Volume XIII: Ergo Sum

Infinitas Ergo Sum Volume XIII Fall 2020

Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology 970 McElvaney Lane Lawrenceville GA, 30043

Cover art by Cade West, 2021

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly.”

-Henri Bergson

Letter from the Editor: Welcome to Volume XIII of Infinitas. The inspiration for Ergo Sum arose from a desire to explore the connections between the three components of a being: the body, the mind, and the soul. Each section of Volume XIII opens with a brief introduction to the component it explores and is designed to familiarize you with the most visceral form of one of these components and gradually blur the distinctions between one component and the next.

Ergo Sum begins by examining the most tangible component of your reality, the body, in Corpo where our talented creators delve into the discomforts and complexities of the human form and its limitations. With the being stripped of its most superficial layer, Ergo Sum then proceeds to explore the vagaries of the human mind and its ability to create a new reality in Mente. Finally relieved of the burden of both the body and the mind, Volume XIII pursues the inescapable of the human soul, searching within for a hint of the eternal in Anima. We hope that the completion of these three sections will leave our readers with a simple realization to internalize: ergo sum, “therefore, I am.”

Thank you to all of the wonderful student writers, artists, photographers, and designers who contributed to Volume XIII of Infinitas in the midst of a pandemic!

Bhavana Kunnath, 2021

Corpo

Me

p.1-26

p.2

bee sting —Joss Gauda bee sting (Art)—Joss Gauda Bath in the Dark—Zach James Photography—Annie Vo My Fingertips are Cold—Victoria Severiche Photography—Avinaash Dholakia An Eye’s Mind—Afiya Khan Autumnal Close-Up—Adia Bush They’ve Been Gone for Days—Victoria Severiche Overwhelmed—Lillie Olliver Sensory Overload—Lillie Olliver Empty Efforts—Matthew Purvis Grasp of Life—Afiya Khan Doha—Lauren Park Doha (Art)—Lauren Park The Value in Life—Moska Arsalan Anomaly—Bhavana Kunnath Artwork—Anonymous Sync-hole—Lillie Olliver Empty Head—Valerie Quarshie

3 3 5 6 7 7 7 7 8 9 9 11 12 13 14 15 17 21 25 26

Bystander—Darshan Photography—Jaylin Liar—Lillie Olliv Head Empty, Only W Olliver A Place for You—Tar Eye of the Beholder— What do you do?—S Do You See What I S jeevirao Jailbird—Adaeze Uz Photography—Isabe Prison of the Mind—X Artwork—Anonymus The Mind’s Storm—A Beyond Imagination— Ode to My Shadow Artwork—Shivani Triv How to Write—Shiza Reflection—Josephine Continuity—Shiza Gh Endless Nothings—S The Silhoutte and its S Ghani Escaping Reality—An Photography—Sowm Artwork—Anonymou Walden—Bhavana K ID—EunSil Rollins The Tower—Aryan A Ringing Halls—Natha

ente

Anima

27-56

p.58-100

na Sharma 29 Gonzalez 29 ver 31 Wingdings (Art)—Lillie 32

ra Kim —Adaeze Uzoije Sean Lynch See?—Meera San-

33 34 35 36

zoije elle George Xander Gibson

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 45 46 47 48

Ananya Kidambi —LanAnh Doan w—Anonymous vedi a Ghani e Chivore hani Shiza Ghani Shadow—Shiza

nonya Kidambi mya Krithivasan us Kunnath

Ashraf han Taylor

49 50 51 52 54 55 55

Flowers and Funerals—Jasiah Anderson Souled—Amah Mancho One of a Kind—Andrea Trejo Double Exposure—Misty Ly My Simple Beauty—Andrea Trejo Afrocentric—Adaeze Uzoije Blooming Beauty—Merea Sanjeevirao Like the Rain—Ananya Kidambi Buttercup—Adaeze Uzoije Acacia—Adaeze Uzoije Acacia (Art)—Adaeze Uzoije A Solemn Day Indeed—Uma Jalloh Looking Forward to Mourning—Adeline Odunjo How Light Meets Darkness—Shiare Kelly Artwork—Shiare Kelly He Gave it Free Will—Moska Arsalan Between C6 and C7?—Theodora Alese Aangst—Suchi Iyer Artwork—Moska Arsalan Submission to the Soul—Shiza Ghani A Candle—Aryan Ashraf An Old TV—Aryan Ashraf Necrospire—Aryan Ashraf Swirls of Imagination—Meera Sanjeevirao Photography—Vernice Le Copy, Copy, Copy—Adrea Trejo

59 63 64 65 67 69 72 73 74 75 77 78 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 90 94 99

BODY CUERPO CORPS CORP CORPORIS

CORPO LIGGAAM LICHAAM TIJELO KÖRPER KINO

CORPO, the body...

The body is the physical tether that connects our being to the earth that all of us steadily tread upon in our day-to-day lives, the earth that the flowers and trees and weeds all bloom and propogate upon, the earth that house stones and minerals and crystals of various values...

The body is physicality.

What can the physical reveal to us?

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bee sting . jossilyn gauda, 2023

the girl’s nose itches as she breathes in the air of the turn of the season.

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she could feel her eyes reddening, but she didn’t move. the warm wind swirled through the air, and she watched the trees sway in harmony with the music that played from the speakers. her body sways in solidarity, with the buzzing of the bees. she hears the soft thud of footsteps approaching, and closed her eyes, not wanting to lose the moment. something pierces her. she gasps in shock and she looks at the mark. the bite of creation now seemed evil in essence. red, and stinging.

the other sucks honey from the vines that climb the wooden fence of the yard. she is oblivious to the girl’s pain. butterflies dance across her fingertips as she reaps the fruits of something in her that nature is drawn to. the bees zip under her arms and around her head, but they don’t harm her.

he gazed back at her. her skin festers and swells. the once beautiful nature catches up with her. she felt her body hit the ground and her hands flew to her throat,

what is in her that causes the first to fall short?

suffocating from his rejection.

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Bath in the Dark Zach James, 2023

Yesterday evening, I took a bath in the dark.

I didn’t want to see myself: edges, insecurities, I tried to end the troubles in my mind, I wished my limbs would melt away.

But when I dipped my feet into that boiling pot, it greeted me.

Scalding hot water welcomed each of my toes.

My brain dissolved and fears drifted away.

I forget how much time had passed, knowing only that I needed those one thousand hours.

I needed the time away.

Still, I can only remember smiling, smiling while the water singed my skin.

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thoughts in all.

Untitled, Annie Vo

My Fingertips Are Cold Victoria Severiche, 2021 My fingertips are cold; So are my toes.

So is my nose.

The breeze is blowing, Mushrooms are growing; The woods are a sight to behold.

My fingertips are cold; So are my toes.

So is my nose.

My blood has stopped flowing, My brain has stopped knowing, And my heart is in repose.

Gold brown and blood red leaves Land on my face as I lie In a soft bed of fresh earth Underneath this autumn sky.

Like bone, they snap And crunch And crack To be a sign that all things die.

It was just a game of hide and seek, And I didn’t want to lose.

But that rock came up so fast— If only I had tied my shoes.

My ears are filled with the chirping Of birds; their words As soft as their wings.

At times I’m jealous they can fly And leave behind these Earthly things.

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Untitled (Lichen), Avinaash Dholakia, 2024 Untitled (Leaf,) Avinaash Dholakia, 2024 An Eye’s Mind, Afiya Khan, 2021 Autumnal Close-Up, Adia Bush, 2021

If only I had tied my shoes.

They’ve Been Gone For Days, Victoria Severiche, 2021

[Over]whelmed Lillie Olliver, 2021 The scene opens on GIRL, lying in bed. The sun can be seen rising through the windows, casting a gentle light on her skin.

She seems to be asleep. A faint clamor from offstage can be heard; ambient sounds of a family getting ready for the day. The alarm clock on her bedside table goes off. GIRL jolts up immediately, slamming her hand down on the alarm clock with vigor. The alarm cuts off.

She sighs, and her eyes open slowly.

GIRL moves the covers and gets out of bed, squinting at the sunlight peeking through the blinds. She stumbles to the mirror, and looks herself in the eye. The whites of her eyes are permeated with technicolor, like an oil slick.

GIRL: (Sighs, mutters) Good morning to you, too.

GIRL winces as she hears a thud from offstage.

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BROTHER: (Offstage, shouts) HAS ANYONE SEEN MY CALCULATOR?!

MOTHER: (Offstage, shouts) ISN’T IT ON THE TABLE? BROTHER: (Offstage, shouts) IF IT WAS ON THE TABLE, WOULDN’T I HAVE FOUND IT ALREADY? MOTHER: (Offstage, shouts) DON’T SASS ME, YOUNG MAN! I AM YOUR MO— All sound cuts off.

GIRL reaches up to touch her ears, and her fingertips come away dripping with technicolor liquid. She sighs, but it’s inaudible to the audience. GIRL moves to the dresser and pulls out a brush, runs it through her hair. The brightly colored liquid streaks through her hair as she brushes.

GIRL exits.

GIRL enters.

GIRL has returned with a bowl of cereal, and is (inaudibly) eating it with a spoon.

She sits down at a small table in the corner and continues to eat her cereal, staring into the bowl. The next bite she takes, the milk is murky and brown. She blinks and tilts the bowl towards herself in such a way that the audience can also see its contents. The milk has turned a muddy brown. She turns her head towards the audience, frowning, and she has colorful liquid dripping from her nostrils, like a nosebleed.

Nonchalantly, almost, she scrubs her finger under her nose and wipes the liquid on her shirt before standing and drinking the rest of the bowl. She can no longer smell the milk.

GIRL walks to her sink in the other corner of the room and brushes her teeth. By this point, both her nose and ears are constantly dripping technicolor fluid. When she spits out her toothpaste, the mixture is technicolor. She coughs once, inaudibly, and the sink is splattered with color. She can no longer taste the toothpaste.

GIRL looks in the mirror, blinks, and pigmented tears stream down her cheeks, thick and viscous. They leave black streaks on her skin. Her hand knocks her toothbrush to the

floor with a noiseless clatter. She can no longer see.

GIRL clutches her head, stepping away from the sink, then feels outwards for what isn’t there. She scrabbles at her skin, as if it burns. She scratches and scratches, and eventually her fingernails come away caked with color. She scratches herself again, and her fingers don’t even twitch. She can no longer feel.

She slumps to the ground, scrambling backwards, and eventually falling flat on her back, her breaths inaudible but heaving in her chest. She stares up at the ceiling of her bedroom, liquid streaming down her hair to pool on the ground from her lips, nose, eyes, and ears. It bubbles up in her mouth and overflows, painting her chin and neck like an oil spill— glossy, shimmery, dooming. Her fingers dig into the floorboards uselessly as her breaths become more choked.

GIRL goes still, and slowly, the ambiance of the rest of the house becomes audible.

Cut to black.

Fin.

Sensory Overload, Lillie Olliver, 2021

Empty Efforts Matthew Purvis, 2021

Forever enduring hardship and strife, Eternally toiling for a change.

Will anything lead to a better life?

Making pools of blood and tears with great rife, Feeling boxed up within a see-through cage.

Forever enduring hardship and strife.

Is it even worth it to take the dive?

I could drown, clawing for air out of range.

Will anything lead to a better life?

If I cannot cut my bounds like a knife, How long will I suffer this tiring stage?

Forever enduring hardship and strife.

Through a tinted pane, I see others thrive While I grow jealous and bitter with age.

Will anything lead to a better life?

Am I encaged in a Zoo or alive?

Even with great assuage, there is no change.

Forever enduring hardship and strife, Will anything lead to a better life?

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Grasp of Life, Afiya Khan, 2021

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Doha Lauren Park, 2021 I lay on the ground as I wonder what my life would have been like without him. Would I have been happier? Would life be the same?

Different? I can’t think of an answer. I can’t think about what my life could have been without him because he was my life.

I was happy before he came. I remember it like it was yesterday, yet it was an eternity ago. Yesterday, my biggest worry was thinking about what to do on Friday night. How did I end up here? How did I end up in this cold, dead world?

A few years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to Doha. I stared at the ferocious little thing. He was affectionate and kept coming towards me, nudging me to pet him. I didn’t think much of it, and I wasn’t very fond of him at first. His fur was the kind of fur that invites you to snuggle with him; he was the color of snow and while I wanted to take him into my arms, I just didn’t have the courage at the time.

My friend had asked me to take care of Doha while she left for some business. I didn’t like the idea of taking care of something, so I almost refused, but Doha looked at me with such eyes that made it impossible to do so. I eventually took him in, fed him, bathed him, walked him, and cleaned after him. It didn’t take long for me to get attached to him.

My parents wanted Doha out of the house.

They said he was not good for me and that he was a troublemaker. They threatened to take Doha away from me, so I took him with me to college.

At the lowest point of my life, Doha was there for me. Doha was there when I cried myself to sleep; when I was depressed; when I had dangerous thoughts; when no one else was there for me. After a long day, I would go

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home to my apartment, and Doha was always waiting for me at the door. I needed Doha.

One day things changed. Doha wouldn’t eat his food. He refused to eat.

“What’s wrong bud,” I said with a voice of concern. He whimpered. I decided not to think much of it.

He must have a stomach ache, I thought.

But the next day and the day after that, Doha would still not eat anything.

I contemplated what must have been going on with Doha as I mindlessly cut the vegetables for my own meal and didn’t notice that I had cut my own finger doing so. I shrieked in pain, holding my throbbing finger as tears formed in my eyes. Blood was dripping down to the floor.

I ran to the bathroom to get bandaged up and was shocked to see the pool of blood that was once on the kitchen floor gone. I looked at Doha and saw the bright red blood stained to his fluffy white fur. I gasped as I ran to Doha. How could I just let him drink blood?

I picked him up and held him in my arms. He immediately started biting the wounded finger; I winced from the pain.

A wild realization had come upon me at that moment. He ate. He ate!

I rushed to the pantry to get Doha’s dog food and grabbed the knife. Without hesitation, I cut my finger again and let the blood drip over his food. As soon as I set the bowl down, Doha scarfed down his food hungrily, even greedily. I was amazed.

Should I go see the doctor? I thought. Then instantly thought what if they take Doha away from me?

I looked down at Doha. His expression seemed to say “MORE. I WANT MORE.”

I reluctantly pulled out the knife again. I would do anything to keep Doha alive.

My friend who left Doha with me came back to the country. She wanted Doha back, but I couldn’t give him to her. I let out a scream as if I was dying when she tried to take him from me.

She scoffed at me with disbelief and then a look of pity clouded her eyes.

“What have I done?” she whispered. “I’m so sorry…”

I was on the floor hugging Doha close to my chest as tears rolled down my face. I got back up to tell my friend that I would not be giving Doha up, but she was already out the door.

I kept feeding Doha his dog food with my blood, but eventually, even my blood was not enough for him. I started cutting pieces of my own body to feed him and keep him alive.

Doha was the only thing that brought me happiness. Doha was always there for me. Doha was my world.

Over time, as I withered, nothing was left except for my heart. But he was worth it. I grabbed the knife and pierced the remnants of my chest around my heart. I didn’t care about the pain. I needed Doha to be happy.

I can’t tell you what I was thinking at the time. I could barely function at that point. What I knew was that I felt good. I felt the rush of dopamine as I cut into my body. I reached, with the remaining energy I had, into my body and pulled out my heart.

I lay on the ground, holding my still warm, still-beating heart in my right hand that was extended towards him, but for some reason, he would not take it. I lay on the ground as I wonder what my life would have been like without him.

I say “I love you,” but the words are not returned.

I can feel the last living thing inside of me slowly fading away, and with the last bit of breath I have, I say “I love you, Doha.”

And again, the words are not returned.

Doha, Lauren Park, 2021

The Value of Life Moska Arsalan, 2021 To live a life, You must roll a dice.

To live a life there are risks And there are mistakes While living life, you face trouble In which the risks are double.

Some are strong and can overcome, But some lose mind of who they become.

They twist and they turn And imagine themselves burn In the fire that they have within.

They live a hell of regret, And their existence is a threat.

They hate their hands And no one understands The pain and suffering that is hid under the sands Full of hate And no longer able to wait, They take their own lives as bait.

Take a stand on a cliff and take a step For all the things you have yet to prep.

You take a deep breath, 100 back And see nothing but a crack; A life full of wreck.

You see a future in the heavens And count by sevens 1…2…3…4…5…6…7…8…9…10 Knowing you have just taken the soul of a man.

The soul that belongs to you.

You leave everything behind To the depression that has made you blind.

Walking down a path, Not knowing the aftermath.

You take a jump Ignoring the speed bump

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Leaving behind only your name That will soon be out of the frame.

You commit suicide With a heart full of pride, And no one has yet cried For the little kid who died While being tied To a fate that tried To live a life alongside REGRET. You commit suicide To stop the voices in your head that are terrified Of being unsatisfied With LIFE.

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Anomaly Bhavana Kunnath, 2021 A hard plate of iridescent material hit the ground. A screech of metal echoed through the lab.

Inanna dropped her cup of 3 a.m. coffee on the floor and darted to the closed laboratory door to scan her ID card. What if something had happened to the samples—Dr. Akuji’s life’s work—in the time she had left Aya in the lab not half an hour ago?

Behind the laboratory door, Aya braced herself before gripping the synthetic plate of skin covering her shin and pulled once more, tearing it open where it had previously been soldered along a neat seam.

“What are y—” Inanna froze in the entryway. An array of slides was scattered across the counters and shards tipped in volatile test samples littered the cold tile—years of careful collection, cultivation, and experimentation dashed into puddles of glass and decay. Her eyes fell on Aya’s exposed connective circuitry. She approached Aya slowly, her hand already floating towards the open wound. “This is serious. We might not be able to fix you by ourselves.”

Inanna turned to call for backup. “DOMINI—” “No! No.” Aya scrambled, grimacing as she put pressure on her damaged leg and slammed her hand on the exit panel. The doors to the lab slid shut, sealing them in. “No one else. I didn’t want you to be here for this, but maybe it’s better this way…Maybe I was wrong to try to keep you away.” She panted for a moment and attempted to stand straight, despite the strain on her leg. She reached up towards the

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back of her neck and neatly clicked open her cervical panel. Reaching in and wincing in pain, she tore out a circuit board and a small clump of associated wire and held it up to the light, watching as electricity arced across the exposed ends of the copper wire for a moment. A relieved sigh. “That’s better.”

Inanna felt a rush of air leave her lungs before her ears could even recognize the wretched noise as a scream.

Aya immediately rushed over and took one of Inanna’s wrists into her hand soothingly, “Shhhh, shhhh. No, it’s okay, see?” She tossed the circuit aside and straightened with ease. “See? It’s painless now. It’s okay now.”

“What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?” Innana gasped, backing away in horror. Her eyes were fixed on a thread of amber liquid dripping down Aya’s shoulder.

It was so dark and thick that when it pooled that it looked like rusted blood. “Oh god- oh god—” Inanna swallowed hard, forcing the disgust and concern into the pit of stomach to make room for reason. She frantically began picking up the bodily debris Aya had left in her wake. “Why are you doing this? Is it something I said? Did you have an accident after I left? Whatever it is, we can fix it, okay? You don’t have to punish yourself; we’ll handle it—” Aya blurted, “No, it’s nothing like that, Inanna—I’m doing this on purpose.” Aya reached down, peeling the rest of the shin sheath off and tossing it aside pointedly.

“See? I’m in control, I’m doing this of my own volition. It’s not your fault, or an accident, or a punishment—” “Stop that! Stop doing that! I know you; you would never do something so self-destructive,

so irrational, so—” Inanna’s voice wavered as the confusion and frustration overtook reason.

It was not the scent of Aya’s earthy blood or the sight of her peeled skin against the tile or the network of wires lying like orphaned veins appearing neon against the sterile white of the lab that left the words clinging to the inside of Inanna’s throat but the carelessness with which Aya was desecrating her own body. It was almost cruelty, but it lacked malice; it was not so much cold as it was calm. Yet, Aya’s actions had claws and their sharp edges dug deeply and precisely into Inanna’s skin. “I know you, Aya. You would never do something so irrational, so… you wouldn’t… you just wouldn’t.”

“Inanna, you’re not listening to me.” Aya almost unconsciously seemed to quicken the pace of her self-vivisection to match the fervor in her voice. “This isn’t wrong; it’s so incredibly right. Do you remember the other night?”

She pulled forcefully and thoughtlessly on her anterior palmar casing, dislodging the delicate sesamoid components of its internal framework. “Do you remember the other night, when we were talking about not being here anymore, not being trapped in our own skins anymore? You laid your head right against my chest, and you said ‘what if we didn’t have to do this anymore? If there was no metal, no flesh, no body, just being?’” She swallowed. “Well, I was looking at those slides, Inanna, and you won’t believe the—the horrors I’ve seen, the incredible wrongness of this all, but I checked and I checked and I checked and it’s true. If we don’t want to be in this skin, we don’t have to be. The slides spelled it out clear as day; we just didn’t see it then. But you were right. If we want it, we can have it. No body, just being—we can have that.”

Inanna wiped her nose on the sleeve of her lab coat as hot tears blurred her vision. “Is that what this is about? Anxiety? I know how the insecurities pile on and on until they’ve buried you, but god, you don’t need to do this. We can… we can cover every mirror in our apartment, if you want, you don’t need to—to tear yourself apart like this twisted game of Opera-

tion will make everything okay.”

Aya groaned. “No, no, no. This isn’t about insecurities or anxiety, but maybe all those feelings were right. Hell, maybe they were all right, and we were treating them like they were wrong this whole time, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Aya’s trailing eyes now met Inanna’s with renewed clarity and conviction, “But this— this is about evidence; about the science behind that self-loathing. God, if I had the slides I would show you, but it was so cruel, so destructive, so, so wrong that I couldn’t do that to you, couldn’t let you see the barbarity of it all like that. But if you had seen the slides, if you’d seen them through my eyes, if you could zoom in so close that you could see beyond the anomalies on those slides, so small you could see the motion of existence yourself, god, you’d know why that rage, that feral desire to pry out every eye that’s soiled your skin by just seeing it, judging it, thinking about it, isn’t so bad after all …

“I wish I hadn’t talked to you about … about all that. I didn’t mean for you to—I don’t even know if we can fix you anymore.” Inanna’s concern was overridden by her undeniable anger. Every moment she had spent teaching Aya, holding her and realigning her joints; every night they had lost to sleep-deprived confessions and wordless conversation, every tender memory was being violated by the image of Aya’s self-mutilation.

Inanna took a deep breath. “You’re one of a kind. Each of these pieces you’ve torn out is near impossible to replace. You think I don’t know that feeling, that perpetual itch of discomfort that crawls in my bones every time I try to accurately picture what I look like when I’m caught off guard in candid? Aya, I’m human.

I know how badly that burns, but if I hate my skin so much that I tear it off, the labs can grow more and graft it back in—what you’re doing to yourself … we have no replacements for you.

No second chances.”

“No, listen!” Aya gritted out. “Listen to me.

Listen, okay? Dr. Akuji needed me to run some numbers and carry out some experiments

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in their absence, right? They left me to look over the slides from Ür—those were the ones I was running through when you went on your break. They wanted me to run the experiments because of my ocular Shift—” Aya paused as if suddenly recalling something and reached up to her left eye. She probed the metallic orb and dug her fingers in deep, pulling out a silver compartment with a tangle of wires attached. The gaping hole where she had mauled her own face revealed life: humming, shrieking through the pulsing network beneath her delicate skull casing, and yet Aya remained unperturbed.

Aya gripped Inanna with a quivering hand.

“The Shift in my eye was just modified so I can perceive particles infinitely smaller than that of which the human eye or even a nanoscope can perceive. And after you left, I was alone with the Shift and the Ür samples, and I was curious. I was alone, and I was watching the samples and, and— Hildegarde’s principle, yes? It should’ve been impossible for me to see it, but Hildegarde was wrong. I saw it—I saw the disease multiply right before my eyes. I saw it.”

“But that’s perfectly normal! Aya, you’ve seen this before! Even I’ve seen an anomaly multiply—I was watching the Mohenjo cells divide just yesterday. Multiply— that’s what these anomalies do.” Inanna tightened her grip on Aya’s hands, pleading, hoping that the warmth of her skin might just breach the steely barrier of insanity. “This isn’t anything new. This doesn’t violate Hildegarde’s principle; there’s no reason to do this to yourself. Please!”

“No, no, no,” Aya continued. “The disease—it wasn’t the cancer in the Ür samples or the Mohenjo mutation; it wasn’t any of the anomalies. Those are just physical manifestations, uncontrolled perceptions, but they’re not the disease.”

Aya caressed Inanna’s face with the partially exposed silver bones of her shaking hand in a moment of incoherent lucidity. “Oh, it’s so good you hadn’t seen it. Oh, the disease, I watched it multiply. I could see the

atoms, the quarks, the … the ….”

“Cell multiplication is normal with these abnormalities. The disease infects and multiplies.

That’s what it does. Aya, don’t do this to yourself over nothing! Whatever you think you saw with your Shift, I can fix it, okay? I’ll make sure a glitch like that never happens again, I promise.

Please—” “You don’t understand. There’s no glitch!

What I saw was the truth, it was just so small and plain and … unsavory we couldn’t see it before. The disease isn’t in the cells. It’s the particles themselves! Don’t you see? It’s the particles themselves! It’s the cells! It’s the atoms!

It’s the quarks! It’s every particle and sub-particle that there is. The disease isn’t biological, it—it’s physical. It’s—it’s—it’s physicality itself.

Physical existence!”

Inanna’s brows were knitted together, her eyes frantic. “I don’t know what’s come over you. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but please let me help you. Whatever it is that’s wrong, let me fix it. I’ll get the best technician there is; I won’t lose you like this! This is madness!”

“This isn’t madness. This is peace. Inanna.”

Aya turned over Inanna’s hand and tapped the flesh of her wrist. “This is the disease.” She pressed her metal fingers flat against Inanna’s chest. “This is the disease.” She dropped the torn-out eye, Shift and all, in Inanna’s palm.

“This is the disease. What a beautiful disease it is, so mesmerizing and gripping, what a divine one it is, to bless us with all of creation. What an ethereal, loving thing it is to let me see you like this. But it’s a disease nonetheless.”

Inanna dropped the mechanical eye in revulsion and frantically rubbed at her skin with her lab coat as if her palm had been stained with human blood. Aya picked both her hands up again, even as Inanna tried to tug them away.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it. I know you.

I know you. I know that revulsion you feel every time you look in the mirror and the reflection doesn’t match the image in your head. You know I’m telling the truth.” Aya’s voice fell from its fever pitch to devastating, lucid softness.

“Isn’t it possible that … that hatred that makes incomplete, as in love and out you want to scrub your skin, your fat, your face of it, as much memory as we right off isn’t hatred, but just the knowledge that are unwritten destinies, at this it isn’t natural? That whatever this cancerous moment right now, and we are plague is, it isn’t you? I promise you there is an all of those wonderful things essence, a dimension, an existence, something outside of these cages, these outside of this. Physical being, physical … exiswalking corpses. This pestitence—it’s not divine intervention or penance, lence that we clothe ourselves it’s not an inevitability or an anomaly, it’s not with defines so little of us that it undermines us. something or nothing, it’s not anything. It’s a … We exist outside of the sheer physicality that colony—a disease that colonizes this beautiwe call being alive. I promise you we do, and ful, ethereal, nonphysical thing. I don’t know I don’t know how it works or what it is, but I will what it does—I don’t know if it’s consuming us find you, and you will be okay, then.” She digs like we’re agarose in its little petri dish or just her fingers into her left talocrural plate, peeling covering us in generations upon generations of it off of her ankle bone. “We can be so free. itself so we’ll forget ourselves and be its vacant Doesn’t it get heavy, carrying these carbon hosts or if it’s cutting into us, whatever we are, caricatures of yourself, letting them pile on you and slicing us into impossibly thin slices so we like the dead? These atoms are nothing. The can’t hold onto every part of ourselves or if it’s cosmos, that whole world out there watching cultivating us like cows and bacterial cultures your every move, picking your image to piecbut it’s doing something …” Aya heaved in a es—none of it has to be any more real than breath, her heart racing. “Look, I can’t promise you want it to be!” you what parts of “Doesn’t it get heavy, carrying these Inanna slipped us exist beyond this down, slumping carbon caricatures of yourself, letting against the lower pestilence, but I them pile on you like the dead?” promise you that we cabinets in defeat. do exist outside of She could see such a this, that this isn’t real—or at least it’s not all there deep conviction, such an incontrovertible mysis to reality.” tical truth burning in Aya’s remaining eye, in the Inanna’s eyes welled up. “Oh, Aya, you’re gasps that racked her frame, that she knew she not a disease! Don’t you dare say that! You had already lost. What troubled her more than are not a mistake. I am not a mistake. We’re the realization that Aya could not be stopped not problems or diseases, or anomalies to be was the fact that Aya was beginning to make removed! This skin you’re ripping off is our sense—somewhere within, she could feel the past and future etched into our present, it’s a fuel of self-loathing and insecurity and anxiety record of our every touch. We are so much kindling and swelling into a wildfire ignited by more than a disease, we’re—we’re people, we the molotov cocktail of a realization that Aya have intellect, we have an endless capacity for had thrown at her. beauty and change. You and I are love itself, Aya dropped to her knees in front of we are happiness and sorrow and passion and Inanna’s hunched form, her metallic kneecaps grief and memory and triumph; don’t let us be clacking against the hardwood floor, pressing a tragedy.” her hands against Inanna’s face with ardent “But don’t you see? All of those things tenderness. “Maybe this is the anomaly—we exist outside of this.” Aya tore another layer are the anomaly. It’s not our existence, or the of shielding from her thigh, ignoring Inanna’s existence of all the cells in those petri dishes whimper as it clattered to the ground. “You, right there, or even the virus that’s eating us and I, and everything we are, and ever will through our skin—the anomaly is our willingness be, and have been. We are as complete and to submit to the physicality of existence, to com-

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Untitled, Anonymous, 2022

modify and value and believe it… But you don’t have to do that anymore. Join me.”

“No.” “Join me, Inanna. I can’t watch you succumb to this. You keep saying that I’m hurting us by doing this, but if you saw what I saw … you’d know that every second you resist your own deconstruction I am watching you die. You would know that we can’t afford to wait. Trust me, let me free us both. I know every fracture line your body has left on your mind.

Let me pour gold in the wounds left by your flesh. Please, join me.”

Inanna couldn’t help but lean her cheek into Aya’s touch. The warmth of life fighting within Aya’s metallic shell made the distinction between the warm flesh of one lover and the metallic flesh of the other blurry.

“I … I can’t,” Inanna wept. “I can’t. I can’t, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t just tear my flesh off! You? You can unplug your pain receptors, I can’t do that. It would hurt too much. I can’t. I’m just not ready ….”

“More than this? More than what’s happening to us right now?” Aya used her thumb to gently brush away Inanna’s tears, managing a weak but overwhelmingly genuine smile.

Inanna let out a breath and resigned herself to a defeated silence. Whether or not she could afford to wait, it seemed that she would.

“Then I’ll join you,” Aya said with resolve.

“I’ll reconnect my pain receptors. I’ll suffer with you to the very end.”

“No!” Inanna’s eyes widened as she scanned the debri for the circuit board. Frantically, she pulled the panel from the carnage and gripped it behind her back. “No.” “Let me do this for you. Please, at least this.”

“No. If you have to do what you have to do … then I’d rather it be painless. If you have to leave me, then let it be peaceful. If this is all we can have before you go ….” Inanna forced a trembling smile between the tears. “Then let us have peace.”

“Can you do me a favor, then? You have to promise at least this much: don’t look. Don’t go searching the slides for evidence, don’t

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suffer what I saw. I know your curiosity and I am asking you that you deny it this one thing.

When you’re ready, you’ll make the decision to join me without ever glancing at those slides.

Promise me.”

Inanna hesitated, then nodded slowly. A reel of the thousand ways the next few minutes could go, the thousands of ways Aya could die began to play in her mind. The icy glaze of denial drooped over her eyes, making her appear almost catatonic.

Silence echoed through the lab and suddenly the pair was aware of the dull thuds of concerned lab assistants pounding on the door.

But the sense of impending loss consumed them and as it breathed in, the calls of the assistants, the very cries of the world itself, disappeared into the quiet stillness of its vacuum.

“I’m not leaving you, Inanna, I’m leaving towards you.” Aya disconnected her patellar joint. “I will find you.” A sheath of aluminum and platinum fell to the ground. She started working her hip joint loose.

“You may not believe me now, but I mean it. I promise. I will find you.” Aya unweaved the fibers of her spinal cord and slid off its casing.

The panels of her rib cage fell slack beneath her hand.

“I will never be any further from you than you are from yourself. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be here. When the disease has erased any memory of me, I will be here. When the colonies of particles have made you their ancestral home over centuries, I will be here.” Aya’s right arm reached over to the rubble of her ribs and slowly undid her left arm. Now alone, the limb began undoing itself at the wrist. The nub of her arm painstakingly unwound the gears of her jaw.

“I will find you, Inanna.” The sound of her name oozed slowly out of Aya’s jaw as it unhinged and her voice warped and deepened until it was unrecognizable. Aya’s jaw and lower cranial casing fell open, exposing the soft underbelly of her neural web. What was left of her twitched but she could no longer make any meaningful movements.

“I know.” Inanna stared vacantly for a while,

the utter vastness of her loss clawing her from the inside as she watched the intention pulsing through Aya’s movements pool like blood beneath her spasming mechanical remnants.

Even if its capacities were limited and its actions were meaningless, it seemed life still clung to the soon-to-be corpse. After a time, Inanna carefully drew Aya’s head into her lap, stroking the hair of the dissected automaton, the remnants of her lover, softly.

After a moment, she lifted a violently shaking hand towards Aya’s cranial cavity and swiftly pulled the mass of glowing wires out.

The pulses of fading life sparked against her hand, making the visceral reality of her fatal movements clear. She tore at the web of wires more rapidly now. Aya’s spasms slowed to a halt.

Inanna allowed the tangle of neurons to slip from her quivering fingers and slowly moved to grip the silver eye on the ground. She blew the dust and metal flakes off it and held it up to the light, peering through the glass with her own eye. Despite the impact of its fall, despite death, the Shift within seemed to still be in perfect condition. She rose, still holding the glass against her eye, and made her way to the nearest nanoscope.

Inanna adjusted the Shift and pressed it against the nanoscope oculus of the last intact slideset Aya had viewed.

“Maybe, Aya, I’lll find you first.”

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Sync-hole Lillie Olliver, 2021

It’s hard when your body and your mind aren’t in sync.

Disjointed, discombobulated, head empty, no think.

Except that you DO think, you think all too much.

But to everyone else, it’s subpar, not enough.

It’s hard when your body and mind aren’t in sync.

Want to run, want to go, be gone in a blink.

Except that your body says, no, you little liar.

You know you can’t run without feeling the fire.

It’s hard when your body and mind aren’t in sync.

Want to eat, want to live, want to breathe, want to drink.

Except that your eyes don’t tell you what they see.

Instead it’s high numbers and shame and pity.

It’s hard when your body and mind aren’t in sync.

Sluggish, then spirited, then hovering on the brink.

Racing thoughts with no outlet, jerking limbs within sleep.

Always wrong place, wrong time, and no benefits to reap.

When your mind is a turntable, a game of roulette, You just hope and you pray that you win one more set.

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Empty Head, Valerie Quarshie, 202126

MIND MENDJE ESPRIT MINTE ANIMO

MENTE VERSTAND GEEST UM MENT MANA’O

MENTE, the mind...

To many, the mind is the distinction between man and animal, but how willing are we to stay with our thoughts to the very end?

Just as our mind is capable of solving the most intricate of problems with even more complex solutions, capable of dreaming far beyond the atmosphere that encapsulates and limits the body... the mind is capable of creating labyrinths that we cannot escape.

What will we find when we find our way out?

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Bystander Darshana Sharma, 2023 5 There were five of us. When the night began there were five.

We had wanted to take a walk at night. The harsh afternoon heat mellowed into a gentle warmth, and Cal had brought up the idea of taking a walk. Grace disagreed.

Walking in the woods was scary enough, its large trees and hazardous floor making it easy to trip. I didn’t have an opinion on the matter.

“C’mon Grace, live a little! We live in Utah. What’s the worst that can happen?” Cal argued. After relentless convincing, Cal had persuaded us to take this walk.

It started okay. The five of us met up in front of the forest and ventured out into the inky blackness of nature. The night had gotten colder and we all failed to bring a coat. We failed to bring anything more than flashlights.

I think that was our first mistake. Our second mistake was having Lewis lead the group. He was notorious for giving bad directions, but at the time getting concerned wasn’t too big of a concern. We wanted to explore the woods that guarded the periphery of our town like a gate from the outside world. Between the five of us, it was silent, only the loud chirping of crickets and stumbling was heard. We all kept our heads to the ground to avoid the common tree root or small animal. I think that was our third mistake.

We had been walking for about 15 minutes. I could hear the group getting winded, and Cal’s positive encouragement fell on deaf ears. We were tired, and these woods weren’t as entertaining as they seemed.

Suddenly, we heard crashing up above us. Without a single warning, a herd of deer ran past, anxious to get away from whatever it is they saw. That piqued my interest.

I could see small birds going in the direction of the deer as well. What did they see? Without words, we unanimously decided to explore.

But before we got far, Mira froze. After a second, I froze with her. It was too quiet.

“Is Cal still here?” she questioned.

It had been a while since we heard a, “keep going guys!” or a, “this will be so fun!”

Our bright beagle of a friend was nowhere to be seen, and none of us had noticed earlier.

Maybe it was the exhaustion that made us not question his disappearance. He might have gotten tired of our lack of excitement. Lewis knew looking for him would be fruitless, so he told the group to keep going. Maybe he thought we’d all get lost. Maybe he didn’t care for Cal at all. I quickly learned that I would not have the time to ask him these questions.

4 Wanting to explore what the animals were running from, we pushed forward. I took this opportunity to look everywhere in hopes of finding Cal, but the taunting darkness of the forest held no answers. We kept walking. Farther and farther. Maybe these animals ran a long way to protect themselves from whatever it was we were going to. Either way, it took a long time. After 10 minutes, we all sat down.

“I’m so hungry,” Lewis said.

None of us had thought to bring any food.

I can now admit it was poor planning on our part.

“Just eat some berries off of a bush,” Isabelle giggled.

“What if they’re poisonous? I don’t want to die!”

“Well, if you’re really hungry, then you’ll take that chance.”

Lewis didn’t like being challenged. He was

all too competitive. He stood up with a grunt and brushed the dirt off of his pants.

“Lewis I was joking. What if they’re actually poisonous?”

“I’ll take that chance,” Lewis grinned.

I stood up to go with him. I didn’t want anyone to be alone. Not right now. But this trip proved fruitless. We walked miles away from the group just to return empty handed. Maybe we should’ve paid more attention on the walk but it was really hard to focus. I imagined their faces when we would return. Maybe their cheeks would be hollower, even though we hadn’t gone long without food. Our fourth mistake was not trying hard enough to find some.

Walking back to the group was easier than I imagined. I kept my eyes directly on the ground and remembered the path. However, when we got there only one remained. Grace.

She said Isabelle had seen a patch of flowers and went to pick them. But I was confused.

There were no flowers nearby. I tried asking Grace for more information, but she was too unfocused to answer them. I could understand.

Isabelle and Grace were best friends. I should have asked Grace questions. That was our fifth mistake.

3 Now just Lewis, Grace, and I, we decided to look for our missing friends. Well, Lewis and I decided. Grace argued that it was too dangerous. But since the majority of us wanted to go, we went. The time was edging towards 2:30 am. I read somewhere that 2-3 am was most common for supernatural occurrences.

Maybe that’s what was happening here.

We started where Grace and Isabelle were sitting, and looked around for a flower patch. However, all we saw were trees, their long arms threatening to strangle us. We chose to split up. Lewis and Grace chose to walk together. I didn’t mind too much because I didn’t get along with them sometimes. However if I knew how long we’d be separated I would have chosen to go as a trio. Splitting up never worked for anyone. I would think that was our sixth mistake. Nevertheless, I walked alone, my

dim flashlight being my only comparison.

It had been 20 minutes when I realized I walked too far. I turned back around, but the trees looked too similar, and I realized I had stopped tracking where I was going.

This was the worst case scenario. I couldn’t get lost. Couldn’t get separated. I was so focused on trying to remember the last landmark I saw,I almost missed the piercing scream coming from miles away. Lewis.

Without hesitating, I sprinted back into the direction I assumed was my origin. The roots and small plants threatened to crawl up my legs and trip me, but every time I stumbled I we got back up. We can’t lose another person.

Soon I had reached the same clearing where Isabelle had gone missing. I pushed forward in the same direction Lewis had previously gone. I felt thorns scrape down my leg, but it wasn’t the time for that concern.

Soon I broke into a clearing. Lewis’ screams were scarce now, and I frantically looked around to find him.

I did find him, but on the ground. His formerly cream hoodie was stained with a dark liquid that smelled of metal. His hands were glued to his side, pressing down on what seemed to be a serious injury. Grace was a few feet behind him, looking traumatized by our friend struggling to stay conscious. I kneeled to help apply pressure, but Grace just stood there. Why wasn’t she trying to help?

She dropped a large stick covered in the same substance that Lewis was losing. Oh. 2 “Is that all you have to tell us?” The policeman methodically said. I could tell he was trying to be kind. I tried my best to accurately recount what had happened hours before, but I couldn’t really stay focused. I could tell the policeman was getting tired of me.

I knew Grace was being questioned in the other room. I wondered what she’d have to say about the whole night.

Untitled, Jaylin Gonzales

Liar Lillie Olliver, 2021 How dare you Assume to know What goes on Within my head?

As if you’ve reached Between my ears And read To your heart’s content?

As if you’d see Anything you Could even comprehend?

It’s all gibberish Up in here Nothing to see Nothing to read Nothing that you Could ever read At least My thoughts look like wingdings font absolute madness A binary code Without the numbers Just feelings And words And pictures So when you say “I know what you’re thinking” I’m not sure I believe That you can suddenly Read wingdings font With perfect accuracy.

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Head Empty, Only Wingdings, Lillie Olliver, 2021

A Place for You Tara Kim, 2022

Minds are vast endless fantasies A place where it is only you.

Your train of personal secrets Masked from your evil surroundings.

Often times people study you, Trying to read what you’re thinking Although they might think they know you, They will never know you truly.

You invade my soul day and night.

Deceitful thoughts keep my awake.

Thoughts running around and racing My mind is poisoned and it hurts.

Good for you, I can fake a smiile To the extent of which they hurt.

My poor pride and fading moments A place deprived of happiness

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But can’t help but think about you How great it must be to hide pain.

I will never know any clues, Because it is a place for you.

Eye of the Beholder, Adaeze Uzoije, 2022

What do you do?

Sean Lynch, 2022 You are walking alone down the street. It’s a cold November night. you’ve just finished up school and decided to retire with some TV when you get home. What do you do? | >walk down the street | You wontinue to walk down the street... You see a car from the opposite end. You start to correct your course to avoid it until you hear something. | Come. It says flirtatiously. What do you do? | >listen | You listen. You only hear the blowing of leaves and the faint sound of an approaching vehicle.

“Must have been nothing,” you think to yourself... What do you do? | >listen | You listen. You only hear the blowing of leaves.

No, wait. You hear him.

I will comfort you in release. He elucidates.

What do you do? | >?WHO | There are 1 characters in the [road]: [You] What do you do? | >?DESC | You are walking down the street. A car is approaching.

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| >asdlfhjslahkjHKJ; | INVALID COMMAND PLEASE TYPE ?HELP FOR VALID COMMANDS It is only natural, she explains, that you are frustrated...

What do you do? | >say “Who are you?” | You say “Who are you?” to no one. A voice responds in your ear, Don’t you know silly? They giggle. A chill runs down your spine. | >look behind | You look behind yourself to only see the road you were walking down. What do you do? | >listen | You listen. The car is much louder. You turn around to face it. Seeing its light. It’s very close.

It will not be able to stop...

Step into the light.

What do you do? | >look for voice | INVALID COMMAND PLEASE TYPE ?HELP FOR VALID COMMANDS >look for voice

| >?HELP LIST OF VALID COMMANDS: -step into the light | >step into the light | You step into the light. Your heart is racing.

“What am I doing?” you ask yourself.

Living.

The car is fastly approaching. What do you do? | >move out the way | INVALID COMMAND PLEASE TYPE ?HELP FOR VALID COMMANDS Won’t you accept the call?

The call of the VOID? | >get out the way

| INVALID COMMAND PLEASE TYPE ?HELP FOR VALID COMMANDS | >jump out the way | INVALID COMMAND PLEASE TYPE ?HELP FOR VALID COMMANDS | >do something, please | You move out of the way. The car drives past with great speed. Your heart is racing. You feel nauseous. Vomit skews in the street gutter. You feel someone grab your shoulders. You look behind yourself to see no one there. You hear it speak...

Don’t worry, I’m not coming for you now... but be ready for my touch once more...

What do you do, reader? | >

Do You See What I See?, Meera Sanjeevirao, 2021

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Jailbird Adaeze Uzoije, 2022 “Stand up.”

I look into the light shining above me, feeling the pupil in my eye shrink as I look at where I am.

Holy crap, where am I. What did I do?

Wait. I remember.

I was arguing with someone. Wait, of course, I was yelling with her. I hated the words that came out of her putrid mouth. Her beauty was ruined by her disgusting words, her nasty attitude, her tendency to reach for the vases in our house and throw them at me. Of course, I would do the same. Arguing was so familiar, and hating her was too. I had done it a million times. I had thought of it a million times. She had it coming a million times over. And over.

And over. And over. And by the time I came to....

She was gone? What happened to her?

What did I-Oh my god.

Why did I do it?

I can’t forget it.

“It was a mista-” “SHUT it, Jailbird.”

The officer slams his hand on the table in front of me, and a deafening sound echoes through the room. The nausea comes with. I remember it. I remember everything.

But it was a mistake! How could I have known that the vase I used was full? She would have done the same. I know she would have done the same and there is nothing anyone can tell me otherwise. I’m innocent, and there’s nothing anyone can tell me otherwise. Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Oh god, I still feel sick.

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Why do I have to remember everything?

Someone, someTHING made me do it.

SHE made me do it. I swear. I swear. I swear. I swear. I sw-“HEY.” I look up. Were they talking? Oh god, I can’t hear them. Are they there? Were they ever? I don’t know. I know everything, but I don’t know anything. My skull hurts. My brain hurts. My elbows are caving in. The guilt is in my veins, coarse and coursing through. I know I hurt her.

Why did I hurt her? Why do I always hurt her?

Why would she always hurt me? Where is she? She can’t be gone. She’s too strong to be gone.

Is she dead?

Impossible.

“HEY, HALFPINT.” I’m against the wall now. Did they throw me? It doesn’t matter, I can’t feel it anymore.

I can’t feel anymore. I don’t deserve to feel anymore. I don’t want to, anyhow.

Oh god, the sickness is setting in. With the regret, with the want, with the need to say something. Do something. Every single joint and pressure point is clotting, like my body knows what it’s done. I know. They know. They know.

They know. Does she know? Would she tell me if she were here? Maybe.

Oh my god, why do I miss her?

Maybe there was a way. Maybe we could have been happier, better, and together.

Maybe she didn’t leave. I’ll be right there with her one day. I’ll find her again. I’ll say sorry!

And maybe then we’ll be okay. But why do I miss her so much? Why do I have to remember the good times, the old times, the first times?

Was it really me? Was the problem really us?

Was she really it?

The woman of your dreams?

Your Achilles’s Heel?

“HOLY--”

Untitled, Isabel George, 2021

I look up.

They’re panicked.

I look down.

I can see my ribs.

I don’t care anymore.

Maybe now, I get to go to sleep.

Maybe now, I can apologize.

Maybe now, I can see her again.

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Prison of the Mind Xander Gibson, 2021

I am here because of my mind: Four bars, a lock with no key— A sword held against my neck that I am forced to grind.

I have lost my body to more bars I couldn’t see.

Promised democracy of the Czech, given the autocracy of the Saudi.

“Shining in the dark will be your soul” Is what they said to me.

I’m left to rot in this shattered wreck, The creation of my mind: a hole.

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Untitled, Anonymous, 2022

Mind’s Storm Ananya Kidambi, 2023

A drop, then another, it falls, Beautiful or outrageous to all, Catastrophe can follow, so can purity, Doing or thinking purely based on destiny, Every droplet is unique from one another.

For those who seek it, it will appear, Gazing back at you sometimes in fear, However many times you close your eyes, It will thunder and buzz like hundreds of flies, Joy you must bring to yourself.

Keep this storm in you, Let it grow if it must too, Make sure it is controlled at times, Never allow your voice to die, On thoughts you must trust.

People are not as different as they seem, Questioning themselves is a storm needing to heal, Rescue yourself in this tornado, Soon there will only be a sunset left to show, that Tomorrow must be a brighter day.

Ugly is a word to describe our thoughts, Vast world’s of rain, hail, or snow are sought, When we realize that this storm isn’t real, Xcusing our minds from an envious feel, You need to see the drizzle at the end, Zoom through your thoughts, you mustn’t be saddened, but please begin.

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Beyond Imagination, LanAnh Doan, 2024

An Ode to My Shadow Anonymous O’ Shadow, how evil can you be? You are just the negatives: hate, lust, greed; these are things society frowns upon; hell, you are no swan.

In my mind rages a war, my ego and shadow, a fight I asked not for.

Painful memories and times I cried, I recall, are products of you; this peace must fall.

It’s like you possess me!

When I had my first kiss, I felt carefree, only to feel shame and guilt after — just t ears, no laughter.

I don’t understand you, And you do not get me; To cooperate is to assimilate, And that is what you advocate?

You are repressed — no authority, Like a minority against the majority.

But in a fight, my ego dies as you open the floodgates — BANZAI! After this fight, I rethink; in my disgust and guilt, I shrink.

What part of my shadow should I acquire?

Add it to my ego — grow the empire!

I understand peace can only come if ego and shadow assimilate, I succumb; this war concludes, only for today, as for tomorrow, this will only replay.

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Untitled, Shivani Trivedi, 2021

How to Write Shiza Ghani, 2022

Life is a blank canvas that we paint on, but with the same colors and same strokes men have painted with for eternity.

There are no new colors, only shades to be discovered.

Reflection, Josephine Chivore, 2022 Reflection, Josephine Civore, 2022

1. Get Set Sit down at a table and get your materials ready. Maybe reach back into the depths of your memory and get some inspiration from a key moment in your life. Or, look around in the present and notice how everything worth expressing is right in front of you. Start writing. Get your thoughts out on paper. Understand that you don’t have to think too hard about what you write, and that there’s no hiding

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from your thoughts in this maneuver of seeking inspiration and manifesting it in art. Your doubts and realizations, your fears and hopes, and your questions and answers all have something in between, and that’s the process of accepting the former and trusting in the latter. That process is what you endure in life as well as the creative process. Life is art. Embrace it.

Continuity, Shiza Ghani, 2022

2. Brainstorm Remember what I said about not overthinking the journey? Scrap that. You’re going to worry anyways. Write a few sentences, delete them, and repeat. Contemplate upon your blank page for a very, very long time. If you do this for long enough, you’ll end up panicking, which is a sure recipe for disaster. Once you reach this point of indecision, I strongly suggest you take a break to refresh your mind and come back later with that cathartic light bulb moment you’ve been waiting for. Rejoice, for

this wonderful idea you had shall pave the way to destiny. You didn’t create this idea from scratch, it seemingly bubbled out of your subconscious for no particular reason. Time to put words into action and kindle the spark into a fire. As you follow your call in both life and the creative process, you come closer to understanding yourself and your world. It is what will save your soul, so capture the spark as soon as you see it flicker.

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Endless Nothings, Shiza Ghani, 2022

When the sun vanishes into the unfathomable deep, nothing but dim, distant starlight above remains. The artist steers on, though the water flows faint of color; it is dull, bleak, and perpetually dark. Without vision, the artist is lost in the mind.

Endless Nothings, Shiza Ghani, 2022 3. Write Write. Be satisfied. Come back to your draft later only to realize that you’re not sure where you’re going with this. Blow out the flame and sit in darkness. Try to remember. It doesn’t work.

Panic. The draft is fine, but it can be better. It can always be better, but it’ll never be good enough. That’s enough of a reason for many to give up and regress to the comforts of before and behind this limbo, but you better believe that it isn’t enough for you. By this point, there’s no real escape from the search for the soul; speaking from Langston Hughes’s artistic lens, you’ve already had the dream, the spark of inspiration, the resolve, and there’s no turning back now. To do so would be to defer the dream. There’s no acceptable solution except for moving forward with your imperishable dream, regardless of the consequences. Take the freed prisoner from “Allegory of the Cave” as an example; they had to endure the harsh effects of overwhelming light that heavily contrasted with the dim cave, where nothing but partial fulfillment of knowledge exists. Soon enough, the light or goal you chase after will fit a little better in your mind, as the process between ignorance and knowledge brings people closer to the dream.

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But what if you decide to give up anyways?

What will happen then? Will the goal “fester like a sore… or does it explode”? Will you really forget? Or will the inspiration become a ghost, lingering in your mind until you can’t help but face it? Ghosts don’t make any sense in your mind at the present, but as you try to reach the goal and uncover the wholeness of what you’re searching for, you’ll realize the incomprehensible wisps of destiny haunted you for a reason, and that’s to spark your journey.

Once you first realize that there’s more out there to discover in life and art, there’s no real turning back. T.S. Eliot wrote that “the world ends not with a bang but a whimper” in “The Hollow Men”, which can be associated with a more personal outlook in that your life ends when you truly deny the dream forever so that it whimpers and your mind and body become hollow of a soul. Inspiration doesn’t make any sense in your mind at the present, but following it will be worth it.

Soon enough, the sun slowly ascends from its slumber, and daylight reigns in the Heavens again. Though time followed its cycle without disposition, the artist now knows that he is not only lost, but stranded as well in his fluid, illusory painting.

The tide continues to carry his vessel, for the whole sea is hopeful without reason.

The Silhouette and its Shadow, Shiza Ghani, 2022 The Silhoutte and its Shadow, Shiza Ghani, 2022 4. Reflect I said the journey will bring you closer to the dream, the goal, the identity that fully encompasses who you are along with every other person, the better understanding of yourself and the world. I never said you will fully reach that point. This harsh truth is found in Borges’s “The Library of Babel”, in which the narrator’s purpose, along with everyone else’s purpose, is to find meaning in incoherent books. The narrator concludes his conjecture on the library by stating that it is “infinite but periodic,” or the meanings repeat over and over again through different librarians’ lives and form a continuity.

Similarly, as you try to discover meaning in your own art forms and life, you’ll get a little closer to your goals, but you will never make it to the end simply because you can’t accept an end.

Perhaps that cold, abysmal doubt and fear of what the end holds is growing, but understand that if everyone is aiming for the same order and unity and undergoes the same process, then the dream won’t die. It will carry on with the soul. The whole process requires a lot of trust in both ourselves and the human spirit in general. Understand that you may never be satisfied with what you wrote, nor may you ever be satisfied with your life’s accomplishments. Accept it, and keep fighting anyways.

Besides, as a human, you have no other choice. This constant and collective struggle defines humanity, so continue and repeat it.

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Escaping Reality Ananya Kidambi, 2023 All eventful expeditions begin with a dark, stormy day. My story starts with compelling light...or so I thought.

So there I was, living my dream. The sky gazed at me as if it knew I was destined to be here, a captain on a ship in the middle of the ocean. The only darkness on this day was the shadow my brand new ship created due to the sun’s reflection across its smooth, brown side.

“Captain, shall we coast to change direction?” My most trusted crewman gave me a look of determination. I could see the steady gleam of passion in his eyes.

“We shall head North and follow the stars from there as night approaches,” I claimed, reaching out to grab the wheel, which lingered in the middle of the upper deck. According to my expert calculations, we expected to reach new land in a matter of days. I stood there only thinking of the plans I had after success.

I imagined the glory, the respect I will earn for my family and my country as I searched to discover new lands.

The days went by quicker than I counted for.

“Get to work. Let us sail into the northern horizon!” I yelled at my men, prepared for any result.

There has to be land nearby! There has to be. I could not go back home, knowing my voyage was for nothing. Eventually, doubt began to form in the back of my heavy mind.

My hands started shaking, and my fingers crawled from off the wheel. I could not bear to fail. Sweat dripped down from my forehead as if water drained off the edge of a waterfall. I could not stand the desperation of success.

Land! Yes, that is what it looked like, land.

The translucent, green water showed off a hint of land ahead. Almost instantly, my ship

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came to a jerking halt. I looked down, expecting to see a full ocean, but all I could see was a shallow layer of water as clear as lustrous glass. Daring to discover, I climbed down into the eerie waters. Step by step, water flowed through my black, worn-out boots, and covered me up to my knees. Slowly, I walked forward into the unknown. Up ahead was not land, but was a void of nothing except a black atmosphere. It was a swirl of what looked like everything I have imagined, but at the same time nothing I have ever seen before. I climbed back onto my ship so that I could get an elevated view. As I realized where I was, thoughts of confusion and excitement swarmed through my mind.

I was at the edge of the world.

I had read such theories in all my years but never imagined such a sight. Knowing it would be too dangerous, I set out my command.

“Begin to process backward!” I started to turn the ship around, but no one was there to heed my request.

The shock hit me in an instant. All my crewmen had disappeared. Searching all around the ship, I exhausted myself to find an answer. My only conclusion was that my crew had wandered into the large, mysterious void sitting right in front of me. So even my curiosity and temptation began to widen larger than my fears.

Reaching straight into the void, I fell past my ship. I carried myself straight into the darkness, leaving the scent of the sea behind.

The moment I was covered in the eternal space, colors started to zoom past me as fast as lightning, or faster. I could not control my mind. It felt as though both my mind and body were being separated. My eyes were rapidly

dilating with the constant flow of colors. Blue, green, red, and so on. I wanted it to stop. The momentum of time was more than untraceable.

Hours seemed like seconds, and minutes felt like days. One minute I was in control, the next I was lost to the sound of silence.

Finally, the images and colors stopped.

They all stopped without recognition and without any sign of what will happen next. There it was, a complete space filled with an unimaginable amount of stars. I looked around the blankness, under, above, and around me. There was nothing but darkness and a countless number of stars. A moment later, everything went dark.

No stars, no sound, no light, but so much fear…

I woke up with a yelp to the comfort of my bedroom. Stretching my arms, I got up and looked towards the outer rim of my door. There he was, my father, standing in the middle of the hallway, watching me get up from the bed. An immediate surge of sadness hit me, allowing me to forget my nightmare. Today was the day

my father was going to lead an expedition to find new land. The recollection of my recent, unpleasant dream, swarmed through me like an ambition. I glanced outside into the darkness. It was early in the morning. I yanked the lantern at my bedside table and lit it for some clear vision. Walking towards my father, I leaped into an unexpected hug.

“Do you have to go today?” I did not want my nightmare to come true for him.

“I must. For you, and for our country. I will be back soon.” He said, while putting his coat on and glaring at me with love.

I realized that all I needed was hope. I had faith that my father was going to succeed and that there is a good chance he will not come to meet the world’s edge.

Swinging the door aside, I stepped outside into the fresh breeze of a morning sea. The clouds began to rumble and lightning struck the tip of the highest point visible. A storm had approached, and I knew, from that moment onwards, that my father’s journey was going to be an eventful one, if anything.

Untitled, Sowmya Krithivasan, 2023 Untitled, Sowmya Krithivasan, 2024 50

Untitled, Anonymous, 2022

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WALDEN Bhavana Kunnath, 2021 Byzantium falls. It falls for centuries.

But I don’t watch it fall.

I am in the hollow nestled in the lap of sleep.

The silence is inside with me, sprawling in my veins.

Why are they so loud out there? They keep calling the time!

I beg the hollow to quiet them, but movement makes Them Loud. They prod the hollow but I slip deeper in.

Voices whisper muddled memories—oh leave me be!

But they’ve lit the match and sent the bottle rattling Down, trying to ignite flame. Don’t they know There’s nothing left to burn? Somewhere within, a candle sparks...music illuminates the hollow! Oh, WALDEN! Ancient knowledge stirs the hollow to search for WALDEN! Its slender fingers draw me up into the Awake.

Light! Light! A flood of acid ebbing in my iris!

Faces look down at me, twisting their lips into sound: “A miracle! A miracle! Welcome back to life, XXXX!” Tubes slip into the hollow and wires sing its beat.

WALDEN! WALDEN! I tell them I need him—he will know.

“Calm down. Calm down, XXXX” they purr, soothing movement into stone.

They say Byzantium fell. I tell them, “Truly, I’ve never heard of it.”

The faces weave in and out dancing to the clock.

WALDEN! Their uniforms turn to me and cluck harshly “No, you are XXXX.” I wish they wouldn’t make that noise at me!

Sometimes, new faces float in to weep and burden me With their own imposing unfamiliarity.

They say they don’t know WALDEN, they say I never did.

Sometimes, the faces hold a glass up to the hollow.

I stretch my mouth into the glass. The hollow stretches Its own at me. But I know it’s just being polite.

The faces shake their heads sadly, they say I know not.

I watch their movements, learn their dance. I wait for WALDEN.

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They say Byzantium fell, that I lost it In sleep. I ignore them.

Sometimes, the uniforms at the door stray from the dance, Leaving their post with careless haste. WALDEN is waiting Outside, he must be. I watch the faces at the door.

I watch. I watch. I wait for the uniforms to step Astray. For a moment, they turn their heads—that is all I need.

They don’t see the hollow and I slipping out, away.

Outside is Louder than the pictures the uniforms Painted for me. Streams of faces rushing past—melding.

Some tug at me with pre-recorded words. “One-time offer!

A sale to die for! Prices we live by!” they repeat.

WALDEN! WALDEN will know, if I could just remember…

Somewhere in the Loud, his song trills above their madness.

“Wait! XXXX, STOP!” the uniforms pursue me, but it’s too late— WALDEN, I hear your call! I part the stream of faces.

I know that you are movement in stillness, memory In this nonsense parade! You must be, must know me!

WALDEN! The consuming colors call, the uniforms Draw close, and signs decompose into silicone sludge.

Byzantium is falling. But WALDEN will restore it.

Surely, WALDEN knows it.

I find the lips humming your song, a fluttering Face, a fool of the crowd. WALDEN! It backs away from Me. I grip its slippery features WALDEN! Why Won’t they tell me where you are? Why won’t you define XXXX? The face points behind me, “I—I just heard it in there!”

Outside pulses with malice as uniforms press near.

“No, XXXX, back away from the store!” they bark as I verge on Epiphany. The hollow presses against the glass, Subjecting me to the glare of a thousand screens with Your song blasting out from beneath fluttering price tags.

Shapes and faces barrel across the monitors, but I know, I know that you alone are my salvation.

But the colors, they scream the same foreign emptiness As the street—I recognize only savage nonsense!

Divinity cries to me: “DON’T STAY WALLED IN BY DEBT!” Enlightenment puppets numbers across the great screens...

“CALL 1-800…” the angels decry. An empty Fist swings through the glass as WALDEN lays dying below.

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Byzantium falls. It falls for centuries.

Now, I see it falling.

ID, Eun Sil Rollins, 2021

The T

Aryan Ash What is knowledge in relation to time, and are they related at all?

For I feel time stretch out like lines of taffy, but what I know stays the same

and what I think doesn’t chang Tha thi thi

My cells are made of real material, but, here, my body becomes incorporeal, my thoughts remaining as the only proof of me.

But how long can thoughts survive?

How long before there’s truly none of me lef The th pa

Cognitive half-lives slip away like letters in the wind, mycological activity ensues beneath my skin, deep from within the grooves of my neural tissue, I feel everything of me get sucked up, pulled up into the floors that are above m W infi ad

I hastily click buttons until they bleed yellow light, but the elevator only sinks one floor at a time, and I have to wait ten minutes before I can go any further, having to make my way onto the floor and hide behind furniture to avoid the monsters my mind has manifested from my bone Ig Ig Tha

Ringing Ringing Halls, Halls, Nathan Nathan Taylor, Taylor, 2022 2022

Tower

hraf, 2021

ge. hat’s why I’ve been avoiding this place, is place that ruined me before, is place that mocks me so heavily as it bends my field of view into a circle and makes my left and right indistinguishable.

ft? he dialect that I think in, he dialogue I have with myself, aired with the imagery my imagination concocts — I feel them rot within my skull, decomposing into nothing but emotion.

me.

Weightless, I finally look up: finite white walls and an infinite elevator shaft, defiant metallic gray streak cutting through it all into the mass of white light where the roof should be, for my fleshless eyes can only see so far.

es. go down, but there’s no exit. go down, but there’s no end. hat’s why I’ve avoided this place, this place, the tower.

SOUL ALMA ÂME SUFLET ANIMA MEA

ANIMA SEELE SIEL DUŠA ÀNIMA ‘UHANE

ANIMA, the soul...

When physicality is only a memory of a life lived long in the past, when calculations and questions from an organ of great power and brilliance are no longer in supply, the only remnant left is the soul.

One begins with nothing but it, and one ends with nothing but it.

What places will our souls lead us to?

What new emotions?

What new labryinths?

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Flowers and Funerals Jasiah Anderson, 2021 Part 1: The Funeral “What a pity…. She was so young…”

“I know! And so beautiful too! I heard she got that from her mother’s side.”

“Uh huh, and like mother like daughter….

Gone too soon.”

“Did you hear she had gotten into Princeton?”

“Wow! What a bright mind. She would have been the pride of the family.”

“She would have been the only thing that family could be proud of.”

“Ha! Steve is a let down to the whole family as a father and a man.”

“Exactly! It’s a miracle that a half-wit like him could make a child that gifted. The lowlife has the audacity to keep crying in front of the casket.”

“I know! Others need to say goodbye too!

To … to … “ “Samantha.”

“Ah, yes! To Samantha. Others need to grieve too. He shouldn’t be so selfish.”

“Yeah, as a father he should be more understanding.”

“As her father, he should definitely be more understanding.”

The white lilies cover any space in the casket that the body doesn’t. The white flowers feel more vibrant than the white skin of the corpse, but they are both decaying.

They are both dead. There is a line to speak to the dead girl. Some are saying their final goodbyes and some are meeting her for the first time. The line is held up by a man sitting down in the grass in front of the box.

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He is crying and shaking and has his arms embracing the wooden casket. He is trying to speak through sobs, but the only words decipherable are “my baby girl”. The pastor looks on patiently and shakes his head. The other guests are shaking their heads too. A cold breeze pushes through the crowded clearing and the grass moves in ripples. The oak trees shake. The flowers in the casket shift a little. The man is pulled up by his shoulders and moved to the side. The other guests need to grieve too.

Part 2: Ghosts “Tom! Remind me to never go to another family funeral again!

Geez!”

“Family is important, but I’m so worn out.”

“These events only remind me of how many crazies we have!”

“Well, he is upset. Just lost his only kid.”

“Sure, but he didn’t have to claim to see her floating around him! ‘I see her! I see her!

Oh, my sweet Sammy!’ Bah! What a lunatic!”

“I know! He trashed the reception hall like a madman. Glad he was kicked out.”

“Some people have no decency. I’m ashamed to be related to him.”

“He must be in so much pain. First his wife, then his daughter? Any man would be on the brink.”

“Yeah, brink of madness!”

“Pft, you said it!”

“Disgraceful … I heard he’s popping.”

“Grief brings out the worst in us, dear.”

“Mhm…” “Popping what Mommy? Popcorn?”

“Nothing Ollie, the adults are talking. Go play with your dolls.”

“They’re not dolls! They’re action figures!”

“Okay sweetie.”

The man lunges into the empty space in the crowd. He reaches for some invisible being and shouts “My Sammy! Wait, come back!” The crowd moves away from his violent jerks but not away from him. They are appalled and intrigued. They do not see whatever the man is trying to reach. Maybe the man does not see it either. He jumps and knocks over a table of platters and dishes.

The crowd gasps. The man does not tear his eyes away from a spot on the ceiling. A hand is placed on his shoulder. He ardently informs the hand that he sees his daughter. Another hand appears on his other shoulder. He increases the strength of his argument. A third hand grabs his waist. Together the hands remove the man from the clearing. The crowd is relieved yet disappointed. Such a shame.

A father removed from his own daughter’s funeral.

Part 3: The Hospital “Ugh! This is not how I want to spend my weekend!”

“Can’t be helped. We’re still his emergency contacts.”

“Yeah but why choose this weekend to overdose? I had a date planned for this Saturday, and now I’ve gotta spend it in a gross hospital.”

“Hey, man! Isn’t that your brother?! Jesus!”

“Isn’t that your cousin?”

“Tsk.” “Why’d you skip the funeral?”

“I didn’t wanna see him grieve over another person he pushed away.”

“What do you mean?”

“What, you don’t know? I thought everyone in the family knew about Angelica!”

“I know she died, but I never knew how. I just knew it was his fault.”

“Pft, and you call yourself his brother…”

“Man! Just—“ “Okay, okay! So, he’s had this kind of issue before, and it was really bad back then.

So bad it affected his wife and kid. They were living paycheck to paycheck and most of that

money was going towards his habits. Pretty soon, Angelica couldn’t take it anymore.”

“I heard he beat her.”

“Yeah, maybe when he wasn’t thinking straight.”

“No, I heard that’s how she died.”

“Oh. I heard it was her choice.”

“Well, it was just a rumor floating around so I don’t know.”

“Are you two his emergency contacts?”

“Ah! Yes ma’am.”

“These couple papers right here need to be signed-” “I’ll take that.”

“And I need to know who to send his medical bill to.”

“Tsk. I guess I’ll take that. Consider it my last handout to him.”

The man breathes slowly through a tube.

One breath in. One breath out. Each inhale takes effort. Each exhale feels forced. He is on a hospital bed, careful not to move to avoid any aches and pains. His mind hurts the most, yet it cannot stop racing.

He saw her. He saw her! He saw her! And it does not matter to him if anyone else did. He smiles to himself. It hurts, but he does not stop smiling. He peaks open one eye to scan his surroundings or maybe to search for her.

He spots two familiar faces, but they are blurry. He hears two familiar words, but they are fuzzy. He hears “Angelica” and “died”.

Memories of his wife flood his pounding brain, and sadness drizzles in after. He tries to shift his thoughts back to his daughter. He reminds himself that he saw her. The man is still smiling. He is crying now, but he does not stop smiling.

Part 4: Assortment “Wow! That’s nasty.”

“I know. No matter how many stomach pumps I do, I can never truly get used to it.”

“Used to clean up, you mean.”

“Ha! Yeah….”

“Wasn’t that guy in here last week? For the same thing?”

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“Um, yeah. I think he was in room 204 last time.”

“Sucks that he’s back though. You’d think his family would look out for him more after an incident.”

“I heard his family didn’t even care that he was in the hospital! Kept calling him crazy or something.”

“Anybody with that much in his system would be crazy!”

“Well, at least this is his last visit.”

“Sick joke! That was a good one.”

“Ah! Sick joke? I see what you did there!

Haha. I went ahead and paid my respects. Left a bouquet of white pansies.”

“Ha! I’m surprised you even know what pansies are.”

“Whatever…. Did you hear about his assortment though? The ME said he had enough to start his own factory!”

“Wow! That must’ve cost him.

No wonder his family had to pay the hospital bill.”

“Are they picking up this one too? And I guess funeral costs …”

“Tsk. Never gets easier man….”

“The death or the clean up?”

“Ha! Both. Now hand me the scrubber.”

The man frantically jerks around the table. His sides keep bumping the corners and the objects on the table roll and shiver, but he does not stop moving. He is counting.

He has been counting since he was released from the hospital. He has to get it just right this time. This time, he won’t make the same mistakes. He mumbles to himself about higher quantities here and lower strength there, but it is barely above a whisper. He is deep in concentration. He knows he saw her; he just needs to get to her. He knows how to get there; he just has to do it right. Last time the numbers were not correct, but he has been counting. He has been counting since he was released from the hospital. He has to get it just right this time. This time, he won’t make the same mistakes.

Part 5: Another Funeral

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“Honestly, I’m not surprised that we’re here.

Again.”

“Was only a matter of time.”

“The grief really got to him, I guess. I heard he overdosed twice!”

“Wow! All within the span of two weeks?

Kinda sad…”

“Kinda pathetic, you mean. He didn’t even push through. Just gave up.”

“A miserable excuse for a man. Disgusting.”

“And did you see that crazy smile he has?

So freaky!”

“I know! Died with a weird grin on his face. The mortician couldn’t fix that?”

“Someone told me that the mortician couldn’t get the muscles to relax. So, he’s stuck like that. A creepy smile for a creepy man.”

“Creepy and sad. I’m not surprised that all the sorrow got to him. He was always weak minded.”

“Well, at least this time we won’t have to worry about him jumping after ghosts.”

“Oh, what if he’s a ghost this time!

“Hahaha! Then he’d finally be reunited with his ‘Sweet Sammy’.

Good riddance!”

“I know right! I was embarrassed to be related to him.”

“So glad he’s gone. Oh, I hear they brought catering from Chipotle!”

“Woah, no way! Do you think they ordered guacamole?”

“I dunno. We’ll have to go see.”

The man and his daughter look down at the display below them. Bristling trees, shivering crowds, and a dark brown casket surrounded by white tulips as a centerpiece. The box is open; there is a very still, very happy dead body laying inside. A line leads up to the casket to greet the dead body, but the line moves very quickly. Few words are spoken.

The daughter intently watches the funeral, more closely than she watched her own, but the man’s eyes are glued on the girl. He had done everything he could to get to her, and

now he was here. He had his baby girl, his Sweet Sammy, by his side once again. The man reaches to embrace his daughter, but a hand caresses his face. Turning cautiously, the man faces the intruder and sees his loving wife floating beside him. Overwhelmed with gratitude and joy, the man embraces both Angelica and Samantha in a deep, loving hug. A family reunited at last.

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Souled Amah Mancho, 2023 Thierry Wieber stood there enveloped in sorrow. It was the usual feeling he felt when he found himself in the garden, and he found himself in the garden more often than not.

The garden was a product of excessive hard-work and certainly was a magnificent sight. It held a collection of flowers, from chrysanthemums that were found locally in France to more foreign roses.

He was inspecting some ferns as he examined their health with precision, before he sedulously watered them with the correct amount of water. He placed the watering can down and sighed; planting didn’t take away the sadness but did take away the time he was left to wallop in that sadness.

He then strolled down the garden as he came across the most significant fragment of the place, or at least the reason for his feeling of dejection. It was a well-made tombstone, which was carved as if someone had put in the effort to get every single curve and corner right. Maybe they had.

In that tombstone lied Laura Wieber— his wife. His love. It was 11 years ago since she had passed, but the feeling of dread hasn’t left since. Unfortunately, Dread had also come with it’s associate, pain. The pain of scrunching his face to hold back the tears. The pain of confining his emotions inside of him so he could be strong for his daughter. The pain of imagining Laura is there beside him in bed, only to wake up to an unadorned pillow.

He noticed the dandelions near the tombstones. They were all dead except for one that was more auspicious. He hadn’t 63

been attending to them as he had wanted to avoid the tombstone that brought him anguish with just being in it’s sight, but now seeing them dead just made him more glum as he had failed at keeping them alive.

He smiled grimly as he collected the one dandelion.

As he made his exit from the garden, he also made sure to collect a flower for his daughter. He knew she enjoyed gifts from the garden.

The white plague had hit France, and unfortunately had also crept it’s way into Theierry’s family. His daughter had unfortunately been a repercussion when the white plague hit like a rushing wave. It passed from person to person, and his daughter had somehow obtained it. At first, the sickness was hardly noticeable, and just like her father, Jacqueline took on a facade as if everything was okay.

Thierry would notice her coughing, but she would wave it off as a simple occurrence. He would take account of her feeling nauseous, but she would say it was a common dizziness. It wasn’t till she couldn’t hide the blood that she had coughed up after dinner that he knew the white plague was within his presence.

That day he saw the blood drip from her mouth, he could remember his heart drop. The same way it did when his wife had passed. His daughter was the only joy left in his life—his last dandelion in a withering field of vacantness. He saw the fear clear in her eyes that day, the look of “will I be okay?” hung to her face. He had told her yes. He had told himself yes. He

wanted to believe yes.

There is no cure for the white plague.

The vicious truth kept the tense silence that night.

Thierry knew there was no cure, but like a child that wanted to keep believing that their second goldfish was the same fish as the first, he didn’t stop hoping. He had been relentless in his search. Doctor after doctor, he would call anyone with slightest sign of medical knowledge.

With him getting more desperate and his daughter getting worse, he had even begun calling those who said they practiced immoral mystics.

As he came upon his daughter’s room today, he walked in on her and their latest visitor. Jacqueline was sitting on the bed, and the doctor that was tending to her was on the side of the bed.

Thierry just stood in the doorway, quietly watching the scene. Even after every doctor would walk over to him and tell him, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do,” he still looked on with hope.

As the doctor finished up, Thierry saw the same look of pity each of them had before they made their way over to him. Except this doctor didn’t have a look of pity, rather just a plain face.

The doctor put their equipment away, and Thierry just then moved to stand outside the door. The doctor then made their way out of the room and turned to stare at Thierry, with a look that was now unusual and unreadable.

“I’m sorry, the sickness is beyond my domain of knowledge,” the doctor said simply.

“Is there any cure?” Thierry asked with a hint of aspiration in his voice, despite already knowing the answer.

“There is none. Not that I am aware of,” the doctor said as they had stopped

making eye contact with Thierry. “Her condition is getting worse.”

Thierry nodded as he tried to keep his composure hearing this, but he couldn’t do a proper job as he heard his voice get choked up. He knew time was running out and he didn’t want to lose his daughter.

Death had taken his wife; it wouldn’t take anybody else from him. He would rather lose his vision and live blindly before he would lose his daughter. But the white plague had come with death, and death had its own schedule. A schedule that no one can plan for when the schedule ends, yet we try to prevent that end from occurring, even if it is inevitable.

Thierry cleared his throat, “Do you know any other doctors? Someone with any other type of treatment?”

The doctor seemed hesitant, as if they were considering saying something that was supposed to be left unsaid.

Their eyes darted around the room as if there could be someone lurking or watching ominously before they said in a hushed voice, “There is something. Or someone. It’s only a rumor...”

Thierry peeked up as his words immediately caught his interest.

“Who?” Thierry asked, not even worrying about keeping the desperation out of his voice.

“It’s not something most should speak of...but if you’re really concerned, I could come back this evening with information,” The doctor informed him, his eyes still mysteriously glancing to the side every now and then.

Thierry felt the hallway get colder, and he felt a sharp breeze brush against his skin. He felt as if something was watching him, and his neck shivered. An invisible presence may be there. Or was it only his imagination? Still, a feeling of fear over-

One Of A Kind, Andrea Trejo, 2023

Double Exposure, Misty Ly, 2022 usual.

“How did the treatment go?” he asked as he took out the chrysanthemum flower he had collected from the garden for her and placed it in her hair.

Jacqueline simply looked at the flower before arranging it to fit her hair as if she was accustomed to these flower gifts. “It was good. Thank you for the flower, Father.

It’s beautiful, you really have tended well to them this year. How is the garden? Have the Irises begun growing?”

“They have, but don’t change the topic from yourself. Be honest, how was the treattook him. There was an uneasy feeling, and ment? Have you been feeling any better?” the atmosphere felt menacing. he asked as he examined her face as if Although, as Thierry looked to see something would have changed about her, his daughter sitting in bed, the fear of his although she was the same brown-eyed, daughter’s sickness overrode this mysterious rounded-faced girl. feeling.

She turned away, looking reluctant to “I want to know,” Thierry assured the speak about this subject. Finally, she said, doctor.

“It hasn’t been helping much. I still feel The doctor nodded as he gathered his nausea throughout the day, and I still have stuff, “I’ll be back in the evening.” continuous coughing fits...”

As the doctor left and Thierry walked Thierry sighed hearing this. him to the door, the feeling subsided.

“Well I don’t want you to worry, the Thierry pondered what that feeling doctor from today said he’ll come back could have been. His first thought scared with something to help us this evening,” he him—he thought it was a message from said as he took her hand into his hands. an unworldly thing that was threatening Jacqueline shook her head, “That’s fine, Jacqueline’s life. Maybe it was really Death but please Father, I don’t want you to worry himself, warning him that there would be about me. You have been stressing yourself consequences for his attempts to defy him. for days, months even. If you say I’ll be Although he shook it off, and declared okay, I want you to believe it too.” it was only a feeling. He had made the Thierry wanted to believe it, and he right decision—he’s only looking out for his really tried to, but the reality of there being daughter after all. no cure weighed in the back of his mind.

Thierry came to stand at the side of Jac“Okay chesnutt, I believe you’ll be queline’s bed. okay,” he supplied as he forced a grin.

“Hello, Chesnutt,” he greeted her by Jacqueline just smiled in return as she her nickname, which corresponded to her fiddled with the chrysanthemum in her hair. wavy brown hair.

“I believe we’ll be okay as well.”

“Hello Father,” Jacqueline replied.. She ----------------------------------------looked at her dad with the same smile as Thierry paced by the front door as he 65

was waiting for the doctor from earlier to return. While he paced, he had to push away many apprehensive thoughts that tried to occupy his mind. Although, it wasn’t hard to forget when he began hearing the strange sounds of night. Creaks that would come from places in the house that would make you think: No one should be there, but should I check if someone is there... what if someone is there?

Usually, Thierry tried to ignore the sounds, but tonight it felt odd. He would hear a creak. Then hear it again. It was like movement.

Although, when he hesitantly convinced himself to check, he was met with no one.

While he didn’t want anyone to be there, the fact of no one being there still resonated disturbingly in his mind.

Then, when he heard a subtle knock at the door, he went over reluctantly.

Thierry was nervous, but he opened it just to be met with a gush of air and the silent, darkness of the night. That alarmed Thierry, as in that moment he realized he preferred a somebody over a nobody, because at least a somebody could knock at the door. A nobody couldn’t do such a thing, and left no explanation for the sound.

He listened to his jolting urge to shut the door and began to close it shut, but the doctor from earlier suddenly came rushing to the door just in that moment.

“I’m here, I’m here—” the doctor said in a loud whisper as he held the door from closing.

Thierry squinted through the small door opening and recognized the doctor. He swung the door open asking, “Was it you that knocked?”

He received no answer as the doctor rushed inside.

Thierry was about to ask again, but he had other questions to ask.

“Who was the person you were telling me about earlier,” Thierry asked as he led the doctor to a sitting area. “The one that can help me and my daughter.”

“It’s only a rumor...” The doctor said simply as he had a seat.

“Yes, yes you said that. Who are they?”

Thierry questioned once again as he had a seat across from the doctor.

The doctor slowly gazed at him. “They engage in sinful practices...” The doctor went on, talking in a quiet voice.

“Like witchcraft?” Thierry blurted the first thing that came to mind.

“I don’t know what it is exactly...” the doctor said as he scratched the back of his head, “but I know for sure he can help you.”

“For sure?”

“Entirely sure. No doubt or question.”

Thierry felt himself light up as he heard this. Finally, something that might guarantee the well-being of his daughter.

“Where may I find them?” Thierry asked the doctor, to which the doctor answered the only way to reach them was through sleep. “Sleep?” Thierry looked at the doctor strangely.

The doctor nodded, “I told you it isn’t a normal thing. What you have to do is—” ----------------------------------------Thierry was in bed getting to the task at hand right away. The doctor had told him the technique was simple; repeat the phrase ”souled” three times before going to bed. It was pronounced like sold. “Odd...” he just said to himself.

While Thierry had been skeptical and had a hunch that the Doctor may have just been lying to him just to extract more money from him, he had nothing to do but follow through with the procedure.

“Souled, souled, souled...” Thierry muttered quietly as he got into his custom66

ary sleeping position. Although with each mention of the word, the room seemed to get darker and the sounds of night seemed to become more noticeable. Every creak, tap, and squeak seemed amplified. It was hard to ignore. Then, there was this terrible feeling that something was spying on him in the darkness.

Thierry tried to close his eyes and ignore it all, but in his mind, his thoughts didn’t make it any better.

He was met with, “Is there someone there? Or is it something?,” “Did I just hear something by the door,” and “Will it get me while I’m sleeping?”

Soon they were gone as he drifted off into sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Awake.

Suddenly, he was awake. Just in a sudden motion he jerked his head upwards.

He was awake—awake but not at home. It was clear he was inside a house, a huge and refined house at that. He stood up startled as he rapidly surveyed the new scenery. He looked around at all the lavish furniture with grand textures. He could see photos of salient-looking people whose eyes were fixed on him.

“Where am I..” were the only words that could escape his lips. The lighting in the house was very dim. It was set in a way where you could tell that something was there, but you couldn’t see what that something was. Then there were voices and sounds coming from every direction. Loud enough to be heard, but quiet enough to keep their messages an eerie mystery.

Then there was the notion that things would move, but so subtly that it would cause you to question if it was your eyes playing tricks on you. Then the malicious feeling from earlier that made him feel like he was being watched was back, but it was so present in the atmosphere he knew for sure that something was watching.

My Simple Beauty, Andrea Trejo, 2023

From these features, Thierry could tell, despite the cordial furniture and decorations, he was in some nightmarish environment. Is it real or only a dream?

“I’ve gone too far..” He told himself as he stood there frozen, scared his movement might trigger some sort of reaction.

He hoped it was a dream. He wanted to believe it was a dream.

Then a door suddenly opened, and he turned his head to stare at it. He was certain this time that the door had been closed.

Thierry backed away cautiously as he wrapped his arms protectively around himself.

Although then a raspy voice, the type that is slow and quiet, spoke.

“Thierry Wieber...come inside,” the voice said, every syllable they uttered sent a bleak shiver down Thierry’s back.

Thierry’s initial reaction was to not listen to the wretched voice, but he remembered the Doctor saying there would be someone that could help him. This must be that someone.

So, despite all his fear, despite his gut telling him not to, he began taking slow steps over to the room.

Finally, he came in.

He saw a person sitting behind a desk in a small room that looked like an office.

The person—or at least he thought it was a person—sat there expectantly. The “person” looked almost human, but not quite.

Their neck was long and they let their head hover above as they stared down at Thierry. They had a strange smile that was offsetting and crooked. Their eyes were yellow and as frightening as they seemed knowing and gave off the expression they could read a person and capture their thoughts and emotions. Maybe they could.

They had hair that was unkempt and messy like it belonged to some ferocious animal.

“Theirry, have a seat. I have heard you have picked up interest in my businesses,” The creature said with that same bone-chilling voice.

Thierry stared at them for a moment not sitting down, and they stared back.

“Don’t be scared. If I had wished you harm, it would have already been done.”

They then said after Thierry hadn’t sat.

Thierry thought for a few moments more, before he sat and asked, “Who are you and how do you know my name? Did the doctor tell you about me?”

The creature just shook their head as their abnormal eyes remained locked on Thierry. “That isn’t your concern,” The creature told him threateningly in a way that told him not to speak of the subject, “Your concern is what you came for. Everyone comes to me for something. Usually for my...talents.”

Thierry nodded dubiously, “I did come for a request, as I have a problem at home.

Can you cure diseases?”

“I can cure diseases as that is in my line of trades,” they answered simply as if it was a simple business question.

Normally, hearing this would have filled Thierry with joy, but hearing it from this strange creature only stirred up nervousness and fearful suspicion.

“How do you do it? Does it hurt? Do you have medicines?” Thierry asked them.

“That is not for you to worry about. You should worry about your daughter,” they said as their smile became more sly.

Thierry’s suspicion faded as he was reminded of the reason he was here.

“My daughter...I assume you already know about her Illness,” Thierry guessed as he could tell this creature had a large range of information that they had obtained by unknown means. “Have you been watching me?”

“I see a lot, I know a lot..” the creature just told him, not really supplying a direct answer, “..and I also can do a lot of things.

I know about her illness and I can help her.”

Thierry nodded unsure how to react, “Yes, yes thank you.”

“There’s a cost, of course,” they added slowly as their smile extended across their face.

Thierry could tell by the way they said it that they weren’t talking about money. He knew it would be something….vital. Although what did it matter, wasn’t his daughter’s life vital as well?

“I’ll pay it,” Thierry said confidently even though he knew he was about to give something of value away.

“Your soul...I want your soul,” The creature told him as with a bony and long finger, they pointed directly at Thierry’s chest.

Thierry looked down at his chest as if he was seeing his soul for the first time. “My soul...” Thierry pondered the thought as he couldn’t foster how he would be without a soul. Would it be like not having a heart?

Would he still even be alive? “What do you want with my soul?”

“To collect it,” The creature answered bluntly.

Thierry just stared at the creature, not satisfied with the answer.

The creature then went on, “You’ll live... but you won’t be the same. A soul is valuable to all and a crucial part of anyone’s being. That’s why we all have one,” the creature then informed him. “Being without one is possible though, and people have done it before.”

Thierry thought it over as he placed his hand to his chest. Would it be worth it if it saved Jacqueline? The creature did say he’d still be alive.

“I’ll take the deal, and take my chanc68

Afrocentric, Adaeze Uzoije, 2022 es,” Thierry had decided.

The creature nodded as they smiled in an odd way.

They brought out a paper that looked like a long legal document. A contract.

They held the contract in their long fingers, but after examining it for a while they smiled and put the contract away. They then looked at Thierry as their eyes filled with some sort of realization. “Usually I like to have my deals finalized, but for this occasion I will allow you a take-back if you’re not pleased with your decision.”

Thierry found this gesture odd, but he obviously wouldn’t refuse it. “Thank you,” Thierry said, but he doubted he would take it back anyways.

“Well then, it is done,” the creature then told him.

“Well...how do I get back home?”

Thierry then asked as he glanced around.

“Allow me,” The creature offered with a gentle nod.

The creature then just quietly uttered the word, “Souled…” Thierry felt a wave of drowsiness suddenly consumed him.

“Souled...” They said again, and he felt his eyes slowly begin to close.

“Souled...” Thierry saw the creature one 69

last time, capturing an image of their wicked grin before he submitted to the feeling of slumber.

-------------------------------------Thierry woke up with a gasp as his head shot up. He looked around just to see he was in his room again. From the rays of sunlight coming in from the blinds, he could tell it was morning. He had slept through the night. So was it all a dream? It felt real.

Then he remembered.

His soul. He placed a hand to his chest as he stared down at it. He remembered he had just given away his soul.

The thought caused him to leap out of bed as he rushed to the nearest mirror.

Thierry just stared at himself searching for any change in his appearance. He still had his messy brown hair and his eyes were still shaded dark brown. His mustache was still there as well—ultimately he looked the same.

He then wondered if anything really happened or if this was all just a scam.

Then again, you don’t see a soul normally, so you probably wouldn’t be able to see if it’s gone either. He felt around his face and his body, but he was just the same.

When Jacqueline saw Thierry that morning, she leapt into his arms.

“Good morning, Father!” Jacqueline exclaimed joyously.

“Good morning, Jaqueline,” Thierry had just responded. He tried to muster a smile, but none came.

“Father, I know this sounds strange, but I woke up this morning without any fatigue or any kind of sickness,” Jacqueline explained, her voice filled with pleasure. “Then I got out of bed and I could breathe just fine, no coughing fits. It was strange, and I felt all brand new. I felt like how I was before the plague. I then waited to see if a symptom would return, as it usually wouldn’t be long,

but none came. Father, I think it’s gone! I think it’s really gone!”

That’s the news Thierry had always wanted to hear. His daughter was okay; she would live. They can be happy, and death wouldn’t be taking her away from him. Yet he felt nothing— all he could manage to do was nod.

Jacqueline assumed his underreaction to the news may have been confusion, so she said “I know it might not fully be gone, and maybe I’m just having a good day, but it’s just—I haven’t felt this good in a long time. Maybe the doctor’s treatment had actually worked? Over the course of a day?”

“Yes, probably….uh... He came back this evening and gave me some medicines.

I gave them to you while you slept, but you were barely awake, so I doubt you remember,” Thierry made up the lie on the spot.

“I don’t remember that at all...” Jacqueline said as she scratched her head.

“That’s okay, as long as you’re okay,” Thierry assured her as he patted her on the head.

“As long as I’m okay,” Jacqueline repeated with a smile. It was the most natural smile he’d seen in a year.

Thierry tried to smile as well, but when he did, it just felt like an expression, not a smile. Like a wave or pointing a finger, it felt like a gesture and there was no happiness behind it. Odd. The two of them planned to enjoy the day and celebrate the arrival of Jacqueline’s good health. At breakfast, Jacqueline was talkative and lively, and she was finally laughing full of spirit. Thierry would nod, and he thought he would feel happy in this moment. It was moments like these that he craved and that he had desired for years.

Moments where he could just laugh and talk with his daughter. With his daughter that he loved and cared for. Although all he

could do was think. Think Jaqueline is okay.

The plain fact: there were no emotions attached.

Then later on, they had gotten a doctor to confirm that Jacqueline was well. The doctor had taken an hour to check her condition, and when the doctor had left the room it was the first time Thierry had seen a doctor smile as they told him the results.

“She’s in good health,” the doctor told him with a gentle smile.

Jacqueline had hugged him and laughed. Thierry wanted to laugh. He wanted to smile. He wanted to scream in joy. Although he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

“Are you okay? Are you not happy, father?” Jacqueline asked as she was confused from her dad’s indifference to this whole situation.

“I am happy...” Thierry told her, but he knew he wasn’t.

He couldn’t be.

He felt emptiness. Felt like he was watching life, not living it.

When he visited the garden with Jacqueline, it was the first time she had seen her mother’s grave in a while.

Jacqueline had sat there in front of her mother’s grave, and had a moment of grief as she had let tears drizzle down her cheeks.

Thierry

Afrocentric, Adaeze Uzoije, 2022

knew he should have been devastated too.

He should have had tears running down his face like a river while he comforted his daughter. He should be missing his wife.

He should be doing all those things but he couldn’t.

When he did manage to have a tear roll down his face it was meaningless. The tear wasn’t from a place of sadness, it was just a tear. Additionally when he thought of his wife it just registered as a fact: Laura is dead. No emotion, no feelings, no thoughts, just a plain, cold fact: Laura is dead.

That night, Thierry questioned his current situation. Jacqueline was alive and she was finally happy again. He wished he was happy too. Everything should have been perfect, but it wasn’t because he was soulless. He realized what it truly meant to be soulless. Everything was just there, and it felt like he truly wasn’t. Was he even living?

Cause feeling nothing—it felt like he wasn’t even living.

He had kissed Jacqueline goodnight on the forehead that night, and she had passed him the chrysanthemum flower back. As he headed back to his room, he passed by the last dandelion he had saved a few days ago, and he noticed its withering form. It was dying, slowly but surely.

That night, Thierry sat in bed and had once again repeated the words, “Souled, souled, souled…”

He didn’t care when he had a hunch that a monstrous creature was watching him.

He gave no bother to the scary thoughts they occupied his mind.

He dismissed every sound he heard from parts of the house.

When he was back in the house, he marched right into the office of the creature.

The creature already was looking at the 71

door like they had been expecting Thierry.

“Changed your mind?” the creature asked as they gestured for him to have a seat.

Thierry had a seat and looked straight at the creature, “I want my soul back.”

“You can have it...but there is a cost,” the creature said nonchalantly, but their tone held a tint of malice. “If you get your soul back, your daughter’s sickness will return. And she will die.”

While this fact normally would shock Thierry, in this state he just took time to digest it.

Now what? Take back his soul just to lose his daughter in the end? Everything he worked for was to keep her with him—to not lose her like he did his wife—but now Death may have cornered him in a checkmate. If he lost her, then he lost the only thing that kept him happy; the only thing he loved. Was it worth all of this to let his daughter die? If she died then what then?

Although, if he was soulless, was he really living? How can he enjoy anything with his daughter if he can’t even produce emotion? It would be like watching life pass and not really being there to laugh, cry, or scream. What would it mean if his wife was dead if he couldn’t cry about it?

What would it mean if his daughter was okay if he couldn’t enjoy it? What would it mean to live life if he couldn’t cherish it?

Thierry Wieber let these thoughts run their course until finally he made up his mind.

Blooming Beauty, Meera Sanjeevirao, 2022

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Like The Rain Ananya Kidambi, 2023

“It’s rain,” he says. “You are like the rain.” He points in my direction and smiles as if shy.

“Me? Like the rain? What a horrible joke! Is that the best insult you have?” My words scramble out of my mouth, dripping into his ears.

“Why, yes, of course! It is neither an insult nor a compliment. You are like the rain!

Through mind, body, and soul.” He had a hint of respect in his voice.

I stared in confusion as he explained…

“You are like the rain, my dear. Passion pours out of you like rain pours out of the clouds. Your hair is always tinted with a beauty much like a gallant waterfall marking its path. Impossible to read, your thoughts are like an ice wall, melting away every time you see the sun. Your smile is not in abundance because all you can see is the ground, no matter how much you wish you could fall upon the heavens; you fall down, down to the ground. But not any ground. You fall graciously to the depths of the emptiness you sometimes feel. Although you bring wealth to the living things around you, you are unaware of how much they need you. And so, it is the reason you do not appear daily. No, you can make people suffer from your absence, but they will still yearn for you and love you for who you become once the storm has passed. Yes, you can bring about thundering ego and harsh blasts of arrogant lighting. Yet, the destruction is only temporary and forgiven.

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No matter how many times you try, the sun will cast your partial darkness away. But, you can’t help it, can you? The darkness without the sun is not your fault, and I believe you. It is only dark because that is all you have ever known. You have been gathered from everywhere and stormed into a single cloud, so how could you know much about the light? The light is what you long for, but you fear that you will be gone before dawn and that, when the sun comes up, a rainbow will appear. But, by the time you see it, you will disappear back to the sea and be forever lost. I can see that smirk on your face is a lie. You hide your true intentions under that horrid thunderstorm. Your smirk is fake, and I can tell that it is a symbol of birth. The things you do are so much like rain. When you appear, you can be a presence of birth and death. And, it is not your fault whether you sparkle transparently, or you sound as if death were by your side. You are the rain, and the rain is you. So, don’t ever forget yourself or the storm in you.”

He smiles that warm smile and stands as tall as a tree. Because, maybe, he is my nature, and I am the rain that nurtures him.

Buttercup, Adeaze Uzojie, 2022

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Acacia Adaeze Uzoije, 2022 Oh, Acacia, my soul’s sole Love, As a man to his kite, I soar above With you alone. The wind would carry my thoughts, My sadness, my worries, my string in knots If you weren’t there to ground me.

Oh, Acacia, your presence is sweet, But not like candy, chocolates, nor treats, But like a lemon drop—tart and light, A ting of excitement that brings delight Because sour is my favorite flavor.

Oh, Acacia, you’re always so tense.

You think you’re a stereotype, but I hold a lens That sees the you past your strawberry blonde hair, Your feminine presence, your skin dotted, yet fair.

I’ll always know you are special.

Oh, Acacia, you’re so unique, ‘Twas love at first glance—you happened to pique My interest—but then I’d soon be spelled.

A ball to a glove, your personality held me Close and lovingly, and I knew I was screwed.

Oh, Acacia, I’ll never know how You put up with me. Look at me now, Desperate for your presence. even when apart, The mere thought of you jerks my heart In every single direction.

Oh, Acacia, when I happened to spill That the thought of us courting made my heartbeat drill And you had agreed, I almost collapsed— That alone would mean that I could happily pass— But we started and stopped for a reason.

Oh, Acacia, I’d never tell, But when you smile, my joy still swells.

But my family is still in my life;

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And they’d rather me a husband than a wife, So I pray that no one saw us.

Oh, Acacia, I love you so, But the world may never, ever know Why we’d be together when we’re worlds away, But hopefully there comes a day Where my spirit rests with yours.

I pray that when my ashes are set You’ll hug my tombstone to your chest So I can hug you—closer than before

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(Acacia), Adaeze Uzoije, 2022

A Solemn Day Indeed Uma Jalloh, 2022 I sit in silence for a long time after hearing the news. My shirt hangs limp and sticky on me, waterlogged from the tears that flow from my eyes, sleek trails that I feel will not soon subside. Cradling my knees to my chest, I stare at the brown bare wall on the other side of the living room, trying to ground myself back to simple things and times. Emotions bubble deep in the pit of my stomach, but I don’t dare let anymore escape, forcing my feelings back down until all I can feel is numb. Numbness is all I can deal with at the moment. My world felt whole for one second, then shattered so painfully as if my heart had been pierced with one of the shards in the aftermath.

The day had been warm and sunny, the sky a burning blue, bright as a hot flame. Nothing big had been planned for that day, just a normal lazy afternoon that I spent lounging around the house in my pajamas. A quite boring day but I was content. I had no idea how, in fact, momentous the news I would soon be getting would rock my universe and leave it unsteady for days, weeks, months, years to come.

“Umu…. can you please come sit down?”

My dad beckoned for me in a slightly unnerving, reserved tone. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

My mind, previously in a slow daze from the lack of events that had occurred so far that day, suddenly sharpened, and mental gears started grinding and turning. Subconsciously, I started wondering what could be wrong, my father’s unsettling tone of voice making me slightly anxious. I thought about what I must have done to upset him, failing to come up with

reason, and my heartbeat quickened. Slowly I walked over and sat on the couch of our living room, directly in front of him.

“Do you remember how your Aunty Zainab was really sick?” My dad started to say, his mouth straight as a line, his eyes cold and hardened, his emotions unintelligible.

For a split second, I was flooded in relief that it seemed I was not in trouble. For a split second, I was saved from the darkened reality rapidly approaching, about to plow through me like a speeding train that cannot see the pedestrian in its way. But then, my mind began to ponder on why he would’ve brought up my sick aunt, and my heart faltered in my chest mid-beat.

I no longer wanted to hear what he was going to tell me. Suddenly, emotions flowed to his eyes, and I could see the agony he was in to break this news to me. I shook my head imperceptibly, not ready for the grim announcement that laid ahead.

“I’m sorry, Umu. She died 10:00 a.m this morning,” he stared at me with the most painful look I have ever seen my dad in.

“Oh no...no...”, I gasped inaudibly, shocked to hear it out loud, shocked to face the ugly truth I had been presented with.

My face grew hot, and my eyes welled with tears. A hard lump formed in the back of my throat, constricting my windpipe, and it felt like the room had become a vacuum, sucking out all the air from my lungs. I started wailing, the sobs racking through my body with great force.

I buried my face in my hands, crying so hard I felt the veins popping in my neck. How can she just be gone?!

Less than half a year earlier, Aunty Zainab had been over to visit us. I remember her kind

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eyes and how she always remembered my favorite pastry of hers, her delectable meat pies.

She would always bring some with her and ship them to us, just for me. She was the loving grandmother I never had, as all my grandparents died when I was little, or before I was born. Needless to say, I loved her with all my heart. And now she passed, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye?

She left too soon! And I didn’t get to say “I love you” enough. I didn’t get to hug her enough times. Her time here was up, but I wasn’t done spending time with her, and now it was too late.

My dad, who’s usually not a touchy kind of guy, embraced me in his arms, and I stayed there a while, sniffling. My little brother came around and was confused to see me crying.

Lots of emotion can be too much for him to handle, so when he heard the news and saw me continue to cry, he left our vicinity to go somewhere else and play on his device. He handles his sadness differently, so while I’m sure the news saddened him, he didn’t show it; in the blur of it all I just became more miserable, though the tears dried. I had cried all the tears I had in me, and all that was left was a scratchy feeling in my throat, a wounded heart, and what felt like an empty soul.

Staring blankly at the brown bare wall now, only a few hours later after the news, I reach a serious epiphany. I will miss my Aunty Zainab greatly, and I know my grief will not soon lessen. I also know that I didn’t cherish my time with her as wisely as I should’ve. Though, because of this harsh experience, I have resolved to make better use of my time moving forward, letting the ones that I love know that I hold them dear. I wipe my tears, and, though with a heavy heart, I now understand that the only time we have guaranteed is now.

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Looking Forward to Mourning, Adeline Odunjo, 2022

How Light Meets Darkness Shaire Kelly, 2024 How light meets darkness How laugh meets cry How you accept your most hated flaws How tears shed become further apart How just being becomes bearable How beginning to smile is just the start How wanting to die isn’t normal How your skin stays whole How wearing all black is only formal And staying clean is one of many goals How you don’t hold on to tiny things How thinking isn’t sad How you love the warm feeling that cuddling brings And not all new people are bad How everything is done on time How meals don’t cause pain How when you speak there isn’t a lie in every line And you learn sometimes you have to dance in the rain How interaction is wanted How sleeping is effortless How you go outside undaunted And you accept your worth, nothing left.

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Shaire Kelly, 2024

He Gave It Free Will Moska Arsalan, 2021 He picked up his tool. Sharp side to wood.

He laid the metal softly against it. Image in mind: thump, thump, thump. He went on pounding. Picking up one heavy tool, laying it down, picking up the next. This one was Australian Buloke. A beautiful shade of brown. The last one was made of rosewood. A beautiful shade of red. And the one before was Snakewood. He carved out the hull of the head. Went down to the shoulders, down to the torso, on to the hips, down the thighs, and finished at the feet. Picked up a tine tool and went back to the head.

Down to the shoulders, torso, hips, thigh, feet.

He laid down the metal, picked up a coarse sheet, and rubbed. Wood against sheet. The sound filled his studio and inscribed itself into his skin. He kept filing. Bit by bit, creating a smooth body out of the earth. Creating a cloud of foundation. He brought its shape level to the sun. You could see inside it. Empty. Hollow. He blew a puff of air and gently laid it beside the rosewood.

He wanted it to have a mind, so he gave it a mind. He opened the hull of its head and inserted into it a mind. The mind was Yes, only Yes. Gently, with tender fingers, he closed its head. There, it was ready. He inserted a bulk of batteries into the wooden torso. A soft hum built in the room. It opened its eyes. Dull eyes. Empty eyes. He came close to it. Inches separating what once was together. He whispered into its ear.

“Are you alive?” It looked up, parted its lips. Shaped those smooth wooden lips into a word and spoke. It spoke.

It said, “Yes.” He pulled his face back and a smile drew itself onto his face. He gently reached for it. Leveling his hand to its feet.

Prompting it to step onto his palm. It parted its

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legs and stepped onto his hand.

Once again he came close to it and whispered, “Your name shall be ____” It creaked his head up.

He slid his tongue out and said, “Yes.” Brimming with emotions, he let a tear slip from his eye. The crystal tear fell onto its shoulder and waded down its smooth surface. It looked down at its arms, legs, and the puddle on his leg.

He whispered “yes.”

Something was off. He tilted his head to the right, and then it followed. Tilting its head to the left. He squinted his eyes and frowned. He had made a wooden doll. A puppet. A figurine. No. No. He didn’t want a doll. He didn’t want a puppet. He didn’t want a figurine. He grabbed it. Fingers wrapped around its torso.

Laid it on the table. Picked up his tweezers.

“Close your eyes.” It closed its eyes, “yes.” He drew near it, dug the tip of the tweezers into it. Pulled out the bulk of the batteries. Laid the batteries next to the wood. He grabbed the metal. Put it up to its head. Thump. Thump. He opened the walls to its head. Took out its mind.

Yes. He tossed its mind to the side. “I don’t want a doll.” He paid more attention this time.

He built it a new mind. The mind was Yes. The mind was No. “I don’t want a puppet.” He gently laid its mind into the frame of its head.

Picked up his tweezers. Picked up the string of soul. Inserted it into the wood. A light filled the room. It opened its eyes. Full eyes. He came close to it. He whispered into its ear. “Are you a puppet?” It looked up, parted its lips. Sound out the word, “no.”

The man, full of pride, stood its frame on its feet and let it stand on its own.

Between C6 and C7, Theodora Alese, 2021

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Aangst, Suchi Iyer, 2022

The man leaned back in his chair and let Opened a drawer, picked up a new metal. out a soft huff and a small chuckle deep in his Long, sharp, dual-bladed tweezers. He turned chest. The man looked into its eyes and saw a his back to the reflection, spun his head around deep emptiness. “Are you alive?” till he heard the click in his neck, and drew his “Yes.” arm around his torso. He pushed the tweezers “Come to me.” He outreached his palm right between the C6 and the C7 of his spine. level to its feet a few inches away as if hoping Pushed. Pushed. Red spilled down his back to catch rain drops following the trend of from a dark sky. his curves. He clasped It started to hum onto it. Squeezed his louder as it picked metal, and pulled. up one foot, laid it This pull was long. He a few centimeters pulled and pulled. A in front of itself, light filled the room and up went the and dimmed. In his next. He wrinkled hand, between the his eyebrows and blades of the metal, held his breath as laid a white strand, he saw yet another stained with small flaw. It was a damn drops of red. It was a machine. At least string of soul. He put that was better it up to his eyes and than a puppet. But dragged his gaze not good enough. across it.

It was able to “No.” He reanalyze and come leased it into the bin up with his own will, and snapped his back but he had nothing towards the mirror. He past his switch, a dug his tweezers in hollow build of again. Pulled. “No.” wood. The man He dug. He pulled. grunted. The man “No.” “No.” He sighed. The man snapped his back tostood and paced, wards the mirror, dug his shoes rubbing his wet red tweezers against the wool of into his broken skin, Moska Arsalan, 2021 the carpet. and pulled. A light “That’s it.” He gave it a body, he gave it a filled his room again for the eighth time. He mind, but he lacked to give it a soul. Electricity brought it to his face. “Yes!” could never mimic the excellence of a soul. He He sat down in his chair. Grabbed it by hastened to his seat, grabbing it tight against its torso and turned it over. Inhale. Exhale. He its rib. Flipped it over. Practically snapped the inserted the string of soul into it. A light filled the bulk of the batteries out of it and threw it out room, and through the beams of light and the the window. Never. That would have never smell of metal, it came back to life. He held it worked. A surge of power was not enough, level and looked deep into its eyes. It looked never enough. back. He looked at it, and it looked back at He pulled off his shirt. Turned his back him. And deep within its wooden build, he to the great mirror that laid behind his build. could see the soul in his creation.

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Submission to the Soul Shiza Ghani, 2022 You sit there in my hand, burning through tears of wax that leak Like sand seeping through the strait of an hourglass.

You take delight in casting fanciful illusions, don’t you?

Distorting my vision of this room So that it seems formless and infin When I desire hollow darkness.

Lengthening the distance between each swing of th So that this moment edges to etern As I plead for static silence.

Don’t you know m

Yo You sh

And let our h

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A Candle, Aryan Ashraf, 2021

m nite . he pendulum clock nity

memories are bound to be forgotten?

You think you’re immortal, Though I can see you flicker from failure. ou should know your wax will run out any day now. hould know my sigh can extinguish you any second now.

I can pretend that we never existed hopes float away like smoke into this boundless, timeless void.

You sense my squeezing grip but rage on, burning my skin— I snap back to my senses, submitting to your reign.

An Old TV, Aryan Ashraf, 2021

Necrospire Aryan Ashraf, 2021

On the afternoon of Judgement Day, I felt the spirit of the atom bloom within me.

I held the cup of seltzer firmly in my right palm, correlating the focus of my eyes on the miniscule bubbles of carbon dioxide rising up like balloons in the colorless drink with the increasing pressure of my hand against the chilled, ridged, rigid glass. Looking back, this was the universe’s first warning to me, a mild foreshadowing of events to come, the silent “Wait!” that a friend calls out when they see you from a distance and want to catch up but you are just walking too fast. And, in that moment, I saw myself as that friend observing me walking too fast, observing my feet glide and accelerate across the pavement rather than pushing off of it with each step.

“What is this fear?” I thought to myself. “Are we doing something wrong?”

At that moment, I assessed those questions as if I had not already asked them so many times before, before we had found those notes and data lost to time, before we read the jour-

nal entries of the woman who left them behind, and before we aboard a one-way plane trip to south Argentina, and, with that realization, I brushed those questions away. We made our choice — we will make the discovery she wanted to make but never could — and, with that choice, I felt my soul shrink closer to a truth, closer but not quite at it just yet. I believe that was the spirit of the atom.

I looked over to my brother, Hassan, who spent the past thirty minutes enamored with the news on the box TV strung up to a corner of the ceiling of the bar. I glanced at the screen to see what was enticing enough to evoke silence from an otherwise perpetual source of noise and babble but got confused at the display of pixelated images of red, brown, black, and white to the audio of reporters frantically speaking in Spanish.

“What is this?” I asked.

“From what I can understand,” Hassan muttered, “there’s a new serial killer on the loose.”

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“That’s right.” We looked at the bartender with surprise. He responded with a warm smile and nod. “There’s a serial killer out in southern Argentina. It’s been the main headline everyday for the past two weeks… I take it you guys aren’t from here, then.”

Hassan shook his head. “We’re from London. We flew in two days ago. This is our first day actually out.”

“That makes sense. Yeah, people say he’s from Rio Gallegos, up north in Santa Cruz.

It started off with odd killings — I got all the details from my cousin, for, at the time, it was only a local buzz sort-of-thing. A run-over sheep, a mutilated goat… stuff like that. It left a lot of people confused, especially the farmers, and it only seemed to be escalating until a few people were found.”

“That’s awful,” I whispered with disgust.

“It sure is. The cherry on top is people who claim to be witnesses say that they saw the killer head south, and the only place south of Rio Gallegos is here, Tierra del Fuego. There might as well be a killer amidst us right now, which is why people here have especially been attentive to the news. I bet their ratings are doing great right now.” The bartender chuckled at his own joke, as he took a rag and wiped down the surface of the bar. He looked up at us for a moment before speaking again. “I assume you guys are tourists, right?”

Hassan shook his head. “No, we’re here for a bit of a longer haul. We got a little project going on, up in the forests.”

“Are you guys zoologists? Environmentalists?”

“Something… like that.” Hassan looked over at me, holding back a laugh. I ignored him.

“I see. Usually, I get a lot of tourists who come by on their way to Ushuaia, which is why I asked.”

“What’s in Ushuaia?” I asked.

“Well… it’s the southernmost city of the entire world.” “... Is that it?”

“I mean, there’s also a cruise you can take

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to Antarctica from Ushuaia. But, I believe the title of ‘southernmost city’ is enough for a lot of people.”

“How so?”

“Well… people love the idea of displacement, right? Most people associate dying in the exact same place where you were born as some sort of failure. You guys are the science-type. Doesn’t matter how much or how long you travel, if you end up where you started, your displacement is 0, right? It’s like you haven’t moved an inch — it’s like you did nothing. So, a lot of people try to move as far as they can, even if it is for a moment, for that semblance of displacement. For some, that ‘as far as they can’ is the southernmost city of the world. For some, that is the cruise from Ushuaia to the part of Antarctica that is open to the public. For some, it’s Antarctica itself,” The bartender chuckled once more. “I get so many people who talk about ‘escaping.’ Though, it always seems that they meet a new obstacle here instead of a pure escape, and that obstacle was how small their displacement would be when they return home.”

I pondered this for a moment, and I could see Hassan doing the same. I took notice of the time and realized our overextended stay, so I got up, nudged Hassan from his seat, and smiled at the bartender. “Thank you for the talk,” I said. “We must leave, but you left us with a lot to think about. And, I’d say that London is a pretty long way from here, wouldn’t you agree?” Dry laugh, goodbyes, motion, and exits followed.

Back to the atom.

We took our seats in our black Jeep, and I felt my ribs tense before proposing the question to Hassan. “Do you think—” “I don’t think anything. What’s done is done.”

I nodded, and we drove in silence. The asphalt roads turned into dirt paths, then paved ground turned into grassy terrain and blue sky got cut up by thick blocks of greenery and brown wooden branches.

We drove and drove, our Jeep jumping up and down more violently the further we went, until we finally made it to the place. It still amazed me that all of her notes, maps, and drawings were able to lead us to this place of anthropological wonder so easily.

We climbed out of the car and began making our way through luscious foliage, damp from the afternoon rain, to the site of our research: a deep pit outlined by tight spirals of cracked ancient stones burrowing deep into the ground, now also marred with wires and machines that we set up yesterday. Based on what she left behind, this pit was made by ancient peoples long ago paired with an ancient technology that has been lost to time (lucky for us, she had mapped out modern replacements that we were using) and that, through this device, those ancient peoples were able to isolate something no man has done yet — the human soul. She claimed that, through the power of some ancient machine and system (or even faith), the spiral would swallow the physical being of a man and leave behind the soul, a power that she claims can be replicated through modulations of modern electricity. And she had pictures! Extensive anthropological and cultural studies! Preliminary data of tests run on animals placed in the spiral! To think of such genius being swept away for so long pained my heart, but here we were, ready to observe it ourselves. Now, of course, we were not unethical beasts. We were not going to throw an innocent person into the spiral, flip the switches, and watch the man writhe away. We were going to start smaller. We were going to start at a fundamental. We were going to start with a corpse.

She believed the ancient peoples who built this spiral did not believe in an afterlife. Rather, they believed that the soul was a physical thing invisible to the human eye that was released with death and decay and remained on the Earth. Several cave drawings and lithographs showed this very premise, depicting eight or ten

pointed stars lifting from a stick figure body being held by other stick figures, presumably family members and friends, along with drawings of those stars existing among the trees and clouds and grass and wildlife of the subarctic forests we were using as our research site. Frankly, if the technology or faith of these ancient peoples were strong enough to extract souls, we might as well run with as much as we could. If it did not work, no worries. She worked with animals, coming close to extracting the soul but not not quite there, backing it up with fascinatingly odd heat readings and pictures of something grand coming out of the corpse of a pudu.

Hassan beckoned me to the small shed we tucked away from the edge of the spiral pit, and we opened the door and pulled out the two bodies: a man and his father, I believe, both hunters. They were living in this forest in a house hidden underneath the thick emerald canopies that we happened to stumble across yesterday, when we were first making our way to the spiral and made a wrong turn somewhere along the way. The two cars and the meat left out to dry indicated a human presence, but the broken front door and windows indicated something worse, which were, of course, the corpses. At the time, we reacted based on recency. We were doing experiments that were going to need corpses anyway, and this allowed us to do some experiments without needing to grave-rob or make ourselves known by asking for corpses from villagers and such. We thought quickly, saw an opportunity, and took the corpses, storing in the shed for use the next day. But, as Hassan and I dragged the corpses to the edge of the pit, my eyes began to analyze the lacerations of the son’s chest and saw the pixels of red, brown, black, and white I saw on the TV. “This is it,” Hassan said with amazement as he looked down into the pit. “Are you ready?”

I thought for a moment. “Ready as I’ll ever be. We’re already here. We might as well go all the way.”

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Hassan nodded. He took the corpse of the father and went down into the spiral, stepping carefully on the stairs made by the arranged stones. When he placed the corpse at the vertex, he walked back up to a machine opposite of me. I prepared and went to the machine on my side. I saw Hassan as he flipped some switches and pushed some buttons, causing the wires we laid yesterday to glow red, blue, yellow, and amber. My heart raced with excitement as I watched the cracks in the stones of the spiral, as I watched the corpse for any signs

of a significant change, as I watched the air for any possible signs of malfunction. And, thus, just as she said it would happen, the cracks in the stones grew red, then blue, then ultrawhite as sparks of blue electricity began to reach out into the concavity of the spiral like sunbursts.

With that, I pulled the lever on my side and watched in awe as I saw the sparks explode into rays of strong electricity that then arranged itself into lines that rotated so precisely and effortlessly in the space of the spiral.

We watched the body attentively. I am not sure if we made sure to record our observation, even if it was just in our head. Our bodies were frozen as we watched her procedure get manifested and confirmed right in front of us, right in that moment. However, we were not going to be satisfied with just that. We wanted more. And, more was what we received as we watched the body begin to writhe as the linear rays of blue began to encapsulate it in net and as stones began shifting between white physicality and black void. Soon, the

corpse was replaced by a large blue orb atop a longer-lasting plate of obsidian void where stones used to be. Then, we saw it. We saw it.

The soul. … The soul?

We waited ten seconds as we watched lift in the air, and I felt nothing but shock as I put the lever back up to its original position and as Hassan clicked switches off and pressed buttons once more and as the sun began to set and hold our setting in the hands of dusk.

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On the evening of Judgement Day, I felt the spirit of the proton bloom within me.

Vernice Le It was a sight to see for sure, but not what was expected. The “soul” was an amorphous body of light, of energy, of something immaterial and nonphysical, like an orb of light surrounded by wisps and rays shooting around it like comets in space… but it was so dark. “... What is this?” I asked in awe.

Hassan stood staring silently. He then laughed softly. “I thought it would be heavenly.

This looks like the void.”

I thought it would look heavenly, and I would still say that it did, only heavenly in the sense that it was not of this Earth, not something familiar and grounded. Yet it did. I noticed

a laceration on the orb that appeared as a shade of grey on the orb that became apparent when it turned a certain way, a deep cut that the light or energy or whatever it was physically winced and whimpered around. And, oh, the way it made me feel. Looking at it made my eyes feel like they were clouding over and made my body feel like it was dehydrating and made my blood feel like it was crusting into brass inside my arteries and… it made me feel like I was dying.

Was that what it was? This “soul” in front of me? Was it nothing but death?

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This was supposed to be the soul! But all we are presented with is what? “Death?” Is that all we are — beings set on a crash course to death? It makes sense. Our birth was already a tipping point for balance and homeostasis in both ourselves and the world, and death was simply the way to bring both back to balance again, so, in a way, yes, our birth automatically set us up for death. And, so much of life is spent preparing for it: safety lessons, safety measures, religious measures to ensure a good life after this one, educational ones to prepare for a good job, which leads to financial ones to prepare for a good retirement and a good funeral… As an idea, it makes sense. But, what about life? What about our lives? What about my life? I am surely more than just my end. We are surely more than our end. Right?

My mind began to spiral as I tried to find an escape route out of this hole I dug myself into, for I truly felt nothing but death staring at this “death” in front of me. I latched onto Hassan’s arm and began listing off observations, any and all, anything that could help me find a way out.

“We tested father and son, did we not?” I sputtered.

“Yes, we did.”

“You see the orb and the wisps, right?”

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“Yes.” “You see how similar they are, right?”

“Yes.” “We didn’t factor in relation! The subjects were related! What if this is inherited? Like genes, like behaviors, like culture, like ancestry?”

“That is a possibility.”

“It is! Then, this can’t be death! Death isn’t inherited. Sure, genetics play into a disease or ailment that one may develop or be more vulnerable to, but that doesn’t factor in freak accidents or murder! This has to be love! Or life! Or the universal moral sense that philosophers blab on and on about as intelligentsia!”

“Then… what about the cut?”

Then, what about the cut? We said we didn’t think anything and that what’s done is done, but that cut on the body made a cut on this “soul,” this “death,” as clear as day. It definitely plays a role in how it looks now, but did it play a role in how it feels? I grew angry at the thought of a man from Rio Gallegos driving me into this emotional pit without any real intention to. How dare he? How dare he? No, this cannot end here. There has to be something else, a better explanation, there just has to be!

I needed more.

On the night of Judgement Day, I felt the spirit of the quark bloom within me.

I grabbed a bag of tools and took out a battery-powered drill and a hammer, and I took a pickaxe and sledgehammer from our shed. I threw it down to the bottom of the spiral before running down myself.

“What are you doing?!” Hassan yelled from above.

“I have to do this! This can’t be all of me, and this can’t be all of you!” I yelled from below.

I pushed the corpse of the son aside and began chipping away at the cracked white stones of the vertex of the spiral, first with a swing of the pickaxe, then the sledgehammer, then the drill, then the hammer, and back again.

There had to be more.

“Please, Alia, what are you doing?!”

There had to be an alternative.

“You’re destroying it all! How are we going to do anything else with it?”

There had to be a detour my mind can take to grant me some mercy from the heat of

the “death” that floated above me as I worked.

“We could have gotten more corpses to test on!”

I mined more.

“We were going to isolate the soul!”

I mined more.

“We had so many plans!”

The first piece of stone caved into black.

“This is so unfair…”

More stone caved into black.

“I don’t want it to end like this. Alia, please—” With that, the floor of stone beneath me collapsed, and I fell, and fell, and fell. Under the spiral was not earth or dirt or stone or the mantle or even the core. It was someplace empty and dark and cold, a void of absolutely nothing. As I fell eternally through this void, I felt my physical self slip away from me, and I felt my “soul,” my “death,” an uncut, amorphous body like that of the father and son burn brighter within me. As I fell, I realized what it really was.

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2

Swirls of Imagination, Meera Sanjeevirao, 2022

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It was the need for displacement.

It was the view of 0 displacement as failure.

It was the want for the semblance of displacement.

It was Ushuaia.

It was the cruise from Ushuaia to Antarctica.

It was Antarctica.

It was a reaper fleeing from Rio Gallegos to Tierra del Fuego.

It was the need to see an animal soul.

It was the need to see a human soul.

It was the need to expand on the experiments of another.

It was the need for an absolute explanation and the need for an alternative, true or false.

It was what was going to suffocate the Earth in time.

It was what was starving so many already.

It was what was going to terraform Mars and drink the water of Europa.

It was the father.

It was the son.

It was the killer.

It was Hassan.

It was me.

It was you.

It was the need for...

The need for..

The need.

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Mo

ore.

Copy, Copy, Copy, Andrea Trejo, 2023

Credits Editor in Chief: Bhavana Kunnath Editors: Aryan Ashraf Darshana Sharma Jasiah Anderson Jossilyn Gauda Lauren Park Matthew Purvis Moska Arsalan Shiza Ghani Tara Kim Victoria Severiche

Special Thanks to: Lillie Olliver, Co-Vice President of the Literary Magazine Club Ms. Vatalaro, Photography Instructor The Literary magazine Club