Oxmag Issue 42 Summer 2019 by Oxford Magazine

OXFORD MAGAZINE Issue 42

Oxford Magazine

Summer 2019

Editorial Team Managing Editor Joe Squance Editor-in-Chief Leah Christianson Creative Nonfiction Editor Amy Bailey Fiction Editor Kyle Swensen Poetry Editor Savannah Trent Art + Innovative Media Editor Freda Epum Digital Editor Paul Vogel Events Coordinators John Fuentes Heba Hayek Madeline Lewis Staff Readers Matthew Boyarksy Justin Chandler Sam Gutelle Jordan King Louisa Pavlik Trevor Root Oxford Magazine is a literary + arts magazine published by the creative writing MFA candidates at Miami University.

http://www.oxfordmagazine.org/

Established 1984

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Table of Contents Cover Art

Pompom Flowers #3, 2018 Oil on Panel, 12 x 12 inches courtesy Four Eleven Gallery ¨¨ Laura Shabott

Fiction Buggin’ Out ¨¨ Travis Landhuis ........................................................................................................ 5 Who You Are and Where You Come From ¨¨ Joel Wayne.……………………….........................16 FOUR CHAMBERS¨¨ Robert McClure Smith………………………………………………………………..42

Poetry

The Heft of Wonder ¨¨ Rikki Santer ................................................................................ 11 Freedom from want ¨¨ Steven Ray Smith ....................................................................... 14 Accent wall ¨¨ Steven Ray Smith ...................................................................................... 15 Waking ¨¨ Brad Johnson ................................................................................................... 26 Revolution ¨¨ Matt Duggan ............................................................................................. 58

Creative Nonfiction Child’s Play¨¨ Hannah Mary Blankenship ....................................................................... 12 Departure ¨¨ Katherine Brown ........................................................................................ 27

CONTRIBUTORS ............................................................................................................... 59

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Buggin’ Out Travis Landhuis Nobody invited Randy, but that was never going to stop him from showing up. And honestly? I was relieved because just having him around takes some of the pressure off me, what with him being such a talkative liar. It was Thursday, the night we aim for a total blow-out—before the weekend hits us full force and we find ourselves trapped in the pizza shop, sweating over the makeline and all those pepperonis while the orders stack up on us and we get more and more agitated with each other and how we are all slow in our own ways. So on Thursdays we get ripped on cheap beer, and sometimes someone orders wings. When I showed up at Suds, Randy was already there, just him and poor Beth, his mouth moving while she stared cross-eyed into her foamy beer, her face plunged into the sweating glass, and I thought I was reading a sort of horror in her eyes, her lifted eyebrows. She was taking a long drink. I grabbed a seat at their table and caught the end of whatever Randy was telling her: “...buckets of it, like if you took a party balloon, filled it up with blood, and dropped that fucker off a bridge. Ka-sploosh…” Beth looked relieved to see me. “Randy was just telling me about this deer he hit.” “Oh, wow. Randy.” Randy looked at me and smiled.

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Over his shoulder, Beth was blinking aggressively at me, but I didn’t say anything quick enough, and then Randy was back in: “But that was nothing compared to my cousin’s accident...” I saw Mark and Kara weaving toward us through the crowd—connected to each other via one of their hands in the other’s pocket, like always—while Randy told us about the time his cousin stapled his hand to his own thigh. “…his dumb fault. Well, Andy had the staple-gun propped up on his leg while we were taking a break to chug something, and then, outa nowhere, Princess was freaking out, barkin’ her fuckin’ head off at a squirrel across the fence, and then she hopped up on Andy’s lap. Well, we both thought the gun was unplugged, but then that tiny-ass little Shih Tzu bumped the trigger and next thing, Andy was stuck to himself and staring down at his little dog in her little sweater, just wagging her tail, and Andy was like ‘shit shit shit.’” Mark, having just arrived, backed away from the table, put his mouth by Kara’s ear, and was off. For beers, I guessed. Randy seemed extra jittery tonight. “And I said, ‘At least you didn’t staple your dog to your leg!’ Which he did not think was funny. Neither did the ambulance guys—they kind of shook their heads at us and loaded ‘em up.” We had heard this sort of shit before, and I was just hoping someone would buy a pitcher soon, which usually helps Randy grow on you a bit. And also I didn’t want to have to ask for any favors until there was at least some beer in us all. I wasn’t quite sure yet the best way to tell the few people I know that I’m technically homeless. I mean, the idea was still pretty new to me.

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Randy stood up and slapped my back. “Time to drain the main vein.” He chuckled and sauntered off toward a dark corner. Mark came back with one beer. “OK. Who invited him?” Everybody likes to bitch about Randy, but I don’t believe any one of us genuinely dislikes him. After a while you sort of tune him out—but even still, he did get to me one time when we were alone in the back of the pizza shop and he started talking about his daughter, telling me how she got kidnapped from his house. How he heard it happen. By the time he came up from the basement, the front door was open and swinging, and outside there was just leaves blowing around. But then another time he told Kara his daughter was in Alberta working with sea lions and living in some commune. So. I shrugged. Mark said something to Kara, and she pulled a little plastic cigarette roller out of her purse and laughed. “Randy just has an overactive imagination.” That was Kara, being nice. I asked Mark how the remodeling was going. Kara laughed. “Remodeling. Good one.” Last time I was over there, me and Mark shotgunned a couple beers and then eventually decided to tear down his garage after he bet me I couldn’t punch a hole through the plywood, which it turned out I could. I asked him if he figured out what he was going to replace the garage with, and he said, “Another garage.” I wanted to spill the beans, but something stopped me. I knew Mark and Kara had a spare bedroom at their place, having crashed there more than once, but I didn’t know

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where to start, and felt generally humiliated by my crumbling marriage, which they only knew about vaguely—mostly that it was something I didn’t want to talk about. . . Then Mark bent his head down toward Kara’s giggling, and I took that as my cue. I stumbled off to the bathroom, music thumping in my back teeth, and stepped up to a grimy urinal. I heard a stall door whip open, and then I was jolted by a sudden hand on my shoulder, which turned my pissing into an entirely conscious act. “Mike.” “Ah, hey Randy.” “How’s it hanging?” “Dude.” He was standing so close. I guess we were about to have a regular conversation. “You know, my brother took off on us in ’69. Didn’t even say goodbye. I guess he stole some canoe in Detroit, paddled his ass over. Next thing, we got a postcard from Canada—cartoon beaver smiling and waving on top of a pile of sticks—and just ‘From: Johnny’ with a smiley face in the ‘O’. Fuckin’ hippy.” I wasn’t sure why he was telling me this. Then I heard this loud unzip, and Randy stepped up to the urinal next to me. So I guess I have no idea what he’s been doing in here this whole time. He whistled for a second and then asked me: “So you buggin’ out?” “What?” “You heading North? You know something I don’t?”

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I shook my head. I wasn’t prepared to tell him how my wife had sort of put her foot down all of a sudden by packing up her car and tearing off to St. Louis on some weeklong getaway with this guy she used to date in high school. Those fuckers even used my card, which I found out right around the same time my landlord started sending me these AllCaps texts about the rent check and something about how it bounced. But I wasn’t ready to have this conversation with Randy. Or at least not with my dick out. Randy made that gross horking sound, and I felt my own throat swallow thickly. “You know,” he said, “when I lost Maggie? I wanted to burn my whole fucking house down.” And he spat a thick loogie into the urinal. Maybe he could feel me bristling, because he said, “Look. I got a trailer, ok? You ever need to stay there, just tell me.” Like he knew. I guess he must’ve seen my car in the lot, and all my clothes crammed in the back with all my other shit I didn’t want to be in the apartment when my landlord inevitably showed up to take his house back. I looked over at Randy, everything quiet except for the twin streams thing we had going at these two urinals, and he turned his head and gave me a shiny smile. I should’ve said thank you. But he zipped his pants up and left. When I got back to the table, there was a beautiful full beer at my seat waiting for me, and Randy reached over and flicked it, glancing up at me, but didn’t stop talking. I spent the next four hours rippling along with everyone else, while Mark whispered into Kara’s ears, and Kara dragged her fingers through all the water circles on the table, and Beth and I kept tipping glasses. We all took turns slug-walking back and forth to the bathrooms, smiling, a fuzzy distance between us and the air we were breathing. I could feel Randy’s

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heat the whole night. He told the deer story two more times, I think accidentally. More blood each time. I smiled at Beth. Then Randy tipped his chair back and steadied himself on the table. I gathered he was leaving, so I stood up too. “Randy, hold up.” He nodded like we’d already decided it. Sometimes Randy is just great. He said to follow him and then got in his car, which was covered with this coagulated brown stuff. I guess he really obliterated that poor deer after all. He lit a cigarette, reached out to wipe the blood off his cracked side-mirror, smearing it instead, then gave me a big sloppy smile and a thumb’s up, his cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He swerved out of the lot, then remembered to turn his lights on, giving me something to follow even if it was just two winking brake lights and the smooth crunch of gravel beneath a dirty moon.

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The Heft of Wonder Rikki Santer

How the blind boy in the gallery tastes arm- in-arm every painting through her words. Elementary school angels with flat halos and cardboard wings. Nicotine’s momentary pardon from crisis. The hopeful pageantry of a going-out-of-business sale. America’s Got Talent, that lamb of a girl who jettisons into a rock & roll lion her boot tassels chiming. How amber can time-travel a prehistoric frog. The typeface and font size of a snake’s rattle. A congregation of air bubbles to corral krill for a hungry team of humpback whales. How flutterings italicize the fledging on a steady branch. The throat of a vagina that pines for love and punchlines that can be trusted like the measured weight of a mother grizzly’s paw.

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Child’s Play

Hannah Mary Blankenship

The child hears screaming crickets. The swamp’s alive. The nights are never silent and leave you with sticky

honeysuckle fingers to be washed before dinner. Magnolia’s citrus scent caught in Spanish moss sweeping the air. The child plays make believe. A mother clad in petticoat and apron, effortless red lipstick that leaves no print on folded napkins. Her hair brushed and raised to a ponytail that sways the opposite direction of her hips when she dances to Otis Redding playing on the radio—isn’t she gorgeous? Household chores transformed into life-affirming performances. Crimson lacquered toenails set against black and white kitchen tile. The child imagines a TV mom, a sitcom mom, a 1950s mom. No pills, mom. A southern belle. She loves me more than she loves him, I can tell. The crickets scream, forming a judgmental choir. Every night they witness. The child imagines Montgomery Biscuits, Cracker Jacks, staccato echo of a ball whacked just right. Men reduced to jersey numbers and season stats. Isn’t that soothing? Their goal is to run back home as fast as they can. Town fair, Ferris wheel, kettle corn, neon lights, stroking ponies, sad eyes, the smell of hay. Fat pigs, their weight guessed, then slaughtered. Fireworks, brass band parade, ringing ears. Big helium balloons as souvenirs, punted back and forth for days. Their slow deflation in bedroom corners. But that’s okay. The child imagines every passing of beauty that way. Painless and then forgotten. The child imagines fathers as magic. Disappearing acts. Plump white dove perched on curled finger, flamboyantly covered by silk cloth, cloth crumbled by swift hand, a nothingness worth revealing. That’s the whole trick—the dove once was but now is not. The crowd loves it, everyone applauds. No girl is sawed in half in this show. Birthday cake, song sang, candles blown out, wish made. Shut your eyes real, real tight. Don’t say. Don’t say or it won’t come true. Shiny dimes splash into wishing wells Oxford Magazine

where they sink slowly. Which God obeys such tiny traditions and small donations? The child imagines one does and prays and prays. Fat knuckles, graduation ring, wedding band, fingers nicotine stained, rough palms, dirty fingernails. Hands known in intimate detail. Did you know a southern drawl sprays spit when hissed? The child imagines baby teeth knocked out by strings attached to doorknobs. Slamming doors. Do you want more? No, sir. Crisp five-dollar bill under duckfeather pillows. That’s the price of pain. But the new teeth are permanent. They stay. That’s the whole trick, you see? The father once was but now is not. Everyone applauds. The God obeyed. Child’s play.

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Freedom from want Steven Ray Smith

In this freedom from want there is not a turkey and not an apron bowing before a cocked father retrieving his prestige, the carving set. There is not a grey bun and bobby pins making way for his magic upon her make-ready. There are not children fitful with hunger, starched like dad, fitful with convenience and surveying the laughter while she remains spackled in gravy. In this version, she is hungry too. He is still suited but seated. She has likewise roasted but there is a humorous part and all around await her punchline.

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Accent wall Steven Ray Smith

He told me a blue joke just minutes ago, a risky joke one only tells to a most trusted friend. And she gave me half her chicken-salad wrap, because she knows I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mind her cooties. My buddy there simply nods every time he sees me, as if we are thinking the same thought, as if our accord is that firm. All ten regard me like that. Around the table, the ten-seat table in the corner room, they only know each other. And now they are all laughing at some private understanding. I try to finish answering a question one of them asked me in the hall, but from the table her tickled eyes glance past me, as if my navy blazer were some vague shadow against the cadet-blue accent wall, one of the many dark and uniform partitions that give our corridor its semblance of latitude.

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Who You Are and Where You Come From Joel Wayne

There are people who use the bathroom before they leave the house, even if they don’t have to go. There are people who wait until they get where they’re going, and even then they wait a little longer, until it’s always the most inconvenient time to say they don’t know where the bathroom is. This is what my mother told me at Deborah Offel’s memorial service, when I was ten. It was my first funeral, and I wasn’t at all sad about missing any of it while my mother clicked her fingers against the stall door. Deborah had been a classmate of mine, and I later discovered her death had shocked only me. She was what people used to call mentally-retarded although, by then, a few of our teachers were hounding us about instead using the word special. So, near the ear of any adult, we’d sing to one another, “Oh, she’s special. She’s awfully special. Deborah Offel is awfully special.” I passed this along to my parents, both bent toward saying the wrong things at all the wrong times. But my mother would continually use the word spacey instead of special, as in the one night, when she loud-whispered to my father in the kitchen while I dropped eaves at the top of the stairs: “Oh, shit. I meant to mention earlier – Deborah, the spacey Offel girl. You know. Poor thing went to sleep last night and never woke up.” ~ Life on the ground floor – chores and school and dust-mopping the wooden floor in the dining room (even though, gawd, it just got dusty again), Dad flicking my lip for both

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pouting and blasphemy, and the dogs bringing us a foreleg from a shallow-buried horse at a nearby farm – all continued uninterrupted, the death of Deborah Offel be damned. Upstairs, I was in ruins. I survived two weeks of no sleep, basting under sweat-dipped sheets, terrified as tiny hands spidered up the bed to steal my breath. She went to sleep and never woke up. Or maybe I’d die like Ted Taylor’s ancient lab, crawling under an abandoned halfton to say goodbye, half-eaten by vermin before they found him. They would discover my body sooner, hopefully, under the sewing station or curled into a dresser drawer, nude and ashamed. There was guilt, gummy and hot, crouched under this new fear of sleep. It wasn’t misplaced; I had my reasons. A year before dying, Deborah and her family had been dinner guests at our house. The Offels were our closet neighbors at a half-mile away. Hardware store neighbors, a different temperament, different religion, Latter Day Saints. It was a sheepish invite that arrived eight years late. After supper we’d escaped upstairs to my room, Deborah, her two younger sisters, and me, while my brother and Edwin Offel secretly BB’s at starlings on the hill-facing side of the barn. We played dinner party. Or rather: I was playing and they were watching. I had had too much wine and was spilling it down the front of my dress while the twins laughed and covered their mouths, like good Mormons, bewitched by my cheekiness.

I refilled the teacup with pretend wine as my ancient tabby, This Old Man, crawled

from under the bed and towards the door. Deborah squealed and scooped him into her arms. Her sisters froze, so I froze. Before anyone said anything, Deborah hollered – Weeee! – and lofted the cat up at the ceiling, like a hairy armful of leaves into a dust devil. He twisted in the air, first belly up, then feet down, just reaching the arc of his flight as the

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blade on the ceiling fan clapped him on the back of the head. Then the descent, tail-overhead, landing sideways on the bed, open mouth facing the wall.

I screamed. I kicked and bit, spoke in tongues. The twins pulled Deborah away from

me, hustled her from the room as she sobbed. My father appeared, kneeling and pulling me into his chest. Dr. Offel, the Latter Day dentist, as Dad called him, laid into his son for playing with guns, which he still held as he ran inside to investigate. My mother leaned across the bed and gently pressed her hand against my cat’s belly. She bent until their noses were nearly touching, and hovered there for a moment before pulling away, and I understood: This Old Man was no more.

The horror sprouted overnight. By morning, it’d grown into a tree, dropping

poisoned fruit into the driveway for the magpies to choke on. Deborah was now an enemy, her special-ness no longer a shield. It was no kid’s game to me: I didn’t look at their house when we drove by on the way to town; I made a routine of spitting on the gravel near the end of their drive; and once I even stepped out of my underwear and peed in their drainage ditch, which I imagined fed into their well, somehow. I burned a page from my journal with Deborah’s name on it, dousing the flames in the trash can with a glass of milk. That earned me two weeks’ grounding. But I extended the feud and snubbed her sisters on the playground; Deborah, by then, was homeschooled by her mother so the sisters acted as a sort of proxy.

Then she was dead. She visited me at night, tossing the ghost of This Old Man into

my ceiling fan, over and over, while I watch through parted fingers. I would drift away and dream of getting caught in the ditch below the Offel house, my jumper hiked around my waist, the whole school watching and judging. Even the secretary, Ms. Luntz, who

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sometimes gave me root beer barrels from her desk drawer. The guilt seemed to kick-start my first period. My mother rushed me to our family doctor, unable to grasp a girl bleeding through her culottes at ten-years-old. ~ I went to Gran Natty. My mother’s mother had moved in with us after her husband died, who I only remembered from a laugh and the pissy smell of aftershave in a green bottle the shape of a car, on a tip-toe shelf in the downstairs bathroom. Gran Natty was a ghoul herself. I’d once seen her nab a raw, round steak from the cutting board and rip part of it into her mouth while my mother pulled potatoes from the oven. She spotted me, watching from the doorway, and put a finger to her lips. She wheeled herself backward into her bedroom off the kitchen, a drip of blood filling a wrinkle on her chin. But Natty also knew things. Terrifying and mysterious facts, which she’d sometimes impart to me or my brother when our parents were out of the room. “It’s much harder to poke out a man’s eye than you think,” she said. “Every man likes a little blood on his sword,” she said.

So in a haze of sleeplessness, of guilt and my period being thereafter linked, like

Sunday and wind chimes, I wandered onto the front porch into Natty’s domain. She was sitting in her wheelchair, watching jays dive-bomb the squirrels while the dogs ran circuits around the house. In her lap, she palmed a tennis ball. There was no explanation for this.

“Gran,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

She turned and looked right through me and I wondered if she was going blind now,

too. But the moment passed and she pulled me into focus before nodding. I sat on the top step, below her chair, and confessed. I even cried, praying my parents didn’t pass by the

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window. No butcher shop stories, Gran, no war stuff, my father would say. Gran studied me and said nothing.

“Do you believe in that stuff?” I said, picking paint off the steps.

“When I was little, my younger brother would just hound me,” Gran said. “He didn’t

mean to but he just did. I had a dollhouse I’d made from newspaper and glue and one day he took it apart and made a boat outta the pieces. Right down the gully it went. He was sad and tattled on himself. Dum dum. My ma and pa told me, ‘He’s younger than you, Nat. He’s just being a boy. He doesn’t know no better.’ Oh boo hoo. None of that mattered to me. Why should that matter to me?” So she had made a plan, and waited for the right moment. It happened one night, after her brother was sent to bed early for throwing a fit, after everyone in the house had gone to sleep, and Gran put on her shoes. She slipped out of the house and into the shed, where she sawed all the handles of her father’s tools in half. Then it was back up the stairs to hide the saw in her brother’s dresser.

Gran laughed at her own joke. She tried to set her hand on my shoulder but her

fingernails raked down my neck instead, not quite breaking the skin.

“That’s terrible,” I said, and scooted a few inches down the step.

“So, at first, they thought it was me,” Gran Natty said. “Of course they did. Because I

was a bad kid anyway. A little curse. And I probably would do something like that. I told them, no way, not me, but I could see they didn’t believe me.” But they had no choice, she said, when they found the saw in her brother’s room. She laughed again. Laughing even when she remembered how sad they were about her

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brother’s sudden turn. What had happened? Her father made her brother work at the ranch on Sundays and he didn’t get to listen to any of his programs over the holidays.

“Didn’t you feel bad?” I said.

“No. I felt good! I felt like I wasn’t the only bad kid anymore.” ~

Now, because it’s talking to me, won’t let me ignore it, I have to make a slight detour: to a memory of my mother as she faded into a familiar obsolescence in our guest room, fortyor-so years after the mutual confession with Gran Natty on the porch. It was the first move my mother had made without my father, the last she’d would ever make. I was molding my figurines in the craft room upstairs. She was keeping me company, although she usually fell asleep, or pawed the same book for a half-year, staring out the window, passing gas, not talking.

“You remember Harlon?” she said, looking up from her book.

I turned, my brush just loaded with a bullet of red paint.

“Harlon-my-brother?” I said. “Yeah, Ma. I remember him. He lives in Buffalo. You’ve

been there. We’ve visited.”

She rolled this around for a minute or so, snapping the spine of her paperback.

“I liked him better than I liked you,” she said. “If you had to compare the two. Which,

I guess, you don’t have to, really.”

Then she tilted her book back up in her lap and ran her fingers down the page,

finding her place. I said nothing but abandoned my brush at the craft table and fled the room. In the pantry downstairs, I cried and drank gin while posted on a step stool, until Donald came home to talk me down.

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~ “After high school, my brother went into the army, and then it was off to the war,” Gran Natty said. “Maybe you heard that. I was still living at home and working at the butcher’s in town when he got killed. Shot, I guess, or blown up. I don’t really know. But the day after he died, or the day after we heard he died – this is why I’m telling you this story – I was sitting at the bus stop, by myself, when someone said, ‘Repent!’ I looked all around, over here, over there, but there was no one at the bus stop but me. Then I heard it again: ‘Repent!’ Still no one there. It was just me and this crow, standing over there on the ground. He was looking up at me with his head kinda tipped. So I look at him and I said, ‘What?’ And the crow said, ‘Repent!’”

“The crow talked?” I said.

Shut up, she told me. Aren’t you listening? The crow kept yelling at her. Again and

again. Well, Gran didn’t like that so she stood up and decided to walk to town. But the crow followed her. He flew from telephone pole to telephone pole, squawking and talking. And when she said, ‘Cut that out!’ he repeated that back to her. Cut that out! Repent! All the way into town they went, until she got into the shop, and even after she got off at her bus stop at the end of the day.

“All week it went like that,” Gran Natty said. “The crow yelling and me running down

the road telling him to cut it out. It just irked me. Then one night, I didn’t leave the shop right away and Syd – he was the owner of the butcher shop – Sydney gives me a drink. I think he could see how anxious I was. Well, we had a few drinks and I got a little tight, I guess, and he probably was too. He asked me: Did I wanna go upstairs? So I said, yes, I think I’d like that. Because he lived right upstairs, above the butcher shop, and I always liked him

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anyway. We drank a little more and talked and laughed and then we went to bed. Afterwards, he said, ‘That was some real good exercise.’” Gran laughed and slapped the arms of her chair. The sound cracked across the porch and spooked me upright. That’s the type of thing he would say, she told me. Even when they were older, married for a long time, and she couldn’t have kids anymore, they would do it and he would say, afterward, lying next to her: “That would have made a beautiful baby.” It was her first time, that night above the shop. She had bled a little on his sheets but he didn’t seem to mind. “Maybe because he was a butcher,” she said. “Ho, I just thought of that.”

Gran laughed again and I felt anxious, like I was waiting in the doctor’s office again, a

ball of toilet paper wadded into my underwear.

“Gran,” I started, not knowing what I’d say next.

But she kept on. She remembered lying in the little single bed of his, telling him

about the crow and her brother dying and sawing the tools in half and the dollhouse. He pet her head and said, That’s okay, Nat. That’s all okay. She was glad she told him. “So when I saw that crow, it was the next day or the next, I was sitting on the bus bench and he flew down and landed on the ground next to me. He was tilting his head and looking at me like a crow does. And he opened his stupid mouth but before he could say anything, I jumped up and kick him right into the ditch. ‘Beat it,’ I said. And he didn’t say that back. Ha! He just rolls around in the dirt and flew off over the peas. I married Syd that summer, your granddaddy you didn’t really know.”

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Gran settled back in her chair and watched the rain sweeping gray over the Blue Mountains, way out at the end of all the fields. She palmed the tennis ball in her lap, loopy grin on her face, like she’d snuck a drink or two, like I’d seen her do once or twice. “She’s picturing my granddad,” I remember thinking. “Granddad Syd who-I-didn’treally-know. She misses him. Of course.” I felt proud for realizing this, and grown up.

“Gran,” I said. “crows can’t talk.” She stirred from her daydream and turned to me. The oily grin had disappeared, and

she looked helpless and angry, as if I’d stretched out my foot and pushed her wheelchair back from the dinner table, how Harlon and I did sometimes.

“You little hex,” she said. “Neither do I believe in your dead ghost girl.”

She stretched her arm into the air, straight above her, and pitched the tennis ball

down at me. The ball bounced off the side of my forehead and shot into the yard. Then she backed her chair toward the house, twisting the doorknob under her armpit, and rolling inside.

I stayed on the porch, watching the sky turn, still feeling the spot on my head where

the tennis ball had rebounded. “That’s what you get,” I thought, sucking back tears. “Of course that’s what you get. You chubby loser.” ~ That night, I sunk into bed and pulled the covers up like a hood. No specter appeared to toss any cats, or eat raw meat, or squawk like a crow, or sit at the end of my bed to remind me who I was and where I came from, like my mother did sometimes, punishing me by

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depriving me of sleep. (I am still in awe of this, at once insidious and ingenious.) I drifted off long before sunrise and woke up so hungry my stomach was in cramps. I folded my pillow in half and lay so it pressed into my belly, tricking it into thinking it was full. When the pain subsided, I fell back to sleep and dreamt of cold streams, soft-boiled eggs on toast, and a boy passing me a quadruple-folded note, written in a code weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d just invented: Do you like anyone in class as more than a friend?

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Waking Brad Johnson

In the parking lot, a wake of turkey vultures picks at the raccoon carcassâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skin with pointed beaks. The brightest section of sidewalk is the square beside the stairwell where the suicide landed, where the school hired a power washing crew to clean the stain instead of funding a memorial. Rain falls. A single engine plane takes off behind the fence.

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Departure

Katherine Brown

2 weeks before She reaches out and slaps me. Her hands are cold, the skin stretched tight over the blue marbling of her veins. My body recoils before I can register the hand mark on my cheek. Soundlessly, I run my thumb across my jaw. My mother’s lips are a hard, thin line. She didn’t look particularly shocked or emotional. “What was that for?” “You have to fucking listen to me.” My hand drops to my side and I stumble backwards. Okay, Okay, Okay. It is the only word I can come up with and it sloshes back and forth inside my skull. Maybe if I tilt my head, the word will leak out of one ear and leave me completely empty. Okay, Okay. This is okay. “You didn't have to slap me.” I say this but the words feel hollow. Something to fill up the space between us. “Go back.” “You want me to drive all the way to Dale City for some sauce.” “YOU FORGOT IT.” “Jesus.” I clench and unclench my fists, trying to pull together the threads of my mother’s mind. I imagine them, blood red, thrown across the room like confetti. A down

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cycle. Down. Down. Down. My mother is unspooling in front of me, vibrating with anger, and I feel like I am the one going crazy. “Just fucking leave. Just go.” My stomach growls, an unwanted interloper that dares to make itself known. She’s sitting on the bed, the sheets twisted around her. The plastic bag of food is perched precariously around her exposed ankles. “Okay.” I hold out my hands, a pacifying gesture. I want to scream, but instead I silently shuffle backwards. It’s slow progress because of the dog shit and the trash around my feet. Okay, okay, okay. I don’t know what this is: a mantra, a bleak attempt at self-reassurance. My mind feels cloudy as I reach for the door handle. Thank God, it’s still there. A way out.

It’s just me and her in the apartment. My father has always orbited around us,

inevitably crashing into our lives. On and off, on and off. But for now, as I rest my knuckles against my eyelids, it’s just the two of us. The door screens her from view, but I know she’s just staring ahead, blinking in confusion. She won’t even eat the food that I’ve given her: steaming yellow rice with peas and carrots, cheese pupusas wrapped in oily parchment paper. I will wait for her head to droop, her face slack against the dirty sheets. Make sure she’s finally still. That’s when I will find her food all dried up, clumps of rice and dehydrated vegetables. The reason I was punished. Of course, she will have no recollection. She never does, living in an acrylic world where all the paint bleeds together. But I always remember. Each memory hovering like a beating pulse, a dull throbbing that continues to light up the insides of my cheek. ***

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The earliest, tangible memory I have of my mother was inside her closet. My mother, when I was four, had crawled under her desk while she was working as a triage nurse in Alexandria, Virginia. For much of my childhood, I imagined the scene in detail because this was the very beginning of the end. I see my mother, her chin curled against her chest, and my father scooping her up as though she were weightless. Over and over again, I see the television screen throbbing with news of the DC Sniper, my father’s calm procession across the lobby. I see him later standing at the gate of my preschool, dusk burning around his shoulders. It will be the first of many apparitions, strangers waiting to take my hand. Your mom’s in the hospital. She retreated into her closet, suddenly and inextricably agoraphobic, and never would return to work again. The closet had a sliding paneled door. She wedged two desks on either end, one for me and another for herself. There were soft string lights that floated above us like dragonflies, silently hovering over our heads. My mother sketched, her forearms freckled with marker ink. What I remember, so distinctly, was that my McDonald’s burger, nestled in crinkled yellow and red paper, had onions. Onions! The fact that my mother—her hair wispy around her ears, dark shadows running under her blue eyes—was undone, hidden in a closet, didn’t faze me. What startled me was the ubiquitous presence of the onions, strongly fragrant, that scattered over my burger bun. My beautiful mother no longer wore mascara and blue eyeshadow to work. Her face had become pale and drawn, almost unrecognizable to me. No one ever thought to sit beside me, at such a small age, and tell me that they didn’t have a clue what was wrong with her. Closets and McDonald's Happy Meals slowly transitioned to my mother sprawled in her bed, lost in a haze. Orange pill canisters and endless hospital

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hallways converged like an optical illusion. The truth was, there was no simple answer explaining how the walls of my mother’s mind began to crumble. You could blame a lot of things: trauma from her time in the Air Force, brain injury, a lack of empathetic medical professionals. The hardest truth to swallow, by far, is the simple fact that I lost my mother before I ever really got to know her. She looks a lot like me. Sometimes I take this for granted, because after seventeen years of being with her, I had run away and slipped into other people’s families. And while a hairdresser or a grocery clerk might not notice that I didn’t share features with those around me, it was obvious to me. I have my mother’s strong jaw, the same shade of hair that has since turned iron grey. The same exposed veins in the same freckled flesh. Mostly, the resemblance scares me. In the few pictures I have managed to recover, I tower over my mother. My arms are skeletal, hanging limply at my sides. I have angled my body so that it doesn’t really connect with hers, but you can see the desperation in her eyes to inch closer. These pictures are deceitful. They show flashes of an up cycle--the way she’s outside, her expression lucid, her eyelids heavy with mascara. She still looks pale, her face dappled with shadow. Her cheeks are round and discolored, as though someone has smudged the photograph. She smiles. In the pictures that I have salvaged, it’s my freshman year of high school. So she still has most of her teeth, but by the time that I will leave, she will lose all of them. It’s actually her worst nightmare: “I wake up and I see myself with all my teeth gone. Just...gone.”

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In the film bank of my memory, she tells this to me over and over, leaning over our apartment sink. I distinctly remember watching her fingering her canines, as though they would immediately slip out of their sockets. They were aligned straight and white in her pink gums, unlike mine. (I imagine that I take after my biological father in this sense— maybe we both have the same gapped teeth, unyielding, long limbs, green eyes. All anomalies that I don’t share with the rest of my maternal family.) But when I see my mother for the last time, in my senior year, she will have a broken, chewed set of dentures. Time disfigures her smile into a leering pumpkin grin. It will haunt me, staring at those dirty, broken teeth. Because her worst nightmare came true.

One Month Before.

The sun splits across my dashboard, burning the back of my eyelids. I cant my head

to avoid the glare, blindly feeling for the car’s visor. “Shit,” I mutter, pressing my foot to the gas. I am already dressed in my work uniform, bleach stained and reeking of old fried chicken. It’s not like I’m late, but I like getting to work early so I can sit in stillness before standing on my feet for eight hours. Beside me, my bag drops with an ugly thunk. I have been awarded a scholarship to attend a writing workshop in Falls Church and now all my notes are sprawled across the passenger side.

It’s August. The collar of my polo sticks to my neck as I switch lanes. I feel like I am

swimming in my stiff, belted uniform. But in this moment, even baking in the waves of hot, stinking air, I am at peace. Someone honks behind me and I don’t even bother to give them the bird. Then, inextricably, she calls me.

I have not seen my mother in a week.

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She often vanishes, this time retreating to Prince William Forest. When I was a sophomore, she left me alone in the apartment for over three months when she drove to New Hampshire on a whim. Junior year, she went to camp in Shenandoah. When I sliced my foot open, I had to call the Park Rangers in order to contact her, only to have her scream at me for disturbing her peace. The hospital staff didn’t want to treat me because I was a minor. But I have come to love these periods of peace, of silence. I had hoped that I would have a couple of more weeks alone.

My heart lurches when I recognize her number.

“Katherine.”

“Yes?” I search her voice automatically, just as I have learned to hunt for the scent of

cheap vodka seeping out of my father’s pores. I can map out whether it’s an up cycle or a down cycle from the slur of her words, the cadence of her voice. “Where are you? You have to come now. NOW. Do you hear me?” “I can’t, mom. I’m on my way to work.” I clench my hands around the steering column until the veins gleam iridescently, pushing up against the skin. This can’t be good.

She ignores me: “Wear black, Kat. All black. Do you have a black hat, baby? I don’t

want them to see you.”

“What?” Again, the wave of hysteria. I taste metal in the back of my mouth.

“I saw them again. Last night. And they took me and no one will believe me. But we

are gonna catch ‘em together, I set up cameras.”

This is new. Mostly new. My mother’s down cycles have always been predictable. I

would count down when I started to notice the signs, the way she would start to make

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impulse decisions and retreat into her bedroom, sleeping all night and day. I would wait for it to pass, when she would emerge from her room, somewhat functioning. I would sit with her while she went to bingo or went on massive spending sprees. Then I would quietly try and figure out her credit card balances, go to the grocery store and make sure she had soft foods to eat. Cottage cheese, boiled eggs, yogurt.

A few times she had hallucinated, but I had always credited it to medication. When I

was thirteen and her voice had suddenly turned husky, another personality had emerged to talk with me. That had been the first time, terrifying me. But I could tell no one, because she had seizures the week before. I had seen her slowly start to twitch, and then, in slow motion, crash into the side table lamp and slump on the floor. I had cradled her head, pushing aside the shards of glass, until the shakes stopped.

“If you tell, then they will take away my driving license,” she had said when I told

her what had happened. “Then what? How will I drive you to school, or to the grocery store?” That was the way it went: there was no one to tell when these things happened. If you tell, if you let them know, if you say anything... I had enough scares with CPS. It wasn’t that I was scared to be separated from my mother. I was scared what would happen to her if someone stopped watching out for her. Who would monitor if she was breathing, if she choked on her pills, if she didn’t pay her credit card balance?

“Kat? When can you come here? Are you on the way?”

I hang up and try to breathe deep. A coldness creeps over me, spilling down my neck

and pinching my shoulder blades together. I do what I always do when something like this happens: assess. Will she come to my work, to pull me out? My mother has no sense of boundaries, of the severity of her accusations.

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Finally, I decide I will let this pass. Eventually, she will wear herself out and sleep.

After all, there has always been an up cycle to replace a downer, always. Lately, it has taken longer and longer for my mother to come back to me. It never occurs to me that maybe she won’t resurface again. *** It must have been around age eleven when I started to assume responsibility for my mother. When she and I moved back to New Hampshire without my father, I suddenly became aware of the depths of her illness. The decision was based on an ugly ultimatum that left our home sundered, broken. My mother would either leave, with me, or she would shoot herself. It apparently wasn’t the first time she had made a similar threat, but my father had tried to shield me. Why he watched us leave is beyond me. My father probably was too exhausted, too drunk, to want to stop us. I never blamed him for this. He had married into this perfect, little family: my mother and me, a two-year old little thing with sprigs of honeysuckle hair. The story goes that I reached for him, smiling, and that was it. All my father had ever wanted was the chance to have a family. He didn’t know that we were ticking time bombs: my mother was already cracking from the inside, out. I knew, on some level, that my father’s strength had begun to ebb the day he carried my mother out of the medical lounge. I had grown up with the sag of his shoulders and his sad, wet eyes. The window of his sobriety was surprisingly short: he would come home from work, wrench his tie off, and take me grocery shopping. While he cooked, he drank bloody marys from white Styrofoam cups. The top of his lips were stained red from the putrid tomato juice, his hands shaking while he chopped and sautéed. He kept his vodka on

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the porch, where my mother couldn’t see. Once he passed out on his recliner, there was no reaching him. I would just curl up beside him, listening to him breathe, pretending he was there with me. That first night in New Hampshire, it rained hard. My mother, maybe afraid, slept close to me on an army cot. I stared at the dark profile of her face for a while, realizing that I couldn’t pull her out of her preternatural slumber. The house could be burning, and there she would remain: breathing through her mouth, lips open, her face stippled with shadow. I tried to call my father, listening to the endless ringing and the shallow recording of his voice. It was in that moment that I realized what it really meant for him to be drunk. He was totally inaccessible to me. I couldn’t simply reach over and shake him awake. Feeling alone, my thoughts collapsed into warm, salty tears. Eventually, I had the painful realization that my tears wouldn’t wake my mother, wouldn’t bring her to me. The rain lashed against the windows, blurring my view of the roof shingles and the muddy lawn. I would learn to slip away, just as both of my parents did, when these feelings threatened to eclipse me.

Days Before

I am sick. It’s mid-September and the hallways feel stifled, the air is still heavy and pregnant

with moisture. I ran out of cold syrup a few days ago, but I can’t buy anymore because I’m not eighteen. There’s two mental countdowns drilled into my head: the day I’m a legal adult and graduation. I’m not sure what’s more pressing at this point. The wave of initial back-toschool sickness passes for most, but I keep getting more and more sick.

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“You don’t look so great.” I’m perched on one of the black lab tables, watching my feet skim the floor. I get to school as soon as the custodians unlock the door, then I make my rounds to the teachers who arrive early. Mrs. Ahrens, who never actually taught me, looks up from her keyboard. She hands me a tissue. “Weird that you haven’t gotten any better. Did you go to the doctor’s?” I can’t go to a doctor’s without a legal guardian, but I don’t say this. “It’s just stress.” I shrug my shoulder, accustomed to lying to well-meaning adults. “You know, senior stuff.” There are half-moon indentations in my palms. Perfect impressions of my fingernails. The truth is, people are starting to notice. Leaving

I wake up to the sound of her moaning. It’s maybe eleven at night, a few hours after

my shift ended at work. Shit, shit, shit. She’s trying to climb the ladder of my loft bed, but doesn’t have the strength. Through the thick darkness, I can make out the shape of her at the bottom rung. Her body sags against the cold, black metal, crouched in thin bars of moonlight. I’ve never seen her like this.

“Kat,” she cries.

“Go back to sleep.” The words come out as a half-audible croak. I had almost lost my

voice at work.

“God...Katherine.”

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“What the hell do you want?” I prop myself up, trying to feel bigger than I am.

Sometimes, when she gets like this, I have to be mean. Loud. But it’s hard when my bones feel hollow with sleep, my voice a raft that keeps slipping away from me.

“Shadow...figures.” She’s talking slow, an awful slurring. “Can’t. Sleep.”

My head screams. I just want to sleep so then I can wake up, go to school. Closing my

eyes, I try and imagine myself sitting cross legged in the hallway. I can see the checkered linoleum, cool to the touch. For a minute, this stills the hammering in my chest.

There’s a loud crashing sound and she’s back on the ground. It’s hard to believe that

this is my mother. I once loved her, I know this. But now all I know is disgust, black and acrid in the back of my throat. And for the first time in my life, I’m scared of her. I’m terrified of what I’ve become, exhausted and brittle and uncaring. Or maybe I care too much.

My mother crawls back to my door, and then collapses against the threshold. She’s

been saying things, but I can no longer distinguish words. I touch my hot cheeks, only to realize that I’ve been crying, too. Quickly, I climb out of bed and stagger to the door, turn the lock. I have never locked myself in from my mother. A moment later, I can hear her weakly pounding against the wood. Crying harder.

“Please, just leave me alone,” I whisper. I have given up all pretenses of being mean.

I want to fold up in on myself, to become very small. There’s the sound of her throwing her body against the door and then more crying. I drag myself to the closet and curl up on the carpet, hands over my ears. The sound of her, broken and ragged, slices through me. I just want it to be over already, for her to sleep it off. When was the last time she slept? When was the last time she was cognizant? I suddenly can’t remember.

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I wake up to the shrill sound of the fire alarm.

For a minute, panic forks its way across my skin like cold water. White light flashes

from the corners of the room. My dog whines from my feet, pacing across the covers. His ears are up, just as shocked as I am. I tuck him under my arm and slip out of bed, sniffing to see if I can smell smoke. I think of all of the electrical wires, tangled and hidden under the rising trash in our living room. Images of embers, tongues of flame, fill up my vision. But I move quickly, not one to panic. I’ve had too many brushes with ambulance sirens and hospital monitors to really be scared. All I can think of is how I am going to move my mother. She is so much bigger than I am, especially if she’s unconscious. And there’s no way that I can ask for help.

“Mom?” The apartment is dark and silent, aside from the screeching fire alarms. I pivot my

dog in my arms, straining to hold onto him and find the light switch. As usual, I am horrified to see the conditions that I live in. My room is my sanctuary--a recent one, too, since I used to share a room with my mother. The rest of the apartment is a sprawl of trash that I carefully work my way around. I continue to scan the living room, where my mom has been sleeping because her room is too uninhabitable. In my confusion, with the throbbing white lights screaming behind me, I don’t notice that there is pounding at the front door. “Police!”

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I run to the door, unbolting it as fast I can. I am face to face with officers, their faces grim. I can see neighbors streaming out behind them, collecting like flies at the edge of the wallpapered hallway. They stare at me, at the police, at the white flashing alarms. The men push into the apartment and start looking around. One turns to me, a familiar look in his eyes. “We were called because there was a suspected intruder.” “What?”

“Is there anyone else in here?”

“No, it’s just me. I can’t find my…” And then I stop. Peering across the officer’s

shoulder, I can see her, incoherent with her fear. God, she did this.

The officers exchange looks. I am very familiar with their disbelief, their annoyance.

“Is that your mother?”

I nod because my voice might betray me. One officer says something into his radio

and then talks to the other officer, who goes to talk with my mother, or maybe the building superintendent. Embarrassment makes my cheeks hot. I immediately turn, because I can’t just stand here. I can’t look at her anymore. The officer follows me, because he has to take a statement.

“I’m sorry, she’s not very present at the moment.” I stop. “Annmarie Wagner. My

mother.”

“Oh.” He scribbles something on his pad. I have to keep moving to disguise how

badly I am shaking. She really was so lost in her hallucinations, that shadow men were creeping through the apartment, that she left me. She left me to be discovered by police and roaring fire alarms. It’s maybe four in the morning, but I stuff books into my backpack,

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determined not to take in the officer’s expression: pity, anger, annoyance. But what he says next makes me freeze.

“Do you live here?”

It’s just a routine question. After all, this is my bedroom and these are my books. My

dog calmly regards me as I zip my bag shut. This is going to be okay. I’m okay. I don’t even realize I’ve spoken until the words are already out:

“No. No I don’t live here.”

The officer nods and leaves. I grip the railing of my bed to steady myself with one

hand. Okay, okay, okay. The familiar mantra is like warm air flowing through my lungs. The alarm shuts off and the sudden silence echoes in my head like a phantom drum beat. My other palm is still on my bookbag, frozen. The blood rushes in my ears, a loud cacophony that is really just my breathing. I rummage through the closet and grab some clothes.

No. No I don't live here. Not anymore.

I run out into the night, past the other residents who are slowly streaming back into

the building in confusion. It’s not until I’m sitting in the car that I finally open up my phone. I have nowhere to go; I have never asked for help. Never considered leaving. Who am I supposed to contact? The only people I can think of reaching out to, my friends, have never glimpsed into this side of my life. Outside, there’s a warm, gentle breeze that envelopes the car. I crack open the windows, thinking that maybe I can smell oncoming rain. Inside the car, the screen lights up my face, casting it a bluish color. This decision is larger than I am. It fills me with a kind of determination, a kind of hope, that I have never experienced before. Not since the moment when I was eleven and realized how truly alone I was.

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Is anyone awake? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m in trouble. Please. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wait for a response, just pull away from the parking space. I let the predawn darkness settle around my shoulders like a blanket.

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FOUR CHAMBERS Rob McClure Smith THE ARTIST Cheryl Bedrieger (1990-2018)

Biographical

Born in 1990 in Weehawken, New Jersey, Cheryl Bedrieger ranks among the most

influential artists of the last decade. Upon graduating from the State University at Stony Brook in 2011, Bedrieger relocated to New York City where she began making her seminal De-con series. A retrospective of Bedrieger's work is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, the exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Vasters Art Center, Minneapolis and the Dallas Museum of Art. A selective exhibition organized by the Logn Skojare Museum, Stockholm will open in 2020 before traveling to other European venues. Also in February, Dini Imbroglione, in cooperation with the Sciocco Perscherzo Milan, published a catalogue raisonne of formative early works produced by Bedrieger between 2012 and 2014.

Cheryl Bedrieger has had one-person exhibitions at institutions that include:

Martin-Gropius-Scherz, Berlin (2014); Sakhai Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (2014); Jeu de Filou, Paris (2015); Auferstzt, Hanover, Germany (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art,

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Chicago (2016); Museum Han-Van-Meegeren, Rotterdam (2016); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Ebaucador, Madrid (2016); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017). Bedrieger has most recently participated in major group shows and biennials such as: MELtDown, 54th Venice Biennale (2015); Dis-Integrate, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); The Skin: Selections from the Wolfgang Beltracchi Collection, New Museum, New York (2017); Color Feel(ed): Artists from the Yves Chaudron Collection, Ponte Dei Sospiri, Venice (2016/17); and Digital Deathscape: 1997-2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017).

Artist Statement

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cheryl Bedrieger's works are experiments. She began not as a painter but as an artist who used paint as raw material and viewed the critical interrogation of the material as its own subject. As such, she was initially identified with the Speculative Realists and that key movement's materialist erasure of the dying embers of humanism. As her work developed, between 2011 and 2018, a process of metamorphosis occurred and her accessible deconstruction of the material undergirding of the art object underwent a gradual transformation into difficult conceptual territory raising serious ethical questions for contemporary aesthetics regarding the position of the artist adrift in a digital world. This metamorphosis also provides a new perspective that alters, with hindsight, the significance of her earlier experiment. In order to work through the critical implications of this evolution, it is necessary to fly in the face of the artist's own expressly non-theoretical, even anti-theoretical stance. Paradoxically, it is because there is no explicit citation of theory in

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the work, no explanatory words, no linguistic clues that theory can here come into its own. If Bedrieger's work stays on the side of enigma it is as a critical challenge and is never altogether an insoluble mystery. Breaking that enigmatic code, deciphering those hidden clues, participating in the artist's post-Benjamin digital aura and, in so doing, applying the theoretical tools associated with our own critical episteme is, to use one of the artist's own revelatory ironic phrases, a project 'to die for.'" -Excerpt from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Deconstruction Digitalis: Cheryl Bedrieger 2011-18,â&#x20AC;? by Laura Ponaredek. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England. 2016. Pp 64-5. THE EXHIBIT CHAMBER ONE: I WOULD NOT PAINT A PICTURE (2012) 1) Title: Color Feel(ed) Artist: Cheryl Bedrieger Date: 2011 Dimensions: 5 1/4 x 14 in. (13.3 x 35.6 cm.) Credit Line: Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Pei-Shen Qian Medium: Oil on canvas Keyword: Abstract

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Label Bedrieger originally wanted to create work “about which no questions can be asked” and never intended an abstract image to represent anything other than itself (See “24 lines of words on useless art statements,” in Broma, ed., Art-as-Art-as-Art, 2014). Here, the artist focuses on the canvas surface creating a pattern from lines and smudged blocks of color. The painting’s small size intensifies its energetic palette and brushstrokes, as if the tightly compressed shapes might explode from the canvas at any moment. Warm reds and purples contrast with cooler yellow hues, highlighting areas of overlap. The significance of these color choices is apparent only when viewing the other realist (sic) canvases in the series. Object Quote “The intellectual and emotional content [of my art] is where the colors come from.” Bedrieger, 2011, ACA Magazine, quoted in Ponaredek, Deconstruction Digitalis, 2016. 2) Title: On Whom I Lay A Yellow Eye Artist: Cheryl Bedrieger Date: 2011 Dimensions: 21 x 56 in. (53.2 x 142.4 cm.) Credit Line: Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of John Drewe Medium: Oil on canvas Keyword: Landscape exterior, Figure group. Animal-cow

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Label Gwalas force-feed a cow with mango leaves in the Bengalese city of Monghyr. The animal's stick-thin and malnourished appearance is a consequence of the fact that these leaves constitute its only diet and sustenance. Later, the cow's desiccated urine will be collected in terracotta pots and clarified as syrup over an open flame and then filtered and dried into pigment clumps called piuri to be sold to European artists as 'Indian Yellow.' The lemony luminescence of this canvas is a consequence of Bedrieger's use of a few of the crumbly spheres deployed by Turner and Van Gogh in their 19th-century masterpieces and, it is rumored, the admixture of her own urine as solvent. Object Quote "It may be that Mukharji lied about the origins of Indian Yellow. I entertain the thought and am entertained by it, if somewhat jaundiced. Hah! Does it matter? What else but the faint odor of piss extracted from dying animals would make the yellow stars of Saint-RĂŠmy-deProvence so alive?" Bedrieger, quoted in Ponaredek. 3) Title: A Rush of Cochineal Artist: Cheryl Bedrieger Date: 2011 Dimensions: 80 3/4 x 66 in. (205.1 x 167.7 cm.) Credit Line: Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Elmyr De Hory

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Medium: Oil on canvas Keyword: Landscape exterior, Figure group. Animal-insect Label In the left frame of this odd triptych is represented the great market of Tenochtitlan where Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors are offered bales of carmine cloth by Aztec nobility. In the central frame, a farmer scoops cochineal insects from cacti into a bag. The deep red of carmine is extracted from the acid the oval-shaped bugs produce to fend off predators. The acid is decanted through a crushing of the insects. The right frame shows the massacre of the Aztecs by Cortés at Cholula. The blood of the slaughtered is rendered in the familiar vivid cochineal of Titian and Tintoretto. The painting's Mexican-red saturation is a result of the discovery of a batch of the original color in 1982 in a Boston warehouse and its blend with the Ébauche of the artist's menses. Object Quote "Sure, they can make it about colonialism if they want. I can't stop them, Cortés the Killer and that. It's been done though. I prefer to think of it as a case of what goes around comes around. And for me what comes around goes in." Bedrieger, quoted in Ponaredek. 4) Title: Quenching in Purple Artist: Cheryl Bedrieger Date: 2011 Dimensions: 5 1/4 x 14 in. (13.3 x 35.6 cm.)

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Credit Line: Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Eric Hebborn Medium: Oil on canvas Keyword: Landscape exterior, Animal-shellfish Label A seascape rendered in vivid shades of purple. An elegant cloak of Tyrian purple is blown along a desolate sandy beach to snag on rocks upon which murex sea snails are clustered. Despite its association since antiquity with regality and luxuriance, Tyrian purple is actually distilled from the mucous gland of the murex that is located below the mollusc's rectum. It took thousands of hypobranchial glands of the sea snail to empurple one swatch of fabric and the past manufacture of the color, given the repugnant stench from faecal excretions, was most unpleasant. Bedrieger's fascination with the intersection of high and low, of ideal and cloacal, and of her viewer's somatic interaction with the materiality of the canvas is subtly reinforced by the faint odor still emanating from it. Object Quote "Actually, it's just my homage to Prince. No, seriously. Did you know that in Phoenicia the nearer to the color of clotted blood a dye manufacturer could get the more expensive his product? See, there's nothing new in the art world." Bedrieger, quoted in Ponaredek

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CHAMBER TWO: LETTER TO A YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR (2015) Title: The Blood Jet is Poetry Artist: Cheryl Bedrieger Date: 2015 Dimensions: 5 1/4 x 14 in. (13.3 x 35.6 cm.) Credit Line: Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Tatiana Khan Medium: Photograph Label The work Bedrieger made between 2013 and 2015 was deeply informed by her tumultuous two-year relationship with the Swedish author Ivar Kreuger. This affair is detailed explicitly in Volumes 4-6 of Kreuger's monumental autobiographical novel Jag SjĂ¤lv Och Andra (My Self And Others). Devastated by the startling revelations in her lover's auto-fiction and the trauma of their subsequent breakup, Bedrieger's art was thoroughly transformed. In early 2015, she wrote a poem dedicated to Krieger. This, she never shared with him. Instead, she carefully framed and photographed the typed text and proceeded to make a large painting of the photograph also spattering the canvas with droplets of blood and etching phrases 'This my letter to the world fucked me over' and 'U bored ME senseless and 'wash yr hair dipshit' with a palette knife. Bedrieger photographed the painting prior to destroying it in a ritual bonfire filmed for her Youtube channel. This is that original photograph. The title is from the American poet Anne Sexton and the only reference to

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poetry in the artist's canon. The continuity from the Chamber One experiment is evident in the four-stage process of making and unmaking an original. However, where beforehand a painting disintegrates into the original layering of color that constitutes it, here four modes of artistic representation are systematically engaged (photography, painting, poetry and video) in order to bring fourth (the artist's own cringe-worthy pun) an artwork greater than the sum of its constituent elements. The Poem Text Poem Alla Prima The color so laid on impasto. Squat yellow moon slung low over some brown scumbling of leafless orchards. Cue chiaroscuro of bone white trees. Cue sfumato: shining black sheets of rain. In the dark motherlap blossoms blossom still: Night Phlox, Nottingham Catchfly, Angel's Trumpet, Moonflower white, Yucca, Evening Stock, Night-blooming Cereus sweating lightning Sweet thick scent of vanilla in this bleeding midnight of bleeding flowers. By the deckle edge, paper cockles where the stretching gesso gave.

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That all this might be a patina of null, A grisaille, not this gouache explosion, And might that I not still want you. Object Quote â&#x20AC;&#x153;Once something was over, it was over. I felt no need to revisit it. Art or person, it's the same thing.â&#x20AC;? Bedrieger, quoted in Ponaredek. CHAMBER THREE: THE QUICK WORE OFF THESE THINGS (2016) Title: Insta-Grammatical Artist: Cheryl Bedrieger Date: 2016 Dimensions: 16 photo series 5 1/4 x 14 in. (13.3 x 35.6 cm.) from Finsta original Credit Line: Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Heinrich Campendonk Medium: Photograph Label Bedrieger's "Insta-Grammatical" performance is only three years old, but in the digital age feels like much longer. On the surface, the project is simple: Using fake Instagram and Facebook profiles, Bedrieger, now 25, spun a scripted online performance of herself as an

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optimistic young woman pursuing her acting dreams in New York City. The first of the 144 postings by the pseudonymous 'Anna Delvey' are innocuous ("another crazy honey funny sunny morning in the Big Apple aaaaahhhh i lov my life" is a typical early selfie caption) and feature mostly banal inspirational messages. However, after a break up with Amalia Sherman, a supposed lover ("why be sad cos it's over, smile cos it happened bae, smile cos u heart is breakin, smile cos u never fakin"), the postings became increasingly grim and disturbing. 'Anna' chronicles her post-breakup breakdown via a catalogue of sexy mirror selfies, which include a period of sexual intrigue with a rich sugar daddy, recovery from surgical breast and cheek implants, and a habit of tearful confessional videos in the small hours of the morning. Finally, 'Anna' details her recovery and recuperation through ballet, mindfulness and foam rolling. In the course of this four-act narrative, Bedrieger's fake Instagram acquired 200,000 followers who avidly watched 'Anna's' personal journey evolve, at least until her final revelation that it was all in fact a performance designed to reveal how emotions and experiences are staged on social media in order to have others bear witness to and confirm one's fragile personhood. Comments on the photographs, becoming over time increasingly vitriolic and misogynistic in nature, are an intrinsic part of the project. (Photos 1-4 from the Luxury to Apprehend series) These photographs are extracted from the original 'rich hot babe slumming' sequence. Through clever use of sets, props, locations and a consistent pink and cream color scheme, Bedrieger fashions a peppy and consumerist fantasy lifestyle. The carefully

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arranged flowers in vases, expensive lingerie and bath soaps and luxury hotel interiors seem both excessive and strangely familiar from the now standard tropes of Instagram representation. Note the replication of the medium's narrative conventions, including the artist's use of hashtags (#simple #pretty #cutegasm #solovely) and the discerning inclusion of 'authentic' intimate or emotional content. The attached comments are encouraging and happy face emoticons predominate. (The Photos 5-8 from the Look of Agony series) These photographs are from 'the meltdown' sequence. After the 'breakup' with her 'girlfriend' and its 'aftermath' the poses become more explicitly sexual and the captioning more aggressive. Following an initial series of posts of herself red-faced and crying on video loop, 'Anna' transforms almost overnight into an increasingly ditzy platinum blonde offering a plethora of pouty faces and apologies ("Haha so dumb I didn kno i was even recordin"; "thought africa a country all this tim but isnt"; "racism sooooo bad"). In response, the comments are harsher as followers critique her growing vanity ("You're beautifulâ&#x20AC;Śbut so boring" #getalife #bitchslap #kindawhiney! #dumbass #whitegirlprob). (The Photos 9-13 from the Your Riches Taught Me Poverty series)

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The controversial 'sugar-daddy' sequence begins with the selfie captioned 'Mile High Turbulence' (#9) in which the artist appears disheveled in an airplane bathroom, skirt hiked above her waist, shadowy male figure in the mirror behind her. The young girl in pastel-hues who loved goldfish and rabbits has now mutated into a hard-edged sloe-eyed minx. Other photos in this sequence are sexually provocative, featuring blurry images of creamy skin and black stockings with dollar bills stuffed in the elastic. In #11 the artist, topless, brandishes a gun and fans a wad of cash. The hints that she works as an escort and has undergone breast augmentation surgery combined with narcissistic sugar-baby remarks ('reasons i wanna look good/for myself/to break other bitch's hearts/for myself" and "cashflow lovin it, cashho livin it" provoke a backlash of cheap flattery, vulgar propositions, and abusive comments (#cheapwhore #slutface #arttart #frankenboob lol") (The Photos 13-16 from the Knowledge of Your Recovery sequence) The 'journey to health' sequence features the artist's self-portrayal as newly minted wellness-oriented green juicer whose recovery jump-starts a healthy vegan lifestyle. The pictures are of ginseng tea and avocado toast on immaculate white porcelain, of Vesper Boards, kimchi shakes and lectin-free diet tips, of the artist meditating towards an inner peace through yogic trance studded with inspirational quotes from the Dalai Lama and Gwyneth Paltrow etc. Hashtags like #grateful #namaste #healthy #fitnlit" predominate although the hashtag comments are scathing (#Gooppoop #eatgrass #stancancel)

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The last photo of the sequence and of the Insta-Grammatical project is a solitary blue screen without text (#16). What followed on these fake accounts was resolute silence. Bedrieger would never photograph herself again and did not permit her picture to be taken during interviews. She was not photographed until her autopsy. Object Quote "I was interested in the aesthetics of the images and in being the brand. These days we are all required to be a celebrity and need to learn these skills. Once I go online, though, it's not me. When I state myself as the representative, I do not mean ME, but a supposed person. I got calls from companies to be an influencer. Verizon would you believe? Can an artist be an influencer even? Can you hear me now? Yes and no. Could you believe me--without? I don't know." Bedrieger, quoted in Ponaredek. CHAMBER FOUR: FOUR CHAMBERS (2017) Label Bedrieger's final work is a deeply enigmatic and meaningful experience: a four-part walkthrough installation designed to facilitate a new relationship between the viewer and the art by putting visitors physically inside a digital space. Blue Room (A Slash of Blue!)

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You are surrounded by coral reefs of varying heights as computer-generated sharks swim around you. Your experience is quite unique as the generated images respond to your movement as you walk through this underwater simulacrum. With more than one person in the room the images change based on the multiple movements, the sharks becoming more frantic and aggressive, with the process intensifying further as others enter. In this way, your art experience is also significantly enhanced when surrounded by other viewers in the room. You become a part of this collective art experience. Red Room (Scarlet Experiment!) The lasers of this artwork are controlled by your smart-phone (use the dongles provided). You can thus create your own shifting patterns with the shafts of red light and are not only within the art, but helping to create the art that envelops you. White Room (White Election!) No phones are permitted in this room. Please remove your shoes. Follow the videoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s instructions, as articulated by the unseen narrator. Fulfill her basic requests until your preassigned number is called and you are permitted to proceed to the final room. America (No Room For The Americans)

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The recurring and disturbing sound you hear is an amplified human heartbeat. Step forward to the gap in the glass partition screen and grasp the hologram gun as you would an actual weapon. Slip finger through loop. The COP .357 Derringer is four-chambered (like the human heart) and will allow you to 'fire' four times at the hooded and bound figure seated in the high-backed chair located between the horizontal metal frames and draped curtains opposite. The arrangement quotes Bacon's Study of Velรกzquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X while also explicitly channeling Burden's notorious 1971 Shoot. This installation recreates the artist's now notorious last performance at the Muzeu Plastograf in Bucharest on the evening of 6/14/18. Pull trigger when ready. Note: Some viewers may find the contents of this room offensive. Object Quote The artist never discussed the meaning or significance of her final installation.

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Revolution

Matt Duggan

We are crab claws bones scattered on the sand washed up from the beach and returned to the master of sea; detached by the beauty that resonates from the deepest surface of ocean. Where they throw us back onto dryland believing that they can give just enough of what we want— a veneer like salt to lassitude and distractions. Though the sea is not our ruler who scribes out the future— They ask that the revolution will never raise a glass to those comrades as they’ve given us just enough of what we want— no longer do we think while we’re mainlined into google chrome.

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CONTRIBUTORS

HANNAH MARY BLANKENSHIP was born in Orlando, Florida and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. She now lives and works in Bremen, Germany. She is a law school dropout, a writer, a musician, and a convenience store clerk selling cigarettes and booze rather beautifully. Her EP 'Born Among Wild Beasts' was released in March 2018. KATHERINE BROWN is finishing her undergraduate at the University of Mary Washington and plans to pursue an MFA for nonfiction. Her work gravitates around the exploration of family. MATT DUGGANâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S poems have appeared in various journals such as The High Window, Marble Poetry Magazine, Into the Void, Confluence, The Journal, winner of the erbacce prize in 2015 and Into the Void in 2016, his new full collection ' Woodworm' will be available June 2019 at https://www.woodwormpoetrycollection.com TRAVIS LANDHUIS adjuncts in writing departments at colleges in Iowa and keeps himself alive by writing freelance websites about back surgery and limo rentals and different types of garage doors. Actually, no. That's not true. He keeps himself alive by writing and reading fiction. The rest just helps him eat. RIKKI SANTERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Margie, The Journal of American Poetry, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, Grimm, Slipstream and The Main Street Rag. Her work has received many honors including four Pushcart and three Ohioana book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her seventh collection, In Pearl Broth, was published this spring by Stubborn Mule Press. www.rikkisanter.com

LAURA SHABOTT is part of a core group of artists whose presence and practices - whether visual, literary or performance -ensures the continuance of Provincetown as a vital arts colony. In 2015, the multi-disciplinary artist returned to painting and drawing through the teachings of Robert Henry and a Romano Rizk Scholarship from PAAM. About her solo show at Four Eleven Gallery in 2018, Emily Mergel writes for Artscope Magazine "Shabott continually draws inspiration from abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann and breaks forms into their most evocative essentials...She seizes the opportunity to burst the gallery walls, speaking with intentional gesture in visual vocabulary all her own."

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A teaching artist at PAAM, Castle Hill and the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Shabott works with adults who want to immerse themselves in drawing and painting after other careers and journeys. ROB MCCLURE SMITH'S fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Barcelona Review, Manchester Review and many other literary magazines. His collection The Violence was published by Queen's Ferry Press in 2016.

STEVEN RAY SMITH'S poetry has appeared in Slice, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, Barrow Street, New Madrid, Tar River Poetry and others. New work is in North Dakota Quarterly, Guesthouse and Chaleur Magazine. His web site is www.StevenRaySmith.org. He lives in Austin.

JILL M. TALBOT'S writing has appeared in CV2, The Fiddlehead, Geist, Rattle, PRISM, The Stinging Fly, and others. Jill won the PRISM Grouse Grind Lit Prize. She was shortlisted for the Matrix Lit POP Award and the Malahat Far Horizons Award. Jill lives in Vancouver, BC.

JOEL WAYNE’S writing has appeared in Burningword, The Chattahoochee Review, The Moth, Salon, and elsewhere. He has won the Silver Creek Writer's Residency, the Lamar York Prize, and is a Pushcart nominee. Wayne produces the NPR-affiliate programs “Reader’s Corner” and “You Know The Place” and can be visited at www.JoelWayne.com.

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