The Grinnell Review Fall 2017

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Copyright © 2017 by the Student Publications and Radio Committee (SPARC).

The Grinnell Review, Grinnell College’s semi-annual undergraduate arts and literary magazine, is a student-produced journal devoted to the publication of student writing and artwork. Creative work is solicited from the entire student body and reviewed anonymously by the corresponding Writing and Arts Committees. Students are involved in all aspects of production, including selection of works, layout, publicity, and distribution. By providing a forum for the publication of creative work,The Grinnell Review aims to bolster and contribute to the art and creative writing community on campus.

Acknowledgments: The work and ideas published in The Grinnell Review belong to the individuals to whom such works and ideas are attributed to and do not necessarily represent or express the opinions of SPARC or any other individuals associated with the publication of this journal. © 2017 Poetry, prose, artwork and design rights return to the artists upon publication. No part of this publication may be duplicated without the permission of SPARC, individual artists or the editors. typeface for the body text is Palatino and the typeface for the titles is Didot.

Cover art: Horns | Charlotte Richardson-Deppe| plywood Inner over art: Approximate Contours (Obscured by Trees) II| Anne Rogers | ballpoint pen and graphite on paper Inner title art: Ventana y Flores Amarillas| Sofia Mendez | photo collage All editorial and business correspondence should be addressed to: Grinnell College c/o Grinnell Review Grinnell, IA 50112 www.grinnellreview.com

LIV | Fall 2017 ARTS SELECTION COMMITTEE Cecily Smith Rodas Hailu Abdiel Lopez

EDITORS Julia Shangguan Thanh Mai Jeremy Epstein Leinā‘ala Voss

WRITING SELECTION COMMITTEE Clara Trippe Mary Rose Bernal Mallory Bergthold Josie Sloyan Andrea Baumgartel Rachel Eber Emma Heikkinen Shida Jing

Contents W riting Steven Duong Ghazals for Young Thug 43

Andrea Baumgartel

Gibberfishing 11

Precursed 18 Mallory Bergthold Ode to a Dying Love Ally Cottrell

I Think, to Try

Hyunji Eom Side by Side

14 15

Peter Sills Curl, Swirl, Spiral

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Miriam Tibbets

Cameras Eurydice Ignores the Blues Hollows

44 8 43

Clara Trippe

Geophagia Not a Prayer But a Revelation In August and Unseasonably Cold

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10 13 17

A rt Naomi Clayton

Grand Tetons

Steens Mountain Mustang

12 42

Steven Duong

Poem on Red Envelope

45

Helen Lant

Stage 5

40

Sofia Mendez

Girl and Moon

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Julia Shangguan

Hold Me America

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Leina’ala Voss Fields 10

Fungi 14

Charlotte Richardson-Deppe Horns

Tears

16 36

Lydia James

Danger Cat Garden Gem

44

18 33

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Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, Not much stays put in this life. Perhaps Ferris said it best: “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” And yet, it would be hard to miss the changes which have been brewing recently, both on campus and in the world.

For the first time in some years, Bob’s was unavailable to host our writing workshops and review committees. The administration’s surprise announcement that the student-run space would be closed this year was baffling, if not uncharacteristic, and it saddens us to think that first-years now know Bob’s only as an inaccessible place, if they know it at all. Here, as in our national politics, institutional memory is short, and even little changes can contribute to large cultural shifts before long. What is to be done in the face of such dispiriting developments?

One answer is to bear witness, to document; to make a testament of who we were and what we did while we were here. This is how we think of the Review: a momentary glimpse into the creative life of our community. We hope that in this act of preservation, we lay strong foundations for memory, and thus for tradition; that regardless of whether you are picking this up in 2017 or 2019, or 2050, you are able to tap into what is going on here in this moment.

We would like to thank SPARC for their unwavering support, Jim Sigmon at ColorFX for all of his hard work and patience, and the Faulconer Gallery staff for welcoming us into this wonderful space. And of course, a huge thank you to all the artists and writers who lent their work toward making this all possible. Don’t stop what you’re doing — we’re counting on you.

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- The Editors arts Julia Shangguan ‘18, Leinā‘ala Voss ‘18 writing Jeremy Epstein ‘18.5, Thanh Mai ‘18

“Then, in college, I had to choose between reading and Keystone Light, and I chose Keystone.”

Ben Percy, speaking at Grinnell College, August ‘17

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Eurydice Ignores the Blues Miriam Tibbets Everyone I know

is obsessed with Eurydice: sung out of the tree in to the arms of the first man she ever met, dead soon after,

the beautiful nymph.

How she must have loved Orpheus.

That’s the general opinion.

But the Eurydice I know

gets chapped lips in Hell, and has a hankering for beeswax; and it’s apparently none of her

beeswax who comes to look

for her in the fields of Asphodel—

“just follow me dummy,

follow the light.”

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She gets a sunburn in the few seconds it takes for her to recognize Orpheus, and then he fucks up, and it’s back

to the dark for the sheeplike Eurydice, the snakebite still leaking venom.

What’s worse,

there’s no aloe in Asphodel.

The Eurydice I know Isn’t sad when the satyrs later rip Orpheus

to shreds.

“What did I want?” She asks herself.

“Did I want him?”

Then she remembers,

as the dead often don’t:

fields of flowers, and rage.

She wanted to disappear.

So when Orpheus’s groping, disembodied hands come for her in Hell, when his arms clasp her to his dead chest,

she turns away into the night.

His fingers fumble at her skirts like he’s playing the lyre again,

his best sexual weapon, his forte, his downfall.

His fingers grab at her ankles, her breasts, her cringing face, however, the Eurydice I know slips back between the dead,

disappears in the field.

She is cocooned within herself,

whole, no longer a sapling, and to Hell with the songs of great lovers.

They only loved her

to death.

Girl and Moon | Sofia Mendez| photo collage

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Geophagia Clara Trippe In my dreams its not that I can smash planets together but if I did, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Can you imagine: spheres in your palms like a basketball, as you shake the trees and mountains and people off. Can you imagine: being the black thing on the screen that is always swallowing.

There is a body, and I think it is a boy, but he doesn’t smash planets, he touches nothing.

His violence is implied by a blank face, no eyes.

I spoke to him with the wide mouth I want to swallow planets with.

The gravity was so heavy, so we clung to our lowest corners. I wanted to kiss the ground and have it break from the force of my tongue. There is no way to go but down, I will tell him, my mouth stained by clay. And then I will tumble, and at some point I will realize I am falling alone, and it is this, not the impact, that wakes me.

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Fields | Leinā‘ala Voss

Gibberfishing Andrea Baumgartel The light slaps silly the lake a plastic egg enigma or a jar of childhood jelly.

Uncapped for flies and boaters in disguise as baiters slipping through that frilly-frightful dream soup. We see

|screenprint, screenprint ink

and dance. The lake is luck. There are no fish any more. Eggs maybe.

Jelly, maybe.

Breakfast on me.

I’ll see you at the see.

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Grand Tetons| Naomi Clayton|photograph 12

Not A Prayer But A Revelation Clara Trippe I was born in a house caved in on all sides.

I didn’t ask him to leave. I did. My first words fell into the rubble. I asked him to shut the door, for privacy. The whites of his eyes. Gaze toward the ceiling. I was left opened. I was left in one piece. My first steps left me with dust around my ankles. We danced on red brick and I forgot who said what. Who wanted who.

I was born and the house caved in on all sides.

My first sounds were drowned under ash and dust and insulation floating down, anointing my forehead. The door was shut, because I had asked him to. There was blood.

There wasn’t. He said “you are so beautiful.”

The noises I made slid across the floor, away from both of us. They were not words, not ones I had learned to say. I grew up bloodless, like the coral I saw in picture books. A dog turned his face and took my cheek. I turned to give him my other. I said no. I didn’t. I said, “this is not what I wanted to happen.” I don’t remember who started it. It could have been me. There was not blood that night, but the next morning, a slow bleed between my legs. Caved in on all sides.

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Ode to a Dying Love Mallory Bergthold The clamor scarcely fazes you as hammers strike iron nails And saws get busy cleaving wood like butchers cleave a cow This screeching shrillness pierces ears in painful grating wails Yet still you stand and labor there as sawdust cakes your brow The screams of severed two by fours drown out a dire fact: Your trade is dying like the battery of your old screwdriver.

The noise and twisting bits will slow until the lights go black And you will stand there wondering how to possibly revive her.

You shudder thinking your first love is terminally ill Your hands had ached to build and make ever since your youth And now in her decrepitude you keep loving her still As though her lust for hardened steel is not the dirty truth.

Into the grave you’ll slave for her ‘til she keels over, too Disciple of a fated trade you wish you could eschew.

Fungi | Leinā‘ala Voss | unfired clay 14

I Think, To Try Ally Cottrell I think, to try I think I know my brain, you see, The way she trains and plots and schemes To make dim memories believe Their golden opportunities.

But I fly high above my head And view hers as what could have been Had I then tried just once and led, Detached that swath up from the skin, Become a fully human form Instead of bird and conscious thing.

I plead, hug me and make me Warm Before I hate the words I bring.

The biggest questions, she and I

In what is what and where to try.

Fungi (detail) | LeinÄ â€˜ala Voss | unfired clay 15

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Horns | Charlotte Richardson-Deppe| plywood

In August and Unseasonably Cold Clara Trippe

I’ve waited a long time on the porch in spring.

I’ve understood very little of it, like I was under fever.

There is something in the back of my throat.

We curled underneath the wood pile and pressed out hands into the center of the tree rings, our fingertips splayed along the circumference like moons in orbit.

The feeling of loneliness; no mail at the door.

I want to have all of it, every last drop.

I want it to avalanche, changing the face of me.

There will be blood pumping down.

There will be eyes closed, frozen.

On our walk home, the sun hangs behind fog, burning haze over us. We ache and ache but nothing comes of it. Also, the sky doesn’t fall; it stays firmly above the power lines.

Can I say to you: this is where he touched me.

It doesn’t burn red but I still remember my fear.

That was yellow and soft. Here he is, hips next to my cheek and I am deep in the ocean, eating my tail. I am scaling the Himalayas. I am laying in my bed, alone.

Eyes closed, frozen.

He covers me in a blanket when he leaves.

This is the only thing that burns red.

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Precursed

Andrea Baumgartel – to, from mother

The trees rang their circles out to sounddry spun their trunks from the ground we raised our snouts we seem to track in faster moons each day dripping rainbow wax synaptic through the window my teller’s currency: stale we built a nest from that castle of cards each face an old expression weather gone bad wither gone mad we keep our tale spinning in timbres our head lost its color and blossomed: split white florets waiting 18

Garden | Lydia James| sharpie

Side by Side Hyunji Eom Before he dies, you watch him take a sip of the coffee you had given him two minutes prior, the drink’s steam curling up to touch the fogged panes of his glasses. He grimaces at the taste because you have recently switched over to almond milk, as you told him, and while he privately thinks that it’s not the American way, putting odd things in good coffee, he gamely slurps down the concoction as not to cause your face to crease in shame. It takes another two minutes for him to place his golden watch over his forehead, complaining of a headache. It takes one more for him to become confused about his wife’s potential return, although he had been the one to tell you about her business trip to Minnesota. Instead of responding, however, you sit in his lap, your head against his chest. He construes the shortness of breath as arousal. You watch his eyes roll up out of sight and listen to the rhythm pounding against your ears

shudder to a stop before standing up. His glasses are still misty with fog. And despite your promise to leave the premises immediately, you watch him for a long time before turning away.

You want to explain. You are not a murderer.

You are just a woman. You are a just woman, but you are so invisible against the grey sidewalks, and so insignificant compared to the ambitious giants that reside in other human beings, that you needed to do something to feel worthy of a phenomenon greater than yourself. You needed a desirable identity, and David allowed you to be not just seen, but desired.

David is—-was—-a kind man; he was a good man, and your affair with him was neither short nor superficial. You were there by his side when he married, and divorced, and married again. You sat on cream-colored loveseats to peer into blurred photographs of family vacations along beachside

this is how you break every promise to yourself and enter his life.

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boardwalks and skiing in the Alps. You watched videos of his son’s birthday parties, filled with chocolate frosting and dripping candles and baby babble. You borrowed his wife’s terrycloth bathrobes on weekends when she was gone, just to take them off minutes later for luxurious hour-long bath soaks. Surrounded by the scents of lavender and rosehips and oranges, you gloried in laying claim to a man named David and a bed with an Egyptian thread number too high for you to ever stay awake long enough to count.

You live directly across the street from David, so in the morning you traipsed along exactly fifteen steps to reach your house. It is as if you have travelled halfway across the globe, but not—-beauty magazines strewn across the coffee table feature Korean, not English, and while the scent of blonde coffee roasting fills the air, so do the redolent aromas of kimchi and acorn jelly and seaweed soup. And while nothing centers you more than a night at home, the flaxen hair and cerulean eyes on the television screen suddenly seem much more colorful than your reality.

You remember the night you made your decision.

The thought came out of the blue, filling your ears with the sound of your thudding heart. You had been reading altered fairy tales, stories where one of the ugly stepsisters seduces the prince with a love potion, or Snow White might fall in love, perhaps, with one of her loyal dwarves. You wondered whether one of these changed classics might feature a princess with almondshaped eyes, perhaps, with a wardrobe of rustling

hanboks instead of billowing blue gowns. But even in your daydreams Prince Charming never seemed quite right standing next to the quaint princess from the East, except, perhaps, when he took her in strange, secret glades while Snow White was off singing duets with her bluebirds. So the princess would have the prince for a short while—-but no one else ever saw her, and she was never a queen.

This invisibility is what you feel now, as you watch through the peephole of your house. David’s wife alerted the police as soon as she returned, and men in black and blue uniform promptly fill the street.

When you are questioned, you answer meekly, eyes averted submissively in front of the authorities; this is exactly what they expect of you. Your fluency in English helps-—it means you will not be disparaged as uneducated, and while you grew up beneath California palms and dry winds, your features communicate that you are Korean--South, of course, you say, to clarify for their sake--, Asian, female, and therefore guiltless of this crime. It is already clear that they have dismissed you; one is distracted, his eyes following the grieving yet beautiful wife; the other, tracking the movements of a hunched male passing by.

Later, you call your mother, wanting to hear her voice, although it is strained with the burdens of a disobedient son and an indifferent husband. Mother.

Mom. Umma. I took a man’s life. I made my way into his bed and his heart and his life, and I don’t know who I am anymore. You mouth every word, but

somehow the execution is flawed and so everything just comes out as small gasps of air mirrored by the sighs on the other side of the line. But even if you had successfully told her she would not have understood your English, and so you just give up the matter as a bad job all around and say good night.

It takes a week for you to admit your curiosity, but afterwards you visit his house with boxes of fruit in hand. To your surprise, one of the officers who had questioned you opens the door. This time, however, he is dressed casually, almost plainly; a dark-blue button down matches the shadowing in his eyes as he glances back at David’s wife. She invites you in, and you follow her into the same kitchen you killed her husband.

“I heard about David,” you say, setting your boxes of pears and apples on the dining table. “I just wanted to let you know that I think I can somewhat understand.”

And although she tries not to, her eyes betray her recognition, because the entire neighborhood is aware of your own husband’s death six years prior. If anything, her silence is proof enough that she knows.

“Did you know David well?” she asks, and you trace the faded stain of wine you had spilled on the couch years ago before turning to reply. It is still shockingly scarlet.

“I knew him enough,” you answer. Your visit is short, but apparently emphatic enough that you walk out with an invitation to the funeral, leaving her alone

with the nameless officer who suddenly seems to have become very close to David’s wife.

The funeral is held a week later, and you take care with your black dress. When you return you will change into the more fitting white clothing that marks death, but in the meantime you drive to the quiet churchyard where the ceremony will take place.

You feel nothing but a slight pang as you watch the coffin being covered with dirt, but the sight of David’s small, small son, obviously confused, obviously upset, squeezes your heart until your face is streaked with tears. David’s wife holds a gathering at her home afterwards, and you seek out the little boy, whose toostarched collar mirrors the tenseness in his face as he watches the officer comfort his tearless mother.

His expression reminds you of the nights at home when shattering glass filled the air and your mother cried herself to sleep because there was no one there to protect her. You crept into your younger brother’s bed and you would both pretend to hear nothing but your shaking whispers of wizards with magic and children who had no parents to be scared of. He was just five and you were just seven but neither of you needed an adult to tell you that your family was broken and the only thing you were sure of in that moment was that you wished your father was dead. But your love for your brother was greater than your hate, and so you smoothed back his hair until his tense face no longer looked like it was going to break and instead smoothed into sleep.

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Maybe it is the fact that he is also five; maybe it is because you refuse to let a child’s face look like it is carved from granite; maybe it is just that he is David, thirty years younger—-whatever the reason, you sit next to his son and talk to him.

“Brandon,” you say, catching his blue eyes. You do not look away. Instead, you talk until he lets you sit close enough to place your arm around his birdlike shoulders and lean into each other. You talk until he spreads one warm, trembling hand out to grasp yours.

You talk until his wet eyes finally well over and you know that you have received his love forever. * This is how you break every promise to yourself and enter his life. Brandon does not want you out of his sight. So whenever David’s wife, who is the officer’s wife now, leaves her home empty, you walk across the street to watch over Brandon.

He is a spoiled little thing, but his corkscrew curls and ruddy cheeks make you weak, and so you shower him with love you did not know you had possessed. He is also intelligent, and so it is only a year later when he traces the outlines of your eyes and asks why his friends sometimes call you words that make him angry for a reason he does not understand.

But you do not know how to explain to a sixyear-old why people berate you for speaking Korean in public spaces, or how you have known nothing but America and yet feel no patriotism for a country that considers you extraneous. And so you settle for telling

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him that your parents had come from a country very far away, where many others look like you. You tell him that many people become scared and hateful when imaginary figures turn out to be walking, thinking beings that do not fit with their conceptions of normal.

Brandon looks at you with clear, clear eyes, and you believe that he does not understand, but before you leave that day he whispers that he does not wish to be friends with anyone else but you.

In exchange, you invite him to your home.

You let him try fermented cabbage and laugh when he grimaces at the taste. You turn on Korean classics, filled with old men crooning bittersweet memories of childhood friends. During Chuseok, you stuff him with honey and sesame rice cakes and play yutnori for so long that he ends up overturning the game pieces out of sheer laughter. You wonder if it is enough.

You want to explain. You loved David. You murdered him because you hated yourself. You are a just woman, so you promised yourself that you would kill that aspect you so loathed. But you are just a woman, so you underestimated the presence that David had taken over in your life. You turned to Brandon because he gave you a chance to be a part of a phenomenon greater than yourself. The strange princess could not wed the prince, but a prince’s mother was a queen.

And it is with regal self-control that you become the photographer to Brandon’s life. You snapshot countless moments, and are present during many

more. It is you who Brandon comes to, his set, stubborn chin only highlighting the bruises he receives in his neighborhood arguments, rather than to his birth mother. You never ask, and he never shares, so you never have to know that he never fights for anyone except you. All you know is that he has chosen you over David’s wife. * Much later, on your birthday, a thirteen-year-old Brandon hands you a sloppily wrapped gift before calling you mom. He instantly freezes, a grimace on his face.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said, turning his reddening face away. “I say it all the time to my friends’ moms on accident, too.” You are wracked with remorse—-you killed his father, you cannot do this—-but you do not hold yourself back from giving him a very tight hug as you reply.

“Thank you for my present,” is all you say, and you both pretend to understand what you are referring to. Later that night, you clutch his present to your chest and guiltily think that this could never have occurred had David been alive. * David. Brandon retreats inside himself every year on the day of his father’s death, and this one is no different, but the atmosphere is charged. Anticipatory.

Brandon is a young man now, blonde curls darkening into murky brown. College is right around the corner.

“Did you know him?” he asks, hands wrapped

around a steaming mug of coffee.

“I did,” you reply, stirring in a spoonful of sugar.

“He was a good man.”

“Everyone says that,” he scoffs, and watches you as you head to the refrigerator.

“It’s true, though,” you reply, opening the door.

You turn to face him. “I’m sorry that he couldn’t see you grow up.”

“Me too,” he says, catching your eyes. “I’m glad I have you, though. I know you probably wouldn’t have had to help me out as much if he hadn’t died.” His steady eyes don’t leave your face.

“I’m flattered,” you joke, and there is a pause in which he studies you, almost pained, before he releases a sigh that pushes him into a chair. He obliges you, though, and smiles, dimples settling into his cheeks.

Everyone—-everything—-relaxes. As you close the refrigerator door, your eyes rest on a carton of almond milk before turning away. You hope college comes quickly.

And yet it feels too soon when fall arrives for Brandon to head off to college. There is no vestige of that lonely boy you saw at the funeral, and it is only the sight of grey strands mixed within your hair that can jolt you to the passage of time. Across the street, his parents stand, taking photos of his last moments as a child, their smiles failing to hide their pride.

Still unnoticed, you watch from your doorway until Brandon turns in your direction.

“I’m leaving pretty much forever, and you’re not

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even going to say goodbye?� he calls. You smile, and close your door behind you as you step into the fading sunlight.

Years later, as you look over the developed photograph, you find yourself thinking back to that moment, when you whispered a secret into his ear in Korean, something you never taught him, no matter how much he begged. You turn away.

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Hold me America | Julia Shangguan| handcut paper on paper

held firm. The line was restless; the passengers, amused.

Rachel bit the bottom of the card to turn it right side up, then dipped her head down as if bowing the machine, fed it. It worked. The bus driver raised a grizzled Peter Sills eyebrow, grunted, “That kind of morning?” Rachel nodded, lurched to the back of the bus, squeezed into a It was a Monday morning in early June, the unwelcome, unbearably humid kind of morning that seat, and put everything back in her bag.

Rachel liked the ride to P.S. 221, where she taught cultivates little agonies, so to Rachel, a lightly-freckled, chestnut-haired, plainly pretty woman waiting in line dance. She liked looking out of the dirty window at bicyclists and rollerbladers and skateboarders cruising for Park Slope’s B67 bus, it was only natural that the by. She thought herself young enough at thirty-one bus was late and crowded, that the doors wheezed open on their own time, and that she once again found to make a game of catching the cute ones—taking in herself in a quiet crisis of her own design. To find the a sculpted swerve or a thigh’s rippling thrust—but MetroCard that had disappeared at the bottom of her beyond unpacking them after work. She disdained canvas bag, she’d pulled out its contents. Change purse ceremony. The dates, the sex, the parents, would be fine. was tucked in left armpit, deodorant balanced in right Wedding, honeymoon, great. Instead, Rachel imagined a quiet weeknight evening. Her husband would be elbow crook; warped post it notes were wedged in bra, receipts were clutched under one thumb, a manila doing the dishes. Laundry bag in hand, Rachel would peel his two crusty tennis socks off of a chair, put one envelope dangled under the other, so that finally, the in the hamper, and fling the other at his back. It would Metrocard was delicately extracted from the depths of her bag with the pincer pinch of her pinky and ring land on his head. He’d go about the rest of his evening fingers—all items combined composed a constellation. genially, as if it didn’t exist, not daring to touch it; and in bed he’d carefully, luxuriously angle it across his Rachel thought she looked like a lost circus act. Had face, cuddle it, and Rachel would laugh and laugh… she remembered to refill the card? The line shuffled And as she ate dinner alone, she’d laugh to herself at the forward, forcing her to the front.

Rachel lowered the card into the machine; it was thought of it. That this was love, and that it must be out regurgitated with a metallic burp. A little boy wearing there, coaxed Rachel to Ultimate Frisbee pick-up games and hipster pot-luck picnics where she met the same a red sheeny plastic backpack jumped onto the bus white-shoed white dude as boring, if not grotesque, as behind her with a power-ranger’s double-footed stomp, almost shattering Rachel’s composure, but she his soggy kale salad.

Curl, Swirl, Spiral

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Rachel’s lower back felt sweaty. She rummaged through her purse for a handkerchief or hand towel— she’d dropped the envelope!

It was beside an older woman’s opaque calves at the front of the bus. When Rachel arrived, she saw that gravity, friction, and a few other physical laws had colluded to place it across the aisle, between two blonde-haired shins sprouting from black rollerblades.

A tall, thin, bony man with cuffed shorts, a green t-shirt, and longish sandy hair—young looking, twenty two, twenty three, Rachel guessed—was peeking into the envelope when she reached him. “Excuse me,” she said.

Startled, he smiled. “I’m sorry. This is yours?”

He had an accent. “Yup. It’s yours. Here you go.” He handed her the envelope. “Again, sorry. I was looking for a name or something to return it to.”

“Not really,” Rachel said flatly. “You were opening it.”

“Okay, I was. I find people’s lost paper scraps really interesting. This looked promising.”

“Well, you’re not missing much, just few pictures for my fourth period class. But I can give you some unpaid bills if you want.”

“Nice try,” said the young man, then, as if reading from an official document, stated: “But I only take handwritten items. No receipts, bills or checks.”

He’s odd, thought Rachel. He’s alright. “So why are you wearing rollerblades if you’re taking the bus?”

“I’m late to work. Is your back okay?”

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Rachel’s hand had been drying her sweaty back, under her shirt, on its own accord. “Yeah, I’m fine. This is my stop. I hope your paper-mâché project gets an A!” He absorbed her banter with a pretend frown.

“I’m Tam. If you want your back checked out, I’m a physical therapist.”

Rachel, now halfway out of the bus, replied, “It was nice meeting you!”

“I work on DeGraw! Come—” he called to the closing doors.

After school, Rachel was waiting for her bus home, when, on a whim, (because the weather was nice? because life was short?), she crossed the street and took the uptown bus to DeGraw. The physical therapy place was a block away. Through the window she saw Tam, humbled in baggy sweatpants, helping an older woman bend her knee. How to approach him?

A back problem would be convenient, but keeping up the act would be odious. She could wait for him to get off work and run into him on the bus—no, too desperate. A bulky man in a blue polo tapped Tam on the shoulder, shook his head, and took over, demonstrating the proper knee bend technique. Rachel smiled, she’d leave him a note. She wrote her number on a grocery receipt, then smirked, scrawled, For the therapist’s assistant. Here’s my number. Too bad you don’t take receipts. When Tam went into the office in the back, Rachel entered and had the secretary put it in his mailbox.

that posture, and something seemed exaggerated… he hadn’t just taken the lead to play hard-to-get, she Tam called her Wednesday night. “Hello? Did I deduced—he was wiggling his little biker-shorts butt meet you on the B67, Monday?” at her too! “That’s damn good flirting,” she said to Rachel winced. She should’ve signed her note. herself.

“Hi. You did. My name is Rachel. Is this Tam?” Suddenly, Tam veered down a hidden path.

“It is. Hi Rach-el.” She could tell he was smiling.

Rachel almost careened over in pursuit. She felt an His accent made her name sound sweet. anxious flash, harnessed it, propelled herself to him.

“So it looks like you broke your rule for me.”

“How nice of you to join,” Tam said “What rule?” amiably. Rather than respond and chance revealing “I gave you a receipt. You said you don’t keep receipts. Also, you’re not a physical therapist. You’re an breathlessness, Rachel gritted her teeth and passed him. For a minute he pretended to be unable to catch assistant.” up, then his thin wheels slipped beside her hairy ones.

“Did I say that? I’m not sure…Anyway, I’m “I try to get out here once a week,” he said. “At night. about to go on a bike ride, and I thought you might It’s nice.” like to join.” Rachel realized she’d hoped to detect Rachel tilted her chin sideways in feigned some ceremonial shyness in his voice, but it was plain. sincerity. “Ah, Tam. The lone night biker. Scooping No matter, a bike ride was brilliant. She met him at an up love letters and suicide notes, reading them in the entrance to Prospect Park. moonlight, holding them to his bleeding heart.” Tam Tam was all business: tight biker shirt and opened his mouth, closed it. “What’s that accent of shorts, gloves, helmet, shiny red bike. A neon ankle yours, by the way?” strip accented his blonde shin hair. One foot buoyed “Swedish.” he said. “And yes, I literally grew up restlessly on a pedal. He started riding into the park riding horses in the mountains, the only son of a poet before Rachel reached him, forcing her to catch up. As she sped up, he did too. After a few minutes he looked and a toymaker.” Sounds recited, thought Rachel. Must back, grinning. “Not to be rude, but won’t you make a be a popular line at parties.

“Do you use that line on every girl you meet? little effort here? Or should I slow down?”

“Don’t you dare!” Rachel hollered, happy to play Or only the ones whose business you rifle through?”

Tam’s front wheel flinched. He mumbled something along. Sure, she thought, he was dressed like the type inaudible in the wind. Rachel scolded herself. She’d of biker that hunches over the handlebars, rear in the gone too far, she should share something. air, but he wasn’t pedaling with effort prerequisite for ***

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Rachel was raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

She excelled in LaGuardia high school’s prestigious dance program, but her parents were passive and she loved to go to parties and someway or another the college process passed her by. At least she got in somewhere. Tam empathized. His family had moved to the U.S. when he was fourteen, forcing him to learn English on his own. But didn’t have patience to practice it, so he never quite got the hang of it, making graduating high school so grueling that college was out of the question. School wasn’t for him, he said, it cramped his instinct for keeping life fresh. And what a strong instinct it was! He’d probably gone through some fifteen occupations in the last five years. He was even beginning to get bored of the physical therapy apprenticeship his mother had connected him with.

He liked physical therapy; he didn’t like having a job. Rachel understood. It wasn’t until she’d almost dropped out that she realized she needed to give dance everything she had. It was one of the two things she loved and did well, dance—and sex. She looked him in the eye and let the ensuing silence suspend that last seedy syllable between them like a glaucous glue fly strip peppered with black bodies turning, glistening, hung by a filthy brown string from the ceiling of a rotting public bathroom, in a tropical location, on a moist, sweltering day. Tam’s eyes bulged, something in him stuck, squirmed, settled down. Rachel sensed the eight or nine years separating them topple to her advantage.

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“Taken together they’re quite addictive,” she concluded. Tam regained countenance and began to ramble, bumbling and spontaneous, but Rachel became reserved, suspicious even. Life was up to something, an old magic trick. She’d been tipped off by the wind. It was warm, sweet, substantive. Whistling in her ear, flowing over her skin, pleasure intensified on an asymptote bordering the sublime. Then, she’d glanced across the grass field to her left at a long dense row of different species of trees. She’d seen them countless times, but now registered each one as a vivid, bulbous, supple texture, moonlit flecks fluttering with a dark muted glitter. Rachel knew the world’s sudden slippage into something more beautiful was no coincidence. Rather, romance’s affect, its conspiracy, was at play, and Rachel rejected it. Still, she’d like to sleep with Tam, and soon, it was a school night.

Tam had wound them into the park’s center. Rachel unwound them in the direction of her apartment.

Behind her, she thought she caught Tam say to himself, “Onward.” *** Tam would come unannounced and come often, that June. Rachel sometimes worked for an after school program. Those days she’d come home at six or seven, dying for dinner and a bath, mentally listing errands, completely contained within herself, when Tam would ring the buzzer sometime after eight and stride into her flat peeling off his biking gear, all self-involved and excited, exuding that quirky, quivering energy that

was his quiddity. They stayed up late, even on school nights, Rachel regretted. But then again, exhausted and disappointed in 4th period’s dances, a giddy surge would pry her lips into an involuntarily smile as she recalled Tam leaping from bed to armchair with superheroic panache. Or, she’d do something stupid, like put off dinner till eight, eight-thirty, nine, just in case he showed up. In June, she never asked him to come over, she never asked him not to. Either he was there or he wasn’t, and that was fine—what bothered her was that after a while, she began to picture seeing him every day, as if conditioned to by the sporadic nature of his visits.

For all she knew, he could be seeing other women, not that it mattered, in June. She’d work herself up trying to put him out of mind when he wasn’t around, but it’d all dissolve when he knocked on her door, often bearing a gift: a bottle of wine, a nicely patterned but useless lamp shade from a stoop sale, his own toothbrush and conditioner (a gift to himself, he admitted, but still a gift!), some wire—“to shape how you like, of course”— and most recently, a pair of rollerblades, so he could teach her how to skate.

Rachel had “the balance of a butterfly,” as Tam put it. She had no idea what that meant. Stationary, butterflies were poised; aflutter, erratic; she’d argue.

Tam would only smile blankly. The first few outings,

he was helpful, offered his arm to lean on, but in early July, as soon as Rachel could wobble around on her own, he would pretend to accidently drift away, forcing her to catch up, or would skate circles around her, backwards on one foot, always enjoying himself, always teasing her, always a step ahead.

Their dates were inconsistent and Tam often rescheduled last minute. Rachel assumed he acted aloof for fear of becoming boring. After all, she was by far better in bed. She wished he was easier to get a hold of, but was too proud to bring it up. In this attitude, they made separate plans for July 4th, carried those plans out, woke up on Rachel’s couch. Neither recalled meeting up, but Tam remembered holding her on the F-train ride home; Rachel, wading into the water…that view of Coney Island, all fuzzy lights and fireworks…no, no, they’d done it on the Ferris Wheel! “It was your idea!” Tam gasped between giggles as Rachel smacked him with a pillow.

Rachel got the hang of rollerblading the next week, just as Tam happened to become bored of it. He suggested he teach her skateboarding. “But Tam, dear,” Rachel parried in a text, “I’ve already bought you a few weeks of my yoga classes!” Tam floundered. Yoga was too slow and repetitive, and Rachel was always correcting his posture. But he had a good attitude,

“It was warm, sweet, substantive.”

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attended, (albeit late), almost every class through July, relished taking his shirt off, and though she never mentioned it, Rachel liked that her classmates couldn’t keep their eyes off him.

Tam didn’t take to yoga classes, but he loved the sun salutations. On their walks through the park, he made a point of greeting big fields with his own kind of salutation. Stance wide, he’d reach his arms to the sky as if trumpeting his joy, his existence, to the park, to the world. “Who’s my big shiny star?” Rachel would coo, patting him on the back. But Tam gave her a look of such lucent self-assurance that she was soon converted. One afternoon in early August, after their salutations, Tam began growling and stomping around.

“What are you doing?” Rachel asked.

“Bearing my terrible claws and gnashing my terrible teeth,” Tam replied matter-of-factly.

“Oh.” “Like Max from Where the Wild Things Are.” “Who’s that?”

“Didn’t your parents read you anything?”

Rachel shrugged. “Too busy with real wild things, I guess.”

Rachel’s father, Terry, was a cop; her mother, Anne, a security guard. They loved her well enough, took care of her when she was sick, fed and clothed her, but it never occurred to them to nurture her, as Rachel put it during that night bike ride in June. Unwitting negligence, she’d said. They wanted her to be happy, and she was, and thought nothing of it until the night

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she told them she might drop out of college. They’d said it wasn’t for everyone. Deeply insulted, Rachel doubled-down on dance and graduated. The parents of Park Slope’s P.S.221 oppressed their children with extra-curricular activities. Rachel was grateful that hadn’t been her. Still, she sometimes wondered where she might be if she’d been brought up better.

Tam laced his fingers through hers. Rachel rested her head on his chest. He located the aching affection he’d felt on their first date and mistook it for love. “I love you,” he said.

Ten o’clock that evening. The couple is fresh out of a hot shower, dressed in thin running shorts, and thoroughly entangled under Rachel’s cool sheets.

Rachel has placed her head on Tam’s bicep, wet a clump of straw-colored underarm hair in her mouth, and leisurely rolls the matted cone between thumb and forefinger. She rubs her toes against his shins. Tam flips through a brand-new copy of Where the Wild Things Are. Rachel’s one-night stands were usually older, wealthy, lonely men. Each distinguished himself to her by being that rare lover who could complement a perceptibly overwhelming performance with an engaging talk after—starring, of course, his sensitive, inquisitive, sun-browned ego. When Rachel played nice, she’d let him talk her to sleep. But if he probed her too persistently, she’d concoct a labyrinth of typical feminine emotions for that soft little ego to worm through till morning. She’d tally the kisses and caresses

she could coax from him with her back turned, then wake to breakfast in bed. Rachel found it refreshing that Tam was too naive and transparent to toy with. He didn’t perform for her; instead, he expressed himself.

Not eloquently, but earnestly.

Rachel thumped Tam on the belly. “Alright,” he said, tucking his elbows into the bushel of pillows behind him, “You ready?” Rachel nodded. In a low, slow voice resonant with paternal potency, he began, “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind or another…” Rachel shuddered. Hot moisture sprang into her eyes. She wrapped her arms around one of his. “His mother called him a Wild Thing…” Lo and behold, the bedposts sprouted branches, silhouetted leaves outside bobbed as if at sea, the air conditioner’s guttural gurgle pulsated like salt water waves, a cold column of moonlight crystalized against the cloud-grey wall, and the room rumbled as shadows danced around the bed. Rachel gushed a daughterly squeal and squirm, planted an appreciative smooch on Tam’s jaw.

He closed the book. “You know,” he absentmindedly mused, gaze blank, “I could make a daughter.”

Rachel rubbed her eyes. “Would you like that, Tam? Start a family?”

“Right now even…” he continued, impressed with himself.

“But darling, daughters need money. You don’t have any.”

“I do so!”

“Then how come you always ask me for it?” readily retorted Rachel, punctuating her tease with the sidelong smirk that told Tam she’d got him.

He reiterated his usual excuse. “I spend all mine on rent,” he muttered, boyishly inspecting the stuff between his toes. Rachel was moved.

“You could live here, for free,” she proposed, shocking herself. This progression in the relationship hadn’t occurred to her before; spoken aloud, it stirred in her chest the pluck and tug of yearning. Still, that the utterance vocalized itself, and in a palpably hopeful voice, betrayed her. Such exposures stung like paper cuts, were the reason she layered affection in aggression. She would’ve taken it back if she didn’t feel so oddly relieved, sedate, as if she’d been suspended in the surface tension of some warm delicious substance and just plunged through.

Tam thought a moment, a shallow frown forming on his brow. “I don’t think I can. Well, not yet, I mean.

I have something in my apartment I can’t bring.” He smoothed a ruffle in Rachel’s hair.

She closed her eyes. “What’s that?”

“It’s hard to explain. I can show you tomorrow.

Trust me, you’ll understand.”

“Okay.” Rachel rolled over. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight Rach-el.”

Rachel reflected that she really, really liked Tam. Probably more than she’d ever like anyone. Then, she dreamed.

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In the morning they bought bagels and biked to Tam’s. He’d assured her his place was nothing special and he was right, except for the tapestry of paper scraps blossoming across the living room wall. He shuffled his feet. One hundred and sixty-one pieces of paper—two years of collecting—he said, proud and ashamed. It was supposed to be like a map. His apartment deed was in the middle, and found scraps were to be taped around the deed in relation to where they appeared in the city.

But he was so bad with directions, even North, South, and the two in between, that he’d ended up making one central clump for Brooklyn, and a few tendrils spiraling out of it, for other boroughs. The scraps were tightly knit in the style of composed chaos. Blue grocery lists penned on college-ruled paper encircled a letter in Russian calligraphy; delicate, organic ink doodles interbred with the checker of post-it notes violated in sharpie; marker on parchment in one corner, opposite, a pencil poem in toddler’s scratch; all faded, lined, sustained by the city.

Rachel thought it was weird. The kind of thing crazy people do. She couldn’t fathom sharing something like this, especially with someone as dismissive as her. For Tam to unveil this vulnerability must be a meaningful endearment. She was special.

“So,” Tam began, “I can take a picture of it, pack it up, and move it over sometime. It might take a while because some pieces are quite delicate.”

Rachel wasn’t sure she wanted it, so she ignored Tam’s comment, and instead said it was impressive, and

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she was honored to finally see it. In search of a more specific, intelligent compliment, she walked up to it for a closer look, squinted, tried to read the scraps in one direction or another in the hopes that a narrative would emerge, but words, then whole lines of language, swam and dissolved before her eyes. Text regressed to texture, to touch’s tactile echo. It was nauseating, degrading.

Rachel swore she caught a spiral slowly rotating out of the corner of her eye, but it must have been vertigo.

She put her palm on the wall for support, closed her eyes, steadied herself. Tam said you were supposed to look at it from farther away, so she turned to face him, but if she’d stayed another moment and traced, or even brushed, the scripts with the swirls of her fingertips, she might’ve contacted—through the prose patches imbued with the twitch, dart, style of muscle fibers submissive to fingers whirling a pen in sync with the crenellate press and release of a hand puppeteered by a brain servant to a mind conscious in the voice of a person—all the people that had fragmented, flattened, floated in the wake of a subway or drifted along sidewalk vents like ghosts, imprisoned on one side of paper, of time, windcrippled and placeless…then pocketed, scotch-taped, coalesced into a single dimension, something eerie, umbra, wretched—and now entering Rachel’s arm, embodied in a current of goosebumps, dancing up her nerve endings with the chilling sweep of piano keys: Death’s calculated reminders snaking around her soul, unlatching it, exposing a desperate vigorous urgency to live, to persist in love, stagnant until, following a

frantic sweep of the hand, the feel of a familiar phone number in sarcastic scrawl links it to Rachel’s centrifugal center, her axis, unwinding it throughout her, changing her, inspiring her to rip the receipt from its sepulcher and vow to always be a vital part of Tam’s life….Instead, Rachel took a few steps back, looked at him, blonde hairs blazing in the window’s dirty sun-streaks, timidly explaining himself, “…first moved here, by myself, and New York was so, how do you say, impersonal…city feels smaller now…other people’s lives…One day a note fluttered against my ankle…beaut—” at which she’d heard enough and asked him to put water on for tea. *** “Tea?” Rachel repeated, incredulous, as she made her way from living room to kitchen. It was that first June night, at Rachel’s apartment after the bike ride. She couldn’t tell if Tam was asking for tea—she’d suggested whiskey—to throw her off, to seem sophisticated, to signal restraint, or because they had work the next day.

The water began to bubble. She could be his first time, she thought, he was still that young. But he looked like he’d done this before, sitting at the coffee table, legs crossed, leafing through a magazine, one long blonde arm stretched along the back of her red couch, wrist melting into the lamp’s orange bend, the stark bar of his collarbone gilded against its purple pocket. He turned a page with a glossy pop.

Rachel brought two mugs. Tam held his mug up as if performing a magic trick, dipped the dry, dusty packet down once, pulled it out with a plop, presented the

Gem | Lydia James| marker on Bristol

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result: a swirling amber blossom hung in the water, like a star.

He motioned to a National Geographic on the table. “Why are so many pages cut out?”

“I brought a few pictures to my fourth period class. They’re choreographing dances inspired by—” Rachel turned to the front cover, “by deep space discoveries.”

“Do you think they’ll turn out well?”

“No. Not a chance. It’s way too abstract.”

“Ah. Too abstract.” Tam sipped his tea.

They chatted. Tam nodded and smiled at loquacious Rachel, and Rachel reveled in her rhythm.

Time seemed to open itself up to her. Suggestions packaged in gesture and intonation snapped into place as she spoke, and she entertained herself with Tam’s facial expressions as he arrived at their titillating implications. Animated, Tam was elusive; in conversation, captive. When she’d enjoyed herself enough, she slanted a shoulder, and, injecting her sweetest timbre, said, “So, you’re a physical therapist.

My hips are like, really tight. Can you work on them?”

Tam’s fingertips curled into the couch cushion, impressing five little spirals. “I’d like to,” he said clumsily.

A pang of longing took shape in the space between them. They kissed—or rather, Rachel kissed Tam despite his best efforts to make-out with her. She stripped off his biker shirt, socks; ran her palms over his shins. Meanwhile, Tam cupped the back of her head

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for so long it grew awkward, and realizing this, rapidly moved his hand under her shirt, where it floundered before settling on her waist. His thumb massaged her hip flexor with volute motions. A bolt of ecstasy trickled down her tendon like warm honey. She asked him to say her name, and he savored the el like the last bite of a caramel. She giggled, took his hand, and led him to her bedroom.

They met Friday evening. The apartment was quiet. A few plants grew slowly and silently on the fire escape. Half a sun was shrugging off its warm colors, banding Earth in red and yellow. Solar radiation entered through the open window, warmed the two kissers on the couch, coagulated inside them. Rachel let her lower lip linger on Tam’s collarbone, then sat back, looked around, felt an expansive contentedness.

They had all the time in the evening to do anything in the world. She would like to drink. She put on a jacket and they went to a bar. Adequately inebriated, Rachel dug through her purse. She pulled out a few dollars, looked up at Tam. “I’m actually kind of low on cash,” he said sheepishly. She paid for his drinks that night.

And for his dinner the next. And that time, he hadn’t offered to pay, or to even to pay me back! recalled Rachel on August’s final afternoon, sitting on her warm brown stoop, clutching a handful of distressed receipts, solemnly summing: one hundred, two hundred, two hundred and seventy-one dollars she’d spent on Tam. How? There’d been an unspoken understanding last

Sunday at brunch with her friends. Rachel was Miss Adult, rummaging around her canvas bag for a credit card while Tam charmed the company, hair wet and combed, dressed in her favorite corduroy buttonup, the one with the crooked collar that fatigued her iron with its juvenile curl. To be fair, he’d bought them a brunch a few weeks before, and though that had felt like a treat, Rachel never felt burdened all the other times. The effect of habit, she supposed, and tried to trace its nascence back to June, when she’d felt obligated to take him out to balance all his random gift giving, but lost the trail in July, disgruntled, as receipt after receipt reported lunch on her at Daises Diner, where she and Tam got salads during his break. She would strap on her new rollerblades and arrive ten minutes early just to watch him help older people move. Once, the secretary had told her Tam was often late, that his mentor, David, was too nice to say anything, but needed him to get his act together. Rachel assured the woman she’d mention it, and she did, over salads.

Tam pouted. “I’m not even late. I take like three minutes to change out of my rollerblades. Or lock my bike up.”

“So leave three minutes earlier,” Rachel said.

“I know, I know, it’s just that been trying to make my lunch in the morning so I don’t have to buy it, like

you said last week.” Tam took a breath. “And I know this is the worst time to ask, but the rent’s gone up.

Can you help out again?”

Rachel skewered a tomato. “Yes, but I’ll actually have to cancel your yoga classes this time. Maybe mine too.”

Tam touched her hand. “I mean, I did get a lot out of it. Thank you.”

Tam wasn’t the best at paying her back, but the more often he borrowed, the less he was unavailable. Rachel knew it wasn’t healthy to think about it like that, but then again, she liked the feeling that she was helping Tam get on his feet in the Big City.

That she was investing in them.

Besides, there was something marital about having a financial relationship, and since the night Tam read aloud to her, Rachel had been dreaming her wedding.

Summer day. Craggy cliff-side. Eternal sky meets splashing sea. The plump crumple of single luminous cloud floats in the far distance. Veranda, crumbling pillars, white arch, white grid of chairs, flowers, friends, family. A proper affair. At first, she’d wake up glowing and dying to tell Tam, but knew better, so she’d make a sharp espresso to snap out of it. She never understood dreams anyway. Yet she’d be back every

“It was one of

the two things she loved and did well, dance--and sex.”

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36

Tears | Charlotte Richardson-Deppe| cloth

night, and as the groom shuffled down the aisle she’d tweak his hair, expression, and tie, just how she liked.

The pastor might be Peter Segal, or talk about a nudist colony in Iowa, and one night after watching an award show Rachel recited her vows to the entire cast of the Simpsons; but she’d always return to the groom’s eyes, time would freeze for his smile, and they’d kiss. At some point she started letting her good mood linger.

Pillow and blanket in hand, she’d follow it onto the fire escape, make herself a cozy perch, and spend the day watching Park Slope parents push strollers past Smiling Pizza, constellating her breakfast, lunch, and dinner dishes around her. Some dreams drifted past the wedding on a current of joyous security: setting sun on honeymoon in Hawaii, holding her child in the hospital (mornings she’d consider names, Elise?

Rose?), a new house, another baby. Eventually, a sense of entitled expectancy, of destined harmony, slipped from dream to daydream and blossomed in Rachel like a tumor. She and Tam had started life together. Time would catch up.

Rachel savored September seventh, her last free Thursday before school started, on her fire escape, soaking in the sunlight, (a few ruddy slats stretched along crusty panels, tingeing some silverware over her left shoulder, and the rim of a plate on the landing below, with stellate coruscations), and humming while toying with the wire Tam had given her; at some point it happened to resemble some recognizable form, and so inspired, Rachel twisted it into the skeleton of a

butterfly. She hadn’t seen Tam for a few days. After calculating how much he’d cost her, she’d texted him about making good on a few loans, but came off as angry. He never texted back. The butterfly was a good excuse to drop by his apartment. To bike or to bus? To bus.

One of Tam’s neighbors let Rachel into his building. The paint was chipped, the air hot and musty.

Rachel rang his bell. No one was home. She waited on the dim staircase, reading the book she’d brought.

After a while, Tam’s voice echoed from the lobby, followed by the sprinkle of keys and an indistinct murmur. He clomped up the stairs, appeared on the landing, noticed Rachel, blanched. Behind him stood a young woman with knock-knees, peach-tan legs tucked into tall black boots, a black jacket decorated with buttons and zippers, a black camera slung around her neck, and peppy pencil-blonde bangs. She scrolled her phone screen, the blue glow of which had long ago vaporized her eyes.

Rachel spoke slowly, crossly, courteously. “Tam, can you introduce me?”

“This is Sicily,” he said. Sicily didn’t look up.

“Excuse me,” said Rachel, sharpening herself.

“For interrupting your date.”

“You aren’t.”

“So you are on a date?”

“That’s not—” he began, then sighed. “It’s different. It doesn’t like, mean anything.” Rachel pursed her lips and glared. “I really like you. You’re

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really important to me. But I’m still pretty new to New York. So yeah, I guess I’ve been dating around, a little.

If anything, it puts it in perspective how special what we have is.” He attempted a smile.

The girl, whose attention evidently commanded such little capital in the currency of comprehension that she had to strictly ration it lest all be lost on something as abstract and un-clickable as a curiosity, donated a sideways glance.

Rachel crossed her arms. “How many girls?”

Tam looked over his shoulder at Sicily and lowered his voice, but because she’d splurged on the glance before, she could hardly account for own existence, let alone his or Rachel’s.

“A few. Nothing lasting. Nothing like us.” He pleaded with his eyes.

“This whole time?” asked Rachel. “Seriously?”

Tam was silent.

Rachel handed him the gnarled butterfly, looked him in the eyes, and left.

On the bus, Rachel replayed the scene over and over. At home, she crawled into bed, got out, turned on Netflix, microwaved pesto, turned off Netflix, took a vapid shower. She imagined melting, slipping through the drain. She envied the woman contained in the mirror who could, at will, cease to exist with a sideways step.

“Datin’ around!” she said to the apartment, voice stressed and sardonic. She was just a summer

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fling. Fling sounded like something fun to smash with a hammer. Could she blame him? Hadn’t she had her share of fun at his age? She’d been there, she knew Tam was truthful when he said Sicily, and the other girls, didn’t matter. Her phone would ring any minute, or he’d show up at her door with a box of chocolates begging to be taken back, ready to be committed; they could go steady, be happy, if Rachel gave it another chance. Better not to. She paced a third loop around the room. Better to punish herself for letting herself go, for entertaining those frivolous, quixotic dreams.

She picked a sock off the floor, frowned. When had she started deceiving herself? Assumed he was revolving around her, was aloof to keep her interested, himself to win her over, because she was the better one in bed, the one with the money…and after everything she’d spent— she’d mothered him, hadn’t she! Maybe that’s why Tam hadn’t wanted to move in. Rachel grabbed a beer, then froze, bottle cap half crushed. Maybe it had been to sleep with other people, maybe it had nothing to do with his paper project. But he’d worked so hard on it, been so sweet and so shy. That was her Tam. She wished she could peel the worst from the best of him to see the worth of what was left, but Tam, and knotted to him, her gamble on romantic love, was one dense mass, one big lump in her throat, to be swallowed down or spit out, given another chance or forgotten. *** Tam called her for a few weeks after, dropped by her apartment once or twice, eventually gave up.

He had a blast hooking up with people through his twenties. He stuck with physical therapy, but because of his habitual tardiness, he didn’t get a promotion before the rent went up again, so he had to move, which meant taking down the now formidable foundpaper instillation. He never got around to putting it back up.

Rachel joined a few dating sites, juggled a healthy variety of widowers, career-men, desperate divorcees; selected chubby, childless Gabriel, married him, honeymooned in Hawaii, moved into a brownstone flat; gave birth to Annabel and was infinitely happier than she’d ever been in her life; she wanted another right away but Gabriel said give it a year or two, for now they’d nurture Annabel as best they could. Life on maternity leave was lethargic and fulfilling. Rachel savored bathing, feeding, teaching Annabel, and napped with her all the time. They woke up one winter evening to find the lights on and the windows milky black. Rachel scooped her child up and went downstairs. It was shadowy and still: scattered toys, hissing radiator, Gabriel’s jacket slung over the couch, he was chopping a cucumber at the kitchen counter. Rachel squeezed his shoulder, he turned and gave her a peck, she flipped a light switch, they made salad, ravioli with tomato sauce, poured two glasses of red wine, juice for Annabel, her sippy cup was somewhere, probably under the couch. Gabriel said maybe he’d remembered there being another one around at some point so Rachel

went upstairs to a closet where a few unpacked boxes had retreated as if to hoard their pointless burdens in solitude. Couldn’t find the sippy cup, she’d have to retrieve the one downstairs then; might as well grab the balsamic vinaigrette, oh, and there’s some oregano as well. She started to leave, took two tentative steps, turned around, crouched, reached her right hand all the way to the backmost box with the slanted flap, felt around with her fingertips—just a few clueless objects, time to follow that waft of warm dinner smells—then something crinkled. Rachel pinched a corner and extracted the envelope, released its contents: Jupiter, various moons, Mars rover, an elysian nebula, a wedge of sun, and then, the title article’s two-page spread, not a photo, but some poor graphic designer’s cheap rendition of a phenomena too vast and deep to capture by any instrument but the imagination—and there, in the margins, Tam had amused himself by labeling each one with their names—Rachel and Tam, the two colliding galaxies.

A few strange, suspenseful moments flashed through Rachel’s memory, her stomach knotted, she sensed herself on the curve, the cusp of something important; but it wouldn’t click, and dinner was waiting, so rather than contemplate their summer Rachel crumpled up the whole gently twinkling cataclysm and recycled it.

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Stage 5 | Helen Lant| watercolor

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Hollows Miriam Tibbets

Far along the coast the elms have died, and just there outside my window, the cicadas have surrendered their artless noise to the crickets. I wonder if either understands the desperation of life. How one does, or does not, sustain themselves.

A boy in the library next to me.

An accent lost, Mississippi boy.

A life deconstructed like the hollow shell-body of so many cicadas. Here, too, has another tree rotted up from the roots.

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Below you see the fertile junkyard of home, and above the light of loss to which we all fling ourselves, one after another, like the burning bodies of a remnant swarm of flies.

It seems like forever ago that the trees succumbed; you, Mississippi boy, not yet a caricature of northern grace, and me not yet a dormant body buried beneath the elms.

Steens Mountain Mustang

Naomi Clayton| photograph

Ghazals for Young Thug Steven Duong I.

II.

To engage him is to inhale whole stars.

Or rather, the hue-soaked black between stars.

At twelve, he returned to his home address.

He—Bowie-born in satin dress.

The bard prefers a godnectar cocktail of promethazine, codeine, Sprite and stars.

White doves nest between the folds. Fatherpaved streets twist

He anchors himself to human-ness with a middle finger gilded in frozen stars.

his body into raw yelps, seek redress from skin now undressed

Impossible metrics spill from inside.

His is the frequency of the stars.

I pack an 11—slurred parables dipped in cursive cleave heaven like Parabellum stars.

Today, Jeffery stepped out the Gucci store and shot the reverend full of stars.

in tattoo constellations.

Today, glazed in purple, wounds dressed with honeyed furs, He addresses the gatekeeping party. He—glitterbomb transgression, dress rehearsal for a new Valhalla.

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Cameras Miriam Tibbets

In the style of Kaveh Akbar

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Danger Cat| Lydia James| marker on Bristol

In the middle of the night.

I see the moon start to fall. Fall.

Into the ground at the base of the house.

Its face looking. A picture of horror. Horror.

How long until it spills. Over my head.

Like a river of milk. Mixed with blood.

I can make it all disappear. The click.

Of this shutter. Like a shot. Like a wish.

Like a picture of horror. I can make.

A wish. A gesture. This all disappear.

My family disappear. So fast. Just start.

Shooting. Their hands behind their backs. Posed.

Can you see. The rhododendron. Blooming.

Take a photo of it. Before it dies. The dew.

On the petals like jewels. Rotting.

In the middle of the night.

I don’t sleep. I lie on my back. Like I used to.

When I was scared. Of monsters. Their shadows.

On the closet door. Underneath me. I want.

To be kissed. By them. All. All of them.

The tall ones like football players.

The short ones like salsa dancers. All. Like bodies with inconsequential faces. All. Like hands in gloves waiting. To escape.

To smother. Without a trace.

If the moon were a ball of water. I would still.

Keep my umbrella closed. I deserve.

All of this. Its face. Its blood. A picture.

Of my family. Falling. Into a new trapdoor.

The monsters running. Towards the mountains.

Towards the fields. Everywhere.

Like dogs in the back of my head.

Biting my thighs. Like when I was young.

I know. I know. I should sleep. I should.

Spill. My guts. Lie in bed. Alone. I can make.

This happen. Call myself by my name. How long.

Until I grow into it. A thing without a face.

Naming breaks the thing. One shot. Is all it takes.

Poem on Red Envelope | Steven Duong| digital printing/multimedia

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Contributors Andrea Baumgartel ‘19 is a third-year ENFP, 7w6 (with strong Type 2 tendencies), Sagittarius, English and Biology major from Peoria, IL who really likes words.

Mallory Bergthold ‘18 is an English major from the Dallas area with a passion for all things artistic.

Naomi Clayton ‘21 Growing in Boise, Idaho created a desire in me to be in the outdoors and explore the natural world. I bring my camera with me on all of my adventures as I work to capture the amazing beauty of nature, and I hope to help others gain an appreciation for the outdoors.

Ally Cottrell ‘21 is probably lost.

Steven Duong ‘19 is an unholy amalgamation of deathless souls haunting the first-floor bathroom of Mears Cottage. Trapped in this waking hell, he spends his days retweeting Young Thug and writing poems about soup.

Hyunji Eom ‘19 a third-year English major pursuing medical studies

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Lydia James ‘19 You can’t handle my strongest potions! No one can! My strongest potions are fit for a beast let alone a man.

Helen Lant ‘18 As an artist, I have to ask myself some pretty original questions: Am I original? Am I the only one? Am I sexual? Am I everything you need, you better rock your body now.

Sofia Mendez ‘19 is a third year philosophy and studio art double major. She loves orange juice and swings.

Charlotte Richardson-Deppe ‘19 likes cream cheese.

Anne Rogers ‘19 was a spoon for halloween.

Julia Shangguan ‘18 is on the hunt for some creativity.

Peter Sills ‘18 often confuses himself with the crunchy Greek chip, is known to emit a meow when he is content Miriam Tibbets ‘20 is a Spanish and English double major from the Twin Cities. She enjoys Café Bustelo coffee, ultimate frisbee, peach lollipops, and sketching in old Tricycle magazines. She hopes to someday teach high school english.

Clara Trippe ‘18 is a fourth year and not looking forward to joining the work force.

LeinĀ‘ala Voss ‘18 is craving dried ika!

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