Echo 2016

ECHO 2016

The University of Texas at Austin

ECHO Literary & Arts Magazine

A Publication by the Liberal Arts Honors Program The University of Texas at Austin 2015-2016

EDITOR’S NOTE To understand the way that I see Echo, imagine yourself as a child knelt over a cardboard box full of puppies. Some of the puppies are already starting to grow into their over-sized paws, yelping and tumbling around in the blankets. They are lively and strong, and they capture your attention. But there’s one other puppy, tiny and dark with heavy eyelids, curled up peacefully in a cardboard corner. Your mother reminds you that you can only pick one.

In choosing Echo my freshman year, I chose that sleepy runt of the litter, and I wanted to make it strong.

Echo is probably the smallest literary publication on our campus, and for years we’ve gone fairly unnoticed. No advertising, small staff, few submissions. A sleepy little magazine curled up in the corner of the LAH office. And that was fine. It was comfortable. But this year, we decided to make a change.

When I joined Echo three years ago, I knew I wanted to make it into something greater than it previously was. I served as design editor last year, and this year as editor-in-chief I was able to put some of my plans into action with the help of Echo’s production editor, Emily Varnell. We increased our visibility and built a strong staff of enthusiastic readers – including Caroline Rock, who graciously volunteered to design this year’s issue. We worked hard to make our name known on campus, tabling and putting up flyers. In the end, we received more submissions from UT students than I had ever seen before in my time at Echo.

We’re still the runt of the lit mag litter, but we are growing.

Echo is stronger now than it was before, and for that I thank Emily, Caroline, the rest of the staff, and, of course, the authors whose works are printed on the following pages. I chose the runt of the litter, and I’m glad that you all did, too.

We hope you enjoy Echo 2015-2016.

Miranda Adkins Editor-in-Chief

STAFF Miranda Adkins Editor-in-Chief

Emily Varnell

Production Editor

Readers

Sydney Bartlett Audrey Black Anna Dolliver Sarah Ferring Benjamin Gerzik Daniel Hrncir Marissa Kessenich Kori Morris Emily Nguyen Caroline Rock Emily Saunders Eleni Theodoropoulos Nicole Ting Carly Williams Kathleen Woodruff

CONTENTS Poetry When You’re Hiding in Starbucks

6

Change

7

(please) love me the same

8

Ken’s Donuts

8

On Inequality

9

Katie Hollister

Bhabika Joshi Nicole Ting

Denise Weisz Sahara Khan

Did You Know That?

10

Mom’s Kitchen

13

Sydney Bartlett

Haze Park

Prose Café Central

Elizabeth Dubois

14

Stormy Sacrament

21

Our Mercurius

27

Ed Visits Estella

34

Sydney Bartlett

Elizabeth Dubois

Denise Weisz

Photography The Lake District April Herrera

cover

Up Above

35

Les Sculptures de Versailles

36

08.12.15

36

Texture

37

Amsterdam Canals

38

Saint-Sulpice

38

Jessica Joseph

Elizabeth Werth Caroline Rock Audrey Nguyen April Herrera

Elizabeth Werth

POETRY When You’re Hiding in Starbucks Katie Hollister

What is this strange device clamping my stomach, the top onto the bottom half?

What is this icky finger sinking its fleshy roundness into the cushion of my now cartoon purple bruised heart?

I want to push it away, it’s the addict I know.

Talk about glutton for life, you always were.

You were guzzled, my best friend, you who absorbed movies whole into your kid pupils and gulped down bulging burritos into your tiny gut and exploded in sprawling dances on the floor to no music and twisted out raspy, inhuman voices, the strangest noises on Earth, for my benefit.

And you scrunched into dinosaur and troll faces and embodied a hunchback and a buff Helga-like Bertha and created Buster the talking skeleton doll and had him harass strangers out the window and you did it to hear my chuckle tumble out and to hear me love you.

We also slowed each other down, walking in pale winter around a fountain.

Your glowing blonde head thawing my brunette head, both angled into our most unseverable tunnel between our twin wits.

6

(Only you and I could see inside.)

My wooly heart spreads to my arms seeing us: Warm marrow in whitewash winter, a fond rocking.

But searing seasickness once we got older, seeing you stealing a pair of pajamas.

Your once charming “play-bored” sarcasm-heavy eyelids, hang too many weights, too much dangling now that you’re high.

And you’ve rolled the most disturbing dough across your eyes.

Stunted and stumbling around in a Starbucks and every burning step you take brands me.

Change

Bhabika Joshi in fifth grade we learned about precipitation and the water cycle how it changes over and over behind a telescope she learned about stars and the ever-growing universe how space changes over and over inside a room i call my own i learned about you and the way you forgot me how you changed over and over

7

(please) love me the same Nicole Ting

you told me you loved me, even though ships have drowned in this treacherous skin of mine. but darling, if i show you my bones, if i show you my terrified hands, if i show you the anatomy of my bruises: an unending map of ache, of naĂŻve continents pulled apart by oceans of hurt, if i show you the darkest, most shipwrecked parts of me, tell me, when you look at my ragged wings, will you still look at me like i could fly? tell me, when you look at this erratically beating fist, this anxiety inside my chest, will you still love me the same?

Ken’s Donuts Denise Weisz

i.

I have seen the face of God in the blue light slapping the silver street, the soaked-through shoes, walking toward the Promised Land Muttering Eliot to myselfAn attempt to impress some pretentious deitiesI have known them all already, known them all Praying that I reach Jerusalem without drowning 8

I have seen the face of God In the yellow-gray puddles leaking poems into my head I have seen the face of God In the wet dreams and the earthy smell of coffeeAnd I know I have arrived. ii.

I have seen the face of God, And it is your drunkish bluish eyes And it is your lips curling up when you erupt into me And it is the bruise on my thigh winking just above my birthmark, Five circles from where your fingers pressed down on my skin I have seen the face of God, And He won’t look me in the eye anymoreHe has passed that duty to you, and we are well aware of how to create heaven

On Inequality Sahara Khan

And all at once, every cell in its crimson tributary thronged to my aching heart.

My chest swelled with the anxiety of a hundred fizzing bottle caps, fervently awaiting their emancipation.

I could feel my emaciated insides imploding, wringing the life out of me, soaking up my sweaty, confounded fear as I contorted violently on the curb among broken bottles and torn candy wrappers.

I winced, my bloodshot eyes purging wells of desperation, my lips trembling whispers of contempt, of sorrow, and of pain.

9

A shiny leather loafer crushed my lifeless fingers, as their like had done a thousand times, a thousand hammers pounding me numb from the inside out.

A shiny leather loafer crushed my lifeless fingersAnd kept walking.

Did You Know That?

Sydney Bartlett

VI. (The ocean) breathes slowly.

Did you know that?

It inhales and rises and then, pausing as if it regrets something, it exhales and falls, like some tired old god speaking a language that its creation forgot a long, (long) time ago.

I. It hits me as I stand in (water) at my chest and hold my arms out and up, my fingers o u t s t r e t c h e d and my eyelashes on my cheekbones.

There is a pause, (silence,) and I am thrown (underwater) where I taste (salt) in my ears and hear the (current) tickle the back of my throat.

I surface, laughing and chok-ing on joy and (waves) which is happy, but then I cough on 10

the past which is bitter.

II. I try to leave and it tugs at me like (water) receding from its (shore,) and it takes away seashells and beer bottles and haphazard souvenirs and me, too.

I turn away and something (deep) inside of me (sinks) back into its clutches, (floating) away towards something (bigger,) something (bluer,) something (else,) and probably something (better.)

So I don’t leave.

I am only mortal.

I run and (splash) and (sink) into those (depths) like all of those past humans have before me and those who will after me.

III. My fingers swell (under) the sun as I collect rocks and shells and as I fill empty water bottles with sand all in that naĂŻve, that desperate, belief that I am taking the sea with me: just a drop or a grain of 11

the past.

I am wrong, of course.

I know that those tokens of memory lose their spirit when IV. I take them away from their source of life.

By the time I order them on the shelf beside my bed they are already dead.

I know that.

V. I sit on my bed, breathing slow and (deep), inhaling, rising, and exhaling, falling, with the smell of salt and wind and sun washed out of my skin and no more sand hiding between my toes and my hair dry and brittle and my throat sore and my memory happy and bitter and, VII. yes.

I know that.

12

Mom’s Kitchen Haze Park

She has everything in her kitchen, Whole world is in her kitchen Her heart pounded like the first time Her mother made the lemonade for her.

Yesterday, she asked her fiancĂŠ, Hey, honey, would you like lemon pie for breakfast?

No, honey, my life is already sour I want something honeyed.

So at morning, she stood up at the middle of the world And picked up flour, sugar, milk and blueberry.

Yesterday, she asked her daughter, Hey, sweetie, would you like lemon cookies before lunch?

No, mom, people already sugar-coated me, I want something fresh.

So at noon, she stood up at the middle of the world And picked up lettuce, chicken, and balsamic vinegar.

Yesterday, she asked her grandson, Hey, Pumpkin pie, would you like lemon bar after dinner?

No, grandma, my life is full of freshness, I want something mature So at evening, she stood up at the middle of the world And picked up dark chocolate, whipping cream, and cocoa powder.

Blueberry pancake, soft as pillow talk, Lettuce salad, crisp as hidden truth, Dark chocolate, bitter sweet as our lives Day by day, Yesterday, she asked herself, What would I like to eat?

She has everything in her kitchen, But lemon.

13

PROSE Café Central Elizabeth Dubois

They were standing outside the Café Central, and Madeline thought it was colder out than the cellphones predicted, but maybe that was just her nerves. She and Mother were waiting on Louisa and Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc from Johannesburg, Jean-Luc with the sharp, raisin black eyebrows that looked like wands of licorice from the Texaco back home.

Louisa was Madeline’s only sister, but Madeline preferred Louisa’s husband to Louisa, perhaps because she was thirteen-years-old and boys her age still behaved with the inconsistency of a deus ex machina, or perhaps because Jean-Luc laughed at her jokes instead of rolling his eyes like Louisa did.

As they loitered by the entrance of the famous Café, the one where, as Louisa had explained to them on the telephone earlier that morning, Leon Trotsky and Peter Attenberg had once molded their literary circles, Mother seemed nervous, too. The people slipping in and out of the heavy, stainedglass doors seemed cloaked in the shadowy ambiguity of people who would have once occupied those literary circles: the women wore straight, minimalist shift dresses; the men followed behind them in freshly pressed chinos. The warm, low-wattage light deflecting from behind the travertine flora-framed glass excited Madeline.

“If Jean-Luc tries to pay for us, say no. You know, politely decline,” Mother was saying, her fingers gathered into two identical lemons at her side. Mother was older than other mothers, but Madeline was only starting to realize it. Mother looked young from a distance, or through a profile angle in the hole of a camera lens. She toweled her face twice a day, she ate her suggested calorie intake, she had Madeline 14

accompany her to Haystack Rock back home to catch the coast’s salty breeze. People only began to question Mother’s actual age when they stared directly into her face after a night out, when her Estee Lauder foundation began to peel and all that was left were the wrinkles even high end makeup couldn’t erase. But her age was beginning to reveal itself to Madeline in other, less physical ways; Madeline knew a lot more about James Dean than any of the other girls at school.

“There they are,” Mother said. Louisa moved in the way they do in old Brando movies, briskly and intentionally, as though everything was sped up on film. She was doing her makeup, she was closing her compact, she was readjusting her purse, she was taking Jean-Luc’s arm. They looked freshfaced and fashionable; they reminded Madeline of Graham Greene characters, of people waist-down strolling through New York, of beautiful strangers she romanticized but never met in real life.

“Sorry we’re late,” Louisa called, her pale-blonde curls breezily waving at them, as if to eradicate any possibility of lethargy, of stillness. “Library’s are just a bunch of buzzing phones now. I can never get anything done.”

Jean-Luc was grinning at Madeline, his sleeved arms widening for a hug. She took a quick glance at Mother before sinking into his onyx, slim fit sweater. He was warm and smelled like old books.

“Hi Maddy Cat,” he said, his subtle accent making it sound like ‘Mattie.’ His bass timber reminded her of the last time she’d seen him, last Christmas, back home in Portland, when they stirred “too many” marshmallows into their hot cocoa after early morning hikes and stayed up until 2 a.m. watching reruns of The Twilight Zone. He pushed her back to admire her face. “You look tan.”

“Thank you. I’ve had some sun,” Madeline said, doing her best to sound refined, her cheeks peeled open to reveal her irreverence.

“Well, nice to see you Mother,” Louisa said, lightly tapping Mother on the back, a third-cousin of an embrace. She 15

rubbed Madeline’s shoulder in the way she always did to greet her sister, in a hard, frantic way that in later years could only remind Madeline of sex. “You too, Maddy.”

“How are you, Mrs. Angly?” Jean-Luc asked Mother.

“Are we just going to sit and stand here or stand and sit here,” Louisa said. “I have a table reserved.”

Madeline eagerly stepped through the door Jean-Luc held open for her, her eyes immediately becoming meres of refracting chandelier light. The chandeliers themselves were rustic wire, with crystalline pear light bulbs and gold bangles at the base of the light sockets. Everywhere Madeline looked there was gold trim. The vaulted ceilings boasted Baroque embroidery; the burgundy seat covers displayed a maze of whispery golden flora. Straight across from the entrance on the opposite side of the large space were two ornately framed portraits of Emperor Josef and Empress Sisi. The portraits imitated the faces of a very-much-alive young couple that sat directly beneath the frames, an oblivious mirror.

Perhaps they were happier than Sisi, Madeline thought, less in love than Josef.

“Bitte,” the hostess was saying, “Hallo.”

“Hallo,” Louisa said. She secured her name and the party followed the waiter past the case full of a myriad palate of colored cakes. Madeline tried not to mimic the hysterical expressions of the smaller children who had lined up at the counter, their noses pressed to the glass case, their eyes pawing over every sprinkle, as though they were mice brooding a piece of cheese in a mousetrap.

The waiter was helping Mother and Louisa into their chairs, so Jean-Luc helped Madeline. “After you, Miss,” he said, and she slid into her seat, feeling mature and sophisticated and not at all like a thirteen-year-old from Oregon.

“So, anyway, like I was saying, I have a million essays to grade,” Louisa said. Everyone was settled, but Louisa was already fumbling with the menu. “Should we all order Alt wiener Suppentopf?”

“I’d like a coffee,” Mother said. Her voice came as a 16

surprise to Madeline; she hadn’t realized Mother had hardly spoken until she had. The phrase sounded forced, as though she were reciting a subsidiary line in a boring play.

“Let’s have Marghilomans, Mother.”

“Brandy this early, Lou?” Jean-Luc asked.

“It’s well past five.”

“But you have essays.”

“Which is why I deserve a brandy.”

Madeline was sitting facing the far wall with a bird’seye view of the aging pianist who thumped the keys of a slick Grand Piano. She watched him through a tall bouquet of heather, his fingers disappearing in and out of view behind the flowers. He transitioned from a little circus-like ditty to “What a Wonderful World.” The room seemed to breathe in response; Madeline felt a chipper, bourgeoning nostalgia as she sipped her glass of water across from Jean-Luc. The nostalgia wasn’t real; the nostalgia was from reading The Great Gatsby.

“So, how’s the trip?” Jean-Luc managed to ask, as Louisa ordered the soups.

“Far out,” Madeline said. “Groovy.”

Jean-Luc laughed. Madeline looked up to see Mother’s response; Mother smiled a little.

“Really? Budapest is still picking at its scab, from what I’ve heard.”

“Oh. Yes,” Madeline said. “That’s true. I had to sit next to a lot of sweaty Germans on the train ride over. I kept whispering verzeihung as I bumped into them on my way to the bathroom and they kept laughing at me. I don’t think I have the accent.”

“Say it again. With syllables.”

“Vare-say-young.”

“Do more of a z.”

“Vare-zay-young.”

“Hey. That’s better. You’ll get it.” Jean-Luc beamed at her across the table.

“Is it hot in here to you?” Louisa asked no one in particular, fanning herself with the laminated wine menu. The 17

waiter was gone with the soup order.

“So, Budapest, Vienna. You must feel like a world traveller,” Jean-Luc said.

“Thank you so much for the hotel in Budapest, JeanLuc,” Mother said. She shifted in her seat; her eyes were glued to her dripping coffee spoon on its saucer. “Your generosity doesn’t go unchecked.”

Jean-Luc reached to squeeze Mother’s hand across the table.

“Of course,” he said easily. Her chest rose like an inflating bounce house at his touch; she met his eyes and smiled her thin smile.

The soups arrived.

“This soup has chicken, boiled beef, carrots, leek, semolina dumplings, and noodles,” Louisa recited, as though someone had asked her to present her dish on a cooking drama. “The dumplings are to die for. Actually, they’re simply good.

I wouldn’t die for these dumplings. That’s something I’m trying to shake out of my students. You know, exaggerated clichés.”

“Do you like it, Maddy?” Jean-Luc asked.

She tried a carrot. It melted into her mouth like cotton candy. “Yes.”

After they finished the soups, Louisa ordered another Marhiloman and Mother let the waiter take away the untouched one Louisa had ordered for her. Jean-Luc let Madeline taste his espresso.

Madeline forced her face to remain expressionless, but she bent across the table to secure Jean-Luc’s confidence, her fingers framing her mouth in a pyramid shape. “It tastes like Nyquil.”

He laughed and thumbed her nose, his fingers still a little chalky from a lecture earlier that day.

“Maddy, why don’t you go over there to the case and pick out a piece of cake you want,” Louisa said suddenly. Mother, having let the waiter take her brandy and coffee spoon, had nothing else to stare at except the single, unlit seamless candle tin at the center of the table.

18

Jean-Luc nodded at her. “Get the craziest color,” he whispered as she rose from the table. “Get the most insane frosting design.”

Madeline excitedly walked over to the case that nearly bumped the pianist’s back, just behind the coquettish bouquet of heather. Through the heather she could still hear her family’s voices as she joined the other children at the case. She didn’t press her nose against the glass like the mice; instead, she stood with her shoulders back and eyes downturned, in the way she imagined an Austrian woman would look, outwardly serious but inwardly scandalous.

“We said thirteen. We said when she was thirteen,” Jean-Luc was whispering.

“I don’t see much of a point this late in the game,” Louisa said, her voice harsher and considerably less concerned with being overheard.

“So, you just don’t want to tell her at all?”

“J, we talked about this. Don’t pretend like we haven’t talked about this, like this is some new thing in front of my mother.”

The voices were silent.

“I want to hear your mother’s opinion, that’s all.”

Madeline stared at a white angel food cake that seemed to be melting from every angle, its frosting slanting down like beams of sparse sunlight on a snowy bank.

“I just think it won’t really make a difference,” Louisa said. “I mean, she can’t move here. We’re only adjuncts. We’ll be gone in a year. And the book needs reworking. I can’t focus on rereading Freud with a thirteen-year-old texting incessantly on the sofa or extrapolating on the genius of some overhyped YA author or getting her period for the first time.”

“I think she should know.” It was Mother’s voice, tense and reserved, another nervous delivery from a nervous girl in a high school play. “I think she should know as soon as possible.

She’ll only get older. And then it will only hurt more.”

The table fell silent again.

“I want her to finally look at me and know she’s our 19

daughter, she’s my daughter,” Jean-Luc said. His voice cracked. “That I’m her father.”

Madeline stood there as her eyes began to swell, the angel food cake in front her blurring like a mailbox outside a rainy window. She blinked a few times and watched the cake regain its shape, shrinking back to its normal size.

Madeline felt the chandeliers jeering at her, their wire ribs upturned like the mean grins of certain girls at school.

She walked past the glass case, the mice, the sleek women in their sleek dresses, and out of the majestic doors of the Café Central, sucking in the fresh air that welcomed her outside the restaurant. The café’s excess seemed claustrophobic now that she was out in the cool, Austrian breeze. She walked to the end of the block where she found a wall of English yews skirting the side of the Austrian palace where Empress Sisi had once mourned what she believed to be the somber realities of life.

As Madeline submerged herself in the plant, curving her body into a little ball in order to completely vanish inside the shrubbery, she knew things would be different from now on.

But the yews reminded her of Oregon, of Mother steeping Earl Grey as they sat looking out at Mount St. Helens, of Mother holding her hand as they walked along the coast, making careful footprints in the mud.

20

Stormy Sacrament Sydney Bartlett

My old stone church at the end of the road is just as I remember it.

The dripping sun sets against the building, harsh, melting into its cold walls and breathing a strange life into its stained windows. The church’s severe form slices into the sky, creating a division in the heavens that I think only a god, if He perchance noticed, could reconcile. The air is full of clouds and quiet except for the dull clang of a bell way off and up in the distance, echoing across distant pastures and raising goose bumps on the back of my neck.

(The cold wind in the empty parking light carrying our voices as the rain begins)

Altogether, the scene reminds me of the one that always plays out in moments right before some great and terrible storm. Oh, you know what I mean. The one where the angry skies snap open and pour gray waters onto the earth.

Haphazard light crashes onto land and thunder roars in outrage all around us.

You pull the car over and the windows next to our bed rattle like chattering teeth.

(Your suit soaked and my dress heavy)

So right now it may be quiet and still, but I promise that soon it won’t be. All seems right and peaceful in the world, but only for a short time, my friend. Soon something will go wrong and, truth be told, it wouldn’t be the first time. I have been wrong many times. And I’m sorry for most of them.

(Our clothes dry stiff)

I guess that’s why I’m here.

-- I see Joan of Arc watching me from her stained glass post, sword in hand and fire from the sunset reflected in her severe gaze. She has short hair and shiny armor and the sunset makes her look almost maniacal. The corners of her mouth are slightly curled as if she knows something that no 21

one else has heard. She probably does. I keep an eye on her, expecting her to step out of her glass form and come to me at any second, not saying anything and knowing that she doesn’t have to. Just one look from Joan of Arc would pierce me, I’m sure. The sword is superfluous.

I remember when I was younger, when her sword was gallant and her gaze kind and the sun forgiving and the church new, I loved Joan of Arc. God, that sounds odd, but it’s true.

Some kids dreamed about wizards and dragons while my focus was only on the bloody and unfair lives of martyrs, particularly hers. I had a dream once, one that I’ve never forgotten. I must have told you about it.

I was young, maybe twelve or thirteen, wearing a long white dress that should have been elegant, but I kept stepping on it and rose thorns snagged the ends. I could hear the fabric tear and I was surrounded in the dark by tall trees. My sleeves had mud on them and my hair was long and knotted so that I knew my face was dirty. I walked forward, I didn’t know towards where or what, but I put one bare foot in front of the other on a path that the moon lit for me, just some spilled silver on muddy ground. A faceless man placed a crown on my head that was gold and bejeweled and beautiful and much too heavy for me, constantly falling over my eyes. Somehow I knew that it was Joan’s. I kept calling out to her while the walking got harder and the crown became heavier and I begged her to take it back but she didn’t hear me or maybe, now that I look into her face, she ignored me. My knees hit the ground hard when I fell, my fingernails digging into mud and the bottom row of my teeth slamming into the top, my ears ringing.

I woke up with sheets tangled around my wrists and ankles like ropes and an ache beating against my head, my heart throbbing.

I’ve never forgotten that dream and, judging by the look in Joan’s eye as I walk past her now, I don’t think she has, either.

But I think I told you all of that already, a while ago: 22

before the storm came and Joan turned harsh, thunder rattling her window and ours.

I hear leaves crack under my feet, which are much heavier than I remember, and even when I try to step lightly they still splinter loudly into fragments on the pavement, waiting with the rest of us to be carried off in the autumn wind.

It’s odd, the quieter I try to be, the more each and every one of my movements is magnetized to an almost unbearable frequency. The opening of the heavy church door is the entire building falling to pieces, I scream when I clear my throat, my fingers tracing the surface of holy water turns into a cannonball from long summers spent at lakes long dried up.

-- Opening the door places me at peak of the center aisle, rows of pews that used to be full cascade to the left and to the right while the altar waits, foreboding, in the midst of it all. Christ hangs from a piece wood close to the arched ceiling, avoiding eye contact with me. His crown of thorns looks gray with dust and I think that his ribs are even more evident now than when I was twelve years old. I can’t see the gash in his side from here; there’s no blood or water. Joan’s sword is somewhere off to the side and there’s a vague scent of incense drifting in the air, though I can’t tell you for sure if that’s not just my own memories saturating this place.

If I were to close my eyes, just for a few seconds, or maybe even blink for too long, I think it would all come back to me, like a dream except much more and way too real. If the truth is to be told once again, walking in here forces me to realize something I have long since sought to bury: the unavoidable fact that I’ve never truly, in my heart of hearts of hearts, left.

That’s the thing about the past, you never really move beyond it; you carry it with you, and right now life is so thick with nostalgia. I feel it slipping over my eyes as my knees dig into the pew, and I’m back in the place that I left only to find that it never left me.

Jesus seemed more substantial on the cross then: less 23

ribs and dust. I saw the gash on the side of his body as clearly as I could see into his eyes, old and knowing. Music filled the church, making the air dense and I would passively mouth the words. My old neighbors sat two pews over, beside the little boy with the gap-toothed smile who whispered to his sister while his mother pretended not to notice. I rested between my brothers, all of our bodies so warm and comfortable together that I could have fallen asleep if Father wasn’t talking.

Instead, my eyes are stretched wide open and my head is tilted to the left, soaking up those words that made everything feel real, like magic.

I know that I told you about him. But, for the life of me, I still cannot remember a single syllable out of the thousands that fell from his mouth, and that thought, that cold reality of forgetting them all, never fails to make me sick to my stomach. All I have left is how those words made me feel, and I clutch with desperation to hope and confidence and warmth and certainty, my knuckles white and fingernails sharp.

But Father has been gone longer than you have. To think I’m the only one left, sitting here in this dusty church with Joan, not really sinking into the past, just recognizing that I’ve always been entrenched within it, is odd. It’s sad and heavy and brittle and all I want is for Christ to look at me like he used to when I was young. But I understand why he doesn’t.

The last time I was here I told him that I was never coming back.

And so did you.

It returns to me in flashes. I remember how we sat at the window next to Joan that day, how you didn’t want to be there in the first place, how my parents were angry with us both. We walked out into the parking lot after Mass and you made a comment that gave my mother a shocked look in her eyes and made my father’s jaw clench in anger. It was hot that day. I shivered against the wind and pulled my jacket tight around my body, preparing for two storms.

Then everyone shouted and I shouted, too. It was them, meaning Him, or you. And I screamed in the rain that I chose 24

you, screamed at you in the car for making me choose, and I think that I’ve been screaming my entire life since. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember what started it all. Not anything specific, not your words or theirs. Now, as with every old argument, the beginning doesn’t matter quite so much as the present, as the feeling that something is wrong that cannot quite ever be made quite right or the same.

I clear my throat.

I’m sorry about that, about blaming you. Even though I never told you that I always believed it was your fault, you knew what I thought, like you always did. I should have been sorrier before now, but there a lot of things I should have done. If I were to start counting now I don’t think I would stop and the church does have hours, you know.

It was the fault of something deeper inside of me, a part of me stained like an old glass window, too easily persuaded by everyone except the voice in my own head.

-- The confessional is open and I could walk into its doors at any point, but I’m frozen. Ghosts run across my vision, whisper in my ears things from years ago, and leave me immobile. The air is heavy with anticipation, as if the impending storm has leaked through the crack underneath the door, and I feel that the slightest motion of my smallest finger would set the course for a series of great and terrible events that no one, least of all me, could handle in this life. So I sit and listen to the bell toll and feel my spine against the softening wood of the old church pew.

And then I’m wearing a white dress that’s too short on me, that was maybe elegant at one time. Rose thorns scratch at my ankles and I slap their thin stems away with the rougher palms of my hands. There are trees, tall and dark with desperate branches reaching towards me. My sleeves have mud on them and my hair is short and matted. My face feels greasy. I keep walking forward, stooped over and lost in a world that I both recognize and have forgotten. One foot steps in front of the other under the veil of night, and I have no idea why I con25

tinue to move forward. I feel someone press that crown onto my head, its jeweled edges leaving indentations on my skin as it falls over my eyes. I’m unable to make any noise, to scream or even to clear my cloudy throat. The crown just grows heavier and I feel my balance wavering as I walk forward. My knees hit the ground hard when I fell, and the crown rolls away from me. I open my eyes and I see you, your eyes like jewels and your smile maniacal in an odd ray of moonlight.

“I’m sorry.”

“Excuse me, are you alright? Did you need to speak with me?”

My eyes snap open and I’m greeted by a face melted by wrinkles and a square of white amidst a stark black collar.

“It’s just that you were, well, talking in your sleep, dear.

Are you here for Confession?”

For a second I’m silent, either because I don’t know what to say, or I know that I’ll say too much. I find myself uncomfortable with both of these alternatives.

“I’m sorry. I, uh, I’m not sure, exactly, why I’m here. I think I forgot something. Have a nice evening. Get home before the storm hits.”

“Oh, the storms passed this week, you know. Weather should be just fine now.”

I leave, Joan’s eyes like daggers scraping my back, and I know that I will not be back, in the physical sense at least.

And I know that the weather will not be fine.

(Your body is stiff and pale, dressed in the suit you hadn’t worn since that day)

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Our Mercurius Elizabeth Dubois

She was an Ilene born into kaleidoscopes and soybean chicken nuggets. Mother’s chopsticks, from when she taught abroad, dangled in front of her while she teethed; Father’s paintbrushes gently stroked her lids to help her see. Maybe if she read Alexander Pope, she’d have known she could’ve never not been a poet, maybe she would’ve caught the “disease.” But she read Kafka instead, and learned to crawl.

Georgina lived next door and fed the puppies that barked at the fence. Georgie wasn’t so “eclectic” as Ilene’s parents, as she liked to say. She was “humbler.” But Ilene didn’t know what “God” meant, so she let the dogs lick her hands.

Sister grew up faster than her and took the trash to the curb. Ilene watched from behind the Cheerios. Mother yelled at Sister when things weren’t right, but Father never yelled.

Ilene and Father watched from behind the vase bought in Prague.

Dad-o, dad-o, dad-o, said Ilene.

Mother cried because Ilene said Father’s name first.

When winter melted, Ilene stuck her tongue in the spongy cake Georgie baked. The house was exhaling neighbors and watermelon balloons. “Don’t go too fast,” Georgie said to Ilene. Mother clicked the Polaroid. “They grow up too fast,” Mother said.

Father taught her how to hold on to the swings. When he pushed her from behind, Ilene tossed her head back and saw his upside down smile in front of splotches of sunset. His shadow formed a giant.

Swing-swing, swing-a-ling, said Ilene.

Father painted her a purple swing floating through a sapphire sky on a photograph-sized tableau. He hung it on a nail in her room. Soon, he let her sit on the floor and watch while he painted on the brawny, bleached canvases.

Georgie asked Ilene if she knew about forgiveness.

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“God is attempting a big balancing act,” Georgie said, the new puppy asleep on her lap. The lazy afternoon on Georgie’s porch was melting into a milky dusk. “He makes us imperfect in some ways to make us more perfect in others.”

Mother cried the day the little bald boy died at school.

He was in Mother’s drawing class. Father touched Mother’s hair, but she moved his hand away. Ilene watched from behind the staircase.

Another winter went and so Ilene skipped to school alongside Sister. “In Cambodia, tiny children were given bowls of rice without spoons,” Sister said. Sister didn’t wave as they passed Georgie’s porch, but Ilene did. Georgie held up the new puppy. “If they burned their fingers from eating the rice too fast, their captors knew they were upper class and were too used to spoons.”

Ilene tripped over the strap of her brand new Jellies and scraped her knee. “If so, the little kids were beaten to death with a shovel,” Sister said.

At school, Ilene learned about colors. “What color is an apple?” Teacher asked. She tap-tapped the edges of the black board with her sculptured nails.

Red, red, reddy, red, said Ilene.

“Red, Ilene,” Teacher said.

“Red,” Ilene said.

Father began taking her on walks to search for chalk.

“It’s all natural,” Father told her. “It’s a gift from the earth.”

Ilene held the chalk offered by the Earth. She rubbed it between her hands. The Earth’s chalk gave her white fingers, like the stomach of one of the new puppies, or Georgie’s hair.

Father illuminated other things on these walks. “A diamond is valued because of its flaws,” he said. Ilene’s chalky thumb slipped in and out of his hand as she skipped. “Every diamond is unique. It’s a diamond’s imperfections that make it perfect.” Ilene giggled as he scooped her up from behind and waved her like the tops of the loblolly pines.

Later, while Mother made stuffed avocado, Ilene squeezed Mother’s calf muscle.

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“What are you doing?” Mother asked.

Ilene let go. She closed her eyes. “I’m trying to squeeze you into a diamond.” Sister was learning disturbing facts that she’d report back to the family at dinnertime. “147 university students were murdered in Kenya today,” she said.

Mother jabbed her fork into a piece of tofu. “Edie, seriously,” Mother said. She looked at Ilene. “Kenya’s far away from Virginia.”

Ilene, too, was learning at school. She absorbed the most from her desk partner, Henry. Henry got away with everything. “Why not be friends?” he whispered to Ilene, during the math lesson. Teacher’s eyelashes peeked over her shoulder.

“Three plus three is six, Miss Taylor.”

Henry was a genius.

One day Father tore through the garage door with rosy cheeks. “They bought it.” Mother and Ilene admired the painting of the ballerina. Tomorrow, the Danseuse would pirouette into the city and moon on the walls of an important bank.

Edie disliked Father’s paintings. She went to bed.

Ilene began practicing piano. Then she practiced oboe.

Then violin. “Play Oom-pa-pa again,” Father said, after a few winters. He was melting into the patchy, green armchair by the window as she thumped the piano keys. He always smiled. “I love Oom-pa-pa.”

Edie frowned when Ilene played, even at the recitals.

Both Henry and Ilene dipped in Handel, but once Ilene’s violin teacher revealed The Planets Suite by Holst, Ilene’s musical palate was never again the same. ‘Mars, the bringer of war’ inspired her to practice until her calluses bled. The eerie, seraphic choir of ‘Neptune, the mystic’ kept her wholly still, staring through the ceiling.

“Ilene, do something new,” Edie said from the doorframe, in the middle of ‘Mercury, the winged messenger.’ “In Nigeria, girls are impregnated and their babies are sold into illegal adoption services.” Edie religiously listened to Sun Ra.

During the October after Ilene started algebra, Georgie began to cough. “I’m old,” she told Ilene. The porch swing 29

creaked under their weight. A dog’s slippery tongue hit Ilene’s toes as they rocked back and forth. “Oldness can be good.

God is old. God is the oldest of all. And God is good.”

But the Cherry Blossom Festival came and went, and Georgie died.

At the visitation, Ilene played the Catholic hymn ‘Be Not Afraid’ on the violin. Mother cried. Edie made sure to assert God’s nonexistence after the service.

“Be not afraid

I come before you always

Come follow Me

And I will give you rest.”

Henry grew into Leibniz and Kant, and Ilene followed by learning acoustic guitar. Edie decided where she’d go to college. “The students at the University of Cape Town petitioned to take down the Cecil Rhodes statue,” Edie said to Mother.

Mother was at the kitchen table, grading watercolor projects.

“It worked. It’s being removed.”

Mother and Father couldn’t disagree with that.

While Edie moved to South Africa, Ilene swung into sleepovers and lacrosse games and middle school dances.

She’d often skip to Henry’s house, where they’d begin their long walks through the posh, West End neighborhoods together.

Henry strolled assertively on the sidewalk; Ilene stepped through the grass.

On the day of the Valentine’s Day Dance, Henry and his mother arrived at Ilene’s house. Ilene peered down the staircase in her cameo pink baby-doll shift dress. Henry was standing on the last step, placed in some old John Wayne flick, his head to the ceiling, his whole body in view.

“Pretty,” Mother said to Ilene.

“Strategic,” Henry said.

And maybe as Ilene found her way through the dance’s alternating red and pink streamers and into the slick, Fabreezed hallways of her high school, five years later, she still knew Henry could’ve been head of the Situationist Internation30

al if he’d read a smidge more Debord, or even Palahniuk. But he favored an ancient aesthetic, so he scrubbed Aristotle’s toes.

In her second year of high school, Ilene had a dream:

You and Father cover your faces to mask your identities. You go out and shoot the sniper. Back at home, Edie is used as bait to trick Father into letting another killer inside. The killer comes in and shoots Father.

Father sold more paintings, and Mother bought more dresses that she forgot to iron. Edie was at school on full scholarship, but she’d write asking for money for a phrase she’d underline two or three times: equally worthy causes.

These included occasions such as “a fundraiser for research on the dowry related deaths in India” or “a mission trip to Vietnam.” Edie visited home briefly for the winter holiday and brought Ilene a copy of South Africa’s Mail and Guardian.

“Hired help is valued in Africa,” Edie told Ilene, pointing to the Madame and Eve cartoon. “Eve is the hired help. She’s always outsmarting Madam.”

Mother cried when she drove Edie back to the airport.

Kids at school began asking Ilene if she believed in God. Henry answered for her. “What do you mean, God? Zeus, Monad, The Flying Spaghetti Monster?”

But Ilene couldn’t forget that Georgie was with God.

Soon, Ilene began practicing with the top orchestra at the high school, and the director confirmed Father’s suspicions that she had the potential to play music professionally.

Especially, the director hinted, if she started to compose.

So, Ilene dove into composing. She composed piano three-part melodies and violin concertos. She wrote little on the oboe, though those were the canticles Father loved most.

For Henry, she put Satan’s speech from Paradise Lost to guitar chords, to help him memorize.

Ilene became a musician. “Our artist,” Mother would say, introducing her to their friends.

“A musician, not an artist,” Ilene would say.

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When Edie died in Mozambique during the year of her thirty-ninth birthday, Ilene managed to leave the orchestra for a few days to drive home and comfort her mother.

“Banality,” her father said, as they sat in the kitchen, percolating in baked goods. “That’s the only word for it.”

A jeep had toppled over in the bush, crushing its contents: three regional social workers, Edie among them.

Ilene’s mother burst into tears and left the room.

Of course, Ilene’s mother and father were in their mid-seventies, and felicity meant stability. The death rattled their new Ethan Allen sofa, the jade dragon cup shipped from Britain, their weekly sculpting class.

Ilene was almost thirty.

She found herself sitting in her old room, which was now a storeroom for her father’s paintings. There wasn’t much left of hers, really. On the wall: a small portraiture of a swing.

“Henry.”

He’d sauntered into the house unannounced. Ilene stood up to embrace him. He was older. He now wore winered spectacles; his dissertation had stolen his eyes. His collar smelled like Tom Ford.

He held her for a moment, let go, sat on the bed. “Jesus Christ,” he said. His glasses pointed to a stack of white canvases near the closet. “Is this your father’s?”

The painting was an amalgamation of sundry abstract objects: cream tornadoes, ballet slippers, a trilby. Ilene assumed it hadn’t sold at the last auction.

“Do you think he’d sell it to me?”

So, once Edie’s body was lowered into American soil and the relatives lugubriously drank all the Yellowtail, Henry left town with a painting and Ilene went back to work.

She left her parents in good faith that her father would keep their lives organized. “We’ll visit soon,” he said, his elbows shuffling to look casual on the car window frame. “Give Melissa a kiss.”

Melissa had stayed with Ilene’s closest friend for the week of the funeral. Melissa was four. Ma-moo, Melissa

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screeched, scrambling to the front door Ilene stepped through.

“Are you okay?” Ilene’s friend asked.

“You’re a blessing,” Ilene said, her lips drawing soft circles on Melissa’s forehead.

She took Melissa to the park that evening, right at dusk when the sky was grimy like violin hands. Gnats swarmed around the little girl’s blonde braid as she shuffled through the mulch.

But a cream tornado Ilene’s father had painted wouldn’t stop cavorting through her thoughts. The dance was: ‘Mercury, the winged messenger.’

Tomorrow she’d take Melissa to daycare and she’d go to rehearsal. She’d spend the afternoon working on her solo tracks.

She might go to church.

Pray with me, Father Stephen would say.

But another voice was deafening.

That night, Ilene dreamed:

On the wall is a Jackson Pollock painting. Father, a younger version, is standing in front of the wall, admiring the piece. Suddenly, little black hands begin to dig through the canvas. The hands turn into arms that turn into bodies that turn into faces. Emaciated African children come tearing through the painting, reaching for Father, their fingers tightening around his neck. He chokes to death on an expensive gallery floor.

“Edie’s a social worker,” Ilene heard her Mother whisper, somewhere years ago. “But Ilene, our Ilene is an artist.”

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Ed Visits Estella Denise Weisz

A bed-ridden old woman lays in a tidy room, waiting on flowers from an old man. Her breath is quiet, the room completely undisturbed all day. The old man is on the bus to her house, flowers in hand, when someone jostles him and he drops the flowers under a seat. A man moves towards the door and steps on the flowers on his way out. I propose the old man considers picking them and giving them to her anyway. He knows that she does not deserve stepped-on flowers, so he steps off the bus with empty hands.

A smile flashes on her face when he enters the room, but her joy is dampened by his forgetting to get her favorite carnations. She blames it on his age, just as she blames her sickness on her age. They take turns pulling slices from an orange, smiling at each other and not saying many words. Under the orange rind her long fingernails grow yellow. He keeps his short with a thin film of dirt on the edges. He squeezes her hand and takes the orange peel in his palm, tossing it into the trashcan on way out of the room. He walks to the kitchen, touching his fingertips to the counter and inhaling the deep fragrance of dust. The front door closes behind him without a sound. Every Sunday he comes on the 6:04 bus and leaves on the 7:15. They had met many years ago and were never in love.

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PHOTOGRAPHY Up Above

Jessica Joseph

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Les Sculptures de Versailles Elizabeth Werth

08.12.15

Caroline Rock

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Texture

Audrey Nguyen

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Amsterdam Canals April Herrera

Saint-Sulpice Elizabeth Werth

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SPECIAL THANKS to the Liberal Arts Honors Program Dr. Larry Carver Director

Stacey Amorous Associate Director

Dr. Linda Mayhew Academic Advisor

Mary Cone

Senior Administrative Associate