Leland Quarterly Vol. 13, Issue 2: Winter & Spring 2019

WIN/SPR 2 0 1 9

Lilith’s World Lilith Frakes

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LELAND QUARTERLY VOLUME 13, ISSUE 2: Winter/Spring 2019

EDITORS IN CHIEF Lily Nilipour Zuyi Zhao

FINANCIAL OFFICER Lily Nilipour EDITORIAL STAFF Arielle DeVito Elizabeth Dunn Wyatt Leaf Andy Lee Young Fenimore Lee Andrew Lin Olivia Manes Lily Nilipour Angela Yang Linda Ye Lily Zhou LAYOUT DESIGN Lily Nilipour Zuyi Zhao Cover Art by Lilith Frakes

Copyright 2019 by Leland Quarterly | All Rights Reserved Stanford University | Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco

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Army 2 Julia Gillette

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EDITORS’ NOTE

This year, although not without its challenges, has been both profoundly encouraging and deeply humbling. As the Editors in Chief of a small, but powerful and passionate staff, we have witnessed this literary magazine become re-inspired by a strong community devoted to the arts and humanities.

A warm and genuine thank you to our staff, our contributors, and our partners at the Stanford Storytelling Project for their support and commitment to the project of celebrating the creative spirit still present and alive on this campus. Thank you, as well, to our readers, for allowing us to share it with you.

And, of course, all the best to the next volume’s leaders, Olivia Manes and Linda Ye, Editors in Chief, and Wyatt Leaf, Outreach Director.

Zuyi Zhao, Editor in Chief Lily Nilipour, Interim Co-Editor in Chief

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CONTENTS Poetry

Spring, 1932, Valerie Trapp 9

In a Dream, Eleni Aneziris 10

Sacrificial Poet, Kory Gaines 20

Human Hearts, Tucker Matta 26

Were the people, Alec Wilson 27

Softshell Elegy, Melina Walling 29

A Brief History of This, Marika Tron 30

With dull blade in hand, Alec Wilson 42

In the Valley of the Giants, Melina Walling 44

The Mirror Stage,

Amanda McCaffrey 46

[anoche soùÊ con usted], Sanjana Friedman 56

Wave, Ben Davidson 58

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Prose

Horror Vacui, Wyatt Leaf Shelter Song, Ben Davidson Craving, Shana E. Hadi Birthday Party, Valerie Trapp Butterfly, Valerie Trapp

12 23 32 40 52

Visual Arts

Lilith’s World, Lilith Frakes cover, 2

Army 2, Julia Gillette 4

peaches are my favorite fruit, Julia Gillette 8

Vero, Lorena Diosdado 14

Kate and the Owl, Melina Walling 22

Among the Reeds, Lilith Frakes 28

can’t make this up, Melina Walling 34

Video still from “Can the United States

buy China moon?”

Christina Shen 43

Cocoon, Christina Shen 50

Content warning: Certain pieces in this issue touch on aspects of mental health that may be triggering.

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peaches are my favorite fruit I like how fuzzy they are the color of peaches is nice like a sunset if the peach is ripe the juice will drip down my face and marks my cloths I can eat four peaches in one hour and not even get tired of them they are sweet and juicy Julia Gillette

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Spring, 1932

Valerie Trapp Ekphrasis of “Spring” by Florine Stettheimer (1932) I am the orange lady dancer, And on the floral fields I dance.

I make no mind; I don’t consider, I leave it all to wishful chance.

My world is pink and made of feathers, No fear inside a pastel cage, And on the dawning of the autumn— I quake, I cry, I fight, I rage.

This time I have is full and blooming, Infinity in pinks and blues, I’ll dance, and I’ll just keep on dancing, Until the trees begin to lose.

Valerie Trapp is a freshman studying Psychology and Theater & Performance Studies from Winter Park, Florida. She enjoys frolicking, likes shoving copious amounts of popcorn into her face, and recently learned how to pronounce “adolescence.”

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In a Dream

Eleni Aneziris

In a dream I was lost once.

I couldn’t find some place. I spent an hour looking, and by the time I’d found it, whatever it was that I was there for was already over. I went elsewhere.

In this dream there were four-hour periods of time in which I did absolutely nothing.

In this dream I saw you. I saw you standing with a gang of other rolled-sleeve champions outside a building I was supposed to be at.

I found a fence to lock my bike to. It was either green or lavender. Might’ve been red. I walked down the stairs and into this building, where again, I couldn’t find the room I was supposed to be at.

On my way back up the stairs in this dream I saw you and your gang laughing into your palms.

Faces turning four shades closer to the color the fence might’ve been. I turned to the fence. My bike.

My bike was locked. There were so many locks. At least seven locks.

I did not know why there were at least seven locks on my bike. You strolled over, a keyring of keys tangled in your fingers. One by one you unlocked them until you were essentially crying, on your knees.

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In this dream I took two airplanes to get away from you.

There was a doorway in this dream on the other side. Through the glass, green floor tiles with silver fillings. A lady with frown lines sitting at a desk that was probably brown, listing off several places I needed to be instead of here.

In this dream I got my bike back in the end.

In this dream I didn’t know how to ride it.

Eleni Aneziris is from East Setauket, NY and is a junior at Stanford University. Her writing appears in Glass Kite Anthology and Polyphony H.S., among others. Her work has also been nationally recognized by competitions such as the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the Walt Whitman Birthplace Young Poets Contest.

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Horror Vacui

Wyatt Leaf

In a rapid, backward jolt of the head, Victor gazed for a moment down Palm Drive. Paralyzed by the lurid beauty that had engulfed the surroundings of the University, he contemplated the nature of his path to that forever new, forever foreign land. The palms drifted languidly through the spring heat like undulating flowers, flipped upright in a pond and spinning in a motionless blur. The path was verdant, sunlit. He was so close, yet so far from home.

Such had been his life for three years, as if fixated invariably in that pose: eyeing Palm Drive and guessing at something indecipherable. He attended his classes, where his mind radiated with philosophy, literature and languages from distant lands. He almost never kept in touch with those who lived back home. Except with his little brother, Malcolm, who steadily worked toward graduation in the parentless home which had bred both of them and so far launched one of them into the world That distant home was in a town called Similar. It was rural, situated in the interior of California—the part of the state which many tend to forget about—and it was populated by only a couple thousand people. The population mostly consisted of retirees who sought retreat from the boisterous city life, but it was also inhabited by riffraffs, lowlifes, criminals, and those who had decided, for fear of change, to linger interminably in the same isolated place, as if afraid to be exposed to the external world. Similar was full of nature, but nature was empty, soulless and incapable of offering anything of enticing quality to a young man. For this reason, leaving Similar was a noteworthy personal accomplishment on the part of Victor. He had set challenges to himself and had risen to the occasion. In having overcome Similar, he was adopted by the University and had surpassed the limitations of his hometown.

His present reality was a radicalization of his new, foreign worldliness. He now wrote and read more in French than he did in

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English. The conversations among philosophers echoed throughout his mind and had become more intimate than any nostalgic, hometown memory that might have lurked in the deepest caverns of his being. He had transformed into a man of the world. Besides keeping in touch with his brother to keep him in check, to give him advice and to send him money for food and other necessities, he never glanced back at Similar.

However, leading up to Spring Break of his last year at the University, he considered various options to venture further beyond: to spend yet another brilliant moment in Paris, to bask in the literary neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, to peruse the intense and fast-paced neighborhoods of New York City. But, finally, the following question appeared in his mind: What if I went back? And, suddenly, those words began to permeate malevolently throughout, as a kind of neurological poison, somehow becoming all the more convincing. It hadn’t even crossed his mind since he had left. It was only now that he questioned what would happen if he were to return, what the harm in it might be, and, most importantly, how beneficial it could be to check in on his brother in person. As if the mere thought were fatal and unstoppable, he resolved that he had better spend some time with him: to go out to Similar, for once, and see how things were going with his brother, if at the very least to make sure he was staying on track.

Victor set to planning his itinerary to return to Similar. Being that he had no car, he had to make use of the less than efficient Californian train system. Had Victor owned a car, reaching Similar would have been a straight, three hour shot into the dark heart of California: directly inward, into the immensity of nature that bled outward from Yosemite. Nonetheless, he found himself perplexed in the face of potentially serpentine and nonsensical routes. The logistics of getting to Similar were simply incomprehensible. It was as if to penetrate into that dense abyss of rurality was to pass into a hidden realm—and yet it was so close! After hours of wrenching reflection, he managed to roughly construct a clunky but seemingly feasible route. He would take the train into San Francisco, then the B.A.R.T. to the extremities of the East Bay—to Richmond—where he would take the San Joaquin line up and out of the Bay Area, in a sort of susurrating, serpentine S shape which then dove into the depths of Central California; there, he could ask a

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Vero Lorena Diosdado

Horror Vacui | Wyatt Leaf

friend to drive an hour out of Similar to pick him up and bring him back to the town.

He called a friend: Vincent Stint. He wrote home to his brother. †† Victor hesitated at the threshold of his room, looking back at the blankets folded evenly across his bed, the curtains dangling in the languorous sunlight that melted across campus amid spring mornings and lit up the titles along the sides of his abundant array of books. He breathed and seemed to dissipate out of the dorm in one step.

The gnawing banality of the journey is what killed him. The train fled from Richmond down the San Joaquin line, winding around the northern part of the Bay, past Martinez and Antioch, until Stockton—one of many points of no return. The excitement of civilization seemed to fade behind Victor. Each city in the dry trough of the Central Valley reinforced the depressing distance from the Bay. By the time he landed in Merced, he was exhausted, deprived of humanity by the mundane rumbling of the train on its tracks.

After passing through the station, he waited by the parking lot and looked off into the nocturnal shades of dark, dark Merced. He saw nothing but boredom, endless limitations, and the empty irrelevance of a forgotten California: all its heat, its dirt, its brush, its open space. Resigned, he would have to go even further into the abyss that lay ahead.

Merced was, in fact, the final, ghostly vestige of civilization before Similar.

His chum, Stint, arrived two hours late to the parking lot, driving his mother’s old Honda Civic. Victor was fatigued, having accumulated now a total of seven hours in commute. He mechanically stepped into the car, exhausted at mind and heart, and reclined his seat back as they set off across roads that wound through dusk-lit fields.

Similar was enclosed by mountains, cut off even from the slight ripples of active society that punctuated the flatness of the Central Valley. Its open space was clustered with trees, whose beauty was only an artifice that shrouded the town’s vacuity.

“I can’t believe you chose to come out at this time.” said Vincent, in the silent dimness of the car.

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“Why do you say that?”

“Fires, man.” he said. “Everything around Similar is burning down and we’re breathing in all the smoke.”

Victor nodded with a deathly colorless sense of disappointment and regret as the two shot through the mountains and began to see the roaring, fugacious flares that both Vincent and the unrelenting opacity of Merced’s darkness had hidden from Victor: a hungry inferno that would soon engulf him.

The two drove so close to the fires that embers drifted through the windows and they worried that it would burn the seat or their skin, but each glowing particle seemed to vanish before landing on any surface. If only Victor could have learned beforehand to never go back.

Suddenly, the blackness of the night reappeared and remained consistent for several miles, until they came across a bridge that led into Similar and passed through several hills that were also afflicted with waves of ravenous fire. It was only once they reached the center of Similar that they reunited with the darkness—but they still saw, ubiquitous throughout the surrounding mountains, a lurid, orange glow that augmented, swayed, reignited and raged.

“You got time to grab a drink?” asked Stint.

“I think so… Malcolm will be up late anyway.”

“Stand-Up?” He was referring to the Stand-Up Saloon, some few hundred feet from Victor’s house. He figured it was all right. He could spend an hour or so there and meet up with his brother afterward, as he often stayed up until the early morning. The two got out of the car into a desolate parking lot and inhaled the smoke that had inundated the town. They ambled across a road made purely of dirt and gravel until they found themselves at the Stand-Up. As they walked through the front door, a mucky smell wafted over them, highly distinct but not preferable to the sea of smoke outside. The saloon seemed empty, but as they moved closer to the dimly lit bar, Victor saw that there were several silhouettes lurking throughout the establishment, playing pool in dark, leather jackets. The bartender recognized Vincent, but eyed Victor as if he were an underage,

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Horror Vacui | Wyatt Leaf

out-of-place city-slicker: “Can I see your I.D.?”

Victor pulled out his passport, never having obtained a driver’s license or California state I.D. The bartender asked what they’d like.

Victor ordered a scotch and Vincent got a pint of beer.

“You know,” said Victor, as the bartender set the drinks in front of the two young men, “I’ve been seeing all this news about the fires... in Thousand Oaks and Napa… Didn’t hear anything about this.”

“Hah!” pulsated Vincent, and lifted his beer after an indifferent shrug.

“Cheers,” said Vincent.

“À la nôtre…”

The two sat calmly and sipped their drinks, somehow slightly cherishing the tedium of Similar. Vincent leaned over and said: “You should’ve never come back.”

“I know…” said Victor, thinking it was obvious.

And then Vincent pointed his index across the bar. Victor’s eyes followed it through the confusing range of light and shadow directly to the bullseye of a dartboard. In the fray of surrounding bikers, huddled and emblazoned with their insignias, he saw an indistinguishable woman.

Victor abruptly downed the rest of his scotch.

“I’m gonna head back…” he said.

“All right, I’ll be around here for a while…” said Vincent, “You still remember your way back?”

He couldn’t forget. He dashed out of the saloon into the patient, nocturnal vapor. †† Victor shuffled through the heavily forested maze that led back to the familial abode: the tiny trailer he had inhabited, along with his brother, in the years leading up to his high school graduation. As he moved through trees and across dirt roads, he thought himself propelled by the staggering heat that blazed throughout the mountains and seemed to corner him, growling malignantly, menacing: go back home.

Malcolm opened the door in advance to his brother’s arrival,

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as he heard the famished dogs of the neighborhood roaring away at the unexpected return. The brothers appeared in front of each other taller, hardened, transformed into men: disillusioned but not jaded.

“Just got into town, I grabbed a scotch with Vincent at the Stand-Up,” said Victor, as the brothers embraced. “Has mom been around?”

“I think she’s at work.” said Malcolm.

For a moment, Victor reflected back to the silhouette of the woman at the bar, and then dismissed the thought. Of course she was at work. He entered the house. It was crummy, neglected. Since he had left, Malcolm took his room: an effervescent, grandiose and literary space that somehow resisted the decaying trend of the rest of the house.

Victor had left him his entire library: the books that had nourished his deepest intellectual curiosities. They were ordered alphabetically, neat, in stacks savagely spread throughout the room. They had been in a bookshelf, but it broke sometime after Victor’s departure. Surrounded by the piles of books was his old desk, wooden, creaky; his twin-sized bed, with its hellishly tattered sheets; and his dusty, antique, velvet armchair that towered over his priceless objects.

“You been practicing your French?” Victor said, while taking a seat in the armchair, so reminiscent of his days till graduation, as he had sat there and read incessantly by candlelight. Now, there was a desk lamp, which Malcolm had—before lying down in a contemplative pose on the bed across from the armchair—flickered on.

“I’ve been doing my best.”

It was the first and only subject of conversation that night, since Victor, drained, was singularly focused on the memory that he had begun to train his brother in French amid the latter, starving years of high school.

Victor then pulled out a copy of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer from one of the stockpiles nearby. He began to read, wanting naively to share with his brother the passion that had ignited his bellicose journey to the University. Malcolm gazed up at the ceiling as if in awe by a constellation above a deserted encampment and listened:

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Horror Vacui | Wyatt Leaf

“J’ai appelé les bourreaux pour,

en périssant, mordre la crosse de leurs fusils.

J’ai appelé les fléaux,

pour m’étouffer avec le sable, le sang.

Le malheur a été mon dieu.

Je me suis allongé dans la boue.

Je me suis séché à l’air du crime.

Et j’ai joué de bons tours à la folie.”

As Malcolm heard the verses, he contemplated fascinating things well beyond the quotidian reveries and rivalries that speckled his existence. He began to grin in a genuine appreciation of le sable, le sang, la boue, and la folie, and thought about how he would have never heard those words had his brother not returned. But as soon as Victor uttered the next verse:

“Et le printemps m’a apporté l’affreux rire de l’idiot.” a dense, black smoke began to seep through the cracks of the window— just above the velvet armchair—obsessively filling up the pale, lamplit room, enveloping the two brothers—as Victor continued on—dizzying them, until everything in the proximity glowed under opaque smoke and they both drifted warmly into the brooding, sonorous words of Rimbaud: empty, immense, and interminable. As they dozed off, a barrage of visions, dreams and memories vanquished their minds, as devastating and all-encompassing as the expansive flames. It was a never-ending torrent of erasure. Victor veered, despairing, and murmured incomprehensibly: “Je n’aurais jamais dû revenir.”

Wyatt Leaf, Class of 2020, studies French and Spanish literature at Stanford. Born and raised in California, Leaf has lived in various regions throughout the state over the course of his life. Passionate about culture, criticism, translation and writing fiction, he is looking forward to a career in letters and academia.

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Sacrificial Poet

Kory Gaines I am the sacrificial poet I sacrifice myself and the She-goat Boys Black as tar do not sacrifice their goats We may cross up the greatest of all time We wear straight backs and headbands, Think about the game, not practice.

I am the sacrificial poet.

I sacrifice Time itself I am enamored by the sunflower That once wanted themselves to implode O sacrificial poets listen to the Muses When they sing for if you don’t, If you turn a blind ear, You’re to blame for your Deferred Dreams.

If I were to die, Two planes would take me down.

As I cascade over the marketplace, the streets, I hope my twin sista is not attacked wit me Please protect my sista, protect all the sistas.

The poet is wise, law abiding The poet brings upheaval of law When we go to war, don’t draft me The law does not abide me

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I remember how you treated me in Tuskegee Whether in flight or so called clinical studies Can’t eat with Spartans at common mess Our constitution fails in comparison. eyes closed, blinded, levitating, soothsaying Rise high enough for aviators to strike The poet is to tell you Who you ought to be.

I am the sacrificial poet.

I tell you how I ought to die.

I am a large aviator the same one that struck I am not ashamed to say my wings wobble.

I am not ashamed to say that I change That I want change and the privilege to dance during my revolution.

Change only comes from radicals and dissent My descent starts in a city worthy of rediscovering.

My descent will proceed into the Inferno for research purposes Like Dante, my descent is an ascension.

Kory Gaines is a sophomore at Stanford studying African and African American Studies and Political Science. He is originally from Washington, D.C., but also calls Prince George’s County, Maryland his home. Kory is very intentional about placing their poetry in conversation with their predecessors in the African American Literature tradition.

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Kate and the Owl Melina Walling

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Shelter Song

Ben Davidson

I’ve made friends with a bird.

Well, not really. I don’t know if birds have friends. They definitely don’t have friends in the way that I’m used to, the type that you text or eat dinner with or go out on a drunken Tuesday night and break chairs against the road with.

But there’s a bird that comes by a few times a week to eat at the bird feeder I’ve left outside the kitchen window. I know they’re the same bird because they have a patch of off-white next to their left eye that looks like Maine, if Maine were a little wider, a little rounder, and also off-white and small enough to fit on a bird’s head. I also know that they’re probably an American Tree Sparrow because I joined a birdwatching group on Facebook with about seventy thousand people, posted a few blurry pictures and asked what kind of bird they were, waited long enough for there to be a consensus, then thanked everyone and left the group. So I have a one-way friendship with an American Tree Sparrow that carries the state of Main on their head, like Atlas but if Atlas only had to carry Maine and was also a bird. An American Tree Sparrow.

I’m split on the issue of naming them. On one hand, it’s kind of weird to name a friend. If you had a friend named Robert, you couldn’t just say, “Hey friend your name is Alice now I’m calling you Alice.” On the other hand, nicknames do exist—some are derived from the original name like Bob or Bobby but some are based on in-jokes or physical features.

The second type would be more okay since I don’t know if they have a name and I don’t know if sparrows have names at all, but just in case they do I don’t want to pull a Robert-Alice and trample over their actual name. The problem with the second type of nickname, though, is that you generally want to check with the friend to make sure they’re okay with the nickname before sticking with it, and if my friend the sparrow

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speaks English then I haven’t heard them say anything I understand.

Maybe it’s one of those heavy dialects, like the near-unintelligibility of some people from the Deep South. But the second time I joined that birdwatching group people seemed pretty certain that birds don’t speak English, so it’s probably not that.

Maybe they immigrated from somewhere else? My town has a number of Korean immigrants, but I don’t speak Korean anyway, so I wouldn’t be able to know if they spoke Korean, accented or not.

Does Korea have the equivalent of a Deep South?

I continued putting bird seed in the feeder and they continued to come.

I would sit in the kitchen, sit with my hands around a cup of tea—or if I was feeling brave, hot chocolate—and perk up when I saw them. The way that their head would swivel and peck at the seeds fascinated me, eyes always alert, tiny claws dexterous, feathers fluffing up when the wind blew. I wondered if I could get closer—scatter some seed in front of me and then work up to holding them in my hand—but gave up on the idea, afraid that if I went too far I might scare them off and I would never see Maine again.

Weeks and months passed like that. I met them in the spring, not long after migration season, and I was counting down the days until the fivemonth anniversary of our friendship when I saw them crash into the birdfeeder instead of landing. Weird.

I went outside to take a look, approaching as carefully as I could. I looked around the area below the tree branch that the birdfeeder hung off of, and though their plumage provided excellent camouflage against the autumn colors, I found them by looking for Maine, lying still on the ground. I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do here was—do I approach, see what was wrong? Let them work it out by themselves? Is it okay to touch them?

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Shelter Song | Ben Davidson

My mind was made up when the sunlight glinted off of what looked like a fishhook stuck in one of their wings. I didn’t need to join the group a third time to know that that shouldn’t be there.

Doing my best to be gentle, I gathered them in my hands. I had more questions. Was I holding them too tight? Was I going to make things worse? They weren’t moving—were they unconscious, were they going to explode into motion and startle the both of us? Do I wiggle the hook out or yank it all in one go?

I didn’t like the mental image of accidentally pulling out a chunk of feathers and flesh with the yanking, so I opted for the best I could make of a crude wiggle. Left hand wrapped around them so as to limit movement, right hand pulling and twisting. I tried to keep my hands from trembling, since that would only make things worse.

At some point, they woke up from the stupor they were in. Their eyes were fixed on me, frozen. They didn’t say anything, though I wasn’t sure if that was because they were too surprised and freaked out or because they didn’t speak English. Or Korean.

When the hook came out, only a bit of fuzz attached to its barb, I let out a few shaky breaths before opening the hand holding my friend. A second or two passed before they took abruptly flight, my eyes quickly losing track of them against the muted foliage.

I never saw them again.

Ben Davidson is from Marietta, GA—near Atlanta—and is a member of the class of 2021. Ben is a Religious Studies major and a Creative Writing minor. Ben likes playing D&D and not thinking about job prospects.

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Human Hearts Tucker Matta

Some glass is so thin That it dreams of breaking And perched near the corner of the table Even while mother suggested it be moved to the center It spends all day Just waiting to fall–

Hopeless, our hearts.

Tucker Javier Matta is a student in the Stanford Class of 2022. He was raised in Woodside, California.

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Were the People,

Alec Wilson a shivering body sinking itself in night water which reflects the sky full of stars that we are not just thinking just not that we are the sky full of stars in night water which reflects a shivering body sinking itself

Alec Wilson is a senior studying Management Science & Engineering. He is a baseball player and aspiring author from Cumming, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. He is a dog person.

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Among the Reeds Lilith Frakes

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Softshell Elegy

Melina Walling The last female Yangtze softshell turtle has died.

She was ninety years old.

She lived alone at a zoo in China.

I hope that, while scientists were nervously collecting buckets of her milky-white, slippery, infertile eggs, that she had the chance to talk the researchers’ ears off, to tell them her war stories, to watch Wheel of Fortune while she still could.

After all, there were no other retirees to listen.

Melina Walling ‘20 is an Interdisciplinary English major with a secondary concentration in Art Practice and minors in history and psychology. She grew up in Las Vegas but now lives in Philadelphia, and loves thinking about the diverse ways that people interact with each other and their environments. She works at the Stanford Storytelling Project and The Stanford Daily, and coordinates hikes for Stanford Peaks and Professors.

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A Brief History of This

Marika Tron I have lost track of how many days it has been.

This—thing, this—time, this—journey (though it has been significantly less glamorous than anything of the same name) looms forever in both directions.

Behind me is the Ukraine, the fighting and the famine,

the love and the loss,

my home.

Behind me Nick lies in the ground on the side of the road between the willow tree

and the rock that looks like a crescent moon.

Behind me is the camp, a big ugly thing with Ukrainians on one bank of the river and Germans on the other.

I raced a girl in that camp one spring, won my mama and I some bread and meat.

I grew wings that day.

Today, we walk again.

Ahead of me is land, only land.

I’ve stopped saying it all looks the same to me, that upsets mama.

Instead, we point out wildflowers and give them new names like “kolach” and “pierogi.”

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Ahead of me, in ten years, I will meet Alex,

my savior,

the love of my life.

He will tell me of his—thing, his—time, his—journey.

We will learn that he grew up in the same part of the Ukraine, that we sometimes sat in the same pews, lived in the same camp.

We will learn that this was a miracle, and we will tell our four children.

Ahead of me is land with no Kaiser,

no tsar,

no war.

Great White North, mama tells me.

Why is it so great? I ask her.

Because we will be safe.

Marika Tron has been a writer since she was nine years old, and she will continue to be a writer for a very long time. She enjoys black tea, getting tattoos, and comedies with strong female leading roles. Her role models are Jack Kerouac and the cowboy emoji.

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Craving

Shana E. Hadi

Her wails echo through the restaurant, but the waiter only comes to refill our water, metal pitcher clinking with the frosted glass.

I hug Ana tightly, fumbling while she perches on my lap. I move the crook of my elbow so she can rest her head more comfortably in my arms, and she quiets down.

I flip through the menu and gaze at the man before me. He doesn’t seem to notice anything besides his phone.

Ana cries a little more, and I look down and pat her gently. Her soft flesh bends easily to my own, and I enjoy trailing my fingers down the satin of her skin, warming my ice-cold hands.

He clears his throat, and I shift my head back up. Our eyes meet. The zipper on his overcoat digs into the underside of his jaw.

“This isn’t going to work.” He throws the green napkin under his plate, hiding the remains of his shriveled mushrooms.

We only made it as far as the appetizers. But he is no outlier in the cyclic nature of my dating life, ever since I moved to the city. I swallow my disappointment while Ana reshuffles herself, ready to leave.

“Agreed.” We split the check and slip away to the door. My mouth waters at the prospect of finishing my meal, but I do not want to stay here alone. He walks first, a solitary man in the shadows of skyscrapers, thumbs hooked into his jeans. He does not look back.

I go next, hand-in-hand with my companion Ana, who clings to a spool of my sundress with the stubbornness of a little girl. If only she really were one. <>

During our walk back to the office, I fall into familiar patterns, bending down to speak with Ana and show her the delights of the downtown cityscape. We pass by store windows, and at a boutique she smiles at the lacy dresses with their tulle and stitched flowers, blowing onto the glass and pressing her palms to wipe away the mist. It fogs and clears, fogs and clears. What she gives breath to she also takes away.

Despite her roaming, she never lets go of my dress, and we

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make slow progress back to my office. Our footsteps are in rhythm against the pavement, tuned to the constant honking of cars trapped in the byzantine chase for parking.

After the rain, the odor of dried urine and cigarette ash has faded into a mere aftertaste, not characterizer, of the air. But with Ana, I only smell her sweetness, the citrus zest from my mother’s lemon tree.

Fresh and comforting, while I am armed with the lightweight nothingness of deodorant.

Still, these scents feel more natural than the tropical Febreze that accosts us as soon as we step through the high-rise elevator doors.

The doors close with a click, and we slowly rise to the thirty-first floor.

When we reach our stop, I can feel the building tremor. Ana does not seem to mind, and after a few seconds, we continue onward.

But when we pass through the doorframe, I see my product manager and I already know. She holds her trademark white clipboard, which I have never once seen her use. But she is frowning.

“Alana, you’re already late. My office, now,” she demands.

Something smells delicious in the conference room, and I inhale deeply before I walk after her, my eyes set on her fuchsia gold-tipped heels.

Ana quietly follows. <>

When I return to my cubicle, I sink into my chair and swivel.

I keep swiveling until the vertigo comes, and then I slowly wind down like a clock. One of the few remaining perks of the job. It is lonely in the annex. My desk mate has gone on vacation for what seems like indefinitely – but she has most likely been fired, as I soon will be.

After the end of my three-month trial period, I will not receive a full-time offer. We like you well enough, but you have to understand, we have had to make some difficult choices to stay afloat before the merger, and we cannot afford new employees, she said.

I shudder. For this job, I moved 2000 miles from my alma mater and my family to the middle of Ohio. My friends are scattered across the states. Fresh out of college, we took the best jobs we could find.

But my future prospects are choking. I will have to move back home to a room the size of a closet, shared with a sister who will just be starting

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canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make this up Melina Walling

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Craving | Shana E. Hadi

high school. I will have to start my job search over. Fend off the advances of my ex. Live off of my parents. Be a disappointment.

I shudder again. Most of all, I can’t face my mother.

“Ready?” I ask Ana, and she nods, stretching her knees and knobby arms. She appears taller, and I take out my measuring tape from IKEA, which I have kept coiled in my wallet ever since Ana started appearing.

Ana obediently stands straight while I measure her, but this disappoints me even more. My suspicions are correct: she has grown a full foot since lunch. <>

I stayed one hour late for a twofold purpose: so I would not have to face my coworkers with my tears, and to take home leftovers from the afternoon meeting. I could smell it from my little spot in the annex, two half-eaten party trays of charcoal-barbequed chicken and spicy potato curry, garlic and thyme seasoning. And for dessert, strawberry rhubarb pie. From overheard conversations – my mind has a laser focus for food – there are at least two whole pies in the fridge, untouched, their flaky crusts sinking into the creamy filling. Wasting away. What a shame if they went uneaten.

Greasy, sugary, and very, very satisfying. And on my tight budget, free food is exactly that: free.

But my hand stilled when I reach for the fridge. I looked at Ana and she held her thumbs up, but I didn’t move.

And after a few minutes, we walked away.

Now Ana is asleep in the passenger’s side of my car, her head nestled in the crook of her arm. She leans against the window for support, the shadows further obscuring her darkened face. She has shrunk to the size of a toddler, but I strap her in all the same.

Oh, her face – or the lack of one! She only has a smooth, polished oval with the hue of obsidian stone. Ana horrified me when she first appeared, but I have grown used to her presence. She has always been a part of me, though in college she was only in my dreams, a steady whisper that crept over me even as I huddled beneath my sheets.

It is wonderful to have someone to care for, to talk to, to share

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in my life. Ana rarely responds, and if then, only in the barest of gestures. Already she is far better than my ex, whose thoughts would constantly spill out of him like a cup of red wine knocked over, wounding me with more than his words.

But she cannot stay for too long. Ever since she arrived three months ago, I have gained twenty pounds from feeding her. Two dress sizes. My right hand, the one not on the steering wheel, goes to the paunch on my stomach. Folds of fat strain the waistline of my summer dress, which used to fit me like a sieve.

I exhale. Today will be better. A fresh start. Today, Ana will shrink until she becomes reabsorbed as a twinkle in my eye. Today, I will make the first incision to cut Ana from my life. <>

When I get home, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to think. I just want to move, and I want to shed those wasted calories from my failed lunch date.

He spent five minutes picking off bits of green oregano from the mushrooms, and then blew them onto a corner of his plate, secluded like a refuse pile.

Picky eaters are a turn-off.

I lift my dumbbells with both arms and do six reps, and then my phone buzzes. I turn away and continue, but the tone keeps playing, a 30-second sound clip of a nasally voice whose chorus repeats as soon as it ends. I have no trouble placing it. So much so, that in my haste I drop a dumbbell on my foot.

My toes feel every ounce of the six pounds.

For all my talk on separation, Ana and I howl together as we drop to the floor. My affected leg twitches, toes burning. I make an awkward hop with my other leg to the fridge. My sweaty palms are slick against the walls I lean on for support.

I take my time getting the bag of icy corn and peas, resting my head for a few seconds in the bursts of chill from the freezer, which pants in its attempt to keep up with my wastefulness.

To be cold, to freeze, to be free.

I close the fridge door and risk a glance at my phone. The screen has gone dark, but I can take no chances. Last week, my ex left

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twenty-eight messages during the time I took a shower. My fingers quiver as I take the phone and place it under an upturned fruit bowl from my dishwashing rack. I haven’t blocked him, not yet. In some ways, I still miss him. It is beautiful to be wanted.

Ana is still watching me, face tilted up from her pose, like a carpet sprawled haphazardly on the floor. “How about some dinner?” I ask, far chirpier than usual, hazy with pain.

She only looks at me, but I take it as a yes. <>

Ana just stares, her head turned fixedly in my direction. She shifts only slightly each time I take my chopsticks and shift the lean cuts of pork, delicious bits of fat snipped away, and green bok choy sizzling in the pan. A not unpleasant aroma emanates from the mixture, traces of olive oil and chili pepper.

By the time I am finished, a few of the ends are singed black, and a charcoal smell coats the mixture. But it is edible, and presumably healthy.

With a measuring cup, I parcel out the recommended portion size and stow the rest in the fridge. One plate, a table for one. Ana never directly eats anything I cook, but she still prefers to stay near me when I have food.

I walk over to the little nook of a dresser-turned-dining table, and the cheap IKEA chair squeaks as I drag it across the kitchen tiles. I set my plate down and sit, facing the blank concrete wall. I never did get around to decorating as I had planned, and with my departure looming, it seems futile to start now.

My phone buzzes from under the fruit bowl. The same highpitched voice, the lead from my ex’s favorite band. The chair whines when I jump up and shove the phone in the fridge.

I return back to my plate. My fingers clench the spoon tightly. I can do it. I can eat one bite.

I lift the spoon to my mouth, staring at a treacherous green leaf that covers the burnt pork, and I force myself to chew.

Slowly, I finish one bite. I stab one bok choy with two fork tines, fold it over until its stem has been tangled with the leaves, and stab it

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again. This bite takes considerably more effort, but it eventually slides down my throat, thoroughly trampled by my molars.

I hear muffled ringing from the fridge. And beeping, which means he’s leaving voicemails too. When he gets to this point, he will start harassing my mother and my college roommates, who will call me to let me know. And I will break down when I hear their voices.

It will be too much. I can’t face them. Not today.

I can’t do this anymore. My diet will have to wait until tomorrow.

I take my plate and swiftly slide each slice of pork and green leaf into the compost bin. Injured toes forgotten, I jog over and yank my car keys from their spot on the wall. I know what I need. <>

An hour later, Ana and I return to my apartment with our hands intertwined. Her soft, shadowy shape now reaches the height of my shoulder. In my other hand, I hold the half-eaten trays of chicken and curry, savoring the garlic and soy sauce wafting from underneath the foil. She walks triumphant beside me, holding a paper bag with two gleaming pies.

All in all, it was rather easy. A quick affair, with no hesitation.

I set the aluminum trays of entrees onto the table, and I attack the cardboard surrounding the pies with a knife. Ana stands behinds me and wraps her arms around my shoulders, resting her chin on the base of my neck, smelling faintly of lemon. She is warm as she squeezes me close.

We are ready to eat.

And I am so hungry. <>

After I scrape away the last bites of potato and curry from the tray, grind my teeth against the mountain of chicken bones, and lick the frosting from the pie tins, it is still not enough.

It is never enough.

I look at Ana, and this time, she nods. Almost like she’s smiling.

And then she transforms, her shadowy body morphing into a platter that appears before me, wafting with tangible glee. Without utensils, my hands morph into claws and I indulge my final cravings, savoring the first bite of her rich flavor.

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Craving | Shana E. Hadi

<>

Each day ends with this. With Ana. Ever since I moved. She ends in different sizes, but she always tastes of home.

I keep eating her flesh until my mouth swells with ink that floods my tongue, but the copper taste only adds to my growing desire.

I tear the Ana-dish apart with my nails and the hunger consumes me.

I keep eating her until my stomach protrudes past my waistline and she is gone, returned to the flesh of my flesh with her shadows reabsorbed.

For once, I am at ease. I sit back. My belly gurgles in pleasure and I deeply breathe in, then out. In, out. In, out. My mind clears. <>

But this, too, is temporary. Ana waits to be reborn in the curve around my waistline, a dark half-moon that glows dimly through my swollen abdomen.

With a sigh, I lift my heavy body from the chair and get ready for the next day, waddling over to fish my phone from the fridge. The screen is dead, and it will not turn on until it acclimatizes to room temperature. I leave it under the fruit bowl.

I go to the cabinets and pour Special K into a measuring cup until the grainy flakes are level with the red lines. I will return to my diet tomorrow. I will be careful. I will not relapse.

But as I shuffle off to bed, I pat Ana gently, rubbing the smoothness of the skin between us. She responds.

Over breakfast, she will return to me. Like yesterday, with the precision of a surgeon I will trace a line downwards from the bottom of my rib cage to the start of my hips, dividing layers of reddened flesh so I can give birth to her once more.

Shana E. Hadi is an active night owl who enjoys green tea, pine trees, and flights of imagination (spurred from works like Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”). When she’s not reading speculative fiction or attempting to write it well, she wonders if books are word sandwiches and their themes are different flavors of idea jam, and if that’s why they’re so nourishing to the soul. She lives and breathes her hometown of Los Angeles, and plans to graduate from Stanford in 2021.

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Birthday Party

Valerie Trapp

Aba is sporting heels that get stuck in the grass as she hobbles around the lawn—straightening table cloths (“They go like this!”) and yelling orders at the cook (“Lucia, I said yellow rice, not a block of yellow cement!”). She passes Pirulin, shooting him an urgent look that says “I didn’t pay you to stand and look pretty next to my flowers.”

Trust me—it’s a spooky one. She gives me that same look when I forget to wear socks in her marble apartment.

The air around us is so heavy that it hangs around your ankles, defeating gravity, dragging salon-dried hair up towards the Sun. It’s a shame, really, because you can bet all these ladies that showed up (are they Mami’s friends?) spent their Friday under a blow dryer with alien rolos protruding above their ears while sipping Lipton powder iced tea. I guess that’s the point of it, though—or at least, that’s what Mami says. Iced tea and gossip, iced tea and the chisme about Rafaelito’s new mommy, iced tea and forget your problems to talk about Marleny’s and walk out with gringa hair.

There is a tent propped up on the lawn next to the golf course— the one Papi and I roll down the little hills on. A herd of grandmothers and aunts who aren’t really my aunts but Mami says I have to call them Tia anyway are fixing the arroz and habichuela buffet, because after all, this is a big day, and there’s nothing like a Dominican party.

Enter the star: two fat legs not much taller than the grass carry in a head of curls stuffed into a white taffeta dress. Mami has forced me to wear a headband of flowers, and it keeps getting stuck in my hair, and I just know that my hair is going to get so tangled and when Mami washes my hair on Monday, it’s going to take 45 minutes instead of 30.

“Baby, stop scratching your hair,” Mami says as she carries out a plate of platanos. “You’re two years old today. You’re a big girl now.”

She lowers the plate onto the table and kneels in front of me, making sure her blue dress doesn’t get stained by the grass. She plants a kiss on my forehead, and I can feel her lipstick sticking to me like honey that escaped from that teddy bear-shaped bottle.

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My Tias all look like parrots when they stand in a line—they’re all bright floral shirts and red-rimmed glasses and never-caughtwithout crimson lips, and they squawk in unison and grab each others’ forearms for balance when they laugh. They’re laughing at a clown right now making balloon animals by the bougainvilleas. His name is Pirulin, and I know that because he is my friend. He made me a dog once.

Sometimes he gives me little caramelos too, and I know that my friends Sabrina and Gabi and Anna Consuelo will like him a lot.

I hobble to Pirulin, throwing my arms around his bright red legs and standing on his clown shoes. He bends down to steal my nose.

I am noseless, which sucks, but at least he finds it later again behind my ear. This time, Pirulin makes me a cat out of a yellow balloon, and I name her Serafina, like the cat in the Barbie movie Mami let me watch last week. I place her underneath my arm, give Pirulin a kiss on his cheek with white paint on it, and run across the grass to find Mami and the Tias. They must become aware of my spoils. *** Mami tells me one night when I am between my pink sheets that I will not see Pirulin again, not even for my third birthday. I ask her why. She strokes my cheek with her thumb and tells me he’s gone to a better place.

I didn’t know Pirulin wanted to move to Madagascar. I hope he makes balloon animals for the little girls there, too.

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With dull blade in hand

Alec Wilson After Joan Brown Seated in the Anderson Collection Someone chiseled those scars on her chest and forgot to give her arms so now she cannot hug, and they hollowed out her eyes, so at least she cannot see the woman she will never be.

But here I am whole, on the edge, perched before some great fall with pregnant back exposed to the dull blade of my creator.

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Video still from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Can the United States buy China moon?â&#x20AC;?

Christina Shen

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In the Valley of the Giants

Melina Walling

Mist gathers in the distant copse, sorely missed, Herald of a moisture that only used to rest in my teary, dust-weary eyes, Now settling on my chest, shoulders, mud-ruined boots.

It curls into me like peach tea.

I am joyous but slow, so far from the trailhead, and My hands swell with cold. My feet swell with pain, Pain stabbing the tiny bones in my ankles and toes With dull utensils.

Tense, I turn my neck to pull the cords That bind my shoulders, and then I look up, Drawn to the grey pieces of sky, small as slivers of pie, That sit between the tree-trunks.

I call this the valley of the giants, My companion confides, like it is his secret.

He has trod this trail before, In less muddy boots, caked dry before the rain.

How improbable that these redwoods should fall in our lifetimes.

His silver-tongued ease, the perfection of the line, surprise me.

For an instant he is a philosopher, an actor, With a glib and gentle voice, feathery like the ferns.

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But his voice is not his own. The line belongs To the valley, the rings of redwoods, the singular silence, The grateful trails dripping with globs of mud So thick it could be concrete, pulling us down.

His voice belongs to the trickle of water in the moss, Or the tiny seedling by my feet, Or its thousand-greats-grandmother, Taller than the sky-So wide she could hold All of us hikers within her, While telling us of the improbability of rain, Of fallen giants, of seeing anything at all.

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The Mirror Stage

Amanda McCaffrey I

When the infant looks on herself in a mirror for the first time, she comes to understand that she is a thing separate, apart from other things. She is contained in a small, soft body, and that body is not her mother’s. Whereas she had believed, until then, that there was only one thing (and that thing was everything): her, her mother, and all the rest, to a lesser extent, were of a piece, just one piece.

And it is horrifying to become unmoored in that way.

That is the first traumatic event, Lacan says: the mirror stage.

How does being with you feel like being a child?

Is it because my world grew for a couple decades, expanding, absorbing, including, but for the past few years it’s sort of been contracting, and now is reducible to one face, again.

This sounds sad, like I’m talking about a loss, but the loss was realizing that my mother was just a person, and not the entirety, not all that exists.

And so that’s why now it feels like being returned, or made whole.

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So it’s not that the world has been shrinking, I guess, or even that it was growing before. It was splintering.

Now it’s coalescing, and that’s why this feels like healing.

II You say thinking about barbecue reminds you that you are among the fortunate people in this world: the people who get to lay on the couch eating bacon and watching a program about humankind’s many meat-smoking traditions, as opposed to, you know, going off to war.

Earlier I’d asked whether your parents were still working on your French citizenship, because I heard on a podcast that John Bolton might reinstate the draft. You keep dying in my dreams lately. Awful dreams, and I won’t have them realized in North Korea or Iran. Someone from my school who I never got to meet just went down in a helicopter on the Syrian border of Iraq. My inbox has been full of tributes; there will be a plaque. But it’s true, we’re just sitting on your couch, our plates piled high with greens, another laid out with bacon, ceremonial. Someone from Carolina is breaking down a whole hog on TV. A woman from Texas tends a rack of ribs all through the long night. She stokes the fire.

She hallucinates. She says she slacks off between 3 and 4 AM. Tomorrow I will sit alone among the thirty-eight potted plants in your living room, which you overwater. It will be so hot that tonight’s bacon grease will turn liquid again in the unwashed pan on the cool stove.

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2019 III When I was just a little girl I asked my mother, what will I be I come apart in our room on the fourteenth floor of this art deco hotel, the crown jewel of Cincinnati. I don’t remember parts of the breakdown, and the fourteenth is actually the thirteenth—I guess they used to skip 13 because sign seemed more salient than signified, whereas now, what? We’re not superstitious, or we’ve realized that the signified is the problem, and changing the sign can’t solve it, can’t trick the spirits. While I sob and pace double over in panic you soothe, you shush, you say que será será.

Earlier, while we explored the secret rooms on the third floor—one was gilded, mirrored, gold-leafed, supposed to be haunted by a green lady; another, inexplicably empty, black, cavernous, a glowing orb on a pedestal at the far end from the perfectly ajar door—I found a framed photo of Doris Day, who made her professional debut in the hotel nightclub when she was fifteen years old. You didn’t see it; I don’t think you even knew her name.

She was born in Cincinnati. I took a photo of the photo: she’s small; the band grins. Later she’d star in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, and the world would sing with her: Que Será, Será.

Still later, I would play Sentimental Journey on repeat with Chloe. When it was time to leave their house and meet our friends at the bar, it was seveeeeen, that’s the time we’ll leave—at seven. When we cooked an extravagant dinner, more than we could afford, in their light, perfect apartment, it was salmooooon, that’s the fish we’ll eat—it’s salmon.

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The Mirror Stage | Amanda McCaffrey That was before we met. Before I grew up and fell in love, I asked my sweetheart: what lies ahead?

Will we have rainbows, day after day? Here’s what my sweetheart said: que será, será. (He said I should get it tattooed on my arm.)

Whatever will be, will be.

The future’s not ours to see.

Que será, será.

IV I’m trying to work out how to do total trust and simultaneously never take for granted.

Those seem almost like poles, like, the more you treasure it, the more you hold an awareness that it’s not infinite, necessarily, not necessarily at all; but the more you trust it, the more you think it unshakable, solid, necessarily so.

I’ve got hold of one, you’ve got hold of the other, and we’re holding each other together, but I’m pretty sure we both deserve the other to hold it all, right? How do we spread our arms so wide as to hold those poles in our four hands at once?

Amanda McCaffrey is a JD student at Stanford Law School. She holds a BA in anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House.

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Cocoon Christina Shen

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Butterfly

Valerie Trapp

It’s a very cluttered desk, frankly—a rolling table busied with plastic cups, containers with eczema cream, papers from group meetings with tips for sleeping that I keep forgetting to read. I had spilled water everywhere yesterday while putting on the friction socks, and even now the notebook is wet. You know the one—the blue spiral one, 100 sheets, college-ruled. Filled with the thoughts that slipped out when my skull couldn’t hold them in anymore.

The nurse knocks. She tells me my mother has come. I leap out of the reclining bed, all plastic and midnight sweat, and run towards the front desk faster than my friction socks can fight against physics. I am tugged outside of myself, maybe by the ghost of an umbilical cord, or a pull to be in my mother’s arms, or a primal, biological need to be held by the one who made me. I had called her yesterday before I had to turn in my phone. It was a conversation I’d never thought I’d have. Me: Hey Mami… Don’t freak out, but I’m in the psychiatric clinic. Her: on a cross-country flight from Florida, landing at San Francisco International Airport within the day. I had told her she didn’t have to come all the way here, but she kept on repeating, Baby, you’re my baby, I’m coming baby.

Now, she is here, and every atom in me is pulling me out of my bed and to her. Another part of me is running in the other direction too—past my room where Megan lays, not eating, drawing cereal boxes with slogans like “nothing fills the emptiness,” past the chair arm Matt grips, holding on for dear life as a manic spell pulls him out of himself, past Paul with the sunglasses with only one lens, muttering a cigarette a day, a cigarette a day keeps the doctor away. This is not a place for my mother. This is a place for me and my fucked up friends.

The first thing I notice is her black dress: floor length, adorned with red flowers. She is posed midstep at the end of the hallway, halfconversing with the front desk nurse, half-looking around for me. Everything about her is out of place—her salon-dried hair, her laptop that

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she clutches in her manicured hands, her programmed smile. They’ve always said she’s the kind of woman that lights up a room, and now she’s competing with the fluorescent lights. There was a time when they used to say that about me.

She spots me on the opposite end of the shining passageway, a ghost of a girl clad in blue hospital pajamas and matted curls. Her black heels start moving before her face registers mine, and soon the floors are pounding with the footsteps of four feet—four feet carrying two women into one desperate reunion.

I hold my mother like I am falling: half relief, half shame. I bury my head in her familiar scent, and I start to cry, and it’s not even because I’m sad. I’m embarrassed. I’m so fucking embarrassed that here she is, in her beautiful black dress and heels and intelligence and poise and here I am, in my hospital pajamas and eyebags and depression, and in that moment I conclude that I am a failure to her. I am not the daughter she raised in taffeta dresses and flower headbands, the little girl every adult friend of hers deemed charming.

In this sterile hallway, she has been brought into my mind, into where it has brought me. It feels like an intrusion. She can see the parts of me that are coarse—the ones that don’t match the exterior I’ve spent my whole life sanding. I do not have the strength now to hold up my legs and my shoulders and especially not my head, so I cling to her. She is crying, too, and her ringed hands are in my oily hair, and she is kissing my head and my cheeks, leaving lipstick marks everywhere she can.

I’m taken back to me, six years old, and her, the mother who would sing me a bedtime song about a butterfly who carried a flower every night. Her voice, a rich alto, and her two caramel eyes—assurances that the darkness was just on the outside.

We let each other go, gasping for air. I am itching for outsideof-here, so I ask Dr. Louie if I can take my mom to the garden. He looks up from the file cabinet he is perusing and studies me behind wirerimmed glasses. He tells me I have to promise not to kill myself, and I laugh, because I have not been taught the words to say in response. He is waiting, though, drumming his fingers on the sleeve of his white coat, so I say I promise.

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***

The sunlight peeks through the iron gates of the interior garden. Bashful, unnatural flowers do their best to cheer up the prison-chic aesthetic of the maximum security locks. This is the garden they had taken us to for “Mindfulness” class on the first day—the day I met Megan and Paige. Paige and I walked in one circle fifty times, talking about the roads that brought us to walking a giant circle in the middle of a hospital fifty times. For her, it was a physically abusive boyfriend whose blows landed her in three surgery rooms. We are power-walking at this point, far faster than any of the other patients, so Nurse Maria tells us to slow down and be mindful, girls! Paige’s footsteps lull obediently, but my feet can’t seem to take orders. I am still looking at her, beautiful in her standard blue pajamas and blonde hair. I start pacing one corner, my breath heaving out of my mouth, my thoughts convincing me that I have no fucking right or reason to be here when she is in the same place.

I glance up at my mother in the garden now. Her hair looks redder in this obnoxiously azure California sky. Her lacquered fingers are stroking my eyebrows, her own face furrowed—distant. There is not a lot I can say, so I ask about her flight. She tells me Delta served pretzels. How did you get here baby. She holds my brain in her lap, two hands clenching all my neurons within them, all the things that are wrong and she might secretly blame herself for and she might never understand. Help me understand baby. She says what the script says, the one for when your little girl who you used to sing songs to about butterflies finds herself in the inpatient ward: “We’re going to get through this together.”

What’s in your head baby.

I am tired now. I tell her this. She promptly gathers her black purse and laptop and guides me by the forearm up the fenced stairs like an octogenarian. ***

Later, I come back from the bathroom to find my mother’s hands underneath the blue notebook. She is sitting on the edge of the reclining bed, eyeliner smudged at the corners of her eyes. In this mo-

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Butterfly | Valerie Trapp

ment, I fear that she might be scared of who I am, or what I have become.

“Baby… Baby... I had no idea.” The words are fogged by wet, nasal tears.

Her arms are around me and her nose is running into my hair and all I can do is exhale it into her collarbone—the hot water on my body, the world that had distorted itself. Towers had become cliffs, flags had become nooses, pills had become backup plans. She knows about everything now, she knows everything. In her crying, I hear the sounds of a mother, brokenhearted for a daughter she cannot fix; of a daughter, broken for a father who shot himself when she was just twenty-one. In her cries, I hear her fear of our family history, of pasts repeating themselves as futures. I realize that she did not know what was happening until the me in the pages told her.

My shoulders start shaking and I cannot stop them. Soon, the linoleum floor by our feet is wet with snot. We sink onto the mattress, and I let her hold me in the reclining bed as she slowly starts to stitch the corners of me that had started to peel off.

Bit by bit, softly, not unlike a flap of a butterfly that you do not notice has left until it’s gone.

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2019

[anoche soñé con usted]

Sanjana Friedman frente a mis pies, usted se postra de otra época era hambriento conquistador, implacable dios de la guerra, de la rendición ahora le veo a tiros de arcabuz, desde metros de altura su pecho de espada, sus lágrimas de perlas los soplos que nunca le han faltado y el trémulo olor a sudor a despojo, a saqueo no diré que fuera la luz, ni que la será no le querría halagar y no querría que se enterara de que cuando estoy con usted el mundo entero se reduce al tamaño del círculo de sus brazos rodeándome como dos troncos sudorosos, calurosos, odiosos he de decir que no le quise poseer me inspiró rencor y ternura, ternura y brusquedad, y me llegó a molestar tanto que el único remedio (según una lógica complicadísima que se basa en principios matemáticos y teorias esotéricas) que me quedó era besarle y besarle, que se callara por fin

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2019

cuando nos conocimos me cayó fatal, aspirante a conquistador, me incomodó la forma de su cabeza como sobresalía los huesos de su cráneo y como olía a perfume empalagosa y casi me dio arcadas y ahora me siento a su vera, (¿cómo hemos llegado hasta aquí?) usted, conquistador derrotado yo, fuego incontrolado ahora ardo en deseos de lamer las gotas que se le caen del brazo, del entrecejo, de la nuca, de la axila y ardo en deseos de esbozar con este mismo dedo la extraña forma de su cráneo de immortalizarla en mi memoria y me estableceré en el húmedo hueco de su axila derecho allí fundaré una casa, algo sencilla, nada más un cuarto y una cocina así fundaré una casa y, me negaré a mudarme y, preferiré quedarme y, para siempre olvidarme soñando con usted.

Sanjana Friedman is a freshman from Philadelphia. She’s an avid consumer of poetry and prose alike and is currently poring over the fantastic book “Operación al cuerpo enfermo” written by the late poet Sergio Loo.

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2019

Wave

Ben Davidson I ask a wave “where are you from?” and “where do you go?” and she says “I am my mother’s daughter, and she is very old, but she gives me all she has.

The sun is warm, the foam is clean, the clouds are light.”

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2019

Contributing Artists Lorena Diosdado is from Frisco, TX and part of the class of 2021.

Her current work through oil, acrylic, and photography explores the complex relationship between marginalized communities in the United States and artistic institutions. Complicating conventional views of identity and accessibility, her art idolizes untold narratives, thereby challenging the commonly held assumptions of people of color and “unskilled” laborers. Equity at the forefront of her projects, she has contributed to several Stanford initiatives that aim to challenge historical precedents in art and education.

Lilith Frakes is a sophomore at Stanford from Clarion, PA. She enjoys exploring the human psyche through recreating famous paintings via multi media collage, playing on how the collage’s subjects view their own dramas. Here, exploring personal feelings of futility and release through redesigning Millais’ “Ophelia,” and home and futility through redesigning Wyeth’s “Christina’s World.”

Julia Gillette is a current Stanford Junior double majoring in Psychology and Art History. Julia is a student athlete and competes for the Women’s Squash Team. Julia is originally from Lake Forest, IL. Christina Shen, class of 2022, Hong Kong.

Melina Walling ‘20 is an Interdisciplinary English major with a secondary concentration in Art Practice and minors in history and psychology. She grew up in Las Vegas but now lives in Philadelphia, and loves thinking about the diverse ways that people interact with each other and their environments. She works at the Stanford Storytelling Project and The Stanford Daily, and coordinates hikes for Stanford Peaks and Professors.

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Cover Art Lilithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s World

By Lilith Frakes

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