Sanctuary Magazine: Spring 2017

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Sanctuary Magazine Spring 2017

Masthead

Managing Editor Junior Editor Website Deisgner Public Relations Chair Interns

Faculty Advisor

Emily Teitsworth Sarah French Sarah Adams Richard Berwind Angela Grossman Taylor Breeding Amanda Ducharme Dr. Laurence Roth

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Our lives are shaped by the intricate networks of relationships that we build from the people, places, and things that surround us. This issue of Sanctuary aims to shed light on the aftermath of relationships we experience every day and those we may only experience in our daydreams.

I invite you to scour these pages– feeling the deep connection of knowing someone so well that you could pick them out by the pattern of their breath. Or the feeling of loving an object so much that you wonder what if it were human, as Katherine does in her poem Necessary (Essential) Tools. I invite you to embody the dull repetition of running errands like in Paige’s The Ravin’ and the hardship of simply surviving in a world where it’s easy to lose yourself and walk endlessly in circles, as Amy portrays in her poem Saturn.

I invite you to remember the strain of childhood talent versus motherly discipline when you read Sarah’s story and to let Amy’s story help you better understand the strain memories of past relationships put on ones in the present. I invite you to feel the tension between being tied to the ground and bound to the sky as in Katherine’s poetry. With Steven and Jacob, I invite you to see the comedy of meeting death and how a relationship with death can be one fraught with humor and humility.

By the time you reach the end of this magazine, I hope that you have spent ample time exploring your own relationships– understanding what other people, immaterial items, and nonhuman creatures mean to you. I hope you discover how deeply relationships can weave in and out of our lives, our dreams, and, sometimes, our nightmares.

Sincerely, Emily Teitsworth Managing Editor

Table of Contents 11 Saturn: Poetry Amy Anderson

12 Owl Portrait: Painting Morgan MacVaugh

13 The Sad Playwright: Fiction Steven McKnight

15 Death is my Bitch: Non-fiction Jacob Tashoff

23 All the Pieces Look the Same: Photography Cara Roets

24 The Waitress, the Cloud of Stars, and a Little Violence: Poetry Katherine Hammond

26 A Right Way to Play: Fiction Sarah Dorko

37 Necessary (Essential) Tools: Poetry Katherine Hammond

38 Freed by a Friend: Photography Dylan Scillia

39 Bottle and Bricks: Fiction Amy Anderson

53 The Ravin’: Poetry/Audio Paige Drews

55 Kirby 64: Zero-Two: Audio Music Composition Isaiah Harper

Saturn

Amy Anderson

She 9, He 21 Walk through the pale yellow fields—her arms drape over his shoulders as he carries her on his back.

Grey clouds ripple with electric currents.

She rests her chin at the crook of his neck.

I feel like we’re walkin’ in circles.

He stops—turns his head. The trees, the fields, the road— It all looks the same.

Are you lost?

What about the stars? Follow the star like the Magi.

We’re lost.

He drops his hands—she slides off his back. He turns to her.

This isn’t simple. This isn’t some story in some book.

I can’t follow the stars because I don’t even know where we’re goin’ Then what are we doing?

We’re survivin’ That’s it.

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Owl Portrait Morgan MacVaugh

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The Sad Playwright Steven McKnight

The sad playwright sat alone at his desk, in front of his notebook, waiting for a stroke of creativity to pierce his diseased head. The blankness of the page before him was downright maddening and in order to ease this he began scribbling some stupid self-referential crap about some vague characterless writer. The throes of existential anguish were creeping up on him, along with the responsibilities of his life which he was procrastinating on. “If I can be constructive,” he lied to himself, “I could justify not doing that.” The sad playwright laughed. He was wrong.

Alas, he stared into the void of existential anguish, and unsurprisingly, it did not stare back. There were far more interesting things for it to look at, like grass growing. Like the ebb and flow of the universe shrinking and expanding, like supernovas giving way to new nebulas, like the constant struggle between creation and destruction. The sad playwright would have been offended by this lack of attention from his metaphorical nothingness before him, but he decided to let it slide just this once. And every time after that. He was just one person on one measly planet in one measly galaxy. Hardly worth any attention.

But this is what he hoped to accomplish through his writing. He was one whisper in the roar of the universe, and yet, he thought he could scream louder to the rest, “Notice me. I’m important.” He wanted to snap his fingers and stop the universe, and demand of it, “Listen to me.

I have something to say.” But every strain of words that escaped his pen had no hope of piercing the great drone of reality. This is fine, thought the playwright. This is just fine.

“This is just sad,” said a voice behind him.

“Yes. Yes, it is,” the sad playwright concurred, without even glancing back.

“What a shame,” said the voice, the words lingering in the air like dust, incapable of finding a suitable surface to settle upon.

“Oh, you’ll find I have none of that,” said the playwright. He scribbled onwards, barely paying any heed to whomever or whatever made 13

commentary behind him.

“How rude, sir. It is common courtesy,” said this voice, “to look in the direction of the person with whom you are conversing.”

“A conversation is consensual,” the sad playwright halfheartedly argued, still almost completely drawn into the nothingness he was scribbling out. “You’re striking up a conversation with someone who has no intent to converse. I’m just indicating that I have no interest in continuing whatever this is.”

“You will find what I have to say to be very important,” said the voice.

The sad playwright scoffed.

“That’s what they all say.”

“I am here to collect a debt of sorts.” The voice paused. “It seems your pathetic excuse for a heart has stopped working.”

“That’s also what they all say,” mumbled the sad playwright.

“Perhaps I was not clear. Your heart has stopped working. It is no longer pumping blood. You are a dead man.”

“Believe me, I wish,” scoffed the sad playwright. “But, no. There’s work to be done. There are words to be written.”

“And those words will be written. But not by you. You seem to be under the impression that you’re important, but there are millions like you. Those words will be written by another sad, sad man.”

The sad playwright showed no signs of realization. He did not turn around. He just kept on writing, expressionless, motionless save for his right hand, grasping a pen, scratching away at the paper, trying to fill the void on the page.

“You know who I am,” said this voice, the sound resonating in the empty room, chilling everything within, except for the sad playwright.

“Yes. But if I ignore you, you’ll go away.” And the sad playwright kept writing, feeding more and more words into that void of existential anguish. The voice protested.

But eventually, the voice fell silent.

And the playwright, despite it all, scrawled out a comedy.

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Death is my Bitch Jacob Tashoff

Death1 is a backseat driver. I learned this one summer night on the way to the hospital. “But why were you going to the hospital?” you may ask. Well, my dear reader, that truly is a story to tell. … wait, wait, wait. Sorry. This story actually starts a bit further in the past than when the actual story started. Confusing? Try living it. And so we begin; long ago, in a faraway land (four hours away, to be exact), I decided to let my life be dictated by fate, so that none of my mistakes could be attributed to the shortcomings I clearly don’t have. It doesn’t always work out that way, of course, but I try. Fate lets me live a guilt-free life. I do, in fact, remember a scene from a dream I had in the wee years of my childhood: “Jacob! Why did you break that mug?”

“Fate made me do it, mom!”

Yeah, even in my dream, that didn’t go over so well. But – and this is a big but – I have continued to let fate dictate my actions because responsibility sucks. Now, with that useless drivel of an anecdote, we can get to the real story. 2 We pulled up late in the day; might’ve even been night by that point.

You know how summer gets, where it looks like day and it feels like day and your mom said you could stay up till the sun sets but it’s already like 1 You all super excited to read the harrowing tale of my battle with the physical manifestation of Death in the backseat of my mom’s minivan? Well too bad.

The presence of Death in this tale is merely a dramatization. The core of this story is all good and true, an actual event from my life, and yeah, I could’ve just written about that, but then piece would be short and boring as shit. Death is spicy. In the interesting event sort of way, I have no idea what he tastes like.

2 I advise all you dedicated readers out there to keep this ‘useless drivel of an anecdote’ in mind as you continue reading the actual story I’m trying to tell, cause it definitely shows up again. Kind of. I’d explain more, but… spoilers.

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nine and you have to go to sleep even though the sun hasn’t actually set yet? That’s the kinda day/kinda night thing we had going on. You could tell our campsite was on an island in the same way you could tell Kansas City is on an island (cause all continents are technically islands). I was asleep in the car – it had started out as just pretending to be asleep so I wouldn’t have to help set up the tent, but I did somehow manage to actually drift off.

When I woke up, it was considerably darker, and I panicked, momentarily forgetting where I was. Once I had regained my orientation, I decided it would be a good idea to move to the tent. Not because I was scared of being alone in the car in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods. No way. The tent would just be more comfortable.

I kept telling myself that as I opened the car door, grabbed my pillow, and sprinted to the tent.

The ground was slightly damp. I could feel it through the mesh parts of my sneakers; the campsite was well situated in a clearing. There weren’t even any dead spots (where the dirt was visible).3 I nodded and silently congratulated my dad on his decision to lay a tarp down under the tent – no wet butts tonight. Trying to both be as stealthy as possible (asap for short) and not wake anyone up, I snuck inside the tent. My mother woke up, of course. I just continued my way to an open portion of tent floor of our rather overlarge tent (I’m sure the box would probably call it a family tent or something, but does a tent really need a curtained off section for a dog?4). I also don’t even know if tents have floors, but for the sake of the argument, they do. I dropped my pillow, then my body, then my head.

And that, my friends, is where things began to go south.

I lost practically all ability to utilize my lungs (one of the innate abilities of asthmatics. That’s right, asthma’s a super power.) The best way I can describe the feeling is this: imagine air, only it’s water, then imagine the ability to breathe, only it’s a pipette, and then imagine a nice pair of 3 This is a really awkward sentence, and it would totally read better as something like “there was grass everywhere grass could possibly grow”, but I’m a lazy bastard so it stays as is.

4 Interestingly enough, this is exactly where I found myself trying to go to sleep. I blame it on my fatass brother.

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lungs, only they’re a bucket; now picture trying to fill the empty bucket up with the pipette, but every time you empty the pipette into the bucket, you have to empty out the bucket.

I know some of you readers like to think of yourselves as romantics, so I decided that a second, more romantic metaphor wouldn’t hurt. Maybe you’ll understand it better (even though I am hella sure the first one is plenty clear).5 So at its core, the feeling I was feeling was akin to when you first make eye contact with your soulmate, and the rest of the world falls away, and your breath stops and suddenly you forget that breathing is actually necessary to continue the romance, only there wasn’t any soulmate or love or any of that sappy shit.

Basically, not a fun time. On the plus side, I got to spend the night in a cushy hospital bed instead of three inches off the ground in a sleeping bag. I even got to take steroids. For my lungs, for my lungs, don’t get all worked up.6 I think now is a great time to make note of the fact that most asthma attacks don’t follow this course of action. Normally it starts with a warning of sorts, like “oh that breath was a little difficult”, with each subsequent breath becoming slightly more difficult until it finally gets to the point where “aha! Finally, a good excuse to take drugs!” It should also be noted that most asthma attacks aren’t nearly as bad as the one I’m detailing here – this event is only one of two or three in my life where my asthma has gotten this bad. Normally it just makes it more difficult to get the right amount of air in. It’s like getting really winded, except without the physical activity (or with it; asthma’s not really that choosy) that accompanies becoming so winded. What I’m trying to say is that 5 This may sound insulting to those of you who are romantics, cause it makes it sound like you couldn’t understand the previous metaphor cause you’re a romantic blah, blah, blah. Ssshhhh. If you get offended that easily, fair warning, it’s gonna happen again. It’d be no fun to write something that didn’t piss someone off (what I want to say is fuck you but I’m a good Christian boy so I’ll refrain from using foul language).

6 I wasn’t shooting up or anything like that. I just had to drink what I consider way too much of a substance that looked way too much like sperm and tasted way too much like paint thinner. Nothing crazy.

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this instance was out of character for asthma attacks, and so, perhaps, warranted a slight increase in the panic.

Before getting to the hospital, however, (finally back on track) we had to actually find where it was (‘cause we were in Canada (which I may have forgotten to mention before)7). We don’t live in Canada (if that wasn’t obvious). Interesting side note, the dude on duty at the entrance to the campgrounds when we were leaving was named Jacob. Cool coincidence.

Because that is exactly what my mind was focused on as I struggled to pull in enough air to keep myself from passing out. That was only half sarcasm.

Now, you’re probably wondering where the hell Death being a backseat driver comes into play. Coincidentally, it’s right here in this part of the story! Wow. Imagine that. But it kinda happened a little something like this: We’re on our way to the hospital, my head hanging out the window like a dog8 as I tried to inhale as much as I could – which, as I expressed so elegantly before, was very little. But so we’re driving along, and all of a sudden there’s this great explosion of blackness coming from the back of our minivan that clearly only I could see or my mother would’ve been panicking a little more than she already was and I whip around (metaphorically cause doing that would’ve made the asthma attack even worse) and sitting there behind my seat is this huge dude with great black wings and a huge scythe and a suave black robe that only helped accentuate the absurd attractiveness of his face (attracting my fist to it like a punch magnet (nah, just kidding, Death is an attractive gentleman))9 and all I could do was sit there and stare as my mind went into overtime to try and figure out who this very attractive looking, very dangerous looking man was.

Turns out it was Death. Who would’ve guessed? Personally, I think 7 This is an important detail, Jacob! We should totally find this out earlier!’

Yeah, no, it’s really not that important. Actual geographical location isn’t gonna impact my asthma at all; I just figured maybe someone out there liked the little details, and if it turns out you all do, well look at you go.

8 Maybe that’s why they do it. To get more air into their lungs cause they’re all having perpetual asthma attacks! That’s a sad thought. Poor doggies.

9 Yes, that is a double parenthesis. Totally grammatically correct.

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Thanatos is a much cooler name. Like “who are you?” “I am Thanatos, god of death10, the dark angel of the end, the grim reaper…!” So much cooler than just ‘Death’.

But yeah, so Death is a backseat driver. And not a very good one at that. He kept giving us all these wrong directions, almost as if he didn’t want us to make it to the hospital. He’s like the kind of backseat driver that sticks his hand up into your face to point you in the right (or in his case wrong) direction. So annoying. Luckily, my mom couldn’t see him, maybe cause she wasn’t the one so close to death, or at least was good at ignoring him, ‘cause she followed the directions we got from the Jacob at the campgrounds and we made it to the hospital and I was rushed to a hospital room and got pumped fucking full of those wonderful drugs I mentioned before.

Death spoke to me during the car ride. What? That’s not fair! Not only can he take people’s’ souls, not only is he absurdly attractive, but he can also talk?! I know. So unfair. And his voice sounded super smooth like velvet chocolate or chocolate velvet or some other combination of smooth stuff. The conversation was weird too, but that may just have been because of my lack of oxygen. It’s an important gas.

“Turn right up here!”

“Get your hand out of my face you freakishly handsome bird!”

“I take offence to that. And I swear it’s a right up at that stop light.”

“The other Jacob said it was a left so we’re going left. And if you’re not a bird then why do you have wings?”

“Because wings are awesome.11 And I’m Death! I can have wings if I want to!” said Death matter-of-factly.

10 Side note, this is something that really bugs me. People are always like, “yeah, Hades, he’s the god of death and, like, the underworld and stuff, right?”

Yeah, no, fuck you, pick up a book about mythology, it’s a good read. Hades is the god of the dead, and the underworld, yes, but also riches (cause precious metals and gems are in the earth and I don’t really see the connection but the Greeks did, so…). But Thanatos – the big hunk of man meat sitting behind me looking all grim and like he wants to reap something (that totally got more laughs in my head) is the god of death, the very embodiment of death itself, yadda, yadda… but I digress.

11 It’s true. Having wings would be bad ass.

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“Death? What’re you doing in the back seat of my mom’s minivan?”12 “The fates sent me to collect, kid.”

“Collect what, exactly? I don’t think I stole anything. Also pretty sure I don’t owe anyone any money. I kill my creditors. Less work that way.”

“You kill your creditors?” Death looked at me like I was crazy, but he of course had no right to, considering he was Death and there’s no way Death could ever be sane.

“Well, I would if I owed anyone money. But I already said! I don’t owe any money!”

“This is too off topic! The fates want your soul, kid, not any money!”

“My soul? Why do they want that? And why now of all times? I’m a little too preoccupied to deal with giving away my soul.”

“You really think this asthma attack was a coincidence?” Death looked incredulous.

“Of course not! Coincidences don’t exist. It was just happenstance.”

“The fates can’t collect a soul from a living body, kid. Think about it.”

I thought about it. And then, lo and behold, I had the answer! “The fates gave me an asthma attack so I would die and they could collect my soul! But why do they want my soul? You still haven’t told me.”

Death stared me dead in the eyes.13 Well, at least I think he did, ‘cause he was still wearing that hood and it was hard to actually see his eyes.

“Long ago, in a faraway land (four hours away, to be exact), I decided to let my life be dictated by fate—” “Yeah, yeah, I get it. So they decided to not let me do that anymore?”

“No one can escape responsibility, kid. Now maybe if there was, I don’t know, a prophecy about your life or something, you could maybe escape this, but as far as I know – and I know pretty far – there isn’t one.

Sorry.” He wasn’t sorry. So I thought about it for a quick second. And then I came up with the perfect plan of action.

“I could make up a prophecy right now! It shouldn’t be too hard!”

“Kid, that’s not—” “And so shall the night dawn / With the brilliance of a dying day.

12 Because everyone speaks as if they’re unveiling huge plot points in every sentence. This is totally accurate.

13 Cause he couldn’t really stare at me alive? Get it? Cause he’s dead? And Death and all that happy stuff? That was pretty good.

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/ And the journey from carriage to cradle / Will prove not the test of strength, / For what unfolds within the walls of safety, / So strong in its evil intent—”14 “Kid, that’s not how prophecies work! You can’t just make one up on the spot and expect it to work!”

“Well then I’ll make up the whole prophecy and write a story about this exact part of my life and how I solved the prophecy, which I’ll have to – I don’t know – include in the beginning or something!”

“Critics won’t like that!” However much I was enjoying arguing with Death over the exact use of prophecies and how and when they needed to be written, we had arrived at the hospital, no thanks to Death and his directions I might add.

We left Death in the car, because it didn’t really seem like he wanted to follow us inside, but when we left the hospital the next morning (it was like ten hours of drugs and comfortable beds; I’m also reasonably sure they gave me pudding, but again, drugs, so I can’t remember all too well) he wasn’t in the car anymore. There was this sassy get well card that had a sexy murse15 (male nurse for all you scrubs who haven’t watched Scrubs) who was saying something about ‘having a little something to make me feel better’ and he was winking, but my innocent nine-year-old mind didn’t really understand what it meant.16 Actually, while I was being pumped full of drugs, I managed to fall asleep and boy did I have a crazy dream (this is totally one-hundredpercent true, you can take the word of a drug-addled nine-year-old boy for it). I was standing atop a sheer-faced cliff, clad in shining armor, with a sword buckled onto my belt on one side, and a metal collar-and-chain combo (kinky, I know) buckled to the other side. I stood with my back to the cliff, and the wind rushed over me, howling as it ruffled my hair fiercely. There was a forest farther ahead of me on the cliff (it was probably a mountain in actuality but who knows?) Standing some ways off, closer to the forest, was a giant clad in robes of the purest midnight, a scythe twice my height gripped tightly in skeletal hands. I offered what I’m sure 14 Don’t waste time looking this up. I did actually write it myself.

15 (male-ale)+(nurse-n)=murse 16 Everyone relax, I didn’t actually get this card. That would be hilarious though.

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was a brilliant challenge, but damn was the wind loud. Couldn’t hear myself speak. And so, without further ado, I drew my shining steel blade and charged the cloaked figure in front of me.

A fearsome battle ensued, but I quickly gained the upper hand. I won’t bore you with the details, but with each successful attack on my part my once-giant opponent continued to shrink until he was my height, at which point I smashed his cloaked head with the ruby pommel of my sword, and as my opponent fell to the ground, dazed, I whipped the metal collar from my belt and clasped it around his throat, sealing my victory. Without a kiss. Then I woke up. And I could breathe again!

I do suppose on the journey to the hospital I should’ve been incredibly worried about the possibility of death if I didn’t soon regain full lung capacity, but I was so focused on the effort to actually stay alive that all other thoughts were kind of lost in the white noise of unconscious thought. Death is an ever-present threat in everybody’s life, of course, but I find that as an asthmatic – especially with asthma as serious as mine – death is always lurking around a closer corner. Every asthma attack I glimpse the tell-tale tail of a dark cloak as I round the corner, and the worse the asthma attack is, the more of that cloak I see.

And the only other time (or one of the only other times; like I said at the beginning might’ve been two or three different occasions this happened) I’ve had such bad asthma it actually interferes with living my life, I managed to catch a glimpse of the smile on Death’s face. Death’s is a smile I never want to see again in my life. There is absolutely nothing friendly about it. I’d seen it before, at my neighbor’s funeral, as Death stood tall above her casket. I made the mistake of staring too long, and we made eye contact. The sinister grin creeping across Death’s face seemed to say ‘you’re next’ and my face blanched and for a moment and I felt that we were at my funeral, not the funeral of the old lady I had sometimes helped shovel. That smile sent shivers running down my spine. I couldn’t see straight. It was the most abject terror I’ve ever felt in my life – pfft.

Who am I kidding? I wasn’t that scared of Death! I was hardly thinking about Death on my way to that hospital nine years ago, I was so annoyed I couldn’t enjoy a good night’s sleep. And besides – why would I be scared of dying when Death is my bitch?17 17 Title drop.

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All the Pieces Look the Same Cara Roets

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The Waitress, A Cloud of Stars, and Little Violence Katherine Hammond

Driving to her dead-end job, she sees a streak of fur before she feels a sickening lurch, the lump crushed under her wheels.

Holding the creature at the roadside, she stares into the stars, and hopes there’s a god to hold broken creatures such as these.

She still feels the lurching under her wheels as she stares through the windshield, dead lump in her lap.

She sees the stars billow, sending rolling waves of light, and the mountains of sky calling to be climbed.

She abandons her windshield as she arrives at her work. During her break, she digs out back and buries the creature deep in the ground.

Always with her face turned to mountains of sky, twilight fills her eyes, they glow as they’re bathed in waves from stars.

She buries the creature deep in the ground, then she’s mopping floors, filling coffee cups. She thinks of cold fire, of glowing twilight in the night, of black dirt under fingernails, and a creature tucked into the Earth.

As she mops, she looks through dirty glass, back to the sky.

Food’s scrubbed from plates like dried blood from hands.

Tired feet stomp over buried life as she bears laden trays, feeding filthy crowds under silent stars.

Scrubbing cups, she thinks of blood and fur and bone.

Wincing at a screaming, hungry child, she wades through ragged travelers, feeds and fills the gaping mouths, living tied to ground, bound to the sky.

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She hears the begging, hungry children, hears them echo her hungry soul. Bathed in blood and dirt, the ground, she prays to the stars, and hopes there’s a God to hold broken creatures such as these.

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A Right Way to Play Sarah Dorko

Mom set me on the piano bench before my feet could even reach the floor. They swung back and forth, just shy of the pedals below. That was the first time I made a key sing. It hung lonely in the air, vibrating against the white walls, louder than I was expecting. I hit another as the first faded from my ears. Mom slapped my wrist gently, cutting off the note.

“You don’t have to pound the keys,” she said, sitting down beside me.

She let me strike the keys a few more times, telling me softly, softly, until the keys sang just right. She nodded with approval and showed me how to use both hands spread over the keys, not just a finger.

This was the first time I had ever heard the piano. It had sat in our house for years, but closed, locked, and Mom always had the key on her.

That day, she had unlocked it, just for me. She said I was old enough now.

She laid out lessons for me to practice and learn the notes. She adjusted my fingers when they were off or to keep them curled. You can’t play with straight fingers, she’d say. But she never touched the keys. Never played a single note. Never said, here, like this, or watch me. She’d say, not like that, try again, and that was that. I played until she nodded and we’d move on.

When we were done, she lifted me from the bench, slid that fallboard back in place, and locked it. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” she said, the matter settled. She left me staring at the piano, waiting for tomorrow when the keys would be unlocked for me again.

“You were really good,” Joanna said, sneaking into the room after Mom had left.

“Really?” I asked. Joanna was a year older than me and she should have learned the piano first. But the piano was never unlocked for her.

Mom said her fingers weren’t right for it.

Joanna nodded, but then laughed, something she kept sealed behind her lips. “Well, it wasn’t great, but you’ll do better, Sebby. Maybe you’ll be a really great piano player one day.”

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Knowing that the piano’s secrets were tucked away under the fallboard, Joanna and I left the room, turning off the lights and closing the door.

I could have sat in front of it staring all day. I wanted to play more, but Joanna told me, out of sight, out of mind. I told myself that those words helped, but I could still hear the memory of the notes.

Mom taught me for another week or so until, one day, a man rang our doorbell at lesson time. He wore a big puffy snow coat even though it was only November. He was an older man with a wrinkled face and thin, springy hair, which in the light looked clear instead of white. Mom pulled up a chair for him next to the piano. It creaked when the he leaned back into it.

“This is Mr. Rubins,” Mom introduced.

He held out a hand and said, “Call me Arthur.”

“And this is Sebastian,” Mom said while I shook his hand. It was rough and cracked and I wondered how he could play piano if he didn’t take care of his hands.

Arthur laughed at me. “Serious man, I see. Let’s see what you know, Sebastian.”

We started with flashcards first. Each had a note and Arthur wanted me to name them. I had to turn away from the piano to do so. I knew these already. Mom was strict about learning the basics first. We had been drilling these flash cards before bed each night, but she didn’t step in. I answered the first one for Arthur. “That’s a C,” I said. My eyes slid over to find Mom. She was perched on the sun faded green couch behind Arthur, her stare expectant, lips sealed.

Arthur went over octaves next. He had me point, but not play. He kept smiling, wrinkles etched deeply into the skin. His eyebrows raised with the next request, smile still there, and I watched those wrinkles dig deeper and deeper. Then he flipped open my lesson book and pointed to the notes and had me recite them. Bottom to top, left to right, one note at a time.

Mom and I hadn’t been doing much more, but at least she let me play the piano. Though I didn’t say anything other than what I was asked, Arthur explained all in due time. Whatever that meant. I just wanted to hear the piano again. Yesterday’s notes were fading from memory and I wanted to play the first lesson piece, show Arthur I could do more than

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this. But no, he’d say again, though I hadn’t asked. One step at a time.

Through the entire lesson, Mom stayed on the couch, halfway between sitting and squatting. She pressed her knuckles to her lips, watching like a hawk. I could feel her eyes. I could feel the unsaid words bubbling behind that fist, but not escaping while Arthur was here. He was in charge of the lesson. Her attention snapped to my fingers every time one played a note too straight. She wanted to fix and correct and perfect.

When Arthur’s hour was up, he left with a cheerful good-bye and promises of next week. The front door closed and the fallboard came down and was locked.

“But I haven’t played all day,” I said.

Mom glanced at the piano before her eyes settled on me. “Your lesson is over, Sebastian. We’ll practice again tomorrow.” Then she left, all those words unsaid.

After turning off the lights and closing the door, I found Joanna sitting against the wall outside. She frowned up at me.

“How come you didn’t play today?”

“Arthur said not yet.”

“Well, that’s dumb.”

“Mom said we’d practice tomorrow.”

She smile, satisfied. “Good.” *** A few years later, Arthur didn’t come over anymore for lessons. Mom said I had learned all I could from him, so she went back to teaching me herself. She still treated the keys like they might burn her fingertips if she so much as brushed them. A wooden ruler became her hand’s extension.

It could rap commandingly on the page, directing my eyes to something she believed I didn’t see. It could reach up under my fingers, a silent instruction to keep them curled because she was tired of repeating herself.

It could whack against my knuckles when I made a silly mistake.

She tackled our lessons with a new kind of ferocity. She left the fallboard up longer now that she had doubled our practice times. After she got off work, she sat next to me and had me drill through songs over and over again. At first, I was elated that I could play the piano longer, but my fingers got tired and I got tired.

“You’re not following the music,” she said in her stern voice.

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I stared hard at the sheet music, right at the little p that told me I was supposed to play quietly. I stared until my eyes went out of focus as she continued.

“The music instructs how you play, Sebastian. If you can’t read it then we might as well stop.”

But we couldn’t stop practicing. My fingers might have ached from playing the Mozart piece so many times that they could barely stay curled enough for Mom’s sharp gaze and her ruler, but I would do anything to have the keys under my hands. *** I entered middle school with a newfound fascination with bandaids. The plain ones were fine, better even. When I glanced down while I played, it was like I didn’t have any on in the first place. I wrapped them around my fingers, avoiding the knuckles so that they could still curl perfectly on the piano. I even spread them out over the backs of my hands. While I perfected piece after piece for Mom during our lessons, I could not perfect the art of spreading a bandage one-handed. They rose up and gapped on my hands and I crisscrossed some just to get them to lie flat.

Teachers and kids asked me about them, but not nearly as much if they saw the bruises instead. That’s how it started. The blue and purple blossoms that later wilted to green and yellow weren’t bad. They just came to life under the harsh light the lamp gave off above the piano. I just found I bruised easily. The fingertips were wrapped next. I bit my nails down too low. Any little scrapes I acquired or the way my hands dried and split in the winter started needed covering, too.

Kids will be kids, my math teacher said and he laughed. Plenty of kids got scraped knees and hands. It was just odd with me, the kid obsessed with the piano. They thought I’d be one to keep my hands safe. My music teacher cherished my hands, asking me to play for the class. She clicked her tongue when she first saw the band-aids, a few plastered across the back of my hands, the older ones sagging with a line of dirt around the edges.

Jo walked with me to and from school each day. Mom worked early and we lived close enough that she had us walk. It was Jo’s last year before she started high school. When she noticed the band-aids multiplying, she helped me wrap them tighter each morning in the bathroom.

“I don’t care if the recital is coming up, Sebby. It sounds beautiful,” Jo

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said. “Mom should really give you a break.”

I shook my head. “It’s fine, but it’s not perfect.” Recitals are nothing.

I had played plenty before. From mock recitals with visiting family to real ones held in the high school’s auditorium or in the church down the street, they hardly bothered me. Nerves of steel, Mom said of me before each performance, though it sounded more like instruction than compliment. “In high school, kids play competitions. Mom says then, it doesn’t matter how nice it sounds. It’s all about how closely you play the piece to how it’s written.” The judges want perfection, she’d say. You won’t go anywhere without that.

Jo sighed. “Well then what’s the point?” She still sat outside the room while I practiced, doing her homework on the floor. It was a conversation we’d had many times, but there was nothing she could say that would persuade me otherwise. Precision is key in playing. Mom said so and she hadn’t led me wrong. “How’re your hands?” she asked, looking at them closely and changing the topic.

I pulled my hands away from her eyes, stuffing them into my pockets.

“They’re fine,” I huffed. “I was just playing too fast.”

“But you got every note right. I heard!”

“But the piece says to be played at one sixty, not two hundred.”

Jo bit her lip for a while until we neared home. Then she looked at me and we halted before we started down the driveway. “If Mom didn’t make you, do you think you’d still play?”

I nodded. “I love the piano.” *** I started to question that during my first year of high school and I began signing up for competitions. Most were out of town; some were even out of our county, an hour’s drive at least. Some days I had to skip school and Mom took off work to drive me. I placed well and did better with each one. Mom said that the judges must be impressed. I even placed higher than some seniors. It was when she told me this that I felt a swell of pride in my chest and I knew that all the times of bruises and accidental split knuckles had been worth it after all. Just like Mom had always said, without blood, sweat, and tears, you don’t deserve anything.

Of course, I remember staying up late before the first few competitions, on my bedroom floor crying until my eyes swelled because the fear of

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disappointment was gnawing at the insides of my stomach. That didn’t matter now. Not when she was praising me, in her own way.

But our practices grew. I couldn’t become complacent. There was always someone better and I had to make sure I was practicing just as hard—no, harder—and longer than they were.

Mom didn’t use the ruler anymore. She gripped it tightly in her hands during practice and I thought that it was just instinct to grab for it before sitting down to begin. A few times it would strike the sheet music on the stand, making me jump, but other than that the ruler had no purpose in our lessons anymore. There was no need to slap my knuckles with it. I could drill out piece after piece like a machine. My fingers were always perfectly curled. I was a pro by now.

Hours and hours we spent practicing, but on the day I turned sixteen during my sophomore year, I didn’t come home to practice. Whether it was the rebellious teenager inside me finally emerging or I had just had enough, I didn’t know. But I stayed at school long after the buses had departed, their engines’ roars fading off down the street, and long after the time I was supposed to meet Jo outside the school. My phone buzzed on the piano and it was in the complete silence of the practice room that I could hear the strings beneath quivering from the vibration. Without looking at the screen, I tucked it into my backpack and sat down at a piano that didn’t even have a fallboard to lock.

The first time I saw Mom after skipping the first practice since our lessons began, she was furious. Why, she demanded. I didn’t think she knew quite what to say. I must have caught her by surprise.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying not to rise to her anger. The last thing I wanted was a shouting match in our kitchen. I’d heard her and Jo a few times once before. Something about college. I remember seeing Jo’s face afterwards. Nothing good could come from arguing with Mom. “I’m just thinking of taking a break.”

“That’s throwing twelve years of practice away.” Her eyebrows were drawn sharply. She sounded equally confused as angry, but she was still angry enough that I wanted to back out of the room as quickly as I had come.

Neither of us won that argument. It was a stalemate and after Mom didn’t touch the subject again. She treated it like she treated the piano keys. She started giving me a wide berth whenever we were in the same

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room. Even if she did want to talk about it, I don’t think she knew how.

She knew I loved the piano, so it was beyond her why I wanted to stop so suddenly. On the other hand, I did my best to avoid her. I was still unconvinced that skipping my lessons would make me feel better about playing and I thought it would be all too easy for her to convince me to start practicing for her again.

I didn’t make practices for months and I didn’t see much of Mom either. Without my lessons, she could pick up more shifts at work. She started leaving earlier on some days and coming home later on others.

Some days she wasn’t even home during our lesson time. I only saw that once. For the most part, I hung out a school until I knew I had missed it for sure. Though I had successfully escaped her, eventually I found that I could not escape her voice. At some point, a week into my lesson hiatus, she put found she could put her thoughts into words at last. She let me know exactly how she felt, sticking post-it notes to the counter, sometimes needing two or three to finish her message. I stopped reading them after the first two days. They told me I’d better be at lessons, or else.

The piece was far from finished and the auditions were next week.

She was worried, I could tell. Still angry—more angry than anything else—but worried nonetheless.

I laughed at her notes, messily scrawled in the spare minutes before driving off to work, but the anger boiled and splashed in my stomach.

When I found the first note, I felt sick and nearly skipped school, too. But then she’d find me and I couldn’t get to my practice room, to my piano.

Or else what? I thought as I shredded the notes and tossed them into the garbage. She couldn’t do anything. She wasn’t even home to do anything.

While it took Mom a week to find out how to communicate her thoughts, it only took Jo a few days to find me in the music hall, in my practice room. She didn’t ask anything questions, just scared me when she knocked the first day. I jumped and my fingers slid to flat notes, wrong notes in a chord beneath my finger, still curled to perfection as I cringed at the sound. She just sat and did her homework, pressed into the corner of the room where the walls shined yellow against the harsh lighting. But none of that mattered. Here, the piano was mine. Here was silent. Here was easy.

But here, I began to lose the love of the piano.

Even though the notes sang off the walls, perfectly tuned, even though

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the keys didn’t stick like the other piano in the band room, I felt like I was losing. Like I needed Mom’s approval, her attention, magnified on me and my hands and the notes we were creating, but it was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to be far away from those lessons and here alone in this practice room, playing what I wanted, with Jo as she did her homework and listened and told me just how good I sounded on a walks back home.

Somehow I kept up with my competitions, placing about the same as always. Jo drove me now that she had gotten a car, an old rundown thing bought with the money she had saved up with her summer jobs and the late shift she took at Starbucks. She always joked how it might break down halfway to the concert hall, but it did nothing to calm my nerves.

It was like I was a completely different person before the competitions now. I was jittery, like I had had one too many cups of coffee. My stomach would rumble and my mouth would taste acidic and I’d swallow over and over, like I was going to be sick. Nerves of steel, Mom used to say.

That went out the window. Those middle school days of unflinching concentration vanished.

I was beyond frustrated, stomping out of the hall, slamming the car door, staying silent as my sister drove us home.

“I don’t know what you’re so upset about,” Jo grumbled beside me. I felt her eyes slide my way. Maybe she could tell I was not in the mood for a lecture because her tone lifted ever so slightly. “You played great. I can’t tell how perfect it was, but second place speaks for itself. You’re moving on, Sebby. What’s so wrong with that?”

I stared out the window, thumbnail between my teeth. I didn’t know what was so wrong with that. That was the problem. I had been shifting back and forth between second and third place all of sophomore year.

No worse than the rest of my high school career, but no better either.

Competitions were the whole point of playing piano. If I didn’t show improvement, I’d flatline. Then there was college to think about. Jo had already been accepted. In two years, it’d be my turn as well. If I wanted to continue with music, and at this point I wasn’t sure I did, I had to improve.

“It’s just—nothing’s changing, Jo.” *** The next year, Jo went off to college and I had stopped playing completely. I abandoned competitions and avoided the practice room.

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I didn’t even allow myself to stray to that side of the school. I made the mistake once and the music teachers pounced on me. They wanted to know how my auditions were going. Had I made nationals again? What was I thinking about college?

I still didn’t go home either. I found empty classrooms, unable to face the practice room and its piano again. It’s not that I was still avoiding Mom. I mean, I was, but I had already gotten used to being around her by the end of my sophomore year. She couldn’t work all the time, everyday, as much as I had wished. But, by the time we ran into each other again, it had been too long. I had walked into the kitchen just as she walked in from the garage, like the day after I skipped lessons for the first time.

There was that stunned silence and I waited for her to chew me out again.

It was finally happening, I was just waiting for my nightmares to play out.

I had already imagined it too many times, too many versions stretching out our first argument to grotesque measures. But she didn’t. She just turned back to whatever she was doing and I was ignored as always. It was for the best really.

I didn’t go home because I was still avoiding her, as unavoidable as it was now that her hours had been cut back. I just didn’t like the sour look she got on her face when she spotted me, the way her eyebrows pinched together. She looked like I had broken something expensive.

Like those cartoon moms get when their kid breaks the expensive vase, which shouldn’t have been set out in the first place.

She was disappointed. Well great, I thought. So was I. I especially didn’t like the way the piano room door was always closed now, probably locked, too, though I never tried. Though I imagined the fallboard definitely was.

When fall break came for Jo’s school, she texted me that she wouldn’t be coming home. There was too much going on, work, midterms—but I knew she didn’t want to anyway. What was there to do here? Sit around the house with Mom? Even I knew that wasn’t a fun idea for a break. So I let go of the hope I had been building up the last few weeks and went back to my normal schedule, classes, homework, and avoiding the music hallway.

I was just as obsessed with the piano as I had been when Mom had unlocked it for me for the first time. Only this time, I was running in the opposite direction, constantly thinking I’d bump into it. Then I’d have to

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deal with it. The one reason I didn’t want to see the piano was because I knew what would happen if I did. I’d have no choice but to sit down and play again. What would I play? I had no idea, but I knew I’d have no power over my fingers. They would be drawn to the keys like magnets and I wouldn’t be able to stop them.

And I kept this up until December, over six months away from the piano. Mostly now I was just scared that I wouldn’t be able to play again.

That I’d never be as good as I was and certainly never surpass myself.

That had always been the goal. Get better and better. Do lessons with Arthur until he couldn’t teach me anything else, then practice with Mom. Then do recitals. Then do competitions. Score higher and higher in those competitions. Be the best. Go to college and get better. Be better there.

Keep improving, but where was the goal? Isn’t that why I stopped? There was no light at the end of the tunnel because I couldn’t imagine what that light could possibly be. I had practiced and practiced with no end in sight, just kept going until I was out of breath. Tired. I couldn’t find a reason to play anymore. So I just stopped.

When Jo found me, a visitor’s pass clipped to her shirt, she didn’t ask why I wasn’t in the practice room. She had sat through every lesson, even the ones by myself. She knew why I wasn’t playing.

“Come on, Sebby,” she said. “I want to hear you play.”

And that magnet pulled stronger than ever and I couldn’t resist it any longer. I stood up, packed away my homework, and followed Jo to the music hallway.

“I would’ve come home for break, but I was too busy.”

I shrugged. “It’s fine. I know you didn’t want to.”

“At first, I was positive I didn’t, but I really missed hearing you play.

Didn’t you get my texts?”

“I took a break.” I guess I could call it that. A hiatus from the piano.

One I hadn’t plan on returning from. And, as we turned and opened the practice room door, I knew that now I was. An unplanned comeback. At least for an hour or so.

Jo sat in her usual corner, scrolling through her phone as if we had done this every day for the past three and a half months. She didn’t look up at me when I stayed standing in the middle of the room, hands on my hips as I stared. The pull to the piano was strong, but I couldn’t sit down

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just yet. I studied the smudged fingerprints on the wood that reflected in the bright light.

The band kids came in here after practice. I’d heard them before, giggling while they got the one kid who actually knew how to play. A few could pound out Jingle Bells or Chopsticks. Or get two of them and they’d start playing that annoying Heart and Soul duet. That was an easy one so of course everyone knew it. I think there was one time I went a week hearing that song float out from the band room. I had never been more grateful that the practice rooms were sound proof, at least for the most part.

I pressed one key slowly. It barely made a noise, but the sound hadn’t changed. If anything, it was reassuring, enough so that I could sit down. At the same time as it was a relief, the keys were intimidating.

It took a half an hour of me pressing keys and playing around with the pedals for me to actually start a song. Even if it had been so long, it would take more than that to forget those songs that had once been drilled into my fingers hours and hours a day.

And after that song, I started another. Then another. Soon there was hardly a pause between the songs as the memory of them came back with each chord I hit. Every crescendo, every trill. And when their memory had expired, I went back through, changing the speed, the key, whatever I wanted.

I brought a song that raced through my memories down to a crawl and pounded it out the slowest and quietest. There was no sheet music to follow here. I vividly remember the instructions on the pages and pages of music, but for once I ignored them, allowing them to fade to the back of my mind.

My chest squeezed tight with fear as I created those changes, as if judges were sitting behind me instead of Jo. Like Mom was in the same room, ready to snap and demand perfection because that’s not how Mozart or Bach or Chopin or Beethoven or Debussy intended for it to be played. But along with that fear coursed adrenaline through my veins and the longer I played, the less I cared.

It was dark by the time we left for home, Jo offering to drive with a smile, and maybe that’s why I now felt the need to play. Somebody wanting to hear without needing perfect, changing routine, Jo saying, “What a great homecoming present,” and “Can I come again tomorrow?” Because no matter how perfect or imperfect the playing, I knew there was someone who just wanted to hear the notes.

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Necessary (Essential) Tools Katherine Hammond

As a prescription for a fresh perspective: practice giving your furniture flesh. If human flesh is deemed so important, what happens then, if we distort it?

Regard, regard say – a chair. See how it sits. Squat, straight and bent, in a way humans can straighten and bend. Now give it flesh, and humanize it. Now it’s crouched on grotesque stumps. Who gave the chair it’s legs, but denied it feet? With four legs instead of two, it’s a circus attraction.

“Well, feet weren’t needed, they were deemed unnecessary.” Insists the Practical Man. Will yours be deemed unnecessary?

No, of course you are nobody’s chair, humans can’t be furniture, in any sense of the word.

If held true to human form, a chair is also headless, it has strong square shoulders yes, but there’s nothing set upon them. So now there, as you regard, sits a huddled mess. Shoulders hunched, head blown up – or at very least misplaced – hobbling on the stumps of four awkward legs, which seems even worse than two.

Let us say the chair has arms, though often they’ve none at all. These too are bent unnaturally. Perhaps there are stumps for hands, but you could instead see clenching fists, or arthritically twisting fingers. They clutch and reach and ask for things, “but a chair needs nothing of its own.” The Practical Man is quite sincere.

Now that you have given it flesh, on top of its strong skeleton, it’s all the more pitiable that it cannot move. It’s immobile, locked in place by non-existent joints. The Practical Man rests upon this piece that has only the most essential tools and cannot run away.

“Well, it didn’t need to move.”

No. Neither do you.

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Freed by a Friend Dylan Scillia

38

Bottles and Bricks Amy Anderson

Scott sits at the empty table watching his sister, Maggie, network her way through each one of their party guests.He can tell when she is meeting one of her fiancé’s relatives as she forces an even wider smile on her face, her eyes squinting with the slight chubbiness of her cheeks He watches it fade as the people walk away. She sighs and leans into her fiancé, Derek. His sister smiles and kisses Derek’s cheek.

Maggie catches Scott’s eyes and glares over at him then back to smiling at her fiancé.Scott looks down at his hands in his lap instead, starts picking at a thread peeking out of the inseam of his black trousers.

“Disgusting, isn’t it?” Justin says sitting down next to him, looking over at Scott’s sister.

Justin’s grin looks almost sinister in the dim lighting of the dinner hall.

Scott knows that grin in all lighting, the one that says Justin’s planning something that might get both of them in trouble. It’s what usually got them stuck in detention all throughout high school, even now, halfway through October of their senior year.

“I say,” Justin starts off, scanning the room then leaning in toward Scott. “I say, we steal a bottle of booze and blow this popsicle stand. Whaddya say, Scottie?” Justin shakes Scott’s shoulder. “And don’t say no, because I already stole the booze.” *** “It’s fucking freezing out here,” Justin says, pulling his legs up onto the bench.

“You picked the spot, dumbass.” Scott rolls his eyes and hands the bottle of Puerto Rican rum back to Justin.

They can still hear the orchestral music playing from inside the building from where they sit in the garden. Scott could imagine his sister getting married here when the weather is warmer and everything’s in bloom. He’d probably be sitting in the front row, wearing a stuffy suit with a ridiculously colored tie that matched the décor around them. He’d 39

lie to himself, smiling through the whole ceremony only to end up where he is now, drinking rum with Justin.

“You okay?” Justin asks.

Justin’s blue eyes are calm under his dark furrowed brows. “I just don’t want to be here for it,” Scott says taking the bottle back from Justin.

“Be here for what? The wedding?” Justin relaxes in his seat, his feet sliding off the edge of the bench. “Honestly, I don’t blame you. Your sister’s a bitch.” Justin looks over at Scott and tries to give reassuring smile. “Look, we’ve only got a few months left, then after that we’re outta here. You’ll get into Haverford, with their Strawberry telescope—” “Strawbridge Observatory,” Scott interjects.

“That’s what I said. Anyway, you’ll be best friends with all your professors, because that’s who you are and maybe even find yourself a boyfriend. Who will, of course, need to make it through my rigorous approval process before he even takes you on your first real date.”

When Scott doesn’t say anything, Justin continues. “Seriously, though.

All of this,” he says waving his hands around. “All of this is temporary.

I mean, yeah, your bitch of a sister will get married and your crazy perfectionist of a family will expect you to do something with your life, but once you leave, you don’t have to come back. After everything that you’ve been through, with the accident over the summer and the doctors not letting you come back for soccer season.”

“S’pose you’re right,” Scott says looking up at the dark sky. He wishes that there were fewer lights around them so he could see the stars better.

“I’m always right,” Justin says.

“Not always…” Scott says still looking up at the sky. “It wouldn’t be my first real date,” Scott says looking over at Justin with a curt smile on his face.

“So, I was right,” Justin exclaims with a laugh. “You were totally seeing some dude over the summer! And before you ask the obvious question of how the hell I knew, let me just remind you that I am your best friend and I’m not as dumb as most think.”

Scott laughs, rolling his eyes. “I don’t think you’re dumb…”

“And that, is why you’re my best friend.” Justin’s cheeks are pink and Scott doesn’t know if it’s from the cold or from the booze. Either way, he’s happy for a moment.

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They sit there listening to the music play, muted by the grey, rock walls. Scott thinks about leaving all of this, he wonders if that means leaving Justin too. He doesn’t deserve him. A lot of people think that Justin is just another dumb jock planning on getting through his life with good looks and deathless sarcasm.

“So, why didn’t I ever get to meet him?” Justin asks, pulling Scott back to Earth. “The guy you were seeing?”

“Plausible deniability,” Scott says. “In case my family ever put you on the spot…but after the accident, it didn’t even matter.”

“You never told me what happened,” Justin says quietly. “I remember your dad calling my house asking if I knew where you were...then later your sister called and said that you were on your way to the hospital. You were still unconscious when they finally let me in to see you. I walked in and your entire family just turned and glared at me.” Justin wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Whatever happened…it was pretty clear they didn’t want me asking any questions and then when you were a bit better, you didn’t even mention it.”

“There’s good reason for that,” Scott says.“The guy I was seeing, Aaron, he was there when it happened, I think, but when I woke up, he’d just disappeared like he was never even there to begin with.” Scott bites his bottom lip staring at the ground. “I want to show you something; maybe you can help me figure it out.” Scott stands up from the bench.

“But I’m driving; you’ve had a bit too much.”

Justin looks up at Scott with pink cheeks and a smirk on his face as he sets the bottle down before he gets up to follow Scott out to the parking lot. *** “Had I known we were going on a hike,” Justin says climbing over a fallen tree. “I would’ve worn boots and my shitty work pants to your sister’s engagement party…bet she woulda loved that.”

Scott keeps going, and even though it’s been over a month since he’s been there, he still knows the way through the woods from the playground where he parked the car.

“You know, you still haven’t told me where we’re going.” Justin says breathlessly, following behind Scott through the woods.

“How’s soccer practice been going?” Scott says changing the subject.

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His shoulders hunch forward, his head hanging low, watching the ground with every step. “Sorry I stopped going to the games, just sucked watching all you guys play when I couldn’t. You guys have been winning though, which is good.”

“Practice is a bit boring without you,” Justin replies. “No one to make fun of coach with me when he goes off on his tangents.”

The cold air stabs at their throats as they breathe in. Scott’s fingers feel numb and he curls them into the palms of his hands. The tree line stops abruptly and there is gravel at their feet as the ground inclines up to the railroad tracks and drops off the other side into the ravine.

“What is this place?” Justin breathes out.

“This is where it happened,” Scott says looking up toward the tracks.

He walks up the incline, the gravel shifting under his feet until he’s standing in the middle of the railroad tracks. “Aaron and I met online.

Talked about everything, sports, video games, music, things that were going on at home. We met face to face at a diner two towns over. He said that he was taking a year off before going back to college. Called me out for lying about my age.” The wind picks up and Justin buries his mouth in the scarf tucked into his coat. “He was okay with waiting, said he really wanted to get to know me.” The ground drops down about twenty feet to a small stream that runs parallel to the tracks. The water is half-frozen now.

The remnant of a building scatters whole and broken red bricks across the ground. Only two walls remain. Brick steps leading up to an empty space on one side. Even in the middle of the tracks, bits of the red bricks mix in with the gravel at their feet.

“I don’t get it,” Justin mumbles into his scarf. “What happened here, Scott?”

“That’s the thing,” Scott says looking back at Justin. “I don’t remember.”

He knows he sounds crazy. “I remember being here with him and the next thing I know, I woke up in the hospital. But something happened here, Justin. Something happened and he left me here to die. If the cops hadn’t found my car at the playground—” Scott cuts himself off.

“Scott, I think we should go back to the party or just go home,” Justin says, burying his hands in his pockets.

“I want to find him, Justin. I’ve spent the last month and a half trying to act normal, like my head doesn’t feel like it’s about to explode.” Scott can feel the icy tears fall down his cheeks. “I didn’t tell you because my

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family…my mom, she didn’t want anyone to know how stupid I was for letting it happen in the first place, let alone that I was with a guy.”

“But this,” Scott says pointing to the ground. “I want to find out what happened. I want to remember. I’m tired of feeling ashamed for this and—” Scott’s head hangs. “I’m just tired of everything. I feel like I’m going to lose my mind if I keep ignoring it. I have nothing but good memories of him…of Aaron, but something changed that night. And I feel guilty for loving him, because I think I’m supposed to hate him.”

“Scott—” “I need you to help me with this, J. You told me that I can leave and that I don’t have to come back, but there is still a piece of me that’s stuck here.” The wind settles as Scott stares at Justin in the middle of the train tracks. “I know I dropped a lot on you,” Scott says calmly, “but watching my sister tonight, seeing the way that my mom and dad look at me every day, they don’t want me to be happy because of who I am.

“They tried to keep it all a secret so people wouldn’t look at them differently. I feel like they know something that I don’t…something that I can’t remember, and I want to know what it is. This is important to me, J.” His best friend is standing in front of him with worry in his eyes. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Scott’s voice cracks.

Justin breathes out slowly and swallows. “I—I don’t know. I mean, you haven’t talked about this at all for a month and a half and now you want me to help you track down your ex-boyfriend and you think your family is lying to you about it. It’s all just a bit much, I guess.”

“I hardly saw you all summer.I was with Aaron and he became everything to me. When you were working or at the gym, I was with him.

Hell, I know you were at the gym when it happened, because I know more about what you did that night than what happened to myself.”

Justin shifts on his feet. “You think that I haven’t been keeping an eye on you since the day you got out of the hospital? I know how much this changed you, but…but I think there’s a better way to go about doing this.

I want to help you, Scott, but if looking for this guy means that it hurts you even more then—” “You know what? This is why I didn’t tell you in the first place. I didn’t want you to look at me the same way they do.” Scott looks down shaking his head. “I should’ve never brought you here.” The wind picks up again

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bouncing Scott’s hair across his eyes.

“You want to find something that you lost, and I get that,” Justin says.

“But I think we just need to take some time to figure this out. You’ve been thinking about it for over a month, I’ve only known for a few minutes.”

The two boys stare at each other. Justin’s blue eyes are soft and worried, making Scott feel like Justin is talking him away from the ledge.

“I think it’s time to go home,” Justin says quietly. *** The drive to the diner seems longer than it did the last time. Scott remembers coming Shay’s Diner the first time to meet Aaron; the way his palms were slick on the steering wheel for most of the car ride, he wiped them on his jeans over and over until he finally made it inside. He has the slightest tremor this time around, as he pulls into a parking space on the side of the building.

It feels different being back there again. This was his and Aaron’s spot before they found the area by the train tracks. Scott hears the familiar bell sound as he walks in the front door and he sees a waitress behind the counter that looks familiar but he can’t remember her name. He feels like he used to know it.

He steps up to the counter and out of the corner of his eye, he sees a couple sitting in the booth that was his and Aarons only a couple months ago.

“Scott?” the waitress behind the counter says and Scott brain snaps back into the moment. “Haven’t seen you here in a while, how’s everything going, how’s Aaron?” She smiles at him.

“Oh uh…Hi,” Scott reads the nametag clipped above the pocket of her shirt. “Hi, Anne, I uh… was actually wondering if you’d seen him at all…if…if Aaron had come in here at all lately?”

Anne thinks for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve seen him since the last time the two of you were here.” Anne looks at Scott. “Is everything okay?

He isn’t missing or anything, is he?”

Scott looks down at the black and white linoleum floor. “Yeah, sort of,” Scott says. He rubs the back of his neck as Anne watches him. “I don’t… I don’t really know. But uh… do you have a pen I could borrow?”

He looks up at her.

“Oh, sure,” Anne reaches into her apron and hands a pen to Scott, who fishes through his coat pockets for a scrap of paper. He nervously

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writes his name and phone number down and slides it across the counter.

“If you see him, could you let me know?” Scott can feel his hands shaking when he backs away from the counter and Anne nods, forcing a smile over Scott’s odd behavior.

Scott turns and goes out the door, the bell ringing overhead as the cold wind hits his face from outside. Maybe he’d have more luck at the police station. *** Scott walks into homeroom a week later on Monday morning, dropping his bag and sitting next to Justin.“Apparently, I was an unreliable witness,” he says.

“What?”

“Well, I couldn’t remember what happened when I woke up in the hospital and when the cops questioned me no one knew that I even had a boyfriend so when I blurted out that my boyfriend was there with me, no one had any clue what I was talking about.”

“Are you okay?” Justin asks in a serious tone. “Like aside from all this crap, are you feeling okay? You look like you’re somewhere between passing out from exhaustion and vibrating off the chair from how much caffeine must be running through your veins.”

“Fine is as fine does,” Scott says nonchalantly.

“But you’re not fine, Scott.”

Scott shrugs. “No one has any answers and everyone thinks I’m crazy.

I just want to find Aaron. I tried looking for his profile on the site where we met; it wasn’t there anymore. I even went to the diner where we first met in person; no one had seen him there. None of it makes sense and I haven’t been sleeping, so yeah, I look like shit.”

“Well, maybe you should take step back from all of whatever it is that you’ve been doing for the last week or so… you aren’t just going to magically remember what happened.” Justin whispers and he sits back in his chair.

“I know what I’m doing,” Scott says turning away from Justin. *** Scott laughs as he trips over his own feet trying to keep up with Aaron.

“I don’t get why we have to go through all this just to hang out,” Scott says ducking under a low branch. “I feel like we spend half our time just getting

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to the damn place.”

Aaron shakes his head and chuckles to himself. “You were the one that said your parents couldn’t find out.”

“I recall saying that I would prefer if they didn’t,” Scott corrects him.

“Shit at home is hard enough as is without my white-bread family finding out about you. Christ, they almost kicked me out of the house for being gay.”Scott keeps his head down looking at the ground, but it’s getting darker and harder to see the resemblance of a path that the two boys have made over the last two months. “I think that they think there’s still some hope that I’ll turn out ‘normal’. They might know I’m gay but they don’t really want to know the details.”

Aaron stops, turning to face Scott, who almost runs right into him. “I think that you worry too much,” Aaron says. He smiles and Scott can’t help but smile back at him.

This is it, Scott thinks. He likes the idea of Aaron being in his future. The two of them renting an apartment near campus, coming home and cooking dinner. Aaron taking Scott to the golf course and watching him fail miserably.

Scott didn’t pay much attention to sports other than soccer until he met Aaron, though at the time, he didn’t really think golf was a sport. But he knew all sorts of things about golf, even cheered for Justin Rose in the Olympics. Aaron said that the Brits would get it over the Americans and he was right.

Aaron puts his arm around Scott’s shoulders and places a quick kiss on his cheek. “Come on. Just a little further,” Aaron says, pulling Scott close and guiding him toward the railroad tracks, where they’d sit and watch the stars.

“I was thinking about telling Justin,” Scott says. “He’d be happy for us and I feel like I haven’t seen him in forever. As nice as this has been… I really miss him, you know?”

Without saying a word, Aaron’s arm falls from around Scott’s shoulder and he continues toward the tracks, Scott follows behind him.

Scott jerks awake in his bed. His head and heart pounding. His sheets are sweaty and clinging to his body. It feels like a dream and reality at the same time. The woods around them, Aaron holding him close like that…

Scott’s hand goes to his cheek where Aaron had kissed him and it dawns on him that it wasn’t a dream. His heart races even faster and he wraps his arms around his head trying to get the throbbing pain to stop. He feels the tears falling down his face, soaking into his pillow. His muscles hurt.

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Vibrating and pulsing inside his body.

He reaches over to the nightstand where his phone is charging. The light from the screen makes his sore eyes burn as he scrolls through his contacts, leaving a smudge of tears beneath his thumb. He puts the phone to his ear and hears ringing.

“Scottie?” Justin’s groggy voice says on the other end.

Scott tries to take in a deep breath, but the air hits his lungs and comes out shakily.

“Scott, you alright?”

He can hear the sound of Justin moving in his bed.

“I—I remembered something,” Scott chokes out. He squeezes his eyes shut as hard as he can trying to focus his mind. “I’m—I’m scared, J.” The phone shakes against his ear.

“Scottie, hey. Just sit tight. You’re home right? Window unlocked?”

Justin tries to stay calm on the other end of the phone.

“Yeah.”

“Alright. I’ll be right over.” *** Scott doesn’t even move from his bed when he sees the window slide open. They’d done that since they were kids. The tree outside Scott’s window was close enough to the roof of the wrap around porch, that it wasn’t all that hard to make the climb. But when Justin was having problems at home, he used to go to Scott’s house late at night. It happened so often that Scott just stopped locking the window all together.

Justin takes off his heavy coat, kicks off his sneakers, and walks over crouching down next to the bed, where he can only see Scott’s face, where he’s on his side, arms holding his head.

Scott can see Justin’s eyes, even in the dim lighting.

“How ya feeling, buddy?” Justin asks quietly. He puts his hand on Scott’s shoulder and Scott just shakes his head and begins to cry again. *** “It was weird,” Scott says, sitting up in bed now, his shoulder leaning slightly against Justin sitting in bed next to him. His fingers graze over the fading scar at his hairline. The lamp on the nightstand casts a shadow across the two boys. “It wasn’t even a bad memory,” he continues, “It just felt like my body was trying to set itself on fire when I woke up.” Scott

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picks at the small, loose piece of skin on his index finger. “Me and him were just walking to the tracks…I guess I told him that I wanted to tell you about the two of us.”

“And?” “And that was it,” Scott shrugs.“I woke up and my head was pounding, and pulse was through the fucking roof and I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of water on me, I was sweating so much.”

“Still think you’re fine?” Justin asks casually. *** “You know, I was doing some research on this place,” Aaron says when they make it to the tracks. He wanders over toward what remained of the brick building, crouching down in the debris. “I guess this used to be a sandwich shop-convenience store type of thing, but it was so close to the tracks that kids used to try and hop on the trains from the roof and a couple of them got killed.

So, the owner just closed the place up and had most of it knocked down. Guess he didn’t want the death of those dumb kids on his conscious.”

Scott stands back a couple yards as Aaron stares at the building. Two walls supporting nothing but each other and the mile-a-minute weed growing over them.

“What did you think of this place before I told you that?” Aaron asks turning back around to look at Scott. “You probably just thought it was the place we came to when we wanted to act like the rest of the world didn’t exist. When in reality, a bunch of kids died right over there,” Aaron says pointing to where the wall of the building was missing along the edge of the tracks. “This whole place used to be built up more, but now, no one even knows about it. People forget things pretty easily. Especially when it involves things like dead kids.” *** Scott goes into the bathroom to get aspirin after Sunday dinner is over, he can hear his mom saying goodbye to Maggie and her fiancé at the door. He sees the bottle of Oxycodone in there from when he got his wisdom teeth out last year. His brain racks against his skull but he goes for the aspirin as his father appears in the open doorway.

“You almost fell asleep during dinner tonight,” his father says sternly.

“Yeah, sorry. School’s been rough,”Scott says trying to avoid the argument. He turns to face his father.

“It’s been getting cold in here at night,” his father says knowingly.

“You’ve been leaving the house a lot. Clearly you aren’t sleeping, so I

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just want to know how all that fits together, Scott? Because if you’ve been sneaking off with anyone, I won’t have it. Do you understand me?

Whatever you’ve been thinking, feeling—end it, now.”The calmness in his father’s tone makes him take a step back, further cornering himself in the bathroom.

Scott nods.

“Your mother and I want you home after school. No more of this nonsense. Derek’s parents will be here next week for dinner and I won’t have you make a mess of things. Already had to explain things when you went running off at the engagement party. I won’t make anymore excuses for you. Understood?”

Scott nods.

“What was that?” his father asks, leaning his ear toward Scott.

“Yes, I understand,” Scott says.

“Good,” his father says and disappears down the hallway to his study.

Scott sends Justin a quick text on the way to his room. “Is the weekend over yet?”

Scott lays in bed and rolls over into the empty space. He looks up when there’s a light knock at the window and he sees Justin push the window up. He closes the window behind him and tiptoes across the room, sitting on the floor next to the bed. He pulls out playing cards and starts dealing them out. Anything to take Scott’s mind off everything that was going on.

Scott’s eyelids start to get heavy. “I don’t want to be crazy,” he mumbles.

He wakes up the next morning and Justin is gone. A note sitting on the nightstand, “See you at school.”

Scott rifles through his backpack, when his teacher asks for their homework. He pulls out his books, getting ready to make an excuse for why de doesn’t have it, but he opens the front of his notebook to find his completed homework assignment just sitting there, written in a close enough version of his handwriting. He hands the paper to the teacher and looks to where Justin is sitting next to him with dark circles under his eyes. *** Justin texts Scott that he is coming over. They hadn’t seen each other since the Thursday before Christmas and it’s the day before they go back

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to school from break. Justin climbs up the tree, his gloves making it hard to get the proper grip on the branches, but he manages not to fall.

The light on the nightstand is knocked over, the light pointing at the wall, and Scott’s not in his bed.

“Scott?” Justin whispers, looking around the room. He sees a foot sticking out from the other side of the bed on the floor. “Scott?” Justin says walking up to the motionless body on the floor. Scott’s dark hair sticks out all over the place, looking as if he was trying to pull it out of his head. Justin kneels down next to him, hitting the mostly empty bottle of rum with his foot. “Scott?” he says again and he gives Scott’s shoulder a small shake, breathing a sigh of relief when Scott groans.

This was usually the other way around. It was usually Scott pulling Justin off the floor at some party they went to, putting him fully clothed into the shower. Sacrificing a garbage can to the two or three times that Justin would vomit throughout the night.

Justin gets Scott awake enough to sit up against the dresser and goes into the bathroom, filling the cup on the sink with water, setting it down next to his friend. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?” Justin whispers, but he knows Scott didn’t hear him. *** “I think we should go back, Aaron,” Scott says, shifting awkwardly on his feet.

“What? You don’t like it here anymore? Don’t want to make-out and groan my name as I put my hands down your pants like last time, Scottie?” Aaron says.

“Why are you being such a jackass? Why’d you have to ruin it?” Scott says turning around to head back toward the park.

Scott wakes up in his bed. Looking over, he can see Justin sitting on the floor, his back leaning against the bedframe, the empty bottle of rum in his hands.

“I wish I never stole that bottle at the engagement party,” Justin says quietly. “I finished this one after you puked for the second time last night.

And no, you missed the trash can, thank you very much,” Justin says coldly.

Scott tightens the blankets around himself. “’m sorry,” he chokes out.

His throat feels raw, his head pounding against his skull.

“This is over, Scott. I’m not going to sit around and watch you destroy yourself.” Justin stands up and shoves the empty bottle in his backpack.

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“I’ll throw this out on my way home.”

“I’m gonna find him,” Scott mutters.

“It doesn’t matter anymore, Scott. It hasn’t for a while. Call me if you just want to hang out or something.” Justin opens the window and the cold air shoots into Scott’s room. *** “Scott, don’t leave. I was only kidding,” Aaron says grabbing Scott’s hand.

“I just want to go home,” Scott says trying to pull out of Aaron’s grip.

“Why the fuck would you want to go back there? You said it yourself, they’d throw you out if they find out.They don’t care about you, Scott.”

“I’m just tired. I want to go home,” Scott rips his hand away from Aaron’s hold on him, but Aaron just grabs his arm instead, squeezing harder than before, making Scott wince.

“No, come on, Scott. We can stay here just a little longer. We can look up at the stars, Scott,” Aaron says in a lighter tone.

“Aaron, let go of me.” *** Justin leaves his car at the park, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat. Scott’s text said to meet him at the tracks. He walks quickly through the woods, brows knitted together, with his hands shoved in his pockets.

Scott stands there staring up at the dark sky, when Justin makes it to the clearing. “He wanted to look at the stars, J.” Scott says.

“Why the hell are we here again, Scott?” Justin asks walking up to his friend.

“I just thought that by coming here, I could remember what happened, but—,” Scott says turning to face Justin. Scott’s face is pale and his eyes are dark.

“I hope you never remember,” Justin says abruptly.

Scott looks at him. “What?”

“I hope you never remember,” Justin repeats. “You’ve spent all this time looking for this guy, thinking that you’re going to find out what happened that night. You almost died, but now, you’re letting it kill you for good. I hope you never find that fucking bastard and I hope that you never remember what happened here.”

“I need to know,” Scott says.

“You already do know, Scott. He got angry and he hit you, probably smashed you in the head with one of these fucking bricks and left you in

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that fucking ravine to die. That’s what he did to you, Scott.”

Justin breathes heavily. “It’s over, he’s gone. But you, me…we’re here.

I’m not asking you to forget about it, I’m just asking you to not let it become you. Just let it go, Scott. Please.”

Scott scans the area around them. The broken pieces of red brick mixing in with the stark gray of the small round stones. “I just want to know why,” Scott says slowly. “Me and Aaron, we were happy. I loved him, J. And I don’t know what changed; I don’t know what made him do it.”

“A person that loves you doesn’t do that to you, Scott. So, why should you care so much about someone that didn’t care about you?”

Scott looks up at the stars; he can pick out the three stars in Orion’s belt. He remembers coming all the way out here just to get a clear look at the sky with less light pollution. When he lowers his head, Justin is still watching him.

“Do you think things could’ve been different? Like maybe if one thing didn’t happen, none of it would’ve happened?” Scott asks.

Justin looks around them. The train tracks, the embankment, the broken brick building.

“If you could go back and do it all over again?” Justin thinks about it for a moment before he continues. “I think that you would still end up here.”

When Scott turns, he sees the only two walls left of the brick building.

The cold and the snow got rid of the mile-a-minute weed for a while, but Scott knows it will be back, weeds like that are hard to get rid of.

He walks to the edge, looking down the embankment into the ravine.

He sees where the water used to be, where it would flow around the rocks and carry on to empty out into the river that runs through town. He steps closer to the edge, watching as the small stones tumble down into the empty creek bed. “It’s a long way down,” Scott says.

“Yeah…it is.”

Scott hears the gravel grind and shift under Justin’s feet as he walks over, the sound of soft rubber soles moving against the stone.

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The Ravin’

A Hip Hop Remix of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” Paige Drews

Below, you will find the words to the Hip Hop Remix.

Please refer to our website or this QR Code for the audio version.

Once upon a midnight bumpin’, while I listened, beat a’ thumpin’, To several dope sick mixtapes, fire from the years before— While I rocked out, loudly clapping, suddenly there came a tapping, Like someone was gently rapping, rapping at my bedroom door. “’It’s just some poser,” I muttered, “rapping at my bedroom door— 5 It’s just that and nothing more.”

I remember it was boring early that December morning; Each and every carton spoiling, lacking snacks we needed more.

All my feelings in a flurry; —quickly, I had hoped to hurry From my mixtapes peace from worry— worry for my lost Lenore— For the sweet and klutzy shorty whom the nurses named Lenore— 11 Hope she’s not lost at the store.

I opened the door, real annoyed, hoping it was just some homeboy, But out there was a janky Raven with gold chains (“what it do, boi?”)

Looking at me like a thug; Like I was some wimpy bug; Wingin’ past me and settlin’ all snug, snug behind my bedroom door—

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Right by my Wu Tang Poster, next to my bedroom door— 17 Snug, and set, and nothing more.

Then this brotha started movin’ my nervous feelings into groovin’, By its cool wings and the nature of that stunting bling it wore, “Though you can’t speak or flow ya word, you,” I said, “ain’t no punk bird, Feathered lil’ homie from the streets of Baltimore— Tell me what ya name is from the streets of Baltimore!” 23 Raps the Raven “Evermore.”

“Dumb bird!” said I, “what the heck—dumb bird, what up? What you know?

By the power of Eminem—by that rapper we both adore— Tell ya brother, if it’s aight that within that dismal Shoprite, Standing all alone in the night, stands a lady named Lenore— My super caring shorty, holding grocery bags galore.” 29 Raps the Raven “Evermore.”

And poor Lenore, always willing, still is chilling, still is chilling On some rusty bench or sidewalk just outside the Shoprite door; And her eyes have all the fire that a demon’s might inspire, And her grocery bags grow higher, spilling food upon the floor; And my L Dog’ rounds the parking lot, still searching for the store— 35 So she’ll run errands—nevermore!

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Kirby 64: Zero-Two Composed by Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando Arranged by Isaiah Harper

Please refer to our website or this QR Code for the audio file of this music composition.

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Contributors Amy Anderson, class of 2017, is a Creative Writing major with minors in English, History, and Religious Studies. Her inspiration for writing is The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and the television show Supernatural.

Sarah Dorko, class of 2017, is a Creative Writing major who enjoys spending her time in film and video. Luckily the two work together so well. Whatever the project, being creative is the best part.

Paige Drews, class of 2020, is a Creative Writing major Katherine Hammond, class of 2019, (Kay to her friends, Katie to her family) has been writing poetry since the third grade. However, she can’t actually prove it, as the majority of that poetry has been burned.

Kay writes about things that are dark, odd, and/or uncomfortable. She believes there is beauty in (quite literally) everything, and that not talking about something dark, odd, or uncomfortable is as good as saying it doesn’t exist.

Isaiah Harper, class of 2017, he is a Biomedical Sciences major with a Violin Performance minor in the class of 2020. Music is his passion and hobby. He makes arrangements of songs from video games using FL Studio 12 and Finale 2014, mainly focusing on string arrangements.

Morgan MacVaugh, class of 2019, spends her days thinking up odd things to write and paint. She spends more time thinking of these things than actually doing them.

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Steven McKnight, class of 2020, is a Theatre and Creative Writing major who enjoys long walks on the beach, adventure novels, and channeling ancient and arcane forces to raise armies of the undead.

Cara Roets, class of 2020, is a Creative Writing major Dylan Scillia, class of 2019, is an Early Childhood Education major Jacob Tashoff, class of 2020, is majoring in Creative Writing.

He enjoys long walks on the beach, watching the sunset, having deep emotional discussions, and summoning the Devil from the pits of Hell to slaughter his enemies.

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rson Ande ko y m A r h Do Sara Drews Paige mond am ine H Harper r e h t h Ka Isaia cVaugh a M ht an Morg n McKnig s Steve ara Roet C a Scilli n a l y D off Tash Jacob