SCAN Spring 2022

SCAD ATLANTA’S STUDENT MAGAZINE SPRING 2022 | VOL. 14 NO. 2

SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

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NAIL BITERS Conquering old habits and getting tough.

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HEADQUARTERS OF CHILDHOOD

Drone photography of playgrounds.

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THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE DROME Between the shelves of Atlanta's last video store.

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INTERSTATE

A poem denoting the unusual beauty of the highway.

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DON'T LOOK UP. OR AROUND

As apocalyptic asteroid approaches, an artist apologizes.

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Snapshots of the Dejak family.

A gemstones-inspired exploration of the human form.

Mathieu Hébert: From lawyer to graphic designer.

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ON SLOVENIAN ROOTS

POMEGRANATE SEEDS

A poem from a wandering heart to an unusually captivating love.

SEMI-PRECIOUS

THE CHANGELING IN FRAUDVILLE

A shapeshifter evades suspicion to remain in their beloved town.

THE NEXT BIG THING

ARTS CORNER

Letting go.

SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

Letter from the Editor Before I'd ever written for SCAN, I'd seen copies of it flung around the school and left on top of trashcans — not inside, like the owners couldn't bear to throw them away, but trash nonetheless, as they were no longer wanted. And I thought then, "How sad."

I don't think so anymore.

I am finishing my last issue as Editor-in-Chief now, writing this letter last. This issue is the culmination of many hours' work, from writers and visual artists alike.

In your hand, however, it is ink on paper. Do with it what you will. It was never meant to last until the end of time. I only dare to hope, before you discard it, that this magazine has delivered to you some of the nuance and beauty in that gray area between the things we treasure and the things we absolutely must get rid of, between the things for which we yearn and the things from which we recoil.

One favor, though: If you do end up throwing this copy away, please put it all the way into the trashcan, and make sure it is recycled. Neither of us will feel too miserable. It is the nature of most things we love to only be Semi-Precious.

— Julie Tran

Cover art by Chenyu Yang Staff illustrations by Cait Jayme

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People of SCAN 1.

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1. Julie Tran Editor-in-Chief 2. Daniella Almona Creative Director 3. Chenyu Yang Art Director 4. Anokhi Dodhia Managing Editor & PR Director 5. Benjamin Greennagel Copy Editor 6. John Warner Photo Editor 7. Rachael Ramchand News Editor 8. Rai Mukherjee Style Editor 9. Eva Erhardt Features Editor 10. Annika Harley Opinions Editor 11.Cait Jayme Multimedia Editor

SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

BITERS Conquering old habits and getting tough.

Written by Annika Harley Illustrated by Zhijun Cheng

The garden center wasn’t much to look at, Meadow’s Farms, a small plot of land on the top of a hill, squished between a community church and Route 50. It wasn’t much more exciting to look at from the employee parking lot where I parked my creaky old minivan. And yet it was mine, my place of work for the foreseeable future. For a summer job, working at the garden center really wasn’t that bad. My coworkers were kind enough, mostly middle-aged men. Almost none of them had a college degree and pretty much all of them had a smoking problem. But they were still fun to work with, as they made a point not to take selling mulch and flowers too seriously. Having just graduated high school, I was by far the youngest person on staff, and one of the only women. I think that’s why Theresa took me under her wing.

She was in her early fifties but looked well past sixty, her skin leathery and with a deep tan after so many years in the sun. A grandmother, she made

it well known to us all that she was “too damn old to be working at this dump.” This was usually followed with a short cackle and another drag from her cigarette. She was in charge of training me on the cash register where my job was to check out customer products as I sweat through my uniform in the cramped space behind the counter. People typically paid with credit or debit cards, so my job mostly consisted of the polite, “Did you find everything okay?” as they shuffled through their wallets and purses, sometimes offering me a smile. She would nod approvingly with every successful transaction and be quick to input the manager override when I made mistakes, shaking her head with a grin when I apologized profusely.

When there were no customers in the store, we stocked empty shelves, answered phones, and filled out delivery and installation forms. We called it busy work, that time in the shop when the gossip was as abundant as the dust. Theresa

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“You gotta quit that,” she said dryly, looking at me almost expectantly. I asked if she had ever bitten her nails and, if she did, how the hell did she manage to quit. That’s when she looked at me, a knowing look on her face. “Jail.”

could talk for hours about her daughter and her boyfriend and our “s***head boss,” all between fervent sips from her styrofoam cup of black coffee. She told me all about teenage pregnancy, her insomnia and her nicotine addiction while we stapled and highlighted forms, sweeping the leftover bits of soil and fertilizer from the break room and out onto the soil outside. “Dust unto dust,” she would say slyly. Then we would work our way around the store, checking inventory and watering indoor plants until lunch break, when she would grab her carton of cigarettes and duck out into the parking lot and out of view.

I spent my lunches at the landscaping checkout, a scrappy metal booth at the bottom of the hill, closer to the parking lot where the massive piles and mulch and soil sat, behemoths on the asphalt.

Besides the occasional contractor, I was usually alone down there. But every once in a while, Theresa would finish her smoke break early and end up joining me at my solitary little station.

One time, leaning her hip against the makeshift counter, she asked me if I had a habit of biting my fingernails. It was less of a question, more of a statement. I nodded, unconsciously fidgeting with my fingers as she glanced at my ragged nails.

Whether the charges were accessory to armed robbery or drug-related, I don’t remember, but I do remember her humorless expression as she told me about her time in jail. “There’s always a b**** in jail, and you don’t want to be the b****.” She almost sighed as she said this, and I couldn’t help but picture the Theresa I had met, with her high ponytail and her pearl glasses chain, sitting in a jail cell. She went on to explain how she had bitten her nails her whole life, only to quit once and for all when she took her seat in the crowded holding cell. “You have to get tough, and everyone knows the girl that bites her nails isn’t tough.” She left on that note and ambled back up the hill to make a phone call, leaving me to consider my thoughts in the hazy summer heat.

I stopped working at Meadow’s over a year ago, and my life has looked very different since then, in many ways. I’m an undergrad now, and I spend a lot less time with middle-aged smokers and a lot more time in the soft lights of the cozy neighborhood bookstore. I’m learning how to stay close to friends and family from four states away and slowly learning Spanish. I tried and failed as a beginner plant mom, got a B in a beginner art class and I’m training to run my first 5k. I still bite my nails, notably less than I used to, but I haven’t quite been able to kick it. Sometimes, when I take out my nail file and scissors, I think of what she told me about her habit, and I wonder if this is what getting tough looks like.

SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

Between the shelves of Atlanta's last video store.

There's No Place Like Drome Written by Eva Erhardt Illustrated by Elizabeth Efferson

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Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It has raised old movie franchises out of the ground and given life to entire genres of TV programs. We carry the feeling close to our hearts and, inevitably, to our wallets. The market knows this. The customers — connoisseurs of their own pasts — navigate flashback-ridden waters with shrewdness, deciding whether every 2020s product that comes their way was close enough to childhood to be worth the penny. And when they find a company that perfectly represents nostalgia and everything it stands for, it’s hard to resist. Introducing Videodrome and its owner and operator, Matthew Booth.

Videodrome is the last video store in Atlanta, harkening back to the days of Blockbuster, with DVD lined shelves and vintage movie posters covering the walls. “We often hear something like ‘This is like a Blockbuster!’ when people new to the store come through the door,” says Booth. “That’s fine, because it’s a lot of people's main reference point for a video store. But, after walking around

a bit and checking out our store, the conversation usually moves to something like 'This place is great, it has so much more cool stuff than Blockbuster.'” And they’d be right. Videodrome, although similar to its counterparts from decades before, is a completely different beast. Looking back, most video stores that we grew up with were pretty corporate, offering the basic selection of beloved classics box-office hits. Videodrome is different, with a wider DVD selection. Each shelf offers a different genre of movies that often can’t even be found on streaming. It recalls the early days of the store, which was birthed out of a simple need for more independent DVDs. Booth, who had grown up around video stores since high school, took a part time job at Moovies in 1996 after graduating college with slim job opportunities. After getting a position at the Little Five Points location, Booth found that while he really liked the job, the area and its customers, he still felt that something was missing. “The store was very corporate and didn’t really satisfy the diverse interests of the neighborhood, so another employee, Jeff Sutton, and I decided to investigate opening a more alternative video store.”

From that idea came Videodrome, a little shop in Poncey-Highlands, named after the 1983 sci-fi film directed by David Cronenberg. “We got lucky that a framing store that was located in our current location had recently closed. We met with the landlord and he gave us a chance.” says Booth. “We put our VHS collections together, opened wholesale accounts with a bunch of media distributors, and drove all over the city hunting for VHS. We put together about 10,000 titles that we felt were unique and represented our type of customer.”

SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

The new store aimed to offer a variety of independent movies to its guests and alternatives to those who were tired of the Terminators and ETs that other video stores offered. “We started with a small but unique collection of VHS titles that featured genres like Italian horror, Hong Kong action, anime, French New Wave, American Independent, documentaries, slasher, cult, samurai and films by director,” says Booth. “Our store was pretty niche, we rarely even carried big Hollywood titles.”

The late 90s was the golden age of video stores, with renting numbers being at an all-time high.

“This was the peak of video rental,” says Booth.

“There were three corporate video stores and two independents within a three-mile radius.” The New York Times reports at this time there were over 30,000 video rental stores across the U.S. Add that to the 45,000 outlets that also rented tapes and DVDs and you have a complete domination of media consumption in the country. For a long time, if you wanted entertainment without going out, rented movies were your only option.

Easy, inexpensive and entirely accessible, it didn’t seem like anything could topple the empire.

Enter Netflix. In 1997, they quietly launched into the video scene, offering mail to order DVDs. The process was simple. With a few clicks on your computer, you’d have the video of your choice delivered to your doorstep, much like what Amazon was newly capitalizing on with book shopping. And the best part? No late fees. It was a fresh, new idea that thrived in popularity alongside the Internet.

It was only a few years until video stores started feeling the ripples of streaming services and other contributing factors. Numbers started dropping and the world watched as the friendly neighborhood video store faded into obscurity.

Videodrome isn’t just the last remaining video store in Atlanta. It was one of the last in the entire country. According to USA Today, 86% of the video stores that were open in 2007 are now shuttered and closed for good. What wasn’t killed by the rise of streaming was murdered by the pandemic, with once-thriving chains like Family Video in the Midwest shutting down completely. Kate Hagen, an independent journalist writing for The Blacklist Blog, made a spreadsheet earlier this year, listing out all of the independent video stores left in the world. Looking at the small Google sheets form,

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there are only 96 remaining, with the straggler locations ranging from far-away destinations such as Manila, Philippines to small towns like Seaside, Oregon.

Ninety-six globally is a sore number compared to the near 30,000 we once had in the United States alone. With COVID-19 still looming overhead, it’s a tough time to be a video store, but somehow, Videodrome is making it work. “There have been a lot of ups and downs during the pandemic. We've never worked harder.” says Booth, when asked about COVID’s effects. “I'm proud of our staff for the way we've adapted to the constantly changing environment. At the beginning of the pandemic, we had to cancel events, close the interior of our store for eight months, switch to an email/phone ordering system for rentals and move as many of our retail items as possible to an online store.

We applied for a ton of grants and COVID-related government programs and received enough help to keep us stable. Our customers continued to support us, and we can’t thank them enough.”

If you’re looking to check out Videodrome and the nostalgia it stands for, visit their store at 617 North Highland Avenue Northeast, Atlanta, GA 30306.

Also make sure to check out their website, www. videodromeatl.com, for updates on regular movie screenings, merchandise and more.

SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

HEADQUARTERS

of

childhood Drone photography of playgrounds.

By Jasmine Owens

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SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

S TAT E Poem by Annika Harley Photography by John Adams III, garments by Amari Washington

There’s an elegance to the salt-sick stretch of pavement, Arlington Boulevard A nauseating beauty in the endless push and pull of tin cans and cars dancing along the highway I spent that summer observing Route 50 from a booth selling flowers to people with too much time on their hands Looking on at the motels and mini-malls desperately clinging to the interstate like so many lions and antelope around a watering hole Passing the time, painting perfect little blue buildings in the condensation on the glass until the boiling August sun sizzled them away Waiting for my next break to find some water or conversation, something to fill the profound emptiness in my belly

It was that summer that I became close acquaintances with the scattered handfuls of decrepit condos and aging office buildings wedged between cracks in the concrete Buildings either stretching for the sky or squatting defeatedly along the asphalt There was something almost spiritual about the rush of the freeway, a type of electricity saturated the air as the heat melted the sky into inky darkness Cars screaming down the road like there was nothing left to lose save for some points on their license Something about the little white cottage perched on the battered sidewalk would continue to catch my eye, the sign out front advertising “Psychic Reader” in letters that deserved a gold filigree A hand-painted picture of a tarot card was propped in the window, directly facing my humble cash register, silently whispering to me the things I knew I didn’t want to hear.

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SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

As apocalyptic asteroid approaches, an artist apologizes.

To my super:

(Humor) Written and illustrated by Julie Tran

Ah, well, this seems to be the end, folks. As the window outside my over-cluttered hovel of a studio apartment lights up with the tail blaze of the life-ending asteroid, I feel it is only right to resolve some grievances I have caused you. Consider it my last chance for spiritual clarity before the moment of collision and we all find out instantly, all at once, whether there are spirits or not. But I digress. Here are some of the apologies I must deliver:

You wore a pitying, “you-live-like-this?” face whenever you came up to fix the fridge or unclog the sink, and I very much resented you for it. But now, seeing as our time on Earth is way more limited than I thought, I must let you know I am sorry for making you zig-zag your way through mountains of newspapers, sketchbooks, paintings and boxes — a journey that undoubtedly took whole minutes off your short life. But more importantly, I must also let you know that I am not a hoarder. Hoarders are anxious, depressed, ill people who can’t separate with their garbage because of their exaggerated sense of responsibility or opportunity in the future. I am an artist. And I really, truly need all my stuff because it's totally going toward this other project I’m working on, hopefully done in humanity’s last fifteen minutes. I’m perfectly fine.

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To the mover I hired on TaskRabbit: $30/hour seemed really not worth it by the end of your endeavor to help me transfer all my possessions into my now-apartment. To be fair, I am poor, as are most totally-not-hoarder types, and you were the cheapest mover on the site. If reincarnation is real, maybe think about raising your rates in the next life, so you can avoid people like me. For now, you can spend your final moments blaming the market. Actually, let’s blame the market together. What is hoarding if not the natural conclusion of capitalism — a hoarder’s system, truly, where humanity's folly was thinking that a man could control his stuff, instead of the other way around. The three bins of broken easels, bed frame bits and McDonald’s Happy Meal toys you lugged up weren’t trash, they were investments.

What if I had needed a half-melted plastic Minion’s head and a plank of splintery plywood? What would you expect me to do? Go out and buy them?

In this economy? Yeah, right.

To my painting professor: You have the zeal and artistry of Leonardo (the Italian one), truly a Throwback Thursday to before the institutionalization of art. You, who believe the artist still retains a mystic aura of genius around them, surely you would not mind the towering structures of stuff amidst which I now sit. It is where

the good artist differ from the good consumer, is it not? The good consumer acquires stuff, keeps the good stuff and throws out the bad stuff. To the good artist, all stuff is good stuff. (My four years of laughing at high schoolers who didn’t understand non-destructive workflow in Photoshop and Cloud backups are based on this, so please don’t invalidate it now.) If some rich weirdo in an asteroid-proof basement can clutch with Göring-like vigor the preliminary sketches to Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” I can sit here and clutch the hard drives that housed the sketches to my Double-Stuffed Wasabi-Onion Oreo package design, an NFT artwork that depicts the Amazon forests being burnt by robots and two terabytes of Instagram Reels.

It is the Instagram Reels that I must apologize for — they must have offended your fine sensibilities.

They are far from Michelangelo’s “David,” are they not? I was merely going with the flow — and we artists have had quite a dramatic flow: from mere artisans to mystic geniuses, to girlbosses and content creators. If all the Instagram Reels of us just making stuff were gathered in one place, how many acres of servers would that make? My 30 hard drives seem paltry by comparison. Sure, the “Mona Lisa” might be worth $860 million. But an NFT of a one-minute video of ol’ Leo painting the “Mona Lisa” over a catchy Michael Bublé chorus?

It could have funded enough rockets to reduce that asteroid into confetti. For peace of mind in our last seven minutes, let us blame Leonardo’s time, when the girls obviously weren’t bossing hard enough.

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To the hoarders whose piles my work ended up in: Hey, I never meant for the packaging design of Double-Stuffed Wasabi-Onion Oreo to be that pretty.

Same goes for the seven-layer unboxer’s delight that housed the iPhone Double-X Ultra Plus (pretty sexy when a hologram of Steve Jobs jumped out when you lifted the charger from its spot, eh?). If these things end up in a precarious pile waiting to fall on you the moment the earth shakes, forgive me, I’d only spent the bulk of my higher education learning how to entrap customers with beautiful graphics, to transform a $6 bottle of wine into something that looks $12, to cover non-biodegradable plastic with trees, sans-serif typography and whatever way I could spice up the words “eco-friendly” and “natural.” But hey, none of that plastic ended up in a turtle’s digestive tract or a landfill. It remains in your house! The wrappers that your Things™ come in have graduated to be a Thing™ in its own right, at least in your eyes. I am glad. Did my productivism somewhat sate your consumerism? Did the baby mascot I designed for a toilet paper brand and the printed T-shirt sold on my now-defunct online shop somewhat fill the void the civilized world bore into you? I only ever wished to be of service. As you know, the road to the nearest Amazon warehouse was paved with good intentions, right before they covered it plastic wrap.

If any of your loved ones have left you because you chose your pile of stuff over them, I must apologize for that, too. The good news is, in the last 93 seconds of all life, you could reasonably ask for a reconciliation on the grounds that all of this stuff that you hold most dear, artful and artless alike, are going up in flames. Sixty seconds now.

Cacophony in the distance. Explosions, I hear, as civilized society and its refineries — antique furniture, humor magazines, rare old posters, collectible toys — combust. Would it have been better to live a life without them? Would it have been better if we hadn’t let what we consume, consume us? My possessions are coming down on me. Our downfall, like our ascent, is monstrously loud. And yet, if you really focus, you could almost hear Leonardo (the other one), in an attempt at a Midland accent, musing as serenely as a god.

“We really did have everything, didn’t we?”

Yes, we did, Leo. Arguably too much.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF AN ARTWORK

ING R D AR RDE O H SO ES DI US CA

Most art ends up in the trash. It is only a matter of time.

Genetic: hoarders could inherit genes that cause them to attribute special meaning to every item.

Psychological: objects are gathered to fill an emotional void created by trauma, anxiety, depression, etc.

Sociological: hoarding is the natural consequence of a society that's overrun with stuff.

Artist

Auction house Collector/ consumer

CONSUMER SPENDING ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

72%

21.6% — No answer

18.5% — Twitter

18.8% — Snapchat

23.9% — TikTok

33.9% — Youtube

47.4% — Instagram

50.7% — Facebook

Museum

of users make purchases based on Instagram.

As of 2017, nearly 2.5 million artists were in the U.S. labor force Designers make up 39% of all artists

As of 2021, graphic design industry was worth around $45.8 billion globally logo design and branding made up around $3 billion

Trash/destroyed

Global art market value:

$65.1 billion Online sales:

$13.3 billion To build a following online, artists often have to sacrifice craftsmanship and stylistic experimentation to keep up with post schedules.

The question for small individual: if there really is no ethical consumption under capitalism, can there be ethical production under capitalism?

Sources: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | jstor.org | npr.org | apa.org | arts.gov

SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

ON SLOVENIAN roots Snapshots of the Dejak family.

Written by Stephanie Dejak Illustrated by Eillie Wang

Apple treee “1, 2, 3! Get off my grandpa’s apple tree!”

The white leather couch in the living room of our grandparents’ house on Sugarbush Lane was base, always. As long as you were touching the couch, you were safe, and you couldn’t be tagged.

The rules were that you couldn’t go upstairs to the guest bedrooms or downstairs to the basement, and you couldn’t hide in Miško’s office, but you could run through the kitchen as long as Stama wasn’t cooking dinner.

But if you were on base, and you heard Miško count to three, well … you scattered and you hoped that he didn’t tag you.

Apple Tree was our favorite game to play with our grandfather. He was nearly seventy years old, but he was in fantastic shape — he played tennis often and he walked around Gates Mills to the cul-de-sac and back every morning — so you actually had a fair

chance of being tagged by him when he chased you around the house.

My youngest brother, David, would observe the chase for a while before deciding to join. He was able to develop his own strategy, which was to camp out on the other end of the couch while Miško chased the others. That way, he could just touch base whenever Miško came close, and he could avoid tiring himself out from over-sprinting.

That is, until one afternoon, Miško caught on to his plan. My seventy-year-old grandfather leapt over the couch hurdle-style, almost in slow motion, and tagged David in the midst of a roar of laughter.

The rest of us glared at him with wide eyes, shocked, but ultimately impressed.

“Again, Miško!” David said when his laughter died down. “Again!”

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Cleveland, Ohio

Foster’s Homemade Ice Cream

Although my family visits the Cleveland area at least twice a year, it’s rare that my dad actually drives within the city limits when we visit. Maybe it’s because he’s spent so much of his life there and he’s tired of the gray skyline and all the concrete, but I was endlessly fascinated with any buildings taller than the Albemarle water tower in my hometown and I always wished that we could get even a glimpse of Cleveland’s buildings before driving into the suburbs of Gates Mills.

At the end of Istra Lane sat Foster’s Homemade Ice Cream. It was usually closed during the snowier months, but during the summer there was a line out the door and into the late June heat.

Gates Mills is approximately a nine-hour drive from Albemarle, North Carolina. Eight if your younger brother is driving, maybe nine and a half if you stop to eat anywhere other than the McDonald’s across from the Flying J gas station in Fort Chiswell, Virginia. Definitely ten if you happen to hit Thanksgiving traffic on Interstate 77, but fingers crossed that you don’t.

“Absolutely not,” they would say, and we would pout.

Dejak The last name Dejak is pronounced as “Day-Yawk” in the Slovenian language. However, the American pronunciation is “Dee-Jack,” which is how my family members and I have pronounced it since the 1960s.

However, it does not stop common American Southerners from pronouncing it in a myriad of other ways, including but not limited to: “DuhShack,” “Dee-Shack,” “Duh-Jack,” “Duh-Jake,” and even “Dee …? Sorry, I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce that right."

After growing bored of playing four square or basketball in the driveway, my cousins and I would beg our parents to let us ride our bikes across the usually busy Chardon Road for a cone of strawberry or chocolate chip cookie dough.

But sometimes, after a plate or two of salmon that Miško made paired with Stama’s carefully mashed (but not quite creamed) potatoes, Stama would ask us if we “still vant it ice cream.”

“Stama, we’re so stuffed from dinner,” we would say as we piled into her Cadillac. “There’s no way that we could eat anything else.”

“Oh, don’t vorry,” she would reply with a smile. “It vill melt through de cracks.”

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Immigrants Iris Bailin, a contributor to the New York Times, writes that “[Cleveland]’s metropolitan area contains the largest urban population of Slovenians — about 75,000 [as of 1987], counting second- and third-generation Americans — outside Ljubljana, Slovenia’s major city.”

According to the “Slovene” section of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History at Case Western Reserve University, Slovenians that immigrated to Cleveland after World War II “were mainly political refugees." The Slovenian community in Cleveland was also “augmented by the second generation,” meaning that second-generation Slovenians like my Teta Lenka (“teta” is Slovenian for “aunt”) who stayed in Cleveland and continued to embrace their heritage, have ensured that a Slovenian cultural presence remains in the area today.

John Dejak, both of them John F. Dejak was born in Lipovec, Slovenia, which was considered a part of Yugoslavia at the time.

He moved to America in the 1960s after meeting a Slovenian woman named Amelia Starasinič in Germany. The two of them got married and settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where John F. Dejak started his career as an engineer. They had their first child, a son, in June 1966. They named him John Nicholas Dejak, Nicholas being after Amelia’s oldest brother.

John N. Dejak grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and spoke Slovenian as his first language. He is not as fluent in it now at age fifty-five, but he was ridiculed in kindergarten once for referring to a fork as a “vilice.” He began working at his father’s machine shop, Dejak Machine and Tool Company, on weekends when he was fourteen, and began a career as a mechanical engineer after graduating from Cleveland State University in 1989. He had his first child, a daughter, in November 1998.

They moved from Cleveland to Albemarle, North Carolina in 2000 when he got another engineering job. He never taught his daughter how to speak Slovenian.

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Miško Amelia, after divorcing John F. Dejak in 1995, met a Croatian man named Miško Maslac in 1997 at a holiday dinner at her niece’s house. They were happily married in 2000.

By 2000, Amelia already had four young grandchildren under the age of three. Each of these grandchildren spent extended periods of time with their grandparents, at Stama and Miško’s house, on Sugarbush Lane in Gates Mills, Ohio.

It wasn’t until 2007, when said grandchildren were between the ages of eight and eleven, that they learned that the word “Miško” does not mean “grandfather” in Slovenian. The grandchildren went with their parents to meet an old man in a Panera Bread on Mayfield Road, and they introduced him as Stariata, their grandfather.

“If ‘Stariata’ means ‘grandfather’ in Slovenian, then what does ‘Miško’ mean?” I later asked my dad.

“Mike,” he replied. “And it’s not Slovenian, it’s Croatian.”

Regardless, Miško will always mean “grandfather” to me.

Na zdravje In the English language, the Slovenian phrase “na zdravje” translates to “bless you” or “to good health,” but it most commonly translates to “cheers.”

However, if you visit Cleveland and you’re having trouble with the pronunciation, usually muttering “nice driveway” in a Slovenian accent will do just fine.

This phrase pairs nicely with a short glass of slivovitz, also known as “Slovenian moonshine” to Clevelanders. Technically, slivovitz is Slovenian brandy made from plums, but it’s easier for my family to get Croatian rakija from Miško’s friend Hadjo in Cleveland, who makes his own grappa from grapes. But for us—slivovitz, brandy, rakija, grappa— they all have the same warm yet violent bitter taste, so we use “slivovitz” as a collective term.

It’s customary, maybe not to all Slovenians but to my family in particular, to pour a shot of slivovitz upon a safe arrival to Gates Mills. When a cheerful “na zdravje!” fills the house on Sugarbush Lane, whether it’s during Thanksgiving or Easter or somewhere in between, it’s always the beginning of a memorable family reunion.

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sugar and stuff with fillings of your choice, including but not limited to: fresh strawberries, raspberry jam, maple syrup, and/or cream cheese. But if you’re a younger brother of mine, usually a Slovenian sausage link will do.

Stama Technically, the word “Stama” doesn’t exist in the Slovenian language. The Slovenian word for “grandmother” is “Staramama,” but when my oldest cousin Sam was born, babbling the word “Staramama” sounded more like “Sta-ma-ma.”

Palačinke A Slovenian crepe recipe from the kitchen of Amelia Maslac (Note: these measures can be halved or increased as needed) 7 oz milk 7 oz water 3 eggs ½ tsp salt 10 oz flour Mix with a mixer until smooth.

“You have to experiment,” she says.

If it’s too thick, add more water. If it’s too thin, add more flour. Heat a skillet or pan and spray with Pam or oil. Pour the batter and rotate or swivel the pan so the batter covers the bottom. When the edges are brown, flip it over. Serve with powdered

By the time the rest of us cousins were born, she had shortened it to “Stama,” so that’s what we called her, too. Calling her “Staramama” at that age was such a mouthful. And even at twenty-three years old, sometimes it still feels like a mouthful.

Luckily, she still answers to “Stama.”

Torching One of the only times that I remember driving through the actual Cleveland city limits was when we were going to the Slovenian National Home for the annual Martinovanje festival, which is a cocktail party for St. Martin’s Day filled with slivovitz and polka dancing. I was seventeen and I’d never been, even though most everyone in the car with us—my dad, my Teta Lenka, and my cousins—had been countless times.

As Teta Lenka drove, her and my dad laughed as they merged on to Interstate 90 and said in a Slovenian accent that we were “torching Cleveland.”

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

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“We’re making fun of our dad,” my dad said.

“When your Stariata used to give us directions, he used to tell us to take I-90 ‘torching Cleveland,’” Teta Lenka said. “Except ‘torching’ isn’t really a word.”

“He would morph the words ‘towards’ and ‘approaching,’” my dad continued.

“So, it’s like Stariata’s version of Spanglish, I guess.

Except with Slovenian,” I said.

“Slovenglish?”

“Exactly.”

Waitress After World War II, Slovenia became a part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. John F. Dejak received notice that he would be required to enlist in the army on Yugoslavia’s behalf, so he fled to a refugee camp in Austria in the late 1950s.

His teta was Slovenian as well, so she had no issue with hiring Slovenians to work in the restaurant.

One of the waitresses had a family back in Slovenia that was struggling to make ends meet, so she came to Germany with a work visa to help provide for her family. While Stariata was visiting his teta at her restaurant, the waitress introduced herself as Amelia.

Zlato Throughout their thirteen years of marriage, one of Miško’s nicknames for Stama was “zlato.” I heard him call her that all the time when I was younger, but since I never learned how to speak Slovenian myself, I didn’t think much of it.

It wasn’t until I was in college, years after Miško’s death, when I realized what the nickname actually translated to. A friend of mine had gotten a new tattoo of a Chinese symbol behind her ear, and out of curiosity, I went to Google Translate to see what the same word translated to in Slovenian.

Gold.

While he was there, he was sponsored by an American family who helped him relocate to Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived with a Slovenian family that helped him learn English before enlisting in the United States Army.

Since Slovenian culture has many German influences, my Stariata was quite familiar with German culture and requested that he be stationed there while in the United States Army. He wasn’t very close with his immediate family, but he had a teta who owned and operated a restaurant in Germany.

All those years, my grandfather was calling my grandmother “zlato,” which means “gold” in Slovenian.

And now that I’m much older, I can understand why.

It’s the perfect word to describe everything that my Stama is—beautiful, rare, strong, and priceless.

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The term "semi-precious" closely relates to that of a valuable stone or gem. It is not uncommon to alter the essence of what is a true definition, however, in blending the metaphorical and literal form.

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Director, photographer and lighting: John Warner Model: Rebecca Zaizay

SEMI PRE CIOUS A gemstones-inspired exploration of the human form.

Through the lens, the model was able to evoke a love connection between dynamic and serene forms, pushing the boundaries of beauty and abstraction. The gleaming light acts as a catalyst, pushing her to evolve with her environment.

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Stones and gems have consistent anatomies until altered by their environment.

The alterations or imperfections are what create their uniqueness and character.

This is why the model's environment is exposed.

Her evolution of poses through symbolic movement grants her the ability to create her own value. Though I can announce the preciousness of it, it is she who can define it.

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THE NEXT BIG THING

Mathieu Hébert: From lawyer to graphic designer.

Interviewed and illustrated by Julie Tran

It was spring 2019. Mathieu Hébert stood at the edge of a void, considering his options. Before him was the great unknown. Behind was a coveted law career ten years in the making. There was a moment of panic. Then came the jump. ***** “I was from Montreal, Canada, but I had to leave the country, you know,” Hébert mused, as part of his introduction to our class. It sounded positively Scorsesian. What could have possibly happened to make a thirty-something lawyer quit his job, move countries and take up graphic design?

Halfway through the quarter, Hébert proved to be a capable graphic designer.

“Look at this,” said our professor as he flipped through his project. “If an ex-lawyer can do this, so can you.”

Mutters and murmurs. The professor turned back to Hébert. “But you’re not gonna go back to law?”

“Nope,” said Hébert. “Never.”

We muttered and murmured some more. To a room mostly made up of twenty-year-olds, to whom a stable career and good money felt most precious, his certainty felt quite sacrilegious. And yet, not so long ago, such certainty was unthinkable for Hébert.

“I’ve always kind of known what I didn’t want to do, but not what I did want to do.” Coming from a family of medical professionals, he tried to follow the natural sciences around the end of high school until some time into his first year of college. “I just didn’t vibe with them.” He then reversed course to do a full year of the humanities: Spanish, nutrition, psychology, criminology and, most notably, criminal law, which first showed him how law could give him the best of both worlds, where the high technicality of the sciences meets the humane

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side of social studies. In Canada, you don’t need a pre-law degree to apply to law school. Instead, lawyer-hopefuls would undergo three years of education and one year of specialization. Hébert applied to Sherbrooke University in 2006. He got in. “I really love it. Law makes you understand politics, the Constitution, international relations —” His eyes got very big at this point. “Honestly, everything is so interesting to learn. I wished I had a million lifetimes so I could learn everything. But the world is made in such a way that you have to pick something, and that is heartbreaking.”

a perfect job in a coveted career, furiously avoiding the question that nagged in that backwater region of his head.

“Now what?”

The answer for that has been decided, in part, years ago, in the summer of 2009, when Hébert first met his wife. *****

The decision was made. Degrees in hand, he entered the field as a title attorney, handling wills, estates and inheritance. Three years in a law firm, three years in an accounting firm, and then finally: the big job at National Bank Trust. It was the perfect gig: nice pay, good perks, great location in downtown Montreal. Estates law was broad enough to fight off the supposed monotony of legal practices.

“You have to close every door of the deceased’s legal affair. It’s stressful sometimes, but the thing is, you’re helping people out. At the end of the day, it’s not the money you made. It’s not the law cases you cracked, that’s not a victory. A victory is more like ‘There’s this poor old lady, her husband died, she didn’t know what to do, there’s this big tax debt and we found this solution.’ That’s what you leave with.”

“But then I asked myself, ‘Could I do this for the next 30 years?’ and I just got so depressed.”

Hébert considered himself to always be moving.

The consummate student. The eager adventurer, jumping courses in school and jumping fields as an adult. Yet now he had found himself in the sinkhole of

In summer 2009, Hébert was an intern at Service Canada, a government office. His now-wife worked in the same office, different division. He dealt with pensions. She worked with the unemployed. “I had no idea she existed.”

One morning, Hébert showed up to see firefighters outside the building. A gas pipe had burst. The interns regrouped at the front. A girl asked him what was going on. They started to talk. He asked her to breakfast. “And, uh, we decided to walk. And, uh, we decided to talk. And, uh, we never stopped talking.”

As he told me this, the smile he had on stretched into a grin.

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From then, emails flew back and forth, business hours or no. But she, a Muslim girl with strict parents, having just come out of a relationship, was hesitant. His offers to take her out was shot down each time with an excuse — “I have volleyball practice!” Hébert reenacted. “And I was like, ‘You don’t play volleyball!’” In the end, she said yes, so he took her to a restaurant. They caught the subway home. At his stop, right before the doors closed, he tried to kiss her. She gave him a belly rub. The door closed. He watched, stunned, as the train whisked her away. Cue music.

Everything then flowed like a rom-com montage.

Party. First kiss. Moonlight. She is born in Pakistan, raised in Atlanta, educated in a Quebecois medical school, with plans of interning in the U.S. and eventually becoming a doctor. She loves medical TV drama, most styles of shoes and, ever since 2009, she’s loved Hébert. Two years later, when her program ended and she began her internships in the U.S., their relationship became long-distance.

This lasted for eight years.

“Eight years?” I asked for the third time.

“It was insane,” he said. “I’ve never heard of that.

But we were both so busy, we talked every day or so and got excited for vacation.”

The love story is Disney-worthy. He would drive for hours across the border to see her whenever she was reasonably near. “It was work, making that conscious decision to stay together, because we knew we were going to end up together, that we were going to be married eventually.” The end goal was clear, but there was the American-Canadian border sitting rudely before it. It was either she

comes back to Canada, or he follows her to the U.S. Easier said than done. Conditions were better for her in the States. He had a law career in Canada.

In 2018, her dream was realized: she landed a job as a doctor at a hospital in Rome, Georgia. The time to decide was here. “I thought: Okay, this is it. Whatever romantic idea I had of love — do I love her enough that I would quit my career that I’d been working on for ten years?”

A law degree in Canada doesn’t hold value in the U.S. Lawyering — with all its perks, pay and prestige would be out of the question. It was precious, the dream of hordes of twenty-somethings hunching over their tables in college dorms and university libraries. But was it that precious?

“I was scared. There was so much at stake. We’ve never lived together for a long time, so what if it doesn’t work? Do I put everything on the line and if I lose it, do I start over? Actually, I watched one of Tim Ferriss’s podcasts about ‘fear settings,’ he said to put everything on paper. When you put it on paper, it isn’t so scary. If living together doesn’t work for whatever reason, I can always move back.

It helps to make peace with the transition.”

To be safe, from 2017 to 2019, Hébert got an MBA in Business, something internationally recognized.

But he didn't go into business. The instinct of the

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consummate student returned: there was going to be a big adventure. He compared it to Bilbo Baggins’s in “The Hobbit.” In May 2019, he quit his job. The question that had been hanging there, “Now what?” was revealed to have been partly answered all along. His future wife had filled half of the blank in for him.

Now what? Well, he didn’t know exactly what, but it was always going to be something new. ***** “If you ask my dad, he’s gonna be like, ‘Yeah, Mat’s not creative. I don’t know what the hell he’s doing there.’”

But Hébert has always been drawing — he’d just never shown his drawings to anyone before, never thinking it was real art. Maybe that’s why he blushes so hard when the class makes wowing noises at his projects now.

“I just went back to zero, to before I went into law, like ‘Okay, what are my passion, what’s lacking in my life?’ And I had this gaping creativity hole.

There’s nothing really creative in law. People who tell you otherwise are full of s*** — ‘Oh, I found this great way to speak to the judge.’ Yeah, it’s called talking. Big deal.”

But he didn’t want his keenness for the technical side of things (or that MBA in Business) to go to waste.

Graphic design jumped out at him as the obvious choice. Once again, Hébert went for the best of both worlds, where business meets art, where technicality meets humanity. “There was a purpose behind it.

Besides,” he added, “I had zero confidence in my fine arts skill. I’d only just started.”

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At this point, I offered some consolations. Henri Matisse also started art quite late, after a stint in a lawyer’s office. Hébert assured me the two of them were not the same. Of course not. Among many things, Matisse’s venture into art allegedly disappointed his father.

“I was scared of telling my parents I’m going to —” his hands made a weird flourish, “art school. I thought they were going to destroy me, for sure.”

“My mother’s always been afraid of everything.

When it comes to taking risks, she’s going to put a cold shower over your passion.” Hébert was sure his father was the same, having always highlighted the importance of “the hustle.” To his surprise, both of his parents were supportive. “Maybe it’s because they’re retired now, so they’re more chill than I remember. My dad was like, ‘Awesome. Do it. The big decision was already to switch countries and drop your career.’”

In fact, it was his father that helped him pack up the U-Haul and drove with him in the three-day journey to Rome. They sold his winter tires — no longer will they be needed in the American South.

“It made everything real. This is my life now. I’m here, there’s no turning back.”

In 2019, Hébert and his wife got married. In the same year, he enrolled at SCAD, using the money he’s saved up as a lawyer. Much like how he supported his wife back when she was in school, his wife now supports him as he is in school, in more ways than just financially. “My wife is my art director. She has good eyes, so she helps me tailor some of my work.”

“I’ve done a bunch of stuff, but I’ve never worked

as much as when I’ve been at SCAD in terms of both brain power and time. I’ve done some drawing classes where I was shading for my life for like eighty hours, but you go into a flow state where it’s not painful. It’s a lot of energy, but it’s not a chore. I’ve never worked so much, but I’ve never enjoyed the work so much either.”

I told Hébert once that he strikes me more as an ex-child actor for Disney Channel more than an ex-lawyer.

“You’re too happy about your schoolwork,” I said.

“It freaks me out.”

“That’s because I’ve been to the dark side,” he replied.

“Now I get to do this.”

Before the move, Hébert had posed himself a hypothetical: Were he to get $10 million tomorrow, were the precious job and its financial security to become unnecessary, what would he want to do for the rest of his life? The answer back then was a void.

But then there we were, finishing our interview in class, our design projects on display. He had jumped into the void. The void had given him art.

“So what about now?” I asked. “What if you get ten million now?”

Up at the big table, our professor was talking about the importance of good lighting. Hébert answered me without a second thought: “I would do this exact same thing.”

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Poem by Jackson Williams Photography: "Afterparty" by Chi Huynh

I lose interest so quickly and cannot be expected to stay in one place I shift phases like the moon and sweep by like the wind Running like I’m running out of time But you?

For you, I am the earth the mountains ground into The spreading roots of a sequoia A skeleton in its grave If the world should die I’d be sitting calmly in the midst of all ruin Still patiently and loyally there Swallowing pomegranate seeds For you, I’d stay.

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THE

CHANGELING IN

Fraudville (Short story) Written by Benjamin Greennagel Illustrated by Isabella Tallman-Jones

The midday light is low and oppressive as I trek up a hill covered in yellowing grass. From here, the main drag of Fraudville is visible — a strip of archaic shops, a library and a drugstore, clustered around a railroad track that tears through the landscape like a black stitch. Scents of summer creep forward, promising wet grass and honeysuckle.

I toss my hair over my shoulder and fan my neck. This is my first summer as a girl, and it’s hard to figure out what to wear. I’ve always had trouble with human clothing, but summer makes it all the more difficult.

I’ve worn the same pink sundress every day for the last month.

At the very top of the hill, I come upon Lorelei’s house and make my way into the backyard, where there is a small garage, anchored to the earth by a thick shroud of dark green ivy. Paint peels off the front door in crisp flecks of white, baked off after years in the brutal summer sun. The window panes rattle when I knock.

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Her eyes appear through a curtain, burning with suspicion before she opens the door. “You shouldn’t have come,” she says, glancing over my shoulder.

“The town is restless. They suspect you.”

green substance — with a wooden spoon, stirring it into the consistency of syrup. Her black hair is pulled back out of her face, secured in a tight knot on top of her head.

“That’s why I needed to see you,” I answer. “Please, let me in.”

I grab a grater and take my seat at the counter, where I start shaving off lime zest into a small ceramic bowl.

“I was at the grocery store this morning, and someone asked if I was human.”

She frowns, then places a lime in my hand. “I’ll put you to work while you’re here.”

It’s somewhat cooler inside, like the dim, damp shelter of an animal’s cave. The table is decorated with yellow cans of coffee stacked on top of each other.

A little girl sits nearby, resting her head against the lacy white tablecloth. When she cranes her neck to say hello, her cheek is patterned with the impression of the fabric.

“Make it quick,” says Lorelei, clapping flour off her apron and returning to a large cooking vat on the counter. “I have errands to run.” She begins churning the vat’s contents — a tart and sweet-smelling

“Of course they did!” Lorelei cries, clicking her tongue.

“From the moment I saw you, I knew what you were.

The ears gave it away.” She pinches the tops of her own ears, making them pointy. “You’re better at hiding it, but you still need to be careful.”

She tosses the wooden spoon into a bucket on the floor and starts furiously whipping the green filling with a silver whisk. “You’re not the first changeling in Fraudville. Did you know that? One of you came through years ago. None of the townsfolk ever quite figured out what was actually going on — most folks blamed the devil, naturally — but they did find the

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source. So they rallied together and chased the poor thing off False Creek Bridge. I believe the changeling survived. But I never saw them again.” She looks firm and resolute, and she grips her whisk until the skin on her knuckles loses its color.

I swallow the urge to cry, then pass her the bowl of lime zest. There is something intriguing, macabre, and downright depressing about learning about other changelings. It’s never good news. “This place is special to me, though. I don’t want to be on my own again.”

Lorelei sighs and her expression softens. “I wish there was more I could do, but I’m on thin ice already,” she says, lowering her voice. Her eyes grow distant, and her gaze falls on something behind me. “I can’t put my sweet Sybil in harm’s way.”

I turn to see that the little girl is still resting her head on the table, but now she is fast asleep. The coffee cans are stacked around her, like a neat tin fortress.

“I know,” I say. “But I don’t know what to do.”

Lorelei palms down her hair, smoothing out a few wiry strands. “I’ve got it,” she says, biting her forefinger, deep in thought. “You need to kill someone.”

“What?!”

“If you want to stay, you’ll have to do what you were born to do — kill someone and replace them.” She brandishes her whisk at me, spraying flecks of key lime over the floor. “Your empathy sets you apart from other changelings, but it will turn around and bite you in the ass if you let it. You have to decide what you’re willing to do. And once you make your mind up, you sure as hell better stick to it.” She grabs a newspaper off the counter and slaps it down in front of me. “You should change before you go. And take something off the clothesline on your way out.”

Lorelei’s right; it’s not favorable to morph into someone who’s still alive. Fraudville is small, and people will talk to you if they recognize you. That’s why I stole my face from a girl who passed through on a train back in February. It’s been tricky to maintain, as I haven’t seen her since then. The greenish hue in my skin grows more vibrant each day. I can’t pass for a human much longer.

I flip through the newspaper until I find a photo of a college basketball game. There’s a boy in the photo who looks to be around my age, playing on the visiting team. The second my eyes land on his picture, my hair shrinks back into my head and my face melts away from the girl I saw riding the train. I reach up to my face, rub the new patch of peach fuzz on my chin, and wipe my brow. This one sweats more easily.

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Lorelei’s hilltop is circled with flowering crape myrtles and bright green dogwoods. An entire wardrobe is strung from a clothesline that runs through the backyard: vests, plaid caps, jodhpurs, and trousers flap in the wind. I slip off the sundress I had been wearing and change into something more boyish.

The railroad runs along the bottom of the hill, and I follow it back into town, balancing on one of the thin, steel bars until it leads me to Mainstreet. Magnolia petals drop from their trees like fat, heavy snowflakes, scattering across the sidewalk in a constellation of pink and white. A singular sense of adoration unfurls inside of me, blossoming from my stomach and out into my fingertips as I trace the outline of each building.

A rhythm connects these narrow, brick storefronts, and it crescendos into a mesmerizing ensemble every summer. There’s the thrumming bass of air conditioners, the shuffle of bare feet as they dance across a scorching sidewalk, the syncopated locking of doors one hour before sunset every night. It’s a quiet cacophony that is so distinct, I’m sure I would recognize it anywhere. I wish I could live in this noise, surrendering myself to the patchwork of sounds. The music softens as I reach the end of the street.

“What’s on your mind?”

A pickup truck has pulled onto the sidewalk in front of me, blocking my path. The driver, a man about twice my age, watches me with anxious eyes.

I don’t answer. I am trying to remember the photo of the boy from the basketball game. Does he know this man? Or is this just a friendly stranger?

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“I’m Martin,” says the driver, extending a hand for me to shake.

So he is a stranger. Southern gentility never ceases to confuse me.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around,” he continues, his eyes flickering down to my shoes and back up to my face. He shrugs. “I’m new here. Just trying to get the lay of the land.”

This strikes me as odd, but I remember a similar encounter I had last summer, shortly after I arrived in Fraudville. I was helping Lorelei hang her laundry when a strange man trudged out of the woods. He had been on a hike and felt overheated, so she invited him inside and gave him a jug of iced tea. Is it so easy to make friends in this place?

Then I remember the changeling who was chased off False Creek Bridge, and I decide that no conversation is worth the risk. Without bothering to respond, I turn around to walk back toward the shops.

The truck door slams, and before I have a chance to look, a calloused palm slams down over my mouth, and two thick forearms bind around my torso, tightening and pulling me backward. My muffled scream is knocked out of me as I’m launched into the passenger seat. As soon as the door closes, it’s locked, and Martin is jumping back into the driver’s seat. A long, high-pitch shriek comes from beneath the tires as we reverse off the sidewalk and speed down the street.

“Why’d you try to run away?” Martin says, glaring down the road.

I cannot breathe. My face is flushed. My ears are transfiguring.

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He uses one hand to grip my wrist. “You’re not human, are you?” he says, grinning. “That’s okay with me.” Then he laughs through his teeth — a deep, belly laugh that turns into a sort of growl. When he looks at me, I feel his sick fascination — the magnetic pull of something alluring, something alien. I feel his coarse stubble, his furrowed brow line, his blocky nose. I feel the face of the boy from the newspaper melt away.

He’s screaming now, staring in terror as my transfiguration completes. The truck jerks, swerving off the pavement and into a rocky meadow. His hand is still locked around my wrist, while I am sinking into my seat like I am made of stone. Shadows swallow us. Magnolia branches stretch across the windshield, baring our way into the woods with a horrible crunch.

The seatbelt pins me down, the truck jolts to a halt, and I’m smothered by my airbag.

Martin’s airbag doesn’t go off. He smacks his face against the steering wheel and slumps forward, his head lolling to the side.

Warmth spreads through my limbs. I rip off my seatbelt and fight my way out of the truck. My body is strange — I’ve never been this old before. My fingers ache from somewhere deep in my joints. I never fathomed that my arms would be this hairy.

I’m not sure what my intention is when I throw open the driver’s door. Martin is too heavy for me to lift, so I pull on his arms until he slides out of his seat and lands on the tangled forest floor with a deep thud. I could drive him to a hospital, but what then? Would I walk into the waiting room

and explain that my doppelgänger is waiting in the totaled truck out front?

My legs move slowly as if my feet are ten-pound weights, but I manage to climb over his body and settle in behind the wheel. There’s a lump in the seat.

I reach underneath myself and retrieve a fat leather wallet, containing an ID with his home address.

But when I look in the rearview mirror and see his eyes staring back at me, one overwhelming sensation takes over: repulsion. Repulsion at this face, this coarse stubble and blocky nose, this dripping, baritone drawl.

Everything I have become … will protect me. This is how I can survive.

Lorelei will be thrilled.

The engine sputters and squeals as I back out of the trees. When the tires finally make contact with the pavement, I grip the rearview mirror, yanking desperately until it slides out of place. I muster a faint glimmer of gratitude as I envision myself claiming a place in one of the narrow brick shops. The music drags me back into town.

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A RTS

LETTING GO

CORNER

SALOME

Isabella Tallman-Jones Fourth-year, illustration

This piece was inspired by the illustrative works of Aubrey Beardsley for Oscar Wilde’s biblical play: “Salome.” I really admired Beardsley’s pattern and line work and his sweeping, all-encompassing compositions. In addition to the visual elements he employs, the story was a heavy influence on the direction I wanted to take with this piece. In the play, Salome (the protagonist) can’t come to terms with letting go of her desire for John the Baptist. In this piece, however, Salome is transformed and is experiencing her own alternative ending, one where she resigns being rejected by the prophet instead of enacting vengeance.

By letting go, both John and Salome avoid being executed as they were in the original story. Salome can finally free herself from her own obsessions and desires. She lets go of her desire to possess in exchange for a physical transformation, a manifestation of her ability to rise above her pain and transcend it.

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DEVIL ON CAMPUS

Jiami Liang Third-year, illustration

School violence is a terrible thing. It had brought pain to many children and still exists now like a vicious disease, ruining childhoods. As a child, I witnessed many instances of it but I could do nothing. The artwork depicts a similar situation: a skinny child facing the monster that is school violence, as well as a choice. Should he let go and let it happen or resist?

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NO IDLE HANDS Kathryn Fox Second-year, illustration

This was a piece I developed in the direct aftermath of losing my dad. It served as a validating and ritualistic process that assisted me in letting go of the harsh feelings residing from his surprise absence and redirected me to focus on the positive aspects of the time we shared.

TWO DUDES Chris Cheung Fourth-year, illustration This piece marks the biggest change in me as an illustrator. It was the first time I let go of overthinking. As I drew while relinquishing control, I unexpectedly laughed out loud. That genuine moment of joy showed me what I want my art to be for myself and for others and I've been drawing this way ever since.

SCAN is the quarterly student print magazine of the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. All editorial content is determined by the student editors. Opinions expressed in SCAN are not necessarily those of the college. ©2022 SCAN Magazine. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. Visit us at scadscan.com for all previous issues and more.