Hive Avenue Literary Journal - Issue 8, Fall 2024

Masthead

Faculty

Advisor: Larissa Sprecher

Larissa is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Composition at NWACC, with previous experience teaching at the University of Arkansas after graduating with her MFA in 2017. She writes historical fiction, and loves novels like The Book Thief, and All the Light We Cannot See. She is working on a novel about the WWII battleship Bismarck, although she spends most of her free time riding horses or trail running. Her first publication was in her own undergraduate school’s literary journal, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire’s None of the Above (N.O.T.A), so she has a particular fondness for undergraduate literary journals.

This is my first time as advisor of an undergraduate literary journal, or any literary journal, and it’s been quite an experience. This issue of Hive is one that I have looked at as a revival – since the journal had drifted to the wayside since Spring 2023. With Issue 8 of Hive Avenue I wanted not to abandon what previous NWACC faculty and students began in 2019, but to help create something that would make both that first editorial staff, and our current staff and student body proud.

We wanted to honor Hive Avenue’s roots, while taking a fresh new direction – in part with our theme. When I first began gathering a new editorial staff and gearing up to produce a Fall 2024 issue, I knew we were going into an election season and felt Issue 8 was a perfect opportunity to showcase art’s unique ability to impose some shape and order to conflict. So we set off looking for pieces to remind us of what brings us together, and demonstrate the ideas of unity, connection, and belonging in the midst of time often associated with division.

We also looked to produce a leaner, tighter Hive Avenue –aiming for around half of its previous length to better highlight the chosen works and offer a focused, coherent journal for both our readers and authors. Finally, in efforts of truly pursuing a sleek, contemporary feel, we engaged in a valuable partnership with NWACC Graphic Design students and faculty, with the goal of producing an issue that looked and felt as though it belongs in the modern era.

We trust that the insight of our writers and the innovation of our designers will speak to you and remind you why our differences and individuality are what truly make us shine, and more importantly, make us human. Happy reading! - from my whole editorial team, and all the generous and talented people who made Hive Avenue Issue 8 possible.

Fiction Editor: Brett Nichols

Brett Nichols is a reader with a passion for writing. His goal is to graduate with a Creative Writing degree and put that to good use

Brett’s thoughts on editing Hive Avenue: When I first asked to be an editor for Hive Avenue, I had no idea what I was even doing. It was all new to me, but something I was eager to learn and add to my resume. Hopefully I’m able to keep doing this in some way, shape, or form in the future. I’m grateful to have been given this opportunity.

As for the pieces I chose. . . that was difficult. There were so many excellent stories to choose from. Unfortunately, I could not pick them all (even though I absolutely would have). The ones I chose were the few that really nailed the Unity, Belonging, and Connection requirements we were going for. It’s a short list, however, for the next issue, I look forward to finding even more pieces that fit just as snuggly as these.

Poetry Editor: Sophie Calvi

Sophie is the Poetry Editor of Hive Magazine. She enjoys writing all genres of literature.  This is her first year as a member of the Hive Literary magazine.  She has previously been on the staff of the YAWP Literary magazine.  Her literary experience includes being a member and officer of the West Writer’s Group. Her favorite poem is either “Kinder than Man” by Althea Davis or “Evening Star” by Edgar Allen Poe. Her favorite book is “The Sun is also a Star” by Nicola Yoon. She also enjoys graphic novels and manga.

Sophie’s thoughts on editing Hive Avenue : Poetry is unlike any genre. It has no succinct ‘rules’, and yet poetry is unmistakable even to the eye of someone who does not write it. I believe it would be easier to say what’s not a poem rather than what is one. The genre is wonderful since it communicates meaning in the line breaks, in the punctuation chosen, and in capitalization as well. Currently, the shortest poem is one letter long and the longest one in English is just short of 130,000 lines long; isn’t it fascinating?  I truly hope that you, reader, connect with one of these poems.

Creative Non-Fiction Editor:

Tina Pfister

Tina is a non-traditional student and lifelong word-nerd who currently calls the Arkansas Ozarks her home. She can often be found reading up on her favorite topics of anthropology, medicine, and language – or, donning her boxing gloves for her favorite workout.

Tina’s thoughts on editing Hive Avenue: As I pored over the works of these talented nonfiction writers, I was reminded of the ways in which we yearn for connection to others, carve a space for our ever-changing selves in an ever-changing world, and sometimes forget that weak ties are still ties. All of these links have a place in the intertwined webs of our lives. While you enjoy the following selections, I hope that you, too, find yourself exploring the ways in which you might connect to the writers; I hope that you, too, find yourself contemplating your magical place in the interconnected beauty of humankind.

Social Media Manager: Krista Kinman

My name is Krista Kinman and I serve as the social media editor for Hive Literary Magazine. Previously, I used these skills when I worked with Ozark Sportsman, creating fun and engaging content to draw customers to the store for the various sales or competitions that we would hold. I am a Graphic Design Major, intending to further enhance these skills in my future career. I am a lover of video games and plan to get a degree in video game development so I can use my love of art and writing to craft worlds for everyone to enjoy.

Beachside

Mae Fraser

hands rough like storm-made waves enveloping mine in yours your voice carrying over shorelines covering everything in your sea spray laugh

it’s hard not to think of blue tides white froth green grass warm hands golden sun rays spilling onto our faces

as we’re standing at the end of the world rocky coastline and clouds settling in on the horizon right before the murky dusk says bon voyage to the day and we get in the car, shrouded in the gift of this budding love, taking the ocean with us

Could you Translate?

Laila Jones

I could learn Mandarin in a years’ time, move and settle into Singapore, gardens by the bay, safe and in the know, more foreign to truth than any language.

I am well versed in lies, for I used to eat them.  fed by many I’ve loved, lies regurgitated,  spoonsful of colorless, tasteless words, my mind adds flavor, I would go hungry otherwise.

my perception of love? I don’t know.  food and shelter, a warm woman’s home.  eighteen candles, gifts under the tree. cooked meals and good schooling, lessons of life, I am prepped & primed.  love was making sure I had it all. tools for when it’s only me.  an independent woman raised  an independent woman.

forgive me, for I do not know good men well, I know my father as a shell of a human  filled with coins, dollars, and gin.  I know men like hands, covering my eyes and mouth, I knew good men before the mask removals.

don’t paint me in ungrateful colors, I shine in greens, browns, and pinks, earth tones for my rich soul, I am missing absolutely nothing in life, how does one miss what she’s never had?

so, forgive me, my ears are hearing you, and how you feel.

I just can’t understand you.

You’re Lying, Summer Child

Delaney Hillman

“My pre-cal teacher really pissed me off today,” you say and she nods her head, aviator sunglasses sitting on her nose. She doesn’t turn her head, but she asks an empathetic “Why?”

You tell her, “It’s Ms. Egg, you know? The one who I had for algebra last year.”

She scoffs, “Ugh, Egg. I thought you already had all your math credits?”

“I do, they don’t exactly care.”

“Make sure you pass or you won’t graduate.”

“I will.”

“You won’t.”

“Okay.”

You dial up the volume knob on the dash. She tells you you have the best music taste. You feel the weight beneath your eyes from playing through every song you know the night before, adding The Ones to a playlist just for her. Ever changing, always growing, different songs for the type of drive. You sneak in songs to try and tell her how you feel. The whipping wind through the windows probably blocks out the lyrics anyway.

Mom, I’ll be quiet

It would be just to sleep at night

And I’ll leave once I figure out

How to pay for my own life too *

It’s hot. You tell your mom rolling the windows down consumes more gas than using the AC. She takes the doors and freedom panels off her Jeep Wrangler. Maybe she doesn’t hear. The gusts of air fresh off the hot pavement burn your skin and tie new knots into your hair.

The obnoxious yellow and red sign ahead provides relief as you both pull into the drive-thru. Bojangles, the epitome of Southern fast food, staring you dead in the eyes. As soon as it came it went, now with the added pleasure of a baggie of four stacked steaming cardboard boxes in your already warm lap, “so they don’t fly away.” The only joy of you two picking up the food was getting to eat it fresh in the car, just fried chicken burning the skin away from the roof of your mouth and seeking comfort in your barely cold pink lemonade.

Drinking it feels different; like something is lodged in your throat, but you remember chewing correctly and swallowing before your next bite, right? It stays lodged there as you brew in your thoughts about choking rates and chewing food correctly, tell her you’re queer.

You start coughing, trying to rinse out your thoughts with lemonade.

It doesn’t go away. None of this feels conscious, something unspoken pushing you to regurgitate it all out into the space of the car.

“Can I tell you something, Mom?” you say softly, praying that your words will be muffled and you can shove it all back down your throat, but she looks at you.

“It’s serious, and you’re not allowed to hate me after I tell you, okay?” Despite the breeze, your eyes still feel wet, and as hot as the pavement rolling beneath you.

“I could never hate you.” Inhale.

“I like boys…and girls,” the second half of the statement comes out in the sort of breath you release when you’re punched in the stomach. But she doesn’t flinch the way you do.

“I figured.” Exhale.

You hesitate. There’s a relief, followed by a sting, at least you still have a place to sleep tonight. “Oh, what does that mean?” you question. Could the clarification ease the burning in your throat?

“I just knew, it felt obvious to me,” she says matter of factly like it was a universal truth; like you hadn’t spent the better part of two years trying to make sure she never knew. Why does this hurt?

It all falls out. The tears from your eyes, a broken sob, an apology. You try stuffing chicken down your throat.

Another sob tries to escape but is muffled by the cramming of a dry biscuit.

You’re choking. It’s hot.

You’re a mess.

“David can’t know, you can’t go home and tell him.” The thought hitting you late, a deer in headlights just narrowly dodging the oncoming traffic. Your stepfather can’t know. She assures you he won’t.

“I mean it Mom, please don’t tell anyone, promise you won’t.”

“Bear, I promise. It’s not a big deal, alright? Just breathe.” She finally looks at you, and you can see your own swollen eyes reflecting through her sunglasses.

You listen and you breathe and by the time you’re both home the panic has eased, maybe this was okay. It starts to feel good, to be seen, being an inch closer to her understanding you. You keep breathing.

Mom, would you wash my back?

This once, and then we can forget

And I’ll leave what I’m chasing

For the other girls to pursue

The trees are bare and the sky too gray for your mother to justify her aviators. You drive through town, the bitter breeze sneaking in through the cracks of those same freedom panels.

Your mind goes somewhere else this time. You think this is what they call disassociating as your eyes bore holes through the front window and you can’t recognize anything you pass, despite knowing where you are. You won’t be here much longer, this town, once you graduate you hope to leave it in the rearview even if you end up regretting it.

You think about the speech you did in eighth grade; you made it to the state speech contest. You think you lost because they knew you were bluffing about your faith saving you. You can still see the judges’ eyes peering into your soul as you spoke; did they know the sky was empty when you prayed?

Your mom wrote the speech anyway.

You disappear further, losing your attentiveness to the world around you as the Jeep morphs into a confessional box on wheels, your mother the priest, and you the sinner itching to confess every terrible thing you’ve done. You can’t hear the priest reading from her book at her ambo, you aren’t even sure if she’s speaking, nonetheless, you clear your throat and speak.

“What the fuck?” is the first thing you hear as you come back to the barren streets of five-o-one. What did you say?

“You don’t believe in God anymore?” Inhale.

“I don’t think I could aft-”

“After everything God has gotten you through. Everything and you turn your back on him?” She sneers at you and your whole body tenses. You hate this feeling, the uneasiness pressing down on your stomach and laughing at you.

You want to make your words sting, like a scared dog gnashing and bearing their teeth. You want to remind her of every night she spent at the bar instead of raising you. Blame her for things you knew weren’t her fault. You want to show her the rotten and chewed-up parts of your being. Confess the nights you spent on the cold tiled floor, scrubbing the fingerprints of family and friends from your skin not knowing they’d never fade. Liquidize your shame to paint the little girl kneeling every single night at the foot of her bed, bargaining with god. Ask her where she was. Ask her where was he.

Your hands start to scream from the pressure of your fingernails digging into your palms, and you think you might draw blood if you keep this in any longer. She pulls the car into the driveway and you don’t think she can stomach to look at you. The blood is drawn and you want a way to pour it back into the gaping ugly wound before you bleed yourself dry.

Words can’t leave your throat as she parks and slams the door following her exit. You meet the eyes of your stepfather, already accusing and asking the question “What have you done?”

You dial the radio down before leaving the car.

Mom, am I still young?

Can I dream for a few months more?

Great Lake

Matt Carmichael

sky—bruised slate unburdened  by the weight of glaciers

kettled shore clotted tributary debris of a sea, spent

dead coral and mosquitos the granite soft blood of caribou

stream cut cradled basin wild rye, iron ore erosion, the sadness of late summer cicadas

dune-smooth

limestone tomb of petrified shadow

young wind, cloaked  in emerald shipwreck begging to the moon, spilled across the surface of the water, hungry, howl  let it fill the urn, carry it to the coyotes.

Three for the New Apartment

Matt Carmichael

1] we kept hitting snooze on the blood moon lunar eclipse until the sun woke up and pushed through the new bedroom windows and painted the walls gold and said I will never let anything come between us

2] two weeks in and the books still in boxes

I’ll never forget the look of horror you gave when you unpacked the blue t-shirt stained with mustard

3] on the kitchen counter the small glass bottle broke at the neck and the smooth granite never looked so black eclipsed by those pools of spilled All Fired Up red nail polish

397.22

Chad Lutz

Ohio’s Summit county owns and operates a system of trails following old sections of decommissioned AB&C and NYC railroads, which were in operation until the early 1930s. For fifty cents, passengers could take a one-way trip from Akron to Public Square in Cleveland. The appropriately named Bike and Hike Trail was one of the first “rails to trails” initiatives in the U.S., with the first section of the trail opening in 1972. These old railroad lines, accessible by ten trailheads along the way, now invite great blue heron, coyote, deer, bobcats, cross-country skiers, runners, hikers, and bikers.

No motorized vehicles allowed.

It’s early and there are no signs of Max. His lights are out, his windows are shut, and his giant SUV sits lazily in the drive.

“Shit,” I mutter. “He’s gonna be sleeping.”

I pick up my phone and dial his number.

Straight to voicemail.

I pull into the drive next to Max’s SUV and dial his phone again.

Straight to voicemail.

“God damnit.”

I turn off the engine and open my door. The smell of magnolia affronts me. I check my watch and it’s exactly seven, already light in the sky.

I casually stroll up to Max’s front door and am about to knock three times when the door opens and Max is standing there with a toothy grin and a demeanor that says, Am I right?

“It’s Super Anderman Saturdays!” he bellows.

The neighbor’s dog across the street barks.

“Max, keep it down. Your neighbors are going to call the cops.”

“The sun’s up,” he argues, and hollers again for no reason.

“Come on,” I plead, and motion toward his SUV, a massive Chevy with enough room to fit a buffalo.

“Alright, alright. I’ll spare ya, Chutz.” He scans his living room, maybe making sure he has everything, and then pulls the front door shut behind him and locks it.

The Silver Springs section of the trail is approximately two miles from Max’s house (and only three miles from his parents’ house), which is perfect because it’s early and we want to get this show on the road.

“It’s where I’ve done all my walking,” Max tells me, as we climb into his hulking SUV. “Gotta make a stop at Starbucks first, though. Can’t do this right without some fraysh caffee, noam sayin’?”

I moan playfully and buckle up.

Five speedy minutes later, we pull into the Starbucks parking lot and enter the drive-thru. Max drives right up to the intercom and rolls down his window to give his order, but something isn’t right.

“You hear that?” he asks, and turns the music down.

I strain my ears enough to just barely make out someone yelling, so I put down my window all the way, despite the cool temps, to hear better and catch the tail end of a heated rant about Stevia.

“I said, ‘Splenda’,” the voice insists. “Where’s your manager? This is ridiculous!”

“Somebody needs their coffee,” Max says, still waiting for the barista at the window to take our order.

“I won’t drink it,” the customer ahead of us yells. We hear a splashing sound and the rev of a large engine. “I have half a

mind to fly out to Seattle and tell corporate where they can stick their fucking supply chain issues!”

A smaller but confident voice answers, “Can I make you something else?”

“You can tell em’ Rafael’s coming for em’.” The driver’s loud engine roars even louder, followed by the screech of tires.

“Welcome to Starbucks,” the intercom says.

“What was that about?” Max asks the barista.

“Don’t worry about it,” the barista says, “I get it all the time.”

We drive thru suburbia, yawning and sighing, past farmsturned-Big-Box-stores and middle-class housing developments with naked trees lining their properties, large coffees steaming in our hands.

“Ready to get it in?” Max asks, as we bounce into the ironically generous Silver Springs parking lot, whose twenty spaces are almost never used.

“To the Max!” I tell him.

“Ooooo right you fucking are,” he replies, and throws the vehicle in park. “Right you fucking are.” He reaches into the center console and produces two pill bottles. “Ibuprofen. Adderall. The coffee in my hand makes three. The Anderman Cocktail.” He elbows me in the solar plexus. Then, he reaches across the center console, rummaging for something: a DVD case, which he uses to snort the Adderall.

Lion King will never be the same.

I get out of the car before things get any weirder, but there’s no one around to see the felony happening in the driver seat. The only car in the parking lot is empty. A Mini Cooper with a white racing stripe and out-of-state-plates. Even in the growing daylight, I can’t make out the lettering.

“Look what I have,” I tell him, still squinting to read the license number. I pull out his vape pen and take the morning’s first drag.

“Business as usual,” Max says, with a smile.

I rustle through the big pocket of my vest pack as I hop out of the car, looking for the piece de resistance: my brand new JBL speaker.

“Got it for Christmas,” I tell him. The pill-shaped device boots up with a chicka--whooooomp. “Now we have tunes for weeks.”

Max high-fives me.

“I like where your head’s at,” he says, and fishes for his own vest pack out of the trunk. “What do we listen to?”

“Well, seeing as how we’re literally scraping morning, let’s listen to something appropriate. I was thinking Pink Floyd’s ‘A Piper at the Gates of Dawn’.”

He clears his throat, nods his head, and looks to the east, where the sun is now an actual artifact in the sky. Then,

he checks the time. “Seven-fifteen and the sun’s up.” He shakes his head.

“Having second thoughts?” I ask.

“Nah. My legs are just a little sore from the five I did yesterday.”

“I thought you said you were only walking twos and threes.”

Max makes a sheepish noise, almost-but-not-quite a laugh.

“These pounds aren’t going to lose themselves, Chutz.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that. The el-bees are going to fly right off with the state your stomach is in.”

“I guess,” he says. “You know where we’re going?”

“Indeed, I do!” I tell him. “It’s a straight shot all the way to Brandywine. Macie agreed to pick us up at the end, right?”

“Brandywine Falls,” he says, absently, and then, more lucid: “She’ll be there in about three hours.”

“You think it’ll take us three hours to go ten miles?”

“I honestly have no idea, Chutz. Six months ago, I weighed 500lbs.”

“You didn’t weigh five-hundred pounds,” I tell him, “you weighed four-sixty-five, and you have nothing to worry about. Like you said, you’ve been walking three days a week, with a long walk thrown in for good measure.”

He considers what I’ve said as a biker rolls into the parking lot and dismounts next to the Mini Cooper.

“Beautiful morning to be outside!” Max shouts across the lot.

The bicyclist, a pepper-bearded man in a sleek, black jersey, nods and waves.

“I just finished thirty,” he says. “The trail was practically mine. How far are you two going? Looks like you’re in for a nice little walk.”

And he’s right. Max has a cotton long-sleeve shirt on under a cotton short-sleeve, and a beat-up hat bearing the logo of a college he never went to. I have on jeans, a nylon windbreaker, a cotton short-sleeve shirt, and a hat from a brewery I went to once on a vacation.

Max and I shoot each other knowing glances.

Looks can be deceiving, these glances say.

“We’re hiking to Brandywine Falls,” Max tells the man.

The man whistles.

“That’s a solid hike,” he replies, then he racks his bike on the back of his Mini Cooper, hops in his car, rolls his window down, rolls in reverse, tells us to “have a good one,” and then takes off as if he’d never been there.

Max looks at me, as if searching for an answer, but I have no answer, and stare back blankly, lost in my own thoughts.

“I missed this,” I say, and inhale deeply — the smell of

moisture all around.

“Missed what?”

“Nothing,” I tell him. “I’m ready if you are.”

I extend my arm in the direction of the trail, inviting Max to lead the charge.

“No,” he says, and presses the start button on his watch. “I insist.”

And, just like that, we’re off doing something stupid.

Just as Max’s watch announces our first mile, a runner passes wearing a tie-dye bandana, a black nylon jacket, and neon green short shorts. They’re running alone but seem to be talking to themselves. Max elbows me in the shoulder and nods up ahead with a shrug.

“Singing,” I tell Max, and motion toward the person’s earbuds as they pass. They wave, I wave, and Max waves, but the person isn’t singing. They’re on the phone — something about Tesla stock — but before we can catch anything else, they’re gone, bounding down the trail, leaving me and Max walking to the sounds of Pink Floyd again.

“I forgot about the tunnel!” I shout, as we make our way along the asphalt path. Sure enough, exactly two miles into the hike, we see an automobile overpass with a red-brick pedestrian tunnel underneath.

“I’ve got an idea,” I say with confidence. I take out the vape pen and smile slyly in Max’s direction. “Take a hit and hold it until you get to the other side.”

“You morose mother fucker,” he says, and grins.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I tell him, but it doesn’t matter. We’re only a few steps outside of the tunnel, so I wait, hit the pen, hand it to Max, and then hang the fuck on.

We emerge on the other side of the thirty-foot tunnel in a litany of coughs. My vision ebbs as I try to corral my lungs, but the hit was huge and the steam went deep and suddenly all I can think about is my friend Camden, whose dad has lung cancer.

I ask myself why I’d think of a man dying of adenocarcinoma when Max and I are out in nature, celebrating everything there is to celebrate about life, but that’s an easy one. I’ve been smoking for a majority of my thirty-four years.

My chest tightens as his dad’s image pops into my head: a disgruntled man in his early sixties, short grey hair, glasses, emaciated, yelling at the rest of his family to do this and to do that, while slowly wasting to nothing on an old, hand-me-down couch.

“We should invite Camden out on one of these,” I say, absently.

“Who?”

With more clarity: “Camden.”

“Camden Camden?”

“Yeah, Camden.”

“Isn’t he the kid who shit, puked, pissed, and bled all over and into my toilet and then dipped without cleaning it up like a decade ago?”

“That’s the one.”

“Isn’t he late to everything?”

“That’s the one.”

“So why are we inviting him?”

An orange dot in the distance becomes a runner, who eventually passes without waving.

Max yells, “Bitch,” after they’ve passed and acts like this is the way it should be.

“What the hell was that for?” I ask.

“She didn’t say, ‘Good morning.’”

“Didn’t say ‘Good morning’? What if she’s having a bad day and just wants to be left alone?”

“At seven-thirty-five?”

“At any time,” I tell him. “Strangers don’t owe you anything but common courtesy.”

Max ignores me and fusses with his watch.

“Mile two was an eighteen-fifty-two.”

“Great,” I tell him. “Stop yelling at people!”

“Not a chance,” he says. “Not a chance.”

“I’m serious about Camden, though. He’d love this. And, besides, aren’t you the one that’s always trying to get everyone on board?”

“What are you? His mother?”

“No,” I say, resolutely. “I’m his friend.”

Two Blue Jays land on the path in front of us and fight over some trivial morsel until our presence is too much and they fly into a nearby oak tree.

“The pandemic has been hard on him,” I say. “He hasn’t seen anyone but his family for weeks.”

“Neither have we.”

“What about this?” I ask, and motion to the space between us.

“This is different and you know it.”

“Because we don’t care as much?”

“No,” he says, lording his voice, “Because we’re basically brothers.”

“Is that why we’re sharing a mouthpiece with a killer virus on the loose?”

Max grows quiet.

“Sorry,” I tell him after several stony minutes.

“He’s late to everything,” Max says.

“I’m still going to invite him,” I counter.

Max replies with, “Three miles. Eighteen-forty-five,” and then sniffs the air romantically.

“How’s that Anderman Cocktail treating you?” I ask.

Sweat continues to drip from his chin.

“Feeling good,” he mutters.

“Max?”

He draws another deep lungful and tilts his head to the heavens.

“To the Max!” he bellows.

A family of finch flits away.

“On your left!” a voice calls out from behind us, but it isn’t enough time and the person, a woman on a bike going about seventy-five-miles-per-hour, races around us, nearly clipping Max.

“Is it always like this?” he asks, inspecting his elbow for damage. He’s breathing hard but isn’t gasping. Satisfied he’s OK, he yells ahead for the person to get all-the-way bent.

They wave, no doubt amused.

“At least she announced herself,” I offer, but Max is too tired, too hungry, too invested in the walk to probably care.

“She should watch where she’s going on my trail.”

He punches at the air in front of us.

“My trail?”

I center on this statement, unsure of why it irks me, but I know exactly why it bothers me.

“I used to run twenty-milers at three in the morning,” I tell him. I motion to the eight-foot-wide asphalt road laid out before us and nod knowingly. “If you think this trail is yours, I was the one who laid the gravel bed.”

Max considers this, but instead of getting upset, as I expect, Max’s eyes grow wide and he starts firing off questions.

“How long did those twenty-mile runs to take you?”

“Depends on what I was trying to do.”

“You didn’t run the same pace every time?”

“Hell no! I always shake it up; how far I’m going, what pace I’m trying to run. There are also days you just don’t have it, and when those days come, it’s better not to force it.”

“But you still get it in…” he says, more leading than asking.

Max raises his watch. He’s got a five-mile smile.

“Halfway,” he says. “Eighteen-fifty-two. Thought we were faster this one.”

We climb a small but steep hill and cross a concrete pedestrian bridge with high fencing situated twenty-five feet above Route 8., the local highway. I give my coffee a gentle shake and hear the last few drops splash around.

“How much coffee do you have left?” I ask.

The sun beats down on our shoulders and backs.

“I still have half,” he says, proudly, and takes a victory swig.

I, meanwhile, look for a place to throw my cup.

And a place to pee.

Over the bridge, we wind down a small hill and into another tunnel, where Max takes initiative and asks for the pen.

Puff puff.

Steam steam.

He hands it back with eyes as wide as beverage coasters and then bursts into a coughing fit. The sound echoes in the twenty-five-yard tunnel.

“You’re turn,” he says, breathlessly.

“I’m ready to do my part,” I tell him, and pull steam.

Led Zeppelin reminds us there are good times and bad times.

We go about a quarter mile until it feels like we’re back in the middle of nowhere again. A car honks from somewhere in the distance and we both look up as if we can see the indiscretion, but we can’t see anything but trees and the trail and bright blue sky. A few giant houses here and there; but, nothing motorized, as the sign said.

“This is what I love about being out here,” he says. “I had no idea what I was missing. Especially this part of the trail. It’s my favorite.”

Large rock faces jut out of craggy cliffs and tall evergreen reach for the ozone layer.

“I call it ‘The Crevasse’.”

“I like it,” I tell him, “I’ve always been pretty partial to this section, too. I used to run speed work here with a old crew. Speaking of missing things, how’s the stomach?”

Max pats his belly.

“Reeeeeeeeeaallllll narse!”

“Narse?”

“Nice,” he says.

“Oh,” I tell him. “You’ve really slimmed down.”

Max beams.

“How much weight have you lost since the surgery?”

“About seventy pounds.”

“Seventy-pounds? Holy shit! You look like it!”

“I feel like it, too. No slowing down.”

Max flexes his wrists and punches at the air again.

I laugh because it’s a miracle to see Max do anything but storm the fridge, let alone unleash a six-punch combo in the middle of a ten-mile hike.

“Is Macie bringing water to Brandywine?” I ask. I try to lick my lips, but my whole mouth is dry.

“Why do we need water?”

“Cotton mouth,” I tell him. “And you’re dripping sweat.”

“I’m not thirsty, though.”

“The trick to staying hydrated is to drink before you’re thirsty. If you’re thirsty, that’s your body telling you you’re

already dehydrated and now you have to play catchup.”

“Damnit,” he says.

“What?” I ask.

“Now, all I want to do is fuck Macie.”

“Because I mentioned her name once? Jesus Christ, Max. You have no off button, do you?”

“Revved and raring to go,” he says. “How are the ladies treating you anyway?”

“They’re not,” I say, keeping my eyes to the ground. “I told you, I’m not ready.”

“That’s just the pressure talking. You gotta have confidence, noam sayin’?”

“That’s not the issue,” I tell him. “I’ve dated plenty of people.”

“Then, what’s the problem?” he asks, and retreats to the far side of the trail to kick a white dandelion.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, as he lifts his watch and shows me we’ve now gone six miles. There’s a sudden glint in his eye that tells me it only gets worse from here.

“That’s such a bullshit copout,” he says. “Is it that you’re gay or something? I remember that shit from high school.”

“No,” I say, viciously, but Max doesn’t back down. He wants to know and he wants to know right now. But, the truth is…

“I don’t fucking care.”

“What?” Max asks.

“I don’t fucking care,” I say, louder, “I’ve got more important things to think about.”

“Or so you think,” he says. “Is it the time? The money? Both?”

My feet skid to a halt. The world continues to fleet away from me, an optical illusion.

“You know,” I begin, but stop. No sense in arguing on a trail in the middle of nowhere when this was supposed to be an adventure.

“Have you texted Macie to let her know where we are?” Max grumbles.

“When did you become such a mom?”

“I’m not a mom. I’m Chutz.”

“Well, Chutz, I can’t believe it’s almost ten already,” he says, like someone just slapped him in the face. “I have no fucking concept of time.”

I shrug, tell him, “It was your birthday two weeks ago.”

“Was it really?” he asks.

I laugh and Max laughs, too.

When the hilarity finally leaves us, Max turns his head my direction, like he’s going to say something, and then balks.

“I’m just looking after my buddy,” he says, when the

gumption finally finds him.

“Don’t worry about me,” I say, but I understand that’s impossible. Not just for Max, but for anybody. You can’t just declare a person’s worries away.

He clears his throat, stares into the short distance at a road crossing, and then says, “I can’t begin to thank you enough for all your help.”

He looks at his watch.

“That’s seven.”

“Hey, we’re still just getting started,” I tell him. “but, you deserve to be who you want to be. Everyone does. However, not everyone has the right tools or the means to foster them.”

He takes a moment to consider what I’ve said. Something strikes a chord, because he says, “I had no idea what I was doing, Chutz. I tried so many fad diets, tried swimming, tried walking. I didn’t understand what I understand now; that health is a commitment. Getting the surgery made me realize that. I’ve been on forums where people who’ve gotten the surgery gained the weight back. Can you imagine? Going through something like surgery, a literal miracle, where you don’t have to do anything after you’ve had it to start losing weight, and then to waste it. Waste that gift. That’s what it is, Chutz. This surgery was a gift.”

“Hey,” I say, diffidently, but the words lose power in my mouth, so I shake my head, tell him, “Never mind,” and assume a passive demeanor.

We walk in silence for a while; me not knowing what to say, Max punching at the air. I think about Camden again and the choices we make and wonder why anyone would ever willingly choose anything when everything brings the potential for heartache and failure.

“You have anything going on after the hike?” he asks.

“I’ve got a job interview at two,” I tell him. “I’ll probably need to head home sooner than later once we finish up. Why?”

“No reason,” he says, slyly, and grins.

“What?” I ask.

Max looks down at his watch and then up the wooded trail at yet another road crossing. “That’s nine miles,” he bellows, and then beats his chest one two three. “Nothing can touch us now!”

I try to hide my smile but can’t. It’s contagious watching this formerly four-hundred-sixty-five-pound man amble down a paved trail (any trail really) with gusto.

I scan Max head-to-toe to make sure he isn’t pulling a Classic Max Move and lying about his power level. His face is beet red, his cheeks are salty, his gaze wanders, but his feet move one after the other forward forward forward.

“I bet we could do this every day,” I say. “You working remote, and me, well, you know.”

“You’ve got that interview today though, right?”

His face shines as bright as a lighthouse as he slaps me on the back and says, “You son of a bitch, I’m in.”

“That was easy,” I tell him.

“You’re easy,” he says, evenly, and slaps me on the back again. “To the Max.”

There’s little fanfare as we cross yet another pedestrian bridge and wind into the Brandywine lot.

“Where is everybody?” Max exclaims.

And, it’s true: the falls is yet another casualty of the pandemic. Orange barricades and big signs that say CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE detour would-be vacationers and local sightseers with several lines of fine print about fines.

The only vehicle in the lot is a lone SUV, Macie’s, who waves when she sees us coming around the final bend.

“Max!” she cries as reality sinks in. Macie bounds over to us and latches onto Max. “You did it!”

Max buckles a little.

“Not so fast,” he says, and takes a deep breath.

“I’m so proud of you,” Macie says. “I wish I could do something like that. It’s incredible!”

I say, “It is. This man is a miracle.”

“You just have to have the right tools and the means to foster them,” Max says, and gives me a quick look.

This look says thank you.

For everything and what’s to come.

like pearly, sea sprung Aphrodite poor girl with no mother, dirt-borne: sculpted, stroked,

caressed, clenched, strangled by Hephaestus, the god’s fingerprints

Pandora

Ella Hendricks

engraved into her skin. formed in the image of Man, the punished, created as punishment.

forced to bear children, bloody with kisses, lingering touches on white nightgowns–

stabbed in the gut, leaking blood onto freshly laundered sheets. gifted – No, burdened

with the eros of others – No wonder She, who was the first girl, would claw at that gilded trove.

how could she not?

childhood stolen: never to run wild as Artemis or dance as crazed as maenads, instead

frozen Daphne in Apollo’s deadly gaze. Ariadne and her thread, Leda and that egg,

can you really blame Hera and her rage? ‘lovely evil’ they claim, men all see the same.

she’ll tear you open at the seams like the trove she pried tears in her swollen eyes –

Desperation, bringing with her chaos, destruction and demise, or filled with terror

she surmised a way to take away her pain, to free her from his wretched gaze, Liberation.

Breaking Up With My Best Friend

E.P. Linner

I knew everything about her.

How she ghostwrote poetry on Tumblr. How she wanted to appear cool and reckless, but tried so hard to be the Mexican History teacher’s favorite student all semester long. The way she held her cigarette and the elusive half-smirk of her heartshaped lips. Her wavy, raven-dark hair, tumbling down her shoulders like wings. How she loved history - especially Russian and Austrian history. It’s funny, looking back now, how we both used to say we were like Princess Sissi, the Empress of AustriaHungary; manic, maladaptive daydreamers, and true rebels in a court full of vipers and liars. But there could only be one quirky Empress who thought she was better than everyone else, right? Two would be one too many.

I came back to Mexico after three years of living in Germany, and made it into a new school where no one knew me. Sure, I joined musical theater, I made friends at the library, I joined human rights and environmental clubs. But that didn’t change the fact that I was lonely during the actual classes. I couldn’t connect with these people my age, all loud and entitled and talking back at the teachers after three years of standing straight and saying “Yes, Professor” and “Yes, sir/madam”. I didn’t recognize myself in them.

Then I met her. It was in a mandatory and inconsequential class, of all places, where no one paid attention except us. I remember bonding over Wicked - the book, not the musicaland thinking wow, she reads more than she exists. She’s just like me. She invited me to my first slumber party. I felt myself relax

into the idea of finally belonging somewhere.

Over the next three years of high school, we were unstoppable. We took AP World History together and exactly five shots of tequila at every party. We drew portraits of each other. Our Mexican History professor would grin as we entered his classroom. “Here comes the dynamic duo,” he would say, referencing the fact that we were the only willing participants during his lectures. We made essay-level analyses of Netflix shows and discussed poems by Latin American women authors. Always, we told each other this: we were definitely above the dumb and unthinking sentients who shared classes with us, who could barely lift a book or write a coherent sentence.

We were special.

“I drew this for you,” she once told me, and showed me a drawing of myself, so beautiful and princess-like. I felt my stomach blooming. Did she really see me that way? No one ever had.

She became my world. * * *

I never thought I’d have a female best friend, nor did I think it was important to have one. I thought of myself as someone too boyish, too lanky, too awkward for any of the girls my age to even glance my way. I didn’t learn to do eyeliner until I was twenty, and I never wore make-up to school, more often than not looking like a baby bird that just fell out of its nest.

When I lived in Germany, I had a best friend. Her name was Jessie. She liked the same geeky things I did, and we bonded over Phantom of the Opera fanfics and went to drawing classes together. But soon I moved back to Mexico, back to where I started. And again I thought I wasn’t destined for female friendships. The prophecy had already been foretold.

This perspective stayed with me for more than I care to

admit. Instead of befriending other women, I would run with the boys. Specifically, the intellectual boys, the ones that enjoyed discussing Marxist theory, or being adventurous, or laughing as loud as they wanted - heedless, unbound joys I had decided took no part in the strict and unruly Girl World. Other girls seemed to have rules I couldn’t commit to: never wanting to get dirty, never confronting another person directly, always wary of feeling embarrassed. As if ashamed of our existence. How could I possibly fit in with them?

My new best friend seemed to think so, too. That’s why we were so close. * * *

I would guess the leaks on the floorboard became noticeable during our senior year, when I volunteered to wave the Mexican flag during the ceremony for Independence Day - something a girl at my school had never done before. It was considered a boy’s job. I convinced my Spanish teacher, who nodded and assured me: “Sure. Why not? Women can be presidents, too.” During the assembly, I waved the flag proudly, and when the applause came after the famous Mexican “Grito” of Independence, I glowed from the inside out.

During lunch, my best friend sat beside me with a satisfied smile. “Aren’t you glad I gave you that idea?”

I blinked at her, my sandwich pausing mid-air. “What idea?”

“To be the first girl at school to wave the flag.”

My eyebrows threaded together. “That was my idea, actually.”

“Um, no it wasn’t. I remember telling you to do it.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I had coined the idea by myself a month ago, when I told an entire table of friends that I would be brave enough to volunteer myself.

I gulped down my food. As much as I loved her, I wouldn’t let her get away with such a blatant lie. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

But she wasn’t. She stormed off and didn’t talk to me for three days. Eventually, her silent treatment melted away, and she began texting me again about a boy she had a crush on. We avoided the conversation altogether. The best friend I knew had returned, but the prickly sensation of wrongness from that situation stayed with me.

To this day, if you were to ask her, she would say that idea had been hers.

Much has been said about female friendships. The concept of “female friendships” either fills a woman with images of care and comfort - bakeries stuffed with warm croissants, laughter from across the room - or it sends a shiver of pure horror down her spine. It depends on which woman you ask.

The modern world often denies us real, intimate friend-

ships. Nothing could be more true of female friendships, where the mainstream media constantly pits us against each otherto see who is the prettiest, who is the smartest, who can get the most attention from men.

It’s difficult to not let the messaging get to you. It starts small, with sayings like “Girls are more drama, anyway; I’d rather hang out with the boys”. Then it leads to ostracizing a girl from your friend group, just because she poses a threat to your ego. Or to sleeping with another woman’s husband, just to prove you can.

Being malicious to another woman is like hurting yourself. The woman in front of you is a mirror. She reflects both your greatest achievements and your greatest insecurities. Inflicting her pain is self-flagellation. It is self-loathing.

The self-loathing has different fonts, but they are all self-loathing. The woman who smiles and secretly stabs her friends in the back loathes herself just as much as the pretentious, self-aggrandizing woman who thinks she is better than everyone else, specifically better than other women. It oozes out of us in different ways, but when we self-loathe, we are all trapped in the same cage. We are all performing for the same circus.

And the audience of men laugh gladly, enjoying the performance.

After our high school graduation, we went to different universities. That didn’t keep us from texting every other week, though. During our first summer together after a year of studies, I invited her over to watch movies. I was planning a pool party for my birthday, sending invitations to all my friends. I remember feeling giddy and excited; I hadn’t seen them in a long time.

“You know that whole group of girls hates you,” my best friend said as I texted a friend in common, Sophie.

My heart nearly stopped. “What do you mean?”

She flipped her hair and grabbed a Coca-Cola from the freezer. “Yeah, they said they’d only come to the party because of the alcohol. But they hate your ass.”

I was at a loss for what to say. These had been my musical theater friends, the ones who had shown me the ins and outs of school life. Sophie, in particular, had been my first friend there.

“She hates you the most,” my best friend repeated. I texted Sophie with anger-riddled paragraphs. I cringe every time I think about them now. You pretended to be my friend. How dare you? She said she didn’t know what I was talking about and that maybe I should check my sources. That comment only angered me more, to the point of disinviting her and the other girls from the party. Was Sophie suggesting my best friend was lying to me? She couldn’t be. The girl whom I stood up for at any opportunity, whom I’d kicked people who made

her cry out of my house, couldn’t be lying to me.

No, she was protecting me. She loved me.

She was my world.

University started again. After the birthday party fiasco, my group of friends became smaller and smaller. My social circle, now composed of my best friend and three boys we knew. That was it. I was studying away from her, so that meant going through the arduous task - again - of finding new friends at my campus.

I’d always considered myself a feminist, so I quickly joined student groups and collectives centered around female empowerment and raising awareness for gender violence. There, I met other smart, talented, incredible women. My pretentiousness died, making way for humility and respect. Other women were just like me; they were the human aliveness in me. And I could learn so much about myself and the world through them.

The more I talked with my new friends…the more I spotted that missing spark from my conversations with my best friend. We would go out for coffee and she would tell me everything she hated about everyone. She seemed to know everyone’s most embarrassing story and shared it proudly. And what she said of girls we knew was the worst.

I would mostly nod or fake-laugh, but my mind was reeling. This was so different from my interactions with my new friends, where we celebrated each other, or even women who weren’t in the room. It felt like my best friend was spitting black bile, and I was all too aware of its puddle now.

Was she depressed? Was she going through a rough patch? No. I realized that this wasn’t something new. She had always done this.

It was beginning to make me uncomfortable.

The last summer we spent together, I invited her to my family apartment in Berlin. I also invited Jessie along. The three of us cruised through parks and went to museums and enjoyed the glint of the sun.

But my stomach dropped more and more as the days passed and my best friend became a distortion of passion-aggression. Even Jessie would raise her eyebrows as my best friend would click her tongue and turn her body away from me, gazing out the window. What was she looking for out there that I didn’t have?

She didn’t stay the whole trip. I did not know much about her for two months. One of the last times I saw her, it was for an hour at a coffee shop, where she said the trip had sucked. Then she made fun of one of our friends for her clothing style. And that was that.

I left her birthday gifts on her doorstep. She never thanked me for them.

Months later, Jessie called me from Germany while I was walking in the park. We laughed about old memories, and she caught me up on her life. Eventually, she asked me about my best friend, and I sighed.

“I’ve distanced myself from her,” I said. “She’s been kind of cynical lately. Gossiping about everyone I know. Sometimes I wonder if everything she says is real.”

“I don’t think so,” Jessie said. “I mean, she did lie about your mom sleeping her way into buying the apartment in Berlin.”

My phone almost fell from my hands as I tripped. It was as if I’d heard the words underwater. “Can you repeat that? I don’t think I heard you right.”

“She said your mom slept with a politician or something to get money for the apartment. But I know that’s not true because I know your mom.”

And just like that, my world shattered.

My “best friend”, who convinced me she was better than me, who put me down, who spread cruel and nasty lies behind my back to splinter my friendships.

She was trying to destroy me.

I should have seen this coming.

* * *

Much research and literature tackles relationship breakups. But what about friendship break-ups? What about friendship betrayals? I have never felt a bullet pierce my chest, but I imagine it feels a lot like losing my best friend.

I cut all contact with her. Four years, sliced with the swiftness of a knife. There was no goodbye. There was no closure. Just silence, and a wound that opens and closes on gloomy Sundays.

How could you grieve someone who had already lost you a long, long time ago?

I reached out to Sophie, inviting her for a barbecue night where I could apologize. Surprisingly, she accepted. When I told her everything that had happened, she only nodded.

“She said the worst things about you behind your back,” she said. “But don’t take it personally. She did it with me, too. And with everyone else. That’s why we stopped inviting her to our events a while back. We stopped taking her seriously.”

I didn’t revert to my old ways of thinking. Over time, I made new best friends, all female. They are now a constant for me. I don’t let it be otherwise. My girlfriends invite me out to art galleries, rock climbing, and watercolor classes. They hug me when I cry, they answer when I call. I don’t see them as my competition, and neither do they. We don’t fight over petty jealousies, we don’t give backhanded compliments. We support each other, we are entrepreneurial. They are nurturing, they are life itself.

As Sophie suggested, I didn’t take it personally. My best friend was a victim of a cruel, competitive system, the one all

women know well and suffer from. I could reconcile the two realities: I wanted nothing to do with her, but I forgave her because I forgave myself. I still carry her with me: her laughter, her poetry, and her rare glimpses of kindness.

I realized…I am her. I am all my female friends, past and present.

I am every woman I know.

Sunflower bouquet of my left hand

Alicia Aranyi

I happened upon my reflection, Carrying some sunflowers at hand. Filling a vase, As to not deplete their stems. And as the water rushed, A melodic hush, Which would normally be ignored, The water rushedSo I looked up, And saw the soul my reflection showed. Saw her round face, Soft eyes and lips, But most of all, her peacefulness: The same calm as when I’d tread in my own tiny forest when young,

Tending to the gardens and making bread from some crumbs. Felt myself years past, She who shyly examined her surroundings, Voice too quiet, Cherishing the rules for their structure. And I see her raucous laughter once home.

In the mirror I see my heart, Its tenderness, everyone is close to it. My wildness and quiet show, Contradiction I pose.

Beyond my absurd remarks and hysteric, hyper, laughter, Beyond my quiet in some crowds, It shows.

No one can tame me of my ways, As I tread softly through the sands and the waves.

I happened upon my reflection, Sunflowers at hand, A sunflower again. I hold them softly, a bouquet of my left hand, Filling the vase in my purposeful way, Me again, in my own way.

In Which a Moth Reads My Palm and Keeps My Secrets

Carrie Penrod

We drank cherry wine  from the bottle, large sips that filled our mouths,  spilled over with the tart sweetness of crisp fall nights by the river.  We fell asleep there  on my mother’s Mexican blanket while the water slid past  the muddy bank.

I woke to a webworm moth resting her white body on my Jupiter  mount. She was observing my heart line, taking in the gentle curve of it where it ends  between my middle and index finger. I wanted to ask her,  what does it mean? She tapped  her legs against the crossing little lines, Morse code, drank dew  from the marks of my trauma.  I would have let her take it all if I could have.

I curled my fingers, brushed  the soft downy wing. She glided across my palm, sat at the fork  of my head line, turned to inspect the branching lines of my life, so many  for her to lift off from.

He woke behind me  and she flew from my grasp.

The same kindness

Carrie Penrod

The spider is no bigger than my pinky nail. A small orangish-brown thing with black ink-blot tests  on her back. She’s made her web on the window  inside the back door where she will surely  starve on phantom bugs that, despite her best-crafted web, never seem to get caught.

I take pity on her, carefully move her to a place  outside and wish someone would show me the same kindness.

Remembering the Gap

John Frame

The argument starts mundanely. In the way many altercations on the subway develop, it escalates when a decreasing amount of space causes friction and heat as people jostle for precious real estate. The train chugs slowly from stop to stop. Wheels grind as if milling iron filings from the rails. Nobody with a seat wants to move from their fiefdom of hard plastic. There’s a long journey ahead for many, from the trickling source at Van Cortlandt Park, to the raging rapids of bustling downtown. Faulty air conditioning, screeching brakes, the faint tinny beats of other people’s music, the smell of deep-fried fast food, and ripe, pungent body odor all fray the senses of original passengers - me and the woman and small child beside me - on this train from the very start and in it for the long haul.

A young White guy with a curly mop-top and a Chicago Bulls shirt who enters at Dykman sits across from us, enjoying the music on his giant headphones, cut off from the world and unable to understand what’s going on beside him. He can’t hear the squabble over the seat next to him. Both claimants to the throne, who enter at 168th street, are older men in their fifties. One is a tall, thin, White man, in a suit and tie with a black leather messenger bag, while the other is a stocky Hispanic construction worker, carrying a yellow hard hat, thick protective gloves and a banged-up metal lunch box. Neither seems willing to relent and both maintain angry airs about the situation, although the White guy manages to twist his long body into the seat beside me. The woman shifts in the awkward jostling, causing her child to jump mischievously from her lap, blocking the construction worker’s advance.

The worker mutters something in Spanish, causing some of the passengers to chuckle. This incenses the businessman who feels the penetrating shame of the laughing eyes directed

at him.

“This is America,” he blurts to his perceived tormentors, feeling the need to say something. “People should speak English!” Turning to me, somehow a comrade in complexion, he asks, “why is he speaking in Spanish?”

“I think he’s insulting you,” I say.

“That doesn’t answer my question, does it? I know he insulted me!” The man shakes his head, realizing his supposed ally is of questionable worth.

“Well, we are in Washington Heights,” I state, trying to clarify the situation with geography.

“It shouldn’t matter where we are. This is America! We speak English here, don’t we?” The construction worker glances over at us with a sense of recognition and resignation. A long day of hard toil ahead of him, stress is the last thing he needs.

“I can insult you in English if you like!” He stares directly at the businessman, grinning, goading him to escalate the argument. The White guy doesn’t hesitate in his response.

“Why don’t you just go back to where you came from instead?” There’s a short silence as everyone processes the question. After a few seconds, the sounds of teeth sucking, tutting, and intakes of breath are all around. The exceptions are the woman and her son, who communicate in the mysterious body language of mother and child, and the guy with the Bull’s shirt, lost in a world of musical entrancement.

“Nah, man, that’s out of order,” exclaims one voice.

“Did he really just say that?” a woman asks her friend as the train stops to allow more people on.

“You know what I meant, right?” The businessman turns his body awkwardly towards me, seeking my approval. “If you come here to live, you need to speak the language of this country.” He holds his hands up, seeking divine intervention to arbitrate a matter he assumes is settled, natural law.

“I don’t think there’s an official language in this country,” I say. The man’s brow wrinkles right up to his hairline, like wet

sand at low tide. This is the third time he enlisted my help. I’m Saint Peter after the cock crowed. Passengers nod and hum in agreement with me, although I stated nothing controversial. This should be the final verdict. However, as the train slowly screeches and trundles into another station to swallow up more commuters, the construction worker jumps back into the argument.

“Maybe you should get off at this stop, sir,” he growls, sternly. “I don’t think anybody likes your attitude.” Murmured comments of agreement rise in volume.

“So, this is how the country is going now?” The businessman asks through the din, bemused as events turn to something he compares to mob rule. Once again, he looks to me for validation. “These people think they can come here and do whatever they want.”

“You mean immigrants?” I respond.

“Yeah!” His eyes convey the sense that I agree with him at last. “They’re so entitled, right?” The question comes with no requirement for an answer.

“I’m an immigrant,” I state, matter-of-factly, emphasizing my Scottish accent. He doesn’t expect this. Looking me up and down, he snorts and calculates that it’s time to depart. An incongruous hush seeps into the air as the businessman reluctantly stands up, waving his long besuited arms at people as if shooing their unvoiced opinions away. He’s the martyr in his mind. He’s the vilified, misunderstood victim. People make space, glad to be rid of him. As he passes the construction worker - relieved to conclude the altercation - he mutters “adios,” a strange, ironic farewell. Shaking his head, smiling, the worker moves to the side.

In the middle of the fracas, the businessman’s exit creates a slender passage for the small child. Between stops, the boy froze in place underneath all the yelling, transfixed by the worker’s bright yellow hard hat. Neither parent nor child paid attention to the raging argument. As the businessman moves past the worker to get out, the child sees an opening and decides to scramble toward the doors. The mother frantically gets up.

Carrying a stroller and a bulky bag of groceries, she has trouble maneuvering from the seating area. She becomes more flustered as the train fills up, calling on her child but unable to give chase; her way out of the train obstructed by the young man with the headphones. His dedication to the playlist - eyes closed, Air Jordan’s tapping together - leaves the woman’s exhortations unheeded.

The subway doors start to close. An announcement for our destination comes over the loudspeaker: “the next station will be ninety-sixth street, where you can change for the two and three express trains; this is a south-bound one train, stand clear of the closing doors.” As the signal to move sounds and the doors wobble closed, and then open and close again, the kid stands on the edge of the platform looking into the train. His mother is still inside, with her stroller in one hand and shopping bag in the other. Her face full of anguish, she turns to the passengers behind and lets out a loud, piercing wail.

Most people didn’t see what happened. They’re happy about the prevailing harmony. The racist businessman, banished from the kingdom, while the salt-of-the-earth working man claims the seat over which the squabble began means justice reigns. A crisis, so soon after the first one, is unwelcome. From the south side of the carriage it sounds as if there’s an unbalanced person screaming at the top of her voice. Unpredictable behavior on the subway is not unusual and many are immune to the distress. Even people nearby seem uninterested. The scream turns to a yell. Once again, many passengers look at their phones. People at the doors are unsure why the kid is standing on the platform. They can’t make the connection between the boy and the woman yelling.

The train shudders in a vain attempt to move. The forward motion prompts the woman to appeal to individuals for help, realizing that random screaming is not producing results. Tears stream down her face. The train shudders and moves a bit more. The woman comes back to my area, causing me, the Bull’s fan, and the working man to stand up. We’re ready to help, although we don’t know what to do. The woman holds on to the shoulders of the Hispanic worker, crying in despair. He seems sympathetic and powerless. His lower lip extends and he looks down at the floor. The young guy, headphones around his neck, mutters that he’s sorry he didn’t know she’d been trying to get past him and the situation is his fault and he needs to be more aware of his surroundings and he’s the worst sort of human being - selfish and shallow - and he wishes he could do something to help. None of this placates the woman. She doesn’t calm down.

I must appear helpful because, as she turns to me, she stops yelling. She looks at me as if I know what to do. Unfortunately, I’m not sure. The train shudders to a point where we know it’ll soon gather momentum. Looking in my eyes for a sliver of hope, and finding nothing, the woman drops her stroller and her shopping and pushes her way out of the seating area to the back of the carriage. In spite of the tight squeeze of human flesh, packed in a manner considered cruel if suffered by other mammals, she makes it to the door that connects to the next carriage.

The train crawls along the platform. It’s possible for this woman to jump off from between carriages in an unconventional alightment. As I picture this event, I think of the child on the platform. What’s he thinking? What about the gap? I took the tube in London often enough to recall the constant reminders about the gap. The recorded voice of the woman telling passengers to “mind the gap” crept into my head, repeating its flinty mantra. The child’s whole body could fit through the gap!

I look up at the bright red emergency brake cord and wonder if this is an occasion for its use. According to the instructions, one should avoid pulling the cord in the case of a fire, a medical emergency, or a police matter. Should I risk arrest? Pulling it activates a braking system that overrides the driver’s brakes. Even a mass shooting, a carriage engulfed in flames, or someone experiencing a cardiac arrest, are not considered worthy incidents for emergency braking. That’s how seriously

the MTA takes this measure. Nobody’s stuck between the doors, dragged along the platform, their life in mortal peril. That’s the only occasion I can think of meriting the tug of the red handle. A mother separated from her child doesn’t count.

I steel myself and grab the red handle, pulling the brake cord and bringing the train to a complete stop. There’s a large hissing sound and a slump as we lose momentum.

“What happened?” yells someone from the other end of the carriage.

“Some asshole pulled the emergency cord!” The passengers, once more, begin to build a cacophony of low-humming vitriol against a White man on the train.

“You know, I have to get to work, man,” says the Hispanic guy, frowning at me. “This train is going to sit here for ages, thanks to you. I might get fired!”

“I’m sorry! I thought it was the best thing to do.”

“But the lady got off the train,” states the young guy, who also seems pissed off. Even he and his Air Jordan’s had somewhere to be.

“I know. I just thought about the kid standing on the platform. And the gap.” Both the Bulls fan and the construction worker look confused.

An MTA official walks through from the adjacent carriage. He identifies where the cord was pulled. I brace myself for the inevitable arrest.

“It looks like someone pulled the emergency brake from here,” the train guard says into a walkie talkie. I look up at the ceiling, desperate to avoid eye contact. “Yeah, they pulled it and jumped off the train.”

“That’s not what happened,” interjects the young guy, clearly eager to land me in trouble. “It was a kid. A kid left the train and…”

“I know,” interrupts the guard. “That’s what I’m saying! Some kid wanted to get off and pulled the brake like he’s pushing stop on a bus. It’s nuts! That’s not the way it works on subway trains. Selfish bastard!” Chicago Bulls can’t get his story out fast enough and the guard isn’t listening. MTA’s finest figured out the true story and it doesn’t involve me.

The train doors open, with an announcement of a twenty-minute delay while the brakes are reset. Feeling a sense of repulsion from my fellow passengers, I leave the train. As I walk to the escalator on my way out, I see the woman and her boy reunited. I want to go over but I see the tall White businessman beside them. He’s kneeling with his hand on the child’s head and, as I walk towards them, he stands up. I steer myself in the other direction wondering, as I escape into the affluent air of the upper west side, what he’s doing there with them.

Pass the Bread Basket: This Is How She Stays Full

Haley Sherif

“Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

The chair next to me scrapes against the floor in not an unpleasant way, more just in the way that cues me to stand up and stretch my legs. Another meeting has come and gone and I feel better about humanity as a whole, but still not sure if I buy into this. This being a 12-step meeting in a very well known part of New York–you can hear the hustle and bustle of the city that never sleeps right outside the door, it’s humid and dank in this, well, I wouldn’t call it a basement, but it gives off the same vibes–the floor slopes like even the building isn’t sure of where it stands. Someone congratulates me. I nod, mumble, “thank you,” and try to look for my sponsor. This is an AA meeting and truth be told, I’m not sure if I’m a drunk or just a girl in her young twenties infatuated and disappointed in turn by a life that feels very much out of her control. I do know I’m hungry, though.

New York City is renowned for its restaurants and the ability to get food no matter what time of day. Hungering for a very specific soup dumpling? Easy! Need to itch that BBQ scratch? Done! Craving freshly made bread? Definitely don’t check UberEats, but my mother’s counter instead.

Bread. It’s been a fixation of mine since I was a little girl–an undoing, a way to feel full, a way to soak up the olive oil leftover from dinner on a plate or a way to start the meal. Bread baskets are severely underrated. My favorite part of lunch with my mother was the bread basket–the variety of breads that were warm to the touch, delicious with butter, ultimately sanctimonious to all of the other breads. Skip the seeds, you wanted the

warm pretzel roll or the focaccia, better yet the hot gooey sourdough that melted on my tongue – the same tongue that would find the insides of so many women – their lips, bodies, tattoos dancing across mine.

My brother, like 99% of the world during COVID, learned to make bread. I have to tell you, when you’ve eaten fresh bread, you can’t go back. It’s a religious experience, one that leaves you hungering for your next fix.

I haven’t always had Our Father memorized, but spend enough time in “the rooms” and you’ll be able to produce at least a handful of semi-cheesy yet reassuring slogans as well as the two prayers most meetings begin and end with. I didn’t grow-up religious, but found prayer the first time I found myself on my knees on a cold bathroom floor surrounded by nothing but fresh tears and the echo of my mother’s words, “you’ll always be hungry.”

Growing-up, I was fat first. I mean, I wasn’t overweight, but I managed to carry my weight in the specific way that makes a hormonal teenager (what an oxymoron) feel fat. I got boobs before any of the other plaid-skirted girls in my class, I grew taller (thanks dad), then most of the boys I knew other than my brothers who also seemed to favor the giant genes. All of the boys who liked all of the girls were named some version of Max or Matt or Dylan or Colin as if the names of boys ran out at the M’s and there wasn’t room for any of the other letters. In college, I’d meet an Xander and think, “finally made it to the end of the alphabet” before redirecting my attention to our old, very white professor, contemplating another very drunk, very white, very dead writer.

I never felt full as a kid. I can’t actually remember a time where I wasn’t plotting my next meal as I ate, with the energy of a mother bird shoving food down the throat of its young. Girls are supposed to be soft, thin, lithe, demure (a word now associated most closely with…everything).

The closest I ever got to feeling full was in the middle of

sex with a partner–that feeling when there’s no space between two bodies, you’re so fully melded it doesn’t seem to make any sense that you once existed apart–that and when I’ve eaten a veggie Subway sandwich specifically the summer of when I was 9.

I dutifully would walk a few blocks over to the VHS store (a fossil of my childhood–Blockbusters and stores like them with rickety shelves filled with VHS tapes and DVD’s–their cases depicting who I wanted to be when I “was of age” whatever that meant–a phrase my mother threw my way when I tried to select a R rated movie). My taste in films has never been high-brow except for the brief period of high school when I took a film class and successfully watched a few of the classics (Run Lola Run, North by North West, and 12 Angry Men). I preferred classics such as Mama Mia and anything where a girl would inevitably cry, fall in love, and get married all within the span of 90 minutes (turns out that timeline isn’t so far fetched when you’re a lesbian).

Subway existed between the Mexican bar and a grocery store usually hidden by vast amounts of seemingly never ending scaffolding–I’m not sure what they were working on for our time in that apartment building, but I do know the scaffolding sticks out as a permanent fixture in my memory–there at least until we moved out when my parents got a divorce and I headed into the 6th grade. As a 9 year old, I still had a naivety about me, the world seemed fair enough, and I could successfully flesh out all of my feelings by taking at least an hour to finish a footlong. My order was as follows:

Veggie Delight - add the olives and jalapenos, add olive oil and vinegar, and top off with salt and pepper, the only proper additions were a bag of SunChips & on occasion a warm cookie (ask them to warm it up).

I’d prop my youthful body horizontally on the floor (a position I’d love to attain once more, but unfortunately presents head rushes at the age of 31), open the paper wrapper to my sandwich (eating any straggling veggies first), and insert my DVD into the tiny player which was the antidote to most of my bedtime (yes, I had every season of Seinfeld on DVD and dutifully watched it as an adolescent in the same way I watch it as an adult who can now say she’s “in her 30’s”).

This is an anecdote which I will occasionally brandish as proof that there was at least one positive memory I have as a child (there are probably 5 and this is one of them). When I look up what it actually means when we ask for our “daily bread” the internet tells me that this is us trusting God to meet all of our needs and provide all of His/Her/Its comfort. I’m not sure if I can definitively say that God, an AA meeting, or even my family ever met all of my needs or provided all of their comfort. I’ve learned all too well to isolate myself, to only ask for help once I’ve worked through the problem and have a solution, and to count less on other humans, but I do know that it’s a kind of comfort to find the love you have always lacked in yourself–maybe that started when I was too young to know what I was doing (a version of self-care or even prayer as a I found joy in routine), maybe that started when I sat in a plastic chair in

a church basement and listened to stories that felt relatable, felt deeply nourishing in the way “me too” or “I’ve been there” can be, maybe that started when instead of feeling scared, I felt brave, or maybe that starts each time I sit down, surrounded by a group of friends, a chosen family of my own making, and pass the bread basket.

Farmer’s Market

Liza Libes

And how can I forestall the lapse of pleated skirts & princess dresses,

lacquered shoes because my feet will have grown fat just like a bully in the second grade with one too many sandwiches…

I never liked to haul a watermelon from the market— instead I’d gather raspberries and currants— fruits that did not garner pitiful mementos; the currants might have wept amongst the cherries and the blackberries but thus they fostered

Peace and now I’d rather not contain a melon— I do not need an older woman to rescind her claim upon the stage so I can nurse my countenance at thirty as the subway rattles on

I do not wish to be abused by all the seventh graders bearing grimaces and knives impaled like a swine

And like a ragdoll sewn back up again

Might I be too selfish, fatalistic? Dare I reenact the Edens of my youth arrested in the summers of these vespers and soprano voices coated in vermouth?

But might I hope to see her in the garden fostering a pair of puppies?

Might she be less clumsy, less afraid?

And if I should be rendered sleepless might I hope to hear this music in her dissonant crusade?

Shall I hope to see her off in a white dress? Sometime in the evening she’ll adopt a chair before a fireplace in the house that we picked out together and with my walker I shall hobble over reminiscing on the blackberries and currants

And she might press her hand to mine, whisper,

“Mom, you’ll be with me forever.”

And might it be now time?

Crippled Monday

Liza Libes

Charcuterie and scattered grapes

Like eighth notes on an old Beethoven orchestration

Violins that mingle in a perilous duet

And Grecian urns that overshadow psychedelic flowers—

I’ve gotten into quite a headache

Since I sprayed on too much fragrance just for you

In light of your Parnassian smile

Over a sunset

Lost in draughts of purple wine

And sunshine incantations

I have summoned only half-baked fantasy

Eroding bastions of monogamy and words

That muddle up society

I played you a fantasia

Written in the vein of flower petals

Melting underneath the eulogy of summer

Spells that mesmerize the rickety gazebo

At the outskirts of our garden

Overrun with frost

Since the raindrops waltzed with whiffs of old Turkish perfumes

I cannot forget what it was like by you

Over a glass of chartreuse wishes

And a serving of ceviche

Picking at our empanadas

Reproducing friendly conversation

You didn’t have to make me comfortable

I’m reaching for the whiskey in your new apartment

Carefully avoidant of the yellow settee

Hovering above a wooden table

Leafing through your old copy of Dune

My shoes are littered in the hallway

And I would have lingered through the night

If I knew you’d call me back again

To Name a Fish

Brandon Yu

You don’t name a fish.

Not so with other pets. Dogs go by Rex, Fido, or Max. Cats go by Luna, Leo, or Lily. But what do fish go by?

This question never became more apparent when I bought fish of my own. When I moved into my apartment for the first time, I decided I needed to take care of something. Fish were easy, but my decision to buy them wasn’t.

My track record with aquatic creatures has been terrible. I am to fish what many people are to their houseplants: an inadvertent doomslayer. No matter what I do, they simply die around me.

I had good reason to feel this way. My first fish was a navy-blue betta. I found him in the back of the petstore, hunkered in the aquatic equivalent of a solitary confinement cell. Like all betta fish, he was in there for assault and battery.

I was a child, and I took pity on him. I posted his bail using my own birthday money, saving him from a potential court date. I brought him home in a plastic fishbowl, an innocent smile on my face. I was determined to do right by him. I cleaned his bowl. I fed him twice a day. In spite of everything I did, he died next year, which sounds almost okay until you realize I bought him on December 30th.

Knowing you’re responsible for the death of a living being—no matter how small—is a pretty shitty feeling, to say the least. Ever since then, I always felt a flash of guilt whenever I passed the aquatics section of any pet store I visited. I’d speed up my pace, as if I was passing a nextdoor neighbor whom I was on bad terms with.

Fish can be deceptively difficult pets to maintain. Gone are the days of tossing your country-fair goldfish into a glass bowl and calling it a day. Now, it seems like every home aquar-

ium in America has to be equipped with a mechanized filtration system, submersible heater, nutrient-rich substrate, and underwater plants imported straight from the Gulf of Mexico via private jet for the fish to be even remotely alive, let alone comfortable.

A younger, less-informed version of me might have snubbed my nose at the onslaught of expensive gadgetry involved in beginner fishkeeping, but the older, guiltier me feels like I need to repay a blood debt. I’m not taking any chances. So when I step in front of the aquatic display (justifiably hesitant) at the pet supermarket, I enlist the help of a staff member.

A man wearing spectacles, a salt-and-pepper goatee, and a blue vest arrives. I glance at his nametag. Rick gives me the low-down: my fish won’t last a day if I dump them into my new aquarium as soon as I get home. I have to cycle my tank first, which means letting my water run for a few days before putting my fish inside. This, Rick says, is to foster healthy bacteria in the water so my fish don’t get sick or die from temperature shock.

I nod slowly. I’m disappointed I won’t get to take my fish home today, but I’m determined to stick it out no matter the cost.

But like most hobbies, fishkeeping grows very expensive very quickly.

One moment I have a small but servicable five-gallon tank between my palms. Next thing I know, I’m toting a ten-gallon tank out the door, packed with live aquatic plants, a bag of special algae-forming gravel substrate, algae root tablets, algae wafers, a jar of tropical fish flakes, frozen bloodworms, aquarium water conditioner, plastic fern decorations, a plastic tree trunk, a ceramic miniature of Spongebob’s pineapple abode, and, of course, my TripleMax III submersible water filter.

My stomach begins to sink on the way home. Since my parents raised me to be frugal (God bless them) spending a large sum of money is a stressful, draining event for me.

As a result, my initial enthusiasm rapidly transforms into

wild, overwhelming regret. I suddenly remember I’m a borderline-broke college student. Midterms are next week. I don’t have a girlfriend. I can barely take care of myself, yet spending more than a hundred dollars on fishkeeping supplies is somehow a good idea. What gives?

But when I arrive home, newfound hope surges within me. I fill the tank with bathtub water and haul it into the living room, spraining my back in at least ten different places. Old me will hate me for this, but I’m too excited to care. I have a new project. I place the tank on a low shelf and set up the filter.

In fishkeeping, the rule of thumb is one inch of fish per gallon. On Friday, I come home with seven inches of fish. I have three mollies—a black couple and one dalmatian—that are as jumpy as bedbugs, and two catfish. Since each one is two inches long, each catfish is equal to two fish. I’m sure the IRS has something to say about that, but until my catfish start filing their own tax return forms, they have nothing to worry about.

The mollies are your regular, run-of-the-mill fish. They swim around and nibble at things experimentally, as fish do. They hang around in a group, although I’m sure my dalmatian is already feeling the awkward sting of being a third wheel. To swim, or not to swim—that is the question. In spite of everything, however, he tags along. At times, he seems almost happy.

There is something unimaginably restful about watching fish swim. I can spend entire meals sitting in front of my fish tank the way a kid watches cartoons, silent and enraptured.

Granted, some of my fish aren’t as active, of which my plecos are the chief culprit. The plecostomus—better known as the suckermouth catfish—is the aquatic equivalent of a sulky teenager with too much time on its hands. They spend all day sprawled on their stomachs, suckling at bits of algae-covered gravel on the floor, because staying afloat is clearly too much effort for them.

They’re bottom feeders, which means they eat just about anything. This includes bits of raw meat, fruit, or vegetables. For dinner, I’ll impale a cucumber slice, a chunk of boiled carrot, and a couple of crushed peas on a designated fork—the one I give to guests I don’t like—and drop it into the tank. It’s a veggie kebab. I spoil my catfish, but only because I love them.

Every now and then, one of my plecos will paste itself against the glass wall of the aquarium, displaying its pale white belly and a large, puckering mouth. Evidently, it’s trying to be an Instagram model. More likely, though, it’s discovered a near-invisible sheen of algae scum to inhale for lunch. It’s adorable, but alarming as well.

As with all living creatures, fish shit as much as they eat. In less than a week, my fish tank looks like a Reuters photograph of an industrialized third-world city. The smog is thick and rust-orange, and my aquarium takes on a clouded, bleary look. Worst of all, it’s made of vaporized shit-squibs, which my filter can’t handle. The fish don’t seem to mind, but I do.

I take a deep breath and roll up my sleeves. Things are going to get ugly.

After ransacking my kitchen for supplies, I’m ready. I

corral my mollies into an old coffee mug and drop them in a Tupperware container. They’re fairly easy to corner, but my plecos are a different story: they squirm and wriggle like Indian belly dancers. When I reach for them, they dart to the other side of the tank, and the fact that they stick to floor as they move makes things exponentially harder.

I’m growing frustrated. Not only because I can’t remove them, but because it makes me feel like a monster whenever I see them twist and thrash in terror as I reach for them. They don’t know me. To them, they are literally fighting for their lives. Somehow, I manage to cup one in my palm and lift him out the water, an experience just as terrifying for me as it must be for my fish.

“I won’t hurt you, please don’t die, ohmygod,” I whisper to myself. The catfish feels slippery in my palm, and it makes me want to puke.

I dump him into the Tupperware container. When my other pleco is safely inside, I let out a massive sigh of relief. I empty the aquarium into the bathtub and rinse out the gravel. I fill it again and let the water sit for a while. My fish are all too happy to return to their tank, but the homecoming is brief and short-lived. My mollies are unusually sedate. Every now and then, they’ll dart around the tank in erratic zig-zags that make my heart tighten with anxiety.

I shouldn’t have replaced all that water. I just didn’t want my fish to wallow in their own shit. Compared to that, anything would have been better. Anything, except maybe the mass murder of all my aquatic life via a sudden drop in water quality, something which fishkeepers call New Tank Syndrome.

I’m terrified my fish will die, which just goes to show the road to Hell really is paved with good intentions.

Perhaps—in a perfect world—good intentions prevail. But I’m not in one. I steel myself for the inevitable. I don’t know if I can handle it. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to buy new fish again, but it’s awfully depressing to have a fully-filtered tank lying around with nothing inside. Until I figure out how to do this right, I think, I should just hold back on my fishkeeping aspirations for the next decade or so.

It’s an imperfect world. Even in imperfect worlds, however, miracles sometimes happen.

Gradually, my mollies begin to settle down. They roam around the tank, cautiously circling the plastic ferns as if for the very first time. I don’t know if I should be relieved or worried, but I’ll take anything as a good sign as long as they aren’t upside down.

I keep checking on my plecos. Because they lie on the floor all the time, it’s very hard to tell if they’re dead or just being themselves. I tap on the glass. One of them wriggles away from me in mild annoyance, as if I’m disturbing it from an afternoon nap.

I lay back on the carpet and close my eyes. My fish are okay.

It’s been a couple weeks. My plecos have taken up residence inside Spongebob’s pineapple. They only come out at

night, so I don’t see them often. Nevertheless, I’ve named them after the famous comedic duo of the twentieth century, Abbott and Costello. I don’t think there can be a better, more appropriate pair of names for them in the world.

As for my mollies, they’ve formed a tight-knit friend group and are inseperable from each other. They aren’t too bright, but I guess that’s why fish travel in schools. I’ve named them Moe, Larry, and Curly, after the Three Stooges.

I don’t plan on buying more fish. For now, I’m content just to watch them swim in their tank, nibbling at bits of moss and making bubbles with their mouths.

After all this time, it’s nice to have some fish of my own.

Reaching Out Jenna Martinez

Around the time of my 2nd psych ward visit, I would repeat the same few words to myself over and over.

Worthless. Unlovable. Burden.

But sitting in that hospital common room, you grabbed my hand. You looked at me like I was something more than the useless piece of shit I knew myself to be.

You spoke to me like you cared about me.

In the darkest parts of both of our lives, because you were there for the same reason as I, you reached out to me. You offered me hope.

You held my hand and assured me that we would make it through this. Together.

You gave me your number and they took it away. I never talked to you or saw you again. I don’t even remember your last name.

When I was admitted for the 3rd time, somebody there mentioned you. Knew you. They said you were sent somewhere else, that the Pavilion couldn’t do anymore to help you.

I hope you made it through. I hope you are still alive. I hope someone held your hand.

Choosing Love

Hailey Summer

Slammed doors, raised voices, tears hitting the floor, she’s faced with choices.

She sleeps alone for the first time in a long time with a heavy heart.

Her own painful words echo in her head and guilt consumes her. What started the fight? How did it get so bad?

She was unsure. She gathered her blankets, and her courage, then left her pride lying in bed.

Her heart began to race, worried that he may reject her approach, but she found him to be completely asleep curled under a small blanket.

She slinked into the bed with him silently, She felt him sigh, his body sagging with relief He held her so tightly, she almost couldn’t breathe, and it was a comforting feeling.

With her pride left far behind, and her lover wrapped around her, Tender apologies were whispered, and then she fully relaxed, knowing that she had made the right decision.

The Uninvited (novel excerpt from EXECUTIVES OF THE WORLD)

Dave Barrett

Ben Ailing was trying to remember the name of that late night movie he was watching years ago in South San Francisco when a crazed high school kid drove his Camaro into the side of the Ailing’s house on Arbor Drive: hitting the power box so, at first, they all thought this was finally it: the next big San Francisco earthquake.

It was three in the a.m. and Ben was sitting alone on a barstool in his empty Cactus Room bar at the Sombrero in downtown Republic, smoking his last Marlboro cigarette, drinking his first cup of coffee (with a little Baileys Irish Cream in it). Ben, Jr. had called in sick and Ben was doing account books again.

Thank God he’d been taking those fish oil pills for his dementia!

The bar and restaurant was decorated with lots of red, white and blue for the 4th of July celebration that weekend. In this business, it seemed there was always some big new celebration at hand: Valentine’s Day, St. Pat’s, Cinco de Mayo and now the 4th. It was nice getting all the free swag for the festivities from the beer and liquor outfits though—napkins, coasters and posters. Cut down on overhead costs.

It was a Wednesday night and the tile counter was littered with more than a dozen fifths of alcohol, indicating liquor sales were up again. A good thing! The banquet room—where the kids staged their Hole In the Wall shows—was still a mess. But Billy, the dishwasher, would get to it in the morning.

Blessedly, Will, Jerry and their new friend, Ted Yorker, had finally stopped their whooping, laughing and hollering in the

Boom Boom Room directly over Ben’s head. The Yorker fellow was a bit of an odd duck, Ben thought. A big gangly kid who looked a lot like Ben’s younger brother, Malachy (or the Disney character Goofy)! A nice enough kid though, very personable and all that. But Yorker had a pair of lungs on him that rattled Ben’s nerves. And it was on this last thought, as Ben sat there taking in the quiet of his dimly lit bar—the whirr of the ice machine downstairs and the occasional sound of falling chunks of ice—that the name of the film occur to him:

The Uninvited: an old 1940’s black and white horror flick starring Ray Milland.

If Ben remembered correctly (an open question these days!), in the film a pair of very prickly ghosts had ensconced themselves in the attic of an old mansion a rich American had bought in the English countryside (and later wormed their way into every nook and cranny of the house), tormenting the new inhabitants to no end.

Those ghosts in The Uninvited were like his own wild boys and his boy’s wild friends: their recent antics at the Sombrero not unlike those prickly—and dangerous—ghosts in that old English mansion. At times, Ben wanted to grab a broom and pound on the ceiling overhead: wanted to tell Will and Jerry to vacate their upstairs hideaway—tell them to grow up and get a rental like everyone else in this mean old world! But Ben was a softie at heart with his boys. He just was. Maybe out of quilt of not being the best father or role model to them when they were growing up. Or maybe because he experienced a kind of second-hand thrill watching them enjoy their youth. Or, maybe (and this was most likely it) because the restaurant had been making money hand over fist of late because of the popularity of these Hole In the Wall shows. And, honestly, now that they were finally getting out of the black, the last thing Ben wanted to do was upset the apple-cart just when things were on the up-and-up at El Sombrero.

Get it while the getting’s good! had always been a principle

Along these lines, he was also thinking that life was mostly a little of this and a little of that: or, as Will might say, a mix of Yin and Yang!

And the story of what had happened the night Ben was watching The Uninvited and that high school kid crashed his Camaro into the side of the Ailing’s South City home was a case in point.

Three weeks prior to the incident, Ben remembered returning home after a long day of showing homes in the City. It was late summer and after dark. When Ben pulled up into the driveway of his house at 349 Arbor Drive he was startled to see pinpoints of light emanating off the garage door from inside the garage. (Later, he’d tell friends and family it was like a “constellation of stars sprinkled across my goddamn garage!”)

What had happened was his boys had been harpooning the wooden door from inside the garage with a boxing speed bag that had formerly been attached by a steel rod to a standing platform. Ben had bought the speed bag as part of his training tools to get the boys in fighting shape. Will had knocked the boxing bag off its stand with an uppercut punch. Little Jerry, the wildest of his three young boys, had picked up the speed bag. Then, using the pointed end of the metal rod the speed bag was still attached to, his youngest had chucked it directly into the garage door. It stuck through the wood like a giant dart. Will and Ben, Jr. had been so impressed by the success of their little brother’s feat, that they had followed suit—taking turns harpooning the door from inside the garage a good dozen times until Papa Ben pulled up in the driveway. Then, like racoons in front of a flashlight, the little shits had scattered out of the garage, raced back inside the house and jumped into their beds, feigning sleep. Ben had pulled all three of them out of their hidey-holes, spanked them thoroughly with a belt and sent them to bed, warning the brawling now bawling brats never do such a thing again.

Myra had been next door visiting with a neighbor down the block, the old widow Mrs. Kelly, and she had had the same thought Ben had when she saw the pinpoints of light emanating from their garage door. Years later, Myra had even made light of it by claiming she could make out the pattern of the Big Dipper on their door.

The Yang of this story is when the driver crashed his car into the side of the house, he also took out the Ailing’s already damaged garage door. When Ben felt the jolt of car crash into his home, his initial thought was it was the big one: the earthquake he’d been waiting for since moving to California. But when he opened his front door, he discovered two high school kids wrestling in the dark on the small front lawn in front of the house, fighting over a girl. One high school kid had been making advances towards the other’s girlfriend. When this kid fled the party on his motorcycle, the other kid had chased after him with the Camaro. When the driver of the Camaro attempted to run over the driver of the motorcycle as they came down Arbor Drive hill, he lost control of his vehicle and plunged it into the

side of the Ailing’s garage instead. Ben and others on the scene had to had hold the two youths apart until the police arrived and took the delinquents off to their respective cells at city jail.

Next day Ben filed a claim with his homeowner’s insurance. They got a brand new state of the art garage door out of the deal, and a three-day all-expense paid vacation in Napa wine country at a motel with pool and a meal stipend while the new door and power box was installed at their home.

This was Ben’s gamble with all these new forces at play at the Sombrero: In spite of the increasing rowdiness associated with his boys’ Hole In the Wall shows, in spite of these strange Russian friends of his middle boy, Ben, Jr., and in spite of Milton Ackley pressuring him to sell his property, Ben’s hope was the Sombrero would weather the storm.

No risk, no reward!

Ben’s instincts, his natural inclination had always been to play these situations to advantage, or, at the very least, bunker down in hope of a brighter day. Like the aforementioned story of his twice-damaged garage door, Ben was a believer that most things in life came out in the wash. Then again, he was beginning to wonder if maybe things weren’t getting a bit out of hand at the Sombrero. He could feel a bug of doubt working in his mind.

Taking a last slow draw from his Marlboro (and hoping there was another pack of Marlboro’s in the Sombrero’s cigarette vending machine), Ben wondered if maybe it wasn’t time to question his hard-headed instincts. Maybe there were just too many balls moving through the infield right now. Maybe, for once in his life, it was time to cave. Sell the whole damn kit and kaboodle after all: and he and Myra sail off into the sunset!

Perhaps old John Fitzsimmons—the prior owner of this building—was right: The days of real small businessmen like them were numbered. How could they ever stand up against the big insurance companies, the big corporations, the fucking Russian mob?

Perhaps the luck that had served him so well in life was running out on him this time around.

Scheherazade John Beck

It was her path to survival. She saw the power of stories, how each may shine in its time, incomplete, bridging the dangerous divide between night and day. Scheherazade saved her own life by teasing out her stories, starting a new tale when one ended, making sure the cliffhanger ensured her fate, seeing another morning.

Once caught, her king lived from dawn to dawn, entranced, eager for each new Arabian night.

He grew to love her, lived for her stories, each new one ending with no end, only the promise of resolution on the morrow. He spared her life as she gave him life, new possibilities of wonder, cunning and intrigue, magic and impossible tasks. He decreed that both of them

must live on together to see the dawning of the new day.

In time, she ensured him a long life, replete with tales that spanned sleep’s shade. We too have learned this lesson. We tease out our lives, turning off the light before book’s end. To leave the tale’s end for the next day is to seek immortality.

I’ll leave this chapter undone, marked and closed, the last page unturned. If I chance to die in this night, please leave me in the dark, never tell me how it ends.

Ode to the Wagon Wheel’s

Mustang Flea Market

Rae Zalopany

I peeled the lychee’s pink bark back when another gust of wind hit. The flea markets kicked up dirt path were beneath my fingernails, in my hair, my mouth. If I shut my eyes now, I can still taste it. The watery hotdogs, the bejeweled cladded women who clap at the gulls, the blind acoustic guitar player who sat on a milkcrate by the used books booth. My father would take me here, to the Mustang Flea Market, every couple of weeks as a father-daughter date.

It was our thing.

The lychee tasted sweet, and I liked to imagine it was an eyeball with each bite. We bought a whole branch, which swung at my side in a plastic bag as my father looked over piles of rusted tools laid out on a tarp. I sucked the smooth bullet shaped pit in my mouth, held it between my teeth, pointed it at my dad. I’d always aimed to make him laugh or for him to feel impressed by me. I wanted to be distinguished or different than my sisters, especially during our times alone. As the youngest, most boyish, I found that I could be a sort of surrogate son to my dad. We’d hit golf balls, throw spirals, sit and head thrash to Van Halen in the driveway. I hated and loved these activities.

I would’ve been anything he wanted me to be if he’d asked. * * *

My dad knocks on my apartment door after only giving me a ten-minute heads-up phone call, “Can I come over? I have something for Har-bear.”

I spent that ten-minutes putting pants on, feverishly cleaning the house, lighting candles. Every time he comes over, I want him gone and I want him to stay. There is a nagging, anx-

ious feeling I get in his presence. Like he’s going to ground me at thirty years old.

I run and open the door to my dad shaking a plastic bag of silly t-shirts. He likes to do this often, come over for fifteen minutes, maximum, to bring my son little trinkets that are thoughtful in his own way, but never quite what my son wants. He brings t-shirts of cartoon characters my son doesn’t watch, golf clubs rather than a chess board or video game merch, rare coins my son puts in a wooden box in a drawer. He does this for me too, always saving blood donation shirts crumpled by the front door for me to take home because one time in high school I liked a blood drive design. We never wear these shirts, but we never get rid of them. These almost-somethings that we receive from him.

My son saunters out from his room and looks over the shirts, politely saying thank you.

I give my dad a hug and a kiss. Thank him, several times, for the ugly t-shirts.

The market spanned over two to three miles. The outside section sold fruits, vegetables, fish, and garage sale style goods. The inside section was a mix of antiques and white people selling dream catchers and switchblades, carnival foods and parakeets. My dad and I ambled over each stall, shaking our heads when we wanted to move on to the next. I learned how to haggle here, seven or so with a crumpled five-dollar bill in my hand. My sixseven-foot dad behind me with a cigar gritted in-between his teeth. In our normal everyday lives, if I asked for something it was almost always a no. But here, at the Mustang Flea Market, it was like stepping into a parallel world. A world where I got what I wanted: percaline fairy figurines and time with my dad.

There was a booth inside that sold Yu Gi Oh cards, comic books, and—my favorite—Sailor Moon figurines. I had three: Sailor Mars, Sailor Venus, and Sailor Mercury. They were bootleg toys with lopsided faces and discolored pleated skirts. I’d

carefully place each sailor scout on the shelf above my blue ribbons in my room. My father liked to meander elsewhere while I was here, either perusing the sunglasses stall or talk with the rug vendor, who was also the mean substitute teacher at the middle school.

I’d never seen Chibiusa at my booth before, let alone as my favorite version of her—

Black Lady. Red-eyed and mean, her pink pigtails streamed behind her.

I pointed at her and turned toward the vendor, “How much is she?”

Sometimes my dad would take me to a restaurant called Conch Republic. We’d order mussels diablo and soak our bread in the broth that the mussels steamed in. I’d get full of virgin daquiris before the entrées arrived and we’d eat in almost complete silence after the standard questions of how was school, how are your grades, and sometimes he’d ask about my horseback riding. After dinner he’d take me across the street to the beach. The moon always almost out and the sun just below the horizon, and we’d walk to an apartment building he’d once lived at in his early twenties and tell me ghost stories. He’d talk about the fish tank that would start to boil, and the bones they’d dug up in the backyard, and of the phantom hand that grabbed him while he slept.

I lapped up the light on the wall from him opening the door to his heart, just a little bit.

Then one day everything stopped. The dinners, the stories, the flea market. I became an unruly teenager who couldn’t follow rules and my dad became a tyrannical colder entity. I no longer begged for his attention and in doing so realized that the effort had been viewed as my responsibility the entire time.

The Dark Queen: Birth of Black Lady was my favorite episode of Sailor Moon. Chibiusa was five when she first appeared in the Black Moon arc—not much older than myself at the time I started watching. In the episode, she turns into an evil, adult version of herself, and steals away Sailor Moon’s love interest, Tuxedo Mask, who also happened to be Chibiusa’s future father. A bit confusing, I know, try watching it as a child.

My father would make fun of the show whenever I watched. There’s a sort of bodily catch phrase Sailor Moon does when she transitions into her magical form where she’ll pose with her index and middle finger on her forehead. My father would mimic this constantly but flip his fingers, inversely. He’d do this with other interests like he’d call my beloved stuffed horse a squirrel. Pokémon was Pokemans, my friend’s names were just girl with ponytail or maybe he’d remember one of their names and they’d all be Tonya. What he would remember were the lessons he paid for, the hobbies that held value to him. As I got older, the teasing stopped, because he didn’t know enough of my interests to mimic them.

My father is a firm believer that parents are not supposed to be friends with their children, even when those children

become adults. He doesn’t talk about his feelings, he doesn’t often share his childhood, or let us in on his day-to-day problems, which is why, I suppose, we maintain the same energy we forged twenty or so years ago.

It isn’t unfair to say that my father fell prey to the cyclical nature of emotional withholding—given to him by his father and his father’s father, and his father’s, father’s, father. He didn’t have a great childhood from the tidbits that I’d gathered. Raised by a single mother in a fend-for-yourself household, where he was only given the base line of necessities and the occasional visit from his father who’d introduce his six kids as his nieces and nephews sometimes. I don’t think it’s fair to not condemn him for not taking the time to break gendered, misogynistic practices. He had the resources to go to therapy, to look inward—he just didn’t want to. He gave my sisters and I the love and attention he was capable of. Inconsistent in its warmth and constantly subjected to his ever-changing moods we all built up walls. Became too in tune with other people’s feelings.

My sister, Madison, who’s gone no contact with my father, once read his star chart to me. A true Aries in fire and fervor, his planets and stars aligned in a way that told us how much he wanted to be loved. Needed it. A man so strong and confident was made of glass.

As a kid, I didn’t want to steal away my father like Black Lady. In fact, Chibiusa didn’t want too either. Her adult form was a manifestation of her loneliness. The envy she felt stemmed from the lack of attention she received from her father. Her stealing Tuxedo Mask away was a five-year-old action in an adult woman’s body puppeteered by an evil alien super team. She wanted to be seen.

I ask my son every couple of months these questions: what’s your favorite color, television show, movie, dinner, friend, magical creature. I want him to know I want to know him. When I became a mother my relationship with my father shifted. He was more present, more active in the goings on in my life. He had a new checklist of questions all pertaining in some way to my son. I’m glad my father loves my son, wants to be a part of his life but sometimes I wonder how long that interest will last. When I became a teenager, became less accommodating and more independent, me and my father became strangers. Will that effort be one sided again?

My father FaceTime’s me while my son is having a sleepover at his house. My dad holds his phone up, points it to Harry, who’s doing something between a dive and a belly flop into the pool. I flinch at the lack of athleticism, getting ready for the punchline or quip my dad would inevitably make but it never comes. He’s completely and unequivocally enamored, “What a cool kid.”

I feel grateful that I never had a brother. I feel grateful that my father showers my son with love and attention. I’ve never seen my dad happier or more attentive then when my son is around.

A memory I will share: My father and I were eating dinner when out of nowhere he tells me that he used to have a radish garden as a child.

He went back to his plate of food and said nothing more of it.

I like to imagine my father little, maybe six or seven, in the back of his suburban Michigan home. His face is mine—same big head, wide nose, smirk. He’s visiting that radish garden after school. Perhaps, it’s his one solace of silence away from his five brothers and sisters. His mother is off working or on a date or maybe she’s singing on a windchime lined porch. Perhaps he can hear her. His fingers dig in the dirt for the root vegetable. He thinks of nothing or of the drawings he’ll do later or maybe of space or Elvis or Susie down the street.

Nothing bad, nothing that can hurt him.

I like to imagine him happy here.

The Wagon Wheel’s Mustang Flea Market shut down for good during covid. I drive by it on my way to my parent’s house every time they ask for my son to sleep over. An overgrown empty lot now that will inevitably become a slumlord mega complex.

I still remember how happy I felt as I held Black Lady in my hands. We walked together back out towards the car lot. The day was hot, I still don’t know how the vegetable vendors managed in the summer heat.

Before leaving, I talked my father into buying me a hot dog and we ate by the bayou that always smelled like dead crawdaddy’s. On his lap, I thumbed his gold chained neckless that was once his father’s. It will one day become mine and then my son’s. On one side is the head of a man that I once thought was my grandpa and on the other side is a Pegasus.

We sat in silence at the wood rotted table having already exhausted conversation hours earlier. I ate slow, stealing each moment with him. Our next father-daughter date wouldn’t be for another week or month or sooner, maybe, if his golf game got cancelled or if my mother was out of town.

His watery eyes drifted elsewhere. Mine do that too, sometimes wandering inside myself to be alone at the playground or on the couch with my son, I too can grow silent. I know he loves me, but it is hard to always climb and climb and climb.

My father’s favorite color isn’t a color but rather a shade of grey. His favorite movie is The Godfather and The Sound of Music. His favorite starch is rice, and his happy place is with my mom or watching Dr. Phil in his backyard.

When I finished eating, we stood up to head to the car. Gathered the piles of plastic bags we’d accumulated throughout the day. It’s big red letters that said, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Sleep Deprivation For Beginners

Christian Ward

Start slow: Feed dog food  to the fridge. Stroke the houseplants.

Offer unwanted advice to the bicycle. Hoover the bills. Make coffee

in the shower. Make a piñata  of the inbox and smash it open when hallucinating of minor paradises. Unpeel the moon. Dust colleagues  like statues. Make geese of hedges and train them to fly in the rain.

Every neighbour is a fox reciting  Shakespeare. The sky is just another  screensaver. Don’t worry about winning since you got the medal long before  you even started.

Snail Season

Christian Ward

After a downpour, impromptu  parapets of snails on the garden fence. Others clinging to the wood.

The slow moving measuring  tapes are more than a free lesson  in mindfulness. The empty flower

beds lack dens: No paper  vortices of roses to escape into.  No quiet libraries of apple cores.

No camera lenses of holly berries  to shrink inside. Look how  they accept the universes in their shells, while we climb ladders to take down the stars we put up.

Before I Turned to Stone

Logan Anthony

this is a fairy tale, maybe a tall tale. that is, if you’d prefer to think of it that way. you’ll each do what you want, right? it’s not like i care—either way. perspective won’t change anything. not when this story comes from memory

The seven narrow windows ran closely together in a meticulous pattern along one wall of the bedroom. Each deep walnut frame bore a sill skirted with lace. From an angled view, they all appeared different sizes. Straight on, however, the windows lined up perfectly to form a triangle.

This happened to be the view from the opposite wall where a pair of twin beds stood with their headboards pushed together to face opposite sides, north and south. Each afternoon, the windows worked together, letting slices of light in to paint the three-pointed shape over half of each bed in honey-thick sunlight. Some nights, they permitted a comfortable, pale shade of moonlight to lie over half of each sleeping twin. Always, the moon crept in on tiptoes, spilling gently over the sills. Always, its work was best completed in silence.

In this room, the Bellton sisters slept in their adjacent beds, each curled beneath their own downy comforter tangled with hand-stitched vines. Extra long stems intertwined with the vines, filled in with a deeper green thread. Upon those stems stood pink roses. They towered above the rest of the greenery. A rough-hewn caterpillar hid among the vines. On the second blanket, Mrs. Bellton considered leaving the caterpillar out. Wishing to keep the blankets as identical as possible, she chose to include it. Her second attempt did not yield much improvement. Her girls didn’t notice the mistakes. Even years later, she herself struggled to ignore them.

2

As the toddlers became young children, they grew to cherish their blankets. One of them quietly developed a fixation on something else about her mother’s design: if you squinted closely, you found that Mrs. Bellton had stitched the roses absent of thorns. It was this exact reason that Patty Bellton-older-by-four-minutes-and-nineteen-seconds—as she always introduced herself—blamed her mother for her earliest memory of pain and struggled to forgive her as the years passed by.

When Mrs. Bellton’s twins were around the age of four or five, she began taking Patty and Beth outside with her each day as she tended the garden and flowerbeds. It was with this work Mrs. Bellton provided the majority of her family’s diet. With her husband long gone, she supplemented the garden foods by trading some of her bounty for a neighbor’s hunted meat from the surrounding woodlands. That early morning, the air hung crisp and fresh above the dew-dappled plants. Mrs. Bellton intended to instill into her young daughters the first teachings of her—their—garden’s work. Within minutes of watering the roses that huddled near the house tucked in a bed of mulch beneath the girls’ windows, Patty grabbed one by the stem. She watched blood rise to the surface, beading up to collect in the palm of her hand. Her shrill wet cries sliced the air like a blade. Mrs. Bellton rushed her girls inside. Beth watched, lip trembling, as her mother cleaned and bandaged Patty’s wound. Mrs. Bellton decided she’d wait a season to start her girls’ education on the fall garden when the work was lighter and less dangerous. The previous night, the girls had buzzed with excitement. They hardly slept, awakening grumpy and impatient. Mrs. Bellton knew her girls—being overtired made them quick to anger or upset. That morning, she’d only started them with the rosebed because it was closest to the house.

Mrs. Bellton explained this to Patty countless times

through a tangle of tense years that came later. The memory burrowed into Patty and followed her to adolescence. It sparked a number of arguments between them. Beth kept silent during these arguments, though she’d often felt defensive of her mother. She imagined herself one day summoning the strength to raise her voice at her sister. In the daydream, they all sat cross-legged in the grass, shucking corn. As the years stretched on and the rift between her sister and mother only grew, Beth escaped into her daydream again and again. With each imagining, she whittled her script—an arrowhead coaxed painstakingly from a block of wood. With each argument she witnessed, Beth inched closer and closer to a breaking point. Her head rang with the words she’d soon shout: doesn’t art change the realities of life with each creation? And doesn’t our mother’s stitching strike you as art? And anyway, how could you actually think the beauty of roses would come without cost?

3

Beth’s outburst came on a day shivering beneath a clouded sky that dropped chilling rain in intermittent drizzles. Mrs. Bellton directed the sisters to wind along each row, back and forth, each following their own half of the sprawling garden. The girls, one taller than most of the plants and the other just taller than her, crouched to patrol the rows, each armed with a sharp and narrow spade. They passed by the sundrop yellow of cucumber flowers, deep reds and purples of ripening tomatoes, brilliant orange marigolds huddled around the vegetable plants, deep green of the green peppers bowing their stems as they increased in weight. As they patrolled the rows, the twins were to aerate the soil around each plant that needed it. In addition to a chore, it was an unnamed test.

The condition of tomorrow’s soil would tell Mrs. Bellton which of her daughters remembered how to know if a plant needed its soil aerated. If the work was completed correctly. She struggled with doubt that both girls would succeed and worried for the state of half the garden. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, watching the twins weave among the leaves and stalks out to the far reaches of the acre garden. Finally, she settled on the thought that one day’s worth of rain would not be enough damage to devastate. Nothing that her prize-winning plants could not recover from, or that the three of them couldn’t fix with a morning or few of work. So, Mrs. Bellton remained resolute in her lesson plan. If Patty did not succeed, as feared, Mrs. Bellton would show her daughter how to repair the mistake made to prevent it from happening again. Despite her expectation, Mrs. Bellton continued to hope, a the flame of a tiny tealight candle she tended to, carefully kept alive inside her.

When Mrs. Bellton’s plan fell into action, Patty did not respond to correction with grace. The next morning, Patty woke early and stepped outside before her mother. Looking out across the acre garden, something heavy burned inside her chest. On her half of the garden, though the rain had stopped early in the previous evening, puddles of water pockmarked the soil around the plants she’d been responsible for. She noticed a

slight droop to the leaves of those plants. Some of them leaned a bit to one side, as if something inside of them had slowly started to soften.

By the time her mother joined her, standing unspeaking at her side in observation of the garden, Patty’s heartbeat thundered in her ears. She didn’t fear for what her mother would say—she knew what words would come her way like a refrain. The shame Patty felt at her mistake quickly turned to rage when she faced her mother’s gentle eyes. To Patty, they seemed an empty kind of amused, tired like she had fulfilled an undesired expectation. And that is what Patty feared—not letting her mother down, but knowing that her mother had grown to expect Patty to let her down.

4

At fourteen, even fourteen and four minutes, nineteen seconds older than Beth, Patty wasn’t ready to face this realization of her fear. She exploded into argument. Mrs. Bellton had expected Patty to react this way. She knew full-well that the challenge of Patty’s teenage years was blossoming into effect and would likely only increase in intensity for some time. The thought was enough to exhaust her. That morning, Beth walked heavily to the door, knowing the argument was coming, fearing for what would be said this time.

Beth hated the nasty things Patty said to their mother, and the way Patty cried about what their mother said back hours later, like she thought Beth would sleep through it. Sometimes she dreamed about hitting Patty in the face, right in her open mouth, to shut her up. Other times she wanted to crawl into her sister’s bed and hold her while she wept. On those nights, she often waited until Patty’s cries softened and breath evened out, having cried herself to sleep.

That’s when Beth would cry, too. She thought about how alone her mother must feel in her own room in the middle of a bright night, unable to sleep, like Beth often found herself. Sometimes, she worried her mother had swallowed all the pain throughout her life in shards of glass. One day something would happen and her mother would collapse to the floor in a million pieces, shattered.

Beth knew, deep down, Patty shared this fear. It was something they’d talked about once, years ago, before the rift between Patty and their mother had grown so wide as to separate her from Beth, too. Oftentimes Beth fell asleep, still trying to decide if mothers and daughters and sisters were supposed to break each other. She wanted to know, maybe more than she wanted to decide for herself, what Patty would say. She could guess, sure, but part of her refused to be the one to say it.

5

After such a night of tears and contemplation, Beth struggled to rest. She’d woken later than she planned and knew the results of their mother’s unspoken test would result in a blowout argument since she failed to correct her sister’s work before her mother had seen. She’d been slow to join her mother and

sister outside to look on the garden. She hung back in the doorway, nudging a loose stone across the step with her toe. When the argument came to a head, Beth sighed. She couldn’t take it anymore. She stomped across the grass so determined that later she found lines of chlorophyll green stained to the bottoms of her feet.

Patty had not expected her sister to blow up in the middle of her and her mother’s argument. Truthfully, she didn’t pay Beth much attention anymore. They’d been close when they were young, but as Patty’s resentment grew for her mother, that closeness slowly stretched into a considerable distance. Patty didn’t engage with Beth much after it became clear she either didn’t have a side in the feud or worse, defended their mother. When Beth came alive instead of fading to the background like a ghost—like Patty had grown to expect—Patty grew jealous. Even her own twin sister had been stripped from her, and worse, by their mother. Patty and Beth were twins—weren’t they supposed to have a bond like no other? Wasn’t she supposed to side with Patty in everything, even when she disagreed? Hadn’t Patty started off doing the same for her, when they were young and still inseparable?

Patty stepped back from her mother and sister, horrified to face the distance she’d pushed between herself and the pair of them. Patty worried that her mother and sister had become best friends. What if they hated Patty like she sometimes hated herself? What if they wanted her as gone as she sometimes wished her mother to be, on the hard days when they couldn’t get along in the slightest?

Patty, for once, found herself without a thing to say as her mother and Beth stood together, staring back at her with similar expressions on their faces. Patty realized suddenly how alike the two of them looked now. It was a likeness that had unfolded over time, appearing more and more each year to reinforce this fear she couldn’t shake: that she was crafting her own undoing. That her mother and sister had formed a bond that thrived in her absence. If this fear had been realized, she thought, what was the point in her staying?

6

That night, a new moon emptied the sky. A delicate breeze rustled among the rows of the garden. Patty lay awake atop the comforter she’d stretched over her bed, corners wedged beneath the mattress to remain neatly made. Beth gave a questioning look when she’d noticed Patty tidying her bed instead of getting into it messily, like usual. But she’d said more than enough for the day, content to ignore her sister’s strange behavior in silence. She was still upset with Patty for picking yet another fight with their mother that morning.

Patty remained still in her bed, trying to maintain even breathing. She could feel her sister awake, restless in the bed next to her. She knew Beth wasn’t likely to fall asleep if she thought Patty was still up. Patty waited, surprisingly patient. She needed Beth asleep for her plan to work. She lay, muscles tense, hesitating. Some unacknowledged part of her willed Beth

to stay awake, forcing her to stay. But soon, her sister coaxed her body into the realm of sleep.

Patty remained awake, listening as Beth drifted farther and farther into sleep. When she was sure a dream had hold of Beth’s attention, Patty sighed. Now she couldn’t blame someone else for her staying. She wasn’t ready to make that decision on her own. Instead, she rose and pulled the bulging backpack from beneath the bed frame. She walked lightly through the house in her socks, pausing at the edge of the porch to sit and tie Beth’s boots. Beth was taller and had bigger feet, but Patty’s boots had holes and a torn shoelace. Beth’s boots were nicer, probably because she hardly used them.

Patty tied the laces into tight, double knots. She adjusted the backpack straps on her shoulders and took a deep breath. She started forward, darting between the rows of the garden as she made her way away from the house. She stayed focused on what lay ahead of her, refusing to look back. More than finding her sister’s gaze, she feared she would see her mother watching from a window, making no move to stop her from running away.

7

Patty crossed the far perimeter of the garden, and a few yards later, left her family’s property. She walked across the street, moved aside the branches of sumac huddled together beneath the trees that leaned closest to the crumbling asphalt, and faded into the woods. She walked lightly, quietly, stepping around dry branches and tall grasses. She imagined herself a fox loping beneath the canopy, comfortable in the thick of her solitude.

The first hour passed slowly as Patty maneuvered her sore shoulders beneath the straps of her backpack. They bit into the muscles of her shoulders sharply—a menace she hadn’t expected. Her supplies had added up quickly and weighed more, it seemed, with every few yards she advanced among the foliage.

Sticky with sweat and panting, Patty paused for a drink. She fished the compass from her pocket and checked to be sure she still traveled her path. She planned to move north until she found the railroad tracks that cut through the countryside. She’d follow them until she found a new town to live in. The compass showed north, but the needle angled slightly to the east now.

She’d have to work her way westward just a hair as she continued onward if she wanted to stick to the course she had mapped in her brain. In truth, this map was the equivalent of something hand-drawn in varying shades of wax crayon. The map Patty followed was of her own creation, based on a childhood of roughly-placed landmarks that may or may not have existed where they did in her memories, some of them foggy, some of them not. Still, Patty trusted herself more than anyone else—perhaps more than she should have.

8

Another two hours of trekking through the thick foliage,

and Patty was exhausted. It took much longer to cross through the overgrown woodland than she’d expected. She’d lost time untangling her hair from shaggy branches, taking breaks from the pain her heavy backpack caused, and breaking leaves and branches off of plants that blocked her path so she could make her own. Her back and arms ached. So did her feet and legs. She switched the backpack to her front, straps crossed together across her back. She wasn’t sure how much it really helped. Or how much farther she could make it before she’d have to get some real rest.

As Patty forged on, the trees began to thin, spaces between them opening wider. The shrubbery that grew below stood shorter and much easier to manage. It clumped together in smaller crowds. Patty was relieved when she didn’t have to bring her knee to her chest with each step over another obstacle. This lifted her spirits. She found confidence in her plan once more. Ahead of her, the lifting light of dawn danced between the darkness of the tree trunks and their shadows. Patty squinted her eyes for a better view.

It seemed, just beyond the next few rows of trees, a clearing opened. Patty suspected the railroad tracks couldn’t be set back much farther than that. She pushed through the last few oak trees, wide trunks standing farther apart than the ones she’d been fighting through not ten minutes earlier. The open expanse spanned a wide space, filled with huge clumps of shinhigh grasses, tall green blades interspersed with lines of dead, brittle yellow. In some spaces, puddles of water shone through, reflecting the first light of the new day back up from the dark ground. A few fallen trees cut through the clearing. They wore sheathes of moss, complete with lines of white and orange fungus along their edges like stitching.

A few steps in, Patty’s confidence disappeared. She hurried forward, ready to find the railroad tracks on the other side of the clearing, just past another stand of trees. She never made it that far. Just into the clearing, Patty stumbled into a peat bog. In seconds, she sunk into the muck up to her waist. She could hardly move her legs to get them unstuck, and as she sunk deeper, she couldn’t move them at all. Patty shrieked once as she struggled to untangle herself from the weight of the backpack, straps still crossed over one another on her back. The struggle pulled her down faster. The girl sunk like a stone. Within moments, the rippling surface in the clearing just a few miles from her house had stilled with Patty tucked away beneath, lungs slowly filling with mud. Another bog body swallowed in silence.

9 Patty clears her throat. She looks around the room of listeners. They crouch together in a circle of folding chairs around the dim, candlelit waiting room. An onyx doorway on either side seals them inside. Not one of them knows what lay beyond, either way. Every now and then, a wind finds its way beneath one of the stone doors, cooling the room as it whines. The waiting had grown tedious. And chilly. The more wind that finds them, the tighter the group circles. As chairs fold and unfold, the room

fills with the sounds of metal scraping. A brief reprieve from the roaring silence that only grows as the emptiness surrounds them. That silence—they all fear what waits behind it.

A swarm of memories buzzes in each of their minds, desperate to escape and find the relief of recognition. Mostly, they remember their last moments. The final events of their lives that brought them to the waiting room. These were their only stories to share. And so, they shared. Patty looks up after finishing her telling to find all eyes chewing into her. Most of the others are older than her, though one little boy she guesses is only about half her age. He’s the only one who remembers more than she does. Some of them are about as old as her mother had been. Some of them sitting in that circle of metal folding chairs are so old their voices shake. Even with all of their memories, would they remember being fourteen? Patty isn’t so sure. She doesn’t expect anyone to understand. She studies the dirt caked under her fingernails. She doesn’t know what to say now. “Anyway, that’s how I ended up here.”

The woman with short, dark hair sitting across from Patty reminds her most of her mother. Patty tries not to look at her, but she is the first to respond to Patty’s telling. Her voice is warm and it breaks when she speaks. “Oh darling, that’s so scary out there on your own.” A shuddering breath cleaves her words apart. “Your mother must miss you dearly.” A raw feeling rises to lodge in Patty’s throat. She struggles to breathe around it. “Don’t we all come here alone?” Patty chokes out, colder and harder than she means. She crosses her arms. Marcy, the woman who’s spoken up, bites back the rest of what she’d had to say. The group’s silence stretches on. No one can argue with Patty this time. She clears her throat again and picks at a dried fleck of mud on the side of her thigh, letting the silence that looms in the darkness fill the center of the room. It roars and roars and roars.

Honeydew Cubes

Katy Tempel

A dog is a smile. I don’t know if you’ve thought that but when you leap from the sea to the stars in one day and then crumble to the earth, it’s like a dream come true. When you’ve found yourself, perpetually waving at the details of your childhood, sometimes the details are green but desolate like an unfurnished garish room, that ascends into reticence until you remember those honeydew cubes in the cream porcelain bowl that were left sitting out in the sun on the porch, melting, while you were caught in a reverie.

The Art of Unity

Emily C. Smith

As a graphic design major, my artwork The Art of Unity was created as the cover for Hive Avenue, a literary journal dedicated to celebrating the creative voices of students. This piece is a visual representation of creativity, connection, and community—a celebration of what art and literature bring to our lives.

The blue suit symbolizes a student, embodying the identity and aspirations of those who contribute to the journal. Its faceless form allows anyone who views the art to see themselves in it, breaking boundaries and inspiring individuals to embrace their own creativity. The vibrant flowers emerging from the suit reflect the flourishing of creative ideas, while the bees hovering around represent Hive Avenue, a space where creativity thrives collaboratively. The dotted circular path the bees follow signifies unity—both within the journal and the community it serves. The hands, entwined with vines, symbolize the organic and growing connections formed through shared artistic expression, emphasizing the strength we find in coming together. The Art of Unity is inspired by the idea that art and literature are not only outlets for self-expression but also powerful tools for building connections. This piece invites viewers to see themselves as part of a creative community where individuality is celebrated, and unity is nurtured.

Vivid Waters

As a graphic design major, I find peace in crafting art that is both memorable and meaningful. This piece was inspired by a school of fish, which I see as a reflection of humanity. Like fish in a group, people share similarities but are inherently unique. Through this work, I aimed to celebrate that individuality, emphasizing how each of us contributes something distinct to the collective. The vibrant colors of the fish symbolize the diversity and complexity of our creative minds, highlighting the beauty of our differences.

Denise Lori

Unlikely yet Together

Lee Madrid

I was inspired to make this piece by the symbiotic relationship we see naturally in nature. I feel like we could take notes from these animals as Oxpeckers are often seen helping many different animals help them get rid of parasites, insects, and ticks. I chose the African Ox itself because that is where the bird (obviously) gets it’s name. i used procreate and an Ipad to digitally paint this. Focusing only on using one layer to recreate the actual experience you would have while actually painting. This piece was a challenge since I don’t draw animals very often and it’s a skill I want to improve on. I am currently in NWACC for graphic design, but love all forms of art and strive to be a Jack-of-All-Trades. Each piece I make I like to reflect and set goals for what I want to improve on for the next thing I work on.

Carried by the Wind

Gissel Barrientos

My older sister used to say, “Art is how we leave behind our life.” She would passionately explain how, throughout history, art has been humanity’s way of preserving and sharing our stories—from ancient cave paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and all the way to modern creations. At the time, I didn’t fully understand her perspective. I’d shrug and say, “I just like to make art,” only for her to roll her eyes and tell me to get real.

Now, as a graphic design major in my third semester (a path I owe to her), I finally see what she meant. Art truly is a legacy, and my goal as an artist is to create pieces I’m proud to have as part of my story.

This particular piece is a reflection of my technicolor memories, brought to life through digital art—one of my favorite mediums. The inspiration comes from childhood afternoons spent in my backyard, surrounded by wind chimes swaying in the breeze laying in my hammock. I remember how sunlight would stream through the glass, scattering rainbows across the ground, and the soft melodies the chimes would play. Those moments of childlike curiosity still resonate with me, and I’ve tried to capture that sense of magical wonderment here.

The images featured in this literary journal were created using generative artificial intelligence tools, including Adobe Firefly and ChatGPT. These tools were utilized to complement the creative content with visual elements that align with the journal’s themes.

Please note that the use of these AI tools does not replace the creativity or craftsmanship of our contributors but rather enhances the storytelling experience.