Fools Vol. 10

vol. 10 may 2021

a thank you to our sponsors.

Fools Magazine is generously funded by the Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing, The School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and Undergraduate Student Government. the ideas and opinions expressed in this magazine are not representative of the University of Iowa

a letter from the editor.

Hello Reader, Here is Volume 10 after one hell of a year. You don’t need context for the magazine you’re about to read. We’ve shared this year. We know. And yet, I can’t pin it down. I’ve been looking back at past volumes for a way to put my feelings about this one to the page. Every semester, I think it must be a similar feeling. Awe, mostly; and maybe some disbelief. We spend months working, meeting, worrying—sometimes arguing—and then we get to hold something uniquely ours in our own fingers. I keep thinking, it’s been five years, surely someone has said this better than I can, but maybe this is yet another aspect in which this year is different. I, like my peers, rely on the absurd to make sense of my surroundings. We all seem to handle things in our own ways with empathy, humor, and grace. This is to say that I can’t explain this feeling except by a strange comparison.

I feel like a turtle. I’m sticking my neck out so that my little turtle nose might breach the surface of the water where I’ve been submerged for so long. My tiny turtle lungs expand with fresh air, and for a moment I forget I was out of breath. The average freshwater turtle can hold its breath for about thirty-five minutes, but when their metabolisms slow in anticipation of hibernation they can stay submerged for an entire winter.

Perhaps this is the first breath after hibernation. Perhaps you know this feeling, too. Perhaps this metaphor applies to a lot more than this magazine. Perhaps all of us have been used to breathing at thirty-five minute intervals, and winter has revealed a strength in us that we had never hoped to discover.

Fools emerges semesterly to revel in the creativity of her contributors, and breaches again to share those creations with her readers. Her turtle lungs are full of inspiration, grief, memories, and metaphors. The act of sharing these things is well worth the months underwater, holding our breaths. We hope you feel the same.

with care, Anna Nelson, Editor-in-Chief & the Fools team

Editors Anna Nelson

Nicole Pagliari

Mollie Phalen

Madi Tarbox

Editor-in-Chief

Managing Editor

Creative Director

Photo Editor

Cailin Hall

Franny Marzuki

Melissa Martínez-Raga

Callan Latham

Design Editor

Web Editor

Writing Editor

Writing Editor

Natalie Muglia

John McAtee

Madeleine Ackerburg

Molly Erickson

Writing Editor

Treasurer

EIC Assistant

Junior Designer

Nicholas Cordes

Marriah Talbott-Malone

Gretchen Lenth

Siobhan Morley

Writing Assistant

Writing Assistant

Web Assistant

Design Assistant

Bobi Knox

Hayley Anderson

Photo Assistant

Guest Designer

Contributors Allison Izui

Tess Kamradt

Erin Challenor

Jayne Mathis

pg. 1

pg. 4

pg. 5

pg. 8

Olivia Smith

Sid Peterson

Ebbie Benson

Aspen Taylor

pg. 9, 19

pg. 11

pg. 17

pg. 19, 49

Lauren Sanyal

Madison Bartlett

Estevan Cornejo

Cheyenne Mann

pg. 15

pg. 16

pg. 29, 41

John Paul Cacioppo

Mary Grevas

Anthony Kestner

Georgia Sampson

pg. 30

pg. 30, 33

pg. 35

pg. 39

pg. 25

Carmela Furio pg. 51

Contents Prom Queen ...................................................... 1 Brainrot ............................................................ 4 All That Has Made Me ........................................ 5 A Decade And A Derecho ................................... 8 Sassy, Conceited, A Little Bitchy ..................... 11 Dreamstate ..................................................... 15 Reoccurring Dreams ....................................... 16 Minority Report .............................................. 17 Memory Alone ................................................. 19 All There’s Left To Do Is Laugh ....................... 23 Mugs On A Countertop ..................................... 25 My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own ...................... 29 Night Out ......................................................... 30 Love U Better ................................................... 33 Watership Up .................................................. 35 Alphabet Soup ................................................ 39 Lighthearted ................................................... 41 Imitations ........................................................ 49 On Bones, And Flesh, And How I Am Not ........... 51

By Allison Izui

My Senior Prom is set in the old, dirty forest preserve where I learned to skip stones as a child. The sunset is softer here, contrasting with the itchiness of my skin-tight, scarlet dress that drips with glitter and rhinestones.

My Senior Prom is set in the old, dirty forest preserve where I learned to skip stones as a child.

Unfortunately, the woods are populated with the local tourists.

They gape at the sludge, as if mud were a new breed of scandal.

This place became popular around the time we found out that quarantine was the new normal. There is a rumor that some people want to clean up this bridge and make it into an honest forest preserve. The local wine moms are all in agreement that the graffiti makes it look far too dangerous; their precious babies could fall off the bridge because of the jagged, unpreserved railings.

It's like they’ve never even taken a walk through the trails. I mean, really, after you find your first headless goat sacrifice, the idea of paint and ugly railings being scary is laughable at best. That being said, the cults won’t be out tonight. The moon is waning, and the heads don’t start rolling until a full moon or better.

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So, we burrow ourselves into the woods, dress up real pretty, and call it a party. The slit in my dress allows little mobility, but it’s better than the alternatives my friends are wearing. Angie’s dress clings to her like it’s afraid she’ll leave without it. Delilah and Sam are in ballgowns, like the modern-day princesses they are.

Somehow, we all end up here: where the Demon Bridge earned its reputation for us to disregard. Underneath it, a thin stream of water (likely an offshoot of Lake Michigan) pushes and pulls in a lazy current that surges into sewage water.

After four years of hating our high school, prom takes place about a block past the soon-to-be gentrified Demon Bridge. It’s five in the evening, we’ve shed our masks to share a bottle of Bacardi and a blunt.

If we’re lucky, we’ll be crossed before we find more concerned WASP’s who look at us like we’re lost causes and they’re some kind of Angelina Jolie.

It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking we’re different.

Like, there’s a wilderness in our eyes, past the gaudy dresses and the thick makeup. Maybe there’s an honesty to our messiness that the passing families find uncomfortable, in need of grooming. In that way, I suppose the Demon Bridge isn’t so different from us.

As another family walks by, this one bolder than the last, the mother makes her presence known.

“You know, there are children who visit here,” she says, thinly threaded eyebrows arched in irritation. Her mask is decorated with hand-stitched flowers and her eyes are doing an interesting impression of maternal disappointment that I can’t help but find amusing.

She isn’t anything like my mom. My mom doesn’t care where I am, as long as I come home sated and leave again the next day.

I grin, letting the residual smoke escape through my teeth. “Then leave.”

Angie and Sam giggle, although I seem to have caught Sam mid-sip because hers is closer to a gargle. Delilah doesn’t say anything—she doesn’t need to. Her eyes look like sunflowers and her glare looks like hell. In her forest green ball gown, there’s an unintentional sense of elegance that accompanies her squatting on a log and chugging down the Bacardi.

“I have a right to be here, you do not have the right to be partaking in illegal activity,” argues the mother. If I watch closely enough, I think I can see her hairline receding. It’s hard to tell with the inconsistent lighting that comes between the leaves overhead. Taking another drag from the blunt and holding back coughs, I wonder if she knows about the frog that’s sitting next to her foot.

“Lady,” drawls Angie, whose curly brown hair has been wrestled into a bun that’s likely giving her a headache. “Either leave or we start using big girl words that’ll break your kid’s eardrums.”

The kid, at the mention of her youth, turns her stare from her mother to us. Her father grips her hand tightly, as if he’s afraid she’ll start running any second. A bug lands on my shoulder and I swat at it before I fully recognize the flinch that the kid offers in response.

The mother’s eyes turn to slits, likely preparing a scathing insult in response, but before she can continue chastising us, Sam falls into the familiar role of damage control. She raises a manicured hand, her class ring glinting in the evening light. “We were supposed to graduate this year.”

We were supposed to graduate this year.

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The woman pauses. Apparently, Sam’s struck “Stay safe,” she says, finally, breaking past the a nerve. tense atmosphere before she leaves us be.

I roll my eyes. They’ve stripped this place of any genuine humanity after the first attempt at cleaning up graffiti. This conversation means less and less as more time goes on.

We watch her leave, following her harried figure until the trees swallow her whole.

After confirming that the bottles hadn’t been tampered with, we pass them around and try to enjoy the thinness of the moon as it casts a The family leaves. There are no more words weathered tiara for us to share. spoken, just us four unnecessarily glaring down the family of three who interrupted our pitiful attempt at prom. The little girl keeps turning back, causing her mask to slip a few times before her father wraps a firm arm around her shoulders.

We must make

quite a picture, a

An hour later, the mother returns with four water bottles and a large Gatorade. She smooths out her cardigan and barely refrains from adjusting her ponytail as she tells us, “I’m sorry this year has been so challenging. I can’t imagine … I—” We must make quite a picture, a couple of kids in borrowed formalwear skeptically eyeing some middle-aged woman who’s struggling for words. Maybe this is the wilderness that all of those families seemed to despise so much. A pack of glitter-infused, angsty teenagers sizing up the lone Samaritan who dared to trespass into their territory.

3

couple of kids in

borrowed formalwear skeptically eyeing some middleaged woman who’s struggling for words.

brainrot

by Tess Kamradt

4

all that has made me

By Erin Challenor

Content warning: gun violence in the U.S. in second grade I asked my teacher why all the doors in our school had black paper over the windows.

• in fourth grade the librarian asked me to help her hand out books to other classrooms. pushing the cart down the hallway reminded me of going to Safeway on Sundays with my sister and my dad; to the left is the bakery of first graders, to the right the third grade deli, coming up on aisle seven is fourth grade soups. we were trained so that when men go murder shopping they won’t find it with us.

• during recess in fifth grade someone at the high school a few blocks away brought a gun to school so we went into lockdown only they put us on school buses because there wasn’t enough time to get everyone back inside. we were told to crawl under the seats and we counted the number of screws on the ceiling and slid pencils back and forth to each other along the grooves of the aisle.

• the day after Parkland there was a lockdown at our school and our heartbeats felt as loud as gunshots. that same year we got to go to Seattle to see Hamilton; the actors didn’t use rifles in their performance to us like they normally did. a student from each school who attended went up on stage and said the names of those who were killed and we all sat on the floor of the theater like they did before he breached the doors that have the same locks as ours.

in a lockdown in Latin class sophomore year Mr. Conry told us about the time he was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and how teenagers will always be the foot soldiers of change but the scapegoats for crucifixion and the socialites of revolution and that America’s tendency to repeat herself is her memento mori.

I carry his fervorous heirloom with me to the frontlines to stare the same government he did in the eyes.

• sophomore year was also the first year I actually saw the full video.

I breathed through my hand as my history class watched them smash into a tower each in an engulfment of black smoke and history. my cousins in Scotland asked how America handles 9/11 today and I said we say the word terrorist.

• during drills they bang on the doors and jiggle the knob and yell and kick and beg for us to open them.

I wonder if those people who unlock the doors are just as scared as we are; they come in thinking I’m sorry, and we say us too.

• during a lockdown in AP psych junior year Mr. James asked for volunteers to sit closest to the windows because his room doesn’t have a blind spot and boys’ hands shot up like the flares we have in our classroom emergency boxes. we were too young to enlist. they planted themselves like soldiers under the windows and played the overtures of war with adrenaline reeking from their hangnails and testosterone dripping from their lips.

• it took me three months to delete the Pinterest board I’d made years ago about all the things I was going to do in the summer before college like in the movies because with each time the death count overtook war casualties I knew it was never going to happen. when they replaced the Apple billboard off I-84 with the city mask mandate I deleted my entire camera roll. now it’s been a year and everytime I cry about what I missed because of this virus I say it will be the last time. in another life is my generation’s anthem.

• Mr. Conry used to say that we study history to learn from the past so we lie on bridges and do walk-outs and sit-ins and boycotts and graffiti just like they did. but we have to spread out on the bridges we lay on and we walk out of online class and we paint pigs on the side of the justice center and scratch bastard onto police cars and take videos of when a cop pulls over a Black man and watch their beatings on YouTube as if being alive while they aren’t isn’t a catalyst already and we don’t study history we drown in it.

• our homegrown heat made us join hands with people we’ve never met and I know that if I didn’t have white skin then he would have gone for my face.

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the summer before college I stared a federal trooper in the eyes while the singeing of stars burned my nose and I promised myself I would stay angry and not afraid but I’ve never seen an automatic up close before and I saw a video on Instagram the day before of them tackling a man on a bike and shoving him into a van and stomping people’s faces into the bricks I used to sit and read on and of barricades of mothers in yellow with barrels to their foreheads and claws of smoke furling under the blockades to take custody of our odysseys and make cadavers of our screams and turn my city into a televised proverbial war zone turn my city into a crucible turn my city into a rabid pantheon and for the first time in my life I didn’t want to write about it.

• all my generation wants to do is breathe.

• at work I found that other freshmen had watched John Krasinski’s online prom too. a girl who lived on an American navy base in Japan said that they stretched out their hands as they sat down to make sure the seats were six feet apart. a guy from Texas said they did a drive-by graduation and got to decorate their cars. a girl from Iowa said that they had their prom outside. a guy from Maryland said they did a big zoom call with their graduating class but because it was a webinar they couldn’t turn their cameras on so the only person he saw in a cap and gown was his own reflection. a girl from California said the teachers made a video for them. and in Portland we were handed our diplomas through a car window.

• everyone says when this is all over like a broken record. it used to be our light, our aviary, our gatekeeper to the postponed. now it’s an empty murmur; now it’s a hymn we whisper to ourselves at night like soldiers’ wives waiting for their loves to come home damaged and unstitched; now it grates across our numb tongues as a customary gesture. eyes glazed over we say it like a greeting.

• humans are dependent social creatures with a defiance for admitting that our hungover hearts whine for touch. for a year we’ve been panting craving starving bleeding crying; for touch. you can be deaf or blind but what’s it called when you can’t feel anything? the virus took taste from 2.6 million people but it took touch from 7.6 billion.

• my generation is starting to make a habit of dreaming and hoping in hopeless nightmares.

• the black paper over our classroom windows was the first time we learned that the world was a thing to hide from. but we can’t hide from something that is a part of us. we can’t hide from the things that have made us.

7

A Decade and A Derecho I lounge on the back porch, unaware of the rustling and chirping of birds overhead, of the tinkling of water to my right, of the crunch of plastic protecting the cover of my library book. I don’t care much for the plot or the characters that fill the space between its hard covers, but something about the steady beat of the words enthralls me. The woman whose existence is entirely owed to ink lines on creamy paper walks along the countryside, taking in with relish everything she sees. I pause as she encounters another person; I’m reluctant to jump from the vibrant scenery into action I’m not invested in. Instead, inspired by the coolness of the mud streaking the woman’s hands and the humid taste of impending rain on her tongue, I emerge from the pages and reflect on the gold and green reality of my own summer afternoon.

I, too, am alone. That was the entire point of my decision to sit outside, since I’ve been trapped inside with nobody but my family for months. The only hints that a larger society still exists are the cars and pedestrians that pass behind the gap in the trees, and the clippings lying in the expansive grass field in front of me suggesting someone else’s systematic regulation.

My eyes fall to the line that demarcates my private backyard from that of the public. Most of the neighbors have opted for a fence; we guard our boundary with a line of alternating bushes and evergreen trees that go no higher than my waist.

There was a time when both those plants and I were much smaller, and I could jump the gap between them without ever slowing. Breaking through that line today would be unnecessarily difficult; the leaves and bristles now reach out far enough to connect.

When did that change? I can’t remember. It could’ve happened a decade ago, or yesterday.

Why can’t I remember?

By Jayne Mathis

The spry teenaged maple in the middle of the yard has matured, too. The sun used to filter through the leaves in the middle, but now it puts up a strong green wall.

There used to be low-hanging branches that plagued me when I mowed the lawn, but they have long since been trimmed. We’ve always watched the fireworks celebrating the town’s summer festival from the window of my parents’ bedroom upstairs, but lately, the distant bursts of color barely clear the tree’s top branches. This growth has snuck up on me, too.

The trampoline in the back right corner is a replacement after a storm ripped up our first, in spite of my dad’s effort to anchor it to the ground. When had that happened—sixth grade? Seventh, maybe?

The gray, plastic-walled shed on the left is also our second. The smaller old shed left enough space for me to squeeze past it and the adjoining bush, into a secluded square that hid the humming green electrical box. And there was a corridor between the shed and the neighbor’s fence that I would chase the rabbits through. The backyard hasn’t held so much adventure since those pathways disappeared.

We have a fountain, the source of the trickle of water at my side. It’s a three-tiered concrete affair that stands slightly taller than me, and it is the most bourgeois item my family owns. I’m fond of it, though—partially for the comforting constancy of the background noise it provides, partially because of the dogwood bush it replaced. On a different summer afternoon a few years ago, while playing cornhole with my family, I shifted where I stood next to the bush and was greeted with a stabbing pain inside my ear; it had decided to poke me with a bristling twig while my attention was elsewhere.

The pain subsided, but my grudge never did. When the bush was evicted to make space for the fountain—had that been two summers ago?—I watched it depart with vindictive pleasure.

8

A lattice structure stands above me, filtering away some of the sun’s heat; plastic boards sit beneath me, textured to evoke the slightest similarity to wood.

Neither of these things existed the first time I saw this backyard, when I could answer the question of how old I was with my fingers. There was a short time period during that very beginning when there lay a smaller, uglier deck, made of real wood that had long forgotten the concept of color. It was one of the first things to go, after my parents painted the walls inside the house. The grill standing on the far end of the deck today is merely the current generation of a long line of nearly identical ancestors; the pair of Adirondack chairs on my left would be timeless, except that I vaguely remember my mom ordering them online; the very lounge chair I’m sitting in is a replacement for a table that had sat here for maybe five years, always dirty from disuse.

The girl occupying my chair, too, is different. I don’t like to think about it, but my surroundings only serve to remind me. We changed with you, they say, but you weren’t paying attention. Now you see us, and nothing is as it once was. Do you remember us as we used to be? Do you remember yourself as you used to be? Do you remember? Do you?

I look back to those short green pillars at the edge of this little world. I am determined to see these bushes and trees as more than a vague background, to forever remember the vibrancy of their color, how strong they stand, how wide their branches reach, at this exact moment. I know better, now, than to forget what the future will do to everything around me.

My mom pokes her head out of the sliding door that we replaced two years ago and tells me that my

laundry is done. I’d forgotten about that. I mark my spot in the book—I’d forgotten, too, that I was still holding it—and head inside, still a little dazed from my own train of thought.

My feet hit the cool gray tile in the kitchen, which replaced the sticky off-white laminate of my middle school years. To the left is the living room, gutted and remade a year and a half ago at the beginning of the household purge of honey oak. I go to the right through the kitchen and into the entry hall—past the entrance to the basement, which has gone nearly untouched, except for the missing door that used to collide with the bathroom door—then up the stairs, whose carpet was worn and railing was shaky until not long after the living room got its fresh face. There’s a new light fixture in the laundry room, fluorescent, throwing the brand new paint and flooring into harsh relief. It makes my eyes water a little. I dig my clothes out of the dryer and throw them onto my bed, with its gray sheets that we’d just bought this spring.

A few minutes, and the show is over. With the light departs my excuse for being outside, and the awakening mosquitoes are an excellent reason to retreat back inside. I sigh inwardly at the drone of the TV and the faces I have seen far too much of lately, and go back to actually reading the book.

Two days later, I will wake up to the sound of something solid hitting my window. At least, it’ll seem like something solid, but will really be the pouring rain subjected to gusts of wind. I’ll note with amusement how it was that, not the tornado sirens, that broke through my heavy sleep. I’ll try to go back to bed, and give up on sleep when the rain continues to beat erratically at the glass.

Do you remember yourself as you used to be? Do you?

The familiar motions of folding clothes nearly bring me back to earth, until I look out my window at the neighbor’s tree. I seem to remember it slouching over the back corner of their fence. Its branches couldn’t have become so tall and attentive in the mere months I’d been away, could they?

I return to my solitary post outside. I crack open the book again for pretense, then turn my attention to the sky. I can’t see where the sun is touching the horizon from behind the trees, but I watch as the wispy clouds are shot through with pink, finding the point where the sky’s gradient changes from blue to orange. Every day for the last month, or maybe two, I’ve sat out here and watched the day take its leave. Each time is distinct, if ever so slightly, never happening at the same time, never hitting the same clouds, never painting the same colors. Change is the sunset’s constant, and I drink that knowledge in with profound relief.

photo by Olivia Smith

The wind will rip a large portion of the neighbor’s fence down, one of the Adirondack chairs will fly off the deck and be smashed to pieces, the tree in the middle of the yard will lose over half its volume when part of the trunk tears.

The trampoline will narrowly avoid its predecessor’s fate; only one of its metal poles will bow to the wind’s will. The fountain, a credit to its price tag, will remain totally unfazed.

I will watch all of this with my family, our faces hovering inches from the windows despite our wellingrained knowledge of the dangers associated with glass and strong wind. I have seen my backyard in many states, but flash-flooded will be a novelty. Our lights will flicker, but stay on—a privilege, courtesy of the neighborhood’s electrical box residing on our property, that most others will not share.

The storm will pass as quickly as it arrives, and we will spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning up in its wake. And as I haul hefty branches to the curb up front, I will notice my dad digging up one of the bushes in the line at the back of the yard. Nothing but a gaping hole will be left for two evergreens to flank.

I’ll remember that moment, such a short time before, when I clung to the image of it, so desperate for any object of defiance against the ravages of time. I’ll silently promise the bush’s corpse to remember it as it was that day. Then I will grab another broken branch, square my shoulders, and march on.

10

SASSY, CONCEITED,

A LITTLE BITCHY

by Sid Peterson

11

Nearly four hours before 10 p.m., the openstage call-time at Studio 13, Trevell Shupe begins the transformation. It is a grueling yet exciting process of getting ready that has taken him years to master. He sits down in front of a large full-length mirror in his bedroom and stares at his dark complexion. First, it is time for the makeup. He glues and completely covers his eyebrows, then generously applies layers of foundation and powder. With his face now a blank canvas, he begins to shape his eyes with bright eyeshadow and thick black eyeliner, going for his classic, minimalistic, feminine look. Next comes the lash adhesive, the extralong lashes, and the lipstick.

Unlike many queens, Shupe refuses to wear a corset, simply because he despises the way they feel. Still, his outfit is far from comfortable.

He slips on his garments: hip pads, nude tights, and a bold sequin one-piece. Lastly, he slides on his signature black knee-high booties, the only pair of heels he owns at the moment. Once they are securely fastened, he is ready. Or rather, Giselle Caramel is ready for her performance.

Before moving to Iowa City in 2017, Shupe had never experienced drag culture. His first exposure was a night out during his freshman year with a few friends. They wandered into Studio 13, Iowa City’s LGBTQ nightclub and performance venue, and continued to go back for the dancing, performers, and welcoming community.

“I remember just being so amazed,” Shupe recalled. “I had never been around so many queer people in my life.”

Shupe spent his adolescent years growing up in Sioux City, Iowa, a town he described as

fairly conservative. With only one openly gay person at his high school, he felt uncomfortable publicly voicing his sexuality to his peers. After graduating from high school, Shupe decided to come out to his immediate family. He admitted feeling extremely nervous about this moment in his life.

“When I came out to them, they all started laughing and said ‘We know, it’s fine,’” said Shupe, blushing. “In hindsight, it was the best scenario. I was kind of mad about it, though; I wanted a whole event.”

This kind of acceptance and support was not out-of-the-ordinary for his family, specifically from his mother. When Shupe was a child, he frequently took over the family’s living room, dancing and singing mostly to early 2000s R&B and hip-hop tunes. According to Shupe, his mother has been his biggest supporter in every aspect of life. The two talk on the phone at least every other day, Shupe said.

One week after his 17th birthday, he joined the Iowa Army National Guard, seeing the opportunity as a way out of Sioux City and to pay for college. He participated in the required basic training during his final years of high school and devoted time to an advanced individual training program in San Antonio, Texas, working to become a combat medic. After completing the required training, Shupe became less involved with the Army, only meeting up with his unit in Des Moines once a month.

“I don’t talk about this part of my life often,” Shupe admitted. “I joined [the Army] when I was young and I did not know what to expect. The experience allowed me to meet people from all

12

around the U.S., and I was able to be one of the individuals just beginning their drag careers. first people in my family to attend college.”

Shupe was connected to Ophelia Belle, an established queen and person of color with As a full-time student at the University of Iowa a similar drag style to Giselle Caramel. After later on, Shupe was eager to immerse himself in completing the semester-long competition, the LGBTQ communities within the university, Shupe placed second overall and gained a in addition to spending time at Studio 13. Shupe mentor in the drag world. served as the Vice President of Delta Lambda Phi, the University of Iowa’s only queer-inclusive “Ophelia always said you need to go out on fraternity on campus. Through this leadership stage and be confident,” Shupe said. “That first role, he was involved in recruiting new members walk on the stage sets the tone for the entire and planning the annual Drag Ball that takes performance. I always stomp onto the stage.” place at the Iowa Memorial Union.

This fall, on a recent Wednesday night during Although Shupe often feels uncomfortable the designated open-stage time, Seamus speaking in front of large crowds and gets Sullivan, one of Shupe’s closest friends, nervous before class presentations, performing roommate, and a fellow drag performer, drag comes naturally to him. His drag name, watched him perform to Lady Gaga’s upbeat Giselle Caramel, was carefully crafted. Giselle song “Venus” from backstage. was inspired by Beyoncé, his all-time favorite artist’s middle name. Caramel was the obvious “He hit that first note perfectly and turned choice for a last name because he feels it is fun, around to everyone on the first word of the yet is meaningful because it describes the color song,” Sullivan said. “Normally, on Wednesdays, of his skin. the crowd doesn’t get too into it because it’s an open stage, but they were screaming. It was like When asked if Shupe could describe Giselle a famous person came in. They were tipping Caramel in three words, he replied, “sassy, him five-dollar bills.” conceited, and a little bitchy,” which differs tremendously from his calm, polite, and According to Sullivan, Shupe stands out as a somewhat reserved personality in real life. performer because he is not afraid to interact directly with the crowd. Some queens are “Once you put the wig on and you’re in an reluctant to venture off the stage. However, outfit, you don’t recognize yourself, and the Shupe will spend time focused on lip-syncing to anxiety goes away,” Shupe said. “You feel like one person in the crowd. This confidence and a completely different person, and you wonder, ability to connect with his audience sets him ‘Who am I?’ It feels like an escape.” apart as a performer at Studio 13.

Two years ago, Shupe participated in Studio 13’s Drag U competition, a local spin-off inspired in part by RuPaul’s reality TV show. Essentially, more seasoned drag queens get paired with

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“It is entertaining to watch him perform as Giselle,” Sullivan said. “He’s extremely confident in costume and is just a more enhanced version of himself.”

Unsurprisingly, Shupe’s performances and involvement at Studio 13 have changed in the last year due to COVID-19. Before the pandemic, the night club was typically busy. It was not uncommon to stand shoulder-to-shoulder among people in the intimate setting. The stage area in the venue is not spacious, or elevated.

Therefore, crowds would often move around attempting to catch a glimpse of the performers.

Now, Shupe is not allowed to come into close contact with audience members, nor is he permitted to cross the tape that lines the stage floor. His temperature is taken immediately before going backstage. While performing, instead of grabbing cash tips from audience members with his hands, he must use a fishnet to keep a distance.

that style, if I wanted to perform a slow song, I would like to feel like I could do that without people getting bored.”

Although this is Shupe’s final year as a student, he does not doubt that his passion for performing will remain in his life. In the near future, he aspires to move to Chicago to begin his career and familiarize himself with a new culture and community. What matters most to Shupe is finding individuals who are as accepting and open-minded as the people at Studio 13. Performing is important, but the people around him have an even greater significance. Ultimately, they must be supportive and willing to embrace his multifaceted identity.

Within the past year, Shupe has also been involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Utilizing his training from the National Guard, he volunteered at many of the protests and served on the medical team. Within the drag community, he assisted in creating a list of demands with other Black queens that were sent to all LGBTQ bars in Iowa. Among the list were two important requests: venues must increase their inclusivity to minority groups and people of color, and bars must intentionally diversify their performers. Shupe noticed that most of the performers at Studio 13, and at other venues around the state of Iowa, were predominantly white.

As a biracial performer, Shupe feels that he is expected to act a certain way when performing.

“Many people expect Black queens to be very high energy,” Shupe said. “Although I like doing

14

By Madison Bartlett

15

By Estevan Cornejo

16

by Ebbie Benson

In 8th grade, I read the word “chink” for the first time, and felt as though everyone’s eyes were on me.

I wish my eyes were big and inviting.

If I qualify to feel out of place while trying to be like everyone else.

Perhaps this is just the condition of every young woman;

I am twisted—

Laughing off the dissatisfaction, searching for identity.

Confused as to why I find it flattering when I notice that guy who has a history of taking girls that look like me home.

A boy in my photography class cautions me not to cut my hair short because it’s the “most Asian” thing I could do.

I wonder what the woman who had the I deny every feeling of courage to carry me looks like. estrangement from the majority around me.

I look in the mirror as a child and all I notice are my eyes.

I leave my body and enter my mind.

My prom date told me not to get a spray tan because I’d still be tanner than every other girl without one.

I laughed, because apparently I found this funny.

I check the box on applications that improves my chances, the box that exists to fulfill a quota.

I wonder if I am even allowed to feel like this—

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I wish I had blonde hair.

I attempt to become someone else.

It feels like self-pity, so I continue the process of denying the obvious.

I am old enough now and ignoring reality is no longer an option.

Every comment made by others is a memory that has led me to the learning process of understanding myself.

To acknowledge the obvious and discover what to do with it.

The world is opening up, a new perspective forms.

What was once something that I tried to distract others from now creates my being.

I open my mouth and speak of what it is like.

I have a voice that gives me a job to do.

I have tan skin that does not fade in the sunless months of winter.

I have thick, coarse hair that every hairdresser tells me never to ruin with hair dye.

My eyes are evidence of my reality.

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MEM ORY

ALO NE

By Aspen Taylor

photo by Olivia Smith

The sky cannot decide whether to snow or rain and the blur between the two feels like the rift between the two worlds. Our existences split apart—a dry, ordinary sort of living, and another iridescent realm that hovers slightly above our skin. It electrifies the soft of our hair, reverberates among the atoms to create a heat like an original star. The dewy sensations of the air today—knife-bright raindrops with a bite of snow—thrust me backward into a memory. It’s as if I have peered into the wet, distorted images of the raindrops and by some cruel, necessary mistake, have fallen in, irredeemably. In the memory, I am back less than a month ago, in early winter, when we inhaled something faintly sweet into our young lungs and blew it out into the dark river of the night, watching the smoke coil like a white question, then dissolve into the cold wind. I am there, sitting upon that window

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ledge, cool against my bottom, beside the flushed summer roses of her cheeks.

There is a pulse in the black, wordless eyes of her face, as her lids lie dreamily over the plains of her cheeks, as she says, in some smooth, relaxed language touched by a subliminal light—“now this is a vibe.”

A vibe—how can such a vague noun embody the rippling we have entered: the neon lights which adorn the upper corners of the room flicker and beat lucidly in coming waves as the room began to mutate into something unsure, something surreal. We sat and spoke in our laughter as luscious as daybreak, our limbs loose and light when the shiver poured open, like an impulse, over the deranged length of my spine and I began to merge with that hovering that is always there, that rift of living and non-living. A deathless sort of dying, an inhale, a glitter, an exhale, a pupil. Thoughts disintegrate and I lurch to grab onto the arm of the girl whose face full of roses, has now lost all its color. I think it hit, I said, and I shiver, sweat, melt. She takes my wet hand and together we lie on the bean-bag in the center of the floor. All of the lights, real and unreal, make a new, hot sort of sense.

It’s a delirium—just breathe in and out. In and out.

“

A deathless sort of dying, an inhale, a glitter, an exhale, a pupil.

I love you. I love you. I love you. In this state, it is the mantra I repeat over and over. Love claws and moans. I inhale it, quell the hunger in my throat, still the acid of my saliva. Who could call this a vibe when it’s a chasm: love, distilled, though elusive, trailing like a comet in the lights, real and unreal. Above. Hovering.

And now: a memory within a memory.

Lying there with human flesh melting in my palm, another ache resurrected. I have known of hovering before. It is not simply awakening—it is loss. This seems to always happen, these incidents, the mania, when I am beside those whom I am unsure I love. I long to love them— it is desperate, a luminous and fleeting hunger for their touch, their touch. Who can reach into a chest and finger the blood where warmth remains? Who can invert fluidity so that I may feel it with my own fingertips? Instead, I feel I am always beside absent, winglike bodies animated with dry laughter and heavy eyes. Always I try to lure the love from their mouths—I try to feel whatever that hovering is, that unknown and lovely place that sizzles just above our skin.

The memory within my memory thrusts me from early winter into deep summer.

I had been at a party in a basement with some faces I knew. I left feeling loveless and confused and ended up on a bed with two girls I had known since childhood, who I came to understand less and less.

Being with them was like holding a knife to my own throat, glinting rainlike with the mirror image of my own incessant sorrow.

While they inhaled something pure white, I looked on their lips for evidence of all the lips they had kissed. I looked long for

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the memory of love that touched them in so close a moment. I was furious to know that somewhere in their memories they had kissed someone they believed they loved—to have that falsity glimmer against them, like spit. I had hardly spoken while there. I had sulked. I had played with a lighter, its orange light against my thigh.

All I thought was whatever I touch I lose.

Whoever I am I lost that years ago.

And that same night, on that bed from childhood, with the dark, warm air swelling outside, I inhaled something and leapt into a new plane of existence.

I cried and threw up on the carpet; I quivered, sighed, and said the same old mantra, the one that would haunt me again and again in the sober hours—I love you, I love you, I love you. As I uttered those wild, ceaseless words, I couldn’t feel my face, my head. I had dissolved into summer air, nimble and nonexistent. I came to realize that I love most fervently when I cannot feel its burn, its matter, when even the features of my own flesh are impalpable.

snow, an indecisive sky. Who can reach into the rain and decipher its substance?

Who can reach into the snow and keep it forever? In that summer bedroom, I held the opaline forearm of my childhood friend and felt my mouth water for her. In that lighted winter room I held the hand of a girl I had not known long and I felt the familiar water. Sorry, sorry, I had also said because that’s always what I say in the face of love. When it just burns too much against an arm, when it levitates, incomprehensible, in the weeping air. The highest highs, iridescently burning.

It is all just an excuse to love a little openly— why we inhale these blue chemicals into our lungs, though it scalds against the entrance.

Peel open a wrist and find eternity. See the cosmos rush down her face where once the roses had lain.

In the morning after all this, I will place my hand on your empty shoulder. I will say, I’m sorry about all this and cough a little. And when you do not face me, I will pull on your shoulder, pull and pull until your neck pivots, and I see your face as my own. It rains and snows, my face, an elemental indecision lusting for a moment’s tenderness. Okay, so this is just how it goes. We try to do it all at once because that’s the only way to escape the nothingness. We would throw in a little sunshine if it were possible, but technically speaking, it’s not. All we’ve got is this cool, drenching beauty, enough to freeze a lifeform. It will be years before I know it is too cold to sustain life here. Not everyone cares to warm themselves on memory alone.

Who can reach into the rain and decipher its substance?

Who can reach into the snow and keep it forever?

Later that night, after I had returned home to my own childhood bedroom, I woke in the middle of the night and wrote in my journal THIS IS NOT ME. And in the sober dark I looked up and saw all the faces who left me this bankrupt.

Their frayed, absent faces unquenchable.

I see the thread that will lead me to the future, to that smoking winter room, to the false loves, to this day, now, of rain and

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23

photos by Madi Tarbox in collaboration with Bobi Knox 24

mugs on a countertop

by Lauren Sanyal

But he knows. He moves on from that question too quickly because he knows, and he thinks of her instead, of how he used to watch her get dressed in the morning. Of how she held her long hair up in one hand and tried to zip her dress with the other, and how he walked over and zipped it for her. Or, on the days she didn’t work, how she used to make coffee at noon and wait to eat until 3:00, always some frozen thing from Trader Joe’s.

He thinks about what it was like, whenever she More and more, recently, Adelyn is gone by the opened the door and saw him standing with their time Hunter wakes up. baby in his arms. No matter how many times he greeted her like that, she always reacted the He used to wake and run his fingers through her same. A pause in the doorway, wide eyes and a auburn hair, thinking about fall and the coffee smile that would break across her tired face as they’d shared on their first date, the same that she hurried inside, her arms outstretched. had spilled over her red plaid scarf. But now, he opens his eyes and sees the long red hairs The Morbus took their child from them mere she shed on her pillow through the night, and days before she would have turned one. Hunter he wonders. remembers watching the whites of her eyes turn red, how he had known and how he had lied, because he didn’t want to believe it. How he rushed her to the doctor, his mask on tight and his daughter held snug against his chest, all without telling Adelyn, because he didn’t want her to worry.

He thought he could fix it. He thought he caught it soon enough, that he’d bring her back to her mother with some medicine, maybe. Something easy and small, because the death tolls had yet to skyrocket, and how could he have known?

But the doctors told him they had little time, and Hunter was numb and on fire. He called Adelyn and explained, and she screamed at him through the phone about how he should have told her sooner before hanging up. She showed up at the hospital minutes later. The first thing Hunter noticed when he saw her tear through the doors was the way she paused, the scarf from their first date wrapped haphazardly around her neck.

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“How are you alive?” She’d asked him hours later, when they were walking outside in the frigid air. Her breath had crystalized in front of her face, and she’d stopped walking abruptly.

Hunter stood behind her and prayed silently that she’d turn to face him.

She didn’t.

“I don’t know,” he whispered. He’d checked his eyes in every reflection of himself he had seen— no red. The doctors had checked his vitals when he first got there with his daughter and had found nothing wrong.

“You must have some kind of immunity,” a nurse had told him. She’d given the doctor a meaningful look when she relayed that information to him. Hunter didn’t want to know what that look meant.

It only took a few weeks for the Morbus to quickly grow out of control; it was almost apocalyptic, the way the world had turned on itself. People were running from the cities and towns they lived in like the virus was something they could escape. Even if Hunter thought it was futile, when Adelyn suggested they leave, he agreed. It was probably because he was so thrilled just to hear her voice directed at him.

Hunter didn’t know why he was immune, why his baby had died but not him. Too many people wanted to find out, had asked for his blood or his hair or his sacrifice. So, he and Adelyn left most everything behind, and all Hunter could think about was that damn scarf and how Adelyn had left it on the floor of their bedroom.

They heard about the Bubble a month before, although it was far from the domed fortress it would soon become. Apparently, it was a small area that had remained infection-free because of the tests everyone had to take before entering. It became their mission to get there, because they both knew it was only a matter of time before Adelyn caught the Morbus.

It didn’t take long to find, since a lot of groups could be seen heading in that direction, a desperate march towards salvation they joined at a distance. When Hunter and Adelyn arrived, they were greeted by tall gates and white tents that housed doctors in elaborate suits and people who were hooked up to machines by tubes full of their blood.

Hunter watched the doctors draw his blood and knew it wasn’t necessary, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he turned to watch them draw Adelyn’s blood, trying to see if there was something different about the dark red liquid flowing out from her arm. There was nothing, and he remembered how he had trembled when they came in to tell them the results. But the doctor had been smiling, and she’d been fine. When Hunter reached out to squeeze her hand in relief, she pulled away.

He keeps thinking about every way he and Adelyn have become experts at avoiding each other, how she leaves early and stays out late.

How whenever he’s home, he spends time learning new recipes in the kitchen, looking outside at the domed sky above their heads, and she’s always too busy reading their limited supply of books to eat with him. He thinks about how they used to enjoy nights together, drinking wine with a record on, spinning while they kissed on the sofa, her lips slow and his hands light as they trailed over her skin.

Now that he thinks about it, they never had a funeral for their daughter.

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They always fall flat, his attempts to console himself.

So Hunter pulls himself out of bed around noon and heads to the kitchen, pouring out the extra bit of coffee Adelyn left for him, along with an empty mug, sitting quietly on the countertop.

He stops, his hand unsteady where it grips the handle of the coffee pot. The mug sits there, unmoving and unassuming, but it’s there, and God, when was the last time Adelyn left coffee Nights are different now. For one thing, the stars and a mug out for him? look all wrong. Hunter thinks that the creators of the dome tried too hard to make it beautiful; He stares at that mug and where it sits. He all of the colors above their heads at night look dares to wonder, but kicks himself—what is nothing like the night skies he and Adelyn used there to wonder? She can’t touch him, much to kiss under. less love him. A simple mug, set out just for him, means nothing.

No; he doesn’t enjoy nighttime anymore.

And he makes it mean nothing until she does He thinks about how long it’s been since they it the next day, and the next, and the next. met eyes and smiled at each other. Whenever He tries to convince himself it means nothing they do meet eyes, they just think about how because she still won’t speak to him or look at they failed to bring life into the world and keep him, and that’s what he wants, damn it, not an it there. Adelyn looks at him and sees the man empty mug and a few ounces of coffee. who tore away her goodbye, and Hunter looks at her and sees the woman who can never Yet each time she does it, he pauses in the forgive him. doorway and smiles. She sits outside under that artificial sky and sips from her own mug, and In the beginning, Hunter thought it would they go about their days separately, as if the eventually pass, that they’d get through it other doesn’t exist. together, somehow. Life in the Bubble was hard, artificial, lonely. Only so many had made it in She starts to leave more coffee for him, and time before the rest of the population bled out Hunter dares to believe that she’s doing through the planet’s fingers. He thought that it on purpose, that she’s splitting it in half one day she’d need him, and, maybe, she’d learn now instead of just giving him whatever she to love him again. doesn’t want.

They have time, don’t they? They’re both only in their thirties, and the Bubble shows no signs of failure. They have years to find their ways back to each other. Years.

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So the next morning, he gets up early and sits in the kitchen, waiting. With clammy hands that shake whenever he turns the pages of a random book he grabbed from the shelf, he waits.

At 8:24, the lights turn on. His world is flooded with light that burns, and he realizes that she won’t believe his excuse about reading, unless he argues that his immunity comes with superpowered-night vision.

A part of Hunter is afraid that by the time his eyes adjust to the light, Adelyn will be gone.

That she’ll have seen him sitting there and that she’ll have run, because she hasn’t looked at him properly in months, so how could she look at him now?

But when they do, he sees her standing in the doorway, one hand braced lightly against the wall’s edge. With wide eyes and a shuddering chest, she looks at him, and he looks at her, and he thinks about everything she must see right now: a broken down, horrible father who’s no longer a father. His eyes begin to water.

“Lynn,” he breathes.

She just keeps standing there. Briefly, the hand that was hanging by her side comes up towards her neck. Hunter watches it, and for the first time in a long time, he thinks that she might not have completely forgotten about her scarf, the one she left to decay in their house, hundreds of miles away.

“Hi, Hunter.” She can’t quite meet his eyes, and that’s okay—it’s okay—because she just acknowledged his presence, and God, he knows he doesn’t deserve that from her.

So he stands, and he grabs two mugs from one of the overhead cabinets.

“Coffee?” His voice breaks on the way out, and he’s reminded of all those years ago, when he first saw her in that dumb rhetoric class, the light turning her red hair into embers, and his voice had been lost.

A beat.

“Okay,” she whispers, and she tries to smile at him.

This becomes routine, eventually. They greet each other in the morning like this, and it still becomes too much, sometimes. They still spend most of their days separate, but Hunter is in no rush. He knows he has no right to be.

A few weeks later, they sit together outside under that artificial morning sun, and he asks her, “When you look at me, what do you see?”

Adelyn pauses, and he thinks about times months and months ago when she used to pause in the doorway and smile whenever he greeted her with their child in his arms.

She turns to look at him, and his eyes follow the trail of hers until they meet, and he can feel himself slipping, falling and sliding through the cracks of the shuddering and shattering bones in his chest and he’s struggling, the tissue encompassing his lungs refusing to expand, because he tore away her goodbye, he tore it away, he tore it away— “Her. I see...I see her.”

Something catches in his throat. He looks at her—really, really looks at her.

He says, “She’s all I see now, too.”

And nothing else is said between them for the rest of the day—there’s nothing left to say.

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MY HEART HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN

By Cheyenne Mann

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NIGHT O OUT OU NIGHT NIGH NIG N I

BY JOHN PAUL CACIOPPO PHOTO BY MARY GREVAS

How To Break Me Never let your fingers linger on mine Look like you’re keeping a secret Never text to see if I’m home, safe give me piss-poor coffee Start saying “love ya” when I walk out the door and make me your enemy in the process Feel obligated to keep up appearances Whisper your hate, so only I hear and make me believe you Don’t trust me anymore Never look to me for comfort but be sure you smile, imagine me dead, remember I treat you like the help and realize how little I care about you Ask why we’re still doing this remember you can fuck whoever you want Question my every motive run, lie, push me out leave

30

Never let your fingers linger on mine Look like you’re keeping a secret give me piss-poor coffee Start saying “love ya” when I walk out the door and make me your enemy in the process Feel obligated to keep up appearances Whisper your hate, so only I hear and make me believe you Don’t trust me anymore Never look to me for comfort but be sure you smile, imagine me dead, remember I treat you like the help and realize how little I care about you remember you can fuck whoever you want Question my every motive

I Just Told You That I Knew About the Cancer This Whole Time Never let your fingers linger on mine Look like you’re keeping a secret give me piss-poor coffee and make me your enemy in the process Feel obligated to keep up appearances Whisper your hate, so only I hear and make me believe you Don’t trust me anymore Never look to me for comfort but be sure you smile, imagine me dead, remember I treat you like the help and realize how little I care about you Question my every motive

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T NIGHT OUT NIG

Party Etiquette

UT NIGHT OUT NIGH

Never let your fingers linger on mine Look like you’re keeping a secret Never text to see if I’m home, safe give me piss-poor coffee Start saying “love ya” when I walk out the door and make me your enemy in the process Feel obligated to keep up appearances Whisper your hate, so only I hear and make me believe you Don’t trust me anymore Never look to me for comfort but be sure you smile, imagine me dead, remember I treat you like the help and realize how little I care about you remember you can fuck whoever you want Question my every motive run, lie, push me out

NIGHT OUT NIGHT O

GHT OUT NIGHT OU

Our Marriage Agreement

HT OUT NIGHT O

T NIGHT OUT NIG

You Just Learned I Jacked Off in the Jack O’lantern Never let your fingers linger on mine Look like you’re keeping a secret give me piss-poor coffee and make me your enemy in the process Feel obligated to keep up appearances Whisper your hate, so only I hear and make me believe you Don’t trust me anymore remember I treat you like the help and realize how little I care about you Question my every motive I Just Threw Up on You in the Middle of Sex Look like you’re keeping a secret and make me your enemy in the process Feel obligated to keep up appearances Whisper your hate, so only I hear and make me believe you Don’t trust me anymore remember I treat you like the help and realize how little I care about you Question my every motive I Was Really Hammered Last Night Look like you’re keeping a secret Feel obligated to keep up appearances and make me believe you Don’t trust me anymore remember I treat you like the help and realize how little I care about you Question my every motive I Just Asked You If You Still Liked Me Feel obligated to keep up appearances and make me believe you Don’t trust me anymore remember I treat you like the help Question my every motive Cheating On You Has Been a Decade Long Affair Don’t trust me anymore remember I treat you like the help Question my every motive

What You Should Do When You Learn Everything I’ve Said Is a Lie Question my every motive

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33

love u better

by Mary Grevas

34

Up Watership

by Anthony Kestner

content warning: descriptions of abuse I stopped asking about Grandmother after Mother threatened to wire my mouth shut.

I’d have to pour your food in your nose, she said. Think about the pain that would cause me. You don’t want to see Mother in pain, do you?

I shook my head because it seemed appropriate, though I thought it would cause me more pain than her.

Grandmother existed in a bundle of sepia photographs that Mother hid under a collection of Bibles and crosses with rhinestones; a fake gold halo I’d seen Mother wearing on Sundays, when she’d haunt the house in a white nightgown; and cutouts from magazines featuring women in two-piece bathing suits, posing seductively for the camera. In these photos, Mother cradled my aunts and uncles, little kittens swaddled in knit sweaters and pink beanies. Each photo is more faded than the last. I could imagine Mother taking her thumb to Grandmother’s face and rubbing off the colors, until her skin turned raw and started flaking like pastry. Still, there was the curve of Grandmother’s breasts, the polka dot housedress she wore, the tattered apron likely caked in flour.

I took the photos, and I looked at them on the nights Mother wailed in her bedroom, pleading for mercy to the god she worshipped only on Sundays. My siblings cowered next to me, their beady eyes skittish and frantic.

Look, I’d say, pointing to Grandmother, pointing to the faces of my aunts and uncles. They’re family.

My siblings thought I was Mother. I fed them the vegetables I refused to eat— exploded peas and mushy carrots, broccoli that smelled and tasted like foot

35

fungus, cauliflower that rolled around in my mouth like a scaly barnacle. I ate, and I’d see them bundled under my feet like fallen clouds with twitchy noses and floppy ears. Feed us, their expectant eyes said. Feed us.

The night Mother threatened to wire my mouth shut, she took a bath in the clawfoot tub. She instructed me to sit next to her while the water progressively blackened.

When I was in school, she started, the kids used to meow at me whenever I’d raise my hand. They liked calling me Pussy whenever they walked by me in the hallways.

She chuckled and lathered herself with her soap.

It was gummy, stringy with hair, pockmarked with dead skin. She started humming a song I’d never heard before. She painted her childhood with broad strokes of violent colors, as if she were warning me of something, or pressuring me to take the path she took.

What are you humming? I asked.

A song we sang in school, she said. The kids sang it for me. They called me a witch, said I had three eyes and could see the future. Said that I hated my brothers and sisters because I cast a spell wrong and they didn’t come out right.

She continued humming, dunking her hand and soap into the pitch water.

skirt was snapped against my ass because kids were searching for a powderpuff tail. I shut everything away in my heart, expecting to find the answers in Mother, or Grandmother when I finally got the chance to meet her.

On my sixth birthday, candle wax melted into bubblegum pink frosting. I asked Mother why people mistreated me at school. I grew up watching movies on TVs that were wheeled in on squeaky carts with plugs that didn’t reach the wall outlets, dim lights, drawn curtains. Watching mothers giving inspirational speeches to their bullied children. I was different, she’d say, I was special. The music swelled, the sun seemed brighter, the kiddie-poolsized bedroom I slept in would seem larger. My siblings would crowd around my feet, looking up at me expectantly.

I didn’t hate them because I didn’t do something right, she said, facing me. I hated them because Grandmother fucked them up.

Instead Mother said, Blow out your candles.

I’ve asked her about Grandmother before. When I was six, I asked Mother at my birthday party as my voice filled the void friends were supposed to occupy. I went to a Catholic school attached to a grimy dirt road—boys in navy blue blazers and black slacks, girls in pastel pink blazers and floor-length skirts that made it seem like we floated. I was oblivious as to why kids pulled on my ears and exposed their top two incisors while I gave a presentation on Mesopotamia.

My nickname was Lola. The waistband of my

Mother was an angry woman. If she didn’t have the energy to brand me with her hand, she used her tongue to brand my heart. I broke a vase when I was five and she told me she’d superglue my hands to my thighs to prevent me from breaking anything else. I got into her makeup products at seven, because I wanted to doll myself up like the girls I saw on the front cover of the magazines. Her lipstick was gummy. The eyeshadow was pigmentless. The mascara was like wet cement, gluing my lashes together. I winced whenever I blinked.

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I showed off to Mother, who was in the kitchen, flipping the yellowed pages of an old cookbook.

Mother saw me and said, Bunny girls are not pretty.

She pinned me down, spat on her palm, and began rubbing the makeup off my face furiously. I howled, I wailed, but I didn’t beg. I dreamt that night of Grandmother emerging from the forest surrounding us, cursing Mother in white-and-black robes, a thin fog puddling around her ankles. She saved me, in that dream.

I discovered, then, that it’s the unspoken lessons in school that translate into your life. Instead of finding square roots, I found an invisible zipper at the corner of my mouth. I spoke when spoken to, or provoked; a peer once asked me an ironic question that I felt baited to answer and my ego wouldn’t let me keep quiet. But I generally kept my hand down when my teacher opened the floor for discussion.

and stayed with her. Mother was a goddess; I was sent from Hell as a constant reminder of what she couldn’t have; Mother was insane; Mother hated me the most because I was the mishap. Mother wasn’t just Mother: she was a shifting, nebulous shape that spoke Latin and ancient Greek, and casted spells under the light of the moon. Instead of pulling on my ears and calling me Lola or going tail-hunting on me, their energy was redirected to their tongues.

Their words became folk music passed down to the incoming students and transfers.

Instead of reducing fractions, I reduced my agency.

Mother ordered me to pull dandelions from around our trailer for a dandelion pie; a girl asked me to pull my skirt down to prove I didn’t have a powderpuff tail. I never told anyone because I thought I was getting a good education. I was taking lessons I’d learned and translating them in my everyday life.

Isn’t that what school was for?

Spring died gloriously in a rainstorm that bloated the river that ran by our school, flooding Two evenings later, Mother was making cookies. The the basketball courts. The water seeped into the batter pasted to the grooves between her fingers. kitchen, where hags in hairnets stirred chunky tomato soups and pressed grilled cheese What happened to Grandmother? I asked. sandwiches on grease-stained flattops. It flowed into the hallways. Leaves, pine nettles, acorns, She died, Mother said. I killed her. I killed your aunts and dead flowers were flotsam in the river that and uncles. They were helpless. occupied our school. I trod through shin-high water with the rest of the students after the She let her hand sink into the batter. storm. Summer came the following day and spiked the temperatures into the mid-nineties, Grandmother loved them more than me, she said. the air conditioning broke and the heat crept That’s why I hated them. into the building like a jealous lover. I sweated in places I didn’t know had sweat glands.

There were so many stories about me when I was in school. Mother made deals with the Devil at Carried along the river was the story of Mother crossroads before I was born, and she gave birth to and I the night before. We were in the forest, three of his own children before she could have one with Mother’s bubbling, smoky cauldron, of her own. Mother was a witch who conjured me summoning the storm. We wanted to show our out of her bubbling, smoky cauldron under a blood power, the heft of our wrath. It was a warning, moon, and three curious rabbits were hypnotized the students said, staring at me out of the

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corners of their eyes. A warning for all of us. It caught up with me in art class, where I pocketed a tube of red paint. The next day, I smeared dirt on my face. When asked about it, I said, I was honing my third eye.

A day after, I used the paint to try on a third eye.

Mother saw me and smeared it with her thumb.

Don’t get caught doing something foolish, she told me.

Was Grandmother foolish?

She smacked the wind out of me and stormed off. I grabbed one of my siblings and carried her with me. I wanted them to see evidence of Mother and I’s power. I redid my third eye in the girls’ bathroom and cursed people under my breath during passing periods. I cursed a girl before her bowling team tryout; she dislocated her thumb on the release. I cursed a farmer’s son and, later in the week, his arm was chewed off in a combine. I made them avoid me, give me a wide berth in the hallways. My sister gnawed on carrots I got from the cafeteria. I sat otherwise alone, watching everyone. I pretended I liked it that way. Liked eating my food alone in the cafeteria and giving passersby the cold shoulder.

Don’t sit next to her, a girl with pigtails said to a new student, a chubby boy with polka dot freckles. She’ll give you bad luck.

I told my sister I loved her each time she stared at me with those big irises. Those searching, longing eyes, as if she knew I was not Mother.

That we were still searching for Her.

One morning, Mother’s head was in the oven. My siblings sniffed her Achilles; some were nibbling at her hand, dangling lifelessly out of the stove. I gave them the photos like they were the Eucharist.

Here, I said. Eat this, don’t eat Mother.

They took turns eating the tops of the photos, consuming Grandmother’s faded head and Mother’s stern face, as if the photos were taken without her consent, or she didn’t like the feeling of her own brothers and sisters in her arms. I went into the kitchen and sat down next to Mother. I didn’t have the courage to lift her out. I thought if I did, I’d see her flesh baked, sucked onto her bones like a raisin.

I leaned next to the open door, the gas invading my nostrils, and started whispering to her: Once upon a time, there was a girl who had rabbits for siblings. She was born with three eyes.

I told her my tale. From out where I sat, I imagined I felt her smiling.

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by Georgia Sampson

Su p

abet h l p A o

I spell your name with alphabet Soup

The letters on my tongue feel like You again, Feel like how it felt To hear you say my name I swear I hear you saying across the counter, saying Something about the words I

Arrange to make you smile. All Of this floats to the surface of my mouth I spit into the sink.

I form your 4 letters In my mouth to bring you back, Spelling you out between sips of Boiling broth; My tongue unfolding on that moment.

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I spend my days burning pots and pans, To see you in the vapor that Dissipates on the walls of my kitchen.

I write out “I miss you” On my stove and, through heat, I can feel you again.

I fear that I fill you too much.

Excess spilling on the counter and-You will read out to me: you’re too much, you’re too mu-All the sweet things you Said while you were

Slurping me Turn sour in my mind.

I spend my week vomiting your name Into my pillow through Heaves of heartbreak that You don’t feel.

Poison only works one way.

I can’t say this out loud I play with my food until You think of me.

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Lighthearted

by Cheyenne Mann

CHARACTERS STELLA ……..................................................... Trying to get her emotions surgically removed.

MIME .………...................................................... A mime.

FLESH …....................................................…… Stella’s skin. *DOCTOR ….......................................…………. A doctor. *RECEPTIONIST …….................................. A receptionist. *Indicates doubling.

SETTING

A surgeon’s office.

TIME

Time moves the way it does in a hospital.

SCENE 1 LIGHTS UP.

STELLA, MIME, FLESH, and DOCTOR are onstage. STELLA is sitting at a doctor’s appointment. DOCTOR rhythmically clicks pen.

MIME and FLESH stand in Stella’s orbit, FLESH is behind STELLA. MIME is in front of STELLA. No one should ever directly interact with FLESH except MIME. MIME mimes actions/ events of STELLA’s monologue.

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STELLA

DOCTOR

The stars change every night. I wish I could To get your emotions surgically removed? catch them in the palm of my hand, like how kids catch fireflies. And I’d squish them STELLA until my fingers were dripping with toxic Yes. celestial light, and when I’d lift my hands into the sky, they’d fade into giant burning DOCTOR balls of gas.

Have you considered light therapy?

STELLA and MIME lift their hands into STELLA the sky. I don’t want to photosynthesize. I’m not a flower. I want to be the sun. I want to shine I ate a glow stick when I was a kid, I thought and emit radiation and never emit emotions. it would light me up inside. It was red. Plum.

Pomegranate. It was sickly sweet chemicals MIME that burned my tongue. I scrubbed my (Mimes picking a flower, smells it, peels mouth out with toothpaste after. My mom petals off.) called poison control, and they had me drink a glass of milk. Can you douse stars DOCTOR with a glass of milk? I’d douse all the lights Okay, let me get the right form. in the universe until I was the only shining lightning bug flying in the sky, and then I’d DOCTOR pulls out a form. be every constellation.

There’s a few questions you’ll need to (A beat.) answer first.

If I couldn’t douse the stars, I’d eat them.

I’d let them seep into my esophagus and coat my throat in fire, burn my stomach to shreds. I’d be nothing but smoking flesh and pools of evaporating blood. I’d digest and become. I’d embroider my skin with lightbulbs. I’d burn and burn and burn and the fire inside me would glow and the neuron spiders that swarm my brain would finally stop screaming. I want to be electricity. I want to be fireflies. I want to be cold, emotionless stars. I want to be light. I am light. I am—it is so cold.

Okay.

STELLA DOCTOR

Name and date of birth?

FLESH steps forward.

Flesh.

FLESH STELLA

Stella. The fourth of November. 1997.

DOCTOR

DOCTOR

You’re here to get a referral for the Where is the discomfort located? procedure, then?

FLESH steps forward.

Yes.

STELLA

Pain.

FLESH

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STELLA

STELLA

My skin. I feel it in my skin. It buzzes. It Can you help me? I want to be starlight. swarms. It’s TV static. I’m—my skin.

I want to be nothing but firing particles.

Particles don’t feel. Particles don’t have DOCTOR emotion. Particles don’t have skin. Skin me Your skin? alive, please.

MIME

(Nods furiously. Gestures to skin.)

STELLA

Yes.

FLESH steps forward, no longer behind STELLA. So raw.

FLESH STELLA

Can you skin me?

Bleeding.

Flay me alive?

FLESH STELLA FLESH

Particles?

FLESH DOCTOR

Have you had any cardiovascular or dermatological surgeries before?

No.

STELLA FLESH

(To MIME.) Particles.

DOCTOR

Have you had any cardiovascular or dermatological issues before?

FLESH

(To STELLA.) I am particles.

STELLA

Acne. I fixed it with toothpaste. Mitral valve Pain. Buzz. Like a bee. Like a bee sting. prolapse.

Buzz buzz buzz.

MIME

(Mimes bee. Mimes flower. Mimes stereotypical changing happy/sad trick.)

STELLA

DOCTOR

When were you diagnosed?

STELLA

I was nine. It runs in my family. So do mood disorders.

I am so cold. It is so dark. I just want to see the light. I want to chew on lightning FLESH pulses. FLESH bleeds. bugs and bleed extraplanetary glow stick juice. The blackhole in my skin sucks out FLESH all the light.

Particles of cells. I pulse. I bleed. I feel.

It is dark.

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FLESH

DOCTOR

You’re aware of the details of the procedure, correct? The surgeon will make

an eight-inch incision down the chest and STELLA remove the heart along with any other An orchid. Red. With the petals slightly organ that seems to be causing issues, in crumpled. There’s a sun in the corner. this case, the skin.

It’s light.

MIME

(Mimes the procedure. Bites heart at the end.) (Mimes flower.)

The skin.

FLESH STELLA

It sounds perfect. It sounds too good to be true.

FLESH stands directly in front of STELLA.

MIME DOCTOR changes cards.

DOCTOR

Okay. And this one?

FLESH

It looks like cold. It looks like warm.

STELLA

FLESH

It looks like…like a broken lightbulb, like the (Singing to the tune of “Don’t Go Breaking electricity is buzzing and it’s setting the My Heart”) Don’t go breaking my heart. I whole card on fire. Can you do that to me? couldn’t if I tried— To my skin? I’d like to be on fire.

DOCTOR

MIME

Before I okay the surgery, I need to run (Mimes screwing in a lightbulb. Mimes a quick test for eligibility. Is that alright getting caught on fire. Mimes rolling on the with you? ground in pain.)

Yes.

STELLA FLESH

DOCTOR changes cards.

And this one?

DOCTOR

(Singing to the tune of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”) So don’t misunderstand me, MIME you put the light in my life. Oh, you put the (Looks up. Jumps back with intense fright. spark to the flame, I’ve got your heart in Mimes being stuck in a box.) my sights.

FLESH cowers behind STELLA. DOCTOR pulls out a Rorschach test. She holds one up to STELLA. FLESH I don’t know. I don’t want to say. It looks like DOCTOR nothing. It looks like— What does this look like to you?

(A beat.)

It’s so cold.

FLESH

—I’m bleeding. There is blood, it drips to the floor red as plum, it drips it drips it drips it is cold. It is cold.

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STELLA

It looks like bruises, sickly sweet, red as pomegranate. Plums spread over jaw and neck and blood that drips from nose and mouth and eyes and eyes and eyes and tears it looks like tears it looks like—it’s so cold.

DOCTOR checks notes.

DOCTOR

SCENE 3

The waiting room of a surgeon’s office.

MIME, STELLA, RECEPTIONIST and FLESH are onstage. FLESH cowers behind STELLA. Scared.

FLESH STELLA

Hi. I’m here to check in.

It looks like the surgeon has an opening MIME tomorrow. Are you free at 11:50am?

(Mimes RECEPTIONIST checking STELLA in.)

STELLA

Yes.

RECEPTIONIST

Great, can I get a name and date of birth?

FLESH

No.

FLESH steps forward and holds out a tentative hand.

MIME

FLESH

(Shakes head. Mimes flower. Mimes lightbulb. Flesh.

Mimes being stuck in a box. Sinks to knees. Cries.)

STELLA Stella. The fourth of November. 1997.

Wonderful.

DOCTOR

RECEPTIONIST

Let’s see…You’re here for the emotectomy?

SCENE 2: A MIME’S INTERLUDE

Music plays. All characters still and focus on MIME.

MIME

FLESH withdraws hand.

No.

FLESH

(Mimes driving home. Showers. Cries.

MIME Yawns. Sleeps. Wakes up. Stretches. Cries. (Shakes head “no” furiously.)

Yawns. Brushes hair. Brushes teeth. Eats breakfast. Cries. Checks watch. Picks flower.

STELLA Smells flower. Puts on jacket (STELLA Yes. mirrors this with an actual jacket). Cries.

Freezes in a crying position.)

FLESH It is cold. I will be scarred. Black stitches.

Focus changes to DOCTOR. DOCTOR The center of my chest. Disfigured. Split takes off lab coat and transitions into open. Cracked. Like a pomegranate. Red as RECEPTIONIST. RECEPTIONIST starts pomegranate. It is cold. You are cold. I am typing at a computer. red plum pomegranate. I am—it is so cold.

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MIME

(Mimes reaching into chest and ripping out heart. Mimes peeling off skin.)

RECEPTIONIST

I’ll let the surgeon know you’re here and see if she’s ready for you. Take a seat while you wait. I’ll just be a minute.

Thank you.

STELLA

FLESH

Flower!

The lights get brighter. Strings of lights behind STELLA and FLESH turn on.

STELLA and FLESH stare at the flower.

Oh. The light.

STELLA FLESH

Flower flower flower flower flower flower FLESH flower flower flower flower flower flower Leave. flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower MIME flower flower flower flower flower flower (Mimes crying.) flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower RECEPTIONIST leaves. STELLA moves to flower flower flower flower flower flower a seat. MIME and FLESH follow her. FLESH flower flower flower flower flower flower sits in the seat directly next to her. flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower flower FLESH flower flower— Leave.

STELLA

A beat. I bit into a lightbulb last year. The glass broke on my tongue and I bled. Seven stitches Leave. and a liquid diet, but it was worth it. For a second I felt that buzzing of electricity fry A beat. the nerves in my back molars. My skeleton absorbed the start of light. When the Leave. Leave. Leave. Leave. Leave. Leave. scalpel shreds my tissues, will it charge my Leave. Leave. Leave— lungs with tangy lightning? Will I catch on A beat. fire from the shock? Will I burn alive? They want to take my heart but I am light and I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m cold. I’m sorry. light is electric and there is electricity in the heart and—it is cold, but light is warm.

STELLA looks directly at MIME. They make eye contact for a while. Stillness.

RECEPTIONIST returns holding files.

MIME

(Mimes flower. Hands it to STELLA.)

Stella?

RECEPTIONIST

STELLA reaches for the flower from MIME, when she pulls her hand back she is holding a real flower. It is red. FLESH gasps (Shakes head in delight. running away.)

MIME

“no”

furiously.

Mimes

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Yes?

STELLA RECEPTIONIST

MIME

(Mimes tapping a watch. Mimes “let’s go.”

Mimes driving a car.)

The surgeon will be ready to see you soon.

STELLA Is there anything you need before your (To MIME.) I can’t leave now. My ride isn’t operation? supposed to show up for a few more hours.

FLESH

(Intensely.) SunLIGHT. Not sunBURN. Not red. Leave. We can still sunlight. We can heal sunburn. Aloe. Plant. Flower.

STELLA

(To RECEPTIONIST.) I think I’m okay, thank you.

RECEPTIONIST

Wonderful. Let me know if you change your mind.

RECEPTIONIST leaves. STELLA looks back at MIME. She frowns and pulls a petal off the flower.

FLESH

Sunlight. Sweet pomegranate. Blood does not water flowers. The operating room is so cold.

47

FLESH

Flower. Run. Run now. The light. You’re glowing. You’re fireflies, stars, broken light bulbs, electricity, glowsticks, fire.

You’re bright.

STELLA pulls another petal from the flower.

Your emotions make you bright.

A long pause. STELLA thinks. MIME walks to the lights behind STELLA and FLESH and pulls them down. MIME drapes the lights over them and with that, embraces them both. Warmth. STELLA pulls back and hands the flower to MIME. It is still real. MIME holds it, tenderly.

STELLA

(To MIME.) Will you drive me home?

(Nods.)

MIME STELLA

(To MIME.) Now? Right now?

MIME

(Nods. Mimes tapping a watch. Mimes driving a car. Does stereotypical mime alternating happy/sad trick, ends on happy.)

STELLA

I think I have some fruit at home. A pomegranate. A plum. They’ll go rotten if I don’t eat them soon. I should eat them now.

So they don’t spoil.

FLESH

Flower. Fruit. Sunlight.

STELLA

I think I’m ready to leave.

FLESH

Flower. It is flower. It is light. It is—sometimes it is cold, but right now it is warm.

The lights get brighter. FLESH hums “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” FLESH, MIME and STELLA leave the surgeon’s office. It is empty. A beat or two.

48

49

imitations imitations

snoitatimi

by Aspen Taylor

50

on bones ,

and flesh ,

and how i am not

by Carmela Furio CONTENT WARNING: EATING DISORDERS AND UNHEALTHY EATING HABITS

I do not know how to react to being told I’m beautiful. Not in that humble way in which women are taught to never flaunt or be aware of their beauty—it’s more that I just can’t take compliments for the life of me. I’ve never felt worthy of them, and so I will never feel worthy of the term beautiful. All of this begins with the simple fact I haven’t been told I’m pretty very often. I’ll hear it from friends if I say something mean about myself, or when I turn myself into something suitable for Christmas and my extended family wants to butter me up. I do not know yet if I’m someone considered ugly, but, funnily enough, I have a go-to answer for when those around me joke that they are.

Ew, I’m so ugly, someone can say, and I’ll have my answer ready. Pretty is a construct, I say.

Beauty standards have ties to classism, I say.

It’s formulated. It’s coping. It’s my attempt at placing a ‘turn back’ sign fifty miles down an abandoned road.

fifteen. I fear what will happen when I do.

Moreso, I fear what will have become of me to have started again.

When I’m thirteen, my sister’s swimsuit gets stolen during gym class. I tell her maybe she lost it, say something along the lines of, “Why would someone steal it if they’re not sure it fits?” She screams she’s not like me. Everyone is her size.

Mom apologizes for her later.

Feelings like this are universal; I do not need to explain myself to the sea that holds me. These anecdotes are unnecessary, not because they’re unimportant, but because they’re known, to me, to the girl in the changing room next to me, to my sister, as much as it may seem she’s perfect.

But, nonetheless, I want to speak this, even if only in whispered essays and their false attempt at protection: I do not like to come downstairs I ask my mother once if I am beautiful, and she for dinner too early. tells me if I was, she would’ve taught me how to use makeup a long time ago. I am starting My father has a thing with food, which can to feel, though, that more than not hearing it truly only be described as his ‘thing with food.’ often, I’ve been taught not to think of myself He needs to be the first to get at food. More that way. That I cannot think of myself that way. specifically, he needs to get to food before I do.

He thinks, somehow, I will eat all four portions I’m a size fourteen. My BMI index, because I by myself unless I’m held back. So I do not come can’t hide from it, says that I’m apparently down for dinner early. obese, though my friends who actually look at me daily say otherwise. I do not like to weigh But my father will also be frustrated if I take too myself, have not willingly done so since I was long to come down, will call up the stairs, tell me

51

the family is waiting. I tell my mother I can’t win.

She laughs, repeats it back to me, “You can’t win.” It is as if she is saying, “You cannot swim.

You will drown. Now come eat.”

"YOU CANNOT SWIM. YOU WILL DROWN." Despite all of this, my father offers me bigger portions, always has, says he knows I can eat more, then accepts the fact that my sister, skinny, is full. He does not listen when I tell him I do not like being teased about food. My mother tells me I’m too sensitive. My sister ignores the conversation.

I’ve learned to stop bringing it up. I tell my mother once I do not want her to mention how much I eat and she gets mad. The words she uses are old jokes, stolen from childhood commercials in the 70s. She doesn’t get what’s wrong, and I don’t get the chance to explain.

accepting and wonderful. But they’re also conditioned. I was too. (Was, past tense to the verb ‘to be’, implying a state of passivity, implying that I am no longer, implying that conditioning has left me. It has not.)

I don’t realize how weird weight is in my house until I tell my best friend how my mother once had my sister take me to the basement, so she could teach me how to work out before I started high school. Someone was afraid I’d be bullied for being fat. I cannot remember which of them it was, but I tell the story anyway with a laugh, and my friend looks me in the face, pulls her eyes wide and her mouth grim.

“That’s fucked up.”

I don’t want to attribute all my weight problems to my family. It’s not just them, but fatphobia is interesting in how it moves from person to person. Interesting, as in, hilarious; interesting, as in, this makes me laugh, so how can it be true? How can something held together by only thread still be held? Held so widely, so strongly. We covet these ideas and these ideals and these falsehoods as if they are Truth of God. They are intrinsic and they are nonsense and breaking them down breaks society down, and no one wants that. No one can stomach that. Least of all those with a flat stomach.

This: is Interesting.

It’s dinner and my sister has already tired of my opinion, and I, too, have tired of my opinion.

To complain is to admit to defeat, and to admit defeat is to admit failure. I have failed to become, as I’ve failed to intrinsically be, what is expected of me, wanted of me. To dare oppose that, to say maybe it’s not me that has failed but the expectations, is too much to speak on, certainly over dinner, and certainly with those The main characters in the movies I watch who have proven they just cannot understand. growing up are all skinny, all fear becoming fat. Regina George loses it over a few pounds, That’s the most wonderful thing about systems and even those who mock her obsession with and their thinking and how they hold us— weight still wear her size. My aunt is small and and the villainy of fatness is tied to so many thin and always grabs at her stomach and her systems. There is no net for us to fall into when thighs in public and in the car and at the table. we wriggle out of their grip. It’s all I can do to She turns over, rolls down her jeans, tells me to squirm, to tickle the palm, but I am too afraid of look at how big she’s gotten. the drop. I do not stand for myself, not against those that I love.

I, at seven, ask my mother if I should go on a diet. I, at seventeen, force myself into a diet. I, at I don’t want to paint my family as terrible, seventeen still, have an Intervention in my best because they aren’t. They’re loving and friend’s kitchen, disassociating, watching pizza

52

grease slide down my fingers as she threatens to steal the pills from me herself.

I know where you live, she jokes.

Do you know where I am? I want to ask. I do not need to. She is smaller, but she knows. We both know. We sit together in more than just the kitchen.

DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM? No one has ever told me directly that I can never be beautiful for being fat. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard the phrase “fat is ugly.” But I have heard that it’s disgusting.

I’ve been shown that it’s disgusting, in over dramaticized renditions of what it looks like to be ‘fat’ in health class (Fuck Supersize Me. Watch that ‘documentary’ and replace every fat person with a cow or a pig and see if it changes the narrative. It doesn’t. Fuck Supersize Me.)

She has time and again been blamed for the chemical imbalances in my brain. She does not want to hear about something of mine that might actually have been her fault, if only partially, if only as a bud born off a bud born off a bud, a generational line of loathing and disgust disguised as a rose.

Hate is cyclical. Hate is passed down from woman to woman like a rite of passage.

Hate is part of fatphobia, and fatphobia is a matryoshka doll.

The way we look at fat ties to so many things larger than us—to diet culture, to the skewed ideals of perfection and health, to the fashion industry and fat shaming and trauma passed down through generations. The system behind fat is the actual system of society. It’s so hard to look past fat; it’s intrinsic to nearly everything, so much so that it’s almost unnoticeable, like dust in the air.

HATE IS PASSED DOWN WOMAN When I first start to get medicated for my TO WOMAN LIKE A anxiety as a child, an incompetent doctor gives RITE OF PASSAGE.

me pills aimed towards teenage boys with anger issues. It makes me irate, volatile, aggressive. It When I look inside myself I see the fear of fat also makes me fat. Blew you up four dress sizes, that’s been branded on me by systems, under Mom used to say. that I see the disgust that’s been branded on me by the media, and under that is the same “I’m still so mad,” she tells me, over a decade hate from doctors. Under that, too, is my sister, later. “You were a small thing.” my aunt, my own mother. They are all me and I am all them; it is only that not all of us are small As if that’s what I should aim to be. Compact. enough to fit on the lifeboat (I would like to Contract. What do you mean when you say continue this metaphor, would like to say some small? Enough to pick me up and spin me of us are left behind, on the ship, expected to around? Enough to comfortably grip my thigh? float, fat, puffy balloons in the ice water. They Enough to forget I’m even there? do say CoolSculpting works wonders. But I have omitted it because it’s too morbid).

No one wants to be told that they’ve fucked up their child. It’s an especially sore point Every time I begin to feel beautiful in life I am for my mother, who bore a behavioral needs reminded, by myself, by marketing ploys, and by daughter prone to panic attacks and outbursts, my world, that I am not. That I cannot. who rightfully does not like being accused of ruining me.

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53

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