4x4 Magazine, No. 2

NO 2

2015

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK, NY

MASTHEAD EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Lily Fishman & Eric Wohlstadter DESIGN EDITORS Kolleen Ku & Georgia Lipkin

MANAGING EDITOR Michael Menna

WEB EDITOR Ben Kogan

EVENTS EDITOR Emma Arett

READING EDITOR Serena Solin

BLOGGING EDITOR Julie Moon

STAFF EDITORS Bindu Bansinath - Karen Cha - Devin Choudhury Issie Ivins - Lola Kolade - Sebastian Mazza - Michael Pinkham Ben Rashkovich - Mina Seçkin - Nihal Shetty Evan Siegel - Buddy Travers

© 2014-2015 4×4 Magazine All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists one year after publication.

CONTENTS 4 WELCOME

7 BEFORE THE WATER COMES PJ Sauerteig

8 FROM MY MTA TODOS, N O 21-24 Christopher Thomas Davies

10 /HPPY THNGS Chet King

14 IN BETWEEN ABOVE Frankie Lyon

21 DISSECTION Rosalind Bazett Watson

22 THE ORIGINAL SYNAPSE Camille Petersen

24 CHAIN OF EVENTS Camille Petersen

26 INTRODUCTION Jackson Arn

34 FIRST SEMESTER, SECOND HALF Wells Hamilton

40 DION VALE Alana Solin

44 EUSTACE Alana Solin

45 WHITE RICE NO WOLVES Alana Solin

46 SIMON & SOL Alana Solin

47 KITCHEN EXEGESIS Liv Lansdale

50 FOOT SOLDIERS JS Maarten

64 ’NOTHER ROUND Edward Lee

65 TO CALVARY BY WAY OF SODOM Edward Lee

66 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

68 CONTRIBUTORS

DEAR READER WE WISH THAT, ALONG WITH OFFERING YOU THIS MAGAZINE, WE COULD INVITE YOU TO WITNESS THE INCREDIBLE AND CONSUMING PROCESS THAT WENT INTO CONSTRUCTING IT. Each week, on Wednesday evenings, we meet as passionate devotees to pieces that we have scoured, ready to battle it out with each other, laughing, fighting, occasionally getting carried away, all in pursuit of seeing our favorite work in print.

4×4 is now, unbelievably, two years old. As it rounds the bend into another year, we’d like to express how honored we are to have seen this magazine grow from some words on a whiteboard into two beautiful issues. We have so enjoyed the privilege of leading our brilliant staff as they curated the collection you’re holding in your hands.

One of the most intricate elements of our process is learning, as the year goes on, how the pieces we’ve chosen will cohere and reflect each other. Be it Liv Lansdale’s harnessing of punctuation to evoke emotion or Alana Solin’s explorations of the complexities and terrors of childhood, be it Edward Lee’s and Jackson Arn’s distinctive voices or Rosalind Bazett Watson’s and Chet King’s dissection and reconfiguration

of language, these works comprise some of the most compelling inventions Columbia has to offer.

But 4×4 is more than just this publication. This year we’ve revived the Submit & Mingle event, an old campus tradition at which students read their work and the audience picks a winner. ( You can read Wells Hamilton’s winning piece in this issue.) We’ve also held other events on campus and off, and the level of interest continues to impress us. The submissions we’ve chosen here represent only a fraction of the creative output we’ve witnessed at Columbia this year.

Reader, we would like to thank you. This work is important to us; it deserves the attention you bring to it. Please read and share, as we have.

ERIC & LILY EDITORS-IN-CHIEF 2014-2015

PJ SAUERTEIG

BEFORE THE WATER COMES AT LUNCH TODAY my sister asked me about my first memory. I thought for a while, and then it came to me… The room’s only decorations were scattered books and a crooked painting of a winter dawn. God, leaning back in his chair, took off his shoes one at a time. And when he hit them against his simple bed, little fairies flew out, each a different color, each with a different name: Venus, Orion, Ocean, Rain. “No,” my sister said; “that’s not what I asked: sparkling or tap?”

CHRISTOPHER THOMAS DAVIES

FROM MY MTA TODOS, NO 21-24 21.

In shining Sharpie shoop the 1​ w/ the shastra: y’all should read this.

22.

We wheatpastes over advert posters this very Poem in Notion.

23.

First: then next, so

y’eats bowl Alph’­-Bits, chug bo’le vodka; coke smouple spliffs, ‘ventually’ll vomi’

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~f

o

ſ

o

p

œ

all to o’ 24.

un un tr

d d

y~ over ‘em tracks, soon fatten family bubo Bowery rats.

Hop the styles and wride the quatrain q​ua train in tranqed quill qualm crosstowt to Queens.

CHET KING

/HPPY THNGS hi! so oh yeah you know. like prancing through that field of roses you know what i’m talking about? yeah, right there. oh yeah. holding her hand and you can see her figure leading you like oh. fuck. getting a new toy a new transformer maybe like wow baahhhjjjjpsheuuuuoowwoojjh wow rip open package plastic and look up is that tree are there ornaments & morning sun in window curtain and then you hear your mom whispering behind you & you hear the wind blowing under her voice & she says lisssin boy it is i the one who is going to teach you things pissing toys innings fry buns truth is flowing new leach to drink yes don’t stop drinking quench your thirst there with my saliva in the twenty-nine ways you can outline yourself and me tangled up in chalk outline you know it’s about how cute your cat is outline how cute your dad is outline how cute

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 2 - PAGE 11

your mom is outline how cute your dog is so toboggan balrog barfing bob’s bogged down logs & I’m all in your ear & i’m talking about isn’t it amazing you don’t even know who i’m talking about or who i am anymore but you are listening and that makes me feel good yeah—i say like a like eating out coming up for air & locking eyes that swallow tension she inhales & it is a moment nobody moves you are statues and you break it by suddenly tickling her laughing loud together rolling around couch naked ahhhHH!!!!!

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like when somebody mmade me laugh soooo hard during lunch in second grade and the jello i was eating shot out my nose ow !!!!!! like hearing cat meow for the first time !!!!!! like like fish and chips in the sooommer lake lake whan yr bbby sooster was birn lake sutting in frnt of feere place toosty late loke

KING

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loke whon yoo forst mot somoon yoo foll on lov woth likeg huggng momg leke bng nece to peeoppl like pla y ing w ith you r invi s ible frien d in th e bat h tu b.

/HPPY THNGS

FRANKIE LYON

IN BETWEEN ABOVE

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SINGLE WINDSOR, fold the collar. Brush hair. The ever­ -receding line of fear, creeping back­ -neckward every hour, exposing with each plaintive balding millimeter the fragility and white hopelessness of the clock’s turn. Black socks—every morning—same six pairs since Peoria. Curly blackish hairs on the shiny front of the shin are disappearing or getting whiter or both—he blames the socks but damn they are provident. The belt. Turn back a hole each year it seems. Wider, that is. One of those with the black/brown reversible scheme. Alternate with hue of Dockers.

Always miss the fucking back-­left loop.

Mr. Caswell looks in his double­ wide bathroom mirror and scrapes fresh day’s stubble off his cheeks. He shaves with shaving cream after he dresses—he is good at it. Never spilled a drop of the stuff. He similarly brushes each of his teeth with a vibrating Crest Pro and his preferred Aquafresh paste, the combination of which creates a white salvo of explosive foam that most often drips south to his freshly-­ shaven chin but not once has reached

the venerated surfaces of his tie or button-­up or Dockers or loafers.

He turns away, finally, from the mirror. He slits his socked toes through the loafers’ holes and ties them with the indelible bunny-­ ear method (the superiority of which, once one is familiar with the mathematics, is unquestionable). He sips the wife’s shitty­ -usual coffee and sits into the 2004 Toyota Camry. He drives a very legal 28mph to work.

“JAWS? DO YOU HAVE JAWS?” the teacher asked.

“Like the movie Jaws. You’re asking me,” said the student.

“I’m asking you.”

“Asking for the movie Jaws.”

“Yes Jaws do you have Jaws?” The teacher now shivered and rollicked in the half-­wooden teacher’s desk chair, reclined semilaterally, as her desperation grew outward and radiated through the students, whose agendas were just now lambasted and replaced with the quest for a DVD copy of the movie Jaws—and so the phrases proliferated

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bacterially. Ten minutes and the students began to ask each other: “Jaws?! DVD!” “You?! You have it?!”

“The movie.”

“Jaws!”

“No.” “AND DID YOU SEE any signs or indications— body language, strange phone calls— that may have led you to believe his disappearance was intentional?” “...”

“Ma’am.” “...”

“Ma’am I’m going to need your help here. Your class was the only one Mr. Ketler visited before—” “Do you have Jaws?” the teacher asks.

“The movie Jaws,” says the cop.

“Or do you know where I could locate a DVD copy of Jaws?”

“I don’t really see how this is going to help us find your principal, uh, Ms. Cristosomo.”

“Well if you could just tell me or look around a bit—do they have it?

Would they have Jaws?—my class

needs it we need it bad and I know— would another police department...

—I know you know where to find it because you responded to my call.”

“Ma’am that was Mr. Ketler’s wife who called us. He’s been missing for ten days.”

“There’s a very real reason for this need but right now instead of me talking how about we just find the thing okay.” “...” “...”

“Ma’am I just need to ask you some very simple—” She turned and walked. “Jaws?” she asked.

“Excuse me miss but we need you just to comply for a moment here so we can move on is that so much to ask of you now?”

“Jaws? Do you have Jaws?”

IT’S A FATIGUE that radiates cosmically. The numbness, the same set of morning drives—7:05 or else—your ass numb in the plushed contorted seat of the Camry, the nameless kids

LYON

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 2 - PAGE 17

you are namelessly hated by, who want to fucking take you out doesn’t matter what your name is, the jejune but deplorably spot­-on harassment at the scrupulously graffitied urinals.

Hello my name is Mr. Caswell I am your substitute principal today. And they throw paper shit at me and step all over my loafers. The lunch she packs spills on my tie or something of greater or equal value. I look in the mirror, the always­ -cracked and sharpied mirror, and see the nameless tidy fuck they yell at every day, with a crawling hairline and arrogant-­white teeth.

They look at me and shout and spit and step on my loafers. The minutes are millenia—add together my consummate temporal lifetime, agonizingly stretched into a 7.5­-hour/450­-minute fall from the cliffs. And at a sharp district­ -regulated crash to back here, to Earth, I read 2:05, spit in the urinal, and sit ass­numb in the Camry for a 28mph drive back—back to the flatness and the unyielding dry boredom of wedlock and suburbia.

That this can happen every day.

That not only is this me eating the same suicidally bored shit nine to five but actually most people who do this, who suck it all in and, for all soulful purposes, die five days a week. That, even more disturbing, some enjoy it.

THE NEXT DAY, NOW: “Hello, Mr. Caswell?”

“Yes hello.”

“Hi.” “...”

“We... we uh are very in need of a substitute honcho over here. You see well the regular principal isn’t anywhere to be found for a good two weeks now and so the administration is starting now to breathe underwater without any sort of respiratory luck.”

Mr. Caswell looked at the phone.

He thought of Katrina, of Sandy, of all the beautifully minatory female monsters that have thus far neglected le sortir pour le déjeuner. It was a cordless phone. The light blinked orange every four—wait no six seconds—which meant either it needed charging or there’s a message waiting, he thought.

IN BETWEEN ABOVE

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Either/or. Soren. Denmark... He responded to the caller: “Yeah okay. See you—” “Thank you Mr. Caswell so also this may come off a little left-­ field but are you aware of any sort of—gee how do I phrase this—search for any shark-related cinema in a take-­home disc format? I mean I’m not asking you for it, per se—although if you have it I need it immediately—but there’s this very certain advanced chemistry class that seems to be in dire need of it and there’s some speculative flotsam saying it—the search, I mean—may or may not be directly undoubtedly related to the disappearance. So just let me know.”

Mr. Caswell hung up.

He read 5:44 and thought close enough. He showered, dressed, tied a single windsor, examined the state of affairs noggin-­ wise, shaved, brushed his teeth. His wife was sleeping and she looked ugly, he thought. All of the sudden her usual sleep posture— half­curled with head pointing at feet, on right side, completely maxillofacially loose and relaxed—was measurably

repulsive, like the sight of it now somehow smelled awful, like wet shit, magnetically pointing away his gaze.

When did my wife get fucking ugly.

Into the Camry. The drive. Into the campus, loafers newly polished from the day before’s spit and garbage, feet swallowing whole all the worthlessness of— “Excuse me sir do you have Jaws?”

This was a student asking him. Asian male, shorter than most. Vietnamese or something. He wore cheap glasses and looked right through his eyes, stood still. “Jaws? Do you have it sir?” Mr. Caswell looked the kid in the face and tried to laugh but he couldn’t figure how. He said to the kid something close to Can I speak to your teacher and the kid pointed and walked to the classroom.

“Sir, so is that a for­ -sure no on Jaws?” the kid asked.

He entered the class. Hello my name is Mr. Caswell I am your substitute principal today. Smacked by this: the sight of seventeen minors and one adult frantically, compulsively imploring one

LYON

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 2 - PAGE 19

another asking for the same thing— “Jaws?!” The teacher now rushed toward him, eyes dripping with moist desperate necessity.

“Excuse me sir do you have Jaws!

The movie!” a second, younger person pleaded. Mr. Caswell stood, damn near motionless, staring at the two as they continued without regard for response.

The queries pinged fast off small class-­ walls, striking furiously against Mr. Caswell’s eardrums and sparking an internal cartoon­-gear-­shift frenzy inside his head. He thought of shitty urinals and saw the irreparable physical insults on his loafers—he thought of the shitty lunches his childless stayat-­ home wife could never get right and the desperately mundane sound of the Camry, fresh in the cold morning, starting up with a pathetic half­-roar, luscious carbon monoxide seeping and taunting him day after fucking day. He saw endless fathomed clocks ticking fast and slow, clocks whose numbers started 7 ended 205, crowded his eyes and his whole chest began ticking, singing with these clocks. He saw seven no eight

lifetimes click by, clocks singing, saying die saying die saying die with the smartest fucking smile, here—the faces of the presidents telling him with the Uncle Sam duty-­to-­country public school faces die, they’re saying now, die!, and now the faces are the clocks, they’re ticking and clicking big­-hand slow-­ hand with nothing but die! wearing the big Fourth of July hats and screaming ticking right into his spine, die!, and the whole fucking building is ticking and turning and singing like the clocks now, die!, with the faces surrounding, singing, die!, and— It all clicks.

“Jaws?” Mr. Caswell now asks, of nobody. He listens, intent to the sea and soundscape of the question, floating through the air in all glory, fuzzing and teeming about and searching for each crevice of the mind.

“Do you have Jaws?” someone says.

Mr. Caswell walks around, nearly paralyzed by the presence, the delicious sound of the air, of the search and the question and the goal. Jaws.

IN BETWEEN ABOVE

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He walks without mind into the storage closet to see magnificent arrays of beakers and tubes and chemicals. Die! And he hears through walls, pinging: “Do you have Jaws? The movie.”

He snatches a looking bottle, Diphosphine, and pops the seal. It lights. Die! He drops the diphosphine bottle and the flames puke out, forcing molasses of the plastic, crawling out and onto the tiled floor.

“Do you have Jaws?”

It scratches the cabinets, the flame, and Mr. Caswell feels the warmth, the maternal flow of a chemical fire kissing his cheeks goodnight. Flames lap the

door. Class unresponsive. He stands, entertained—bloodflow thickened with the question and the search and JAWS!— and the class joins him. The building is licking, unanimously screaming out with orange spiky fluid eating the walls and you can see straight down to hell.

And it keeps burning and glowing.

Mr. Caswell looks up at the walls, blackened and almost ready to tumble.

He smiles. He looks at the students and the teacher, static in their incessant asking, causally frozen. He feels his face grow slightly red in the heat, reflecting the building’s new art. He says, “Jaws?”

LYON

ROSALIND BAZETT WATSON

DISSECTION During the dissection you may want to spread the legs of the specimen and tie them to the dissecting pan but it is not necessary to do this

CAMILLE PETERSON

THE ORIGINAL SYNAPSE involved a subway train tightening steel shoulder blades through tunnels lit only by indifferent lamplight, this train kaleidoscopic in its renditions of color vision and right-side-up polymorphisms within single selfDNA not changed, only by life’s disappearances of sun un-melted uncertain suddenly as to what could be worth underground explosions of silicosis and stone-gouging the original synapse involved a nondescript passenger recognizing through that tiny window, over that tiny gap between cars, a stranger

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could not place the stranger could tell stranger did not recognize back could imagine the perils of that formed blankness between learn now that, as depicted in undiscovered artifacts of the Eden generation, anything excavating with bare bone and brain the workings of who and what came before it is prone to abnormality of action, such as annoying Rush Hour delays and worse yet, unintentional blips of weeping inch by inch as if to stop it all for the day see how the synapse has been sketching in you

CAMILLE PETERSON

CHAIN OF EVENTS “So I put quotations around the word ‘friend’...” — The Avett Brothers I directed you to the silver bullet and found you an umbrella for rain that I said would not come but, you reiterated, could. I sculpted you a pseudonym from photo albums you gave me as proof of existence, to which I replied it was not evidence I wanted but something improbable and misidentified, like a species of yourself that was inconvenient, non-parsimonious, and unnameable in any language created in echo laboratories of the human race. I caught you stringing barbed wire around my written words as if it were a chain of Christmas lights and the words a simple pine. I went to a play about the plague, read the thread of insanity from end to end, lost marbles by almost throwing them away. You said you had put the Christmas lights up, around

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the entire deck, years ago, as if that fact were an answer to the God problem or the erasure of Pope Joan. I directed you to the silver bullet and told you I could no longer hold charming ammo shells in my fearful hands, to which you reminded me of the Christmas lights while I tried to recall the last lines of the plague play that had made it so clear something had come to an end. (It did not rain. You never returned the umbrella.)

JACKSON ARN

INTRODUCTION

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IF THERE IS ONE THING about the life of Jeff Vance on which all biographers agree, it is that he planned, carefully and from a remarkably early age, on being famous. Born as he was at the tail-end of the Age of Warhol, he was familiar with the Master’s most wellremembered bon mot (a kitchen magnet, now hanging at the Vance Museum in New Wisconsin and consisting of a black-and-white photograph of Nico with the caption “YOUR 15 MINUTES ARE UP,” confirms this), and must have understood that his chances of one day becoming famous were rather high.

Consider a text message he sent to Jane Simmons, apparently an early hookup, a few months after he turned nine: I’M REALLY SORRY JANE. UR RIGHT TO BE MAD. WHEN IM RICH ILL MAKE IT UP TO U. 1 Besides the not inconsiderable maturity of the phrasing, this artifact is remarkable for the all-out arrogance of its final sentence. Few great men

are modest, but their modesty usually leaves them in their early twenties, when they first discover they are capable of things no one else is. At the age when most of his peers were discovering pornography and decapitation, Vance knew what he was, and had no fear of sharing his knowledge with others.

We should also be careful to situate Vance’s life at the beginning of what was then the fad (an obnoxious, detested fab, at that) of reality television.

Survivor led almost immediately to The Apprentice and The Amazing Race, then a short-lived strain of “professional” reality shows: Project Runway, Top Chef, and the like. A recent autopsy of the Vance family’s plasma TV, long since discarded, uncovered a pharaoh’s tomb for biographers puzzled about the young Vance’s developmental influences. Here were echoes, hieroglyphics carved into worn plastic, of every show that had passed before our subject’s eyeballs— not only the predictable patron saints I have already mentioned, but also the

I am indebted, as so many Vance scholars of my time are, to the BellT&ATSchaung Corporation for its extraordinary generosity with its ancient customers’ information, without which this book would be impossible.

1

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 2 - PAGE 28

nearly forgotten Amish in the City, Miami Ink, Fraternity Life, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, American Pickers, EX-treme Dating, and True Beauty.

Even from this list, a tiny fraction of everything the scientists discovered, one sees the remarkable diversity of television programs that Vance consumed as an adolescent, even by the high standards of the American viewer. We can—and should—press this point even further to note the fascinating tension in his preferences, a distillation of the broader tension in the reality TV of the time, between the shows that celebrated the individual’s skill in a workplace setting (performing a specific job, such as cooking, cleaning, or designing clothing, with relatively minor variations) and those that challenged their contestants to survive a series of decidedly non-professional challenges (river rafting, mountain climbing, maze-escaping, with nearly unlimited variations). Here was the same dilemma—work vs. freedom, direction vs. no direction—that would cause him so much agony throughout his life.

At least part of the reason that Vance continues to fascinate after his peers grow dull and predictable is that he was fortunate enough to be born in Madison, at a time when its industries were booming, its air was clean and fresh, and its crime rate was low—so low, indeed, that at the age of ten he could walk from his house to the bus stop five minutes away and wait, usually by himself, to be driven to school. His parents, besides, were sensible, calm people, and he seems to have been on good terms with his cousins and grandparents from an early age. In his classes, he learned arithmetic and penmanship (two subjects that would not serve him very well later on), as well as typing and PowerPoint presentation, relatively new additions to the common curriculum of American public schools.

There was, in short, very little to distract him from his self-education.

One exception to this rule (one which I will have to deal with more thoroughly later on in this book, but which merits some scrutiny for now) arrived shortly after the beginning of the eighth grade for Vance and his

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friends, around the time when the novelty of being back in school was wearing off. A classmate of Vance’s, one Quentin Karis, began to tease him.

It is easy enough to speculate on why this boy chose Vance to harass. Vance was a calm, level-headed child, thanks to his parents’ good example and the large amount of violence he absorbed daily from Fraternity Life, Cops, and the like; Karis, by contrast, was maladjusted, the product of a strained marriage. His mother, by a strange coincidence, had been a writer for SUB, the station that would help bring Vance’s career to the public eye several years later, but had lost her job in one of the downsizings common to the agency in its early days. Unable to find another job in the entertainment world, she was forced to work as a secretary at a dental office, which, combined with her husband’s equally humiliating work at a juice store, only barely paid for their son’s upbringing.

Quentin’s parents constantly reminded him that television and the Internet 2

were harsh, cruel places, and forbade him from using either for more than a few hours a day. This punishment must have further separated him from his playful, easygoing classmate, whose knowledge of these two forbidden worlds was already encyclopedic.

Disaster struck in October, when Quentin made a threat to Vance, who recorded it in a message he sent to another eighth-grader, Jack Weldon: VANCE: QUENTIN JUST

SAID HE WANTS TO

SLIT MY THROAT! JACK: WHO IS QUENTIN! ?

VANCE: FUCKER IN

GEOMETRY W ME

HAHA2 Whether or not Quentin meant his threat to be serious, Vance’s nonchalance is clearly feigned (even as an adolescent, he rarely ended texts with “haha”). That he would have chosen to confide in Weldon, little more than a stranger to him at the time, suggests a level of desperation that Weldon clearly

My indebtedness to BellT&ATSchaung is so great that it more than merits a second mention.

INTRODUCTION

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 2 - PAGE 30

sensed. Still, his choice to send a text to a more or less random person prefigures the manner of his revenge.

Did Karis actually intend to hurt Vance? The odds seem high, though we should keep in mind that their generation was considerably less medicated than the ones that would follow. Tom Cruise’s famous critique of Ritalin (which Vance would have seen and seen parodied) was much maligned at the time but nevertheless suggested American parents’ general discomfort with the thought of giving drugs to their own offspring. Children could play with crossbows, swords, darts, and the occasional gun without expecting much discipline from their families or the police (shortly after Vance left Madison, one of his former classmates, Spencer Washburn, was pierced through the small intestine by a girlfriend’s bow and arrow). Quentin certainly fit the profile of a violent criminal: lonely, frustrated, and closely controlled by his angry parents. We will never know if Vance was in danger or not; all that remains for historians to discuss is what he did next.

It was easy, in the early days of the Internet, to purchase a microcamera without disclosing one’s age, or even the reason for using it. An online receipt for a second-hand Crystal Fiber Optic Nightlens camera, filled out in Vance’s name and dated October 17, lists only “bird watching” as its intended application (even this pathetic explanation would have counted as high-level security at the time). One pictures a middle-aged online merchant scrolling through a list of buyers, each name accompanied by a two or three word answer to the question “how will you use my product?”, selecting Vance more or less at random, unaware of the role he was playing in a genius’s maturation. But then, how many had the foresight to recognize that the young Vance was deep in the process of creating his own highly original strain of genius?

How he managed to bypass Quentin, his two parents, and the walls of their house will in all likelihood always remain a mystery (the first of his many “impossible” feats!), but it is undisputable that by October 28 Vance

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had attached his new microcamera to the ceiling of his young rival’s room and arranged for the video feed to be displayed online. Thanks to the autopsies of a few laptops that survived recycling, some of the footage can be seen today.

Grainy and murky by modern standards, and sometimes blocked by an irritatingly slow ceiling fan, it nonetheless must have served its intended purpose perfectly well. Within a few days, most of Vance’s classmates had seen his handiwork, though how much of the prank’s popularity was due to Vance’s gossip and how much to word of mouth is unclear.

Vance and his classmates were treated to nothing so dramatic as Quentin crying or masturbating. In the footage that survives, he does a little homework, scratches his back, bounces a ball, and sleeps. What mattered, of course, was that they were watching him at all, or rather, that they were watching him and he knew it. The camera became a school joke within a few days: 3

HE JUST SITS THERE FOR TWO HOURS LOL WHY DOESN’T HE FUCKING MOVE! DO SOMETHING?!

HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A LAPTOP3 The final text is perhaps the most important. By spying on the technologically impaired Quentin, Vance isolated him from his classmates more than he could have imagined.

No doubt, his intention was to discover Vance doing something foolish, yet the discovery of nothing, paradoxically, was far more damaging. To be caught in a compromising act would have been humiliating, but the joke would have become boring quickly enough, and Vance might have found himself in danger of being attacked once again.

To be constantly surveilled was a joke without a punch line, and thus could never grow old.

No doubt, Quentin must have noticed that a sizeable portion of his school was laughing at him. Someone

BellT&ATSchaung, generous as ever.

INTRODUCTION

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might have taken pity on him early on and told him that there was a camera somewhere in his house. But even if no one told him, he would have eventually snuck on to a computer when his parents were away, and seen the joke for himself. A few minutes would have sufficed for him to scratch his ceiling until he found what he was looking for, but then, of course, the real prank would have begun. Unable to find the person responsible, and probably too full of adolescent machismo to complain to his parents, going to school must have been torturous from then on, a constant, unnerving sense of being watched. Vance had taught the eighth grade to stare at Karis, and now they could not help themselves from staring any more than Karis could stop them.

Vance had won, though nobody, not even Karis himself, knew. Nor could they have known that this victory was only the first of a long string of victories involving the Internet, 4

cameras, and near-miraculous acts of daring. Even at the age of thirteen, his intuitive understanding of how people chose what to watch and how to entertain themselves was remarkable.

Yet there was no way to measure it, no teacher who stumbled upon evidence of his talents. Even his own parents seemed unaware, beyond the pleasantries common in families of the time, that they were raising a remarkable young man. But Vance himself knew, and had decided to be unceasingly extraordinary.

As Machiavelli advised, he lived his life as if the world were watching. Though he sometimes expected the world to follow suit, he must have sensed that it never could. In a text he sent his cousin shortly after turning seventeen, he complained: SOME OF THESE PEOPLE ACT LIKE THEY’RE LIVING IN A CAVE ALL THE TIME. SERIOUS, WE CAN ALL SEE YOU IDIOT.4 See what I mean?

BellT&ATSchaung.

ARN

WELLS HAMILTON

FIRST SEMESTER, SECOND HALF

SUBMIT & MINGLE AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY THE AUDIENCE

Waking up on my dorm room floor, dirty carpet, hitting the come down hard like nose bones on diving boards.

Now grasping at last romance like cheap glitter on the rave girl’s face, dime store constellations shortly after she’s puked.

My alarm clock digs me like a grave robber and I’m back from the dead. Cadaverous, and every girl I ever had was a necrophiliac, getting off on rigor mortis.

As for why the prose...

I’m doing this for those who know why dusky cars roll round crowded neighborhoods late at night. Who understand that desperately lonesome, worthlessly Sisyphean search for Something in nothing.

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Me, I’m sick with the sudden bleak realization that I did everything I was supposed to and I’m still not happy.

So you can watch me on your flat screens, Building shelter inside absurdity, like how you cut your camel open when the sun starts stumbling in an abandoned diamond desert.

And Currently, I’m Using my county mug shot with the white backdrop for my linked in profile picture.

Bat mitzvah bartenders pour glasses as I ask for the pitcher. Oh because life’s too damn long to always be sober.

Yet Mostly I just feel like the empty space between cockhead and condom, that clear yellow bubble of empty, waiting for defunded cum during a drunk fuck done with neither intent nor enthusiasm.

Man’s real curse is that drugs don’t last forever.

Meanwhile, I’m leaning over fashionable barstools slurring hey babe, we got them complementing crippling afflictions, You and I, paired like mismatched socks in some schizo’s top drawer.

But us Basic bitches feel no love. Watching apathetically as her eyes swipe me left in some platonic live action tinder.

HAMILTON

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Flash forward and I’m sitting in coal mines counting dead finches, still looking for gold but ignoring cave-ins behind me.

Idiot. No one gets rich in the west by finding gold. You get rich in the west by founding a brothel.

So for now, All my Sunday nights are spent Forming shadow puppets in a wind blown lightless room, with opera music blaring, softly Smoking bath salts in my dare t-shirt after a long hard day of doing nothing.

My life is just this ever growing list of shit I started doing ironically but now do seriously.

My best friend is an imaginary double barrel that talks only in explosions.

We chat, idled on subway platforms, groveling tritely about political efficacy, fate and faith.

I Saw a sign yesterday that just read “sometimes you need a miracle.” Checked my pockets and found that I was fresh out.

I’m guessing God sends pigeons when he’s shit out of doves.

But Really, We’re just a million odd goldfish crammed into a dusty petco tank, sliming over each other on our way to nowhere else. And The universe is looking in apathetically with its

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nose running, absently wondering if we ate the one in the corner.

I don’t know the answers and I’m tired of asking the questions And Found no god worth emptying wallets for.

Besides, besides of course holy holy latter day liquor, and hallowed be its name. Tipping back bottles Till I’m sweating gin and crying vodka onto blasé city sidewalks.

Fuck it. Hell.

This whole poem is a masturbation.

Thanks.

HAMILTON

ALANA SOLIN

DION VALE

4×4 AWARD WINNER

THERE IS BOYS LAUGHING at me and God I can feel the railroad track throbbing beneath my spine. I ask them the only question I can now why and they say nothing for a long time then one says you deserve this and the others laugh and nod and crow and You deserve this you deserve this you deserve this but then the pretty boy is coming up to me and kneeling beside me and he says Hello my name is Eric my uncle’s name was Oliver do you hear me? He was the Oliver. They swept him from this town in a waterlogged coffin and now it is your turn. Because we know your father killed

him. You have been raised for slaughter like a pig. My uncle died and now so will you little pig. We have killed you.

Say I You have no idea what you’re doing say I I will never leave this place now if I die.

Say he Oliver will take you from this place and Oliver will eat you whole.

Oliver will take you Dion Vale and you will die deep.

Say he nothing more and I am run over by a train.

My body is sliced in two and I am dead. The boys come out from the brush; one of them heaves and spews

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breakfast heartily. Another boy grabs him by the shoulder and punches him in the face so his nose is skewed sideways.

They all go to the top half of my body, untie my hands. Don’t touch him on the surface Eric says. But the rope burns! says a different one. Can’t make it look like murder! Eric laughs and say he Don’t touch him they’ll fade. They untie my feet too.

The boy starts throwing up again.

Eric grabs him by the jacket. We live in Dion Vale now say he they will name this town after him when they find him dead and we will be swimming in the blood of Dion Vale and don’t you dare drown and don’t you dare tell or else I’ll

drown you. The boy spits up on Eric.

Fuck this Eric knees him where it hurts we’re gonna have to get cleaned up. You’ve fucked up now you hear me? The boy is crying now saying I wanna go home I wanna go home oh Jesus Christ can’t we lay him somewhere good on a hilltop oh Jesus Christ. Eric grabs the boy’s neck and pulls him down so he is looking right into my face. You see this? Eric yells you fucking did this and you are knee-deep in Dion Vale and if you ever tell I will kill you and not just you but any of you. All the boys flinch. He’s with Oliver now and Oliver will swallow him whole and Oliver will leave this place and so will Dion Vale.

SOLIN

ALANA SOLIN

EUSTACE I woke up this morning In a raging saltwater sea Did the crossword; empirical uselessness And Oh Dali; single word, AlmanacLetter In A Bottle, Pelican, Two AcrossSleep Easy Lion in the charred sand. Two great Gentle paws. Four Down, Seven AM, Like broken dam breaking dry land, like Deep rain, like Deep Dam, like Die DeepSleep Easy

ALANA SOLIN

WHITE RICE NO WOLVES strange to think of the same salt volcano we came from, and strange to think that i wish it had stayed quiet, and strange to think that we need a mountain with vast black shoulders and a pangaeic mind to keep us asleep. strange to think of this house. this white rice no wolves house. this wet comb cold finger house. this house like a leaf sinking into dirty water. lord i want warm milk, lord i want your fat ringed fingers skittering across this wooden tabletop, lord i want you to stop laughing circles around me. lord i think yours was the voice i lurched toward when i was only a swab of dark hot cells keening for light.

ALANA SOLIN

SIMON & SOL Last night my best friend kicked his brother’s face in so I closed my eyes and watched these two boys get pulled apart by wolves.

When it was over my heart was engorged like a tick and the brother ran and my best friend stood with his big hands held out fingers splayed.

I never met a boy with so many throats in his mouth and I never met a boy who whimpers in dry cisterns and I love him yellow-fever.

The wind is wet and the cistern is dry and I want to beat him into a shape that I recognize but I can’t so I let him howl and howl most rabidly.

LIV LANSDALE

KITCHEN EXEGESIS “To be single is to be unsure if the milk’s gone bad.” — Eileen Myles After you called._.I Twisted Cap to smell.

I recognized the expiration date.

I scheduled an in-home visit.

I read the Nutrition Facts. I Experienced the._.Magic when and where I needed it. I broke down the parts and recycled the raw materials. I._.wrapped the empties in paper and sealed the bag.

I Placed it into Any U.S. Mail._.Box. I Always tested for best results.

I did not send back returns

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or defective products. I did not chat with._.Customer Service. I received no Credit or Refunds.

I Prepared for the._.Containment of new or used parts.

I Honored the Trademarks of Respected Owners. I Always tested for best results. I Rejected items._.on which the silver area had been scratched. I tossed everything with a broken._.seal; I checked back for the latest deals.

I safely disregarded Empty Ink warnings and Continued to Print Normally. I Always tested for

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best results. They wrote._.No Boundaries and I believed it.

I Imagined the Possibilities.

I Engaged._.Connected. Grew. I._.Got the Most out of my Exclusive Invite to Discover all This._. and More.

I got._.as close as the objects appear.

I Always Tested._.for Best Results.

I Found a Wealth of Creative._.Resources in._.One Convenient._.Place! ._.They told._.me Hold Please._. ._.I Always ._.do as I’m._.told._.

KITCHEN EXEGESIS

JS MAARTEN

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BELOW US THE SLICE of silver peeked out, tail near the embankment, knocking dirt around as if a great weight was behind it. A larger mass in the run we couldn’t get an eyeful of. The tail finned out of the water, catching the current, and we ran toward the flashing fin before it dipped again and made for the deeper holes downstream.

Otto pulled out in front and halted, “I’m gonna go down between those banks. If it makes a run you make a run, don’t let it fly by us. Push it toward me and I’ll scoop it up.”

The other boy ran his buckteeth across his cracked lips and nodded. The plan was etched into something solid.

Our excitement at the prospect traced through the air, spanking the leaves on the low hanging trees. Bucktooth grinned. It was hard and too much teeth and sent a shiver up my spine.

Otto climbed the small embankment and dropped his body into the low running creek on the other side to flush the silver out while Bucktooth herded it with small sharp pebbles flung one right after the other into the water.

“I saw something,” Bucktooth yelled.

The water was low, sure, but it was fast and empty running over sediment.

It was impossible to tell how deep the middle went, but I knew Otto could wade in and still have control. Could throw his weight over the silver and beat it in a struggle. I scanned the water. Tracy stuck her walking stick in against the current. A flinty gold fin pierced the water, not silver at all. Otto pitched forward and threw himself down, knees first, into the water, his entire torso coming down on the gold mass. He scooped his arms, trying to hug the gold to him, but came up with nothing but air. Tracy and I stayed quiet, our breaths caught. Bucktooth kept shouting, his words running together, “Stay committed, stay on it.”

Otto cursed but dove again, this time blindly, the dirty creek water flushed his eyes and forced them closed. I yelled “Now,” afraid of the failure if he didn’t catch it. He thrust his arms out. It wiggled and flapped.

Otto almost lost it, almost let it run through his wet hands. He held it up

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against him, hooked its mouth and snapped its head back.

“It’s not as big as I thought,” Bucktooth said.

Otto looked over at Bucktooth, “Fine then. I’ll keep it.”

“Looks plenty big from here,” I said.

“I didn’t say all that now.”

Bucktooth said.

Otto held the gold closer, turned silver, turned gold again. “Tracy, how do you see this going?” he said.

“They don’t have a say,” Bucktooth said.

Tracy spat in his direction. It fell short of his feet. Bucktooth gave her the bird. Otto and Bucktooth made their way out of the water and collapsed onto the bank where they left their bikes. Tracy and I followed, keeping on the periphery.

“Get a branch,” Otto instructed Bucktooth.

“No, you’ll take it when I’m not looking. We need to figure it right here in front of each other.”

Otto flicked out his switchblade and the other boy’s eyes widened at the sight of it. Otto pulled the silver-gold

slithering mass, which ran the length of his torso away from his body and raised it up to eye level as best he could, considering the weight of it. He looked at me, then Tracy, and raised the knife, “We’ll halve it. That’s what we’ll do. Slice it right in half.”

THE VALLEY I LIVE IN lies in the shadow of the canyon. Bifurcated into two parts by an S-curve of hills from which two branches of water, what was once a river before the Dam was built and slowed it to nothing more than a creek, flow east and west. The creek, cut off from its source, has long ceased to be a danger to anyone. In winter we immersed our entire bodies and never worried about being overrun by it.

Shrunk to a trickle it rarely rose above what we could manage.

The town began as a center for manufacturing materials out of metal alloys. “Hardfacing,” they called it. Now it existed solely as a home to commuters and retirees who bought up their flat houses at a good price. Before the groves and brown

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hillsides were cut out to build tracks of split-levels packed tightly together.

Before the stucco buildings shot up one after the other atop asphalt with neatly painted lines big enough to contain compact cars. Before the chains and warehouse shopping.

THE CANYON BOYS stood around the clearing in the Redwoods. Otto, the heart, at the center. Tracy was braiding me a lanyard keychain in the shape of a long Rubik’s cube. For my house key, she told me. I was painting landscapes on the smooth faces of rocks with permanent marker. Trees, skylines with tiny birds, pop up houses I learned to make sort of three-dimensional. I tried drawing two kids playing by the trees but I wasn’t any good with people. The boy and girl looked the same, except she had hair. Their arms were too long, their feet blobs, no bones or toes.

“Let me see your feet,” I demanded.

Tracy leaned over to get a better look at the drawing. “You didn’t leave enough space.”

I took off my shoe, peeled the damp sock away from my skin and studied my foot to see if I could figure out the subtle curves and textures.

Sweat dripped down my arm onto the rock face. The heat stuck to my body compressing everything down to its smallest size. Otto was arguing with one of the older boys. One of those arguments that starts from nothing and escalates. It seemed they were about to fight until the others stepped in and someone mentioned the cable.

I thought it would have been better to let them fight it out but Otto and the older boy, a skate punk with a bleached Mohawk, grabbed gear out of the back of someone’s truck. The others gathered closer, placing bets on who would get there first. They returned, with carabiners, spikes, and rope and straddled the parallel Redwoods, dug their spikes in, and started their ascent.

Mohawk was faster. He was longer and lighter and floated up the tree. His arms and legs worked in even, fluid movements. I wanted him to catch on something, lose his grab. But he

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reached the cable first, no problem.

When Otto finally got up there, without a word he slung his rope around his gloved hands, a loop, and then around the cable strung up between the two trees. He hooked the loose end into his carabiner clip. He released his legs from the tree and hung from the cable until Mohawk told him he could stop.

I turned my head away not waiting for the end I knew was coming. He lasted awhile before his shoulders gave, the silence broken by the scream of pain.

The fold. Mohawk descended, appeased. Otto sat favoring his shoulder, his feet dangling from the tree until a boy climbed up and got him down. He wouldn’t take to the loss lightly.

THE SERENITY of the canyon was crippling until the neighborhood sanctioned a small roadhouse restaurant on the side of the winding paved road that runs for miles until it Ts off at the start of another town. The Canyon Boys were friendly with the bikers who passed through and clever

enough to develop the transient encounters into something more: specified drops and pick-ups and payments. The business was passed on to the younger brothers and cousins, the older boys aged out—but never truly out.

There were sisters of course, though in much fewer numbers than seemed natural. It was the water. Fed into the taps of the canyon houses, it proffered the families with a plethora of baby boys. One right after the other, swinging and climbing, kicking and rolling from one scrape to the next—boys. When a sister happened along, she was a token to the mothers. She watched her brothers run half-naked and painted in mud under the conifers and wondered why the water had missed her.

Tracy Boggs was the younger sister of a Canyon Boy and therefore naturally inferior to him in just about every way. The girl was double jointed. Awkward and bony, she was, in essence, miserable, and needed someone she could trust to attest to this misery. The friendship

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was my ticket into the canyon, into the wooded meet ups and occasional ragers the older boys would throw.

Tracy Boggs’ big brother E was the compass of the Canyon Boys. He ran a profitable ring with occasional harder scores. He had replaced an older boy who grew out of this life and moved upstate. Maybe got married, bought a clapboard Tudor in a small sea town and stayed there, silent and satisfied and forgetful of the dirtying deeds that preceded him. E took over the ring because he wanted to, not because he had to. An important distinction, and one he liked to remind us of.

Tracy and I were his runners, foot soldiers who handled the canyon territories. We knew the times, drops, pickups. There was to be no human interaction, not even with each other.

E showed us the routes until we were machines of precision. 2:05pm here, 3:15pm there, never a mistake or an appointment forgotten. The money was better than any other after school part-time anything and it allowed the chance to map out the canyon in my

mind, to know the grooves and length of the creek, its steady meandering so slow to be almost motionless but still feeding, always feeding, a river we never saw. I wanted to know it as well as any boy did—better.

Noiseless, we walked behind E and padded up the back porch stairs as cats on a hunt. We were small, could slip in and out of places unnoticed. We didn’t knock. E pointed out the rock pile shaped almost intentionally for leaving things behind or for finding. A DVD, still in the wrapping. We snatched up the item, put it in our packs and went on our way in one fluid movement as we followed E to the next pickup.

The packages were never what we thought: CDs, or DVDs, brand new, a disposable phone or small packages of coaxial cables. We kept it quiet.

When we got better we split off from one another to cover more area.

Tracy braided her hair back and kept her pack filled with pint-sized survival gear, a real pioneer. I planned out my routes so as to reduce the most unnecessary steps from point A to point

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B, memorizing landmarks to keep track. I used the time on the backroads, empty and tranquil, to think ahead, plan any last minute calculations I had to make if I wanted to cover more area. I made assessments, judgments, and always, always watched for the giveaway, a sign of trouble. A follower maybe, someone on the lookout I was too comfortable to notice. I loved these afternoons spent inside of moments rather than watching them. Each drop, each schedule adjustment.

On a walk through the Redwood trail I saw the boy. He was new. I never forgot faces and I watched his from behind a tree unnoticed. He walked alone, barechested, shirt tucked into the back pocket of his Dickies. A couple years older than me, fifteen maybe, but a scrawny fifteen, slight.

One broken twig and he’d see me, my upper hand gone. I dropped back behind and tracked him, neither of us making a sound, matched in stealth.

The spell broke with a crack of a leaf.

We locked gazes for a second before I took off, him behind me. I hurtled

logs and rocks, my shoulders brushing trunks, leaving bruises. E would never have let me do another drop if I was caught with anything, or worse, if I lost it to this punk. The sound of him after me still in my ears, I ducked behind someone’s woodshed straight across the yard and through the back door, crouched down in some rando’s laundry room with only my own ragged breathing until I figured I lost him.

E GRADUATED US UP to larger packages.

A show of trust I endeavored to earn.

Most operated on a no-contact basis, everything necessary was found in the drop zone. But others, the ones that didn’t care about consequences because they never felt them, never saw one face to face, let us inside.

I walked up to a house covered in stack stone with a red door. Like all the other houses at the top of the mountainous ridge, it misled with its cozy cabin exterior, narrow facade and log siding. Inside, the ceilings soared.

A canopy ceiling carved of exotic rosewood and teak, cut in with large

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glass skylights so shifting sun rays could pierce everything in the house softening the angles of walls meeting ceilings meeting floors until it was all stitched together. One glowing space smelling of scented candles and Mr. Clean. The non-English-speaking maid ushered me in with a quick smile and averted eyes, past the welcome mat and exuberant Labrador, through the open floor plans and spotless family room. We walked, glided really, over the wide planking, my body as settled as the furniture. I soaked up my reflection in the floor to ceiling windows, the canyon stretched out beneath the house, a floating island. The sounds of the house, the soft humming of appliances and groans of the wood under foot moved in rhythm with the time tick of my stopwatch as I awaited instruction. Waited to leave again.

A woman walked in carrying an oversized mug with mom printed on the side. Short and blond, I imagined she drove an SUV, not too luxurious but leather interior for sure. Took her kids to baseball practice with the small

pocket dog she kept in the front seat with her at all times.

She offered me a cup of tea. It was always tea. She held out a tin filled with small round cookies dusted in sugar but I politely declined. It is important to be polite when declining.

Words to the wise from E. We chatted weather, always sweltering but we talked as if that might change somehow. As if we’d wake up to unfamiliar surroundings, a world frozen over, a hope and a fear both. Business came up. She passed me my package. Shoes. Unwrapped.

Never wrapped. Though sometimes in a brown paper bag with brown string handles. It was usually shoes. Adidas or Nike, Puma on occasion. Thick soled and brand new, tags still on them, snugly tucked inside their box between stiff tissue paper. Electronics sometimes. Once there was a twelvepiece nativity set, all hand-painted. A personal favorite.

Tracy and I never went on runs together or talked about what we saw inside the houses. We didn’t have

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to. We could smell it on each other.

Tracy said she didn’t need the runs.

Other than to impress the Canyon Boys she went because there was purpose to it, a needed skill. Suddenly we had a say in a world beyond what was allowed us.

Every night she would prepare us for the next day making sandwiches, turkey on rye not wheat with mustard no mayo. She peeled carrots down to the nub and bagged them with store bought chocolate chip cookies her mom bought in bulk. She would hand me mine, and place her own along with two juice boxes into a plastic shopping bag and knot the top. This she set in her pack with an extra pair of clean dry socks and napkins that doubled for any type of paper product in need while out. I knew Tracy was always waiting for the short end of the stick. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that no matter what we did, we would never be rid of wanting more.

Tracy’s family wasn’t poor. Her dad made good money. So good her mom didn’t work. Watched a lot of soaps

and daytime talk. Tracy couldn’t stand the blunt voices squawking from the set that never shut off. Her mom did everything amidst that TV: cooked, folded laundry, even vacuumed with one eye on the images at all times. But as nice as her mom made it, the Boggs’ house wasn’t like the ones we went into at the very top of the canyon. The ones that slid down last if the land gave, crushing all of the houses underneath it. The Boggs’ house was a middle rung split-level. It was enough to provide security, but security they had to earn.

On a break, we took a shortcut we found, narrow and dank and heavy with trees, all the way up to the Moller ranch. Ever since the Moller brothers died one afternoon while trying to land their helicopter with the wind, the ranch has changed many hands.

It’s been a resort, a country club, a health spa, but no one ever stays long enough to claim it.

We sat on our flannels spread out like beach towels. The weeds poked our skin as we sipped sodas and ate our snacks, tucking the plastic wrappings

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into our pockets to avoid leaving a trace of ourselves. We watched the empty ranch and created several scenarios for its ghost inhabitants, aberrations, our own distortions of lives lived. The more elaborate the better.

“Undertaker,” Tracy said.

“Family business,” I said. “Generational thing.”

“They use the barns to store the bodies,” Tracy said. “Instead of horses and hay it’s embalming fluid and caskets.

They rent the parlor for funerals.”

“His wife and daughter dress all the corpses and do the makeup,” I said. “And the daughter wants to marry the —” “The town florist,” Tracy offered.

“Horticulturist,” I said. “He raises orchids and the daughter loves orchids.

They are finicky but she loves them.

Her father won’t let her leave. Who will take over his business and paint faces on the dead people if she runs off with the horticulturist who brings her flowers in secret?”

“No son?” Tracy said.

“No.” We kept on with the horticulturist

and undertaker’s daughter sitting on the dead grass drinking our colas until the house shrank, compressed by dusk.

The encroaching shadows swallowed the sides of the wide stone porch.

Then the columns went dim, the line between the roof overhang and siding softened. The windows went dark and with them our ability to spin stories.

We sat quiet in the center of the circular clearing where the paved driveway looped around the front and watched the line of the horizon as it changed colors before settling on a humming blue-green, as if the world had flipped upside down and we were now in a vacuum of space at the bottom of the sea.

IN THE SUMMER we weren’t bound to anything and had the mornings to ourselves. Tracy got it in her head to take her brother’s BB gun out shooting.

She found the key to E’s locked case where he kept guns in the garage. We left before anyone was up and walked the length of the creek skipping stones and digging out what we thought were

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fossils from the darker muddier soil.

We washed our fossils clean in the creek and hung them from the trees.

Our own carved clan. We took aim at rodents running loose the way we’d seen the younger boys do, but we always kicked a bit before we got off a squeeze.

Sent it so far off track nothing ever hit.

Tracy spotted a rabbit not too far off and swung the gun up taking aim. I stood as still as the rabbit and held my breath.

It wasn’t the pop of the gun that sent the rabbit running but E’s voice cursing us. We tried to make a run for it but he was already behind us taking a handful of Tracy’s hair as he yanked her entire body back, reducing her to her knees while he grabbed the BB gun from her hands. He shoved her face into the ground and held it there while she begged. My body formed a protest but I stayed put as he pointed a finger straight between my eyes and let it hover without a word. He stood up and walked away stuffing the gun in the space near the small of his back.

I sat next to Tracy still on the ground; her face pulled so tight it looked on the brink of collapse. Not knowing which

word would send her over the edge, I didn’t say any.

The next time I saw the boy it was late afternoon. We had foraged a pile of fallen branches several inches in diameter we tied together with rope, courtesy of Tracy’s dad’s shed, in a crisscrossed pattern and built a structure between two twin trees. We used tarpaulin scavenged out of a neighbor’s junk pile and tied it over the top. From our vantage point flat on our bellies inside our den we had pretty good visibility on the outside world for about fifty feet or so.

The boy emerged from behind a tree into a clearing about ten yards away. He looked right at us, an animal caught, and started in the opposite direction. We yelled at him to wait up, which only made him move faster. We bolted out of the den and took chase.

He wove in and out of the trees like a pro as we pushed ourselves to go even faster but he was older than us, stronger, longer-legged, and had a great lead.

Tracy hurtled a fallen log and I narrowly missed getting slapped in the face by a low hanging branch. He kept

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on as if he couldn’t hear us calling him back. My lungs were on fire and even Tracy who had the advantage of height was slowing. We gave it up, bent over and gasping for air, our hands on our knees as we watched the boy’s back grow smaller while he put more distance between us.

“My brother hasn’t mentioned any new boys,” Tracy said.

I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to give him away. Maybe he just wandered too far from home.

We looked for the boy for days.

Stayed out later than usual, took longer routes on our runs, but we didn’t see him anywhere. Tracy wondered if he was a ghost, an aberration made real, or just some drifter kid who somehow found himself on our side of the trees.

We headed up the face toward the top, ready for ritual, our sodas in our packs, and came face-to-face with a “Private Property” fence constructed overnight. It surrounded the Moller ranch, preventing us access. We walked back down the hill guessing at what it was to be this time.

A Rent-a-Horse, we decided. The boy must be theirs, Tracy said. A stable boy.

THE HEAT was an easy excuse to party, to let out steam. “Ventilators,” they called them.

This one was under the cable, more exclusive than having it at someone’s parent’s house. It was harder to find, it didn’t have an address. Under the cable was where business got done. Only the girls the Canyon Boys really wanted there would know where to go and persevere enough to find it.

Kegs were set up in each corner of the clearing. Several ice chests filled with bottles of liquor were dragged out as makeshift benches. The forest was lit by an unnatural yellow glow by portable floodlights the boys mixed in with the trees. Someone’s stereo was propped lopsided against a tree, reducing conversation to a dull hum.

Tracy and I didn’t dare drink since the time we took a bottle of Wild Turkey from E and spent half the night in a corner throwing up brown liquid we took turns burying under dirt. Now we just watched the procession perched on a log. High school girls trickled in. They smoked too many cigarettes and brought their

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own magic Minute Maid they set out in a giant glass dispenser. The ones without boyfriends who were there to score let their hyena laughs rip and sidled up next to the boys they had their eyes on, chests first. The Canyon Boys kept refilling the girls’ drinks, the crowd in the clearing depleting by twos.

We saw the boy from the woods show up, alone, unannounced, quiet and shifty, before anyone else did. Someone had to have invited him. But the ripple the boy caused when he walked through the party and headed straight for the red plastic cups stacked next to a keg said otherwise. The dimming of voices as the boys watched him drain beer after beer, more out of nervousness than thirst, as if the very act of drinking their beer would suddenly make him one of them, make him safe from them, signified his appearance as a tragic accident. He didn’t know.

I spotted Otto gathering a small crowd of boys. His eyes darted over to the new boy and back to the huddle.

Otto’s hands grew increasingly more animated. His shoulders tensed. The other boys cracked their necks and

balled their fists. Tracy looked at me, her breathing calm and steady but her face revealed what I couldn’t say, a panic, visible and increasing right beneath the pale blue surface of her irises. The boy found a bottle of Jack and poured some into his plastic cup. Two blondes from E’s high school walked over to him. Maybe out of mercy. Maybe they thought he was cute in his awkward, unclaimed shuffling. He seemed relieved, grateful. We should have done it then, chased him off as we had a couple weeks ago. The girls laughed. The boy smiled.

THE ROCK CAME DOWN hard at the base of the boy’s skull but I would be lying if I said I knew the hand it was attached to. He was hidden by a circle of slightly older, taller, bulkier Canyon Boys who had congregated too close to him to have anything other than violence in mind. It could have been as simple and as meaningless as a sideways glance or a look, perceived by the others, deep in their hazy, alcohol-infused animosity, as a challenge. The truth was those two details were as much of an afterthought as the semicircle of rage

MAARTEN

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 2 - PAGE 63

that dropped on top of the boy only to clear as quickly as disturbed beetles when they realized it was unnecessary.

E walked over and lifted him up, the dark pool spreading beneath him. Tracy ran over and I followed. E told us to hold him upright, get him to breathe, but the rock had damaged him past what we were ever prepared for.

E worked quickly with the few who didn’t scatter, Otto’s face not among them. He placed a larger boulder by the boy’s head and handed the bloodsmeared rock to Tracy. Told her to take it to the creek to rinse it clean. We were believably bloodied, E said. Though we heard and understood his words we did not comprehend them then. He told us to wait nearby for the swarm of ambulances and cops that came and went. We sat there with the boy on us and stayed silent. The memory of it locked into the muscles of our faces.

The boy was drinking. The boy was drunk. He wanted to climb.

“Nasty fall,” E said.

“Yes,” we said.

They agreed. The newspapers and local stations and eventually the police, and all the parents and the headlines screaming Casualty in the Canyon and things went dark for a while.

Tracy and I only saw each other in the halls at school as we passed one another, our gazes never leaving the yellowed linoleum.

I found out months later the Moller ranch was sold to some orthopedic surgeon, with a wife, two sons, young, under ten both of them.

The boy’s family lived on a small cement slab in the flats close to my neighborhood. They hadn’t lived there long. Needless to say they didn’t stay, left almost overnight. Replaced by a young commuter couple with matching gas-efficient subcompact cars.

FOOT SOLDIERS

EDWARD LEE

’NOTHER ROUND A MAN WITH A HEAD like an unshelled walnut—and a nose like a shelled walnut—sits obliquely to the unleveled bar. He lights a cigarette that turns out to not be a cigarette. It’s not even weed. I don’t care to ask what it might be. This place is nutty.

My friend Sandy, dishearteningly self-aware that he has a personality as abrasive as sandpaper, uses hand motions to signal the barkeep for three (more) beers—Sandy’s fingers shaped like a pitchfork. I hear a cooler lid open from behind the bar; this is not a good sign. The barkeep brings us three cans of Mexican lager, lukewarm due to the expired ice of the cooler, and leaves. No limes, no salt. What chicanery.

And Ginger says, “You know what, gents? This isn’t the right bar.” His voice ascends in a drunken hiccup as he shamelessly confesses his guilt in—yet again—leading us to the wrong goddamn bar.

EDWARD LEE

TO CALVARY

BY WAY OF SODOM

BY SEVEN, BOTH MEN were mounted up, whiskeyed up, and moving up through the alpine timberline of the Backbone Mountains. By nine, they had crested the eastern slope of Coccyx Mountain, leaving behind tall forests of cedar. On the ridgeline, the small envoy paused, and with the sun at their backs, all of them—including the horses—inhaled the view.

They saw phallic sandstone monuments standing proud and erect amongst sporadic sand dunes. Patches of Joshua tree replaced the grand foliage of eastern Backbone slopes. Even though the Joshua trees dwarfed the cedars, their gnarled bodies supplanted the sublimity of the cedars. Jed took the moment to pack his lower gum with shredded tobacco, where it would bake under his lip like the shards of sandstone on the eastern slope of the mountain in the sun.

“I reckon we hit desert country,” Jed mumbled through the tobacco in his mouth.

“I reckon so.”

“The cabin should be about nineteen klicks yonder,” Jed motioned with his left fist clenched towards the southwest.

“It’s going to be a good day,” said Limerick. It was all the conversation warranted.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WE FEEL DEEP GRATITUDE TOWARD EVERYONE WHO HAS HELPED US TO DREAM, MAKE, AND SHARE THIS MAGAZINE. To the students of last year’s board who founded this project and brought us along for the ride, Sarina and Aliza, we admire you more than ever. To the team that created our Kickstarter campaign last year and to everyone who generously donated to it, thank you for enabling our work. To Ben Fountain, who judged our award, thank you for your commitment. To everyone whose writing we have had the honor of reading and hearing throughout this year, thank you for continually delighting us with your talent. To the groups that have co-hosted our events and supported us, we are so glad to be part of such a vibrant community. To our editors, who have fought hard and stayed late for work they cared about, we do not forget that you are the bird-feathers and ribcage of this project, and that this magazine is entirely indebted to your passion.

CONTRIBUTORS

JACKSON ARN is a senior studying English.

The first story he ever wrote was about aliens invading the Earth. They won.

CHRISTOPHER THOMAS DAVIES generally refuses to identify as anything in particular, yet has no particular reservation identifying with anything in general.

That said, his 4×4 bio-blurb reductively labels him “a self-made synthesist.”

WELLS HAMILTON is a first-year in Columbia College.

CHET KING™ // STUDIES THEATER & ANTHRO // CC 16 // THE FACTS ARE STILL UNDISPU TED

LIV LANSDALE totally didn’t end her last relationship over an emoticon.

EDWARD LEE is a junior in General Studies, majoring in Creative Writing.

Upon graduation, he plans on being a stay-at-home dad in his home state of Alaska.

FRANKIE LYON is a first-year Columbia College.

in

JS MAARTEN is way excited to be included in 4×4 Vol 2 and receive her degree in Creative Writing from Columbia in the same year. She’s hoping this will offset the harsh reality that she will soon be joining

the swollen ranks of unemployed writers and artists trying to hawk poems for pennies. You can usually catch her snacking on the cheese at open mic nights or in one of the many empty seats at the Cinema.

his head often, but ultimately settles on what he and his internalized guilt deem to be the more responsible, safe life path. Authorities say that he was last seen drowning in a pool of panna cotta.

CAMILLE PETERSEN is a sophomore studying Anthropology and Psychology.

She thanks her loved ones for their encouragement and willingness to put up with her weird ideas.

ALANA SOLIN is a first-year in Columbia College. She grew up in a New Jersey suburb and is trying to write about it less.

PJ SAUERTEIG is a senior Creative Writing major who plans on shirking his creative talents to pursue a corporate career. He turns this decision over in

ROSALIND BAZETT WATSON identifies as a human person and a Hufflepuff. She enjoys words, bad jokes, and refusing to carry or own an umbrella.

Sponsored in part by the ARTS INITIATIVE at COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. This funding is made possible through a generous gift from The Gatsby Charitable Foundation.

NO 2 2015