The Route 9 Literary Collective presents...
The Lavender Issue XV: Perishables
Wesleyan’s prose, poetry, and art magazine Spring 2025
About Us
The Lavender is Wesleyan’s student-run poetry, prose, and art magazine that publishes twice a semester. The literary magazine is run under the Route 9 Literary Collective, which also publishes a multitude of other projects including Pre-Owned, Good Condition, The John, Poems of Our Climate, The Route 9 Anthology, and more. Learn more at route9.org.
Why The Lavender?
The Lavender is an homage to the fact that Wesleyan University’s official color used to be lavender. The color was changed because, according to an October 1884 issue of The Argus, lavender was not suitable for intercollegiate sports. “Lavender is not a striking color,” the article proclaimed. Well, 1884 critic, we here at The Lavender find the color incredibly striking.
Why Route 9?
Route 9 is the road that connects Middletown to the rest of Connecticut. It is the central artery of movement that every Wesleyan student, faculty, staff, and Middletown resident has driven on. It connects us and moves us forward.
The Lavender Team
Editors-in-Chief: Georgia Groome, Ella Spitz, and Mia Alexander
Managing Editors: Mia Foster, Elva Leth, and Jane Weitz
Poetry Editor: Mel Cort
Assistant Poetry Editor: Isaiah Rosenn
Prose Editor: Nettie Hitt
Assistant Prose Editor: George Manes
Design Editors: Madeleine Metzger and Kyle Reims
Copy Editors: Emma Goetz, Ben Goodman, Zoe Sonkin, and Sarann Spiegel
The Team: Sydney Atwood, Julia Bartley, Suz Blattner, Samara Brown, Julia Chadwick, Arya Dansinghani, Katie DiSavino, Kiran Eastman, Eve Epstein, Battsetsen Erdenebulgan, Yael Ezry, Jack Farrell, Ava Feliz-Sutter, Eleanora Freeman, Sadie Gray, Sylvie Gross, Georgia Guariglia, Amelia Haas, Asher Harris, Esme Haymes, Oscar Hershkowitz, Ezra Holzman, Esme Israel, Lulu Johnson, Arlo Kremen, Fae Leonard-Mann, Clara Lewis-Jenkins, Tess Lieber, Lucia Mezey, Olivia Pace, Kai Paik, Natalie Piergrossi, Alex Potts, Ellie Powell, Sasha Raskin, Gray Sansom-Chasin, Lily Turner, Eli Villalobos-Sharone, Eliza Walpert, Lyanne Wang, Sarah Weber, Tae Weiss, Aidan Zimmermann
Cover Designs: Natalie Horberg
Logo Design: Leo Egger
Special Thanks to: The heroes at 72B Home Avenue and Fauver 112, all the dear friends who make this magazine possible, Oliver Egger, Immi Shearmur, Merve Emre, Ryan Launder, Alpha Delta Phi, the Shapiro Writing Center, the Wesleyan English Department, and the SBC.
Letter from the Editors
Dear Reader,
When Ella and Georgia (why is it always Ella + Georgia, and not Georgia + Ella? [will it be Mel + Mia? Or Mia + Mel? Only time will tell]) asked us to write this letter, we thought, oh god. Will we have to follow in their footsteps and divulge embarrassing secrets? Nothing can top that strep butt story.
Thankfully, the theme of this issue is perishables, not hauntings, so our secrets will stay safe at 72B Home and 116 Mt. Vernon. Since time is perishable, we want to get straight into thanking the people who made this issue possible.
Too are beloved copy editors,. Saran, Benjamhin, Ema, and Zoië, tanhk you guys for all you’re hard work! Sarzan, without u we would never be able to wrap up an issue. Bin, ur chocolate cihp cooklies killed at the bake sale and probabbaly could kill Emmma (and Mia and Ella). Talk about per1shable! Zooey, thank you four putting 101 percent of yourshelf in this issue. Turns out its reallly hard to write without you’re help!
George and Nettie, we know what happens in the prose room stays in the prose room, but we’re glad that your enthusiasm and dedication don’t. Wading through those long pieces—and long, slippery walks home—can make you want to perish, but you guys always keep it positive. To Isaiah, our new assistant poetry editor: you had some giant shoes to fill, but you were more than up for the job! Even though roles are perishable, you keep the poetry room fresh. Thank you all for being workshop night divas and cracked at giving constructive criticism.
Thank you to Madeleine and Kyle, InDesign Gods and always the winners of Question of the Day. Our time together is slipping away quickly, but we’ll never forget your attention to detail, graphic design prowess, and, of course, senses of humor. Your marks on the magazine will never perish.
To Mia F, thank you for your energy, adorable posters, and for being the most organized Mia on The Lavender staff. Elva and Jane—we’re so glad that being abroad was only a semester-long thing. The Valentine’s Day bake sale was a huge success and we could not have done it without the three of you.
And last but not least, Georgia and Ella: while your time at Wesleyan is perishable, your love for The Lavender (and romantic love for each other) is not. You guys are like our favorite leftovers. Delicious, deeply appreciated, and growing indistinguishably moldy, side by side, in the back of our fridge. Without your leadership, reliability, and love, we’d surely wither away. Thank you for everything.
We’re running out of space and you’re running out of patience, but we hope you love this issue as much as we love the team that made it possible.
xoxo, M&M
Eli Bloom
Table of Contents
Curbing the Avian Appetite by Oliver Smith
Mark’s Eulogy by Nadia Moosa
Who has time, now by Liv Rubenstein
Jane Weitz
Visitor by Amelia Platt
Perishables by Abigail Grauer
Sophie Jager
Down to the pit by Jane Weitz
The Road to St. Aloysius by Jordana Treisman
Madeleine Metzger
The Bat by Julia Bartley
The Hum by Lamfton
Jane Lillard
Ava Carbonara
sing, goddess, of the highway by Sarann Spiegel
What to do with overripe bananas: by Maisie Wrubel
Paper boat by Lyanne Wang
Pet Fish by Georgia Guariglia
Hanyue Wang
winded by Kai Paik
To those I let where God goes: by Lillian Hoefflin
Jane Lillard
Until June by Eve Epstein
Untitled by Lily Turner
There is so much roadkill in November by Beäm
The Glass Castle by Fae Leonard-Mann
To Be God, On The Beach by Phoebe Levitsky
Ruby Dachis
The Camera by Sydney Atwood
give me my birds, bees and imperfect produce by Naomi Ellis
That Nickel Story by Ella Spitz
A Letter Concerning Your Great-Grandmother by Yael Ezry
Eli Bloom
Curbing the Avian Appetite
Oliver Smith
Finding the perfect balance on the beak of a bird before it cries out in pain. Whose wings no longer carry its own weight. Whose bones shatter under the pressure of the winter winds.
Who can no longer fly south for warmth, clinging to the memories of the bluest skies and lightest clouds. Look at it and ask yourself, was its suffering worth its weight in gold?
Or was it simply the easiest way to clean the blood off the first snow of the same winter the bird feared?
The reddest it has ever been just so your fruit could prosper. To share the same shade of red. As the days grow longer and the vines hide all you’ve done until next December.
Mark’s Eulogy
Nadia Moosa
Ahem. Hello everyone. I’m wearing orange today because Anna loved orange. Not a bright, burdensome orange, but the soft orange you’d only see in sorbet, or at sunset in wintertime. She loved the winter. They say winter is citrus season, which I never quite understood. I always thought surely fruits could only be best in the spring and summer… but oranges did always seem to taste better in the winter.
Anna always brought an orange to lunch. Every single day without fail. I’m surprised her blood didn’t turn into orange juice. She brought them so often that I started to get nauseated by the tangy, acidic smell. And it was such a mess to peel. She always made me do it for her. It got under my fingernails, and she hated the white part even though I tried to tell her it’s good for you. It doesn’t even taste like anything. I don’t quite understand why she needed me to tediously remove it.
Anyways… um… she had this really pretty dress. It was her favorite. It had a sweetheart neckline and was just long enough to reach her knees. It was a pastel orange, I think. She was wearing it when we woke up really early this one time to see the sunrise. She always loved sunrises more than sunsets. I hate getting up early… but I’d do anything for her.
Um… I… so… we got up really early and she was wearing that dress, the orange one, and we got bagels and watched the sunrise. It was the prettiest sunrise I’d ever seen. I remember looking over at her eating her bagel and laughing and wishing time could stop forever. Um… oh… and the orange juice. The stupid mini cartons of orange juice they always give you at bagel shops. She could never get them open. I always told her to just poke the straw through the hole, but she refused. She was adamant that it tasted better when you drank straight from the carton. I always had to open them for her or else she’d make a mess and spill it all over my car. I still have the stain from the first time we got bagels.
When I… when she first went missing, I couldn’t sleep. Every morning, I’d go to the same bagel store, get her orange juice, and sit at the dock where we would always watch the sunrise. For some reason, I thought she’d smell the orange juice and suddenly appear. I thought I could lure her out from wherever she was hiding. But she never showed up. And the weather changed. It started getting
cloudy and rainy—so why would she even want to show up if you couldn’t see the sunrise? So stupid. It’s all so fucking stupid.
I’m so sorry I didn’t mean… I’m sorry.
I think that smell is the strongest sense. With just one whiff, all those memories and emotions can suddenly hit you like a truck. You think you’ve moved on just to pass by the oranges at the grocery store or the person sitting next to you puts on citrus-scented hand cream and everything comes back. Does it ever go away? I didn’t want her to go away—I don’t—but… it’s not my fault. It’s really not. She was the one who wanted to leave. I did everything for her, and it wasn’t enough! She was sick of me just like I was sick of the stupid oranges! But I put up with it and her stupid obsession. I had to make sure she couldn’t live without me. She needed me. She just couldn’t see that like I could. I wanted to keep the smell alive. I bought all these citrus-scented candles and oranges to keep in my room. My mom even joked and said I was making a shrine for her. That keeping the smell alive was my way of keeping her alive.
But that’s not it. Not really. It was just to cover the smell. Of her decomposing body under my bed.
Who has time, now
Liv Rubenstein
to write about tangerines, peaches, dreaded pomegranates, brown apples, oranges grown soft enough in your canvas bag that a thumb slips through the wetted skin? Walked to the store, pushed open glass door, reach for the first fruit spotted. Cost nothing, don’t know if it ever blossomed, I ate it hunched over my phone
on the bus. There is a girl I can make by closing my eyes, breathing in rind, a little girl I can put in a house burned and broken, I can make her look out the kitchen window, make yesterday’s figs dance.
Jane Weitz
Visitor Amelia Platt
My mother greeting me at the door before I had time to even reach for the handle was the only indication that the day was out of the ordinary. It was warm, probably April, and I had just gotten off the bus with my one big binder in hand. I knew the eight houses and train tracks of my dead end so well that it was only when I saw my mother in our front doorway that my eyes snapped into focus and I began to look at the world around me. Somehow, that day was the start, middle, and end of so much.
Earlier that year, a guest moved into the spare room in our attic. It was one of those weird rooms lodged into the A-frame of the house so both the ceilings slanted down. Before he moved in, I hadn’t thought much about our vacant attic bedroom except that it stored my once beautiful—now dilapidated—school art projects. Actually, the art projects were the main attraction of that room: dioramas about a possum’s lifespan, a papier-mâché dinosaur the size of a dog. These pieces covered the walls and every inch of shelf space available. No real siblings meant my art was on display all over the house.
When he moved in, it just happened. No serious talks about who or why, just rumblings upstairs and the occasional descent to eat. His presence was off-putting and resembled no human form I had seen before. Perhaps human, or once was, something possessed, taken over, scary, sad. Conversations sucked dry, a mess left behind, dishes and wrappers, mud from shoes. I wanted to understand, to relate, to reach out. But something stood in the way, a removal from one’s body to a new life form, a half-life. Maybe mopey, maybe depressed, something different between the once-solid trio of me and my parents, and now the guest. It put me on edge and made me embarrassed. I stopped having friends over. I didn’t sit in common spaces in fear of an accidental run-in. I always felt the presence one floor above me. It’s impossible to live in a haunted house without getting a bit haunted yourself.
The mornings before school were the only times my house felt like it used to, without the sense of another just around the corner. The house felt calm and made its usual noises, free of unnatural creaks. The sun shone in from the back kitchen window, bathing the countertops in honey-colored light. It warmed the corners of my parents’ newspaper pages as we sat reading and eating in peace. The guest slept in until I-don’t-know-when, but was always awake when I came home from school. The unnatural house noises had resumed and
the shades were often down, cloaking my house in what felt like a weird haze. It would often smell like Clorox from my mother anxiously cleaning, always scrubbing or scraping. During that year, I remember she had rashes on her fingers from fiddling with her rings so much. Why invite a guest that you don’t want to be around?
That day in April was my first real indication that the guest meant trouble. Moving swiftly past the wooden frame and screen door, down our front steps, pulling me with her, my mother closed the thick oak door before I could see inside and announced we were going to the mall, get in the car. The mall? On a school day? It was unheard of. She slid into the passenger seat, keys in hand. I don’t think she even had a purse. She was fiddling with her rings again, and her breathing was audible and faster than her normal, shallow breaths. Dad was home, which was odd because in those days he was always in the office, even when mom wished he wasn’t. Where was our guest? The attic light was off and the curtains drawn, but I had never noticed the curtains before so I couldn’t tell what was ordinary and what was not. Our house seemed cold, distant from my childhood home, bathed in sunlight, smelling of clementines, green wallpaper peeling in places. I felt, with resounding sadness, that something had sucked the life from the house I knew so well. I looked pastmom’s head, out the driver’s side window at it receding in view—A-framed, brick, green door, tall chimney, home to my entire childhood, my whole life. I wondered how the inhabitant of our third floor had taken the spark from our house like that.
The guest left that day and it was only in his wake that I noticed the changes of our home. Dad looked tired. We had foreign, processed, and frozen food scattered around the shelves and freezer that I was never allowed to eat growing up. Mom had lost weight. I felt like I had been holding my breath.
My half-brother overdosed, which I think I sensed from the start, even if I didn’t know. Those days, I didn’t know anything for certain but I had vague understandings, snippets of conversations. I knew something bad was happening to him, to us, and I had a sinking sense of dread that it was drugs. I didn’t know what any of it meant at the time; I don’t think I would have even believed that someone I knew was associated with the drugs he used. But I knew that the bad that happened that day wasn’t the usual bad. And I knew whatever was happening in the attic scared me. I knew with the whoosh of air from the front door slam that day in April, and I knew as we cruised the Garden State Parkway in silence. I
know it to this day and every time I see his face. We came back from the mall and he was gone and I didn’t see him for a year. I assumed he went to the type of place where people go when something like this happens. One of those places where you lock up your phone, you stop drinking coffee, you journal, you use crayons. When I saw him again, he had taken out all of his piercings. I imagined them piled up in a drawer, a big heap of silver metal clanking around with each open and close. He had grown out his hair and dyed it. I could tell he had learned to operate in public better. I could tell he had locked up his phone and stopped drinking coffee and journaled and drew. But my eighth grader brain had a hard time discerning him from the forlorn guest who once inhabited our house. My adult brain has a hard time discerning him from that guest.
Perishables
Abigail Grauer
The mortician walks home after dark and passes a flower shop. Dust
underneath her fingernails, holding tiger lilies, arms you weep into. Bananas at the bodega
turning each other brown next to a bag of Lays, Best By: 1:28:2045.
A hole in the corner with little ants marching out, born last week, hill on the sidewalk
crack, dirt pushed up by an oak tree dropping seeds towards the city
green. A little girl with blond hair chases a boy between the headstones—light up blue
sneakers catch on Mrs. Jameson: Daughter, Mother, Friend—while the geese fly home overhead.
Sophie Jager
Sophie Jager
Down to the pit
Jane Weitz
My mind floats, adrift in a sea with no current
My body, therapy to you, a source of relief, a vessel to self-pleasure
Sensation triumphs sorrow yet again
An unfair trade, your eyes are bigger than your stomach
My hips, my legs, my lips, hands, the glint in my eyes, the steady beat of my heart
My skin is warm in the morning, digestible at night
A peach sits on the counter, basked in sunlight
Ripe and sweet, you bite deep into its skin
The juice melts on your tongue, drips down to the floor
You ingest without giving, take with no remorse
Ferociously you bite, down to the pit
I lay bare next to you
A man and a peach
You and I
The Road to St. Aloysius
Jordana Treisman
The school bus rattles along the rocky terrain, going upwards toward the senior center. I watch the houses get smaller, the trees taller. It’s not darker so much as tinted, like an old movie. Here I am, being carted off with half of the Community Service Club to the House of the Living Dead.
I imagine us crossing flooded moats, rickety drawbridges. It’s like the old people are barricaded in—to protect us or them, I’m not sure.
We finally pull into the large entrance of St. Aloysius Senior Home. It’s not so much a parking lot as a glorified driveway, not a single car in sight—save a large minivan with the center’s logo etched on the side. The building itself is modern, cold. Like a giant Rubik’s Cube with the color sucked out. An aide a couple years older than me greets us as we step out of the bus. She’s got an eyebrow piercing and a septum ring that hangs crooked from her nose.
The aide escorts us through the building into a large sitting room. The “Recreation Room,” she says to us, her back turned. It sounds like she has gum in her mouth, kind of garbled and wet. They split us up into pairs, one student and one resident. I watch Emily, my classmate and sometimes-friend, walk to the backyard to meet an old man with glasses sliding all the way down his nose. I’m ushered off to the other side of the room, where the light can’t really get in. Sitting in a chair inside that darkness is an old lady. My old lady, apparently. I offer my arm to shake, something I associate with old people and respect, but she ignores it. So I sit down on the ottoman next to her.
“This is Angela—give her a minute,” the aide suggests as she walks away.
Unlike the other old people I’ve seen, this woman is not warm or grandmotherly. Her hair is not fluffy and white, it’s dark grey and worn down to her shoulders. While the other old women I know wear bright red lipstick like ’50s Hollywood stars, this woman’s lips are dark and full. Her eyes are dark, too, lined black like a cat’s eye. She’s looking straight at me now, for I don’t know how long. Not looking through me, like when old people are barely there anymore. We lock eyes.
“Are you afraid of death?” she asks me.
I’m surprised, but I remember that old people often say weird things. They don’t know any better.
“A little,” I finally say.
She loosens up a bit and turns to look at me better.
“You shouldn’t be,” she says.
We are quiet again, but she is still staring.
“What you do have to fear, though, is aging.”
I don’t think she sounds like an old lady. Her tone is calm and balanced, not delirious or senile. Like talking to an older cousin on the edge of her bed, watching her paint her toenails dark red or black. I don’t say anything, but the look on my face must give away my curiosity. The woman laughs, a hoarse, deep laugh.
“It’s not the wrinkles or the dark spots, you know. It’s decaying before you’re even dead. Watching your body fall apart like a car breaking down on the highway.”
I imagine driving a car. I haven’t passed my driver’s test yet.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Seventeen.”
Another laugh. “You won’t even know what hit you.” She leans in and whispers, “The fruit has already rotten.”
And then she sits back, and we are both dead silent.
I’m scared with no right to be. To listen to this nonsense. What an idiot. What a baby. I look around the room, to see if anyone is watching. My eyes are moving slower than usual as they scan the room, walls blurry and unsteady. The scent of the air is thicker, smelling of sterile wipes and cleaning spray. I spot another old lady reading a book. But I stop there, frozen. Her arms are a dark green and brown, like moss growing. Like mold, I realize.
I turn to the man next to her, staring down absentmindedly at a chessboard. Same green arms, with mold up the sides of his cheeks. It’s not a beard, I know, it’s fungi on his skin. Climbing up. I stand up and turn in a circle, heart beating faster and ears ringing. The air is moldy, the walls are moldy, the residents are moldy. My arms are moldy, thick on the forearms with a layer of black speckles. Not ink, not shadows, not hair. I’m trying and failing to brush it off. It’s grown into me now.
“I have to go,” I say to the unimpressed woman, stumbling towards a bathroom sign, limping down the hall. I reach the sink and scrub, scrub. The mold isn’t going anywhere, though. Up my arms, fingernails only irritating the surface. It’s too deeply rooted for me to pull out. I let out a sob.
Over the whine of the faucet I can hear my name being called. “Christy?” the voice asks, in the distinctive soprano of my classmate, Emily. I turn to see her looking through the open bathroom door. She is not moldy, not like the other ones here. Her skin is pristine, shining, soft. My breath is ragged and I’m losing
my balance. My hands are pruning now from the water, my arms aching from scrubbing. A groan escapes me. I want her skin.
Emily is pale, eyes wide. I’m just staring, looking. I can’t help it.
And then I see aides walking down the hallway towards me, stomping like soldiers.
“All right, Angela. That’s enough socializing for today.”
I’m not Angela, I’m trying to say. I’m Christy. But I look down at my arms and they’re not just pruney, they’re wrinkled. The mold has lessened, reduced to dark patches and scattered spots. I’ve been infected, I know.
They are dragging me away as if I am nothing, like the backpack I carry to school. I can still see them as they set me in a wheelchair and prepare to roll me down the hall. “Come on Emily, let’s go.”
Arm-in-arm are little Emily and Angela, the woman I sat next to on the ottoman. The one who was suffocating behind the mask of geriatrics. She is softened now, young again. The dark eyes are still there as she glances back to look at me. Pity for the old woman in the nursing home.
I want to call her back, but her own words come out of my mouth, chanting like a prayer.
The fruit has already rotten. The fruit has already rotten.
Madeleine Metzger
The Bat
Julia Bartley
The entire world has flipped upside down. I don’t know where I stand, but my hair pulls at my skull and my face pulsates with blood. Cheeks pushing out of my head like flesh balloons, bile worming its way up through my intestines and pressing against my strained lips.
You speak to me, but you stand upright.
You shout and demand answers, demand me to articulate, but all that leaves my mouth is a bubbling mess of stomach acid and sludge.
My cursing and spluttering like a broken car engine, you are angry.
Ask me over and over and over what I mean, but all I can do is hang, silenced by you and loose organs. A decomposing bat, poked and prodded at by 12-year-old boys with gnarled forks trying to scoop out my insides just to call me disgusting.
The Hum Lamfton
You already know about the first time I heard the hum. I woke up after a red-eye, and whatever virus I’d caught was operating at full strength. I’d never felt so weak and congested. Every breath fought against a dam of mucus. It took two weeks for my head to clear and that’s when I noticed it. A slight hum in my room. I unplugged my alarm clock. The AC unit. I listened to the walls. But wherever I went the sound followed until I realized it wasn’t in my room—it was in my head. For a moment, my stomach sank, but I found that it would go away if I kept moving or was in a noisy space.
With time, it became harder to exist in the evenings when the world would quiet down and I would relax. Or read. Or do anything silent. The hum would grow louder and begin to throb. It would pulse faster and faster the more I took notice. Until I couldn’t take it anymore, so I would put on music or open a window to slow my mind and get some rest.
I started going to concerts on weekends when the hum became unbearable. That’s where I met you. At some point your eyes met mine and I made sure not to lose them until we were tangled up in your sheets. That night felt like a switch had been flipped. I told you as much. But I didn’t tell you that being with you had flipped off the hum. And to me even that was everything.
You told me about your little boy, that he was away for the weekend with his father, and let out a sigh of relief when it seemed I didn’t mind. I could tell that you didn’t like talking about his father, and neither did I. It felt easier those first few months. I would go out of my way to get to know your boy and I saw how it made you smile. Our days were blissfully ignorant. Full of dates and adventures like we were teenagers again and the world was alright. I started spending the night more. We would watch shows and I would fall asleep to them. I asked you about moving in, but you said he might not be ready—your boy. I said ok, of course, I understand.
I told you when I started to hear it while I was with you. Maybe I should have told you earlier. Usually it slipped my mind when we were together. You referred me to your audiologist friend—I don’t remember her name—and she spewed half-baked diagnoses that ranged from Pulsatile Tinnitus to Eustachian Tube Dysfunction. She told me my lifelong allergies might be the root cause but failed to explain why it was so much worse all of a sudden. She gave me pills and steroids and told me to sleep propped up so it wouldn’t get worse at night. If it
got worse, there was always surgery.
Nothing worked, of course. The only thing I really took away was when she told me what the sound was. In retrospect it was obvious. My own blood, pumping through my head. My own heartbeat pounding in my ears.
The migraines worsened. At times, I could only hear things that only I could hear. Popping sensations and crackles and pulses and always, always the hum. The throbbing and the beat of my heart threatened the edges of my skull, and the more I listened, the faster it got. You may remember when I would remove myself from public spaces to find somewhere to calm down.
I need to thank you for being so understanding through all of this. I didn’t like being around you when I was in this state. It couldn’t have been easy for you. I tried to show face for your sake, but I was never fully there, and I was terrified you would think this is what life with me would always be. Everything but you began to flow by like a dream that I was watching to the soundtrack of my beating heart. It was like slowly dying while constantly being reminded of how alive I was. You were what kept me going, and I need you to know that. I do really love you.
It was not easy for me to lie to you, but I knew if I told you I was going for the surgery, you would insist on paying. But you were in as tight a situation as I was, considering you were raising a child. So I went behind your back, imagined coming home to your open arms and being able to hear your voice like never before and telling you it’s ok, it’s ok, I’m here now, finally, I’m here for you. But, of course, it failed again and I woke up from the anesthesia without feeling awake at all and carried the hum as loud as ever all the way home. You’ll remember the night I grabbed your boy by the arm when he said exactly what I wasn’t to him and tried to leave the table before finishing his dinner. You didn’t know where I had been that day. I remember the look in your eyes. I remember breaking down in your bed and apologizing and you holding me like a child but all I could hear was my heart thrashing away until I put my head on your chest and suddenly it was slow. But I realized then I was hearing your heartbeat. I pulled you closer. And you let me hold you until mine finally slowed to your pace. I needed you then, and you were there. When I woke up, I was alone. I found you sleeping in your boy’s room holding him in the same way.
I wanted to be there for you. I never would have left your side if I had a choice, but when you said you had to visit your brother who was having his own child, I had to tell you that the doctors had forbidden me from taking any flights
so my eardrums wouldn’t burst. I offered to take your boy to his recital and play babysitter for the weekend so you wouldn’t have to find one. You took a moment and said ok, and we said bye, and you wished him good luck. And then it was just me.
I wanted to bond with him. You don’t know how badly I wanted to see those eyes the same way I saw yours. I really thought I could. I took him to his recital and smiled when he looked in my direction, even though all I could hear was a muffled cacophony of frequencies. When the show ended, I couldn’t find him until finally, there he was, being addressed by another man my age. He had his hand on your boy’s shoulder. Instantly, I could tell. His chin and his forehead and his cheekbones. I didn’t know he would be there. I couldn’t explain why, but it filled me with something and I grabbed him away and took him home pouting in the backseat. I saw his curled lips in the mirror, but now they were worn by that man’s chin and forehead and cheekbones. I don’t think I would’ve heard a gunshot in that moment.
We both needed to get out of the house. The doctor said leaving the city for clean air could be good for my migraines and ears. Camping was something my father and I would do when we were young. I knew, even if your boy hated it in the beginning, it would be something we could have together. So I packed up the car, told him we would spend Saturday night in the woods. He responded like any 11-year-old would, and I responded like any father would.
I assume he complained the first hour of the hike before giving up. But, to be honest, I couldn’t hear him at all. Every gust of wind was a shrill whistle over the hum as we walked up and up until I recognized a campsite and began to pitch a tent. The boy didn’t help, but I saw him begin to look around and explore. I smiled to myself, remembering my first camping trip.
But even the minimal elevation change of a couple miles walk had disrupted my ear’s pressure equalization, and my nose had grown stuffy from the dust and pollen. Luckily, I had chosen a spot close to a creek large enough to bathe in, so I left the boy to his own and stripped to my shorts, stepping into the freezing, rushing water. The pressure in my head tightened for a moment and cold shocks rifled into my brain, but the sound of the rushing water somehow seemed to be less muffled than everything else. It invited me in. I walked deeper into the creek and towards a small waterfall.
The water got deeper and bit by bit, I descended further into the icy grip of the creek. An electricity coursed through my body. I felt a rush of energy as I realized I was fully hearing my environment; no hum, no pressure, no heartbeat. Just the violent white noise of water against water.
My head seemed to clear as I took sharp, deep breaths through my nose. I saw that there was a gap on the other side of the waterfall, so I ducked through the rushing downpour and stood in the space between.
The inside of the waterfall was like stepping into another planet. The roaring sound took on a cavernous quality, and light danced along the faces of the wall as the sun found gaps through the rushing water. There was this incredible moss hidden on the damp, dark rock, which climbed and crawled around every indentation and even hung overhead, reaching down from above and grabbing at the churning creek. I watched a steady droplet fall over and over again from the ceiling, hitting the river without making a sound. It felt like the quietest place I had ever been.
I felt myself smiling and wondered how long I had been, and then looked up and thought of your boy, how special this would be for him. My body had grown numb but I forced my leg to step out so I could go find him.
I wasn’t there for long. It couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes. But it did more than any pill or treatment could have. As I stumbled out of the creek, the sound of the waterfall rapidly flowed away and I was amazed that for a couple of moments it felt like I could actually hear. I remember distinctly the sounds of birds high above and the trees creaking in the wind, in frequencies I hadn’t heard for ages. I called out to your boy to hear his voice and tell him everything, tell him to come and see what I had found. But he didn’t respond.
So I walked back to our site. But he wasn’t there. I saw his phone sitting on his backpack next to the tent. I heard a low thumping behind me and turned. But there was nothing behind me. I felt it beat against my chest and up through my throat squeezing into my ears.
I yelled out his name. Again even louder. The thumping grew louder too. The distant sound of the rushing creek dissipated and was replaced by the hum as I felt blood rushing into my skull. I held my forehead as it thrashed against itself. My lips moved, I felt my voice yelling his name in my head, but I wasn’t even sure if I was making a sound anymore. I covered my ears but it didn’t change what I was hearing. The trees moved soundlessly in the gathering wind. It sent shocks through my still-wet skin. I felt my stomach turn. I ran to the creek, and that’s where I found him, floating against the rocks on the opposite bank. I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t look away. The water became the hum became the water. Had he called out when I was behind the waterfall? You have to believe me when I say I don’t know. I’m begging you.
Jane Lillard
Ava Carbonara
sing, goddess, of the highway
Sarann Spiegel
first dirt roads cow paths railroad beds
long-distance arteries of america
red blue black orange white grey green cells
do not be sorry spread cement wings feathers tarred caked in asphalt i sing your song low 70 mile breeze mouth on the pulse tires slung across the back of a skeleton angel born to D y i ng Eisenhower
street side thumb points high
evergreen
spring mileage
june in the backseat
i pray
What to do with overripe bananas:
Maisie Wrubel
1. Just eat them. Well, trust me, I wish I could. But there is almost nothing worse to me than the taste of an overripe banana. Even after swallowing, the flavor haunts me, sickly sweet, the essence of rot lingering in my mouth. I can’t help but think, if only I’d eaten this yesterday instead. There’s a sense of “if only” contained in the overripe fruit. The brown, spotty, odorous banana laughs at me and my regret. No, no. Something must be done.
2. Banana bread. The obvious choice, but for a reason. I guess one could argue that banana bread is a banana’s ideal form. In that case, maybe bananas are meant to become overripe, speckled brown, exuding their cloying stench. I can almost convince myself to let go of my attachment to a perfectly ripe banana on its own, no matter how brilliantly yellow. It’s boring, right? With a little complexity, a little bit of decay, it can be so much more. People keep telling me to make lemons out of lemonade. More like make banana bread out of overripe bananas.
3. Banana pancakes. “Pretend that it’s the weekend.” Sunday after Sunday, you would play that song in our kitchen. I remember the first time. 11AM. I had finally put aside my fear of poor sleep and let you stay over. I came downstairs to you making banana pancakes, playing Jack Johnson. Maybe objectively tacky or cliché, but it was hard to see it that way when my last boyfriend could barely cook pasta. I think that sold me. I’m telling myself it still does. But in truth, the song makes me want to gag now.
4. Your mom’s cranberry sauce. I know, I know—not a traditional answer. But, as I’ve told both you and her every Thanksgiving for the past five years, it is, without a doubt, the best cranberry sauce I’ve ever had. And naturally sweetened. I’m convinced that’s what sold my LA mom on your New Hampshire family. It’s the shocking common ground, the way to reconcile our differences, an olive branch—or banana branch, I guess. The thought of having to eat Ocean Spray again…
5. Oatmeal. Now this one is from my mom. Again, her abhorrence of added sugar. “It’s naturally sweetened!” My god, it drives me crazy. But that was some-
thing I immediately loved about you, the spontaneous trips to grab ice cream, or pastries, no matter the time of day, no matter the weather. Your favorite was the chocolate banana cream tart from Sycamore Kitchen. It always seemed like a risk to me, but you never worried. Your sense of taste was never as sensitive as mine anyways. You wouldn’t know if the banana was overripe. I try not to be bitter about it, but I’m starting to think I should be.
6. Banana ice cream. Strangely one of my favorite flavors, I think because of the way that it eternally preserves the best of the banana. It’s elegantly subtle when done correctly. You would tell me it’s “just vanilla” while making a mess with your chocolate cone, failing to see the nuance as per usual. Well, anyways, I don’t have an ice cream maker, sorry! It’s not like I pointed it out every time we walked by Williams Sonoma.
7. Banana muffins. Okay, maybe I’m grasping at straws here—they’re really just banana bread in a different form. I can hear your voice, “The different form matters.” Does it really? Do you even believe that? Next.
8. Banana cake. Same thing as banana muffins and banana bread… unless you’re adding banana to the frosting I guess, but yuck—that does nothing to conceal the foul overripe taste except try to mask it with overbearing sweetness. It doesn’t fool me. A Band-Aid doesn’t fix a bullet hole, and sugarcoating can’t hide that something is truly rotten.
9. Freeze them. But isn’t it too late? I don’t want that nasty overripe banana flavor permeating my smoothies! I should’ve done this days ago, weeks ago, months ago. But no. I didn’t have the fucking foresight. I didn’t want to admit that I maybe wouldn’t eat them, wouldn’t make the most of them while they were perfectly ripe. Avoidant and foolish, how else to describe me? Well, you have tons of adjectives. You throw a couple new ones at me every other night it seems.
10. Just throw them in the fucking garbage. Screw the compost. In the trash. It is over. Done. There is no rehabilitating this.
Paper boat
Lyanne Wang
I am open, sailing. I carry the azure wide, the glitter sun. Oars free, I tumble down the folds of my palms—through the center crease I glide, through the heartline I flow, I rush with the currents, pulse with the rocks. Rounding the river like a bowl, I float as paper, washi unfolding as skin that breathes. My hands are cupped, budding tulips. Stomata open, oarlocks empty, I am soft. Here I float, gentle here I wash a peach so quietly its skin does not peel, I rinse its fur and hug the flesh the juice so sweet in my mouth, I carry in my palms fresh rain and sip it and sip it, I lick the petals of daffodils, dandelions, sugar for stars, I guide my boat by the constellations on my chest, I hold my thoughts as a river holds a rock. I press my knuckles against the edges, strengthen the creases. I send a sailboat down my back and I race it, I race the leaves, I bloom, my spine and all the rest, I am the wind that slips through the sail that slips through the water that slips through the rock that settles and hush. I am the quiet, the whispered chatter of stream against shore. I am open, open, inside out, here the stream becomes a rock, and I am my sweetness that holds firm in a palm.
Pet Fish
Georgia Guariglia
On my seventh birthday, my godfather presented me with a plastic-wrapped, unused white takeout container, rather than the wrapping-paper-covered box I had been expecting. I had no clue what could possibly be inside the strange-looking gift. My godfather told me to be gentle as he carefully handed the container to me, but nothing could have prepared me for the magical experience of opening the styrofoam two-compartment box to reveal two fish calmly swimming, submerged in water. One of the fish was bright orange, its color even more vibrant against the white of the container. The other fish was white with black spots, not little speckles, big dalmatian spots. I named them Dottie and Goldie. It’s not hard to guess which one was which. Their names weren’t original—they were my first ever pets.
There was something truly special about those first few days as a pet owner. I felt so trusted as I shook slightly smelly fish food into Dottie and Goldie’s fishbowl. I had dependents. I was growing up. Suddenly, seven felt a lot older than I had expected.
Unfortunately, the excitement of my new fish came to a gruesome end. A fate that I have learned is not uncommon for small children with pet fish. One day, I came home from school and ran into the living room to say hi to Dottie and Goldie. I got closer and closer to the glass fishbowl, but all I could see was the vibrant orange of Goldie swimming in circles. I guess the fish food I had been shaking into the water had not been enough. Goldie had gotten hungry and Dottie was gone.
A mother’s love knows no bounds, and so I continued to care for Goldie even after the murder. I even fed her extra, now that I knew she had an extreme appetite. My morally-questionable care for the murderous Goldie only lasted one week.
My parents and I went away on a trip. I don’t really remember where we went or how long we were there, but it was long enough that my parents had to ask someone to come and feed Goldie while we were away. When we came back, the fish tank was not where it usually was. In what we assumed was a kind gesture, the person we had asked to look after my fish had moved the tank to the windowsill. Maybe they were trying to give Goldie a better view. I rushed over to
the new location to reunite with my fish, not registering the lack of movement in the tank. The window shades had been left up and it must have been a particularly sunny few days. The sunlight had been hitting the water nonstop, making it so hot that not even my cannibalistic pet could endure it. Goldie had been burned— no, not burned, boiled alive. Even if she was a murderer, I hope she enjoyed the view.
Hanyue Wang
winded
Kai Paik
We’re out of water And running out of food; No more heating in the house since I take trips to the coal seller less frequently of late.
So I tied a windmill to my neighbor’s windmill And wired some wind to my wind-cellar But it was crude and colorless And left woolen shavings in my coat as I climbed down the roof.
All this is to say
That the heat wouldn’t burn with the wind so high; And when the water did run it was murky and spoiled On account of wind leakage from the second-floor boiler.
So I pleaded my next-door neighbor (Now a feckless four-windmill owner and turbine b. capitalist) To spare me some clean wind Or a little drinking oil for my troubles.
He told me, Straighten your back And pay your water bill. Climbing up his roof
To build a fifth windmill he didn’t need.
To those I let where God goes:
Lillian Hoefflin
We have caught dust particles in first light and in dark, dug dirt under a crescent moon beneath my fingernails
To protect my infancy: I tear up these keys stuff a pillowcase with secrets pocket all loose smiles I let one whisper ear-to-ear tucked behind
My foremost thoughts: I’ll show you the stars painted on my Elementary gymnasium floor, the smell of my first sneaker, the pinch of upstanding folding chairs Hand-sewn and gathered indexical memories
patch pantlegs covering scraped kickball knees and bookmark funeral hymns
Singing praises and disclosing hold-ups, my zipper derails
You reap but do not sow I scream, pant, breath, tug, pick anything but prey upon the eyes that see confessions; muttered utterances for my pillowcase now shared with you
I lay thee down to sleep hands folded and held fast Bounding I go, off the page’s edge I Will
Jane Lillard
Until June Eve Epstein
Iris is not so quiet, but she became softer when she was with him. Admiration may have made her that way. Or maybe love. She’s 17. Hugo is 18. Exactly a year sets them apart. It’s actually only 362 days, but forget the difference because, much to everyone’s surprise, they worked—and quite well at that.
Iris knew his name, as most people did. He was known and liked to be–but not in a bad way. Loud but not obnoxious, funny, and clearly smart. Iris liked to listen when he talked. He had Friends– lots of them. Loud, and funny, too. They were all 18. Iris could name each one.
Hugo knew her name too. She was around a lot of the time. She liked to laugh and usually had people around. Hugo began to listen when she spoke. He noticed she was alone sometimes and that she seemed to like it that way. But Iris had lots of friends as well – they were all 17. Hugo knew some of their names.
The trees began to glow deep oranges and yellows when Hugo’s curiosity finally took over. He asked Iris if she would like to go out with him. Sometime soon, he proposed. He was usually the first to ask for things and she loved to respond. That sounds fun.
Iris watched from a closer distance now. She sat with him sometimes–where they were all 18. They liked to talk, and she still loved to listen. Hugo could hear her more clearly now, too. When she spoke, he always watched, and what she said, he remembered. She was 17 but not much different from the rest of them.
Just like that, the weeks passed. Iris still sat alone sometimes, the way she had always enjoyed. But now she would glance up from time to time, waiting for Hugo. When he sat alone, he did the same until he saw her. Solitude felt better with one another around.
And so it grew. What they had was private, and it was good. He was sweet in her arms and she loved to have him there. She loved the one freckle on the tip of his nose and he loved the hundreds that were scattered across hers. Some were small and he looked close to find them. She loved the feeling of his skin. It was soft and very sensitive—with the touch of grass it turned red and bumpy. The grazing of her fingertips always made his whole body twitch and with soft laughter he would crumple up and beg her to stop. She would. But he was only safe for a couple minutes.
The cold settled in for the winter and so did they.
Iris smiled as she told her friends about the daffodils Hugo was holding when he picked her up. And about the race they had run–the one where she beat him. Some things Iris kept to herself, though. Like how Hugo had let her have a five second head start. But there were other things too. Iris cherished the secrets about the millions of ways she had begun to love him; it felt like love, she thought. She was only 17.
Hugo grew more and more attentive. He noticed her every move. The way she bit the side of her mouth and wrinkled her nose as her hair fell in front of her face. He loved the way she pointed at the stars and squinted to make out any sign of the big dipper. He followed her pointed finger up into the dark sky and he squinted too while she convinced him of the seven dots that formed its shape. There was no way she was able to see it every time. But he hugged her close and smiled as she exclaimed into the night.
The April sun began to shine. Its touch turned her skin red and his a warm bronze. The days were becoming longer, a sign that their remaining weeks together were quickly passing.
June made 362 days seem big. Home had given Hugo all it could offer, so Iris spent the month admiring him as he bid it all farewell. Proud: the only word to articulate her watchful eye. At 18, Hugo was ready to leave, but Iris needed time to catch up. She was only 17.
Thank you, he said to Iris.
She nodded. Thank goodness it happened.
Untitled
Lily Turner
You’re in that crack of a dorm room, belly up with hot teeth and a wet hand
If your neighbor closed his window he’d hear the porno through the wall
But the video starts, and you wait for the opening line You’re waiting, and you sit up before you’re back down— and maybe they never say it, something you’re supposed to know.
But that high school boy taped to your walls couldn’t keep his hands steady enough to hold you So forgive me for crying at the mud you dragged onto the carpet
It’s easier to pretend the red glow from the necklace of extension cords is a bomb to explode but it’s not a siren We both know you’re leaving, hands full.
So the man takes the deer he hit in the road home What’s left— but the bones?
There is so much roadkill in November Beäm
Making spirals down the nautilus, I find myself standing in front of entrails exposed on the November concrete.
Algid, Sodden, Carmine, Flayed.
I wonder if I could make a sausage out of you, One that twists and turns bends and bows into a pretzel or some dog, showcasing: your vehemently externalised insides. Just how pretty you might be.
The
Glass Castle Fae Leonard-Mann
The cool door of the freezer calmed my aching head, if only for a moment. A deep breath—and then I was off again, stacking packs of frozen peas with equally frozen fingers. Push them back, grab another pack, and push them again. I rubbed my hands together in a vain attempt to revive my numbing fingers, but they only grew redder. A woman passed me by. Although I could not see her, I recognized the feminine tapping of her shoes against the linoleum. I always knew when it was my manager walking past; the tread of his sneakers squeaked slightly. I stiffened instinctively when I heard it, making sure to focus on my work. He couldn’t catch me out. Not again.
$12.25 an hour wasn’t enough for this monotony. As I stacked, I felt my shoulders grow tense from my repeated movements. But thankfully, just as I thought I couldn’t go on, I ran out of peas. On to dairy.
I rolled my cart over the waxed floors, careful to avoid the midday shoppers who ignored my attempts at eye contact. These were men and women who had just got off of work. I could tell by their creased suits and tired faces. After working in a grocery store, I was familiar with the glazed-over look of those who had wandered the store for too long. They stared at cans of beans with more attention than each other. They thought of me as part of the scenery. Sometimes that’s how I thought of myself as well.
I swung open the fridge, my free hand holding a carton of milk. As I placed the milk onto the shelf, my gaze drifted to the space behind. I’d never noticed it before, but the refrigerated room was coated in a thin layer of glistening frost. The frost had the effect of making one forget there were even walls at all; instead, it seemed like a brittle divider between space.
I looked around. There was no one in this aisle. Following my odd urge, I removed the shelf in front of me and climbed through into the small room. I felt the cold immediately, my long breaths creating smoke that hung in the air. It was colder than it should have been, and I made a mental note to check on the thermostat.
The walls were even more magnificent close up. Small crystalline patterns protruded from the glassy surface. I traced it with my finger, feeling the rough edge as I caught the ice under my fingernails. But as I looked closely, I felt even more convinced that the ice was the only layer, that there were indeed no walls suspending the sheets of frost.
There was that familiar sound, the staccato squeaking footsteps on the
linoleum. Thinking quickly, I shut the fridge from the inside, and ducked behind some boxes of yogurt.
The footsteps receded. I was safe—for now, although no doubt he had seen my cart and wondered where I had gone. Reopening the door, I stepped out into the fluorescent warmth.
After the rest of the milk was stacked, I rolled back to dry goods. As I passed by, I noticed the store had grown much busier. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. The people who had previously avoided my gaze now followed me with fearful beady eyes as I passed.
I looked at the floor, trying to ignore them. I couldn’t figure out what had changed. I felt the same as when I’d entered the ice-filled room, but based on everyone’s reactions, it seemed like something about me had fundamentally shifted, or I had experienced an extreme disfigurement. I felt my face with my cold hand. No, nothing had changed. My face felt exactly the same.
I was scared by this sudden attention, and even more disturbed by the apparent lack of reason for it. My head felt warm again.
I rolled my cart to aisle four and restocked the chip shelf. I wouldn’t let this impact me. I was almost done with my shift, and then all would return to normal. As soon as I walked past the registers, into the parking lot, into my car…
That was all I thought of as I placed the puffed bags onto the shelves. I didn’t even hear the man as he crept up beside me.
“Have you seen the glass castle?”
I looked over quickly. He was an old man with thin white hair. But most shockingly, his right eye was missing, and in its place was a thin pink line, as if his eye was glued shut. I felt a shudder go down my spine. I saw him recognize my fear, but he leaned in closer.
“There’s no more time. Did you see it? Did he see you?”
I felt his hot whispered breath on my face as I stepped back.
“Excuse me, I don’t know what you mean,” I said at a regular volume. He looked at me with disapproval, both for my loudness and response.
“Well, you work here, don’t you?” he hissed, and staggered out of the aisle quickly, looking back at me once with resentment.
Now it couldn’t be denied. Something had changed. I’d met my fair share of eccentric customers, but this man was different from the rest. I recognized his lucidity; he was speaking with purpose. I could not shake the feeling that he was trying to help me.
As I pondered this interaction, a young girl and her mother passed by. The mother recognized me, and took her daughter by the hand and pulled her out
of my sight. Were these people afraid of me? And what did it have to do with the glass castle?
My head was pounding. I craved the coldness of the ice room: the serenity, the solitude. I even wished to be ignored again. Anything seemed better than this eerie atmosphere, rife with tension which I did not understand. I felt sweat cover my feverish forehead. Staring at the chip shelf, I realized I could not stand here anymore passively; I had to understand what the man had said to me.
I walked through each aisle, searching for his white hair. Everywhere I looked, people stared at me with tracking, doll-like eyes. I paused in aisle two, looking at a group of women who were staring intensely at me.
“Can I help you?”
“I can’t find the fountain of youth. I thought it was in the beauty aisle. I’m worried it froze over.”
“We don’t sell that here, ma’am.”
She stepped back, in what appeared to be embarrassment, and broke her eye contact with me. I’d had enough. I continued on, searching for the man, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Pretty soon I had returned to the freezer with the crystal room. Again, I felt a pang of longing for the coolness inside. As I approached the door, I saw a reflection of the man I was searching for. I whirled around quickly, and wondered how I had missed him standing right behind me.
“Forward is the only way. That way, you’ll stay the same. Quickly, he’s coming—go!”
I heard the footsteps, the rubber surface on wax floors (the plastic on plastic) and suddenly understood. He couldn’t find me if I went into the glass room. I ran, the fastest I’ve ever ran, opened the door, pulled down the shelf knocking down my carefully placed milk cartons to the ground, and pushed myself into the cold sanctuary. I sat, knees to my chest, alongside the frozen walls, closing my eyes tight, focusing on the sound of his soles treading on plastic ground, listening for the voice of the man repeating in my head. I have found the glass castle, I thought, I am safe in the glass castle.
I must have repeated this mantra ten times with my eyes glued shut. When I opened them, my breath was still suspended in the air, wavering like a question. The glass room was gone, instead there was simply an endless ice floor, and a periwinkle blue sky that blended into infinity. The fountain of youth was nowhere to be seen. I rubbed my hands together, and my headache was gone. There was a pile of milk cartons to my right, and nothing to my left.
To Be God, On The Beach
Phoebe Levitsky
The beach waits to come alive until night. No human life, but still it buzzes like Electricity, mussels and pale fish
Create a skeleton, muscles and bone
Tangle hermit crabs, skittish from the light. A child, I follow the gleaming crabs
Like religion, I play a god I never had I build hermit crab restaurants, hotels, A remnant of the day they never see. Imagine that they love me, what I’ve done, And leave that night with dreams I’ve saved the world. If only I knew crabs drown in my love, And while I go back home to crisp bed sheets, They dry out where I leave them in the sand.
Ruby Dachis
The Camera
Sydney Atwood
The Purchase
A week ago, on the last day of winter break, Marcy had bought it at a gift shop.
She needed a camera that would take beautiful photos. Marcy did not think she was beautiful; she was convinced her artwork and intelligence pleased the men she brought home. Her photos captured their attention, and to keep getting their attention, she needed her photography to be posted all over campus in her school’s magazine.
This gift shop, a faithful guardian of the dead, sat at the entrance of a seaside graveyard in the town of Mordon. Its exterior was polished wood, so shiny you could make out your reflection. The green shutters were more vibrant than the fertilized grass surrounding the shack. And passersby swore you could smell the Atlantic Ocean wafting out, almost as if the sea was waiting on the other side of its front door.
So, when Marcy entered, she was surprised to be greeted with the creak of the door’s hinges. The smell of a used car that had been littered with fast food. The sight of clocks whose hands spun backward and portraits whose paint seemed to melt off their canvases.
The shop owner stood behind a counter which was surrounded by deflated chairs. One of her scaly hands kept twisting a rusted necklace while the other clutched a clear glass of what appeared to be milk. Marcy, the sole customer, walked slowly around the shop, afraid of offending the owner. She twisted through the piles of knickknacks, almost knocking down a ceramic tower of mugs. Then, to the left of the cash register, she found it. Shelves of cameras, their milky eyes challenging her to a staring contest. Their lenses were all coated in dust, as if someone had taken a bag of moldy flour and sprinkled powder over each and every one. She picked up the one on the bottom left side of the shelf, the one most obscured from view. This camera was untouched; had it even been used? It had not fallen victim to the dust. In its small lens, her own reflection stared back—a challenge. She softened her features, tried to look less on edge, before purchasing the camera. The owner whispered while handing back the change. Marcy had to lean across the counter to hear her; her breath smelled like sour milk.
Fresh Produce
Five days ago, Marcy stood in a room of red. Everything was red: her black bangs, her pink shoes, her navy overalls, and her white long-sleeve. The trays of stop bath, the enlargers, the line of clothespins that slightly swayed as she passed. Without her, the college darkroom was static, time suspended like the photos clinging to their pins.
The afternoon she had bought the Pentax K1000, she drove all over Mordon until her camera failed to capture light. She took a photo of the famous Charlton mansion, the grand estate she had always dreamed of living in. A stone facade, lion statues flanking its entrance, a blue bird bath in its backyard. The sea visible in the background, the sand dunes rising and falling as if mimicking the waves. Next, a photo of the town’s oldest ice cream shop, open 24/7, every day of every week. With her eye pressed against the camera, Marcy recounted it all, almost as if she could see her memories playing out through the viewfinder—her first kiss by the takeout window in the 8th grade, Dad buying her a sundae during his Once-a-Month visit, her friends crowded around a splintered picnic table, frantically licking their ice cream before it started to melt. Then, a large rock sitting on the side of a bending road. As a kid, she used to stand at the top of that rock, whisper a wish, then jump off. Her friend would follow suit, his request barely audible in the summer wind.
But, her favorite shot from the day captured windmills chopping up the sky like kitchen knives. These windmills sat on the horizon, and from Mordon’s shoreline, you could practically feel their blades whisking air through your hair.
The photo of the Charlton mansion was submerged in a bin filled with developer. Marcy leaned over the container, her sloped nose almost touching the clear chemicals, her breath barely grazing the solution’s surface. The estate slowly appeared like the beginning of a movie; were those lion statues alive, or was it just the liquid rippling with each exhale? She waited a minute before she removed the print and placed it in a bin of water to rinse. Then, she dropped the next picture of Mordon’s ice cream shop into the stop bath.
She told herself she would make the front page. She imagined teachers emailing her, expressing their admiration. Her classmates would tell her how inspired they were, how her art made their day. Some would even ask her out, maybe buy her a drink. She would text Dad that her photos were everywhere, bits of her hometown scattered all over campus. Everyone would be pleased, and that
was all she needed.
After each print was rinsed, Marcy hung them onto the clothespins to dry. Suspended in the red room, they remained perfectly still. They smelled of the ocean, of rainbow sprinkles, of the winter dirt and frozen pavement. She turned off the red light and left the darkroom.
The Expiration Date
Today, Marcy faces the row of photographs, her shoes rooted to the polished, red tile. The pictures sway on their clothesline, moving side to side to side, as if a cool breeze has stirred them to life.
She sees:
The ruins of a mansion, waves as tall as towers whisking away the limbs of furniture and porcelain dolls. Next, a man grabbing a woman’s wrist outside a shop with picnic tables. Then, a car jammed into the side of a rock, smoke billowing out of its hood. And finally, a dead whale picked apart by the sea, maybe even some birds, while wind turbines litter the horizon.
The campus magazine editor, Jase, stands beside Marcy. He had expected the smell of a clear winter afternoon, a beach uninhibited by summer tourists, hot chocolate flowing from the infamous New England ice cream shop that runs year round. Now, his zit-covered nose scrunches as he inspects her photos. He frowns, his mouth twisting as if he has bitten into a sour lemon.
Marcy removes the picture of the wind turbines from the clothesline. She holds it up to her nose; it smells like rotten fish.
give
me my birds, bees and imperfect produce
Naomi Ellis
I stare at the apricots in the crate. At 8am, they display perky and pale, untouched and pristine. As the hours tick by, I watch customers stick their grimy hands into the pile of fruit in their ultimate test for perfection, inadvertently forcing the fruits further and further from this unrealistic ideal. Joni Mitchell once said, “Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees. Please.” In summary, let my imperfect produce be! Light bruises turn into deep squishy ones, their thin skin occasionally broken, exposing their sticky, overripe flesh. In an effort to save them, I find myself eating more apricots than I imagine are good for my digestive system. The first few, I gulp down before necessary, gluttonous for their fresh, jammy membrane. But as customers begin to notice the wear of the small gooey fruits, I more stealthily snatch them and pop them into my mouth, spitting the small pits out onto the asphalt. I cannot stop eating them. More grubby customer hands lead me to inhale more tangy, saccharine remnants into my watering mouth. My moral imperative to prevent their waste blends with my sorrow for the mistreated and misunderstood produce. I know they will not make it much further resembling their intact fruit form, so as I pack up, I throw four or five in my bag, optimistic and greedy. When I get home, however, I find they hardly made it the twenty minute walk—now squished and bodiless, juices leaking out the bottom of my bag—and must be eaten immediately. In a great display of bravery, I take on one last feat: more than fifteen apricots have entered my digestive tract, and now, I face five more opponents head-on. This is the price I must pay to uphold my most precious values: good food must never be wasted. So, it breaks down in my stomach, dissolving from moral gluttony.
That Nickel Story Ella Spitz
His first job was to wind clocks so workers could clock in. He pocketed his nickel for the bus and found a way to middleman time.
We replicated his stages of life and stuffed his body like a costume. He can’t move on his own and watched as we moved as him.
There’s no denying it anymore, he said. His feet are swollen and his breath is short.
Always listen to your wife, he said. His throat is dry and his wife is dead.
His last job was to catch a newborn baby. He preferred the Catholic hospital— the nuns made kosher cake and a god was in charge.
A man replaced him in the dance for the opera group he founded. He sat in the audience and watched as a man danced as him.
Tell us that story again, we said. Our eyes are stolen and our breath is short.
It’s hard to remember, he said. His arms are salami and his voice is lead.
When I was your age, he said. Time moved him, as him, instead.
A Letter Concerning Your Great-Grandmother
Yael Ezry
To my future child(ren),
I am currently eighteen, and I want to be like my grandmother when I’m old. If this is not still the case, or if you are not aware, my grandmother has soft and thin shoulder-length white hair. She grew up in little Sweden, Kansas, and makes homemade butter in a gray stone dish stored with water. My whole childhood she has lived in a small house among forest-colored mews in Seattle, which smells strongly of the rosemary bush outside. Her ex-husband (my grandfather) was screwed over by his second wife and now lives desperate and alone in an old-age home a few blocks away. Like a nun, she has perfect karma and resolute loneliness.
The last time I visited her and arrived at the Sea-Tac airport, I searched desperately for her small car in the Departures lane. At all times, there are at least three boxes of tissues and three bottles of lukewarm flavored water. As I discovered her Prius, she immediately presented me with a bag of fresh grapes and boxes of snacks, listing her recurring anxieties. The usual ones were typically about driving to pick me up so late at night, Trump, the latest thing she saw on Rachel Maddow about anti-Semitism, the ache in her hip. In the car, she loves to tell me her most aching opinions: that people don’t need to drink that much water, they love dogs too much and public libraries too little, and that the music beats in her aerobics class are far too loud.
When we returned to her house, her tone began to darken, as it often does.
My mother (I suppose your grandmother), who is a psychologist, would describe my grandmother as the most anxious person you will ever meet. I would say she is nervous and dislikes too much stillness. I once made the mistake of taking a nap in the afternoon, so she opened all the curtains, and the bedroom door, ripped my sheets off, and began passive-aggressively and loudly playing the piano until I reluctantly woke up. My grandfather, who was a psychoanalyst, just dismissed her outright. We’re all probably a little wrong.
“I just love your hair, Grandma. It’s not at all gray, it’s like a stark white. People dye their hair that way,” I said as we sat on her couch, cuddling under a knit blanket.
“It’s too thin. That’s why it has to be so short.”
“I like it,” I said, twiddling my fingers around a new hardback.
“You know, to me, it still looks blond in the mirror. I don’t see the grays or white at all.” She laughed then. “But I suppose I think I still look the same as when you were born.”
“I wonder if I’ll have white hair when I’m older. Mom probably will, since you guys look alike and she has blond hair, too. Mine will probably grow black-and-white and peppery, like my Dad’s.” I pictured my paternal grandmother’s hair, which is in fact not so gray but is still reddish-dark brown, and is balding in most spots on her head, clipped as short as possible by her nurse. She has never been able to speak English and was already descending into dementia by my teenhood, so when I used to visit her, our highest level of interaction was her perched on the doorway, watching me silently play with my aunt’s old Barbie dolls, me pretending she wasn’t there. I winced, imagining myself bald.
My beautiful, American grandmother paused, then closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m not going to be able to see it.”
“See what?” I asked.
“See you when you’re old enough to have all-gray hair.”
This comment made me numb with silence, but she moved on to load the dishwasher, unbothered by this sentiment. “Don’t say that. It’s morbid.”
“It’s true.” She said this like she would say You didn’t respond to my text or It’s already one o’clock. The stuff of ordinary failures.
You’d have to understand that, unlike some women in their late seventies, my grandmother has no permanent ailments. She rarely gets sick. Unlike the women of my father’s family, she is not a fabulous chain-smoker. She lives alone in a house by herself, drives herself, takes Seattle public transportation when she can, tutors and takes classes, frequents any and all local bookstores, and gets a weekly brunch with her friends. In fact, out of all her friends, she is by far the healthiest—some have dementia, others alcoholism, and others both. She has neither. By all measures, she is fine and good.
Yet despite all this, at far past middle age, my grandmother has become obsessed with talking freely and easily about her death. Not only that, but the emotional and physical abuse from throughout her life by men, and by my grandfather in particular. To my mother, she brings up these things casually and often. When she had a hysterectomy, she had her two children watch her bury her fallen uterus under the tree in her small backyard, where she gave a small and mournful speech. When that same ash tree later grew ill and had to be removed from her
backyard, she informed me about the ordeal of removing the tree daily. Most recently, she has been obsessed with her funeral arrangements. It took some gentle but persistent convincing from my uncle and mother that her dead body should not, probably, be turned into compost (a program described in a pamphlet that she delivered enthusiastically), but rather buried, so that her relatives (namely, me) can visit her. Meanwhile, the grievances she has with the world are only growing larger.
The truth is, I am writing this letter to you now because, for the past couple of years, she has been treated by many not like many aging women—as an object that should disappear—but as a woman who has already vanished. She watches television and reads books and sees no one with stark white hair and many, many blondes. She was already supposed to disappear, but here she is and will remain for many, many more years.
To me she has always been perfectly opaque, twisting and pulling and binding. It was only to my mother that she ever seemed like a ghost. As I write about my grandmother to you now, I am aware that the version of her that I have come to know (soft, hair-brushing, gentle-spoken, warm, smelling of rosemary and dust) is not the version that perhaps anyone else in her life has had, including my mother and my nine-year-old sister. I am letting you in on a secret image between us: that she is as strong and solid as she is nervous and worried. When I was born, my mother had a 104-degree fever, so I stayed with my grandmother for the first week of my life. Over the years, she taught me how to play Really Rosie and Free to be You and Me on her shiny black piano, to read books, to watch Sound of Music, to love cooking, to sew my stuffed animals and coats back together, to make the perfect cup of British Earl Grey (it must be a particular caramel color), and how to bake meringue and Swedish desserts. Just this past November, I cried into her solid shoulder at night on the Seattle bus line, curled up into her arms and trembling by a bunch of Phishheads.
So if—or maybe when—she is no longer alive, I am writing in the hope that you read this and remember—or maybe learn—about my grandmother just as she was. If you’re reading this, she’s gone, or perhaps not the same as she is right now. And yes, I probably don’t remember every sound of her voice, not really, just the way her paper-white hands felt and the spangled shape of her words.
Love, Your mother, who was named after her own mother’s grandmother, and was born from the many great-grandmothers before that who were mostly unknown and much-remembered
Eli Bloom
Peephole Ezra Holzman
the sun blinds as a form of enclosure; slowly vignetting the view, until you can only look down to the shivering grass below as your world becomes a pocket town
of ants who roam in their proud tunnels, worms who bow mournfully at the darkness of a bothered person’s shoe, flower petals snatched from their homes by a slew of wind tides and garden shovels digging into unlighted soil. if you could spin your neck around in bounties of ups and sides, then you could hear the sound
of aliens speaking across their planet homes, habitats of frogs sharing joys through ripples of a lonely pond, and the sun grasping the poise
of the little ant— unimportant against a shining cosmic gown, but still proud of its tunnels in its own pocket town.
