LIBERTAS
the awards issue
vol. 27, no. 1
SATREBIL Editorial Staff EDITORS IN CHIEF Raven Hudson Maddy Page
WRITING DIRECTOR
WRITING EDITORS
Ben Caldwell
Susannah Cate
ART EDITOR
Jayleen Jaime
Cathy Xu
Katie Walsh
Dear Readers, In the first issue of the fall semester, Libertas takes the opportunity to showcase and recognize the winners of the Spring 2019 writing and art awards. We see this issue as a way to give these authors and artists the exposure they are not always afforded. We hope you enjoy this preview of the capability, creativity, and talent of student writers and artists of Davidson College. Submitting writing to a competition requires a great deal of vulnerability. While publishing one’s works in a campus publication also involves a degree of risk, it lacks the actual, literal judging of one’s work that competitions entail. Still, we encourage writers to be courageous, to be vulnerable, and to accept recognition for your incredible creative work! (After all, any opportunity to monetize your work is a good one, in this economy.) The available writing competitions occur in the spring––usually around March––and include categories for fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and scholarly works. Students can only participate in one creative category, although submissions to the scholarship competition can be in addition to any of the other categories. Submissions can be sent to literaryawards@davidson.edu once competitions open. With admiration, Raven and Maddy
Libertas belongs to the students of Davidson College. Contact the editors at libertas@davidson.edu.
LIBERTAS October 2019
WRITING 4
ART 4 5 6 9 10 12 15
Birthright Maurice Norman
5 6 8 10
High School and Elegy in Sleep Will Thurston ‘19
11 14
Galveston Ben Caldwell
Houston, 2027 Thomas Waddill ‘19 Excerpt from Islands Beneath Us Katie Walsh Ice Fishing in Europa Leah Mell ‘19
Fleeing North Samantha Spada
A State of Mind Grace Cho The Driver’s Seat Sophia Beall Parrot 1, 2, and 3 Owen Keefer The Observant Ones Landin Eldridge Windswept Alex Nikolaidis Konstas Fluidity Adelle Patten The Club Pearce Hyatt
Cover: Tell me where is the fancy bread, Or in the heart or the head? by Adrienne Lee Back Cover: Still from The City of Adelma by Rebecca Cobo
special thanks to... Faculty Advisors: Zoran Kuzmanovich, Paul Miller (emeritus), Scott Denham (emeritus), Ann Fox (emeritus) Previous Editors: Quinn Massengill, Alyssa Glover, Samantha Gowing, Meg Mendenhall, Michael DeSimone, Jordan Luebkemann, Will Reese, Emily Romeyn, Vincent Weir, Mike Scarbo, Vic Brand, Ann Culp, Erin Smith, Scott Geiger, James Everett, Catherine Walker, Elizabeth Burkhead, Chris Cantanese, Kate Wiseman, Lila Allen, Jessica Malordy, Nina Hawley, Kate Kelly, Zoe Balaconis, Rebecca Hawk, and Hannah Wright Founder: Zac Lacy
Birthright By Maurice Norman
I come from a lineage of broken homes and survival tactics. Men who fed their families with corn tilled from seed to sickle. Calloused fingers, women who understand marriage don’t survive the wear and tear of this daily toil. When he ain’t come home to tuck his kids in bed. Let his kisses wander neighborhoods over. Children born of infidelity. Starving. A symphony of aching bellies.
Women with blood stained hands. My ancestry. I do not shame broken english wrapped in southern twang. Still rose these cities from soil to skyline generations to come. Remember the names of those who laid the brick. The fatigue of building a nation.
I have anonymous branches on my family tree. Each one nourished by an emptied womb. Cattle sliced open into the kitchen sink.
I switch dialects with ease the way my mother taught me. I excuse my father’s absence. I let my hungry belly sing.
We’ve been hurtin’. Ain’t nothing wrong with letting it show.
A State of Mind by Grace Cho 4
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Poems by Will Thurson ‘19 High School A gift you can’t accept. I wanted to cry when he asked are you ok? Loneliness in the liminal. Not quite awake and all too aware. The almost friend. Invisibility is most effective in a crowd. Sum of the undone: spirits of divorce, homework, (falling in love like the dream where you’re falling), unaddressing, unquitting. Son of endings: Graduations, breaking up, out, waking up, an assessment of lessons and shortcuts. Some questions hang without finding answers. They wave like windchimes and tell you it’s morning. Elegy for Sleep The bone-white teapot prepares for its task: the pillow’s a miser and meters each morning into a neat account of debts. Dusk retreats and dawn rushes to carry the torch.
Detail of The Driver’s Seat by Sophia Beall
The patient requires a particular medicine, but in this drought remedies abound: the ceramic mug, the mindless jog, the red blink of an alarm clock. A cloak of night is hung on the skeleton: knees and elbows knock like dice, teeth and fingertips quiver under the load. The ground tilts sideways, a sense of floating. The end of the world is no news to encounter in a state like this. It glimmers and beckons like a mirage: You’d better lie down.
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Houston, 2027 Thomas Waddill ‘19
W e are the first time you seemed to come to from the long dark of
infancy, buckling your seatbelt in the back seat of the car, smooth hot vinyl, your mother driving you to the YMCA for a smoothie and a swim in the indoor pool, fractured sunlight frantic on the white echoing walls; we are your thinking of that moment, the moment’s tessellation into years, the way you can’t seem to get in back behind it. Were there things before? Did you forget them? Did they make it out of themselves? We are your empty apartment in south Boston, later, when you are more tired than you thought you could be, looking at the faux tile floor, hearing the empty echo of your knock on the wall for nuts into which to drill a bookshelf. We are the sour smell of the paper mill that would drift down from somewhere outside your childhood town when the wind was wrong and the long verdant grass stains on your jeans. You are in the sludge of the hottest day of the year in Houston, soaked, looking at a yellow slip held to the windshield of your Honda Civic. A parking ticket. Below a stinking Callery pear. We are your sweating in English class right after Phys. Ed. We are the sons of flint and pitch; we are Titan! We are the first time you had a nightmare that followed you into the morning, the inchoate remainder of something unsayable and horrible – the disembodied legs of your dog bounding up your stairs, threatening and surreal. We are your lethargic terror immobile in a beanbag, at the top of your stairs, watching the legs draw closer. We are Concerned for You – Help Us Help You! We are the residue of your first wet dream, all embarrassment, all wonder. We are food poisoning on a Caribbean cruise with your family, during which you wrote your first poem, something embarrassing about what if your vomit was the sea? When you plagiarized Wordsworth, your summer reading. We are your multitudes. The fact is, many of us are March 17th, 2009, your last year of high school. We are the weird hollow feeling of a night in a town big enough for its light to pollute the sky but small enough for its stars to poke through; the midnight dome felt scraped out, as if the town’s lowlight pushed back space just a bit. It was a grey concavity with orange bleed at its bases. We are your reminder to yourself to write this down when you get home. We are Dave, we are Josh, we are Abby, we are you in the cluster of water oaks in the northeast corner of Rogers Park, where you weren’t supposed to be. We are the soft intermittent patter of falling acorns, we are the perforated hush of torn leaves in Josh’s high manic hands. Josh was lying on his back at this point: now, a premonition, a shadow in reverse. We are the mildly acrid smell of pot and humidity and decaying vegetation, and we are the burn of your thumb’s pad when the roach finally reached you and died. We are Josh posing riddles, uncharacteristically talkative, and Dave and Abby answering them, and you laughing, laughing. We are the one that you’ll be unable to forget for reasons unknown to you: “I have no body and no nose. What am I?” Dave answered: “Nobody knows!” And we are your inability to stop laughing at that. You are high now. Nobody knows. We are the woody announcement of the water oak’s compromise, of cambium cracking, the crunch of its folding bark, all impossible, all hap6
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pening. We are a book that said: “read these.” We are the quick scramble out, we are Abby’s murmured grunt, we are you all turning around to see her not out of the foliage; she is in it, she is below it, and she’s grunting “my leg,” so then we are you thinking how this is all just some kind of joke or cliché, but really happening right in front of you. We are the fact that you forgot for a moment the real thing that makes this all really truly fucking insane, as you will describe it to your friends the next day – the fact that Abby was literally talking like twenty minutes before about how hard it’s been recently that her mom lost her foot to diabetes, how we were wondering how in the hell and why in the hell someone’s foot needs to come off for diabetes and actually sort of making jokes about it whenever Abby seemed really cool about it and kinda started laughing – something about glucose and capillaries. We are her saying that the main thing, though, is how her dad just seemed to totally check out, so it’s really just Abby taking care of her mom, and her mom isn’t grateful at all – we are the way you are all listening, because that was kind of the point of this was to listen to her, sort of show her a good time, we are you all listening, thinking, damn. Worst of all, we are your pausing when the tree fell, after Abby was saying fuck, help, for at least six seconds. You weren’t pausing to run up to the tree – you and Dave and Josh were there almost immediately, trying to lift the thing. No – we are the fact that you didn’t immediately pull out your phone to call 911. We are your first thought: fuck. This is it for me. You had gotten into college, two days before, which was sort of the reason you guys were out here – the reason before you figured you should include Abby because she didn’t seem to be doing great. We are your constant recursion to that moment of cowardly hesitation. We are the smell of sativa still hanging under the wet stench of the innards of a dead water oak flung out into the humid night. We are you finally getting Abby out (without calling 911) and taking her to the hospital because her leg is fucked up and bleeding and possibly broken? It’s not – but her ankle is sprained. We are the suspicious look of the nurse. We are the Greatest Nation on Earth; we are above this, we’re over it, we’re tired of it, we’re really hungry and hoping we can find something to eat in the next couple blocks or so, we are the long flight up to New York for a speaking gig at Columbia years later, we are you apologizing to a bumped shoulder, we are the flash of an old March: really, really sorry, Mrs. Dallory. You’d understand if we told you, if we just said it. We just wanted to show her a good time. We are every March, all March. We are the weird stench by the entrance to the Holliday Inn in Parksdale – was it Parksdale? Knotpark? Knotsdale – the Holiday Inn at Knotsdale where you and your parents and your sister crawled out of a car packed with pictures and china and two dogs and gallons of water and bags of clothes. 1998. We are the large man at the desk who charged you only half because of Christy. We are your mother saying if you ask one more time if David was evacuating (you could barely say the word) to Knotsdale too then she
would take your video player away. It was your second night on the road. We are the hotel carpet that looks like a mosaic of spilled cereal, or vomit. We are you watching your parents, not totally understanding what was going on, annoyed that they were constantly watching the news and would not change the channel. The next day you were still in Knotsdale. We are a “lake” rimmed with dead floating grass and your parents’ feeble attempts at entertaining you and your sister. We are Concerned for Your Safety – No Lifeguard on Duty – Swim At You’re Own Risk. Later your mother would take you both to a movie while your dad stayed back in the hotel room watching the news. We are the constant question: When are we going home, mom? Her answer: Nobody knows quite yet, sweetie. We are the constant alternation between newsroom and a man in a grey rain jacket and soaked suit pants in slanted rain. You would all go out to dinner at an Applebee’s, then head back to the hotel room. We are the picture your mom got in the morning of the third day from a friend who stuck it out back at home. Christy was down to a tropical storm, and moving on. The picture showed a white sky and a yard strewn with branches but no trees down, a house intact, Thank God. We are your parents hugging in relief. While they packed, you and your sister Ellie, her barely older than two at the time, started a game of tug-ofwar on the ground with one of your shirts. We are your remembering this trick you saw you cousin do where you pull and then let go and then the other person falls back. We are you letting go of the shirt, and your sister, Ellie, falling back, and her head hitting the corner of the bedframe with a reverberating, sickening thud. We are her cry loud and thin cutting through the paper walls of the Holiday Inn to your mom who rushes in and the surprisingly big red smear on fingers when she pulls them away. We are you watching on while your parents press wet reddening paper towels to the back of her head, asking you what on earth were you thinking? Get over here and apologize. Right now. And we are your sister’s voice going hoarse with the crying, and the way that you went outside in the hall and started crying with her because you didn’t have a choice. We are your sister in white and we are Josh next to her. You hadn’t seen Josh since high school, not until the bachelor party two weeks before, and your hug felt like what a stale bagel tastes like. We are the hard pew, the rivulets of grain you trace on the backrest in front of you. We are you leaving early from the reception, and we are the thought you’d have many years later that maybe the discomfort you felt during the wedding might have had less to do with the fact that you somewhere were guilty that you never kept up with Josh but rather because you knew, watching him all night, that he was the same person that he was in high school, a point of compressed gravity, a really nice guy at heart but someone who at some point just really needs to help himself and start seeing someone; Ellie called a year ago and said, We’re making progress, we really are, but you just really really need to call
him, Noah. Really. Just talk to him. He still sees you as a close friend. No: you didn’t know it at the time, but when you left the reception early that night, your discomfort was because you saw it when you passed him on the way back from the bathroom – you saw a dead wet tree compromised somewhere deep in its rings, falling already, turning on a broken fulcrum onto the woman sitting far below. You didn’t call him. And you saw yourself letting go of a shirt, and letting Ellie fall back into the menacing corner of a bedframe. And now, here you are. You have left the house, your sister’s house, after a different kind of reception. It is unbearably hot. The AC in Ellie’s house was no respite: the clouding weight of the weird shame at a suicide’s wake stayed hung. Ellie would barely look at you. Your dad said, nobody saw it coming. Nobody could have known. Nobody knows. March 18th, 2009: We are when you went back the next day, how you saw that the water oak was clearly dead, with the deep brown waterlogged naked splinters of the tree’s torn trunk jutting out into the suffocating air seeming weirdly benign, just saying, Wrong place wrong time, buddy. We are the half filled Styrofoam cups of sweet tea with floating chunks of lemon in them left on Ellie’s mantle. We are the hollow clink of a baseball colliding with your bat, soaring out to far left field, foul, hitting a long horizontal metal bar choked with bikes in clanging report. We are very sorry for your loss – let us know if there’s anything we can do for you. But right now, all of us, every single one of us, is a parking ticket, a square yellow slip, on your car, parallel-parked along the curb, facing the wrong way on the neighborhood street. The stench of the Callery pear in Ellie’s front yard is overbearing. You are soaked with sweat, looking at a yellow slip that says, You are not supposed to be here. We are the way that the heat seems like a threat, waves of heat up off the black asphalt, visible from twenty feet away. We are the broken slat in the fence through which your childhood dog ran when you were twelve. We are the clear yard under a white sky, the house okay. $33 until August 24th, at which time we will increase in penalty. Sift through us, resist us – all weightless, all inexact, all clustered, flat, transcendent, luminescent, damning, difficult, aligned, unknowable, stinking, burning, yellow. Josh, still alive beneath the water oak, and his question.
Art by Owen Keefer The Parrot 1 (bottom left) The Parrot 2 (top right) The Parrot 3 (bottom right) LIBERTAS Vol. 27 No. 1
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Islands Beneath Us (An Excerpt) I’m a child by the sea as a child is by a sea somewhere. I pick up rocks in the sand and make them into windows. Isn’t that funny? Windows made out of rocks and sand, nothing that I can see anything out of, but what matters is that they are almost, kind of, windows. I do this before I know that sand makes glass and glass makes windows. I’m fashioning windows out of windows. Everything is made of sand in some way. Maybe even me. I force these windows into the lump my hands have toiled over on this flat beach. It doesn’t have an inside. It doesn’t really have a structure. It is, after all, solid, opaque, sloping downwards every second I’m not building it back up. But windows anyways. To see what? What are these for? Whoever wasn’t in this nearly-house would need a way to see the ocean that would wipe them away eventually in the tide. We left the beach, the three of us then, her and him and I : Hot, warmly tired, eyes closing, burnt into my mother’s shoulder, tasting sunblock and salt in her broad back, I re-made her image out of the sun spots growing on the soft slope of her neck. That day she told me not to dig holes too deep because I’d fall into them. Sand suffocates life. Oh, but then why so many crawly things in between my toes? Something must live there, why can’t I? There’s spaces there between each granule. Infinite space. More grains means more space between grains. What looks solid is actually vast emptiness. When she’s stretching her arms, muscular, across the horizon, reaching to the clean, cool fresh water in the public showers, I wonder if my mother’s smooth broad, tanned back is the same way. I wonder if there’s a way she could disappear beneath the water line, bobbing up once or twice before falling away, disintegrating permanently to be carried to other beaches. I think this in the way I notice that air bubbles from the sand when water rushes out of it. I think this before I can think it. I’d look back at the thing I’ve built on the shoreline. The suggestion of turrets and windows softened into a rounded belly on the beach bed. How long would it take to fall back into the rising tide? To lie flatly again against the sand without scar? Whatever lived in what I’d made then (I thought: mermaid, sea captain, sea captain and mermaid kissing, evil crab king), the one which washed away and was rebuilt days and again by the plastic play tool box of memory must live there still. Which is why now at sixteen looking at this home, straddling a sea wall which hides the hungry mouth of the ocean behind it, I’m confused. The most well-made home on the block, our home, seems vacant. My dad said he built it pagoda style: a fortified castle with hurricane shutter windows. He said they were also sound proof. He didn’t specify whether it was to keep the sound out or to keep the noise in. For the most part, the house is empty. My dad, tall and bearded with ever-clear eyes and sun-damaged skin, works odd hours. By odd hours, he means all hours. My mother nicknames him “Ahab,” which he sometimes likes.
8 LIBERTAS
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by Katie Walsh
“You’re obsessed with work! Your white whale!” She laughs over the slosh of wine one night, a night he doesn’t particularly like the nickname. I know this because I hear about it through the thick-ish wall that separates my room from theirs. She says it too loud, like there’s a dry film on her tongue she’s trying to spit out. “You don’t even read.” He says looking at her from the rim of his own wine glass. His lips and eyes disappear in a sip. She leans back, winding up, the way water recedes before it strikes back. They are now staring at one another without moving. I leave before they crash forward again. On most nights, long after the freight train running two miles from our home sounds 12:32 a.m., he scuttles back inside like a crab surfacing from his hole. He moves slowly and silently. He acts like he’s breaking into his own home. A scavenger: when he is here, he likes to pick things apart. My mother is normally here but less and less present. Her eyes often strain above my head, as if I’m direct sunlight. Too bright and reflective to fixate on for too long. She’s mostly on the dock, cigarette in hand, peering towards the neighbors across the river. She is perfectly still, but I get the sense that she’s about to stretch her knees, that she’s going to move. I check again and again, every thirty minutes or so, to make sure I still see her shoulders fill out the horizon line. We never lived anywhere that wasn’t ten minutes from the coast. Of the few things my mother demanded, this was one of them--an escape route. A tropical storm, downgraded from a CAT 5 hurricane, gently rocked the beach during a weekday. School had already been canceled. My mother had been hoarding supplies: water bottles, flashlights, extra Xanax, things to keep us afloat. But there was no real storm. It had died in the water before it reached us. Only a static clarity remained in the air. The opaque grey sky was broken by a pillowing wall of clouds edging away or towards us. We couldn’t decide. My father was upstairs in his office, and had been for three or four days without explanation or apology. I only knew he was there by the infrequent echo of his footsteps, by the change in shadows his large feet made under the door way, by an odor that crep beneath the door, by the way my mother said, “He is absolutely not to be disturbed.” When evacuation is too late, you have to wait out the wind. My mother squeezed open the shutter covering our sliding glass door and walked outside, letting her hand rise above her head to feel the air. She turned to my brother and I with an expression I can’t describe: somewhere between awe-stricken and determined. “Get in the car. Grab a towel. You can wear what you’re wearing. We’re going to the beach,” she said to me as she snatched her keys off a hook with an urgency. She doubled back to grab sunblock. There was no sun left in the sky.
I
The Observant Ones Landin Eldridge
As the car lurched lonely on the abandoned road to the public beach, we followed the wall of clouds. Or rather it followed us, growing larger and more imposing, filling up the sky with white foamy texture. “Mom, isn’t this bad? Isn’t there a storm? Won’t we like die or something?” I asked, nervous more by the tone in her voice than what we were being asked to do. “We will be fine.” She said with finality. We sat on the shoreline. I made circles with my feet. My toes retracing the place they had already been, over and over, again and again. We weren’t sure the storm wouldn’t loop back around. We weren’t near a T.V. The water had receded so far backward a small island had formed in front of us, bubbling with the residual life the tide had abandoned. She said nothing. Just sat with her hands folded beneath her, letting her eyes fix on the splice of land being born in the middle of the ocean. She began to narrow her eyes, intensifying her focus as if the harder she looked the larger the island became. So I set my eyes forward like hers and waited for a sign in the air, a break in the weather to cling to. I tried to form piles of sand into a house, into a castle, into a bridge. But the sand was dry and wouldn’t hold. Then my mother bent her head forward and began laughing. She rose and wiped the sand roughly from the back of her thighs but it stayed in place. It covered her legs so completely, at certain angles, it appeared that she was made of it. She grabbed me by the back of the shirt and began moving towards the water line. I thought she was going to drown me. The way they show mothers do on T.V. specials that show mugshots of wide-eyed women with strung out hair and lipless smiles. On programs where a mother of four drives her minivan head long into a canal and laughs about it in police interviews. I remembered what she used to say to me before I lept into our pool: that all it took was two inches of water to drown. I let her lead me anyway. We had to wade through chest deep water to get to the
shallow. We hadn’t thought there would be such a deep dip before a break in the water and it took the air out of us. When we reached the island, we realized we barely fit on it together. I clung to my mother as her hair clung in greying strands to her face. My toes disappeared and reappeared a hundred times in the sand and lapping water. The water hung frigid around our ankles, numbing our feet and making balance difficult. Some wound stung on my foot, but I couldn’t place exactly where. I looked up at my mother, whose face wore against the overcast sky and suddenly became a part of it. The water was rising. We could feel it on our shins. She did not move. “Mom, we should go before it gets waist-level, right?” She didn’t respond. “Mom? Remember I’m not a good swimmer, right? ” She only put her hand, thinning around the knuckles, on my cheek. The water came to my hip. “Mom?” I asked again lungs filling up with the thick humidity of storm-born air. “You can go. I just want to stay a little longer.” I was nearly her height. “I’m not going anywhere.” This would be how it was, and at the very least, what it was, was choice in a sea of things we could not control. She looked down at me, as we began to lose our footing on the shifting sand beneath us. She bent her head to mind, eyes closed, and grabbed my shoulders, pushing me finally away towards the beach again. We ducked beneath the waves, pulling our way through the current that seemed momentarily to be in our favor. The island lived for another hour before the tide crept back on to it. But by then it had grown dark, by then she’d forgotten what impulse had driven us there, and we’d left what unexplained clarity that hour held behind us. My eyes followed the threatening cloud that moved away from us but that would be back in the sky again one day. I was sure. But for now, for this fading moment, we were drying off.
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Ice Fishing on Europa
from Hollywood Forever by Leah Mell ‘19
Imagine: a moon that loves and a girl who walks on water. No, this is not a prayer and you are not lighting a votive candle. She kisses like a lullaby. Dissolves. Now all you have is the icepick in your hand. A parable is supposed to have a moral at the end. Hard work, mercy. You drop into the ice and fall for fifteen miles until the sea swallows you into its center. Then, maybe, green
Windswept by Alex Nikolaidis Konstas
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Ben Caldwell
Galveston PART 1
I decided to drive to the beach this morning. I had just arrived at work—chic coffee joint, unwitting sponsor of my burgeoning weed habit—when I dropped my wallet and all of its contents onto the floor. Cursing under my breath, I picked up a driver’s license, cheap fake ID, about 15 bucks cash, and some odds and ends, before I felt something stuck to the back of my insurance card. It was a polaroid picture of you, hair wet, half-wrapped in a towel, that I took on the first night I stayed over at your house. I guess you stuck it back there without my knowing. It must be some cruel cosmic joke that you decided to make a surprise reappearance today, one year after we broke up on that beach in Galveston where we used to go most weekends. I don’t know why you decided that would be a good place to end it, considering the obligatory three hour car ride home. I wish you hadn’t made me remember you today, but you did. After accepting that I probably would spend the day wallowing in my own misery, I figured I could at least do it somewhere with a nice view. So I left work early, and I drove down to Galveston. I spent most of the ride remembering you, like I’ve spent most of the last year remembering you. Memory is a strange bird; it can be addicting if you’re not careful. Too many times, I’ve caught myself wasting away someplace better. If I unfocus my eyes just right, I can find our blurry past suspended somewhere in the middle distance. My memory of you lives like a snake in the grass, and it always catches me off guard. It slithers down Instagram feeds and hides in camera rolls. And in polaroids. It lived in a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale that I had forgotten to return to you. I eventually found it shoved to the back of my bookshelf, and I just threw it out because I couldn’t stand to look at your notes in the margins. When I was tired of living with the snake, I tried to drown it; suffocate it. Between the drink and the dope and the dopamine, I could usually hold myself to one moment of clarity–memory, I guess–per day. When I talked back to my dad as a kid, he would tell me I was “diggin’ myself in a hole.” It’s one of those special southern idioms reserved exclusively for telling your children to shut up. Anyways, I’ve probably been digging lately. My parents talk to a God sometimes, but I hope I’m not still their main topic of conversation. A couple months after the breakup, I almost offed myself again. It went about as well as the first time, when I tried mixing faith and sexuality. Or the second time, when it was atheism and hydrocodone. Anyways, the third time failed too. I filled up my bathtub with every intention, I think, of pouring myself out into the Guadalupe River and letting the Victoria, Texas Department of Public Works deliver me into the great beyond. There’s this scene in Fight Club where the cute girl with the frizzy hair takes way too many pills but insists that it’s not real suicide; it’s probably just one of those “cry for help” sorts of things. Maybe this was one of those cry for help sorts of things, ‘cause I
eventually went and got my dad to patch me up. He was certainly taken off guard but by that point knew better than to be surprised. Of course, I couldn’t tell him why I did it. Hopefully I’ll never have to. If I’m lucky, I’ll find someone just like you, but with all the right parts, and then I’ll marry her and just leave this piece of my life behind. For the first hour or so of driving, I tried to listen to music, but with you on my mind, it didn’t work out. As it happens, the snake lives there too. Leonard Cohen spits venom in his falsetto, and there are dry skins blowing through the silence between every song on Sergeant Pepper’s. I opened the windows up to stave off the boredom, but East Texas heat is sticky, even at seventy-five miles per hour. I spent a little while texting my sister; she’s always carried me through these things, especially once you’d gone. But after about fifteen minutes, and almost killing some silhouette driving a minivan in the other direction, I put my phone down. I might’ve kept staring at the black screen just to spite you—nothing as depressing as your good advice—but the reception was bad, anyways. I drove in silence ’til I got here. This beach is haunted. During the day, two ghosts walk up and down the shore in the sunlight. They hit the town around eight, stop into a few greasy dive bars, and then come back to have PBR and underwhelming car sex in the unlit parking lot. They don’t mind it. They seem to be enjoying their eternity here by the seaside, taking pleasure in the mundane, maybe finding their purpose in each other. They’ve got a dog, too—they named her Bones because she was starving when they first found her drinking out of some muddy creek a few hours north of here. She’s still a ratty little mutt, but she’s energetic and sociable, and they love her all the same. She might be the only creature on this Earth that’s more content on the beach than those two ghosts are. On the drive down, I prayed for rain. Sunshine wouldn’t be that bad, I guess, but I wanted a real mother of a tempest to roll in off the Gulf and scare some of these college kids away. Maybe it could collapse the pier, Ferris Wheel and all, and get the tourists’ blood pumping. Hell, it might even drag a few houses down into the water on its way out, maybe defame some millionaire preacher up in Houston. Happy is the corpse that the rain falls on, right? I still don’t know exactly what that means. I know it’s meant to be preceded by “Happy is the bride that the sun shines on,” but I never say that part. Not sure if I’m supposed to be the corpse or the bride. Of course, there’s no rain today—just a dull, hazy soup without much in the way of texture. It seems fitting that the sky wouldn’t have the decency to acknowledge my feelings. It’s humid, too, so there’s no horizon line, and the world just fades out of existence a couple miles down the beach. The weather feeds the cynicism, since it isn’t all that hard to picture that ugly drilling platform I know is off to my left somewhere, or to remember that all this gray will probably be brown in a few years. I think letting go of someone is like watching the clouds change. As in, you can’t really watch the clouds change. You can stare and stare and really focus on them, but as long as you’re watching, they won’t move. But if you look away for a little while and then look back, they’ll be totally different. If I could just look
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away from you, maybe you’d leave me alone. Of course, there aren’t any clouds to watch today. In this haze, there’s nothing to lose track of; nothing to look back at once my mind has wandered for a bit. It’s funny how low skies can make an open beach feel claustrophobic. I glance up three or four times a minute to see that pale sun, still staring down at me through the clouds. Jeering. We used to sit out on this beach and look up at the clouds for hours. You’d call out which ones looked like animals, because you loved that sort of cliché shit. I think about it differently now. Your wanting to live out clichés. Like maybe you were trying to get
Fluidity by Adelle Patten PART 2 I left you a year ago, to the day. I marked it in my calendar hoping either of us would achieve some concrete growth in that arbitrary amount of time. You never cared too much for social media, though, so it’s difficult to gauge if you’re doing any better. Sometimes your face will scroll across my feed and I’ll stare at it, reading the caption as though it were addressed to me. Maybe ‘aimed at me’ would be more accurate. Anyways, I ended up calling in a personal day, not really knowing what I’d do. It just didn’t feel right to sit behind a desk rather than giving some thought to what we were; what we could or couldn’t have been. I ended up just driving back to that beach in Galveston, where it ended.
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the most out of our relationship because you knew it was ending, trying to use me up before I expired. I’m jealous of you. When you left, you didn’t have to lose anyone—it was more like you gained my absence. All I had was a dwindling list of reasons to even be awake now that you weren’t around. I think I’m gonna walk up the beach and grab a six pack, for old time’s sake. Maybe watch the sun set and fill my lungs with tar, actually follow your advice for once and not drive home tonight. Maybe try and figure myself out. Let the clouds change. Cut up that polaroid and throw it out into the sea.
My mom and I talked on the phone for most of the drive— hands free and all that; I wouldn’t want you thinking I’m a hypocrite. I’ve always been able to talk to her about you, and I suppose you could talk to her about me, too. When we were together, she did a hell of a lot better job raising you than your own folks did. There’s not a day that goes by without both of us thinking of you. She once said that you had too much pride to ask for help, but I never really thought so. Honestly, I think you were scared that if you actually sent up a flare, someone might come along and try to rescue you. You never seemed to want to be saved. Galveston seemed like a good place because I hoped we could do a postmortem on the car ride home. I tried to be rational, told you how I thought it would be best if both we spent some time growing up on our own. How I thought I was holding you back. In retrospect, that conversation was a bit of a pipe dream. You didn’t
(cont.) say a word to me but seemed awfully interested in a dead cricket mashed against passenger side window. When we pulled up in front of your house, I said that I would never stop loving you. You thanked me for the ride home, because it had given you time to learn to hate me. You said we’d never speak again, and I suppose you’ve held to that. I watched you disappear through the screen door, just idling for a moment to feel my engine rattling at the foot of your driveway, one last time. You didn’t look back at me, maybe for fear of turning into a pillar of salt right there on the front steps. We were up real late on the phone one time; you were pretty drunk and you started babbling about the Cities of the Plain—Sodom, in particular, and letting the River Jordan carry you away. You were always smarter than me, probably too smart for your own good. I knew what you meant, though, and even though you never mentioned it again, I made sure we stopped going swimming in the Guadalupe. A couple of times, you said you were imploding. You asked me to cut you open and pull up on your ribs, real hard, just to make sure there was really something beating in there. You were always more melodramatic than me, too. Somewhere in your mind, there’s another version of me, a grotesque little funhouse image. He doesn’t know my thoughts and intentions or why I made my choices. I’m sure he’s easy to hate, so I don’t really blame you. I wish I could explain what it’s like to fall in love with a boy just to watch him burn himself alive. You tend to leapfrog from one bad habit to the next, and I’m sorry it took me so long to realize that I’d become one of them: another escape from what was really ailing you, something you couldn’t confront until I was gone. I have a version of you, too, living in my memory like a stubborn tenet who ignored the notice to vacate and changed the locks instead. He’s a familiar presence, but I sure wish he would move out. A few months ago, someone walked by me in the hallway at work who had the same shampoo as you, and the smell hit me like something along the lines of a nuclear blast. My shadow is probably still burned into the wall outside the break room. When I got here, I wandered around town and stopped into a couple of our old spots. I walked by the record store with the chalkboard sign that says, “Art is how we decorate space. Music is how we decorate time.” When you saw it, you put on this silly hopeless romantic face and said, “Love is how we decorate life,” and pretended to swoon. That night, we went to a concert in this dirty restaurant down the road—they didn’t even notice that we’d brought the dog inside—and you said you loved me for the first time. I watched you dancing around in the strobe light, one smoky
III flashbulb frame at a time, and then we followed a pod of dolphins back up the beach. We used to sit out on that beach for hours, just watching the clouds. I can almost see you with your oversized Aviators hanging low on your face. The earpieces were too loose, and they’d shake around if you didn’t tangle them into your hair. Your dad probably could’ve fixed them by tightening the screws a bit, but he never did. He didn’t notice, and you sure as hell never asked. When they eventually broke, we lost the pieces in the sand. I like to imagine that there’s not a metaphor there, but I know better. If I think about it for too long, it really starts to bother me. I grabbed some food around sunset and eventually ended up here, in this sandy parking lot where I would always insist on staying the night if we’d had anything to drink. The asphalt is sun-bleached to oblivion, the white lines all but invisible, and I can tell you didn’t pay them any mind—your car is over in the corner, haphazardly straddling two spaces. I had a moment of panic when I saw it but wasn’t all that surprised that we’d both somehow been drawn here today. I walk over to the chain link fence at the edge of the parking lot and look out over the tufts of panic grass toward the beach. And there you are. Well within shouting distance. As I stare out at you, my sentimental side starts to sing. I want to walk down the boardwalk and meet you there. I want the contents of every shitty bar and trendy little store on this beach. I want the keys from every piano on Beale Street and all the paintings from the Louvre. I want the Gulf of Mexico, and all those summer storms you used to love, and the sun, and the moon, and the dregs of the stars from every black hole. I want every bit of good in the universe in my hands, and I want to give it to you. Then, we’ll ride away aboard the sunset while a big “The End” appears and the credits roll across the sky… But you’re owed far more than I could ever give you. When I imagine your future, I can’t find myself there. I think I need to get in my car and head back up to Victoria. I spend another moment there, the fence digging into my arms, to soak in one last impression. You’re out in the sand, sitting on a faded beach towel, polishing off what looks like your third or fourth can. Your shoulder blades are still sharp enough to cast a shadow, but you look healthier than I remember—even if you clearly haven’t stopped smoking. There’s a new pair of sunglasses lying on the ground next to you. The wind has blown off some of the humidity, so you might actually get a decent sunset. As I turn away, it occurs to me that I’ve gotten what I came here to find. I hope you find it, too. And please, don’t try to drive home tonight.
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Fleeing North The storm shutter finally closed with a resounding metallic snap. Sweat trickled down my forehead, the South Florida humidity making my shirt stick to my skin. I trudged back to my front door, kicked off my dirty sneakers, and entered, unprepared for the way my stomach turned at the sight. Even at night, my home had never looked this eerily dead. All the natural light had been blocked out by the shutters I had pulled on the windows. I could have compared it to being underwater, but that would only bring up memories of diving under the Florida waves, hair floating around my face like it was caught in a breeze, and sunlight breaking through the surface of the water to illuminate the translucent fish that gathered by my ankles as I held my breath for as long as I could. This was not that easy of a suffocation. This was if my home had become a coffin. Sealed, air-tight, with every weather report being a shovelful of dirt, packing us in tighter“Samantha, honey.” My mom flicked on a lamp and my eyes struggled to adjust. “Yeah, mom?” I asked automatically, trying to bring my mind back to a place where it would match my casual tone. “Don’t be scared by the shutters.” Mom had always had the uncanny ability to read my mind. More than once, as a child, I would sit silently next to her and think really hard: Mom, can you hear this? Nod if you can read my mind. She never nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. It wouldn’t be a secret super power if she told everyone about it. “I’m a little freaked out by them,” I admitted, letting out a shaky breath. Mom laughed. “Me too. Come on, let’s find your terrible brother.” --We found my terrible brother, Paul, dragging our lawn chairs across the yard and looking entirely too excited to be up to anything good. “Mom says we get to throw these in the pool.” I looked to Mom for confirmation and she just shrugged. “We don’t want the winds blowing them into the house.” Paul let out a whoop before hoisting a chair over his head and tossing it into the pool. It didn’t go flying the way we all hoped. It kind of just toppled out of his hands and into the water with a muted splash. Paul seemed put out before he caught sight of another chair. He grasped this one with two hands and tried to fling it into the water. Similar results. Still, Paul’s enthusiasm was contagious. I joined in. Each time we threw a chair, we hoped for a beautiful arc into a huge watery explosion, and each time we were a little bit bummed at the lack of dramatics. “Hey, Mom,” Paul called when there were no more chairs to be tossed. “What about Marina Pearl?” Marina Pearl was the name we had given to the half-naked mermaid statue that lived under a palm tree in the corner of the yard. We bought her at half price from a creepy back alley sculpture garden and gifted her to Dad for his 50th birthday. Marina Pearl was almost part of the family. I didn’t think we needed to worry about the four foot tall slab of concrete being picked up and thrown into the house, but my mother was just relieved to see us having fun. “Sure, throw her in.” Paul and I couldn’t pick her up, so instead waddled her over to the edge. “Goodbye, Marina Pearl. We will miss you. Though this is probably for the best because you’re kind of gross and covered in dirt nowadays anyway.” I patted the top of her hair. “Hey, how are we gonna get her out once this is over?” “That’s a problem for future you,” I told Paul as I pushed Marina Pearl into the pool. --As the day wore on, the tension in the house only grew. I helped Mom fill Ziploc bags full of water and store them in the
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freezer. Paul pulled dead and dying branches from the palm trees in the backyard. We gathered up our flashlights and counted out the batteries. Through it all, a reporter’s voice was constantly pouring out of Dad’s iPad, despite his earlier proclamations that, “This whole thing is overblown. This will be nothing, you’ll see.” “Grocery stores are completely emptied of bread and bottled water as Florida residents scramble to prepare for the oncoming storm. Authorities are warning-” “I remember when it was Hurricane Andrew,” Mom frowned down at the case of generic Publix water bottles sitting on our counter. “It was awful. I went to the store for supplies and just... froze. Everything was stripped clean. Shelves were absolutely cleared. It was like the end of the world. I didn’t know what to do.” Over the course of the next four days, Mom would tell that story over and over, as if she just couldn’t seem to shake the memory of those empty shelves. --When Hurricane Irma became a Category Five storm, Mom did what she always does when things look dark, which was to call a family meeting. As my brother and father ambled in, I watched the weather reports on Snapchat. People in Puerto Rico were filming the devastation of what, for them, would be the second hurricane to hit in only two weeks. Video after video of storm surges, flooding houses, and palm trees bent into the ground by the wind. “Samantha, put that away,” Mom told me quietly as she called my sister on facetime. When the family was gathered, Mom started. “Daddy and I have been thinking that we should evacuate.” My brother crowed with delight and punched the air. “Woo, road trip!” “Evacuate to where?” My sister, Sabrina, asked. Her face seemed pale against the darkness of her apartment. She sat crosslegged on her bed, wearing a faded University of Florida shirt she had had since freshman year. “We would come get you. The drive to Gainesville usually takes around seven hours, but who knows how long it will be this time,” Mom told Sabrina. “Then we’d either stay there or find somewhere to stay in Georgia. If we can’t find somewhere in Georgia then we might might go to Virginia to Uncle Rick’s.” The beginning of my brother’s cheer was quelled with only a look from Mom. “Is it really going to be so bad that we have to evacuate?” I asked. “Well, the storm isn’t really going to be the worst part,” my dad spoke up from his chair where he was scrolling the weather reports. “The aftermath is what we have to worry about. No water, no power, no AC, debris everywhere. Who knows how long its gonna take to get everything up and running?” “I want to be with Sabrina. I just need everyone to be together in one place.” My mother’s separation anxiety was normally something my sister and I would make fun of, but now I could only agree. I wanted Sabrina with us, too. As much as my sister drove me crazy, she could make me calm like no one else. “If we are going to leave for Gainesville it needs to be soon. The roads are already starting to clog and God forbid we are stuck on the highway when the storm hits.” The conversation circled a bit more, everyone chipping in ideas on how and when to evacuate. We called out news alerts and advice from friends. Dad contributed hurricane updates and mentioned “the aftermath” at least a dozen more times. The clock ticked over into 10:00 p.m. when Mom finally ended the conversation. “Alright, it’s settled,” she said. “We leave at four. That means we have six hours to eat, pack, and sleep if you want to. Sound good? Good.” We all murmured our assent and began to prepare. --I was raised in a household with a strong belief that food could solve anything. There wasn’t a problem in the world that couldn’t be fixed with a heaping plate full of carbs and butter. Bread was nowhere to be found in the grocery stores of Fort Lauderdale, but Mom had managed to scrounge up a pack of tortillas
The Club by Pearce Hyatt the previous day. While Mom left to pack and Dad went to sleep since he would take the first shift of driving, I pulled out a pan and turned on the gas burner. The blue flames jumped to life and burned steadily. My teenage brother could be summoned by the crinkle of any plastic bag. True to his Pavlovian conditioning, as soon as I grabbed the shredded cheese from the fridge, he ambled in, searching for food. “Whatcha making?” I turned and poured oil into the pan. “Quesadillas. I figured I should try to use up the chicken and cheese, which won’t keep once the power goes out.” “Cool.” He pulled shredded cheese from the bag and started eating it by the handful. I looked at him, trying to make my disgust evident on my face, but he didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. -- The drive to my sister’s college was a paranoid blur. Irma was back over the ocean, gathering strength for its siege on the Keys. It took us ten hours to inch our way up the peninsula and the gas supply in the state was running low. We started looking for a station every time we reached a half a tank, not wanting to let it run down only to not find another open station in time. We were late to evacuate, we realized. Thousands of people had already taken to the road and progress was slow. Lingering over all of us was the feeling as if we weren’t escaping fast enough. The threat of Irma loomed, not needing to nip at our heels for us to feel her gathering strength. I slept in fits. When we reached Gainesville, Mom shook me awake. I sat up, pressing my palms against the carpeted roof of the van in a cramped attempt to stretch my tense muscles. I rubbed my eyes and looked outside, feeling a chill sweep through me. Gone was the vibrant university life with students chattering in groups and restaurants vying for attention. Instead, it seemed like a ghost town left hollow by a plague. Shops were locked down. Windows were dark. Gas stations had plastic bags wrapped around the pumps, signaling they were drained. Most unsettling were the windows, with tape stretching from corner to sill in an ominous X. I understood the idea behind it. That hopefully the tape would reinforce the window so that it might not shatter when the storm hit. I also understood that while it was a comforting idea, it was terribly dangerous. Tape couldn’t possibly hold against hurricane winds, and when that window did break, the glass would be held together in
even larger, more hazardous pieces. I wanted to tell people to take the tape down, but there wasn’t anyone left to hear. We were all fleeing north like rats from a sinking ship. Greeting my sister was quiet. Usually Sabrina would be met with shouts and jokes and bear hugs. Instead, I just walked over and wrapped my arms around her. We silently embraced until she patted my head and I let go. Inside we shared a few tense smiles and a bag of grapes. It was clear that Sabrina’s apartment was like the rest of the town: in no way prepared to weather a hurricane. So we left. -- Irma had made landfall and the traffic was only getting worse as we drove into Georgia. I thought of how Irma’s winds travelled at 175 miles an hour, and how incomprehensible that seemed when we were at a standstill on the highway. Heading north, we were bumper to bumper; the only thing visible in the night was the stretch of red brake lights spanning as far as the eye could see. The left-hand lane heading south was barren, save the occasional crew of five or six utility trucks racing toward the storm to the aid of the people left behind. We drove during the night, catching only a few hours of sleep in any motel that wasn’t completely booked, in the hope that the roads would be less crowded while everyone else should have been resting. They weren’t. The highway was more of a parking lot than an escape route, so we decided to travel the backroads. It took us thirty hours to drive what is normally a twelve-hour trip. As I sat, knees tucked under my chin and arms wrapped around my shins, I couldn’t stop watching the hundreds of brake lights, completely steady in the early hours of the morning. We were surrounded by people, all with completely individual thoughts and worries. But, in the moment, we were all the same. Caught. Waiting. Exposed. All wondering how leaving home was supposed to be safer, even though it felt wrong in every way. Wondering what would be left for us to return to. All of our thoughts turned anxiously in tandem, but as we sat, I had never felt more estranged. I was surrounded by my family, but we were each wrapped in the static white noise of our own apprehension, something that couldn’t be soothed over with sleep or drowned out by music. I was just another steady red light among the thousands. In those dark hours of the morning, I was just another car’s length keeping someone from the safety of their refuge.
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LIBERTAS Still from The City of Adelma by Rebecca Cobo
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