SCAD Artemis 2017-18

SCAD Artemis

Elmer Ramos, M.A. painting; B.F.A., illustration, 2010, Metuchen, New Jersey

SCAD Artemis 2017-2018

Introduction At the Savannah College of Art and Design, creativity knows no bounds. Offering more than one hundred degree programs—the most diverse assortment at any art and design university—SCAD is uniquely positioned to prepare undergraduate and graduate students for careers in thriving, competitive fields.

People from all over the world choose the SCAD writing program because of its widely published faculty, comprehensive curriculum, and high post-graduate employment rate. SCAD offers unmatched resources such as Ivy Hall, a hub for distinguished visiting scholars-in-residence, lectures, and literary salons. Through the Ivy Hall Writers Series, students have received coaching from acclaimed writers including Elmore Leonard, Augusten Burroughs, and Jeannette Walls.

SCAD writing students are immersed in a learning environment that exposes them to varying creative styles, formal and informal techniques, and journalistic approaches. The curriculum provides a foundation in visual art and art history courses that enriches observational sensibilities and enlarges the writer’s ability to describe and narrate.

Students also develop an understanding of design and computer applications to prepare for work with multimedia and new media content—skills that land jobs.

When you view the work in this volume, you’ll see poems, essays, and stories that represent the best work selected from the writing major and creative writing minor. These items reflect the talent, hard work, and unique and authentic voices of our students.

SCAD students often finish their degrees with publication credits to their names and are prepared to work as copywriters, editors, novelists, news writers, humorists, social media marketers, web content writers, and critics. Our students have been hired to write for Vanity Fair, Time magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Southern Living, Vice, Oxford American, Marie Claire, and Paste magazine, among other notable media outlets. Some have found literary agents and sold books or book proposals even before graduation.

The pieces we have chosen for this issue of Artemis reflect the dedication of an outstanding faculty that includes bestselling novelists, authors of creative nonfiction, memoirists, journalists, columnists, bloggers, and writers who have their work featured in noteworthy publications around the world. Through their industry connections, SCAD professors cultivate contacts that lead students to rewarding careers.

Experience the truly amazing work presented here and see for yourself why students come from all over the world to study at SCAD.

Faculty editors Angela Merta Brandt Mary C. Kim James Lough, Ph.D.

Contributing graduate student editors Renuka Vasu Aileen Marrero

Table of contents ’ROUND HERE.......................................................................................................................... 9 Fiction by Alexander Brookins

WAYS TO REMEMBER...........................................................................................................13 Poetry by Daniel Wiedenmann

THE SOUND OF A DOWNPOUR........................................................................................14 Poetry by Daniel Wiedenmann

SISTERS.....................................................................................................................................15 Fiction by Alissa Malhoit

CURTAIN CALL........................................................................................................................19 Poetry by Alexander R. Erdman

THE INABILITY TO SAY GOODBYE...................................................................................21 Nonfiction by Kai Freeman

A GREETING............................................................................................................................26 Poetry by Jake Harrison

LANDSCAPE WITH PARTIAL ECLIPSE............................................................................ 27 Poetry by Moe Kirkpatrick

BAGUETTE, FROMAGE, TOUR EIFFEL............................................................................29 Nonfiction by Elizaveta Galkina

THE SPACE BETWEEN..........................................................................................................31 Poetry by Finn Stratos

RUSTED TOOLS...................................................................................................................... 32 Fiction by Kristen Golz

THE POEM................................................................................................................................35 Poetry by Hannah Fiorillo

WHEN IT’S EASY, IT’S EASY...............................................................................................36 Poetry by Hannah Fiorillo

GOOD NIGHT.......................................................................................................................... 37 Nonfiction by Olivia Greubel

PIP..............................................................................................................................................42 Fiction by Kendall Shepard

TO DAVID.................................................................................................................................46 Poetry by Tilleen Meitzler

A STATEMENT.........................................................................................................................47 Poetry by Tilleen Meitzler

LAST LOAF OF BREAD........................................................................................................48 Nonfiction by Emilie Kefalas

WELL TRAVELED................................................................................................................... 52 Poetry by Ryan Whiteley

AFTERNOON PONDERING................................................................................................. 53 Poetry by Desiree Ellen Nygaard

DINNER TIME..........................................................................................................................54 Fiction by Alissa Malhoit

SELFLESS................................................................................................................................. 57 Poetry by Carla Gonzalez Varas

GOLDFISH OUT OF WATER................................................................................................58 Poetry by Desiree Ellen Nygaard

RUNAWAY TO PARADISE...................................................................................................59 Nonfiction by Shelby Kennedy

SLOW BURN............................................................................................................................62 Nonfiction by Shelby Loebker

JANUARY MORNINGS..........................................................................................................65 Poetry by Carla Gonzalez Varas

MISUNDERSTANDING ..........................................................................................................66 Fiction by Alissa Malhoit

IDENTITY CRISIS....................................................................................................................70 Nonfiction by Caro Moya

A REPLY FROM CASHEW................................................................................................... 75 Poetry by Aidan Casey

HEARTLAND...........................................................................................................................76 Fiction by TS Brookhouse

REVISITING DEERWOOD....................................................................................................84 Poetry by Lysa Rodriguez

I. SCRIPTURE ..........................................................................................................................85 Poetry by Caro Moya

THE AVIARY ANALOGY.......................................................................................................87 Nonfiction by Alyssa Nickerson

3 O’CLOCK BLOOM...............................................................................................................92 Fiction by Noelle Marasheski

CHRYSANTHEMUM.............................................................................................................. 101 Poetry by Carla Gonzalez Varas

SNOWFIGHT.......................................................................................................................... 102 Nonfiction by Scarlett Ruggiero

DENIAL................................................................................................................................... 105 Fiction by Shelby Loebker

THE “WHY” CHROMOSOME............................................................................................. 107 Nonfiction by Alicia Caffero

’ROUND HERE

Fiction by Alexander Brookins

Before she left us for an Army man joyriding to California, Mama told me that a good, proper Southern home ’round here ought to have two doors. The door in front is full-up of glass panes and crisp slats, painted a good, normal color like white.

You prop this door open on Sunday afternoons, when the sun’s beating down on red-faced church-goin’ men hiding their pit stains under tired suit jackets. The other door is solid wood, maybe oak or birch, something strong, something the prying eyes of Mrs. Dawson down the street can’t peek past. Chipped inside from children’s games and shattered china, this door you shut in a hurry Monday night when Papa stumbles in with a beer-stained necktie strung around his collar like a noose.

“I think we oughta move away!”

Lynn’s sudden chirp from my side startles me, and I stumble on the sidewalk edge.

Her hand is in mine as we continue walking toward the bus stop, and her bright, six-year-old blue eyes aren’t troubled by her own suggestion. I grind out a laugh.

“We don’t just do things like that ’round here, Lynn, you know that.”

“Why?” She looks down and scuffs her shoes jerkily against the pavement, and though I can’t see her face, I know her lower lip is starting to peek out. “Why?” has been my sister’s million-dollar question of the week, and she never likes the answers I give her. Why can’t we wear pants under dresses? Why can’t we shave our heads? Why do dogs have whiskers? Why can’t we eat pie for dinner? Why can’t we go stay with Mama?

“Well,” I say with a sigh, “we like where we are.”

“I sure’s heck don’t!”

“Lynn Rose! Watch your mouth.” I swivel my head to make sure no well-meaning 9

grandmothers sitting out on their porches caught the conversation on new hearing aids, but we’re alone save for the Tuckers’ golden retriever wrestling a tree branch across the street. The last thing we need is more whisperings about “those poor Thompson girls—terrible, their mother running out—really been a year—wouldn’t be surprised if they turned out delinquents, you know how it is—it ain’t hard to see why Buck’s been leanin’ so hard on that bottle.”

We walk several yards in silence before Lynn mutters: “I just don’t see why we s’posed to stick around when nobody want us here.”

“What makes you think nobody wants us here?”

“Daisy told me on the bus yesterday that her mama doesn’t want her being friends with me no more ’cause somethin’ ain’t right with our family.”

Blood rushes to my head, and my grip on Lynn’s hand tightens. From the hard knot of betrayal stuffed under my lungs, I curse my mother for making us the subject of the town gossip, for leaking all our secrets out from under the doors, for tossing her responsibility over her shoulder like a half-eaten apple.

“Daisy’s mama always been fulla shit.”

Lynn gasps and pokes me hard in the thigh.

“I thought we’s supposed to ‘watch our mouth!’”

“I said you need to watch your mouth. Can’t have you showing up at school cussin’ like a trucker. That’ll definitely get Daisy’s mama talkin’.”

We round the corner and spy the huddle of mothers and backpack-laden kids clumped by the street sign. A few of the mothers turn their heads and nod politely as we walk toward them. I smile in return and scan the crowd to find the eyes of LuAnne Sawyer as she grips Daisy’s hand. I hold eye contact with her for a long moment, until she uncomfortably turns to her daughter and wipes some imaginary dust from her shirt collar.

The bus trundles toward us with screeching brakes, and children quickly tear away from their parents toward its doors. Lynn skips forward with a “Bye, Maggie!” thrown over her shoulder. I wave back until the exhaust fumes and engine grumble and disappear down the street, before turning to walk home.

The morning air is sticky and sludge-like already, another benefit of living in southern Georgia in spring. The air trickles into my lungs slowly, as if through a coffee filter. I reach the end of the sidewalk and hesitate. Instead of heading home, I turn and jog across the street to the tall, baby-blue house poised on the corner like a hawk. I ring the doorbell and look around the front of the house at the perpetually

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closed shutters and immaculate garden. The door cracks open, and a brown eye peers out at me.

“Oh, it’s you, Margaret.”

“Mornin’ Lucilla. Could I come in?”

The door swings open, and I hop in as Lucilla latches it behind me. It always astounds me that, no matter how early I come by, she looks as if she’s been up for hours. Graying afro hair pulled into an impeccable bun, dress ironed and pressed, same silver necklace her mother gave her as a little girl—she looks ready to head out the door, even though I’ve only ever seen her come out on Sunday mornings.

She heads to her small dining room table, and I follow. This is our normal spot, on the days when I come visit her.

I stumbled onto Lucilla’s doorstep one day a few months ago after running out of my house into a downpour; Papa had gone missing for the first time since Mama left, and I had no idea where to go or what to do. I don’t know if it was a Good Orderly Direction that brought me to the blue house on the corner, or if it was simply a soaked dress and childlike desperation. I didn’t know anything about her, just what other folks in the neighborhood said about “the only colored person in these parts, never seen her come out ’cept for church.” Even though the shivering white girl on her front porch was a stranger, she brought me inside and gave me a blanket and some tea and listened quietly as I cried.

We soon discovered that neither of us will breathe a word of the other’s stories outside the tall stone wall. I don’t stop by every day, but sometimes I could use a talk, sometimes she could use a talk, and sometimes we could just use a cup of tea and the pleasure of gentle company.

“Lucilla, I think folks are . . . talking about my family.”

She looks at me expectantly, with an implied, “And?” “Lynn hears things in school—you know how unkind kids can be.”

Her gaze remains steady.

“It’s—I’ve—When’s it going to stop?” I lean back and press my fingers to my eyes.

“I’m tired of tryin’ and tryin’ to keep us looking good and respectable and normal like I oughta, and just . . . we never catch a break.”

“Honey-child,” she says with a deep sigh, “why you think I’ve been holed up in this house for twelve years?”

“Well, I mean, I figured you just didn’t like goin’ out much.”

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She barks a dry laugh, and the wrinkles in her forehead crease together.

“You known me this long, and you think I just don’t fancy going out? I used to go out all the time—down to the market every Wednesday, maybe the little park on Jackson when it wasn’t hot as the devil’s ass.”

“Don’t try it today,” I say with a grimace. “Why’d you stop going?”

“Listen, I knew ain’t nobody wanted me here since the beginning. I kept going ’cause I thought if they saw my face enough, eventually they’d get tired of spewing hate.” Her voice wavers, and she takes a breath. “I was wrong. After Charles passed, and I became ‘that old colored widow,’ nobody had reservations about making their feelins’ clear. Maybe the adults here hide their thoughts, bein’ some kind of polite, but their kids still get the message. I’d come home to burning dog shit on my porch, my garden all tore up, nasty things painted on the wall. If I went into town, nobody’d even act like I was there. One night, my phone rang and some white child was tellin’ me to ‘get out,’ and a second later a rock came crashing through my front window.”

My mouth has gone dry listening to her.

“So that’s why your shutters stay locked . . .”

“Listen, Margaret, people ’round here gonna talk about you no matter what. You get to make a choice now ’bout whether you stay safe and quiet, or if you gonna live loud and free.” She pushes her chair back with a squeak and walks toward the door. “I’m going to do some gardening. You can stay if you want, or head on out.”

I mumble that I’m just going to head home, thanks, and I stumble out into the thick Southern heat.

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WAYS TO REMEMBER

Poetry by Daniel Wiedenmann

I want my gravestone to be a stepping stone or a bench or a kid’s slide or anything other than a waste of space people will always keep dying but the earth isn’t getting any bigger and if we keep digging graves one day the whole planet will be full of them years later earth will be a tourist attraction a ball of dirt covered in headstones orbiting the sun for our forever like a pin cushion in a planet model I don’t want to be just another corpse I want my bones to be carved into tools or trinkets and I want my skull to be a ceremonial bowl used to anoint future generations into adulthood I don’t want to go to waste

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THE SOUND OF A DOWNPOUR Poetry by Daniel Wiedenmann

At first the shuddering of rain is a new noise.

You can hear the cloud drains being pulled all at once.

With time our minds push it aside.

But it spills over the other sounds.

Before the bird chirp reaches you it has dodged the downpour, has been coated with a slippery, drenched quality.

Waves of wind will join to sheet across streets, flood the ditches, slap building sides and finally rush the threshold where the wet shoes sit, bragging about where they’ve been.

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SISTERS

Fiction by Alissa Malhoit

Nicole hated children. She hated the way everyone acted, as if babies were more precious than anyone or anything. Like some soft-headed newborn was somehow more important to the world than brain surgeons and, ya know, people who understand the basic concept of a toilet. It wasn’t so much that she thought they didn’t matter. They were much like her new pair of Converse: cute and in high demand, but not worth the fuss.

Her older sister Shawna had been trying to have a baby for some time now. Nicole couldn’t understand why. Shawna had just gotten married three months ago and already she and Derek wanted a kid. As if their combined college debts and sub-par jobs didn’t create enough of a money cruncher. No. They wanted to add a roundthe-clock juvenile to the list. It didn’t seem to matter, though, because it turned out that Shawna couldn’t have a baby. Or at least not anytime soon. Nicole tended to lose interest whenever word was mentioned about Shawna’s many attempts at conception. Something about Shawna’s irregular periods and how Derek only had one functioning ball.

Good old-fashioned sex didn’t seem to do the trick. Shawna began referring to their honeymoon as a “failed opportunity.” They decided to try in vitro but that didn’t change much either. Once, while her sister sat crying on the couch between her and her mother, Nicole tried being helpful.

“You can always adopt,” she said.

Shawna only sobbed louder.

That was the one and only suggestion Nicole made to her sister. Personally, she couldn’t understand what the big deal was. You don’t always get what you 15

want, and who needs sleepless nights and an extra mouth to feed anyway? If they wanted a cute, attention grubber then go buy a puppy. But they didn’t stop trying and Nicole kept her mouth shut.

The whole baby thing had become an obsession for Shawna. She spent any free time she had researching the latest fertility treatments, allowing her body to be poked and prodded while Derek and his one good ball sat in the waiting room.

She had a close call once. After several more months of treatments, Shawna finally got pregnant. Their parents invited her and Derek for cake and bubbling cider as a little “congratulations on your now-growing fetus” but it was short lived. She had a miscarriage just a few days later. Shawna remained seemingly unfazed.

One night Shawna and her parents went out for dinner and another intervention about how she should take a pause on treatments and try to just enjoy married life. Nicole had agreed to keep Derek company while Shawna was out, and they sat on the couch watching Rocky (not the good one, but some sequel where half the movie is a montage of Sylvester Stallone training in Russia). Nicole hadn’t spent much time alone with Derek but she appreciated the way he always stayed patient with her sister, even when she didn’t deserve it. Shawna had been even harder to deal with lately, her emotions all over the place with the hormones and supplements she was always taking.

About two-thirds of the way through the movie, Derek turned to Nicole.

“So what do you think about all this baby stuff? I never hear you say much about it.”

“Well . . . I’m not really one for kids, I guess. If it’s what Shawna wants.”

“Yeah,” Derek said. “If it’s what Shawna wants.”

Nicole never paid much attention to Derek. But now she couldn’t help noticing the way Derek’s hair was tousled on one side like he hadn’t brushed it in days. His eyes drooped and his T-shirt had a murky stain on the sleeve.

“How have you been lately, Derek?”

He didn’t answer. He just stared at her for a minute, then slumped further into the couch and turned back to the TV. Nicole wasn’t sure what had changed between the start and end of Stallone’s fight with his steroid-induced, Ken doll of an opponent, but Derek had somehow ended up on top of her. At first she’d struggled, tried to wiggle her way out from under his grabby hands. But it didn’t take her long to start tugging at his stained T-shirt and leather belt; her lips on his neck and his hand down her thigh.

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An hour or so later Shawna stormed into the living room, her parents following in defeat.

“Let’s go.”

Derek stood up from the couch and reached for Shawna’s hand. She snatched it away, turned and left the room without even a “goodbye.” He nodded once to her parents before turning to Nicole, still on the couch.

“Thanks,” he said.

Once the two had pulled out of her parents’ driveway, Nicole’s mother went over and sat beside her on the couch.

“Well, I hope your night went better than ours. Your sister’s relentless.”

“She’s tough like her father, that’s all,” Nicole’s dad said from the kitchen.

Nicole didn’t respond. She just nodded her head, got up from the couch and headed upstairs to her room. No one noticed that the top of her blouse was still unbuttoned.

Shawna and Derek didn’t come over again after that. Shawna called Nicole once, saying how she was sick of Mom and Dad always telling her what to do and that she was married now so she could do what she wanted. Nicole didn’t so much care about the sudden tension between Shawna and her parents. She wondered instead if Derek had maybe told her. She knew that he wouldn’t. What had made him kiss her that night? Did he like being with her then or was she just his best option? What would it be like the next time they saw each other and were her underwear still under the couch?

It wasn’t Nicole’s first time. She’d been with one other guy. Luke Wryder. He was a lacrosse douche who always wore his sandals with Nike socks and shirts that were two sizes too big. He wasn’t anything special. Nicole didn’t really believe in the whole “first time” crap. She preferred to get it out of the way instead of “saving herself” and all that. Luke didn’t have too many redeeming qualities, but if there was one thing Nicole could say about him it was that he was clean. His mother was an elementary school nurse who carried around bottles of hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes like they were candy. She may not have taught her son that a bedroom full of posters of supermodels in bikinis wasn’t the best decorative decision, but she did teach him proper hygiene.

Now Nicole questioned this decision. Maybe it was a more precious thing than she’d let on. After all, her parents had been married 32 years and they still seemed

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happy. And even though Shawna was ungrateful 95 percent of the time, she loved Derek more than anything. And he loved her.

He loved Shawna, her sister. Where did that leave Nicole? She sure as hell wasn’t giving Luke a second thought.

She looked up at her bathroom ceiling. It was a pale stucco with three lights hanging from the center. The floor tiles were cold underneath her butt, a teal blue that reminded her of the beaches her family had visited a few years back in the Caribbean. She and Shawna had been so excited to swim with dolphins and wear coconut bras by the ocean. She couldn’t remember seeing her sister smile as much as she did that trip. There was something about the way her blonde hair was always creased from laying out all day; the way the wind blew her fly-aways in ten different directions. She didn’t complain once. Not like now.

Nicole had thought that marrying Derek would make her sister happy again, like she was on the island. But it hadn’t.

And now all Nicole could think about was that night. She could still taste his sweet breath. She wanted so badly to run her fingers through his hair. She knew she never would.

The plus sign on the little pink stick in her lap told her so.

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CURTAIN CALL

Poetry by Alexander R. Erdman

The house is about bristling tiled roofs on a leathered patchwork, listening chimneys, and an arterial entanglement of pipework; my house is about currents moving, leakage, electrical wiring, beams splintering all over so that the composure of the exterior is matched by the intricacy and messiness of the great corona beating inside my kept closet.

My tribe is about the four people and the one butt-waggling dog—the ever-moving nomads without headdresses, minus the sand and woven rugs but a troupe of thespians just the same. My actor is about holding close the soul’s inner liquor— not the stuff that is never quieted but a pulsing music at a pitch and rate that only you and I can hear.

My loneliness is about twigs, leaves, sun rays, the meaning of smallness and sweetness—humble and eternal. The ordinary life that is never only echo, never seen by those who take steel stacks for ingenuity and mink for success.

Their cage is occasion.

Their occasion is about putting on the nice suit, those polished shoes, a verbena-scented throat— an apparition of the lonely one.

Their appearance is about the crowd without autonomy: The brown-eyed girl in a miniskirt or the furrowed brows of the buttoned up two-pieced grandfather.

We clap and smile but tell them to move back behind the curtain with our applause.

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The moving back is about a footpath forward, clouded by velvet and transparent as dream.

Behind the curtain is about the proximity of our hands and the open door of our house.

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THE INABILITY TO SAY GOODBYE Nonfiction by Kai Freeman

During my fifth and sixth grade years, I lived in Thailand with my mom and stepdad—coming back to the U.S. over the summer to stay with my dad and his wife Caroline. While in Thailand, I went to school at NIST, the New International School of Thailand. I lived nearby—couldn’t have been more than a ten-minute walk, but my mom wanted me to take the bus anyway.

The buses wouldn’t leave for a little while after school ended, though, so I’d stay in this building—I guess I’d characterize it as the entrance building to the rest of the school. It was a small, one-floor affair; and I think it was mainly there for security, ‘cause there were some guards in it, too. It also had a seating area, and people would often wait there for their bus.

That’s what I was doing when a friend of mine, James, came up to me one day.

“Whatchu doin’?”

“Waiting for my bus.”

“Oh. You wanna come over with me and get some bubble tea?”

Across the street from our school, there was this guy who hawked bubble tea on the sidewalk.

“I don’t have any money.”

“That’s fine. I’ll pay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yah. I mean—it’s only 20 baht anyway.” (That’s a little less than a buck.)

Offering to buy me bubble tea was typical of James. That’s just how he was— openhanded. He was generous with both his money and his time. I mean, sure, it wasn’t really his money, it was his mom’s, but I think he still would have given it even if it was his.

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I remember once, while we were in the cafeteria, I was reading this book, Ender’s Game. He came up to me, saw the book, and asked me what it was about. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember giving the most incoherent, rambling, and complicated answer I’ve ever given in my life. The thing is, though, he just sat there the whole time and listened to it—entranced. The one thing my explanation had going for it was that it was passionate, and I think he felt and mirrored that.

“Dude, that sounds awesome.”

He would always give me the time of day. He was just a patient guy.

“What you want?”

“Oh. Umm. Can I get the orange one? One Thai tea please.”

I always got the orange Thai tea flavor, and James would usually switch between honeydew melon and lychee depending on the day. We walked back to the school to sit in the entrance building after thanking the street vendor.

In Thailand, most buildings had air-conditioning—or, if not, they at least had a fan going. Not the building we sat in. It was an open building—at least on the ground floor—so I guess the lack of AC made sense. But as we were walking back, the humid air, mixed with car fumes and smoke from street-vendors’ cooking, would gradually rise in temperature ‘til it felt like your shirt was part of your back.

The only respite was the rain. During the rainy season, kids that looked more like amorphous blobs through the downpour ran home carrying their backpacks overhead; in minutes, busy streets turned to puddles, with water levels rising up high enough to give motorcyclists pause before they weaved through stand-still traffic; and in the dead of night, when only the light of the flashing neon signs remained, if you looked down into those puddles, you would see the signs’ reflections, with one in particular standing out—the pixelated face of a woman.

But as soon as you make out what it is you’re seeing, she blinks out of existence.

But this is no matter, as your eyes are quickly fed by another image—that of her breasts, which appear under where her face once was. And in quick succession, her ass, legs, and the pole squeezed in between those legs are shown in much the same fashion as the face, each given their moment before blinking away. And when you realize what it is that has been shown to you piecemeal, all at once, the image materializes. Every part now is showing. And the bright, saturated colors on the surface of the puddle start to blend with one another, shimmering and rippling from the footsteps of passersby.

Looking up, you see through the rain that same sign, its red glow spread and 22

diffused, each droplet surrounding it absorbing the light. Together, they act as a thousand moons—capturing, reflecting, and dazzling the light back into your eyes.

You walk away, comforted by the sound of pattering rain on your umbrella.

The rain and the puddles and the umbrellas, however, would soon dry up. And as James and I came back with our bubble tea in hand, the sun beat down on us with both of its mighty fists.

I think we both relished that first sip: It would calm your nerves, bring you back to reality, allow you to think thoughts other than “Goddamn, it’s so fucking hot here.” But you’d have to sip it slowly, or else your head would alternate between exploding and shrinking small enough to become its own black hole.

This sort of became a ritual for us—walking across the street to buy bubble tea, then sitting together and sipping it slowly out of the colorful and comically large straws necessary for allowing passage of the boba. Sometimes, the silence was punctuated by bits of conversation. But it couldn’t be a whole lot since I had to get to my bus pretty soon afterward.

It was when we were sitting like that, on the last day of school, that I decided I had to tell James I wasn’t coming back to school next year. I told him that we probably wouldn’t see each other again, or if we did, it wouldn’t be for a long time, and that I’d be living in the States from then on.

I kept my voice low and even as I told him, occasionally glancing in his direction to see how he was taking it. He was looking at me as though concentrated on each word I said. After I finished, he leaned over to hug me.

Now, at that age, I was a profoundly awkward person, and I didn’t like the idea of hugging people out in public, out in front of other random strangers. I guess I just didn’t like the idea that they might see and start staring at me. I don’t know.

It’s weird; but that’s just how I thought at the time, you know?

And so, when James came over to hug me, it was like I turned into a fucking wooden block. I couldn’t hug him back. All I could think was, “People are staring at us. People are staring at us. People are staring at us,” with my arms and hands rigid and unmoving at my sides. As much I liked James, I couldn’t bring myself to do the simple motion of raising my arms and wrapping them around him. For me, the whole thing was just painfully awkward.

The chairs we sat in were made of a hard, blue plastic—the kind of chairs you’d find in a school cafeteria or something. And the way they were arranged, they were

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next to each other, but they faced frontward. So, for the most part, if you wanted to see the person you were talking to, and they were in the chair next to you, that meant you’d have to keep your legs relatively straight while turning the upper half of your body toward them. It would be like if you were sitting next to them on a bench. You couldn’t move the chairs though ‘cause they were all attached to one another by an iron bar that was attached at the back of all of them.

This exacerbated our awkwardness ‘cause when James went in to hug me, I didn’t turn to meet him. I just faced forward, and he had to span his arms across my shoulders with his head on my right shoulder. At this point, my whole body was rigid, and I was just boring holes in the chair in front of me. He gave up after a few seconds and dropped his arms.

The scene might have been funny if it wasn’t so awkward—or maybe that would make it even funnier. It was the kind of scene you’d find in Napoleon Dynamite or The Office.

Actually, no. You wouldn’t find it in either of those. Tonally, it’d be too dark, too depressing, too harsh. More likely, you’d find a scene like that in Louie or BoJack Horseman, or any show nowadays that’s modern in the sense that it features a main character with self-destructive tendencies that stem from an awkwardness so complete as to render the character unable to function in social interactions, or at least severely limit such functions. This awkwardness, itself, stemming from an isolation from human contact, with that time replaced instead by, not just the reading of books, as was traditionally the case, but further compounded and enabled by newer technologies allowing one to binge-watch TV shows or even to put themselves further in the place of the character in the world of electronic games, and, with ever-greater visual aids, allowing even those without the imagination for reading to appreciate the craftsmanship and to find themselves engaged with and obsessing over such work.

I guess I’m not really talking about these shows anymore, am I? I think I’ve gotten a lot better now, but I remember when I was younger, especially at that middle-school age, I’d sit around and binge-watch shows like How I Met Your Mother or I’d read the Twilight series. Maybe that’s why I was terrible at talking with people. I remember always being painfully shy. And the only time I was really confident in what I was saying was when I was mad with someone.

To some extent, that’s still a part of me. A lot of my friends like to do things to frustrate or annoy me ‘cause they want to see my reactions, but it’s always meant

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nicely; and, at this point, it’s just kind of our dynamic—a dynamic I like, by the way.

It keeps things interesting and fun between us.

Re-reading what I wrote—about the effect of art on me in its various forms— honestly, I’m not really sure I believe all that. I do think art, in all its various forms, has had a generally positive effect on me; and I wouldn’t be surprised if, without its aid, without its allowing me to throw myself into it completely and feel all of the emotions the artist intended and with full intensity—I think, without all that art has given me—I’d be more generally angry, frustrated, or simply snippy with people because I would have emotions that would build, day after day, with no release, or rather, I would have a lack of emotions that would build, a boredom that would evolve into a hatred of life and a view of it as being pointless bullshit.

So, I guess I’m saying the opposite of what I said before. I think art’s effect on me was such that it actually helped me with my awkwardness. And while it may not have affected me enough that I could express myself honestly in that moment with James, without it, I don’t think I would have ever developed the maturity and openness necessary to hug a close friend out in public or to otherwise express myself and my emotions as honestly as I do now.

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A GREETING

Poetry by Jake Harrison

To my Mother for showing me that the smallest signs mean the most.

“She is saying hello.” – D. Hunt Monday morning on the streets of New York City, there is poverty and their fellow little warriors.

I walk the avenue through a layer of silk fresh off the Hudson, then turn the corner to a wall of friendly foreign faces. Down the row of lights the girls are all in line for one spot, and the yelling of the cars.

The scent of subway, the dinging of doors.

It is easy to get lost.

But I know, when I’m above the clanking of rails, I can look to find my north star that soars above the others with its silver spire.

One final block towards work; I watch every step, keeping close the color of every 3-by-3 square.

Last stop at a stand where the ink is fresh and piles tall.

My wrist tells the time and when I stop, I spot Lincoln flat and stoned on the ground. If I stoop, if I feel the overused copper texture lined with a layer of the city, I might realize who is sending me a sign, their small love and Good Morning.

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LANDSCAPE WITH PARTIAL ECLIPSE Poetry by Moe Kirkpatrick

—for Joey Lately I’ve been thinking about the mirror you keep in your chest, pointed backwards, refracting your light into shards. In this way, you hand yourself out without trouble, like crystals, not too bright or too large. I get it: you’re scared of Icarus.

He wanted what you want, which is to be the sun, which is blasphemous and, moreover, how dare you take yourself so carelessly. How dare you look up for the white-rimmed sun. How dare you lean into the salt wind and try hardest and laugh loudest—don’t you know about being too much?

Don’t you know already the red impact, the slow death, and the shame, like smoke, down the barrel of your throat?

Haven’t you been told about Phaethon?

We stare at the sun and we’re wrong.

We reach for the sun and we’re wrong.

We become the sun and we leave billions dying, burning in our wake, the black bodies baked, the fingers crusting into ash. Haven’t we learned anything from our parents about self-control? Haven’t we learned anything from Bruegel? Landscape with Icarus. Landscape with people ignoring Icarus. No one wants to see you splash down into the Mediterranean.

You’re a dumb kid causing a fuss, trying to figure out if the warmth you’ve always known is the only one you can ever have and lately I’ve been thinking about the eclipse. The one over the summer, during work, when my mom made me take tinted glasses 27

so I stood out by the smoker’s table with Bill and Donna and passed my pair off to the front office manager and the cheese monger, the whole dairy department, the self-checkout assistant and the woman with her five-year-old daughter, wandering around desperate for something to look through before the moment passed. Hadn’t I learned anything from Bruegel? The people who want to look will look. Damn the rest.

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BAGUETTE, FROMAGE, TOUR EIFFEL Nonfiction by Elizaveta Galkina

Paris can look grey and sad and uninviting, but at the same time it can be fragile, melodic, and inspiring. It’s all about the angle you choose to look at the greyness, and I always chose to see the beauty in the melancholic. Sadness is poetic and Paris can be the greatest muse.

On the rainy days, we would hide in boulangeries eating croissants. Or find a café with a terrace and chain-smoke cigarettes while drinking coffee, pretending we were French.

Nora spent her college years in Leeds, U.K., and although she was German, she had a very heavy British accent. It surprised me every time she spoke. She always wore all black, took amazing photographs, and made bags. She is so cool, I thought when we first met, I want to be friends with her.

Quentin, or Quin, was Canadian and his accent was very American, the one I was used to hearing—something in between New York and Boston. He was all about fashion, dance clubs, Polaroids, and boys.

Suzana was Polish but went to an American high school. She loved shopping and needed to learn how to smoke.

Duke was from Seattle and his accent was the clearest of all. He took care of me when I drank too much.

Matheus, from Brazil, barely spoke English but his apartment was in the perfect area, and he loved to throw parties. He showed us the fancy parts of the city.

Then Prachi, from India, who always had a crazy story about men and purses, told them in her articulated language and Indian accent.

And Venice, a woman from Bangkok who spent the last decade of her life 29

between the U.K. and the States. I thought she was a genius—she was talented in absolutely everything. But she complemented her talent with hard work and she knew what she was doing.

And then me, a Russian just starting to learn English, finished with my first year at an American art school. Depressed, but hoping for the best.

We all shared a desire to fit in during the best summer of our lives at ESMOD, a fashion university in the heart of Paris. I was eighteen, careless, and in my favorite city in the world. A summer filled with cigarettes, baguettes, and cheap wine. With laughter, nights by the Seine, and crepes. Hours and hours working on fashion projects, but mostly getting inspired walking around Paris, exploring thrift stores, street markets, museums, and rooftops. Getting lost in the subway or missing it completely after a long night out and taking turns sleeping on park benches.

One either loves or hates Paris—indifference is impossible. For a group of artists like us, Paris became home, a place that celebrated our youth with us. Some Paris nights worked out, some did not. But what happens in Paris stays in Paris.

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THE SPACE BETWEEN Poetry by Finn Stratos

So we’re sitting on this new wooden bench outside the Trinity Christian lower school, and Charis is talking about Michael Amico.

We’re skipping Mrs. Waller’s second floor study hall, and Charis is going on now about Amico’s passion for life, his goals, aspirations.

He’s a star soccer player, you know, president of the student government, too, one of Charis’ closest friends.

And as of right now, the only openly gay kid in K-12.

Charis is a lover of people, and she loves talking about them to other people, and today she’s talking about Michael Declan Amico.

It’s been maybe ten minutes and I hear her sigh, then brush that truth away with a lighthearted laugh, leaning in— I hope he finds a nice girl to marry.

This silence seems to be fraying the string between us from my clenched fist to her open heart so I cough out a laugh, see that Charis is oblivious to the danger, and I let it fall, unsure of what to do next.

Before I say something I wouldn’t regret, we’re being ushered off the bench by some assistant who saw us through her window playing hooky.

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RUSTED TOOLS

Fiction by Kristen Golz

George Burmer settled beneath the sheets in his hospital bed, awaiting news from the doctor. The weak muscles in his hands made an infirm grip, causing the television remote to wobble. After thirty-six years of performing as a concert pianist, George’s most trusted tools appeared to have rusted.

He clicked through the television channels while awaiting the return of the doctor.

A local news channel caught his attention as it flashed its headline— “Breaking News! Concert Pianist, George Burmer Hospitalized Prior to Carnegie Hall Performance.”

While only a few hours had gone since he asked his wife, Rebecca, to call an ambulance, news of the incident spread rapidly. George expected as much; his upcoming performance at Carnegie Hall captivated the attention of the press. A sold-out concert formed a spotlight; not arriving to the concert brightened that spotlight tenfold.

A news reporter occupied the screen now, the headline repeating at the bottom.

Normally, George detested the invasion of the news in his life, but waiting on the doctor encouraged George to test his patience.

“Hours ago, concert pianist George Burmer was brought by ambulance to Mount Sinai Hospital, where I am currently standing.” The hospital respected its patients’ privacy—no reporters could reach him here.

“The exact details have not yet been told by Mr. Burmer himself,” the reporter continued, “but we have been informed that it was in the car on the way to Carnegie Hall for the scheduled performance that Mr. Burmer began experiencing symptoms.

What happened to Mr. Burmer? How will this incident affect his career? Will—” 32

George clicked the television off, his patience burnt. He reminisced about the days prior to his fame, without the reporters or spotlight. A sense of peace passed through George’s mind as an aged memory. It had been a long time since George knew of a peaceful privacy.

The twist of a knob redirected George’s attention to the door. Rebecca stepped into the room carrying two plastic cups of water. She placed one cup on George’s table and held the other to her lips.

“I’m on the news,” George remarked, a weak smile on his face.

“Oh, don’t bother yourself with that,” Rebecca advised in her usual soft-spoken tone. “You know how they are, just looking for a story. . . . Dr. Polski should be in soon with some answers.”

George maneuvered upright and reached for his cup of water. It was only hours ago that George’s hands took to the piano keys with the same ease as a dancer on a stage, or an athlete to a field. Now his hands could barely support the cup—one wrapped around the side while the other supported the bottom.

The sound of the door opening again caught George’s attention. Dr. Polski stepped in, clipboard in hand, and looked to Rebecca. George felt as though the doctor intentionally avoided George’s eyes until the exact moment of delivering the news.

“Mr. Burmer, this news is always difficult to give. You have had a stroke that appears to have compromised a majority of your muscular strength and mobility.”

The doctor paused to allow for the news to sink in and emotions to rise.

George’s gaze bore into the doctor. “Are the symptoms permanent?”

“With physical therapy, there is some hope of rebuilding a portion of the muscular strength. You should still have your independence in terms of walking and caring for yourself. While we have hope for improvement, it’s unlikely you will regain the strength or mobility in your hands.”

The air in the room stilled and the news created a weight that built within George’s chest. He could not play piano anymore.

“May I be alone for a moment?” George murmured, his eyes switching from the doctor to his wife, “Please?”

“George,” Rebecca’s soft tone now swam in pity and compassion, “We can get through—” “Please, Rebecca.” George forced the words to come out soft, despite the weight that continued to press within. The request hung there for a moment, dangling in

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the still atmosphere, until finally Rebecca and Dr. Polski complied.

Once the two stepped into the hall, the closed door isolated George with his thoughts. He tossed off the sheets and slid out of bed.

He could not play piano anymore.

The weight that had settled in his chest began to rumble, creating an unanticipated sensation. George distrusted it, convinced himself denial was fooling him. Tricks of the mind erupt at times like this, yet the more time he allowed to pass, the more the sensation spread through his limbs, tingling all the way through to his fingertips.

George glanced at the black television screen and a slight smile stole his expression. Though his steps were weak, George struggled forward, holding the bed rail for support. He drew closer to the screen until his reflection filled the space.

He would no longer play piano.

The rumbling in his chest grew stronger, preparing to burst. George could no longer resist, a sensation as powerful as such could not be a trick. It was the truest feeling he had experienced in years. And it was rising out, demanding to be made a reality.

George complied. Holding the rail of the bed, he dropped to his knees, opened his mouth and laughed. A laughter loud within, yet quiet when emitted to maintain its secrecy, real yet only in the reality of this room. The weight that had been built over thirty-six years poured out in a flood of relief and the room momentarily filled with the soft sound.

George was no longer chained to the highest expectations of beauty, nor bound to the needs of a world that yearns for the gift of music he possessed. George was relieved of duty, his spotlight finally dimmed.

He soaked in the silence of the room and pondered a future independent of expectations. An empty quiet filled with opportunity for exploration. Concert pianist George Burmer had dissolved into a memory, opening space for a new, unsung George Burmer. The sense of peace returned, no longer a memory, but in fact a true, genuine, present peace.

George raised his hands and studied them with reminiscence. “Thank you, my tools, for finally rusting.�

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THE POEM

Poetry by Hannah Fiorillo

I put my knees to the grass and wait all the way to Sunday.

I’m there when the rain starts, when it stops and starts again.

I wait with ants marching over me, with men who can’t mind their own, asking loud questions from the sidewalk.

When I get home, I wait in the shower and let the warm water run, later I wait with my ear to the pillow, with my eyes hanging on the wall, then my feet bare against the floor, exposed.

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WHEN IT’S EASY, IT’S EASY Poetry by Hannah Fiorillo

Every Monday we drove twenty minutes to Maplewood and spent an hour in King’s Grocery where they had pomegranates the size of my head.

And I’d ask her for six.

I promised I’d eat one a day until we came back and I did, and they were the size of my head.

At home I’d hear her talk through the walls, her voice wasn’t music, but you don’t love someone because their voice is music.

She’d be three hours into a phone call when I’d hear her laugh and I’d love her.

There were times, towards the end of a long car ride, the tension would fall away.

The kind that keeps things on the quiet side and I would talk to her as if she hadn’t raised me.

She would laugh, and she would tell me she loved me and when we got home I’d hold the door for her.

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GOOD NIGHT

Nonfiction by Olivia Greubel

My father had grown up spending most of his life swimming at the bottom of bottles. He didn’t really know or understand that he was living in a bottle at the time; through the glass that’s just what the rest of the world looked like to him. It was only when a group of similar-minded people found him and helped him climb out did he realize that there was an entire world composed of completely dry land, and he could see that one so much better. He hadn’t had a drink in over a year, but here at this party he could feel its presence all around him. That prickle, that tangle, that tickling sensation hit him the same way that gritty nails-on-a-chalkboard sound did, and it left his hair standing on end. The taste in his mouth was bitter.

He looked down at his cup and swirled his club soda. He wouldn’t drink today, tonight, or any other time. It left him more nervous and a bit more shy, but that childlike self of his he’d buried beneath pools of vodka was starting to bloom again.

His wit was getting sharper, his smile was getting crisper, and his laugh lines were getting deeper. So far, he liked the person he was becoming, or at least thought he did. It was, after all, a learning process, and he was both the student and the teacher.

He heard his friends from across the room before he even looked up from his cup.

All of them had laughs that boomed and cracked like the night sky on the Fourth of July, and sometimes their faces flushed hot pink from either the joke itself or the alcohol that often accompanied it. My father’s face was hot not from drunkenness, but because the room had grown humid from the sweat that hung in the air. Cletus and Mike were laughing red hot and loud because they got Roy to chug another Solo cup fresh from the keg, and beer came out of his nose a little bit. This group

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of men had a boy’s sense of humor that could only come from growing up on the same street and never being more than a ten-minute walking distance from each other. All of them already had siblings, but growing up on Burncoate Drive gave them more honorary ones, a family chosen rather than born into. Sometimes they liked those siblings more.

When my father approached his friends again he was greeted by a slap on the shoulder by Cletus, and was debriefed on everything he just saw but in a closer more play-by-play way. Roy was using one of those colored party napkins to wipe the beer off of his chin, and despite being embarrassed a bit, he couldn’t keep from laughing either. It was easy to be happy with these guys and that’s what made ignoring the alcohol so much easier for my father. His friends weren’t a distraction to him, they were more of a living, breathing, driving force; a collective group that left his throat scratchy and his stomach tight from laughter. They fed him joy and happiness like a prescription, and it kept the nagging and tugging of the alcohol at bay. It became easy, second nature.

It was here, from across the room, that my father saw a young woman he didn’t know talk to Roy’s mother, who he did know. She looked to be about his own age, dressed in a T-shirt that was tucked neatly into her jeans. Her hair was worn down in curls that framed her face well enough to display how poorly she tried to hide her rolling eyes from Roy’s mother. She wore a lazy smile easily across her lips, which meant she got away with that type of behavior. Her cheeks were flushed pink either from heat or drunkenness, as well. My father wasn’t aware which was true, but he was becoming aware that for some reason, he could not look away from her.

My mother had been at the party for a little over an hour and despite having a good enough of a time, she couldn’t help the bubble of irritation that was beginning to boil in her stomach. She felt guilty for it of course; Roy was her cousin, and she and her siblings had traveled the eight hours from Mississippi to Missouri to make it on time for his graduation. Her brother, Frank, apparently found through his own research that the best way to celebrate this was by squandering his money playing poker in the basement. It became my mother’s job to refill his Solo cup whenever it got empty, and she was on her fourth trip up the stairs when she couldn’t help her frustration any more.

“Please don’t tell me all of this has been for you,” Aunt Janet said.

“Are you kidding me?” my mother said, “Of course not. Frank will throw a fit if I don’t bring him his refills every ten minutes, though.”

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“You don’t have to do that, you know. You could just leave him. You should just leave him.” My mother gently rolled her eyes and hoped her aunt wouldn’t notice.

She probably did though, her aunt was as perceptive as her own mother.

“I don’t want him to get crabby in front of everyone,” my mother said.

“Honey, it’s Frank, he was crabby when he walked through the door,” Aunt Janet finished as she walked away. My mother let out a sigh and continued to the keg.

Roy’s friends were crowded around the table, laughing loudly at something she didn’t see or hear. From here she could see Cletus, the one she always thought was cute; and Mike, the one they always called Hairball, and for good reason. Roy had spittle on his chin and was laughing at something a boy she didn’t recognize had said. He seemed more reserved than the others, with one hand in his pocket and the other wrapped around his own Solo cup. He had tan skin and dimples so deep they looked more like canyons, and she felt instantly hotter in the face and couldn’t tell if it was from the running around or looking at that boy a moment too long. She kept her gaze low as she filled up Frank’s cup.

“Geez woman, how many beers are you going to have tonight?” Roy asked as he enveloped her in a half hug. She let out a small chuckle that sounded more defeated than she intended it to.

“You know how Frank can get,” my mother said.

“Just ditch him,” Roy said. “Stay up here with us. That’s where the real party is anyway.” My mother smiled again. “I will at some point, I promise. I just don’t want him to get too crazy tonight.” Roy just shrugged his shoulders in understanding.

The other boys were discussing something else among themselves, but she did catch the eyes of the dark-haired boy once more before she departed. She tried not to dwell on the furrow of his eyebrows and the crinkle of his forehead as he listened to what she had said.

In all honesty, my father had taken some sort of secondhand offense to what my mother had told Roy. He assumed that Frank was her boyfriend, and he was a little afraid to admit to himself how irritated that made him. He didn’t like a word that came out of her mouth about him and he couldn’t help but think how much better she deserved than that. His feet moved against his will and he began to follow her downstairs. He looked back at Cletus and Mike and Roy and told them he wanted to check out the basement and he thought for a moment that this might be crazy, that she might think him strange, but he hoped for the best and followed

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her anyway, swallowing his nervousness with every step. Roy’s mother caught his eye and pulled him aside before he could go downstairs.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Roy’s mother asked.

“I wanted to check out the basement for a minute,” my father said. “Is Carl down there?” Roy’s mother looked like she knew something he didn’t, and it left curiosity gnawing in him from his fingers to his toes.

“Don’t think I didn’t see the way you were looking at my niece just earlier.” My father couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows in surprise.

“Oh, no. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on. I have known you since you were a kid, I know what it looks like when you’re smitten with someone,” Roy’s mother said. She was right, she had known him since he was a kid. My father was actually pretty certain she’d known him since he was a baby.

“She’s a very pretty girl,” was all my father said, desperately trying to avoid talking to his friend’s mother about girls at said friend’s graduation party. It made him feel like a kid again.

“Yeah, she is. Why haven’t you tried talking to her? It’s not like she hasn’t been looking at you, too.” When Roy’s mother said this, my father puzzled over it for a moment.

“What about her boyfriend, though? That guy she’s with. What was it? Frank?” he asked. Roy’s mother blinked at my father for a moment before laughing so hard her voice cracked a bit. My father puzzled over this more. “What’s so funny?” Roy’s mother still needed a minute more before she stopped laughing though, leaving my father antsy and a tad embarrassed over something he didn’t even know yet.

“Oh, that is too good. Frank is her older brother you damn knucklehead. If you spoke a word to her you’d know that. Now will you please talk to the poor girl instead of staring at her all night?” Roy’s mother said.

In that moment, my father felt like both the stupidest man on the planet as well as the luckiest. All he could do was nod his head at Roy’s mother, which sent her into another smaller fit of laughter, and continue his journey to the basement. He had no idea what he would say to her, he had no idea what to do, but he had to do something or else he felt as though he’d regret it forever. Only when he reached the threshold of the basement did he realize how much he was overthinking what was happening, because she stood right there in front of him, empty Solo cup in hand, looking like the answer to a question he didn’t even know he’d been asking his whole life.

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“Hi,” my mother said.

“Hi,” my father said.

He could see it now that he was up close, her eyes were green, and she had a few faint freckles from days in the sun lingering across her nose. Her perfume was subtle but bold enough to notice, and he did. He became aware that they were just standing and staring at each other for some time. He became aware that it didn’t bother him. He became aware that they ended up spending the whole evening talking to each other, until the stars came out and the man in the moon greeted them; except to my mother she never saw the man in the moon, she said she could only see a rabbit instead. It must have been luck though, because as it would happen, when they bid each other goodnight, my mother slipped my father her phone number, and over time they would call each other every single night.

Over time an eight-hour drive didn’t seem too far apart, and over time it ended up being that there wasn’t a distance farther than the other side of the bed.

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PIP

Fiction by Kendall Shepard

The sun was just breaking over the mountains. The way that the sun’s rays illuminated the forest below gave it an ethereal morning haze, the perfect kind of morning for Pip to wake up to. Pip loved mornings like this. He felt like he could see the silence of the land, without any birds singing, trees rustling in the wind, or any other early morning stirrings he read about in books.

Looking out his window like this was the first thing Pip did every morning. He would tip-toe across his cold, wooden floor to balance on the rocking chair in the corner. He would stare out the window for what felt like hours, his small hands resting on the sill. His window had the perfect view of the rolling hills, and he dreamed at night of what lay beyond them. He imagined worlds full of heroes or monsters, just like in the comics Papa would bring from town for him to read. He only read books about boys like himself, in small towns with simple lives, but in his comics, the boys had fantastical lives.

Every week, Papa would head into town and bring Pip back a week’s worth of newspaper comics. Pip would sit for hours after dinner, reading and laughing at the silly characters and their lives. Papa would even star his favorites so Pip would know which ones he liked best. Pip always liked the color-printed ones best because they were the easiest to read, and the sillier the characters were drawn, the more Pip liked to look at them.

Just as the sun was almost completely over the mountains, Pip would get down off the rocking chair and make his way down the hall to Mama and Papa’s room.

Usually, Papa was already out of bed, either out in the garden, working on the truck or the tractor, or going into town. So, in the mornings, Pip climbed into bed with Mama, snuggling under the covers with her.

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Mama had been sick for a long while. Pip saw the worried face that Papa had whenever Mama seemed too tired, rubbing her back and kissing her forehead.

She always got up late and went to bed early, typically not being awake long after supper. Lately, there had been days she didn’t get out of bed at all. Pip would want to stay in bed with her all day, but he knew Papa needed his help. So instead, Pip stayed a little every morning, and most days it made her smile.

Pip loved his mama more than anyone in the world. He loved her soft, gray eyes, the way they crinkled at the edges when he made her laugh. He loved when she held his hand, how soft her skin was. He loved when she kissed the top of his head, feeling the brush of her lips on his forehead, like she was whispering a secret to only him. He would love her until the day he no longer existed.

One of three things always happened when Pip lay in bed with Mama. Either she would fall back asleep, and on those days, she may or may not ever get out of bed. Papa would go in and wake her at some point. Or maybe she would get out of bed and go to the bathroom to bathe. Typically, on those days, she would be up most of the day, helping clean and maybe even make Pip lunch or help Papa with dinner. Or maybe she would ask Pip to leave. On those days, Papa would get sad before going to try to wake her up. On days she asked Pip to leave, she never got out of bed. Pip wouldn’t see her for the rest of the day.

This morning, Mama fell asleep, so Pip wiggled out of her arms as carefully as he could. He felt like a super spy, sneaking out of the bed and across the room to the door. He would try to open and close the door as softly as he could, not wanting to wake her.

In the kitchen, Papa had left Pip something to eat for breakfast. He always left two pieces of buttered toast and some cut up fruit. This morning it was banana.

The toast was a little burnt this morning, but Pip munched away happily, alternating between two bites of toast and one bite of banana. When he was done, he placed his plate in the sink like Papa always told him to and made his way back to his room.

In there, he put on his overalls like Papa always did, and used his little comb to brush all his hair to one side. Pip smiled, thinking about how much he was just like his papa.

At this time in the morning, Papa was usually outside, working on fixing something with a motor or working in Mama’s garden. This morning, Pip found him on his hands and knees by her garden, pulling little green leaves out of the ground.

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Papa ruffled Pip’s hair, making him upset because he took the time to try to make it look just like Papa’s. Pip tried to smooth it back to one side with his hands, but felt like it was a waste.

Papa then asked Pip if he wanted to take over his job for him. Pip nodded excitedly and watched as Papa pointed out which leaves to pull out of the ground and which ones were Mama’s plants. Pip paid close attention to what Papa was showing him, looking between the leaves Papa had already pulled and the ones in the garden to make sure he knew the difference. When Papa left to do his other work, Pip carefully inspected every leaf in the ground to make sure it was the right kind. He didn’t want to pull out any of Mama’s vegetables or flowers.

He knew it was Mama’s favorite time of the year when the flowers all bloomed, and her smiling was the best thing in the world. Pip thought about when the flowers bloomed and how he would pick her a different type of flower every morning.

He would bring her the flower in bed and she would smile and kiss his head. Pip thought he could put all the flowers he picked into a vase and Mama could keep them on her bedside table. She could look at the vase of flowers all day and smile, even when Pip wasn’t there.

Thinking about what he would do for Mama when the flowers all bloomed made the time pass. Before Pip knew it, the sun was past the middle of the sky, already beginning to dip down toward the west. He had finished pulling out all the bad leaves from the garden and went to go find Papa.

Pip checked all around outside, looking around outside the house before going to see if he was in the garage. There, the hood to the truck was up and there were tools on the ground, but no sign of Papa. Pip decided to check the shed, to see if Papa was there getting something for the truck, but he had no luck.

Outside the shed, however, were some daffodils, having bloomed too early this year. While they were having an unusually warm early spring, a flash frost would surely come along in the next week and kill them off. Pip decided these would be the first flowers to bring to Mama then. They were bright yellow, and yellow was a happy color. Papa never brought Mama as many flowers as he ought to, so it was up to Pip to do it. Pip carefully picked the daffodils, there were three of them, and made his way inside to give them to Mama.

Pip knew upon entering the house that something wasn’t quite right. Papa wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room. Pip started his way to Mama and Papa’s room before remembering he needed to take off his shoes. He ran back to the door,

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dropping one of the flowers and stepping on its petals. Pip picked up the flower and tried to straighten the petals. He decided that two flowers ought to be enough to show Mama, so left the damaged one by the door. He kicked off his shoes and made his way to Mama and Papa’s room.

The door to their room was ajar and Pip could see that Mama was not in bed.

The blanket and sheet on top were thrown to one side, falling off the bed into the side of the room Pip couldn’t see very well. Suddenly, Pip saw Papa’s head appear on that side of the room and made his way over to see what was going on.

Papa was holding Mama, and Pip could see that Papa’s shoulders were shaking.

Mama was lying across Papa, her eyes closed and her arms falling to either side of her, like she was about to give a hug. Her head was thrown back, almost on the ground, and her face was still. Calm.

Papa wasn’t calm. He was shaking Mama, grabbing her face and pinching her skin, like he does when she sleeps in too late. As Pip got closer, he could see that Papa was crying. He didn’t like the fact that Papa was crying. It made him worry that something was really wrong.

Pip clutched the flowers tightly in one hand, wanting Mama to wake up so he could give her the flowers he got for her. He wanted her to wake up so he could see her smile when she saw how yellow they were. He wanted her to kiss him on the head and to snuggle him tomorrow morning. He needed her to wake up right now.

Pip tried to remember what all the superheroes and comic characters did in situations like this. He thought of the Greek myths and mighty captains. He thought of Billy the Kid, how a Western outlaw would know what to do. Pip ran into the kitchen to get the phone he saw Mama use all the time. He remembered the number he saw whenever someone needed a doctor or a firefighter in the comics. It was only three numbers, and he dialed them as carefully as possible, the same way Mama would have.

Pip held the receiver to his ear and felt a tingle on his cheek from the receiver.

Was this someone talking to him? He tried to say that he needed help, that he needed someone there that would wake Mama up. He tried moving his mouth to form words, but he didn’t know any that he could say. He couldn’t show them, point so that they could see. And then, just like Papa, Pip too started to cry.

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TO DAVID

Poetry by Tilleen Meitzler

I bought your book

I’m not sure if poetry

while broke but excited about poetry.

would be worth our time

I like what I’ve read so far, and

if we already knew everything.

I write too, but I don’t feel safe when I call myself a poet out loud.

It’s too much weight and slams hard on the ground, too heavy for me to pull back up.

I am afraid someone stronger than me will pick up my words and I’ll be whipped with every line. So, if it’s OK, I also want to talk about death.

I guess it’s always been a metaphor to me, in seriousness.

I stared her down once, and Death said she could recite any poem in the world on command, by heart. I didn’t like her, she knew too much.

Or there’s too much I still don’t know.

I think that’s it, that there’s an impossible amount to experience, each event a spider web of circumstance that shoots out in a spectrum of passion strands adjacent to other moments, maybe eclipsed and indifferent.

You know? The whole thing can so easily tangle up in someone else’s web while we blow somewhere, or nowhere, in the wind. At times I see the world, figuratively, of course, as the spider with legs that never rest.

And the legs stretch out longer than I can see, so I call myself a poet quietly.

David, do you too? Either way, don’t tell me why.

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A STATEMENT

Poetry by Tilleen Meitzler

When it comes, your smile is more of a statement than a question mark. I crack myself dry. I lose ChapStick to later find as pink goo, psychotic on the floor.

But where are your words now? You see, since Gregor Samsa threw himself off a balcony thinking he could fly after dropping too much LSD, I lost part of my larynx.

I’ve chain smoked since the cops called.

No one else knows how to love a roach.

Then where is your mirror? Since we all hate confessions I try not to read Plath, or open my mouth.

I can’t touch myself without breaking a bone because I’m all glass and deception and Tennessee Williams was once my sugar daddy, but he drove off and I am cold.

My oven is open. I only speak as it heats up.

What happened to your eyes? My eyes are lost roaming the streets. They’re cloaked in red wool and I feel them scratch. I’d get them back but I have no money left for a taxi let alone a search party. Something feels too Little Red here.

I am also the wolf. I am also my own shoveled snow.

Are you doing better? I hate wolves as much as mania, sharp teeth and infected wounds. Send a prayer if you believe thoughts count, but sometimes I can’t reach up to ten.

Mail me a letter soaked in your lover’s perfume so I can smell like purpose while I pretend I’m not wretched. I’d write back if I could avoid a paper cut, but last time I had an out of body experience and I can’t moderate for the life of me.

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LAST LOAF OF BREAD Nonfiction by Emilie Kefalas

In school, teachers were considerate enough to abbreviate my Greek last name, which followed my very xeno-sounding first and middle ones. “Xeno” translates as “stranger” but Dad’s side, specifically my Thea Antonia (great aunt Antonia, though we call her Thea or Tony), uses it when referring to non-Greeks.

Thea converses with my sisters and me in quick phrases of “Fére mou éna potíri neró, chorís págo,” (‘Get me a glass of water, no ice’), and like a good great aunt, she taught us exclamations like “skáse” (‘shut up’), “ti symvaínei” (‘what’s up’), and my favorite, “Fýge chaménos, mou arései o fílos sas” (‘Go away loser, I like your friend’).

Thea’s accent has always been the thickest and most distinct, unmistakably Greek of the family, even though she has blonde hair and has lived in the United States since 1975. She is probably five foot three inches, because I am five foot fiveand-a-half inches, and when I hug her, her hair gets in my mouth. She showed us around Greece when we visited my Yia Yia’s parents’ home on Andros, an island about an hour ferry ride away from the mainland. Her shrewd negotiations helped lower the prices of three hand-painted serving dishes; Mom got one, Thea got one, and Yia Yia got one.

Yia Yia was also short, but even shorter than Thea. It got to the point I slightly bent over to make her feel like she was not shrinking. Toward her end, which was this past fall, she was faded, shaking at the breakfast table, and the veins on her hands and arms were almost transparent. I was barely 22 and tried to do as much as I could to prevent her from getting up; she tired easily, and I was afraid she would fall over her shoelace or my Papou’s, a silly “what if” in retrospect since both wore orthopedics.

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The last time I saw her alive, she had me help her make what nine-year-old Emilie called “church bread,” but it is actually an ancient recipe known as Prosphora (“that which is offered”) in the Orthodox church. During communion, it is mixed with red wine and served in a tiny silver spoon. The prayer recited during the sacrament is this:

Kai pistévo óti aftó eínai katharó to sóma sou kai to dikó sou polýtimo Aíma. Os

ek toútou, parakaló, eléisón me kai na synchorísei ta paraptómatá mou, ekoúsia

í akoúsia, me lógia kai práxeis, gnostés kai ágnostes.

‘And I believe that this is Thy pure Body and Thy own precious Blood.

Therefore, I pray Thee, have mercy on me and forgive my transgressions,

voluntary and involuntary, in word and deed, known and unknown.’

Untranslated Greek prayers are difficult to recite, but they exit your tongue, no matter the language level, like God easing a toothache. I do not know the words entirely but somehow the effort of forming the back of my throat to fit a stressed vowel feels similar to tuning the mouth of a trumpet.

“Prayers are angel songs,” Yia Yia said when I was about eight. “They are not meant for human ears. The voice and the deliverance are just as important as the words.”

In Yia Yia’s kitchen I took off my coat, because I saw the flour and the bread maker Mom re-gifted years ago when they moved to Decatur. I knew I would stay a while. My sister Sarah was with me, but she supervised and talked with Papou about school and Savannah. Papou was practically deaf unless you emphasized your syllables and spoke in a lower-than-normal octave. His hearing aid struggled to process high-pitched sounds, including my usually light inflection and Sarah’s.

After Yia Yia died, Papou could not make bread. I wanted the bread maker, if only to make Prosphora for Papou while he was still around. When he died eight months later, the bread maker was collecting dust in the corner of the kitchen counter.

Yia Yia used a hand-me-down, double-sided Christian bread wood seal from her grandfather’s kitchen. He was an Orthodox priest (they can get married and have families), and his church is still on Andros near some of Yia Yia’s distant cousins.

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Proper Prosphora is simple. You need: •

5 cups all-purpose flour

•

1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast or instant yeast

•

2 cups cool water

The dough would rise in the bread maker until it was at the ideal texture. Yia Yia instructed me to knead it on the cutting board.

“Put the flour down, and get at it.” Her voice shook in the way it usually does before people cry, but Yia Yia only cried when she sat down and talked to me about her hopes for me and my sisters. She never cried in the kitchen, certainly not while baking bread.

“Like this?”

I was really getting into my work. Kneading is nothing revolutionary, but I feel my toughest when I push and roll dough, so malleable and amusing. Bread dough breathes beneath the palm pressing. It inhales when I lift my hands for a millisecond to re-rub my fingers with flour, and it exhales when I massage it to perfect consistency.

“Yes, make sure you get the corners. When you’re done, shape it into a disk.”

I did not look up but remained fixated on the cutting board. I did not like to look at Yia Yia when her voice trembled; it did not match her face, but it made me cringe to watch her dentures rattle.

“Got it.”

Yia Yia’s name was Angie, or Ανγελα, pronounced “An-gell-lee-kee.” When she was young, she was the best looking of her seven siblings, and she was the third youngest. Before she died, she, her older brother Jim, and her younger sister Kathy were the three remaining, but now only Kathy and Jim survive with their grandparents’ hand-me-down kitchenware that they do not use because they can’t cook like Ανγελα; Thea says nobody can.

She told my sisters once, “Your Yia Yia is the best cook of the Lafakis family. Billie was good, Mary was better, but Angie was . . . oh Angie made the baklava and the spanakopita the best out of everyone, even her own mother.”

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Before Yia Yia was a Kefalas (Κεφαλασ), she was a Lafakis (Λαφακισ), and we always asked her about growing up in a big family, how her mother did not know how to drive, how her father drove Thea to the Granite City public high school for English lessons in 1976, and how he taught Thea how to drive, because she married Greg, the runt of the Lafakis litter. Greg was the smallest and the youngest (Thea said he was an accident).

Yia Yia told me I had to learn all the parts of the Greek Orthodox service so we could participate after she died. I was still surprised at her funeral when my Uncle Bill came up to me while I was wiping my eyes and asked if I would read the first scripture reading. The service was conducted in Greek in the Burlington & Earls funeral parlor, and I knew absolutely nothing about Greek funerals. Weddings and baptisms are different, but the prayers are equally as long and the incense is just as pungent.

I watched the priest for my cue, a slight hand-wave gesture. My palms sweated and my nervousness kept me from crying, and my relief rested in the fact I would not have to recite the reading in Greek. The priest completed the Kontakion and Hymns of the Eight Tones, which meant I was up, and he remembered. I stood and concentrated on each of the five steps I took to stand beside him, then I opened the bible Uncle Bill gave me to the page he marked.

“A reading from the First Letter of Saint Paul to Corinthians.” I paused.

I began the first few lines as steadily as I could, but something happened when I reached the middle: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory; The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law; But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I shut the book and bowed my head, hoping Yia Yia did not see my tears.

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WELL TRAVELED

Poetry by Ryan Whiteley

I suppose a dead soul

I suppose a dead soul knows love

doesn’t long for the past,

but can’t quite place the feeling

and I suppose a dead soul

I suppose a dead soul would like

doesn’t lay awake at night

to remember.

thinking of spring.

T I suppose a dead soul doesn’t check his calendar

or make a grocery list or forget a birthday.

I suppose a dead soul smiles at the living, content because a dead soul has become well-traveled and shared his stories under the moonlight.

And I suppose a dead soul travels light, a black leather suitcase

with a pair of socks and some matches.

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AFTERNOON PONDERING Poetry by Desiree Ellen Nygaard

I am two things: either the presence of all pigment or the absence of all light.

All matter has anti-matter.

Trees inhale carbon dioxide and exhale dioxide where does the carbon go?

If my name is Desiree, where is the anti-Desiree?

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DINNER TIME

Fiction by Alissa Malhoit

On nights when darkness crept between the trees and into the thicket adjacent to the house at 167R Great Neck Road, they came together: a man, his wife, two boys, and the youngest, a girl. The girl was unlike each of them in her own way.

She wasn’t outspoken like the two boys, jubilant like the wife, or cold like the man.

She was simply small, shy, and irrefutably tender.

It was the mother’s stew of roast and potatoes and carrots that brought them here. They sat in wooden chairs at a wooden table beside a wooden man who only ever looked down at his stew. He ate slowly but with great discretion, so as not to miss one piece of his potato or sliver of carrot. His fingers thick, hair a dark umber against a wrinkled brow. On various occasions he would return to them with a new piece: a goatee one month and a horseshoe moustache the next. They didn’t think much of it anymore; he was still the same wooden man.

On either side of him sat his two sons, both tall and slim and bronze-skinned.

Unlike the man who remained silent during the meal, his sons kept up a sort of witty banter only they themselves understood.

“We’re painting the roses red, we’re painting the roses red,” began the younger brother.

“Off with his head!” the elder replied.

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?” asked the younger again.

“Some go this way. Some go that way. But as for me myself, I prefer the short cut.”

Unfazed, the man continued to eat his dinner with his face to his plate and back to the television. His wife, directly opposite him, laughed at her two sons, recognizing bits of their conversation, if you could call it one, as snippets from 54

Alice in Wonderland. Her laugh was hearty and so genuine it seemed to poke at the man’s wooden shoulders, as if taunting him. Still, he said nothing.

“No king, no king! La la la la la la!”

“Idiots, there will be a king!”

“But you just said . . .”

“I will be king!”

This went on for some time, as the pair recited each movie they’d watched on cassette tape as small children over and over. Older now, they seemed to test each other through these dinner table skits, one keeping the other’s memory alive.

It wasn’t until nearly everyone’s plate was finished, the two brothers had exhausted nearly all possible subject matter, and the mother had gone from laughter to a constant head shake, that the father looked up and said, “Nice weather out today, huh.” He formed this as more of a statement, emotionless and also wooden.

To this they all looked up at him. Then they all looked at one another, heads spinning. The younger brother’s lips curved upward as he began to chuckle. The elder bowed his head in defeat, shaking it from side to side as his mother did during the brothers’ previous repartee. The girl continued eating with one eye on her plate and the other, warily, on the man. The mother simply got up from the table, put her plate in the sink and began washing dishes.

The man looked back down at his plate on the dark wood table, scraping it clean before getting up to make a second. The two boys followed suit, filling their plates with a second helping of stew and sharing another ambiguous exchange. However, just as the eldest brother cried, “Stone him!” the man interrupted and said, “So anyone know what time the game is on tonight?”

At first no one responded, only another chuckle or a head shake took place. After a minute, though, the younger brother looked over at him.

“I think it’s at eight.”

The man didn’t so much respond as glance at the boy blankly and then look back down at the table, scooping a piece of potato into his mouth. From there, slowly, both brothers stood, put their plates in the sink, and, without a word, went upstairs to their rooms with the door shut behind them, two loud smacks against their wooden frames. The mother remained at the sink scrubbing dishes and the father, after clearing his place, went to the couch, turned on a Red Sox game, and sat quietly with a grainy beer in his hand.

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I myself said nothing either. I waited beside my mother for a bit, watching her glove-protected hands soap each dish. She was delicate with the oak cutting board as suds foamed off one side. I smiled at her and she smiled back, all teeth.

I then turned and walked silently over to the couch, sitting beside my father, the wooden man.

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SELFLESS

Poetry by Carla Gonzalez Varas

The lights are off when I touch her.

The lights are off when she leaves me.

She doesn’t want to be touched.

She likes to believe the lights are always on.

She likes to believe the sun shines at night.

Or at least… that’s what she tells me when she turns away, When she leaves the lights on at noon, when she’s leaving me.

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GOLDFISH OUT OF WATER Poetry by Desiree Ellen Nygaard

Today, I want someone to forgive me because I can’t forgive myself.

My mistakes were not my own, though I’m still swimming in regret for getting caught on his hook.

My naïveté prevented me from noticing the enticing bait was merely plastic.

He pulled me out of the water for sport then threw me back and now there’s a hole in me.

Today, I want someone to forgive me because every time I think I see a fisherman my feral instincts resurface, after a lifetime of unlearning.

My eyes bead with the rubies of a leopard shark.

Today, I want someone to forgive me because it took me so long to realize his shame was not mine.

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RUNAWAY TO PARADISE Nonfiction by Shelby Kennedy

The Bahamas is a living rococo oil painting with the exact ability to make you stand still for hours based on pure self-reflection. I felt as if I stepped through the painting and into my own mind. All of the colors are richer, warmer, and far more vibrant than I expected. Most of the locals have biblical names, as if transcending into guides as magical as the land itself. All in the course to help me wash away my troubles with a swallow of gin and salt air. I think distantly of The Tempest, and I am Prospero discovering myself.

Nassau, the horseshoe island, can be seen from far away. I think of The Tempest theories, how the story is argued to be a translation of the tripartite soul. Nassau is strategically based on where you want to indulge yourself most: shopping like a local, celebrating at the Atlantis resort, or floating on the water. The silhouette of Atlantis blends with the trees, nearly a mirage. My family and I stroll through rows of the sherbet-colored mansions for a bit, and pass the markets that still contain a quiet nature to it all.

The water calls me most, the clearest I’ve ever seen. There are different levels of blue within the water, indications of how deep the water is and isn’t. As I stare at the surface, I see paint. I lean closer to the water, and it looks even more like individual brushstrokes and I wonder how it’s real. It only convinces me more that I’ve stepped off the ship into a cerebral part of my brain. I must be sleeping, but even my dreams couldn’t be this vivid, this calm. But it wanted to be, and the Bahamas answers that call. It soothes, settles, and assures that I am right for chasing dreams.

For taking risks. And most importantly: for living.

The tour bus driver, a thick man with intelligent eyes, takes his time to leave the 59

station. His name is Emanuel: name of an angel, voice of a smoker. Even with a loaded bus, he leans his head out the window to talk to people. The goodbye for each is a strong clasp of hands for two, three moments. Then his fingers glide over the wheel, some of his palm carrying aged callouses. As he drives, he explains the history of the city. Their story is one of a slow victory. And it is as if he is telling the history of me. He chuckles as he explains that he isn’t driving on the wrong side of the road. It’s so clear that he accepts their English habits and why it’s simply . . .

OK. For me, it was the same as asking why I’m left- or right-handed. In the end, does it really matter?

The deeper I travel within the Bahamas, the more I swim through metaphorical waves. There are continuous absences and presences of sound. There are quiet moments to think about life in a new light. Then one step into markets and the volume turns to full blast again. They pile on top of one another, voices harmonizing as they pardon and sway tourists into their pocket shops. There is hardly room to walk, to think, as I consider the merchandise. A short wander to the head of the street, I pass a 1960s home repainted with pallid pastels. Embedded within each street name and logo are mermaids, swirls, and starfish. Seashells are skewed all over the place, and it’s as if the island has recently surfaced from the watery depths.

Boats are beloved in Nassau, being the dream for most locals. I ask Solomon, a teenager who assists a boat owner, what he wants to do with his life. He watches the ocean, “I want to own a boat.” That’s it. If you follow his gaze, you’ll see the water move like a breathing Monet. I always made my dreams complicated. But talking to Solomon, I can be more like him. Don’t make it complicated. Do what you want, and do whatever you need to get there.

An aged man with orange and blue clothes greets me. I don’t catch his name, but he looks like a Cain, maybe a Judas. Regardless, he has a double-decked boat, and I want to scuba dive. I’m not alone, there are roughly twenty other tourists that come as well. When the boat takes off, he passes out laminated photographs.

He explains what is dangerous and what isn’t. “Don’t touch these types of corals, for they are poisonous. Eels are known to show up from time to time. If you see one, swim away and call for help. Simple.” I’m tempted to ask if he has a laminated photograph of who the eels and the poison coral are in my life. But I’m sure he would only laugh and wave off my concern as he does when someone asks more about the poisonous coral. He acts like it’s all a test run. And that’s just it. It’s all a test run as long as you’re willing to take a risk. Taking risks is the fun of life, and I

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can hear the knowledge in his laugh. “You should have no troubles, yah?”

It’s so easy to belong; the water welcomes the skin, wrapping itself around you with cool arms. After getting in the water, blue plastic rectangles are tossed from the boat. An oar follows, floating near me. I reach for them, and at first paddle-boating is difficult. Most tourists fall right off and as it takes a while for them to climb back on board, the natives try not to laugh too loud. For me, I balance on the flats of my feet. It feels natural, something I should’ve done a long time ago. I feel alive, one with my body, mind, and decisions. I keep up with Solomon, and stand tall at the edge of the world, listening to the lapping water and seagulls. This is acceptance.

When I get back in from the water to relax in the shade of the boat, I ask the owner for a Bahama Mama. He gives his Judas grin. He doesn’t hold back. Twothirds rum, a third orange juice, and a squeeze of coconut flavoring. Glancing to me, he pours a little more rum for good measure. He makes one for himself—half rum, half orange juice. With a toast, he says, “A real Bahama Mama.” For me, it is a toast for real living.

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SLOW BURN

Nonfiction by Shelby Loebker

The first time I saw her with a cigarette, she was so far gone she could barely hold on to it. It kept slipping lazily backward until someone finally took it out of her hand to keep her from burning herself. Her skin was so papery by that point, I imagined her whole body would instantly be engulfed in flame if the sagging embers reached the back of her hand.

She lived maybe a month after that; a month where the world was put on pause and everyone who knew Edie Mae Fath simply waited. No one in my family was there when she died, but I imagine she was slumped in the high-backed armchair in the foyer and she just slid away, like she had slid to sleep so many times in the past month. Once upon a time she sat there righteously, her back straight and her legs crossed, ruling Val-Hi Farm and all of Ripley, Ohio, with the quirk of her thin lips and a wave of her wrist.

Edie was the first person my parents met after they moved the 60 miles from Cincinnati to Ripley, and by no accident. She worked for 30 years in a cubicle across from my grandfather. Their lives were completely different, but they were both industrious and sarcastic, so it seemed natural for them to be friends.

When Papa told Edie that his third daughter and her new husband had purchased 100 acres in Brown County she said, “I live in Brown County.”

“Well, they’re headed out to Ripley!”

“I live in Ripley.” And that was how my family came to live across the street from her, with exactly ten minutes of time between piling into our Chevy and knocking on her front door every night.

There was a massive Forsythia bush at the bottom of the Fath driveway, and every 62

year when it bloomed buttery yellow, my mom and I would both shout “Spring!” but then when it became unruly enough to scratch at her car, my mother would put on her work overalls and cut it back, practically to a stub. Her determination was never enough to kill it.

Edie was a short, thin woman, but never let it stop her from getting the things she wanted. She had dusty brown skin and short, tightly curled, dusty brown hair that she got dyed and permed on the same day every other week. She had been a traveling line dancer in the ‘50s before marrying her husband, a weak-willed tobacco farmer who began drinking himself to death early on and wrapped it up just before the first anniversary of her death.

By the time I was old enough to really get to know her, Edie had retired from P&G and the farm had significantly downsized. Never idle, Edie turned her efforts to the town instead. On Sundays and Wednesdays, I helped her cook for the Ripley Lions Club’s bingo night. She would stir soup on the stove and I would bake while she listed out the ingredients of each cake from memory. Each time she would laugh and say, “Your mom uses box cakes and makes her own icing, and I make cakes from scratch and use icing from a can, so you’re going to be the best baker of all of us.”

My mom was Edie’s opposite in every other way, too. She was tall and square, with a long, pointed nose she called her beak. She was just as much of a control freak, but where Edie controlled with her cool demeanor and quick tongue, my mother controlled with a raised voice and wild gestures that made her look even more like a bird. Every emotion showed on her face, and if you asked her why she was so expressive, I’m sure she would look disgusted and say, “I’m just an honest person. I don’t have time for bullshit.”

In the fourteen years I knew Edie, the most dogs she had at any one point was also fourteen. I could probably name them all if I tried; Teddy was the spitz who bit my dad, Cissy was the dachshund that used to run in wiener dog races, Waldo the beagle was possibly the fattest dog of all time, etc. They all had bizarre rescue stories and an encyclopedia’s worth of medical issues. When Edie and Ed were out of town, it was my family’s duty to feed and care for her menagerie. No matter how many times we did it, she would always leave a diagram of where each dog belonged during feeding time, to keep them from acting on personal grudges and stealing each other’s food.

Casper was one of her later acquisitions. He had a deep, bellowing growl and rightfully terrified everyone who tried to approach him. Not Edie. She took him in

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and called him Casper, after the friendly ghost, of course. My mom was the second person to befriend him because once, when Edie was out of town, he growled at her and she responded by bending in half to put her face near to his and bellowing, “You shut up!”

I thought at the time that meant my mother was fearless, but really I think she was more afraid of Edie’s disapproval than any dog’s teeth. Because, despite their differences, Mom was the one Edie chose to refer to as her adopted daughter when she described her relationship with my family.

My dad would playfully shake her by the shoulders and whine, “Why do I have to be the in-law?”

Edie would laugh, “Oh, Ron,” and wave him away, but that didn’t stop her from buying him teasing birthday cards addressed to “Son-in-Law.” She loved him too.

Edie had a real, officially adopted daughter. Their relationship didn’t end well.

Her skin was brown and wrinkled like Edie’s, but that turned out to be less of a coincidence and more the result of a lifetime of smoking and living in Brown County, Ohio.

After a year of fighting, Edie beat lung cancer, but it took the following kidney failure for her to even consider giving up smoking. She did quit briefly, then after a debilitating stroke she was back on her crutch. She smoked openly then, because she already knew what it took the rest of us months to believe. She wasn’t recovering this time.

The Forsythia bush is gone now. It was replaced with a stretch of gravel and a sign advertising hay bales for sale. It turned out that it wasn’t that hard to kill. I suppose my mother was never really trying.

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JANUARY MORNINGS

Poetry by Carla Gonzalez Varas

Today I resolve to resolve nothing.

Today I will remember

whoever used to make me happy

… and why they don’t anymore.

Because today, I want to not think of the early twilight and hear the sleep burn through my head.

Today I will take time into account— Neglect all ghosts that fade and hide and warp.

In this foreign field of green, today

I will only look back…

with no fear of anguish and watch it all dissolve before my eyes.

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MISUNDERSTANDING Fiction by Alissa Malhoit

Her father was a short, stiff man. He had deep-set wrinkles from time spent in the sun, and his eyes were a hazy shade of blue. He went for a run every morning, followed by coffee at Starbucks and a good read at the adjoining Barnes & Noble.

He sat and read a fresh copy of a historical biography or picked up wherever he left off last. By doing this, he avoided purchasing any new books and took great pleasure in both saving money and cheating the system. No one ever bothered him about it and why would they? He wasn’t doing anyone any harm. He spent his days at work in a power plant. He was a lead engineer and took great pride in his craft. At night he ate a well-balanced dinner in his single-bedroom apartment and then drank a few beers at the bar downstairs. His life was a simple routine and most days he liked spending so much time on his own.

He had an ex-wife and three kids, all nearly grown. His youngest, the only girl, was in her early twenties now. He hadn’t seen her in several years and quite frequently missed the sound of her voice. Often he sat sifting through cardboard boxes in his apartment, looking at faded clippings from when she’d appeared in the newspaper.

As a young girl, she had loved him dearly. They went on bike rides, she pedaling that little pink bike he and her mother had gotten her with a round bell on the handle.

She looked almost nothing like him, and was much more like her mother, but she was a quiet girl and in this they were the same.

As she got older, though, she grew to dislike him. He attributed it to her mother, who, he believed, spoke poorly of him in his absence.

The girl detested her father. Since the time she was six years old, he rarely lived

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with his family, leaving all the parenting to her mother. When he did come home, it was only for a few days and never more than a week. She loathed the time he was home, feeling uncomfortable in his presence. When she was probably eight or nine, she remembered coming downstairs after not seeing him for several months. He was hugging her mother awkwardly and smiled when she walked into the kitchen. It was the first time she did not recognize him.

It had been easier for her to ignore his shortcomings when she was a child but she was now in her twenties and saw him for all that he was. Recently she had learned of her father’s many “indiscretions” with other women while still married to her mother.

She learned that her father was now seeing a woman, if one could even call it that, who was only with him for his money. He knew this and accepted it as fair, considering he received other, more physical things from her in exchange for his financial support.

A real-life sugar daddy.

She found this ironic—when it came to paying alimony, it seemed he always lacked sufficient funds. He never visited his own mother, who was nearly ninety, never called his other children, his two sons, unless he was feeling lonely, and could only maintain any kind of relationship with his ex-dog who lived in his ex-home with his ex-wife.

Her father moved often but had lived in an apartment in Iowa for a few years now.

She often wondered what it was about Iowa he found so appealing, other than the woman he kept at a different apartment just five minutes from where he stayed.

She received a phone call from her mother one afternoon.

“It’s your father.”

“What’d he do now?”

“He called me in some panic, saying someone’s stalking him.”

“That’s a new one.”

“Elle, I’m serious. He sounded terrible. Do you think he’s alright?”

Her mother had a bad habit of believing (and forgiving) whatever he said.

“I’m sure he’s fine, he’s just dramatic, I mean, you know how he is.”

“Yeah, I know, but he sounded . . . confused.”

“Confused how?”

“He said that he thinks someone’s been to his apartment, gone through his stuff and now he thinks they stole his car. He’s standing in the Walmart parking lot, waiting on the police.”

“He’s finally lost it.”

“Elle. What if—Wait, he’s calling me again. I’ll call you back.”

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She waited for several minutes before the phone rang again. In short, it turned out no one stole her father’s car but rather he had parked in a different spot than his usual one, and so the police acted as a mere escort back to his red Cadillac.

After this, her father began to feel even more confused. He refused to fly to see his mother when she needed surgery because he swore he could not afford to. He called his ex-wife several times, swearing that the woman he was seeing was blackmailing him, that she had a criminal past and was a danger to be around. After attempting to cut ties with the woman, he packed a suitcase full of his things and drove several states over until he found himself along the coast of Rhode Island. Here he felt at ease, a place he once lived several years ago, and so he found a new one-bedroom apartment to live in, and returned to work at a different power plant with close to equal pay.

At first, Elle took his confusion as a kind of joke. She viewed him as unreasonable, dramatic, and mostly pathetic. When the woman he had been seeing stole his bicycle (yet to have been shipped from his old home in Iowa), Elle smirked, feeling that her father deserved what he got. But soon he began calling her and, when, every time, he got the answering machine, left long, solemn messages about how dearly he missed her. When her mother informed her that her father had gotten back together with the woman, she was no longer amused.

“He did what?” she said.

“Yup. He’s back with that woman and you know what that means.”

“Yeah, it means he really is insane.”

The girl joked with her mother about this, but the thought held a new meaning to her now. She no longer felt she understood her father. All these years she’d thought she had him pegged. Just another deadbeat, money hungry man who chose sex over his own family. But she now realized she knew close to nothing about him. His childhood or even his life after were things that no one seemed to talk about. Her father was far more a stranger than he was her own flesh and blood. She wondered if it was him she’d grown to hate or her perception of him.

She received a call from him several days later. She watched her phone vibrate for a moment before picking up.

“Hello?”

“Elle?”

“Yes.” “It’s your father.”

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“Yes, I know.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s good.”

“Mhmm.”

“So what, what have you been up to?”

“Not much.”

The conversation remained strangled until she finally said she had to go and her father managed a quiet “Goodbye, I love you,” and hung up.

She waited for a moment, then redialed.

“Hello?”

“Yes, it’s me again.”

“Oh Elle. Are you alright?”

“Fine. Do you want to get coffee tomorrow?”

“Oh well, yes, sure. Are you in town? Every morning I go to—” “Starbucks. I know. I’m passing through. We can meet there, ten OK? “Ten’s just fine, it’s great.”

“Alright I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.”

“Bye.” She wasn’t sure if it was the way he’d sounded like a lost boy on the phone when he’d called her the first time or the way he’d answered it the second, but she knew she’d been wrong. He was a cheater, that was true. He had left her mother to singlehandedly raise their three children. He had chosen money and power over everything else. But not to be purposely selfish and not, she thought, because he didn’t love them.

She picked up her phone once more and dialed.

“Hello?” It was her mother.

“You were right.”

“About what, Elle?”

“He’s just confused.”

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IDENTITY CRISIS

Nonfiction by Caro Moya

I don’t have the answers to a lot of questions, but I’ve found myself struggling with “Where are you from?” for a while now. I’s a generic question, one that is probably not supposed to spark an identity crisis, but I find myself wrestling with three possible choices: a) I’m Cuban but… b) I live in the Dominican Republic but… c) I was born in Miami but…

Option A is not entirely true. Yes, my family is Cuban and most of my cultural identity comes from what they’ve passed on, but at the end of the day, it still feels like a hand-me-down sense of self. Option B is true, but technically doesn’t answer the question. I live in the Dominican Republic, meaning I have a home there, made up of some of my fondest memories, a close-knit family of friends, and my mom.

But I am not from the Dominican Republic, no matter how much I have loved living there. It is simply the place that has taken me in. Option C is true, but hasn’t held any weight for a while. I no longer belong in Miami, mostly because of the disconnect I feel from my family and their way of life. Even though Miami is a city with its own very specific subculture, the answer implies that I am American. Out of all the options, this is the one I identify with the least. I could go with an “all of the above” approach, but that would take a full 60 seconds to say and, truth be told, no one cares that much. So, I am left with three answers that feel wrong as soon as they leave my lips.

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For the first decade of my life, home was a house painted a pale shade of green in Davie, a small town that prides itself on its Wild West aesthetic. Technically, it isn’t considered Miami. It is part of Broward, one of the many counties that make up the entire metropolitan area. But to my ten-year-old mind, it all meant the same thing. The town is no bigger than a few blocks, its biggest attractions being the local Griff’s Western store and the occasional rodeo. What made it home were not the shops reminiscent of cowboys and pioneers or the neat little houses that lined the streets of my neighborhood. It was the proximity to my grandparents’ house, the heart of my childhood and a place best characterized by the sounds of loud, bustling Cubanas.

Their house was always known to me as la finca (the farm), a nostalgic reminder of the family house in Cuba. It is the center of operations for the Vilarino clan, a family of exiles that emigrated to the United States in the Mariel boatlift of 1980. It wasn’t long before my grandfather opened the first of what would become a chain of Cuban restaurants. He named it Las Vegas in memory of the miles of land he had owned on the island until Castro began confiscating property and he was thrown in jail as a political prisoner. My mother and her four younger sisters were the first official employees. They threw themselves into the business, knowing they had no other option but to make it in America. Even after they had married and started households of their own, they never left the restaurants. The family continued to operate as a codependent unit. Every decision, whether it concerned an individual member or the whole clan, was discussed collectively at the round table. You would think a family tree made up of twelve women and only one man would lend itself to a matriarchy. It did not. My grandfather was head of the table on all accounts.

Cuban heritage bound us together more tightly than the average family. A history of exile had deepened the belief that staying together was the only way to survive.

Growing up, I remember thinking our situation resembled a colony.

“You don’t need any friends . . . you have your cousins,” our grandmother would tell us every day after school. “Remember girls, at the end of the day family is all that we have. We stick together.”

For better or worse, I never considered the idea that I didn’t belong. Even though I knew my family’s history inside out, I never once doubted that I was American.

Mornings were marked by the Pledge of Allegiance, every September 11 called for a moment of silence, and the world was limited to the four corners of the United States. However, it only took a couple of years under a different sun for my sense

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of home in the U.S. to start dwindling. It hasn’t made a reappearance since.

The beginning of my cultural crisis started in 2008. We were leaving my grandparents’ house after breakfast one morning. My stepdad was driving, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding my mother’s. A box full of sunglasses sat between them on the center console, cheap rhinestones glinting in the sun.

“What’re those?” I asked. I saw them exchange a look.

“Are they presents? What’re they for, huh?” I pressed, sensing I was being left out of the loop.

“We have a proposal for you.”

“What do you mean, proposal?” Another look.

“What do you think about having a store with your name on it?” my mom pitched, catching my eye in the mirror as she let the idea sink in.

It was a strange year to begin with. My mother had recently left the restaurant business to pursue a career in real estate, and I had just blown out the candles on my first two-digit birthday cake. I didn’t really understand what either of these changes meant. I only knew that our trunk was now full of For Sale signs, a topic I often overheard my aunts whispering about. As for the promise of a sign with my name on it, I understood that it meant the end of the world. We were moving, and not just anywhere. The store would be located on an island. I don’t remember my initial reaction to the news, but it seemed appropriate that I should pick a side. After consulting with my cousins, we decided what stance I would be taking: absolutely against it.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Two months later we were getting off the plane and squinting up at the scorching Dominican sun. The first thing I noticed was the lack of traffic lights. I was quick to report the deficiencies back to family headquarters in Miami.

Years later, I understood that my mother’s decision to move was made out of desperation. The suffocating family dynamic and the stress of the restaurant business had sent her spiraling into a deep depression. Her decision to work as a realtor in Miami had been her last attempt to escape the family business, where no one was financially or emotionally independent. Unfortunately, the stock market crash of 2008 stacked the odds (and property values) against her. So, when she fell in love with the beaches of the Dominican Republic after a short family vacation, she figured she had nothing left to lose and made the island her new home.

I suppose it’s not uncommon for exile to send love of country into overdrive.

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Nostalgia and homesickness can make previous circumstances feel like heaven on earth. For the first two years as an expatriate, I clung to the idea of belonging to Miami, more specifically, to the United States. At the time, I believed it was something that made me superior. In hindsight, I see that what I once mistook for pride was just a twisted sense of pre-conditioned loyalty. I idealized my former life because there was an underlying sense of guilt for breaking away from the family.

My mother’s newfound independence came in the form of duffel bags filled with cheap, wholesale items we would buy in Miami to sell in the Dominican Republic.

That was the beginning of Cusie Boutique, a gift shop designed to cater to a surprisingly booming market of Russian tourists that suddenly flooded the island.

We offered everything from shoes and purses to aged rum and cigars, and with every sale we made, my mother’s smile beamed. I watched her at night as she practiced Russian words (privet!) on a pirated version of Rosetta Stone and knew that this unexpected success meant we would be staying indefinitely.

Eventually, the Caribbean’s vivacious colors and sea-scented breeze wore down my defenses and seeped into my soul. I built a life under the dancing palms and found pieces of myself in the land of no stoplights. Looking back, I am surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Dominicans are a smiling people. They pride themselves on their hospitality and their laissez-faire approach to living. Tough times are met with a warm plate of food and an enthusiastic “Pa’lante es que vamos,” a Dominican equivalent to “Just keep moving forward.” They are quick to laugh and eager to please, instantly welcoming you into a warm embrace. I began to dread visiting the U.S., where my family was permanently stressed and my cousins seemed confined to a suffocating safety bubble. None of them had the liberties or independence I enjoyed on the island, where open-mindedness, acceptance, and friendships were the norm. It’s ironic because, for the first ten years of my life, I truly believed that the United States was the sole guardian of freedom.

My arrival in Savannah for the start of college marked the height of my cultural dissonance. At first glance, I was completely enamored with the city that seemed to jump out of a hand-painted storybook. The excitement of a new chapter in my life gave the Spanish moss a life of its own, every street corner seemed to be brimming with charm. But, to my dismay, my sense of belonging in this town was fleeting. My disenchantment has a lot to do with the feeling of claustrophobia that set in once I realized that my world is only 0.926 square miles of one main street and twenty-two park squares. But culturally speaking, living in the American South

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has in many ways confirmed my suspicions about how truly disconnected I am to the way of life in this country. For instance, my time in Savannah has been deeply marked by the lack of human warmth I have experienced among people my age.

I’ve found it difficult to accept this culture of averted gazes after growing up in a place where greeting people with a kiss on the cheek is not an invasion of personal space and eye contact is encouraged.

When I am asked where I’m from, I find myself face to face with a medley of cultures that have created a dissonant sense of identity. The question remains unanswered even after the conversation has moved on. However, as I was researching the meaning of culture in preparation for this essay, I came across an idea I hadn’t considered before. Geert Hofstede, a Dutch social psychologist and author of Culture’s Consequences brings up an interesting point.

“Culture is not the same as identity. Identities consist of people’s answers to the question ‘Where do I belong?’”

In other words, my identity crisis boils down to the simple fact that I have mistakenly believed that where I come from is synonymous with where I belong.

If this is true, then there is hope for peace of mind the next time I introduce myself to someone new. I am “all of the above.” I am the daughter of exiles, a child raised by the island, and an American citizen all at once. But I have yet to discover where I belong, and truth be told, I am perfectly fine with that.

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A REPLY FROM CASHEW Poetry by Aidan Casey

A rooster, on wilted wings, can glide If the wind is alive enough.

On dirt he stands absent. Waiting On Apollo’s crest. The stillness, although He may scuttle or squawk or even Dance, seems eternal. And finally When the ritual wait is won, his Sour song sung, a rooster on dirt keeps absent.

Oh, that wind current breathing on his neck.

It hooks wilted wings so a rooster May soar. He swims on atmosphere In careless focus. A bird so wistful, Now present. His perception extended So that the dirt is all but a single pebble At the bottom of a charging river, wind tunnel.

Air amongst every feather, sweet whisper.

An intrepid tongue rounding the lobe.

The delicate reassurance of running touch.

A rooster feels as a bluebird, sojourning From the condition of his tradition.

But the wind, alive as the tides of dream, Must retreat, as is its nature. He is left To be stripped, as a bed sheet in morning.

But only for a moment. A sweeter song: The Rooster, not any bird, must memorize the wind.

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HEARTLAND Fiction by TS Brookhouse

It was the second time in a month that Jessi-Lou was hospitalized. This time, Mama was quiet. The high school football game played on the TV in the corner.

“Look for a blue number seven jersey,” Mama said. “You gotta wave when you see him so he knows we’re watching.”

Jessi-Lou tried to pick out numbers and waved when the camera showed the whole field. One of the tiny blue figures was her brother, and he needed her. He said so; no one else could match him in a name-calling fight. No one else was small enough to shimmy up an apple tree and toss down the best fruits. That’s why she and the doctors were going to beat pneumonia—it had come back strong, but she wasn’t out of the game yet. So Jessi-Lou was going to fight hard and Tony was going to play hard, and they were both coming home champions.

Mama had watched them promise all this, Tony holding Jessi-Lou on his lap, while the doctor talked to her about treatments. Then Papa had taken Tony to the game and Mama had taken Jessi-Lou to a bright, clean room with a bed, where they put on the local news station that aired the Friday night game. They would cheer together for Tony. Later, Tony would cheer for her.

Jessi-Lou fell asleep. When she woke up, it was halftime and Reverend John was there. Mama’s voice was sad and worried.

“—just sounds so bad, even when she’s resting. I thought . . . I know it’s too early to say, but in case it’s not . . .”

“I understand,” Reverend John said. “It’s hard, not knowing if God’s calling someone home.”

Reverend John was tall and straight as a pin, dressed in a black suit like he was 76

ready for work. Mama was wearing the same sweats and cotton tee she wore around the house. There hadn’t been time to change when Jessi-Lou’s breathing almost stopped. Mama looked out of place, lost, standing there in her house clothes in a hospital room, trying to find something to look at. Not like Reverend John. He looked like he knew exactly what he was dressed for.

Jessi-Lou began to cough, hard and dry, her tiny chest compressing until her whole body shook, then gasped and fought to refill her lungs before she coughed again.

Stars burst behind her eyes.

“Oh, baby girl,” Mama said, grabbing her hand and squeezing.

Reverend John bowed his head and opened his palms toward the ceiling.

Another series of coughs rattled her bones as Mama wept and stroked the hair from Jessi-Lou’s face.

“Jessi-Lou, I want you to listen to me,” Reverend John said. “If you hear the voice of our Lord Jesus call your name, I want you to answer him and follow him home.

God will call you to the light. You’ve always been a good girl, Jessi-Lou, so when you see that light, you go.”

She hadn’t always been a good girl, Jessi-Lou thought. She heard Tony use a curse word, and then she used it, too, even though she knew better. She had pushed a girl at school for telling her she wasn’t pretty enough to use nail polish. She had snuck the last of the Pop Tarts and didn’t say anything when Tony got in trouble for it. If she could just take a breath, she could say all that and Reverend John could forgive her.

The coughing fit subsided, and Jessi-Lou lay back in the hospital bed, too worn out to open her eyes.

Mama wept. “She’s only eight.”

Reverend John put a hand on her shoulder. “She’s not gone yet.”

He told her to have faith in God, that He would do what He must, and asked her to call if there was news. For several minutes, Jessi-Lou only knew her mother was still there by the sound of her sniffling.

“Mama.”

“Yes, baby.”

Jessi-Lou took a shaky breath. “Why does God make people sick?”

Mama inhaled through her nose, then exhaled. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and steady. “Well . . . In the Bible, there’s a man named Job. He loved God very much, and God gave him every good thing—a big family, lots of good farmland, healthy livestock. Then Satan told God, ‘Maybe Job only loves you

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because you treat him well—he wouldn’t love you if you took it all away.’ So God tested Job by making him suffer, and Job kept believing because he knew God’s love is more than the gifts he gives you.”

Mama went abruptly silent, and Jessi-Lou opened her eyes. She was still sitting there, her hand over her mouth, her eyes tightly shut, shivering although the room wasn’t cold. She sucked in a breath and blew it out slowly.

“But Job had to suffer,” Mama said, “To prove his love. He had to lose his flock, and his fields, and . . . He had to feel all of that loss and heartache, and still love God.” A cheer went up from the TV, loud and sustained. Jessi-Lou and Mama looked up to see Tony, arms in the air, riding the shoulders of his teammates. Winning touchdown.

Mama smiled and wiped her face with her fingers.

“Sometimes you’re Jesus, baby,” she said, “And sometimes, you’re Job.” The reverend came back the next day, reminding her where to go if she heard the voice of God calling. But then the doctors drained the fluid from her lungs, and the landlord found black mold in the trailer walls, just like the pediatrician thought there would be. They would have to move out, but Jessi-Lou would get better.

When she left the hospital a couple of days later, it wasn’t toward a light, summoned

by God, but to a motel, to wait while they moved into a new trailer. She and Tony were both champions. Mama called it a miracle.

Tony turned on the TV and started drinking as soon as he opened the front door, filling the emptiness with noise and cold, flashing light. Jessi-Lou, at the dining table alone, kept her eyes on her geometry homework.

“Did you make dinner?” asked Tony.

“I’ve got school work.”

Tony stood very still. Jessi-Lou felt the hairs on her neck prickle.

“So were you planning on eating tonight?”

“Maybe later.”

“What about me? I’ve been working all damn day, you couldn’t think about that?”

“I was in school, it’s not like I had time.”

“You got home before I did, what were you doing?”

“I had homework—” “Yeah, well, it wouldn’t have killed you to cook first. I’m the only one paying bills and it’d be nice to not have to do everything around here.”

“I spend my whole weekend cleaning while you just sit around—”

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“I am paying bills and keeping a budget—” “—that takes you twenty minutes—” “—budgeting takes hours, you have no idea what that’s like—” Jessi-Lou slammed her geometry textbook shut and snatched up her school bag.

“I have to do my homework. I’m going to my room.”

He followed her toward the hall. “Jessica Louise, get back in here!”

“You don’t get to call me that! You’re not Papa!”

“I’m the one in charge, now,” Tony shouted. “You have to listen to me!”

Jessi-Lou slammed her bedroom door shut. Tony didn’t come after her.

She finished geometry, then U.S. history. Tony cooked, slamming the fridge door and the cupboards. The smell of hot food made her hungry, but she did a biology worksheet before surfacing from her room again.

Tony was sitting in Papa’s old chair, an empty dish on the coffee table and a beer in one hand, empty bottles collecting by his ankle. She thought he hadn’t noticed her until he said, “I was going to go back to school. You think high school’s hard, wait till you reach college. When I lost the football scholarship, I thought I’d come home and work for a while, save some money . . . then you got sick again and the bills added up, so I did my bit to help. And then they died.”

He gestured at the urns on display along the window sill. There was a photo of Mama in her wedding gown to one side, and Papa in his tuxedo on the other. In a third frame in the middle, the two of them embraced each other and smiled for the camera. They, and the driver of the other car, had died instantly.

“I believe family is important,” Tony continued. “I love you, and I am here for you.

That’s why I’m here—I want to you to graduate, I want to support you. But it’s just hard, seeing all of us bend over for you your whole life, being the only person here to do it now, and you just . . .”

“I never made you bend over,” said Jessi-Lou, aghast.

“See, you don’t even know,” snapped Tony. “All you ever had to do was cough funny and everyone rushed to your side.”

“I almost died, you asshole! Four different times, I almost—” “And what about the other times you got what you wanted because you ‘weren’t feeling well’? Every time it sounded like you might have to work for something or go to gym class, you clutched your inhaler and whined until Mama said you didn’t have to.”

“I did not,” Jessi-Lou insisted, rubbing helplessly at the tears in her eyes. If Mama

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were here, she would know how to say it so Tony understood and he would finally stop being angry. “I really can’t breathe, Tony. I can’t.”

Tony slouched back in Papa’s chair, studying the beer through the green glass bottle as he swirled it. “Times got rough, she was always saying, ‘Sometimes you’re Jesus, and sometimes you’re Job.’ Sometimes you’ve got that holy light in you, and you speak the word of God and you change the world. Everyone bows down, and they listen, and you mean something.” He took another sip. “And sometimes, you’re just a college dropout taking care of his sick kid sister because your parents are dead.

No room to be anything else.”

Then he chugged the last of the beer and set the empty bottle next to its siblings.

It fell over and bounced loudly against the floor.

Jessi-Lou wanted to smash the bottle over his head for drinking in Papa’s chair, for using Mama’s words, for forgetting that she had lost her parents, too. She let his drunken tantrum hang there above the sound of the TV, too furious to tell him he was wrong.

On Sunday morning, they rose early and put on their best clothes to hear Reverend John speak of Jesus’ glory. Jesus sacrificed himself so that we may be forgiven, he said, because His love for us was so perfect. Church was the only place where Tony looked like he used to, before he came home again and before Mama and Papa died.

It was the only place he seemed happy.

“Seek to emulate Christ in your lives,” Reverend John urged, “and He will always walk with you.”

Tony said “Amen,” shifting on his feet like he was trying not to dance. Every time Reverend John spoke, Tony nodded like he was really listening, like he was ready to nail himself up on that cross, too, if it would mean something.

On the ride back, still uplifted by service, Tony said, “Reverend John really is blessed.

Every Sunday, that man seems to know exactly what to say. Don’t you think so?”

Jessi-Lou nodded, watching the blue-black rainclouds gathering in the rearview mirror.

“I wish I could do as he says. Be like Christ. I wish I could be that perfect.”

“Christ was tortured,” said Jessi-Lou. “And still, he forgave,” Tony replied.

She almost said, That’s not what I meant. They only ever talked about Jesus when He was perfect and loving, the Son of God taking away the sins of the world. That was the image Mama saw in her mind when she used to talk about Him, eyes bright with

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the Holy Spirit as she spoke. It was what Tony saw when Reverend John preached, and what he denied seeing in himself. Not the self-righteous martyr who chased people with a whip through the temple, or endured the nails and the spear and demanded to know why he had been forsaken. Tony thought he was Job, laid low by circumstance, but only because he forgot how Jesus could be.

Jessi-Lou recognized the signs of his mood tipping. The glow was fading from his face. By the time they returned to the trailer, he would stop smiling. By dinner, his eyes would be shuttered and abandoned. Just after she went to bed, he would open a beer—and he would wait, because it was Sunday, and that beer was just between him and God. She took a puff from her inhaler.

“After everything we do, all the ways we fuck up,” Tony murmured, gazing out the window at the empty road and rolling fields. “Jesus still forgives. Imagine having enough love for that.”

For the first year after she left town, Loulou didn’t call home. They had fought so much in the two years between when their parents died and when she graduated high school that she swore she’d never speak to him again.

After about eight months she had mellowed, and amended it to time apart, just to cool their heels. When she did call, the land line number she had memorized as early as she could dial a phone was still connected. Tony sounded startled to hear her.

“I wanted to wish you happy birthday,” said Loulou.

“Oh—thanks.”

“Are you doing OK?” “Yeah. Still working. Not much has changed. . . . Are you doing OK?” “Mhm. Working, too. I live with three roommates and we’re all broke, but the city is really nice.” “. . . You thinking of coming home?”

“No.” “It was just surprising, you calling like this. I thought, maybe.”

“I just wanted to check in with my brother.”

“Yeah. Still family,” Tony reassured. “Family’s important.”

Loulou felt the knot in her chest relax.

“I don’t have a lot of time to talk,” she said, which was a lie; she needed this one conversation with him to end well. “But I didn’t want you thinking I forgot, or anything.”

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“Thanks,” he said again. “It’s good to hear from you.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve usually got time after church on Sundays,” he added. “If you want to call again.”

“OK.” “Love you, Jessi-Lou. Glad you called.”

“Love you, too,” she said, and she didn’t tell him that no one called her Jessi-Lou anymore. Hearing him say it felt like home.

Loulou called on Sundays, and Tony always answered on the second ring. Their conversations grew from a few minutes to half an hour. They only talked about the present, as though they had no mutual history to speak of—as though Loulou had dialed a number and spontaneously befriended the man on the other end.

She didn’t ask why he hadn’t returned to college, now that she was gone. Not going back hadn’t been about her in the first place, and it hadn’t been about medical bills, and it hadn’t been about a scholarship. When she had understood, all the guilt she carried had burst into self-righteous fury, burned to ash, and blown away.

Loulou wasn’t the only one who had lost her parents.

Her room, Tony said, during their twelfth call, was just how she had left it. He assured her he hadn’t moved anything. “So if you want to visit, it won’t be weird.”

It would always be weird, going home, but this wasn’t something Tony would understand. Loulou was broke and far away, but she was happy. There was room for more than Jesus and Job, here. She needed to feel that a little longer, to tie herself to it like a lifeline and anchor it at her core, before she dove back into the heartland.

“It might be a while. I don’t think I can afford the time off. If you want to come visit, though,” she added.

“Oh, no, I don’t—” Tony floundered. “I couldn’t take time off from work.”

“I understand,” she said. She hadn’t expected him to agree. “It’s fine.”

“It’s just so big,” he continued. “City life. It’s a lot at once.”

“Yeah.”

“Would I drive there? Fly?” “I took a bus.”

“And there’s so many people. Everything crammed in.”

“We can talk about it another time.”

“It’s a lot to handle,” he said, breathless. “It’s a lot.”

On the way to her evening shift, Loulou looked out the bus window at lights

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and colors flashing past. Signs invited business in two or three languages at once, advertising fresh groceries or PC repair. People wove among each other through crowds, sagged out of windows with lit cigarettes, sat at outdoor cafes and basked in the setting sun. She recognized some of them because she saw them so often—Yellow Bike Guy, Mohawk Miss, Goth Mom and Twins—and felt her spirit rise and reach out in greeting. Without even knowing their names or the sound of their voices, she had begun to love them.

Loulou tried to imagine Tony sitting on the bus, watching her people, the light in his eyes sparkling like he had just left Reverend John. It got to you like that. The city held so much that you had to make yourself bigger just to take it all in. It washed off the past and raised your spirit and gave you a chance to become somebody new, someone you liked being. Tony could use that in his life, she thought. She hoped he would find the room.

T

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REVISITING DEERWOOD Poetry by Lysa Rodriguez

I wrote how I lay on the grey shag, looking to where the fake mahogany fan moved.

I wrote how even though I wanted to remember all that fell, how even though I wanted to hear my brother’s guitar, I kept seeing a smile that vanished, a soft voice I’ll never hear.

I think about my mother, how she is dead and how my father didn’t want me to share this poem.

I think about all the missing words, or reading my poem and thinking about my mother being dead while wondering who was the woman who shared my eyes and sat in my desk for open house.

When I read aloud, I watch his eyes on my poem, hoping to find why I wrote about a dead woman who still walks.

I wrote a poem about a dead woman.

I wrote about how she smiled, how she laughed, how that cheap mahogany fan looked like a spinning halo over her head.

I think about the guitar playing through the walls of my brain, harmonizing with the memory of a mother who died four years ago only to rise without the smile I love.

Because my mother is dead.

Because my mother is dead and because language fails the millions of ways one human can die.

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I. SCRIPTURE

Poetry by Caro Moya

Today I write to you because I’m tired of talking.

When words are never enough and must be wrenched out of my gut it is safer to seal them, a lick of the tongue

a flammable scripture.

Whatever hides in the back of my throat unravels the knots for you, for we face each other and wonder

who tied this noose?

Today I forgive you.

Even when my chest mangles and mauls in

silence.

I understand, only you have filled my shadows even if you’ve stolen all the light.

The tired cadaver of a bulb swings it hangs there, and does not illuminate the absence of dust where your shoes once lived.

II. If the Mockingbird Don’t Sing…

What she really wanted was a wire sparrow to whisper the alphabet in her ear when the world came crashing

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To lift her like an angel

I let you carve your name in first.

across pavements that claimed the skin

You let me cross it out.

of her scraped knees the broken bulb

These are the gifts we give,

of her eighth grade science project

peace offerings wrapped in barbwire a crimson dove

Sidewalks that led home,

a motel in the cupboard

But we have wrung its neck,

where she first let herself

So leave room on the headboard

step off

for one last dying breath.

the windowsill,

to take flight.

Her paper town of scabs and bruises Diminishing, a wire sparrow singing A

B

C

in the dark

III. Making Our Bed And by the end, we are left with nothing.

We have turned the bed into a graveyard, a final resting place

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with a halo of thorns

for our broken resuscitations.

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THE AVIARY ANALOGY Nonfiction by Alyssa Nickerson

”A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds . . . ” Percy Bysshe Shelley1

In my sister’s office in Denver, a flurry of finches flutters between painted perches, chirping at the silhouetted Rockies just visible on the edge of a landscape made false by the barrier of a plate-glass window.

I can hear a muffled chorus through the wall of my blue townhouse. In my neighbor’s identical living room, lovebirds whine and peep, their blue and green bodies pressed tightly against one another. It is a fortress, this plaintive hymn, it is a talisman against the thin iron bars that surround their hours. These pleas are only interrupted when she swings the small door open and lets them escape to swoop between the shelves of her bookcases or preen on the blade of a white overhead fan, tousling their feathers just beyond reach. Though she and I no longer speak, I still see her birds sometimes—perched behind her window, hidden by a curtain, gazing with confused envy at the black shapes of crows and mockingbirds that punctuate Savannah’s blue skies.

They only know a crippled form of flight.

1 Shelley, Percy B, John E. Jordan, and Thomas L. Peacock. A Defence of Poetry. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Print.

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“All poets are obsessed with birds,” Ishai, my poetry professor, says suddenly.

Then he laughs, a quick staccato rhythm. A few giggles swirl around the Virginia classroom. He looks at the clock; we have finished critiquing today’s poems; the last, a brief dream of flying, left the room pretending we were not searching the skies for that power.

For a moment, we want to feel the hollow skeleton of Toulouse-Lautrec as our own. We want to feel the brittle weightlessness of a bird’s body, to know the danger of a fall from steep heights, to let our feet leave the ground in an extension of which our own forms are not capable. We want to see why our hearts leap.

Ishai continues, a small smile setting off his smudged wire-frame glasses. “Many writers are interested in birds, but all poets are obsessed.”

As the bell rings, time skips a beat. Ishai stacks his books inside his black canvas backpack. We exit the classroom and feel lighter than air; if only momentarily, our feet hover above a linoleum floor speckled like robins’ eggs.

Though only an offhand comment, his statement resonates in my mind.

I am curious. I am a northern flicker pounding the ground with my curved bill, digging its length into the dirt to retrieve some tasty beetle of information.

I search through journals and archives, seeking parallels and pathos, wanting some illuminated connection between our species to jump out from the pages, glowing like an electric shock.

I trace migrations of songbirds and fall asleep to the shrillest of their symphonies; I wake to soft twitters and the shadows of mourning doves lining my curtains from their perch on the sill. I whistle bits of music until I’m sure I can tell the signature sound of a nuthatch from that of a chickadee. I watch the musical chairs of a statuesque chorus of flyers and singers lining the telephone wires down my street. I find feathers scattered along lawns and sidewalks, collect them in an old cigar box, and take them out now and then to run my fingertips along their barbed flanks; I feel the crisp certitude of their shapes, the strange strength within their softness.

Then the ornithomania shakes out its wings and flies into a niche toward the back of my mind, occasionally peeking its head out from its cerebral nest to peck its way into my perception.

I do not think of it consciously, nor with the same enthusiasm, until five years later. Then, a man walks into my life and brings it back to full focus—and so casts light upon my own migration patterns, my own endangerments.

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I can hear Ishai’s quiet speech in my mind the night I meet Martin Wolf. Not only because he is intelligent, or beautiful, or the strangest man I have ever encountered.

Not only because he, for a time, held a post as a government scientist—an ornithologist in the labs of the Smithsonian’s Pete Marra—but also because he brings back this inexhaustible curiosity that years earlier led me to the same studies they published in their time at Cape May. I see him watching the whirl of bluebirds through exposed branches, following the steps of plovers along the cold beaches. I see him occupied, whole, bright with an integrity long gone by the time we cross paths.

That first night we discuss the true hues of a bluebird’s trademark feathers—not at all blue, in fact, but a deep reflective grey. A mirror, of sorts. This same illusion defines Martin, as well, a fact I will not comprehend until much later.

Martin places a lightness in my chest like pockets of oxygen in bird bones. I feel strong for the first time since my flight from Virginia to Savannah; I am motivated to let my tired body cross oceans as seasons cycle across land.

It is a sort of freedom, I think at the time. But for me, freedom teases as sharply as any magician’s trick or any natural mirage.

Another writing professor once told me, at the end of a memoir class, that my writing centered around one issue. That all my poems, all my essays, all my stories and scenes featured, in one way or another, the dichotomy of entrapment and freedom.

The tragedy, he told me, is that within that contrast, I know my own station. My own place. I may write of freedom, but my voice only leaks from between the bars of a hanged cage.

It is the same with love.

Before I left Virginia, I swooped through the window of Jacob Rusnak’s brick house and could not find my way out for a year. I knew, during that period, an abuse like clipped wings. By the end of our relationship, I was bruised and emaciated.

I should have flown, but I was tethered by my fondness for him, my belief in his empty apologies. I shouldn’t have worn the history of black eyes and split lips as one might wear the evidence of an excited kiss.

But I did.

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By the time I escaped, I knew what it was to be caged.

After a particularly vicious fight, one in which I told him he would not be joining me in Savannah, his eyes flashed like that of a wild, wounded hawk. When I approached him, tried to soothe him, he attacked. I was used to this by now.

I was not, however, used to the darkness I witnessed when I regained consciousness and opened my eyes to find my body stripped and bleeding, crumpled upon a naked mattress. Tired of what he saw as my rebellions, he had locked me in his basement. A drum set stood silent in a corner; fermenting kimchi, his roommate’s pet project, lined the shelves. I did not starve, but I questioned whether I would get out alive, or at all.

Five days later, he released me. When he went to work, I gathered my things and fled. I took too long. He interrupted me, pulling out a chunk of my hair, leaving blood to run down my neck as I turned the key of my sputtering Honda Fit and wished, once again, for the power of flight. I wished for wings.

Martin does not devolve quite as drastically, but he leaves the same bitter taste in my mouth: that of poisonous berries, bright in a dead season. My time with him is not marked by physical violence, but by emotional manipulation. He knows the games of jays and crows, the evolved social systems of ravens; he holds equally a knowledge of the cruel and egocentric methods with which these birds will lead larger predators to prey too big for them to kill alone. He feeds on scraps left behind by Jacob, twists carrion into braids, builds a nest from which he will eat the eggs. Ours is a morbid banquet of spirit and misplaced affection.

But it is also Martin who teaches me to unlatch the door of my cage—even if I cannot leave my enclosure quite yet, still stuck by the sort of agoraphobic Stockholm syndrome known to pet birds left too long in their confines.

One night, he drinks himself into a sort of shamanic state. He grabs my face, holds it close to his, forces me to look into his eyes. “You could be free,” he tells me, “if only you were not so afraid of yourself. If you no longer had fear, you could change the world.”

Perhaps it is not he who opens that small gate. It is his loss that acts as fodder to the notes, the verses and lines I sing. Throughout each evolution of my cycles, each

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fresh coat of paint to my birdcage, each half-hearted attempt to unlock the ornate door, I have been singing—and I continue to sing, will continue to sing even as artificial night is draped over the top of my enclosure. It is in my song that I will find my self, my trajectory. It is in my song that I will know what it is to be free. It is in my song that I will grow the wings that will allow me to eventually desert the comfort of my entrapment.

I will be a nightingale, calling out into the no man’s land of darkness all the ageless laments of beauty. It is through these songs that light may shine.

I do not yet know why the caged [birds] sing, but I know how they will sing. I read the sheet music in my sleep.

We sing in poetry. In rhythms, in lines, in notes that flirt with then surpass what human ears may read. In light and in darkness. In melodies intrinsic to variations of species. In quiet rebellion, as a reminder, in keeping time. In flight or upon stable ground.

Still, somewhere, buried in slanted shafts beneath dark rock, a lantern will shed its glow upon the soft silhouettes of canary and coal miner. Neither will leave the other behind. And as they sing, they will cry.

T

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3 O’CLOCK BLOOM Fiction by Noelle Marasheski

It was mid-afternoon, meaning the residually energetic shopping street had calmed down. The lunch rush was over, and considering the coffee shop closed by dinner time, they’d only receive a few more customers by closing. That was good news for the waiter as he tried to get the order of a regular customer who should’ve known what the special of the day was by then.

Every day, Sam would have to get up on a wobbly stool and etch the special on the chalkboard for all to see. It was high enough on the wall to be over everyone’s heads even when the place was packed. The place was empty, and the man should’ve seen the board.

“What’s your special of the day again?” Jerry couldn’t make up his mind. He went there almost every day, yet he never saw the sign no matter how many times it was pointed out to him.

“It’s the spring chicken soup; it’s got carrots, garlic, scallions,” Sam started to recite the ingredients, the portly man waving him off.

“Nah, I think I’ll just have a cheeseburger. Medium rare. Good ole white American cheese.” Jerry shoved the menu back to Sam, who was still attempting to write down all the specifics to his order.

Sam took the menu, holding it to his chest in the crook of his arm while he finished.

“And what drink would you like?”

“Oh, you know what I like.” Jerry heartily laughed, patting Sam on the shoulder.

Sam gave his best guess from what he could remember after sidestepping to gain back some personal space. “Blue Moon?”

“Yeah, that’s it!”

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“I’ll be back with that. Would you like anything else?”

“Nope, just my beer.”

Sam returned to the kitchen to put in the order and to grab the choice of drink.

He never understood the purpose of drinking alone, but Jerry usually arrived for just the food itself. Jerry had told him once that he wanted one of their sandwiches on his deathbed. He wasn’t what Sam considered old, but then again, death is often unplanned and considering this man’s eating habits, Sam wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of surprise happened sooner than later.

Sam ripped off the sheet from the notepad, tacking it onto the line for the chef.

He usually didn’t talk to the cook that often; Sam didn’t want to throw off his groove, plus he could never remember his name. He opened the fridge, getting blasted with the cold air. The bottle was so cold it stuck to his fingers, and he carefully switched hands as he grabbed a coaster.

“Here you are.” Sam set down the beer in front of Jerry, who looked to him and grinned.

“No lemon?” Jerry questioned, and Sam flinched.

Sam couldn’t remember having ever grabbed lemon for him before for some reason. Then again, Sam also couldn’t remember if he had breakfast that day or not.

It was a long day, and it took all his remaining brain power to come to some sort of conclusion. He was second- guessing himself when Jerry spoke up.

“Good. I don’t like anything weakening the drink. People always just put it in there without asking and it drives me insane! Gimme it hard or gimme none.” Jerry laughed, holding his drink up to acknowledge the right choice Sam had made.

Sam sighed in relief, forcing his exhausted face to smile. “I hear you on that one.

Enjoy.” Not that he had ever drunk before, but he felt like it would be a decent response. Although Sam didn’t usually enjoy the oddly personal conversations he’d have with Jerry, he always got a decent tip for participating in them. He made it seem like he enjoyed them for that purpose.

Because there was nobody else around to wait on, Sam could take the opportunity to water the plants. He looked for the can in the kitchen. He wasn’t paid to water the plants, but he took it upon himself to ensure they were healthy. It was an extra gesture Sam enjoyed doing that usually brought him peace.

Until he almost kicked the can out from underneath the sink and stumbled to catch himself. Sam definitely didn’t leave it there the last time he watered the plants. He wouldn’t leave a potential tripping hazard like that. It must’ve gotten in someone’s

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way in its original place so someone moved it to be in someone else’s way. That’s how the world worked.

Sam cared for the plants, but he didn’t spend his own money on buying a can so he made his own makeshift watering can. Sure, he enjoyed working at such a nice café, but he wasn’t going to spend his hard-earned cash back on the place. A repurposed, thoroughly washed coffee can with jabbed holes in the side worked well enough. It was something from what was considered nothing, and Sam was proud of his small display of ingenuity.

Filling the can became a ritual, and he enjoyed every second of it. The sound of the water first hitting the tin bottom, feeling his hand dip from the weight of the water beginning to make a difference. It allowed his mind a moment to rest and not have to juggle the rest of his duties, like washing tables, delivering orders, and doing the things he was actually paid to do.

Even the walk out to the door was a part of the relaxation. If he walked too fast, the water would threaten to slosh out or drip out through the holes onto his hands.

If he walked too slowly, the opportunity window would close and he’d have to rush through the rest of it. It required a practiced, medium pace that he had come to master over his three months of working there.

Sam leaned against the door to open it, carefully stepping around the outdoor tables when he noticed Lilah sitting at one of them. It was the farthest table from the door, and it was hard to notice when someone sat there unless you were at the door itself because of how the windows were. She was sporting a golden woven sun hat, a different pair of dark sunglasses, and one of her white flowing dresses. That usually meant she would order a salad instead of a sandwich. There was less of a dripping hazard that way, she had once confessed.

Although they went to the same school, Sam didn’t see her around often unless it were at the café. If he did, she was just another head distantly bobbing along in the hallway. At work, she was one of the few customers that never gave him a hard time, and he appreciated that, along with their thoughtful conversations.

“Hey, Sam.” Lilah chirped. She set her purse on the ground between herself and the wall to the café. Her cane was already out of the way, her purse holding it to the wall.

“Hey Lilah, how are you doing today?” Sam greeted, smiling as he approached her. She sat beside one of the larger, solitary flower pots on the ground. She was in place among the flowers, the afternoon sun casting her shadow onto the table in front of her.

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“Pretty good. It’s such a nice day. It’s almost too nice,” Lilah responded, laughing lightly as she pointed to her sunglasses. “Had to bring out the big guns to deal with those beams.”

The sun was definitely shining in his eyes as he squinted through the light to nod, “Yeah, I almost wish I had a pair right now. Would you like me to grab you a menu?”

She passively waved him off. “Oh, I’m good. Finish watering the flowers first. I’m pretty sure I already know what I want. I only come here like, every Friday.”

Sam grinned, nodding again as he stepped around her to water the tulips. The tulips and the forget-me-nots were blooming, and they were never at risk for shriveling up because of his attentiveness.

“Although . . . What’s the daily special?” Lilah questioned. “Do you think it’s worth trying?”

“It’s called the spring chicken soup. I haven’t tried it, but it sounds like it should be good,” he offered, and finished off the flowers before returning to her side. It’s not like she could see the board from the outside; her seat faced the side of the café that didn’t have the board.

She hummed, drumming her fingers on the metal weavings of the table. “Maybe I’ll try it another day. I don’t feel like getting any on my dress; wearing white seems to attract all kinds of unexpected things.”

Sam couldn’t agree more; the number of times he’s had to change his work shirt mid-shift due to unplanned disasters garnered him the foresight to pack an extra shirt just in case. It sat crumpled up in his car in the parking lot around the back. He almost had forgotten to put in a new backup shirt this morning, but he recognized the lack of contrasting shirt against the black interior and remembered to grab it.

But that was the morning.

“Okay. So I assume you would like your typical never let pepper-jack go salad?” Sam snickered, unable to contain his amusement from the food puns the owner created.

“Yes, please.” Lilah laughed. “Can I have the Italian dressing too?”

“Yes, I’ll put that in for you. Anything to drink?” He absentmindedly ran his finger along the rim of the can, somehow managing to avoid the sharp impacts from the pen-pierced holes.

“Just some water would be nice. Thanks.”

Sam nodded, carrying on with a new mission as he returned to the kitchen.

He quickly wrote down her order, adding it to the queue. Jerry’s food seemed

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to be almost done, so he’d have to hurry with the other flower pot and giving Lilah her drink.

He returned to her with her glass of water in his one hand, the can full of water in his other. In his rushing, he had nearly used tap water from the sink in her glass instead of the tap from the bar. Of course it was the same water, but he felt like it was cleaner coming from the tap. She didn’t have to know about his potential mistake.

“A water for you, and now some water for the plants.” Sam hummed, setting the water down in front of her before holding the can with both hands.

Lilah nodded her appreciation, tentatively patting the table once before her fingers brushed against the side of the glass. She took a sip. “Thanks . . . You know, I love the smell of these flowers. It’s why this is the best seat here.”

Sam mirrored her, nodding in agreement. “Oh definitely. It’s why I water them.”

He realized the implication and became flustered as he tried to backpedal. Sure, it might’ve been a part of the real reason, but to admit that would be too forward for him, and he feared the awkwardness that could follow without correcting it fast enough. “Uh, because it’s nice to take a breather out here, that is. There’s nothing worse than being surrounded by the strong smell of coffee for six hours straight.”

Lilah turned her head in curiosity to see if she heard him right, a reflexive smirk beginning to form on her face. “Then why in the world do you work at a café?”

That was a good question. Sam was sure that there must’ve been a deeper, more soul-searching answer than the one that was the immediate reality.

“Because it was hiring and I needed a job.” Sam leaned against the wall. He wasn’t allowed to sit, and technically he wasn’t allowed to lean, but he figured leaning wasn’t as bad as sitting. If no one saw, he’d be safe. He was sure Lilah wouldn’t rat him out, either. His legs were aching from walking across the school all day only to come to work and walk around some more. At least at school he could sit.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here.” Lilah commented, taking a sip of her water before she chuckled. “Who’d water the flowers if you weren’t?”

He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to take that, but he felt himself smiling as he shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s a good question . . .”

Still holding the repurposed coffee can full of water, he took a couple of steps away to begin watering the other pot of flowers to multitask. It almost splashed back at him from how fast he had tilted the can.

“Are they pretty?”

Sam turned to glance over at her as he hummed in confusion. Lilah didn’t respond, so he spoke up. “They who?”

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“The flowers. I know they feel nice, and they smell nice, but do they look nice too?” Lilah asked. She ran her fingers along the side of the condensation of the glass in contemplation.

He almost felt like it was a test of some sort as he stared at the vibrant pinks and the baby blues, contrasting against the green stems beneath them and the brown dirt they resided in. They were right in front of her; did she not like the type of flower or something?

“I think they’re pretty . . . . Why do you ask?” Sam took the bait, looking back to the girl.

Lilah shrugged contently, “Well, I can’t see them, so I was wondering what you thought of them. Haven’t seen in years, actually. It’s interesting. You can ask different people the same question yet the answer always varies . . .”

Sam felt his mouth open in the process of coming up with an intelligent response as he tried comprehending why she couldn’t see them. Then the realization hit him.

She was blind. It was like being dumped on with a bucket of cold water from someone else’s sinking boat. How could he have missed that?

The more he thought about it, the more of her mannerisms began to make sense to him. He also realized he had never seen how she arrived to the café; she usually just appeared out of nowhere. Realistically, she had to get there somehow. He spotted the cane poking out from behind her purse and resisted the urge to bop himself over the head for being so ignorant. And for being oddly silent.

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“This is when I go ‘you know nothing Sam,’” Lilah paused, trying to suppress a giggle. “Wait, what’s your last name?”

“Keeley.” Sam answered with a cautious optimism, nervously playing with the can.

It slipped from his grip and he fumbled, catching it against his pants. The metal holes snagged on the material before he carefully detached the can from him.

“Yes. You know nothing, Sam Keeley.” She announced, propping herself up on her elbows on the table, holding her head. “Although, I don’t really know that much about you either. So I guess we should fix that.”

Sam laughed in relief to her warm reception, nodding. “I guess we should.”

“Would you wanna hang out some time?” Lilah proposed, leaning to her side and pulling out her phone from her purse.

“Definitely. Yes, that sounds nice.” He went to grab for his pen and paper, but stopped in realization that she probably wouldn’t be able to read his number unless he carved it into the paper or something of that sort. Would that even work?

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Sam returned to the side of her table and Lilah held her phone out to him. The phone rapidly repeated the numbers being input, surprising him as he jumped a bit. Once getting past the robotic voice piecing together his name as he typed it, he managed to fill out the contact card. He handed the phone back to her, taking a step back as he laughed anxiously.

He glanced up from her to see through the window that Jerry was beginning to get antsy. Or rather, Jerry had been antsy for a long time and was approaching dangerously annoyed. Sam felt his heart skip a beat at the thought of pissing Jerry off. Jerry was not only without food, but also without his second beer he usually ordered on the occasions he had a beer; it was never just one. Jerry beckoned Sam through the window and looked like he was about to go hunting Sam down to make a burger out of him if the plate didn’t come out within the next minute.

“Oh, shoot. I gotta go.” Sam turned on his heel. “I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah, with my salad.”

“Oh, yeah. With your salad.”

Lilah chuckled to herself as Sam rushed back to attend to Jerry. He consciously put his mind back into waiter mode as he approached the man. His shift was almost over, but he still needed to work. In order to get that well-paid tip, he needed to make up for his delay.

“How was your beer? Would you like another?” Sam inquired, taking the clearly empty bottle out of the way.

“It was great; I want my food, though,” Jerry declared, punctuating his wants by smacking his hand on the counter.

“Yes sir, I’ll be right back with that.”

When he reached the kitchen, Sam tossed the bottle into the recycling bin and placed the watering can on one of the shelves with some available space. He briefly realized that he might’ve absentmindedly been the one who put the can somewhere out of place if he was in a rush like this.

“Where’ve you been? His food’s been done for five minutes now. Go get it out to him.” The silent cook spoke up, his voice almost shaking through Sam. That could’ve been Sam’s own worry building, but the sudden authoritative nature of the cook didn’t help.

“I’ve been helping the other customer, I,” Sam began, only to be waved off by his fellow employee. He let out a huff, picking up the plate and speeding back to Jerry.

“I apologize for the wait; here’s your burger and fries. Would you like anything

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else?” Sam placed the food down in front of the man, or at least, the most in front that he could reach around the man’s large figure.

“My beer.” Jerry grunted, picking up the burger and taking a bite. He recoiled, turning to Sam. “It’s not even hot anymore; go warm this up for me, will ya’?”

Of course it wasn’t hot; it only sat out long enough to become lukewarm.

Sam nodded quickly, taking the plate back from him. “Yes sir, sorry about that.

I’ll be right back.”

He rushed back to the kitchen, popping the burger into the microwave. The cook was already cleaning the stove, so it was the next best thing. If the grease splattered, Sam could easily wipe down the interior of the microwave real quick before he finished the rest of his cleaning.

Sam managed to grab the second beer and return to the microwave before the burger started splattering. The plate was hot and he nearly dropped it, but he managed to find a colder spot to grip it as he returned to Jerry.

“There we go. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Look at that steam!” Jerry bellowed, grinning in pleasure at the sight of his food he had been waiting for. “Took you long enough.”

Sam slid it across the table so his heated fingers could find quick solace as he switched the beer bottle to that hand and placed it on the counter. He smiled sympathetically.

“Sorry again. I was helping a different customer and I must’ve lost track of time.”

Sam explained.

Jerry took a bite of the burger, humming in approval as he chewed. It wouldn’t kill him to close his mouth while he ate.

“You certainly did.” Jerry commented, burger bits spraying onto Sam’s shirt.

If Sam had been closer, his face would’ve received the blow, but thankfully the distance spared his face. Sam held his breath and felt his jaw clench as he resisted the urge to berate the man for giving him unnecessary work at the end of the day and dirtying his shirt.

Sam forced a smile onto his face. “Enjoy.”

After lingering for a moment in case Jerry needed anything, Sam returned to the solace of the kitchen. Lilah’s salad was already ready to go. They didn’t take too long to compose, and so he picked up the plate in one hand, and took the silverware and cup of dressing in his other.

“One salad and one Italian dressing.” Sam announced, setting the plate and

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silverware down in front of her. As he looked down, he noticed the spots on his shirt from Jerry’s burger and tried to hide it by crossing his arms. After a moment, he remembered that Lilah couldn’t see it anyway so it didn’t matter. He was going to have to adjust his mannerisms.

“Nice, thanks.” Lilah grinned, taking the silverware into her hands and placing the napkin across her lap. She kept her hand low as she located the dressing and poured it across her salad.

“All set?”

“All set.”

Sam shifted his weight as he looked to the shop across the street. “I’d stay and talk but uh, I gotta close up.”

“Go, go. Don’t get behind because of me. We can talk later.” Lilah waved him off with her forkless hand, smiling.

Sam grinned. She was right. They could talk later. “Okay, let me know if you need anything.” Sam offered. Lilah nodded in response, digging into her salad.

He returned to the inside of the café and headed to the back to grab the spray bottle for cleaning the tables out front. Once he got to the shelf of objects, he realized that the watering can was in the spot of the spray bottle, and that meant the spray bottle was missing. He yawned, picked up the can, and moved it back under the sink.

He found the spray bottle next to where he slid the can back.

Sam stared at the two objects, wondering how they originally had gotten there and shook his head. It didn’t really matter; if he had found what he needed, he wouldn’t have to worry. His phone suddenly buzzed in his back pocket, and he took it out to see who the text was from.

Hey Sam, can I have some more napkins? Lost some to the wind. Thanks! -L He stood up and took a couple of extra napkins from a nearby container to bring out to her. Sam didn’t expect to have made a friend that day, but it was a needed surprise in the monotony of work. He looked forward to hanging out with Lilah, and having a potential social life. Sam couldn’t help but smile.

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CHRYSANTHEMUM

Poetry by Carla Gonzalez Varas

This flower I could name

This flower, however,

after the ugliness of this world

won’t have cosmic winds

that I have hidden,

absorb her fragility

I could call her

surgent among toxic roots,

And listen,

she’ll shed a petal or two,

or maybe mimic our father’s name instead.

I’ll show her the world, I’d tell her all the wicked things,

dismiss inherent brutality

call a prude flower all the crude things

I’d never let you,

innocence will remain

a sister, see.

unscathed.

Saturn’s profanity is

and maybe

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a saddened shape of violent tides

taunting your fall

into primal salacious arms.

Sister, I am not who I say when the world yells and swallows my shadow.

I too, shift into a youthful flower with little to no petals. easy to count, A stem.

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SNOWFIGHT Nonfiction by Scarlett Ruggiero

I had no sister, just my two big brothers, Nelson and Ugo. I was born five years after them, so they had time to for their own little brother clan. They accepted me only if I agreed to be a boy among them. Technically, they never asked. For me it was obvious because it was more a question of survival.

At six years old, I watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars with them. For a reason I still don’t understand, I thought Jar Jar Binks was my son, and I became my brothers’ Padawan. For everything. “Go get me cookies, Padawan.” “Padawan, ask Dad to buy us the new Beyblade tops.” That day, I called my dad five times until he went to Toy“R”Us. And you know what? The Beyblade tops really sucked.

Nelson was a Sith and Ugo, a Jedi. My allegiance switched between the one who could offer me the most: from candies to cuddles. I remember Ugo trained me each evening. We switched off the lights and turned our plastic sabers on. He had a blue saber, and I, a green. I never won; I was a Padawan for a reason.

Around the same time, they made me watch The Lord of the Rings, and ever since, I feared to find a goblin under my bed. And let’s not even talk about Golum. Nelson kept his devotion to the dark side, and he playfully became Golum under my bed before I went to sleep. Ugo was Legolas, and I, Frodo. This was how the hierarchy went: Nelson was the master, Ugo was his second, and I was whatever was underneath them.

I was too young to have the notion of time, but they weren’t. I didn’t understand why they had stopped showing me their favorite movies, and why they had stopped calling me “Padawan.” While I was still as tall as a hobbit, I hadn’t realized how tall they had become.

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For the first time in years, it snowed in November in the Parisian suburbs.

My primary school had a huge playground and I ran against the falling snowflakes.

I thought, “Santa must have a lot of fun in his sled.” It was like running against powdered sugar blowing in the wind. I caught some snowflakes with my red gloves.

They always melted before I could see them.

I had to go back to classes when playground time was over. I was sad. I wanted to play a little longer. But on Saturdays, Ugo picked me up and it made me happy.

All parents stood in front of the school’s red brick entry. Ugo was already there; he was never late. He took my hand—because he had to, Mom made him—and we started on our way home.

I was ten years old and he was fifteen. While I was still growing up, he entered the classic teenage no-talking, leave-me-alone-stupid phase. Our saber training stopped.

I tried to talk to him a little, but he only answered with “hum.” What could a tenyear-old say that could interest her brother? Nothing. He had other problems. One of them was acne.

We passed by the candy shop. We used to stop every Saturday to get fresh churros and he would let me hold them. This day, the candy shop was closed so there were no churros for us. We hadn’t stopped for churros for a long time anyway.

Along the road, there was a toy shop. It was my favorite; they had wood toys, war hammers, stuffed animals, and Hello Kitty products. My favorite was this blue pencil with an eraser on its top that smelled like chocolate. But we didn’t stop there either because Ugo had already gone yesterday.

Home was close and we had to be careful not to slip. The parked cars on the sidewalk looked like they were sleeping with a snow blanket. I wanted to draw something on the windshields but Ugo didn’t let me. He was cold.

Finally, we were home. We passed the dirty grey gate and he inevitably let go of my hand. Almost automatically, I lowered to get some snow and made a snowball.

I threw it at his stupid coat.

“Don’t start,” he said. He didn’t bother turning around.

He talked. I threw another, targeting his stupid head.

He stopped and turned around this time.

“If we start, you’re going to get crushed and you’re going to cry . . .” he said with lassitude. He couldn’t finish the sentence because he received another snowball in his stupid face.

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I don’t know if he lost his balance or if my childish mind distorted the memory, but I remember him shouting, snow all over his face: “THIS IS SPARTA.” He threw a big chunk of snow at me without even caring to shape it into a snowball.

I was smaller and quicker, so I managed to avoid his projectile. I ran to hide under a snowy pine tree—the perfect hideout—but he found me quicker than I thought, like a kid who saw his present under a Christmas tree. With a roar worthy of an orca, he grabbed my wet buckskin boot and got me out of my sanctuary. My body left a mark on the snow like a gigantic worm, erasing the footsteps printed in it. As he dragged me, I threw all the snow I could with my free hands, wet thanks to my red fabric gloves. Now, it looked as though a giant millipede had crossed our garden.

His hands slipped and I went free. I was too close to him so I tried my ultimate move, my signature. With a head jerk, I threw my wet hair—hardened by the snow—at his dumb face. It was a beautiful strike into his eyes. With zebra marks all over his face, Django would have looked like an amateur. Then, he took a lot of snow in his hand, flattened it, and, you know how clowns throw cream pie to people? I’ll let you meditate on that.

We stopped, exhausted, both seated in the snow, laughing until our jaws hurt. At some point, without consulting each other, we stood up and went inside the house.

I had snow on my hair, in my boots, my black coat had become a raincoat now, and I had lost my hat. My abs and my jaws hurt, and for some reason, I was craving churros.

Ugo had already taken off his coat and shoes; I spotted his smile when he was going upstairs to take a hot shower. With a smile to further hurt my face, I thought I was still his Padawan. Maybe there would be some saber training later.

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DENIAL Fiction by Shelby Loebker

Lucas pulled the key out of the ignition. We sat in the car until the yellow cabin light flicked off. Now that it was dark, he sighed. I didn’t say anything to comfort him.

At first, I was sad, too—shocked more than anything, when the police car pulled up to our house instead of our parents’ gray Volkswagen—but now all I felt was a sick sense of relief.

I hated myself for it, for how little I felt, for how I couldn’t seem to see the world as different now that they were gone. But no matter how much I tried to rage like Lucas or cry like our aunts, there was only relief.

Maybe the tears would come later; grief was a process, everyone kept telling me.

Maybe next month when I started school, it would hit me like a wave in front of homeroom and I would run home and cry on my parents’ bed. Maybe, years down the road, I would have my first child and be struck with the realization of how much my parents actually had loved me and I would be overcome with emotion.

For now, I opened the car door.

“Libby. It’s OK, you know.” It’s not OK. Lucas continued, “I know things weren’t great.” You don’t know.

“You weren’t there.”

“You can’t hold that against me, Libby. It’s just us now.”

“No, it’s us again. Because for a really long time it was just me, and if you think you’re here now and you’re saving me from whatever the hell is supposed to happen to orphaned teenagers in the twenty-first century and that I’m going to look at you like some kind of knight in shining armor, you can leave. Run away from our problems again.”

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Lucas laughed once, a dry and breathy sound. “You’re so dramatic.”

I got out of the car and slammed the door shut.

It wasn’t my brother’s fault that he was a genius and a prodigy and a million other letter-of-recommendation buzzwords I couldn’t begin to list. It wasn’t his fault that I could never be like him.

But he wasn’t wearing long pants in family vacation photos because his knees were pinpricked with scabs and rice-sized bruises after getting two Bs on his third-grade report card. He didn’t spend long hours at the kitchen table, stumbling over algebra problems, hoping to finish without mistakes and finally get dinner.

It wasn’t my brother’s fault. But he left to go to college hundreds of miles out of state and stopped calling. And now he was the only one left to blame.

Lucas followed me into the house, draping his black suit jacket over an armchair.

He faced me with his hands at his side.

“Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

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THE “WHY” CHROMOSOME Nonfiction by Alicia Caffero

Rippled skin, stray hairs, and horrific red bumps plagued what we could only assume was a vagina on the projector screen.

“You see, kids, using protection can help you prevent situations like this,” a woman explained, flipping through various slides of worst-case scenarios.

I had been waiting for this day since the mother-daughter tea party two years before, which didn’t mention a word about sex, sexuality, or what we should do with the three weeks when we aren’t bleeding. Much to my dismay, we weren’t allowed to learn of the power held between our legs until it was almost too late.

There were six months before high school started, and I was itching to discover what exciting teenage escapades would be in store. According to “Cha Cha,” the average teenage girl got her first kiss at the age of thirteen, and I would be damned if I would fall outside that statistic. My style and weight held me at a disadvantage, as the brooding Goth girl didn’t attract many admirers. The long and drawn-out transition from eyeliner and Avenged Sevenfold to floral and Sufjan Stevens was almost complete, making me hopeful for the future.

I had been pursuing a boy named Dustin for the entirety of middle school, but eighth grade felt like my time to shine. The only things we shared in common were the school bus, a naïve interest in drugs, and the fact that we were large. In fact, he was one of the only boys in our grade who was heavier than me—a feature that I found intoxicating. The idea of a boy being able to scoop me into his arms and twirl me around, or lift me at all, seemed endlessly appealing. Unfortunately, Dustin spent most of the year confined to an electric wheelchair after riding an engine-powered Razor scooter down our street and into a tree.

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He was 6 feet tall, 200 pounds, and a notorious bully, but that didn’t stop me from fawning over his pencil-thin lips and the potential that they held. We bargained for months over the arrangement. He would kiss me if I flashed him a peek of my pale Midwestern plains, an unequal trade in hindsight, but there wasn’t much to see anyway. I had already fulfilled my part of the deal, so now it was a matter of finding the right situation to be smooched before I turned fourteen.

“If you have unprotected sex with one man, and they’ve slept with another woman, and that woman with five other men, and those men with other women, soon enough, that one night of sex has you connected with potentially hundreds of strangers, all bearing different diseases.”

Time was running out, and while I could’ve been making headway with my brick of a boyfriend, I was instead stuck in the library—during recess, no less—being forced to stare at disfigured forms of anatomy I didn’t fully understand in the first place. My friends and I sat in the back of the group, rolling our eyes at the horror stories. We may not have known much, but we knew this woman wasn’t going to help us.

Her turtleneck was wrapped tightly around her throat, rubbing against the bottom of her chin when she spoke. The projector screen showed a photo of Catherine ZetaJones looking particularly glamorous on one side and a mangled vulva on the other.

“It’s true. Celebrities get STDs too. Not only does she have HPV, but because she wasn’t safe, her husband now has throat cancer.” Several students gasped in disbelief, while others repeated the words under their breath, trying to comprehend how a vagina could spread an infection to someone else’s mouth.

My friends chuckled and nudged my arm, to which I nodded and smiled, hoping it seemed like I knew. The birds and the bees were revealed to me in the fourth grade by a friend, giving me an advantage over the rest of my classmates. We huddled in the cubby area as she explained how sex actually worked, gesturing with her hand and a finger. From then on I became obsessed, constantly trying to figure out what made the topic so forbidden, and why it was worth the trouble.

After discovering the wonders of late-night radio, I spent my nights being educated and entertained by Psycho Mike and Dr. Drew’s bedroom banter, stifling my giggles into a pillow so my mom wouldn’t know I was awake past ten. Once it was time for us to have our school-mandated scare-session, I was already saturated with naughty phrases and vulgar stories, branding me with the reputation of “school sexpert.”

“OK, now it’s time to take some questions—” We swarmed out of the library and on to our respective classes, mine being gym. The girls in the locker room went back

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and forth measuring their prowess, trying to determine who had “the talk” before today. They giggled over bras and kissing while trying to act comfortable as they changed in front of each other.

As I made my way out with the rest of the class, a voice squeaked my name. I turned around to find Katerina, an Indian girl half my size sitting alone on the locker-room bench, frozen in fear. I sat down next to her and asked what was wrong, to which she responded, “I didn’t understand a single word that woman said today.” I laughed at first, reassuring her that a lot of us were confused. Katerina shook her head and repeated herself.

“Not a single word.”

The chirp of sneakers against the gym floor echoed through the walls as the boys began to spill out of their locker room, arguing over the details of our assembly and what we now knew that they didn’t. I could hear Dustin’s low shotgun laugh, and I wondered how much time until class would start.

“Well, how much do you know about sex and all that?” I asked her, to which she remained silent. Her eyes darted around the room, searching for answers. Dustin’s voice became harder to hear. I sighed.

“I guess you and I have a lot of work to do then, huh?” I said. She looked back up at me and I smiled. Before I could say anything more, the gym teacher called our names from outside and we rushed out to join the others.

It was a running day, so we spent the majority of class jogging in the back of the line, as I was briefed on how much she had missed. The rest of the school year was spent filling her in on all things sex. Every recess, gym class, lunchtime, and study hall, we sat together discussing the different mysteries of life. I taught her how boners work, how babies are made, what sex was, and what people do beforehand.

As word got around, other people joined in on our lessons, and before I knew it, I was teaching a small group of girls on all things “woman.” The locker room became our classroom and I felt responsibility for their well-being. Texts would fly in at all hours of the day, asking new questions, each more complicated than the next. Definitions became second nature to me. The only information I couldn’t provide was why these things were done. I became a walking textbook, spewing out facts and vocabulary, understanding less as time went on.

Dustin texted me a time and location, and I threw together the sexiest outfit I could find: skinny jeans and a v-neck band tee. My hair was arranged just so, and I walked excitedly to the park. He rode in on his bike and just kept going, calling behind him

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for me to follow. I continued to jog behind through a forest and back again before he finally decided on an open field. My outfit was damp and my hair destroyed by humidity, but I didn’t care. I panted and wiped my forehead, desperately trying to seem calm. We sat on opposite ends of a picnic bench, refusing to acknowledge what was to come.

The lean-in took longer than expected, and I didn’t know what was happening until the moment before. His lips brushed against mine with the same sterility of strangers bumping on a train, and my expectations crashed into reality at a fatal rate. I covered my mouth; trying to decide if I should laugh, scream, or cry. Years of expectation and dreaming of this day, all coming to a screeching halt in a matter of milliseconds. Dustin crossed his arms and leaned back.

“You’re happy, I can tell.” I nodded in silence, hoping if I pursed my lips tight enough they would fuse together and I wouldn’t have to respond. Dustin drummed on his lap and looked every which way that wasn’t toward me, trying to come up with something else to do or say. He stood up and climbed onto his bike, inching backward like he was escaping a hostage situation.

“So . . . I’ll see you around.” Loose dirt swirled in the air as he rode away, leaving me lost and alone. Once he was out of sight, I raised a hand to my lips, searching for a change. *Names were changed in this piece to protect the people involved.

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