Leland Quarterly, Vol. 8 Iss. 1, Fall 2013

FALL 2013 EVELYN

ANDERSON NATASHA

AVERY GEENA

CHEN JENNIFER

SCHAFFER MAX

WALKER-SILVERMAN

leland Q UARTERLY Leland Quarterly Fall 2013

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leland

QUARTERLY VOLUME 8, ISSUE 1 Fall 2013

Copyright 2013 by Leland Quarterly, Stanford University All Rights Reserved Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco Editors-in-Chief: Katie Wu and Kunal Sangani Managing Editors Van Tran Benjamin Pham

Prose and Poetry Editor Rukma Sen

Senior Editors Chaz Curet Haley Harrington Dylan Sweetwood Varun Kumar Vijay

Layout Editors Irene Hsu Sera Park Varun Kumar Vijay Stepanie Wang

Associate Editors Alexandra Gray Irene Hsu Grace Kearney Sera Park Abe Romero Stephanie Wang

Financial Officer Dylan Sweetwood

Leland Quarterly: A Statement on Literature, Culture, Art, and Politics is a general interest magazine that showcases the very best in Stanford University undergraduate art and writing.

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EDITOR’S NOTE:

Why I wish Javier Bardem were here to explain it all to me...

T

here is scene in the Woody Allen movie, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” in which we meet an aged Spanish poet, the father of the painter Juan Antonio (i.e., Javier Bardem). The eponymous Vicky, brought by Juan Antonio to meet this man, learns that the poet has deliberately chosen never to speak any language besides his native Spanish. As Juan Antonio puts it, “He writes the most beautiful sentences in the Spanish language, but he… he doesn't believe that a poet should pollute his words by any other tongue.” Vicky seems to grasp only vaguely why this should be so, when she responds, “I understand, ’cause of the translation and the things you might lose...”

What is it, then, that you might lose? Learning a new language, you will experience the feeling of, “Somewhere, there is a three-year-old child—nay, a whole cohort of three-year-old children!—who can communicate with more precision and eloquence than I can.” And this won’t be melodramatic, it will be true. For anyone who never questioned her own fluency, the idea of having the tongue amputated and then rebuilt with agonizing slowness (and never to the dexterity of its native original) is a real loss, a trauma. After that, language, any language, can never be a given. Maybe when you first wrote something and it pleased you, maybe then you could hold together indistinguishably sound and meaning and connotation, not even wondering at the ease of rhythm, because there seemed to be no difference; it was all one thing. Think about how to conjugate your verb, find a substitute for the word you don’t know how to translate, and then you cannot believe anymore in an innate totality of language. Of course it’s still possible to achieve the effect, but you’ll know all the little ways in which language is a kind of alien object. You’ll know how strange it is that it ever seemed natural.

Yet despite this terrifying shift—in W. G. Sebald's words, “he had the special gift of acquiring a foreign language, without apparent effort…solely by making certain adjustments to his inner self”—despite this, I can’t help but think that what we’re all doing here is finessing the loss. Whether the language is French or C++, chemistry or philosophy, photography or biology—in short, any of the things you might come to Stanford to study and get good at—we can’t claim not to be altering ourselves in the process, and much more than our own sense of continuity would probably suggest. We’re erasing all the old feeling of unencumbered naturalness to make way for a wider reach. So when I say that we’re finessing the loss, what I mean is something akin to the courtiers of Renaissance-era Europe, striving to inhabit that inimitable gracefulness which is so powerful precisely because it's no one’s native state. It isn’t false, it’s merely learned. Contrary to the poet’s fears, detaching from our born idiom doesn’t diminish us, because in the trade we gain everything that’s greatly strange. And after that, what comes naturally might not seem so exciting anymore.

— BRIAN TICH

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CONTENTS

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

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ARTIST PROFILES Geena Chen Photography

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FICTION

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Sprout Natasha Avery

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The Collector's Tale Sarah Sadlier

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POETRY Bar, Hyder, Alaska Max Walker-Silverman

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Jack and the Jennifer Schaffer

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The Properties of Oxygen Wyatt Hong

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Rush Helen Anderson

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The New Mysticism Brian Tich

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Smoke Spot Irene Hsu

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Upwards West Max Walker-Silverman

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Shade Max Walker-Silverman

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Class with Boy and Banana Laura Pospisil

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Bus in San Francisco Max Walker-Silverman

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PAINTING

Queen, Drip, Drag Evelyn Anderson

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That Summer Evelyn Anderson

cover

PHOTOGRAPHY

Blue Sky, Grey Tongue Evelyn Anderson

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Marin Reeve

Open Throat Eyes Closed Evelyn Anderson

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We Haven't a Glue Evelyn Anderson

Night Becoming Evelyn Anderson

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Bar, Hyder, Alaska Believe it or not there’s still bars with cigarettes I’m told bars with pretty girls they say bars with Johnny Cash we think Guess I’ll go and grab a drink try to make another friend try to win a game of pool try to understand this world.

—MAX WALKER-SILVERMAN

with graphic illustration by Irene Hsu

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Jack and the —JENNIFER SCHAFFER

We’re sitting on the back porch of a hookah lounge when Jack looks up at me, hookah tip in one hand and cigarette in the other, and he says, ‘Tell me a story.’

‘A story,’ I repeat. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘you’re a writer aren’t you,’ and I want to say yeah and you’re a painter, paint me a painting, and then stick out the backs of my palms so he can paint it right on me, but I know he’s right, a writer should have a story to tell. I lick my lips, take a sip of the Smirnoff Ice he bought me, unironically. I stall. ‘Once upon a­­—’ He grimaces. ‘No, not like that.’ I raise an eyebrow. See at this moment I think I’m past the phase where I let men act like they can teach me a lesson but I’m not, I’m not there yet, I just think I am and that’s somehow more dangerous, somehow worse, like a lamb that sees a wolf and thinks she knows what a friendly one looks like. ‘Tell me a story from real life,’ he says, leaning back into his chair, and I’m surprised because up until this moment he’s wanted to know as little as possible, it absolves his guilt, you see, it keeps him clean, keeps him free, if he doesn’t know about what I’ve given up to be here, at this dingy little bar sitting next to a broken heat lamp on a freezing night in November he can take care of the 20 quid bar tab like that’s all there is, like there are no consequences to be paid.

A story from life, I’m thinking, well Christ, because this was the season I started thinking about people’s lives like strands of spaghetti, all twisted noodles overlapping, no longer the

nice mountain peaks your high school English teacher drew on the chalkboard next to the words climax and denouement but instead something sloppy and doused in sauce, and now he’s asking me to pull out a strand, tell him how I’ve lived. And have I? Well it’s funny because when I go home to the mess that I have made people will comfort me by saying at least you got a story out of it. They will listen, wide­eyed, to the narrative I piece together that validates my hard­-earned recklessness but what I carry will not be something cohesive and melancholy, what I carry will be moments, moments like this one, as he gets up to switch out the coals and I realize we’ve been sitting next to a river the whole night, and like that the geography of the evening unfolds below me like I’m a bird caught on an upwind and the formation I’ve been a part of lies below me now and there’s no story there, just the beating of wings carrying the night to some unseen, intuitive destination in the dark.

Shoot the bird back down from the sky. ‘Tell me a story,’ Jack is saying and I should say, No, let me keep this one for someone who doesn’t ask, let me whisper it like a gift, not a performance, not a reply to a command. But instead I begin.

‘There’s this man and he has so much stuff,’ I say, ‘So much crap Leland Quarterly Fall 2013

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he’s acquired through years of living, books and watches and the car door and walks down the dunes and up to the water dress pants and dog food, and a wife and three children and where he spent summers as a boy and he crouches down and a car that’s all paid for, one house then two houses, I guess falls over right there on the beach, and he lies there curled up you’d call the second one a cabin, but still. And more and trying to find some thread that will bring him back into the more the things he’s acquiring are things he can’t throw away linear sense of his life but all he’s got are these fragments that because they’re bigger than him, physically bigger, heavier. he can’t piece back together.’ Jack’s staring at me. ‘The end,’ I And the man gets scared, he starts waking up in the middle say, and I’m lying but Jack doesn’t care, he’s reaching out for of the night from these panic attacks where he feels like he the bill, he wants to get out of here. can’t breathe, like there’s a house on his chest, and when he And this is what you get in life. Not stories. Just­­nights. wakes he sees it’s just his wife’s hand but the weight’s still there The smack of cold air between the moment you exit the taxi like everything you ever put in a storage locker dumped right and step into the apartment. The feel of grape skin stuck to down from above. And then one late late night he wakes like the backs of your teeth. The echo of water running out the tap this but it’s not the weight this time, it’s the doorbell, and he in the room next door. The look of a window that’s dirty from slides out of the bed, right, he rushes across the carpet and the outside in. Not touch itself, but the moments right before. down the stairs and when he gets to the door of his big brick You don’t get narratives, you get the uncanny sheen of cheap house there’s no one there. Huf and puf and blow this polished wood, you get the cobweb caught across the house down, he says to no one in particular as he "Pull the lampshade, swept up in one hand and dropped shuts the door, locks it, and heads back up the the wastebasket lined with an orange plastic string again, inbag. stairs.’ At this point, Jack’s just staring at me, The glow of tiny screens, the bookshelf Jack, I'll give enthralled because he doesn’t realize I’m just full of borrowed things, and the tone of voice telling him his life in reverse. ‘And then what.’ a doomed man takes when he says, You make you It’s not a question, it’s a statement. ‘Alright,’ I me feel less alone. The color of morning stories for say, ‘And then he goes upstairs and suddenly when it comes too soon, the brightness of it hits him. He’s not safe here. He’s never been days, and I go noon when you try to will it away. If you think safe here. So he puts on dress shoes, just with his you get to keep the sex or the man, you’re wrong, on." pajamas, and he wakes his wife and says Sweetheart it makes for a good story but you’re making it up in we gotta get out of here, and he wakes the kids and he stuffs memory as you go along. them into one of the four cars in the driveway, and he leaves What you keep is just what frames them. The nearly­bare the front door open and they drive out, out, and when they’re tree with arms like a grandmother’s fingers and tiny delicate on the highway he steps on the gas with his left foot and rips red fruit like baubles filled with poison, lazy poison that the shoe off of his right and tosses it out the sunroof, and the would just slow your gait for a few weeks before taking you youngest kid is crying but his wife is silent and he rips off the down some idle early Wednesday afternoon, that hour when left shoe and throws it up above too, and they’re booking it, no one ever knows what to do. The taste of the 4:50 a.m. sky just racing into the night on this island that’s a country, going while you’re waiting for the bus to Heathrow, gut empty for straight East because that’s fastest, and when they reach the lack of goodbyes the last moment you ever expect to get one end of the land, the wife has tears just streaming down her because after this you won’t, anymore. cheeks and two of the kids are screaming bloody murder, And it’s only much, much later, that I realize the closure I pulling each other’s white blonde hair, and they all think it’s will seek for years is lying there right before me on the table. the end, even the man himself thinks This is it.’ I stop there, Jack’s hands are shaking. Trembling. for a breath. Smoky air. Stories. What good do they do you?

Yes the whole time, the whole time Jack’s hands were I just want to know where I arrive. But there’s Jack across the vibrating, quivering like he was hungry, real hungry, like he table, grinning like a child in a dirty sandbox who’s found was a man who hadn’t eaten in days, like the food he needed a doll that speaks when you squeeze its belly and I’m not was somewhere deep deep inside me where he could never me now, then. I’m going on my run­-ons with the conviction reach, like my kidney, or my youth, or all the places I would of strong emotion or the nearness of death by secondhand go, long after the man pulls his body up off the beach, pushes smoke, Pull the string again, Jack, I’ll give you stories for the sand off his heels and walks to the car, kisses his wife on days, and I go on. ‘But then he stops the car. Right there up at the cheek and kids on the forehead, and drives, back across the edge of the country he’s never left he stops. And he opens the coast, even­breathed, backlit by dawn.

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The Properties of Oxygen —WYATT HONG

I first learned of its need Through its absence In the thrashings of a bird in a jar.

A drug of natal addiction that keeps A man’s heart revving like the engine of a car, It takes the life it gives, turning a car Into a wreck of rust, and a man’s heart Into a jar of flies. Without a war The pyramids of Giza fall apart.

Yet people choose to breathe and burn Not because they prefer a slow painful death To a quick painful one, but because they yearn For a common doom, whose seal is breath.

In a conflagration we become dust And shower the ruins Where we burned us.

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The New Mysticism —BRIAN TICH

Who says, rise with the morning? Who says, remember?

Days of curtains strung up and dropped like winks say, show us the backstage magic crowding in the space above the bed.

[Undressed after dancing, lush with glitzy pop and loosened from the pummeling of sound pressure on me, I fold into sheets. The glowing seam fed from the hall lamp slides under the doorframe—fine hyphen and glutted as the split of a camera’s shutter.

So the light-bashed photo plate silvered for the soulscrape of being seen is me. Lulled past preparation, my eyes float up. Soft wait.

I think I lived years before I could remember what two days jammed one after another do and do not mean.]

Late morning pushes into butter gray. Ten seconds still before I will see I’m awake. Straight field space. Window bonesolid behind the scalloped muscling of the drapes—like a bright blank porthole flaring out offstage. That’s the funneling in of all the webbed tissue the day spins between its points.

It’s reclotting in the dimpled habitual places.

[Silver burn makes an image like clothing put on without looking to remember a scene laced into the framing of force and light.]

Blue then yellow pry into the black-and-white, click of the lids slams the bed closed, I look at the clock. The suspicion is only one-sided: flip a coin, what to notice is how your own fingers have altered. Who says, I have found no suitcases to convey my mania any further intact across your borders, and for this it’s just some flawed stitching at the edges that’s at fault?

[When morning is called and the bridges are let back down into their slots, the city reconstitutes its streets, demonstrating that suspension of the impassable hours is ended.

Where taxis just minutes ago couldn’t cross, stayers-out-too-late ride embottled like forthright messages thrown out over the crimping of the water. The place and the people that wake to fill it, remade: all the same things every day—only, here or there, an alteration takes

(which will leave us some simpler reason in explanation).]

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Blue Sky, Grey Tongue, Evelyn Anderson

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1 2 3 N Q R 7

RUSH —HELEN ANDERSON

The trick, in New York, is to swap out the word fear for adrenaline, and to always laugh when you talk about it.

This means a call to California on your first night in Brooklyn. Your sweat laminates your body to the sheets and your phone to your face. "Oh, that noise? That might be gunshots." You barely choke out the word for giggling.

"Who knows? Maybe someone's just really ready for it to be the fourth of July." On the other end, Sean is still trying to figure out what's funny.

People ask where you’re living and then they ask if you’re okay. You think about the morning you woke up early to find a police car hunched outside your apartment.

You think about the phrase good morning and how sometimes it feels better than that first cup of coffee and sometimes it makes you reshuffle the keys between your fingers, those DIY talons stashed in your pocket. You think about the teens at the corner bodega who call to you and your roommates. “You only like white boys? We can be white boys.” You were carrying Trader Joe’s bags. You were asking for it.

“I guess it’s kind of a rush,” you tell your concerned elders. You’re on their turf— Greenpoint, or the Upper West Side—where it’s easier than ever to laugh.

At first, you thought the scariest thing about living in New York—sorry, the greatest adrenaline rush—is when you’re on the train and the conductor starts leaning on the horn. For a few seconds it’s just noise, and then it fills up your sinuses and gets stuck between the wobbly fingers in your lungs and starts to pool in the indents of your spine 12

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and you know, you know, there’s someone on the tracks.

In your car, a toddler cries into the blare. He misses the F train. “But this train is better,” his mother says, bouncing him on her knee. “See, there’s air conditioning.” He wails.

Everyone looks irritated. No one looks freaked. You wonder if it hasn’t clicked yet or if this is just easier. Maybe they’re doing substitutions too. Someone’s about to die has been scratched out and replaced with Fuck, I’m going to be late for work.

You always brace yourself for the terrible thump, but it never comes. Out the window, you see people in hard hats standing on the narrow ledges right up next to the tracks, bored.

Once, waiting for the G train, you saw something moving on the tracks. It was a rat, you thought. You had seen them before, on the yellow signs stuck up around the platforms, and sometimes down there among the garbage, like overstuffed bacteria, ready for mitosis. But the thing moved out from behind a column and there it was, fully human. You thought about the announcements they sometimes made over the loudspeaker: No object is as valuable as your life. If you drop something on the tracks, leave it.

Then you saw his neon vest. He was placing some sort of red light between the sets of tracks. A train yelled, and he scuttled back onto the platform. The red light blinked, meditative, like the signal on your fire alarm that tells you the batteries need to be changed.

Your fears were always misplaced, caught up in some theme park version of real life. You let yourself dig into the rush of the scare, and then you would jump into the waiting hammock of relief. This is just the city going about its business. Nobody is going to get hurt.

You know there’s something you should be scared about, but if it’s not this, what is it?

Your apartment sits there, like a shameless wide smile, begging to be robbed. There are five of you, and two bedrooms. You leave the back window open, even when you’re not there.  Usually Anthony’s the last person in, and he forgets to lock the door. The two people sleeping in the living room—your first line of defense, really—could sleep through World War III, if it broke out right here in Bed Stuy. You know this because Brittany came in one night and knocked over a chair and it sounded like a firework in a concert hall. On the futon and the air mattress, neither of them stirred.

have similar safety alert systems, and if so, how many times a day do they media-blast their campuses, and do they, too, have to remind residents to lock their doors and windows?

You’re thousands of miles away, but AlertSU wants you to know that there’s been an armed robbery on campus.

This hits you harder than Ailina’s news about the stabbing in your neighborhood. Suspect is described as a heavy set 25yr old black male, wearing a black beanie, brown bandana with white accent, a brown hoodie, blue jeans, carrying a silver handgun.

But the thought of an armed robbery at Stanford seems surreal, almost laughable. Are you sure he wasn’t in costume? you think. Are you sure it wasn’t a social experiment?

After your first—and maybe only—month in New York, you feel like a survivor. All you have to do now is make it to JFK, and the hardest part, you think, will be getting your suitcase under the subway turnstiles.

The A train—the one that will take you to the airport, and across the country, and back to tame, air-conditioned

Your subway stop is Murder Ave, but no one tells you that until your last day in new york.

During your last week, you come home and the front door is hanging open. Nobody is inside. You try to close the door, but it won’t. It’s so hot that the wood has swelled up, and now it won’t fit inside the door frame. If you slam it hard, it will wedge itself in part way, but never enough to lock.

Your subway stop is Murder Avenue, but no one tells you that until your last day in New York. Before you got there, you looked up directions to the apartment on Google Maps, and the Myrtle-Willoughby stop sounded like something straight out of The Secret Garden. You couldn’t say it without thinking about The Wind in the Willows, or that children’s song: Willoughby Wallaby Woo, an elephant sat on you. Willoughby Wallaby Wee, an elephant sat on me.

“Remember that night we went out and then you stayed at my place instead of going home at 2 AM?” your friend Ailina says. “The next day, I saw on the news that some old man in Bed Stuy had been stabbed to death. At 2 AM.” Instead of braving Murder-Willoughby, you had fallen asleep that night to an episode of New Girl, and you woke up in Ailina’s apartment near Central Park, where all the neighbors had dogs.

Back at your apartment, all the roommates are accounted for. In the evening, everyone’s phones go off in chorus. You find a text message, an email, and a robotnarrated voicemail waiting for you, all courtesy of Stanford University’s AlertSU system. You know AlertSU best for gems like the suspect is an average-sized Indian male who smells of apples, and you wonder if schools in New York

suburbia—is delayed. They’ve inserted the word substantially before delayed. You’ve been told to take the C, if at all possible.

The platform feels like the rainforest, but has that kalamata olive smell you’ve come to identify as garbage heating up in the steam. A couple hours later, on a different but equally sweaty platform, you meet her: the only MTA employee who carries herself like a human. She wears gold hoop earrings, and pink lipstick, and defeat. You’re worried about missing your flight. She tells you what the loudspeaker won’t: someone jumped in front of the A train.

You sit down on your suitcase. You wonder if the conductor leaned on the horn when it happened. You want it to have been like that. You want everyone to have heard that ugly, all- consuming fanfare: BE AFRAID! BE AFRAID! But you know there wouldn’t have been time. There would have been only the cymbal- heavy headphone runoff, and the endless rehearsal of hoarse homeless men begging small bills, and the sound of the train itself, like the bloodrush when you plug your ears. There would be no thump, and if there was, it could have just been a Coke bottle.

It would be too late, but the conductor would slam the brakes and the people in the cars would all fall into each other. They would right themselves like rigged bowling pins, and then they would pat their pockets to make sure their wallets were still there. Everyone would be annoyed, and no one would be freaked.

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California

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Artist Profile:

Geena Chen

Geena Chen ('16) is a photographer and poet interested in selfportrayal and how, as we change our relationship with ourselves, those changes become outwardly visible. The pieces shown here are photos stitched together from different time periods and forced to interact within a single frame.

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Beach House (above) Silver Lake (opposite)

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Bloom (above) Half Moon Bay (opposite)

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Nanjing (above) Braun (opposite)

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“U

P W AW RE DS S

T ”

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Sleepless, we hit the fevered highway calloused and insane, just a couple caffeine headaches with toothpicks in our mouths – westward the washboard miles like a foreign war.

The old man rides shotgun with a younger man’s grin all dust and jitters and tangled nerves – ever the old soul now the prostate to match. running the fateful race against a melanomic scalp.

He casts a fly in small streams and doesn’t catch a thing – stumbling over rocks and memories, chest deep in cool nostalgia and happy for the first time in years.

He takes a long time to tie flies now.

I’ll help.

—MAX WALKER-SILVERMAN

Self-Portrait, Geena Chen

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Smoke Spot —IRENE HSU with photographs by Marin Reeve

LAURA

I don’t know what to do about my son Maurice. He is too old for God, my advice, and curfews, though my sister the psychic said otherwise over the phone. I called her last week for three free sentences of personal guidance.

“Maurice may be in grave danger if he doesn’t watch out for curfews.” Her words, not mine.

“That’s a load of bull,” said Maurice last week. “You just don’t want me out.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I just want you safe.”

“I’m seventeen,” he said, and slammed his door.

Then last night: he comes home past eight and scoots into his room like nothing happened. I opened the door to tell him it’s Sunday, why wasn’t he at church, and why was he home after sunset?

He was shaking.

I knew it. He had thought he didn’t need a jacket, and then he had left without his jacket, and then he had been

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out past sunset, and then he had caught a cold. I covered him up with a blanket, but he just brushed me off, and the blanket fell on the floor.

He just doesn’t understand. He never listens to me, no matter how many times I tell him to. All I’ve ever wanted was for him to listen.

He stared at me, then said, “Mom, if I tell you something, will you call the police?”

I knew it. He was smoking marijuana. Probably with that boy Christopher. I always knew he was suspicious.

“I witnessed a murder,” he said. He had found a dead body in a car. And had seen the murderer running over the hill? Is that what I was hearing? Was he high?

Maybe I could say that it was okay. But it wasn’t. And he would tell me it wasn’t and that I was crazy. Or I could say that everything will be okay. But he would tell me I was crazy too.

What could be done? What could I say?

“I told you,” were the words that came out of my

mouth. Because I really had told him. “If you hadn’t been out, this wouldn’t have happened.”

He stared at me.

“If you had listened to me, nothing would’ve happened,” I heard myself saying again. I picked the blanket up and started to wrap it around him. “You’re shaking. You caught a cold, just like I said you would.”

“You’re crazy,” he shouted, pushing me away. “Leave me alone.”

He pushed me out of his room and banged the door shut.

He just doesn’t get that this is serious and that he brought it upon himself, and I told him that. He deserved it, or at least that’s what I told myself as I tried to pick the lock on his door.

But after a while, I realized it wasn’t entirely his fault.

Maurice is a good kid. If my psychic sister had told me exactly what would happen, I know Maurice wouldn’t have been out after sunset.

I called her again.

“Laura, don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s not what you think. Get some sleep.”

I asked her why she didn’t tell me about the goddamn murder, but then she laughed at me and hung up because I didn’t want to pay for a fourth sentence. Then, I called her again to tell her I’ve hated her guts ever since I was ten, but she told me to calm down. Calm down! She sure didn’t calm down when I got an A in Calculus and when

her ex-boyfriend asked me out and when Mom gave grandma’s necklace to me, not her. I bet I’d even make a better psychic.

MAURICE

I saw a murder.

Well, Christopher saw it, but I was at the scene of the crime, and then the murderer saw me. I haven’t been at school for a week. And Christopher doesn’t even care.

I said to him, “We’re witnesses.”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” he said, smashing his clay pipe.

“We need to tell the police,” I said. He laughed.

I couldn’t believe it.

“Do you think this is funny?” I said on Tuesday.

“It is,” he said.

Sometimes I don’t even know why I put up with him.

He always swings his legs up on my dashboard. I say, “Hey Christopher, mind taking your damn feet off my dashboard?” And he looks at me like I’m crazy. There are permanent shoe prints on my dashboard. It’s my car.

Or was my car. Now it’s my mom’s car—we traded, just in case. Just in case the murderer finds me, since he’s definitely out to get me. After all, we interrupted his prayers and almost ran him over. Even Hamlet let his uncle finish his prayers in peace. My point is, I need to take extra precautions, like taping up my license plate

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and covering the windows with towels.

I’ve also been on the move. Safety first. I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been to the grocery store, the elementary school, the aquarium—anywhere with a crowd. I’d take Christopher, but he doesn’t seem to care about his life, which I don’t really understand.

The way I’ve budgeted my time is that I get up to “go to school,” but instead of going to school, I drive to Christopher’s place to drop off my homework. Then, I drive someplace else. I text Christopher where I am so that if something happens to me, he’ll know I’m missing. I stay there for half an hour, and then I drive someplace else. Then, at two, I go back to school to go to art. It’s dangerous, I know, but how else can I pick up the next day’s homework? And how can I leave Christopher alone? Not that he cares, but isn’t it the right thing to care for someone who can’t care for himself?

He used to skip school liberally, too. He wanted to go everywhere with me, even to find Dom’s smoke spot. But then again, Christopher, he doesn’t even care about his own life. He doesn’t understand that there is more to life than getting stoned every day. The first time we hung out, I smoked with him—once, just to be polite. You know, etiquette. But now it seems like that’s the only thing he does.

If my mom finds out that I haven’t been at school, she’ll kill me. I’ve ruined my perfect attendance, but I have to get my priorities straight. My mom—she doesn’t get the magnitude of this. She storms into my room, tears the towels down, cries about how I’ve caught a cold, and when I explain, tells me I’m crazy and cries some more. She even tries to bring Aunt Claire into this, until I want to scream, “If she’s so goddamn psychic, why doesn’t she rip out the phone line before you call?”

Pardon my French, but this is a stressful moment in my life.

Aunt Claire brings me to my next point: I’ve started wondering if I’m making something out of nothing? Mom and Christopher wouldn’t actually be this nonchalant unless there really were nothing to worry about, would they? I mean, even my aunt is telling me to calm down, and she’s clairvoyant, for God’s sake.

But the way I see it: if the murderer isn’t coming after me, then I’m just wasting some time. If he’s coming and I don’t do anything, I’m dead.

Better safe than sorry.

That means I’m doing the right thing, and Mom’s a psycho.

Christopher’s definitely a psycho. My psychic aunt is a psycho. And if I don’t get some peace of mind soon, I may end up one, too.

I mean, even my aunt is telling me to calm down, and she’s clairvoyant for God’s sake.

LUCY

I think I need new friends.

Today was the day my old high school friends planned to have dinner, but I forgot how spontaneous they can be. Instead of dinner, they decided to drive down to the old lake—I thought we were going to have a picnic, but instead they wanted to go skinny-dipping. I said it wasn’t a good idea.

“Lucy,” they said, “you need to lighten up a little.”

Everyone is always telling me that I’m a prude—but I’m not. I can have fun. I always tell them that we should make scrapbooks, or go iceskating, or have a picnic or something, because having fun doesn’t always 26

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mean getting inebriated. And now I’m standing with water up to my neck and I am cold and it is night and I have no idea where my clothes are.

They also took my keys, even the shoes. And Dom got those for me. I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but Dom used to be a wild guy—the kind my parents would flip out about. He even used to drink and smoke. But I think he quit for me.

I wish I could call him now. Or that I had my socks. As it is, if I ran up that hill in my bare feet and got into my car, imagine the mud. The dead insects. It’s a new car.

The worst part is, I can see my car up the path. Someone even walked up to it, but I couldn’t shout—because I’m naked.

I told my parents I’d be back before dark, so they’ll know something went wrong. Maybe they’ll have the housekeeper come find me, once they track my phone.

I don’t understand. Why couldn’t we have just had dinner? I hate when people change plans, and now, my parents will think I lied to them, like I planned this.

Maybe I’m just not cool enough to have the kind of fun my friends have. I’ve always felt a little left out, like the time we all went clubbing.

God, I hate practical jokes.

“Was that here the last time we were up this hill?” said Maurice.

A red BMW Z4 perched on the slope. Maurice rolled his crushed can of a car to a stop. We whistled at the retractable hardtop roof.

“Look at that,” whispered Maurice. “300 horsepower.”

As if I didn’t know.

I almost lost it—if you saw his face, you would’ve too—but instead, I yelled, “Drive!”

CHRISTOPHER

Maurice and I wanted to find a new smoke spot since the city council busted our old one. They even took down our graffiti. I was so mad—that spray paint cost $10 for the paint, and $10 to pay someone over 18 to buy it for us.

It’s like minors don’t even have rights.

It was for the better, I guess. I didn’t like our old spot anyway. It smelled like rotting rain in the summer, and once, we found a dead rat split in two at the base of the wall.

The thing is, Maurice heard that Dom had a place up in the hills, so he wanted to root it out, just to piss Dom off. I didn’t want to. Dom’s tough like beef; if you’ve got a beef with beef, you’re as good as dead. But Maurice, he’s had it in for Dom ever since he was five, but Dom doesn’t know, so that’s why Maurice isn’t dead.

We should have been carving out our own spot, but instead, we spent the whole damn afternoon looking for Dom’s, which was probably just a decoy so geeks like Maurice wouldn’t trash it. Maurice must’ve wasted a gallon of gas driving up and down that damn hill.

“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s smoke.”

“I want to find the stinkin’ spot.”

That’s Maurice for you, dogged as hell, perfect attendance for all of high school.

It was getting dark and we were driving up the hills for the eleventh time.

The glint flitted off her curves. It glided off her silver trim, leather upholstery, rims—she was a beauty.

Maurice squashed his nose against his car window. He looked down. I looked down.

“What’s that?” I asked.

That was a pair of Oxfords, said Maurice, who knew not because he was gay, but because his mother paid him minimum wage to shop online for women’s shoes. They were tan, with patterns cut along the shoe like lace, Maurice narrated. Who knew shoes could be so complicated? I mean, to me, they were the size of two toilet paper squares, sitting on the slope by the Z4, waiting for someone to step back into them.

We stared in silence.

“Whose are they?” I wondered.

“How should I know,” said Maurice. “Check in the car.”

“You look. You’re closer.”

“I’m driving.”

That’s his damn excuse for everything, that prick. He made me get out to look. So I looked.

There was nothing. It was empty.

I could feel Maurice staring.

“What is it?” he called.

I counted to three. Then I dove into his backseat, slammed the door, and screamed, “There’s a woman lying facedown!”

“What?”

I almost lost it—if you saw his face, you would’ve too—but instead I yelled, “Drive!”

The car lurched forward. Maurice screamed at me and I screamed back, interjecting curses every so often to maintain my act.

A dark figure appeared.

“Slow down!” I screamed.

“What?”

“You’re about to hit something!” I screamed. He screamed. We swerved.

“What was that?”

That was the shape of a man kneeling on the ground.

As we whizzed by, I could hear his voice trailing, “Oh, God!” Leland Quarterly Fall 2013

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“He’s praying,” I decided.

“Are you crazy?” Maurice screamed. “Why is he praying?”

We were out of the hills. Maurice was still shaking by the time he pulled into my driveway. It was great.

“What are we going to do?” he said.

“Just forget about it I guess,” I said.

“That man just murdered that woman,” he screamed.

“Yeah,” I said.

I didn’t feel like telling him there was nothing in the car. I figured I’d throw it in like a punch line someday.

That’s what you get when you pull me into your secret beef with Dom that I really, truly don’t take stock in.

Especially when I just need a smoke.

JONATHAN

My nephew's hamster has been “missing in action” for weeks now. I’ve been telling the kids that it ran away and I’d get them new one. But every time I say that in the house, my sister shoots fireballs at me with her eyes, so I’ve taken to telling them outside the house.

Inside the house, I’ve been telling myself that it is time to move out.

I mean, we’re pretty thoughtful people, even for siblings. I even thought about getting her leather shoes

a can of beer to wash down my toast and remembered to turn the channel to twelve so I could turn on the TV and scroll through the guide.

But now he’s married.

We had lived together for six years, including college.

We could have just lived together for the rest of our lives and been wingmen and played beer pong every night. But it was inevitable that he’d crack, just like everyone else, and get married. I mean, she wasn’t even cute.

And what am I left with? A hamster, that’s what. That selfish S.O.B. Of course I moved out after he got married, because how the hell do I pay the rent with a crappy job at Starbucks? Knowing that a Macchiato is an upside-down latte doesn’t get me my own two-bedroom apartment.

The hamster and I walked up and down the aisles, and I asked it what my sister would want. I felt bad. Martha was right, I couldn’t be a bum forever. The hamster pawed at the wall and stared at me.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “We’ll get some beer.”

So we got some beer, my hamster and I. We set ourselves down outside the store so I could open a can and figure out how to get back into the house. Then, the cute cashier who thought I was cute, I thought, came out and told me not to loiter. Who was loitering? I sure wasn’t loitering.

“We don’t need her,” I said to my hamster, and it pawed at the wall a little more frantically and stared at me with its soulful eyes.

We sat down in the parking lot and drank.

“Want some?” I asked when we reached the parking lot. “Don’t be shy.”

I finished a can. A couple walked by me and whispered.

When I gave them a dirty look, they scampered away. I finished another can.

“Do you think she’ll have us back?” I asked the hamster.

It wriggled into the bedding and I turned the cage upsidedown. “You can’t ignore me like that. You’re not Martha.”

I finished another can.

“No, you’re right,” I said. “We don’t need her. Let’s live the good life without her.”

Just then, someone interrupted.

“Sir, you’re in my way,” someone said. “That’s my car.”

“I need a ride,” I told him. “My sister threw us out and my roommate got married.”

He stared at me for a moment.

“I can’t drive,” I repeated. “I’m drunk.”

I clutched my hamster as he drove. He played piano music, and I tried to sing along.

“Could you keep it down,” he said.

I felt like crying. No one appreciated me.

Knowing that a Macchiato is an upside-down latte doesn’t get me my own two-bedroom apartment once, for God’s sake. I saw them, and I immediately thought, wow, she would really like these. I mean, I didn’t get them, but it’s the thought that counts. It wasn’t about the money. They just weren’t in her size, because there was only one size. But now, she just wants to kick me out of her house, like that night I lost her kids’ hamster.

Actually, now that I think about it, it was my hamster.

I bought it with my own money, and it was cute, up until people were trying to sleep. Then it went nuts and ran around in its wheel. I mean, I didn’t mind, but I guess my sister did. She’s always been a light sleeper. When we were little, I used to get up to take a leak and she’d tell me to stay the hell in bed, even if the house was on fire, because she wanted to sleep and I made a racket. Then, a few weeks ago, she had told me that I needed to get the hell out of her house, and to take the hamster too.

So I took the hamster, cage and bedding and all, and I went to the grocery store. That place has been like a second home to me, even before my sister got sick of me. Maybe since my roommate first moved out and stuck me with a lease I couldn’t afford. My roommate was the only one who ever understood me. He was the only one who left me 28

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“Turn left here,” I said.

“Here?” He swerved left into a dirt road.

“Go up that hill.”

He gave me a look but did as he was told. It felt good to be taken seriously.

“Keep going,” I said.

I saw a metal glint on the next hill. “Actually, stop here.”

“Here?” He stopped the car. We were on a hill. “You sure?”

“Yes, yes.” As I stood up, the earth almost tipped me over. “Hey, thanks.”

“Don’t forget your hamster,” he said and drove away. His car disappeared into a tiny dot. Then, it was quiet.

I stood at the top of the hill. That asshole had dropped me off in the middle of nowhere, not even close to the glint. What did he expect me to do now?

“It’s so quiet,” I said to the hamster. It was so beautiful. The sun was sinking. It hurt to look.

I really needed to pee, but not in the open. So I trekked down the hill.

My hamster and I, we talked about life. We bonded. We discussed the economical difference between tall and venti, and how some hotshots just don’t leave tips, and finally, we reached the bottom of the hill. I took a leak.

“Good stuff,” I said, zipping up my pants. Then, I saw there were more hills.

“Let’s go up that one,” I said.

We went down one hill and up another to the glint. Then it turned into a big object.

“Hey,” I said. “That’s a nice car.”

It was red. And shiny. I leaned over to touch it and tripped over something.

“Hey,” I said. “Nice shoes.”

They were leather shoes, sitting outside the car. And no one was around.

“I should get them for my sister,” I said. “They look girly. How much time do you think that would buy me? A year?”

My hamster turned its bum to me.

“You’re right,” I said. “They look small. Martha has big feet.”

Probably to trample all over my life.

“Screw her!” I concluded.

I looked my hamster in the eyes.

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t you ever get tired of this ratty old cage?”

One of us had to live the good life.

I left the shoes and hiked up another hill. At the peak, I dropped to my knees to scoop the hamster out.

“Run free,” I said. “Eat some nuts.”

It crawled away.

I heard a rumbling in the distance.

“Rain’s coming,” I said and started digging. “I’ll make you a home.”

The rumbling got louder. Louder, then brighter. Was it a tank? A car? God? It was getting closer, closer, but I couldn’t get up. My knees were glued to the dirt. My body was so heavy, I was dying. I squeezed my eyes shut.

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“Oh God,” I shouted, as a gust of wind hit me.

When I opened my eyes, it was quiet.

“That was close,” I said to my hamster.

There was a bloody pancake off to the side.

I couldn’t believe it. Life was so short.

I cried and promised I would live a full life, not one moping over my roommate’s marriage, or mooching off Martha, or making upside-down lattes at Starbucks. I was a new man. I would turn over a new leaf. No more groveling for a place to stay.

I scooped up the pancake and cried some more. I moved it into the burrow I made. I prayed, “Hamster, you have not died in vain.”

The tears stopped, and I knew it was time to rise. It was time to go back to my sister’s home and apologize and promise to move out. After all, we were family.

I got up to find the shoes. They were at the top of the other hill. But it didn’t matter—I owed this to Martha.

I took a deep breath and started moving towards the shoes, when suddenly, I felt sick. I threw up.

It was a sign. Clearly, nature didn’t want me to move in that direction, and I was sure my sister could understand.

Plus, my knees hurt.

The shoes probably didn’t even fit her anyway, her and her big feet.

born needing a smoke. And lately, I’ve been thinking about my life. Lucy and I, we go to Starbucks when she’s home from college. This guy mans the cash register and makes Frappuccinos all day. No matter the hour, he’s there. He is Starbucks. And he’s thirty. Always gripes about living at his sister’s and drunk-dialing his flaky ex-roommate. I don’t want to be that guy, the old guy at Starbucks making minimum wage. If I’m thirty and I’m working at Starbucks, I want to at least be manager. But that guy at Starbucks, he’s not even a shift leader.

I’ve decided that people like that aren’t good influences

I walked up to her and asked her out. She told me I had initiative. So that’s what I’ve wanted my life to be about.

DOMINIC

Yesterday at lunch this guy Christopher sat himself down next to me, peered at me with these glazed eyes and asked whether I really had a smoke spot up in the hills.

“Why do you want to know,” I said.

“My friend Maurice is obsessed,” he said.

I didn’t even know a Maurice. Maybe he was the nerd in my history class who always asked questions— sometimes questions that even teachers couldn’t answer.

That guy—he seemed like someone my girlfriend Lucy would like. I wondered if he’d be good for my initiative.

The first time I saw Lucy, I walked up to her and asked her out. She told me I had initiative. So that’s what I’ve wanted my life to be about.

“I don’t know a Maurice,” I said, “and I don’t have a smoke spot.”

I quit smoking almost a year ago. It’s part of my initiative, too. Lucy doesn’t like the smell, and I’m going to marry her, really. In a month, we’re celebrating our anniversary. It’s hard, not smoking, but she got me a lot of gum. I pop in a few pieces and the feeling goes away.

People keep asking if I want a smoke, but they don’t realize that part of me has melted away.

Lucy’s happy about it, too. She said she loved me.

Christopher, though. He’s one of those guys who was 30

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in the long run, only going to keep me back one more year in school. So I’ve just been eating alone. It’s nice, except when people try to talk to me or sit with me because they think I’m lonely.

“Well, we spent all of Sunday driving up and down the hills for your spot,” Christopher continued.

I told him again I didn’t have one.

“What kind of lighter do you have?” he asked.

This kid, he smelled like smoke and couldn’t take a hint.

“Excuse me,” I said. I was going to have dinner that night with Lucy’s parents. They’re high-class people, and parents don’t like me very much, even when I don’t smell like smoke.

“Why don’t you tell them about quitting smoking?”

Lucy had said. “My dad used to smoke, he’d understand.”

Dinner with parents? I’d need a smoke every minute.

It’d ruin my initiative.

“They’ll like you,” said Lucy. “I tell them good things about you.”

Maybe she told them about the shoes—then her parents would know that I care about her. Like last week, she told me she wanted these shoes called Oxfords. I looked them up on the Internet, and I thought they were really cute. Then last weekend, like magic, they popped up in a store display, and they were just in her size.

That’s the great thing about quitting smoking—having money to spend on things that last more than a joint.

Maybe she mentioned my A in business. Her dad was a businessman—we could talk business. We could talk about Lucy’s Oxfords, and we could talk about my initiative. Then one day, we could talk about my job, a real job, like a P.E. coach or life coach or a pilot.

And after that, we can talk about me marrying Lucy, and if it all works out, it’ll be me and Lucy doing all the talking. Making breakfast, tucking in the kids at night— no one else, because it’ll be me and Lucy, together.

SHADE —MAX WALKER-SILVERMAN Billowing nimbus, white with parental strife haunts a farmhouse in Kentucky A careless mist drunkenly kisses the toes of poachers and tourists counting tics on a Pensacola clock Humid vapor thick with sweat and dollars swamps con artists and crooks sending housewives to hysterics in DC The weighty machine haze blesses bankers and abundant bums with tumorous halos in New York Jaded storm greys throw their sorrows down the rutted waterways of Denver Amorous fog sweeps my sweetheart off her feet in holy San Francisco This road I’m on got no shade.

It carves a lonely path through urban umbrellas and directs this rough, hot wind through painful crevasses in my chapped lips.

This road I’m on.

This road.

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class With boy banana AND

—LAURA POSPISIL

Professor’s talking cognitive resource allocation, but mine is captured by imagination: You peel my yellow dress from ripe white slender soft sweetness.

Your mouth works its way from top to bottom, finishing the sweet indulgence; My body is your lecture snack.

I let the mystic flower keep its petals and ask instead the phallic fruit, its cross-section a “Y” for yes, telling me I won’t go another night as a banana who wears her pajamas.

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Open Throat Eyes Closed, Evelyn Anderson Leland Quarterly Fall 2013

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Sprout

—NATASHA AVERY

During morning break, Jamie from HR came up to our lunchroom with big news, strutting into the middle of our huddled bunch.

“I just hired your new temp,” he said excitedly. We asked him to tell us about her, but he just smiled and shook his head. “You’re not going to have to worry about her becoming full time, I’ll tell you that much.” We offered him a caprese skewer. It was mid-March, leading into beach season, and the four of us were on Atkins. He politely declined. “Just wait and see.”

Next Monday, we saw. Hearing loud, unfamiliar laughter coming from Pete’s office, we froze in our cubicles, sitting high in our chairs to peer over the gray dividers. Pete opened the door, and, walking backwards, still in mid-conversation, out came a tall blonde woman wearing a green dress that went down to her ankles. Towering over Pete, she must have been about six feet tall.

He handed her the tissue-wrapped BullsEye Adminstrative Staff uniform that we had all received on our first day. We watched her walk towards the ladies’ room, her flowing dress trailing behind her like a wedding train.

“Oh my,” Pam said.

Too distracted to work, we listened for her shuffling to her new station. We stood up to see, and noticed that her brown henley shirt fit loosely on her shoulders, but the material clung tightly to her rounded belly.

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We clustered around a bowl of strawberries in the lunchroom, waiting to cross-examine our new arrival.

Pete had introduced her during morning meeting as Mary, sparing biographical detail. She strolled in a few minutes late and took her seat across from us.

“Remember, you’re only supposed to have seven strawberries per snack,” Pam said, swatting away Karine’s hand.

Mary laughed heartily for a second before realizing she was laughing alone. She opened her bag and pulled out a large Tupperware container, unleashing an aroma of Tzatziki. Studying her face, I thought she had the looks of a pin-up girl, and the plumpness of her cheeks just exaggerated her full lips and slightly upturned nose. She was one of those girls who was pumped full of estrogen; something about her changed the uniform, bringing out a sexiness we hadn’t imagined in a shirt and cargo pants.

“So, Mary,” Pam said, leaning into the table. “When are you due?”

“The fourth of July,” she replied. “ Is it a boy or girl?”

“A boy.”

“Oh, how great! I bet your … husband’s real happy about that?” Pam said cautiously. Mary shook her head, and picked out a ball of falafel with her fingers.

“Oh, I’m not married.” She plopped the falafel into her mouth, then slowly licked her fingers clean.

“Your boyfriend, then?” Pam suggested.

“I’m not seeing anyone.” She said. “Are you?”

Pam shook her head and laughed. “Oh no, not me.

I’m just, you know, focusing on me, you know, working on myself….” She looked around, to Lesley, to me. “But it’s fine, we’re okay with that, we’re all under thirty…”

••• She was a flirt too. Although she quietly smiled around the admin girls and mostly stayed plugged in to her workstation, she grew animated whenever she spoke to Pete or any other supervisor. I even overheard her telling rude jokes to the maintenance team.

“It’s like she doesn’t even realize that she’s…” Pam motioned around her stomach. Karine and Lesley would take turns repeating some variation of this complaint.

But mostly I liked to watch her eat. I’d walk by her cubicle to refill my water bottle four or five times a day and she’d always be devouring something in a manner that was simultaneously carnal and sensual. She had a bottomless supply of labeled containers, and there was always a little bag of trail mix open next to her pencil cup. Any time she was on the phone she’d prop the phone receiver on her shoulder and use her hands to scoop hummus onto pita chips. Reorganizing the fridge, she placed her peanut butter milkshakes right in front of our camo-colored juice cleanses.

•••

The first time I got to talk to her alone was at the beginning of April. Pete let me choose a partner for my data entry project, so I marched up to Mary’s station and told her that Pete had assigned her to the Annual Customer Satisfaction survey.

In reality, it was just entering numbers 1-5 into a big spreadsheet, but I nervously rambled on about BullsEye’s Fundamental Code and the importance of cross-checking data.

“Yogurt pretzel?” She finally interjected, sticking the can under my nose.

“No thanks, we’re not eating dairy,” I said. Mary didn’t retract her hand and the sweet, synthetic smell filled my nostrils.

“You sure?” She smiled at me. I looked at the tin of yoghurt pretzels and imagined how they’d taste. I couldn’t remember. I had been on a diet since I was fourteen. I tried to estimate how much three pretzels would set me back. “I promise I won’t tell them.” I reached out my hand, exhilarated by the idea of a secret between us.

••• For someone whose figure promised such scandal, my conversations with Mary were surprisingly benign. She’d bring me artisan pickles and explain how to make tuna jerky or banoffee pie, laughing that her unborn child turned her into a foodie. Any old thing would remind her of a movie I hadn’t seen, and so she’d recount the plots of romantic comedies about people living in New York in minute detail, giggling through her favorite lines. She had plans to move there as soon as her baby was older. She’d find a job in a Manhattan hotel and eventually send him to LaGuardia.

She never really asked me about myself, but I was fine just nodding, snacking. I hadn’t realized that I had been hungry for so long.

••• Word began to spread about Mary, the third floor admin with snacks. People from different divisions, mostly men, begin to casually frequent our hall, initially pretending to have business with Pete. Tall as she was, big as she was, she was imposing, radiant, and men continued to fawn over her.

I was not immune. I only kept one ear bud in so that I could hear her slide her chair out. I’d help her carry her boxes of files or even run and refill her water bottle. She told me I didn’t have to dote on her, but I assured her that she made punching numbers a little less monotonous.

“Look at her, walking around like she’s the earth mother or something,” Karine said. The other admins wanted the dirt on her, but in response to any indirect questions about the baby’s father, Mary would just smile politely and return to her cashews.

Noting my new allegiance, Pam started coming by my cubicle to gather intelligence. “You know, I find the idea Leland Quarterly Fall 2013

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Night Becoming, Evelyn Anderson 36

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of women in that condition working a little crude,” she whispered, leaning in close. “I know I know, women’s rights and all, but I don’t know why anyone would hire someone, like… ” Pam raised her eyebrow. “Is she going to be able to carry a box of files if she gets any fatter? Is that safe for the baby? Do you think the father supports her decision?”

Not sure how to respond, I just held out a Ziploc bag of vanilla wafers. “No thanks,” she shook her head. “And what are you doing with those? We’re supposed to be doing Paleo.”

••• Mary grew plumper, but instead of turning shapeless she became more and more voluptuous. I think she felt bad about asking Pete for yet another bigger uniform, and I watched in amusement how those shapeless cargo pants now outlined her backside, and a small sliver of stomach peeped out from under her shirt.

Olives, figs, prunes, dark chocolate. In May, my cargos were feeling snug. When I sat down at my desk, I could feel a little roll of fat creeping out of the top of my pants. It was so novel, so out of place that I found it kind of entertaining and would pinch it between my fingers.

••• “I’m so glad there’s something sprouting inside of me,” she’d tell me. I nodded because I was beginning to feel the same way. My bits of flesh that had withered away on number crunching and dieting were slowly coming back to me. I had always felt ungainly and unsightly and furrowed and mostly tried to not be in anyone’s way, but now, I felt present.

As Mary grew, her motherly glow bloomed into a quasireligious fervor of new recipes and emotional speeches. I couldn’t get so much as a nod in edgewise.

“I feel so purposeful, in everything I make and do.” She was passionately tearing away at a tangerine. “ I feel chosen and blessed and just—" “—Mary, you can tell me,” I interrupted her, surprising myself with my assertiveness. “Whose baby is it?”

She stopped peeling and looked me in the eye, gravely.

“It’s mine,” she said. “It’s all mine.”

••• But that didn’t suffice. I needed to know. She was too good, too immaculate. She was too powerful. I waited a few days before I made another attempt.

“You know, Mary, you can talk to me, I’ll understand.”

Mary gave me a wearied smile.

“But we’re friends.” The words felt weighty, putting a seal on the last few months, on my file carrying, on our shared lunches.

“If that’s what you think that means, then I’m sorry, but I think I have to get back to work.” She started to get up, a quiver in her knees.

She cooled to me after that. I thought it was a petty thing to get upset about. Her data entry completed and our relations strained, I had gone back to sitting with Pam, Karine and Lesley. We were trying the Alfalfa diet.

“The great thing is that you eat all the Alfalfa you want for fourteen days,” Pam explained, swearing that the Alfalfists she knew had lost 15 pounds each. We pitched in to buy some pots that we placed on the windowsill. “Whenever you feel hungry, just eat some alfalfa, and remember to chew slowly and carefully!”

By the end of June, Mary’s newest uniform stretched taut in the front. She lost that sensual swing in her step, waddling through the halls with her hand on her back like an old woman. I still brought her files, but now I had less reason to sit in the lunchroom and worked through my breaks to finish up my end of the project.

July 3rd was the hottest day of the year, and I was having trouble figuring out whether I was feeling warm or just fatigued from staring at my screen all day. But even when Lesley put the fan on full blast, I was still feeling sick. I thought it might be hunger, so I opened my Ziploc bag.

Eight days in, alfalfa tasted like dirt, and chewing the sprouts left a bitter taste in my mouth.

I returned to my work, but only a few minutes later I started to feel a sharp, intermittent stab in my lower stomach, feeling nauseous again. I was going to ask Lesley if she had any PeptoBismol when I heard telltale coughing from behind me. I turned to see Lesley bury her face in her little bin, slightly muffling the sounds of throwing up. Once, then another time.

The smell hit me, and, clutching my gut, I passed her my trash can and ran to the bathroom. Bent over the toilet bowl, all that came out of me was a yellowy green soup, some undigested alfalfa swimming at the surface.

••• By the time the four of us returned to work after the Youngstown alfalfa salmonella outbreak, Mary was gone.

Pete told us she had phoned to say that she delivered a fat and healthy baby 22 inches long and weighing 9 1/2 pounds.

He told us that she hoped we were all feeling better. We wondered if she had smote us.

“And who would have thought that she’d help me finally reach my weight goal,” Pam said dryly, and we chuckled. We were all still pretty weak, and light in our uniforms. We were told to drink a lot of water.

Pete came to me individually and gave me her phone number, saying that she wanted me to have it. I never called. I’d rather imagine that she’s in New York, happy. I forgot all the recipes she told me about and never tried to cook anything. We joke that she’s probably force-fed her son into obesity. We imagine she’s still turning plenty of heads in New York. We talk about her often, though we try not to, because each mention of Mary brings memories of jam and fudge and watermelon.

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We Haven't a Glue, Evelyn Anderson

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The Collector’s Tale —SARAH SADLIER

“I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the common-wealth, would deserve so well of the publick, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.”

— Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729) Verily, it shrieks, resists, defies, submits—silence.

They call me the collector. That is, those whom I collect for and from. The others seem to view me as the nameless, inarticulate exchanger, a middleman of sorts, but of this fact I am not certain, for I do not converse with the living or the dead, as this is strictly forbidden. They are my taboo, as I am theirs, for no sentiment is to be associated with the trades for which I am the vehicle. Inexorably, I am a necessary fear, a tool of this land’s modus vivendi. The esteemed governing body of our hallowed British masters deems me essential; thus, I exist, though to say so in the traditional sense of the term is debatable. Afore this heartrending, pardon me, obligatory system came into being, I was the most educated of the conurbation of Cork, which was precisely the reason that I was chosen for my current position. To be a collector requires a soundness and acuity of mind, as I must handle all transactions between buyers and sellers. My ill-fated predecessor was in want of the stamina of psyche that I providentially possess, but why must I have mental fortitude?

Am I not providing an invaluable service, one that is the salvation of our race? My own, selfish deliverance in this infertile countryside?

Fie! Hush, thy impertinent brain and heart! Red betwixt black.

Night is for the round of the township. Swiftly as a shadow do I shift from door to door, searching through the frigid fog for the precious bundles. My disembodied hands extend, 40

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grasping the fabric that envelops the tepid package—I leave ten schillings. Only if that which I collect should produce ghastly noise will I induce eternal stillness in it, this being a directive from Parliament. Otherwise, I carry fresh life on my cart, bungled and tied, from the fire to the frying pan, or is it the other way around? Alone, I travel the rutted roads carrying my once and still dear cargo. The cacophonous cackle of a crow reverberates through the formerly bustling, now barren, streets lined with the specters of chattering children.

Avaunt!

Thither to the village of Blackrock, a site of once teeming abundance reduced to a colossal centre of fodder. There, the smoke billows black as the charred flesh. (Was that a flash of red?) I forwith deposit the blue babe on the doorstep, the rope ‘round its neck the suffocating leash of death. Alas, such are the way of things, what was I to think that I could change them? Why would I endeavor to do such on this frigid night?

A tawdry cook emerges, grabbing the rope. He nonchalantly nods to acknowledge the presence of the collector, abruptly turning to drag his newest dish to the hellish pit, ready to roast it like a suckling pig. As he disappears into the inferno of his kitchen, I, like an obsequious mutt waiting for his bone, linger on his doorstep. In return for my indispensable services, I receive a small, mortal portion of that which I so dutifully collect.

Oh, what a lot to have in life!

A fterword:

This creative piece is based on Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in which a speaker proposes that Irish starvation and excessive population growth may be corrected through the selling of human children for consumption. In the tale of the collector, Swift’s proposition had become a rather revolting reality. The tone of the collector can best be described as primarily morbid and unwillingly remorseful. Moreover, the collector’s attempted apathy is a hallmark of his tone. He is determinedly detached, as demonstrated by his “disembodied hands” and reference to himself as a “tool.” Occasionally, he slips with emotive words such as “heartrending,” but for the most part, he strives to remain emotionally disconnected from his deplorable reality by hushing his “impertinent brain and heart.”

The style of the collector’s monologue is suspenseful, as the audience is not entirely sure of what he collects until he deposits the strangled child, or “the blue babe,” onto the threshold of the cook’s door. Only in this moment are the readers truly privy to the collector’s purpose in society. Furthermore, there is frequent foreshadowing, especially in the first line. Additionally, the style could be referred to as idiomatic, for it includes words that would have been natural to speakers in the 18th century, such as "afore," "avaunt," and "fie" amongst others.

In this particular monologue, there are multiple instances of irony. The collector is the middleman between life and death, yet the audience is unaware of such upon initially reading that he was a “middleman of sorts.” Likewise, he claims that he is a “tool for their modus vivendi,” when in reality, the mode in which these people’s existence is not characterized by vivendi or life, but rather, death. Looking back, the “shrieks, resists, defies, submits—silence,”

could demonstrate both the struggle of the collector to subdue his guilty subconscious, or the strangling of the infant. The final two sentences have different interpretations, the first being that the collector receives some of the baby’s flesh as compensation for his services and is thankful for the rations that he receives. Conversely, the second is a lamentation of his unfortunate circumstances and loss of his humanity.

The use of Cork, a real 18th century Irish city, denotes the collector’s effort to cork, or restrain his feelings of grief and bereavement. Additionally, cork means to blacken something; therefore, the collector darkens his soul with his cold-blooded indifference. When he counsels himself to keep “Red betwixt black,” he indicates his attempt to harden his heart by making it as cool and unyielding as dark lead. Blackrock truly is a suburb of Cork; thus, by corking his emotions, the collector ultimately blackens his soul. Furthermore, the collector dogs, or follows death, but he can never attain it. He waits on the doorstep of hell, yet even then, he cannot gain admission to the afterlife.

The crow is a reference to the goddess of fertility in Irish mythology. Morrígan, whose name means phantom queen, assumes the shape of a crow when communicating with humans.

The etymology of her name derives from English and Gaelic for monstrous nightmare. The collector is living in the midst of such a grotesque nightmare when Morrígan jars him out of his apathetic stupor with the phantoms of the dead children. She cruelly cackles as she laughs at the humanity’s bizarre attempt to save their populace, and so the specter children are, in a way, a mockery of the follies of mankind.

Queen, Drip, Drag, Evelyn Anderson Leland Quarterly Fall 2013

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SAN FRANCISCO

IN

BUS

22 Fillmore there’re sweat stains on your baseball cap but you aren’t a major leaguer.

Orange, black, dirty with scratches and stickers and humanity’s fragrant grime.

22 Fillmore I see Bolívar I see Che Guevara 40 years past his death, bearded.

A tragic lineup of lookalike bums and visionaries – 22 Fillmore someone broke your heart but I still think you’re pretty - take off your sunglasses.

22 Fillmore you’re a cruel lover and I just can’t leave you.

You were drafted ten years ago 22 Fillmore give up!

22 Fillmore your nighttime lighting is nauseating you look better without it.

22 Fillmore you’re a niners fan dressed in black you’ve lost yourself to the controlling camouflage of night.

Bald-headed Anglos and comb over Jews flirt with American Apparel queers I can’t understand a word you say.

22 Fillmore I’m impressed by your confidence – 9 o’clock Tuesday have you been drinking? all I see outside are the pearl bright signs of banks and adulterous corona dives.

22 Fillmore how many infidelities have you enabled?

Are you a great friend or the worst?

22 Fillmore the light just turned yellow – and we’ve still so far to go.

—MAX WALKER-SILVERMAN

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CONTRIBUTORS

EVELYN ANDERSON is a sophomore from Alexandria, VA. HELEN ANDERSON is a senior from Austin, TX. NATASHA AVERY is a senior from Warsaw, Poland.

GEENA CHEN is a sophomore from Bedford, MA. WYATT HONG is a senior from Seoul, Korea.

IRENE HSU is a freshman from San Jose, CA. LAURA POSPISIL is a senior from Abington, PA. MARIN REEVE is a freshman from Provo, UT. SARAH SADLIER is a sophomore from Gig Harbor, WA. JENNIFER SCHAFFER is a senior from Chicago, IL. BRIAN TICH is a junior from Ellicott City, MD. MAX WALKER-SILVERMAN is a junior from Telluride, CO.

CONTRIBUTE

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• We accept submissions from all genres: we are concerned first and foremost with quality of expression, not in the genre of the work itself, so feel free to innovate.

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READY TO SUBMIT? Leland Quarterly Fall 2013 Visit www.lelandquarterly.com

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Volume 8, Issue 1 Copyright Š 2013 by Leland Quarterly Stanford University www.lelandquarterly.com 44

Leland Quarterly Fall 2013