PROJECT ARTS CREATIVE WRITING 2022
Project Arts 2022 • 2 Contents Writing Crew [RENAME SECTION] Judy ChenTo the Day to Day MatthewAugustChen4th, 2022 Prisha GuptaShewas Never One for Extremes WilliamThHerffeNews Reports for Tyler King Kevin HuangTickTick Tick Ravi JainCounting Sheep Joshua LeeThe Fish and the Bird Kerry LumOpen Shut Sancia MiltonLetterHome Abby MeltonSeattle, Washington AlveenaAftNadeemer-School Cafe Julian OrregoSleepto Dream Trisha SantanamInscape Havish ShirumallaNirvanaforMice Coco deStillVinkWork-in-Progress...? In form of poem. 28232221201917161411109874
3 • Creative Writing
Next to her, April could feel Peter’s leg jiggling furiously. She glanced over at him meaningfully, and after a moment, he spoke.
It felt unfitting that April Legasky would move out just as summer began, when most kids were not yet out of school and the sun was only just starting to boil down with all its piercing rage. She was to leave at five tomorrow morning. With her, the last bits of what she and Peter had decided she’d take would move eleven hours south to a small town house already half furnished.Peter still hadn’t come home—this wasn’t surprising anymore, he’d been staying out with his friends later and later each day since they had finalized their separation—but even by these new standards it was beginning to be late. With Vincent back at school and all of April’s belongings packed, checked, and double checked, this meant April was left alone in this house for four with nothing to keep her company beyond her own thoughts.
A pause.
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“Vincent,” she began. “There’s something your father and I need to tell you.”
In the perfectly rounded circle of her dinner plate, her face looked as if it were haloed in a wan gray light. Only the last bits of gravy and the remaining pile of potatoes scraped to the top betrayed her mortality.
To the Day to Day Judy Chen
It’d been a long time since she’d had so much quiet all to herself, and even longer since April had last found herself facing such a different tomorrow.She turned over, checked the time again, and sighed.Perhaps Peter would not be returning home at all tonight. Perhaps the gutted rooms of the house they had lived in for twelve years was too much for him to bear. She couldn’t see the empty rooms when laying in bed, but the silence of the house was unsettling. Maybe in her new home she’d buy something that’d make soft noise as she slept. What kind of sounds would she want to listen to? Music? White noise? Maybe she’d leave the windows open, and let the sounds of the street help her fallWhatasleep.would Peter add to this house after she left?Deciding such things would have to come after the unpacking, and the cleaning, and the checking of all utilities in her new house. She would need to make sure all her old registration information was properly changed, and she would need to make whatever calls were necessary to make. Then she would need to shop, and clean, and get prepared for her new job, and greet the neighbors, and drive around to become more familiar with the city, and then she would need to clean, and cook, and eat, and Aprilshower…woke up.
“This…won’t be easy to hear. But it’s not easy to say either, and while we know you might be confused and angry, please know that we really did try our best.”
At nearly four years old, her son was just beginning to run around like a child possessed, smiling his extra-gummy smiles as he hopped and jumped through every game Peter played with Hehim.smiled extra wide when April joined them,Sheltoo. had discussed with Peter how she could balance taking care of Vincent and new classes, but while Peter did encourage her to continue every time she asked, between his full-time job down at the docks and her parttime job working to helping manage the flower shop downtown, she would not have time to fit together the cleaning and cooking and basic time and attention a growing child needed if she picked up hours of extra classes and studying now.April hesitated, gripped the worn down mouse, and then closed the browser.
With one fluid motion, he reached into his suit and pulled out a small silver box. His eyes were earnest and dark and smooth like river stones. In the fiery glow of the sinking sun, April saw how her blue dress turned russet, how the light spread over Peter’s hair.
5 • Creative Writing
It was alright that she couldn’t go back to school yet. It wasn’t right to focus on these things now, anyways. She had a family, and she would not regret that for the world. Her other plans would just have to wait a bit. Maybe next year… April woke up.
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to be able to wake up next to you, every day, and know that I am the luckiest man alive,” said Peter Lagasky, in front of her and down on one knee.
Peter saw this too, and under the table April gave his hand a small, firm squeeze before getting up to stand over by Vincent’s side. She tried to reach out to his shoulder, to reassure him that they still loved him and that they would still be a family even now, but before she could he lurched out of his chair and ran up the stairs. A door slammed loudly. “Vincent!” Peter said, standing up now as well. April looked down. Something was wrong. Passing by her plate, she saw her potatoes begin to rot right before her eyes, each seasoned slice shriveling and darkening like the buds of a new black rose. The gravy stiffened, solidified, and erupted in mold. The chairs sagged, and the table groaned, and when she reached down for her fork, it began to melt, its metal dripping over her hand, into the tablecloth, and then down, down, down to the carpet… (unfinished) April woke up. Today was June 25th, the last day to apply for a start in the fall season. Her application was finished and unsent. It would only take $70 and a few more clicks to set herself on an entire year in a classroom filled with other students, where she’d be one step closer to becoming someone hired to do research full time. But that would also mean one entire year of not being able to fully care for Vincent.
“Lately, we’ve been arguing a lot. I’m sure you’ve noticed, and while we both tried to work things out, your mother and I”—he glanced at her, just a quick, sharp movement of the chin— “have agreed that it would be best if we parted ways.”His statement hung in the air like a pungent stink, leaving all three of them stuck holding their“We’rebreaths.getting divorced,” she said. From across the table, Vincent stared back at them in silence. His eyes were glassy and dark and smooth like river stones.
“I want to be with you, always.”
Project Arts 2022 • “April…Would6 you marry me?” She said yes. Ecstatic, he leapt up and crushed her in a wild embrace. April could feel his heart beating rapidly through his jacket, and as they walked back home from the lake and the air got chillier he took it off himself and wrapped it around her instead. Peter was sweet like that.Itwas why she decided she would say yes when he finally did propose. For someone to spend the rest of her life with, he was better than most others. In the back of her mind, April knew this wasn’t how most people felt when they got engaged, but it was going to be fine. She was fond of Peter, and he made her laugh, and that would be enough. And even after marriage, she could still easily become a professor or do whatever else it is she wanted to do,Hertoo.heart beat a steady rhythm in her chest. Together, they walked past the blooming rose bushes, the left out bikes, the ducks settling in for the night. When they stepped off the lake path and set out on the small street to their way home, the bruise pink clouds of the evening sky began to converge. The cotton mass in the sky started to swell in size, and then it suddenly fell apart. Large clumps of shimmering dust drifted down slowly. But on second look, the clumps weren’t dust. They were grinded glass shards, and they were falling faster now, sparkling and twinkling and glittering down into April’s hair, falling over her nose, entering her mouth and then filling up her eyes… (unfinished) April woke up. Next to her, her phone shrieked, each cry of its alarm making it lightly shake and bounce around. It was too early for the sun to be shining, but the birds were already beginning to scream at each other. In the darkness, each shape of the house blended in with the next. April rolled out of bed and started her day.
7 • Creative Writing August 4th, 2022
Matthew Chen
It is customary to fear four in my culture. come in four: every human has four grandparents, four wings, four weak chambers of the heart, heart disease affects fours. We crawl on all fours towards yeye in a crowded apartment in Shanghai with smoke-filled eyes, four years old, just barely in the world. Four steps to live, four steps to die, four dumplings in the soup that takes four breaths to dull, four bridges To cross to my mother’s mud motherland, four rains to wash away the mud, four seasons to bring it back, four ways to say goodbye, four monitors in the ICU, four, Four, four, four, four, four, four, four means x Death in Chinese. Si is Si death is four and four is Fourdeath.isnever said. Death is a hurried glance and a scowl. Four is permanent like loss, to dream of four is to prophecy loss. Four is easier in the mouth and on the tongue than saying those words fours times, for you. Four is me and I am four. It’s been four days since you’ve died and I do not know what comes after three.
She8 was Never One for Extremes Prisha Gupta Humidity is her chest tightening, her throat choking, the tears gathering in her eyes but never falling. She hasn’t cried in 100 years. She’s let the sun shine bright. She’s beat, burned, scalded, and dried— melted skin while the birds flew. We hated her smile. Comforting warmth turning into suffocating heat, we begged her to cry. She bawled in the dark, releasing terrifying cracks of thunder and lightning. We watched the lake rise and water run— held underhandsahidden sun. In the murky blue, you can see him, Destruction so peaceful, his soft hands brushing the tears off her face, celestial waters falling and falling. My heart crumpled and squeezed as she ignored drowning pleas. Why must we have to wallow in tears? Why must we sink in them and be swept away? We hate how she’s treating us. She’s not holding back anymore as his fingers guide torrent waters: A lesson. I know we deserve it. But here, away from capitols and white houses, shoulder deep in water that was once yesteryear’s ice, What do we do?
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“I’ll probably just donate them,” she told our reporters, “who needs all that freightage anyway.”
9 • Creative Writing The News Reports for Tyler King William Herff New Vulture Protection Act Ruins Orientation Scavenger Hunt
On Wednesday, college orientation leaders at the University of Literacy had their plans for incoming students thwarted by the passage of the new Vulture Protection Act. Planning to spend the week poaching various species of scavenger vultures, the counselors were expansively irritated with the untimely news, which comes just one day before the arrival of the class of 2026.
The reform has taken a serious toll on scavenger hunt extraordinaire and program director, Brody Fishman, who was at a loss for words yesterday, when we caught him at the local lake. We had to let him off the hook (which was tough, considering he really bit into it) and talk to color crew leader Kylie Kruxel instead. “It’s a real disappointment,” she said with tears filling her eyes, “I spent my whole summer planning this hunt, and now–now it’s wrecked.” Kruxel is a wunderkind of the University of Literacy, and boy do we like the cut of her jib. She’s bright, capable of solving quadratics, and, apparently, purchasing 500 military-grade crossbows on the school’s budget without raising an eyebrow.
Old Man Rejoices as Viagra Spill Triggers City-Wide Hard Water Crisis
Craig Hotard, 73, told reporters Wednesday he was rejoiced by the hard water crisis instigated by the municipal viagra spill. Unable to tell whether Craig had a banana in his pants or if he was just excited to be on the news, our sources confirm that the viagra spill has given hard water an entirely new meaning. Most of the viagra has ended up in the city’s aquifer and is capable of yanking the carnal marionette strings skyward for those curious enough to consume the tap water. “I’ve been collecting the stuff in jars,” said Hotard, who had to make 3-4 trips a week to pick up his arousing medication before the spill. He’s hoping the water doesn’t run soft anytime soon, because right now his life has never been more convenient, and his exploits on the bedsprings have never been better.
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Tick Tick Tick Kevin Huang Curtains shut. Blankets tight. Thermostat set to precisely 71 degrees with that weird little setting called “sleep mode.” A glass of water by the bed, filled to the brim despite the fact that she never takes more than a couple sips. The fading dampness in her hair, turned warm then cold then warm again from detachable showerheads and makeshift blow-dryers. A far-too-expensive memory foam mattress. The night should be perfect. Should, she thinks. Tick. Tick. Tick. Darkness takes her vision and she wills her limbs still, but a bombardment of small things keeps her mind from silence. The rustle of leaves in the wind. The quiet chirping of crickets. The lingering scent of soaps and shampoos and the myriad of essential oils diffused out of a pastel green humidifier. And thoughts. Thoughts after thoughts after thoughts after Worriesthoughts.and wishes and aims and ambitions and goals and desires and embers and fires and all the tiny things that keep one still awake. An onslaught of things that keep her from her Andreverie.so still she lies, until the night is but a memory.
THE BUSINESSMAN goes back to bed. He squirms back and forth before laying face-up. On the flat, a projection of sheep starts to appear. They look abstract and hazy.
THE BUSINESSMAN: Usually there’s one sheep. Two sheep. Three sheep. Four sheep. The whole pack should be jumping over the bridge—or was it the moon? No, that was the cow who flew over the moon. The sheep just jumped a fence. Not even a bridge. The moon’s too high for them anyway.
11 • Creative Writing
THE BUSINESSMAN: Too hot. Too hot. Adjusts thermostat.
Counting Sheep
Ravi Jain Lights fade in. The stage is bare, entirely painted in white. The only distinguishable items are a neat bed located center stage, a small travel suitcase with its contents flung out and the top open. Behind the bed, there is a large white flat that stretches for the majority of the stage; an opening is available on the stage right side, where a white door is installed. Through the play, projections are heavily utilized, with the flat acting as the projection surface.
Shifts in bed again. Brief Projection of the date “8/27” in large font, covering the entirety of the wall
THE BUSINESSMAN: But the sheep won’t jump today, will they? They won’t move. [Quiet muttering] Why can’t I sleep? Something must be wrong. [Loud again] The sheep are on strike—they declare themselves: “free of any more fence jumping from this day forth unless their needs are met.”
Projection of empty fence
THE BUSINESSMAN covers himself in comforters and pillows, nearly suffocating himself. After a few brief moments of struggle, he wakes up, sitting straight
THE BUSINESSMAN: It’s never perfect. It’s never just in “that” good spot. Yet another attempt to fix the thermostat, then
THE BUSINESSMAN: Too cold. Too cold. He goes stage left to adjust an imaginary thermostat, then comes back to sleep in the same awkward position.
THE BUSINESSMAN enters stage right through the door. He wears a neatly ironed suit, a mundane tie, and a pair of hotel slippers. THE BUSINESSMAN crosses the stage and abruptly jumps onto the bed, legs akimbo. Beat.
THE BUSINESSMAN: To which their boss says: “Then jump over the moon with your short legs, you ungrateful cattle.” And now, I can’t count those sheep. [pause] Is that why I can’t sleep?
Lights fade to being barely visible. THE BUSINESSMAN wanders around blindly through his room. He knocks against the open suitcase.
THE BUSINESSMAN: Pieces of my sleep, [pause] my sheep chopped off and sold away. Projection slowly fades out. THE BUSINESSMAN falls back down onto his bed
THE BUSINESSMAN: I can’t stop seeing those three numbers. Too much is within that simple, simple, simple date. Why can’t I stop seeing everything in those numbers? It’s just a meeting. But think of all the possibilities. They branch out. Fracture. Splinter off into me. They possess me. They never cease. Who can sleep when everything in life condenses into a single date?
THE BUSINESSMAN: Is there another fence waiting for me, waiting to be jumped over? And after that, another fence again? How can
THE BUSINESSMAN: But they can’t all be dead, can they? My sleep can’t just disappear like that. It’s not right. It’s unfair. [THE BUSINESSMAN stands up and paces around.] There must be one or two sheep alive in my head. Maybe they’re still jumping up and about, forced to keep hopping over fences that get more and more difficult to pass. Maybe I can find them. Somewhere. Sometime.
THE BUSINESSMAN: How many days on the road was it again? Four? Five? Seven? Ten? Everything blends into itself. [Feels against suitcase] Crazy how many trips this thing has gone through.
THE BUSINESSMAN: I mean, most of them are butchered already. Projection of price tags from abattoir.
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THE BUSINESSMAN rummages through suitcase, not finding what he’s looking for. He searches further, occasionally flinging clothes about.
THE BUSINESSMAN: I just lose count. Every night is a sleepless night. And every day is a restless day. I can’t even begin to question why—it just doesn’t make any sense. I try and try to find some peace, but it’s a towering, impenetrable wall that I cannot clear and that I must hit straight on with my head to no effect. I cannot jump over the moon, can I? Projection of “8/27” in large font, covering the entirety of the wall. This time it stays for a long time. Occasionally, large fences identical to the ones shown previously flash on and off, giving the impression of endless obstacles.
THE BUSINESSMAN: Oh God, why did they have to quit now? I would always count those sheep going by when I was a child, each one passing the gate with so much ease. They defied physics. And what do they have going for them now? Huh? What do the sheep do? How do they like being fired and tossed away? No, they’re done, their lives ruined. Projection of sheep rounded up, followed by a brief projection of “8/27” in large font, covering the entirety of the wall
THE BUSINESSMAN: When can I stop? [He turns to look at the large date projected on the wall] Is it with this meeting? The projection of fences fades out. Projection of “8/27” in large font becomes even brighter No more lights on stage except for those of the projection. THE BUSINESSMAN stops his rummaging, completely enveloped in the huge date.
THE BUSINESSMAN rushes upstage to touch the numbers.
13 • Creative Writing I know? I’m led eyes down, following that one head sheep who just got a bit more lucky than me—just a little bit extra, that was all. Airports and their grey corridors are just long paved pathways to the same fence. Offices transform into sheep pens. And the meeting. The meeting is always there, just the same as it was before. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to years nonstop. [Beat] THE BUSINESSMAN turns back downstage THE BUSINESSMAN: If someone could just give me some dark void to fall back into, to escape from these dreams and drop into my blankets with not a single thought in my head. [THE BUSINESSMAN flops back down onto the bed facing up.] I would decompose into dirt, feeling the beat of sheep hooves as they jump across farmyard fences. Dirt never thinks. It’s just dirt, counting sheep as they pass. Lights slowly start to fade out. The projection of “8/27” still remains THE BUSINESSMAN: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Lights out.
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Joan always told me that I reminded her of a blobfish, and I always got angry since I thought she was hinting at the time that I almost drowned at the four feet side of the pool despite having been at least five feet at the time. She always laughed and just told me that it was the first thing that came up when she Googled “ugliest fish”. She collapsed back and told me that she thinks she’s a caged bird who desperately needs to spread its wings and fly. I announced to her that this wasn’t the animal kingdom.
In ninth grade, she asked me about sex. “Flesh against flesh?” She inserted her index finger into the hole she made with her other hand. I would say that I was surprised that someone who still covers her eyes when there’s a kiss scene even had the capacity to formulate a question like that, but we did attend a public high school. It was virtually impossible for anyone to not be exposed at least a little bit especially with Carter and Eli always playing the penis game—or as I like to call it the 1.3 GPA activities game— during PE. So, in my very best forty year old mom voice, “When two people love each other very much-” I don’t remember whether I actually explained it or instead lied about some baby carrying stork. But I remember her fascinated eyes, bobbing her head up and down in enchantment.
The Fish and the Bird Joshua Lee Once two Korean families become intertwined in any way, they share one body and fight over the mind over a couple bottles of soju. But their struggle for the mind is always a loud one. Even the Dreamworks boy perched on the crescent moon outside drops his fishing rod and covers his ears at the clangorous bursts of intoxicated laughter. As they gleefully boast to one another about their children’s flawless report cards and the fact that their kids can recite the letters of Hangul perfectly, they fail to notice that their precious children are slowly fading away.
Back in 4th grade, on our first and last Halloween night together, Joan and I dressed up as Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, despite her parent’s stern disapproval at participating in such a “satanic” holiday. We knocked on every door with the same toothy grins and filled our stomachs with chocolate as we walked. Until we got to Mr. Wilson’s house, that is. I remember that Mr. Wilson stared at us with such bewilderment that I started to wonder if he actually believed Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse had somehow come to life and were at his door asking for candy. Not everything was so Disney however when he dumped racial slurs in our Halloween baskets instead of the Snickers he kept in an orange bowl on the stairs behind Ihim.guess we got the Trick instead of the Treat. She didn’t laugh, obviously not finding my joke very funny. I understood though. I didn’t find my joke very funny either.
In 10th grade, we traded pensive secrets under the pitch darkness of a half eaten moon, carved from experiences under a lie, and we hid them from the dreamy gaze of the sun. That night, she told me she wanted to shatter into colorful hues and bleed through the metal bars of her cage so that she could finally escape her world of grey and black. When we rebelled under the shelter of a lie, it was never enough. Never enough for Joan to break from her cage and truly spread her wings. She was chained to her grades, her suffocating image as the perfect Asian daughter, her swallowed bullets of racism. She was her parents’ little sculpture, subject to her parents’ bony fingers poking their own aspirations into her sides. They chose not to notice her brittle skin dry and crack and instead continued to mold with the tightening grip of their cold fingertips. “The sculpture does not lie,” they said when she told them that she didn’t want to be a doctor through a layer of burning tears. They continued to frame her life with their own greedy hands. And eventually, all pots slowly disintegrate under pressure. When I heard the news, I really did feel like a fish out of water. Ugly crying, helpless, gasping for air. That night, even though I had wrapped myself in a thick futon, I felt cold. So I prayed for warm feathers instead of scales, blood that ran warm instead of cold. But I still felt cold. Inside and out. Like Joan who had just attempted suicide. I knew she lived from the rumors that fed the mouths of nosy Korean women gathered over yukgaejang. But I wasn’t sure if she was still living a life that wasn’t hers. Only on Chuseok, I send her a text and pray for a response, and, like usual, I choke on the delivered message. But I’ve learned to expand my life to worlds and realms beyond what I can see and imagine. I’ve learned to become more than just a deceptive fish that circles around its little fish tank. Sometimes, I stare out my window and wonder if I’ll see her soaring through the air, a bird finally freed from its cage.
15 • Creative Writing
Project Arts 2022 • 16
He didn’t like the place he went to when he opened his eyes. Every time he arrived, the place had deteriorated more since his last visit. Rain slipped through the ceiling panels and fed mold in the cracks. The cabin walls peeled, rotted, and yellowed. The same happened to his skin. His nails grew past his knees, then the bed frame, then the door. But every night when the clock struck eight, the man woke, his eyes wide shut. He never stirred. Only his pupils moved, which darted like flies under his eyelids. The man lived where most people rent. His name was Jeff. Jeff the Insomniac.
OpenKerryShutLum
Sancia Milton Mechanical bulls and the sponginess of facial expressions, the astrology of Lemonade, the great squeeze-out until perfection, the tables set with solo cups in retrograde, the Cluttered existence of dream-bloated girls and men money-made, we precipitates in Broken chemistry. Tell me what you see in this perception of me.
17 • Creative Writing
Letter Home
You—I can identify you, in the cadence of a familiar sloppy speech, I can hear you in the stoned murmurs of my beach—no, yours. Not mine anymore. But you—I can quantify you, a jello-sun hung in all-you-can-eat sky, A cloud bird, sunk in this blue night of mine—no, yours.
I forget that the pronouns divide. That my hair was cut from the gold of your July, That my eyes were chipped from your glass, your city lights, That you were blown straight out of me, Mowed grass left on mezzanines, the clippings of a world set free. Can you keep a secret? Sometimes I collect those clippings still. Sometimes I pass them by and never will. But let’s talk more of mechanical bulls, the feast of extroverted eye contact, the shimmying of Names through stranger’s heads, let’s conduct a flash mob and dance to the sound of skin, let’s Win people, places, coke bottles empty to the brim, let’s live, we are lions, we Kingdomsarebred of camping tin. But tell me what to trust in this perception of You—weus.talk about you, a catalyst of connection and indifference, We can pass around pictures of you like lock-screen love and long distance commitment, Like model dolls of the stuff that once made us, but there is too much Timewind.hasblown the clippings in one great gust.
Anyway, I am dreaming of crocodiles eating peanut brittle, I am listening to the music of Cannibals who sit lamplit and finger-twiddle, I am mary on a cross and holy water stuck in Barbecue sauce—Have I forgotten you yet? Sometimes I think I can. Sometimes I fear I have, and that I have nothing left, but You. I miss you. I am bare-shouldered and cold and telling them to drink up stories of you, as if this could fill the nothing in my skin, as if this could quench my need for some sense of self-definition, as if you could stitch a jacket for my heart and forever fit. But we are broken chemistry, squeezed dry with inconsistency. You and I cannot be made equivalent.
Time18 left nothing of ourselves in us.
So tell me what we mean by perceptions and personalities. We are just new air on old lips, Holding sticky notes that never stick. What do you find in unnamable things? Just city eyes, memory-slick. Just July hair, loose like tea.
Project Arts 2022 •
Ismell the rain in the air before I feel it as I bound down the stairs of the entrance to my apartment complex. I already have my keys in hand, so, as soon as I make it to the parking lot out front, I’m already manually unlocking the driver’s seat door of my aggressively reliable 2004 Toyota Avalon. As I wait for the car to heat up to a survivable temperature, I play the little game with myself where I watch the raindrops race against the window, winning my own personal bet on which droplet would reach the bottom first. I knock my head against the headrest. For the first time in weeks, I take a deep breath. It reeks of cheap pine-scented air freshener with a hint of melancholia. Though I know myself enough to understand the importance of taking time to be alone, I can’t help but feel a little incomplete as I pull out of my parking space and leave my life at home. That hole is quickly filled with a temporary contentment as I take in the sound of nothing but the gentle patter of rain on the windshield. Though it had already been turned to Do Not Disturb, I chuck my phone from the cupholder and into the backseat just for good measure. It’s like I’m making a silent commitment to letting myself go fully away. Who was this message for? Myself? The seemingly never ending list of text conversations and emails lying in wait inside the phone? Both, probably. I pull off onto I-90 and escape onto an eerily quiet, open road. Before I can let any feelings of isolation creep back into my mind, I turn up the radio, muscle memory spins the dial to my favorite Oldies station, and I remind myself of the wide world out there that is mine to take on.
Seattle,AbbyWashingtonMelton
19 • Creative Writing
Project Arts 2022 • 20
After-School Cafe Alveena Nadeem when 3pm rings, i ride shotgun to one of two cafés in 30 miles square and circle through the drive-thru straight into the dining room (is it faster, faster or just a feeling?) where a photo-framed robert e lee shines with moral integrity as I am roused by luke -warm “chai tea” and the barista tasting the “v” in my name. and on weekends, they turn on the TV – a fireplace in H.D. radio burns with passion (for christ or God or whoever you pray to) sweaty palms on father Ryan as we sing songs of holy nights lick cream on cherry delights cleanse with wet rags then leave“Come again soon!”
Him, hymns, and he still on my mind.
Sleep to Dream
21 • Creative Writing
Dreaming tales of tortoise and hare, left long ago in hopeless air. Ennui tempts those who may find it, swiftly changed by a flame unlit. Harken back to those days of bliss, remember nature’s fleeting kiss. Sweet scents of cherry blossom trees, fill brisk spring skies with hopeful breeze. May gardenias line lush park streets in full, and spring sneak up, making brave soldiers lull. Whenever a sleepless night may occur, dream visions of earth and it will deter.
Julian Orrego Silver mist burns through weakened eyes, threatening nightmares filled with cries. Sleepless darkness brings gnashing teeth, leaves yearning for the laurel wreath.
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My father got the house a dog he didn’t want. Cranked up the growling engine of his truck thirty miles to a farm to pick it up. He scowled at the pup, made it huddle low in the hay. It buried its nose deep into the starchy strands. I knelt down and let it lick my palm. A few nights ago, we saw the old red heart stoop to pick up the little dog and settle into a patchy armchair. He placed a bulging hand on the dog’s head and kept patting until four eyes drooped closed. The foyer table swelled in the bronze July heat.
TrishaInscapeSantanam
23 • Creative Writing
Diversion One The figures peer further over, leaning as to delicately teeter their pelvically centered mass on the ledge. Beneath them on the ground floor is a sense of presaging discomfort, the makings of which the spectating figures seemed to prophesy. Within seconds, a clamoring ripples across the bank floor, emanating up to the balcony and past; whispers at a mezzo-forte, gasps and shrieks building in intensity as some gazes turn to the direction of the source, and rare others who had gotten a disinterested glimpse turn back – Conway’s Game of Life –bodies acting as fluid to witness the scene. I look down, and see a yellowish-gray blob appear from a hallway, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. A mucous trail is left in its wake, and it slithers and slides into the lobby. The tellers have instructed the customers to an exit opposite the main entrance, and security stands in front of the creature, drawing weapons in confusion. A pseudopod erects itself and engulfs an officer, who attempts to tase it within its grasp but only shocks himself as he enters the translucency deep enough to fully obfuscate his existence. Only God knows what happened to him. I retreat into the oriel, where one of the figures, now distinguishable as a white man in his forties, approaches me. He tells me with a self-satisfied grin, one juxtaposing the context of his words, that the blob is known as the Ancient Phlegm, a supposed meta-being (a meta-being being one which transcends the unity of spacetime, to unjustly paraphrase) which he had come across in his military diplomatic work in Trabzon – the humid Black Sea climate preserves its moisture – and was cursed by an alchemist who had ties to the Laskaris family, the patriarch of which provided the Phlegm Zero during a fit of diphtheria which soon killed him. He continues that the curse, all this being relayed to him by a teenage kokoreç vendor stationed a block from the embassy, would take hold upon those who were deemed to be infringing on the sovereignty of the Nicene Empire (a rump state of the Byzantine Empire) through what we now know as quantum entanglement – the Phlegm Zero seeking available phlegms to inhabit and transfer its curse, it’s metaphysical properties, to. It was present in the attempted and failed recoup of Constantinople, albeit thwarted from success through an espionage campaign by Baldwin of Courtenay revealing the only way to slay the Phlegm. Now dormant for nearly eight hundred years (alas, who could have predicted such a sharp turn from the empires of yesteryear), conspiracies in the American Office of Foreign Assets Control to sanction Turkey for,
Nirvana for Mice
Havish Shirumalla Paralysis, it seems. That’s all this endless movement is. Two figures peer over the balustrade. Time in a drunken stupor, jamming its half-finished Kölsch bottle into the machineries which govern us. And yet inertia triumphs, conveyor belts churning – the bottle shatters under the skirtboard. What are we to do but lie inert as shards litter our may-as-well-be corpses? It hydrates us, does it not?
I am a custom hat salesman. Today I head to the Hollywood Hills to pitch the product to Brad Pitt in his vacation villa. He has built an underground vault solely for the potential discussion, storage, and transaction of the hat, one which he says that even he has not stepped foot in, and the builder of which he kidnapped and sent to a private hypnotist to scrub his memory of the vault. The technology of the hats goes over my head (and occasionally on it when I am permitted to test them), as it is not up to anyone but Thurman to understand their production – something about nanobots and pausing entropy.He welcomes me to his abode, exposed rough-hewn wood in a miniature Palladian style, voluminous Doric pillars lining the entrance, sharp corners, walls adorned with classical engravings but covered in splatters of pastel-colored paint which he tells me is part of Dr. Improvisio’s, his therapist, experimental art-anger therapy (a name familiar to me from
Project Arts 2022 • 24 possibly nuclear, reasons unknown but in the grand scheme of things, irrelevant, triggered its arousal. I inquire why instances such as the First World War did not trigger the Phlegm (he corrects me that it is the Ancient Phlegm and removing the adjective tends to refer to modern lab-grown recreations), to which his confidence wavers for the first time for a mere second. He motions to his partner, a younger man dressed in a suit, who pulls a dagger out of his flap pocket, and a vial out of his satchel. Muddled bryony berries, I learn. They’ve been trying to kill it with alphabet soup, the man tells me. Ancient Phlegm Committees and Mucus Forces based in Topeka, Fort Worth, Reno, Milwaukee. Descendants of the Laskaris family and their aristocracy have taken an offended stance to this, and taken an offensive stance as a result – Anti-Ancient Phlegm Committees (he clarifies that the “anti” applies to the committee and not the phlegm itself, a seemingly apparent interpretation but one he felt necessary to spell out) and the like. He invokes the common expression which I have never heard, that when Franz Ferdinand pays, we all pay. His partner leaps over the balustrade onto the Ancient Phlegm and is swallowed by it, breaching its epidermis with such force that globs of viscous liquid pop out. Seconds of tension follow before, like a deflating balloon, the Ancient Phlegm shrinks and bursts and spews matter and vomits and splatters and reveals the security guard’s decomposing corpse and the partner, lying unharmed. The implication is clear – the dagger dipped in bryony was lethal to the Ancient Phlegm when administered internally. Off to Jacksonville, he tells me.
Diversion Two If eighty-four year old Thurman Rickabaugh’s demeanor as a sprightly geezer, his remaining gray hairs flowing behind him on his motorcycle like a decrepit party blower, skin moling in unnaturally inoffensive regions to bolster his retired superstar semblance, speaking with satisfied inflection – strategic monotony, strategic slurring, of, the, words – seemed contradictory to his almost cherubic blues which dominated his public outlook what seemed to not be more than a decade ago, a shift even he would not have expected but is the fortunate way in which the cards were rolled, we must first recognize how and why such despondency and weight, the weight of perhaps everything, held the capacity for his outright self-acceptance and nonchalance – of course, the smallest of stars the most luminous, the heaviest of rain showers parting to reveal the most majestically hued heavens – and what bold, perchance cryptic, perchance magical, perchance otherworldly, perchance pseudo-pseudoscientific, methodologies and meteorologies and philosophies and phallologies brought him to emerge as one of the most mysteriously wealthy men in America: that namely being his top-secret development and social-elite underground marketing of custom hats.
We sit in silence on opposing couches for a few minutes until he offers coffee, to which I decline and open my briefcase. I begin to deliver my speech as he fumbles at a counter obstructed from my vision and audibly releases a wet cough. They’re fully customizable, fully in the broadest sense of the word, the technology goes over my head, and isn’t it amazing that we live in a world with custom hats, and what a time to be alive and much of it is credit to Father Rickabaugh and his cutting-edge innovation, and the very hat I’m wearing right now is entirely custom and does not exist in its singular form in this God-forsaken amalgam of rocks, dust, gas, and liquids we call the Universe.
Diversions Cue the Satie, please.
Brad comes back with a cup of coffee for himself along with a loaf of rye and a large quenelle of butter sprinkled with black salt on an acacia paddle serving board. I begin to remind him that brown bread stuff is bad for him, but hold back (this is called agreeableness and it is one of many traits and skills I have picked up as a salesman). It’s full of impurities which take away from the essence. The same thing happened when they tried to add more lettuce into the Big Mac. I asked for it without lettuce here and there before realizing it was really a microcosm of larger issues, so I changed my fast food go-to to Arby’s. I pull out our proprietary SynConnect technology and instruct him to wear the headset and not mind the poking sensation as he imagines a hat, any hat he desires, any shape or design or style or material even – unfortunately I cannot disclose the nature of the hat he thought up due to the exclusivity and shrouding mystery which has made Thurman the man he is and custom hats the product they are. I hear a squelching from the kitchen, which he assures me is just his drain processing food waste, but the sound appears to be moving, slimy, amoebic, large, growing, mucous. Diversion Three And so we take what we know are our last breaths in this God-forsaken amalgam of rocks, dust, gas, and liquids we call the Universe. Ready to be consumed by the Ancient Phlegm, we prepare to sing our favorite song.
my business with him in his Newport Beach high-rise - 3B’th floor, as those in his field are partial to the natural properties of base twelve), and pulls out a book from a shelf to expose a ladder presumably leading to the vault.
25 • Creative Writing
Georgie pulls her ukulele out of its case for the final time, strumming a half-time vamp of E major, B minor seven, C major seven, A major, one chord per line. There’s folks over the range, And fellows under the bridge; From LA streets so far and strange, And the Missionary Ridge. The aces of altitude, And the vagabonds of void; The dwellers of flatland solitude, You name it, we’re destroyed. We’ve fought so long and lived so poor, Now to be swallowed by the blob; But for axles turning evermore, It’s hardly a job! Our radical cheek was meek, But we’ll turn it if we must, But death by phlegm is what we’d seek Than freedom on us thrust! Yes, death by phlegm is what we’d seek Than freedom on us thrust!
It is at times like these where you, the reader, can reflect on our friends’ troubled circumstances in silence. They lived a life of fear, and yet what liberated them was fear itself.
Project Arts 2022 • 26
weight
There was always an excess of noise, but now there is nothing. Even time itself slips into its arrow creaking under the of absence.
oblivion,
27 • Creative Writing
Project Arts 2022 • Still28
Finding the dream is losing the Whendreamthe animals sound their ferocious and illusive roars as the ground breaks and the birds come to aimlessly flock and chirp and the mountains pierce the absent sky with their conspicuous peaks When the desired fantasy reveals itself to only withdraw beneath the shadows
Work-in-Progress...? In Form of CocoPoemdeVink
The becomesdreamersuffocated beneath the dripping net, heavy with the volatile story of fantasy and fiction When eyelids droop and the steady rumble of an awaited snore tingles at the nose the mind is harshly confronted by what it knows it cannot have realities in the form of cruel and severe fables twist the minddreamersfurther and further lost In a final, tragically humble attempt The dreamer grasps at the wild nothingness and what they think is real
29 • Creative Writing