Los Angeles Miscellany Volume 65, 2017

VO LU M E

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LOS

ANGELES

miscellany VOLUME 2017

65

Copyright © 2017 Loyola Marymount University.

EDITOR-IN- CHIEF

Bryan Rollofson SENIOR

EDITORS

André Enriquez Madeline Tykeson EDITORS

Jessica Aquino Mathew Levitt Patricia Lynch Ashley Yashar ADVISING

PROFESSOR

Chuck Rosenthal COVER

ART

Patricia Lynch DESIGN

&

TYPESET TING

Ash Goodwin PRINTER

DSJ Printing, Inc.

CONTENTS

T U ES DAY SA FA R I .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Rachel Mullens MAN ON FIRE ................................................................................................................

Michael Kirk M E M O RY I S P U R P L E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Grant Nagai H E R BO DY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Aashna Malpani N I G H TS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mattie Norman

11 17

18

20

F I RST T I M E FO R E V E RY T H I N G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

André Enriquez I SC A R I OT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alexander Dulak HONEY.........................................................................................................................

Nathan Faust

9

22 24 25

27

TO U C H E D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Katie Calo DA P H N E D U M AU R I E R O N W R I T I N G R E B E CC A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Courtney Harshbarger

28 34

M A K I N G T H E PAS T T H E P R E V I O US .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eleonora Comaschi

37

TO M O R R OW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Liz Holland VERNAZZA ..................................................................................................................

Rachel Mullens

39 43

D I P P E D I N P R ET T Y.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Meleana Coito PAT I E N C E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jakob Sergei Levitsky Weitz M O M E N TS O F R E D .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Carolina Avner

48 52

N O O N E’S M I S T R ESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Taylor Cohen WO M •A N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Emily Baade THE FUNERAL..............................................................................................................

Mustafa Yasar II CO N TO U R S .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Madeline Tykeson

45

54 55

63

64

TO N OT E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Paige Evans H I S DAU G H T E R H A D A N A M E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

André Enriquez SICK.............................................................................................................................

Paige Evans AU BA D E TO A G O OS E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nathan Faust

65 67 69

O U R S U M M E R WO U L D F LY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Gardner Stevenett

71

T U E S D AY S A FA R I RACHEL

MULLENS

(’18)

Scrawls of M-I-L-K on the yellow post-it note clutched in hand, the jingling coins in my right jeans pocket and my charm bracelet (horse, snowflake, heart) are my own eight-piece orchestra. And I’m singing serendipitous, serendipitous, serendipitous (I read that in a book somewhere).

I cross the parking lot carefully, jumping over peeling white lines and alligator infested waters until the glass doors slide open and I wave to the drugstore cashier with long clacking nails of bright fuchsia.

“How’s your momma today?”

I smile the smile grown ups like to see—

“good.”

9

DROUGHT

•

PAT R I C I A

LY N C H

('19)

MAN ON FIRE MICHAEL

KIRK

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.

I. The devil probably thinks of himself as a saint. I mean, if you think about it he was an angel once. And do angels ever really stop being angels? Hell if I can answer that. I haven’t bothered with questions of theology since I was in my twenties. I just say the words, lead the prayers, and act like there’s more than tap water dripping from my fingers onto each baby’s forehead. It’s kind of funny . . . That’s the only time I feel like I’m helping.

Shiloh isn’t a particularly spiritual town.

There are a handful of families who attend every week. They drag their disinterested children through the doors every Sunday, seat them five rows back and tell them there will be hell to pay if they hear a single sound out of that damned game box. Then the parents

(’18)

take their seats in the front row right by the center aisle and wait to greet me. Before walking out of my office I plan my route and practice the humble smile of a holy man. I take my first steps out and greet the Jamesons.

Mr. Jameson is a pushover. Without Mrs. Jameson and her flamboyant habit of taking charge he’d probably starve to death trying to decide what takeout restaurant to call for dinner. No one would find the body for weeks since no one would visit that house without the threat of an eternity of Mrs. Jameson’s passive aggression. She could make the devil himself come to dinner and say a prayer before carving a rotisserie chicken. Mr. Jameson doesn’t really believe in God. That’s one thing he and I have in common. But at the same time he does has some sort of faith. To him it’s just what you’re supposed to do, but I have a feeling he just says he believes so that every Sunday he can come and talk with someone who isn’t his wife. Mrs. Jameson only believes in God so long as she gets exactly what she asks for. Three weeks after giving birth to her oldest, Faith, she told me in a confidence that she no longer believed because she had prayed morning, noon, and night for a boy.

Faith Jameson told me last month she’s a lesbian. She’s one of the only reasons I think

11

there might be a God. Back then I told Mrs. Jameson the Lord works in mysterious ways. I can’t help but enjoy that coincidence.

Every other week Mrs. Jameson comes to confession and tells me she’s fucked her neighbor again. She tells herself it’s Mr. Jameson’s fault. She says it so much she’s actually starting to believe it. She thinks if he were a little more assertive maybe she wouldn’t need to go off looking for satisfaction. Since it isn’t her fault she doesn’t feel the need to tell him. My guess is as long as she’s forgiven in spirit she sees no reason to tell Mr. Jameson.

The thought of them sleeping together lingers with me for days after these sessions. It involves Mr. Jameson constantly asking if he’s doing a good job and Mrs. Jameson dismissively telling him yes and to hurry up because she doesn’t want to miss that talk show where doctors tell you how to lose weight and live forever. I never did learn either of their first names. Even when they have me over for dinner I refer to them as Mr. and Mrs. Jameson. They just think I’m being polite.

After the Jamesons, I’m approached by a booming whisper from Barry Sebastian and a gentle hug from his wife Claire. It feels more like I’m caught in a breeze than the embrace of a woman. Once the wind passes Barry asks me to put a good word in with Jesus for him as if I talk with their lord and savior for hours on end like he and I are high school sweethearts.

I never see either of them in confession; I guess when the entire town knows you’ve been selling the drugs you confiscated from the teenagers wasting away behind the liquor store you already feel forgiven. Barry and Claire met when Claire’s son went missing last year.

No one is sure who the boy’s father is but most people are convinced he’s still somewhere in Shiloh. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the boy

speak. Barry was assigned to Claire’s case and, being the hotshot officer he is, he took it very seriously. In fact, the neighbors say there were some nights when his patrol car would be parked outside Claire’s house all night until morning. They were touched to see him so dedicated to the case.

The boy came home on his own after two weeks. He was hiding out in his mother’s storage unit a few miles from the house and was living off Diet Coke and stale potato chips from an old vending machine outside a convenience store across the street. He ran out of cash the day before he came home and only returned because he was hungry. Claire and Barry were married the following month.

The police department chose to ignore how their relationship started and dismissed the stories as rumors. The couple is positive that I am their ticket into heaven. I have to admit it hurts knowing that I’m letting them down.

These are the only full conversations I have before the sermon begins. When I take the podium I get a smile from Samantha Beiley, the pinnacle of chastity herself. In the second row there are a few nods from Andrew Young, the would-be baseball star who lost his scholarships when he got his first DUI at 19. These are followed by a few less-than-excited looks from the two younger Jameson kids and a smile from Faith Jameson. All three are seated behind the local bum, Alfy. I’ve gotten in the habit of finding new ways to say the same thing every week. It doesn’t really bother me that it isn’t completely true to the text.

“Selfishness. What do we earn from our selfishness?” I ask. “When we first begin to pursue our own self interest we first begin to turn away from God.” I see Mrs. Jameson nod and shake her head in agreement. She’s planning on coming to confession today.

12

“Think of selfishness as sin. When you act against our community and only for yourself you choose yourself over the community, and when you choose yourself over others you turn away from God. When you hurt the community you hurt yourself. Everyone here is intertwined.” It’s all bullshit, but it’s what these people want. What they need.

After the sermon I told the congregation I couldn’t hold confession today due to some personal conflicts, but really I just wanted Mrs. Jameson to sit wit her guilt for a little while. Maybe this time she’ll tell her husband what’s been happening. Barry and Claire approached me after my announcement to ask what was happening, since it isn’t like me to postpone confession. I told them there were some family troubles out of state that needed my attention, but that I would be remaining in Shiloh during this time. When I left the church to head home I found Faith Jameson sitting on the steps outside the door.

“How long have you been waiting out here?” I take the keys to the church out of my pocket and search for the front door key.

“Only about half an hour.”

“Well you could have come in to speak to me, you didn’t have to wait out here in the heat, you know.” I lock the door and put the keys back into my pocket.

“No that’s fine, sometimes I like to just sit and think.”

“Well,” I take a seat beside her on the steps, “that is actually a wonderful gift.”

“What is?”

“Being able to be alone with your thoughts.

That isn’t something most people can do.”

“Really? Why not?”

“You face a lot of demons when you start thinking. Demons that are inside you. And that scares a lot of people. Not a lot of people

can handle their own thoughts and even less can actually understand them well enough to put them into words.” She didn’t look at me once as I spoke. ”Think of it this way; we get married so that we don’t have to go through life alone, right? Because when we’re alone we don’t have someone else around us to tell us what we should think about this or about that. When we’re forced to form our own thoughts we start wondering why we feel that way and sometimes we can’t come up with a reason and when we can’t think of a reason we start to question our thoughts.”

“I don’t really get it . . .”

“Then just think of it as a gift. In the future maybe you’ll see what I mean.”

She smiled and sat for a moment without a word.

“Do you really think there’s a God, Mr. Reese?”

This caught me off guard. I felt I had to lie.

“Well, I am in charge of the church.” I laughed.

“But that isn’t what I asked. You might be in charge of the church but do you really believe what you say? I’ve seen you around town lately and you look unhappy. I feel like someone who believes in God wouldn’t be unhappy.”

“You should probably be headed home Faith, your parents are probably starting to worry.” I stood and gathered myself before beginning to walk home.

“I don’t think God is real. There’s too much bad stuff in the world that people can’t control. If God was real I don’t think he’d let those bad things happen or exist.”

“Well, sometimes God wants to give us troubles. Life has troubles and God wants us to live. If we didn’t have troubles we wouldn’t grow as people.”

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“So if there’s bad stuff with and without God, what makes people think he’s real?”

“That’s a question a lot of people ask, Faith. And in the end you’re the answer.”

“Me?” “Well, not exactly. I mean faith. Some people have faith, some people don’t.”

“And what about you? Do you have faith?”

“Well I have you.”

“But do you have faith in God?” “I think whether someone has faith or not they should try to be a good person. There’s no reason for someone who doesn’t have faith to be cruel or bad. Being good and kind makes life better for everyone and, honestly, I don’t think God really has anything to do with that. Some people just believe in him because he’s always around. Always telling them to be good. Keeping them from deciding to be good for themselves.”

“I think I kind of get what you meant about being alone, Mr. Reese.”

“Is that so? Well, I’m glad. Now,” I stand up and brush some dirt off my pants, “We both should be headed home. Your parents are probably worried.”

“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Reese.”

“Have a nice evening, Faith.”

I watched her start off before I began to head home.

II. That night there was a mob of people marching down my street. They walked about two blocks beyond my house and took at left at Mayflower towards the Jameson’s. That isn’t exactly the most common thing in Shiloh, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t happened before.

I would have called the police but chances are the majority of them were in the mob already.

It wouldn’t have done any good. So I waited and watched them pass, it didn’t seem like

they were violent. Maybe it was some political decision on the news that stirred them all up.

You never know with small town folk.

The next morning I walked down the street to see if anything had gone awry. The Jameson house was ransacked, Barry’s patrol car was parked outside, and four Jamesons were wrapped in blankets outside. Mr. Jameson was speaking with Barry about what happened. The two younger Jamesons were in tears and Mrs. Jameson just stared at the ground. She looked like a brick. Red from holding her breath, emotionless and inanimate. As I approached Barry turned to me.

“She hasn’t said a word since I showed up, Padre. Maybe you can get her to open up about it.”

He looked to Mrs. Jameson. The yard was torn apart. The words dyke, faggot, and cunt spray-painted among others on the garage and the face of the house. The front door was kicked in, windows were broken, and there were giant gashes in the garage door that seemed to be made from an axe. I looked left and right but could only find four of the Jamesons. Faith was nowhere to be found.

I took a knee in front of Mrs. Jameson and the two younger boys to try and get her to speak.

“Mrs. Jameson? Can you tell me what happened?” There was no answer. “Mrs. Jameson, Barry and I want to help you but we can’t if you don’t talk to us. Can you tell me where Faith is? I don’t see her out here.”

“She’s a queer.” She said without looking up. I called Barry over to hear what she said.

“What happened, Margaret?” Barry said walking up behind me.

“She’s a fucking queer, Barry. This whole time she was a god damn queer ruining my house!”

14

“Okay, okay, calm down Margaret. Can you tell me what happened?”

“Someone in the town found out. Word spread and a mob kicked in my door and took her.”

“Can you tell us who took her? Was there anyone you recognized at all?” For some reason I seemed to be the only one upset by what she was saying.

Mrs. Jameson looked me dead in the eyes and without flinching sneared. “Not a damn person.”

I could see the defiance in her face. She knew every face that stormed through her door. How could she not? There are only about 4000 people living in Shiloh. If you don’t know one of your neighbors it’s actually taken as a vile insult. She was protecting them.

The people who destroyed her house, trampled her lawn, and kidnapped her daughter. Mr. Jameson was apparently knocked out by one of the intruders right after the door was kicked down. The kids were told to stay in their rooms the moment things got violent.

They didn’t see anything. The mob was only after Faith. Since the only witness refused to give any names, the investigation had almost nothing to go on. I stayed on the site all day.

I watched the Jamesons be questioned and shuttled to the Police Station.

Once night fell I had to leave. In the few blocks between the crime scene and my home I passed by Alfy sitting outside the grocery store asking for money. When I was already a few feet past him I heard him say something under his breath.

“What was that, you were saying, Alfy? I couldn’t hear you.” I walked back to speak with him.

“I said it’s a shame what those boys did to that house down the street.”

“You mean the Jameson’s place?”

“Damned if I know whose house it is.”

He began to peel an orange he had hidden in his pocket. “But it’s a shame. That’s the nicest house in Shiloh, or it was at least. Pity that girl had to go around looking up skirts.

Ruined a perfectly good house ‘cause some shit for brains girl decided she wanted pussy.

It’s like you said yesterday, Father, it’s selfish.

Selfish as shit. An’ when someone’s selfish it hurts everyone. Damn if that ain’t the truth right there. Those boys that done it might not’ve heard what you was sayin’ but hell if they didn’t have those same thoughts in those brains. You’re a smart guy, Father. Those boys did us a justice and I think even the family know that. You ought to find out who eacha them was an’ go thank ‘em. Shit. How the hell can you raise a daughter to be a dyke? That’s just careless parenting. Damn woman knows how t’ make a damn good lookin’ house but can’t tell her girl she’s s’posed to want a boy like a normal girl. Better keep an eye on those two young boys though, I say. Only thing worse than a dyke is a faggot, ‘nd if those parents raised one queer it jus’ makes sense that more’ll come out of that house. Shame though. That used to be the damn prettiest house in Shiloh. Real shame. Doubt it’ll ever be that pretty again.”

I was silent for a while. “You’re right. That house never will be that pretty again.” I gave him some change I had in my pocket.

“Only coins today, Father? You’re usually a pretty charitable guy.”

“It’s all I have today, Alfy. I’m sorry.” That wasn’t true. I had plenty of bills.

“That’s awright. Anythin’ helps.”

“You have a good day.”

“And you!” As I walked off I heard him muttering more to himself about the house.

15

Later that night I bought a book of matches from the liquor store, doused the pews with kerosene and struck every match in the book. I was arrested for arson of a religious building and received an indefinite sentence. I’m honestly not even sure arson of a religious building is a real law on either the federal or state level, but that’s the beauty of living in a town small enough to be governed

by the people entirely. You do something they all agree is bad and they’ll find a way to put you away. Now they call me the Shiloh Devil.

I can’t help but feel it isn’t the most creative name, but I suppose Shiloh isn’t the most creative town. Faith’s body was never found.

End •

16

MEMORY IS PURPLE GRANT

NAGAI

Your calloused feet have braved the shards fingers cling to chain-linked fences In the tide pools of this sainted town, awakened shoeless in an alley, Free of time, no tears lament until the dawn, whose shoreline dew How few of them remember, who lived to love, bleed, smear then rot

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(’19)

on broken bottle boulevards, where chanting bullshit names.

The Purple Fall Brigade— robbed of yesterday’s parades. the water down the rusty drain spits salt atop your pain.

The Purple Fall Brigade— like paintings caught in rain.

H E R BO DY AASHNA

M A L PA N I

(’18)

Have you ever looked at what you initially thought was a blank piece of paper, only to discover creases and dust prints in its folds? Erased scribbles that have chipped some of its skin off, or dents from when pencils couldn’t decide on a word and frustration won them over? Or maybe, they never knew how to do Origami after all.

Nonetheless, I can’t seem to un-see the hideousness of tattered remains, no matter how hard my fingertips try to smooth over scathed edges.

I was standing in front of the mirror today, just staring at a bare reflection.

The image of Eve reincarnated itself right before my eyes.

My hips bore a taunting title, love handles, peppered in claw marks. The stretched skin urged me to think of lightning touching undiscovered sandy shores. They looked like hieroglyphs to me, complicated, intricate hieroglyphs.

Baal would have read passages off of the riddles that cupped plump, but you got here first, didn’t you?

You ran a manicured fingernail down one length and called my language a scar.

You sunk a family of judgmental fingers into my flesh and grappled for bone.

They came up empty.

You spat on my purpling bruise.

I cringe every-time the clouds roar my name.

I hate thunder now.

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Soft and bumpy, it rested gently against my palm. It was in deep sleep, gently rising in and out, matching my hips well. It reminded me of Aphrodite, and melted caramel, and lovers kissing in spring. It was everything warm and divine my soul wanted to be. After all, how can you not fall in love with your baby’s future home?

But you couldn’t let that happen, could you?

You cackled at my fear as I braced my belly.

You pinched what you thought was too much and soon, bites were all over me.

Blue, black, red, sore, bleeding.

She cried and cried as you kept on pinching.

And pinching.

“I have to cover up the bruises. I am afraid they’ll never go away.”

“Good”, you said. “I did you a favor.”

Uneven mountains make for the most beautiful sceneries. Just like uneven mountain peaks make for a heartbeat.

You make me a woman. Breathing with me, pulsating with me, standing tall with me. I adored you, and loved you, and took pride in your individuality.

My ornaments to greatness.

My identity.

You charged at me with graying teeth and nipped and ripped and tore till all that was left was shame and shame and shame.

I wept as my chest bled through holes.

You dragged at it with white satin, “cover yourself up, you filthy whore.”

And you spat in my face.

I blinked, and blinked and blinked.

Oh, I have to put my robe on.

19

NIGHTS M AT T I E

NORMAN

(’19)

your car is caked in cola colored slush the driveway shrieks tires skid backward & forward you leave the curved concrete for the street you don’t tell it that you’re going to a parking lot where no one waits for you under looming orbs of yellow on gridded chalk-stained pavement that reeks of french fry grease & that kind of wet grass that isn’t welcoming but itchy and impossible to touch without it sticking to your fingers & rooting there & you realize it doesn’t matter that you left to come here because no one noticed & you’re allowed to be human until the morning when you’ll get up & grab the books you didn’t read & open her bedroom door to watch her chest rise & fall one more time just in case it stops before you make it to that parking lot again & get to feel human for the night until someone turns on the lights & asks you if everything’s ok & you have to say yeah it’s fine because you know they can’t make sense of the it and how it is also you they don’t ask questions until the next

20

morning after you’ve taken another trip to that parking lot & thanked whoever is up in the lights for the nights when no one looks at you

After “Because It’s Summer” by Ocean Vuong

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FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING ANDRÉ

ENRIQUEZ

(’17)

He was hanging around my door like a sloth that’d had too much ramen, a pale smile tickling his face but with a white warmth wading somewhere behind his lower lip.

Sloths are cool though. So I let him in.

He told me he was free . . .

I said nothing was free.

He told me to take his clothes off him, that he was breathing cardboard here.

I don’t hold people who only want to screw in a high regard, but sloth, right? So I helped him out.

He told me seven and an eighth. A two and a half diameter.

I fumbled. Come again? Afterthought: who measures an eighth?

He was from Charleston, SC. You know, the whole soup for breakfast thing. Too candid for my taste but then again Cream of Broccoli’s my shit.

I pulled him out. He was so, delicate.

He told me to put him in he needed to warm up but my hand wouldn’t let go. It fit so perfectly.

So smooth.

I’m totally good in really any damp location, he said, bluntly, like a fact. A fact. Any direction, take your pick. He kept on smiling. …

I saved $238 on him that night, honestly he would have been, and every night since. But I guess the best things in life really are free, right? I like him, he says I turn him on, and he sleeps next me.

I’m gunna dump him in 3 years though.

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(see accompanying image)

SLOTH

•

ANDRÉ

ENRIQUEZ

(’17)

ISCARIOT ALEXANDER

DULAK

(’18)

Brother, I want to pray. I heard your voice by the river bend but last night no rooster called my name. I think I may have loved you, but in a sheep draped over the shoulder kind of way. I kissed you for longer than I had expected, salt lingering on my lips. You were the savior of beggars, harlots, middle-class workers and petty town councilors. I needed you to be my savior, not give Ceasar what was his.

I fled the upper room possessed by a demon of broken hope, shuffled feet washed clean in Passover mud. I fed the silver pieces to a flock of sparrows, spinning them out of outstretched hands like grain sown among thorns. My orphaned mind waited by the Lion’s Gate. Galileans came to take possession of the kingdom, salt of the earth.

My paradise was vacant but yours had a zipcode.

Lord, I watched you on the shipwrecked tree, a distant scarecrow. Cheeks flushed with wine and blood over the ones still left behind. Your broken frame the only prayer left.

You chose me. Were you unconvinced of your own determination? Yesterday, I was convinced of mine. Today, I hope I was not.

I’ll meet you in the potter’s field.

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HONEY N AT H A N

FA US T

(’19)

The king is dead, that’s what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.

—Neil Gaiman

The smiling man still dances on the curb, outside your brownstone, tap-tap-tapping away at the cement.

He won’t go away, no matter how many rocks you throw at him.

You draw the curtain, and turn to me.

I cannot give you the world, a disk on the back of an elephant, which rests on a turtle (It’s turtles all the way down).

I prefer this version of the story.

I cannot tell you what to prefer.

I have a place to go.

It’s a house by the sea.

You want to go there, no matter how many beasts,

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striding across the hinterland on their spindle legs, stand in our way, out in the fog.

It will cost something to leave.

The smiling man, suit as brown as his skin, may not find us for many years.

Would you like that, you, whose skin is too tight around your skeleton?

You have an empty bottle of clover honey on your desk because its shaped like a bear and you cannot stand to throw her away.

We leave out the back.

Inspired by Cynthia Cruz

26

TOUCHED KAT I E

CALO

(’19)

When a man you just met through a friend of a friend reaches his hand toward you in mid-conversation to grope your body, it is almost unbelievable yet it is believable because those are his fingers, tangible and real, wrapping around your flesh. And you step back and it’s over and we are all drinking and this is the kind of thing that just happens, isn’t it? He wanted to do it and so he did.

And later his friend comes up and apologizes for him; he must have noticed the shift in your face. Apparently it was the way you spoke to him, the way your body looked in that black dress. He flashes a smile at you as if this is supposed to be a justification, a compliment, and goose bumps creep across your skin.

Did you hear what you just said?

In the style of Claudia Rankine

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DAPHNE DU MAURIER ON WRITING REBECCA COURTNEY

HARSHBARGER

(’19)

(Well, not Really Writing . . . Mostly Just Thinking About Writing)

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . Last night I dreamt Rebecca had never died . . . Last night I dreamt I could write more than one sentence of a story before giving up on it.

I rip the page from my typewriter and cross out all but the sentence concerning Manderley.

Something about it intrigues me and I know I could use it as the basis for the rest of my novel, but my hands are apparently incapable of typing more than one decent line per day. I can imagine the finished product in my hands and the feelings it would produce in its readers, but actually writing it seems impossible. The more I tell myself I can do it, the less I believe I truly can. Perhaps I could, in a different universe where I actually type out my thoughts instead of spending all my time imagining what it will be like when I have finally finished.

Just as I decide that I have done enough “writing” for the day (after spending hours crafting one semi-adequate sentence), Dorothy runs into my room. She insists that I walk over to Mary’s house with her to help with an “urgent matter.” Exhausted, I lie and say that I am too busy writing at the moment to go out. Dorothy looks at the piece of paper on my desk that has one short sentence hovering above three that have been crossed out. She laughs as if I was

joking and pulls me out of the room.

As we walk, I try to ask Dorothy for her advice regarding the writing process, but she only says, “I hate writing, but I love having written.” I completely agree with the statement, but this does nothing to help my predicament because I am still trapped in the stage where I hate writing and have written close to nothing.

I sometimes refer to this as the self-destructive phase in which I doubt my abilities and constantly consider never writing again. Despite my misery, I ask her to help invent ideas for the storyline, but she seems distracted and only gives me vague responses. I decide to ask Mary for her opinion once we have dealt with whatever urgent matter awaits at her house.

When we finally reach Mary’s house, she guides us inside and wastes no time before asking us to help her hide something. Thinking she must be keeping some sort of surprise or secret from her husband, Percy, I eagerly agree.

Dorothy also agrees, and the two of us follow Mary to a closet, which she cautiously opens.

As the door opens, an aging man falls out, completely tied up in ropes and gagged with one of Percy’s dirty socks. Images of a kidnapping pass through my mind as I search for possible plot points for my novel before I realize that I

28

should probably be shocked that Mary has been keeping an old man tied up in her closet.

I ask far too calmly who he is, and Dorothy and Mary laugh at my nonchalant attitude. I learn that his remarkably generic name is James Patterson and that he is both a writer and a fraud. Dorothy, who has apparently been in on Mary’s secret the whole time, informs me that he creates story concepts and then hires unknown writers to turn his ideas into full-length books under his name. I am torn between disgust and jealousy. I do not agree with his methods, but to his credit he has supposedly published over one hundred books and I am still struggling to finish a simple sentence. As I ponder the morality of this immensely rich man, he squirms on the floor in an attempt to break free of his bindings.

Dorothy suggests that we remove his gag and stick it somewhere else, but we ignore her.

Mary asks if I think the basement would be a good place to hide his body. I think this means she intends to murder him, but she assures me otherwise (not without mentioning that she would not mind terribly if he did happen to die). Mary eventually gives in to my questions about the circumstances of the kidnapping and she admits that Patterson had tried to co-write a novel with her. She was outraged that he thought she, Mary Shelley, author of one of the most famous books in the world, would ever consider working with the likes of him. “Hell, even Dorothy Parker, who no one has ever heard of, is too far above that kind of work!” Dorothy shrugs and nods in agreement.

I ask why such a proposition could not be turned down with a simple “no” instead of a fullout kidnapping and Mary finally admits that she thought it might help spark my imagination again. She thinks I should do something exciting and reconsider my artistic options. I think I should reconsider my choice in friends. Patterson keeps struggling on the floor and trying to make

noise, so I agree to discuss this further with Mary in the basement so he cannot draw any unwanted attention to her house.

When the three of us finally manage to settle in the basement with the roped-up Patterson, Mary asks how my novel is coming along. I unenthusiastically admit that I have yet to complete more than one sentence. She somehow takes this information to mean that her kidnapping was the very thing I needed to help move my novel forward. Dorothy seems amused with the whole situation and keeps aggravating Patterson with little insults here and there, refusing to give me any advice.

I share my concerns that perhaps I should write more like Patterson. I could write for the sake of selling books instead of whatever “artistic” reason I had in the first place. Mary and Dorothy both hate this idea and take it upon themselves to explain their own methods of writing, as well as their reasons for doing it in the first place. Mary starts off by explaining her life up to this point, and while I am not entirely sure how this is supposed to help me, it is an interesting story so I listen anyway.

Most of her life sounds like it was stolen from a gothic novel. She learned to read by tracing the letters on her mother’s tombstone, she watched prisoners march to the gallows from her bedroom window as a teenager, and she was inspired to become a writer by the novels left behind by her dead mother. (I still fail to see how this has anything whatsoever to do with my own writing style, but Mary seems happy to tell the story so I continue to listen).

She finally gets around to the day that she met her eventual husband, Percy Shelley. The famous poet immediately struck her fancy and he was likewise attracted, especially because she was the daughter of two of his favorite authors. They became quick friends and finally lovers (Dorothy was incredibly amused to hear that, in keeping

29

with her life’s macabre theme, Mary lost her virginity to Percy in a graveyard). Soon after, she decided to leave her overbearing father’s house and go on an extended trip around Europe with Percy.

When she gets to this part about her elopement with Percy, she (not so subtly) mentions that her father thought of it as a kidnapping even though she left voluntarily.

I roll my eyes and ask if Patterson voluntarily got tied up and thrown into her basement and she concedes. I do take note, however, that Percy was already married at the time of the elopement. This “tragically” led to his first wife’s suicide, which I am glad to hear of because it gives me a spark of inspiration for my novel. The jealousy, the suicide, the love triangle with a dead person . . . I think there must be something there so I keep it in mind.

I wonder for a second if my pursuit of a story has made me such an awful person that I am willing to overlook kidnappings and suicides for the sake of plot, but then I remember that I was not technically involved with either of these crimes, so I ignore my nagging conscience. At this point, I realize that Mary has still failed to tell me anything about her actual method of writing, so I ask her directly about it. She simply says that she writes about herself (I stop myself from calling her pretentious because, seriously, what writer isn’t?).

I prod her for more information and she admits that she writes about what she cannot say out loud for fear of retribution.

This certainly sounds more intellectual, but I think that her first answer was probably more truthful, and there are countless similarities between her life and her novels. I worry that my own life is far too boring to be a source of inspiration, but then again, I am sitting in a basement with two of the greatest writers of all time trying to decide what to do with our tied-up captive. I thank Mary for her insight and turn to Dorothy, hoping she will take

me seriously for once. Of course this was an impossible dream, and Dorothy avoids my question with a sarcastic one of her own. She asks if there is any particular phrase I would like to be written on my tombstone.

I hesitate for too long, and Dorothy answers for herself, “I would like mine to say: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.” All of us laugh, even Patterson, who begins to choke on his gag. Mary and Dorothy seem indifferent to his dilemma, but I loosen his gag to allow him some time to breathe. He looks up at me with frightened eyes and I ask him if he has any advice for writer’s block. Relieved, he responds with some long-winded advice about something or other (honestly I lost interest at the first word) before I remember that his books are not even totally his own, and I gag him again mid-sentence.

After a few minutes of silence, made awkward by Patterson’s sporadic choking fits, Dorothy begins reading us a poem that she has been working on. It consists of eight short lines and is apparently a list of different potential forms of suicide. Each line also goes on to describe why the various methods are no good (guns aren’t lawful, gas smells awful, etc.), finally ending with “you might as well live.” I know that Dorothy intends the poem as a sort of joke, but I cannot help but wonder if she uses such humor as a way of covering up her depression (completely contrasting my own selfdeprecating humor, which definitely, probably, has no ulterior motive whatsoever . . . ).

Although I may be completely wrong about Dorothy’s emotions, I am inspired by the possibilities of the tormenting devil that is her mind, and I take note of more potential plot points for my novel. I decide to let this influx of new ideas settle in my thoughts, so I take a break from heavy discussion and instead propose a game. Mary’s basement is filled with dusty old

30

bottles, and I set a few standing up in a linear formation a few feet away from where Patterson lays. We then take turns grabbing Patterson by the head and spinning him toward the bottles, counting the number that his tied-up body successfully knocks over. I have to admit that this is the most fun I have had in a long time, and I am starting to agree with Mary that this kidnapping was actually a good decision.

After much more spinning, I worry that Patterson needs a break from the game, so we stop sliding him around the basement floor. I even undo his gag again so that he can recover from the dizziness. Always thinking of my unwritten novel, I decide to run a few basic ideas by the group. Unfortunately, every idea I mention has apparently already been taken (in some form or other) by Patterson in one of his many books. Eventually I do come across an idea for a main character that has supposedly not yet been used by him.

She is a combination of Mary and Dorothy, though most heavily influenced by myself of course. Her general mindset is that of my own, and I intend to write in the first person perspective. The macabre circumstances of her existence closely match Mary’s (dead parents and a love triangle with a dead woman), and Dorothy’s depressing yet relatable tone will be peppered throughout the novel’s themes.

Patterson makes a comment that my story could use more adventure, so I take that as confirmation that I should make no such changes. Dorothy thinks that Patterson is getting too comfortable, so she turns him over on his stomach so he has to put his face directly onto the floor.

I had expected to be overjoyed after coming up with an idea for my book, but instead I am resenting the fact that I have no more excuses to avoid writing. I really have no reason to be surprised . . . I have written books before, and

it always starts with dread (closely followed by more dread) as I begin writing but then worry that I have somehow lost my ability to write properly and that the story will turn out dreadfully. I always forget how to start writing every time I stop. Do I really just start typing out my ideas? As far as I can tell, I stare at the blank page in frustration, wishing something would appear, and then as suddenly as I write one sentence I’ve written one hundred.

I express my concerns to the group, asking how they go about starting, but I have finally puzzled them. Neither Mary nor Dorothy can remember how they ever start writing. Dorothy jokes that I could ask someone who writes Patterson’s stories for him and he just shrugs.

I decide that planning out my story first will surely help. I even take out a sheet of paper and “borrow” a pen from Patterson’s pocket, but then I stop myself. Why would I bother writing out a plan for something I want to write in full? I hate writing, and that would only mean extra work that will never even make it into the final draft!

I resolve to think until my hands cannot take it anymore and start typing of their own accord, out of annoyance.

I ask Mary if I can borrow her typewriter so I can get started, but she says she only writes by hand (horrible, I know). Dorothy chastises me for not carrying a portable typewriter with me wherever I go, but she falls silent (and rolls hers eyes) when I point out that she did not bring one either. I run the short distance home to find my own typewriter and bring it back down to Mary’s basement. I then type out the same line from this morning at the top of the page (the only one I did not cross out in frustration). Dorothy reads it aloud as she looks over my shoulder. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

Everyone simultaneously asks me what I mean by Manderley, and I glare at Dorothy as I

31

turn my work away from the group. I hate when people read my work while I am in the middle of typing. To be honest, I hate when people read my work at all (unless they absolutely love it and make a point to tell me so, many times). I ignore their question and continue typing. Actually, I try to start typing but am once again completely unsure of which letters to press. Just as I am about to attempt a new sentence, Patterson sneezes, causing his face to smash noisily into the ground and he groans in pain. The motion startles me and my hand crashes into my typewriter, unintentionally printing the letter ‘I’ in the process.

At first I am annoyed, but then I start to wish Patterson would sneeze again so I could accomplish some more writing, even accidentally. After a few more hours, maybe even years, (but probably just minutes) of staring at the page, I notice Dorothy and Mary watching me. They both look amused at my frustration so I start typing out of spite (which usually makes for the best stories anyway). I spend the next few days doing almost nothing but writing. Mary occasionally brings me a meal and I take a break to chat with her and Dorothy, ignoring Patterson’s occasional attempts at conversation. Despite Mary’s offer to move to a more comfortable room, and Dorothy’s suggestion that I torment my own house with my loud typing, I stay in the dark basement with Patterson. As much as I hate to admit it, Mary was right and the situation does inspire me to write a uniquely creepy story.

After a long period of writing in the basement with the company of my friends and our hostage, I write the final fiery sentence of my novel. I stare at the large stack of papers beside my typewriter and feel unsure of myself yet again. I take a moment to worry that the whole novel is a pile of drivel that should be burned immediately, but I stop myself and decide that

it must be adequate at the very least. I could go back and revise, but I would rather not, so I decide to have it published right away. The only problem is that I have no idea how to get it published so quickly. Of course Mary and Dorothy are about to weigh in, but Patterson speaks up first, and (for the first time) I actually listen to him.

After some shockingly good advice from him, my novel can be found on Amazon (for those who don’t know, Amazon is an online website where you can buy almost anything you can think of). I had no idea so many objects could be purchased and sent around the world at just the click of a few buttons! Mary was so shocked by the discovery of Amazon that she originally thought it to be some sort of witchcraft and it took Dorothy and me a while to calm her down. Speaking of the wonders of Amazon, anyone can purchase my novel there for exactly ten dollars, and I encourage everyone to do so. I may be apprehensive about people reading my writing, but I think the money will serve as a great comfort.

As to the Patterson ordeal, we still have yet to come up with a solution. Dorothy originally jumped at the chance to let him go and finally rid us of his presence, but she now realizes that he would then be free to sell more outrageous works of “literature.” Mary suggests a few various ways of murdering him, but none of us want to be the one to do it. Finally, we decide to keep him in Mary’s basement because the benefits to keeping him around somehow manage to outweigh the disadvantages (he provides excellent entertainment when we spin him around, he would not be able to spoil the world with his fraudulent works if he is too busy being locked up, and we would not be arrested for murder). Surely no one will find out about the kidnapping, and I doubt anyone has even wondered why he has been missing for quite some time.

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I type this now from the comfort of my Patterson-free bedroom, but I plan on paying him and Mary a visit later today. Once again, I encourage you to purchase my novel, Rebecca, (and please do not ask about the name, you’ll figure it out when you read it). It has more than one woman, it has mystery, it has death, and essentially anything you could want out of a good novel. I also fully intend to use the money for a good cause, so do not worry that the purchase will go to waste! I am working on becoming accustomed to quite a luxurious

lifestyle, and the full proceeds from my novel sales will go toward that goal. Now I must stop typing because I have just remembered how much I completely despise it.

Only Somewhat Sincerely,

Daphne Du Maurier •

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M A K I N G T H E PA S T T H E P R E V I O U S ELEONORA

COMASCHI

(’18)

Trying to make the past the previous.

Pouring strange liquids together— listening to Jack’s empty words and I, tried to shut my eyes but I, saw my own pain as a reflection of my gaze.

Let it go I whispered, between incessant drags of cold cigarettes at two in the morning, when everyone and their mother was asleep.

Tired embraces, and suitable smiles of finely dressed acquaintances.

Little lost lovers laughing in-between poisoned liquids . . .

What the fuck is alliteration?

Cold considerations, on the tip of my single malt fingertips— and the moon gazed over iridescent urban rivers and faces of acidic lovers— breathing tiny gravitational gasps— moaning for Earth’s approval— for a love that is too distant.

And the phone rang melancholy tunes of poisoned promises An echoed silence.

Little tears lingered in dried crevices, Touching forgotten scars— I wondered, If my inner June Gloom would break past the aching—

34

The breeze rolled along the heated streets Pushing past humanity’s inconveniences, Sitting cross legged, above it all, I wondered If they knew this pain unspoken To have touched a frozen mirror— fingers trembling Anxious because I couldn’t recognize the reflection Scars I couldn’t trace— Screaming into the emptiness Drawing road maps with my pitches— Engraving lines on the hardwood floorboards Paving places of distant spaces I would have rather been.

Murky— I remember Even the bathwater was polluted With cherry tears.

I remember your hatred on my shoulders.

I remember the things you taught me.

To hate the gaze looking back at me behind tired eyes.

To think I could never be loved by anything Other than the back of your calloused Hands.

On cold nights when everyone and their mother Was asleep— I remember, sitting alone with the wind As it whispered shivers Little apologies for nature’s Synthetic mishaps.

I never understood how humanity could be so Taciturn.

35

Today I am tracing my little fleshed mountains And comprehensive crevices With careful caresses.

No longer seeking P your fucking validation.

Like whiskey on a fire I burn relentlessly.

36

TOMORROW LIZ

HOLLAND

(’18)

4:00 am is cold.

It’s colder than any time of day should be, but it’s sweet.

The day’s smells are budding in the flowers, and the earth is damp.

There’s no reason, the moments are just crisp and damp and sweet and fresh.

In this cold, she looked up at the stars and sighed.

Not a sad sigh or a tired sigh, just a sigh.

She was lying bathed in the last remnants of moonlight and she looked naked. Her skin and dress had coalesced.

So he handed her the sweatshirt he’d been resting on.

It was blue and when she wore it she looked safe.

She looked small.

Beneath this sky and above this grass, she looked small.

His heart began to beat quickly and he turned away, feeling large.

“You know what I like to think about when I’m alone up here?”

Her voice forever surprised him.

She was loud and slow, edging on limitless.

He shook his head and she told him “I think about the end of life, like maybe there shouldn’t be a tomorrow.

Maybe it’s only if we think hard enough about tomorrow that it happens.

Maybe people die because they can’t bear the thought of tomorrow.

Maybe you and me, maybe we shouldn’t think about tomorrow.”

“I guess it’s hard not to, cause what else is there?”

She closed her eyes and he tried to feel the grass on every part of his skin.

Grasping at anything but tomorrow.

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He wanted to think about this moment in all its sweetness and coldness and freshness.

He turned to breathe in the scent of her, melted butter and raspberry preserves.

He looked at the blue nail polish on her fingers.

Recklessly painted and days-old—chipped, but his favorite color: lake-blue, tinted green like wet algae.

Together they shared a moment of nothing.

No words or looks, just the moment when even thoughts become unnecessary.

She lay back down to look up at the stars again.

Every time it was with different eyes.

The woods, yards behind them, were yawning.

He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

Maybe he’d wanted to listen without making any sound.

He frowned now, when he’d get up from the grass and return home she wouldn’t be next door she wouldn’t open the backdoor and ask for his help there’d be no sounds of fighting from the upstairs windows across the lawn there’d be no breaking or sobbing no smells of baking banana bread from the kitchen no smells of pot wafting from behind the old shed.

She wouldn’t be there at all.

This was going to be the last sweet moment here.

And he knew, although she didn’t want him to, even now he was thinking of tomorrow.

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VERNAZZA RACHEL

MULLENS

She sat clutching her small leather shoulder bag the color of sticky caramel atop crossed knees. My arrival interrupted her poised observation of the crowded station only for a brief moment. After one quick sweep over my figure top to bottom, her eyes returned towards the water speckled glass.

The next two hours passed slowly, and after opening and closing my notebook several times, I admitted defeat. We passed through lush expanses of green dotted with cows and nameless structures of ancient stone. Besides the gentle pendulous rhythm of her teardrop earrings that created a kaleidoscope on the small laminate tabletop between us, the woman remained motionless. A coffee cart with squeaky wheels passed by and then returned. At the opposite end of the car a baby shrieked. My tangled headphones were mocking me all the way from my nightstand, a mere 4,028 miles away.

His initials were emblazoned on the blue resin of his favorite fountain pen that rested uncapped and untouched below the windowsill.

I discovered it in the bottom of my bag as I rifled for my passport, just twelve hours prior. It seemed to have more weight than it should, and despite its mass I fancied that it was capable of sending the Boeing 777 into a sputtering tailspin towards the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. He didn’t get down on one knee. He stood on two

(’18)

feet and asked for more than I could give. That perfectly timed phone call sent me packing my bags in search of a story; the “Cosmic” ringtone will forever be my personal hallelujah.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the ring. It was custom made, each stone in the sunburst cluster painstakingly sourced and cut to sit on my finger until I die. After that I would pass it on to someone who deserves it, or at least that’s what I thought. I hadn’t allowed myself to try it on. Instead, it sunk deep within the rosy silk lining of my mother’s old trench coat, only emerging to reflect shards of sunlight that left my vision blurred and my head spinning.

I hadn’t noticed, but the woman across from me uncrossed her legs, unzipped her purse, and pulled out a creased and fading photograph.

She slid it across the table with two hands that looked like a geographical map of some distant land, with blue river veins and five knuckle mountains.

Within the white tattered border stood two grinning figures on the precipice of youth. The young man was dressed in a button down shirt and his auburn hair resisted the strokes of his wet comb, the stray strands fell towards his eyes in the shape of a C. The woman was a head and a half shorter, her dark hair falling in waves past the cardigan draped over her shoulders. They weren’t touching, but you could sense their

39

intimacy nonetheless. I could imagine the man telling a joke with smug confidence, watching to see her reaction. The moment a smile spread across her face, it was immortalized by a single click of a shutter. I wondered who took the photo, if he or she felt lonely standing in the presence of pure recognition and devotion. I felt an ache in my stomach, so I turned my attention to the woman sitting in front of me. There was an eerie gray tint to her face that mimicked the photograph.

Unsure if she would understand me, I asked, “Is this you?”.

She replied in perfect English, “Yes, it’s the only photo I have of my love.”

I had mistaken her silence for a sturdy language barrier that I tend to tip toe around.

She could pass for an Italian: olive skin, deep amber eyes blanketed in thick lashes, and raven hair threaded with strands of silver pulled back in a slick chignon. I envied this ability to become a part of the landscape. I was a spectacle with my blonde hair, pale skin, and failure to realize how far my voice carries.

With raised eyebrows she spoke again, “You know, those are meant to be worn.” Detecting the remnants of a Brooklyn accent, I scanned her left hand for any shimmering gems, but all of her fingers were bare. With the same defeated shrug that I always use to deflect the probing of my mother’s friends at dinner parties, I lied.

“It’s too small.”

Desperate to change the subject and eager to feed my inner skeptic about a love that lasted half a century, I asked her where her wedding ring was. She replied, “My husband is dead. I couldn’t bring myself to wear it, so I sold it.”

Gesturing to the photograph, she continued, “I’m going back to the place where we fell in love. Vernazza.”

The corners of her eyes were glittering as she reached for the photograph and tucked it safely

within the depths of her purse. I wanted to ask her more, but I was afraid she would break under the weight of my questions. She was frail, and her small feet swaddled in smooth leather loafers didn’t quite reach the ground.

I assumed our brief exchange was over, and welcomed the blanket of silence that soon settled over us. But as soon as I turned my gaze back to the blur of flora and steel skies, she spoke again, this time in a quieter voice: “I was twelve when my mother died. My father was in the Navy, and he survived the second World War, but losing her slowly killed him. He spoke six or seven languages; he was a brilliant man. As soon as I graduated high school, he sold our house and bought an old fishing boat. He wanted to leave me behind and send checks in the mail, but I begged him to take me with him. We made a deal that we would find one town to be our new home. I would live there and he would return every two weeks. We sailed all over, but nowhere really felt like home. For days at a time all we would see was blue, the blue sky and the blue water.

We never really talked much. I lived my days in dreams, bobbing along, numb and queasy.

And then we docked at Vernazza. My father went to ask about the price of propane, our stock running low. I went to find a market of some kind, dying for fresh fruit, or anything that didn’t taste like salt. I was wearing baggy overalls, rubber boots, and had my hair tucked into my hat. I had forgotten what it was like to feel pretty. Until I saw him . . . Alessio. He was pushing a cart of produce down the street.

I couldn’t bear the thought of being seen in my smelly fisherman clothes, so I hid inside a doorway until he passed.”

She chuckled to herself, shook her head and drew a small breath before continuing, “That night I told my father that Vernazza would be my home. The elderly woman running the only

40

inn in town let me stay in their smallest room if I cooked for the guests and cleaned the rooms that gathered dust. Usually I was the only guest, so there wasn’t much work to be done. All of her children had moved away. In a way we adopted one another. No one that I had met spoke English, so I was terrified the day my father left.

In my free time I began to sew myself a dress out of old bedsheets. I was determined to enchant the man pushing the produce cart.”

Incessant conversation usually leaves me jittery and irritated, but while she was talking I was completely absorbed, anticipating the next word to leave her mouth. I was convinced this woman was a sign from God— a God I hadn’t prayed to in years. Without the permission of thought, my hands moved on their own. Like a thoughtless child signing the cross, I slipped the ring on my finger.

“One Saturday morning I offered to get bread from the market to spare the inn keeper’s old joints on the cobblestone steps. The weather was starting to grow cold and damp—the skies looked much like they do today. I had been in Vernazza for almost two months. My Italian was good enough to get by. I wore my dress made out of bedsheets and a thick wool cardigan with abalone buttons. It was a present from my father. My hair was wavy from the humidity and my cheeks were flushed from the brisk air. I bought a few loaves of bread from the old baker and strolled over to him. I was so nervous that I began to speak in English without thinking, ‘Hello.’ That’s all I could muster. All of my effort to appear calm and cultured flew out the window. I almost turned to walk away because I was so embarrassed. But little did I know that he spoke English. His father learned from American soldiers in the war, and he passed it onto Alessio because he wanted him to have a chance of getting out of Italy. ‘Hello. How is it I don’t know the only beautiful woman

in this town?’ he asked, confusing the ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds, making it apparent that he hadn’t spoken anything other than Italian in quite some time. I blushed, but it was a fact as much as a compliment. I was the only woman under forty in the town.”

She pressed one of her veiny hands against her cheek, like she was trying to remember what it felt like to be flushed, to feel her blood rise and fall like the waves that swept her in the drift of fate.

“I told him that I had just moved there during the summer and was working at the inn.

He sold me the last of his peaches and told me his name was Alessio. I started going everyday to the market. And everyday we would stare at one another in wonder and exchange bits of information. I had never had someone that was mine as much as I was theirs. We fell steadily in love even though I knew from the minute I saw him that he would be my very last and only thought before death. Two weeks had passed since my father had last visited. And then another two weeks passed, and still no sign of him. I never did learn of his fate, I figured he capsized in a storm because the thought of him starting a new life somewhere without me was even harder to bear.

I wore that cardigan he gave me every night to bed for years. My only ties to the world were in Vernazza, Alessio and the inn keeper.”

I felt like I knew how the story ended, like every other great love story, every romance novel my mother slipped into the midst of my precarious stack of murder mysteries and science fiction sagas. With a clammy palm clasped around my ring finger, I asked, “How long were you married?”

“Forty three years. But that has nothing to do with this story.”

I had unintentionally been holding my breath. All of the air left my lungs in a whoosh through parted lips. The woman could sense my bewilderment so she elaborated, “That was never

41

in the cards for us. Alessio was my soulmate, there is no doubt about that. But he grew restless in Vernazza. He had never seen the world and he began to wonder what else was out there. I had never felt like I had a home. He left. I stayed.

Eventually the inn keeper died and I went back to America.”

“So your husband . . .”

“I married a banker and had two kids.

I never learned what happened to Alessio. I always hoped that we would both come back to Vernazza.”

I hadn’t realized how close we had gotten, both hunched over the tabletop, transfixed in the past. She sat up straight, smoothed the creases in her long skirt, and sat like an empty vessel. She had shared all she had to give. She never asked me about my ring, my love, my doubts. I never told her that I believed romantic love to be the

biggest lie perpetuated by the human fear of an inconsequential existence, that being special to one person doesn’t save anyone. She already knew this much, I bet the banker she married knew this, too.

A stream of Italian unknown to me flowed through the speakers and my stop flashed on the screen in fiery all-caps. I exchanged a last glance of understanding with the nameless woman before gathering my things that occupied the empty seat next to me. Umbrella at the ready, I waited for the automated doors to open and anticipated the frigid gust of wind that would greet my lungs with a swift punch. I stared down at the fragmentary pieces of earth soldered together with gold, somehow supposed to symbolize eternity. I thought of the trains that I have yet to ride, the soulmate that I have yet to meet and yet to lose. •

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DIPPED IN PRETTY MELEANA

COITO

(’19)

Nestled behind the hands of palms and petals. inside a marble coated home, lies an infant corpse. rotted at its roots yet swaddled in ribbons of cotton candy, The child is lullabied by her mother’s cussing.

Its belly button jabbed by a prickly rose with eyes glued shut yet just enough to not ruin the child’s mascara.

Mother dips her brushes one by one into pots of bruised hues.

As she strokes the matte “i love you so’s,” she whiffs the foul odor of eye rolls, & blends the satin soon to be “what have you done’s.” the child’s skin, soft as milk hands cold like the moon its virgin feet only responds to fight or flight more so drop

43

dive into an ocean of silenced voices.

hands cold like the moon gauzed in the child’s skin soft as milk

44

PAT I E N C E JAKOB

SERGEI

LEVITSKY

WEITZ

(’17)

a girl, blonde. earrings and a red collar. green eyes. asteroids and a purple drink in a strange bar. a facemask of oxygen. impotence.

2006. three dots of light in sunglasses. a bus. a beard now. letting go. trying to avoid your mom’s boyfriend. your old job. waitress. salmon pink dress, white apron. smell of stale coffee. grease. someone shouting at a small red truck leaving. a kid with a bandage over his left eye. him, alone at night. four streetlights but the ones in the park look different. the windows of the buildings are tall yellow and empty; a feeling like running naked through an underwater hallway.

45

the mirror. that’s a nightclub. right. can I help you? flesh gone, drowning in a quicksand of skin, pulling you with fingers. turning you inside out.

a notebook. snow. a green hat with the flaps that cover your ears. a three year old boy that wasn’t supposed to be born until 1986. a mask. driving fast. yellow streets turn to serpentine green valleys and you burn your car to ash and walk away, feeling like solid meat and gristle on your way to a family reunion.

2012, again. your brain has a way of reshaping memories. you pick up a baby’s dress, white with red polka dots. you put it back. we sit on a bench and you look at the ground between your knees. typing late at night. asking to be medicated. a black frame with five green dots scattered, and a zebra pattern of flamingo blue, turquoise peach, white-pink, and yellow radiating on the right hand side.

46

— — two giant faces looking at each other against an all-black page.

— — the more I saw the further my embers drifted into the ghost world.

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MOMENTS OF RED CAROLINA

AV N E R

(’18)

1.

People say they do not have memories from toddlerhood. This is a myth. Close your eyes and go back. Rewind your mind to your earliest memories. Now hold your breath . . . feel the beginnings of a fire in your chest and push. Stretch yourself beyond that starless void, not just with your mind’s eye. Stretch your prickling fingertips, listen to the loud static of silence bombarding your ears. Just when your chest feels like it’s smoldering and your eyes perceive shadows swirling behind tightly shut lids—breath! There it is . . . my Abuelito is laughing at my tomato face. Decades later his throaty laughter remains.

2.

I recently learned red is the favorite color of all children but that as they grow this changes. The mind is maturing so other colors become more pleasing to the eye. I must have missed the memo because my eye never wandered. I walked barefoot down the loud streets with the heavy diesel fog defying all authority for the first time, convinced that only crisp apple red was allowed to lead me home.

3.

Everything around me was a garage band of sounds being played by carpenters. The sun was hugging me tight even though my dress was light. There in the window were red mary jane shoes made out of leather, gleaming so bright I reached out to touch them with my fingers and my face. That was the day Santa still existed.

4.

I sometimes wonder if we crossed paths before the day my memory of you begins. I love you above the rest. I’ll never be Mona Lisa. The truth always sets me free no matter how awkward. It colludes with my rapidly heating face staining it like pomegranates. I’ve always been accused of being too friendly but you know, asi soy.

5.

One clear morning at a McDonald’s above Montana across the border in Maple Leaf Canada I washed my hands in the bathroom with cold water. In the mirror a woman came out of her stall and put her

48

purse down on the sink counter. It was the 80’s so her hair was a big puffy cloud of blonde, blue blouse with shoulder pads. When our eyes met in the mirror I smiled as I shut off the water, ready to dry my hands. Instead she froze like cherry popsicle stick, eyes bugging out, her lips a thin line, snatching her purse back from the counter, she hugged it to herself. This woman walked around me like an escaping lion tamer. She never smiled back. I was alone trying to understand why an adult seemed afraid and angry at the same time. Why did my stomach suddenly feel sick? Why was my pulse racing? Why was my chest and face an inferno? On that clear Canadian morning my mother explained that some people didn’t like brown but it wasn’t my fault.

6.

Since my eighth year of life brown became a color I lived with, like my cat. Most of the time I didn’t notice it since I was too busy chasing dreams on my red roller skates. But I was aware of brown, it was that crayon in the back corner of the crayon box that hardly got used except if you needed to draw trees.

Brown was not hated by me but it hurt. Brown was a purple amoeba looking bruise that never faded, so I ignored it instead. Left it in the back corner of the crayon box, healing.

7.

Things change as you grow, life is a sticky syrupy mess between your fingers you can’t lick off. I was following R.E.M. and losing my religion becoming enlightened. I had burgandy lips with a voice in english, my spanish had been locked away for a year solid. It was doing time because calling me whitewashed and questioning my layers of brown compared to their brown was a mind numbing agony every Monday through Friday. I didn’t need to have stuck on fly-away bangs with tarantula mascara to be cool. I just needed my matte burgundy lipstick and my truth to set me free. Fuck you Texas.

8.

Everyone should do a year abroad. Just get your stuff and go. Doesn’t matter where, just get out of your country and travel the unknown. My red became rojo, rouge and ahmer. Red was universally decadent. Abroad people painted their homes red, all shades of red. It was fantastic and I died because I was finally living in my color! Dinners were S ole Meunière, Chicken Tangine or Tapas. There were naked women on beaches and breasts were not just sex symbols they were life giving mana for babies. I realized I might be prudish when I saw a naked man brushing his teeth in a toothpaste commercial and I screamed. To be fair I was a virgin and no one prepared me for that one. Have to love the French.

9.

After walking through sites that predated Jesus Christ I can say America is young. In my youth I thought we were perfect. Even Superman hung up his red cape in America. When I was eight and Canada showed me their filth I felt my mother made the right choice immigrating to America instead.

But that was before Texas. Before my math teacher in Arlington called me you people and said I was only good for a factory line. Before the Latinas at school dragged me through the mud because I didn’t have an accent. Before I witnessed a burning cross outside of a friend’s house letting him know no blacks allowed. That was the 1990’s—America is young.

49

10.

Tuesday, November 8th is a day I long to forget. If we could all just wade into the River Lethe and dunk our heads under the water once, completely submerging ourselves, we would all be cleansed of 18 months worth of hell. I sat in shock watching red swallow state after state, betraying my love in order to gain power. Red, you have finally destroyed years of work in one single night. How is it possible that my best loved color now makes me feel sick with anxiety? Love failed.

11.

24 hours into a new reality has left brown, black, yellow and red outside of the crayon box. Ready to be walked on and broken into tiny pieces. The only way to save them is to cook them all together to make one multicolored crayon in any shape you could desire. It’s too bad rainbows are now being targeted.

We’ll just have to throw it all away.

12.

2 days after the 8th of the 11th month in the year 2016 and my tweets have been deactivated, my facebook cleaned up of opinions that would make anyone blush. Debating to erase all instagram pictures, what about snapchat? A petty vindictive man is in office with a slippery NSA at his beck and call. Snowden isn’t worried but he’s in the Red Square. Chomsky called it but we didn’t listen. The news is worried about designers refusing to dress Melania. It’s the end of the world as we know it . . .

R.E.M playing like Nostradamus.

13.

As I crawl through the first week of President Elect Trump, the man who manipulated red against me, I am still brown and his followers will not let me forget it. Civility was shot to death by open carry hatred in order to Make America Great Again. What else have we got to lose? Kids are building fences now with shoes.

14.

If you shout Trump until your are red in the face you are allowed to spew the most hateful vile words your limited vocabulary allows at any person of color. This is our new normal but the news says we are not normalizing this behavior so shhhh it’s a secret only allowed to be reported on social media. But what does social media know? Stanford proved we can’t tell fake news from real news.

15.

My skin feels egg shell thin with tiny fissures connecting to each other. Just holding hands until I crack.

16.

Red and Orange foxes are being placed in charge of all chicken coops. Everyone is smiling as the KKK holds a convention in Washington, D.C. The head of Breitbart is now the senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist. The news cycle is convinced we need to talk about Hamilton and Pence.

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17.

Women are advising each other to get an IUD before January 20th. An IUD is an intrauterine device, t-shaped piece of plastic or copper inserted into the uterus to provide birth control. Some of them can last for 5 years, just long enough to survive Trump. Women are currently getting covered 100% for birth control under Obamacare unlike before and they are worried their rights to control their reproductive systems will be assaulted by the good ole boys. They don’t want to go back to bloodstained back alley care. This is not fake news.

18.

It’s been a month red and I think we are never ever getting back together. Every time I want to forgive you I see another offense that batters my skin, my gender, my religion, my beliefs like an uncaring tropical cyclone drowning me. I’m shutting it off, it’s just not the same anymore.

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N O O N E ’S M I S T R ESS TAY L O R

COHEN

(’20)

I am the girl You have to think about, The girl That takes excruciatingly long to commit to, Because I am not one of the perfect girls, Who have the artful curves, And the picturesque smile, And the captivating eyes, And are whatever else a man wishes.

I am the girl Who wants endlessly to be that perfect girl.

I am the girl That will fall for anyone Who takes the slightest of interest.

I am the girl you are not sure why You are drawn to.

I am the girl you find intriguing But do not want to fuck.

I am the girl you love deeply But do not lust over.

I am no one’s mistress.

I am the girl Who makes a loving wife, A compassionate mother, But not that tempting nymph, Nothing any man longs for.

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You may fall in love with my eyes, But beware I am the girl your mother urges you to be with, The girl you know you should love, Not the one you’ve dreamed of.

I am no one’s mistress.

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WOM•AN E M I LY

BAADE

( G R A D UAT E

STUDENT )

(ˈwʊm ən) n., pl. wom•en (ˈwɪm ɪn) adj. n.

1. an adult female person, as distinguished from a girl or a man.

2. a wife.

3. a female lover or sweetheart.

4. a female servant or attendant.

I am not a wife and I am no one’s lover. The last conversation I had with a man he told me I would not be single if I were able to embrace my feminine side but how I can pick a side when the world is as flat as the chest I wish sometimes I didn’t have. I can say “The world is flat” like I can say “The sky is orange” like I can declare that unicorns are as real as the sexism I feel and it doesn’t matter because no one is listening anyway. This is the response to a moment of breath where I take a minute to exhale and open my eyes. I have noticed it is harder to fight with your eyes open because when your eyes are closed, you can’t see who you hit when you swing a fist so I will stare at you until you unfurl your hands and stare at me. I am not a wife or a lover and I am not a servant so what does that make me, woman.

I do not cook but my blood boils and my heart steams with the smoke and mirrors of a lullaby my mother used to tell me about sticks and stones. I do not clean because the last time I tried to scrape the dirty parts of myself away for Man I scrubbed so hard that my flesh peeled back and I exposed more of myself than I had intended until I was barely there at all. I am not a wife or a lover or a servant but I am stretching myself thin to grow into the mold of an adult woman. The Body Of A Woman is a body that has started to inhale at my thighs and has held its breath until purple veins have sprouted like permanent beads of sweat down my hips. You are no Aphrodite— I was raised to accept that the symbol of Love is the picture of a woman standing in shame wearing a mask called Modesty. I may not be made of marble but I am made of a substance stronger, a subject that refuses to be ashamed of purple veins and the unicorns I believe in. On the day Man decides that I finally qualify, I will have figured out how to build myself up into a tower so high that I can no longer hear Him, anyway.

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THE FUNERAL M US TA FA

H

william

“William . . . I’m so sorry. You’ve got 6 months, maybe a year,” said the doctor.

William was not exactly sure what to say.

He began to think of lemon tarts, his favorite dessert. The tang of the filling, the way it mushed with the springy crust. He had picked some up earlier that day, ordered a week ago from Marco’s, his favorite little bakery, a New Year’s Day treat to go along with his favorite champagne; a victory snack for another year conquered.

William was staring at the wall, light blue, flatly illuminated by the long lamps that hung from the ceiling. What a relaxing color, William thought to himself. They try to fool you from the get-go.

“William, are you listening?” asked the Doctor.

“I hope that you fucking die before I do,” said William.“You shouldn’t shoot the messenger” said the Doctor, “I just want you to take care of yourself.”

At home William watched numbly as his wife, Winona, a melancholic young woman in her 20’s, jewelry shopped online. To suppress his grief, William approached her. He felt her acquiesce when he started to rub her body. He had sex with her, but it didn’t help. For a while

YA SA R

II

(’18)

after they both just lay there, staring up at the high white ceiling of their mansion’s masterbedroom.

“Winona, I’m going to die soon. I’ve got between 6 months and a year,” said William.

“Well,” said Winona, “It’s good you finalized the will some time ago, isn’t it?”

William started to cry.

“Oh dear,” said Winona. She gently placed her husband’s head onto her lap and stroked his shuddering head. “Did you sleep with my hairdresser last week?” Winona asked.

William was briefly shocked into silence.

“Is now really the best time to talk about that?” asked William.

“Well, I’ve got an appointment with her in half-an-hour, and I figure that if you slept with her last week then I shouldn’t have to pay her today,” said Winona.

William continued to cry. Winona stroked his head, clearly annoyed, for about 10 more minutes before she left to get her hair done.

William stayed in his bed for about a week. His maid, Josie, would come in to feed him, and change his shit-stained clothes. One time Josie’s daughter, a high schooler named Natasha, came with her. She stared at him pitifully and a little sardonically; he wasn’t a pretty sight. His wife Winona would briefly visit him every day to

55

check whether he was still alive.

After seven days, William crawled out of bed and dressed himself. He walked to the kitchen and took out his lemon tarts. The citrusy scent of the pastry smelled happier than he felt, but he savored the tangy bite of lemon.

While he ate his snack, William looked at his phone for the first time in a week. He was surprised by the number of voicemails messages that had bugged up in his absence.

“Hey Bill, it’s Greg. Winona told me that your days are numbered and you know, the first thing I thought, the very first thing, was how much I’d miss your $20,000 monthly donation to the Affluenza Society. I wanted to ask if you could send one more large payment, carpet dust it for the year, cause I mean who knows when you’re gonna kick the bucket at this point. With our Global Yacht-Plane-Poker Tournament coming up, it’s imperative we have all of the funds necessary to successfully complete our Franco-German-Italian Alcohol Appreciation Trip.”

“Willie, it’s John! Winona told me at the Twilight Brunch that you’re croaking soon, and I just wanted to send my regards, let you know that I’m thinking about you. Winona’s been pretty shook lately. She was pretty quiet after we had sex in the Wilson’s shoe closet, and I figured it’s because she was thinking about you. You picked a good kid to marry, Willie, not just cause she swallows, but because she’s so damned thoughtful.”

The messages continued in this fashion, and after about half an hour, William threw his phone to the floor. He contemplated the most painless way to commit suicide. He thought about cutting his wrists, but didn’t like the idea of watching his arms gush blood. So, William decided to hang himself.

William owned neither a step-ladder, nor a

length of rope, so he went to the hardware store to buy them both. As he walked towards the front counter, the brassy glint of an Egyptian oil lamp caught his eye. Anachronistic as it was, William could focus on its curves and color, think of something beyond his pervasive sadness.

“How much for the oil lamp?” William asked the cashier.

“The what?”

“The oil lamp,” William said, “I found it by the rope.”

“What the hell is an oil lamp?” asked the cashier.

“Google it,” said William.

So the cashier Googled oil lamp on his phone.

“I’ll be damned, it’s an Aladdin lamp,” said the cashier.

“Yes,” said William.

“Well why the hell didn’t you just say you wanted an Aladdin lamp?”

“Can you please just tell me how much you want for it?”

“Five hundred dollars,” said the cashier.

“That’s a rip-off!” said William.

“That’s an oil lamp actually, and it’s five hundred dollars,” said the cashier.

“Fine,” said William.

The cashier eyed William’s other product choices and smiled, “Try not to hang yourself!”

“Yeah,” said William.

William set up the noose and step-ladder underneath a chandelier. He pulled out an old bottle of scotch, a glass, and poured out his last drink. After draining his glass, William turned the oil lamp over in his hands. He noticed a small scruff in the brassy surface, so William pulled out a corner of his shirt and tried to rub out the blemish.

CRACK-BOOM-POW: lightning,

56

thunder, rumbling, and then a bright light, brighter than the glint of the lamp, blinding.

The light sucked back into the middle of the room, there was blackness all around and William was blind. Finally, a small explosion popped in every color. The beauty made William marvel at the infinite variety of the universe. He remembered when he was five and his mom was holding his grubby little hand, and he remembered that she loved William, her little Bill, even though one time he had slapped her hard enough to make her head suddenly tilt a bit to the side. But, she didn’t care because he was her little Bill, and they were going to walk through the garden and then get ice cream.

William felt like there was hope and love and peace floating just past his finger tips, and all he had to do was reach out a little more and he could do something kind for someone else to make the most of the rest of his life.

But then the colors around him restored themselves to the dull browns and grays he’d seen his whole life, and with the restoration of the natural lighting of the room came the restoration of William’s bitterness. There was one thing that was different though, a giant red-blue frog was comfortably plopped in the middle of the room.

William stared at the frog silently, and the frog stared back. The awkwardness in the air was palpable, eventually prompting the frog to speak.

“Hello, mortal,” said the frog, “I am Johnathan the Great, Genie of the West, and you’ve woken me from my slumber.”

“You’re not a genie, you’re a frog,” said William.

“Yes. All genies are frogs, but not all frogs are genies,” said Johnathan the Great.

Johnathan the Great was magnificent; his skin was bright, oily and glowing. He took

up the length of William’s living room and squatted proudly. Johnathan the Great regally surveyed the room and noticed the noose-andladder set-up.

“That’s depressing,” said Johnathan the Great.

“I know,” said William. He stared at the floor.

“I’ve never been summoned by a mortal that wanted to die,” said Johnathan the Great, “Greed, avarice, a strong lust for life! These are the qualities of the men whose wishes I grant.

But you—you’re just a sad sack of shit,” said Johnathan the Great.

“I’m going to die in half-a-year anyways!” said William, “At least this way it’s on my own terms.”

“If you say so,” said Johnathan the Great, “are you going to wish yourself to death?”

“So I do get wishes?”

“One. You get one wish.”

“Do I have a time limit?” asked William.

“No, take all the time you need,” said Johnathan the Great.

William decided think about his wish while taking a walk. He went to his favorite ice cream shop, a local place that bordered a laundromat. He bought a medium cup of salted caramel, then left the shop so he wouldn’t have to watch the sticky brats, or the horny high school couples, or the tired parents suck up all the life out of the air. As William walked towards the back of the building, he tripped on an untied shoe lace.

As William fell to his knees, he watched in horror as his ice cream cup floated out of his reach. The cup corkscrew flipped, and while the cup was upside-down the spoon fell to the floor.

Miraculously, the ice cream stayed stuck to its container, and the cup itself landed right-side up. The ice cream was fine, but the spoon was

57

now too dirty to use.

“I’ve got an extra spoon if you need one,” said a voice.

Johnathan turned around to find that the voice came from Natasha, the daughter of his maid, Josie, who had force-fed William and changed his shit-stained clothes.

“Why do you have two spoons?” asked William.

“You would be surprised how often people at ice cream shops drop their spoons. I keep one handy, just in case,” said Natasha.

“That’s nice of you,” said William.

As William took the small stick of molded plastic from Natasha’s hand, he was struck suddenly with a sense of decency and humanity.

William realized that Natasha was the first person in years that handed him something without expecting anything in return. Tears sprang to his eyes.

“Are you okay?” asked Natasha.

“No. But thank you Natasha, you’ve made me realize what I want.”

And with that, William left and started to head back to his home. He was angered by the fact that the only person that had showed him kindness in years was the daughter of his maid.

William wanted revenge for every selfish act of dishonesty that he had ever put up with.

“Is that salted caramel?” asked Johnathan the Great, as William walked back into the room.

“I know what I want to wish for,” said William, “I want to put my funeral-goers through hell. They never treated me honestly, and they never cared about me. I want to them to be imprisoned and to suffer.”

“That’s a mouthful of a wish,” said Johnathan the Great.

“Can you do it?” asked William.

“Well yes, but it’s technically not one

wish,” said Johnathan the Great, “it’s at least two.”

“Will you do it?” asked William.

“Sure,” said Johnathan the Great, “but to grant this wish, you’ll have to trade your soul.

Is that a price that you’re willing to pay?”

“Take what you need,” said William.

Johnathan the Great’s buggy eyes lit up, literally, with delight. The frog smiled viciously and croaked out a harsh laughter as he sucked William’s soul from his body. natasha

Natasha was scared. The air around her and the ground beneath her feet seemed to burn through her clothes and shoes. There was fire burning around the planes of land she was walking through, which made her feel like she’d done something wrong.

“Hurry Natasha, we’re going to be late to the funeral. You need to pay your respects, because of him you’ll be able to go to college,” her mom had said. But, when they walked into the service they were suddenly in Hell, the biblical kind, and bright-red tentacles grabbed her mom and whisked her away as she screamed in terror.

Natasha ran as fast as she could after her mother until a large wall of red fire spouted out in front of her. She screamed and closed her eyes afraid that she was going to burn; but, when she opened them again she was still alive and staring at a red-blue Frog.

“You seem kind. You could break this spell.

Do you want to save your mother?” asked the Frog.

“Yes!” said Natasha.

“There are three tasks you must complete.

If you succeed, I will release you from this landscape,” said the Frog. He disappeared.

There was a flash of light, and Natasha

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suddenly found herself watching what at first glance seemed to be the beginnings of an orgy.

A group of eight people, four men and four women, were all naked, grunting and touching themselves. Weirdly, there was no interaction. They didn’t seem to realize that other people were around them. The scene was a sad one. Natasha felt melancholic and helpless, especially after she recognized one of the women to be William’s wife, Winona.

Natasha had always considered Winona vapid and generally disinterested in anything beyond materialistic goods. Natasha also remembered an act of kindness.

There had once been a small cat being chased by a dog in front of William’s mansion and Natasha had just stood there. But Winona noticed the cat too. She sprinted with all her might towards the cat, scooped it up, and kicked the dog. The dog bit Winona’s leg in protest, but Winona just kept striking the dog on the nose while holding the cat in her other arm until the dog scampered away.

Natasha walked towards Winona hoping to get her to say something. She pulled at Winona’s arm, called her name, but Winona remained distracted. Natasha stepped down on Winona’s foot. She looked at Natasha briefly, then turned back to masturbate.

There was a crack and the red-blue frog appeared again.

“Why can’t she talk to me?” asked Natasha.

“There are more ways to communicate than talking,” said the Frog.

“It’s obvious that she wants to have sex, but she can’t; none of them can. And it’s your fault,” said Natasha.

“They’re not interested in sex, they care more about gratification. They don’t even see the other masturbators around them. It’s a

shame, they’d probably have a lot more fun if they noticed each other,” said the Frog. He croaked out a chuckle.

Natasha noticed the frog from the first time. He was taller than her despite his permanent squat. His skin glowed dangerously; bright red and bright blue. Natasha was scared to touch him. His mouth was stretched into a malicious grin. His eyes, swirling red and blue, mischievous and intense, drew Natasha in.

“You’re crazy,” said Natasha.

“Your first challenge is a question: What do people want?”

The question seemed completely left-field.

Natasha just stared at the Frog. He didn’t say anything else so Natasha looked back at the group of people touching themselves. She considered their eyes and noticed that they all seemed to be profoundly sad, the kind of sadness that she had felt when she told her mom she wanted to write poems, emotional and imagistic like Pablo Neruda. Since she was ten, Natasha had read herself to sleep. Her mom told Natasha that she was going to be a Doctor, and that poetry was for white kids who didn’t have to worry about their future.

“They just want to be understood,” said Natasha.

Another flash and Natasha suddenly found herself in the passenger seat of a sleek, black BMW i8, which was exciting because Natasha loved the sensation of accelerating quickly down a highway. She felt a flash of accomplishment for her answer.

Natasha turned to her left to talk to the driver, a handsome but older man whose face, locked in an angry scowl, made Natasha feel uneasy.

“Excuse me sir, who are you? Are you friends with William?” Natasha asked.

“Name’s Greg, Greg Daniels. Came to see

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Will, pay my respects for the man who I sucker millions out of every year, and found myself here. Thought I was back home taking a joy ride for a minute, but there’s these damn GoKarts. I can’t catch up to them no matter how hard I try, and then there’s more of the bastards in the back that pass me up,” said Greg, “Every time I think I’ve cut the bastards off, they pass me by on the other side and flip me off. I can’t fucking stop them. Look, there’s another one.

Quiet down, I’ve got the bastard this time!”

Natasha watched and saw that it was just like Greg said. A Go-Kart that she saw in the rear-view mirror changed lanes and started to speed up. Greg cut the Kart off, but to no avail.

The Go-Kart suddenly swung into the other lane and rushed by Greg. A little imp leaned out of the Go-Kart and flipped them the bird, then sped down the track.

Natasha watched as this happened three more times in a row. Every time Greg would doggedly try to stop the Go-Kart from passing, the Go-Kart would zoom by.

“Why don’t you just let one of the Karts pass by?” asked Natasha, “You should relax and enjoy the drive. Who cares about the imps?”

“We’re in a BMW, and you want to let them just drive by? They drive Go-Karts! I didn’t ask for your help anyways, so shut the fuck up you little bitch,” said Greg.

This pissed Natasha off, and as the next Kart began to change lanes Natasha climbed a bit onto the car’s console and slammed her foot on the brake. The car lurched to a stop, Greg threw Natasha back onto the passenger seat, and the Go-Kart passed by unchallenged. The little imp flipped them off and then jumped onto the top of his cart, turned around, and shook his ass at them as the Go-Kart continued to speed away.

“Goddammit, you let him go!” said Greg.

He pulled back a fist to strike Natasha when there was another flash of sudden light. Natasha was suddenly in a beautiful, grassy plain, an idyllic landscape full of flowing, silvery rivers and purple-barked trees full of fruit reaching towards a bright blue sky.

There was a house and it was huge, but when Natasha walked towards it she found that it had become small and cozy. She knocked on the door, and while she waited for someone to answer, she couldn’t help but wonder why she felt so peaceful and anxious at the same time.

“Heaven is hindsight,” said the frog.

Natasha screamed.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s hard to make a paradise. But if you think back to mistakes that other people made, suddenly you’ve got a perfect world.”

The frog disappeared when the front door opened and William walked out. He looked the same, maybe a bit less pathetic, except for his eyes; they were a bright, strained red, like he had popped a bunch of blood vessels at once.

“Natasha,” said William with a smile, “Have you come to bring me more spoons?”

“You’re supposed to be dead, what are you doing here?” asked Natasha.

“Come inside, it’s nice inside,” said William. He opened the front door a little wider and then started to walk inside. Natasha followed him.

Natasha walked inside and yelled out in relief when she saw her mother.

“Mom, you’re okay!” said Natasha.

“Of course I’m okay Natasha, it’s so nice inside here,” said Natasha’s mom. Natasha rushed to hug her mother but stopped herself; something was off. Natasha’s mom wasn’t communicating any of her self-righteousness, pseudo-intelligence, or general annoyance that things weren’t the way that she wanted them

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to be. Natasha knew something was wrong.

She looked at William and he smiled, which was odd, because William had never smiled at her before.

“What’s wrong dear Natasha? Is something bothering you?” asked William.

“Dear, there’s no need to worry,” said her mother, “why don’t you go into the living room and read some poetry. There are stacks and stacks of books in there, you could read all day if you wanted to.”

Natasha hadn’t noticed any books while looking around. But when she walked into the living room, there were stacks of books from Pablo Neruda and Jose Luis Borges and Emily Dickinson and even more poets she hadn’t read before but wanted to.

“Wow, that’s a lot of books,” said William, “can you read them all, Natasha?”

Natasha was ready to read every single page of every single book. But she couldn’t help but notice that William’s voice was lazy and disinterested, when before it had always been kind of depressive, concerned, and a little whiny. William’s eyes, which were not just red but glowing like a glow-stick, a bright, intense red that made all of William’s actions seem otherworldly.

The weirdest thing of all was that in the corner of the kitchen, there was a huge stack of unwashed dishes in a dirty, wet sink that contrasted so heavily with the otherwise picturesque home that she started to walk towards them.

“Natasha, don’t worry about the dishes, I’ll take care of them when I’m finished here,” said her mother. But when she turned around and looked at her mom Natasha realized that her mom wasn’t doing anything, and neither was William. They were both just flitting around the house aimlessly.

Natasha took another step towards the dishes.

“Natasha I told you, I’ll take care of the dishes, go read for a while,” said Natasha’s mom without moving. Natasha realized that nothing was going to get done if she didn’t do something, so she grabbed William. His piercing-red eyes dispassionately bored their way into her soul, but she managed to break away from his gaze and grab her mother with her other hand. She pulled the two of them towards the sink. She released the tap and started to wash the mass of plates covered in residue and filth.

Natasha’s mom and William both watched her wash the dishes, but neither moved to help her. Before Natasha’s mom could repeat that she was going to take care of it, Natasha forced a plate into her mother’s hand, and then into William’s.

They both screamed loudly. The screams beat upon Natasha’s ears and made her feel like scraping the skin from her arm.

As her mother and William screamed, the water started to boil and steam. Natasha could hardly think. She just knew that the three of them had to keep washing the dishes, so she forced a sponge into the hands of William and her mother. The two of them started to wash the stack of dishes while screaming. The cries hurt Natasha’s ears. Her mother sobbed as she picked up another plate, and Natasha felt her heart rip from her chest.

“Keep going!” said Natasha, “We’ve got to finish this!”

William’s eyes shone brighter and brighter until they were like two flashlights shooting from his head. Natasha had to use the lights from his eyes to see through the steam that was spreading all throughout the house. Natasha wouldn’t let him stop washing, no matter how

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loud he got, or how dangerously bright his eyes shone. When they finished the plates and cups and got to the pots and pans, William’s screams were louder and Natasha’s mother’s sobs worsened. Natasha kept forcing plates into their hands in between the ones that she washed herself, until they had washed the last dirty pan.

There was a bright light, a pop, and a crash. Suddenly, they were all in the middle of

a church, not only Natasha and her mother and William, but also everyone who had come to pay their respects for William’s death. Natasha took some time to breathe before looking over at William. He was dead. Natasha took William’s head and placed it in her lap. She broke down and cried. The dazed mourners all turned to look at Natasha crying over William’s dead body. None of them moved. ª

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CONTOURS MADDIE

TYKESON

(’17)

There’s a certain shame towed to the past. it drags its feet like an insolent toddler and wails a siren betraying the escaped prisoner, it clunks down the stairs behind you like a broken cymbal, a puppy belligerently nipping at your heels, snaking around your legs to trip you so it can burrow itself into the base of your spine and foster its gluttony in your mauve marrow.

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TO NOTE PA I G E

E VA N S

(’18)

The thought begins as liquid, A distance.

That sliver of the breath Which betrays the desire to die.

So I begin as temper, Or temperature— And moments fold Upon themselves In the sweet Familiar frisk Of percale, of chemical.

With a slow blink of sound I am strung to my words Like a marionette— And I can only run My tongue Along the blades Until They bleed.

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HIS DAUGHTER HAD A NAME ANDRÉ

ENRIQUEZ

(’17)

A shadow is more narrow a place to live than you’d think, Especially at night.

And while my native soil hugs me in my sleep, A box isn’t something you can share, Comfortably.

For to eat is to love, And to love is to eat, And though I don’t drink, Wine, The trans folk of Pennsylvania Will understand me when I say You’ll find that a man is in the word woman, And to consume Another Body and soul Is a beautiful thing, A miss understood Thing, A misjudged Transformation of a transformatively Under standing folk, who understand naturally Unchosen states As consuming one another As equals!

Not as an(other)!

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Well?! Am I, allowed to love?!

I know I’m a tall woman, but Perfume, I tell you, On a pillow, Can be far more romantic Than cologne in red dirt.

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SICK PA I G E

E VA N S

(’18)

Recall one thing . . .

How to scream.

In a hungry mist of light Brittle-eyed and drunk on shame My body consumes itself.

Screeching sly ignoble truth, silence.

Skin confused with bone and blood laughter, mercy beats my lungs to dust.

Sleep.

The ricochet of blame between callous walls.

I’m addicted to this casual tragedy— the comfort of slow death, breathless in my own sweat, soaking in sycamore shadows after noon drinking syringes empty of what will not save me, so I undress the nurse with my eyes.

Apologetic mornings.

Soft spoken wrists a blur of pulses and pressures and ‘can you feel this?’ No—

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‘wiggle your toes.’ I can’t— hear a word over this compulsive cracking of smiles, morphine— tell me about your god.

My sick blood operates the guillotine.

Slather me in heroine.

Take my place.

This room holds only echoes of please let me be twelve times as likely to die than to live until tomorrow.

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AUBADE TO A GOOSE N AT H A N

FA US T

(’19)

Hello, Goose.

You know who you are.

Snow doesn’t fall in Portland. It’s either 33 and raining or 31 and dry. Leaves are crisp underfoot as I cross Division, Hawthorne, Belmont, under the stone arch, down the winding path, to your summer home.

To other people, there are more beautiful birds. Sister Duck is followed by the little ones. Sister Swan is snow white and sings her song. Your neck is long, your voice isn’t that great, and you’re abrasive with your cries. They don’t see your soft, brown feathers. They don’t see your flecks of gold. They don’t see the nebulas in your dark eyes. They throw rocks. You fly away. Your wings cut the air as you tilt, bearing East, riding the West wind.

I stand hands in my pockets next to the pond.

Autumn is my entry hall and Winter is my ballroom. Jeans are my comfort, goose, so those suit pants were a cage. I wandered the floor, sliding between dancers as raindrops slide down the windowpane, avoiding swirling dresses and tripping feet, wine glass held improperly in my hand. I found the door, threw it open, found the trees, the lake, the night. I found you, Goose.

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The Laurelhurst park pond is cold, clear as yesterday, and my hair is heavy. Breath tumbles out of me like smoke off a train. My hands are mashed into any pocket I can find.

The land underfoot is made of the bones of dead giants, the kind who owned golden geese.

Camelot never existed, goose, no matter how hard we tried.

My crown is tin and my sword is rust. Toss it back into the lake.

I’ll love you until you return, bastard.

Until Spring,

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O U R S U M M E R W O U L D F LY GARDNER

STEVENET T

In early June of 1999 Josh Boych and I set out to invent a flying broomstick. I was almost eleven, Boych was ten and a half. We figured it wouldn’t be that tough—my science grades were pretty good, and Boych’s experience as an amateur illusionist would provide crucial conceptual insight. Our invention was to be a marriage of science and magic in the most literal sense, and proof that such opposite, seemingly incompatible disciplines could achieve the impossible when mashed together. We felt the pull of these opaque and misty corners of the universe just waiting to be made sense of.

We would use no magic spells. Boych, like all illusionists, despised superstition, and my failures with “Wingardium Leviosa” led me to agree with him. Also, our invention would only be a broom in spirit. The bristles, we both agreed, were necessary, though predominantly for show and functioning only as a mask or casing for the jet engine within. Boych said he had a Boy Scout magazine with an ad in the back for plans to make hovercrafts out of weedwackers. I suggested he bring it to the next meeting.

There’s a certain period of childhood where you can get intoxicated on the things you wonder. It happens at night lying in bed alone, just on the cusp of sleep. You feel and see yourself flying, in a prequel to a dream, where the lift is

( G R A D UAT E

STUDENT )

real and generated by the briefest slip in gravity’s hold on your twin-size bed. Then the feeling escapes and it drives you crazy—so you try to wrangle it into something that can withstand the strict sensibility of daytime. This is what inventing a flying broomstick is all about.

This was also the summer when nobody wore shoes. The neighborhood was fenceless and the different-shaded grasses of the yards came together in a verdant, sweet-reeking quilt.

Grass this soft, in weather this warm, was made to poke out from toespaces. So we were all barefoot: Boych; my brother, Jackson, and I; Josh Fenerman; and even the girls of the culde-sac, Ashley Bowski and Steph Davies. Our feet knew only grass, the silky-black fabric of backyard trampolines, and the new beige shag carpet of my mostly furnished basement where Boych and I made our headquarters.

We had all the tools of a productive creative team. We had markers, both Sharpie and Crayola Washable, a loaded stapler, and ample desk space. We also had some “Precise V5” Pilot pens and a ten-inch stack of legal pads my father had unknowingly donated. We were steadfast in our work, and as the heat of June seeped into July we had perfected a number of prototypical designs. You could have called them “Vintage Inspired.” This wasn’t much of a conscious decision, though every drawing did wind up

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looking like a broom handle sticking out of a mid-century toaster or the tail fin of an old Chevrolet.

Though the propulsion and levitation mechanisms still eluded us, the basic design had been agreed upon. We had abandoned wood as a medium—a difficult decision, made with weighed-down hearts. But we knew deep down that mixing jet engines with lumber (we’d abandoned hover technology out of a shortage of weedwacker donations) was surely professional— and likely actual—suicide.

“Let’s do steel,” I said.

“Too heavy,” Boych said.

“Stainless steel?”

“I think that’s even heavier.”

Boych said, “Why not aluminum?” and it was a funny joke, what with soda cans being as prone to crunching as they are. We walked over to Ashley Bowski’s ground-level trampoline, trying to think of other possible metals while she and Steph talked about leg shaving. Ashley was a year younger than Steph and had very tan legs with lots of dark thin hairs on them. Steph’s legs were less tan, but hairless and shiny-smooth with lotion and sun. Ashley said her mom wouldn’t let her shave her legs until she was twelve. Later, while Boych and I compiled a list of metals in my basement, we talked about how much Ashley’s mom sucked.

The problem with metal was that it made for heavier-than-we-expected broomsticks, meaning we needed even more powerful jet engines, which would then be pretty heavy themselves. Boych stretched out on my couch scanning a hardcover of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for something clue-like, while I doodled absently on a legal pad on the floor, deliberating all the many roadblocks set before those called to the mechanical frontiers of human flight.

Mid-July came with a deeper, to-the-bone

heat along with a serious setback: we were being evicted from our office in my basement. And it was all Josh Fenerman’s feet’s fault. Josh was the annoying younger brother of the whole neighborhood. He followed us bigger kids around all the time. He was prone to juvenile abstractions and quick to cry. Also, his feet had this left-out meat smell to them. With puberty still years out, the notion of bathing voluntarily was alien to us all, though we did what we could to instill that deep hygienic insecurity within the seven-year-old Fenerman kid. It was, of course, in vain. The boy would only start to cry.

The problem was Boych and I shared an office with my father. Whenever he had work to do in there, we were forced to continue ours, or just play Nintendo, in the next room. One evening, over dinner, my father broke down. “I can’t take the smell of that Fenerman kid’s feet,” he said. My brother and I laughed and laughed and Mom buried a grin with a paper napkin. “If he’s in the house,” Dad said. “No matter where, I can smell those feet.” Mom then acknowledged that Josh’s feet really did stink and everyone but Dad laughed some more. Toward the end of dinner, Dad banned Josh Fenerman’s feet from our house. He said that they brought unwelcome PTSD-like flashbacks of the pigs that lived on the farm he grew up on as a child, and that getting any work done at all was impossible.

“It’s either Josh’s feet or me putting food on this table,” he said.

At first, my brother and I kept the mandate secret. But within a few days we had run completely out of excuses for Josh about why he had to hang out by himself in the yard all day while the rest of us played Nintendo inside my cool basement. Soon, the sight of his lonely stinking feet hanging down into the basement’s window wells spawned within us enough guilt to abandon the basement till summer’s end. Boych and I, now office-less, found ourselves in the

72

yard with the brims of our ball caps pulled just over our eyebrows. Our horde of office supplies made a small mountain range in the grass.

Making our office in other floors of houses was out of the question. It is a fact that the only defense for a basement against millions of spiders is the installation of carpet and drywall—things that my basement, or half of it, was the only one in the neighborhood to have. The fleeting pleasures of air conditioning paled in comparison to those of the cool, almost damp climates of dwellings subterranean. So, we decided to move operations into the playhouse that my dad had built for my little sister in my backyard. It was mostly finished except for the lack of a staircase to the upper floor and the ceiling still had points of screws poking in every few inches. My sister and her friends were too small to climb up to the second floor—nor were they allowed to, on account of the pointy screws—and it would have been a shame to see such real estate go to waste.

Boych and I had actually done some work in the playhouse the summer before: We invented an illusion where you fit Josh Fenerman into a big plastic storage bin and throw it off the playhouse roof. When the bin crashes on the ground, exploding apart from the impact, Josh is nowhere to be found. The whole thing involved some mirrors and trap doors and had to be done at night, and was theoretically flawless though we never actually got to try it. But summertime in the playhouse was hotter than we remembered, a good ten degrees warmer than the rest of the yard. We also had the distractions of noise from cars driving by and from the barking neighborhood dogs.hen there was my sister and her friends pretending to burn muffins in the Fisher-Price kitchen set below us for six hours every day. Despite all this, we finally had a serious breakthrough. Toward the end of August I met Boych in front of the playhouse with a

laminated placemat and the smuggest grin of my young life.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

Once we climbed up to the second floor of the playhouse, I laid out the placemat in front of Boych on the carpet. It was a Periodic Table of the Elements. I touched my finger to the square with an “O” in it. “This is Oxygen,” I said. “Air. And it weighs 15.999.” Boych said nothing.

His eyes followed my finger as I slid it across the diagram to “Li.” I told him that this was Lithium, and that it weighs only 6.94 (less than half the weight of Oxygen!) and that it was, get this, a metal.

“It’s the lightest metal in the whole world,” I said.

We nodded our heads in conspiracy, our faces rearranged with garish, still-missing-teeth smiles.

This was a game changer. If Lithium was as light as the Periodic Table said (and why would it lie?), then we wouldn’t even need jet engine technology. Probably just a few of those spray bottles with foam-propeller fans that they give out at Fourth of July parades. Boych thought he had a few of them.

That night, we played night games, as usual.

After dinner and sunset, we left our houses and came together on Ashley’s trampoline under a scooped-out moon. Sometimes we played “Ghosts in the Graveyard,” sometimes “Freeze Tag,” but us older boys liked to just talk and move around the trampoline. We practiced our ideas of flirting on Ashley and Steph, trying to grasp whatever it is girls are all about. We studied the gaps between their giggles like scripture and all the wonderful things that moonlight and shadows did to their skin.

Throughout the night, Boych and I dropped little hints about the greatness of our secret invention, though we refused to say more.

On the last Saturday of the summer, Boych

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and I tried to get his mom to take us to Ace Hardware to find out the going rate for a few pipes of Lithium. I imagined them in the back room where they repair the lawn mowers, kept all together in a fishnet kind-of-thing, bobbing against the ceiling like balloons. But Boych’s mom was busy. She was hunkered down in the living room between waist-high mounds of laundry watching a reality courtroom show.

Anytime you entered the Boych household, it would be this way, with his mom half-buried in the family’s colors and whites and too busy to take you anywhere.

So we went to my house to ask my mom for a ride, only to see her speeding away to an emergency hair salon appointment for my sister and her friends. We found my Dad in the bathroom with a dustpan and a small brush sweeping up snips of my sisters’ and her two friends’ hair—red, blonde, and brown—in widely varying lengths. This was also the summer of having the Lindsay Lohan Parent Trap movie on relentless repeat in my living room. My little sister and her friends, known in the neighborhood as the “Neapolitans” for their hair colors, had not only memorized the movie’s dialogue, but had reenacted nearly every scene, and this particular morning, while on my father’s lackadaisical watch, they had done the scene where the one Lohan cuts the other’s hair off. The Neapolitans filched a pair of scissors, shut themselves away in a bathroom at the far end of the house, and gave each other trims just north of the scalp. Mom was angry and without words when she came back from the salon. The Neapolitans, in matching crew cuts, gleefully reassumed their pretend baking accidents, though their eyes were stained red from half a day’s worth of tears.

So Boych and I didn’t make it to the hardware store. Still, at church the next morning, our families sitting a few pews apart,

Boych and I exchanged knowing glances, mouthing the words, “Lithium” and “Booyah” all throughout the long meeting.

That evening, after dinner, we were all outside and Boych and I talked about Lithium.

There is a special ritual in that neighborhood where, on the Sunday evening before school starts, all the people come out of their houses and talk to each other. The parents walk around the cul-de-sac and the kids fly up and down the streets in packs on bikes and Razor scooters.

Everyone tends to talk just a little quieter than usual, especially about the sunset, which is more than beautiful. To the parents it seems to be frozen in time. For kids, it’s in freefall. Then, when the sun is all gone and the clouds’ orange and pink eruption falls away, you go back to your house. You go to bed earlier than you have in months.

That year, Boych and I wound up in different classes. And it was unfortunate. Of course we got together during recess, but the self-imposed responsibility of inventing our broomstick had been supplanted by that of our class assignments. Come recess, we just wanted to take a load off, to play. Soon, I made friends with a kid named Alex Weaver and bought a used skateboard from his older brother. Around then, the rigged set of cards and fake plastic thumb Boych was always carrying around got to being a lot less cool.

It wasn’t long before the real difference between Boych and I became clear. It all had to do with they way we managed our passions.

Boych had only the two: magic and invention.

He sustained them with a kind of loyalty anyone could, or ought to, envy. My own passions were many, with my dedication harboring a kind of lunar quality: my investment in one thing or the other swelling over the weeks into an overwhelming brilliance, only to fade ever so gradually and predictably into the next

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marvelous thing. After the broomstick came skateboarding, then I started a newspaper, which then became a comic book. Then came golf, then football, and then a quirky devotion to the punk movement, and then some more skateboarding. Other things came and went too.

Within a few years, I had shoulder-length hair and had nearly mastered the kickflip. I wore tight pants designed for girls, listened to alternative rock, and, out of some dark embarrassment, avoided Boych, still with his plastic thumb in the halls between classes.

And then even more years passed. I graduated high school and started and dropped out of college. I moved to Southern California for a few years, and then I came back home again. Eventually, I moved to Cedar City, Utah and enrolled at Southern Utah University to give college another go.

One evening a couple weeks ago, I was driving back to my apartment after buying some

school supplies for the coming semester. The sun was deep in the west and its rays were slapping directly against the red rock mountain on the east side of town and making it glow. Nearing my apartment, I changed radio stations and the first few bars of a Nirvana song plunged into the car. I hadn’t heard the song in years. The mellow, yet steeped-in-angst verse shook itself into the chorus’ riot, and all the intensity of past emotions from my youth, only echoes now, rose up from the crappy speakers.

I pulled into the parking lot of my apartment complex just as the DJ faded the song out. He told the listeners that the song was called “Lithium,” and for some reason the word dropped through me. Something electric and speed-of-light shot deep into my mind, and the memory of that summer, of Boych and our crazy idea, broke over me.

It came like a flood. •

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( A RT H U R’S )

S E AT

AT

821.8

FEET

•

TA L I A

BAUGNON

(’17)

LOS

ANGELES

miscellany