Los Angeles Miscellany Volume 64, 2016

V O L U M E

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LOS

ANGELES

miscellany VOLUME 2016

64

Copyright © 2016 Loyola Marymount University.

EDITOR-IN- CHIEF

Bryan Rollofson SENIOR

EDITORS

Madelynn Sanchez Kate Vermillion EDITORS

Jessica Aquino Joselyn Barrios ADVISING

PROFESSOR

Chuck Rosenthal DESIGN

&

TYPESET TING

Ash Goodwin PRINTER

DSJ Printing, Inc.

CONTENTS

U N C L E SO N N Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Paige Prevost

10

C I N N A M O N & W H I T E Y .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Michael Robinson SC R A B B L E .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jessica Ann Aquino R I V E RS .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mark Noa Gardner H O L LOWS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Emmett Schlenz N U M B E R S W E W I L L N E V E R C A L L .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Elise Cimino H E D O ES N ’ T D ES E RV E T H I S SO N N E T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sabrina O’Reilly LOV E R S T H AT WO U L D N OT L E AV E H E R .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kate Vermillion

11 15

18 19 24 27

28

I D O L L AT RY: 2 0 1 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mary Densmore

30

“ H OW D O ES I T F E E L? ”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Aja Hoggatt A B LU T I O N A RY R I T UA LS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jessica Ann Aquino O BS E RVATO RY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mia McNeil

33 39 42

FO R M Y L EG AT E E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Esther Dalton

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H A I L H O LY Q U E E N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sofia Leggio SA N DS TO R M .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Madeline Tykeson SEHNSUCHT................................................................................................................

Jaime Maier NAN ............................................................................................................................

Mark Noa Gardner

46 48 49

HIS HUMANITY.............................................................................................................

Eleonora Comaschi P U R P L E T R I A N G L ES .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Madelynn Sanchez

31

54

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P E AC E I N T H E S I L E N C E ( C U T T H E CO R D ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bryan Rollofson

61

M I L ES DAV I S’S B R ASS T RU M P ET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ian Green AMERICAN ARK ..........................................................................................................

Sofia Leggio DA M AG E D K I D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jaime Maier LOS A N G E L ES 2 0 1 5 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Danny Birmingham

64 66 68 70

FOUND

POETRY

STAC K

•

MICHAEL

ROBINSON

( G R A D UAT E

STUDENT )

UNCLE SONNY PA I G E

PREVOST

Those pearlies weren’t so white but the smile was wide and it was all for me I called him “coon” before I knew the meaning and thought maybe I shouldn’t but I was used to it and so was he that man who didn’t mind wore it with his back straight, his arms by his side, and an open window in his eyes, my endearment for him.

When they named a street after my Uncle Sonny, not everyone thought of yellow tank tops and the sun’s warmest hug They didn’t think of Easter eggs at St.Anthony’s Church and how they needed to hide.

When “Sonny” sauntered through their minds:

(’18)

he was a half-filled 75th birthday bash at the Civic Center, a man who was not his older brother, a doorbell that rang and rang and banged until it was opened he was a man with too many sounds to say and not enough people to let their earbuds bloom Yeah, my uncle Coon.

One summer, my mom and him entered a boxing ring with their voices the heavyweight champ unclear, no fisted hands lifted above a head.

As he left, he gave me a hug.

The roughness of the hair that surrounded his smile caused me to pull away, rubbing my cheek and complaining about the itch.

10

CINNAMON & WHITEY MICHAEL

ROBINSON

The woman I called “Granny” had once been a Mommy. Perhaps that title doesn’t change just because a child . . . leaves. Cinnamon Dumas long suspected her beautiful boy merely acquiesced to this world’s realities, realities that pained him. He never found the magic in living—not a fairy’s thimble’s worth, as Granny was fond of saying. It took magic—some—to get people out of bed, to give those sleepwalking through it subliminal direction.

So when he—my Dad; her son—“died of an overdose” before I was born, as she told me years after I began questioning the fiction of his “drowning”—there were medals going back to his high school years in New Orleans, some bronze ones green from the humidity of the ragged Georgian coast from his days on the Negro swim team at Morehouse—she concluded his unhappiness never left: it fell down a hole in him, where it grew into a hard, hard bitter pill like cyanide. That became the story: that John Dumas tried drugs only once and found heaven.

I remembered Granny pulling me into her as she finally finished the story. My face, wet, I recalled how I sobbed, heaving in a way that threw off the regularity of my heartbeat. Precise, practical, a woman of high personal standards, Granny never substituted margarine for butter in a recipe, never watered down “he finally found a ways to kill hisself” with the whitewash of “it was an accident.”

( G R A D UAT E

STUDENT )

Granny, nonetheless, was a pious woman who came by her piety setting God as true north, the wellspring of all the magicks squirreled in the crannies of this awful and large world. She discounted preachers and revival tent shenanigans. For her, even the Good Book, referenced every day, like her Betty Crocker’s in the red-plaid binder, served as mere touchstone and guidepost. God existed in the world through the magic in wonders and whispers; the cauldron work and realized spells voiced all around—that anoint and uplift.

Granny softened our talk with a sidebar of magic and a generous plate of warm chocolate chip cookies she whipped up while we talked, never using a measuring cup or spoon (other than a wooden one). It was all just a ceramic mixing bowl and the twelve ingredients.

“Maybe you and he, you pass one another.

He up and going to the Maker and you coming down from the Good Lord to be with me and your mother.”

••• I pulled the blanket I kept like a roll pillow on the sofa from under her feet and covered Granny with it. I was on my own for an hour or so. Whitey, her cat, curled into the warmth of her so it was up to me to keep watch on the

11

twelve courses being prepared. Most, I will take up to the church to hold for Saturday’s Feeding program. Some of the vegetarian dishes I will hold on to. I studied Granny and the cat. Both looked impossibly frail to have survived in the Ninth Ward during Katrina.

duster’s prop.

New Albany lost forty-six souls that day— three lives per mile. The two kids saw one of them: a man spinning with living room furniture perhaps a football field down from them.

•••

••• Had t’ve been a good half dozen hurricanes suppose t’ level New Awlins pass half-dozen years ‘ fore this Katrina, Cinnamon Dumas thought, defying her television and the on-going messages to evaluate the lower areas of the city. Hurricane Cindy had, a couple of months back, caused blackouts bad as the ones that the big hurricane in the Sixties caused. The season had hit the city with its worse; her small two-story woodframe could weather another bout of weather.

Cinnamon, herself, had weathered worse. She only needed to double-check the windows, ensure she had a full pantry . . .

••• In 1917, late March, a tornado tore through fifteen miles of her hometown, New Albany, Kentucky, zigzagging the divide between white and black folks in the small town as if to underscore the insignificance of such human categories.

She and her brother, Daniel, had been stomping through fields of wild berries on the white side when the sky turned leaden and fierce in the west. Using the rope that kept his pants up, Danny tied his sister and he to a nearby water pump. They watched, horrified, as the western horizon solidified into a dervish that roared like a great beast, but a beast finding itself small and cowardly amid the volatility of the air around it, the sky that made it. As if in mindless panic, it scattered livestock and multi-ton farm machinery like loose field grass before a crop

She only needed to double-check the windows, ensure she had a full pantry—and extra water. Perhaps she should fill the bathtub.

The phone rang and she first felt about for the remote to turn the TV down before picking up the handset on the seventh ring.

“Mom?” “Oh, hi, cher—“ “What are— You need to git to gittin’!”

Cinnamon smiled, seeing the little boy with the stern face and watery eyes that lectured her every time she put a cigarette between her lips.

All the reporting, all the doomsday talk, had rattled him. Him. A man that walked beside the Reverend King. That endured thrown bottles and rocks, bats with barbed wire wrapped around them. High-pressured water from fire hoses, trying to put out fires beyond their design.

“I’ll be fine, child,” Cinnamon said. “I’m going to make sure everything’s sealed up tight and—“ “Mother,” he said. “This is no time to be stubborn. This ain’t 1917. Your big brother’s not tying you to a water pump while a tornado tears through the town.”

“Didn’t we have this talk a few months back?” Cinnamon starts to sit down and almost sits on top of her calico cat. Whitey moves just enough to avoid getting squashed. “That’s why you’re not to set here, Whitey!”

“We had the talk but, like now, you’re too busy fussing with your damn cat to—“ “Child, you best dial that attitude of yours way—“

12

“I’m coming over,” the younger Dumas threatened. “You’re leaving that house. I’m coming over.”

“No, you are not!” Cinnamon said in four firm syllables, putting her foot down in unseen emphasis. “You’re staying under your roof. Out of all this. Like me. Understand? Take a Valium or something! You’re high-strung as a jay bird!”

short hall and down the angle of the stairs: the landing, that had been dry a short while ago, was now underwater. There was no going back to the kitchen.

•••

••• It was the cat, Whitey that woke her. The wind and rain had made such a racket; she had taken her own advice, taken a Valium. The water was cold but numbing to the point that her body did not react to it. If it hadn’t been for the cat . . .

Cinnamon stood, not entirely awake, and felt susceptible to the rapid motion of the rainwater.

Whitey leapt to her shoulders and her claws galvanized something in Dumas to think clearer.

Get up the stairs. The water was rising, rising.

With Whitey practically on her head, Cinnamon gingerly stroked over to the stairwell; it was more efficient than walking through. At the second or third step, she stood, her head out of water. She could not believe Katrina or any storm could flood her out. She could not know, then, about the levees. Cinnamon used the bannister to half-pull her up the stairs to the dry shore of the landing. The water seemed intent on changing that.

Cinnamon kept a landline extension in the bedroom on the second floor. She knew before she picked up the handset that it wouldn’t work.

She had filled the tub. Drinking water. She had a stocked medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and, for now, a toilet. She had at least three wool blankets, blankets that would keep her warm in the event they got wet. What she didn’t have were the cans of food she’d left on the kitchen counter thinking, at most, waist-high water.

Cinnamon looked beyond the doorway, the

“Are you sure, Ms Dumas?” The young sheriff’s deputy had either not been at his job very long or was overwhelmed by the magnitude of it over the last week. Of course Cinnamon was sure of the identification. She only had one child.

“Yes,” she repeated. “That’s my boy.”

••• He had not died from a drug overdose. A half a century ago—nearly three generations— John Dumas, a gadfly rooted in ideas and ideologies, abandoned his family. He tried to be that man that stayed with a woman, stayed with his child but he just wasn’t that man.

Cinnamon kept tabs on him. He was her son. And she followed him, splitting her time between him and the abandoned until they didn’t need her. She joined him in Birmingham, Selma, D.C.. Memphis.

After Memphis, he settled down in New Orleans.

After Katrina, he settled into the depths of the waters of the Ninth Ward.

According to the investigator Cinnamon hired—I rehired— John Dumas left the French Quarter where he had lived for something like thirty years and journeyed out to get her. His mother thought she’d dissuaded him. He wasn’t.

He’d found a man struggling to get a small red boat with a large bright yellow fleur-de-lis and a small motor out of the water. John traded his car, a silver gray Mercedes Benz 200, for the

13

boat. He wore a bright yellow rain slicker and, according to a family crossing a bridge, was seen heading towards his mother’s block, waist-deep in water. This was before the levee broke and the flash floods of the ward.

Pieces of the boat ended up stuck in a window of a home.

John, himself, was found floating with other bodies downstream of the neglected levees.

••• John Dumas moved through landscapes in a hurry to get to the next. He had no forevers in him, only nows. It would be good to know what about Mom and I scared him so much that he needed thousands of kilometers between us. But

Granny will never tell me his truth. Not directly.

Her boy grieved the reality of this world and found nothing magical in living—“even a fairy’s thimble’s worth.” Only monsters. Demons he flailed against, took it on the chin from, and dedicated his life to either end or give him reason to keep rolling away.

Watching Granny sleep, I am her blood.

I know the nightmare she keeps from me. My father dying to get to her; dying because she, of all people, had underestimated nature.

She starts awake, her eyes finding mine.

There was a muddled expression in her eyes expressing, what?—fear and loathing; despair and anger—all shook together. It overflowed the depths of her brown, watering eyes.

“It’s just me, Granny. Just me.” •

14

SCRABBLE JESSICA

ANN

AQUINO

(’17)

Scrabble was the coup de grâce of Philippine Summers His name is the murmur of rain on a tin roof, the breath of wind chimes at dawn, the purrr of a jacket zipper, the crunch of gravel underfoot.

A name too wild and delicate to say out loud.

With a voice that only mumbles and fumbles honest words.

Ears, his ears, that bloom open like roses and burn like stargazer lilies.

Calloused hands that whip chicken scratch into sketches dying to jump into this life.

Hands lay down the 70-point Scrabble tiles and feed quarters to the Big Blue carousel for that hour-long ride.

Feet to keep mine warm from the Marina chill Feet beat in time while M*A*S*H 4077th explodes in shells of confetti.

A mind that works and works, in a million different ways.

A mind meant for shaking hands— midday meetings— 6:00 am coffee— shifting, planning, alert and aware— in a million ways— Wait, where’ d we leave the car again?

That straight nose, that Boy Scout nose that steals the air straight from my lungs.

15

That Adam’s apple yo-yo’s with every joke, every new idea erupting like lava, the sky opening up under an observatory, unclenched fists with three little freckles in the middle of his palms, like ink blots on the wall, Hands that fill mine like water poured into a cup full of stones.

Lips that hide my secrets and tempt me with new ones to keep.

Lips that drive me so far from a mind that’s become a dusty vacation home.

Adoring with eyes like the ocean after a storm but before a sunrise.

And from that mouth that makes any laugh bubble through my lips, or wrings tears out of me like a ragdoll after rain, comes that same pitter patter against the roof.

As— You— Wish—

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KØ B E N H AV N

•

JAIME

MAIER

(’16)

RIVERS MARK

NOA

GARDNER

(’16)

I gashed my face open the other night shaving and made a wound as wide as the sea.

I could not stop the blood from racing down my neck, black and thin, as if it too were mourning its own passing.

I once dreamt that we were walking through the woods holding hands, moonlight carving out our bodies, until we happened upon a dark river.

You helped me out of my clothes as I slipped you out of your dress and I watched the cold water break over the white of your untouched skin and you told me that you missed me, that whenever things get to be too much, you fashioned circlets and purity rings out of twigs and thorns from bramble bushes and adorned them while you slept.

And maybe this is my way of grieving for you: by cutting my skin whenever my face becomes too rough and instead making it smooth like the inside of your thigh, hoping to strip myself down to joy, but this dark river still fills me full of missing.

I could not stop the blood from pouring out my wound but the sight of it calmed me.

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H O L LOWS EMMET T

SCHLENZ

He sang a duet with an empty room.

Beneath a high and lonely ceiling, sitting in decades of dust and shattered glass, he answered his own echo. As a harmonizer an empty room has perfect pitch but a poor memory, so he kept singing, sad Irish songs about dead Irish people, all the ones that used to suit his brother’s voice so well.

He sat on the floor, cradling the guitar on his hip, his back against one of the dozens of broken and ransacked display cases, all splinters and spearheads. A few held the things left behind. A tuft of taxidermied fur. Small white signs spelling out long Latin names. In one case, taller than he was and twice as wide as that, just a small and lonely knuckle bone.

He sung another song to the rusted chain dangling from the ceiling—crumpled below it, the brass bones of a chandelier—when a black hole opened in his stomach. It sucked his heart out from behind his ribcage and through his intestines and he knew with a ghost’s certainty that his brother was dying. How he knew he was not sure—the instinctual sympathy between the dead and the dying, he reasoned later. He had not seen Michael since he left home to study physics, hadn’t seen anybody at all since the day he himself died bloody in the street, listening to the screeching of wheels on concrete.

He knew his brother was in their old hometown of Carpenter’s Shore the same way he

(’16)

knew he was dying. The ghost had returned once, decades before, but did not make it more than thirteen feet over the town line. He thought about finding his way back again, and remembered how he receded as he approached, how he felt himself fading. The ghost stood up and slung his guitar around his back, neck pointing at the ground, and started for the chipped marble staircase at the end of the hall.

He thought about the museum as he climbed, about history and the history the place used to hold inside it. A few fragments, like the knuckle bone, remained, the way hair stays attached to a corpse long after everything else, but he wasn’t sure the building could be called a museum anymore, empty as it was. It had joined the ranks of hollow spaces—boarded-up churches without a congregation, the weedy lot where your childhood home used to stand. Are things what they are, he wondered, or what they once were and can no longer be? The dust on the railing was undisturbed by his trailing hand.

He reached the top of the stairs, took a right, and followed a wide and shadowed hallway to the tall wooden doors at the end. Spiders skittered up and down the walls. Beyond the doors lay what remained of the portrait gallery. He had spent hours in there, amidst its broken frames, since coming to the museum a few days before. It was comforting. And he was in need of comfort.

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When he reached the doors he stepped right through them, like water trickling through pine needles, and the cobwebs on the door handles did not so much as flutter.

He entered a cluttered, drafty room.

Moonlight and a cold breeze streamed in from the broken and seacolored stained-glass window high on the wall, casting everything in a chilly blue.

Wooden and gilded frames littered the room— stacked in corners, strewn on the floor, leaning against the wall. Memories of faces painted on shreds of canvass—a flash of an eye, a ripped smile—rustled across the floor.

Somehow, someway, one painting survived, hanging crooked on the wall. The ghost walked up to it so his nose was inches from it: a young girl, beautiful, with pale skin and a soft smile. He had never seen her face before coming to the museum a few days before. He dragged up a memory of Michael’s face, from a trip they took to the Grand Canyon after Michael graduated college. He was reddened with a few days’ stubble, laughing, a knitted hat pulled low over his forehead, framed by the rocky arms of the canyon reaching for the sunset. He tried to sketch age lines on Michael’s face, approximating the lost decades, but could only see him as he was that day in Arizona: a young man who had not lost his brother.

He raised a trembling hand to the crooked painting and pressed his fingers against the paint, trying to imagine how its ridges would feel if he could feel them, trying to touch the closest thing to a human face he could find. He could not return to Carpenter’s Shore. Would not. He did not want to fade from the world. But he would do something to remember Michael. The best he could manage.

He walked to the left of the railroad tracks, keeping his eye on the sliver of sun over the far-off mountains. He had seen a thousand sunrises since his death, and a thousand more sunsets, and while

he never stopped wondering at both, he thought it was a myth that you can’t tell the difference between the two. Sunsets have more energy to them. It is when every breathing thing of the world looks up and watches its world fade to black like the dragged-out end of a movie. They lend it their own life. More often than not, when the sun rises, it does so in loneliness. He preferred sunrises.

On either side of the railroad stretched breasts of plains, soft-swelling. They could fool a person into assuming their infinity if not for the mountains that cut them short at the edge of one’s vision. Buildings, he thought, are not the only things that can hold the past. God knows how many ghosts lie quiet beneath the railroad tracks.

In America, at least, history is never so much behind the country as it is hanging like an anvil above everybody’s heads.

A distant whistle sounded, and the ghost stepped over the iron on his right to stand in the middle of the tracks. He tucked his hands into his pockets, turned to face the whistle, and bowed his head, shoulders sloping. The train sped at him.

The two posed a challenge to the law of physics that states no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. The law went unbroken, he being all subject and no object.

He raised his head and stopped himself inside the dining car, brightly lit by lamps that teetered between charmingly tacky and garish. All was painted in pastel and kindergarten colors. Desserts were everywhere. A pleasant sugariness thickened the air, lightened by the clinking of silverware, grounded by the happy murmur of conversation.

Glasses floated upwards and red wine drained out, forks chiseled off cake, all by unseen hands. A banquet for the specters of the living.

The ghost unslung his guitar and sat down, cross-legged, in the middle of the aisle. A dessert cart, axles needing grease, wheeled itself down the aisle and through him. It parked at a nearby table, sowed sweets, and squeaked back to its resting

20

place by the bar.

He cradled his instrument in the crook between his hip and the beginning of his thigh.

Strumming, humming, he listened for his brother in the hollow of his guitar, playing what they used to play together on the back porch during summer nights. Firefly music, they had called it. Every so often, somebody’s voice would cut through the foggy din hovering over the dining tables, slightly puzzled.

“Does anybody hear music?” it would say. “It’s beautiful.”

He took the train all the way to Flagstaff, and a bus from Flagstaff to the park. From there he made his way to the edge of the South Rim and looked down into the hollow of the earth that was the Grand Canyon. It stretched out before him, naked beneath a bright and cloudless night sky, exposing the old bones of the earth.

He began his walk downwards, knowing it was late enough that he would see no one even if he could see the living. The sun would rise in a few hours, and with it other wanderers, but that night belonged to him and the canyon and no one else. He had walked this same trail with Michael, the first time they had come here together. It was night then, too—they’d set foot on the trail too late in the day, and gone farther than they should have, and made their trek back up to the rim in darkness. To pass the time he thought up a ghost story to tell Michael, hoping it would frighten him, forgetting that his brother wasn’t a child anymore. Michael smiled at the end of it, and asked if he had made it up himself, and said it was good.

He had asked Michael if he believed in ghosts, and Michael said yes, and he teased his brother then, but as he walked down the trail as a ghost himself, he took comfort in his brother’s belief. It’s a hard thing, not being believed in. He knew how it must feel to be God.

After a long walk he reached the bottom, near where the Colorado River flowed. He lay down in the sand, looking at the stars and listening to the kind of silence only found in nature. The sound of running water was constant, sure, punctuated here and there by the call of a bird and the brush of a breeze, but those were the same sounds that had filled the canyon the day before, the year before, the century before. They had filled the canyon ever since it was carved out of the earth by time, or shifting ice, or running water, or a god who wanted to feel a little less lonely. In that forever sort of sameness, there was silence.

The silence made the Grand Canyon appear exactly like it was: an eternally empty thing.

Beautiful, but empty. There were other parts to it: the river, the trees, the dizzying cake-layer canyon walls, the hikers, but these things were not the canyon. The Grand Canyon was defined by what it was not: filled-in land. We are, the ghost thought, the things that we are missing. We are our empty spaces. Spaces filled only with the smoke from our forest-fired past. Gray tendrils of absent friends and family and sacred places, of gods and lovers and childish minds, of our past irretrievable selves which we wonder about when we’re low, whether they were better versions of us than we are right now. These are the gaps left between us and the world when the world moves a bit faster than we do. And while the Grand Canyon could not shovel dirt into itself, fill itself up, it was content—in the way of inanimate things—to be beautifully empty, and it would stay that way, forever. He could stay that way, too, but lying on the banks of the Colorado River, he made up his mind.

Eternity was a long time to spend hollow.

He stopped at the very edge of the town limits, toes touching the imaginary line dividing what was Carpenter’s Shore from what was not. It was morning, the sun was high, and he took in all

21

the colors of the world: the greens of the grass, the browns of the tree trunks, the gold of the dog that sat panting in the slatted black shade of a white picket fence.

He walked over the imaginary line, and he kept walking, and he felt himself start to recede.

Colors drained slowly toward gray. Sound was dampened, distorted. He saw the world bleeding out around him, each footstep a teardrop on a watercolor painting. He dug his feet into the pavement and kept moving. He knew where he was going.

He walked through his childhood, a small town in a small state, passing all the places he used to know. He had preserved different parts of Carpenter’s Shore in his memory, picking and pickling moments. There was the barn where his family used to gather every summer for a raffle, stretched out on blankets and swatting mosquitos, checking tickets and booing winners who didn’t share their last name; boarded up, now, the grass gone brown. There was stretch of ocean road where he and a love had lain in the back of a car, skin touching, listening to the rain, when he was sixteen; barely a road, now, eroded into nothing but sand and memory. There was the cemetery where he watched the burial of his best friend’s grandfather—so much fuller, now, brimming with the dead. And here he was, walking along, a stranger in his own hometown and watching it fade to black and white.

Then, in the increasingly colorless world, a splash of brightness: a red door on a modest house at the end of the street. He walked up, knowing what it meant, and passed through into a tidy living room. A small sofa faced a television, and dozens of photos lined the walls. In them, he watched his little brother grow up. Graduation, wedding, the birth of his kids, coaching his son’s soccer team, him grey and smiling with his wife.

Here was his brother’s life, the one he never got to see, splayed out before him. Framed and set

prominently above the archway leading to the rest of the house was another picture. It was not a good picture, really. They were both squinting into the sun and their hair was blowing madly in the wind, but there they were, the Grand Canyon opening up behind them.

A staircase rose up nearby, and he followed it to a landing on the second floor. Every step up was hard, like he was being tugged back by a wave, and the world was more than just colorless now. The edges of the world were starting to blur, like a smudged charcoal drawing. Even the light was dimming. When he reached the landing, he stepped through the door on his left.

There, facing away from him, straightening his tie, was his brother Michael, all in color, gold tie, brown eyes, pale blue shirt. He was old, wrinkled, bald except for a tufty crown. Time had calcified on his body, dragging it down. There in the mirror, next to Michael’s face, was his own, young and tan and handsome, the same as it had been the day he died. Michael’s eyes shifted up to his brother’s, and he started, whipping around and clutching his chest.

Neither said anything at first. Neither needed to. But when Michael went to embrace his brother, his arms passed straight through, and both felt a sharp pang, like coming home and finding you’ve been robbed. After that they needed words, so they sat on the bed and talked for a long time. Michael made a hasty series of phone calls, cancelling his plans for the day. He told his brother of his life, filling in the decades-wide gaps left in between the pictures in the living room. The ghost told Michael of his travels, of the things he’d seen, of the last visit he’d made to the Grand Canyon.

“Felt real stupid, thinking about things,” he said. “Remembering how I laughed at you back then when you said you believed in ghosts.”

“Always have believed,” Michael replied. “A ghost is just empty space where a person ought to be. And the world is filled with those.”

22

All through the conversation the ghost felt himself fading further, bit by bit, and when night came he knew he did not have much longer. He told his brother this, and asked if they could go outside and look up, like they used to when they were kids, like they did when they were in the Grand Canyon.

Michael, his old bones threatening to give way, struggled up from the bed. His brother could not help, and he felt one of the last sturdy parts of himself break. But Michael got up, and got down the stairs, and got out the door, and maneuvered himself down to the ground, where he sighed and

stretched out and patted the grass next to him.

The ghost lay down next to Michael, balancing his guitar on his stomach. He strummed a chord and the years fell away, and they were on the banks of the Colorado again, practicing harmonies to impress clever girls at pretty parties.

They sang to fill the empty spaces in the world, in each other, in themselves, voices weaving, thatching. The ghost closed his eyes and swelled with the moment. He gazed up at the empty space between the stars and waited to pass from the world. •

23

NUMBERS WE WILL NEVER CALL ELISE

CIMINO

(’16)

Take it a word at a time: sapphire sandalwood saint A phrase: comfortably numb An image: Our sloppy smiles widen as we close the distance between our bodies and your hands find my skin A city: Venice A hemorrhage: Your words echo through the hollow of my frame and between our kisses I curse myself for choosing the temporal once again for in a few days I will feel as empty as ever

*Inspired by “Four Legged Girl” by Diane Seuss

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ENGLISH

B R E A K FA S T

•

JAIME

MAIER

('16)

LOCKS

•

MEGAN

BROWN

(’16)

HE DOESN’T DESERVE THIS SONNET SABRINA

O ’ R E I L LY

(’18)

The wake of morning’s light laments the time of piercing vengeance versus speeding love.

To find my purple skies immersed in winestained lips and battered tongues highly rung, shoved beneath your haunting breath, the chocolate taste of colored hair. The smell of skin lingers in nightmares, stilling portraits paint in haste our evenings, frozen mazes of fingers that traced your lips. You pursed them, swearing me that mine would never be wounded as they are now. A fetching gesture with darkening, biting memories, which love’s vehicle conveyed.

Nurse me to life! I wish to fall asleep.

Forget the acid blow you’ve torn so deep.

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L O V E R S T H AT W O U L D N O T L E AV E H E R KAT E

VERMILLION

(’16)

She wished to kiss the sun’s rays and tell him that she loved the dust he illuminated at her window.

How bright had her days become since devoting herself to salutations.

She fell for the ocean, but he was arrogant and beat her back from his shores.

She would have plunged herself into his depths, with a sea cloak wrapped around her thin frame, yet he was far too stubborn to let her dance in his waves.

She greeted the breeze like an old lover, letting him push the hair from her face and plant kisses of minty breath on her cheekbones.

But he fled too soon from her fingertips and travelled over the soft green hills.

She returned to the candles in her window, soft wicks that silently twirled in the midnight breeze, watching them as she fell asleep, sinking into her pillowcase and the dreams, dreams of lovers that would not leave her.

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F LY I N G

HEART

•

MEGAN

BROWN

(’16)

I D O L L AT RY: 2 0 1 6 MARY

DENSMORE

(’16)

Girls should be pretty, Sexy and sweet.

Hairless and harmless, Ageless and flawless.

Big ass, small waist, Round breasts and heart-shaped face.

Don’t speak so much Or be so loud, It really is unbecoming.

Don’t think so much, He’ll do that for you, He likes a smiling face, And your frown lines are already showing.

Be sassy and flirty, And show off those legs, But wait, that’s too much— You must be slut.

Don’t sleep around, But don’t be a tease, And don’t expect monogamy.

Get a job, make some money, But not as much as your hubby.

Don’t try and be a CEO, Without that Y chromosome.

Clean the house, Have the kids, And don’t forget dinner by seven.

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HOW DOES IT FEEL? AJA

H O G G AT T

(’17)

A breath escapes “How does it feel to be the only black girl in the grade?”

I look down At the terracotta colored track beneath my feet Our paces are the same but I could not feel farther apart My advisor, my safety net was no longer so safe.

She asked with ease.

Her face had no stress, no emotion not even curiosity She felt nothing.

But I, well I feel it all.

The curly bush atop my head My inability to be a lean size zero or two The Sunsets and the Crenshaws How does it feel?

Feeling out of place in every direction you look That is the feeling that penetrates my mind each day I know I am different from the hair straight as an arrow and the skin light and bright Different from the twig like figures that walk in a swan like dance around me No drivers, but instead Eight years of yellow buses and a sea of red brake lights

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Each day going back to a territory alien to my peers How am I supposed to feel?

Nothing could change my differences, and why should I want them to?

I am the only black girl But I am also the only Aja See, I wouldn’t trade that for the world So I answer “It is all I’ve ever known.”

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A B LU T I O N A RY R I T UA LS JESSICA

ANN

Raphaela tittered gaily at a joke she hadn’t heard. She doubted it was even all that funny, but how rude it would be to not take part. Looking around, she was happy to be recognized by her guests.

Friends that Raphaela had stopped caring for a long time ago littered the living room, all carefully maneuvering around and hoping not to disturb anything. McKale adored his expensive trinkets.

“That vase,” Raphaela’s husband McKale squealed, “is from the Qian dynasty.” He was warning some nobody. “It’s more precious than your life!”

Everyone in the room rolled their eyes as the office girl hung her head. She was very pretty, and clearly well-bred. Her husband came to collect her, apologizing profusely. He must’ve been some nobody from McKale’s office.

Raphaela sipped her wine demurely and tilted her head slightly. Why was it so important, she pondered, to protect something that would never cry out? It would not weep. It would not contest. It couldn’t feel pain.

Maybe that’s why she and McKale never had children. Children wouldn’t understand that they needed to be careful with precious pieces.

Raphaela’s longest friend questioned lazily, “Raphaela, darling, what happened to your precious finger?”

AQUINO

(’17)

Raphaela glanced at her bandaged failure and remembered how pointless the gesture had been yesterday. She had expected to feel so much more than that; she had expected pain.

Instead, she got blood. She looked up again and shrugged. “I was bored. Don’t you have those days, Michelina?”

Michelina grinned and laughed lasciviously, no blush of excitement pinking her pallid complexion. “Oh, Raphaela, how you experience life inspires me.”

Raphaela fancied the illusion of pouring her wine over Michelina’s beautiful halo of hair.

What would Michi do then? But the urge passed quickly enough; passion was ephemeral.

“Yes, well,” Raphaela said, bored as a game of Monopoly. “I strive to inspire. Excuse me, will you?”

Friends, she thought, as she weaved in and out and between every person that somehow had stepped foot into her house. Many of them scowled at her for disturbing their conversation in order to pass through. Had she actually let these people in? These friends. These friends that tiptoed around everything, afraid of making a footprint, making a difference, and hated it when she made a difference.

Careful people were always so entertaining, the lengths they went to leave behind no impressions, to keep everything nice and neat.

Nothing had ever happened!

33

McKale came to his wife’s side and asked her how she was faring.

She knew the truth would only get him pissy. Routine caused the words to slither through her teeth so easily: “I’m having a blast, darling.”

She pushed her hair over her shoulder and adjusted her bracelet, their anniversary gift, whichever anniversary it had been. Only then did she turn to her husband.

He adjusted his gold watch and smoothed his tie down. Only then did he kiss his wife.

They stood together for compliments and endless praises. People loved beauty to stare at, to drool over, to ogle, even if it signified nothing whatsoever. They loved to marvel and not understand because to understand meant to see the truth. And God forbid the truth be unleashed to ravish all these unearthly people.

Sometimes it got easier because some things never needed understanding.

Raphaela remembered the day they had gotten married. Hedia had said, “The earth sighs today, Phae. It tries so hard to bring light and rightness to this world. And then you two go and get married, reversing all that hard work.”

That old hag. What could she possibly know? It was no wonder hardly anyone had attended her funeral. She constantly poked her nose in business that wasn’t hers, making changes and believing herself better than everyone. No one got along with her well. Her closest friends had been less than a handful; they all attended her funeral.

Raphaela then rejoined Michelina and said aloud, “My good friend, my darling Michelina, are you enjoying yourself?”

Michelina grinned again and raised her empty glass. Raphaela, shamed by the fact that a friend’s glass had been emptied before being replaced, turned away and summoned a waiter.

“Be of use and serve the people you should

be serving.”

Suddenly yet slowly, Raphaela’s younger sister Zephne stepped away from the crowd and embraced her sister. She asked how Zephne was, checking her fingernails subtly.

Zephne’s plastic lips smiled easily. “I would love to tell you. If I even knew.”

“How is your dear husband?”

Zephne guffawed and choked on a sob.

“Dear indeed.”

Her tiny son Amadeus ran to grasp his mother’s leg desperately. He wailed out for his mother’s mercy, begging her to take him home now.

He wore a tiny sailor boy’s suit, his small handkerchief tied perfectly about his neck. It was a precious sight. Zephne, spotting a mishap in his apparel, tightened his handkerchief. His tears stopped almost immediately.

Zephne was not so obviously upset by his ruining the clothes or her reputation.

“Yes, yes, in a moment, my precious Amadeus,” she promised, her smile so tight it seemed to be screwed into place. Turning to Raphaela, she went on, “It was so wonderful seeing you, Raphaela. Mother would be proud.”

Yes, Hedia must have been extremely proud.

“Thank you, Zephne.”

With that, Zephne took her young son some place else, not yet taking him home. She melted back into the mesh of people, doing whatever it was they all did in that group. She seemed to disappear.

Yes, Hedia must have been proud indeed.

See all these people, Hedia? They will all be attending my funeral, and I can guarantee that.

You’re proud, right, Hedia? Well, what were children if not the product of their creators?

Maybe that was why she and McKale never had children.

Glancing at her husband again, Raphaela tried to remember what it was she loved about

34

him. He was easy to be with. He held the door open for her. He complimented her on her new things. And thankfully, they hardly bickered about much, merely lived their simple but precious lives separately together. And McKale was not a bad husband to have at all. He was wonderfully easy to live with.

When they had found one another after college, Raphaela had been ecstatic in finding what she had thought was everlasting joy.

Hedia had warned her, “You are a pathetic dolt, Phae. Love is not cradling every little supposedly precious thing you find.”

Another face emerged from the sea of guests.

An old friend hid her scowl as she approached the hostess. Kiffany and Raphaela had never gotten along, simply because similar people could not be anything but the most compatible enemies.

They let cheeks graze and then exchanged pleasantries. She enjoyed the easiness Kiffany provided her parties. Kiffany complimented her home, demeaning every word by comparatively praising it to her own home. Kiffany’s children were mentioned a few times. She boasted of their multiple accolades and accomplishments, making them her own. Raphaela talked about her easy life as a housewife, tending to all of McKale’s needs, tending to her own, not having children to fuss over. It was all so easy. And her belongings were all very precious to her, as though she had children to care for.

Kiffany made a rude comment that Raphaela chose to ignore. She didn’t care for what Kiffany thought.

But still, Kiffany said, “Oh, I hope I didn’t offend you, Raphaela.”

Raphaela smiled ungratefully and unintentionally made a cloyingly chummy remark.

Then Kiffany disintegrated back into the party, becoming the same face as the rest. Yet Raphaela almost missed her presence.

Would any of these people cry out in pain if

they were shattered?

A stranger complimented Raphaela’s dress gracefully.

Suddenly, she became exhausted in her masquerade. The smile was heavier and heavier every time she put it back on. And yet, what was her expression without it? What would she be without it? But she knew that beauty was not cheap and not everyone could come by it in this world. That thought almost made her laugh out loud. No wonder she fell asleep every night feeling like grime in between the grooves at the bottom of her stilettos.

Oh, enough, Raphaela. Enough with the whining and the weeping.

She resented how useless soap was in cleanliness.

Hedia’s voice crept through her mind: “You want to find something precious, Phae? Don’t lock it up, thinking you can protect it. Don’t cradle it in your arms! No treasure deserves to be cradled. Smash it to the ground, you ninny, and then you will have your answer. Anything worthwhile will survive.

Burn it, and you will know what’s strong enough to last. Precious does not equate to delicate, Phae.”

She still did not understand what she meant.

If not delicate, then what, Hedia?

And then, with a full glass of wine, Michelina lovingly embraced her hostess. “What a kind heart. A kind heart, Raphaela!”

Suddenly, as the embrace was over, Raphaela found her wine glass turned over and her wine dripping from Michelina’s chin.

The world paused.

And then nothing could be taken back.

Raphaela, a rush of relief and adrenaline erupting from her heart and through her shivering veins, convulsed violently with laughter. Her howls of pure joy could have been mistaken as howls of absolute torment.

In the midst of her merriment, she grabbed the nearest vase, Qian dynasty, hm?, and, with a

35

force that could have shaken the earth to its core, smashed it to the ground.

Every guest stood in amazement, wondering if the pulverized vase could ever possibly be repaired.

But what was the point, Raphaela belted at the top of her lungs, “What is the point!

Everything shatters in this crystalline world!

Everything shatters!”

She yelled obscene profanities at her guests as she went around and destroyed more of her costly possessions. Grabbed the throw pillows, rent them any way she could, Oh, I’m way past pretending to be your friend, knocked glasses out of hands, He’s cheating on you—and I don’t blame him, drenched the Oriental carpets in red wine and white wine, just for balance, You both bore me to tears, overturned full dining tables, Your children are hideous, opened cabinets and drawers with expensive China, obliterated the perfection of each, spread the shards evenly— What a flotsam! they were all thinking.

Raphaela fell to her hands and knees, gloriously exhausted from this release, knowing the freedom that came next. She was aware of the pain searing her body. And finally, she felt.

Finally, she could feel.

And in her pain, she found profound purpose.

Her next door neighbor Chiazam, horrified, wrenched Raphaela to her feet and slapped her across her beautifully painted face.

Raphaela wept uncontrollably at her misfortune in having a fortune.

The guests stood there and watched as McKale’s precious little wife lost her precious little mind. Not a single person in the room cared about what had just happened, wondering instead how much repair it would cost McKale.

It was as though a tiny animal had come into the party and pissed all over the place.

She tried to remember a single name—one name!—from the people so settled in her house.

But they were mannequins with their mouths agape and their eyes vacant.

Raphaela wept.

Why couldn’t she find friends she could destroy?

Why couldn’t she find friends who could destroy her?

Raphaela stopped her worthless tears. What did she deserve to cry about? She threw her hair behind her and left through the front door. They made a pathway for her, sure never to be very near, afraid of catching what she might’ve had.

The air was wonderfully biting.

The thought of infected wounds did not distress Raphaela for the first moment ever.

She thankfully let her hair free from the tight binding, and the thrashing in her brain ceased.

She hadn’t known her headache had even existed till now. Collapsing to the ground, she kicked her stilettos aside and gloried in the dirt. The soil looked as decadent as chocolate, rich and dark in appearance but moist as cake; it smelled as delicious as life, like children’s laughter or the world after rain; it felt as soothing as a mother’s hug after a long fit of tears. It was the first time in her life that Raphaela felt grass between her toes, like soft fingers tickling her feet. She could finally wiggle her toes! They could do that? She laughed out loud. Who knew toes wiggled? She untucked her blouse and rested on her back, hating every moment of her natural life as a privileged woman.

This was all she wanted to do forever, lie in the dirt and be a part of the world. Lying there, she could feel the earth pulsing through her body; she could feel its life and its vitality.

She longed to have the branches wrap around her arms and for the ground to mold to her and eventually make up her skin and her bones and her muscles and for the rain to fill her empty veins and for the flowers to become her. She wanted their purity.

She wanted to become the earth and never

36

resurface. People were beyond her now. She wanted nothing to do with them anymore.

People did nothing but desecrate all they touched or even thought about.

She wanted to be so connected to the world that the two entities would no longer be separable in her mind. She wanted to be a part of something, and so she would be part of all the world. She was so happy to finally be rid of these non-celestial beasts and only have the world and herself.

Floating was all she was now. She felt herself growing as thin as air, becoming one with the wind, as if she would disappear, be taken away, obliterated, and suddenly, she was terrified of being so alone with the world. For she knew it would devour her whole and leave nothing behind, not even an imprint of her body on this soil, this soil that has always been her own. She clawed at the grass below her that refused to anchor her to anything.

She was afraid to disappear.

But then McKale came outside and stood over her, keeping a good distance apart, and she felt the ground again. He stared at his wife as though she were a dead bird.

“Well,” he muttered, “that was a disaster.”

Lying solemnly there, she told him to leave her in peace.

“You call this peace, you mad woman?

You’re filthy! You’re lying in your own blood and sweat— This is peace for you?”

She closed her eyes. “Do you care?”

On her deathbed, Hedia had said the kindest words uttered from her lips, “The bitch you can beat that isn’t more than a speck of dirt on your shoe— That’s the one you can love forever.”

If only Raphaela could have found someone to love that way. Her heart throbbed—throbbing after all these years of dormancy—throbbed heavily for someone to love that way. Even if he never loved her that way in return, that’s what

she wanted.

McKale knelt down beside her and scooped her up and held her like a babe. She was too lame to budge.

He stared down into his wife’s face and Raphaela saw something different there. It was so unfamiliar that she could place it from neither memory nor experience.

“You need me, Phae,” he muttered almost desperately. What could he possibly be desperate for? Perhaps, she mused, perhaps, he wishes to fix me. He wishes to not have to endure a divorce, and the only way to avoid it is to fix me.

She weakly rolled out of his embrace. The ground hurt when it rose to meet her. It hurt!

She nearly giggled in ecstasy. But this was not a moment of pure laughter.

“We needn’t play any longer, McKale,” she replied. “Hedia said to burn all the things we have.”

He moved closer yet again, though she made it clear she disliked it. Thankfully, he didn’t touch her.

“Why are you coming closer? I don’t want your comfort, McKale. I don’t need it either.”

“Burn all we have? What would we have left if we were to burn it all?”

Suddenly he began to weep into his palms.

He made no noise or vigorous motion. At first, Raphaela thought he was merely wiping his weariness of her away. But no, he was crying.

McKale was crying. In all the years of their marriage, of their knowing each other, Raphaela never thought McKale was capable of tears or intense emotions at all.

Seeing him this way tore at her. It made no sense that this would affect her so. He was only her husband and she only his wife.

Her arms somehow found their way around his shoulders and pulled him into her bosom.

She couldn’t understand where any of her actions blossomed.

Just as suddenly as his crying began, it stopped.

37

He paused to take a breath, and his voice came clear and steady: “Then by all means, Phae. Burn it all to hell.”

The challenge gave her pause.

He kissed her icy cheek and sighed into her collarbone. As his head came up again, he smiled the softest and kindest of smiles. “What do you need, Raphaela? Now I will give you what you need.”

His face had tracks of tears. They were cracks in such a dear face.

Raphaela could not imagine what he meant.

She let her arms fall at her sides and she lay supine again. “I need nothing, McKale. And I need no one. My redemption has come, you fool. Don’t you see? We’re frauds, McKale! Us, a married couple? It’s a farce! And I am finally releasing myself from it!

“I release us both, McKale. All this money and power we have . . . It means nothing. I hope you can someday see what I now see. People are horrid—horrid—creatures. The things we are by nature can be so hideous, don’t you see? We’re violent and emotional and intense.

We manipulate those we love in order to have whatever we want. And I suppose we only feel remorse—or shame—after the fact. It makes me wonder: Why do we exist? Human beings are wretched. Aren’t we?”

She let out a half-chuckle.

“Oh, but aren’t we?” she continued. “Yet humans, still, are also the most beautiful beasts to behold. I’ve heard there’s a lot of goodness in some of us.” She sighed. “I am no longer a part of your charade, McKale. Don’t you see? I don’t have needs anymore.”

He took her hands into his cold, wet ones.

She felt her wounded hands stinging in pain against them.

“No, I don’t see, Raphaela. All I see is the face of the most hideously heartless woman in existence.”

She opened her mouth in outrage but he hushed her and continued: “Such a ritual of cleansing doesn’t make you better than anyone now, Phae. Money and prestige is never what separated you from people, from me. It was you. You and how selfish and self-righteous you are. You want to be free? You feel confined? Well, I’m sorry. You did it to yourself, not I or anyone else did that.”

“Not you?” she exclaimed. “Are you delusional? You are just as haughty as I ever was. Who’s being self-righteous now? And I am most certainly redeemed. I am.” She yelped in frustration. “Oh, what difference does it make? I don’t need you to believe it.”

“Right,” he said. “Because you need nothing.”

“You’re right, McKale. Not even you.”

Irrationally, she feared that with those words he would leave her now.

But he stayed. She listened to the crickets for the first time and she studied the new face of her husband all the while. Her hands were still trapped in his. They were dry now, though, so she did not mind at all.

He removed his gold watch and fed it to the grass. She watched him, feeling comforted.

Everyone at the party stayed inside. But the other two remained with the world. •

38

O B S E R VA T O R Y MIA

MCNEIL

(’18)

The sunlight stains the white carpet as tears begin to scar her face and burn her cheeks.

The light breaks through ombré curtains as strangers peer into the lacings of her mind. She misspeaks and sleeves of their white coats begin to twitch.

Lead scrapes against the freshly printed sheets as the calligraphy on walls stitches itself together. Bloody fists have beat their stories into minds of little dolls.

“You see where their pretty skulls break?” her sultry voice sings with a Southern drawl leaving burning flowers in her wake.

The happy little pill hidden under her tongue. As dolls guide her to wander.

39

SINKING

LA DY

•

AIMAN

SA M AT

(’18)

LONDON

SKYLINE

•

MEGAN

BROWN

(’16)

FO R M Y L E G AT E E ESTHER

D A LT O N

( G R A D UAT E

STUDENT )

Tuck away the feeling of a cashmere shawl wrapped around your head, hiding your mouth.

Fold the curves of my handwriting between the smell of last year’s lemon blossoms and the stomach-churning drop of an elevator.

Is your mind like mine—a card catalog of odds and ends meticulously curated?

Look at the crucifix through a microscope.

Look at the microscope through a telescope turned backwards. Feel the miracle of an airplane landing in your rear-view mirror.

Keep your grandmother’s prayers and the cashier’s “Good morning.” Lock the drawer and remember your passwords. So it is for we who have no house to stack things in.

We misplace ourselves.

But these things are well organized.

These things are well organized.

42

H A I L H O LY Q U E E N SOFIA

LEGGIO

I was seven when I realized there was something different about my mom. The other mothers talked to each other after school, picked their kids up early. My mom screeched into the parking lot at a different time every day and yelled at us to get in the car quick sharp. But that wasn’t it. The other kids came to school with combed hair and neatly ironed uniforms; we came to school having combed each other’s hair, yielding variable results, and clean but rumpled uniforms. But that wasn’t it either.

My mom had a big plastic coffee mug she took everywhere. It was tall and white, and had a wide-mouthed red lid. It rattled with ice in the morning when she dropped us off and sloshed lazily in the afternoon when she picked us up.

Sister Mary Christina helped me figure out that this cup was what made my mom different one day after First Communion class. She kept me behind and told me that our mother’s drinking was a real blessing because we could offer it up to Jesus for the souls of the little dead babies in purgatory; Father Tom said Sister Mary Christina was an idiot. He told me that while our mother needed a little more help than other mothers, she loved us and that we ought to trust that God would keep us safe. Safe from what, I didn’t quite know, but I nodded and piously accepted a mint out of the cut glass dish

(’16)

on his desk. He paused and then told me that sometimes God also needed a little help though, so I should call Aunt Bev or the police if God was busy somewhere else when we needed him.

I resolved to get rid of the cup, since it was clearly the source of Mom’s trouble. And it was down to me to do it, because my siblings didn’t have the secret information from Father Tom about God needing help. Only I knew that, so only I could destroy the cup and save our mother.

One evening after school, after dinner, after dishes, after Mom kissed us and went to sleep, I went back into the kitchen and grabbed the cup off the drying rack. I stuffed it under my t-shirt and ran back to Lucy’s and my room. She was eleven and up late reading as usual. She looked up inquisitively, since I’d come into the room quietly for once.

“What you got up under there?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. Lucy closed her book with a humpf, hopped out of bed, and looked hard at me. She grabbed the scruff of my shirt with one hand and reached under it with the other, pulling out the cup. Her face softened and fell.

“You were gonna hide it? From Mom?” I nodded defiantly. She sighed and said, “You can’t hide it from Mom. She’s a grown-up.” She told me to

43

go put the cup back on the rack, that it would be harder tomorrow if I didn’t. When I got back to our room, she hugged me once and turned the key in the special porcelain ice skater music box Dad got her that I wasn’t allowed to touch. I got into bed and tried to fall asleep to its tinkling tune. I could tell Lucy was awake too. But we didn’t talk about the cup again.

Up until that day with Father Tom, I guess I had figured that Mom was an adult, and adults got to do what they wanted because they were grown up. So if Mom wanted to drink in the morning, that was perfectly normal behavior. If drinking in the morning meant she was meaner to me in the afternoon, well, I was a just a dumb kid and there was probably something I had messed up; if she was being mean to me, there was definitely something I’d done to deserve it.

I’d just have to be better, work harder.

By this time, I was eight, and TJ was in high school at St. Cecilia. So now, he drove us around in a battered Malibu he’d bought with the money he’d earned doing yard work around the neighborhood. He’d take me, Lucy, and Mikey to St. Martin’s extra early, then drive cross-town to get to class in time. We’d wait for him in the afternoon at the afterschool program where Mrs. Salinas, the wrinkly old teacher’s aide, gave us lukewarm milk and stale crackers. Then we would do our homework sheets and play with the old kickballs in the shed, throwing them at each other’s heads, examining each other’s scabs when we got tired of that. TJ would show up around five, after hockey practice, and we’d go home together. Sometimes he’d stop at McDonald’s for us and we’d share fries or an apple pie.

We loved driving with TJ because he let us listen to music without the bad words bleeped out, and we’d all merrily scream along with the

dirty lyrics. But I started to dread coming home.

I’d hold my hand on the front doorknob for a second before opening the door, holding my breath. Who would she be today? Good mom or bad mom? Would I be allowed to tell her what I’d learned about snails in science, or would I get yelled at for leaving my sneakers at the door?

And every time I heard her key turn in the lock, my heart would stop and my stomach would tighten. I’d drop what I was doing and make myself busy with homework or chores, preparing myself to pretend that I hadn’t heard her coming, so that I could be surprised by whatever mood she presented me with. If it was a good day, she’d come in whistling Dolly Parton, arms full of groceries, come give each of us a sloppy kiss. She’d bustle around the house and ask us about our days and help us with unfinished homework. If it was a bad day, she’d slam the door, drop her purse on the coffee table, and tell Lucy to brush her filthy hair goddammit, we weren’t raised in a barn. I couldn’t stand to talk to her like that.

She wasn’t my mother when she was like that.

But after a while, even on the good days she couldn’t hide it. After a while I didn’t know which person I’d be talking to. I didn’t know my mother at all.

On Mikey’s fourteenth birthday, we were, all five of us, gathered around the old honeycolored breakfast table, specially decorated with cards and balloons. In the middle was the cake mom had made for him the night before; it had been a good day. It was a Dr. Pepper cake, rich and luscious, off of which I had tried to sneak fingerfuls of chocolate frosting. Mom had swatted my hand away, but later called me back into the kitchen to lick the spatula. She stroked my hair and called me her little Baboo like she used to when I was really young. I stood

44

there, holding tight onto my mother, trying to breathe in the true essence of who she was, trying to burn into my heart the real mother she was trying to be so I could hold onto her for safekeeping when the other mother lashed out.

We were gathered around this beautiful cake, all of us singing as Mikey sucked in his chest, preparing to blow out the candles. He closed his eyes tight. And we all wished for the same thing. •

45

SA N DSTO R M MADELINE

TYKESON

(’17)

I crawled to you on the brink of a pipe dream dusted in diamonds and dusky desert sands, gasoline faintly fuming from the lights of my eyes, but you knew I would come— fate has laid my path for me.

Your gaze is a solar eclipse that could twist me to stone

If I turn my back on it.

We’re on the same page, but it’s a blank one,

and the days have become crayons pooling under the heat of quiet tensions.

46

GULFOSS

•

JAIME

MAIER

(’16)

SEHNSUCHT JAIME

MAIER

(’16)

Take me along on your journey, O, warrior, traveler, adventure-seeker To lands I’ve never known.

Fill my desire, my yearning— We’ve everywhere to go, and we’ll be there, Uncharted soil, our home.

I want to know where the Lorelei sings And men are dashed upon the cliffs.

Let’s go to the swamps of the voodoo priests, Slow green rivers where gators drift, Or the arctic winters of eternal night Made resplendent by the northern lights.

We’ll find the castles that the years forgot, Run our hands over timeless walls.

In black forest meadows that pagans sought We’ll stand amongst stone totems tall; The fjords of the lands of the midnight sun Where ruined ships mark old battles won.

Take me along on your journey, O, warrior, traveler, adventure-seeker To lands I’ve never known.

Fill my desire, my yearning— We’ve everywhere to go, and we’ll be there Uncharted soil, our home.

48

NAN MARK

NOA

NAN—late 70’s, brown cropped hair, barefoot, wearing a blue dress. Brown-skinned.

ALICE—Nan’s daughter. Mid 40’s. bigger than Nan in size. Smokes like a dragon.

Brown-skinned.

Author’s note: Nan speaks in broken English.

Alice does not, however, it will slip out every now and again.

GARDNER

(’16)

ALICE

No, Ma. You have to tell her. Today. When she gets out.

NAN

Take that goddamn cigarette out your mouth.

You look like a freakin’ cow chewing its cud.

How can anyone ever understand you with that thing in your mouth. Are you a cow? (said in a tone that Alice is all too familiar with it) ALICE

Setting: Hawai’i. Alice and her young daughter Maddi, live in Nan’s house. The house is small but accommodates the modest lives of these three women.

No, ma.

Nan enters the kitchen from the back porch.

Alice is sitting at the kitchen table with papers in front of her, dangling a cigarette out of her mouth. The sound of a shower can be heard offstage throughout the play.

No, ma. (getting heated)

NAN

Good. And is your daughter the Duchess of Ka’ena?

ALICE NAN

Good, then tell your daughter that 20 minute showers runs up my bill and doesn’t leave any hot water for wash dishes or for do laundry!

ALICE

NAN

Goddamn it! What I went told that girl about taking showers! She no can take 20 minute showers! She must think her Nan is made out of money, I tell you.

ALICE

You have to tell her.

Alright, ma, Jesus. (aside) It’s not like you can still do any of those things anyways.

NAN

I tell you, kids nowadays. oh my goodness.

Always making trouble. All of them. They no care. She leaves her clothes all over my floor, shoes on the table . . . don’t make no good sense.

NAN

I tell her every day about her showers.

ALICE

She’s a good kid . . . better kid than I was.

49

NAN

Maybe, but still too much like her mother. No ambition, I tell you.

ALICE

NAN

Don’t act. You loved it.

ALICE

. . . and all you left me was potato chips and Coke.

You think I have no ambition?

NAN

You know, I give my tenth graders an assignment at the end of every year. I tell them to draw a picture.

ALICE

Draw a picture? That’s it?

NAN

I tell them draw a picture, and if they draw anything past the Circle Food Store, the one at the end of town, then I know they’re going to college. It shows they have dreams—dreams of getting out of this town.

ALICE

Are you trying to say I never had ambition?

NAN

NAN

Those were your favorite! You so dramatic sometimes. You turned out okay. Always like dwell in the past, yeah?

ALICE

(indignant. puts out cigarette with force) You’re right. Let’s look towards the future (picks up paper, clicks pen) So when are you gonna die?

NAN

(hears the contempt but decides to disregard it) Next Tuesday. When the rain’s gone.

ALICE

Okay. (writes it down on the piece of paper in front of her) And did you decide how you’re gonna do it?

You did, but you went let life get in the way.

ALICE

(Takes drag, blows it out hard) Sorry I got pregnant, Ma. NAN

. . . Always said ‘don’t have sex. You won’t be able to stop.’

NAN

Pills, I think. (she gets up. opens the fridge). You want some pie?

ALICE

Sure. Why the pills?

NAN

ALICE

Lord knows I have enough pills (starts listing different medicines, laughs to herself). You want whipped cream?

NAN

ALICE

. . . yeah, until he left you.

Sure, put some on the side.

I was in love.

ALICE

You can be so cruel sometimes.

NAN

(cuts her off) No. Too much fat.

NAN

It’s not cruelty. It’s called being a mother.

ALICE

ALICE

Fine. Whatever. I meant, why go with the pills again? It didn’t work the first time.

Some mother you were.

NAN

Excuse me?

NAN

I’m so stupid that’s why. I forgot to check the expiration dates on ’em. My fault.

ALICE

Mothers don’t leave their 5-year-old children home alone.

ALICE

You were fuckin’ pissed when you woke up in the hospital (starts to laugh)

50

NAN

ALICE

You’re goddamn right I was pissed! Those damn doctors tied me down . . . (rubs arm) bruises all up and down my arms.

They all thought you were crazy . . . still ARE crazy.

ALICE

Even Heather didn’t believe me. When I kept screaming, “What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?” She went told me, “drink alcohol with it next time” (beat) (beat) So . . . add that to the list . . . The alcohol.

NAN

You were thrashing around like a crazy person.

All you kept saying was, “What did I do wrong?

What did I do wrong?”

NAN

There was that one nice nurse. What was her name?

ALICE

Mom, are you sure about this?

ALICE

NAN

(lights another cigarette) Heather.

Never mind that. Now show me what’s been done so far? (Impatiently) Come on. Come on.

Come on.

NAN

Heather . . . yeah . . . u’i loa ’o ia . . . so beautiful . . . and so smart, that one!

ALICE

Alright! (shuffles papers around) Well, I copied over the banana bread recipe.

ALICE

Yes, please, go on and on about Heather. Tell me more about Heather. We all adore Heather!

NAN

Let me see. (looks at recipe). No, see. You wrote tablespoons instead of teaspoons. And what is this? Chocolate chips?! You know that’s not right!

NAN

Don’t act. You’re always so jealous, yeah? I talk about you with other people. I tell them, “my daughter loves her job! She’s the head clerk at Jackie’s Department store.

ALICE

So what?

ALICE

NAN

You do not!

NAN

I do! I tell them, I say, “If you need a new shade or some eyeliner, go see my daughter. She help you.”

ALICE

(slightly taken aback) Well, that’s nice of you. (drags) You know, people were mad at me because I’m helping you with all of this. All your friends, they came up to me, and said ’how could you let this happen?’ I told them, ’you don’t know my mother.’

NAN

Everybody thought I was joking. I told Mr. Johnny down the street, told Gloria, told Mr. Phillip, and Mrs. Hannity down at the school, hell, I even told the boy that bags my groceries down at James’ Market.

“So what,” she says. It matters! Everything matters. You think I wrote that recipe all willynilly. Write it right.

ALICE

Fine. Fine. Sheesh.

NAN

Everything’s gotta be done right.

ALICE

Yeah, yeah.

NAN

Yeah, I am right! Okay, what else? The jalousies have been replaced, the bathroom is all re-tiled.

Did you fix the lock on the back door?

ALICE

Yeah.

NAN

So if I go check it right now, the lock will work?

51

every day. Some no more legs, arms, people born deaf, dumb, and blind, but sure enough they getting along every goddamn day, and you sitting here gonna kill yourself over some arthritis in your hands.

ALICE

(shrugs shoulders) Yeah. (Nan starts to get up from the table) ALICE

No okay! I’ll fix it tomorrow.

NAN

NAN

Always lying, I tell you. Okay, get up. (They walk over to the sink). Go ahead. (Alice stands still) I’m waiting.

ALICE

Oh my god. This old woman think I don’t know how to wash a dish.

NAN

Look at my hands! They’re deformed! Can’t do a goddamn thing. No. (stiffens up) No. Can’t hang clothes, can’t wash dishes, can’t even pick up that little girl, not with hands like these . . . if i’m useless, I’m nothing. Can’t have people looking at me with their pity, looking down at me. No. Can’t have it. (beat)

Excuse me!

ALICE

And what about Maddi? You gonna just leave her? Huh? “Sorry, baby, your Nan couldn’t be pitied.”

ALICE

Fine. (runs the water, washes dish) NAN

No no no no no! You see how much soap you’re using? Too much, too much! You know how much soap costs now? No of course not. You don’t shop! My goodness.

NAN

She’ll understand eventually.

ALICE

NAN

Oh, really? (Alice is now becoming upset) Oh, yeah. Well, what about me? Do you think I’ll understand?! You never even asked me how I felt about it.

ALICE

I sat you down at this very table and told you why!

ALICE

Fine. Go. Show me how. (beat) Don’t be cruel.

NAN

Wash the dish. Go. Show me.

ALICE

Yeah, but you never asked me how I felt about it! You just said, “Here’s a list of what to do once I’m gone. Bake banana bread and take it over to Mr. Thompson every other week. Replace the screen in the spare room . . . Here. Here’s a check for the casket. Make sure it’s the mahogany, not the cherry oak” . . . You don’t even trust me enough to pick out the right fuckin’ casket.

NAN

Stop it. (visibly upset) (beat) ALICE

You want it done right, gotta do it yourself, yeah?

NAN

Stop it.

ALICE

That’s what you always saying, yeah? Go. Show me. (beat) (beat)

NAN

I just want to know everything’s done right.

NAN

ALICE

You think I like being useless? Can’t do a goddamn thing with these hands. (looks at her hands)

I’ve done most everything on this list but the one thing I’m not going to do is tell that little girl in there that her Nan is going to off herself. You’re doing that. Today. As soon as she gets out that

ALICE

Everybody has pain, mom. People get along

52

shower, or I swear to Christ, Ma, I’ll put you in the cherry oak.

NAN

Okay okay okay okay. Shhh shhh shhh. It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay. I’ll do it. (resolved) I’ll do it.

(Both are at the kitchen table, embracing. Alice’s head is resting on her mother’s bosom. Nan stroking her hair.)

NAN

You think that’s going to stop me from doing it?

You don’t think I’ve thought about this? About all of this? You don’t think I’m not thinking about that girl?

ALICE

I just wanted to be a good daughter. (whispers) I just wanted to be a good daughter.

ALICE

I just think she deserves to know why.

NAN

NAN

Some things are not meant for children.

ALICE

I’m your child, whose mother has asked her to do the unthinkable for her. But I won’t do this. I can’t tel Maddi. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it . . . (hysterical). I can’t do I can’t do it . . .

You are. You are. I’ll take care of it. (trails off) I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of it. (Alice and Nan are left embracing at the table. Both with tears streaming down their faces. Off-stage, the sound of the shower can be heard turning off).

53

BLACKOUT

HIS HUMANITY ELEONORA

COMASCHI

(’17)

I write this for you because miles apart there is no sight of consciousness and for every breath there is a death of communication— I would stand at the train station for hours to watch and wait your return . . .

Oh god, this cigarette how it burns.

I am standing empty handed.

I feel my knuckles knotting and my veins clotting A frustration so deep— I’d never dig out the minerals that make up the emeralds in your eyes— I write this for you because when you left I needed an oxygen mask and you never asked are you well, because truth be told I dwell among your weathered skins.

And please one more time, let me reiterate— I’m lost in the beauty of your

54

emerald fraternal twins.

On cold nights between my frozen clouds of words And two thirds— glass of detox tea my mind goes on a fucking spree.

Even if I pull the fabric curtains closed I will not find solace because your irises are so lawless— an Alaskan winter sky could not compare, I mumble your name like a broken prayer.

A touch that has never been felt I dream of holding your gaze between thumb and forefinger the way the sun beams linger between my dusted window panes and the willow that still weeps aging accusations.

Instead of putting your name between quotations, typing screaming words with ambidextrous finger tips— I’d rather be there tracing your lips that are bruised and sun torn abused and forlorn.

I’ve spent twenty years looking in a cracked mirror looking for my own reflection seeking some twisted form of perfection and I saw jack-shit until I looked at you.

Between comical whit and an enlightened consciousness I threw out all of the consequences.

Because when the doctors told me I was sick I told them, listen there’s this boy, and he planted seeds of hope

55

in my lungs and watered them With cultured words and that’s probably why my trachea hurts.

My doctor told me no, it’s because I smoked too many cigarettes and I said in return, no you don’t fucking get it.

When this human being speaks I hold back my tears and light a half-finished cigarette because god-damn it he is the humanity I haven’t seen in years and when you face that kind of beauty no words come out of your mouth nothing.

So I fill my lungs with toxic smoke to keep my foolish words lingering down in the pits of my stomach and yeah Doc, that’s probably why I have stomach cramps.

I have a stomach full of erratic butterflies and it makes me nauseous sometimes and sometimes I get paralyzed because how do you nurture a Russian Sage without sunbeams?

I don’t have a green thumb I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

I just know, and let me make this clear to you— that when I saw this boy for the first time the outside world paused— Pacific Coast Time meant nothing.

When he sat on my couch and spoke nothing of himself, and when he laughed I swear I saw the first rain On my drought of hope.

56

No, Doc I’m not thirsty. I don’t need any water.

What I need is for people to understand he exists!

This human being I swear is like a luminous carnation— in a marsh of drowning water lilies.

You can intoxicate yourself with his scent of jet fuel and pray, pray he never leaves again.

But he did.

And when my hardwood floorboards gave way to his goodbye, creaking tiny screams begging him to stay— he threw me a half painted Mona Lisa smile that tattooed my mind to this day.

As it rains outside I pray it doesn’t wash away the remains of his hand-carved beauty— because there is nothing out there that could ever compare to his humanity.

57

PIHLAJASAARI

•

JAIME

MAIER

(’16)

NO

LOADING

OR

UNLOADING

•

MICHAEL

ROBINSON

( G R A D UAT E

STUDENT )

PURPLE TRIANGLES M A D E LY N N

SANCHEZ

(’16)

“Fear not them who kill the body but cannot destroy the soul.”—Sing to Jehovah, Song 33 (Matthew 10:28)

The Jews were not alone when being hauled away, bodies to the slaughter.

My people were there too, Soldiers of Jah do not seek a life of ease because a man sought worship from all and they dared to refuse because their only savior was the one ruling in heaven because they evaded the draft to a national war

because we abstain from all wars. the world and its rulers we do not try to please, because “Heil Hitler!” would never cross their tongues because their arms would not rise to the salute because they rejected a nation’s ideology

because we show no nationalism.

Unspotted at all times remaining because even with the opportunity of release, they held fast to their beliefs because they would not denounce their God, Jehovah. because they would not call their teachings false

because our faith sustains our souls.

Our integrity we shall keep maintaining.1

These four lines comes from the song “Stand Fast in Great and Hard Times” written by Enrich Hugo Frost while imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp for his activities as a Jehovah’s Witness.

1

60

PEACE IN THE SILENCE (CUT THE CORD) B R YA N

ROLLOFSON

There’s something appealing and wonderful about a shotgun. It’s not useful in many situations like an assault rifle, and it’s not compact like a pistol. It doesn’t have the sheer stopping power of a sniper rifle, and it definitely doesn’t have the explosive capabilities of a missile launcher. It’s not quiet, it’s not precise, and it’s not delicate. By all accounts, I shouldn’t even bother carrying one. But try carrying one. Just once, feel the weight of it in your hands, the potential of power behind your trigger finger. You’re unstoppable. Tremble at the thought.

God. Damn. I love that feeling.

Besides, the mission today involves me, alone, taking back the client’s estate from between ten and fifteen well-armed mercenaries.

Sounds fun, right? Right! So that’s why I’m carrying the pump-action, along with a few other toys, of course.

Now, you might be thinking that this looks a little like a suicide mission, and for anyone else, you’d be right. But let’s be realistic. I’m not a nobody playing at some Jack Bauer bullshit. I am the one, the only, the legendary Poet of Bullets, leader of the Sons of Shadow, Inc. I know exactly what I’m doing. I do this every single day. There’s a reason the client will pay us what we ask for.

But anyway, back to the estate. I’m dropped in about 900 meters away from the target and make my way in on foot. I’ve studied the

(’16)

blueprints for the main house for the last week and a half and marked out the best vantage points for lookouts. More importantly, I found their blind spot.

The estate is in the middle of the woods, secluded. There aren’t any neighbors for 10 miles in any direction. Let’s just say the client is “eccentric” and doesn’t want any witnesses saying anything about screams in the dead of night.

Whatever. Not important.

One of the house’s walls is surrounded on two sides by trees, meaning it’s perpetually in the dark. That’s where I’m making my entry. Of course, they’d be stupid not to have a guard or two posted near the door into the house, which is why I don’t go skipping out of cover to ring the fucking doorbell. I carefully climb to the top of the last hill before the house and look down on the entry point. Two guards stand a dozen yards apart, their backs to each other. Who knew.

The guards are only 10 meters or so from the door into the house, so there’s no avoiding them.

What I can do is misdirect them. I keep several empty magazines in one of my suit’s pockets. I remove one, measure the distance between me and the guards, and throw it. It lands with a loud CLICK on the opposite side of the guards, who both turn and try to pinpoint the source of the noise. They don’t dare leave the safety of their posts in the dark, especially when it’s threatening

61

to rain. Cowards.

While their backs are turned, I come up behind one and put him in a headlock, cutting off his oxygen supply. He’ll pass out shortly if I maintain pressure, but I lighten up ever so slightly while I pull out my pistol and keep it trained on his partner. Once he turns back around, we’ll have a nice little chat.

The guard turns around. I pull the trigger and hear the slightest sound as the bullet touches the back of his helmet and stops. The suppressor has done its job, ensuring we won’t have more company. The guard drops to the ground while I holster the handgun. I pull out my knife and turn my attention back to my friend, still struggling to breathe.

“Start talking.”

He tells me what I need to know. I increase the pressure on his neck, and after a few seconds, he’s gone. So far, so good.

I creep up to the door and check it.

Unlocked. Such lax security tonight. Convenient enough for me, but I know someone’s getting fired tomorrow. I open the door inch by inch until I can slip inside, then close it behind me without a sound. Infiltration successful. Big freaking deal.

I’m starting to notice I’m in a sour mood tonight. Well, more so than usual. Nothing seems fun tonight. I couldn’t even enjoy the look on that guard’s face in the instant before he clocked off forever and ever, amen. I always enjoy that moment! What is wrong with me today?

[01100100 01101001 01100101] Oh, right. That. But I regret nothing. I said what needed to be said, and nothing more.

Nothing less. Just try to find some fault in that.

Just try. She [01110010 01101001 01110011 01100101] Focus! Now is not the time to worry about that. Those problems will be there when this is done. That’s the whole point!

Alright. I’m inside. Two guards neutralized

outside, unlikely to be discovered for twenty minutes or so. By then, I’ll be long gone. Focus.

This is a side entrance into the house, and for some reason, the client decided this was just the place for a personal library. Three rows of two bookshelves that each stretch up halfway to the ceiling fill the room and make it feel as warm and inviting as any labyrinth I’ve ever seen. I see the staircase leading up to the second floor and start making my way across the room. A book catches my eye as I pass the shelves, one I haven’t seen in a long time: The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters.

Note to self: pick up on your way out. Collateral damage. The client won’t miss it. I turn my attention back to the stairs.

On the second floor landing, the target destination is straight ahead: the client’s private study. Why does every crazy rich bastard insist on having a private study? It’s such a stereotype.

Stupidly obvious, too. Where else would the client hide his world-shatteringly sensitive documents?

I’m guessing there’s a safe hidden behind an oil painting somewhere in there. I make my way across the room and open the door a little too quickly.

There’s a guard standing there. Not just any guard, the fucking commander of these mercenaries. Of course. As he turns towards the door, I see he’s been talking into his radio, but he stops when he sees me. He’s about to sound the alarm, but I’m faster. My pistol was in my hand before he’d finished turning, and before he can finish saying “Con—”, my bullet pierces his brain, and he drops to the floor.

Shit.

I lock the door and start scanning the walls for paintings while the radio screams with a dozen voices trying to reach their recently-departed leader. On my left, there’s a reprint of a portrait of Napoleon. Bit of an ego on this one. I rip it from the wall (it wasn’t that impressive anyway). Bingo.

I reach into another pocket and pull out the

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client’s key to the safe. How considerate of him to think ahead. I insert the key and open the safe.

Jackpot. I clear the safe out, carefully place the documents in an inner pocket of my suit, and close the safe again. Mission . . . almost accomplished. But the voices are getting louder now. I can hear at least three of them out in the hallway. It’s only a matter of time before they decide to burst in. I should wait. I should prep a smoke grenade, wait for them to open the door, toss it, and slip out in the ensuing chaos.

That’s what I should do. That’s what I would do any other day.

But this isn’t any other day. Today, I want blood. I need blood. Today, I’m going to get it.

I unholster the pump-action. They all thought I was crazy for taking it. Well, who’s crazy now?

I can hear them on the other side of the door, trying to pick the lock. I hear one of them give up as another steps forward to give it a try. I put on my best, rage-laced grin. This is the face my enemies will come to fear, the face that will haunt their every waking moment until I come for them. I glance down at my phone and wait for the right moment to hit PLAY. It comes.

“Fuck it.” I hit PLAY. Cue music.

(Freeeeedom / la la la la / Freeeeedom / CUT IT) I unlock the door and kick it open, sending the unfortunate guard trying to pick the lock flying halfway across the room. Before his two friends can react, I level the shotgun at the one on the right and pull the trigger.

BOOM! CH-CH! There are few things as satisfying as that sound. I love it. I fucking live for that (Switchblade / on the edge of your wrist) glorious, glorious sound.

The third guard turns to run, but he doesn’t get far.

BOOM! CH-CH! Easily one of the top five sounds in all of human history, and its power is in my hands.

(Cause agony / bears no reward) I start for the stairs and am halfway down to the landing when I feel the sudden shot of heat and pain in my back, and I’m crashing down the stairs, and I hear more voices coming from above me, but above it all I hear the ringing, ringing, ringing [011001000] I look to my left and clearly see my phone for the first time in an hour or so. Maybe two. I lose track of time so easily. I look at the name to see who’s calling. If it’s her, I don’t know if I’ll pick up.

It’s not. I answer.

“Dude, when’re you gonna be on?”

No “Hey, how’s it going?” as a means of introduction. We’ve been friends for too long for those kinds of formalities.

“I’m on now, man. Just playing some Metal Gear, getting my murder on, clearing my head.

What’s up?”

“Halo, bro! Jared and Jay wanna run through it tonight and we need a fourth! You in?”

I know I should consider it, but I don’t have the endurance for that kind of gaming marathon anymore. But hell, I can help out for a mission or two. No harm in that. I check my phone for messages. Nothing major until I see two messages from her. Checking to make sure I’m okay.

I can feel the blood blasting through my veins, the anger dying to get out again. I close my eyes. For a moment, everything is still, everything is silent, everything is fine.

We deal with our shit in very different ways. I open my eyes. I feel alive again. •

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M I L E S D AV I S ’ S B R A S S T R U M P E T IAN

GREEN

(’17)

The sound of Miles Davis soothes my mind.

The Jazz, it blasts from out that megaphone: His trumpet calling armies out to fight.

I feel the red, and white, and blue inside the fluid, grooving movement of his tone.

The sound of Miles Davis soothes my mind.

A Hajji regiment in the front lines shot U.S. boonies, caught in beaten zones.

A trumpet calling armies out to fight.

As I lay silent, feeling Coltrane ride The rocking waves of rhythm in the drums.

The sound of Miles Davis soothes my mind; And I Imagine Davis, clear in sight Upon the soil of Iraqi bones: His trumpet calling armies out to fight.

And God with Gun would storm the rival lines with vicious visions for his war-time foe.

The sound of Miles Davis, loud and high; His trumpet calling armies out to fight.

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D E AT H

AT

NIGHT

•

AIMAN

SA M AT

(’18)

AMERICAN ARK SOFIA

LEGGIO

(’16)

A little man And a little lot in Watts An Italian with a cigarette And a weathered tan And his own two hands And a plan A lot of cement and sand and shells And broken glass And broken tiles And broken hearts repaired And hearts And hearts What was the purpose?

What does it make you feel?—No, What is art?

What work?

Why so closed off?

Why not a constant building and shaping and shaping and sharing?

Why not add our own hearts?

What reaching?

What grounded?

America the bad bad America the good good America the free America the fragmented America the blackbrownwhiteyellowred, immigrant, chicano, mulatto, muslimchristianjew America the unresolved

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America of dreams—cement the fragments American dream of building higher and higher and higher Stand the stress tests And it holds A n d i A n d

t

h i

o t

l

d s h

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o

l

d

s.

DAMAGED KID JAIME

MAIER

He parks his motorcycle right in the storage unit where he lives in the shadier side of Stockholm, because it’s all the room he needs, really; it fits his hair spray and his hair dye and his cowboy boots worn down from countless nights onstage which he’ll probably have to get fixed soon because there’s a hole in the front of one and the sole is falling out. And what does he really need more than a place to eat and sleep and store his clothes and booze and watch his potatoes sprout roots like crab legs, and it’s easy to lock up and shut down when he goes on tour which has been more often than not the case in the past years. He likes to be on tour: everyone’s homeless for a few months but every night they’re welcomed open-armed and sheltered from the road by the warm masses of girls and boys who find home in the music and so it’s kind of a fair exchange. Tonight he’s back from a tour of the States and soon he’ll be going to England, which always feels like home to him since he found his way there after a childhood spent being the bad seed in a religious cult, but his father only did what he thought was right and he cried and he tried but he gave up and got out, and made it across the water to the UK where he fell into a band or two. There’s pictures from those days on the web, probably, when he was all big blond hair and sparkly blue eyes and glowy skin and real smiles.

(’16)

He takes his bracelets off now, one by one, and throws the potatoes in the wastebin after snapping a picture for posterity, and avoids using his stitched-up finger to do any of it because it’s pretty bad but at least he still has it and if anything else, at least it wasn’t his fretting hand. He does a lot of things he shouldn’t do because if he’s not supposed to do it he has to do it, like stage-diving when the sign says not to or swinging from the beams of low-hanging rafters in a venue. If you’re not supposed to do it, it’s rock’n’roll. The fans laugh and cheer about it and they don’t mind the potential danger of a tall Swede in studded boots falling on their heads and they’ll always catch him, always. Sometimes it’s easy for him to talk to fans on tour and other times he doesn’t feel like it or it doesn’t feel right; he’d always want to but sometimes it’s weird. Like a couple of girls at the Whisky where he felt almost at home as he does in England because the Whisky, the Sunset Strip, that’s rock and roll mecca; he’s toasting it even now as he grabs one of many bottles of Jack, patron saint of the Strip, and drinks straight from the bottle. But those girls, pretty little skinny blonde Americans, probably definitely ten years younger than him and quietly fawning over him during a brief request to take a picture that probably went straight to their Facebooks and Instagrams and got texted

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to jealous friends, and he didn’t have much to say to them because what would you say, really, if you didn’t know what they wanted from you. Or what they thought of you or what they thought they knew of you. Maybe they just liked his accent and his hair or maybe they planned to come back to his bus after the show and give him what they thought he wanted—which he would but not from them because they were kids and he’d been there too many times and seen too many falls from grace and they were human, they’d all been humans and he knew what it was like to be human—or maybe they loved the music just like he did and they might have had something to talk about if it hadn’t been so loud.

The blonde girls were in the front row during the show, and after the final song the taller of the two was the first to have her hand out to him, and he knew he was supposed to grab it because that’s what happens at shows, but time slowed down for a moment and he thought about that human and her hand and what she wanted and what she thought of him and she kept her hand out to him, reaching out to him. Her brows furrowed the way a woman’s brows furrow when she thinks you’re starting to make her look like an idiot, but she didn’t pull her hand back and she looked determined and demanded his hand with her eyes and time started ticking again so he grabbed her hand like he was supposed to and then everyone in the front row put their hands out to him, because that’s what happens at shows.

He sits at his desk under his loft bed now, taking out his biggest earrings and smearing thick black eyeliner with a rub of his fist.

Tomorrow he’s got to re-shave the sides of his head and dye his roots because they’re coming back and they’re almost half an inch now. No

more blond hair and sparkly eyes and glowy skin and smiles, but blue and white and black and coon-tailed and whatever he feels like doing with his hair, and worried brows and skin covered in tan and tattoos and the first signs of aging too soon like the mark of a permanent frown, and a mouth that smiles seldom and rainy eyes that smile less. He carefully smoothes the bandage that covers the greater left portion of his forehead; he can probably get rid of the bandage and let the gash air-heal in a week or two. Now he’ll have a big scar on his face but luckily it’s in an aesthetically pleasing area—just about an inch above his brow and diagonally cut, angling into his face. It’s kind of badass, he’s thought, but also makes him a little sad when he thinks about taking the bandage off; he used to be so resilient. Now he has a big scar on his forehead just in time for the guitarist’s wedding. He’ll be at it, of course, just like he was at the bassist’s wedding, not all that long ago. It’s that time in a band’s career when everyone starts pairing off . . .

He climbs into his loft, lounging in wrinkled sheets that haven’t been touched since he left for the tour, bunches them around himself and takes a moment to update his Facebook page for his fans—he’s getting better at being consistent with it. He reads a few of the sycophantic comments: declarations of love and marriage proposals, requests for a tour in Brazil, comments about his hair, and gentle chidings for getting hurt in response to a photo he posted earlier of his face and bandaged wound after his stunt. He does things like that all the time, except this time he has a lasting mark to prove it.

He does a lot of things he shouldn’t do because if he’s not supposed to do it he has to do it. If you’re not supposed to do it, it’s rock’n’roll, and he might be the very last rockstar. •

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LOS ANGELES 2015 DANNY

BIRMINGHAM

(’16)

I.

Los Angeles is a dry city, full of dirt and dead skin. Grocery store shopping carts crowd parking lots and all the trashhhhhh of coffee cups and McDonald’s bags slither around on a dusty ground that won’t be washed aside from a spilled Sprite. Heavy haze hesitates on half-had horizons across foggy waters filled with salt. A suit and tie hello goodbye with a few bucks for a caffeinecrazed air-conditioned packed-lunch white-walled work day.

II.

You walk past a dispensary at dusk with a security guard and you’re not going anywhere in particular. The road beside with horn honks and whizzing wheels scratching asphalt as frowns faces horse races rush against the hour up the hill to the place with a couch and a beer and a long awaited ahhhhhhhhh next to a foot rest.

III.

But where are you going? Dusk or twilight it doesn’t matter because the sun is gone and the moon is out and the Venice canals remain gross or indifferent or placid between fast-talking free CD’s and unappreciated expensive paintings.

But where are you going? Lincoln Boulevard is the artery and you want the veins on your cheap bike under western ivy crawling shrubbery artificial fences flowers leashed dogs and more parked cars. Too late to surf to write to read or run for dinner is another drive-through organic shop stop at Whole Foods where the self-conscious self-righteous next-step in human evolution converges to congratulate one another with condescending recommendations.

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IV.

Stretching palms deserted parks and maybe a star crawl across the sky as you motionlessly wander through these sinking streets. It doesn’t matter where you’re going as long as you’re going and look like you have a place to be. But all the places to be have all the people they need and someone like you needs to have an answer before arriving at some door looking for one. Which is why your hair looks like that your clothes like this and his friend’s music is the best; so is that little restaurant around the corner or that one microbrew which is just so hard to find.

V.

Toes stretch in the sand golden hair golden breeze bon fire citadels with their small distant gatherings illuminate this night away from neon OPEN signs where waitresses wear pants with plates in delicate hands holding margaritas, salty margaritas with ice cubes. Rushhhhhhh the white water inches on the shore reaching for more, your toes, calling and demanding that jeans roll up hairs rise skins splash, washed, not dead. Throw away your flask unlock your bike (but where are you going?) to grab her hand hold her hand feel real, something real, washed, washed, torn away from the artery, the blood spills, you’re the blood, your blood, free, free, free . . .

But where are you going?

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SUMMER

DUSK

AT

LMU

•

MICHAEL

ROBINSON

( G R A D UAT E

STUDENT )

LOS

ANGELES

miscellany