was launched right back into my own concerns, knowing that this experience had probably aged all of us by at least 10 years.

The soft cotton of one of my favorite t-shirts was a welcome contrast to the itchy and cold fabric of a hospital gown. However, the thin fabric no longer hugged my skin the way it used to. Even my tightest pair of leggings, which I liked to wear because they gave the impression that I actually had a shape, were loose. The material bunched up around the knees and near my thighs in the unflattering way I hated, just another obvious sign that things had changed. My dad started to turn his head in my direction, and I quickly swung my head back to the right, wanting to avoid conversation as I watched the hospital building fade into the distance. The tan bricks looked warmer in the evening light and the glass windows looked far more open from the outside. I rested my head in the palm of my hand as I fixed my gaze on my medical prison.

“How do you feel?” my dad asked quietly, and I didn’t answer.

Tracing back to the source where everything started brings back vivid memories. That summer, my family and I had visited my uncle and his family on their farm in West Virginia as per usual. We always made

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EMMA FRY

Corinthian Column No. 7’ (“Bloodbath”), 7ft x 2ft ceramic

an effort to visit our extended family every year, and we usually visited my Uncle John because he had the biggest house and the most space for us kids to mess around. The kids usually consisted of my sister, my cousins Ryan, Mary Ellen, and John Patrick and then Uncle John’s kids Levi, Kate, and Taylor.

There was always some kind of chaos. There were always kids running frantically through the house, kids jumping on the trampoline outside, kids chasing each other through the corn field, and kids playing made-up games in the wide-open backyard. That summer, my uncle had just bought lambs and cows as he wanted Kate and Taylor to start showing cows at the West Virginia state fair. I always hated cleaning the animals, especially because I hated getting dirty and the animals’ stench made me want to gag, but I did it because my mom said so and because I didn’t want to look lazy. Washing the cows was disgusting and I screamed the whole time in my head, but I did it anyway and nothing felt different.

We ate dinner that night as a big family like usual, and the rest of our stay was completely normal. Our quick trip to Washington, D.C. before our trek back to Colorado had also been painless and normal.

The issue started a few days after we arrived back in Colorado. I woke up in intense pain, my abdomen feeling as if someone had wedged a knife in it and was slowly twisting it. What started out as an initial trip to the doctor resulted in tears, admission to the hospital, and a whole bunch of nurses asking questions. I was at the children’s hospital close to our house, but after multiple tests were run, it was decided that I needed to be transferred to the main hospital in Aurora,

and I had my first ambulance ride. It wasn’t an emergency, and they didn’t need to turn on the flashing lights, but I still tell people I rode in an ambulance. My memories after this point start to run together as my condition kept worsening, but there are moments that I do recall.

“On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level?”

I got used to the blending of night and day, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed it. I got used to the only images I could see being the ones I conjured up in my dreams. I got used to the taunting, blue light of the monitor keeping track of my vitals. I got used to the pervasive smell of Clorox, the whirr of the hand sanitizer machine going off before anyone would enter the room, and the aggressive yellow robes that doctors and nurses had to wear because E. coli is an infectious disease.

There was persistent nausea, constant confusion, barely the energy to move a finger, and the odd images I would see but couldn’t quite distinguish from reality. There were nasty, chalky pills and never-ending wires pumping nutrients and other liquids into my body. There was the pain of being able to see and hear but not respond. Being in a semicomatose state the majority of the time meant I also got used to feeling pretty helpless.

Simple things like sitting up and even eating food became challenges that I dreaded. Being helpless for so long takes a toll on your mental health, and I found myself trying to be passive to everything so I didn’t have to feel the emotions. I didn’t want to think about my emotions because I knew that would open a floodgate I couldn’t close. Focusing on the

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facts and diagnoses from the doctors was far better than focusing on the devastation from the loss of my independence. However, the constant presence of at least one of my family members made ignoring the humanity of the situation a constant challenge. I needed their support, but I also resented it at times.

“So we have two options.”

“Okay,” my Dad replies evenly.

“She has something called a stricture in her colon. It’s a result of the E. coli. We need to run some tests, but what’s going to happen is we are either going to do an ileostomy, meaning that we’ll connect part of her small intestine to the abdominal wall. Her waste will be emptied out into a bag until the colon heals, or we can try something else. It just depends on the test,” the doctor reports bluntly.

I’m only partially listening. The only thing I can focus on is that term the doctor had just used. What’s an ileostomy? The doctor directly asks me if I have any questions, but I shake my head. I do have questions, but what I really want to do is look it up on my phone after he leaves to see how bad it’ll be. He gives me a diplomatic smile before nodding and then exiting the room. My dad asks me how I’m feeling about it, and I reply with my usual “I’m fine.” I’m not really fine, but I haven’t been in the mood to talk about any part of this experience for a while. I don’t think I’ll ever want to talk about it. I know my dad means well, and I know my attitude is probably making things worse, but I can’t help it. I’m too angry at everything and everyone to really consider the consequences of my actions and mood. I pick up my phone and quickly Google what an ileostomy is. It’s an opening in the abdominal wall made during surgery.

It creates a stoma, which is the part that will stick out of my stomach and will be how my

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body will get rid of waste. I will have to wear a bag over it and change it frequently. I won’t be able to use my colon or go to the bathroom normally. I stare at my screen after reading up on the surgery. It doesn’t sound fun. I don’t want it. Why can’t I just have one thing go right for once?

It’s not a guarantee that I will need an ileostomy, but there’s a part of me deep down that’s telling me this is the result. I ignore it. I don’t want this. I don’t want to have to wear a bag. How will I be a normal teenager like that?

“I’m gonna take a nap,” I announce quickly.

“Okay.”

My dad nods understandingly from his position on the fold out sofa under the window. He’s on his iPad like usual. It’s better that way; I don’t want any attention on me.

I slowly close my eyes and try to ignore the harsh hospital lights as I begin my prayer.

Lord, please don’t let me have to have an ostomy bag. I really don’t want it. I pray that the results are good and that this isn’t the outcome. Lord, I have already been through so much, please just let this one thing work out. I’ll cut the attitude; I’ll be a new person after I get out of the hospital. Lord, please just let me not have to have an ostomy bag. Please.

Parts of my colon are damaged; it’s bad.

The doctors decide that the best treatment is to go through with an ileostomy.

“On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level?”

There was always some kind of liquid feeding into my veins. The sting of the IV not being quite aligned was almost always overshadowed by the numb coldness of my arms. It was always cold. There were always eyes on me, scrutinizing every detail and clocking the information into a chart or in their mind to tell a doctor later. One of my

parents was always there beside me, listening intently to the doctors’ and nurses’ feedback and taking mental notes on how they could help me. They were always watching me with careful eyes even when I was too absorbed in my own pity to notice. There was a thin layer of ice in my tone whenever I would have to describe the aching pain yet again to another stranger when I returned to the hospital for the second time. There were moments when one of my parents would crack as well, and I’d hear the desperation and grief leak into their tone. There was the tightening of my throat and the strong set to my jaw, not just when I had to be on a breathing tube and not just when I had to have an NG tube stuck down my throat to feed nutrients directly into my stomach. There were the stable and comforting hands of my mother or father wherever I’d have to have another needle or medical pipe stuck into me. There was the undeniable squeezing of my heart whenever my mind would wander back to a time where just breathing didn’t hurt me, or when thoughts of a future without assistance crossed my mind. But there were also moments where my heart would jump with hope and feelings I just couldn’t voice in the moment because they were so overwhelming.

“On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level?”

It’s nighttime at the hospital. Outside, I can see the glow of other buildings, the streetlamps outside the hospital entrance, and the faint outline of the highway. Inside my room, the lights are on full blast where my various wires, connected to a giant pole, are on display. Inside my room, nothing has really changed, but outside the hospital walls I know people are scurrying home and are busy living out their own lives. My dad is sitting in the only green chair meant for guests, watching

EMMA FRY

detail of Corinthian Column No. 7’ ceramic

something on his iPad. I can’t see what time it is, but I have the familiar feeling that comes with repeating the same actions every day that it’s almost time for shift change. It’s time for the night nurses to come, and it’s also time for my dad to go home and rest for the next day and for my mom to spend the night with me. However, when I hear a brief knock and then the door opens a second later, I find myself pleasantly surprised from the break in routine.

“I’ve brought a visitor!” my mom declares happily.

Behind her, my younger sister steps into the room and waves at me. It may just be me, but she seems older. Her dark brown hair is tied back into a ponytail and it looks like she’s still wearing her school clothes, so she must not have gotten ready for bed yet. I don’t say it aloud because we’ve never had that kind of relationship—actions are more natural to us—but I’m excited to see her. It feels like we’ve been part of two different worlds while I’ve been here, and I feel an odd sense of responsibility wash over me when I realize that she’s already started her freshman year of

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high school. I should have been there to show her the ropes, not that I have much more insight, but it’s an older sibling duty. Instead, I decide to make up for it by interrogating her about her high school experience so far and asking how marching band is going. The awareness that was present when she first stepped in has disappeared, and we easily slip back into our usual dynamic, gossiping about teachers and students. I show her some video I’ve been watching recently on YouTube, and she shows me one that she’s been watching.

For a second, I can almost believe we’re at home watching the same video on our separate phones on our respective sofas. I can hear my parents talking quietly in the background. I know they’re talking about me, but I can also hear the inflection in their voices and know that at least some positive things are being exchanged.

It’s not perfect. I’m still experiencing a baseline of pain even as we talk about high school freshman woes, but it gives me a moment of peace and some semblance of normalcy. When Charlotte’s visit eventually comes to an end, she goes to sit in the middle of both of my parents on the hard pull out sofa, and I get a small glimpse of our little family just trying to make it through. As they sit against the large hospital window, I finally start to see how my trauma has taken a toll on all of us, not just myself. Actually seeing the changes in some of the only people who truly know what’s going on shows me the significance I’d been trying to avoid.

“On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level?”

I feel the cold, wet cloth glide across my skin even though it isn’t even touching me. We’re

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at home after the first hospital trip, and the sensation hits me as if it is happening in real time even though I can clearly see my mom still opening the packet of wipes. She carefully pulls out a single piece while I sit next to her patiently. My mom’s eyes are focused and her hands are steady, but I know she wishes she didn’t have to do this. She has told me before that if she could trade places with me then she would. I appreciate the sentiment, and just with that quote, I know that my illness is something that affects the whole family.

Both my parents are fantastic at being strong and supportive for me, but there are simple moments like these that remind me that it isn’t easy. I know how horrible this experience is firsthand, but I can only imagine what it’s like from their perspective. As my mom continues preparing the medical supplies, I realize that I don’t even know what I would do if I was in my parents’ position. I don’t think I could be as strong if our roles were reversed.

My left arm is already exposed to the cool air in our dining room, ready to go. A small wire pokes out from the top, inner part of my left arm. “It’s called a PICC line,” the nurse had explained. All I really understand is that it’s a different kind of IV; it goes straight to my heart, and my mom is terrified to be the one to have to pump the medicine into my veins. I understand that she is scared that she’s going to accidentally pump too much air into my veins whenever she flushes the wire. Even with a few months of experience now, I still see how careful and calculated her movements are. I still see the gears turning in her head as I sit there with my arm resting gently on our dining room table. My mom meticulously rubs the wipe all over the tip of the IV just to make sure that it’s thoroughly sterilized. The

squeaky sounds of cloth on plastic permeate the room as my mom concentrates. She then gingerly picks up the syringe filled with air, fits it into my IV, and slowly pushes the air through. My mom’s measured breaths come out shallow until the syringe is finally empty, then she lets it all out in one, relieved breath.

“Okay, that wasn’t so bad!” she announces.

She always does that. I know she’s stressed, but she always tries to put a positive spin on things since she knows that I have a pretty negative outlook. She’s already reaching for the second syringe containing the actual medicine before I even have a chance to respond, but I know she only really said that to reassure herself. I twist my arm slightly so she can have better access and hear the click of the syringe fitting into the IV a second later.

I jolt slightly when the cold fluid suddenly reaches my arm; even though I’m anticipating it, the sensation still catches me off guard. The process is over before I can even wonder how long it will take, and then both my mom and I are relaxing back against our seats. It’s done.

The torn-up packages containing the one-use

wipes and the syringes lay strewn across the table, evidence of what we’ve accomplished.

We’ll clean it up, as usual, and forget about it until the next day when the process will repeat itself, but the image will always linger.

Sitting stock still in our dining room with my arm propped on the table will be something my body will remember even hours after we finish, even years after I get the PICC line removed, even when I go back to the hospital a second time and have to get a different one in the other arm.

“On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level?”

By the end of the year, I’d been out of the hospital, back in, and then back out again. I had been in the hospital a total of two times, and I had ended up spending a whole 80 days there. The rest of my recovery process also proceeded like this, in lingering pieces.

There are pockets of time from 2015 that I distinctly recall, and the majority are filled with white sheets, white covers, and pristine medical supplies. They are filled with that disgustingly clean, chemical scent of alcohol

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detail of Corinthian Column No. 7’ ceramic

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wipes and splitting pain fanning out from my stomach all the way to my head. These moments were tough and continue to be tough as they suddenly flash into my mind, but they challenge me the same way criticism lights a fire underneath me. Thinking back on my medical scare is strange. It sometimes feels as if I’m recalling another life, it’s so unreal. When I think back on some of these moments, I’m met with pride for being so resilient instead of bitterness for having to go through them in the first place. I see my physical scars and know they are a symbol of my strength. I see myself smiling brightly in present day photos surrounded by my family members and know that we survived that trauma. I see their joyful expressions and understand that we’ve all come a long way.

“On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level?”

My dad’s blue BMW takes a right onto Orchard, the main street that connects our small neighborhood. Familiar brown trees and white two story houses come into view as we stroll along. My elementary school teacher’s house is right on the corner, and I note that she’s gotten her roof redone. The speed limit sign flashes as we pass by: my dad’s going exactly 25 miles an hour. The small brick church at the end of our street

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where I learned to ride my bike has also gotten an upgrade. The words are no longer faded and the font has been updated to fit a more modern audience. Two brown horses gallop freely in the open field next to the church. It’s winter, so the trees are mostly dead and shriveled like the moisture has been sucked out of them—it’s not entirely wrong since Colorado is extremely dry. Despite the somber atmosphere, I find myself smiling with excitement as we take a left onto our street, Dogwood. I’ve driven this exact route hundreds of times and have ridden it even more, and it will never cease to evoke some nostalgia. My dad slows down as the car bridges the curb, and then he pulls the rest of the way up the incline into our open garage.

When I open the passenger door, I’m struck in the face with crisp Colorado air and a strong sense of déjà vu. I’m standing exactly where I was three years ago, feet firmly planted on cold concrete and staring at our creaky front door that leads to our kitchen. Except this time, I open the car door myself. This time, my mom doesn’t have to hold my arm like I’m about to topple over with each wobbly step. This time, I haven’t returned with a wire sticking out of my arm and emotions I have no idea how to process. This time, when my dad asks how I feel, I can say “great” without any reservations. n

LYDIA GUNN

Kingdom Come Shoes acrylic leather paint on Nike Jordan 1 shoes

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9 MONTH REHABILITATION

by M.J. Solorzano Ariza

Month 1 Oblivious to your presence, I’m taking shot after shot, numbing the pain and trying to forget the man for whom I gave up my sanity.

Month 2 Still unknown to me, I’m sobbing night after night, contemplating my life and questioning if I’m worth anything.

I’m not.

Month 3 I know.

It took four tests to convince me.

How can I bring you into a world I don’t want to live in myself?

I break the silence and go to your father.

He provides the comfort I so desperately need.

Month 4 We’re keeping you.

We’re going to be a family.

We will move in together.

We will make it work.

That’s what we told my parents.

Month 5 He’s not taking my calls anymore.

We will be together soon is all he writes.

But while he’s warming up to another woman, I’m warming up to you.

Can you hear me read to you at night?

I hope it makes up for the crying.

LYDIA GUNN

Beyond This Cage ceramics and wire

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Month 6 I moved in with him, but we’ve never been further apart.

He spends his days high on whatever while I scream into our empty apartment.

I’m sorry.

I hope the Mozart I blast through the speakers is enough to conceal my disappointment.

Month 7 The waiting room is filled with pregnant wives and supportive husbands.

It’s too bad he’s too busy to witness your growth.

My belly is the size of a melon.

I feel warmth with every move you make, and I hope my voice does the same for you.

My singing is off key, but I want you to know me.

Month 8 I moved back in with my parents.

The room I once called mine is now ours, filled with boxes and boxes of diapers, tiny onesies, and shoes.

You’re not even here yet, but you’re already loved by everyone.

Month 9 We’ve both grown so much.

You have mended my broken heart.

I regained my sanity and made sure I was worthy.

I am worthy.

August 9, 2017 I finally hold you in my arms.

I get to press you against my chest and smell your hair.

I will love you forever.

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by Kate Polaski

A DAY IN THE LIFE Trigger warning: mentions of self harm and disordered eating Today is one of those days where I am not inhabiting my own body. I have spent so much time reading that I have started narrating my own thoughts like a book, but I don’t mind that because it feels far easier than actually thinking. I force myself to keep reading a story that makes me cry, and it’s been so long since I felt anything hard enough to make tears leak out of my eyes that it feels like coming home.

I keep wandering back into the kitchen.

And I eat because I have to. Because I have nothing else to do. I shove Oreo after Oreo into my mouth, hoping they’ll fill up something empty inside of me, but they never do. While I’m chewing (ferociously, ravenously, like a wild wolf who doesn’t know when he’ll get his next meal, despite my full stocked fridge and pantry), I know that I will hate myself for this later, that I will lie in my bed thinking of how much I weigh and contemplate starving myself even though I never follow through, but I keep going for some undefinable reason.

I open my phone’s notes app and stare at the empty waiting page. I have so many words inside me that I need to write, but they all come out wrong and out of order and I am sure that anyone else trying to read them would think that I am either crazy or trying too hard to seem crazy. Most days, I don’t know which is true either. I try to write a poem, but it has no strong images to center on, and the line breaks feel gratuitous, so I give up.

I lie down in the dark on my bed. My heart beats in my chest, and it feels too fast and too hard, but I have never had anyone

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else’s heart, so I have no means to judge. My fingernails are all bitten down to stubs and the skin around them covered in hangnails, but I still pick at them, looking for one small thing to ruin of my own volition. I squeeze my watery eyes shut, hoping that will finally silence my brain, but they refuse to obey me, popping back open after a few seconds to stare into the blurry dark void above my bed.

The blinds on my window are down, but they let in little strips of light between them and I wish I could make the room darker so I didn’t have to see anything, but when I try to shut them tighter, the blinds only quiver in a way that seems to be threatening to break, so I stop. There is a shaft of light coming from under my door too. My roommate is still doing laundry, the dryer cycling upon itself over and over again, the dampened sound echoing in my head. I wish it wasn’t running, but at the same time, I wish it was louder because maybe then my thoughts would finally be drowned out. I am not thinking of much at all, but every word that surfaces is painful. I am still writing the book of my life in my head and I do not know how to stop.

My stomach turns and my mouth tastes acrid and I want to throw up, but I know that if I do that here, there is no mother to come find me in the bathroom and tie my hair back and whisper soft words, so there’s really no point. My comforter is uneven, sliding down one side of the bed and pulling away from the other. The harder I try to yank it into place, the more fiercely it defies me. Every time I close my eyes and let my head sink into the

pillow, another sentence lights up my head, so I have to open my eyes again and grope for my phone to write it down.

“Purgatory” is the word that comes to mind. There is a pimple on my chin that refuses to pop, even though I tried to force it open yesterday by stabbing it with a safety pin. I cannot stand when they linger under the surface of my skin, unfixable. Far too many things are unfixable. Like me, I think dully. I vaguely wish I could at least have an original depression. There is no such luck. I pull my fingers through greasy hair until it stings my scalp and scratch at the scarring tissue on my chin. I want so badly to yank the hairs out of my skin, but they elude my grasp. The pimple feels like it is burning. I wish I could scratch my whole face off. If I did that, it would be a reason not to turn in my project that’s due tomorrow, at least. “Please excuse this student from this assignment as she does not currently have a face,” the doctor’s note would say. The idea amuses me, but not enough to stop the itching sensation growing in my scalp. Every part of my body feels wrong.

I get a text from a girl I no longer consider a friend. I am too hot under my blankets. It is midnight. I need to be awake and normal in nine hours. My throat is clenching. My phone screen is too bright. I am still not inside my own body. I have eight hours and 58 minutes to get back. My paper will not have written itself when I wake up, nor will my mind have fixed itself. I hear my roommate open and close the dryer. I shove my sheet away with my feet but am still too hot. I throw my

pajamas off and hate the way I feel naked. No one will ever want to see me like this. I will be cold when I wake up. I get another text, this time from someone who doesn’t talk to me nearly as much as I wish they would but not infrequently enough that I ever feel able to reach out. I do not want to exchange the meaningless pre-written dialogue of life with anyone right now. I have eight hours and 52 minutes to be okay. Maybe I can put it off like I do everything else. Maybe I can go to sleep and lose myself in dreams that make no sense until the way that the sheets feel against my bare thighs doesn’t bother me anymore.

Maybe I’ll do the same thing again tomorrow and the day after that. Maybe one day soon I’ll figure out how to be back in my own body. n

MADELINE OSTROWSKI

Dear Today photograph

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THE WORLD KEPT TURNING

by Elinor Shelp-Peck

You said it was a “cool summer,” But for me, climate change was all too real.

You said Boston was “cute,” But you weren’t willing to go that far for me.

For her, you kept the world steady, You traveled the distance.

But I hope someday you hear the ice caps melting— Plane ticket prices increasing—Gas prices skyrocketing — Animals disappearing—Fires burning—Water levels rising And I hope, just for a second, you see that I heard these all along.

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PAIGE RYAN

Sunset at the Sutro Baths photography

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PYRE

by Tamar McMahon

the blaze that made me was a woman with hands of flint and steel and a school made of bone dry firewood I call the last years of my childhood a pyre it was not a forge the heat of it did not temper me into steel because the only iron I had ran in my veins and they bled me dry long before I started burning my name is ashes and I will whisper how brightly I blazed I will show you the scorch marks from where I stood and the charred remains of the stake they say I tied myself to I was no martyr no one watched me as I burned there is a plume of choking black smoke in the distance this far away, the inferno I called my home feels like the warmth of a hearth it is not and I fear for the children who will wander through its doors looking for belonging I fear they will leave charred with marks of rope on their wrists or be consumed like me learning to live as vapor and soot but what is smoke to do about the fire except chase others away? what does smoke do when the masses do not smell it? dissipate? or linger in the air a phantom of carbon on the wind?

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CANDICE LILLARD

Not So Merry Christmas, 9x12 digital photography

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2 ND PL AC E , PROSE

I T’ S T H E T H R I L L

by Sophie Lee Dirt clumps underneath my fingernails and gravel makes little indents in my skin as we sit underneath the playground slide. This is our place. Casey and I have spent every recess underneath the shade of this plastic slide comparing toys since we met last year in fourth grade. Sometimes we fight evil spirits and I get to be the fairy queen and Casey gets to be a cool dragon. She loves dragons; I know because I sit next to her in class and get to see the doodles all over her homework. Casey reaches into the back pocket of her gaucho pants and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. She holds it out triumphantly, eyes shining with excitement.

“Look at it!”

“What is it?” I ask curiously as I take the paper cautiously.

“Just open it!”

I make sure to go slow and even smooth out the extra wrinkly bits. After a little bit of pulling and pressing, I eventually see the bright colors of

CANDICE LILLARD

Aesthetics Series (ABOVE AND OPPOSITE) digital photography

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Casey’s favorite gel pens and two images.

“It’s you and I!” Casey says proudly.

She leans forward too quickly in excitement and has to adjust her glasses before they completely fall off her face. Casey taps gently on the image of a blue fairy with a gold crown.

“That one is you.” Then she slides her finger over and pats the drawing of the pink dragon breathing fire. “And this one is me. It means we’re best friends now!”

I like it. She even remembered to include a diamond in the center of the fairy crown. I fold up the drawing and open my mouth to thank her.

“Casey, it’s awesome! I—” The sound of excited shouting and feet scurrying across asphalt drowns out the rest of my sentence. I look behind me at the rest of the playground to try and see what’s going on, and I hear Casey make a confused sound as well. Some girl from our class whose name I didn’t bother to learn is about to pass by when I stop her.

“Hey! What’s going on?”

She rolls her eyes like I’ve just called on her in class for being too loud.

“The new kid Johnny is here! Don’t you pay attention? Apparently he moved from New York, and his parents are, like, super rich! I bet he owns all the Sillybandz!”

Casey and I exchange a skeptical look but stand up anyway to follow. I slip Casey’s drawing into my pocket as the two of us walk across the playground and onto the grass. We stop a good distance behind everyone else, but I can still see when a tall brunette kid who doesn’t look elementary school age steps out of a sleek black car. I don’t really care about cars, but I know that it looks nice, and I know that the clothes the kid is wearing have words I haven’t even seen before. I know from his straight shoulders and slight tilt of his head that he thinks he’s something special. I know that everyone’s swarming around him as if he’s someone famous, and I know that the cheap drawing in my back pocket suddenly feels like it’s burning my skin.

I don’t want this anymore.

“Jessie! You need to leave now!” I hear my mom shout from the kitchen.

I make sure to draw out my groan of annoyance as I stomp down our carpeted stairs.

“I’m going!” I snap back.

I don’t need to see my mom’s face to imagine her disapproving and dismayed expression; it’s the same one she wore when she found out that I had been teasing some random girl in our class about her “Dumbolike” ears. I had been punished with two weeks of sitting in the teacher’s classroom for lunch, but I had never understood why. Everyone had laughed at my joke; they had even joined in. I still laugh about it because it was and still is funny.

I stop by the kitchen and purposely ignore my mom’s presence as I scoop my blue lunch box off the counter and stuff it into my bag. I

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don’t really understand why she keeps making lunch for me; she knows I don’t eat it. I know she sees the untouched sandwich, chips, and Gatorade in the trash can every afternoon. I know this, but she still insists on making me lunch every day.

“Have a good day at school, honey!”

“Sure.”

Stop faking like you actually care. I know what you actually think of me.

Mom’s tone is particularly sweet today, and I hate the term of endearment that she chooses.

It’s fake. I’m surrounded by fake people all the time. Genuine people are so hard to come by nowadays. I make sure to keep my lips in a thin line and my eyes unimpressed as I head out the door. My backpack jingles as my keychains knock together, and I hear it hit the doorframe on my way out. I’ve always worn my backpack with only one strap on. I hear my mom close the door gently behind me and roll my eyes. Lately, everything she’s been doing has been getting on my nerves. Most people get on my nerves.

But my mom? She makes me want to lash out and scream and berate her for getting in my way. I don’t need her lectures on how to be kind, on how to make good friends, on how to be respectful. I already know what I’m doing.

I can feel the ugly yet familiar heat in my stomach return as I spot my friend Casey waving at me from across the street. It’s the same scene from years ago when I met Casey for the first time. I remember her shy smile, her curly brown hair, her innocent eyes, how I had instantly lit up at the idea of finally having a friend my age on our street.

We were inseparable, always hanging off one another, spending every waking moment at one another’s house and playing pretend every day at recess. We used to braid each other’s hair and show up to school with the same Hello Kitty pajama pants and pretend it was a coincidence. There were no secrets between us, and we had joint ownership over every toy. Casey used to be the only person I was interested in at school, until Johnny transferred into our class. His charisma, status, and ability to quickly make friends allowed him to easily rise in popularity. He

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CANDICE LILLARD detail of Aesthetics Series

didn’t let anyone get to him, not even the teachers. He did what he wanted when he wanted, and he always got away with it. He cheated on a test, no problem; the next day he would come in with a Gucci bag as an “I’m sorry” gift. He “accidentally” injured some kid on the playground, no big deal, that’s nothing a gold piece of jewelry can’t fix. Suddenly, playing with plastic people and drawing pictures of Disney princesses weren’t going to cut it anymore.

I used to be satisfied just being in Casey’s presence. Now, all I see are ugly blue braces attempting to fix a crooked smile, thin-framed glasses that match her nerdy vibe, and long white socks that are definitely not the noshow socks meant to be paired with low top Converse. It’s pathetic. Doesn’t she understand how stupid she looks? Just seeing her evokes something inside me, something dark like tendrils from a horror movie, something nasty that makes me spit out insults just to see the pain and fear flash across her face. Casey bounds over to me with bright eyes and her ugly pink backpack slapping against her back.

I don’t hate Casey, though; we are friends after all.

“Hi Jessie!”

“Hi Casey!”

“Are you ready to go?”

“Yup.”

Ugh. Why am I already annoyed? It’s all Casey’s fault.

Casey carefully falls into step next to me.

She automatically moves to the side closest to the street while I walk on the raised sidewalk.

We’re taking our usual route to school, strolling through the suburbs.

“So are we playing four square before school starts?”

I bite my lip and roll my eyes, tilting my head to the left as if I’m thinking hard.

“Mmmmm—nah,” I answer flatly. Just stop being lame! I’m trying to help you!

“Oh, okay.”

I pointedly ignore Casey’s disappointed tone and the downturn of her lips. I clutch my backpack strap with my right hand so the mesh pattern digging into my palm gives me something to focus on. I don’t always get pleasure from doing this to her. I do it to protect us. The last time I let her act freely she showed off her “water bottle” to the whole class and wanted me to defend her when people started teasing her for bringing a “sippy cup” to school. I still remember the harsh sting of embarrassment and the vow I made to myself to never be made a fool again.

For the rest of the trek to school, we’re completely silent. The leaves and brown pine branches crunch under our shoes as we shuffle along. The weather is starting to cool down, but it’s still warm enough for me to defend wearing cute shorts. We pass by the park where the blue paint is chipping off the tube slide we used to try to climb on the top of. It’s the same one I had conquered years before and stood at the top proudly like a queen overlooking her kingdom after a brutal war.

Now, all the equipment has lost its glow, and I stare at the increasing rust and cracks.

The two of us pause at the crosswalk less than a block from the school and tiredly look both ways before skittering across. Casey has

begun fidgeting with her own backpack straps, and her stupid My Little Pony keychains are clinking together annoyingly. I tighten my left fist, which had been previously hanging by my side in a futile attempt to keep the anger in. My cheek starts to hurt with how hard I’m biting the inside of it. Why can’t she just drop all the baby stuff? Doesn’t she know how it looks?

The school’s familiar chain-link fence gets closer and closer and so do our peers. I see Johnny, Caleb, Rachel, and some other sixth graders standing around the basketball court, and some other students either running around chasing one another or hanging out on the climbing gym. They’re still facing away from us; I only have a few seconds to react.

“Will you please put those away?” I sigh as I grab the nearest keychain dangling from Casey’s backpack.

“Why?” I can see her eyes shining with curiosity and even spot a glimmer of defiance as her gaze flickers down to look at my own keychains. I’m almost impressed at her confident response—almost. Instead, I grit my teeth and force out an answer that I’m sure she’ll understand.

“Because they’re stupid.”

You are not going to embarrass me again.

I drop the keychain like it’s offended me and hear it clang against her metal water bottle. A second later, Casey’s eyes turn glassy, and I see her avert her eyes to the sidewalk, and I feel something inside me flare up. It’s a burning sensation, yet it also seems to lift up a weight I didn’t know had been resting on my heart. I don’t understand why this only happens when Casey’s around, but I can’t separate myself from it. The first time I said something hurtful to Casey was many years back when we were playing in her backyard.

The weather was mild, and the leaves were starting to turn like they are now. It was an

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offhand comment that just slipped out. It was a simple statement about how she might need a smaller size because she was drowning in her sweater, and it looked ugly. Casey was genuinely upset, and I knew that, but I didn’t even feel a twinge of remorse. There was a weird satisfaction that bloomed in my chest at Casey’s reaction, and since then the sensation has never faded.

Before I fall even further into whatever is happening to me, I quickly try to take control of the current situation.

“Listen, Casey. I’m just trying to help you, okay? The others are going to think they’re lame too, and I don’t want you to get made fun of. I’m trying to help you.”

She nods, but she’s stepped back and put about an arm’s length of distance between us, and she refuses to meet my eyes.

“We’re friends, right? Right?” I repeat when she still doesn’t acknowledge me.

I eventually get a timid nod out of her before I stalk forward, knowing she’ll be right behind me in a matter of seconds. I hear her noisily unclipping her keychains and stuffing them into her bag. The clinking still makes my ears ring, but I let it slide because she is listening to me, and that’s all that matters.

“Come on, and let me do the talking.”

Soft footsteps echo my own as I lead us over to the basketball court. Caleb sees us approaching first and uses his free hand to wave. I give him a bright smile and wave back.

He’s one of Johnny’s newest additions to our group, and he’s nice enough. I get the feeling that he’s still a little uncomfortable, but he’ll get used to it, everyone else has. When we finally make it onto the asphalt, Johnny flashes a disapproving look when he spots Casey behind me. He tucks the red rubber ball under his arm and tilts his head as he scrutinizes my friend.

“What’s she doing here?”

Casey doesn’t say anything, just shuffles her feet around in front of her. Good.

“Just ignore her. She’s not gonna play anyway. She’ll just sit over there by the wall.

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What are we doing anyway? I thought we were playing basketball?”

“Mrs. Roth took away our ball after Johnny threw it at some kid’s head and made him cry,” Rachel says.

I quirk my eyebrows up at that. I’m not that surprised; Johnny is known for his spontaneous fits, but I never thought he’d actually hurt a person. Everyone knows this is how Johnny is; even the teachers have stopped paying close attention.

“So we’re playing four square, then?” I ask.

Caleb snatches the ball away from Johnny after Johnny chucks it at the asphalt full force, just to see how high it will go.

“Maybe, as long as the ball doesn’t pop.”

“Can we just play already?”

I turn around and whisper to Casey to just go sit over by the brick wall. She does so obediently, not making eye contact with me. I watch her unceremoniously drop her backpack to the ground before slumping down beside it.

She brings her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them. It’s pitiful. Why can’t you just be like me for once? Just forget about all the kiddy stuff. I feel the ugly monster inside me start to reappear, but I quickly push it aside in favor of getting to my designated square for the game. We haven’t played on this side of the playground in at least two years, and the white painted lines separating the four squares are faded and smudged. But we don’t have a basketball, so it’ll have to do.

Rachel starts first and lightly taps the underside of the ball with her palm to bounce it once into my square. I bend my knees and rock forward onto the tips of my toes as I step forward to bounce the ball out of my square and into Caleb’s. The sounds of shoes scuffling across asphalt, the dink of the hollow ball as it hits the ground, and our panting fill the air.

We’re all laser-focused, none of us wanting to ruin the flow. Normally, when someone would mess up, another person would take their place, but after a prior incident involving Johnny making up rules just so he could

continue, no one else wanted to play with us.

However, none of them are foolish enough to tattle on us, either. Now, whoever lets the ball bounce twice in their square or lets it roll out of bounds has to do a punishment given by the others.

My eyes track the red ball like a homing missile, and my feet are positioned to help me react and go in whatever direction I’m needed.

My focus is sharp and my body is in tune, but apparently my foresight isn’t because I only have about one second of clarity before I see Johnny’s malicious smile and then the ball is hurtling towards me. I barely get my hands in front of my face to protect myself before the patterned rubber makes contact with my skin and rolls away. I hear the joyful sounds of laughter, and when I remove my arms from my vision, Johnny gives me a nonchalant shrug, but I see the glint in his eyes and his crooked smile. We may be partners in crime at this school, but I know the power means more to him. I harden my eyes and glare back at him, trying to ignore the pit in my stomach. There’s something about Johnny’s gaze that chills my bones and simultaneously draws me in.

“So, Jessie,” Johnny drawls. “Ready for your punishment?”

My heart is in my throat and something within me is starting to boil, but I simply nod my head and brush some stray hairs out of my face as I try to feign indifference.

“Whatever. Just shoot.”

“Get the ball and spike it at your friend over there.”

I feel my jaw open as I search Johnny’s young face for any traces of a joke; there are none. He’s entirely serious, and I don’t know how to feel about that. Apparently, none of the others do either.

“Are you crazy?! You can’t make her do that!” Caleb says.

“Why not?”

Johnny is staring back at Caleb, face stone cold and void of any emotion. He’s scarily calm because he knows that Caleb can’t do anything—he won’t do anything. Everyone at

CANDICE LILLARD detail of Aesthetics Series

this school is just a part of Johnny’s intricate web. A second later, he whips back around towards me and I’m forced to endure his piercing gaze. I desperately want to look away, but I can’t. It’s like staring at your reflection in the mirror for too long; I’m drawn into the eeriness of the face staring back at me.

Do it. The words echo around in my head, and I don’t know whose voice it is. All I know is that it’s not mine and that I have to obey.

Caleb, Johnny, and Rachel are still in front of me. I can vividly see them arguing. I can see Caleb poking Johnny’s chest with an accusatory finger, but it lacks commitment.

I can see Rachel’s ponytail swinging as she shakes her head passively, and I can clearly see Johnny’s chest rise with amused chuckles as if this is all just a game to him; maybe it is.

The nagging voice has turned into a maniacal cackle that starts to crescendo as my body moves. I see my feet shuffling forward before I can stop them, and I see my hands reaching out to scoop up the red rubber ball, but I can’t feel anything at all. Even when I see the ball

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firmly resting in my hands, I still can’t feel its bumpy texture or the uneven ground beneath my feet. My body means nothing, and it is nothing as I slowly make my way back to the group.

I see Caleb and Rachel giving me looks of confusion, or is it disbelief, or maybe horror?

They’re not pleasant expressions. Now, all I see are Johnny’s prideful eyes, and all I feel is the burning sensation from earlier, except it’s amplified by a hundred. My stomach is an inferno and that familiar desire to harm has returned full force. I wouldn’t be surprised if horns have suddenly sprouted from my head either. I shift my focus from Johnny to Casey like a sniper who’s just found their target, and then I release.

The ball leaves my hand in slow motion, and I see my palm make contact a second later. The ball collides with Casey’s face and forces it to the side; I can already predict the red patterned mark it will make. Her glasses are knocked off her face and they land next to her with a crunch. Casey stares back at me, and I hear surprised gasps as well as my own name falling from my other friends’ lips. I should feel guilty, or at the minimum surprised at my cruelty, but instead, energy flows through me and my heart beats excitedly. I feel alive, and the burning hasn’t stopped—it’s been stoked.

When I see Casey’s pathetic face staring back at me with fearful eyes, I know I should feel bad. There are a lot of things I should feel, but at this moment, the only thing I feel is satisfaction, and the only thing I see is the shadow of a monster outlined on the red bricks. n

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MY BODY

by Layla Davenport

Trigger warning: sexual assault six hours spent together, none of which were occupied with conversation you grab me by my hips, and my head is running wild, but not with thoughts of you if not my mind, then my body i follow the motions, placing my lips on yours as you pull my hands lower if not my mind, then my body if that’s the part that’s worthy you trace the slopes and curves of my figure, my nerves tingling upon contact if not my mind, then my body because it’s better than being alone, but when you’re gone, and the only touch i feel is my own, i wish i’d kept my body.

HANNAH SCHNEIDER

Decay of Nature cyanotype

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LYDIA GUNN

Nomad

copper etching

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by Layla Davenport

THE FEELING OF HIS TOUCH

Trigger warning: sexual assault the feeling of his touch it’s rough but not calloused it’s aggressive but not strong i’ve been catalogued into his mind, into a part i don’t belong the feeling of his touch it’s heavy but not wholesome it’s charged but not electric i’ve been catalogued into his mind my thighs, hips, breasts, lips: not the parts that need cataloguing the feeling of his touch it’s wanting but not gracious it’s cautious but not caring the feeling of his touch it lingers in the wrong places the feeling of his touch is not one i want to remember the feeling of self loathing after is one i will not forget

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VANESSA “Wait!”

Oh, I fucked up. I fucked up real bad. I can’t believe I said the wrong name.

“Valerie, wait!”

She keeps running, deaf to my protests, her heels clacking against the shoddy pavement of the park, causing droplets of water to fly against the heavy rain.

I slow down, wheezing already, my hands against my knees. I’m so out of shape. God, why did a girl like Valerie decide to go on a date with me? It’s raining pretty hard, so I try to take shelter under a tree; it doesn’t help. I notice that one of my expensive shoes fell off.

I look up at the gray sky and let the rain wash my face. I check my wallet; it’s a good thing I didn’t forget it. Oh, but my debit card is missing. Do I have my keys? Good, I do. I should go back to the restaurant to get my card.

I pull myself up by the bark of the tree and walk back the way I came. It takes a good 30 minutes to get back to the restaurant due to the storm, though having only one shoe on one foot doesn’t help. I must look terrible. I haven’t shaved in a while, either. I walk through the front door and approach the host stand. Do they have the card?

Good, they do. I order a cheesecake to go. God knows I’m not losing weight anytime soon.

The host hands me a little foam container and plastic utensils. I turn to leave. The rain’s still pounding out there, but the cheesecake will live. I have my keys and my card. I’m ready to go home.

I walk slowly to the metro with soaked socks and get on the subway to my neighborhood. Nobody bothers to look my way as I enjoy my soggy cheesecake. It’s not very good, but the sweetness dampens the bite of Valerie’s disappointment. I should apologize to her.

I make it to my tiny apartment. I unlock the door and step in, shedding clothes before I even lock the door. I’ll wipe the water up later.

I put my somehow-dry phone on the kitchen counter and take a quick shower. No messages when I get back. Whatever. In an adjacent room, I sit on my bed and turn on the TV, watching the news in my underwear. Storms, storms, and more storms. And yet, it’s calm inside.

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by Shelly Whitmire

LYDIA GUNN

Did Valerie make it back alright? Or did she break a heel and fall, scraping her bony knees up without anyone there to help her? Or maybe there is someone there to help her, while I sit here watching streets flood.

I hear my phone ring from the kitchen. I let it ring, unwilling to move from my comfortable bed. Some minutes pass, and it rings again; I get up off my lazy ass and check my phone: it’s Vanessa.

I grit my teeth and pick up. “What do you want?”

“It’s really coming down out there,” she says.

“Why did you call me? I’ve told you not to.”

“You never blocked me, did you? And you’re the one who answered.”

I look at the kitchen sink. The faucet drips once.

“Can I come over?”

The faucet drips again.

“Do you need me?”

The faucet drips.

“Do you want me?”

I hang up. I return to my bed and turn off the TV. Chilled, I get under the covers and look outside at the pelting rain. Drenched in torrents of water, I watch as the grime of city life gets washed away.

I’ll apologize to her tomorrow. n

Long Distance acrylic paint, watercolor, markers, and colored pencils on paper

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JULIA GRAY

Lake Jordan Sunset digital design

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WHAT IF WE TOLD THEM?

by Elinor Shelp-Peck If they knew, what do you think they would say?

To when you chose to not choose me or when you swore so much you forgot, yelled so much it stopped.

If they knew, what do you think they would think?

Of when you promised never again or told me it was done, and did everything but run (I really wish you had).

If they knew, what do you think they would do?

When you told me I wasn’t worth it or lied and said I was, and messed around just because.

If they knew, what do you think would change?

From when you hid me behind closed doors or refused to let me cry, just because you thought I’d die.

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HANNAH SCHNEIDER

Untitled Series, 8in x 10in chemigrams

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STRANGERS

by Sarah Page

The room was still except for the incessant rumbling of the engine that was keeping the ship going, propelling it closer to Adara and further from Earth, where Florence belonged.

She kicked out against a bench, covered in suitcases, bags, and Juniper’s tank. The snake itself was in a travel bowl, though Flo wasn’t sure the little snake was going to make it. Liftoff had been rough on him. Juniper had caused a lot of paperwork for her mom, but Florence had insisted that he had to come with them.

“He’s the only friend I have left now,” she’d pleaded with her mother.

“Nonsense, you still have Bari,” her mother had answered, tapping away at her display screen, never once glancing over at her daughter.

“Bari doesn’t count.” Flo loved her little brother, but he couldn’t compare to Juniper.

She’d gone out and chosen Juniper; her parents had just showed up one day with Bari, never consulting her on the merits of having baby siblings.

“I’ll see what I can do. Now go do your homework, I need to fill out these forms.”

Her mom had gestured behind her towards the door. Flo had stomped out and gone to sit with Juniper.

Fortunately, Juniper was included on the packing list, thanks to Flo’s father. He had come back to the house to get a few things and stopped to talk to her mom. Flo had been listening through the door.

“Come on Tabbi, let her take the snake.

You’re dragging her off to a whole new planet, it’s the least you could do for her.”

“Don’t call me Tabbi.”

“You used to love it.”

“Well, not anymore.”

“At least try and look at the paperwork for snake importation on Adara?”

Florence had held her breath hopefully.

“Yes, yes, now will you let me work?” her mother had replied.

“Of course.”

Flo scrambled back as she heard footsteps heading towards the door but paused when she heard her father say, “Is there anything I can do to get you to stay on Earth, please?

Adara is so far away and isn’t incorporated into the Interplanetary Travel Network yet.

I’ll never get to see the kids, or you.”

Florence strained to hear her mother’s reply. “That’s the idea, Aquila. It’s quiet, it’s affordable, better than Earth, actually. It’s out of the way, and I can start over again.”

“Tabs, I—” “Fine, I’ll take the damn snake, too.

Happy? Now please leave.”

Florence had run away from the door, not wanting to hear anything more.

Now, they’d been flying for a long time, so long that Flo had stopped looking at the clock that she’d brought. They hadn’t been able to leave this room since her mother deposited Flo, Bari, and Juniper there just before takeoff.

“This ship is not for exploring. You need to stay in this room or my room, understand?

It’s dangerous.” Her mother hadn’t left any room for argument.

Florence had known that as soon as she saw the ship. Through the tiny shuttle view window, she’d caught a glimpse of hulking metal and alloy, dented in many places and clearly older than most commercial space carriers. Her friend Sylvie, who was obsessed with spaceships, had once told her that most ships only lasted 10 years before they were replaced with newer, updated models.

“Mom, are we riding in that?” Bari had asked, grasping their mother’s arm, his face crumpled. volume

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“Yes, it’s the only ship that will take us to Adara.”

Flo wondered if there was a reason that only old freighters 25 years out of date would make the trip to Adara. Her mother had searched hours to try and find passage to the little planet. It was the only ship that Flo had ever seen in person, so maybe that was why it looked so different from the pictures Sylvie had shown her. Maybe all ships when seen in person looked more banged up and worn down. Maybe space travel does that to you.

Flo hoped not.

“What’s Adara like?” Bari was impressed by neither the ship nor the move.

“It’s peaceful, with lots of new friends,” Flo’s mother had said, distractedly brushing Bari’s hair from his face. Flo didn’t believe her. Any planet that wasn’t part of the Interplanetary Travel Network, a system where space ships moved from planet to planet like Earth’s old airliners, clearly wasn’t interesting enough for anyone to start a new life on. She was pretty sure her mother had picked it because it was far away from anything interesting. If this trip so far was any indication of what Adara would be like, Flo had some concerns.

Bari was in their mother’s room. He had been there for a while, leaving Flo to her thoughts. She got up and crept over to Juniper, who was languishing in his travel bowl.

“How’s it going in there?” She crouched down, peering in at him. The little green snake did nothing. His forked tongue poked out for a second, and then he withdrew it.

“I know this trip’s been hard, but I’m sure it will be over soon.” Flo tried to put on a reassuring grown-up voice so Juniper wouldn’t know how she felt. The snake’s lidless eyes continued to contemplate the tag on a nearby suitcase.

“Alright then, you know me too well.”

Flo couldn’t keep a front up with Juniper.

“I feel terrible too, I want to go home.” She tried not to think about the fact that her old house was now someone else’s home, and her neighbor Sylvie was probably making a new friend at that very moment. “I don’t like space travel. It’s no fun.” Flo sat next

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to the bowl and picked it up, wrapping her arms around its cold curves. “I wish Dad was here. He would make it interesting.” She ran a finger over the rim of the bowl, making the glass squeak. “Do you miss Dad, Juniper?”

The snake didn’t respond. “He’ll be here soon, and then we won’t have to miss him.” Flo’s parents had fought before, and her father had disappeared for a few days, but he always came back without fail. This time would be no different, except this time he’d need to get a ship to join them.

Flo leaned back against the wall and stared up at the old strip lights. Their light was so dim she couldn’t help but wonder if they would give out before their trip was over.

“Do you remember when I got you, Juniper?”

She set the bowl down. “It was the best day in my life.”

It had been summer, only three years ago. She had enthusiastically campaigned for a pet snake for weeks. Every day after lessons, she would go to her mother’s office to lean in and ask, “Have you changed your mind yet?” And her mother would reply, “Ask me again tomorrow, love.” Then Flo would go downstairs to see if her father’s study door was open. The rule was that if it was open, he could take visitors, though more and more often, he’d been shutting his door and not speaking to anyone. Sometimes several days would pass before Flo saw him. But on that special day, his door had been open. She’d peeked in. It was a chaotic little office. Antique books from the early 21st century and pottery he’d made himself were jumbled in with his collection of model planets a museum had commissioned him to design and make. Her father had been typing away at something but had stopped when she tapped on the doorframe.

“Hi there, Monkey Bars, what can I do for you?”

She put on her biggest sad eyes and stared at him. “I really, really, really, really want a pet snake. Can I have one?” she blurted. He sat back. She’d asked him before. At this point, it was tradition to ask him. He’d known what she was going to say. But she hadn’t expected his response.

“Will you take good care of it?” He looked down at her.

“Yes, the very best care. I’ll never leave its side.” She’d stared up into his eyes resolutely.

He looked at her for a moment.

“Okay, I’ll get my coat.”

Florence had spluttered in shock, but the next thing she knew, she and her father were driving to the reptile store, which was a long trip because there was only one around for miles. And her father had helped her pick out Juniper.

“Green snakes are good pets, Monkey Bars,” he’d said, holding her hand in his warm one.

“He’s perfect! Thank you, thank you.”

She would never forget leaving the pet store with both she and Juniper hanging off of her father’s arms. It had been a couple weeks before her sixth birthday.

Her mother hadn’t been happy, but she had shrugged and said, “As long as you look after it.”

Now looking after Juniper included taking him to a new planet. The room that they had been given to stay in was in a lower part of the ship, close to the engine.

Sometimes, the rumbling of the engine would make the whole room rattle; other times, it was barely noticeable. Flo didn’t like the rumble. It made her skull vibrate.

She picked up Juniper’s bowl and carried him to her bunk. “Time for dinner,” she said and started hunting through the pack for the box of crickets that she had brought for him.

That had also required paperwork, apparently.

Feeding Juniper and talking to him helped the time pass quicker.

There was no day or night onboard the ship. Instead, Flo’s mother had made them track their sleeping habits with a circadian clock so that they would know when to sleep.

Flo wondered if maybe it was broken or if her mother had used the clock wrong because every time her mother told them it was time to sleep, it was impossible for Flo to do so.

Her stomach would hurt and her head would buzz and she would lie in the dark for what felt like hours, unable to drift off, filled with discomfort.

Later, after eating her own dinner and climbing into bed, the discomfort was especially strong. The uneasiness sat on her chest and filled her lungs. She rolled over onto her side to look over the edge of the bunk. On the other bunk, her three-year-old brother was slumped against their mother, who hadn’t gotten dressed for bed. Instead, she sat, running her hand through his hair while he slept. Suddenly, Flo was filled with desperation. She felt a spark of jealousy toward Bari, who was unafraid to ask for hugs and cuddles. Flo wasn’t sure how to approach such things with her mom. She knew that a nine-year-old was pretty grown up, but a desperate feeling was filling her up, and she was sure the only way to fix it was a hug. She leaned further out of her bunk.

“Mommy?” Her mother looked up and it shocked Flo, turning the panicked, desperate

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feeling in her chest to heavy, weighted stone.

Her mother’s eyes were red and damp and looked more tired than they ever had after work. Her shirt was wrinkled. Flo’s mother always dressed neatly.

“Yes, sweetie?” Flo couldn’t choke out the simple words. Can I have a hug? They stuck in her chest with everything else and wouldn’t come out.

“Never mind. Goodnight, Mommy, sleep well,” she croaked. Sleep well is what her parents used to say to each other, many years ago, before Bari was born. Maybe they would start saying it again when they got to their new home and they had a chance to agree with each other. Her mother seemed convinced Adara was a fresh start for them; that included her dad, right? But that wouldn’t happen if Dad didn’t hurry up and join them.

Flo wondered where he was. Maybe he would join them at the station they were docking at tomorrow. Her mother had said that they were stopping for supplies there. Perhaps her father would be there to board as well.

Flo rolled over, dragging her heavy chest with her. Tomorrow she would sneak out with Juniper and wait for her dad to board. She’d run up to him, and he’d give her a big hug and thank her for waiting. She’d tell him how much she loved him, and he’d promise to stay with them. He’d say that he missed them, and then he’d go talk to her mom. It would be like last time. Flo tried not to think about last time, but it did have a happy ending so she thought about it anyways.

Her father had gone into his office and closed the door for several days—so long that Flo lost track. Her mother would go in every few hours and then come out, each time looking more tired than before.

“He’s resting, Flo, just let him be.” And rest he did, all day long and then all night long. Flo’s mother would bring him food and then leave after a few minutes. One time, in the middle of the night, Flo had snuck downstairs to get some chips and had seen him for the first time in several days. He’d

looked like a stranger. His hair was matted and greasy, his clothes rumpled. His face was unshaven, and he had huge bags under his eyes despite all the rest he was supposedly getting. He was slowly eating the chips that Flo had come down for, but now she crouched in the shadow of the kitchen’s entrance, staring at her father. What was wrong? Why did he look like this? Maybe he was sick. Flo crept into the kitchen.

“Hi Daddy.” She didn’t mean to startle him, but he jumped and dropped his chips.

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” he asked, retrieving the chips from the floor. As he bent, a strong odor washed over Florence.

He needed a shower.

“Are you sick, Daddy?”

He froze. “No, Flo, I’m just tired.” He poured a glass of water for himself.

“For several days?”

“Yeah, something like that.” She reached up and took his hand. “Have you tried sleeping?” she asked. Her father chuckled in a way that let Flo know he didn’t find her funny.

“Yeah, I’ve tried just about everything.”

“And nothing works?” She followed him to the kitchen table where he sat down.

“Sometimes, Flo, you can be so tired that no amount of sleeping will help.” He stared at the water in his glass, but Flo wasn’t sure he was really seeing it.

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“Is there anything else you can do?” she asked. He stopped and tapped the table.

“Yes, but I don’t think it’s as bad as that,” he said, shoulders dropping as he slumped back in his chair. Flo wasn’t sure what he meant.

“You should be happy, Daddy, and if you’re not, then—then you should do something about it.”

He sighed. “Thanks, sweetie.”

Flo frowned. He didn’t call her sweetie.

He should be calling her Monkey Bars. There was something about him that night in the kitchen that made him feel like an utterly different person than the man who had taken her out to buy a snake. His skin was papery and his face looked sunken; there were hollows in his eyes and cheeks.

She had stood up from the table and walked over to the bread bin where she started pulling out a loaf along with other sandwich-making supplies.

“What are you doing?” her father asked, eyes slowly tracking her progress.

“Sandwich.” She carried it over to him. “I hope you feel better soon, Daddy.” She kissed his prickly cheek and fled the kitchen, not wanting to stare at him anymore.

The following day, her father had left the office twice to shower and to eat. And her mom was more relaxed that day, smiling, the work lines on her forehead less pronounced. It took another few weeks, but slowly her father had seemed to go back to normal. Flo couldn’t help but wonder if it would happen again.

“Is Dad okay?” she’d asked her mother a few days later.

“He has good days and bad days.” Her mother was dusting and Flo was helping her by sweeping the floor.

“What does that mean?”

“Please don’t ask, sweetie. I don’t want you worrying about it. All you need to do is love your dad. Everything will work out.”

Of course Flo loved her dad—she loved him the most, and so he would come back to her, hopefully on the ship when it docked tomorrow for supplies. Flo rolled over in her

bunk and stared at the flickering safety lights lining the floor. The room started to shake, and she closed her eyes and tried to ignore it.

She woke up hungry the next morning.

Meals were freeze-dried and unpacked on an as-needed basis, and Flo was sick of it. Her mom’s room had a little kitchen unit that she used to make breakfast, some type of healthy protein-based meal that was made up of little balls rolled up like donut holes, ultimately tasteless. The only bright side to them was that Flo could get breakfast immediately after waking up before sneaking out of her room to find her dad. She had snuck out only once or twice before, but she’d never gone farther than up and down the hallway. Now, with Juniper in her pocket, she had to find where new passengers would be boarding the ship.

Spaceships, even old crummy ones, had a lot of rooms and passageways. Additionally, access points with map readouts were high up on the wall at average adult height, making it impossible for Flo to reach them. Barely anyone else was out and about, and no one gave Flo and Juniper a second glance as they wandered along. She had removed Juniper from his bowl, and now he rode in her shirt’s front pocket. Every door and hallway looked the same, and she couldn’t figure out where the boarding area could possibly be.

“I hope we’re not late,” Flo said to Juniper.

She sat down on a crate at the entrance of a storage room and stared forlornly at the hallway’s floorplates. She lifted Juniper out of her pocket and cradled him in her hands. The hallway was so gray and dull, Juniper’s green scales stood out brightly. “He’ll be here. He always comes back.” Juniper’s tongue darted out and caught her palm. The uneasiness was back, swelling in her chest. “Do you think Mommy told him not to come back?” The last time her parents had fought, it had been the worst.

The day had just started badly. As soon as Bari had woken up, he’d thrown a fuss about leaving the house, refusing to budge and complaining loudly. He said his tummy hurt and that he didn’t want to leave. Flo and her mother had been in a hurry to get out because

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Flo had a doctor’s appointment. They were hard to get these days, and the late fees were enormously high. Flo knew this because her mother complained about them every couple years when Flo went for a checkup. Eventually, her mother had given up on bringing Bari. She had instead pushed past Flo and shoved open her father’s study door.

“Honey, Aquila, are you awake? I have to go. Please keep an eye on Bari, I’ll be back soon.” And then Flo and her mother had rushed out the door.

The drive was terrible. Her mother was agitated about the traffic, and Flo was agitated about the doctor. They had barely made it on time. On the way back, her mother had been calmer. As they pulled up in the driveway, her mother smiled and patted Flo’s knee.

“You were very brave today. I know you don’t like the doctor.” Flo beamed at her. Her mother rarely gave those kinds of compliments. She climbed out of the car and giddily followed her mom into the house.

As soon as they entered, Flo could hear Bari crying. Immediately her mother rushed past her and ran up the stairs. Flo ran after her, and as she passed her father’s office, she noticed the door was ajar, just as her mother had left it hours earlier. Flo hurried up the stairs and towards Bari’s room. She froze in the doorway. Her mother was holding Bari and rubbing his back, trying to soothe him, and there was vomit everywhere. It plastered the bed, the floor, and Bari. Flo took a step back. Her mother stood up and carried Bari out to the bathroom. Flo stared at the drops that they left on the floor as they walked past her. Hours later, after her mother had washed Bari and tucked him into Flo’s bed, after she’d cleaned Bari’s room as much as she could, she’d walked into the downstairs office and shut the door. Her raised voice passed through the door, and Flo ran outside. A few days later, her father had left, and a week after that, her mother had announced the move.

Now, here Flo was, sitting on a box in a hallway on a rickety old spaceship. Hot tears

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trickled down her face as she stood up and turned around, hoping she wasn’t lost.

She couldn’t remember their room number, and now she wasn’t sure where to go next.

Juniper curled around her fingers as she walked.

“If we’re lost, then I’m really sorry Juniper. At least we’ll be together.” She wandered back the way she thought she came, and the floor started vibrating more.

Flo grinned, pleased with herself. Their room rumbled the most, so she would just need to follow the vibrations back to their quarters.

She hurried down the hall, pausing to feel the floor and then continuing. As she got closer, she slowed down. Maybe she could sneak quietly back in and go to bed without her mother waking up.

As she crept back, Flo could hear raised voices coming from their room. Dad? She ran up to the door, and sure enough, she could hear her father, except his voice was distorted. Flo stopped herself from opening the door. Her father must be speaking over a transmission.

“Aquila, we talked about this. I just can’t do this anymore. I’m exhausted. I’m sorry.”

Her mother’s voice cracked.

“Tabitha, I understand, I really do, and I won’t ask you to be that person anymore, but do you really have to move to Adara?” Her father sounded so far away and desperate. Flo held her breath, wishing her father was there so she could hug him.

“I just—I just needed to get away. If I was still on Earth, I’d have to fight the urge every second to come and check on you.”

“Is that so bad?”

“Yes!” Flo heard something slam and pulled back from the doorway. “Aquila, I’ve tried everything—interventions, I’ve listened, I’ve looked after the kids on my own, pretending that everything is fine. You’ve refused to look for help again and again. What am I supposed to do? Because I don’t know.”

Flo could hear her mother pacing back and forth, her shoes tapping on the metal floor.

“Do you know what it’s like sitting up alone, wondering who’s going to break first, yourself or the love of your life?

There was silence and Flo wondered for a moment if her father had cut the transmission, but then he spoke up.

“I don’t know. I feel trapped, but I do know that I can’t bear the thought of you on another planet with the kids. I love you.”

“And I love you too, but this isn’t working.

I never know when you’ll be able to get up and parent and when I’ll need to take over again.

I can’t look after two kids and someone with depression. I’m sorry.” Her mother’s voice whistled in her throat. She was crying. “I can’t watch you run yourself into the ground. And I can’t make the kids watch it either.”

More silence. Flo pressed her hand against the side of her head and rubbed at her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Tabitha,” her father said.

“What?” Her mom’s voice sounded wet.

“I’m sorry I’ve been putting you through this.”

“I just, I don’t know anymore, Aquila.

I’ll make sure the kids can call you later.”

“Okay, I, uh, I love you.” The communicator beeped and Flo knew the conversation was over.

Flo heard her mother cough out a dry sob. Maybe it was time to enter the room. She pushed the door open. Her mother stood by the bed with her face in her hands.

“Mom?” As soon as her mother saw her, she wiped her eyes and straightened up.

“Where have you been?” Her mother sniffed hard.

“I was waiting for Daddy, but I just heard him talking to you so I guess he isn’t coming.”

“No, he isn’t coming.” Her mother sighed.

“I heard you talking to him.”

“Florence! Eavesdropping is rude.”

“So is lying to me about Dad. Why does he need help? Are we going home?” Florence fished Juniper out of her pocket and set him on the bed.

“I don’t know.” Her mother sighed.

“Why not?”

“Florence, you must have noticed that your father isn’t always around. Not like he used to be.”

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Florence shrugged. Her mother was correct: her father had gotten worse in the last year. “Yeah, he’s not been so good.”

“No, he hasn’t. He’s struggling right now, and I don’t know what to do.”

Florence wasn’t sure how to respond. Her mother always knew what to do. “Why is he sad?” Florence didn’t understand.

“I don’t know. It’s something he’s always struggled with. But it’s gotten worse in the past few years.”

“Why did we leave him?” Flo needed to go back and check on her dad immediately.

“I’ve tried helping him, sweetie, again and again. I can’t tell you how much I’ve tried.” Her mother had started crying again. “I’ve tried everything. I can’t stay and see this happen.”

Florence stared at her mother, who was scrubbing at her eyes. She didn’t look like her mother, just a hopeless woman crying. The woman had similar clothes to her mom, but this woman’s clothes were crumpled. This woman was sinking to the floor sobbing. This woman didn’t know what to do. Feeling lost, Florence reached out and wrapped her arms around the strange woman and sank to the floor next to her, wishing for her parents, not strangers.

“It’s okay, Mom, it’s okay,” she whispered, staring but not seeing, feeling the warm drip of this woman’s tears soak into her shirt. “It’s okay.” n volume

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KASEY VANDENBOOM

Delicate Taboos, 18in x 14in acrylic and collaged paper on wood panel

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2 ND PL AC E, POETRY

FREE DOG

by Emerald D. Swenson

I want to know how real freedom feels.

Like a dog that has stopped begging.

Like a dog who has snapped his leash and broken free from his master’s hand.

The rope drags behind me, sending sparks up to god himself, daring them all to try and stop me.

Panting madly, bared teeth shining with spit and foam, drooling life down my chest, soaking my fur as I run down the middle of suburban streets and through your backyard.

You shook your head and grabbed your children, wondering what I might do next.

I’m as wild as the extinct buffalo wolves, blood hungry, pavement wasted and looking for revenge for my habitat, for the loss of my west.

I scan for the belated autumn moon, hungrily chasing down cats that have never known a leash or felt the neck breaking humiliation of being called to heel.

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by Olivia Slack

AFTER THE FIRE It was summertime in Calverton, so hot that the tar on the road made the whole town smell like syrupy ash. School was due to start back in two weeks, and kids were trying to make the most of their last drops of freedom.

Marybeth and Janice were playing on the swings at the playground a couple blocks down from our house. It was a rusty setup, and the squeaks and protestations of the swing set made me cringe as my sisters played.

“Don’t you want to go on the slide?” I suggested.

“No!” they yelled in chorus.

I sighed and looked around, uncrossing my arms and fanning myself. If we left soon, maybe I could make it to see Dean Martin’s new movie with Susan and Lisa.

“Say, girls, why don’t we get going here in a few minutes?” If I said that, we’d be out of here in at least half an hour. That was soon enough that I wouldn’t melt to bits, and I could ring Susan to ask her to pick me up in her new Mustang. That was the only part of school starting again that I was looking forward to—pulling up with Susan in her new ride. We’d be the talk of our class.

“Sure, Dolly!” Janice finally hopped off the swings and ran over to the monkey bars, her blue pleated skirt flaring out as she ran.

Marybeth had decided to match her older sister’s outfit today, and in true copycat fashion ran behind Janice to the monkey bars.

It was eerily quiet without the squealing of the swings.

I held up my hand and shielded my eyes so I could squint down the road. The asphalt shimmered with heat waves, turning everything wavy and yellowish. On our side of the road, behind the playground’s chain link fence, it was all woods, so thick you couldn’t see where they ended and the factories started.

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God, it was hot. I walked over to the lone bench and sat down. When I leaned back, my shirt caught on the chain link. A hot, ashy smell permeated the air. My head nodded down, lulled into a daze by the relentless sun.

“Hey! Hey!” A whooping yell in a voice that I recognized from school snapped me out of my daydream.

“Dale?” I stood up, frowning. Why was Dale Hartley here? He only lived three lots down from the playground, but he preferred to stick with his little brother James. Dale made a point not to hang out with anybody outside of school, to the degree that he only came here with James when no one else was around. Susan and Lisa said his locker was filled with books—and not anything normal like comics, either, but huge volumes of Homer and other old poets. Why anyone would want to read that outside of class, I couldn’t imagine.

When I looked down the street, Dale was running towards us. I looked behind him and realized why. “Janice, Marybeth, get over here now. We’ve got to go.”

They looked at me in irritation, but then their faces crumpled in horror.

A forest fire had broken out—God knows how or when—maybe from the factories? It didn’t matter now. I had to get Marybeth and Janice back home. Was our house even far enough from the woods to be safe?

Dale was still running our way, James scooped up in his arms. The flames of the forest fire weren’t close to the road yet, but I knew his house was right at the edge of the woods.

“Dale! Come to my house,” I called without thinking.

We all started running and didn’t slow down the whole way to my house. We threw

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ourselves through the front door, panting and gasping for breath.

“Dolly? Why do I smell smoke?” My mother came around the corner. “Are these the Hartley boys?”

“Fire,” Dale gasped out. His usually slicked-back hair had broken completely free of its gel and was flopping all over the place.

My mother’s eyes widened, and she pulled open the front door. The loud crackling of the fire could be heard even from here, a few streets over. Sirens wailed past us.

“We’ll be safe here. We’re far enough away.”

My mother sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “Dale, where are your parents?”

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“They’re at work,” he said. James whimpered and hung on his brother’s leg.

“Okay. Let’s all just sit tight, okay? The fire department will get it under control soon.”

For some reason, we all sat down right there by the front door. I was already regretting inviting Dale to stay at my house— not that there was anywhere else for him to go, I guess, but if anyone at school found out, they would never let me live down inviting the weird kid to my house, even if it was during a fire. I could hear it now: “Have fun reading Ancient Greek with the shut-in?”

If Michael Christenson heard that I’d had Dale over, that would be the end of any chance I had with him. I could feel my social prospects withering even as we sat here.

“Where do your parents work?” my mother asked Dale.

“At the steel factory,” he said, picking at his sleeve.

Somehow, during all the years we’d gone to school together, I’d never even known that about Dale’s family.

My mother went to flip on the TV. On channel five, a reporter said that the fire had broken out in the manufacturing district.

Dale tensed up beside me, and I felt a twinge of remorse for my earlier thoughts.

What if it had started at one of the steel factories? What if his parents were hurt?

James whispered something to Dale, who muttered in low tones to him something that I couldn’t hear. He was shaking his head, looking about as severe as I’d ever seen him. I looked out the window above us. The sky was a hazy red.

James squeaked out, “It’s my birthday.”

Dale looked uncomfortable.

My mother stood up, looking purposeful for the first time since we’d come running

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inside. “James, Marybeth, Janice, come on and help me in the kitchen.” They all got up and followed her like a trio of ducklings.

“We’re going to make a cake,” she continued.

“Marybeth, you get out the flour.”

Dale and I were left there, sitting together in the entryway. His hair was still flopping around, falling into his eyes. It was in need of a haircut, far too long and out of style.

The phone on our wall rang. I jumped up to answer it.

“Dolly, are you okay? There’s a fire.” It was Lisa.

“Yeah, I’m alright. Are you? You’re closer to the forest.”

“I’m fine. Susan’s alright, too. I just got off the phone with her. Have you seen anyone else around?”

I glanced toward Dale. “No, I haven’t run into anyone.”

“Okay, just keep me posted. Gosh, I hope our houses are far away enough from the woods.”

“Me too. Bye, Lisa.”

“Bye, Dolly.”

I put the phone back up.

“Who was that?” Dale asked.

“Just Lisa.” I scratched my arm. My blouse had gotten itchy all of a sudden. “Hey, Dale?”

“Yeah?”

“You won’t tell anyone at school you were here, will you?”

Apprehension was clear in Dale’s face following my question. Suddenly, I remembered another time I had seen that look. Last year in the tenth grade, Michael Christenson and his team had just won us the football game. The morning after the game in the school hallway, Dale had bumped into Michael, and all the books he was carrying in his arms spilled. Michael was only carrying the football from the game the night before, the one he’d made the winning pass with. It bounced onto the ground.

“Watch where you’re going. Parents too cheap to buy you a backpack?” Michael had laughed.

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Dale hurried to scoop up his books.

“Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.” He handed Michael the football.

When all the books were back in Dale’s arms, Michael smacked into him. They clattered to the ground again. “Whoops.

Wasn’t paying attention.”

Michael and his friends walked away.

Susan, Lisa, and I had seen the whole thing.

The two of them weren’t fans of Michael, but ever since we’d had chemistry together the year before, I’d been trying to get him to notice me.

That day, I had laughed when Michael knocked Dale’s books to the ground, and I had seen the same look in his eyes as I did now.

“I’m sure your parents are alright,” I blurted out, trying to cover up what I’d said only a moment ago. “The fire probably didn’t even start at their factory.”

“Maybe.” Dale avoided my gaze. “Sorry about what James said. He’s a dumb kid.”

“What? No. My mom is probably relieved we don’t just have to sit here anymore. The kids needed a distraction.”

Dale nodded.

“When do your parents usually get home?”

He shrugged. “Now. I’m not sure if our house is…”

“They might come looking around,” I suggested.

He stayed silent, so I decided I’d better shut up. We sat there for a little, listening to the ruckus coming from the kitchen where the cake was being made. It was eerie, sitting there in the red light, not knowing what was happening outside. We could have opened the front door, but it felt wrong, like the fire might decide to come closer and eat up our house if I dared to look for it.

At 6:30, the back door opened and my father came in.

“Eleanor,” he called to my mother. “Have you seen what the hell is going on? Oh—who is this?”

“This is James Hartley,” my mother said.

“His brother Dale is here, too. He goes to school with Dolly.”

I scrambled up and went into the kitchen.

“We had to run from the fire.”

“It’s my birthday,” James informed my father.

“We’ve made a cake,” my mother said.

“We’re not really sure when their parents will be back from the factory.”

“Can I talk to you a minute, Eleanor?” my father asked. “Dolly, watch the kids.”

I did as I was told. My mother and father went into the living room, and I strained to hear what they were saying over the din the kids were making as they attempted to clean the kitchen. “…half the town is gone.” That was my father.

“What about….” “…not sure. It’s not looking good.”

“We’re lucky, then.” “…can stay with us…”

Marybeth tugged on my sleeve, startling me out of listening. “Can you take the cake out of the oven?”

“Sure.” I made them all stand back and slid the cake out. My mother and father walked back in as I did.

“Dale, James,” my father said, “you can stay here until your parents come to get you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Dale said from the kitchen door where he was standing.

My mother went over to the refrigerator.

“Dolly, Dale, help me cook up some dinner to go with this cake. We have everything for pasta salad, I think. I’ll bake the chicken.”

Dale and I looked at each other. I didn’t know what to say to him, so I said nothing.

“I’ll chop the vegetables,” he said, “if you can do the pasta?”

I nodded and started the water boiling.

Marybeth, Janice, and James were standing with my mother, talking loudly about whatever was happening in James and Janice’s first-grade class. Evidently, the two of them got along better than me and Dale.

“Dolly,” Dale said quietly as he cut up the tomatoes. I stared at him. He took a breath, keeping his voice low. “I understand what you said earlier. And not telling Lisa I’m here.

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I know people at school don’t like me. They think I’m strange.”

I fiddled with the lid of the pasta box. Him saying that he understood just made it worse.

“I shouldn’t have said it. I should have just told Lisa you were here. I don’t know why I lied.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to lie.” Dale poured a handful of halved cherry tomatoes into the bowl.

“What do you mean?”

“I know you like Michael Christenson, and he hates me. If it gets out that I was at your house, it’ll ruin your chances.” Dale shrugged.

“Bad enough that we used to play together after school.”

I winced. “We did?” I hadn’t even remembered that. Maybe that explained the look he’d given me last year when Michael pushed him.

“When we’d wait for our parents,” Dale said. “It was a long time ago. I mean, I barely remember it.”

He was obviously just trying to make me feel less ashamed. I thought about what Susan and Lisa would say. “Dale is a weirdo, but Michael is a jerk.”

“I don’t even really know Michael,” I said.

“All I’m saying is I get it.”

“You two okay over there?” my mom called over Janice’s chattering.

“Just making the salad.”

She turned back around. Dale had moved on to the cucumbers. I hadn’t figured him the cooking sort. I hadn’t figured him any sort, really. With a guy like Michael, who walked and talked like a movie star, people were always trying to figure out what his deal was, what he liked, how to get in with his crowd. With a guy like Dale, it was hard to imagine him having a crowd at all, much less what kind of person he was or what he might do in his free time.

“I’m sorry, Dale,” I said. “I’ve been rude.”

He shrugged again. “I have a piece of advice. Get over Michael. He’s an asshole.”

I knew Dale was right—I’d known it for a long time. When I was around Michael, I would do anything to get his attention, to

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show him I was cool enough to go out with.

But maybe that wasn’t a good thing.

The rest of the time in the kitchen we spent in silence. Anything I could’ve said would make me sound like a hypocrite, and Dale didn’t seem too inclined to strike back up the conversation.

When everything was done, we set the table with the chicken, salad, and James’s birthday cake.

“Take a picture!” he cried. “I want to show my parents.”

My father went to the closet and pulled out his camera. It was a Kodak that I’d convinced him to buy a couple years ago, thinking our family should be more like my friends’, whose parents had loads of pictures of their kids.

We all gathered around the table, the strange orange light coming from the windows illuminating our little party.

Before the picture could be taken, the telephone rang again. My father picked it up.

“Hello?”

We all listened anxiously.

“They can stay here for dinner. Yes, I’ll tell him,” my father said. He hung up the phone.

“Dale, that was the fire station. Your parents are safe. Your house is damaged, but they’ll come to get you and bring you to a motel later this evening.”

Dale visibly relaxed. “It wasn’t their factory?”

My father shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like it. One of the neighbors must have seen you boys come here and let the fire station know so they could tell your parents.”

“Thanks, Mr. Miller.” Dale turned to me as my father got the camera ready again. “Thanks for bringing me back here, Dolly. I don’t know what we would’ve done otherwise.” He seemed genuine, not an ounce of anger toward me for what I’d said earlier.

Before I could reply, my father said, “Smile.”

The flash went off, and James blew out the candles. n

SUJAYA VENKATESAN

Mushrooms and Shadows (ABOVE TOP)

Oranges and Shadows

Spinach and Shadows

(ABOVE CENTER)

(ABOVE BOTTOM)

photograph

photograph

photograph

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AR T INDEX

Butler, Abbey Polly the Pig Series

48

Duncan, Camille Keraunos and the Diadochos

30

Eudy, Destiny • Awakening • From Below Series

17 46

Fromer, Dora Something Greater

23

Fry, Emma Corinthian Column No. 7’ (“Bloodbath”)

76

Fulk, Jordan The Elements of Storms

63

Gonzalez, Arianne Untitled

33

Gray, Julia Lake Jordan Sunset

104

Gunn, Lydia • Beyond This Cage • Kingdom Come Shoes • Long Distance • Nomad Jebaraj, Rachel Untitled Jensen, Leah • Argo Adventures Ads • Moss Weaving • Transformation Laube, Deb • late winter afternoon over the lake • winter 2022 series Lillard, Candice • Aesthetics Series • Not So Merry Christmas

84 83 103 100 59 54 69 55 04 14 92 91

Morin, Kristin • Body Series I: Viewed • Body Series II: Comparison • Body Series III: Freedom • It’s All Too Much • Life/Death Series, Death is Peaceful

65 65 65 35 08

Mullis, Karlie • Burning Queen of the Night • Self Portrait

117 57

Nelson, Sydney Lucy

53

Ostrowski, Madeline • Dear Today • God’s Fingers Series

87 11

Ryan, Paige • Sunset at the Sutro Baths • Young Desert Big Horn in the Valley of Fire

89 75

Schneider, Hannah • Awakening Series • Decay of Nature • Personal Identity Suite • Untitled Series

02 99 45 106

Spann, Sara-Rose Metamorphosis

07

Vandenboom, Kasey • Anchored to Ghosts • Delicate Taboos • Mind and Body • Woman or Vessel?

29 114 66 24

Vanyo, Caroline Three Sisters Coiled Vessels

38

Venkatesan, Sujaya • Mushrooms and Shadow • Oranges and Shadows • Spinach and Shadows

121 121 121

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LITE RATURE IND EX

Andrews, Lizzy Bell, Caroline E. Brown, Mada Cin, Amelia Davenport, Layla Donofrio, Alaire Gable, Bridget Garcia, Cameron Lee, Sophie Martinez, Valeria McMahon, Tamar Mullis, Karlie Niemi, Kate Page, Sarah Polaski, Kate Rounds, Sadie Shelp-Peck, Elinor Slack, Olivia Solorzano Ariza, M.J. Swenson, Emerald D. Wendorf, Erin Wiese, Krista

Whitmire, Shelly

Daybreak Fall Out Winter Cold Love My Body The Feeling of His Touch A Feathery Lesson Tea Leaves and Tiles Olive and the Rotten Rabbit It’s the Thrill Moving Durham Pyre On Your Chain Too Young A Neighbor That I Always Pass Strangers A Day in the Life Atop the Walls My First Days Without You The World Kept Turning What if We Told Them?

After the Fire Witch’s Brew 9 Month Rehabilitation Sí Lo Soy Free Dog This is Not a Fairytale November Swine Tapestry Violin Lessons Vanessa

05 67 16 15 99 101 06 34 48 92 76 24 90 33 32 47 107 86 30 68 88 105 116 38 115 56 84 28 09 29 58 102

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AWARDS POET RY AWA RDS Juried by Jayme Ringleb Jayme Ringleb joined the Meredith faculty in 2021. Dr. Ringleb is the author of So Tall It Ends in Heaven (Tin House Books, September 2022), poems from which have appeared recently in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast. Dr. Ringleb has served in editorial capacities with The Adroit Journal, PEN America, Pleiades Press, and the Southeast Review.

1st Place

A Neighbor That I Always Pass |

by Kate Niemi | page 47 Balancing elements of the absurd with elements of the familiar, “A Neighbor That I Always Pass” is an impressive study in worldbuilding. In the prose poem’s small, wooded world, where “trees cough up mildewed tears,” the speaker’s neighbor puts on a wild, seasons-long morality play featuring all sorts of characters—skeletons, prophets, “black-winged fiends.” The moral of the morality play, though, is left unclear, which permits reflection for both the poem’s speaker and readers: Are we all, in some way, putting on plays for those we keep at a close distance? How much of human morality is performance, and how much of performance is hiddenness?

2nd Place Free Dog | by Emerald D. Swenson | page 115 “Free Dog” is an unrestrained and incisive poem that examines the power of resistance. The poem takes its initial simile—“I want to know how real freedom feels. / Like a dog that has stopped begging”—and extends the metaphor, reimagining a suburban setting as a site of tameness, colonization, and the eradication of the natural world. Underlying the directness of the poem’s language is a remarkable complexity of emotion: here, hunger for freedom is a resistance against humiliation, conquest, and grief.

PRO SE AWA RD S Juried by Ruth Moose Ruth Moose was on the Creative Writing faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill for almost 20 years and won the Tanner Award for Outstanding Teacher Excellence. She published six collections of poetry and three books of short stories, with individual stories first appearing in Atlantic, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and other publications. In 2014, she won the Malice Domestic Award for her novel Doing it at the Dixie Dew, which was followed by Wedding Bell Blues in 2016. St. Andrews University Press is to bring out The Goings on at Glen Arbor Acres soon.

1st Place

Atop the Walls | by Kate Polaski | page 30 Judge Moose said she chose this piece because of its “beautifully written, fresh language” and “tightly controlled viewpoint.” She also commended the author’s “impressive imagination.”

2nd Place

It’s the Thrill | by Sophie Lee | page 92 Judge Moose noted that this story’s unreliable narrator “really grabs the reader” and provides “great tension.”

Honorable Mention November Swine | by Krista Wiese | page 09 Judge Moose highlighted this story’s “terrific details” as one reason she found it “a powerful piece.”

Honorable Mention Sí Lo Soy | by M.J. Solorzano Ariza | page 28 “Sí Lo Soy” is a striking demonstration of how to reclaim the language others unfairly place onto us. Through examinations of gender, multilingualism, and self-love, this impeccably structured poem finds power in translation: “Soy desenfrenada because / I refuse to wait on a man. // Soy irrespetuosa because / I defend who I am.” Given that language is always an act of translation, this poem encourages us to consider how we speak about—and to—ourselves.

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HANNAH SCHNEIDER detail of Awakening Series

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LITERARY STAFF CO-EDITORS

Olivia Slack Krista Wiese POETRY EDITOR Maria Solorzano PROSE EDITOR Kate Polaski ENGAGEMENT MANAGER Kali Ranke ARCHIVIST Tamara Bomparte SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS

Haileigh West Arri Woodhouse FACULTY ADVISOR

DESIGN STAFF GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Ariana Davis Dora Fromer FACULTY DESIGN ADVISOR & CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Dana Lovelace Professor, Graphic Design Director, Circus Design Studio

Ashley Hogan Assistant Professor, English Director of Creative Writing WRITER-EDITORS

Michaela Altman Mada Brown Amelia Cin Alaire Donofrio Shae-Lynn Henderson Kendall Johnson Stephanie Melvin Karlie Mullis Sarah Page Mia Shelton Constance Wesley

PRODUCTION NOTES

Printer Printivity Copies 500 Type Families Museo Sans & Chaparral Pro

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