Layout design - Veronica Crichton-Hill Logo design - Maggie Benson and Emily HIll 1
Table of Contents Poetry 5 - Early Morning in the Alley - Isadora Gruye 12 - Outpour - Brianna Morris 23 - Poem sans Clemency - SK Osborn 27 - Three Miles of Bad Road - Addison Rizer 38 - POOL/FIRE - Carl Atiya Swanson 43 - Mary - Reyna N.A.
Fiction 8- Cheese Dip - Lauren Turner 16 - Bloodletting - Will Leemkuil 35 - Three Thousand Dollars - Sean Ennis 39 - STALE - Short Story by Katerina Kishchynska, translated from Ukrainian by Alice Chester
Nonfiction 28 - A Calculation of Gravitational Force Between Artwork and Viewer In Units of Extended Metaphor - Lauren Swee 45 - Firstborn - Rebecca Otter
Art 4 - Confusion - Wong Tsz Kwan 7 - Level - Keegan Burckhard 14 - Of Me - Logan Jones 15 - gobble gobble - KC Legacion 22 - Visceral - Catherine Miller 24-26 - Dear Diary Burn in Hell - Abigail Thompson 34 - rise - Keegan Burckhard 37 - Untitled - Anna Klein 42 - What’s the Time - Kelley Dahlen 44 - Sleeping - Kelley Dahlen
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Masthead Editors in Chief Bridget Dugan Ben Schroeder Fiction Editors Bridget Dugan Aubrey Asleson Nonfiction Editors Koryne Martinez Andrea Nelson Gabby Granada Poetry Editors Ben Schroeder Mara Rosen Art Editors Veronica Crichton-Hill Emily Hill Fletcher Wolfe Managing Editor Aubrey Asleson Development Directors Gabby Granada Andrea Nelson Marketing Manager Koryne Martinez Marketing Team Summer Freed Mara Rosen Web Development Fletcher Wolfe Andrea Nelson Copyeditors Ben Schroeder Andrea Nelson
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Production Veronica Crichton-Hill Event Planning Koryne Martinez Aubrey Asleson Summer Freed
Confusion - Wong Tsz Kwan 4
Early Morning in the Alley Isadora Gruye
You had this theory: homicide detectives were a lot like sasquatch: so rare and so strange you’d recognize one the moment you saw it. Its face locked in mournful smugness, nose twitching at a staggered pace. Shoulders pitched forward just so. Early morning in the alley reveals something different. They scribble on yellow notepads about the slump of your body. They search the puddles pockmarking the back lot, murky purple water trembling from the weight of passing produce trucks. What surprises you is how they smell of camphor and microwaved fish sticks and how lovingly they fold your evidence into plastic bags: your untied sneakers, your cherry bomb chapstick, your grocery list that only reads tampons and toilet paper. No one chuckles or makes small talk or rolls their eyes. You wish they’d make less work of you. Wish someone would mention 5
your fitbit was still vibrating, glowing with blue encouragement to take 230 more steps.
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Level - Keegan Burckhard
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Cheese Dip Lauren Turner
I bang on the walls of our bedroom during panic attack number two. They are already cracking, there along the molding of the ceiling and in snaking patterns around the door. I wonder when they will break, and I bang to see if I can make them finally fall down. I wonder if my parents are praying them down. I wonder if my parents will act surprised when I call with the news: Hey just letting you know my house has fallen on top of me and my boyfriend you’re so suspicious of, and it was not a bit his fault, but no we cannot get up, and well maybe it all happened because we shouldn’t have had sex before we married—maybe you are right about everything after all. If there’s anything salvageable just put it in the Museum of Pastors’ Children Who Have Egregiously Sinned. After I wear myself out with all the banging and crying, I go pick up some chips and cheese dip from the nearest Mexican restaurant. I sit on my yoga mat, which is primarily used for this purpose and sometimes for yoga. I watch YouTube videos while I dip and crunch hypnotically. It is 10:31 p.m. There are crumbs on the yoga mat, and I don’t care. When the walls fall down there will be plenty more crumbs, mostly not made of tortilla chips. When I was in elementary school, my dad was still the youth pastor at the First Baptist Church, which I was very proud of, thinking it must mean that somewhere out there are seconds and thirds, fourteenths—but we must’ve won. He and my mom would invite the teenagers from the youth group over to our house and tell my brother and I that the Big Kids were coming over. We loved that. They would come over to our cozy-but-super-small home and fill our kitchen, overflow into the backyard, and sometimes jump on my trampoline. They’d eat pizza rolls, veggie trays, and Velveeta cheese heated with Rotel tomatoes, which in Texas we sternly referred to as “queso.” My mom would give them hugs and make sure they had all the food they wanted. My dad would play video games until late at night with some of the boys. They loved being at our house. They would sing worship songs along to CDs that I would help cue on the boombox. My dad would preach a little sermon while we sat cross-legged on the floor in a circle. These were some magical times. The Big Kids would play with my hair and ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always said, “An artist in Africa.” When I said this I pictured myself in a beret (I didn’t know the word at the time, but I longed for what it seemed to represent), standing at an easel overlooking a vast horizon of the Sahara desert. In my vision, there were also lots of animated safari animals that looked similar to those in the movie The Lion King, and those were my favorite to paint. Once when the Big Kids were over I beelined back to the bowl of queso for round two, greedy to try it with some grapes from the fruit tray, some pizza rolls, anything dippable, really. My dad gently took a knee next to me at the table and in a low voice told me that I probably didn’t need any more queso. He did so with kindness, but utilized some hyperbole to make his point: “If you continue to eat this much queso all the time, you will be as big as a house.” I remember looking down and recognizing the concept of fatness, that this might be how one achieves such a state. I thought about my body expanding, torso squaring, my head becoming a roof. I thought about banging my walls down. 8
Later that night I remember being in my Lion King nightgown, brushing my teeth, and it being almost bedtime. Some of the Big Kid boys were still over to play James Bond Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 with my father. Mom was lamenting all of the cartoon bodies being shot and killed on our television screen while Dad mischievously egged the boys on and let out an occasional belly laugh. My little brother would peak his toddling blond head out around the corner of the hallway to watch. I asked for a bedtime story before I had to fall asleep. One of the Big Kids told my mom he would love to read me a story. She consented and he followed me to my bedroom and sat on the bed while I situated myself under the covers. He asked which book I’d like to read from my stack on the nightstand. I think I might’ve blushed a little. We agreed on one about dogs that had buttons you could push that made barking sounds. He didn’t do anything to me but read, but sometimes I think about how he could have. He was really sweet I think I remember. But I still think about how he could have done a lot of things, a high school student in a six-year-old’s bedroom. I think about how my mom said sure and how the bedroom door was shut. I thought about it when my mom texted me the morning before I moved in with my boyfriend of three years, saying: “I’d like to ask you to consider one more time-- I’d like you to honor your mother and father and be married before living with a man.” I think about it when I’m banging on the walls. One morning, I wake up and all the cracks in the walls are gone. I wonder if I’m dreaming because I am really obsessed with those cracks, let me tell you. I think I probably have them memorized, each crevice a reflection of the intricacies of my own thoughts. They might even be more similar to the stretch marks I’ve begun to notice vining around my middle. It’s just that these sorts of things simply can’t disappear on my watch. The next thing I notice is that all of the texts from my mom asking my favorite candy for a stocking stuffer are gone. I had planned on answering them in the morning. It’s just that there were too many emojis for me to fully process at midnight. But now they’re all gone. In fact, there is no conversation history with my mom at all. I text her my answer anyway, with a couple emojis to boot. 9:30am: — Mr. Goodbar, Reese’s cups. Anything with peanuts, I guess! I feel a sense of dread emanating from my rib cage and decide to try a meditation tactic I read about the other day. I sit cross-legged on my yoga mat and am thinking very hard about not-thinking and doing not-thinking correctly when I feel one of last night’s chip crumbs poking my heel. Fuck it. I get up and try to start on a painting. It’s sort of a vignette of that night when the Big Kid read me to sleep. I decided it might help to paint it out so that all of its incessantly branching what-ifs might stop taking up so much headspace. I still feel the dread seeping up through my skin and imagine it as a cartoonishly chartreuse, smokey stench that is wafting through my rib cage and out of my mouth and through my fingers, spilling out onto the canvas. I begin painting several cracks on my childhood bedroom wall. When I’ve finished the cracks I wash my brush thoroughly, pushing down a gnawing sense of frustration that I shouldn’t actually be done yet, that I didn’t work long enough. This sensation feels overwhelming and manifests in a sudden desire to consume the brush. I’m curious what its bristles 9
would feel like on my lips, my freckles, my stretch marks? Suddenly, I am feverishly painting over my stretch marks—a bright, period-blood red. I feel like I’m watching myself from above, satisfied by the clarity of where the brush ought to go next. It’s like how doing a paint-by-numbers might feel, I guess. I lay on the yoga mat and let the paint dry. It occurs to me that if I ever become pregnant I will not have enough red paint to cover all of my marks and actually pray to Whoever It Ever Was to please don’t ever let me get pregnant, even though I have taken numerous other more atheistic precautions to ensure this. I never hear back from my mom. I take a shower to clear my head and wash off the paint, which looks like some wonderful kind of deliverance as it trickles among the suds and swirls down the drain. My boyfriend comes home, and we have sex. My back bumps up against the wall several times, and I imagine that this might be how the cracks will reappear. Afterward, while he is toweling off, I check. There are still no cracks. I ask him if he’s noticed. “What cracks?” He asks, kisses my cheek, and walks to the bathroom. The next morning, mom still hasn’t texted me back. The cracks are still not there. I am drifting in and out of sleep, becoming groggier with each snooze of the alarm. I half-dream that the X-Acto knife I just bought for an art project is in my hand and I am standing on the window sill to carve each crack back into existence, just as it was. I am wearing lingerie while I do it, and the curtains are open. In a jolt I open my eyes for real, grab my phone, and check my texts to find that my mother still has not responded. This is strange, worrisome even. I need to get out of bed. I go to the grocery store and pass a display of Velveeta and Rotel tomatoes. I think about how comforting that would taste today, but pass it anyway. I’m using a handheld basket instead of a fullon shopping cart, and by the end of my shopping, I have to use my free hand to carry the stuff that won’t fit. This always happens because I force myself to only use the small basket, even if I’m getting something large like rolls of paper towels. I’ve now successfully denied my desires twice before noon. I still feel guilty for some reason. My therapist is clambering around in the back of my mind once I have identified the word guilt, and I imagine her with an X-Acto knife, wearing lingerie, carving up the walls of my brain. I feel more guilt though this is really pretty funny. In the checkout line I see a mother reprimanding her son with a package of hot dogs in her hand. They kind of act as an extension of her gesturing, flopping around with each movement like some kind of bizarro, limp phallic dance. I am a little amused until I see that the child is crying uncontrollably. The mother will not relent: she throws the hot dogs on the conveyor belt with surprising force and points her glittering, sharp fingernail two inches away from the boy’s nose. “Sorry,” he sobs “mommy.” I feel tears rapping at the back door of my eyes, and I think of how my mom would’ve never scolded me like that, hot dogs ablaze and unaware of my ability to breathe. I almost tell the woman this but end up incredulously staring when her glare finally rises to meet me. I quickly avert my eyes down to my phone, checking my texts again compulsively. There are none from mom but I begin to type to her anyway: 10
10:31 am: — I also like Snickers a lot. You probably remember. I’m sorta gaining weight and really don’t need a lot of candy, but I do like Snickers. Again, thanks for asking. — Mom, what kind of candy do you like? 10:33 am: — Also… kinda weird, but thank you for never flopping hot dogs in my face at the grocery store and making me cry. Thank you for telling me that one day I could maybe become an artist in Africa. Thank you for being polite when you asked me to reconsider moving in with my boyfriend. It made me mad, but I think you were trying your best. I think you were trying to protect me in the way you knew how. 10:35 am: — I love you The woman in line has stopped the hot dog wagging, and the boy is eating a cookie with amazing vigor, chomping, cheeks all tear stained. She had asked him if he wanted the kind with peanuts in it, and he had nodded yes. I come home from the grocery store and make myself some kind of taco salad with black beans and peppers while listening to a reissue of a Captain Beefheart record my mom got for me in high school. I crush up the remaining tortilla chips from the Mexican restaurant and sprinkle them on top while his voice crushes itself and sprinkles over me. It had been my birthday. I’d asked for my first record player when vinyl was coming back or whatever, and mom asked me what albums I would want. I knew she could find that reissue of Clear Spot at the Urban Outfitters downtown, and I really loved that song “My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains.” She hadn’t known who he was and told me when I unwrapped it that he sure looked different. I showed her the song, and she reminded me that Christ should be my home, rain or shine. I turn off the record player, bring the salad to my room, open my laptop and unroll the yoga mat. I go to YouTube and search Captain Beefheart “My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains” live. There are no videos of him playing it, so I instead choose the super saturated looking one that I’ve seen before where he’s playing “Electricity” on Cannes beach. While crunching, it occurs to me that I haven’t checked on my cracks yet. I hit the space bar on my laptop to pause. I look up. They are back. I swallow. I hit the space bar again and take another bite.
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Outpour
Brianna Morris My heart was a nasty slush on the tile, a grey weight staining my bathtub and clothes. The slush took the shape of a hand, then disintegrated in my grasp. It took the shape of the house I grew up in, and I still moved away. I want to start living again. Give me apple slices and midday naps, waking up two hours older. The past is just a primer for what comes next. Salt dissolves in a pool of memory before spilling over fresh wounds. I remind myself that someday the dust will settle. I will let my heart be a raw and dangerous shadow, burning quietly in my ribcage like a solar eclipse. What’s left of you is a haircut and bad lungs. Ink-skin and checkmark and late reply—I could go on. Instead, I piece together a tender rebirth in a time zone adjacent to yours, unraveling the quiet with my bare hands. I used to pick up calls that weren’t for me. Would place down my phone and waltz alone to dial tones, that guttural, elongated note— the dirty marrow of a mistake dripping from the speaker. I think the problem is how long I’ve gone without dancing. There’s a type of self-intimacy that still evades me. My arms have become yearning hallways, parallel vacancies swinging at my sides. I would rather be a piece of construction paper folded once into a Valentine’s Day card, or your most recent outgoing call. Let me be the sunlight that pours over you 12
when dawn comes to remedy your ache and there’s nothing left to bleed for anymore.
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Of Me - Logan Jones
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gobble gobble - KC Legacion
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Bloodletting Will Leemkuil
When I went to the grocery store, a little sliver would be added to the growing pile of debt I had accumulated. Wherever I went, I carried this pile with me, and the slightest financial indiscretion would throw me into a spiral of hopeless introspection that hung over me like cold mist for days on end. Most of the time, I felt like I was blindly stumbling, bumping against this obstacle or that but in general making very little progress towards escaping my predicament or even understanding where exactly I was. I often went days on end without speaking to another person, not counting when I was at work. I was working at a call center administering a variety of academic studies serving vague governmental bodies whose acronymic names were almost impossible to remember. All day long, I sat in my cubicle and faced brutal skepticism from wary Middle Americans. “What are you gonna do with my information,” they’d ask suspiciously, as if by answering my questions they would be irretrievably surrendering little bits of themselves to a force they neither trusted nor understood. I found this protective sense of privacy to be misplaced. What did they have to lose by sharing their information? And besides, they were compensated for participating in the studies with gift cards or cash rewards. But then again, I suppose everyone is conditioned to think of themselves as prey. “Your responses will be stripped of all identifying data,” I would explain, “and then collected in aggregate and used for academic research purposes. Surveys such as this one have been helpful in the discovery of lifesaving treatments for many types of illnesses. Type 2 Diabetes is just one example.” It remains strange to me how often a canned line like this would strike a chord with the person on the other end. Hearing this disease mentioned, something would soften in their tone and they would go momentarily silent. During this lull I would picture them sitting at their kitchen table staring momentarily out of a small window. More often than not, though, we never made it to the point of speaking. The phone rang endlessly, or the call would end suddenly with an enigmatic series of beeps and clicks. If I got an answering machine, it was usually an impersonal message read by a robot. “The person you’re trying to reach is unavailable,” a chilly, synthetic voice would inform me. Occasionally, a recording of a chipper suburban mother said something like, “Thanks so much for your call! The Robertsons aren’t home right now, but leave your number, and we’ll get back to you!” When I got through to someone, they were generally not pleased to hear from me. At least a few times a week, somebody would snap into an unhinged rage and come at me with a type of pure and unmasked emotion that I could barely comprehend. “Don’t you EVER fucking call here again!” a man shouted. “How DARE YOU interrupt my family during dinner. Get a REAL JOB, you parasite—you VAMPIRE!” 16
I bet your mother is proud of you, or don’t you have a family? Don’t you know what this is like?” a woman hissed through clenched teeth. Once a man commanded, “FUCKING HANG UP THE PHONE!” and proceeded to repeat this until I was worn down and gave in to his commands, though this was against our policy. Outside of my cubicle, in all directions, I could hear voices softly speaking. I could never shake the feeling that I was surrounded by an army of isolated people softly and endlessly murmuring to themselves. What could I do but add to the chatter? I shared a dim, cavernous apartment with too many roommates, one or more of whom were always hanging around in the kitchen or watching the TV by the front door. Their habits rubbed off on me. Involuntarily, I spent many long nights drinking and getting high, watching one of them discuss something with the other: sports, girls, their jobs, or simply how drunk they were. I would sink into the couch and feel my thoughts grow wispy and insubstantial. It took me hours to build up the willpower to excavate myself from where I sat and roll into bed. As I lay in the pitch black with my eyes wide open, memories of the night would drift before me like particles of dust caught in shafts of moonlight, but by morning there would be only a void. Desperately seeking an excuse to leave the house and escape my roommates in the cold months, I bought a pack of cigarettes and each night forced myself to smoke them as I wandered in aimless circles around the neighborhood. I hated the bitter chemical taste. With every inhalation, I could feel my gums drying out and tiny particles of soot clinging to my lungs. Lying awake at night, I was beset by visions of my teeth growing weak and loose, until eventually my graying gums would release their grip and teeth would drop out and rattle around in the basin of my sink. So, I had to give up smoking, but the walking habit stuck. When I dragged myself out of the basement into the dim, lifeless streets, some feeling returned to my limbs. I felt awake. I would hold my hands out at length in front of my eyes, marvelling that they were connected to me, forced to do my bidding. But most of the time, I would pull my hood down and walk for leagues at a time without removing my eyes from the sidewalk in front of me. The silence that hung in the night air was interrupted only by my own breath and the occasional car cutting through the streets, throwing brackish slush on the dirty banks of snow. One night, I stumbled into a sandwich board clumsily set out in the middle of the sidewalk, tripping and almost tumbling right onto the plywood sign as it fell to the ground with a thud dampened by the slush. Once I regained my composure, I restored it to its standing position and looked it over. In a neat, even hand, laid on the bumpy plywood in chipping acrylic paint, someone had written GIVE BLOOD. MAKE $250 PER WEEK. RELATIVELY PAINLESS AND SAFE. Underneath these words was a tiny, bright red heart. I glanced at the building next to me: dull, vague brick, dark window decorated with streetlight reflections. I walked up to the window and attempted to peer inside, but an opaque curtain had been drawn shut. There was light seeping out through the openings along the edges, but I couldn’t make out any further details about what exactly was going on in there. 17
So I moved on. It was a bitterly cold evening, the sky cloudless. The temperature was dropping rapidly. My thoughts froze in my head, and I felt my body transform into a vessel full of icy sludge that barely contained enough will to carry my spirit home. It seemed like I had just lain down when I was startled by a loud thud directly above my bed, a sound like a heavy sack of corn hitting the floor. After a moment of silence, I heard a loud retching noise as someone emptied their guts, into some receptacle I hoped, but it didn’t seem worth it to check. $250 per week was a significant amount of money. What was left after rent and various debts amounted to a small handful of change. With $250 extra per week, I would have the freedom to change my life. I could live in a nicer apartment. I could start going on dates again, get married, and even have children. The future stretched out before me, newly bright and clear. A sense of warmth spread through my belly. Upstairs, the retching continued. I found myself standing before the clinic’s dingy facade, much dirtier in the pale daylight than it had seemed the night prior. In the reflection of the window, behind which the heavy curtain was still pulled tight, the street behind me was busy with cars that sent streams of gray water high up into the air like an army of gloomy jet skis. As I walked inside, my glasses immediately fogged up in the hot, humid air. “Hi there,” a female voice chimed from somewhere in the room. I gave an unsure wave, reeling from blindness and the surprising heat. I hastily wiped the steam from my lenses. Stationed at a small folding table directly in front of me was a tiny woman with curly black hair. She was around my age and had a tattoo of half a broken heart on each of her wrists. “Did you see the sign outside?” she asked. I nodded. She beamed, showing off her straight, white teeth. “I painted it,” she said proudly. She slid a clipboard across the mottled plastic surface of the beige table. I signed in and, following her gesture, took a seat in a small waiting area that was empty except for a large man who was fast asleep where he sat, his chin tilted forward onto his chest. I was summoned to a windowless room. The walls were wood paneled, and I could hear the lights buzzing in their sockets. Against the far wall were six identical chairs with long leg rests, each accompanied by a tan plastic box with a glowing panel on the front and a scale on the top. A pale woman occupied one of the chairs. Her long chestnut brown hair flopped over her face, creating a veil behind which I could see her open mouth and closed eyes. She, too, seemed to be asleep. A tube ran from her arm, through the plastic box, and back out the other side, her dark blood filling a bag that sat atop the scale. The only other person present was the nurse who had called me in. He looked me up and down critically. “I need to administer a physical assessment,” he said, motioning with a clipboard 18
towards the far end of the room. He was small and withered looking and wore a surgical mask that jerked about when he spoke and muffled his words. After recording my height and weight, the nurse drew an object that looked like a silver pen from his breast pocket. He grabbed my index finger and held it outstretched, then jabbed the device into the fleshy pad of my fingertip. Blood began to pool into a large droplet. In a graceful motion, he turned my finger over, and the drop fell neatly into a test tube that he held in his other hand. He screwed a stopper onto the tiny bottle. “Take a seat,” he said, and he glided out of the room, the bright red drop of my blood safely tucked in his breast pocket. It had been so long since I had last seen my blood. I was often conscious of the way it ran through my veins. I felt it recede like a tide from my extremities as I took my long winter walks, and I heard it pounding and rushing through my head when I struggled to fall asleep. But when was the last time that any of it had escaped the looping confines of my circulatory system? Did it feel trapped as it circled indefinitely, heart to brain to lung and back again, trapped forever? From somewhere, I recalled that blood flows through the human body at a rate of three to four miles per hour—walking speed. The nurse guided my head back as I climbed into the chair. He wiped the crook of my elbow with a cotton swab that held a cold, yellow liquid and began to massage my flesh. I watched with fascination as a vein rose from my arm and began to pulse visibly. The nurse grabbed a needle from a small dish and pop It punctured my skin with a slight sting. My blood crept through the tube in a series of sudden starts and stops as the nurse adjusted the equipment, and finally, it raced down the line and began to fill the plastic bladder on top of the scale. My head swam. I relaxed my muscles and let my body slump back into the chair. I realized that I had forgotten to ask how long this process would take. I turned to the nurse, but he had disappeared, the curtain that hung over the entrance still fluttering in his wake, so I just settled back and closed my eyes. The feeling in my arm thrilled me. I could sense my blood leaving my body in a steady stream. My arm began to feel light and hollow, a sensation that spread to the rest of my body until I felt I was levitating slightly above my chair and could not open my eyes. I imagined an enormously long leech latched onto my arm, its snaking body coiled around mine. With each second that passed I grew lighter and the leech grew fuller as we progressed towards equilibrium. Once it had taken enough of my blood, color and vitality would return to its shriveled form, and in turn, my body would be freed of some of its damning weight. Lithe and strong once again, the leech would disentangle from me and slither through the reeds and murky water of the river, along which I would walk, my feet sinking with a slight bounce into the moist grass of the bank. The sun, high overhead, warmed my skin and hummed with a deep vibrant energy, the universal om. I turned to look at it and shielded my eyes, overwhelmed by its brilliance. I curled up in the bough of 19
a tree, and as I slipped away, I felt something warm wrap around me, a slim branch with half a heart carved in it pulling me close. I stumbled out into the cold air clutching $125 cash in my hand, enveloped in a thick haze, barely conscious. As I crossed the street, a car swerved around me, splattering my jacket with slush as its driver laid on the horn. I hardly noticed. As if I had seen it in a movie years ago, I remembered the nurse forcing my eyes open to shine a bright light into them. Through a fog, I heard the woman at the desk telling me that I was welcome to come back twice per week. Suddenly, the cold snapped me out of it, slapped me in the face, pinched my cheeks, and froze me to the bone. I shivered and trembled. The freezing air cut through my protective layers of clothing as if they were nothing. I was surprised by the light that shone all around me. Everything was so bright: headlights cutting over the tops of snowbanks, a red beam flashing down the block, even the streetlights shone with blinding intensity. My attention was pulled in all directions: a window, slightly ajar, quietly leaking jazz music; a man across the street wearing a bulky red jacket, walking a small dog, and muttering to himself; the crunch of my boots through frozen-over slush; above me in the clear night, the stars, which I don’t remember ever having been able to see in the city, now radiating and piercing the pink glow of the sky; the stars, which I could feel softly jabbing my face with their small points when I turned it skyward; the stars, beaming down some incomprehensible message that I could never hope to decode. The world was full of so, so many things, and I was swallowing these disconnected details like an endlessly empty vessel, unable to quell the flow of perception. I struggled through my mind for a thread of thought, a chain of distraction I could catch, but nothing would stick. I felt like I was trying to grab rain from the air during a downpour. I just wanted to melt away into the silence and warm darkness of my basement room. I pushed forward through the night as the world clanged and crashed all around me, rushing through the streets I had walked so many times, my path unfamiliar and crowded with revelation. After taking a long drink from a fountain, I took a seat in my cubicle. I began my calls, and surprisingly, someone answered on the first try. I began to read from the script, but the line clicked and went dead. Following protocol, I called back. “Who do you think you are, calling me back when I already hung up on you,” a man said. “I apologize for any inconvenience. I am not selling anything. I am trying to conduct an academic survey. The results will be used in important types of research, and you will be compensated for your time.” You know what, you pathetic little fuck, shut your mouth, and don’t you dare waste my time again,” the man sneered. “I made more money today than you’ll make all month.” Without warning, a hot and overpowering rage flooded my body. My face flushed. “Hang up right now,” he said, “and kill yourself while you’re at it.” Before I knew what I was doing, I had jumped to my feet, nearly ripping the headset cord from 20
its socket. “FUCK YOU!” I screamed into the microphone, so hard it hurt my throat. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I threw the headset onto the ground and stomped it into jagged little pieces. White hot blood pounded in my head, and I felt my heartbeat in my fingertips. I looked around the room and saw dozens of pairs of dead eyes peering up at me over the walls of the surrounding cubicles.
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Visceral - Catherine Miller
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Poem sans Clemency SK Osborn
in one hand, a knife. in another, an offering. there is forgiveness & then there is coming home. my baby teeth sleep in a pink box & i have forgiven them for leaving, but i don’t touch them anymore. this (even if only this) we learned in the church of things good at swallowing: not everything can be eaten not everything fits back where it once did: i ask you to touch me & then i ask you to stop. i open the box of my teeth & ask why nothing wants to live here. my hands tremble in the kitchen light as they let go of everything: the knife, the roses, your hand. they are still here. they are still shaking. they are still here.
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Dear Diary Burn in Hell - Abigail Thompson 24
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Three Miles of Bad Road Addison Rizer
we are three minutes into three miles of bad road (teeth clattering) and i can’t speak without a tremor in my voice. i would say the tremor is from the potholes, but she, she, is talking just fine. these shaking bones of mine are fear with its favorite mask on, so i can curse the hands and their neon vests that laid this asphalt, blame them for this sleepy-grinning terror as she turns to me, head leaning back against the headrest, the rattle blurring her edges. i wonder if i haven’t created her to fill the emptiness, a daydream except for the big gulp she spilled down her t-shirt hours ago and i swear i can still smell it in the air. i want to touch her with sticky fingers (though i do not dare). we are four minutes into three miles of bad road and i don’t care about the metal we are leaving behind. the tires pop and she calls them fireworks, shifts her sharp shoulders and the windows shatter and i realize this whole time i haven’t thought of turning around. love has become the eraser of invention for me (door handles and turn signals and the brakes—the mere concept of slowing down). the bumpers are clashing. i mean crashing. (i don’t know what i mean except she is a collision i had time to avoid but didn’t). i am a crash dummy with a mouth that can only say yes. (yes i’ll take you anywhere you ask and yes i’ll run this red light and yes this road can be our grave and yes i mean it). yes and yes and yes. we are five minutes into three miles of bad road and i can’t remember the sound of the engine. must have lost it while she was laughing. there goes the steering wheel. the back seat. all the things i loved before her. minutes from now i will be in the middle of the road, skidding across poorly-laid asphalt with this machine, and i won’t have thought once of getting out of the goddamn car.
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A Calculation of Gravitational Force Between Artwork and Viewer In Units of Extended Metaphor Lauren Swee
Abstract so much depends upon a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
- “The Red Wheelbarrow” by Williams Carlos Williams (1938)
Equations Fg1 = Fg2 The force of gravity between any two objects is equal. Whether it’s two neutron stars an unfathomable distance away or you and your couch, there is always, invariably, an equal and constant pull between any two objects. Fg = m × a The force of gravity, like any force, is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by the rate at which that object is accelerating. Earth’s force of gravity is such that is accelerates any given object at a rate of 9.8 m/s2 and even though some high school teacher attempted to instill a sense of doubt in you by dropping a feather and a bowling ball side by side, this is indeed true. 1
1
It’s air resistance. Feathers fall slowly because they have too much surface area for their own good.
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But the force of gravity, like astrology, 2 can be described in more than one way. So here’s another. Fg = G(m1 x m2 /d2 ) This equation is nice because it shows how the force of gravity is really dependent upon both objects. It’s proves that you pull the Earth just as much as it pulls on you. And that the closer you are, the more you pull on one another. I like to think that when I slip on the ice outside my door that I am not falling, but colliding. Introduction I work as a gallery guard at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum and have run out of things to worry about, so I want to know the magnitude of force between any given piece of art and its viewer. The Weisman has nine galleries, depending on how you divide them up, yet the art out on the floor represents less than 1% of the museum’s collection. The other 99% of it is housed either in the basement or off site in a large storage space. Every few months, a number of gallery guards are taken to bear witness to the rest of the collection. My coworker Alex has gone on one of these excursions and compares it to the final scenes of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Just too much to take in, ya know?” he says. We stand small in the expansive and airy main gallery. I love to ask my coworkers which art pieces they love and which they despise. Any answer, save for the indifferent, demands my attention. Rachel loves Portrait of Clarafor the way her blush-colored shawl falls against the slope of her shoulders and the way that her frame spreads across the canvas in lifelike proportion (Nordfelt, 1911). Erick loves the Greek pots (525-500 BCE) for their aged wisdom but hates Alexander Archipenko’s Two Bodies(1936) for their phallic demeanor. Rachel loves that same statue. “Why?” I ask. I tell her what Erick said about how they look like penises. About how the Archipenko’s title doesn’t make a great case against it. Rachel laughs and says she can’t explain. Liz3, unlike any other gallery guard, is enamored with the pottery collection. There is a case full of Warren McKenzie pottery, which she hovers over for a full 30 minutes, in exposition. And while her description is exhaustive, I’ve gained a respect for these pots. Ironically, Liz informs me, Warren McKenzie would not have intended for his pots to be in a museum. He believed that pottery was unique Cosmo’s Pisces (my) horoscope for this week: “Your solar return begins on Monday, and your best skills are shining above from the universe and below on your experiences. Tuesday’s full moon helps you invite, deepen, or transition the love you deserve. This weekend, surround yourself with your most authentic friendships and birthday parties.” Vogue’s Pisces (my) horoscope for this week: “That glow of self-love looks good on you, sister! It’s what sets the queens apart from them ordinary folk. This is the week to come into your power and realize what a magnificent being you are! The metamorphosis you are going through will make you alluring to both abundance and love. Your psychic gifts are also coming to the fore, Pisces. Learning to take your own guidance seriously promises to be a game changer.” 3 Liz is an art history major and it shows. 2
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and precious in that it was art intent upon a relationship with its user. But what about the other pieces? Could I have a relationship with the Georgia O’Keeffe painting that hangs in the museum, and could I possibly impact that bundle of blooming poppies as much as it impacts me? What is the mass of a painting? What is the magnitude of gravity between us and our art? Equipment The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (1): to hold the artwork A Gallery Guard (1): to consider such absurd ideas as the gravitational force between artwork and viewer Unsuspecting Visitors (lots of them): to pass the time Time (lots of it): to be passed Procedure Not everyone has the same mass. You and I fall to the ground at the same rate, but that doesn’t mean that we exert the same force on it. This is where I begin. If we want to know the force between any given piece of art and ourselves, we must know the mass of that art. But how do we define this? I could define it as the age of any given art piece. Certainly, with time comes meaning and heaviness. In that case, the most massive piece of art in our museum would be these two black terracotta figurines from 200 BCE Han Dynasty4 that sit in a lonely corner of our ceramics gallery. I sit on the bench there when no visitors are around to witness my laziness and imagine the statuettes falling off their thin pedestal. If a two-thousand-year-old figurine falls and no one is around to panic, did it make a sound? If it were to fall it could be silent. Maybe after all these years the material would simply puff into a cloud of dust on impact. I could also define an art’s mass by its fame. As I’m standing and thinking about how much my feet hurt one day, I see a visitor glide across the main gallery toward me. “What is the most famous piece of art you have here?” he asks. He hasn’t even crossed the full distance of the room yet. I perk up, thrilled by my chance for company. “We have an O’Keeffe...” I point in the direction of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Oriental Poppies (1927)t hat sits idly against one of my favorite walls in the whole building. Figure A illustrates this change in trajectory:
4
I lied. The Greek pots are older. But the Greek pots are safe under a glass covering, so they seem so much less fragile.
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O’Keefe
Me
Figure A: The trajectory of a museum visitor changes due to lack of interest in me, the gallery guard.
The man turned and passed me before I could lower my pointer finger. I stood, as one does, after being passed by a car in the rain, metaphorical water just beginning to collect into droplets on my chin. Or I could describe a work of art’s mass by the number of viewers it attracts. In that case, I believe Marsden Hartley’s 8 Bells Folly(1933) to be the most massive. It’s a visceral painting that sits just one wall away from O’Keeffe’s lustful poppies. The piece is a tribute to Hartley’s friend, Hart Crane, who drowned himself in 1932. The piece screams at you from across the room until you cede yourself to its tumultuous blue gravity. I’m there one day as judges for a writing contest travel around the galleries, reciting submissions about different pieces. They stop in front of 8 Bells Folly and stay there for a long time, obliging to the many writers who demand a conversation about this piece. There are so many stories of suicides, and I have to leave that room. One painting in the museum pulls me more than all the others. Marsden Hartley’s Deserted Farm ( 1909) sits like a black hole in the corner of one gallery, devouring the space around it. It’s my favorite piece in the entire museum. I like to stand close to it. So close that I can see the globs of paint that have been swept up in each individual brush stroke. Thin grains of wood disappear behind the overbearing lacquer of the frame, and I can see the rough texture of the canvas that lays just behind the void. Just faintly, you can see through the darkness a small square that’s supposed to be a cottage. I can feel the daunting weight of nighttime dragging against my eyesight. As though I’ve been stranded in the woods, desperately imagining what a cottage should look like if it were right over that hill. As though I could will my vision to see shelter up ahead. Results 31
I want to smash the artwork.
Yes, I really do. I want to throw the ceramics from their crisp white pedestals and watch as they shatter. I want to take a baseball bat to the glass cases and watch as the broken glass mixes with the broken pottery: the protection and the protected, together and inseparable. I want to dig my fingernails into the canvas of an O’Keeffe and pull. I want to strike my hands against a Hartley repeatedly and drum a bizarre song. I want to meticulously tear A Portrait of Clara into long, even strips and then braid them together. I want to take T wo Bodiesand separate them using my fists. I want to drag Deserted Farm out into the most remote parts of the woods and desert it. I want to take 8 Bells Folly and drown it in the river—holding its head down as it struggles. I want to rip-hit-tear-crash-smash-punchwreck-cut every piece of art in that entire museum. I really do. But I won’t. I promise. So please don’t show this to my supervisor. Across the building, in the Riverside Gallery where guests are allowed to sit at tables and visit, there are only a few pieces of art on display. Opposite the twisting and crooked curves of the Weisman’s western wall hang a collection of three. These pieces are little more than squares of color, using only a couple shades each. They are the kind of art that is constantly subjected to that insufferable accusation, “I could have done this myself.” I’d given so little thought to these pieces until they came up in conversation with a coworker I had never met before. We were standing in the doorway between two galleries, and I asked her my favorite question. “Do you have a favorite piece of art here?” I asked. Her face lit up. “The pieces in Riverside,” she answered. But her body was leaning forward. She wasn’t done answering yet. “Why?” I yielded happily. “It’s not so much about what they look like...it’s your reaction—the art is your reaction.” I leaned back with an enlightened smirk on my face. What an epiphany! Conclusion The gallery guard position is for university students, which means that the longest any one guard has worked at the museum is four—maybe five—years. And any long-term career at the Weisman takes place a floor above the galleries in the offices. Which means that it is very possible that in the lifetime of at least a few of these art pieces, I am a significant figure. So the force between me and Deserted Farm must be greater than others, right? I’m at the Weisman one day and watch as an aging woman disappears into the ceramics gallery. Ten minutes later, I hear a loud sneeze, and the woman reappears, her watery eyes catching the last rays of sun from the skylight. She approaches me. “You guys need to dust in there.” 32
References Artist Unknown, Figurine, Han Dynasty, 206-200 BCE Alexander Archipenko, Two Bodies, 1936 B.J.O. Nordfelt, Portrait of Clara, 1911 Georgia O’Keeffe, O riental Poppies, 1927 Marsden Hartley, Deserted Farm, 1909 Marsden Hartley, E ight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane, 1933 Various Artists, Greek Pots, 525-500 BCE
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rise - Keegan Burckhard
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Three Thousand Dollars Sean Ennis
Three weeks after I was laid off, a check appeared from my previous employer for three thousand dollars. This was the money I would have been paid for sick days or time off. Christmas was coming soon, and this would help me pay for a video game for my son and a necklace with my son’s name on it for my wife. When I told my therapist about all that had happened to me, he suggested that when one door closes, a window tends to open. I told him no one leaves a room through the window unless there’s some emergency. At home alone during the day, I cooked elaborate meals for the family. “How about roasted butternut squash soup with smoked paprika and crispy arugula?” I’d say. I made salted caramel cookies too. My wife, a professor, leaves her notes for class around the house. One read, “the abject: voyeurism, bestiality, instrumentality, etc.,” and I wondered what novel she could possibly be discussing. I’d read plenty of books. The dogs sat on the couch, and the cat we fed ran up the driveway to greet me while I smoked a cigarette. I had twenty five hundred left after the power bill and some groceries. Still plenty for presents. Maybe a phone for my son too—he was old enough—and new suede boots for my wife. I did so much laundry I broke the dryer. I could crouch down and gape into it, but it was fifteen years old. I shopped for new dryers, ones that looked like the cockpit in some spaceship, but I decided to call a handyman first instead. He came with his tools and did not hide his surprise that I was home during the day. He wiped his hands after fifteen minutes and said all it needed was—and I stopped paying attention, wondering if he ever made three thousand dollars in one day. Three days later, the gifts for my family arrived, and I hid them under the bed. The game, the phone, the necklace, the boots, a book about the history of football, and a set of fancy pens. They seemed thoughtful. When I told my therapist about the gifts, he said he was glad I wasn’t wallowing, the holidays can be a difficult time. When I got home, I wrapped the gifts as best I could and put them under the tree. My son knew that Santa wasn’t real. A woman I used to date posted a picture from holidays in Grand Cayman, presumably a trip worth at least three thousand dollars. She married a rich man, or she was rich, or they both were, the internet suggests. I didn’t regret ending things with her, but it hurt to think she didn’t regret it either. How does a person find a high paying job? I went to college twice. I broke my ankle once and used a book bag to carry things. I worked my old job on crutches. I took three pills for my mind and two for my blood pressure. The former made conversation difficult and the latter gave me dry mouth. It was 4:30 p.m., and my son was with his video games. My wife wasn’t home from work yet. I did some math and wanted to order more gifts but drew a blank. I didn’t even want the three thousand dollars—now fifteen hundred—I disapproved of myself that much. Couldn’t I be defined by something more abstract and attractive? Staying busy was hard though. I turned on the TV and the radio at the same time. I ran the dishwasher and the washing machine, and then I turned on the shower. My therapist said I could not know 35
when I was in a state of mania, only after the fact would it be clear. I thought about how my wife still sleeps next to me at night, despite my disappointments. She snores, and I sweat; I imagined us as two restless animals in a cozy den. But it wasn’t all drowsy months and dread and chores. For instance, on Christmas Eve, my wife came home with a bag of schoolwork and a marijuana chocolate bar to share, and against my better judgement, while our son slept, I agreed to eat some. We could still surprise each other.
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Untitled - Anna Klein
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POOL/FIRE
Carl Atiya Swanson The questions do not come as questions, they are formed as absolutes, the certainty of your body betrays you. Words flow down your neck from pooling in the hollow of your ear, a sticky film forced by the weight of your chest, the pull of your hip bones out from your skin, the twist that curls and collapses into a noose on the couch. Running your tongue over an envelope to tease the paper cut, down the barrel of a pistol it’s a damn good thing you don’t have, over a penny, a battery, a live wire, just to be alive, to please be alive, to be on fire and sparking. The tar of these words burns with muddy light, singeing hairs and sending up the faintest smoke signals; but let that be enough, enough for now.
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STALE
Short Story by Katerina Kishchynska Translated from Ukrainian by Alice Chester Her feet are huge. Her head barely reaches my shoulder, but her shoe size is that of a man’s—almost like mine. They remind me of flippers or clown shoes. I imagine her wearing a clown costume, face covered with white makeup, a curly garish wig on her head, her loud voice ringing across the hall so that the circus tent is trembling, and she’s slurring some words so no one can fully understand what she’s saying. I liked this character, though I’d better hold off on saying that, or I’d get in trouble. She’s dangling her leg and whistling. “Get your stompers off the suitcase,” I say. She raises her hands in the air as if surrendering, puts her enormous feet on the floor, slowly, one after the other, and smiles at me. “Better?” I roll my eyes. “Better.” I join her on the couch and pass her a hot cup. Two teaspoons of coffee, one teaspoon of cocoa, boiling water, a bit of cream, some cinnamon, no sugar. That’s one of my cups. I have a couple of cups nobody else is allowed to drink from. Most people aren’t anyway. She’s fiddling with the numerous friendship bracelets on her wrists, and I can see words swelling up in her throat. I’m waiting for her to ask me how I’m doing. She has to ask me how I’m doing to break the silence at least. But she’s short on air. She puts her cup on the table. “How you doing?” I ask. There’s a tint of a smile on her lips. She looks at me for a moment, then looks away and slaps her knees. “Let’s go to Albatross!” “I’m sick of bloody Albatross. Half of the chairs have got the shape of my butt already. And what’s with all the excitement? You barely leave the place anyway.” “First off, I do leave. Second, I’m performing tonight.” “Oh, well now we’re talking! Guess I’ll cancel the move-out.” “The move-out” falls between us like a heavy boulder and almost crushes my toes. Albatross is a cafe squeezed between an electronics store and 13/1. It’s got the worst omelet in the world and also the open mic. The typical crowd consists of factory workers, a few mongers from the local marketplace, and schoolkids who consider the open mic nights better entertainment than movies or sitting around on rooftops. The owner of Albatross once decided to amuse the guests with old anecdotes, and then other performers joined him. That’s how the open mic nights were born. I know the entire schedule by heart: Mondays and Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m., Fridays at 5:00 p.m., and Sundays from 4:00 till 8:00 p.m.. The rest of the nights, the stage is taken by the owner’s daughter and her band. They only play Beatles covers, and they’re pretty bad at it, but I still like them more than the open mic nights. Everything the performers bring to this stage is a copy, either of someone else or of 39
themselves. At least this one is of The Beatles. She, on the other hand, loves the open mic. She’s the star of the open mic. No matter what she says, they listen. Nobody has ever booed at her speeches, stand-up, or outright clumsy poems. In fact, it’s unlikely that anyone there understands what she’s talking about. It’s not even because she uses words like ‘transcendental’ and ‘biological determinism’ and drops half the syllables. They simply listen to her on a different wavelength. They just like the way she speaks, each word colored with emotion. I wonder how she controls their state of mind with such ease. I secretly call her ‘the Pied Piper of Albatross.’ “I know. Listen,” she says. “I’m hosting this one.” “There have never been hosts.” “Now there are.” “Are you getting paid?” “No.” “So you volunteer?” “Sort of.” “And you don’t perform anymore?” “I do.” “Got it.” “You got what?” “I just got it.” She fixes her eyes on the suitcases. I never had many things in my apartment, so everything fitted into three big suitcases and a backpack. All that’s left now is a wardrobe, a desk, some armchairs, and the sofa we’re sitting on. It felt strange at first when she came to my apartment, with her loud voice and colorful trinkets and the amounts of emotional baggage I would never be able to collect in my entire life. It was strange, and it was full. We never really had much in common. Usually, she just listens to me complaining about people who are too much like her. She herself isn’t really someone to complain about. Somehow there’s something warm and lovable about all her bullshit. She, on the other hand, can’t stand my smoking. As soon as I light a cigarette, she immediately comments. “For Odin’s sake, if you’re into killing your lungs anyway, then not with this flavored shit at least.” She says “killing your lungs” because “killing yourself” is taboo. “If you don’t like the smell so much, I can open the window. Can’t breathe here anyway.” “You’ll get your fresh air under the air conditioner on the flight.” “Yeah, if the plane doesn’t crash.” “Yeah, screw you.” Hell, I think to myself. There are times when words appear in my throat, and they’re tied to my tongue with irony and dark humor, and my brain won’t filter them out before I can speak. I can almost hear cogs and bolts spinning and whirring in her head in an attempt to generate a conversation topic. All in vain. It’s 40
rare that she doesn’t know what to say, though I do remember it happening the day we met. I don’t remember much of what she was trying to say. “Will be loved and remembered,” “terrible tragedy,” something like that. It’s as if I can still see that: her arms, no bracelets, no polish, fingers squeezing a bouquet of red carnations so tight like she’s trying to flatten them out. Her black dress was too long, and it made her look like a traffic cone. It wasn’t like either of us had plans to make friends at the wake of a mutual acquaintance—to be more specific, of her boyfriend and my lover. That was the second breaking news, the first being that he seemingly couldn’t choose between a noose and jumping out the window, so he hung himself on the balcony railing. Dramatic. Just like him. The wake was held at Albatross. That was when she wouldn’t shut up. She went on and on with her stories, each of which I’ve completely forgotten, and made jokes about our situation. Capital S for the situation. She kept asking me for intimate details. It was sad and a bit funny, for there is no point in causing a scene to a dead man. When everyone left, we stayed and drank cheap vodka together. She wrote a manifesto of our brand new friendship on a paper menu and announced it from the stage. That was the last thing I remember. We did get quite wasted. “Do you think there’s gonna be anyone else this old studying with you?” “I don’t know.” “So you’re absolutely sure about this?” She’s looking away from me, strumming my trunk’s lock with her foot. “I am. It was you who said there was nothing for me to do here.” “I knew you’d start quoting me one day.” “Meh.” “Ever going to miss this dump at your cool university?” There’s forced contempt in her voice, and she seems to be talking to the wall rather than me. I might miss it. It feels like I won’t be able to leave if I say it out loud. “I might miss you,” I say. “A bit.” She looks up at me and nods with a faint smile. I walk up to the window, lean on the sill, and look out at the street. I’m not sure what I expect to see there. Maybe it’s not the street I’m looking at. I’m just staring through the dirty glass. Before, there was wind in this apartment. It came into my void; it brought little sketches into my notebook, and monotonous shopping lists and blank conversations. And then it carried all of that out through the open windows. She closed them and filled the space with words, and colors, and the fear waiting for her next to the front door. So the door got locked, and the windows got closed. We just got used to this, and now that I’m ready to get out, I can feel it. The air is stale.
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What’s the Time - Kelley Dahlen
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Mary
Reyna N.A. The delicate mechanics tighten the scene until it ticks. Here, the sink where I watch you wash your hands. The crumbs you missed. The living room where you almost let me— I have this dream where you turn your mouth in my direction. I have this dream where it’s yours. It’s all yours. The television, yours. This dress. The portrait and the banister, yours, yours. I can’t stop crying. I still sleep in your bed. Is this alright? Is this? Even this? Don’t ask what I mean. Just nod. Just untie us. In my head I track the clockwork, your perfect fingers. This is where I could turn, and if you met me, it would all be over. If I could turn, the little glass bulb shuddering and looking away, even the dark could exhale, finally. Finally. So, I turn, and behind me, the door. Always the door. Finger a rhythm. Turn out a light. Now everything’s a party! Now everyone can sleep. I’m so glad you made it, where I can call to hear you warm over the phone, and press my tongue against the screen, my hands against the mirror. My hands against my hands. I wrote your name and pushed it through the crack. Little piece of paper. Tiny script. Three times to see you. But I never say it out loud.
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Sleeping - Kelley Dahlen
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Firstborn
Rebecca Otter After October is over, when the sun sets early, I ride my bike home in darkness. Once I pass the stoplight and the blinking yellow light and the church window lights, the sidewalk gets much darker, the trees huddle up tighter and merge in the shadows. When the early darkness was new, I worried about rough hands parting leaves and strands of hair snagged on branches and abnormally large rocks because unlike my motion and speed, these are things I cannot control. These worries have quieted some in three months. I ride this path twice a day. I’ve learned which squares of cement are slightly misaligned with their partners. I balanced for a few squares of cement with no hands my first year in Wilmington. Riding just ahead of me, my three roommates competed to see who could go the longest. They swung across the wide path, recovered their grips at the last possible second before disaster. I’d been in the back, pulling the coastal air through my lungs and watching the cars watching us. Everyone knew I couldn’t ride with no hands—too scared of what happens after you fall off—so no one knew I’d done it too. A picture of six-year-old me straddling a bike made the newspaper once. I was a late bloomer by the standards of our neighbors, so my dad bundled me away to a park outside our neighborhood, away from judgmental eyes. I wore flowery leggings and a helmet, of course, which I know from the curling picture clipped from The Gazette that still hangs in my faded pink bedroom. I knew how to play the piano years before I could ride a bike. I loved playing chess, made instrumental songs on the computer, skied every winter—all things to do with my dad. When he taught me to jump neighbors’ curbs and to make left-hand turns around my cul-de-sac under a low-hanging sun, I trusted him with this scary way of moving. When he would leave me in the car at the gas station, my imagination conjuring kidnappers waiting outside the bathroom door, he always came back, and still I’d cry the next day in choir when we’d sing the sad song about the lonely eagle. My parents revealed my dad’s affair when I was fourteen: the eldest child, I was old enough to understand the nature of an affair but still young enough to have dismissed the clues that had been present (or absent) in my parents’ relationship for most of my life. “We wanted to protect you three,” my mom mumbled. Something like that, something silly about how announcing a divorce when we were young kids would scar us. I cried for a little bit with my sister on the couch while my brother sat in silence, worlds away. Then I slipped out our back gate, ran along the narrow dirt trail and past the towering Ponderosa pine. I sat on the thinning bluff, and I was alone. Below me stretched the city of Colorado Springs, row after row of neat suburban roofs blending together southward like some postmodern farmland, split up here and there by the deep furrow of an intersection and trudging specks of dutiful light—then a hill and more roofs, some designed to resemble adobe mud-houses, some mini ski lodges, some just normal houses that normal people live in who want nothing more than an average American life. It’s been unwise to remember learning how to ride a bike or reading Tolkien out loud at bed45
time or much else about my dad except what happened after that day. When he moved out of our house he packed up his computer and guitars and favorite socks, but he didn’t take his cats, didn’t take his children. He says “heart” now instead of “I love you.” But he wants to be at our house every other week and emails me podcasts, tells me over ice cream that Christmas means nothing if he doesn’t get to see his kids, just sits there eating and doesn’t notice me cry. I want to think he’s just not good with emotions, want to ask if you wanted a new life so bad then why can’t you leave us for real, but instead I imagine a day when I’m echoing the words back to a child all my own, and I dearly hope she won’t taste fear. Six years later and I am still most afraid of what happens after the fall is forgotten altogether and caution is unlearned, of unclenching handlebars once more, of trusting the motion of two spinning wheels on a cracking sidewalk in the dark.
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