Los Angeles Miscellany Volume 68, 2020

LOS

ANGELES

miscellany VOLUME 2020

68

Copyright © 2020 Loyola Marymount University.

EDITORS-IN- CHIEF

Charlie Martin & Amanda Koenigsberg EDITORS

Megan Loreto Sam Yaziji Kellie Toyama Sofia Meisburger ADVISING

PROFESSOR

Chuck Rosenthal COVER

ART

Sofia Meisburger DESIGN

&

TYPESET TING

Ash Goodwin PRINTER

DSJ Printing, Inc.

CONTENTS

writing MORNING SHIFT................................................................................................

Comer Wadzeck, Class of 2022

10

N O CT I LU C E N T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charlie Martin, Class of 2021

12

F R AG M E N TS O F A LTA.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Joyce Fehlau, Class of Dec. 2019 S K E LTO N G A R D E N .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alex Paradzick, Class of 2022 CO L L AT E R A L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Megan Loreto, Class of 2021 FO R G I V E N ESS I S T H E SC E N T A V I O L E T S H E DS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sofia Meisburger, Class of 2020

YO U T H ’S O BJ ECTS ( I -V ) .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sam Yaziji

17

18

26

I P L A N T E D YO U . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Amanda Koenigsberg, Graduate Student, Class of 2020 P H A N TO M PA I N O F PA I N I TS E L F . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sofia Meisburger, Class of 2020

11

27

28 30

U N T I T L E D ( “ I N A C A F E L AS T S U M M E R” ).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hudson Luthringshausen, Graduate Student, Class of 2021 C R OSS I N G L A F R O N T E R A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Maria Del Carmen Gonzalez, Graduate Student, Class of 2020

32 34

T H E A R C H I T ECT U R E O F M O R A L S U F F E R I N G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sofia Meisburger, Class of 2020 I TA L I S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hayley Dennings, Class of 2022

36 39

O D E TO T H E D R I E D O U T R I V E R S T Y X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charlie Martin, Class of 2021 TELEGRAPH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Megan Loreto, Class of 2021

47 48

R I CO C H ET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Amanda Koenigsberg, Graduate Student, Class of 2020 FO O L’S G O L D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sienna Caputo, Class of 2023

45

50

SAT U R DAY .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Danyela Gotcher I N ST RU CT I O N S O N H OW TO C L E A N S E T H E C I T Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kyle Kalmanson, Graduate Student WA R N I N G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kapri Washington, Class of 2020 ANYTHING.......................................................................................................

Alex Paradzick, Class of 2022

58 60 62 75

B E YO N D T H E R I V E R L E E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sara Pool, Class of 2021 M AG N O L I A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Isabel Brown, Class of 2020 C LOA K E D I N B LU E F E AT H E R S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Joyce Fehlau, Class of (December) 2019 M I SS E D YO U .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kellie Toyama, Class of 2022

51

77

79 83

art T H E S P OT O F M A N Y F I R S T K I SS ES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Christine Petersen, Class of 2020 W I ST E R I A.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Rena McInerney-Olk, Class of 2020 WA L L O F B LO O M S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Amanda Koenigsberg, Graduate Student, Class of 2020 STAT U E W I T H S E A S H E L L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Megan Loreto, Class of 2021 W I N D OW TO I TA LY .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Christine Petersen, Class of 2020 T Y P E FAC E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Megan Loreto, Class of 2021 F LO R A L RU I N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Amanda Koenigsberg, Graduate Student, Class of 2020 F I RST S N OW .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charlie Martin, Class of 2021 C U R R E N TS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charlie Martin, Class of 2021 UNTITLED........................................................................................................

Sofia Meisburger, Class of 2020 W E A R E U N D E R T H E SA M E S K Y.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Amanda Koenigsberg, Graduate Student, Class of 2020

9

15 16 25

33 46 49 53 59 68 78

THE

SPOT

OF

MANY

FIRST

KISSES

•

CHRISTINE

PETERSEN, CLASS

OF

2020

MORNING SHIFT COMER

WA D Z E C K , C L A S S

OF

2022

I must have been asleep when I was born.

My eyes closed, indolent pearls The trees leer like jealous blue-green gamblers Today, L.A. is a bowl of cold milk In fine China – birdsong falls like discarded cloth.

I must have been asleep when I was born.

Last week I dreamed that I was a barn owl.

A rusty river was lace looped round your neck.

The trees leered like jealous blue-green gamblers.

You lay on my left side and your hair sticks Like gold-leafed Velcro to my chin.

I must have been asleep when I was born.

Sometimes, I become shrunken. Like fumbling With a small black button, or a set of keys And trees leer like jealous blue-green gamblers.

Already my children are laughing as I tell them about the snow on Kilimanjaro.

I must have been asleep when I was born among Trees that leer like jealous blue-green gamblers.

10

NOCTILUCENT CHARLIE

MARTIN, CLASS

OF

2021

In the cold April wind, your head should not be this warm. You pack mittens in pockets made for biscuits and scarves, and when I ask you about your fingers, you pick a penny off the dirt, tails up. Were your fingernails always this black?

You put another pair of gloves on my hands and sit until I no longer ask how passion-fruit tastes that tart. Sometimes blood looks brown if it is left out long enough, I learned, as if that was an answer. You cut more bark, blade turned in, penny in your palm. A crow laughs on his branch. You say you will keep putting mittens on me until my hands are as big as yours, or as cold. Dead leaves crunch like the almonds on your breath, or bones in a hand much stronger than yours. I almost forget about the bruise around your eye, the warm liquid plum and cherry that spreads so soft across your skin. I wonder how it stains me when you kiss my nose. Sticks break under calloused heels and when the horned toad croaks, you jump. We look up to find trees skipping the nightingale’s nursery tale, and needled navels dangle noctilucent nights, hidden by marshes and strings of spiderwebs. Your pupils have legs. It is almost as though you are looking at me.

How do blood vessels break? The marsh covers your fingers–– the penny, the passion-fruit, the plum––and takes you back from where you came.

11

F R A G M E N T S O F A LT A J OYC E

FEHLAU, CLASS

OF

(DECEMBER)

2019

Lately, mentions of skiing, of Salt Lake’s unseasonal warmth and clammy snow leaves me dry m o u t h e d.

To go to those Wasatch canyons whose namesake cottonwoods stretch, and memories of skis strapped together with a neon orange bungee and pudgy limbs in vibrant one-piece suits that later grew ashamed and then watched my mother’s hair grow back; but she still wore an oxygen tank, the way one carries water in a camelback when hiking, only the tubes cupped her ears and nose and hissed when she breathed.

And after, when with nipped noses and toes we skied to my grandpa’s house on the hill and drank hot cocoa; later I sat on my grandpa’s lap as he steered and closed my eyes because I was scared that the thunderous and jerky snowCAT would fall off the dark hillside.

To pack and go to up that big cottonwood canyon, where I traced twin lines around white firs and where I persisted to grow up; where I did not return

12

except by frustration except by recklessness except by refuge except … where scissors cut into names we claim (grandmother; joyce) and birth dates and our relationships to our parents while the gingerbread house turned stale.

Scissors that now cut into baptized names and categories of: Jesuit, theology, church, religion misunderstood for something like belief, something like mass; but I am trying to remember the wildflowers violet fireweed and indigo lupine blooming beside the familiar Indian paintbrush and full umbrellas of golden yarrow that burst in springtime behind that Alta house.

Except, I was baptized long before these subtle violations in the olive and clay red waters of the Colorado and in that white winter crest of snow in the Wasatch.

Participating in the linage of Alta I learned to ski like my parents did before me, and I was doused again and again and again in that snow, and I do not forget these sacraments.

—

13

Last I was in Alta the aspens, whose yellowed leaves lay in fading flecks of ochre bellow, stood like modeled pillars for whose shocking stone facades give poise to the cathedral canyon.

Though bare now, I know the aspens will offer certain greens and bold yellows again.

It is the snow that I worry for: will it be here when I wish to teach my child to ski to breath and to learn the names of the wildflowers?

14

WISTERIA

•

RENA

MCINERNEY- OLK, CLASS

OF

2020

WA L L

OF

BLOOMS

•

AMANDA

KO E N I G S B E RG , G R A D UAT E

S T U D E N T, C L A S S

OF

2020

SKELETON GARDEN ALEX

PA R A D Z I C K , C L A S S

OF

2022

Lay out on the forest floor until only flowers remain, With trees as solitary company.

Bougainvillea warps the spine, cracking vertebrae like wishbones.

Daisies push up nail beds, every prayer a wedding.

With trees as solitary company, Bluebells burst in corneas and bees dive into pupils.

Daisies push up nail beds, every prayer a wedding as Lavender overpowers lungs until scorpions fear breathing.

Bluebells burst in corneas and bees dive into pupils.

Nightshade hides in alleys of the mind forever rotting.

Lavender overpowers lungs until scorpions fear breathing while Briars wind like barbed wire until the heart is all but meat.

Nightshade hides in the alleys of the mind forever rotting.

Forget-Me-Nots pepper the tongue, slurring their own name.

The heart is shredded meat, briars winding like barred wire with Sunflowers bursting from the stomach in a bid for light.

Their name slurred; Forget-Me-Nots pepper the tongue.

Ivy follows the curve of arteries, chlorophyll beats iron.

Sunflowers burst from the stomach in a bid for light.

Marigolds stick to the throat, petals decked in gems of red.

Ivy follows the curve of arteries, chlorophyll beats iron, and Bougainvillea still warps the spine, cracking vertebrae like wishbones.

Petals dotted in gems of red, Marigolds stick to the throat.

Please, let me lie here until only the flowers remain.

17

C O L L AT E R A L MEGAN

LORETO, CLASS

Contrary to popular belief, Death does not attend funerals. This explains why—ten years later—I failed to recognize her when she knocked on the door to my apartment one morning in August.

I still lived in San Francisco back then.

The tech giants were slowly reaching forward and wrapping their fingers around the neck of the city, but the vitality of the place remained.

The rent the artists paid was low enough for them to eat and I was among them. I typed up arts and cultural stories each week, worked at a secondhand bookstore, and on weekends I made my way up the hills of the city and tried to think up stories of my own.

I was only several miles away from the place where I grew up and I visited my mother sometimes. My grandparents still lived in a house that was a bit too big for their possessions and a bit too small for their oppositional forces.

I called as often as I felt myself missing them and they were always delighted to hear from me, even if it meant spending time in the same room together.

I was navigating my twenties in a mild and decent way. Perhaps biding my time for literary greatness or whiling it away before I met a man and fell in love and bought a brownstone in some city to fill with two point five children.

Unhappiness, I assumed, would find me before too long but until then I could enjoy my years of freedom against the backdrop of a crowded city.

OF

2021

That day I opened the front door with a cup of coffee in hand, expecting a neighbor with the package that had been dropped into his box two days ago. Instead my eyes were met by the eyes of a woman about my height, so beautiful and pristinely dressed that she looked like an actress with my building’s moth-eaten carpet stairs as her backdrop.

“Good morning,” she said. “May I come in?”

And that’s when all of the colors I had painted over my life began to peel away.

I showed her to the living room sofa and offered her a coffee.

“Please. Two sugars and extra cream, if you don’t mind. Thank you.”

“Are you a lawyer?” I asked as I handed her the mug.

She laughed, but it sounded hollow.

“Something like that.”

She looked familiar. I struggled to place her firmly in my memory.

“Don’t you remember me?” she asked, smiling as she looked at me.

“Should I?” “Well, it depends on who you ask. Your therapist would probably be relieved if you don’t.”

My brow furrowed.

“How do you know I have a therapist?”

She laughed again.

“Sweetheart, I know a lot of things. Don’t be afraid.”

18

“I’m not afraid.” I tried to say, but it came out of my mouth like a question.

“Let’s talk about business. This whole ordeal will make a lot more sense if you let me talk now and hold your questions until the end.”

“Okay.”

“This conversation is going to… well, it sounds like a cliche, but it will change your life. I just want you to know that before we get started.

There’s a lot to it and a limited amount of time to explain. I am a busy woman.”

I opened my mouth to interject and she shot me a warning look.

“That being said, I want you to know that helping you is my main purpose in being here. It is not only important for you to listen to me, but an important part of my job to try to understand and help you to the best of my ability. These cases come around every now and then. They are not rare, exactly, but they are—shall we say—special.”

This opening spiel done, the woman looked slightly more at ease. She sipped her coffee before reaching for her black briefcase. She pulled out a bundle of papers and an envelope with a red wax seal. I tried to see what else was in her bag but she snapped it shut before I could glimpse anything else and set the papers on the coffee table between us.

“I want you to know that these papers can sometimes be a bit upsetting to read. Shocking and upsetting, some might say. I have gone through yours in order to prepare you for the worst, but in your case you will probably feel more sadness than any other emotion. It will be difficult, but not traumatic. The best I could hope for, really.”

She glanced up towards the ceiling with these last words, as though they were meant for someone else entirely. I could not help but look up too. I saw only the clean, white ceiling that had always been there.

“Go on,” she said, pushing the papers

towards me. “The letter first.”

I went to my room to retrieve a brass letter opener that my grandfather had given me years ago. I rarely had occasion to use it. A wax seal seemed to me an antiquity. When I returned to the living room the woman was standing in front of the round mirror that rested atop the mantle. Her head was cocked to one side and she was staring at her reflection.

I cleared my throat. The eyes of her reflection met mine. She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

I opened the letter and read.

“Is this a joke?”

She shook her head and studied me.

“You’re calmer than most.” I could make no meaning of the look she was giving me because I couldn’t swallow. I was struggling to remember the rise and fall of my lungs that should have been a subconscious urge. Was it really today?

Had so much time passed?

“Am I?” I heard my voice echoing outside of me.

“It’s not a joke.”

“I just need you to know that I don’t believe in God.” The woman laughed. “I’m not God.” I signed my part of the agreement. What else could I do? Sometimes, when things are very quiet in my life and dusk begins to flicker at the edges of the afternoon, I wonder if there were other choices for me. Something tells me there might have been, but I never asked.

She disappeared for a while after that visit to my apartment. She told me I had another year to myself before things would begin.

“Strange,” she said. “Me, talking about beginnings.”

And then she went away.

19

The human brain is a magnificent thing, really. When she closed the door, I shut my eyes, and begged myself to forget what I could, and when I opened my eyes I managed to convince myself that most of whatever had just happened was a dream. I made bargains with myself, as all people do, to ensure the sanctity of my sanity.

In doing so, I mostly wasted away that last year of complete freedom that I had been given. I wrote very little and dreamed even less. I ate and slept and walked and loved very few people and told even fewer. I was young and terrified of the truths my mind was capable of producing if I acknowledged how much I now knew.

Still, distraction and complacency are not as easy to maintain as we believe them to be and by July, I was exhausted and lonely. At the grocery store I began choosing the same middleaged cashier in order to try to win her friendship and spent most of my time in coffee shops so I never had to be alone in my apartment. When August came, I began to return home during the early morning. Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays I slid my key into the lock at 2 am.

When I saw her sitting at the Embarcadero train stop, I felt nothing but sharp relief. I approached her without hesitation.

“So,” I said, “ Is it time?”

She looked up at me and seemed, for an instant, disoriented. I knew immediately that I had made a mistake.

“No,” she said, finally. “Not yet.”

The train came then, and I knew better than to follow her. I waited for the next to arrive and later that day I heard on the television about the man who had jumped from the platform. I threw up that night, emailed my boss telling her I would not be in the next day, and went to sleep.

When I woke again, my clock read 3:46 and I scrambled out of bed with a start, pulling the curtains and steeling myself against daylight that

would not penetrate the darkness for hours. It was still early morning.

I sat at the foot of my bed and cried hysterically before racing through my apartment to turn on every light. Digging through my closet, I poured out the contents of brown boxes and old grocery bags onto the hardwood floor of my bedroom. Manuscripts, unsent postcards, receipts, and overstuffed notebooks covered the floor. I sifted through the mess on my hands and knees with a manic force that had been building up in my chest for months. When I finally found what I was looking for it was daytime.

When there was a knock on my door that evening, I had already placed two mugs on the counter in my kitchen. I let her in and made coffee with two sugars and extra cream. She was wearing a pristine grey pant-suit, but she was without her briefcase.

“Listen,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the couch across from her and setting my mug on top of the coffee table. “I think I understand.”

She didn’t respond.

“But I still have questions.”

“How have you been?” She asked. And I was surprised to find her expression blank.

“Me? I’ve been fine.” I said, automatically.

She nodded, knowingly. “Yes, that’s true.”

“Things feel different,” I confided, without knowing why I was continuing to speak.

“They should. Look, let me be honest with you, this isn’t easy but it shouldn’t feel like a punishment either. Taking on the years another person was meant to fulfill—it can mean a lot of things—and it will change you. That’s one of the things I’m supposed to help you navigate.”

“Hasn’t too much time passed? It’s been eleven years since he died.”

“Time?” She looked at me with bemusement.

“It’s such a human obsession. But, no. Eleven years is not as long as it feels to you.”

“It’s half the span of my life so far.”

20

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes.” “Let me tell you something before we go any further because it’s something you are going to need to understand: time does not define the span of your life. Time may be the language humans use to express the measurement of people’s physical experience on earth, but it says nothing about the span, influence, and stretch of their lives. Some people are transcendent—time is completely irrelevant to the scope of influence their lives wield. Their webs tangle with so many people that their essence can stretch on towards an infinity that even I struggle to conceptualize.

Some people’s webs are infinitesimal, even if they are given a hundred years on earth. This doesn’t mean that those people who touch very few others aren’t important, but it does mean that time is a fraught and stilted lens through which to view the span of individual life.”

“Basically, you’re telling me that the way humans measure their lives is inadequate?”

“Yes.” She looked at me the way someone looks at a petulant child about to throw a tantrum.

I shrugged. “We know that, though.”

“What?”

I could have laughed at her expression.

“Humans know that time is an inadequate unit of measurement for their lives. Have you looked at any art recently? We say it everywhere. All the time. It’s a question we’ve always asked.”

The mania brought on by my hours of sleep and crazed search on top of the innate absurdity of the situation had imbued me with adrenaline and unmerited confidence.

“And a question your people have never managed to answer.”

“I’m guessing that means you know the answer?”

“In some ways it is the only question you have ever needed to ask. It answers the why, the how, the when, the where of all human existence.”

“And who?”

The ghost of a smile played across her lips.

“And who? I thought you were an atheist.”

“I am. And a skeptic.”

“You’re strange for a twenty two year old.”

“I thought the measurement of time didn’t matter.”

“In the same way the concept of gravity doesn’t matter: it’s true enough for conversation’s sake.”

“We must look so small to you.”

“Not at all.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Sometimes.”

“I found this today.” I smoothed out a crumpled piece of paper onto the table. She leaned forward in her seat to peer at what I had produced. She drew back upon seeing it and studied me.

“Where did you get that?” She asked.

“My closet.”

“How long have you had it?”

“Eleven years.”

“Did he give it to you?”

I shook my head no. “You did.” *** Tap, tap, tap.

I let my fingers drum against the plastic hospital chair. My mother told me I couldn’t see my father that day. I waited outside of his room on my own. This was unusual. Normally someone sat with me and tried to talk to me while I stared straight ahead at the white walls and pretended not to hear a thing. There was an amateur painting of a vase of flowers outside of his new room that appealed to my eleven year old sensibilities. I would stare at it, focusing and unfocusing my eyes until I found myself in another world entirely. There I could walk through fields and brush my hands along the heads of roses and poppies and violets.

But that day I found it difficult to let my

21

mind float away. When someone was speaking to me the hospital noises could be drowned out.

The low beeping of medical technology, the sounds of gurneys being wheeled past, the squeak of a nurse’s shoes were muffled by explanations of heaven and hell, good people like my father and bad people like my mother.

I was used to my father’s family speaking badly of my mother by then. When she left the room they would whisper in my ear that it was her fault he was dying. They would tell me that she had told him not to go to the doctor and convinced him that he was okay when he wasn’t.

I didn’t believe them.

By that point the cancer had reached my father’s brain and he remembered only two names: mine and my mother’s. His brothers and sisters, I knew, were sad because of that and it had turned them against my mother. They used to praise her for her selflessness, now they fell silent when she walked by.

As I sat and waited and wondered where everyone was, I heard the click of heels against the tile floor. Not a nurse or a doctor: a tall, slim woman in a black dress was walking down the hall. She peered into each room, as though looking for someone, and soon enough, without taking any notice of me, she was peering into my father’s room too. I watched as she pushed the door open and entered.

Moments later she reappeared through the door. And that’s when her eyes met mine for the first time. She held my gaze for only an instant before approaching me and knelt next to me. She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a paper.

“Here,” she said, “He wanted you to have this. A last request. Don’t tell anyone.” She placed a manicured finger perpendicular to her lips and slipped a piece of paper into my left hand. Her hand was ice cold against my skin but I did not move away. I grasped the paper and I didn’t see

the woman again until she came to my apartment ten years later. *** “You were very young,” she said. “You’ve kept it all these years?”

“I remembered this morning.”

“That’s good.” She seemed disinterested in me and took to stirring her coffee with a deep concentration.

“How did he know?”

She put down her coffee, stood up, and walked over to my bookshelf. She ran a hand along the outward facing spines. I watched dust settle onto the floor.

“Him and I spoke a few times. People tend to see things more clearly when they get close to me.”

“Do you remember him?”

“It’s my job to remember.”

“But how did he know that I would have to do this?”

She shrugged dismissively and pulled a book from the shelf.

“Time. It’s not linear.”

“But it was for him. He died before he did these things. They were just ideas in his head.”

“And how do you think those ideas got there?” She replaced the book and pulled out another.

“I don’t believe in fate or predestination.” I meant to say, in a way that was cool and matterof-fact, but once again my voice nearly shattered halfway through my sentence.

She laughed suddenly, and turned to look at me. “Haven’t you ever been in love?” Her eyes were colorless, I realized. Why wasn’t I afraid of her?

“What does that have to do with it?” I asked, confused.

“It’s okay. You’re young. You’ll find someone eventually.” She was goading me.

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with it.

That question is a non sequitur. You’re implying that love proves fate’s existence.”

22

She replaced A Moveable Feast and made her way towards the coffee table magazines. “You ought to be more amenable when it comes to these things.” She picked up the July issue of Vogue. “Although, you are right. Love mostly has nothing to do with fate. And fate itself is fallacy.”

“What is it then? What determines these things and how would my father understand the lives he had failed to reach—that he was supposed to reach— just before dying? He couldn’t even remember my name when he died.

The cancer...” It ate him away.

“We don’t call it fate.”

“Purpose then?” I was leaning forward in my seat, straining to understand. I pushed back a question that danced at the edge of my consciousness: how dangerous it would be to hear the truth from this woman?

She studied me, carefully.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but I don’t think she meant it. “I can’t tell you everything you want to know.”

“Tell me something, then.”

She looked down into her coffee cup.

“More coffee?” I asked.

She nodded. “I did tell you it would be difficult. At the beginning of all of this,” she called after me as I went into the kitchen.

“I know, but I haven’t thought about any of this in years. It all seems so distant to me. Being given extra years to touch the lives of the people my father never had an opportunity to touch while still living out my own life—it’s confusing.

It doesn’t make any logical sense.”

“Let me ask you this: do you live your life in a linear way? Do you do one thing because you did the thing that came logically before it? Do you put your shoe on and then tie it?”

“Yes. I mean, mostly. Normally.”

“Mostly, right, but have you ever put on your shoes without tying them and realized midway through that your coffee is ready? So you go over

to drink it before it gets cold and then you check your phone. And before you know it, you end up answering a text message from a friend that requires you to look something up on your computer and just before you send the message, you realize that you never did finish tying your shoes?”

“I... guess.”

“That’s how it works,” she said. She looked satisfied with this explanation and clearly expected me to be as well. She clapped her hands together and stood. “Are you hungry?”

“I’m sorry, but that meant absolutely nothing to me. I still have no idea what I’m doing. You’ve given me a letter that basically says I am going to live another ten years with almost no explanation as to why or how.”

She took a deep breath, looked up again at the ceiling, and back down onto me.

“After this: lunch,” she said, before sitting.

“Yes, you’re getting extra years but they will be a natural extension to the life you have always lived.”

“What—” “If we’re going to get through this quickly, I need you to stop interrupting me.”

“You’re speaking at a ridiculously high level and saying the most ridiculous shit.” I felt my hysteria approaching again. “The life you have always lived?

As though my life has already ended?”

“You have one chance.” She said and there was more than just warning in her words. I didn’t know she was being patient with me before but now I understood.

It was my turn to look at the ceiling.

“Go.” I said through gritted teeth, and her eyes flashed at my order.

“Say please,” she said and leaned back in her chair.

Us tiny mortals, I thought, how she must wonder how we manage to cling to the threads she extends to us.

“Please.”

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“I said to the life you have always lived because that’s how we think of things. You can think about lifetimes however you want to but you’re going to be wrong. The analogy of the shoe tying was to explain that life isn’t logical. It doesn’t follow a straightforward, step-by-step, or scientific pattern. Things happen out of sequence.

It’s why everyone has so much trouble making sense of life. There are too many forces pulling you in too many directions all the time. No one is able to identify the true source of the pulling.

The thing is, this life extension will work in the same way. You might be scared that because you have to carry on your father’s legacy, your own legacy might become collateral damage to his premature end. That fear’s not legitimate because the forces you feel pulling at you, the ones that pulled your father, are a part of you. Like how you might conceive of DNA. It’s something fundamental in the individual.”

“Like DNA?” “Yes. Do you understand?” Her tone was derisive and for the first time I saw her for what she really was: a goddess that had wielded the scathe across fields of wheat for centuries. She was not a woman who went to the salon to get her nails done every other Tuesday, but a being who had walked through the wake of famines

and wars collecting bones. She knew the reason we lived our little lives. She understood our steps before we took them.

She stood. “Well then, I’m going to get lunch.”

I stood too, certain that she would invite me wherever she was going, but she picked up her briefcase and gave me a look of curiosity.

“Are you going somewhere?” Her voice was polite now. I couldn’t remember why my hands were shaking.

I blinked. “Am I?” “I don’t think so,” she said, kindly. “It was a pleasure doing business with you.”

“You too.” I said, automatically.

“Mind if I leave my mug here or should I put it in the sink?”

“Of course not! Just leave it on the table.”

“Thanks. Goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye.”

Just before the door closed behind her, I jumped up and ran to the landing. She was halfway down the first flight of stairs.

“Wait!” I called and she turned. “Will I see you again?”

“Of course.” She replied.

And, although I know she wasn’t lying, it has been many years since I have seen her face. •

24

STAT U E

WITH

A

SEA

SHELL

•

MEGAN

LORETO, CLASS

OF

2021

FORGIVENESS IS THE SCENT A VIOLET SHEDS SOFIA

MEISBURGER, CLASS

OF

2020

Explain to me why the most used word in my vocabulary is ‘sorry’ and why I can’t stop apologizing for having the audacity to exist when the boy next to me is taking up half of my legroom with his wide open stance and he just oozes confidence and I must exude subservience because he doesn’t even spare me a glance as I adjust in my seat and wonder why I was taught to shrink in on myself like a dying flower both beautiful and tragic but he was taught to grow outward and expand like an unforgiving oak tree cruel and machismo like it’s in his very nature coded into chlorophyll like chloroform like rohypnol on the roof of that new year’s party I was sixteen I was only sixteen both beautiful and tragic but he was relentless and I was happy to be wanted and isn’t that just how it always is except when it comes from the boys who are supposed to love you who are supposed to let you grow but I was only sixteen I was only eighteen and I am only twenty-one and still I long to bury my fingers into his soil to taste the feeling of the color blue to smell immortality otherwise known as axe fucking body spray and I forgive myself for hating myself but I will never forgive him or him or her or him because I am more than a violet’s scent on the boot that has crushed it I am more than forgiveness I am a woman and nothing less and I live

26

I P L A N T E D YO U AMANDA

KO E N I G S B E RG , G R A D UAT E

S T U D E N T, C L A S S

OF

2020

I

planted you in the sand, a granule, an oceanic seed. We found a coin outside your house four

years ago when I walked you to your door after work. You saw something in the

driveway, small and old with worn edges, dented and distorted by time. It’s from Barbados, I told you. My best friend had similar coins on her kitchen counter

when we were little. You handed it to me along with instructions: tell it

everything you hate about the world and bury it somewhere. I nodded but kept it

in a copy of The Paris Review until this past winter when it fell to the floor.

I made that three hour drive to the coast and sat by the water cradling the gold wafer in my palm, the weight of a newborn sparrow and tarnished hue of weary pipes. I told it how your blonde waves would spill across your face when you leaned over your desk reading stacks of screenwriting memoirs. I told it how you used to rest the tips of your fingers on the back of my hand, nonchalantly, a fallen leaf on a front lawn, a car idling in the red zone. I told it that I couldn’t accurately describe the blue of your eyes, but I could paint the greying bruise on your right cheek with the hue of cornflower and moldy blueberries. I told it how I wished I went after that old car of yours, how I watched your headlights shrink into themselves and tuck into that left turn you made. I bargained with the coin to trade the foggy cache of your laughter and lingering hugs to hear your voice.

I watched as preludes of nomadic foam carried you under. Your skin, a coin, salted brine— a trifold curtain of aching light.

27

P H A N T O M PA I N O F PA I N I T S E L F SOFIA

MEISBURGER, CLASS

OF

2020

I want to be nourished like a cow before slaughter, fat and clean and new, like a four-month old baby.

I wonder why my orbit is in the shape of my mother’s arms before remembering that doomed stars collapse like destroyed women.

You fold those hands like wet rabbit feet into neat paper origami on your lap. A pause.

Then we kiss until we can’t tell whose shame is worse.

My first memory is a waterslide in Saigon, then the fisherman’s stilted house in Phnom Penh, the handkerchief embroidered with tropical fish, and an orange soda box crushed underfoot in Kathmandu.

Don’t you ever get tired of psychoanalyzing?

You sorry excuse, you happy mistake, you invertebrate. You can lead me to the river, but you can’t make me swim.

My mother smells like lavender and a distant fog: incomparable sacrifice and lukewarm disapproval.

I have a false memory of that bookcase and bus and I don’t remember how long I spent talking to god in that library or on the pavement.

You wear your skeleton on the outside like an insect while I hold myself together like two dolls and make them kiss.

If heaven exists, how can I be happy here?

28

My religion is well-worn by TV and self-loathing, and the ritual goes something like this: first you starve yourself for three days so that the lovely comes organically; and then you devour what you can find in the wreckage, until your belly is sore and blistering.

What will it take to make you full?

I am starting to believe you: maybe the best parts of myself are pain.

And yet there are some days— when I inhale kind faces like air, speak daggers into existence, and pull eyelashes off like friends.

Other days—better days— I ask myself unpardonable questions, confess irredeemable truths, and forgive them.

29

YO U T H ’S O BJ E CTS ( I -V ) SAM

YA Z I J I , C L A S S

OF

2023

I. I’ve never seen leaves crunch like a handful of almonds— I flatten them into origami

pancakes, every stomp

a dry crack in the gravel cavern.

II. The Doberman sits in his sauna, plastic paws melting into stained glass, a Lego puddle of little consequence, locked away somewhere in the drawer filled with fragments— scattered limbs so sharp

they’ d chop me up with a thousand

splintering pointillist jabs.

III. They brought the box from Damascus long before the war, its compact frame and shrink-wrapped surface like a silvery pond, oily ribbon streaks dipping

and twirling, mirroring

the clouds in placid, meandering ballet.

30

IV. I’d run around with that camcorder, lone documentarian pacing along wooden panels, a yolky glow leaking from their grains and striations into my soles, entwining my tibial nerve in alphabets I’d later learn to mean so much more than brush and stroke—sizzling pitter—nails licking

my cold back—squeeze

and rub—forearm hairs wilting,

a field of moldering virginity.

V. The sky back then would bound across those sprawling courts, muscular tangerine churn dissolving clouds and flocks of crows—

feathers tumbling into mounds of fine clay and scrapped racket grip, shards of glint and luster grazing the world’s edges.

31

UNTITLED H U D S O N L U T H R I N G S H A U S E N , G R A D U A T E S T U D E N T, C L A S S O F 2 0 2 1

in a cafe, last summer in Barcelona — in secret. a little windmill towers atop your head whistling the mediterranean breeze and circling round and round, making your face turn white and white and whiter and reflective and porcelain and those eyes, they disappear into their whites so your face may take the shape of a plate and shatter, astoundingly: into an infinity of pieces you perish — floating on like poems in the wind, little daydreams, little lifelines, which moments before were brows and freckles and lips and so many more of these details that gave form to you: fragments, now rising high on the foamless tides of our skies, spreading out in the places of clouds, titans — thundering above, our last and only stepping stones in hopes of reaching any heaven: you —

32

WINDOW

TO

I T A LY

•

CHRISTINE

PETERSEN, CLASS

OF

2020

CROSSING LA FRONTERA M A R I A D E L C A R M E N G O N Z A L E Z , G R A D U A T E S T U D E N T, C L A S S O F 2 0 2 0

It was 100° outside, but it felt like 150° in the car. My brother and sister’s arms were sticking to mine as the three of us struggled to get comfortable in the backseat. We had been sitting in this line of cars for three hours now and it felt like we hadn’t moved all day. We tried to pass the time by playing the license plate game, but when we realized that the other cars weren’t moving either, we gave up and found something else to do. Tomás played Super Mario Bros. on his Gameboy and Elena played with her Malibu Barbie. I looked out the window to see men and women wearing oversized hats pushing shopping carts between the narrow aisles of cars. They had everything you could ever want like chips, sodas, elotes, knock off American toys, souvenirs, churros, traditional Mexican blankets, and other little antojitos. I let out an annoyed sigh at the all too familiar click on the car’s CD player which meant the disc would be repeating for the fourth time today.

When we were about two cars from the front, my dad yelled at Tomás to put his Gameboy away and Elena cried when my mom took her Barbie. When the backseat tears subsided, my dad gave us the speech we had heard so many times before. Don’t talk until they talk to you. Smile when you answer their questions. Have your school ID ready.

Where do you go to school? The car was silent for a minute and then we each mumbled

our schools’ names. Con confianza! With confidence, he said. When it was finally our turn, I could feel my siblings shaking next to me as they gripped their school IDs. My dad rolled down the window and the white man peered in, scanning each of us through his dark sunglasses while his x-ray machine scanned our car. He asked my dad where we were headed and my dad said, “San Bernardino,” in his broken English. The same broken English he used when he made fun of the shows my siblings and I watched at home. After looking over the green cards in my parents’ hands, the man pointed at me and said YOU. His eyes seemed so cold as he began his interrogation.

1. WHERE DO YOU GO TO SCHOOL? George Washington Elementary School.

2. WHAT GR ADE ARE YOU IN? Fifth.

3. WHY DID YOU COME TO MEXICO? My grandma died.

There was no emotion, no break, no sympathy in the questions that he asked.

Suddenly, there was a scream in the distance. All the bodies crammed in the stopped cars shifted to see what was happening. Chismosos. A woman was being held down by three men on the blistering black asphalt as her child was dragged away from her. Her screams made the car windows

34

vibrate. The white man threw our IDs back in the car and said, MOVE FORWARD. The gate arm lifted, and he yelled GO! My dad slowly drove through the gate as the panorama

of San Diego unfolded before us. While the rest of the car let out a sigh of relief, I looked back at the woman melting into the asphalt.

Did she get a question wrong? •

35

THE ARCHITECTURE OF MORAL SUFFERING SOFIA MEISBURGER, CLASS OF 2020

It was the Grandmother that first said this to the Girl: “Trauma is inherited.”

The Girl was six; the Grandmother was impossibly ancient. Perhaps even eternal. She knew better than anyone. What does that mean?, said the Girl. Does it hurt?

“Always,” she said. “It feels a little bit like when your veins are pumping blood, but the blood is not entirely your own.

The blood is cherry-fickle and viscous, pain-painted streaks of your parents and those before them. Each molecule of murdered memory coagulates like bumper-to-bumper traffic, as if the vein running vertical down your forearm was the FDR highway.

The war-tired misery of those that came before you will haunt only in daydreams—but it will ferment deep within your bone marrow, so that each rib you break in the accident will unleash new hurt from your ancestors.”

The Girl broke three ribs in the accident. She imagined that each one belonged to a different dead grandparent. She felt the hurt she was promised.

The Father carried the bodies of genocide on his breath. Sometimes, when the Girl listened just right, she could hear their ghosts in his laughter. When the Father was her age, he kept a shotgun by his bed, loaded once. He carried symposiums on shuttered shoulders and pleaded guilty for his crimes. But the cerebral chorus would not yield.

Pride muddled disappointment when he found the Girl in the mess she had created; he was sad, unsurprised…but the Girl had survived. That was worth something. It is not so much a failure to fail at thirteen. The Girl would grow used to waking up, and eventually tire of it.

36

The Mother detested the Japanese almost as much as she hated the Dutch; their colonial legacy was embedded in her genome. Of course the Girl would fall in love with exactly that—the tension of colonizer and colonized was the very fabric of her being. The Mother and the Father drew the blueprints, but the Girl was the architect of her own suffering.

“We’ ll burn that bridge when we get to it,” the Boy was fond of saying. The Boy was always the same, even as the bodies changed. Mere vessels to the Girl. But the first Boy was cool and quick and science-fiction. The second was magenta. The twenty-third was almost a whisper. None of them seemed to know when to stop.

At seventeen the Girl was raped, as some girls sometimes are.

At eighteen, she caught a Greyhound to New York and had a miscarriage in the Union Station bathroom. She resented that rubbery alien egg almost immediately. It was disgusting and weak and a reminder of #5. Only the size of her thumb. The Girl flushed the Unborn Child without a second thought and crinkled her nose at the thought of maternity.

The Girl did not feel her blood thicken at all during this time. She half-expected to be fully paralyzed by now, stiffened by wars and dead friends and such acute loneliness. Why had her blood betrayed her, in all those crucial moments? When it flooded to her cheeks or the tips of her ears, instead of clenched fists and white knuckles? The skin was pulled taut, the Girl could see bone: but no blood to be found, red or green or otherwise.

When the floods came and the dogs drowned, the Girl should have felt a pounding in that longsilent chamber. But the blood did not belong to her.

The storm cloud had been descending for quite some time, but two decades can bring any soup to a simmering boil. She let it arrive freely—invited it in as if it were the vampire and not she— and encouraged it to kick its feet up. The cloud unhappily obliged. Soon the whole living room was covered in cling-film and the window grew more and more opaque.

The Girl took naps in this room. All she did was take naps. The worst dreams were the ones where she was omniscient but unmoving, forced to see the faces of every person she killed in one way or another. (The last face was always her own, ugly and mirrored, but the Girl didn’t want to be dramatic about it.)

It ached the Girl to be this angry. The rage was constant and effervescent. Fire to the skin does not hurt as much as self-immolating memories. But sometimes, for fun, the Girl allows herself to remember, and if it’s a good day, the Girl will practice this exercise:

37

she will think of the time she died at thirteen. Oh, how much life she has lived since then. How unlucky must that girl feel, knowing she died so young?

Fifteen is worse. The Girl hadn’t even lost her virginity yet. What a loser. She wouldn’t have even known what she was missing.

The next few years are harder to justify. The Mother became angrier, the Father started forgetting. The Brother, mostly absent, decided to cement this. He moved away and told the Girl how much he loved her only when it was certain he was never coming back.

But the Brother was still alive, for God’s sake. The Mother and the Father and every Boy and Girl before—they were all alive. The Girl was alive.

The exercise always ends like this. Melancholic pleasantness. Frayed nerve endings.

Unconditional love. This is all the Girl imagines life to be. This is perhaps all that life is.

The Girl recognizes that she is no longer young enough to know everything. Death, too, is no longer as scary or as comforting as it once was. It is in fact what makes life worth living.

Some days the sun shines brighter through the cling-film, even when the Girl can’t yet feel it.

She trusts that warmth will return in time. Time fixes all things that we ourselves cannot.

It’s a beautiful day. The Girl is content. She no longer needs to prove to herself that she is capable of bleeding. In the boarded up walls, beside piles of discarded plastic: a thump. •

38

I TA L I S H AY L E Y

DENNINGS, CLASS

POPU L ATION : 904

“No,” Eden groaned. The sun beat down on the back of her exposed neck, causing beads of sweat to form and drip down her shoulders. It was hardly noon and the temperature was already approaching 100 degrees.

Matt shut the hood of their car and dabbed at his face with his shirt, “I can’t fix the car, Eden; we need an actual mechanic.” His black hair looked soaked from all the sweat and he had a few dark smudges of soot that stood out against his pale skin.

Eden ran her fingers through her curly hair, sighing heavily. Her muscles tensed as anxiety coursed through her system, but her chest still felt hot with frustration, “How did this even happen?

I thought you checked the car before we left?”

They had been on the road for almost four hours and hadn’t made a single rest stop when the car started making weird noises, then suddenly came to a halt. Right in front of the welcome sign for ‘Italis’.

“We’re lucky we stopped here and not in the middle of nowhere.” Matt grabbed his bag from the front seat and tossed Eden hers as well.

Eden scowled and slung it over her shoulder, “This is the middle of nowhere. Nine hundred and four people is not a town, it’s a cult. This isn’t a lucky occurrence, it’s probably a curse.”

She waited for Matt to lock the car, then followed him onto the main road. The trees thinned out a few meters past the sign, and the two walked

OF

2022

into a seemingly never ending grass field. With no shade, Eden began to regret the little amount of sunscreen she had sprayed on earlier that morning. Her shoulders and ears were already getting tender and sore from the impact of the strong rays and it would only get worse. Her dark skin usually protected her from bad sunburns, but the heat of this town was proving to be too much for her. She was just about to ask Matt to stop, when a car came speeding up the road, directly towards them.

Matt waved his arms and shouted for it to stop, but it kept forward, full speed, only screeching to a halt right in front of them.

The driver, an older man with a scruffy mustache and gray hair, didn’t budge. But one of the back doors opened and out stepped a tall slender woman with silver hair. That hair, Eden thought, would have made anyone else look like an elderly person, but her features were impossibly youthful, and her cheeks glowed a radiant pink, perfectly kissed by the sun. Eden couldn’t find any wrinkles on this woman’s face, even when she smiled. Her skin looked like the airbrushed models that Matt would paint for a few extra bucks.

Matt struggled to form a coherent sentence, “Hi-um, hello, we—we’re Matt—or I’m Matt, and this is-” “It’s quite a long walk into town,” The woman said cooly, as if she couldn’t bear to hear Matt stutter another word. Her voice was gentle and doled out each word with remarkable grace, like

39

honey being smoothed across a buttery biscuit, “The sun is so harsh on such tender skin,” She reached a hand up to Matt’s cheek and Eden was too distracted by the odd decision to wear long leather gloves in the middle of Pennsylvania’s August heat to care about this beautiful young stranger stroking her best friend’s face. They were red, and came up to her elbows, creating a stark contrast with her white dress and sun hat.

The snap of the woman’s fingers cut Eden’s staring short. She blinked and started at how close the woman had gotten, the flecks of dark gold apparent in her emerald eyes, “Excuse you,” Eden backed up, stumbling over her own feet.

She reached out for Matt’s arm to steady her, but the woman was there instead, wrapping her leather clad fingers around Eden’s forearm, “You need water,” The woman said softly, letting Eden go. She opened the door to her car and gestured for Matt and Eden to get in, “I’ll escort you into town, if you don’t mind. My Cordelia makes wonderful, cold drinks that will cure your dehydration instantly.”

Eden rubbed at the part of her arm that had been grabbed, surprised at how much strength the woman had. She seemed so delicate and pure, like the most innocent curse word would send her into a full body shut down.

“Matt,” Eden growled, when her friend began to enter the car. He looked back at her and shrugged, but Eden crossed her arms and turned to the woman again, “We don’t just go with strangers.”

“Oh, pardon me.” The woman cleared her throat and smoothed her hands over her hair, still smiling, “My name is Anastasia, but you can call me Stas.” Anastasia nodded curtly, “Are we close enough now that I may offer you a glass of water in my home, Eden?”

Eden stepped into the car without another word, but couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that hearing her name come out of

Anastasia’s mouth gave her.

She had never told the woman her name. …

Anastasia’s home was exquisite. It was a massive French country house with a large colorful garden and bubbling fountain in the front courtyard. Eden couldn’t understand how a house this magnificent could exist in such an arid town. As they had driven through the town, Eden noticed that not a single other person was out. Perhaps it was too hot to enjoy the outdoors, but even the buildings looked dead and unlived in. If she hadn’t seen the cars parked out front, and lights flickering behind the curtains, then she would have assumed it was basically a ghost town.

Anastasia didn’t have much to say on the drive over, but she did stare unwaveringly at Matt and reach over to touch his face quite a few times.

Matt didn’t seem too bothered—Eden, actually seemed to be much more irritated on his behalf.

She wanted to smack the stupid red gloves away from her friend’s face, but she kept her composure, and distracted herself by looking out the window.

Eden believed that Anastasia ran the entire town. It looked like every ounce of money the town made went towards her house. None of the other houses in the area were halfway as grand; they were decent at most. Eden wanted to say that Anastasia didn’t belong in the shantytown of Italis, but then it hit her that she really didn’t know the woman that well enough. Still, her outfit looked like something out of Vogue, or it at least looked like it belonged on a New York Fashion Week runway.

Anastasia didn’t even have to unlock the door, it swung open for her and out stepped a man with black hair, his face as youthful as a college student’s. He greeted Anastasia with a quick kiss and introduced himself, “Welcome to the Mortali

40

house, I’m Lex,” Lex held his hand out for Eden and while Eden hesitated, Matt took it, smiling eagerly, “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Lex. I’m Matt, this is Eden. Your house is so beautiful and we’re so grateful that you’ve welcomed us here-” “Slow down, honey, you’re talking a mile a minute,” Anastasia laughed and gestured for them to follow her inside. They went to the kitchen, where an elderly woman with white hair was pouring ice cold water into a few tall glasses.

She briefly met eyes with Eden and the woman paused, her thin lips pressed in a firm line. Before Eden could say anything, she was turning back to the refrigerator and Anastasia was handing everyone a glass, “This is only the beginning,” Her luminous eyes sparkled as she spoke, “Cordelia makes the most spectacular peach sangria,” She winked at Matt and Eden heard Lex chuckle behind her, “It is absolutely to die for.”

Eden’s burnt, aching body felt instant relief when the water slid down her throat. She almost felt relaxed enough to enjoy her time with the Mortalis, but she couldn’t stop thinking about their car waiting by the sign, heating up as the sun crept further across the sky. She nudged Matt’s shoulder with her own and nodded towards the door, “We should go. I can call a tow truck-” Matt regarded her with a mixture disappointment and frustration. His hands brushed over the cool marble that made up the kitchen counters, but he snatched them away when Anastasia chimed in, “I could give you a tour while you wait for the tow truck. It will take ages for it to find you here anyway, you might as well enjoy the air conditioning.”

As much as Eden wanted to argue against Anastasia, she couldn’t. Everything the woman said made perfect sense, given their situation, yet Eden still felt miserably uncomfortable. She hesitated a moment, then cleared her throat and looked towards Lex, “Where’s your bathroom?”

Lex waved towards the foyer, “Down the hall

and to the left,” “Thank you,” Eden smiled, her lips cracking with the force, “Don’t wait up for me; I’ll catch you guys when I’m finished.” As soon as they left, Eden marched right up to Cordelia, who had kept her back turned the entire time, “Excuse me, Cordelia.” Eden tried to be as polite as possible, but she was beginning to grow impatient as time slipped through her fingers.

Cordelia turned to face Eden, and it was then that she noticed a long scar that stretched from her chin to the base of her neck. Eden shuddered at the sight and rethought her decision to stay behind with the maid, “Um-” “It’s just a scar, everyone has ‘em.” Cordelia said. Her voice sounded off, like a bad American accent. Eden shook this thought when she couldn’t determine where she could possibly be from and proceeded with her questions, “My friend, Matt, and I have to be at our hotel in Bethlehem by six, but our car broke down. Could you please give me the phone number for the mechanic in town?”

Cordelia straightened up, her face impassive, “There is no mechanic here?”

Eden frowned, “I saw a mechanic shop on the way here-” “Oh,” Cordelia nodded slowly. Her eyes were on Eden, but they looked as if they were looking through her, rather than at her, “Right,” The maid went back to the same spot on the refrigerator, scrubbing at it with a dirty rag.

This poor lady, Eden thought, she needs to retire. …

The tow truck service couldn’t make it out to Italis until the next morning. The Mortalis offered to let them spend the night and while Matt quickly agreed, Eden wasn’t willing to give up getting out of that town so easily. She called every ride service she knew of, but none of them were willing to

41

make the journey out to Italis. They were at least 80 miles from a big city, so Eden knew her chances of getting out soon were shot.

“We’ll bring the mechanic out to our car and see where we can go from there.” Eden paced back and forth in the guest room where Anastasia had left her and Matt to rest and think things over. It had been nearly three hours since their car had broken down and nearly two hours since they had arrived in the Mortali house.

Matt sat up from his spot on the bed and rolled his eyes at her, “You can’t be serious, Eden.

Let’s relax for a bit. I’m tired of driving.”

Eden almost couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Seeing her friend sit so loosely on a stranger’s bed, and seeing him interact so confidently with that stranger made no sense to her. Matt was by no means a shy person, but he was usually reserved when being introduced to new situations. This time, though, he was acting like he had known these people all along and couldn’t be happier to have met them, “Matt.

Why are you acting like I’m the crazy one right now?” Eden snapped, “We don’t know these people. I will drive for the rest of the trip back to your mom’s house if we leave now.”

Matt groaned, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes and falling back against the pillows, “You always do this-” “Do what?” Eden could feel her heartbeat quicken as her body filled with a defensive rage.

“You freak out over nothing to make a decent situation seem terrible,” Matt glared up at her, “These nice people haven’t raised any red flags that would give any possible signs of danger.

You’re being overdramatic-” “She is wearing leather gloves in this heat!

Don’t say that I’m crazy for wanting to leave just because you want to stay so you can sleep with her!” Eden exploded. She instantly regretted raising her voice when Matt’s face darkened with hurt, but anger still resided within her and she

couldn’t shake her gut feelings so easily. Eden grabbed her backpack and left, slamming the door behind her. …

Eden underestimated the size of the town and what she thought would be a quick walk to the mechanic’s ended up being nearly an hour long trek that had her sweaty and sunburnt by the time she made it to the old, rickety garage.

It looked dark and desolate inside, but there was no sign that indicated whether or not it was open, so Eden decided to take her chances and went right in. The mechanic building was more like a large warehouse, with holes in the ceiling and cobwebs hanging from every corner. There was not a single vehicle in sight, and Eden was starting to understand why Cordelia had been so confused about the mechanic when the sound of a heavy object being dropped on the concrete floor erupted in the large space.

Eden jumped at the loud noise and turned to see a tall, slender man with a shocked expression plastered to his face. He had gray hair and despite his surprise, had kind brown eyes. He looked to be about the same age as Cordelia.

“You’re not from here.” He said slowly.

Eden bent to pick up the fallen object for him. It was a mallet, or metal meat tenderizer.

It felt cold in her hand as she handed it to the man, but she didn’t have the patience to ask why a mechanic needed such a tool. “Are you the mechanic?” She ignored his previous statement, not wanting to get sidetracked from her mission of getting out of there.

The man nodded and Eden didn’t wait for him to say anything else, “My car broke down right outside of town—next to the sign. Do you think you could-” The mechanic’s eyebrows furrowed and he shook his head, “I don’t do cars.”

42

Eden couldn’t explain why the simple words sent sharp chills down her spine, and despite the heat that managed to infiltrate the large warehouse, she felt goosebumps prickle across the skin on her neck and arms. Her palms were slick and when she wiped them on her shorts, they came away sticky. Eden looked down to see that her hands were smeared with bright red blood. She realized with a jolt that the mallet was covered in the substance and hadn’t realized it earlier in her haste to get answers from the mechanic. Eden swallowed a gulp of hot air and slowly backed away from the man. He made no advances toward her, even as she flung the door open and ran outside.

The sun had just sunk below the horizon in the distance, casting a dusk glow across the entire town. The temperature had dropped significantly from when she had left the Mortali’s house, and despite it only having been an hour since then, night time seemed to be approaching quickly.

Eden suddenly became more aware of how odd everything in the town was. The curtains that had been shut during the day were now wide open, and soft vintage music came fluttering out of the open windows. As Eden walked down the street, the doors opened and out stepped the inhabitants, all coming together in a large, slowly swaying group behind Eden. To her horror, they all had white hair, no matter how young they seemed to be, and all of their faces were void of any expressions, their eyes just gazing right through her.

Eden began to pick up the pace, running until she couldn’t see them, or hear them anymore. Once the Mortali’s house was in view, she ripped her cellphone out of her backpack and called Matt. The phone rang and rang, but he never picked up, even after she called him three more times.

The streetlights in the last little neighborhood before the Mortali’s house came on and the same vintage music started playing. Eden could hear

the growing sound of footsteps in the distance, and she looked back to see the enormous crowd of people slowly advancing towards her. She cursed under her breath and, with her phone firmly clamped in her hand, raced up the stairs and into the Mortali’s house. The door swung open once she reached the porch, like it had been expecting her all along. It closed right behind her, instantly shutting off the eerie sounds of the approaching crowd of people.

Eden struggled to find her breath for a moment, finding strange comfort in the house that she had been trying so desperately to escape.

She started to climb the stairs that would lead her to the guest room where Matt was, but was stopped by a familiar voice, “Come join us for supper, Eden—we’ve been waiting for hours.”

Eden’s grip tightened on the stairway railing and she clenched her jaw, biting back a curt response.

“It’s delicious, Eden.” Matt’s warm voice that she knew so well calmed her nerves a bit and Eden took a deep breath before turning back towards the kitchen and dining room.

They were all there, waiting for her.

Anastasia sat at the head of the long, wooden table, gently swirling a glass of red wine while she watched Eden walk in. Lex had his eyes on his wife, his eyebrow only twitching slightly when Eden cleared her throat and went to stand behind Matt. Matt had dark circles under his eyes and didn’t react to anything Eden said to him. She bent down to touch his face, pinch him, anything to get him to respond, but to no avail.

He remained firmly planted in his seat, his eyes glued to Anastasia.

“Careful now, it takes a while to recover after strenuous activities in the sun, darling.” Anastasia said, sipping her wine.

Eden whirled on her, fists clenched and shaking with rage, “What the hell did you do to him?” Matt and Lex still didn’t move from their positions at her dramatic outburst.

43

Anastasia shrugged and Eden wanted so badly to knock the smug look off of her perfect pretty face, “I only gave him what he wanted so badly, dear.” She set her glass down and stood so she could walk over to Matt. Her hands smoothed over his shoulders and down his arm. It seemed to wake him from whatever spell he was under and Matt suddenly jolted in his seat, bringing his hands up to cover hers. Anastasia placed her fingers under his chin and tilted his head up to her face, “You said it yourself, Eden.” She whispered, sliding her eyes over to Eden’s, “He just wanted to have a little fun.”

Before Eden could make any movement to stop her, Anastasia had parted Matt’s lips with her own, and when she came back just a few inches, Eden could see a thin stream of white mist flowing from Matt to Anastasia. Matt’s skin went from a pale pink to a sallow yellow and then finally a sickly gray. His irises whitened and his expression went slack as his head lolled to the side before he collapsed onto the floor.

Anastasia stepped back, exhaling after the last of the mist had disappeared into her mouth. Her eyes rolled back into her head for a brief moment, then she removed her gloves and Eden watched as multiple long, purple veins sank further under her skin, and her once wrinkly, translucent skin faded to a more subdued, soft pink like the skin on her face. Anastasia smiled, then tossed her gloves into the table.

Eden couldn’t bear to look at her slumped friend. Her body felt numb save for her pounding heartbeat. The blood had dried on her hands, but she could still smell the metallic scent that hung in the air around her, “What did you do to him?”

She whispered, her voice hardly loud enough for anyone but her to hear.

Anastasia tilted head, but her face remained void of any confusion, “He’s a painter, yes? Well, then.” She clasped her newly youthful hands together and grinned, “This town could use a talented artist. The last one made art that was far too depressing to look at-” “You’re psychotic.” Eden tried to back away, but she bumped into a hard shape behind her. A strong pair of hands clamped over her arms and she could barely turn to see Lex’s impassive face staring down at her, “Let me go!” She yelled as Lex hoisted her up into his arms and carried her out of the room.

“Don’t frighten her too much, Lex; the scared ones are never as pleasant, nor are they as effective at rejuvenation. We need her to last us for a while—who knows when the next travelers will pass through here.” As Eden screamed for help, she could hear Anastasia speaking to someone, perhaps Cordelia, “Your husband always does such a wonderful job in the warehouse, dear. He will fix these two up right away. He’ll make them as good as new, just like he did with you and the others…” •

44

AN ODE TO THE DRIED OUT RIVER STYX CHARLIE

MARTIN, CLASS

“The desert will take

OF

2021

I ask you: “Who now? And why are you so wet?”

what belongs to it,” you said to me when I left.

“You cannot put this relationship in a suitcase and pretend that hairs

Sweat and tears will not fill the Sahara, will only attract bees you had, so desperately, tried to kill.

won’t stick out from the zippers.

Here, I can zip up your dress without catching any strands.”

It is only now, that the pale, dissipated river once so soft and so deadly

I had cried this day and shoved sand in my mouth, remembering there was once water in which bees could drown or beg the unanswering

sucks you into its depths Can you remember how to breath? and you, with cracked lips and a dry tongue, will dig and dig for water that is no longer an entrance for my return.

gatekeeper for a love that commits or perhaps even promises.

I remember that Persephone was allowed to return – but only over half the year: make it weekends hidden in back alley winters or fervent springs

All you will find: an empty suitcase, half buried.

where our bodies no longer fit into one another, and where hairs get caught in dress zippers.

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‘ T Y P E FA C E

•

MEGAN

LORETO, CLASS

OF

2021

TELEGRAPH MEGAN

LORETO, CLASS

OF

2021

F O R WA R D - - B E R L I N

roses, red roses, red wine, empty wine bottle on the table top, everyone drunk, laughing, crying, stumbling home STOP i had coffee STOP i begged questions of the man behind STOP he heard me for a moment, but just for a moment STOP at the train station STOP there was snow falling through the open window onto my bed, you would have liked it STOP it felt like you STOP it felt like when you left STOP the boys in the truck slowed STOP on the corner and when i tried to walk away i was called back STOP kept looking at the sidewalk, kept my head down STOP felt ashamed for wanting, for being STOP film camera, shots 1 and 2 and 3 came out blurry STOP someone is smoking a cigarette or applying lipstick in the lounge STOP there is a photograph of a mirror and a girl who makes me feel STOP it rained the whole trip, my umbrella never got stuck once STOP so many stairs to climb, you wouldn’t believe STOP it’s bad for her heart and bad for her, we made her take the lift but it is so small i cannot breathe so i climbed and climbed and cannot breathe anyway STOP bullet holes in the wall, they’re filling it with plaster STOP the trains are always on time here, even in the morning, the early morning when the bars finally close STOP for the first time i don’t wish that you were here, not once, not even once STOP we got lost on the way STOP my world is either done upin color or in black and white STOP i sat in the museum gallery and looked at marble statues, it reminded me of homes that are far away STOP i miss falling in love with someone for the first time and the way the sunlight feels on closed eyelids STOP someone whispers STOP someone asks me a question that i cannot hear STOP

47

RICOCHET AMANDA

KO E N I G S B E RG , G R A D UAT E

S T U D E N T, C L A S S

Exhibition. There’s a gallery on 9th that breathes feathers, coated in vines and torn pamphlets from last month’s exhibition. Titled: “When Flowers Stick to One Another” Dried Fruit. Two people sit in a gunmetal bathtub holding hands in molasses. They give a sermon on the properties of figs.

Salt Block. Art patrons, or cultured folk, appreciate piling on fabric and cold collarbones.

Highly flammable. Easily satisfied.

Coal Briquettes. A man in orange approaches me and asks if I like to write with ink. I reply no and that I prefer to be sung to via theremin or floorboards.

Granite. Parking lots are greedy. They gift vertical cherries and horizontal metallic wrappers. I saw a blue and silver wrapper once. It held a thimble of rainwater in its ribcage, the crook of its wing.

Keys. His spine can bend like metal. I asked him if mice prefer his company or that of old tugboats. He said the latter because what they lack in conversation they make up for in rust.

48

OF

2020

FLORAL

RUIN

•

AMANDA

KOENIGSBERG, CLASS

OF

2020

F O O L’ S G O L D SIENNA

CAPUTO, CLASS

OF

2023

I haven’t known what it means to feel at home, though if you ask my friends I’ve sworn differently at least a thousand times, painting Meaningless things into royalty and writing people into gods—too afraid to think I have yet to find what I’m looking for or that I’ll never find it.

Rumi tells me I am already everything I want.

Still I mistake uneasiness for butterflies, skin-on-skin for intimacy, the streetlamp outside my childhood bedroom for the moon. And I wonder why it feels like I am always grieving something.

Inside this skin, I’ve been trying to feel at home. Maybe if I turn my body inside-out I’ll get there sooner. I know I have so many things to unlearn—you, being one of them.

But you should know I never needed you to tell me I was whole, I just wanted you to hold me while I learned to tell myself.

50

S A T U R D AY DANYELA

GOTCHER, CLASS

The page of her book sat limply between her forefinger and thumb waiting to be turned for the last half hour. The clock struck noon, the final hour of ante meridiem signing of, marking the turn of the day and reminding Daria of how little she had accomplished in an entire morning. But it was the afternoon now, and post meridiem had given her a fresh start; she made a new resolution to utilize the upcoming hours to be productive and do something meaningful. So, she decided to see a movie.

Daria had figured that the theater would be deserted because she had arrived at a time between matinee and premieres, but she instead was stuck in a long queue of bustling chatter.

She was sandwiched between families with small children, overly affectionate couples, and pairs of friends who all, most likely insincerely, enjoyed spending their Saturday afternoon with a loved one. But, being alone at a busy theater was a comforting feeling for Daria. She could go unnoticed in a long line because people were engaged semi-absently in conversation while they feverishly waited to make it into the theater. It wasn’t the same as going to dinner alone, people noticed that. Especially when the waiter asks, “table for two?” and she has to hold up a measly extraterrestrial index finger announcing her solitude. Then following behind the waiter, past the questioning eyes that prickled her skin, to be seated alone at a table meant for two, surrounded by full tables with ongoing conversations that

OF

2020

contrasted hers so greatly, it made getting through dinner insufferable and she would often only make it to the appetizer before bolting out.

But ordering a large popcorn and coca cola with two straws isn’t gawked at, because it isn’t the last stop like being seated for dinner. The refreshments are taken into one of many dimly lit theater rooms where someone could be sitting saving a seat waiting for the salty, “light butter, please” snack and ready to ask if their companion remembered to get the peanut m&m’s, not the plain chocolate. Unlike intrusive waiters, the concession stand worker would not know or care to ask if the shareable items will be shared with someone else besides yourself.

So, Daria enjoyed her alone time at the movies, and even more so when she sat in a middle seat where both of her elbows could brush against the ones next to her. At the cinema, she was never really alone, physically or socially, because she had the company of likewise film lovers who sat in the dark theater room immersing themselves in the world that played out on the large screen before them, just like she did. But her shiny lightbulb of relaxation and afternoon resolutions that was screwed tightly in hope burned out when she got to the ticket stand.

“I’m sorry that’s sold out.” The jaded ticket worker explained into the muffled speaker attached to the plexiglass.

“Completely?” Daria asked.

“Yes, but there is another one at 3pm.”

51

“That’s an hour from now.”

“Sorry.”

Daria stared into the expressionless eyes of the employee, who did not seem willing to even genuinely comfort her in her misfortune.

“How did you get your hair like that?” Daria asked.

“I don’t know, I just told my stylist Mia Wallace.”

This was the third occasion when she saw someone with the razor sharp black boxy haircut, and now, three times the charm, it had become a full obsession. She took it as a sign.

“Well thanks anyway.”

Daria walked away from the ticket booth and onto the street. The cinema no longer was her intended purpose. A new fixation had plagued her.

—— Daria stared past the toothpaste splatter on the mirror into the lifeless eyes of another unmet expectation. This is not how Mia Wallace looked.

Daria looked as if she had been electrocuted. Little frays of hair swayed as if an invisible magnet was pulling them forward. She wanted a clean cut, sharp as a razor edge, but her curly hair was not meant to be straightened or lay flat. When she got home from the cinema she looked everywhere for scissors and turned up with nothing. But she had been determined to get the look and fulfill the fate. So, she took her bread knife and stood over the bathroom sink. Steadying her hands, she axed off her shoulder length hair, breathing out slowly which each slash. But now her hair sat stiff around her ears, with some strands falling a little longer near her chin. It created an uneven angled bob that was nothing but disappointment.

She tried to smile, but her face was numb.

She pinched the apples of her cheeks and watched roses bloom to the surface, and then quickly wilt away. Daria was dead, her reflection was an

unrecognizable offbeat mimic of her, mocking her true terror with its battered hair and quivering lips on the verge of tears.

“You’re not me.” she told the mirror. The reflection was rabid and out of control, so Daria picked up the potted plant that set on top of the toilet and threw it at the imposter.

The faux marble pot bounced off the mirror and crashed into the sink below, breaking into little pieces, while the slightly cracked mirror housed the unscathed reflection.

There was a chalky taste in her mouth. Her tongue swelled, sticking to her dry cheeks and making it hard to swallow. She knew she belonged to death. Daria stared at the shattered pieces of glass and thought about taking control of her demise. But she was powerless, and contemplating her own inevitable death completely drained her energy, centering her in a reality where the only thing that mattered was sleeping. So, with heavy limbs she discarded her responsibilities to the mess she had made, and dragged herself out of the bathroom towards her bed, pulling each leg slowly after another until walking the short few steps was even unbearable and slowly tumbled onto the ash carpet. On hands and knees, Daria inched her way into the bedroom, collapsing at the sight of her bed and was plunged into a deep aching sleep.

—— She woke to the sound of a peak bellying aching laughter that gathered at a high octave, ringing in her ears. It was coming from outside the thin walls of her apartment. The laughter died into a muffled conversation of joy and intimacy that descended away towards a world Daria felt far away from. Her mind was hazy and she wasn’t sure how long she slept, although it was pitch black in her apartment except for the street light the softly illuminated her bedroom window.

52

FIRST

SNOW’ •

CHARLIE

MARTIN, CLASS

OF

2021

Daria would have been content believing that she was still dreaming, if it wasn’t for the immense ache on her side. The tension she felt rising in her temples as she lifted her head off the shaggy fabric was only another jolt into consciousness. She was awake and still alive. Daria was grateful for the darkness that surrounded her, she didn’t have anything that could remind her what she looked like and she could imagine, even in consciousness, that her impulsiveness was a figment. But even though she couldn’t see it, Daria knew that the hacking had been real, when she rubbed the back of her neck and did not feel her own hair graze the back of her hand. She had really done it. Daria stood up and moved toward her nightstand. The time of the clock read 8:53pm. It was hard for her mind to rest at night for more than a few hours, but somehow she had exhausted herself into a languishing long nap.

There it was again. The cackling continued to pass her door in waves now from two muffled voices.

“Shut up! He didn’t?”

“Yes, I swear, I swear! I wouldn’t make this up.”

“Oh my god remember when…” the conversation trailed off with a sporadic high pitched laughter, descending down the hallway until completely out of earshot.

It was Saturday night, and Daria was once again thrusted into a separate part of time that was offering her a new beginning. The night sky illuminated by distant stars and fluorescent street lights were meant to remind her of how vivacious and dazzling living could be. And on a Saturday, where the upcoming week was still meant to feel miles away, Daria was supposed to leap into the night with a carefree joy, detaching herself from the day’s worries.

Daria was unsure if it was the shoddy hair job or purposeless afternoon, but she felt in a rather sour mood. She was hesitant of the night’s proposal because of what it revealed about herself.

It was nights like these, where she could hear life

exist without her, that she felt most deceived. At least during the week she could pretend that she was living life as normally as everyone else. But hearing other people’s happiness where she was excluded, made her feel most captive. She felt unaligned, as if she was in a limbo waiting for the time of her life to catch up with her, where she was adorned and surrounded by others. The façade of being comfortable and unconcerned by her confinement was unmasked. Where she had to admit to herself that her stability lied in the conformation that she belonged. All of the moments that she tried to shrug off feeling invisible, were futile. The actuality of her life was that she was entirely disregarded.

Feeling an unease rising to her stomach, Daria sprung from her duvet and raced towards the bathroom, suddenly finding the indifference that people had toward her indigestible. She hauled herself over the toilet seat and waited for her pity to eject itself out of her. But nothing came, and all she felt was a hollowness in the pit of her stomach that was a twisted mix of gloom and hunger. It was possible that a meal would release her from part of her anguish, so Daria stood, closing the toilet seat and keeping her eyes on the gridded grout as she walked out, avoiding the glass imitation and chaos in the sink.

—— Disappointment greeted her once again in the white glow of the empty fridge. There was nothing for a sufficient meal, just a few rotting avocados and spoiled milk, and other miscellaneous condiments. Her stomach grumbled. With all of her disorderliness she had forgotten to go grocery shopping. That was a part of the day’s activities, and something she could not commit to now, so Daria had to finally give into the night and leave her isolation behind. Grabbing a knitted cap and throwing on her dark denim jacket that laid languish on the kitchen counter, she geared up

54

to embrace the night. Opening the door slightly, looking to her left in right, ensuring that she wouldn’t have to engage in useless small talk with a neighbor walking the corridors, she trampled out of her apartment, quickly locking her door behind her.

Upon walking out of her building, Daria was met with an immense cold that brought shivers to her core. The unbearable weather was something the night didn’t mention in its terms, that not one of all its gleaming stars could compete with the warmth of the daytime’s sweltering, blazing giant.

But the ache in her stomach forced her to ignore the chills running up her spine and continue forward.

She lived in a quiet apartment complex, and her own home was situated right in the middle of it, surrounding her wall to wall with brick structures. Her main living room window looked right into another window of an overly loveydovey couple that never drew their curtains, and even when they did it was null because the fabric was ridiculously transparent, that Daria suspected they wanted her to spy on them because they needed the world to see and envy their undying affection for one another. But even though her building was secluded, she was only a couple of left turns away from a bustling street center. Though she often tried to avoid the main center because most nights and early mornings were overloaded with pedestrians and impatient drivers. But the restaurants on the quieter back roads had early closing hours, and though Daria would have liked to slip in and out of a grocery store and buy a frozen dinner, the ones within walking distance were also most likely closed or would close by the time she made it to them. So she continued on through the busy street, pulling her cap further over her head, trying to make as little eye contact with other humans as she possibly could.

Daria walked onwards, glancing into the shop windows and gauging how many people were in them, eliminating the ones that were too occupied. Occasionally swerving abruptly to the

left or right of the sidewalk to avoid crashing into unaware groups of friends or couples not looking to see that there was someone walking in their direct path forward. “Sorry,” someone would say absently if her attempts to shift to the side were not quick enough and she collided with a stranger’s shoulder.

Until finally she reached a small bistro, at the end of the long lane with a faded storefront sticker naming it “Quick Bites,” that from the window looked to only be inhabited by two male shop employees. The bell on the door announced her entrance and she felt unwelcomed as the two pairs of eyes steadied on her, and the upturn lips full of conversation only seconds before zipped into an emotionless paper fold.

“Hi, sorry, you aren’t closed are you?” Daria said when the employees failed to greet her.

“No. we’re open.” One of them said shortly.

“Okay.” Daria’s cheeks were hot, she realized how dumb and small she must look with her thin jacket and botched curls falling out from her ratty hat. And though she didn’t know what she looked like, she had a hunch that there were large bags under her eyes. But she was already inside and would be even more embarrassed to walk out after she clearly made it seem like she was a customer. So she walked slowly and awkwardly to the counter.

“What can I get you?” This employee’s name tag identified him as Brian, the other one must have been cleaning before she walked in, because he was now, wet rag in hand, wiping down the coffee machine.

“Sorry, could you give me a minute?”

“Sure, whatever.”

Daria was beginning to sweat. She looked up at the menu, but everything looked a bit blurry.

The low hanging incandescent lights swung like a pendulum above her making her feel dizzy.

“Breathe, Daria.” She said lowly.

“What was that?” Brian had turned back around to continue their conversation she had

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interrupted while she had been looking at the menu.

“Sorry, nothing.” Daria said.

“So are you ready to order?”

Daria had barely even looked at the menu, but she had to decide because she could feel herself burning alive from the irritating light and employees sizing her up and judging her meek mannerisms.

“Yes, I’ll just have a club sandwich.” She said lowly.

“A what?” he asked.

“Um just a club sandwich.”

“Oh. Ham or turkey.”

“I guess, turkey?”

“Okay. Oh actually we’re out of turkey. Is ham okay?”

“That’s fine.”

“And there’s no cheddar around, so do you want Swiss or pepper jack?”

Daria could have screamed.

“Swiss is fine.”

“Alright. Anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“5.65.”

Daria took out her card and handed it to Brian.

“Coming right up,” Brian said.

The entire interaction had left her winded so she walked away from the counter without a word.

She sat down at one of the empty tables and carefully untied and retied her shoelaces, in hopes to stop her rubbery hands from shaking awkwardly. Daria knew she would have to walk back to her apartment to eat her dinner, because she couldn’t stay there. She wasn’t even sure if she would even eat because she hated ham, but she refused to go back up and order something else. If she were with someone else, maybe the Quick Bites employees wouldn’t have been so standoffish. Or maybe Daria would have ordered confidently with someone by her side, assured that the rude encounter would soon turn into a funny

memorable moment that she could say “remember when?” at a later date and laugh endlessly about a memory that only two friends shared. A friend she could sit across from at the wobbling wooden table of Quick Bites, and lean in and whisper about how awful guys can be, while smugly eying Brian and the unbranded co-worker. But, she was alone. And the worst part of it, Daria thought, was that she did not have anyone she could call on a whim that would grab dinner with her. Getting dinner was turning out to make her stomach even queasier.

“Hey. Your sandwich.”

“Oh sorry.” Daria was brought back to reality where she sat alone and zoned out, while Brian continued staring at her with piercing eyes holding out the sandwich bag as she walked the trek toward the counter.

“Thanks.”

She did her best to snatch the bag out of his hand, but it was just a normal grab. Daria could have sworn that she heard laughter as the shop door closed behind her, but she ignored it and walked briskly down the sidewalk. Daria’s pace quickly turned into a jog and further into a full sprint. She needed to get away from the night and all its false promises. The stars were suddenly too bright and invasive, the dark walls of the sky were closing tightly in around her. She passed a trash bin and threw the sandwich in; the entire evening had made her lose her appetite. Daria continued to run until she safely turned the key into her building, leaning against the door with ragged breath and eyes shut, grateful to have just missed suffocation.

As she tumbled into her apartment, without turning on the lights, she thought of how comforting being engulfed by her pillows and covered in the duvet sounded. She wanted to leave Saturday as a figment. There was comfort in tomorrow because it was unknown yet predictable. Each day was dragging along one after another carrying her as a seaweed drifting

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wave to wave, each with different heights and depths, until it hit shore. After Sunday there would be Monday smiling on the horizon and Tuesday reaching for Wednesday and Wednesday bracing for the weekend, time slipping away into

an endless continuum. Tomorrow Daria would start anew. But for now, all she wanted was to forget her existence and be transformed into a state of tranquility that only a deep unrecognizable slumber could synthesize. •

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I N ST RU CT I O N S O N H OW TO C L E A N S E T H E C I T Y KYLE

KA L M A N SO N , G R A D UAT E

STUDENT

1.)

If the Condor sheds two feathers, you know Inti is not pleased. Walk through Mama Sara’s field of purple maize and don’t forget to smear some blood on her stone door. Once you cross the bridge of human hair, climb down to the base of the river that meets Mama Qucha and turn right.

In about a mile you’ll find the tomb of Cavillace and her unnamed son. The big stone and the pebble. Weep as you go by. Pity she who was once so great but naïvely ate the seed of Coniraya in the shape of the papaya. By this tomb, you’ll find the pool which formed from her weeping. Take a cup, fill it halfway, and make your way back to the river. Every ten steps, touch the water to your lips. Don’t drink it all, Inti must taste the tears of his dead daughter; lick the sweat of his shamed grandson’s stomach. He who never lived a day. Return to the city and enter Inti’s sacred grove.

Here, at every golden disk, pour a drop of the tears and speak these words: “Pity us Inti, as you pitied your daughter. She who ended herself out of grief, so for your own grief, take another.” Next, take a thief and throw him off the nearest cliff.

2.) If the Puma bares her teeth and only half of them are white, you know Mama Killa is not happy. She is lonely and misses her son. High in the mountains, you must take a mat and a child no older than twelve. He must be of the nobility. She will not stand for a commoner; those who pick grain. If rain starts to fall, Papyaqaqa has already chosen that child as his own. Take him back and pick another. Once you reach the peak, dig a hole and feast with the boy. Let him sip from the sacred cup, tasting the fruit of the Sapa’s table. Let him lie on the mat in the ditch and sing him to sleep. “Mama Killa, here sleeps your son, oh how he longs to wake. Rock the sky and kiss good-night, for he now longs to wake. Take him high to your silver breast and let him suckle thy milk. Mama Killa, here sleeps your son. Oh, how you must long to see him.” Then, leave the child to his mother’s care.

3.) If the Serpent doesn’t hiss when he crawls out of Mama Pacha’s bosom, you know Supay is in need of slaves. Knock on the doors, rattle sticks on the floors, and gather all who steal, lie, or be lazy. Bind them to the pier and cut out their thongs for no master likes a yappy servant. Set them ablaze, and he’ll carry them away down to the palace of rock and bone. Now, drink and be merry – for Uku Pacha is generous for those who volunteer their neighbors for his service.

If the Condor sheds a feather or less, if the Puma bares all-white or read teeth, or if the Serpent hisses – it is a good day. You may go home and do laundry.

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CURRENTS

•

CHARLIE

MARTIN, CLASS

OF

2021

WA R N I N G KAPRI

WA S H I N GT O N , C L A S S

OF

2020

Little Red Riding Hood was not a fairytale it was a warning, to foreshadow the story of a black boy with the same model of hoodie except his was red because it was blood stained the black boy is not always a boy, not always a Little Red Riding Hood but sometimes a Big Black Riding through his ‘Hood with his hood on belittled criminalized lynched before he even makes it home to grandmama this is a story of what happens to the black boy if he walks through the woods past dark alone with a pack of skittles or a hair brush or with his hands in his pocket or with his baby on his back or with his girlfriend at his side it doesn’t matter what happens when he is walking down the street he lives on or through the store aisles that everyone else is safe in this happens: he runs into the wolf when he’s careless like the white boys or perhaps not breaking any rules at all only the one that says we are not meant to survive in this white world

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these wolves who wear badges and flashlights and tasers who use their guns before their brains to hunt black boys until all their hoods are red because grandma is not satisfying enough anymore these wolves want the men Little Red Riding Hood was not a fairytale it was a warning but since it was placed on the same bookshelf as the “happily ever afters” nobody believed it.

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ANYTHING ALEX

PA R A D Z I C K , C L A S S

“What would you do for her?”

OF

2022

didn’t mind, because all he cared about was her.

She spat the question at his kneeling body, sweat and blood trickling together down his face.

He didn’t want to answer her. She didn’t deserve an answer, but no one refuses the goddess of magic. One does not refuse their queen.

He thought of his love on the battlefield: leather armor wrapped in a red cloak, arrows flying left and right. Green eyes glinting with fire, caramel hair sticking to tan skin in strands.

He knew the scars on her body, the callouses on her fingertips, better than he knew his own.

Venari had always been a fighter, but he had never expected this rebellion. Against Magia, who could turn mountains to dust, stars to ice.

Against the queen.

It hadn’t gone well. He didn’t even know where she was, where Magia had taken her. There was really only one thing he could say.

“Anything.”

146 BC: The Island of Crete Greece was a large and beautiful place with people that still knew to fear the gods. He had wandered and met mortals, and so he had come to know those myths that gave the mortals strength: of Heracles and Perseus, Andromeda and Medusa. They called him Hades and he

It was not until Greece fell to Rome, and his name was changed to Pluto, that he found her for the first time.

There was an island by the name of Crete that had goats roaming the streets and people selling fruit on ice. She was in the market, two warm rabbits slung over her shoulder, dressed like a man. Her skin was still dark, but the scars were new, and her caramel hair was cut short.

Venari was leaving the market, bow gripped between bandaged hands, her tunic stained in animal blood. He followed her, a looming specter in black, and it was not until they had ventured deep into the wild that he realized she would not remember him.

He ended up on his back, her knife at his throat—because even as a mortal she was the fastest person he had ever seen move. When they had both been gods, she had cornered him in her forest and threatened to shoot him for scaring away a deer. Her hair had been long and her skin shimmered gold, but her eyes looked the same as they did now. He had started to fall in love with her in that forest, and he felt like he was falling in love with her again.

“Why are you following me? Who are you?” Venari hissed with narrowed eyes. She was

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making her voice seem deeper, trying to make herself seem bigger. For all her gusto, she was actually quite short. He had teased her about it all the time.

Mors decided to press his luck, and sat on the wall that bordered the town from sunrise to sunset. When Cass finally arrived, he talked to her and asked about her traps.

“I’m Mors,” he whispered, desperate.

Desperate to hear Venari say his name again, with kindness and love.

She was not the most welcoming to questions.

She hadn’t been when her blood was gold, either.

It became a simple game of back and forth, of evading and dropping small bits of information.

Mors told her that he had an older sister and that he worked under a powerful person. That back home, he knew a glorious hunter just like her.

Cass did nothing until he produced a rather pitiful bouquet of wildflowers. He was sure that most of the flowers were actually weeds, but he was just relieved they hadn’t withered in his touch. Cass had taken them with the same calloused fingers Mors knew the caress of, and stared into his eyes like she was seeing him for the first time.

“Your name is death?” she asked, the translation causing concern to flicker across those green eyes. Her freckles were brown instead of gold. She was not wearing red. She was mortal now, and mortals came with superstitions.

“Is yours any better?” he questioned back.

The two of them had always gone hand in hand.

Death and Hunt. Unless Magia had stolen her name from her. The thought made his blood boil, made the grass around him die.

“My name is Cass,” she muttered, in the fake voice of a man, “Don’t follow me again.”

She ran then, into the wild, under the cover of trees. She was always good at hiding, and it would take him leveling the forest to rot to find her. Mors simply sat up and smiled. He’d found her. That was what mattered.

It was the first time he settled down in the mortal world. He got a house on the edge of town and asked the locals about the boy named Cass that lived in the woods. The boy was a stranger, they said, and he could shoot straighter than anyone else on the island. He sold rabbits and goats, and was kind only when he needed to be, never staying in the market longer than it took to make a sale. His mother had lived in the woods alone, claiming that Hecate had blessed her with a child.

“My real name is Cassiopeia.” She looked to the town. “They’ll think you’re courting a man.”

Mors shrugged. He may have put down roots, but they were easily removed.

“Let them think that,” he said. For I will love you no matter which skin you wear, what name you choose. She smiled then, a full smile that she had only given him twice before: when he had kissed her for the first time, and when he had proposed. Cass climbed onto the wall separating them and kissed him. Her lips were chapped, just like they always were, and his hands slotted onto her waist as they always had. She promised to come back the next day to show him her home in the woods.

Mors knew he was making Magia mad. He had not picked up his scythe since the failed rebellion, had not physically collected a soul since his wife was lost to him. His older sister Memoria had been trying to make it appear as if he had

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been working. He was the only one that could really reap and make sure the souls traveled to whichever afterlife they considered correct.

Sometimes they stuck around, purposely avoided his blade, becoming ghosts and poltergeists.

Making sure that spirits didn’t harm the living–– that had been Venari’s job, that hunt of rogue spirits. But she was gone, he was distracted, and the world was suffering twofold.

Mors knew that he was bad luck. He was Death, after all. He was feared by all mortals.

He knew that he didn’t cause the tsunami.

Mors tasted magic in the air that morning, that bitter tang that layered itself over tongues and wormed its way into stomachs. It made him gag, brought him back to that cursed rebellion, kneeling before a witch on a marble floor. The water rushed in soon after, a roiling wave that swallowed the island whole. Mors didn’t want the people to suffer, so he slowed their hearts until they were forced to sleep. Until they simply flowed sweetly to death.

He went to the woods before anything else, stumbling through mud and grime, over fallen trees and the bodies of wildlife. Until he found the waterlogged and collapsed walls of a small home, and a hand calloused from years of bow work sticking out.

Mors wanted to believe she was sleeping.

He could feel her soul hovering, waiting to be sliced free. It was the first time he was able to hold a scythe in years.

Nothing grew in the forest of Crete for a century after.

1349: Haugesund, Norway

Mors wasn’t sure how long the time between would last. How long it would take Magia to stitch an immortal soul into another mortal body, how long it would take to build a family and life and a new name for Venari. He searched as soon as his grief was finished, as soon as Crete was a dull throb in the center of his chest.

He looked. Across cities and countries and continents. Magia demanded he return to his duties, but he ignored her, and laughed to himself because he knew Venari would say her stubbornness had rubbed off on him. Magia would not stand for being ignored.

She sent Plaga, a small goddess that was painted in shades of gray, with white skin and hair and piercing stone eyes. Plaga was as creative as she was colorless; humans began dying at a rapid rate from the rats that trailed at the goddess’s heels. Mors started to work again, the scythe a steady presence in his hand, clipping souls free from their blood suffering.

He was in Norway, at a church, when he saw her. Walking between rows of the dying, with his robes of black, a crooked staff of wood in his hand. The dying assumed he was a priest. They saw a cross around his neck where there was none, kindness in his eyes where there was only sorrow.

At the end of the line was a woman, wrinkled and coughing blood. Maybe ninety at the youngest.

He dropped to his knees when he saw her, that weathered skin and those shining green eyes.

Her hair was streaked with silver, and her face was lined with years, but it was her. She looked at his face stuck in perpetual youth, and smiled in the way that only the mad could.

“Are you an angel?” she asked, blood leaking from her mouth. The whole church smelled of rot and sweat. Mors didn’t know when, but he had

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started to cry. “A young thing like you shouldn’t cry for me,” she whispered, a wheeze. He could feel it, a throbbing in his hands. If he wanted to, he could reach down and pluck her soul out of her body like a ripe berry. Maybe he could do it; maybe he could cradle it close to him and keep it safe from the queen’s bitter hands.

“If I had found you sooner…” he whispered, tears dripping onto her cheeks. She patted his face more like a mother than a lover, her fingertips stained black. If he had found her sooner, perhaps he could have aged with her. Perhaps he could have stopped this.

“Don’t focus on ‘if,” his love chided him.

“No one escapes death.” She coughed, the spit splattering onto Mors’ face, and his fingers bunched into the ragged blanket her body was wrapped in. He laid beside her and made them unseeable, him and this old woman who he knew but did not know him.

box. He approached, in all black and his walking stick, and introduced himself as a simple nomad going from place to place. She asked his name, and when he said Mors, she wrinkled her nose and cocked her head.

“Sounds familiar,” she said, and his heart fluttered at the thought. “You sure you haven’t been here before?” Mors shook his head, and could not help but smile.

Until, of course, her husband walked out the door of the small cottage.

She went by Aoife in this life, and her husband reminded Mors of those who he had taken in the waterlogged alleys behind pubs. He was large and angry and smelled like whiskey. Mors resisted the urge to strangle the man then and there, for the way he gazed at her with no kindness in his eyes, and the bruises she hid beneath long sleeves.

His name was Cormac, and he conceded to Mors staying the night if he slept out in the barn.

“You’re right. I just can’t seem to leave you.”

1623: The Irish Countryside It was easier the third time. Mors didn’t know why. Perhaps each time she died he only became more familiar with her soul. He felt drawn, from the middle of Brazil, to the Irish countryside. To rolling green hills, overcast skies, and the tales of fairies on the lips of natives.

She was a sheep herder, a farmgirl, wearing wooly skirts and talking in a lilt he had never heard from her mouth before. Her skin was lighter from a lifetime of overcast weather, and her calluses were from doing housework instead of hunting. Her freckles stood out even more against her skin, and her hair was plaited into two thick braids that bounced against her chest when she moved. The house was a small, dull cottage, with blue wildflowers growing in the window

Aoife came to him when the moon was high and the air was freezing. She climbed into the hayloft in a nightgown, hair still in plaits, and ran her hands over his face. “You are so familiar,” she whispered before she kissed him, and Mors felt the heat of her skin through the fleece. It had been so long since he had had her as close as this, and as he ran hands over her new skin, he whispered to her.

“Please, let me worship you,” he begged. “Let me memorize your body and whisper your name with divinity until you pull all my offerings forth with hand and mouth and teeth.” She laughed, and raked a hand through his hair.

“You could be Shakespeare with all those fancy words,” she whispered against his mouth.

He did not tell her he had said them to her before,

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on the night of their wedding. She had said his name the same way then as she did now, and when the time came, he lost himself and whispered Venari into her neck instead of Aoife.

When morning rose, she told him to leave, lest Cormac attack him in anger, and Mors wished he held dominion over life so he could kiss away her bruises and save her from himself.

He returned to the farm only once more, one year after he made love to her, to find Aoife’s head smashed in and her body lying on the kitchen floor. Cormac was sitting at the table drinking whiskey and crying.

Mors was so angry, all the sheep on the farm died at once. The flowers growing along the windowsill turned to shriveled husks. Cormac smashed the bottle on the edge of the table before burying the rest into his throat.

Nowadays, they say that hill is cursed.

1789: Saint John, Canada The fourth time he saw Venari was when he made the biggest mistake of his immortal life.

Mors had gone to his sister, gotten on his knees before Memoria, and begged her to help him. He had not cried, but he had been close to it. It was only when he confessed the punishment Magia had conceived for Venari that she agreed to help him. She had bottled her tears, and on his way to the mortal plain, his sister-in-law Tempestas looked at him with lightning and frost in her eyes.

When he approached the apothecary shop owned by Elizabeth Williams just a few miles north of the Canadian border, it was raining.

her, smelled of rosemary and peppermint. She wore aprons and crushed herbs, her hands were smooth from years of such work, and her mouth was always quirked to the right. Eliza wore her hair down, the caramel strands only pulled back when she needed to make medicine, and Mors loved the way her green eyes sparkled when her remedies worked.

Mors steadily gained her trust, and every night after the shop closed, he made her tea. He had been doing this for months, and even though he used his name as he always had, she showed no memory of him. She laughed and talked and gossiped—about her customers, her family, America’s revolution. She was the furthest from his Venari.

He put his sister’s tears in Eliza’s cup. Drops of water shed from Memory herself, clear as diamonds and sour going down. Eliza took one sip. She dropped the cup, and while the tea would stain the hardwood, Mors found he could not care in the slightest. “Venari?” he asked, and it hurt his throat to say, for he had not said her true name in years. She looked at him, green eyes burning with age and recognition.

Mors thought, as she smiled at him like she always had in their bed, that he had succeeded.

His heart beat in his chest, his cheeks flushed with relief, his tears were joyful.

He did not notice the growing cold in his hands.

Not until she fell to the floor and shook, blood pouring from her eyes and ears. Foam forming at the corners of her mouth. She whispered words of comfort to him as she died, and promised to remember. Mors knew it wasn’t true, but he held her still, and kissed her forehead.

Elizabeth, or Eliza as she had insisted he call

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He buried her behind the shop, in the heavy rain, and the only thing marking the grave was a bundle of rosemary and mint.

1862: A Road Somewhere in Kentucky Mors had been ignored by a majority of the pantheon for years. Only Magia actually tried to talk to him, and others he had to look for himself. They knew he was grieving, as well as doing some sort of repentance for that rebellion, and left him to his wanderings among mortals.

In 1861, Venari’s twin brother came to him, and told him to go to America.

The twins had always been close, Venari and Certamen. Hunt and War. He looked just like her, with tan skin and caramel hair and green eyes and scars. He was stronger and more vicious, and he had been spared after the rebellion because he was married to Magia’s only son.

“There will be a great war there,” he told Mors. “One where half the fighting will be hunts.

Go there, and perhaps her memory will stick this time.” Mors had worked with Certamen as closely as he had Venari, but was happy he had fallen in love with her rather than her brother.

He carried his scythe with heavy hands across the American South, blue and gray blurring to one blood-soaked color in his mind. The smell of smoke and gunpowder stuck to his clothes, and those that saw him passing on the road thought him a ghost or devil. He saw Certamen on occasion, switching from uniforms of general to private, and only offered him a halfhearted salute.

Her name this time was Annabelle. She had a nice Southern drawl, and she ran a halfway house. Her sign said she was closed for the war, but Mors could sense the fluttering souls inside, so he knocked and she answered.

Her hair was pulled up in a bun, and her eyes flickered with unease as she leveled a shotgun at the space between his eyes. Annabelle looked him up and down and spat in the dust outside his doorstep, before telling him that white men were not welcome in her house.

Certamen had assumed Venari would be pulled to the hunts, to the bloodhounds and the thrill of human prey. That something deep inside her would resonate. But she was too kind for that.

So Mors told her the passcodes he’d learned in his travels, showed himself to be an ally, and promised protection for the people inside her home. Said it would be easier to pass the permanent closing off as real if she had another worker to vouch for it.

Annabelle lowered the gun, and agreed to let him in, if only so he could pretend to be her husband for the passing soldiers.

The fact that he had to pretend was a spike through Mors’ already-battered heart. But in the end, it did not bother him as much as it might have. He lived in the same house as her, his scythe a forgotten wood stick in his closet. Mors wore things that were colors other than black, collared farm shirts and suspenders that stretched across his shoulders. The people in the house liked him well enough, enjoying the idea of the protection he provided. Annabelle put him to work, and when he spotted Certamen passing by the road, he nodded, to tell him that his sister was safe from the war.

He was happy for the first time since Crete, if he was being honest with himself. Annabelle did not kiss him like Cass, did not go to his arms in the night like Aoife, did not marry him like Venari. But it was enough simply to be around her.

To sleep under the same roof, to see her strength day in and day out, to see her laugh. Mors could deal with small accidental touches if it meant he could be here with her.

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UNTITLED’ •

SOFIA

MEISBURGER, CLASS

OF

2020

It lasted about three years.

to retrieve the bodies, and found them in neatly sliced pieces.

Such a long time for Annabelle, for the everrevolving slaves that passed through her doors. A drop in the bucket to Mors. A millisecond to him.

Annabelle complained about her age once, in the second year, and all Mors could do was weakly laugh. You’re so much older than that, he wanted to tell her, And I’m even older than you. He had thought that it might have lasted longer. A decade, maybe. Mors dared to hope for that much.

The soldiers came while he was escorting the current group of runaways to the next stop. The night was heavy, the moon a sliver; the fireflies like fallen stars that had made their way to earth.

The windows in the top floors of the house were dark, like they always were, but the front door was open. Mors saw them, in bedraggled uniforms, rifles leaned against their shoulders. He had never minded empty nights, but in the moment, he would give anything for the security of daylight.

He could hear Annabelle arguing with them, screaming. She was beautiful when she was angry.

Beautiful and terrifying. It was one of the reasons he loved her. It was one of the reasons they shot her.

Mors heard the blast, and the laughter of the men, and the way Annabelle’s ribs cracked. That cold grew in his hands again, as she lay in that slice of light coming from the door. It made her look like what humans called angels, with the golden light framing her, and the fireflies laying across her brow like a crown.

Mors ignored their calls as he walked back into the house, removing his scythe from the closest, and unsheathed the blade that had not even been left long enough to gather dust. The only one he left alive was a child aged thirteen, who he ordered to run. The child would later tell the nearest town that the devil had been there.

The townspeople laughed at him until they went

Mors carried Annabelle’s body along the road until her brother appeared out of the woods, uniform tattered and blood smeared across his face. Mors held his twins body out to him. Death looked to War and cried silent tears that shone as brightly as fireflies.

“Do you want to bury her this time?”

Certamen nodded, and cradled his sister to his chest with a tenderness Mors had only seen him use with his husband. “Magia will pay for this.”

“That’s your mother-in-law you’re talking about” Mors reminded him, brushing his tears from his face. Certamen nodded, and looked at his sister’s blood on his hands.

“And her son agrees, and her daughter. The god of misery and the goddess of chaos wish to see our queen fall.” He brushed a strand of hair out of Annabelle’s face and stared at the freckles that mirrored his own. “I want that. Do you, Mors?”

He was in Crete, the bitter taste of magic on his tongue, Cass’s lips on his, her hand crushed between stone and mud. What would she do if they tried to rebel again? What would happen to Venari’s soul? Would Magia destroy it, rather than pass it from mortal to mortal? He did not look at Annabelle’s body, he did not look at her brother. He just watched the fireflies dancing in the warm night air.

“I don’t know.”

1920: New York City, America Mors didn’t look for Venari after that.

He felt as if he had disappointed her, not wanting

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to fight against the woman that had done such a thing to her. If he saw another of his kind in the mortal world, he did not acknowledge them.

His sister and her wife had a child: a little girl that followed the creation of the lightbulb. Mors did not visit her, and did not even know what she looked like. Memoria tried to contact him, but he ignored her. It didn’t matter.

The night he thought he might finally be ready was the night her scarf got caught in the axle of the car she was riding to the theater in.

Her neck snapped. Mors made sure she looked presentable when the coroner came. As graceful in death as she had been on stage.

He didn’t really think anything mattered now.

Don’t you want Magic to fall?, War had asked Death.

The world got brighter, and faster, and men wore suits and women wore sequins. He switched from black robes to an all-black suit, with a red tie to honor the war cloak Venari used to wear.

The world got more exciting; the world got more poetic. Poor people died young, and rich people died gluttonous. Mors got used to passing through shows instead of bedrooms.

His favorite was a theater where an orchestra played. A stagehand was set to die of a stroke, but Mors was getting kinder in his old age, and decided the man could have one last show well done. It was a ballet this time, and he stood there in the middle of the aisle.

A ballerina all in gold danced out on pointe shoes, caramel hair beaded through with peacock feathers, glitter on her freckles. She looked out at the crowd, and while Mors was invisible, he felt those green eyes all the way through. She was graceful, beautiful, and young. He had found her again. He hadn’t even meant to this time.

He didn’t even know her name.

Death closed his eyes and whispered – Yes. 1940: Lyon, France She was French this time, and her name was Aurora. She had a little brother named Henry that looked too much like Certamen for Mors’ liking. He had found her at thirteen and decided she would live a long and good life, becoming a shadow that some might call a guardian angel. He followed her for three years, and she was happy.

Then the world was at war, and he spent more time in Germany than he would have preferred.

He wondered how he and his family had been forgotten by the world. They blamed God for everything. They prayed to God for everything.

Mors stayed for the whole show, and left. The stagehand lived a full five more days.

Mors, with his black suit and well-worn scythe, did not want prayers or blame. He only wished that he did not exist. What would the world be like without me in it?, he questioned himself as he moved through cattle cars and fake showers. Perhaps it would be better, perhaps it would be worse. Perhaps there would be no world at all.

He kept going to her shows, watching her twirl all in gold. Mors never looked for her name because he wanted it straight from her lips. He knew he was working up the courage and the will to try one more time.

Aurora was the most like Venari, with callouses and rage. He watched snippets of her life as the war went on, and the way she acted made him smile. She smuggled food across the borders, dressed as a boy so running would be easier, threw

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rocks at soldiers, and carried messages her mother baked in loaves of bread. She spoke French as gracefully as she had danced, a lifetime ago, and it hurt him to hear those words from her mouth, so close to the dialect that made up their names. She wore a red scarf that flapped in the wind, which she used to cover her hair or wrap around her neck. It made Mors anxious, considering how she had died the last time, but he did not interfere.

The allies came to France—the British and Americans. The world, while injured, started going right. Aurora met a British soldier on that day, and when the war ended, she moved with him to London. The soldier had the same dark hair and blue-grey eyes that Mors knew he possessed; perhaps he could have made it out as a compliment, but it just made the dull scar of grief throb along his sternum. Mors followed them across the channel, a shadow in a dark suit, bags under his eyes and his shoulders slumped. Now was no time for him to love.

She married that soldier, and they had three children, and Aurora Jones died at the age of thirty-two in a hospital bed. Four years after being diagnosed with cancer, following a night of telling her children about the times she helped the war effort. Mors was there at her bedside, as dutiful as ever, and he held her soul like an injured bird before sending it away. In the early days he had considered following it, to capture it before Magia could twist it. But it always moved too fast.

On the outskirts of the cemetery, right after Aurora’s funeral, Certamen approached him. He was wearing an all-black suit, and Mors thought that he and his brother-in-law looked too alike at that moment.

“We’re planning a rebellion,” he said, and Mors’ knuckles tightened over his weapon.

“I’m listening.”

1985: Orlando, Florida Mors was at a club, the lights blaring, and he stood out because of his clothes. All black, with a red tie. This was the time for color, for dancing, for drugs and booze and safe sex. Music was the best it had ever been, movies were being pumped out at a dizzying rate, and fashion was bright and eye catching.

He hated bright colors, except for a select few.

He had always been a horrid dancer unless Venari was there to lead. He tried drugs and drink but wondered how much he would need to ingest to actually feel it. He would never sleep with another aside from his wife. He had no need to invest in music, movies, or fashion.

Mors was in this club for a job. It was his normal job. He did not want to do it, but he had to. Certaman had taken him to the heirs of the divine empire, the only children Magia had ever had, Chao and Dolorem. Mors could see the echo of the queen in their faces, though they looked so much kinder. Chao had promised she knew a way to break her mother’s spell, and even speaking of it had made the goddess of chaos refuse to meet his eyes. Dolorem, Misery, gripping Certaman’s hand like a lifeline; begging Mors for forgiveness with those shining eyes of his How cruel could a queen be?

“Kill her, Mors,” Chao whispered. “Kill her, and make it hurt. The next time she’s reborn will be the last.” Dolorem closed his eyes, blue tinted tears streaking down his cheeks.

Very cruel indeed.

Her name was Erin Harrington. She liked the bright colors and the dancing and the drink.

She went to the movies and listened to music

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and wore what most considered to be fantastic fashion. She had no scars or calluses. Her skin was tan, her hair was caramel, and her eyes were green.

She was leaving, walking out onto the sidewalk, ready to go home until the next weekend rolled around. Her makeup needed to be removed, her hair was losing its spray given bounce, and she was already limping in her heels. Mors made sure to trip her so she stumbled into the street right as the driver went into cardiac arrest. The car hit her straight on. Her body was small and light and muscular and she flew right over the damn thing.

People tried to call the paramedics. Mors blocked the calls.

He did not allow himself to take out his weapon until his hands were numb from the cold, until his fingers felt like snapping off. Until he wished he could turn the blade on himself. Mors had had so many names over the years: Hades, Pluto, Osiris, Grim Reaper, Fourth Horseman.

Magia had made him add another.

Murderer. His own wife.

Mors reaped her soul, sat on a bench on the side of the road, and waited.

2020: Portland, Oregon Her name was Bridget Scott, and she was American again. She lived on the West Coast and she was twenty-two years old. She wore her hair in a braid that went down to her waist, wore ripped jeans and combat boots, and did ballet as a hobby. She had not decided her major, but was thinking about joining the military because her father had been a soldier. Mors sat in a café in a hoodie and jeans and waited for her to look at him. Chao said it would be immediate, that as soon as they locked eyes, she would know. She would remember.

Mors remembered Eliza seizing on the floor of her own store, blood pouring out of her ears.

His scythe took the form of a walking cane now, topped with a ruby, and he wondered what would happen if Chao had been wrong.

If he would turn the blade on himself first, or on Magia. Bridget was drinking coffee when it happened, when she turned just a bit to the left.

Immortal eyes met mortal ones.

She dropped her coffee, paused, and shattering glass had never sounded sweeter to Death’s ears… Mors felt the air slow. He saw it.

The glint of mortal temper turning to immortal steel, familiar scars tracing their way onto skin, her hands developing calluses, her skin shining in just the right light. She walked across the café, ignoring the questions of staff and the calls of mortal friends, and grabbed Mors by the forearm.

Then…

They were not in the café anymore. They were in a forest; a forest Mors had not dared to set foot in since she had disappeared. She was looking at him, and that recognition turned towards him.

“Venari?” he whispered, and the forest stilled, anticipating. The soul of the world itself was holding its breath. He waited for the blood to pour from her, because it all felt too easy.

Thousands of years, and she was in front of him with her scars and her strength and her beauty.

“Mors,” she breathed back, as if the word was fragile. As if he was fragile. As she wrapped her arms around him, he realized just how true that statement was.

The two sank to their knees, arms gripping each other with godly strength, tears steadily streaming down. Mors whispered her name into

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her hair, her cheeks, her lips. He ran his hands through her hair, along her shoulders, her waist.

Venari gripped him like he might disappear, like the world might fall out from under her.

stormed the gates of the divine with his scythe swinging. This was not the first time it had tasted immortal blood, but it hungered for it all the same.

“I remembered. Every time I died, she made me remember, and then sent me back and I-I didn’t know you,” Venari explained as they sat in that forest. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Mors did not take her apology, as it was not something she had to give.

Venari was beside him, in leather and red, her arrows flying, her hunting knife sinking into bodies. His sister was there, and her wife; Certamen and his husband. Others had gathered when they heard that the goddess of the hunt was once again returned to them. Magia, years ago, was strong. Strong enough to beat him, Magic overtaking Death.

“Your brother wants me to lead another rebellion against her,” he said instead, throat raw from relief and sorrow alike.

“Will you?”

“I don’t know if I can muster the strength,” he muttered. He cupped Venari’s face in his hands and thought back on all those years. The marble biting into his knees, the bitter taste of magic on his tongue. Cass drowned, the women gone to plague, Aoife beaten, Eliza seizing, Annabelle shot, the dancer strangled, Aurora slipping away, Erin choking on her own life. All with his love’s face. Grief turned to sorrow; sorrow turned to rage. Mors brushed his thumb along Venari’s cheek, and breathed in the scent of wet dirt and sweat and rotting leaves.

“I want to see her suffer,” he confessed. His wife, his darling wife that had died so many deaths, just smiled. It was a smile she had only given him three times: when he had kissed her for the first time, when he had proposed, and when she got to kiss him for the first time all over again.

“Then we destroy her together.”

A Place Outside of Time Mors had not worn his armor since the first rebellion. Decked in silver and black, he

But belief had waned and practices had stopped. Magia was weak. Magic was in flux; it was finicky, unpredictable.

Death was constant.

It did not surprise Mors that, when they got right to the throne room, they could not be stopped.

Venari shot her arrows, through eyes and heart and throat. When Magia tried to cast a spell at Mors, Venari shot an arrow through her hand too. She smirked at the perfect mark, a hole punched into the palm that had so easily damned her.

“Nice catch,” she laughed, fury mixed with satisfaction as Magia’s blood dripped to the foot of her throne. She smirked, and standing there covered in sweat and dirt, Mors thought she looked like the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

She was beautiful when she was angry. It was the reason he loved her. It was the reason Magia feared her.

Mors placed the blade of his scythe, coated in thick gold blood, against Magia’s throat. The crown on her head was gaudy, made of gold and covered in jewels. He hated the crown, but he loved how scared she looked. Mors smiled in a

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way he never had before; in a way that showed his teeth.

“What would you do for your crown?” he asked her. He asked this question while looming over the queen, triumphant gods behind him.

He was never going to kneel to her again. Magia whimpered, and yet in her gaze was only hatred.

“Anything,” she answered.

“Then die for it,” Mors said.

Venari’s crown was brown stone made to look like wood, with small emerald leaves dotting it.

It looked more like a wreath than a crown, Mors told her, and she had told him that at least hers didn’t have to come with a warning label.

The night after the coronation, while a party raged below, Mors pulled Venari close and told her: “You are the person I love the most in any life.” Venari placed a kiss on the lips of her king, and smiled at him. There was sadness in her eyes now, just like there was sadness in his. Mors doubted it would ever fully go away.

And the queen’s head rolled down the stairs.

“You are the only man I could ever love for eternity,” she told him. Then she grinned. “In fact, I would die for you.”

*** The next time a crown was placed on any god’s head, there was a king and a queen.

Mors’ crown was simple black stone, spikes that seemed to grow from his skull. There was no ornamentation, and to this day, the only color he wears is a red tie.

For the first time in years, Mors threw his head back and laughed. •

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B E YO N D T H E R I V E R L E E SARA

POOL, CLASS

The air was cool against my skin as I walked down the street and into the city. I had been here for three months now, and the once foreign gleam of lights and water were now ingrained into my memory. Simple etchings in my brain that would probably be gone in a year. This city did weird things to me. Sometimes it’s grey backdrop and constant buzz would make my heart soar with a kinship I didn’t know I had. Other times, however, the constant grey skies and buzz of cars driving on the wrong side of the road made me want to scream in longing for something else, something familiar.

As I entered the city the loud laughs and drunken cries from the pubs mingled with the fiddle player belting out a heart breaking lament for the girl that had left him. The pain of his low coos filled the street as the shoppers and commuters walked past with their eyes diverted from the flat bill hat on the dingy cement asking for spare change. The neon lit sign of Tesco’s supermarket shone in the distance casting a weak glow on the streets beyond.

I waited at the crosswalk listening to the rhythmic chimes of the pedestrian signal to quicken and let me know that I was allowed to cross the street. When it did my feet slammed against the ground matching the pace metered song.

Then I saw him. It was while I was trying to speed past a group of teenage boys gathered outside the local arcade passing around a cigarette.

OF

2021

He was dressed in a wool trench coat, jeans, and a blue sweater. His blonde hair shown under the streetlamp he walked under. Our eyes caught.

His were greenish blue with flecks of gold scattered throughout. My heart started pounding. I smiled at him and he smiled back.

Here it was. The moment in what film they like to call the meet-cute. The moment in which I would find my soulmate and live happily ever after. Of course, I wouldn’t know it at first. There would be no drama in that. No story.

No, it would be something dramatic. Maybe he would be an asshole at first and I would hate him, but secretly I would be in love with him and just not know it. Maybe I would have seen him later, fighting with a girlfriend and I would be the friend he used to make her jealous, but then in a miraculous turn of events he would fall in love with me instead. Maybe we would be just friends and I would get engaged to another man, but then he would finally realize his feelings for me and I for him. Of course, my fiancé would be secretly in love with another woman too (preferably my best friend) and we would have barbeques together and forget the muddled love connections we all once had for each other.

Maybe he would know right away, but he would be too shy to tell me. So we would enter into a dance of evading the subject directly, which would leave us both confused. We would stay like this until in my despair I would confess my love in a long dramatic monologue, preferably on a

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cliff somewhere overlooking the ocean. He would be quiet for a moment and then get down on one knee and all of a sudden the world would start to spin around us and I would say yes.

Whatever was going to lead to the final moment was unknown but, this was the start.

We would have a future full of petty fights and loving embraces. A life of diaper changes and driving to soccer practices. We would live behind a white picket fence in a peach colored perfectly manicured house and every night we would smile at each other and thank god that love at first sight is real.

This was the moment that they could freeze frame in my life and point to when everything changed. A story that could one day be produced for the big screen and showcase the real-life story pictures of us being married and surrounded by children at the end of the credits.

I smiled wide. He smiled back.

I took a step. He took a step.

The world was stuck behind me as he moved closer.

We were almost two steps away now. I could almost reach out and touch him.

“BEEP!” the car’s horn blared with a deafening intensity. Joulted, I looked away for a second to see a line full of cars behind me. The ring of the walking indicator was yelling at me, begging me to hurry across.

When I turned back he was gone and I was standing in the street like a lost child.

In despair I ran across white line crosswalk, trying to avoid the cutting stares of anger from the revving cars. When my shoes hit the sidewalk on the other side, I looked back to see him striding up and over the bridge and to the other side of the River Lee. •

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MAGNOLIA ISABEL

BROWN, CLASS

OF

2020

Let’s address the elephant in the yard— ancient, wrinkled hide, tusklike cones of white petals. All year long its leaves flap, listening. Leathered by heat, shinydark and pricklyhaired and evergreen. Steadfast and most ancient of trees.

In spring, flowers bloom, bowllike, collecting sunlight in concave porcelain. The cones smell lemonyellow even as the petals decay around them, browning in summer heat. Come fall, rubies pop from bract scales, tiny fruit food for birds, bugs, and curious children. On a dare, baby teeth bite glossy seeds— red a false warning, and relief sugarsweet.

No matter the season, visitors shimmy up its graybrown trunk, they whisper in its green ears, press feet into its branches. The tree holds muscle memory; it never forgets.

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WE

ARE

UNDER

THE

SAME

SKY

•

AMANDA

KO E N I G S B E RG , G R A D UAT E

S T U D E N T, C L A S S

OF

2020

C L O A K E D I N B L U E F E AT H E R S J OYC E

FEHLAU, CLASS

OF

(DECEMBER)

2019

The grass is a generous listener to child

whisss ss s

p

e

r

s

–– And I wish to seep into the phthalo blue night – to dance in blue skin and halo blue lit air in blue clothes, and my lips and eyes too in phthalo: I swam once into the plump of Rothko’s red cathedral-womb.

I ache to again be swallowed (whole) and re-live the secrets in saturation.

–– I long for the gratitude of clovers, and so climb into a cage of branches; tree limbs arch like antlers curling, bowing to herbs and root ball tendrils.

Moss thinly clings to bark: one should read these water lines and remember the last flood.

Into this antler cage (a sanctuary; a hol(e)y grotto) I climb.

An orange humming bird flirts in and out of the cage limbs.

––

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The wet down of evening light presses into my skin And I say g o o d b y e to the Desert sage and Coyote bush.

Later: a little black ant crawls along my cheek bone as if to join the glitter of my eyelids.

–– I wake to find nine seed burs clinging to my wool vest amongst a company of leaves.

Do coots bleat like a lamb? Or is their song that of a chipmunk’s click?

I ask, as I watch one scoot across the water, scattering lines of grass before caught there as if in an encaustic inlay.

–– With the morning-dew’s kiss on toes (grass clippings cling, Kelly) I am flushed with the twine-y memories of my same squished grass child-toes and I can still smell the honeyed hints of Greater Periwinkles.

Amethyst in pastel slip sweet gifts into puckered lips.

But here youth is disguised in Whoville-like Fuchsia bottlebrush and –– On the pond shore I feel as if there is a cracked memory I am trying to seal with slip of stories and bird songs, and colors of shadows (leather, viridian, ochre) Slip // score.

Re— m em ber.

––

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I lay in the night kissed grass ( d a m p ), watching the Great Horned owl unfurl its wings revealing a soil pallet of molting under-wings.

Hoo o hoo o hooo oo o Tribbles, and a short screech: a surrogate song for chapel bells.

The bark of lemon eucalyptus in which the owl sings too is furled in strips of feathered wood: moving, wrapping itself upward.

And, where the feathered bark has shed, patchy hued shadows remain, curving and bending and bearing upwards a clamor of leaves; the owl drifts to another tree.

This smaller eucalyptus stands one long trunk: bare bark is fleshed, pocked skin and celluloid curves, like my own.

The branches arch and descend as soon as they begin dividing: two of two of two.

A hunched figure, skeletal except where seven bouquets of leaves fall down like a willow weeps.

And the owl continues to hoot on this Dr. Seuss tree when I depart.

–– When I return in the sun, a humming bird flirts with the feathering bark, but the owl is gone.

Burgundy and honeyed leather leaves still hold hinds of olived-winter hues, and I fold them in my fingers before bringing their perfumed creases to my nose: the incents of balmy summer nights with roasted portabellas, wild rice and green beans crisp, keeping the mosquitoes at bay.

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–– On the phone today, my father told me that the daffodils where starting to bloom (true yellow).

The ones closest to the house catch the heat that reflects off white paneling and of the dryer’s linen-ed air.

It’s too early for spring.

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M I S S E D YO U KELLIE

T OYA M A , C L A S S

OF

2022

I didn’t know how much I missed you until I heard my ribs crack open enough for you to wedge your frail fingers through the fracture and climb out.

You are so small now: your eyes are bloodshot, they’re carrying empty purple purses that pull your lashes down.

Your body shakes, your teeth chatter, and your lungs sob for air like an infant who has never tasted it.

Because I had starved you.

I starved you sick.

Never anticipating your return.

Forgetting.

But here you are.

I can hardly recognize you.

None of them would recognize you.

The body you inhabit will not be the one you know.

Her skin is tattered, her hair breaking.

But she is still a host that will welcome you home.

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