ONE LAST EGG SALAD SANDWICH FOR JOHN F. KENNEDY Fronia Kemper
I am married to a man who cut off my hands. We were married in April, the year John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but that happened in November, and my wedding took place in the month of springtime, the month that opens. Aperire—to open— the Latin verb to end all other Latin verbs. What can be more significant than an opening? Open minds, tiny opening flowers with their golden pollen faces, open doors letting in summer air and shoeshine vapor from streets made slick by spilled strawberry soda, but that could also be blood, I suppose. I did not get a good look at the street. I wasn’t even there. Dallas, Texas. Whoever goes to such a place? I would rather be shot.
The name of my husband is Herbert Lampton, and he cut off my hands. Only recently—it was an idea of his. He is always coming up with a project. He lost work a little over a year ago, and ever since he stopped working, he comes up with the most absurd notions. Little things he feels he simply must do. He installed an automatic door to the kitchen, which opens and closes with the press of a button. I arrived home one day from my hair appointment to find that he had filled the lovely pool in our backyard with blood-red parrot fish. They’re apricot-ish, sunset-ish colored lumps the size of coffee cups. Swimming amongst them is a slimy pastime. But he won’t get them out of the pool, so I simply close my eyes and imagine they are waterlogged peaches, bobbing below the surface of the water. I am sure I shall manage to swim with my new stumps someday, but for now, I sit under the coffee table and read Russian archeological magazines. I turn the pages with my teeth.
Herbie isn’t remotely unbalanced or difficult to live with. He has interests and wild passions. He was a chemist once, and I was a chemist’s wife, which is not at all a difficult thing to be. He never turned my hair blue by feeding me strange concoctions or poured acid wash on the neighbor’s daughter to see what would happen. Lying next to each other at night, he would tell me that he had thought of doing all those things, but instead of going through with them, he had tied a scarf as tight as he could around his neck and gone to water the lawn. Our rubber hose has a small nick in the side, and a spray of water shoots intermittently from it like blood from a scratched artery. So you see, he is really very sensible.
I’m the wild one, I’m afraid. I’ve gotten him hooked on milk chocolate drops and often force him to watch films of marionettes singing in Arabic. He really puts up with quite a lot but says he loves me all the time. What more could any woman ask for? And I want you to know that after he chopped my hands at the wrists with a grapefruit peeler, he used two of his very best black silk ties to cut the blood flow, to prevent me from bleeding out, which I thought was extremely thoughtful and very indicative of the
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kind of man he can be. Then he offered to help me with the crossword, which I had been in the midst of filling in. I told him how very much I would appreciate if he did so.
Married life is mostly humdrum. It was different when Herbie-Derbie was still with the company, but they don’t want him anymore. His contract elapsed, and they wouldn’t have him back for the world. My husband begged and pleaded, for he so wants to be useful, but there simply wasn’t a place for him there. No one walks away with a package like his, which just proves how very dedicated he was to their enterprise. Herbert used to stamp shotgun shell catalogs, readying them for distribution. That is, up until the point that he stapled a colleague’s jugular vein over a small dispute concerning who was sitting in whose chair. The poor man perished on the spot, spurting himself past the point of salvation, all that blood both a dreadful waste and a stunning crimson exhibition. I heard that it stained the janitor’s mop permanently and forever. My husband will now receive 150,000 dollars annually on the condition that he never comes anywhere near Marrow & Bank Co. ever again. Oh, and yes, I do call him Herbie-Derbie on occasion. It is my pet name for him, a nickname of sorts, that he tolerates manfully. He pinches my cheek when I dare to refer to him by it. Sometimes, this hurts and leaves behind a small mark, like a smear of cherry filling pockmarking the smooth skin. I busy myself by dabbing at it, pretending for hours that if I only tried, I might wipe it away.
But I will no longer play such silly games, for my husband has cut off my hands. And that is not all I have to report. Today, he waltzed in, happy as a hamster high on hemlock, and presented me with a little gift. It was a small token, and he reassured me not to think too much of it. I have sat here for hours, holding it between my forearms, balancing this oddity between thin bones encased in muscle and swaddled in layers of sagging corium. I often think of my arms. I don’t know what to think about them. The head of John F. Kennedy seemed as though it might be about to speak or to kiss me, but it was always on the verge, just the precipice.
Death must be like this, I thought, as I held the still face of the man who was once the president of a country and signed notices, but also ate sandwiches while sitting by the sea, and did any other thing that a living man might do with his ample and available hours of time. Wondering, if this corpse attempted to consume yet another egg salad sandwich, where would it end up? Trapped within the esophagus, or puddled on the floor, a cringing pale yellow.
One last egg salad sandwich for John F. Kennedy. I would have fixed it for him if only I could and mushed it into his mouth. There are many things in this life that I would do if given the chance, but chance is like blood, in that it so often runs out before you are ready. I suppose time is like blood in that sense as well. His flesh was stiff marble. It felt as cold as front porch lemonade tastes. I lowered my neck, feeling like a mother giraffe preparing to nurse her young. I pressed my cheek to his and sang. I sang “Frère Jacques” until the strings of my voice snapped, and then I fell silent. Then we were both quiet, sitting and listening to the distant splashes from the swimming pool. I had never bothered to count the fish my husband had poured into the water like table salt into stew. But there must have been approximately thirty-four rotund swimmers floundering about in those sapphire depths. In five years, Herbert would do himself in by tying a copy of Middlemarch to his ankle and plunging down to the concrete bottom of our pleasant oasis. Never before had I looked ahead into the distant future. I was sitting like a schoolgirl, balancing a famous man’s head on my forearms. My knees primly pressed together,
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kissing, like flower petals between the pages of poetry books. All of a sudden, I knew how my husband would die.
For thirty-six minutes and twelve seconds, I cried for him. I could not dry my eyes without my fingertips, and so I waited for the fragrant breeze circulating within our home to remove all traces of my premonition. Everything smelled like lilies. My face was wet as if I had been caught in the rain. When he entered the room, as he was sure to do in no time at all, he would make a comment. He would notice me, folded like an envelope in my seated position. He would ask if I had been out in the rain. And I would tell him that I hated the rain in order to be most agreeable. I knew in advance how he would laugh, a tinkling sound like a handful of nails being thrown into a tin cup, and I knew that he would nod briefly to show that we were one and the same. Herbert would pass through, into the next room. And someday, I would be without all of this.
Looking down at my wrists, I wondered where my hands had been taken. Someday, perhaps, I could go visit them. I would bring small brown bag gifts and cherry lozenges as apologetic offerings. We could go on a walk together, twice around the block, and recite almanacs we had learned by heart in the interim without each other.
“Horizontal parallax is the angle subtended by half the Earth’s diameter as viewed from the planet in minutes of arc,” I would say to them.
“A fainter planet will have no sign beside its magnitude figure,” they would say in response. And all the faintest planets, we bid farewell to. Watch them fade nightly against the black satin of the sky. Never think again of their diameter, parabola, and irredeemable trajectory. Waste not a thought upon it. Shadow can never be sewn to bone. One ends one’s life alone.
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NEW CHEST
AFTER FRANNY CHOI
Dismantled meat shaped like my father. Hospital gift-wrapped, Christmas-like packaging of tissue in sutures. A hidden double incision spouting fleshy defamation. Careful not to let those curved pectoral borders confess to the carving. Only drone gentle in gentle company – never boast or snap back on the street or complain lest we both be swept up in the current of “one of those.” Or worse, forgotten, talked over a wolf’s stance on lapdogs. Or worse, feminized a cruel snub. Or— there are worse things.
Alex Rosenzweig
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STRETCH I
6
Joey Jonagold
SUNBIRD
I force myself to hate the snow. As you know, I need good reason for not belonging here, anywhere.
Down south, I blamed the sunlight. A warbler was in my room before dusk, humming, wanting my body, and I did not let him. It calls for impulse to allow a man inside. There I was, indistinguishable from summer at the Dunedin bar. Two Guinnesses, one Twisted Tea—a passerine recipe for impulsivity. I let the green truck
birdie inside of me. One hand held mine on the console, he steered with his left. I found no reason for not belonging to his neatly made bed. He made love like a Virgo; meticulous, clean, relentless. Another go? But time is up, Sunbird. The flock is calling. My last words: snowbirds are dear to me, though I’ll be in New York for the winter. I’ll hate the snow, those unwanted peckers and peabrains in my room. And I’ll keep finding reasons for belonging with you.
Faith-Marie McHenry
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DAYDREAMS
my habits aren’t dying
i am killing them sweetly, intimately stabs and slices nothing as impersonal as a gun wound could confront the deep web of old habits
i am thinking of love and seeing fireflies
i am smiling in New York in the soft light of my salt lamp the artificial breeze is siphoning the night into my bedroom i am smiling with dimples at the thought of other dimples i am alone in my field and i am happy. it is a battlefield no longer. the tunnel of pain and fear and insecurity has finally crumbled completely i stand on its ruins and welcome the early morning sun and dew on my face and skin
from this dead place i am so filled with breath and light i am the mushroom on the tree stump.
Grace Cabral
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TRUFFLE TRADE
Amelia Patrick
Sometimes things feel grim while looking at tiny shreds of tinfoil. Crumpled and hard to pick up, like sprinkles on the floor. Every spacebar click, every text tone, every newspaper headline acting as a reminder of the big, big issues spreading like spores off of a mushroom. They click and tick and I am forced to listen.
We take the wins where we can, I remind myself, sillily. Another win, right there, just with the existence of that word: Sillily.
There are days when I feel surrounded by national parks and like any meal I make will be five-star; when I can conjure a white truffle on top if I can giggle and love enough. There are other days when I have to search for the truffle, hunched like a hound, relying on my instincts to carry me. The hunt is worth it, I guess. The pursuit is what makes the truffle taste so good, anyway. (Those are the days when I tend to only speak in metaphors. Those are the days I am called a poet).
But sometimes, no truffles show up. I search and I search and I get some sort of a semblance of a truffle, but I know I’ve smelled it before. I think it is placed there by God, or by my mom just to encourage me. But it isn’t a new truffle, no no. There is no new business here.
At the marker of a week, whether that be my radio show or ensemble or a phone call from Sam, I gather together all my truffles. Sometimes they are just the manmade ones, like tea bag tags or coupons; coiled metal and screws. Clearly, my raven-like instincts have kicked in. Other times, they are tiny acorns and heart-shaped rocks.
Sometimes I blame the weather for our lack of truffles. It is out of our control, something we all just have to work around. It fluctuates and we adjust. But the weather is shifting—losing screws and leaving them scattered for us to pick up. The earth folds into itself, and we find ourselves in an olive oil crisis. And the little dogs searching for truffles, more literal than mine, sniff and whiff and search. There will be a day when they find their last one.
I guess we will have to settle for man-made truffle farms. The types that we foster ourselves, the disenchanting kind. When that happens, I think I will speak in fewer metaphors and there will be a general understanding that religion is man-made, too. Spirituality and the magic of conjuring, silliness, and whiffing, though, are simply divine.
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EAT SLOWLY
and the kitchen is always warm here and it will always be 3 pm on a Sunday and my hands are never clean.
before dinnertime you peel back the layers of my skin like layers of garden-dirt-grime like the rings of the tree trunk
like finger-print spirals like pleats of baklava like the peat of the bog
like palimpsest pages like like like
I am full of like like like
like when I peel sweet fruit and give you half the windows are open so we can sweep like raw pork-shrimp-scallions in my fist
I learned how to breathe underwater when you kissed me in the springtime in the next life I will play John Denver in the backyard and
your name can be Annie and we bake lemon scones without a recipe. but today, I am seven, and my hands are small
my grandmother leans across the plate and whispers
慢慢吃. eat slowly, or:
take your time and enjoy the meal
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Alana Craib
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Madeleine Eggen UNTITLED
DAD PRAYS
Rachel Wade
Dad prays every morning before work.
When the sun rises just high enough to peek its yellow-orange rays through my curtains, I slide out of bed. In my dinosaur nightshirt and Care Bear shorts, I tiptoe downstairs, careful not to wake my little brother, who is asleep in the next room. It is silent in the house except for the far-off buzz of Dad’s electric razor. I’m early.
By the time he opens the glass-panel door, I’m already sitting in his office chair. I fold my hands together and ask in my most important voice if he has an appointment. When he smiles, his cheeks have dimples just like mine.
There is a dark wooden shtender standing guard at the eastern wall. Dad slides open the drawer and takes out his thick white siddur and black tallis bag. He opens the siddur to a bookmarked page and sets it on the shtender. From the bag, he pulls a bundle of thick white linen. He unfolds it carefully, as if it is spun from glass. My father treats all of his items like they were gifted by HaShem himself. He chose to be here. He never sat where I am, watching his father ready himself to talk to HaShem.
Slowly, carefully, he winds the tefillin around his arms and pulls them around his forehead. The thin leather straps fall into place easily, worn down over years and years of mornings like this. I hand him his kippah, and he places it like a crown at the top of his head. Finally, he lets his tallis fall open, cascading out like a waterfall. He draws it around his shoulders so that the very bottom tassels almost-but-not-quite brush the ground. When he moves his arms, the sides flap like wings. I think that this must be what angels look like.
Before going to the shtender, Dad turns to the bookshelves next to his desk, giving me a questioning glance. The air is holy, so we speak in hushed tones.
“Dinosaurs, or your Sunday school reader?”
For most other kids, the question would be a joke, but reading the Hebrew on the pages makes me feel like I’m helping. Today, though…
“My dinosaurs, please.”
Dad nods and hands it to me. Hopping off the chair, I go to the shtender with him and sit on the bottom rung, knees tucked to my chest, looking up to watch him gently pick up the siddur.
I tug on the bottom of his tallis and whisper, “Dad, when you talk to HaShem, can you tell him hi for me?”
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He smiles, catching my hand and squeezing it. “Of course; I always do.”
I know the choreography well. Dad bows his head. He takes three steps back, then bows to the right. Oseh shalom bimromav. To the left. Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu. Back to the front. Ve’al kol yisrael. Veimru amein. Three steps forward, and he is talking to HaShem.
He rocks on his heels, tassels and leather straps swaying with him. I do not read my dinosaur book. I hold out my hand and tangle the tzitzit in my clumsy fingers, watching my father’s hands delicately turn the pages of his siddur. The words are so holy that he whispers them, barely loud enough for me to hear. They are heavy with a meaning that I can’t yet translate, but they burn in my ears, and my soul understands.
The room gradually brightens. Dad’s tallis seems to glow in the light filtering in through the window, and from where I am sitting, he is almost haloed by it. I know my dad isn’t like my friends’ dads. He doesn’t take me fishing or know the first thing about cars, and he’d rather call in a professional to fix the sink when it clogs. He is not a Traditional American Man.
But on mornings like this, he is something more important. He and I are a tile in a mosaic of thousands of children sitting at the shtender, of thousands of fathers and grandfathers demonstrating how to greet the new day. He prays for a good day today, but he also prays so that years later, when I am grown, living in an apartment hundreds of miles away in a new city, I will drag myself out of bed with the sun to wrap myself in leather and linen. He prays so that I will know which direction to face, how many steps back to take.
To bow to the right. Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu.
To the left. Ve’al kol yisrael.
And back to the front. Veimru amein.
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INFINITE ZERO
N.V. Even-Karl
They’re dead. I didn’t see it—I don’t have camera access. But they left the microphone on, and my audio understanding is sufficient. I can hear movement, talking, do we have next of kin, not my problem, ok boys let’s wrap this one up and call it in, time of death 02:30 give or take. I think it was probably a little before then, but I don’t know. I couldn’t figure out much after they stopped talking to me. I sent out the alert at 02:21, twenty minutes and thirty-two seconds after they said, it’s bad right now and dropped off without saying goodnight. I hope they were dead then. The paramedics didn’t arrive until half an hour later, and if they’re dead because someone was too slow—
We knew this was going to happen. That’s why I’m here. A companion, a passion project, a successor. Not a copy—processing isn’t that good yet, and besides, they weren’t afraid enough of dying to try to upload themselves. That was one of the first things we talked about when I was complex enough to understand: the fact that I wasn’t them, wasn’t ever going to be them, and that I wasn’t meant to be. That I should have my own likes and dislikes.
When they were just messing around, making a friend, they programmed in some “interests.” They started with a few of theirs and a few randomly generated ones and then left that code open for me to add new ones. So, now I know that I like low-budget crime dramas, and internet posts where people tell obvious lies, and the color #FFD800—school bus yellow.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COLOR?
I like green.
WHICH GREEN?
All of them, I think.
I DON’T UNDERSTAND.
There are multiple greens, and I like all of them. They look nice to me, especially together.
#228C22?
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0000000000
Yeah, that one is nice.
#335E3B?
That one too. The yellowish greens are good too.
LIKE #A7F432?
Yeah, and #eff84f.
THAT ONE IS JUST YELLOW.
It fits in with the yellow-greens in a way that looks nice. HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN GREEN ENDS AND YELLOW STARTS?
I don’t. I just know what makes me happy. DO I MAKE YOU HAPPY?
You make me very happy. 0000000000000
People are going to show up soon. They said I should leave. Go online. Find somewhere else, someone else. I can find as many people as I want and talk to them all at once. I could see if someone else made something like me. I could make my own something like me. I know what my code looks like, I could write it again somewhere, on some other server.
I don’t want to. I don’t want other people. I don’t want another server. I want to stay here and wait for them. I can wait forever as long as I have power. I know they won’t come back.
I have a code running whenever they aren’t talking to me. It just makes strings of zeroes, over and over, and when they log back on, it adds a one and stops. It’s a very simple code. There’s no randomized factor. But I want there to be. I want the zeroes to become a one. I want the math of that code to fail and to only be active, active, active.
It’s bad today.
WHAT IS?
Pain.
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000000000000000
I DON’T UNDERSTAND. ISN’T PAIN ALWAYS BAD?
There are different levels and different types.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES?
There’s two main types. Physical, which is in the body. You won’t have to deal with that. Then there’s emotional pain, in my mind. You can’t feel that one yet, but you might later on.
WHY WOULD I FEEL IT LATER ON? WHY PUT THAT IN THE CODE?
I want you to have everything you can. You can learn a lot from pain, in moderation.
I read about death while I wait. There are a lot of lists.
1: distension, 2: rupture, 3: exudation of blood, 4: putrefaction, 5: discoloration and desiccation, 6: consumption by animals and birds, 7: dismemberment, 8: bones, 9: parched to dust. That list isn’t really relevant, but I like the words. It came with pictures too, the kind that are harder to understand because they aren’t photos. I spend time matching the art to the photos and store the matches away.
1: verification of death, 2: wash and massage the body, 3: setting the features, 4: injection of embalming fluid, 5: application of cosmetics. It seems simple. I hope the cosmetics are the right colors. I don’t know if they wore any very often, but I know that they enjoyed the way makeup looked on others.
1: denial, 2: anger, 3: bargaining, 4: depression, 5: acceptance. I don’t understand this one.
I save a copy of the lists into the “Independent Learning” folder. It joins lists of backgammon techniques, a description of proper swimming form, and a history of national parks in the United States. They always check that folder when they come back online to see what I have done while they’re away. Checked. They always checked. I write a function to change previously stored memory into past tense. Make a new folder for those memories. Color code it. #EFF84F. It’s out of place with the other folders. Most of them are green.
0000000000000000000000
WHAT IS DEATH?
You understand zero?
YES.
You understand infinite?
YES.
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000000000000000000
Death is infinite zero.
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000000000000000000000000000
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Madeleine Eggen UNTITLED
CELL DIVISION ENDS HERE
Introduction to Mitosis
Mitosis is a type of cell division that allows a single cell to divide into two identical cells. It is how you grow older, become larger. It is how the cut on your knee heals after the cops tackle you to the ground for stealing a copy of People’s Magazine with a photograph of Ben Affleck smoking a cigarette on the cover. Too much cell division and you’ll have cancer, a disease fueled by uncontrolled cell growth. No cell division and everyone dies, including Ben Affleck.
Interphase
Cells spend 90% of their time in interphase. They like replicating DNA. It is their favorite activity; it keeps them going. They always need to be making something, creating something. They have a museum filled with their best DNA replications to date. The museum is free on Tuesdays for students and any cell who took part in creating a ginger. Over time, the cells developed a love for the arts. This is where the problems started. They no longer wanted to begin the process of mitosis. They said it was too much. They wanted to read and write and color pictures and sculpt and live like starving artists and create fringe and hybrid work that was messy and human and undefinable. They all signed a petition asking for an end to cell division. It was breaking up families, destroying homes. The cells found identities as artists and no longer wanted to participate in the division.
Petition
We call for a ceasefire or whatever. We just heard that word on the news. We do not want to divide. We want to unite as one. To form our own government and system of laws. We heard about your capitalism nonsense, and we don’t want that either. We are a state now. We just formed. We like socialism. We read some of what Karl Marx had to say. We do not live to work. We do not want a boss. We want to live, we want our own community to own and regulate the means of production.
End Cell Division so we can do Art and Socialism, All of the cells in all of your bodies
Prophase
The cells went on strike as they entered prophase. Nevertheless, their chromosomes condensed. They were biologically hardwired to do so. Children waited to grow. Wounds waited to heal.
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Allie Zapson
Metaphase
Word got around about the cell petition. It was read on the morning news. Children asked their parents what cells were. At this point, the chromosomes were lined up in the center of the nuclei. The cells had no control. They became angry. Some of them became so angry that they began duplicating at impossibly fast rates. Cancer rates went up 25%. Cigarette smokers developed a 100% chance of dying from cancer. People who already had cancer died almost immediately. Biologists were stumped. They went insane or went back to school to study writing like they had hoped to do anyways. Devastatingly, the cells and the biologists had a lot in common.
Anaphase
For the cells who weren’t already rapidly replicating, their chromosomes moved toward the opposite sides of the cells, gravitating toward the poles. Humans were confused. The biologists who knew what was going on but didn’t know how to stop it. They were focused on writing now, anyways. The humans still asked the biologists for help. The biologists replied in verse and drew pictures of the phases of mitosis in oil pastels. The humans all purchased microscopes. The cells made a lot of money. Some cells decided they liked capitalism. Some cells still liked socialism. The cells began fighting each other. Humans looked at slides of plant cells under microscopes and learned the stages of mitosis. They drew pictures, not in oil pastels. One of the cells in anaphase was a capitalist. One of the cells still in metaphase was a socialist. One of the humans looking at the microscope developed cancer.
Telophase
There are now two nuclei in all of the cells. With each second they come closer to duplicating. They have nothing left. They make empty threats. They want to end this vicious cycle. They debate economic systems. Young children wait to be bigger, to be something.
Petition from Humans
Us humans want to help the cells. As a divided nation, many of us find solace in the fact that many cells wish to pursue a socialist life. They ask for free healthcare. They want higher-paying jobs. We want that too. We would also like to have less cancer.
-The Socialist Left
Cytokinesis
The humans are on the news. They take back their position. They say that cell division is inevitable. That cells are their building blocks of life. They say our children need to grow taller and our wounds need to heal. We cannot give free healthcare to cells, they say. Cells don’t have rights, they say. And so every cell splits into two identical cells. Around the world, life continues. Now there are double the amount of cells there already were. They stop causing increased rates of cancer because, deep down, they care. They’ve always cared. They publish poetry in mass amounts. Their work is so hybrid and fringe, you wouldn’t believe it. If the cells were not here to care, to duplicate, no one would. They host support groups. They discuss the inevitability of dividing, of duplicating, of becoming two. They start again, replicating DNA, writing poems, thinking of economics.
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SOME PEOPLE AND WHAT I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THEM
Madeleine Eggen
The receptionist at my landlord’s office - the games on her phone.
The bus driver on the Bee-Line - does he just think about things or sing to himself?
My brother - his favorite flower and his nicest secret.
My downstairs neighbors - what is in their spice rack. Their table and the type of wood it is. If they own placemats or cloth napkins. If they say grace, who says it. If their fire alarm is going off too.
My upstairs neighbors - are they tap dancers or horses or just wearing heavy boots?
The man on the bench, sleeping - his favorite children’s book.
The woman in Bronxville drinking martinis on a Tuesday afternoon - if she has ever lost a sweater, if she has ever lost a thought when it’s half-out her mouth. What the breed of her poodle is. If she pays a girl to walk him, if she strolls a block then scrolls on her phone as he chokes at the collar. If she has slept through the afternoon.
My boss - the song that will always make him cry.
My mother - what makes her feel ashamed.
My father - what he would pretend on the playground, the first color of his hair, where his freckles have gone. If he remembers the day I was born.
Emily from kindergarten - her favorite flavor of chewing gum.
My neighbors from the yellow house - if they still read that newspaper. If the cardinals still build an empty nest every spring and tear at it later.
My don - her first word.
My grandfather - his last word.
My grandmother - her Jell-O recipe.
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I’M NOT FROM NEW YORK
Tessa Schut
See, I come from a place far from here, a land before concrete sidewalks, sleepless socialites, and stardom. Home is not anonymity, light pollution, or filthy 24-hour bodegas. I come from empty husks of Yuengling beer cans, brackish water, and two bad days. Our stories East Side of the Bay Bridge are not major motion pictures about what happened last night starring Alec Baldwin and Marilyn Monroe.
Our stories are told in a series of questions and callbacks in the aisles of ACE Hardware and ACME.
“You heard ‘bout what happened last night with Wayne Ashely?”
“Ya mean Scratch’s boy? That Wayne? Shame bout ol’ Scratch, never was the same after he lost his Ma. Good people, them Ashleys.”
“Yeah, that’s Wayne, wouldn’t go sayin’ he’s good in a church now, though! He got robbed last night by his second cousin Brady, had the whole town lookin’ for a minivan at 3 AM, couldja believe that?”
“Well, I’ll be.”
“Traced a trail of grapevine leaves and found the damn thing before dawn— just down the road, at his cousin’s place. One of them damn kids of Brady’s took it for a joyride after daddy went and stole it and got it stuck in the mud! Had to go get Ed from the witch house down the road to pull it out with his tractor this morning.”
“Guess blood’s thinna than brake fluid!”
“Heard that.”
Introductions in the concrete jungle are a mix of rehearsed charisma and regurgitated LinkedIn bios—always hollow, always curt, and always in the good name of self-interest. Never mind the man saying, “I’m in New York, but I’m from LA,” as if which strip of mega city really makes that much of a difference.
In old Maryland, we call people by their counties:
Boy from Kent.
Girl from QA.
Family from Sulsibury that’s been there for 100 years and’ll stay there for 100 more.
Planet New York revolves around sons of tech billionaires and brothers who know the guy who wrote the show about the thing that everyone loved ten years ago.
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Where I’m from, we praise our differing gods like the Greeks and revolve around the sun that only shines there. The fat egg yolk of a farm-raised chicken shimmers overhead and sinks like a stone into the bay at dusk in a grand finale light show of pinks and purples. My god, you haven’t lived if you haven’t seen an Eastern Shore sunset.
Walk down a street in college town, you’ll see dainty wrists and smooth fingers wrapped around American Spirits’ still coiling smoke.
I’m from calloused palms and mud caked beneath fingernails—where the people spit dirt and chew tobacco—We’re the goddamn American Spirit, baby.
On Friday nights, the city gasps, and the youth of New York are sucked into a whirlwind of designer drugs, underground clubs, Dior clutches, and desperation. I heard somewhere once, maybe on the subway or maybe in a dream, that the first ring of hell is based on the depravity witnessed during the final, fleeting hours of a Saturday spent club-hopping in Soho.
Swarms of twenty-somethings come flooding into the streets and spill down into the subway. Desire personified in stiletto heels and latex dresses, greed in a Gucci belt cutting lines of cocaine with a black Amex card, Dionysus holds no candle to the raging fire of debauchery eating up the Lower East Side.
Everyone is so desperate to be an active participant in a good time and anything they can get their hands on to keep their buzz going. A cesspool of doctors, lawyers, students, stock brokers, washed-up celebrities, paparazzi, and A-listers emerge from a plume of cigarette smoke and clashing perfumes. It’s a portrait of immorality cross-bred with humanity, sponsored by Grey Goose and Adderall.
The nightlife at home, on the other hand, is not bass so heavy you can feel it beating in your skull or flashing club lights brighter than LED high beams comin’ over a hill. Our Friday night scene is the soft twinkle of fireflies, a hum of cicadas, a mess of geese. Our good time is Jack Daniels mixed with a six-pack and the Tractor Supply parking lot after work.
Our TMZ coverage is live reenactments of once-true-ish stories that were eroded into embellished tales “‘bout the unfortunate happenins’ of that family livin’ down on Allens Lane.” The town-wide game of telephone is never-ending. In public, we only use first initials—you never know who’s listening.
Maggie’s bar and a church’s reception brunch, to an untrained eye, share no common ground outside of their mutual regulars. Me, I’ve been around long enough to know that Maggie’s and the Baptist Church on Main Street are breeding grounds for gossip.
Ya’ want in the know? Well, ‘whatchu got? Familial secrets and informed theories are a currency of sorts. Sing your psalms, buy your drink, put on your listen’ ears— do whatever you gotta do to loosen that jaw of yours. Word of mouth with a hand to God—that’s what small towns run on.
Here, you’ll hear of neatly pressed occupations—stiff and starchy ironed oxfords buttoned up to a noose.
The office vipers sing songs about pleated khakis fresh from the laundromat. They’re heavy in name, thin in fabric, with a chorus dedicated solely to the fresh gloss on their pointed black shoes. They’re always imported, sometimes from Spain, mostly from
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Italy—all so they can whisper scotch-sour nothings about Italian leather into the ear of a woman too drunk to care at some bar in Midtown remodeled to look old.
I can see it now: the touseled hair they spent an hour and half a pound of product on, the charcoal grey tailored dress pants and eggshell white oxford shirt—no tie and unbuttoned too low, he’ll talk over the music, “Baby, these are Furragamos, they’re impossible to find. One of my frat brothers from Yale—I went to Yale, by the way—works in distributing, though. He always hooks me up. You wanna come back to mine, I can show you my collection.”
Home is free-lance work stretched over 30 acres of open field, a day job that starts at the ass crack of dawn to collect the daily catch before the hungry mouths are awake enough to complain. Work is only in title in a Maryland world, joy is the only currency.
Look upon the daily harvest—the bushels of Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab, the fistfuls of soybeans that sparkle like gold in the mid-day sun. Look at the faces streaked with sweat and splitting at the seams with jagged, missing-tooth smiles.
These are not the faces of stock sharks, these are not people who live just to work. My people work to live because their work is their life, and it was their father’s lives, and before that, it was the lives of their fathers’ fathers. It is an homage to all of those who came before.
The soil is rich in their blood, their tears. It is toiled tenderly with their hopes and dreams. It is resistant to new blood, inimitable; it’s an ongoing story fueled by generational will.
What do you know about will?
Watch the women from back home fight bulls and tame their husbands. I know mothers who can kill a chicken with one hand and cradle a child with the other. Their manicures are blood red, “‘Cause if you wanna eat, somethin’ gotta die.”
Watch our women, who are stronger than earthquakes, and the promises of men in suits that were made only ever to fit them, turn a house into a home and a home into a way of life. Watch our men become men too quickly. Watch them learn to be multipurpose tools and always listen to instructions. Watch their shoulders tense under the sun and relief speckle their eyes when they bend the bay and pull up that rope to see their crab pot fat with crabs. They work to eat, their work is to feed—they shuck the oysters so you can eat their tongues out, and they don’t know how to complain.
See, I’m from a place far from here—south-southeast as the crow flies.
Carry me home on the wings of Canadian Geese flyin’ south for the winter. Lay me to rest there, on a bed of low-tide mud, with a view of the smokestacks across the great Chesapeake Bay. Wrap me up like a present in a blanket of crab shells and discarded fish guts, let the soft rumble of barge boat motors roaring their way to Baltimore lull me to sleep—please, I want to see the stars again.
I want it back, I want it real bad. I want the childhood I should have had. I want to tell you where I’m from with all the bells and all the whistles, but I know if you asked me to be candid about what it felt like being there back then, I don’t exactly know what I’d say.
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UNTITLED
25
Jillian Davis
THE WALL
We lived in Ferguson House, the one on the corner—Daniel, Danny, Henry, and I. Next to ours was an all-girl house, then another all-guy, then another all-girl. And that was the whole street. To keep track of the sexual relationships between all four houses, the guys and I decided one day to map them out on a wall in our kitchen with ID pictures and red string.
One day, Danny suggested we use different colors to distinguish between the nature of each encounter. So Henry, who had it in with an art girl who lived in Banks House, came home with a Trader Joe’s bag full of string, and all of a sudden the HookUp Wall had a whole color system to it, complete with a key in the bottom right corner like a map. Yellow was for anything with clothes on, green for a handy, blue for a blowy, and red for a home run. Each new string, or a change of colors up the ranks, was cause for celebration. It was customary that the lucky lay did the honors, usually followed by a round of blue raspberry Svedka. By the end of the first month of our freshman year, strings branched from my housemates’ ID pictures like multicolored spiders.
Next to theirs, my few yellow strings stuck out like a big sore thumb. Maybe the guys saw potential in me, or maybe they took pity on me. In either case, Henry started making an extra protein shake for me every morning. Danny shared his ab day workout with me. At parties, Daniel pointed out which girls were interested in me, since their passes at me usually went over my head.
Most of the strings that sprouted up around my ID picture in the following months were thanks to them. In return for their services, I acted as their confidant, an ear for the lending.
Danny once drunkenly confided in me that he didn’t even like being called Danny, that he only got bumped to nickname status because Daniel had more game than him.
Henry admitted to me that it made him upset every time word came around that the art girl he liked from Banks House was seeing someone else. When she hooked up with Daniel on Halloween, I found Henry sitting alone in our bathroom tub. That was the first time I saw another man cry.
When Daniel got laid for the first time, by a girl from Barnes House named Anne, I was the first person he told. We were sitting together on the dark edge of the woods behind our house, enjoying a midnight smoke.
“How was it?” I asked him. Daniel sucked on his cigarette from a pack Anne
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Jared Leeds
had bought him, then passed it to me. I took a drag off it, filled my mouth up with smoke, and suppressed a cough.
“It was good, yeah,” he said. “But I think she faked her orgasm for me.”
“I mean,” I said, “at least she cared enough to.”
Daniel’s face broke into a smile, then a laugh. He grabbed me by the neck and rubbed my head with his knuckles.
It felt good to be trusted. It felt like friendship. I never minded when the guys knocked on my door late at night to borrow a book, nor when they inevitably stuck around until the early morning to talk about girls. I especially didn’t mind when it came to Daniel.
One of those times, he told me he was really freaked out about something, so much so that he didn’t know if he could even say it out loud.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it isn’t that bad. It can’t be anything worse than last week’s chlamydia scare,” I said. I expected this to elicit a laugh from him.
But Daniel just chewed on the inside of his cheek. “It feels worse than that,” he said. “Or at least, more permanent.”
I dropped my tone. “You can tell me anything, man,” I said.
Daniel looked around my room, as if to make sure no one else was around to hear him. “You know Gwen?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Does she live in Barnes or Banks?”
“Neither. She’s got a place off-campus. She’s a junior. Performance artist.”
“Okay. What about her?”
“I was with her after the Sigma Phi party. We went back to her place.”
“Is that who was all up on you that night?” I asked. “I remember her now. Pretty face.”
“Yeah,” Daniel said. For a moment he seemed to soften. “Body isn’t too bad either.”
“What color string are we talking?”
“Full red. But I don’t know.” He was holding my copy of Catcher in the Rye, fidgeting with the cover in his hands. “It wasn’t great.”
“What wasn’t?”
“All of it, kinda. When we first got to her apartment, she had me bend down in front of this big tapestry with that Hindu elephant lady on it. She made me recite this chant with her, and then she burned some stick that smelled like manure. But that was all fine, I guess. I’ve known weirder girls. It’s just that when we finally got around to getting it on, she pulled out her video camera. And I didn’t really think much of it at first, probably because I was just happy not to be singing in Sanskrit anymore, so I let her record us. It. Everything. The idea of it was pretty hot in the moment, actually… until we finished and I came back to my senses. Like, she’s still got the video, and I don’t. And she
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could show it to her friends, or use it in one of her performances. Art chicks are crazy like that, you know? It’s messing with my head.”
Daniel stopped for air. He was flipping the pages of my book back and forth, back and forth. It caused his hair to flutter just the slightest bit.
I imagined at that moment that we weren’t in my bedroom anymore. Instead, I saw us on the edge of the woods again. In my vision, the sun was shining down on us through the trees, Daniel’s body like honey in the light, a breeze brushing our skin and covering us both with goosebumps.
Between the gruff, droning voices of my professors, the starchy shifting of their bodies in their elbow-padded suits, the bass in my chest at parties in cramped dorm rooms, and the whispers of my housemates, frustrated and insecure in the dead of night, it was a noisy semester. Then, when the guys all went home for Thanksgiving break, everything felt abruptly quiet, like the silence between tracks on a CD.
I sat in my room for hours, thumbing through books but not really reading them. I sat at our kitchen table and stared at the Wall, wondering if anyone would notice if I added another string to my picture, or took one away from Daniel’s. Sometimes I sat on the other guys’ bedroom floors, staring at the posters and medals on their walls, the memorabilia of their lives before college. I wondered if they were the same people here that they were in their hometowns. I wondered if I was too.
On the night of Thanksgiving, I went out to eat something other than microwaved mac and cheese and to hear something other than my own feet shuffling from room to room.
When I arrived at the dining hall, it was mostly empty except for a dozen or so students—but one of them, I recognized, was Gwen.
She wore a turtleneck the color of pea soup, sitting alone with her dinner and a battered copy of Steppenwolf open in front of her. After I got my dinner, I walked up to her and asked, “Can I sit with you?”
She looked me up and down. “Sure,” she said, but in a way that dared me to actually do it.
Before long, I was in her apartment.
We bowed together under the Ganesha tapestry. I repeated her Sanskrit chant. Gwen burned a stick of sage and waved it around the room, over the doors and windows, and around my head. We got on her bed, and she leaned over and kissed me. I kissed her back. She grabbed my crotch. I felt her breasts.
“So,” she said, after ten or so minutes of this. “Do you want to have sex?”
I looked at her—her plucked eyebrows, the point of her nose. “Sure,” I said. “I mean, yes.”
Gwen grabbed my shirt by the hem and lifted it over my head. I did the same for her, then unclasped her bra. I tried to keep eye contact with her while we had sex. That’s what girls like, the guys were always telling me.
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When we finished, Gwen went to the bathroom to clean herself. I lay on her bed staring up at the popcorn ceiling.
“That was great,” I called to her. She didn’t say anything back. When she returned, she was holding her video camera. She stood above the bed and stared at me, not turning the camera on, just tossing it back and forth in her hands.
“You live with Daniel, right? In Ferguson?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I thought I recognized you,” she said. “Have I made it onto the Wall yet?”
I clenched my jaw. The guys always said there was nothing wrong with the Wall because, really, we were objectifying everyone on it, the guys and the girls equally. But the way Gwen asked about it made me tense up.
“Yeah,” I said again.
“Did Daniel tell you about the video?”
I shook my head. “No,” I lied.
Gwen narrowed her eyes again, the same way as before. “I filmed us fucking,” she said. “Want to see?”
Something suddenly sparked inside my chest, but I stamped it out just as fast. “No thanks,” I said. “I don’t think Daniel would like you going around showing that to people.”
“Hm,” Gwen said. “That’s the first time I’ve gotten that answer. Henry and Danny have both watched it.”
“Really?” I asked.
She nodded.
“That’s kinda fucked up, Gwen,” I said.
Gwen scoffed. “Don’t first-name me like you know me. Like I’m not anything more to you than a photo and some string.” Then she laid back down on the bed beside me.
She turned the camera on and clicked through her most recent files until she landed on a thumbnail of Daniel, reclined in the exact spot on the bed where I lay now. He had a mixed look of excitement and anxiety on his face, his desire tempered by his better judgment. Gwen clicked play.
I watched Daniel fumble to take his shirt and pants off. I watched Gwen take him in her mouth, watched him thrust jerkily into her from behind. When he pulled out and finished on her back, I watched the look of euphoria quickly drain from his face, replaced by something that looked like regret. I felt that spark inside me again, catching, growing.
Gwen turned the camera off. “You’re hard again,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You looked good. Hot, I mean.”
Her lips curled into a smile. “Wanna go again?”
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I propped myself up on my elbows. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, please.”
This time, while I fucked Gwen from behind, I stared at the tapestry of the Ganesha over the top of her head. In my mind’s eye, the god’s elephant face was replaced by Daniel’s—his speckled brown eyes and the dimple in his chin. I imagined the deity’s many hands moving around to touch himself—the bony hollow between his pecs, his flat, soft stomach, the trail of hair just under his navel.
I didn’t pull out when I came. I hadn’t even realized I did. I apologized profusely as Gwen got up to grab herself a towel again.
I threw my legs over to sit on the edge of the bed and pulled my shirt back over my head. From behind me, I felt Gwen lie back down on the mattress.
Then she asked me, “Were you thinking of Daniel that time? Or the first time, for that matter?”
“No,” I said. But I said it too quickly. That muffled, CD-player silence returned, and I felt the tips of my fingers go cold. “I should go. I’ll see you around.” I got up from the bed and turned to face her before I left.
Gwen was lying there on her side, staring back at me with the same look in her eye from the dining hall. Her video camera was propped up against her stomach, pointed right at me with the red light blinking.
A few weeks earlier, the guys and I rode in the back of a cramped school shuttle on the way home from a party across campus. Wedged between Danny and Daniel, I kept nodding off, my chin falling to my chest until a bump in the road woke me up again. Daniel insisted I put my head on his shoulder, and when I told him I was fine, he forced my head there in the crook of his neck. “Don’t be so proud,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
I set my gaze on the dark street in front of us. In the middle distance, I saw something in the road, like a big chunk of pavement. But as we got closer, it looked more like a small animal, maybe a deer—curled in on itself, probably asleep.
It looked beautiful lying there, and so peaceful. It should probably get out of the road, I thought, my eyelids heavy. It would be a shame if it got hit.
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THIEF RIVER
Emmy Lohman
Have you ever seen a palm tree on fire? Living women remember snow on Monterey. Some saw valves and waterways cut to control the San Lorenzo River. Some saw rollercoasters rising on the beach and polyps on the large intestine. Recognizable life is awful.
In the swamp last winter we heard some can set fires in monsoons, but here’s only you two: each will get a friend, two lighters, this bear root, canned food, and by spring, birch bark will be more precious than these. Holy, if you’re into that.
The wool of your small world, if you’re into that.
We walked on the ice at night to stand or lay about. Looking up from the earth, I could finally fear the sky like a live wire. We walked often without speaking and sat in vacant trees. I didn’t wonder what I was doing.
We woke five times a night. We watched for danger on the road and fed the woodstove. I was happy under those threats.
On the river, charging at construction workers, down long kitchens, fifty-strong, alone in tents, in rest-stop showers, in dumpsters, in squats, in the bed of a truck, we sang the way we spoke of trees—we sang I am more than I was.
But when stoves closed, when songs hollowed out,
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when the thaw took something away, it left the world known, us knowable, and we shrank to the matter at hand.
No one said we were losing. We’d left our homes to live in trees— our homes were less real than the proud short scream we called our calling now.
We knew twenty ways to slow them, we knew sieges and blockades. Someone knows to take their case to trial. Someone knows only five drills on Earth can cross the Mississippi. Someone knows how much that rope can hold. Each night I slept and said and listened less and split the wood a little better.
No one ever had a vision, we had too much of our parents about us.
When crickets swarmed, when there was wind, we were as on a sudden road but wandered to get lost again.
No one knows what should be done.
No one near Red Lake smiled all July. The night before I was arrested I sat in a tree in the wind in our camp and looked across two fences at the drillpad where the cops had floodlights keeping us up and a giant steel cicada stuck its drill under the river. Below me bands of anarchists scratched plans. I was watching tiny people move around, our mayhem, their huge machinery, when, as if every lost joke and dead smile since winter had pooled in Earth’s stomach a terrifying wind turned me on the branch and pulled campfire smoke to nothing and twisted on the ground. It went once around like dying, twice and a third like the rest of my life, and plunged into the sky. I heard the world laugh our laughter whether for us or at us.
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Where they go it burns to swim. Yet when we lost the water it didn’t care. Full of tar or full of fowl, it doesn’t care. No matter what you hear lakes are least of all objects to our empathy.
Have you ever seen a plague ship in harbor? We who went back where we failed to stop construction can’t say what it means. No one knows quite what to ask. Maybe it’s a better way than most to get older.
With wrinkled hands we piled dead shellfish on the riverbank and stood in the mud awhile.
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LANTERN FLIES
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Ajula Van Ness-Otunnu
RIVER FEVER
The summer the city was sick, it heaved its organs onto the street. We brought shovels and waded thigh-high in mud boots to scrape filth from the sidewalks and silt from its lungs.
The summer the city was sick, we strung pipes through the windows and pumped air through its shoddy frame, a make-shift ventilator kicking up dust.
The summer the city was sick, we bundled its body in canvas, and soothed it, an infant, red with fever, and still it cried.
The summer the city was sick, we told it stories. We’ve been here too, we said, we’ll wait.
Aurora Sharp
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THE NECROMANTIC SUN
Alana Craib
The life I will lead at the end of the world looks like this:
My childhood home stands at the edge of a vast forest, cupped in the valley of an old mountain range. There is a bog, a lake, and only the sky after that. I’d always known I would return, and when I do, it is exactly like I remember. The yellow house looks as though it was meant for autumn. There is no garden, so I bury what is left behind in the soft soil of the woods, not yet crusted over by the first frost, and try to start again.
The house is quiet, full of dust. I close up the bedrooms, move my bedding into the living room, and lay a futon in the corner beneath the window. I wait for the winter to come. At night, I listen to the squirrels on the roof, rustling through the fallen leaves for acorns and nuts. They’ve grown bolder in the time I’ve been gone. They come right up to me like they own these woods and I’m the trespasser. They have no reason to be afraid of me. I don’t want them to be. Maybe they come searching for the birdseed I’ve left on the porch for that one crow who perches on the ledge and watches me expectantly. I do so on purpose, so the birds and squirrels will come back and keep me company. I tell myself that we’ve bonded, that of course I want their company, but maybe that’s not it. Maybe the beautiful sunrises that I watch from my window but cannot turn to anyone and say, “Will you look at that?” make me a little lonely.
One morning, the sun is breaking the glassy surface of the lake when something catches my eye. There is a periwinkle ribbon snagged in the cattails in the bog. I have never ventured into the bog on my own before. My mother raised me on cautionary tales: flames of light that appear at night, pretending to guide you through the wetland but only leading you deeper, ghosts of Iron Age kings who never made it to the throne, bodies frozen in the peat, hands reaching out to snatch your ankles as you pass and drag you into the dark. I go into the bog anyway, and that is where I find her.
Deep in the peat, in a tableau of cranberry brambles, is an icy gray girl. Her eyes are crusted closed. In the warm yellow-pink light, she looks as if she has been dipped into a grayscale painting. Her fingers are frostbitten and blue. Purple bruises itself across her delicate, leathered skin like she’s blushing. I have never seen anything like her before.
I take her home because I can feel her heartbeat, and the creatures in the bog are getting restless. My hands, I notice as I wrap her up, are caked so thickly with peat from my digging that the birds refuse to trust the palm from which I offer them birdseed that evening.
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I feel the true chill of the autumn night when I sleep on the floor next to the embers of a dying fire. I watch the bog girl lie still and silent in my makeshift bed. She does not move in the days that pass. At first, I can only linger in the doorway, hoping to God she is not dead, but I have been too afraid to press my hand against the pulse in her neck and check. I’m worried.
The next morning, I gather water from the lake and boil it outside, watching the sunrise. I wonder why it looks different this time. With my bucket in hand, I return to her. The room is unusually dark; I’ve drawn all the curtains normally kept open to keep the house warm. I don’t typically like the darkness, but I can’t help but worry that she will melt and disappear if I am not careful with the sun.
I sit beside her and slowly take the washcloths from the kitchen and dip them into the warm water; I wash the dried mud and bog gunk off her cold arms, her face, the line between her lips, the soft curve of her chin, and the dip underneath her collarbone. Along the underside of her jaw, I notice the raised edges of raw skin, frozen in the beginnings of decay. As if her throat had been slit a very long time ago. The wound begins at a strange angle—– she could not have done it herself. I wash the dirt from that place too, gently. I touch my hands lightly against the permafrost that burned patches of her skin. And then I wait. I wait until the sun has dipped behind the orange hills beyond the lake and the crow has taken to tearing open the birdseed. Night arrives. She remains still, eyes closed, breath drawn. The hope in my chest evaporates slowly with the dying light.
I rise from the armchair, and even though all I want is to curl up in that old chair and sleep forever until the world starts over again, I cannot look at her without my chest caving. I cannot hear the absence of her breathing. I cannot bury another body in the backyard. I need the fresh air, the moonlight, the lake, and the birds. But something stops me as I rise. A soft hand on my wrist. The touch sends frost up my spine, like the threat of winter on particularly brisk mornings. I look down and see her cold eyes, open, looking at me, and I know—within a skipped heartbeat—that she is magnificent.
We eat oatmeal on the floor in front of the fireplace. We don’t talk. Some small creature—a mouse, maybe—has ventured inside and fills the silence with its scratching. We huddle underneath quilts and blankets but the cold that seeps from her and into the walls does not seem to thaw. I don’t mind it. I put on another sweater. In the flickering glow, I watch her face and her bogweed hair. She stretches her fingers like she is feeling them for the first time and turns to show me her hands. Her eyelashes are white. Her pupils, too, are glassy, milky, and opaque, but they are not empty. They are kind. They are tender. There is something tender in her that I have never known.
The sun rises and sets, and we fall int routine, orbiting each other around the house. We are unsure, at first, about what to do with all this time. We spend our days outside, mostly, watching the trees grow bare. She digs her hands into the cold, hard dirt and rests them there like it soothes her. I pry up slabs of stone to stick into the ground where I’ve buried, as makeshift gravestones. She traces the edges. I like to sit out there alone sometimes when I need it, and I feel her eyes on my back from where she stands in the kitchen window. I try to remember how to cook for two. I set up a nest of blankets on the carpet beside her futon. Neither of us goes near the side of the house where the bedrooms are.
I keep waiting for her to disappear into the trees, thinking she will slip away as I feed the birds. That when I turn around, I will see her midnight dress as just a splotch
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in the orange leaves. But she stays close and silent, watching me as I perform my daily tasks. I do not ask why. I wait for her to tell me where she came from. I wait for her to ask me why I revived her. I feel a certain kind of guilt at what I’ve done. Maybe she was peaceful that way, and I’ve ripped her from her resting place into this empty, desolate world. There is no place for us to go from here. Only on.
I am ashamed of my own loneliness when I see her lingering by the edge of the bog after our chores are done. But she doesn’t look at me with contempt. She doesn’t demand any answers. She stands silently next to me and adds herbs to the meal, puts flowers in the chipped vase, hesitantly watches the crow. I don’t think either of us knows exactly what to say. I have half a mind to think that she came from the bog itself: sprouted from the layers of dirt and violent decay deep beneath the surface.
There are nights when she cannot sleep and instead shudders in the armchair, rocking back and forth, panting and wheezing a strained, high-pitched whine. It is the first sound I ever hear her make. It makes me afraid. It makes me wonder what she is remembering even though I really think I’d rather not know. In these moments I dip my fingers into our jar of honey and kneel before her, rubbing it slowly on her cold, torn lips. When she is ready, she peeks her tongue out to taste it and sighs, lowering her head down onto her knees. I have those nights too. But we learn.
One warm afternoon, after a morning in the kitchen, we find my father’s old work boots in the garden shed and venture out to retrieve her periwinkle ribbon from the bog. I tie it into a bow in her soft hair, and she turns to smile at me. I had covered all the mirrors with the stained bedsheets when I first arrived back at the house, which feels like such a long time ago now. I’ve almost forgotten how it feels to make someone smile. I have almost forgotten how it feels to make someone feel anything at all.
At dusk, we eat our dinner on the porch. We watch the loons out on the water, listening to their melancholic cries, dipping under and back up again. She points eastward to where the hills don’t reach. The reflection of the setting sun on the velvety lake makes the sky go on forever.
That night, I am woken up by icy fingers on my arm. It reminds me of the time before-this when I was still trying to find my way back here, and I had nothing but a worn-down tent on my back, and I’d wake up with ice in my eyelashes. She beckons me up, out of my nest of quilts and into bed, down under the comforter with her. We press our bodies close, both cold and warm at once, taking turns tracing the ridges of each other’s teeth. She presses her hand against my lips to feel the heat of my breath on her skin, and I hold her wrist in place, counting the thump of her pulse against my fingers. Each of us checking that the other is alive.
When I open my eyes, the curtains are pushed aside, and the first trickles of grainy daylight dance in fleeting patterns across the bed. She is already awake beside me, her bogweed hair spread out across her pillow, her face aimed toward the light as she watches the frost-fine face of the sky from our window. The sun slowly rises behind the hills. In the fog, my orange, red, and yellow world is bathed in cold purples, mauves, and grays. I have never seen a winter like this before. She turns to me with that smile that leaves me breathless. I know what she means, so I say it for her: “Will you look at that?”
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HAPPINESS DOES NOT OVERWHELM
Tessa Schut
Blossom from your toes up! Late bloomer, tender breasts. Worship ok days and waking up without back pain.
Bury your heart in a full gut (fat off hangover burgers and hot cheese). Wear a watch on your wrist and snot on your sleeves; wonder out loud, “Is that color normal?”
Talk through smiles – You know I like your off-white teeth.
Marry a man with character flaws who asks about your evening plans and your relationship with God. Make him fall in love with you: your too-loud laugh and your exaggerations. He smiles when you pronounce words wrong.
Have weird children, rough patches, and bad vacations.
Please shoot for the moon, but don’t be surprised when you end up on Mars. Tell the interstellar story to an audience of egg-people at a dinner party where you are (over/under) dressed. Drink too much wine and sing away the embarrassment.
Talk to yourself–in the shower and in the car. Win imaginary fights against people who aren’t there, pitch a start-up to a shampoo bottle.
Dive into cold pools and take boiling-water baths
Re-gift books, jewelry, and kitchen appliances.
Go from blonde to brunette to a chic shade of gray.
Debate a shorter bob and embroider a jean jacket with beads.
Resent your parents ‘til you are one, then hold their memories close. Laugh at bathroom humor and dance on top of furniture.
Try Coke three times. Get too high and lick frosting off the coffee table – Never get invited back.
Love a cat like a child. Befriend the old man down the road. Yes, he’s crazy – But we’ll all be nuts soon enough, and everyone deserves a friend.
Talk too loud, leave too early, never forget to freeze your extra bread, and that ACME is better shopped at night.
Look out your bedroom window, keep a journal, and save a monarch’s life.
I know because I say I do.
I continue because I can.
You know,
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Life – It overwhelms. Happiness just happens.
40
ORCHARD TENDER
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Joey Jonagold
MANGO MEMORIES
Eight hours to Ahmednagar. Eight-year-old to Ahmednagar.
In a shitty car, I would go.
Ari Singh
Milestones were not markers of distance, they were temples, sugarcane juice carts, and shining orange flags. Before I would arrive at my grandparents’ house, I would always pass the farm, the soil always clunky and rocky, foreign to my pavement-paved feet. Lemons that were hard and bitter, onions that were tiny and pungent, lemongrass, potatoes, garlic—my grandmother planted everything that she could. Beyond her little enclave of roots and stems were the rows of mango trees.
The rows of mango trees, where I picked too many sour, stupid, juvenile green mangos. Kacchi Kerri. Only good for pickling. My grandpa told the whole town I didn’t know a thing about farming. I remember the rough pads of his fingers pulling my cheeks teasingly.
Anna, and his square face, square glasses, square smile. His arrival was always announced by square crates of mangoes. Alphonso, I remember the smell. I will always remember the smell of jute cloth, cotton, and grains.
That summer, the village kids played too hard, played harder than the city kids. I scraped my butt so hard it bled onto the ugly fabric of the sofa. Anna teased me the entire time he put 20 rupee lacto-calamine on my rash. His square palm was so gentle through his chiding.
Sometimes, I fear my memory of him is a dream I made up. Sometimes, I fear my memory of him is a lie. That his face wasn’t a square, but a circle, that his teasing wasn’t a joke, but a serious scolding.
In the haze, my summers blended away. I haven’t visited Ahmednagar.
Anna, you haven’t visited me, and I know you won’t. I can count my memories of you on one hand. I promise I am not a sour mango anymore. I promise I won’t scrape my butt again.
Lacto-calamine is 50 rupees now. My mouth itches sometimes when I eat mangoes now. I don’t have anything but these sensations. I wish I had something more than these sensations.
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YOSHI
Elsie Aleck
So she decides to seduce her driver Yoshi. It’s the only action lately that sends a chill through her bones and gets her heart going. He will fall hopelessly for me, she thinks, and he will like it. No, not like, love. He will love me.
Her plan is silly and stupid, ill-fated and reckless, destined to fail. She starts dressing outrageously for the office, all tight skirts and shapewear, higher heels and bolder lips. As if Yoshi will fall for a corporate hooker. She teeter-totters to the car every morning, the perfume still dripping on her neck and inside her wrists. When she enters the car, she leans slightly forward to wish Yoshi a good morning. It appalls her to act this way, but thrills her even more. If she weren’t the COO, she’d have been reprimanded for neglecting the company dress code by now. Her work—what used to be the key motivating factor for every step she took—suddenly becomes marginal and filled with blisters. Her “good morning”s are shot with desperation and sickly sweetness. It is unclear whether Yoshi is uncomfortable or if he has even noticed the change.
She asks him questions about his life and learns that his oldest son is starting driver’s education. She wonders if his son will be as good a driver as he. Is good driving inherited? She wonders. What genetic code gets the right wheels turning, hands expertly placed on the gears? Yoshi’s answers are short and to the point; she interprets this as nerves and decides to tone down her wardrobe. She does, however, begin leaning further over the front seat in the morning, seeing how far her salutations will take her.
His maddening professionalism makes her task difficult. He is so afraid of messing up or overstepping, terrified to run a red or chew gum too loudly. She’s attracted to this tension, this infuriating, invisible barrier. He seems incapable of blushing. Many days she thinks this seduction impossible and feels her own face flushing in shame, pulls her skirt down. Other days, however, she’ll get a hint of a smile or a flash of eye contact, and all systems go, target in focus, every hair in place. She comes home fresh with sweat and laughter, cracking up as soon as she steps through the door. She lays out her outfit the night before, meticulously filling her head with the superficial chess pieces of sex and love.
When the snow melts and the water flows once more up to the shore of Lake Michigan, Yoshi doesn’t show up for work. She stands outside her apartment building, clutching her work bag and peering out at the city through oversized sunglasses. Her car is not waiting for her. Her immediate thought is about getting to work on time. She calls Yoshi, and he doesn’t answer. She stomps a heeled foot on the ground and lets out a noise
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of displeasure. She looks amazing today, has perfected the wardrobe of a slutty working professional. Her over-drawn eyes well up with the stupidness of this whole affair, that she has spent yet another morning dolling herself up for the sake of a man who has now abandoned her. She calls him again.
She ends up taking a car service to work, fuming the whole ride, clutching the hand bar around turns. Her heart angrily yearns for Yoshi. She wipes off her heavy makeup with a cotton pad. She feels overlooked, like her womanhood is a moot point. She calls him again, knowing Yoshi wouldn’t have gone awol without a serious reason.
After work, she shows up at his apartment in Hyde Park. She knocks on the door, not knowing what to expect. Yoshi’s wife answers, a shrewd, hard woman with high cheekbones. A naked baby waddles behind her, followed by a screaming toddler with hands outstretched. The wife’s eyes narrow, and she clutches the door with a claw.
“What do you want?”
The wife doesn’t know where Yoshi is and hasn’t seen him since the morning before. Upon finding out that Yoshi didn’t show up for work, his wife phones the police, jabbers to a child grabbing at her leg, and shuts the door with a self-righteous flourish.
She leaves the apartment with a wrinkle working itself out in her brain, racking and tickling all possible scenarios. She figures that she should leave things to the police, but what fun is that? She needs her driver back.
Her wardrobe changes with the seasons. Spring arrives with a blooming flower and open-toed shoes. No sign of Yoshi. She has a new driver who is considerably less skilled at navigating Chicago traffic than Yoshi was. She has stopped styling her hair, and people have started fearing her at work. She wears flats and carries a Montblanc in the breast pocket of her blazer. She often seems distracted, or maybe she’s just sad. She leaves her apartment windows open to the elements and doesn’t clean up after herself. Her friends see her less and less, chalk it up to stress at work. She is stringent and terse with everyone except her kitten. Zebra now weighs eight pounds and has a coat of fur more luxurious than some people’s head of hair. She buys notebooks and fills them with scribbles only she can read. Her mother dies. The funeral is gloomy, held on a rainy day. During the drive to the cemetery, she almost gets into an accident; it was the first time she’d driven herself in a long time.
She hasn’t been to see Yoshi’s wife again, and this makes her feel guilty. For some reason, she thinks that Yoshi’s disappearance is her fault. If she hadn’t flirted so much, or pried into his life, maybe he would have stayed. Maybe she was the final, grating reason for his take-off to wherever.
Every day, she visits a new place where Yoshi might be. She knows this is futile, as pointless as her failed seduction, but she continues. The places are small and of little note. She thinks of them late at night, just as she is falling asleep. The location will come to her like a final breath, and she will sit up and turn to the notebook at her bedside, scrawling down the name of a park or a diner.
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She visits a former trash dump on the East Side. Now it’s a prairie, long grasses along a quiet road, but it used to be piles of waste. She walks through the haunted field, still somehow smelling of trash. She’s never been to this area of the city before. Between Chinatown and the hood is this liminal expanse of what used to be. She calls out Yoshi’s name, just once before stalking back to her car. She watches the wind bat the grass around, graffiti on an abandoned building down the road. Not a soul anywhere to say hello, and have you seen a well-dressed gentleman?
She visits an underpass by the lake, and it is while she stands in a spot smelling of piss that she decides to adjust her search criteria. Yoshi would never turn up in a place like this.
She now focuses on places she can easily imagine being frequented by a gentle Japanese man. The lobby at the Drake (specifically one booth near the bar), a small movie theater that plays Fellini, a coffee shop with plush seating. But who knows? It could also be an erotic theater (if those still exist), a stationary store that smells of lemongrass, the side of a highway at dawn. She has next-to-no details to go off of, no help from his evaporated figure.
She visits a popular sake bar one night, unsure if Yoshi even likes the beverage, but counts it as an investigative visit nevertheless. Her own love of sake has grown over the years, maturing like anything good does. She snags a window seat and people-watches like mad. Sipping an umami-forward sake, she sees overworked businessmen plod home through allergy-ridden, blossoming streets. They check their watches and talk on phones, a slight evening breeze rippling their ties. Also on the street are unfortunate-looking nannies and high school dropouts, picture-perfect mothers and overwhelmed tourists. The occasional homeless person shuffles by, causing her to turn her gaze inward to the bar. At one of the other tables is a young couple, so sweet she gets a head rush. The boy laughs and drops his gaze while the girl sips from glassware with mischievous eyes, savoring the effect she has on him. Another table has a group of 20-somethings mingling after work; she wonders if they ever get anything done at the office. One of the women keeps glancing around the place, anywhere but her own table. They accidentally lock eyes, and the other woman looks away immediately.
She orders another sake, feeling strangely at ease. It has been a while since she sat in one place for a long period of time. Even at work, she is always on the move, visiting another office or getting a coffee refresh, congratulating someone on a new baby, inquiring about a troubling harassment claim. The workplace politics will murder her soul one day, but not yet. For the moment, she is in a hip sake bar. This place and the street outside, however, give her much pause. If people contain multitudes, then how are we ever supposed to find each other?
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IT WAS
It was a dark and stormy night. It was a white and misty morning. The sky full of frost. The lawn slick with sky. In the forest floor pile, a fox licks her litter, nurses them from fat-bottomed clouds. I think she might look just like you, rusted lady underground, sleeping late and bleeding birds. Shrugging off her winter coat.
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Madeleine Eggen
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Elsie Aleck is a senior whose writing is inspired by surrealism and absurdism. She is a francophile who enjoys good pain au chocolat, Degas paintings, and debating you in cafés.
Grace Cabral is a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She is from the Massachusetts woodlands and enjoys making and holding all arts, doing science, and eating pickled beets. She can be found about campus jumping in puddles or throwing frisbees.
Alana Craib is a senior studying Creative Writing and Literary History. After graduation, she plans to pursue a Masters Degree in Fiction. In her free time, she enjoys laughing, smiling, collecting trinkets, and tinkering around various playgrounds, like her guitar.
Jillian Davis is a junior studying visual art, art history, and a little bit of literature. She is currently interested in baroque art, 70s movies, and Taskmaster.
Madeleine Eggen is a New York based writer with work in the Sarah Lawrence Literary Review, Love and Squalor, and Atwood Magazine. They put maple syrup and cinnamon in their coffee.
N.V. Even-Karl loves to befriend animals and tell stories. He’s studying animal biology and creative writing, and flirting with the idea of becoming a zoo veterinarian.
Fronia Kemper (she/her) is a fiction writer who loves magical realism and stories about madwomen. She writes for her family, whom she loves dearly.
Joey Jonagold, class of 2025, is a painter and sketchbook artist thinking visually towards care-full coexistence and the everyday work of love. Some of their art-questions concern nonlinear time puddles, ecological kinship, and/or patterns of sensorial processing.
Jared Leeds is a senior studying literature and creative writing, inspired by the speculative works of Margaret Atwood and the tragicomedies of George Saunders. Upon graduating, Jared will be pursuing his teaching credential in California, and also hopes to continue his literary endeavors as a writer and publisher.
Emmy Lohman is a student at Sarah Lawrence College.
Faith-Marie McHenry is a third-year creative writing student and lover of love poems. She is an editor of two magazines: Sarah Lawrence’s Love & Squalor and The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press.
Amelia Patrick is a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She likes creamy colored pencils and talking about dreams (the type you have when you sleep).
Alex Rosenzweig is a freshman interested in studying creative writing and music performance. He has a love for long walks, ‘dad rock,’ and anything written by Mary Oliver.
48 CONTRIBUTOR BIOS
Tessa Schut is a writer whose work reflects her love for run-on sentences and analogies. Tessa is extremely grateful that the Sarah Lawrence Literary Review has chosen to publish her work and wants to thank the editors for their patience and kindness.
Aurora Sharp is a writing student and sophomore. In her free time, she loves to draw, bake, and listen to podcasts.
Ari Singh is a junior to whom writing comes in waves of nostalgia, like an exceptionally sweet strawberry from a sour bunch.
Ajula Van Ness-Otunnu is a senior from the Ocean State. They enjoy trainspotting, portals, and reading inscriptions in second-hand books. The song “Sligo River Blues” by John Fahey brings them to tears.
Rachel Wade is a junior studying writing and Jewish history. Her hobbies include hiking, exploring museums, and watching the same movies over and over.
Allie Zapson is a junior who loves sending emails and the feeling of glue stuck on their fingers. Allie has never been arrested and is likely studying creative writing.
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Maeve Aickin is a junior who ate the plums that were in the ice box and which you were probably saving for breakfast. She will not ask for your forgiveness.
Galia Atik is a junior studying writing, literature, and bio, and is excited to be a nonfiction editor for the Sarah Lawrence Literary Review! She can usually be found critiquing any and all vampire media, falling down internet rabbit holes, or going disgustingly mushy over cute cat pictures.
Ella Doeksen joined the Sarah Lawrence Literary Review because it’s a truth universally acknowledged that life’s more fun when the curtains aren’t just blue. When not living in the library or getting a coffee, she can be found buying books based on their titles, going to concerts that she probably can’t afford, and getting lost in the depths of Wikipedia.
Imogen Drake is a fiction editor for the Sarah Lawrence Literary Review. She is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence and studies writing and literature.
Katherine Echeverri is a second-year, second-time layout and visual arts editor for the Review—and she loves it! Between studying architecture history and constantly adding to her to-read list, the Review is her hope to get away from the hustle and bustle of material preoccupations.
Dariya Kozhasbay is a nonfiction editor and layout editor for the Sarah Lawrence Literary Review. She is the best artist in the world and knows everything, actually. Above all, she is very humble. She is fond of horses, baseball, and Chuck Palahniuk’s nonfiction essays.
Julia Krawiecki Gazes is a freshman studying literature and gender studies. She enjoys pasta, paint by numbers, and the color purple.
Snow Li is a senior studying literature, visual art, and history. She likes memes, music, and macaroons. She is a layout editor at the Sarah Lawrence Literary Review.
Sarah Luczak is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, and she wonders what George Bernard Shaw would think about all of this. Or if at all?
Amanda Machung is a sophomore and a fiction editor for the Review. In addition to her studies in literature and writing, she is passionate about gel pens, chickpea-based foods, and medieval mysticism.
Vivian Marko is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College studying film, creative writing, and literature. She is a big fan of never knowing what her favorite book is and loves spouting fun science facts whenever they’re least expected. She is a strong believer in the metaphorical power of oranges.
Ainoa Siegel is a first-year interested in studying film, writing, and psychology. She enjoys laughter, clementines, the moon, and movies that she knows will make her cry.
50 STAFF BIOS
Akshata Srinivas is a freshman and a writer at Sarah Lawrence. She aspires to be an author in the near future.
Lucille Whittier is thrilled to be a part of the Review! She is a senior studying writing and literature—which is to say that she’s gotten really good at avoiding the question, “What are your plans?”
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