EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Marie Claire Dwyer
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Delia Rainey
MANAGING EDITOR
Jen Para
FICTION EDITOR
Sarah Grill
POETRY EDITOR
Chloe Laramie
NONFICTION EDITOR
Jen Para
FICTION READERS
Jacob Smith, Gerard Edic, Marlee Baldridge, Breanna Payton-Simons, Erica Hampton, Evan Pagano, Annabel Ames, Erin Niederberger, Jesse Whitaker, Jessica Heim-Brouwer, Alyssa Gregory
POETRY READERS
Jonathan Tatum, Stephen Lancey, Kelsey Larimore, Madeline Shaw, Sherell Barbee
NONFICTION READERS
Katherine Herrington, Peyton Stableford, Emily Price, Doran Vaillancourt, Tonya Eberhard, Elizabeth Bland, Mary Hudson, Elizabeth Arnold, Matthew McFarlane
EPIC LITERARY MAGAZINE
EPIC is the University of Missouri’s undergraduate literary magazine, published by the student organization English at MU (EMU). Submissions are accepted year-round via email at epicsubmissions1@gmail.com. EPIC is funded by the Organization Resource Group.
DESIGNER/LAYOUT ARTIST JONATHAN KAILUS
COVER IMAGE
SABRINA TINSLEY, "INNOCENCE LOST"
INSIDE Fiction ERIN NIEDERBERGER BROOKE BUTLER
THIS IS NOT A LOVE STORY JESÚS SAVES
7 37
Nonfiction ELIZABETH ARNOLD KATE HERRINGTON TONYA EBERHARD
FROM THE FOREST OF OUR YOUTH SMALL GHOSTS MEDICATED
13 28 35
Poetry TRAVIS BAKA OLIVIA BERTELS SADE HOWELL TONYA EBERHARD WYATT LAWRENCE TONYA EBERHARD
A TRAILER, A LAKE, AND TWO FUNERALS DEVOUR HEAT LABOR DAY WEEKEND A BEDTIME EULOGY FEMICIDE IS A WORD
6 12 17 18 34 35
Visual Art SARAH LEITUALA ERICA EISENBERG EDWARD HENUBER CARMEN WOODROW SARAH LEITUALA BO BRENDEL BO BRENDEL SABRINA TINSLEY MITZI DOMINGUEZ MITZI DOMINGUEZ SIMON TATUM SIMON TATUM CARMEN WOODROW BO BRENDEL
QUICKSAND MORE THERE A WALK THROUGH SOME WOODS JELLY PRECARIOUS GROUNDS SUTRO BATHS JOGGER PUBLIC TELEPHONE DRAGONFLY UNLIKE REFLECTIONS HIDDEN FACES EYES SAY IT ALL Complexion BICYCLE ROTHWELL HEIGHTS BATHER
5 12 13 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 36
Foreword
Editor-in-Chief | Marie Claire Dwyer EPIC Undergraduate Literary Magazine has had a long and successful legacy at the University of Missouri. The unique quality about this magazine is that it is entirely run by students for students. As undergraduates, we are rarely presented with the opportunity to publish works of literature and art. Yet as artists, both in the literary and artistic sense, we produce pieces with the intent of the viewing of others. Although our magazine is small, it is filled with the best of the best in terms of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork. Like our title suggests, this magazine is made up of extraordinary writers, staff, and artists. Just as Homer and Virgil, our authors push the envelope on topics that relate on a personal level as well as a societal level. Poetry like Travis Baka’s "a trailer, a lake, and two funerals" will rile your sense and evoke tremendous emotion as he describes to you a funeral you will never forget. Everyone has a story to tell and in a form that fits his or her unique individuality. The stories told through each genre will take you on an unforgettable journey Every piece possesses an individual voice that projects feelings that we, as readers, pick up on immediately. "This is Not a Love Story" by Erin Niederberger discusses the friend that was always there for us but then taken away too soon. Meanwhile, Olivia Bertels enthralls and entices us with her use of words and style in "devour." Not all poems rhyme or come in the same structure. Olivia’s work reminds us that sometimes things can get a little crazy. Also remember when everyone had an avatar on Yahoo and MSN? Elizabeth Arnold’s "From the Forest of Our Youth" reminds us of a time when we used avatars to represent who we were or, at least, whom we saw ourselves as. In fiery passion, Sade Howell describes an enflamed encounter with brilliant imagery that will make you feel the warmth of "Heat." From her lyrical and empowered poetry to the realism and beauty of a true story, Tonya 4 EPIC VOL. 14
Eberhard illustrates in "Femicide is a Word" the horrific reality of femicide in societies and serenity of youth on a long "Labor Day Weekend." Tonya does not shy away from the truth of anxiety by relating America’s pastime baseball to the black hole anxiety can pull you into in her work "Medicated." Everyone has something to battle even when the opponent is unseen. Kate Herrington’s "Small Ghosts" tells a nostalgic story with diary entries. Diaries hold our deepest secrets just like we trust our friends to do. In "Jesús Saves," Brooke Butler explores how not everything we learn is what it looks like. Sometimes what seems to be perfect is actually a nightmare. This same idea is followed by Wyatt Lawrence’s "Bedtime Eulogy," which asks the question “and me?” The process in which the editors and readers undergo preparing this magazine is always an epic adventure. This year in particular took the strength and intelligence of the entire staff and as a reward we are able to share this great feat with all of you. We are continuously fortunate to have the help of our fellow MU readers who help us make tough decisions about stories as well as the writers who willingly provide these works. Everyone part of this magazine has invested a great deal of time and effort leading to another successful publishing year. We hope that you will enjoy reading these fantastic works of art and the experiences they will bring.
QUICKSAND | SARAH LEITUALA, PHOTOGRAPH
VOL. 14 EPIC 5
POETRY a trailer, a lake, and two funerals Travis Baka
Grandma’s walls lean, weighted with silk roses. Electric candles burn in sleepy lace eyelids. blind to the rutted field, pocked streets, empty foundries The clock strikes train, tracks stretched taunt across town strum. Windows sing in their frames. the howl is your name A black rod stretched over scummy water, crooked. Grandpa with pine skin folded in a pew his gnarled knuckles clutch the night crawler hands shake so I must do the deed Fog rolls across, filling his eyes. Fish flap on a gut slick dock I don’t know if I’m more afraid of him or the hook in the worm Gravel separates the liqour store and funeral home. Mourners kick clouds of chalk and bone dust, a trial into the antiseptic fluorescent safety of the walk-in-beer-cooler we’re trying to forget how bored we are Consolation casserole sweats and puddles. A tape of hymns crackles the tracks shake the cross Your corpse is a work of art, skin polished wax white. subtly offset by the purple bruise of the vikings jersey they buried you in. Buried with photos of muscle cars and hunting dogs with a garden gnome in a vikings jersey to help us remember football teams, horsepower and not the plaster plug in your temple a gnome to forget Blood misted in morning dew, frogs swallowing skull fragments. I can’t blame you When the clock strikes train, close your eyes lay on the tracks. wait
6 EPIC VOL. 14
FICTION This is Not a Love Story Erin Niederberger
A boy meets a girl. He falls in love with her (or so people say; he never tells her for sure) but she doesn’t love him back. She doesn’t love anyone. She can’t. This is not how these stories are supposed to go. I didn’t answer my phone the first time it rang. I thought about it; I really did. But my halfhearted reach for the phone didn’t quite make it, and I flopped back into bed until it rang itself quiet. Then it rang again. And again. I sat up with a groan, pushing the heavy covers down to my waist so I could reach my phone sitting on my desk. Still ringing, it buzzed in my hand like an angry wasp. I blinked away the early morning fuzziness in my vision and tried to make out the name on the screen. The last time someone had called it had been my mother. “Any boys catch your eye at college?” she’d asked. I had adjusted my grip on the phone, wondering whether I should say I had homework. It wouldn’t be a lie. I did have homework, which I’d been rigorously avoiding. “No.” A pause. “Any girls?” “No.” She sighed, a burst of static in my ear. “Well, you’ve got time.” Today the name on the screen wasn’t hers. “Hello?” I mumbled. I might be escaping my mother's interrogation, but I wasn't happy about a phone call before seven in the morning. “Have you heard?” Cassie, a friend from high school I’d kept in touch with online, sort of, was her typical rapid and breathy self. I thought her words sounded more urgent than usual, but it was hard to tell. She considered a two for one pizza deal worthy of alerting her entire contacts library. “Heard what?” “Theo. He died last night. It was on the news this morning and everything. It’s probably not on TV where you are, and you guys used to be close,
so I thought you should know.” She trailed off, waiting for me to respond. I didn’t feel like someone who should be getting news of a friend’s death. I was twenty years old. I wore a threadbare shirt from a high school assembly and old shorts as pajamas. A sheaf of notes on entropy lay fanned out on the floor where I’d tossed them last night in frustration. The watery blue-yellow light of dawn had begun filtering through the blinds to fill my room with faint luminescence. And Theodore Brown was no longer breathing. “Oh,” I said. I flew down a few days later and stayed at my parents’ house for the funeral. Missing class would hurt me, but my grades were on a downward spiral anyway. I didn’t even bring a textbook. The shock wore off in spurts as I whiled away the hours in the airport and on the plane. I crossed time zones, and as I did, I crossed from a world where Theo was alive to one where he was dead. No more talking, no more laughing, no more movie nights locked in his basement. He was gone. Goodbye, college. Welcome to the real world. After an hour or two, I wished I’d brought a book. My father patted me on the shoulder and muttered a short word of condolence, but my mother chattered. Maybe she thought she could fill the space Theo had left behind with words. Like my father, I preferred silence, and I longed for something to hide behind. Over dinner, she told me it had been a car accident, the kind of thing people never thought would happen to anyone they knew. It received a brief mention on the local news before the anchor moved on to other traffic with the casual indifference of someone who has seen it all before. He’d died on impact, they said. No pain at all. Sometimes at night I thought I felt the pain he never had, a crushing aching weight in my center like a steering column shoved under my breastbone. VOL. 14 EPIC 7
FICTION I could almost see it, the faux-leather glinting slickly against my skin. A human automotive. Stick your hands into my guts and turn. I felt like I was dying. I felt, well, like my heart was breaking. But that couldn’t be true. If it were, I would have felt something that day. “It’s too bad you didn’t love him,” my mother said once at breakfast. She had said it before, plenty of times, often after I’d ushered him out my front door at the end of a study session. Tugging on that wheel in my chest, trying to steer me in the right direction. “He’s such a nice boy, Jamie,” she would say with a long-suffering sigh as he pulled out of our driveway. “Can’t you decide to like him?” I had always answered with a harried headshake and a no, the familiar frustration bubbling up in my stomach with a heat almost like guilt. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. This time I thought of how I’d woken from a nightmare of twisted steel and smoking wreckage, curled around the invisible hole in my chest. “I did.” She looked at me, spoon poised in mid-air, and frowned like she was watching something particularly unpleasant on television. “I thought you said –” My fingers twitched as if they were holding onto the edges of that textbook I wished I’d brought, shutting out the world. “Never mind.” “If you’d loved him you would have –” “I said never mind.” If I’d loved him, I wouldn’t have said no. “I always thought he’d win you over in the end,” she said. She stirred her coffee with a clink of spoon against ceramic. “He’d convince you. He was good with words. Always so polite, that boy.” I didn’t answer. I’d taken two bites of yogurt and felt my stomach heave, ready to send back any more. Dry cereal might stay down, if it could work its way past the cold hard presence in my chest, but we stored the cereal in the pantry. Retrieving it meant entering the no man’s land between my seat and my mother’s. I didn’t think I was ready for that. He had been good with words. Even I, whose preferred strings of letters these days were combinations like C3H7OH and ClO4-, could recognize it. I remembered marveling at the way he constructed his essays, how every sentence flowed 8 EPIC VOL. 14
into the next like it belonged there. I’d asked him to help me with my own assignments, but they’d never turned out as well as his. He had something I didn’t. Words had weight when he spoke them. People listened. Most people, anyway. I remembered him slinging his arm around my shoulders during one of our movie nights camped out on his ratty basement sofa and announcing his mother thought we’d be a good couple. “Mine too,” I had said, rolling my eyes. On the screen, giant spiders menaced a pair of teens. He tossed a piece of popcorn my way, and I nabbed it, popping it in my mouth. “Nice catch,” he said. “Do you think they’re right?” It was one of those silly flirty statements he made all the time around girls. I never took them very seriously. He tried them on lots of people, and I figured he was practicing, even if he had been saying them around me more often. He knew better. Even if I didn’t have a word for it then, I’d let him know that, for me, alone was fine. I didn’t have a hole in my heart that needed filling. The way he kept bringing it up made me wonder if he didn’t believe me. “You can do better,” I said, watching a boy’s head get bitten off and hoping to the bottom of my hole-less heart that for once he didn’t mean a word he said. I remembered that like it was yesterday, and I swore the dusty smell of his old sofa rose up to tickle my nostrils and threatened to make me sneeze. My mother’s spoon clinked against the edge of her coffee cup again, and I let the memory fade. He’d convince you. I stirred my yogurt until it built up in mountains on either side of my spoon and toppled over, burying it. “There’s nothing he could have said that would change my mind.” “You could have made him happy.” “Maybe.” I put a spoonful of yogurt in my mouth, felt the muscles of my abdomen clench, and bolted for the sink. The funeral visitation was held in the parish building of the Brown’s church. I saw faces too young for an event like this mingled with the crowd; young adults sweating in poorly fitting
FICTION formal wear. Some of the girls were crying. They’d been careful to choose waterproof mascara. I kept to the edges of the room. Some of my former classmates had never left town, happy to pick up family businesses or link up with high school sweethearts to start the whole cycle of life over again. Others were successful college students, brimming with worldly knowledge and quotes from Descartes. Engagement rings abounded, and the coat rack bulged with university logo-emblazoned hats and scarves. I’d gone to college out of state, leaving all my friends and family behind. That might be part of growing up, but mostly it had felt like running away. I put three states between me and the town I grew up in, but that didn't stop their expectations from following me, tugging at that steering wheel, showing me where to turn. I spent my days sitting cross-legged on my dorm bed and flipping through incomprehensible textbooks or taking long walks in a climate warmer than the one I’d known at home. Life dissolved into a whirl of parties I didn’t want to go to, homework I didn’t know how to do, and classes where I didn’t know anybody’s name, filled with the ever-growing certainty that this place was not for me. Everyone went to college, though, so I stayed. What else was I supposed to do? Chemistry was nice, anyway, when you got past the math. I found a certain satisfaction in watching all my carefully measured reactants go up in smoke. The visitation crowd had begun to thin as people headed for the parking lot or divided into small knots of conversation. Cassie found me and walked over, a half-eaten cookie clutched in one hand. I nodded when she said hello. As people went, Cassie wasn’t too bad, even if she did talk more than I liked to. At least I didn’t have to worry about awkward silences with her around. She thrived on communicating with the silent. “You didn’t say anything,” she said after exchanging prolonged pleasantries. “I thought you might.” I shook my head, looking at my shoes. “I don’t really do speeches.” “At least a few words.” I doubted my idea of a few words matched hers, but I didn’t say so. “You were best friends.” “Once. We didn’t talk much after graduation.”
I gestured vaguely toward the crowd of old classmates, many of whom I hadn’t spoken to since senior yearbook signing day. “You know how it is.” “But still…” Cassie took a bite out of the cookie, looking at me reproachfully. Having successfully managed to create an awkward silence, I followed the people streaming outside. The room, with its heavy air and weighty expectations, felt suffocating. Cassie tagged along behind me. “What would I say?” I asked her. “He was my best friend for three years, sure, but I couldn’t love him the way he wanted. Now he’s gone, and I’ll always get to feel guilty about it.” We cleared the parish building's doorway, and I kicked the dirt, imagining him locked six feet under it. “Rest in peace.” Cassie had abandoned her cookie in favor of arguing with me. “You don’t mean that.” “Fine.” I felt that heavy painful pressure in my chest again, reaching up to constrict my throat and start my eyes prickling. “I did love him, and I do miss him, but I can’t say that because I left. Because I loved him, but I wasn’t in love with him, and that’s all that matters to them. Because I was the girl who didn’t want him, so I must not have liked him enough. I can’t cry now because I haven’t talked to him in months, not even over the phone, and I’d look like one of those people who just fakes it, but it hurts.” “It’s not your fault,” she said. I wanted to shout, “What do you know?” but she did know, better than most people anyway. Cassie Flynn, who was a chatterbox and a gossip and thought everything was everybody’s business, had been spotted kissing a girl in the eleventh grade. If anyone knew what it was like to not want who you were supposed to, it was her. “You can’t help it,” she said with a touch to my shoulder. “It’s part of who you are. He couldn’t blame you for that.” “I know.” My voice sounded thick from trying not to cry, thick as the breathless air inside. “I think he knew too, in the end, but it’s hard. Everyone expects…” I didn’t know what to say, thinking of college and graduation and the rings glinting on so many of my classmates’ fingers. I thought of chemical equations and how reagent X plus reagent Y makes Z each and every time, unless something’s contaminated or ruined or wrong. “They expect VOL. 14 EPIC 9
FICTION things. If you can’t do them, what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to get a happy ending?” She stood next to me outside the church, watching the first few cars full of mourners pull away. I envied them for knowing where they were going. I hadn't had that kind of certainty in years. “I don’t know,” she said, answering my question. “I really don’t.” I thought I knew, once. I found a word on some lazy afternoon internet search, a word that reached into my whirling mess of thoughts and feelings and teased meaning out of them, like finding that last puzzle piece under the sofa and slotting it into place. I sat on the low wall at our high school stadium that only seniors had the right to sit on, kicking my feet against the stones. Theo had friends in the band and the cheerleading squad, exuberant people like him whose faces I could pick out in the crowded hallways during passing time. He went to home football games to support them, and sometimes I went too in solidarity. He had gone to buy hot pretzels from the concessions stand, and I was bursting with the desire to tell him what I’d learned. “I figured out why I don’t want to date anyone,” I said when Theo returned. He handed me a pretzel. I bit into it, tasting the tang of salt on my tongue, bright and sharp as the excitement fizzing through my blood. My aversion to high school romantic exploits had always been a mystery between us. Now I had the answer. I readied myself for the announcement as the end of halftime buzzer blared across the field. “I’m aromantic, I think. It’s this word I found. It means you don’t fall in love. Not with anyone, not ever.” Theo dipped a chunk of pretzel into his cheese sauce and raised it to his mouth, unnaturally orange gobbets dripping to speckle onto the concrete below. “Are you sure?” I felt my smile drop at his tone. He sounded querulous. Almost hurt. “I think so.” “I wouldn’t want that for me. For anyone, really. It sounds lonely.” “I have friends. I have family.” I felt very small beneath the bright stadium lights and the heavy night sky. 10 EPIC VOL. 14
What I wanted to say was, “I have you.”
The marching band got third quarter off, and Theo drifted in the direction of their stands to commune with the saxophone section. During a lull, Cassie waved to me from the cheerleaders’ position on the edge of the field. I waved back, dropping from the low wall and walking over to lean on the fence between the field and bleachers. “You okay?” she asked. “You look kind of down.” Spilling to Cassie Flynn might make me a front-page name, but I didn’t care. Fat lot of good it would do to spread this around anyway, that I had found a word to describe me that spellcheck didn’t even recognize. According to Microsoft Word, I didn’t exist. “Can you do something about it?” she asked after I’d explained. “Why?” “Well, you and Theo… I guess I always thought you two might be something one day.” Greeted by my incredulous stare, she said, “You smile a lot with him. More than anyone else.” “Because he’s my friend,” I added, remembering last year’s gossip and the week Cassie had been uncharacteristically silent. “Some things about yourself you can’t change.” The pompoms wilted in Cassie’s hands. “That makes sense,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She meant for making assumptions, but to my ears it sounded like sympathy. For my condition, for my newfound label, for the way Theo had looked at me with that pretzel halfway to his mouth. A few hours after finding this word buried in the depths of the Internet, I already felt like it was something to be sorry about. At freshman orientation, I nodded hello to my new classmates and was very careful not to smile. I feel like I’ve been frowning ever since. A boy meets a girl. He falls in love with her, and she loves him back. She does in every way she can, and that ought to be enough. This is most definitely a love story, and this is how it ends.
FICTION I drove out to my old high school the day before I flew back to campus. I parked in the back parking lot, climbed out of the car, and slammed the door. A tree grew in the ragged patch of grass across the street, its branches bearing a few leaves the late autumn wind hadn’t yet stripped away. My feet crunched on their fallen brethren as I walked up to the trunk and rested my face against it, eyes closed. It smelled like dust and dirt and, if I imagined hard enough, of water. Behind me, cars sped by, carrying their loads of passengers who had no idea where they were going. Just like everybody else. “We were never each other’s happy ending,” I said, “but I miss you.” A gust of wind sent a few more leaves spiraling through the air, and I reached out to snatch one. It shuddered between my fingers, the wind tugging at edges already worn to lace. “Nice catch,” I whispered, and I let myself smile.
wished I’d feel something, even though I knew to the bottom of my rain-drenched soles that I would not. But this is not that story, not the kind he wanted. Instead, I mostly thought about how squishy my socks felt inside my shoes, and that I wanted to go home, somewhere warm and dry. I thought that people really shouldn’t have their faces so close together. I waited for it to end. The rain? The kiss? The love story? They’re all about to end. When it was over, he pulled away and he could tell. I’ll give him that; he didn’t push. He looked at me and knew. No more teasing, no more flirting, no more hints of maybe one day. I was gone. Around us, the rain began to die like a reaction running out of steam. “I just wanted to fix you,” he said. And I said, “I’m not broken.”
I let him kiss me once. It wasn’t sudden, or unexpected, or in a fit of romantic passion. He didn’t make a grand gesture or chase me through an airport to prevent me from flying out of his life forever. He asked, and I said yes. It was raining, the kind of storm that rushes out of nowhere and pounds the ground like angry fists. The air was warm and thick with thunder, but I still shivered in my damp jacket. My hair clung to my scalp and leaked cold droplets of water down my neck. We had taken shelter under a tree by the high school parking lot, waiting for the downpour to let up long enough to let us dash to our cars. Through the hazy air, the high school looked blurred and unfamiliar. Graduation was a few months away, and the old building felt like somewhere someone else had gone. Pre-word Jamie, before I'd had to worry about definitions or labels or accidentally breaking my best friend's heart. So when he asked, maybe inspired by the romance novel situation of two kids caught in the rain, I shrugged and nodded. I’d like to say I felt something, some trace of desire or maybe disappointment, that I saw the ways my life could go from there, branching out in a hundred different directions like the fingering trails of lightning overhead. Or maybe that I VOL. 14 EPIC 11
POETRY devour
Olivia Bertels & you will slice me open like a pomegranate destruction the harbinger of consumption rind of leather & pith the white flesh inside & seed & membrane as one as burst as crunch an exercise in contrast in contradiction pith & pity flesh & clemency flesh is fruit & you suck lips suctioned & you suck out teeth stained crimson wine welling up blood & you consume until pale pith is all that remains peel my skin hollow all but weathered rind you will slice me open like a pomegranate pith & pity flesh & clemency my flesh is fruit once picked it won’t ripen anymore hollow me crimson teeth mark of a man in French: grenade flesh destroyed the consumed eventually will consume.
MORE THERE | ERICA EISENBERG, MIXED MEDIA 12 EPIC VOL. 14
A
A WALK THROUGH SOME WOODS | EDWARD HENUBER, PEN ON PAPER
From the Forest of Our Youth Elizabeth Arnold
For the first time since high school, it’s just the three of us—Becca, Dustin, and me. We’re on break after our first two-and-a-half years of college, huddling around the fire pit in Dustin’s backyard. In front of the fire, my back is cold, but my face feels like it could melt from the proximity to the crackling kindling. The energetic streaks of reds, oranges, and yellows dart and dance across the wood and up into the starry sky like a ground display of fireworks. Across the fire I see Becca for the first time in what feels like an eternity. Her once brown hair, which matched Dustin’s and mine so closely, is now blonde. Becca and I met in kindergarten and
NONFICTION
bonded over a mutual love of digging in the dirt and playing with the bugs, while everyone else played red rover and tag. Dustin joined us junior year of high school. He and I were on the soccer team together, and gradually he, Becca, and I became a trio. Our friendship hasn’t been perfect, but we stuck by one another as we made our awkward transitions into adulthood. As I watch the fire I realize that the three of us have grown to resemble our parents more than each other as we once did. When we were young, we were nebulous pale figures under swaths of chestnut hair. As we become more defined, our bones revealed our parents, but our
VOL. 14 EPIC 13
NONFICTION mentality still reflects the impression we left on one another. Instead of toasting marshmallows, we pass around a bowl of popcorn and take turns throwing pieces of the bag onto the fire. We watch the waxy papers shrivel and turn to ash. For a moment we are all transfixed— “So,” Dustin says abruptly. “Who has a tattoo now?” Becca pulls back her sleeve to reveal a small illustration of one of Plato’s ideas cast in white ink. Once we exhaust that conversation, we turn to relationships (mostly failed) and jobs. All of this is an attempt to understand whom the others have become. As it turns out, we have yet to reach nirvana; however, we are able to exist comfortably in our own skin, unlike our younger selves. When all of our burning questions are answered, the conversation reaches a lull. We look at the sky and inevitably marvel at the smallness of our existence. Here, on the outskirts of town, there is very little light pollution. Each star is crystal clear and bright. “What if all of this is a dream?” Becca sighs. “Do you ever dream about people you’ve never met?” I ask. We all agree that we do. “I heard that those figures reflect your subconscious. They might reveal things that you are afraid to admit to yourself.” Dustin says in a low voice. Staring off into space, I am lost in my thoughts. “Is everything okay over there?” Becca waves her arms in large sweeping motions to catch my aloof gaze. “Yeah, I just saw something move in the woods. I thought it was a person and it freaked me out.” “It was probably just a squirrel,” Dustin remarks. “It does get kinda spooky out here at night.” “Has anyone ever come out of the woods while you were out here?” Becca inquires. “Yeah, a few times. Once there was a guy we think was an escaped convict. He matched the 14 EPIC VOL. 14
description of a man the police were looking for when we called to report the incident…” All of us become visibly tense. “Mmm—Do you guys want to go inside?” Dustin questions. “Yes!” Becca and I dart into the house as Dustin puts out the fire. We slam the door behind us. The sensation of running slowed by nervous laughter reminds me of New Years Eve 2006, before Becca and I met Dustin. The glass door slammed shut in Becca’s basement as we sat in eager anticipation of the crackle and bright shimmer of celebratory 2006 New Year’s Eve fireworks. Becca and I envisioned tall glasses of champagne and elegant amusebouches, but we were sipping sparkling water with lightly buttered popcorn and sporting knit pastel ponchos instead of elegant cocktail dresses. In the midst of envisioning our would-be glamorous lives, we heard the unmistakable sound of a door crashing into its wooden frame with a loud thwack. We assumed the sound was an inebriated homicidal manic. The bitter fizzy water turned to an acrid feeling of fear. It was, albeit, fear mixed with the giddy excitement of a preteen girl—a panic conjured mostly out of boredom that is prepared to materialize at the slightest unidentified noise. Just as Dustin, Becca, and I fled from the fictitious murderer lurking in the woods behind Dustin’s house, Becca and I ran up the stairs to find safety in her room. “Do you think someone really came in through the basement door?” I asked out of breath. “Let’s just talk about something else,” she paused and stretched out in front of her computer. For the rest of the evening, we listened to Gym Class Heroes and Vanessa Carlton while reviewing instant messages from our crushes, realizing, but not acknowledging, that their polite conversation was just that: polite. We were awkward around boys and handled romantic situations poorly: after a boy in our class tried to kiss Becca, we crafted a voodoo doll of her lover from an old tennis trophy. We couldn’t fathom why we were still
NONFICTION single. But an online presence gave us the chance to express an image of ourselves to the world—or at least our classmates—that we could control, thus granting us the advantage of disclosing our personalities over our appearances. Despite our non-styled hair and thickly layered shirts so as to avoid wearing a bra, we hoped to hold our own next to the other girls who wore delicate layers of sparkly, vibrant tank tops along with hip-hugging bellbottom jeans. On the Internet you could present what you perceived as the good parts of yourself through backgrounds, profile pictures, and quotes or song lyrics. And as puberty kicked in with a vengeance and my knowledge of the Internet expanded, platforms with avatars became appealing because I could have a smooth, wide-eyed visage instead of a real photo revealing my double chin and pimple-covered cheeks. Yahoo! Messenger was one such platform. Becca and I spent time tweaking our avatars to reflect different facets of our personalities that our physical bodies restricted. My avatar had my same shoulder length brown hair and blue eyes, but they were on a thin frame. I could make a tear roll down her cheek, or have an ear-to-ear smile spread across her face. Her skin didn’t crack and molt in the winter, and she never had to worry about her panty line showing. With the click of a button, she travelled from an apple orchard to the London Marathon. I often had her don a yellow rain coat that matched the rain gear sported by her corgi puppy because I wanted to live in stormy Corvallis, Oregon, rather than my home state of Missouri. I arranged her lips in contemplation as she and her furry companion stood on a muddy path cut in the tall grass of a green meadow. Though I had never visited Corvallis specifically, it grew to represent a goal. While Missouri is beautiful, the landscape turns to gray scale in the winter. Something deep within me resonated with the Willamette Valley’s perennial green landscape; its population that dedicated itself to the land inspired me.
I’m pulled from my thoughts at the sound of Dustin’s back door open as he pries his way back into the house. Dustin looks at Becca and I huddled in the living room in hysterics and joins our agitated state. “What?! You just abandoned me! You left me alone out there!” He exclaims in a shrill tone that asks a question as much it means to mock us. When we calm down, we glance around the living room and see Dustin age from infancy to his twenties. His face, now framed by sideburns, bears little resemblance to his senior portrait, which rests on the fireplace mantle. The progression of photos makes it appear as though his parents swapped out their child every five years. For a while he was blonde and then brunette. I swear his face shape changed several times. Now that he is twenty, I can see that his face reflects his mom’s smile and his dad’s eyes. A few days before I gathered around the fire with Becca and Dustin, I had returned to Yahoo! to retrieve an email. I saw my avatar’s face stuck in contemplation framed by a yellow rain hat just as it was when I abandoned her. She has been trapped approximately five New Year’s Eves, and has spent those events mostly alone. When I saw her, I was reminded that I never made it to Oregon to meet her in the life I dreamed of. As an adolescent, I wanted to escape the past that pigeonholed me so that my true self would crystalize. I thought that I needed to leave Missouri for that to happen. I haven’t given up on Oregon; but I now know that I can grow into myself from anywhere. I want to change her—if only to put her in a sunny day and maybe an outfit that isn’t made of plastic—but the avatar site has been disabled. A forum tells me that this is because Yahoo! wanted to be taken more seriously. In its reconstruction efforts, the company made the unpopular decision to dismantle the tool that allows for frequent selfreinvention
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NONFICTION People lucky enough to have signed on during the reign of the Yahoo! Avatars are left with a mugshot of a slightly more attractive simulacrum. While no one is thrilled, some are more content with their alter egos than others: OMG I AM GONNA BE AT SCHOOL FOREVER, NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - TobyD It has me eternally pregnant! - SARAH Well….I guess I’ll stay in Paris with my cat then :) - Gissy ¹
Now frozen in time, the avatar loses its appeal. It has become—much like the physical body—an image that claims to represent our entire being when it really only denotes one small aspect of a vast entity. The malleable nature of the avatar is what held the appeal; one day a soft and feminine princess, only to transform into a starving artist the next. Avatars wait in their separate realm, perhaps wondering what has become of their person, while humans attempt to find a truth within themselves without the aid of a drawing board. Endnotes: ¹ Found on a Yahoo! Answers forum titled, "What Happened to the Yahoo! Avatars?" TobyD, SARAH, and Gissy are users that posted in the thread.
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POETRY Heat
Sade Howell slow and steady or fast i can’t really remember the exact moment your vulnerability seeped into soil your stillness refused to shake the tulips my tulip prim many-hued in our moments where my feet became feathery on the weight of your laugh my judgment finds you beautiful a sort of precious rarity binding your center to mine an angel’s effortless breath sweeps my collarbone excels against the insides of my neck building pausing at the rim of my bottom lip until it streams out slow and steady maybe fast i don’t remember i determine there is something everything that makes you beautiful holds you as the liquid sunshine trickling over many-hued tulips lying in a bed of soil trembling under the vow weighted possibilities of greater times vivacity to grow in our sleep
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POETRY Labor Day Weekend Tonya Eberhard
Hookah smells like incense from Mass and we be singing holy holy all night long with Led Zeppelin as the choir. Beer in one hand, hot August nights in the other. Yeah you joke about ISIS and Syria since you so far away from what they call home. You got the long weekend and school waits on Tuesday like a hungry dog ready to shred you for a single bone. It don’t matter to you. It’s the weekend and you still young. You still young and you a cat with nine lives. So your buddies tell you. But it’s the beer talking. Alcohol borrows voice boxes and vocal chords. You young and got eight lives to get rid of. That’s what you are.
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JELLY | CARMEN WOODROW, PHOTOGRAPH
PRECARIOUS GROUNDS | SARAH LEITUALA, PHOTOGRAPH
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SUTRO BATHS JOGGER | BO BRENDEL, PHOTOGRAPH
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PUBLIC TELEPHONE | BO BRENDEL, PHOTOGRAPH
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DRAGONFLY | SABRINA TINSLEY, PHOTOGRAPH
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UNLIKE REFLECTIONS | MITZI DOMINGUEZ, ACRYLIC PAINTING ON CANVAS
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HIDDEN FACES | MITZI DOMINGUEZ, PEN ON PAPER
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EYES SAY IT ALL | SIMON TATUM, PEN AND INK ON PAPER
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COMPLEXION | SIMON TATUM, PEN AND INK ON PAPER
SMALL GHOSTS KATE HERRINGTON
BICYCLE | CARMEN WOODROW, PHOTOGRAPH
NONFICTION OCTOBER 4, 2008 It was a temperate night for Sedalia, Missouri, but considering the fluctuating nature of Midwestern climate, it’s likely that 23-year-old Dana Bruce brought a jacket with her when she left the house. Or maybe she thought it unnecessary baggage and left for the bar in only a tank top and a jean skirt. Either way, she didn’t bring any money. She didn’t need it. She knew how to get all the free drinks she wanted. She danced her way down Main Street, her delicate frame barely casting a shadow on the aging buildings lining the road. The fluorescent sign of the historic Hotel Bothwell shone in the distance, but the lights Dana sought were at the end of the street, paralleled by the Amtrak station, where night trains would burn through due east, ferrying commuters with urgent meetings and family weddings in St. Louis the next day. Malone’s on Main wasn’t much more than a cheap dive bar, but people knew Dana there. The bouncer winked and let her slip by without paying the five dollar cover. She went inside, where the crowd threatened to swallow her up into a tempest of drunken team spirit: a football game was projected on the far wall, and the University of Missouri had already scored a pair of touchdowns in the first quarter. Dana slipped out to the back patio where a makeshift bar had been erected to service the overflow of bar hoppers. She pulled a cigarette out of the pack she kept in her back pocket. “Need a light?” an unfamiliar voice echoed the age-old refrain. Dana smirked and produced her slender matchbook. “No, but I could use a drink.” *** Explaining my town to someone who’s never lived there is difficult. Even the thousands that flock to Sedalia for the livestock, funnel cakes, and rickety amusement rides offered by the annual state fair can’t really understand the dynamics of my tiny city. Its hub of activity is the Wal-Mart Supercenter on the west side of town. Here, white collar business associates, first generation eastern European immigrants, and meth addicts shop sideby-side. Some days entire Mennonite families in their “plain dress” caps and gowns and overalls and foot-long beards can be found buying pre-sliced fruit tray arrangements while carrying on lively 30 EPIC VOL. 14
conversations via iPhone. Sedalia is what happens when a town booms in the 19th century, and then slowly is forgotten as rail lines close and opportunity seekers rove to the hearths of thriving urban settlements. The sentimental and the agrarian stay on for the big skies, infinite grazing land, and the comfortable feeling that everyone in their community has known them since grade school. Others—like me—find themselves here involuntarily. Forcefully relocated from the suburbs of Atlanta when I was thirteen, exploring Sedalia made me feel as though I were a befuddled astronaut, mistakenly landed on this prairie-like planet where raising pigs is in vogue, and pajama pants are perfectly acceptable fashion statements among the adolescent demographic. My first impressions of Sedalia happened in the winter of 2008. My family stayed in a hotel over New Year’s Eve. We drove around with our Moldavian real estate agent and tried to picture ourselves living next door to cattle ranchers. We were stunned as we took a walk downtown, finding we were among the few wearing heavy coats; our warm southern bodies cowered under the gusts of twenty-mile-per-hour winds that seemed to be no match for the rugged Sedalian natives. “Oh, there’s a missing woman.” My mom pointed to a flyer taped to the front window of an out-of-commission theatre. “Says it just happened a couple months ago. This is why girls have to be so careful. Don’t ever go places alone at night!” It was my mother’s usual safety spiel. I wasn’t sure where she thought I’d be going, though. I was undeniably in the abyss of pubescent awkwardness and had yet to make any friends in this foreign land. I studied the woman’s picture as my family moved on. She was small, almost like a young girl. Framed by brown hair that brushed her shoulders, her cheeks were rosy, and her smile slightly strained, like she was posing for a picture that was someone else’s idea. A strange green light was cast on the ceiling and people mulled about in the background. We saw several more posters as we continued around town, some offering physical descriptors and reward information. I remember being particularly disturbed by the idea that anyone would cause harm to a girl who only weighed ninety pounds.
NONFICTION *** APRIL 23, 2002 The sun was shining as a sinewy springtime breeze shook the limbs of a black walnut tree towering behind the high school. Dana sat below its lofty reaches, drawing long gusts from a joint nestled between her fingers. Her friend sat beside her in the cool grass, a relentless smile on his pale lips. His heart was full, and he could barely open his eyes for fear of letting out the happiness. And it wasn’t just the weed. He hoped she was happy, too. Her eyes were closed as his were—a good sign, he thought. He considered slipping an arm around her. The small of her back was inviting. But the moment passed and she stood up to leave and he just took another hit. *** Lying in my warm, quilted bed, I spent many adolescent nights thinking of Dana Bruce as my brain crept slowly to sleep. What if she had grown up like I had—in houses with hardwood floors and imitation granite countertops? With parents who have Master’s degrees and have seen the ends of the earth and tell her she can achieve anything she’s stubborn enough to chase after? Would she still be lying in a shallow grave? Scattered across the state in ashes? Floating apart into bloated pieces at the floor of a muddy farm pond? Entombed in cement? Walked daily over by ignorant feet? I’d like to think she’d be sharing a cozy apartment with a friend and two other girls she barely knows, having anxiety attacks about her midterm load. Struggling to decide which career path will most fulfill her in life. Writing an essay about a probably-dead girl from her town. Why am I not the probably-dead one? *** OCTOBER 4, 2008 Around midnight, the babysitter got up when he heard a familiar knocking on the front door. He found his good friend standing on the porch step, running her miniature hands along the budding goosebumps on her forearms. A red pickup truck was parked outside.
“Could you keep the kids until morning?” Dana’s blind eye looked more distant than usual. The babysitter sighed and leaned against the doorframe. “Who are you with?” She turned her good eye away. “Just some guy I met. The kids are ok, aren’t they?” He nodded. “Yeah, they’ve been asleep for a few hours. But who is this guy? Are you sure this is a good idea?” Dana giggled. “Don’t worry. He’s kinda funny-looking. Plus he’s an ex-Marine and he makes bank now.” She pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket and smiled at him. “Here.” He hesitated. Dana probably needed the money more than he did, and he would have done anything for her for free, anyway, but something in her expectant gaze told him this would make her happy. He thought of the hours he had spent with her – cutting class and sneaking joints behind the high school. His meager willpower receded as the memory washed over him, and he took the money. She ran off the porch with promises to return first thing the following day. But in the morning, when he awoke to the sound of her babies whining, he realized that she hadn’t. *** OCTOBER 11, 2014 Just like the night of Dana’s disappearance, this October afternoon was a particularly warm one. The trees had mostly exchanged their greenery for kaleidoscopes of maize and vermillion. The farmers looked cheerful from their tractor thrones, towing their hay bales and waving to me as I cruised past. After enlisting the help of a mutual friend, I was able to procure an interview with the detective who had been assigned to the nowstagnant Dana Bruce case, and I eagerly drove to meet with him. The only stipulation: I wouldn’t share confidential information. After downing a cup of steaming coffee, the retired detective looked at me squarely. “Are you ready?” I nodded and twitched in my seat. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. Fold them professionally or pensively spin my black ballpoint pen between my fingers? “There’s a video of her with our suspect at the bar,” the detective began. “This guy from the newspaper was filming. It was a big night. And that guy, who was taping everybody, is actually in prison VOL. 14 EPIC 31
NONFICTION now. So he was a suspect too.” I nodded again, hoping the little voice recorder my dad let me borrow was functioning properly, but I was too afraid to check because this was my first real interview, and I was terrified of doing something to make that fact obvious. “So we talked to the guy from the video as soon as we found out that he was with her that night, and he acted very strange. Like, ‘you guys don’t have any right to do this to me, to suspect me of this.’ This guy worked for one of the big businesses here in town, and he made a lot of money because he was a master welder. He can weld anything. You’ve got to have a lot of degrees to do that. So this company hired him, and he had this big attitude because he could make a thousand dollars a day if he wanted to.” I kept bobbing my head and making “mmhmm” noises, thinking I was coming across as eager and attentive. Later, when I played back the recording, my muffled grunts sound more invasive than anything else. “The suspect said to us ‘she gave me her name on a matchbook and said that her husband was there and that he was gonna try to cause trouble.’ We had nothing to prove that wasn’t true. After we questioned him, we told him to stick around and not go anyplace. He quit his job that weekend and left for the east coast.” That detail of the case is public knowledge, and I knew what came next, having read every account of the investigation that was ever published: a highway patrolman in Georgia pulled over the suspect and found several ounces of marijuana in his truck. He was arrested on the spot. “We sent three detectives out there.” The detective disclosed. “My bosses. They questioned him. They took DNA samples, clothing. He had a trailer. That’s where we thought maybe he’d taken her, but they got nothing. We talked to his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend and they both said the guy had been with them that night. We ended up not being able to file any charges against him.” His voice was tired. I could tell that the case still frustrated him. The police questioned countless others. The guy from the newspaper 32 EPIC VOL. 14
who turned out to be a child molester. Dana’s exboyfriend who had beaten her despite that she had borne him two children. The babysitter who had loved her since high school. “It was like molehills everywhere. Everyone I talked to sent me to somebody else. Everyone knew each other and would back each other up, and then turn on each other. I heard the same rumor told about several different people, but no one really knew what happened that night. They were all too high or too drunk to remember anything.” Somewhere around this point in the conversation, the voice recorder turned itself off, but I only realized this once the interview was over and the detective was long gone. I fervently wrote down every squandered detail I thought I had trusted to the recorder. My little moleskin notebook was crowded with hazy descriptions and timelines that were only feeble placeholders for the restricted identities and locations of an active case to which I was not privy. The scribbles stared back at me from the college ruled paper, their futility creeping around the edges of my erratic handwriting. I closed the book. *** In the past six years, I’ve come to love Sedalia. I’ve never found a place more welcoming, and I’ve grown accustomed to seeing dozens of people I know every time I visit Wal-Mart. I even discovered that Mennonites are exceptionally friendly and bake the most delicious pastries. Usually in conversation I refer to the old railroad city as my hometown, not minding the insinuation that I was born in such a funny little place. Frequently people remember that yes, they’ve been to Sedalia. For the state fair. They ate a footlong corn dog and paid two dollars to see A Real Life Snake Woman, who was really just a girl in a ridiculous costume. Less frequently someone will know that the famous ragtime musician Scott Joplin began his career in Sedalia, or that John Wayne once stopped into town to film an episode of Rawhide. Recently a documentary was made about the Ozark Music Festival that took place there in the 1970s—hundreds of thousands of hippies who came into town to see REO Speedwagon
NONFICTION and Lynyrd Skynyrd ended up taking over the city, sleeping naked in everyone’s yards, and overdosing on heroin. No one remembers Dana Bruce. It’s been years since I’ve seen any flyers bearing her name. I used to find them everywhere—stapled to telephone poles, tacked to community boards, hung in business windows. I wonder how people decided when it would be acceptable to take them down. Maybe they just mistakenly ripped them off one day, having grown so accustomed to the sheets of paper that they’d forgotten what was even on them. *** OCTOBER 11, 2014 I took a detour on the way home from the interview. Main Street was decrepit as ever—a wretched reminder of the lack of fervor and financial means that plagued the historic district. I looked for the little dive bar that I had never before thought to seek out. My GPS placed a very vague blue dot on the map for 115 West Main Street. Many of the buildings were closed, garbage strewn in their front windows. Slowly I rolled past gun shops and neglected antique stores until I found the bar I’d been hunting. “FRIENDLY’S!” shouted an out-ofservice neon sign. The corroded brick exterior spoke to the countless number of businesses the old corner building must have housed since its construction. I wondered if the bar was still in business and if the original Malone’s had closed in connection to Dana’s disappearance. As I drove away, I decided that the events were probably unrelated. People move on and they forget things that once seemed very urgent to them. Trudging forward, they exchange their hopes for the comforts of immediacy and ignorance. As I headed back north across the train tracks, I stopped to look both ways, but nothing was coming.
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POETRY Bedtime Eulogy Wyatt Lawrence
Fallen notes, restless as they spin off the piano roll, akin to the thrill of taking, taking preacher’s fire from this expanse of blackened air. A pool of grey, poor man’s silver, cast off by a mosaic moon. And me? I smear dry thoughts on a tombstone of polished marble. I’m bound to forget that head of hair, soft as will-o-wisps, lost in clumps, and foreign to this salted plot of soil. Too bad it doesn’t snow this far south, hollow without the crackling of winter air. And me? I’m full of wonder (or despair?), drawn from a well of brackish water, stagnant except for drops that fall like glossy pearls off a busted necklace. Listen to the pit split and hiss, eager to soak up all the dew of later days. And me. And me.
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NONFICTION Medicated Tonya Eberhard
Pure pill obliterates everything nightmares are made of. Dracula bats, metal bats that swing. Hey batter batter swing batter batter! The crack of the baseball flying. Echoes in the empty stadium. Echoes in the church. The Mass is empty but I want to exorcise myself out of my own body. The digging of a final resting place. Curse the primitive animal inside, clawing the thighs from the inside out, to live, live. To have lived many lives in every blackbird against the sunset. A gathering of nostalgia in each sunset and blackbird where lives were lived, no longer recognized but revisited. To exorcise the self from every boot print made on one side of the city. Boot prints on the path walked with unrequited lovers, almost-made-itlovers. Pure pill destroys nightmares but holds in the aftermath of Hiroshima bombings, making catharsis hollow and incomplete. The echoes in a silent church. The crack of a wooden baseball bat as it snaps in half. A fragment. A whole missing one piece.
POETRY Femicide is a Word Tonya Eberhard
Must be the desert that hungers for another girl pretty, petite full-lipped, black hair on a dry dinner plate Yeah, you’d like that How does the desert like it— a dress pulled above the waist or bleached bones? They don’t care They need another factory worker with nimble fingers eres hermosa, stupid girl The way you dress, you deserve it In the cotton killing fields of eight pink crosses and 27,000 candles If you go there, you might understand the frustration when police say she ran off with a boyfriend when it is not the hunger of the desert or one serial killer but the appetite of too many men
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ROTHWELL HEIGHTS BATHER | BO BRENDEL, PHOTOGRAPH
FICTION Jesús Saves Brooke Butler
I do feel a bit guilty. I try not to, but I do. Her bare feet slide across the dashboard of my car as I turn down her street. She’s been asleep for at least an hour now and I’m tempted to pass her house and keep driving. I could have her in Mexico in fourteen hours. Does she have a passport? I look around my car and spot a blanket in the backseat; maybe I could throw it over her when we make it to the border. I watch as the warm July wind picks up her sand blonde hair and waves it out of the window. “Leigh.” I whisper her name and nothing. Her house looks like something out of those Better Homes and Gardens magazines that my mom always flips through when we’re at the doctor’s office. I put the car in park and stare at the windows, wondering which room is hers. I want to say her name again, but I don’t want to wake her up. I stare at her face. It doesn’t really look like a face of a girl who wants to kill herself. She looks peaceful. Her eyelids are decorated with thin, dark blue lines above her lashes, her skin is adorned with freckles and her lips are chapped with dried pink lipstick. No, if this was a girl that wanted to kill herself, she’d have thicker eyeliner. She stirs a bit in her seat and now I’m nervous because I don’t want her to know about the letter or that I know what she plans to do tomorrow and goddammit I’m terrified she’ll see it on my face if she wakes up. I put the car in drive and watch as her house becomes smaller in my rearview mirror. When I reach a stop sign, I look through my search history on Google maps, trying to find my dad’s old house address in Mexico City. It’s three thumb scrolls down and when the app begins to route it, I imagine my mom scolding me. I can hear her voice telling me: “There’s nothing there mijo, just an ugly, empty house.” But she’s now replaced by the invisible lady’s voice telling me to turn down a street and I quickly turn off the volume. Leigh’s still asleep. I don’t let myself think about what I have done until I get on the freeway. It happened just about a month ago. I was
mowing the lawn at J. Waters Cemetery. I do this every Saturday morning at five before the living come to visit their dead with daffodils. I look forward to it. The pay isn’t bad and I get to keep the dried flowers I collect from all the wellvisited graves in a garbage bag. Wonk, the main groundskeeper, tells me that the cemetery has a strict policy on flowers. They must be lively and colorful, not crunchy and faded. So I take them in the garbage bag and I put them in the trunk of my car. When I’m done mowing, I go down to the abandoned community pool and I dump them there on the dry floor tiles. But that’s not something I feel guilty about. The pool is vacant and sad, and I give it another chance to be beautiful. What I am guilty about is something I’m not proud to say out loud. Flowers aren’t the only things I pick up on the job. I take cards that people leave, too. Wonk would kill me if he knew, but I can’t help it. The dead can’t read and it’s a goddamn tragedy for words to go to waste. So I collect them. On a good day I’ll have at least ten and some will be written in thin cursive, some in big fat lines; some are even decorated with stickers or drawings. The saddest ones have Dad written on the front of them. I save the Dad ones for last. Three Saturdays ago, I found one written in small print. It had “Gene” written on the top of the envelope and it was lying on a new grave. I could tell because the grass wasn’t settled yet. It had intrigued me more than the Dad ones because people usually wrote things like “my darling” or “grandma” and Gene was just so formal. It was cold. I tucked this one in the front of my pants instead of in my back pocket with the others. When I opened it, I was sitting in my usual letter-reading spot, the diving board. As was the tradition, I would read a letter, set it aside and then toss in a few bundles of flowers. Gene’s was the last letter of the morning. As I carefully removed the letter from the envelope and spread it in front VOL. 14 EPIC 37
FICTION of me, the first thing I noticed was the wide-ruled paper. Stationery is important when writing a letter. I lifted it to my nose and sniffed it. No perfume. Careless. I thought, poor Gene, and began to read. Dear Gene, Christ, this might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. And honestly, I’m sorry, but I had to tell somebody this and I picked you out of the obituaries because you seemed like you can keep things a secret. Unlike Helen Kirk in the column next to you, who looked to be the biggest loud mouth ever. Anyways, I’m writing you because I’m tired of living and I can’t pretend that I’m not tired anymore. Shit. I’ve never really said that out loud and I know technically I’m just writing it to a dead guy but yeah, wow. It’s nice not to keep that secret to myself anymore. I’m doing it soon too. Fuck, might as well give you the date, right? Let you know where to meet me in hell. You know what Gene, I’m sorry. That was rude of me, I’m sure you’re in heaven. I’m sure you saved some African kid’s life by donating five bucks every month for a year, bet you had his picture on your fridge, bet he was smiling. Anyways, mark your calendar for July 22nd. I would do it on the fourth and go out with a boom but my mom loves fireworks and hotdogs and being patriotic so I can’t do that to her. So now that I’ve told you, I’m going to seal this in an envelope and then it’ll be official. Goodbye, Leigh Shrigley P.S. I’m indifferent about the entire thing and that’s what kinda scares me when I think about it for too long. I knew Leigh from school. Well, sort of knew Leigh from school; we mainly knew each other from hanging on front lawns at parties. She was always really calm and I was always really drunk and she never minded drinking out of my flask after me. She even called me Jesús sometimes. Everyone at school only called me by my last name: Pacheco. And Leigh did too, but she was practically the only one outside my family that called me Jesús. So I was sitting and rereading this letter and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. I folded it back up carefully and put it in my pocket. 38 EPIC VOL. 14
There were nearly a dozen purple tulips I had saved for Gene lying at the bottom of the bag and I just couldn’t toss them out. All I could think is fuck; I couldn’t let the girl that called me Jesús die. So I picked up the garbage bag and I threw it into my trunk and I drove for what seemed like hours and I listened to the mix CD I made myself. I practically screamed out Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and then I texted Arnie, a mutual friend of Leigh’s and mine, asking for her number. The first few texts were awkward between us. I had to make up this story about how I had been missing a sock for weeks now and maybe I had left it at her house when a group of us went back there after those cops came and busted the party at Caroline’s last month. She said she couldn’t find it. I asked her if she wanted to hang out. She said sure. Three weeks later and here I am and there she is and I know I should be paying attention to the road but it’s three in the morning and the freeway is empty and I just want to get another good look at her. Her legs are now curled up on the passenger side and her head rests uncomfortably on the seatbelt. My dad used to tell me that he fell in love with my mom in a car. What the hell was I doing? Why did I think Mexico was going to save her? It didn’t save him. “Leigh.” I whisper her name again, and this time she opens her eyes. It takes her a second to fully wake up and even then she doesn’t move or say anything, just sort of takes in her surroundings. Then her brown eyes meet mine and she scans me before she speaks. “Where are we?” She yawns. “Umm, we’re on I-70 right now,” I say in my most casual voice. She sits up more now and checks her phone before responding. “Pacheco… my parents are gonna freak, it’s 3 a.m.” I look at the clock on my dashboard and act surprised at the time. “Time flies, huh?” I smile but she doesn’t return it. “I gotta go home.” “But wouldn’t you rather go to Mexico?” I ask jokingly. She smirks, “Yeah, definitely. Let’s go!” “Really?” “No, Jesús, take me home.”
FICTION I look over at her and put my blinker on. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to Mexico? We were making great time.” “Maybe another time.” She smiles. “I know about the letter,” I blurt out. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I stare ahead and turn off the interstate, knowing her eyes are all over me. “What are you talking about?” And I don’t want to answer. I don’t really know how to answer. I can’t just be like: “Oh, hey, funny story, I steal letters from graves and read them and I found yours and I know what you’re planning to do tomorrow, wanna go get some Whataburger?” So instead I just open up the glove box and hand her the letter. She doesn’t say anything. She takes the letter and immediately stuffs it in her back pocket and I’m tempted to turn on the radio. “I’m sorry.” I mumble and she begins to pick at her nail polish. “How did you find this?” “It’s a long story.” “We have thirty minutes.” So I do as she says and I tell her the story from start to finish. I leave out nothing. I even tell her about Tom Petty. She doesn’t laugh. “I don’t want you to die.” That’s how I end it. She stares straight ahead and watches as we go down familiar streets. “It’s complicated,” she says quietly. So quietly I almost miss it. “But I’ll miss you.” Her face turns to mine and she half smiles. “But you don’t really even know me.” And I want to say: “four weeks of you and I doing shit together is enough for me to not want you dead.” But I don’t. Sounds too harsh. Instead I go for an eloquent: “So? What does that matter?” And she laughs at that. “It doesn’t, I guess.” It’s quiet again as I search for something better to say, something about how she has told me a lot now, how she has trusted me on nights where she has slurred, how I have listened to her stories, even the boring ones. “So what did you do with the tulips?” she asks. “Still in the trunk, actually.” “Let’s throw them in the pool,” she says. When we get to the pool, I help her climb
the fence surrounding it. She jumps at the top and lands on her feet with ease and I quickly follow, landing on my ass, but with the tulips in hand. I hand them to her and she breathes out heavily. I follow her to the diving board and we sit there quietly for a few minutes. I check my phone. It’s 5 a.m. now. The sky is lighter and I can see Leigh’s body begin to shake. Her back is curved and her head is tucked tightly at the top of her knees. I don’t know what to say. I’m not great with criers, so I just put my hand lightly on her shoulder and she allows it. I wait for the diving board to stop shaking. “I don’t want to die, Jesús,” she whispers and I nod. “Then don’t die.” Her eyes lock with mine and she looks almost relieved by that. “Yeah? It’s that easy? Just live?” she asks, and I nod again. “Yeah, live.” She’s quiet and I watch as she wipes the tears from her cheeks. She’s thinking. And I regret removing my hand from her shoulder because she’s now staring at the dried flowers at the bottom of the deep end. We aren’t on the high dive, but Christ, we’re high enough. She moves and I panic. “Leigh, wait.” I nearly fall off reaching for her arm. She ignores me and walks to the edge of the board. I watch, paralyzed, as she just stands there. Then she lifts the old tulips and chucks them as hard as she can in front of her. They scatter everywhere.
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SPECIAL THANKS TO: UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI - DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH OUR ADVISOR, LILY GURTON-WACHTER