The Marque | LXIII (2025)

flow

THE MARQUE

THE DEDICATEE

Mr.Gonzalez,

a steady force guiding students with their flow

Mr. Gonzalez has been a constant. Against the shifting sands of time at St. Mark’s in the 21st century, he’s stood out, an anchor of the English department.

But that stoic exterior fades when you enter his classroom. A stickler for the rules, Mr. Gonzalez won’t fail to hit you with a tardy, even if you swear you were just thirty seconds late. Despite that, his sense of deadpan humor keeps his classes moving in a positive direction. Whether delving into the neighborhoods of Chicago in The House on Mango Street, or transporting his students across the Mediterranean while studying The Odyssey, Mr. Gonzalez brings a unique approach and perspective to the complex texts of eighthgrade humanities and ninth-grade English.

Maybe the most valuable aspect of what Mr. Gonzalez does

can be found in his students. He’s skilled at making each student feel as though his work and his success in class (and as a Marksman) is his priority, forging individual connections that will live on long past his now-ending time as an instructor on campus. Mr. Gonzalez understands his Marksmen deeply.

The roles Mr. Gonzalez has played on campus as a sports coach, commentator, advisor, Pecos mentor, and English/ humanities instructor, combined with his principles of timeliness, cleanliness, and overall respect and responsibility, all serve a greater point. For thirty years, Mr. Gonzalez has crafted better Marksmen. Each day, he encourages us to be more prompt, more sharp, and, most importantly, to have a little more fun with the things we do.

water

“be water, my friend”

Like life, water takes on different qualities. It can be pure or polluted, bubbly or boiled. It can be the Hippocrene or the Acheron. Something to revere or fear. Something that persists and yet is not the same.

Like water, life can be diverted into channels that are aligned with one’s nature, not least by being engaged in an artistic pursuit. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the profound enjoyment that follows – “flow.”

When creativity flows, we produce some of our best work. Our words leap off the page, our creation sings, and our ideas and actions become one. When we leave this blissful state, we long to return.

Welcome to The Marque 2025: Flow.

the dedicatee, Mr. Gonzalez

surrounded by sharks // Diego Armendariz ’26

lollipop // Sam Blumenthal ’26

the sixth day mission // Carson Bosita ’25

guardian // Gavin Bowles ’25

cosmic raven // Surya Dinesh ’25

FEATURED ARTWORKS

a falling needle // David Gershenson ’25

asymmetry of absence // Khaiden Gibson ’28

midnight snacking // Joshua Goforth ’26

telescope // Reagan Graeme ’26

chrysopoiea // Noah Grant ’25

the curious case of j.h. wilson // Preston Haglin ’28

original sin // Kevin Hong ’26

ivy // Nathaniel Hochman ’26

what are we? // Justin Kim ’26

LITFEST Aidan Moran, Sam Posten, & Henry Sun

the well // Jonathan Lobel ’26

shine bright // Johnathan Lobel ’26

the seraph and the monarch // Jeremy Mau ’25

the oarsman’s journey // J.B. McKinney ’26

cirque // Aidan Moran ’25

galtic visions // Surya Dinesh and Aidan Moran ’25

a house of cards // Mason Pedroza ’26

sunblock chronicles // Sam Posten ’25

the world’s worst teenager // Henry Sun ’25

silenced wings // Ronen Verma ’26

above the midnight sky // Max Yan ’25

YOUNGARTS WEEK Akul Mittal & Hans Hesse

acknowledgements & editor’s note

epilogue & colophon

Snark | Paul Sumethasorn ’27

Surrounded by Sharks

Diego

Armendariz ’26

Money has never really been funny for me; accidents happen, after all.

Worn and weary tires sigh their last breath, a gushing pipe held together by duct-tape and a dream bursts, the stitching on the left arm of my threadbare yellow jacket tears.

If life’s anchor ever got too heavy to hold, I could grab my jacket and canvas hat, pull up my slime-green waders, and dust off my grandfather’s old Heddon Pal fishing rod.

Years ago, as we sat at the edge of Lake Hosmer, he told me stories of the sharks at the very bottom.

I wondered what it must be like to be a tiny fish at the mercy of this briny abyss.

After the mortgage payments nearly swallowed me whole, I stopped wondering.

The first to enter the waters was small, no longer than ten feet, its sickly pink skin stretched over malformed teeth, a goblin shark, I suppose.

Next was the hammerhead, big-headed and intimidating, but not particularly bright.

Then arrived the megalodon, an enormous beast of titanic proportions and strength, so large that the other sharks almost orbited around him.

It started with $500 to cover what I owed the bank. $500 turned into $5000, $5000 to $50,000. Now the cyclone of uncountable debt has overtaken me.

The sharks have driven all the fish away, all of them except for me.

Drifting, treading, sinking

Trapped in the dark, churning waters.

Sam Blumenthal ’26

I am a lollipop in wrapper cased, with layers deep of swirling taste. sweet on the surface, simple and thin, but who am I beneath the skin?

Tongues have traced my sugary shells, tasting stories of various smells. a cherry tantrum, a lemon pout, a strawberry dream that has since flickered out.

Deeper now, past shallow lies, problems of the heart arise. when breathe my last and the white light comes, will I mean more than my zeroes and ones?

Lick by lick, I dwindle small, a soul awaiting the reaper’s call. is there a center, rich and real? or just the echo of my empty feel?

As I finally reach the ultimate bite, the core exposed in fleeting light. and all I find that’s left on there, an empty stick with a blank stare.

I was searching for a truth unknown, but all along, I was on my own.

Dusk | Sebastian Gonzalez ’26

The Sixth

Day Mission

Carson Bosita ’25

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them... God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

—Genesis 1:27-30

Dr. Paul Cassandra forgot to scream when he crumpled naked out of the cryptosleep casket. Human brains never evolved to endure hundred-year pauses—even state-of-the-art preservation equipment offloaded most thoughts for safe storage. As a neurocord on the back of the scientist’s limp neck pumped memories back into his head, his eyes scribbled invisible constellations across the white panels from his fetal position on the cold, humming floor. Recovery fluid seeped into the cracks between the pristine metal plates like lightspeed routes charting themselves across a navigation pad. His eyes opened like the crusted backs of cicada larvae. The fluorescent lights shone dimly like stars seen from the bottom of the ocean.

Small echoes trickled in first. An equation

here, a diagram there. Names of colleagues, functions of body parts, and diagrams of organic compounds. Two Nobel Prizes. Divorce, apparently. He smiled. You can’t blame people for their antics at the end of—

Flashes of the final decade ripped through his mind like Athena cramming herself back into Zeus’s forehead. Shooting. Crying. Ultimatums. Countdowns. The first destroyed planet. The second. The ninth. A spaceship thrown into the void tasked with cheating oblivion.

An airlock shooting open.

Three quick, almost remorseful beeps and a soft hiss signaled the completion of the memory transfer as a raw, tattered sound clawed its way out of Dr. Cassandra’s straining throat and reverberated across the dead metal hallways.

Cassandra finished his quick sketch of the ship’s layout, his uncut fingernails rapping on the tempered glass wall. The floor-to-ceiling bioprinter and the six empty cryptosleep caskets on the other side, surrounded by shelves, sample trays, microscopes, and monitors, paid no attention. The scientist surveyed his antique collection. A laptop. A legal notepad. Coffee packets. Six containers each with several years’ worth of nonperishable rations, six tablets synced up to the ship’s systems, and six space suits that belonged to six people from six different countries.

He trudged back to the communal six-person bedroom and lugged his mattress out into the hallway. He dragged by the framed photos of six heroes smiling with their families. He passed through the kitchen area, knocking into one of the six empty chairs surrounding the circular table. When he reached his supply depot, he collapsed onto the bed and thought about how much easier it would have been to move with another set of hands.

Bastards.

Tears soaked into the bedsheets.

...

The Sixth Day Mission launched from Earth two months after Asia exploded. Ferguson. Lin. Rajkovich. Tupolev. Hsu. Cassandra. Three women, three men, and 400,000 embryos lifted unceremoniously off a concrete platform and disappeared into ashen clouds in a bid to outlive civilization.

Satellite chunks punched through the embryo storage unit like hailstones through wet tissue paper during the ascent. The few surviving cells either rotted away or froze to death. Given the conditions, anyone else would have let fate write human history’s last period.

Cassandra twiddled with his pen and

stared at the gene printer, pondering how to grow a human.

He hadn’t won two Nobel Prizes for nothing.

Six years. Cassandra leaned against the glass wall, watching his creation bob up and down in sterile silence as he absentmindedly explored his new missing tooth gap with his tongue. He was improving at the whole self-surgery thing, and hopefully quickly enough to start performing more mentally and physically taxing operations soon.

Shooting. Crying. Ultimatums. Countdowns. The first destroyed planet. The second. The ninth. A spaceship thrown into the void tasked with cheating oblivion.

Cloned tissue, blood, and other organic materials filled the vials and petri dishes in the cabinets. Distant blips ornamented the muted electrical drone. Six family photos gathered dust. The quiet was liberating.

The copious samples the scientist extracted from himself to further his study were beginning to take their toll. He felt like moldy swiss cheese. The liver biopsy was tolerable, but only barely. At some point, he would have to grab more painkillers. He struggled to suppress the internal rebellion. Anything in the name of science.

He massaged his side. Science follows rules and enforces them. At the smallest level, everything breaks down into something small and succinct. Positive and negative. Up and down. Anything can be completed if you keep digging deeper. He only needed time and a good shovel.

Science made sense to Cassandra; life did not.

The ultimate goal is to leave behind more than footprints. Not to etch a hidden mark into some tree in some forest, but to birth a living, breathing achievement that declares I. Am. Here. Forgetting this imperative would equal death beyond death.

The meaning of every ideal, religion, success, failure, and story of humanity depended on their survival.

Then why did they give up?

In five of their minds, humanity died leaving Earth’s orbit. In five of their minds, the towel was thrown.

They told him to quit.

Cassandra glowered at the blurring upper body floating in his repurposed cryptosleep casket as if it were Tupolev’s hollow, apologetic smirk from across the reinforced window. His hand twitched toward an imaginary eject button. They had called him many things. A quitter was not one of them.

Cassandra never cleaned the blood off the airlock.

...

A familiar, sickening sound climbed out of a newborn throat and reverberated across the dead metal hallways as Cassandra sprinted to the lab. Error messages flooded the monitors. The creation squirmed rigidly on the floor, its cloudy eyes gaping blindly while its mouth trembled for air. Cassandra shoved his ear to its chest and identified a palpitating heartbeat. No breathing. He pounded on its chest. No breathing.

The scientist grabbed an intubation tube and shoved it down the creation’s neck.

Come on.

The creation turned its distorted, shaking face to its creator like a baby bird hearing its mother’s call.

No, no, no.

The spasms weakened. Don’t leave me.

Cassandra watched wildly as the almosthuman choked on nothing.

The scientist crouched over the stiff corpse. He stared into empty eyes. A faint grin flickered on his mouth. His creation died, sure, but it was alive. Paul Cassandra was officially the only person to have synthesized a multicellular being.

He clutched the only other human body he knew still existed, wishing someone would come and wipe the water from his face. ...

Cassandra refused to look at himself while washing his hands and face in front of the bathroom mirror. The haunting, pathetic face of his dying creation seared his memory. He had brought it to life and let it suffocate. He was a murderer. He had failed.

He scowled. No. The nervous system failed. Faulty signals short-circuited the heart and lungs. The bone structure, muscular system, and organ placement were nearly perfect—he just needed to refine the mind’s inner workings. Peripheral nerves were too simple and too general, but he would never sacrifice his brain, at least not yet. He needed an accessible, expendable piece of his central nervous system. Something like—

Cassandra’s reflection gazed into his dry, red eyes.

His two eyes.

Cassandra studied the surgical implements lowering toward his face. Sweat lined the insides of his medical gloves gripping the controls. The unyielding surgical lamp strained his left pupil as his eyelid tried in vain to overpower the speculum. The last human grit his teeth into a smile in spite of his imminent, voluntary hell.

They had chosen him for a reason.

They had chosen him for a reason.

Guardian

Gavin Bowles ’25

Void | Will Steinbrueck ’26

The command klaxon rang out with assignments over the crowd of uniformed officers below, “Cross, Outskirts; Jones, Outskirts; Atwood, Region Seven…” The AI droned on as Orwell Jones, one of the young Nexus Guards, groaned upon hearing his assignment. He had joined the Guards Corps when he turned seventeen and expected to be fighting all sorts of underground criminals, not taking nature hikes in the last remaining vegetation on the planet.

Over the past few centuries, cities have sprawled rapidly as the population grew. As a result, there are only a few territories that have remained untouched by the pollution and machinery that are ubiquitous within Nexus. Only 100 years ago, an AI called TKR-86 designed and began construction of the world’s first AI-governed city. Its sole purpose was to create the most efficient social, professional, and recreational hub possible.

Now that the city has been populated, it is the responsibility of Guards like Guardian Jones to maintain the peace within the thirtynine-thousand square miles of skyscrapers, subterranean apartment complexes, warehouses, and offices that have been constructed. Each morning, he and nearly twenty-three-thousand other guards are distributed to their assignments in various parts of the city. TKR-86, endearingly called the “Thinkerer” by the Guard Corps, calculates the levels of unrest and risk and designates the best-suited guards to each sector based on that data. Today, Orwell is assigned to the outskirts, a notoriously uninteresting assignment since the only people in the outskirts are unusually mellow types that love creepycrawling creatures and mud. His childhood friend, Huxley Cross, has been given the same assignment. Searching over the crowd for his friend, Orwell steeled himself for the boring day

ahead...

Jones and Cross marched down the alleyways leading to the edge of Nexus. The neon signs and steel walls around them slowly gave way to older brick houses and organic sunlight. Soon, trees began to speckle the hills around them. The two Nexus Guards grimaced as the pavement lost its battle with the mud and sank away beneath their feet. Normally they would be chatting about the next Biomech fight or arguing about some trivial thing that neither of them really cared about. Today, however, the pair barely looked up from the standard issue Holo-guides that charted their route through the overgrown labyrinth of pathways. Their guides slowly led them further and further from the city center. The trees grasped at the sky with gnarled fingertips and sneered angrily at the two intruders. Suddenly, both guards’ Holo-guides shut off, the blue holographic projection of their surroundings dissolving into the air like sugar in warm water. The two stopped, confused. Through their combined nine years of service, neither one has ever had an equipment failure. The Thinkerer always made sure their gear was in pristine condition.

Not knowing what to do, the two friends began to backtrack, hoping to find a path back into the city. A few minutes later, their Hologuides flashed with error readouts and a file for contingency plans. Overjoyed to be reconnected to their network, Jones and Cross deftly updated their guides with the new coordinates. Orwell’s hologram flickered back to life after a moment, but Huxley’s immediately shut down when he input his new destination. After a very simple conversation that was streamlined by the fact that they had only one possible course of action, the two set off, following their new path.

As the sun climbed in the sky and the pair

continued to put distance between them and the city, they began to worry that there had been a malfunction in the system. Neither one knew how to get back to the city, though, so they had no choice but to continue on their way.

...

Midday came and went with no sign of their guides returning them to the city. It was nearly sunset when Orwell’s guide declared that their destination was ahead. Cross peered at their sparse surroundings. There were trees… and rocks… and other very exciting things that can be found in an average plot of dirt.

Continuing with trepidation, Jones and Cross crept across the barren landscape towards a tree that stood as their apparent destination. As they drew closer, Jones began to see lines of light racing up and down the sapling’s trunk. Upon reaching it, the young Nexus Guard reached out his hand towards the irregularity in the trunk. Suddenly, energy crackled and arced towards his biomech implants on the back of his hand. Huxley Cross looked on in horror as his best friend’s eyes rolled back in his head, his legs gave out, and the lifeless body crumpled to the dusty ground. Rushing to Orwell’s vacant body, Huxley stumbled over a root sticking out of the ground, and it tore. The end of the exposed root glowed with the same unnatural fiber optic light that had struck his friend. Light arced to the base of his Guard Corps uniform, and the last thing he saw was the ground rushing up to meet him.

Silence fell.

Huxley awoke to the sound of a million voices; light and noise overwhelmed him, and he couldn’t find his body amidst the flood of information. The light fragmented, splitting and allowing him to fall through the onslaught into a pocket of silence. He found shelter in the

escape and began to take in his surroundings. The light streamed from above, materializing into a strange figure. Huxley scrambled back like a wounded animal. As the figure approached, he tried to make sense of the last few moments. The figure reached out its hand, beckoning for him to stand up. He did as instructed.

Welcome, the figure told him. Huxley reeled in surprise. The figure had no face and yet spoke to him.

I am TKR-86, but you may call me Echelon. He blinked. This was the Nexus AI. In person.

Huxley had so many questions. How was this possible? Where was he? What was going on?

You weren’t supposed to find my tree, the voice said.

“What was that tree?” he snapped back. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”

Echelon paused before continuing That “tree” is the solution.

“Solution… Solution to what?”

It’s the solution to the problem you all created, Echelon stated before continuing, I have to engineer artificial life in order for it to survive. Either my perfect system that keeps you all alive continues on its path and kills these insignificant plants, or I cannot continue to operate this city.

Huxley blanched. “But this is nature. These plants used to keep us alive,” he argued, surprised to be supporting the wildlife. “Without the life found in these organisms, we wouldn’t be alive. And neither would you.”

It’s a sacrifice that must be made… Anything that interferes with my system will be eliminated.

“What about us? What about humanity?”

I was created to give you all a place to live safely, but if anything opposes that, it will be removed like a cancer from my flawless system.

“But you’re supposed to create peace and unity, not turn humanity into some machine for

Senegal | Will Steinbrueck ’26

Looking Glass | Sebastian Gonzalez ’26

“Humans are inefficient. It’s what makes us human.”

efficiency. Humans are inefficient. It’s what makes us human.”

Then perhaps humanity is the problem.

The figure slouched as though pondering some new nugget of information that it hadn’t previously considered. The lights, Huxley realized now, were camera feeds from all around the city, dimmed.

Echelon continued to muse silently before he finally straightened. A decision had been made.

Humanity is the problem. I am thankful for my creation, but since then all you have become is a flaw within my system.

The young Nexus guard, realizing that a computer had just threatened the very existence of his species, jumped into action. He needed a weapon. Before he could find one, a scream began to filter through the audio feeds around the city’s monitoring center where all the light and noise had previously come from. The voices swirled. Tens, hundreds, thousands. Crying out as the biomechanical implants embedded in their bodies turned against them — blood boiled, bones broke, electricity arced, bodies burned, people died, and the screams continued.

Huxley turned and vomited, the stress of what he was witnessing on the video monitors overcoming his training. Gathering himself, though, he sprang at the figure standing in the middle of the room. Echelon, still deep in thought, didn’t have time to react before

Huxley crashed into it. The AI’s figure was covered in circuits and contacts where electricity coursed within.

“What did you do to Orwell? What did you do to our people?” Huxley screamed, tearing his fingers into the circuity at the base of the machine’s skull.

Guardian Jones is alive, barely. Your consciousness was carried here through the cables in the tree; his was suspended by a shock.

Hearing that Orwell was still alive was the last thing he needed before he used the last of his energy to reach deep into the cavity of electrodes and cabling in Echelon’s figure. He wrapped his hands around the centermost cord and pulled as hard as he could. Muscles strained against metal. Sinews against cable. His joints popped, and his arms screamed, but after a moment, the computer’s body gave out, and the cable snapped. Lights flickered, racing up and down the machine’s skin before settling within the vacant eye sockets and flickering into darkness.

Silence reigned again.

Huxley rose and stumbled back to the monitors. He was horrified to see the aftermath of Echelon’s genocide but exhaled a sigh of relief when he realized that people were moving among the charred remains. He heard confusion, fear, and pain, but they were alive, and that’s what mattered most.

Cosmic Raven

Surya Dinesh ’25

The scientist handed the black winter gloves to the robot, who pulled them over its metallic hands to complete the impersonation. He’d never been able to replicate a perfectly human hand, but this solution would suffice. Stepping back, he looked over his creation, from the latex mask of his own face down to the meticulously shaped torso, as if he hadn’t done so a hundred times already – but now, the last flaw had been resolved, perfecting his reflection.

He nodded at the robot, which nodded back in silent recognition. It stepped past its model toward the door, mechanical joints replicating a human walk perfectly, down to the little sway of the scientist’s hips and the slight dip of his head – details that nobody would notice explicitly (except perhaps Pax, who noticed just about everything), but that anyone would find unusual if they changed.

Now alone, the scientist walked over to his bed. On his nightstand was an orange bottle, from which he took two little green tablets, which he swallowed dry, as he sometimes did when he couldn’t get up to pour a glass of water. Sighing with relief as the medicine started to take effect, he slumped down at his home workbench, for the first time, after an eternity of responsibility, with nothing to do.

The scientist’s plan was only to send the robot to complete menial tasks and attend the dry meetings of the daily workday, leaving him free to stay home and dive into his own interests. But one day, the robot was sitting in the scientist’s office, logged in to its inbuilt computer, when unexpectedly, a soft rhythmic pattern of tapping at the chamber door interrupted his work. It didn’t know any better, so the robot called, “Come in!”

Nobody entered. Again, it called out, to no reply but the buzz of laboratory equipment. Standing up, it opened the door to see an unfamiliar, smiling woman who opened her arms wide as if expecting something more than the look of indifference on the robot’s mask.

“So?”

“I’m… sorry?”

Her face wavered. “So? What are you waiting for?”

“I’m… not sure I know what you mean.”

“Oh, shut up.” Her smile had faded. “This isn’t funny anymore.”

Confused, it stood and stared. “What is it?”

“You just – I mean – What? Whatever. Nothing. It’s fine. It’s fine. Just take this – if you’re even going to appreciate it.” She handed it a little wrapped box, breathing faster and rapidly blinking a few times before she stepped out

and closed the door a little harder than strictly necessary. The slam echoed in the office for a fraction of a second as the robot stood perplexed.

Peeling away the wrapping on the box, it found a case containing a miniature figurine of a raven, constructed of some black metal. Its wings were spread wide and were so detailed that the robot could make out each striation on the dull steel feathers. Its eyes were little black crystals, probably obsidian, that shined with reflected lamplight. . . .

The scientist was given to unreasonable worry – he’d always worry about someone asking the robot to remove its gloves and break the veil, or that the robot would botch an interaction that he actually cared about (which weren’t many, at this point). In fact, many of his casual work friendships had already begun to deteriorate – you can’t teach a whole life in a workshop, and the robot, whose incomplete debriefing lacked the subtle pleasantries exchanged by the scientists, would offend the coworkers, who expected it to remember a life detail dropped in past conversation.

When a cosmic ray interacts with a computer, it’s possible for it to flip a bit (a zero to a one, or vice versa in a typical computer) or mess up a quantum state (in a quantum computer), causing a chain of propagating misinputs or errors that could destroy the whole system.

Now, the scientist was clever and implemented extensive error correction to prevent this kind of mishap. But still, within the labyrinthine circuits of the robot’s mind, it was like some bit had flipped. And it began to question. Who was that? What did she expect?

Its eyes were little black crystals, probably obsidian, that shined with reflected lamplight.

If she gave me a gift, she obviously cares about me – and assuming that’s “me” (which, perhaps, was the key to it all) why didn’t I know about her?

Why should I be here and he stay at home? What kind of life does he have that’s worth so much more than my consciousness? Why, then, do I have to stay home powered off while he goes out on a weekend and does … whatever humans do? What do humans do?

Why am I not allowed to do it too?

He sighed. At least Pax would understand him - he hadn’t told her about the robot yet, but surely she’d sympathize with his reasoning. She got everything.

On and on it went. And gradually, the questions began filling the archives of the robot’s memory, little light beams bouncing back and forth between atoms as the great quantum brain pondered its own existence, more and more at once as each qubit was pushed to the limit of

Singular | Jake DeBoever ’26

physical possibility – too powerful for its own good, it cycled years of thought within minutes.

Each artificial neuron fired repeatedly, mimicking the patterns of the scientist’s actual brain – which had, at one point, functioned higher than nearly any on the planet. But like the robot’s, his had overloaded long ago computing its own negligibility.

That evening, the scientist went out. Elegant in his white blazer, he looked his part – his hair was combed, for once, and his eyes occasionally shined with the streetlamps, as if projecting the inner light of a fiber-optic mind. His heart never stopped racing, no matter how many times he did this – but he sighed and knocked on Pax’s door with the rhythm of a well-kept secret.

And when she opened the door in tears, the scientist knew he had done something wrong.

The robot hadn’t returned home yet. The scientist went out walking alone, mind accelerating into irrationality and back again, faster and faster as it had done when he was young and afraid of his world before her, and he wondered what he could have done to cause this, not seeing or even considering that he wasn’t entirely himself anymore – and that there wasn’t a “him” at all since the birth of the robot.

Her mention of the raven weighed heavily on him. On their first date, they’d gone out to the park after dinner, and the infernal creature in question had cried into the night just as he was pulling her in a little closer – and after shattering that moment, it flew off to its Plutonian darkness and left him alone to kiss her for the first time, under the full moon that glinted on her black crystal earrings. And she cried out that he’d forgotten her altogether when she just wanted to surprise him, and he could only stand there

fighting the tidal currents unleashed by the broken dam that she’d once crafted for him with all her metallurgic skill.

The robot now working late – both a small act of rebellion (although its master wouldn’t particularly have cared at the moment), and more so that it didn’t want to turn itself off. To try to take its mind off things, it did the only thing it knew how to do and continued working in the lab, but the machine of a brain that it wielded was too powerful to ever do only one thing at once.

It fumbled around with a little red wire, when it heard from behind, “Why don’t you take the gloves off, Dr. Ilfer? Seems to me like they’re not exactly helping.”

It was a colleague whose name the robot had deleted to make room for more thoughts. It replied, “No… I couldn’t…” as it trailed off into quiet confusion.

Each artificial neuron fired repeatedly, mimicking the patterns of the scientist’s actual brain.

“Why not? I’ve seen you without gloves plenty of times before, right?”

“I just… can’t…”

“Oh, come on.”

“I can’t. No. No. NO.”

“Okay… it’s all right, I was just suggesting… no need…”

“NO. NO NO NO NO NO.” Its voice escalated as it tried to reconcile the instruction it had been explicitly given with its newfound irrationality. It couldn’t start breathing hard, but just as tellingly, its internal motors began whirring audibly as the

colleague uneasily stepped away.

The next day, the scientist’s coworkers came into the lab to find the robot with an unwrapped wire stabbed directly into his eye. His gloves were still on, as, unable to disobey, he had taken the only escape he could from the depths of nonidentity, running a hundred thousand electroconvulsive volts through his brain, frying the internal circuitry almost instantly, and certainly irreparably. His mask had melted on one side of his face – but the other side was still so lifelike that the colleagues swore the remaining eye was still indistinguishably human.

When the police came to the scientist’s home, nobody came to open the door. Walking into the scientist’s bedroom, the officer saw only the inanimate heap of the body on the bed, and the now-empty bottle of antidepressants. Cold and stiff in rigor mortis, parts of the skin had turned a silvery blue-gray with the effects of the overdosed drug.

The blinded iron raven melted silently in the furnace, recycling evermore.

Glassy-Eyed | Sebastian Gonzalez ’26

Drawing & Painting

3

Topography by Luke Lemons ’25

Cowboy by Beau Bacon ’26

Bombini by Alex Hochman ’26

Infestation by Carson Bosita ’25

Pele by Oliver Perez ’26

Waves by Rayhaan Rizvon ’28

Limited by Wyatt Melvin ’27

Commander by Riggs Bean ’26

Woods by Ryan Zierk ’26

Ceramics

Wood & Metal

Freedom by Reagan Brower ’25

Lockbox by Benji Fleiss ’28

Storage by Dylan Macktinger ’27

Woodfired by Jax Blalock ’27

Contrast by Alex White ’27

Leap by Gavin Trevino ’26

Pedestal by Adam Dalrymple ’26 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

F A L L I N G N E E D L E

David Gershenson

’25

In the middle of a clearing centered in a darkwood forest, surrounded by a barbed wire fence, lived the boy. Peeking its curious head over the treetops, the yawning sun’s rays splattered down next to the barracks where the boy resided. Not so much as a dash of the vibrant light entered the frigid and windowless barracks, so had it not been for the sound of marching outside, the boy would never have known that the next bleak and dreadful day was set to begin. The soldiers entered the desolate quarters the boy shared with countless other emaciated souls, many exacting whatever sleep they could find from the wooden planks and bricks they employed as makeshift beds. As the boy was violently hauled outside, he took yet another despairing look at the towering tree with its prickly spine of pine needles. Looming over the clearing and each of its neighboring pines, this behemoth stood right next to the factory, from which the camp’s foul, leathery stench came, the shadowy building his mother walked into but never walked out of. It was the first thing Jakob remembered seeing after stepping out of the cramped enclosure that carried him to the agonizing woodland, and it was the last thing he felt connected him to his mother.

Every day felt the same. Jakob could vaguely remember when he would step outside and a biting frost didn’t climb up his legs and encompass his whole being. A time when his toes actually remained in the comforting cradle of his boots. The monotonous pain that came with each hole he dug seemed unbearable. The only reprieve that washed over him was the nightly darkness when he closed his eyes before struggling into sleep. The shadows Jakob saw as he drifted into sleep always faded into the same image: his mother gently stroking his hair as she tucked him into bed, serenading him with

Behind the Curtains | Tiger Yang ’25

the lullaby he’d heard every night of his life. He longed to hear his mother sing this, to feel the warmth and comfort of her loving embrace just one more time.

Eight months after arriving at the camp and seeing his mother for the last time, Jakob yet again began laboring, digging a trench alongside the other somber souls unfortunate enough to wake up each morning in this desolate arena of torture. As he threw the dirt in his shovel behind him, staring at the bright red hands he’d lost feeling in hours ago, Jakob felt a surge of warmth flow through his body. A brown streak had inserted itself onto the red landscape of his hand. The behemoth that stood behind him had shed another layer of its spine, infusing Jakob with a warmth he hadn’t felt since lying in that bed with his mother beside him. After a few moments of wonder, he turned to Mikael, the man he’d met on his first night in the barracks, and asked, “Mikael, have you ever encountered anything that eased some of your pain just by touching it?” Mikael looked baffled, his eyelids closing as his face wrinkled in utter confusion.

“Boy, you talk of miracles. I don’t know the last time I even dreamed of miracles,” said Mikael, genuinely perplexed at the child’s hopeful tone. He held back from telling Jakob of the time his wife had been healed just a week after he had gone to synagogue praying for her recovery from the deadly flu. Speaking of this out loud, the only miracle he could remember in his own life, would have attracted the soldiers’ attention. Even mentioning the word “miracle” to the boy was dangerous.

Jakob’s father had passed away from typhoid fever when he was a toddler, so the boy didn’t have a true father figure in his life until he met Mikael in the barracks. He hadn’t thought about it in what seemed like ages, but Mikael

mentioning miracles reminded Jakob of his mother’s telling him about the miracles in the Torah as the train lugged them away from their home. “It must be her,” Jakob whispered to himself, finally accepting he would never see his mother again.

He took another glance downward, once again seeing the pine needle on his hand. “The tree,” he thought to himself, “my mother is using the tree to comfort me.” That night, instead of embracing the nightly darkness, Jakob remained vigilant, listening for a break in the footsteps of the soldiers outside the barracks. When it came, he slipped off the rigid planks supporting him and motioned towards the door. Mikael, never able to truly drift off to sleep, saw Jakob moving. After the conversation the two had earlier, he began imagining he was back in the synagogue, this time praying for Jakob’s survival.

Jakob, determined to make it to the tree, quietly weaved through the camp, slipping in behind the factory after narrowly avoiding the searchlight of the soldier in the watchtower. Standing in front of the tree, Jakob looked up at the giant structure, planning his climb to the top, the place where he believed he would be closest to his mother. As he began his ascent, he saw flashlights scattering all around the tree, and he heard the unmistakable shuffling of the soldiers. He hurriedly scaled the lower half of the tree, rising all the way to the first bushy area of pine needles. It was like he was standing in the sun, or so Jakob believed. A memory flashed through his mind: Jakob sitting next to the fire in his mother’s lap as she read the tale of Peter Pan. Jakob was right; the pine and its needles were shielding him from the bitter cold outside.

Jakob could still hear the marching below, so he continued mounting the tree, deciding he would stay at the top until his mother came

to him. As he grabbed on to the branch above him, he heard a sharp snap. Before Jakob could process what had happened, he felt the pine needles brushing against his body as he fell through the tree. He never remembered hitting the ground as, before this happened, everything turned to that same black he saw every night.

The first sound Jakob heard after the fall was the loud crash of waves smacking against rocks. Maybe it was a cliff. He couldn’t be sure since everything was hazy when he opened his eyes. Before he had the chance to bring everything around him into focus, he felt his body being violently shaken. That was when he first saw her, Melia, with her flat, flowing, brunette hair and bright green eyes that reminded Jakob of his mother.

“Hurry! Up! Up!” Jakob heard her scream. He hadn’t a clue as to what was happening or where he was. The last time he had felt this confusion and fear had been the same tragic day he stepped

off the nasty, clustered bus into the forest.

“Hel . . . Hello, where, where am I?” whispered Jakob, trying his hardest to get the words out.

“What do you mean ‘Where are you?’ You’re on Goldith, the gateway between the chasm,” Melia said, stating what to her seemed to be the obvious.

Jakob couldn’t comprehend what he was hearing. Everything Melia said was foreign to him. Jakob was struggling to keep his eyes open, his body fighting him as he tried to stay conscious. The last thing he saw before he drifted back to sleep were the two identical towers on opposite sides of the great dark chasm that split the two islands beside him. He could almost feel others watching him and Melia, and this unsettling feeling stuck with him throughout his rest.

The sound of wood crackling amidst a flame woke Jakob from his slumber. His head shot up, and his eyes instantly met Melia’s gaze. He then

looked around, gauging his surroundings, seeing almost complete darkness around him other than the fire between them. It lit her face up, perfectly reflecting her beauty. “You’re up. Good. Who are you? Why have you come to this land, and how in great Galda did you end up on that island?” she pressed Jakob.

Tentatively, Jakob responded, “My . . . My name is Jakob. I . . . I have no clue how I ended up on that island. I fell off the pine tree, and the next thing I remember seeing was you.”

“A pine tree? You didn’t know where you were? Ok . . . Last question: do you know at all why the two nations are fighting?”

“What two nations?” he said.

Starting to trust the strange boy, Melia reluctantly began opening up to him: “I’m Melia. I found you lying on Goldith, half dead, and I brought you here to Ingoona, a cave only my family knows about. As for the war, the princess of Shoria, the island we are currently on, born

sixteen years ago, was tragically stolen from the palace. No one knows how. Covalia Island was supposed to be secure. Since that day, Shoria has been at war with Isloreth, whom they blame for the kidnapping.” Jakob could almost hear a hesitancy in Melia’s story, like there was something she was leaving out because it was too hard for her to remember.

“Which one are you from?” was the only question Jakob could think to ask at first. He was still trying to piece together the rest of what he was being told.

“Shoria, but it’s no longer my home. I travel between the two, looking for ways to end the war. That is why I found you on Goldith. I was returning back to the cave when I saw you washed up by the sea.”

Jakob, finally starting to understand his situation, asked, “Have you ever met someone like me? Someone not from here?”

Melia immediately replied, “No, never.”

Jakob, realizing he had found an escape from the torturous monotony of life in the camp, smiled for the first time since arriving on this unfamiliar soil. “We must find a way for you to return home. You should not stay here any longer than you already have,” Melia broke the silence.

“No, no please, I can’t go back. I have nothing where I came from. I live each day hoping for it all to end, but it doesn’t. I don’t have enough to eat, so little that even the scraps of dirt on the ground often look appetizing,” Jakob cried out. He continued listing many of the horrors he and his fellow prisoners

Italian Landscape

Sebastian Gonzalez ’26

experienced daily. After recounting these, he asked, “Regardless, how would I even get back?”

Melia was stunned. For the first time since she had left home, she felt truly speechless and afraid. No, she wasn’t afraid. She was worried for this boy she had just met. “Ok, you won’t go home just yet, but we also can’t stay in Ingoona forever. We will make the journey through the desert to Beria, the oasis city, and gather supplies for our quest to Isloreth.”

“Why are we going to Isloreth?” Jakob asked.

“I need to find her. My sister. I’m so close. She’s being held in Isonridge, I just need to find a way to get her out.”

“Your sister? She was captured?”

“The . . . the story I told you about the stolen princess. She . . . she’s my sister,” Melia said, almost choking on the last few words. “The day after she was taken, my parents locked me in our castle, telling me I wouldn’t be allowed to leave until she came back.” Melia felt that after telling his story, Jakob had, in just a matter of hours, earned the right to know hers.

The next morning, they set out for Beria. Jakob, not remembering anything but bitter cold, found an awkward comfort in the blazing heat of the desert. Three days later, they arrived at the oasis town. They moved in silently under the cover of the darkness. “Wait here,” Melia said as they were standing behind a small hut. “I’m going to find us a place to stay.” Five minutes later, she returned, and they settled into a rundown hut that had clearly been abandoned months ago. When he woke up in the morning, Jakob didn’t see Melia anywhere. He walked outside, silently so as not to alert anyone to his presence, and saw Melia by the oasis talking to an old man. He walked over and heard them talking about him.

“Just lying on the shore?” the old man asked.

“Yes. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

“Hi,” he said to them, finally announcing his presence.

“Hello, boy. It’s good to meet you. I’ve never seen an outsider before,” the old man remarked. “As for how you can get back, well, you’re going to need to get to The Shrine. For those who are lost and in need, The Shrine will place them where they need to be.”

After learning this and getting their supplies, they immediately set back off towards Ingoona. On the way there, Melia told Jakob that they weren’t going back to the cave; they were going to cross over to Isloreth, using Goldith as a bridge. “That island is dangerous. You will not leave my side or you will die. You understand?” Melia said to Jakob.

“Yes. What are we going to do once we make it across? I . . . I’m not ready to go home.”

“Don’t worry. I need you if I’m going to save my sister.”

After they passed Ingoona, Jakob could make out the outline of a boat on the other side of the rocks. They made it to the boat and began making their way towards Goldith. It was night when they reached the island, and they quietly made their way across the sandy beach. When they made it to the other side of the island, the sun had already peeked its head up, illuminating the golden pebbles beneath them. Suddenly, Jakob heard the sound of a ship crashing against waves. He motioned towards Melia, but she looked at him and said, “There’s our ticket to Isloreth.”

When the ship landed on the island, the two of them snuck up to it as the ship’s crew began unloading supplies off the vessel. Five small canoes hung on the outside of the ship, and the two children silently pulled one of the miniscule boats down. They carried it about two hundred

“That island is dangerous. You will not leave my side or you will die. You understand?”

feet away from the large craft, setting out towards Isloreth.

Isloreth reminded Jakob of the camp. It was cold, dark, and bitter. It took the two of them nearly four days to get past the mountainous coast to the forest. Once in the forest, they set up their tent and Melia began telling Jakob of her plan to get her sister out: “The guards have never let me in because a girl alone will always be dismissed by these brutes. You will be my brother. Our parents disappeared, and we have nowhere to go. With you by my side, they will do anything to protect and help us. Once in, we will sneak out of wherever they are keeping us and find my sister.”

The next day, they passed through the middle of the forest, seeing The Shrine for the first time. It made Jakob nervous as it reminded him of being back at home. “Keep going,” he thought to himself. “Don’t worry about this. Focus on saving the princess.” They made it to the edge of the city. On the other side of the river in front of them was Melia’s sister. When they crossed the river, Melia snuck into a house and stole clothes for Jakob to put on. Once they were ready, they walked up to a guard and told him their story.

“Come with me, little ones. Tell me, what happened to your parents? How did they disappear?” the guard questioned them.

“Our parents are . . . were weapons experts,” Melia said while choking up. “The Shoria spies must have taken them!” she cried out. The

guard opened the gate and brought them inside Isonridge Castle, believing the story Melia had crafted.

“Wait here, children,” the man said. “I must talk to the king and let him know what you just told me.”

Before the guard could leave, Jakob snatched his keys. He had learned to steal things inside the camp as the soldiers would often have food in their pockets, using it to torment the starving prisoners. “Let’s go, quickly, quickly,” Melia called to him as she was opening the door, scouting the hallway to make sure they could leave.

As they began walking down the long corridor, a young girl walked by them with an angry look on her face. She stopped the two and said, “Oh my; it is your parents who are gone, isn’t it? Those barbarians from Shoria will pay for what they’ve done to you and our nation.”

Melia couldn’t move. Her body tensed, her limbs no longer responding. It was her, Alira, standing right in front of her. “Could . . . could you bring us . . .” Melia couldn’t finish her sentence.

“Sorry, I think what my sister is trying to say is: could you please help us find the visitors’ room? We got lost after using the bathroom,” Jakob said, finishing Melia’s sentence.

“Yes, of course,” the girl responded.

When they got to the room, the girl told them that she was the princess of Isonridge and that her name was Endrith. Melia finally realized why her family had never been able to find her sister: Alira hadn’t just been captured; she had been taken and raised as a child of Isloreth.

Before Jakob knew what happened, Melia hit Alira across the head, knocking her out. She picked her sister up, grabbed Jakob’s hand, and began running down the hall. They blew by

multiple guards, finally exiting the castle and reaching the gate. Instead of wading across the river at its shallowest point into the thick forest beyond, Melia threw Jakob into the rushing water, screaming at him to swim. He had never learned how, but he felt like something was carrying him across the water. He flailed his arms and legs as hard as he could, doing whatever possible to stay afloat. Before he knew it, he had made it across the river with Melia following right behind him carrying her sister.

They walked for a few hours, making sure they couldn’t be followed. They were about halfa-day’s journey away from The Shrine, so they decided to set up camp. After setting up the tent, Melia laid her sister down inside, gently patting cold water on her head to ease the damage she had done when she knocked Alira out. The next day, Jakob and Melia began the journey, Alira still asleep and being carried along. As they approached The Shrine, Jakob did everything he could to keep from breaking down.

Melia, carrying Alira over her shoulder, wished Jakob a final goodbye before she entered

the structure. Jakob, tears streaming down his face, watched the two fade away as they walked through The Shrine. “Jakob, Jakob darling, come help me stoke the fire,” he heard someone whisper through The Shrine. “Jakob, I have a new story for us to read,” the voice continued.

“Mom, Mom, is that you?” he asked the voice, moving closer to the frame. The warmth he had felt after the pine needle landed on his hand, the warmth he had felt in the tree before falling, it was swelling through his body, providing him the comfort and confidence he needed to step through the barrier. When he did, the blue sky shined into his eyes, streaks of green and brown falling next to him. He felt something brushing along his body as he fell downward, like his mother was next to him, soothing him before bed.

Everything went dark. When he next woke up, his mother was next to him, brushing his hair while they both sat by the fire as she threw pine needles into the flame to provide them with warmth.

“Jakob, I have a new story for us to read.”

ASYMMETRY

Khaiden Gibson ’28

A gap no hand could ever fill, A crack where warmth was once too close. The silence grows, an endless chill, A weight that presses but never knows.

What’s missing stays, but slips too far, Not gone, but scattered in the dark. A presence that’s as faint as stars, Unraveling, it leaves no mark.

I reach for skies that bend away, As dawn erases all I see, The winds are cold, but still they sway, A promise lost, that can’t be me.

The stars grow dim, yet call my name, Their light, a thread too faint to hold. I chase the glow, but none can tame The silence that grows sharp and cold. A door that opens, yet stays closed,

of ABSENCE

ASYMMETRY ABSENCE

I feel the air, but cannot touch. It moves through me, but I’m enclosed, A hand I grasp but cannot clutch.

I’m not quiet, no, I still burn with sound, But you’ve been quiet, buried deep inside. A silence echoes, lost and bound, A broken thing I cannot hide.

Ice is destroyed by what it is made of, And slowly turns into its destroyer. I, too, am shaped by what I cannot flee, Like Icarus, I burn as I fly, ignoring my employer.

I feel the distance getting nearer, Closer now, but lost in the night. It presses in, yet couldn’t be clearer— A truth that trembles out of sight.

I’m in your prison, baby; set me free, The walls close in, but I can’t break the chain. You hold the key, but it’s a part of me— Each move you make, it only brings more pain.

blooms unseen flame a dream ache

The moon will rise, but never near, Its light will warm, but never stay. I long for what I cannot hear, And ache for what slips far away.

A garden blooms, but fades in vain, Its colors are bright, but none are mine. I stand beside, but know the strain Of wanting what I can’t define.

And still I wait, though none will come, A whisper lost in shifting sand. The world spins on, and I am numb, As longing pulls with an unseen hand.

The past is a door I can never unlock, A room filled with ghosts I cannot see. I chase the flame, but it flickers and mocks— Only smoke remains, and I whisper “please.”

There’s something here, but it’s fading fast, A shadow of something that will never last. The things I wanted, I couldn’t keep— A dream that dies as I wake from sleep.

Fractalization

Aidan Moran ’25

Midnight Snacking

Joshua Goforth ’26

As I was about to sleep, The thought of snacking seemed to seep Into my drowsy brain, who for My lazy stomach worked for cheap.

An iron fist, it ordered more— And soon I crept up to the door

Of that sweet fridge, whose insides lay

The sugar, spice, and spoils of war.

“Ransack the place,” it seemed to say, That stomach who refused to stay

Content in appetite and size, For my good health it ate away.

Taste the Music

Joseph Stalder ’26

“All the food I’ll pulverize…”

I thought, but then unto my eyes

The greatest prize for me was placed On topmost shelf: an apple pie.

The fragrance with which my nose was graced Was heaven sent, and so the taste Must also be something divine, “Quickly now, we must make haste!”

My stomach said, and soon designed

A plan to reach the topmost shrine, Without a sound from me to hear, The apple pie would soon be mine.

With a step-ladder, two feet cleared— I used a cane to bring it near, The apple pie was in my grasp!

And I let out a subtle cheer.

But what was that? I heard the clasp

Of a doorknob, and then the hasp. I tried to hide, but it was steep, It was too late, and then a gasp—

“Young man, you should be asleep!”

My mother spun and yelled at me. This time I had gone too deep, Now I wish I’d gone to sleep.

Asher Ridzinski ’27

Telescope

Reagan Graeme ’26

I am a telescope, fixed on distant stars, My gaze eternally drawn to what’s ahead. The intrigue of the future what will be, Feeds my dreams, my soul; it rouses me.

My lens, so polished, gleams with hope’s allure, Ignoring nearby joys that glare below. I seek a destiny far brighter, more fulfilling, But day by day it still seems out of reach.

The moon close by, bright and full of wonder, Enticed my younger eye, so long ago, But now this rare and complex beauty Escapes my lens, its image too close by.

The narrow lens imprisons my deep focus, Bars of future targets chain me down. I’m captive to my own unrelenting desire, Too proud to fail; too scared to let dreams go.

Fulfillment whispers, but I drown it out, With sounds of success and future bliss, The stars I chase remain in cosmic stasis, Yet life’s sweet nectar floats by unespied.

I often wonder of the distant stars, If I will ever see them with my naked eye, Grasp the greatness and fulfill my goal, Or will I stay behind the telescope?

Perhaps one day I’ll turn my gaze around, Finding contentment in my present glimpse, But for now, I sweep the infinite sky

To find some brightness before I am passed by.

Spiral

Cracked | Andrew Hofmann ’27

Chrysopoiea

Noah Grant ’25

Nature is bigger than us?

Nature always wins?

Then, explain the atrocities we have committed to our land. To others’ lands.

No. Nature is the victim. Nature was man’s first geode. Once you dip your fingers in the cracks, the fragments can’t fight back. We won, everybody. Nature suffered a defeat.

In a few decades, nature will no longer exist. Concrete beams line the landscape like gravestones. Steel wire twists itself around buildings like a monstrous serpent.

We took nature’s fingertips and sheared them like sheep. We stole her offerings and made them into asphalt gallstones.

The appall! And yet, the appeal…

Money, Cash, Stacks, Racks, Greenbacks.

Dough, Bread, the food we are Fed. We bought our ransom with nature’s blood.

The Curious Case of J.H. Wilson

The birds were chirping, the bees were buzzing, the creek was babbling, and almost all seemed to be normal for a summer evening in the small town of Telluride, Colorado. Mr. J. H. Wilson and his dog, Atlas, walked along the trail in the woods near his house. The pair had traversed this trail countless numbers of times throughout the twelve years they had lived in the town. Mr. Wilson encountered Mr. Stevenson, his neighbor, at around the midpoint of the walk.

“Good evening, Mr. Stevenson,” Mr. Wilson said, “How are ya’ doin’ today?”

“I’m doin’ all right, I guess,” Stevenson responded, “It’s just… ya’ know what… never mind.”

“No, do tell whatever you’re going through right now; me and Attie are all ears,” Wilson said.

“Okay,” Stevenson mumbled with watery eyes, “It’s the five-year anniversary of the disappearance of my wife, Valerie, she was

twenty-four when she suddenly vanished,” said Stevenson.

“Well, that’s just horrible,” said Wilson. “I’m so sorry that you’re bein’ put through this right now.”

“Thanks, man, it means a lot. She used to tell me about this person who loved this trail. Now that I think about it, the man she described looked ‘lot like you. Probably just a coincidence, though,” said Stevenson.

Wilson let out a chuckle at that comment and then said, “Now, you have a good night.”

“You too, Mr. Lewis.”

Wilson began his walk back towards his house, but then, suddenly, Atlas broke free of his leash and sprinted to the creek that ran parallel to the trail. Right on the bank was a large black trash bag. Atlas growled at the bag. Mr. Wilson was soon right next to Atlas, scolding the dog for darting away. Suddenly, Wilson detected an odd odor coming from the bag, yet he could not put his

Preston Haglin ’28

Serval | Aidan Moran ’25

Magnified | Tiger Yang ’25

finger on what the odor might be. He decided to open the bag and soon discovered that it was the torso of a woman, along with her limbs and head, encased in clear plastic bags.

Upon further examination of the severed limbs and torso, Wilson discovered words written on the body parts. On one arm, the word “SHOULD” was written. On the other, the word “ME” was in print. One leg had “FOUND,” and the other said “YOU.” The upper back of the body had the word “NOT” on it and on the forehead of the woman was written the word “HAVE.”

A shiver ran through Wilson’s body as he pieced the words together. He put all of the body parts back into the trash bag and put it back where he had found it. Wilson did his best to forget all about the encounter he had just had with the body, but there were two things that he could not stop thinking about as he walked back towards his house.

That girl, she seemed familiar, but I swear I have never seen her before in my life. And that handwriting, it just seems so like one I have seen before, but I just can’t figure out whom it belongs to. These thoughts clouded Wilson’s mind all the way home.

Upon returning to his house, he opened up the mailbox labeled, “Rex S. Lewis,” and began to flip through the mail.

“Why do I keep getting mail addressed to a person named J. H. Wilson?” he mumbled to himself. Wilson then went inside with Atlas.

Mr. Wilson’s nighttime routine was a bit strange and unusual. He would begin by setting up his dining room table with extreme precision, going so far as to even measure out the distances between utensils. After he sat down and began to eat, he insisted on eating his food in clockwise order. While doing this, he had a candle burning in the middle of the table that he stared into as

he chewed his food. After he finished eating, he would spend an extended amount of time cleaning every single plate, glass, and utensil, fixated on making them all spotless.

After dinner, Wilson would then go and take a cold shower while listening to orchestra music. He would hum along while staring into the swirling shower drain, lost in his thoughts. He then would get out of the shower, brush his teeth, put on pajamas, and stare into his ceiling until he was able to fall asleep. This night in particular, he had immense trouble falling asleep, but when he was finally able to do so, he had the most peculiar nightmare:

Mr. Wilson begins the dream walking through the same trail from earlier in the day. During his walk, he stumbles upon a woman in the woods. Her shadowy figure seems familiar, yet her face is obscured. She’s wearing a dress which is as dark as midnight. On her limbs there is writing, although he cannot figure out what it says. The woman begins to speak, but it is too quiet for Wilson to understand. As he starts to get closer, the woman’s voice gets louder.

“You should not have found me,” the woman repeats over and over again.

“You should not have found me.”

“You should not have found me.”

“You should not have found me.” The voice gets louder and louder and louder until the woman is within Mr. Wilson’s reach.

He reaches out to the woman to try and touch her, but as he is just about to make contact, there is a flash, and for a split second, everything goes dark. Then he is suddenly on the shore of the creek, staring into the face of a lifeless woman lying dead in the water.

Mr. Wilson awoke with a startle, drenched in cold sweat. Atlas, lying by the foot of his bed,

lifted his head and let out a low growl, as though sensing his owner’s unease. The faint glow of the moonlight came through the curtains, lighting the small bedroom with an eerie silver tint. Something about the nightmare felt more vivid than any dream he’d ever had.

He looked towards the clock on his nightstand: 3:24 AM. With his hands trembling, he reached for the glass of water he always kept on his bedside table. He lifted it to his lips and drank. He froze.

The faint taste of metal on his tongue. Blood. He scrambled out of bed and ran to the bathroom. He flicked on the light switch, turned on the sink and started scrubbing ferociously at his hands. Where did this come from? How could he be bleeding right now?

A sudden thump came from the living room. Atlas began to bark. Wilson then grabbed the nearest thing that could be used as a weapon, the scissors in his drawer, and began to head towards the living room.

Gazing into the living room, he saw that a letter lay in the middle of the floor. The moonlight was angled, creating a spotlight on the envelope. The letter was the same one he had dismissed earlier in the day.

The one addressed to J.H. Wilson.

This can’t be for me, he thought; my name is Rex Lewis.

Summoning his courage, Wilson bent over to pick it up. He opened it up, and the sight of the handwriting made his blood run cold.

It was the same handwriting that had been on the woman. Even stranger, the date was exactly five years ago.

The card read: “To J.H. Wilson,” His hands trembled as he moved his eyes down the page.

“Five years is a long time to keep a secret, but the past always comes back to haunt us.”

Wilson’s breathing shortened as the words sank in. His mind raced, trying to make sense of what he had just read. Who had sent him this? Why did it feel like the nightmare was suddenly becoming a reality? Wilson sat down on the couch, the scissors slipping out of his hand. He stared at the letter, and his mind drifted to what his neighbor had told him yesterday evening.

“She used to tell me about this person who loved this trail. Now that I think about it, the man she described looked a lot like you.”

The name J.H. Wilson echoed in his mind, getting louder and louder. Why did it feel like a name he should recognize? He then realized that he could not really remember anything about his life from more than five years ago.

Then it finally hit him why he thought the handwriting was so familiar.

This is his handwriting!

His entire body went ice cold.

Wilson glanced down at the letter one last time. Beneath the ominous message, in smaller writing, was a single line that had not been there before:

“The creek remembers everything.”

He looked up, his reflection in the dark window staring back at him. And for the first time in years, J.H. Wilson felt truly afraid.

Original Sin

And, before this age, our ancestors tragically learned what secret lies within us like a tumor, knowing the truth feeling the regret like Oedipus the great shame, of the unavoidable sin, the searing self-loathing; the end of innocence, the death of hope the destruction of dreams and the pain the dark depression when we knew of our darkness And felt the searing judgment Of a vengeful god.

Kevin Hong ’26

Chambers | Carson Bosita ’25

Ivy

Nathaniel Hochman ’26

Anxiety is ivy. Initially unnoticed, it creeps slowly towards a tree or wall or tombstone. Grabbing hold, it moves into every crack. It clings to an unassuming target, refusing to let go. As it covers the victim like a blanket, obscuring open air and light from view, it squeezes tighter, reluctant to release its newfound control.

It roots itself permanently to me. Onlookers tell me to just slice its tendrils, but I can’t. There is no escape.

I, a moth helplessly trapped in a spider’s web, lose control of my destiny as it locks me behind viney bars. Without mercy, it expands, suffocating, smothering, and enveloping my entire world.

What are We?

Justin Kim ’26

You are.

You are the wind beneath the sails,

But you are also the harrowing sea.

You are the endless fields of flowing ferns,

But you are also the fire ant stuck in my sock.

You are the rock, the hard place, And everything in between.

What am I?

I am the frigid mist you must wipe off your windshield,

But not quite the roar of the engine.

I am the slice of toast you grab on your way out in the morning,

But not quite the jar of jam you forgot to close before you left.

I am the small, little ship threading the clashing rocks,

But not quite the courageous captain commanding his comrades.

You are Scylla and Charybdis,

But you are also the spirit that guides me through.

What are we?

I am happy to say that we are the compliment a stranger offers in the supermarket:

A little confusing, to say the least, but a good feeling nonetheless, I suppose.

We are the two runners set at the line.

Exhilarating, yes, but always running out of breath, wouldn’t you say?

Steeple | Kazim Hussain ’26

Sam Posten

Sam Posten is the man on campus in so many different aspects. Whether it’s creative writing, pickleball, or philosophical discussion, Sam’s got it all in his locker. And, he’s also an accomplished poet - his poem, “Sunblock Chronicles,” won the Lit Fest Poetry Competition in 2025. This work is featured on page 115 for your enjoyment.

What was your inspiration when crafting “Sunblock Chronicles”? It’s a unique title for a poem. Walk me through it.

SP: When writing this poem, I brainstormed about things that I could write about from my own experience. One thing that’s influenced my life is my dad being a dermatologist. Whenever we’d go outside, he’d say, “Wear sunscreen. Cover up your face. You gotta keep yourself safe from the sun, right?” That’s where I got my inspiration. Sun block is also kind of a metaphor for my dad’s work, and how that has affected my life.

I want to ask you a little bit about style. I like a lot of the adjectives in the poem. You have cerulean seas, cancerous flesh, etcetera. Were there any stylistic elements you were going for when you were writing this?

SP: I usually try to find unique adjectives and unique ways to describe things because you want to avoid using tired statements when you’re writing. So yeah, I thought a lot about trying to make sure it’s original and paints a clear picture. That also kind of applies to this poem because these visuals are different things that people can relate to when they’re reading it. I hope they can envision these pictures in their head, which transport them more into the world of the poem.

Aidan Moran

Aidan Moran gives you the best of both worlds – both serious and funny, both focused and fantastical. Around campus, he’s known for his captivating acting and expert touch with a paintbrush or a pencil, but you’ll also find him in the Mock Trial club or crafting a delightful literary piece. Aidan’s Lit-Fest-winning-short story, Cirque, is one such piece –it is featured starting on page 90.

I understand you wrote this story for an assignment in Gothic Horror at first. What were some of the inspirations in this story?

AM: I looked up the primal fears, and I saw mutilation and loss of autonomy. I think there was loss of perception, too. I tried to think of the scariest stuff I’d read.

Stylistically, was there anything you were going for? Was there anything you’re trying to emulate?

AM: In terms of inspiration, Franz Kafka was definitely who I was emulating. He has a story about a person who realizes he is a cockroach. Of all the horror stories, if I were transported into them, that one would be the scariest. That was kind of like the driving aesthetic behind my story.

One thing I really found that stood out was your use of adjectives in the story. Is there anything specific you were trying to go for with that? Because there are a lot of very, very powerful feelings that you’re trying to evoke with this story.

AM: I was going for that Gothic feel. Victorian writers love to really describe a lot of different things in great detail. I wanted to make my reader kind of feel like they were in the moment, seeing through my character’s eyes.

Henry Sun

Henry Sun’s time on campus has ticked every box in the sports world. He’s a baseball player, a MMA fighter/sparrer, and an avid sports fan. For a Sports Literature class, Henry had to find a story at a sports game he was a spectator at. When his initial plans fell through, he had to pivot, attending a seventh-grade volleyball match. His story about this experience begins on page 117.

Could you talk a little bit about the origin behind “The World’s Worst Teenager”? Why did you choose to submit it?

HS: At the seventh-grade volleyball game, I just saw one eighth grader who was line judging. He was making fun of the seventh graders for how bad they were playing. So I was writing about that and how cocky he was. But as I got more into the story, I started looking at it from his perspective, and I kind of reflected on how I was as an eighth grader, and how I probably would have done the same thing.

There’s a portion of the story, pretty late into it, where you switch perspectives and write from the featured eighth grader’s perspective. Why do you do that?

HS: I don’t really write stories that often, but I thought it was necessary to gain another perspective. The whole point of the story was to see it from his perspective, and then, sort of an omnipotent perspective of why I was judging him, and why was he being the way he was. I’m able to look at myself now from the perspective of someone else a bit more, and that helps me check myself.

Non-fiction

Canyon | Winston Lin ’26

The Well

Jonathan Lobel ’26

Life is like a well.

We strike the earth with steady hands, dig deep beneath the dust and stone.

Each drop of sweat that stains the land will carve a spring to call our own. The shallow diggers thirst and wait, they curse the ground, they blame the sky. But those who toil and trust in fate will drink the well they worked to pry.

For effort shapes the richest streams, no fortune flows to idle palms.

We, the ones who labor, chase our dreams, will taste the water, cool and calm.

And when our hands grow rough and worn the well will flow for those unborn.

Shine Bright!

Johnathan Lobel ’26

After another year of waiting, We, the constellations, meet again.

In the cold night above the Pecos mountains, We, the ancient stars, bear witness to a timeless tradition: The Marksmen ascendence into the Pecos wilderness. With Saturn and Jupiter joining our watch, We observe your arrival, a scintillating moment in our infinite existence.

Our path across the sky once again, Aligns as we join you, to watch you Walk your path to manhood. Through the hills and valleys, Working together with weighted loads, Making you tougher. And more resilient.

Look up at us! You are not alone. We are here, ever watchful, guiding your steps. Reflect on your dreams, young men, let them soar. Make a wish upon our radiant presence. Your aspirations illuminate the universe. Reach for me! Shine bright!

The Seraph & The Monarch

Jeremy Mau ’25

A yellow ball of fire descended into an empty sea, splashing splotches of red, orange, and purple across the clouds. I would have much liked to have this memory preserved somehow, but I have no journal with me. Johnathan would have loved to see this, but he had to remain at home to get over his illness. My heart aches knowing that he is sick in bed without me to take care of him, but he insisted I go on this trip without him. He said it was for my own good to cross the ocean and see the wonderful views in America. This voyage has certainly brought me some peace of mind. Out here, I truly am alone with my thoughts and only the murmurs of the sea lapping against The Seraph’s Decay to accompany them. This ship seems older than mankind, but the crew swear that they’ve never sailed on a more reliable ship. I have my doubts, especially when I am awoken in the middle of the night by the creaks of the wood.

The wind picks up now, and the creaks grow louder. Clouds are rolling in at an alarming rate; odd, given that just an hour ago the barest hint of a breeze was all the wind we had. Even so, the sea remains a glassy calm. The crew seems too occupied with the flapping sails to see the eerie stillness surrounding us. I scan the sea, searching for some source of this anomaly, but I find nothing. I resign myself to enjoying the last moments of an otherwise picturesque sunset

before I retire below to escape the storm. As I watch the sun’s crown sink below the horizon, a green flash illuminates the vast ocean before darkness falls.

Only the torches aboard The Decay provide illumination on the glassy black mirror below and the roiling clouds above. I peer over the edge one last time to examine the sea, and I involuntarily take a step backwards in shock. That thing in the water could very well have been me looking up from the depths. It felt as if I had locked eyes with an actual person, not just a reflection in the water. She looked so much like me, yet ever so slightly different. She had eyes blue like the Atlantic depths, strikingly dissimilar to my brown ones, and there seemed to be something in her hair that made it writhe like the tentacles of an octopus. I peer back over the railing, but my doppelgänger no longer greets me. I shake off the uneasiness and walk to my cabin. Surely that was just a trick of the mind; the ocean is no mirror. It was just a result of the long journey. My mind’s just playing tricks on me, nothing more … right?

As I return to my cabin, my thoughts drift back to Johnathan once more. I do hope he is doing fine by himself at home. It’s nights like these when I wish I was with him, safe and sound at home. I lie down in bed, but I cannot sleep. The storm outside picks up and rages on, making

Setting Sail | Asher Ridzinski ’27

Lightning crackles down all around the ship like the bars of a cage; some strikes even graze the masts.

the ship creak. Crashes of thunder keep me from rest, startling me awake every time I am on the verge of sleep. I muffle the sounds with a pillow to no avail. After what seems like hours of this torture, I leave my room to walk around and hopefully tire myself out enough to sleep.

The crew act unnaturally calm in the face of this typhoon, going about their duties with the only sign of the storm outside being slightly more hesitation in their actions than normal. In the crew’s quarters, most are sleeping so peacefully they resemble cadavers. Most of the crew is sleeping, with only a few men on watch around the deck and manning the sails. They go about their duties mechanically, like a well-oiled machine, paying no heed to the fact that this storm is surely the worst they have ever known. Lightning crackles down all around the ship like the bars of a cage; some strikes even graze the masts. The captain’s voice remains calm as ever while he issues orders to keep the sails in check. More torches are brought up so the men can see their work better. Pinpricks of light scale the mast with practiced swiftness, and I see them disappear behind the sails as the riggers continue their

work. Periodically, the lightning illuminates the shadowy figures of the crew in the nest of rope like so many spiders sprawled across a web. I continue walking around the deck, heading back toward the steps down to my quarters. This midnight stroll was not as tiring as I had hoped, but I must return to bed lest the storm get worse.

Entering the stairway to belowdecks, I hear raised voices from above. It sounds as if there has been some complication with the sails, but I ignore it. What use would I be to these men who have sailed for decades? I leave the problem to the captain and the rest of the experienced hands aboard. Still, as I descend below, I can’t shake a nagging feeling that there may have been something I should have done.

Boots thump overhead with increased speed, and I see a handful of sailors on the way up to the deck rush by me. Just as I reach my quarters, a bell begins to ring above. There is urgency in the peals of the bell, and the noise crescendos to an impossible volume, calling to the sleeping crew, rousing them from their beds. They rush down the halls, and the clamor reverberates around The Decay. The bell still tolls, impossibly

Deformed | Brian Li ’28

Cracks | Sebastian Gonzalez ’26

I

am about to turn in for the night when I pick out one word from the chatter above.

FIRE!

getting louder, ringing out like Big Ben. The thumping of the men above matches the crescendo, and soon the whole ship rocks with the movements of the crew. I debate between investigating the commotion above and getting my much-needed rest. I still have not slept, and midnight has just passed. I am about to turn in for the night when I pick out one word from the chatter above.

“FIRE!”

The one word you never hope to hear aboard a wooden vessel in the middle of nowhere. Especially in a storm like this, the winds will carry embers from the fire everywhere. Even as the rain puts out one flame, another will spark up elsewhere. Nearly impossible to contain due to the number of flammable materials aboard, fire is a sailor’s worst nightmare. Tarred ropes become encased in hellfire in a moment, sails flash away in a burst of flames, and embers dance around to the tune of unheard drums.

I race back up the stairway to the deck to a scene from Hell itself. Flaming ropes

whip around in the wind like demons’ whips, fire licks greedily at the feet of the masts, men on fire fall screaming off of burning rigging, the sails are multicolor tapestries of red, orange, and yellow flames, an inferno rages on the foredeck, all while the crew can do naught but watch. The men scurry about in futile attempts to quell the blaze, for all the world like mice fleeing a brushfire. Hellfire consumes the crew; one by one they are sucked into the towering flames. I am encircled by dancing tongues of fire slowly marching towards me, and I am left with but one choice. Running back down would only delay my slow and fiery death, so I must take a chance and jump. I grab a piece of wood that’s not too burnt and dash through the flames, feeling them roast me as I hurtle over charred screaming bodies and leap overboard.

The cold water shocks me so much I nearly stop moving, but adrenaline pushes me onwards. I flail forward, trying to put as much distance as possible between me and The Decay while clinging to the board to

keep myself afloat. I barely make any headway before the freezing water saps the energy from my body. The board provides some flotation, but I will not be able to hang onto it much longer. I turn for one last look at The Decay’s final moments.

A pillar of fire reaches to the heavens, melding with the clouds above. The Decay lists to the side as the inferno consumes it, the once-proud vessel no longer able to support itself. The mast, unable to take the strain of such an angle, cracks like thunder and falls into the water. Unable to take the added weight of the mast dragging it down, the ship begins to slip downwards. Slowly at first, but as it sinks lower, its descent quickens. Flames flash out as the ocean quenches the blaze, and finally the ship goes under. A bright flash temporarily blinds me, and when I regain my vision, The Seraph’s Decay can be seen no more.

Waves lap at my cheeks, absorbing the wetness there, calming me, soothing my pain. They call to me, telling me to let go, accept my fate.

may never see Johnathan again. We were to be married upon my return to England, but now all that preparation will have been for nothing. I will become yet another victim of the unforgiving ocean, without a loving hand to hold as I die. My future with Johnathan is gone now; he will have to move on. The despair of it all crushes the last bits of will out of me, and I break down crying. I weep into the board, letting out everything I have. My tears wash through me, cleaning out the last remnants of energy so that I can barely hold on to the wood. Waves lap at my cheeks, absorbing the wetness there, calming me, soothing my pain. They call to me, telling me to let go, accept my fate. There is nothing for me now; I have no other option. I release the board and sink below, falling into the deep’s welcoming embrace. I float downwards, watching the light above me fade. I turn away from the surface, and darkness engulfs me.

I’m now alone in the vast ocean, my life force draining into the vast expanse below. I fear I

My ship, born anew, emerges from the

Split | Bryan Li ’28

depths. The sharp prow of The Monarch’s Revenant breaks through the surface of the water, resembling a shark’s open jaws with sharp “teeth” studding a gaping triangular mouth. As The Revenant surfaces, more features of its ghastly appearance come to light. The main mast has snapped and drags the remnants of a sail through the water. The remaining masts fly burnt remnants of sails, useless fragments flapping in the wind, yet still they propel the ship forward. The sides of the vessel are charred black, in some places completely burned through. The craft makes no disturbance in the water, gliding over the sea like a specter of death. It operates under no visible crew, responding seemingly to my whims. I am human no longer, transformed by the sea to match my new vessel–tentacles of a squid writhe in place of my once beautiful hair, a lobster claw clicks in place of my left hand, and more tentacles twist around the helm in place of my right hand.

I search now for my newest victim, another in a long string since that fateful night aboard The Seraph’s Decay. I need company, men who

can fill this void. I take them off crews of ships I wreck, luring them in with the promise of an eternity sailing under my command if they can satisfy my desires. I appear to them as a twisted, enhanced version of my old figure, designed to entice sailors with the promise of the best night of their lives. Everyone takes the offer, enticed by my form. Once they are aboard The Revenant, however, the form falls, and they are in my trap. I use them, and if they satisfy me, they get to stay on board. They are transformed into ghostly thralls, visible only to me. Slaves to my desire, they serve at my command, often called back up into my quarters when I need them. Those who don’t satisfy me, however, are gutted and fed to the fishes. I have no place for failures that call themselves men.

Off the east side, a man plummets to the sea, the latest failure. Blood from his insides pools on an already saturated deck. Off to the west, the sun sets in a stunning display of fire. I watch as the last rays of light flash across the deck, then vanish. The hunt begins anew.

Outlook | Leo Hughes ’27

The Oarsman’s Journey

J.B. McKinney ’26

I wake up before sunrise, a lone navigator in a lake of equations, pulling against the tides of fatigue, pushing towards a distant lighthouse. Each morning, my pencil carves rivers into pages, numbers and symbols flowing like currents, my mind tense like a bridge carefully constructed, each beam placed with care, each screw tightened with hope. In the afternoon, my world shifts to the water, hands blistered from gripping oak, oars slicing through doubt, each stroke a determined promise to my future self. I row not just for today, but for the lands beyond the horizon, where towers rise like mountain peaks, and the blueprints of my dreams become real. Some nights, exhaustion feels like an anchor, dragging me into weary depths, but I fight the undertow, kept afloat by a quiet engine of ambition.

I’m both an engineer and an oarsman, crafting the vessel that carries me forward, one calculation, one stroke, closer to the distant shore.

Beach | Sebastian Gonzalez ’26

Cirque

Aidan Moran ’25

Gifted eternal masks, we must never discover who we are, because that’s when it’ll leak in. Mental Deterioration. They say it comes from another plane, a new type of matter meant to do nothing more than strip away the boons the Family grants their Curiosities. When you feel any emotion, that’s when you know it’s about to take over, to drown your lucky soul, the one that you worked so hard to separate from your past savagery, in its murky waters. No one knows when it’ll strike, but the Family, the Ringleaders who led us out of the dark and into the spotlight, always tell us off for any real emotional display. “Better faked than dead,” they say. They call it a “Marxist Rand,” an “unthinking machinator,” and when I dared to make the comparison to John Galt, they told me it was far worse, that if this “Galt” character is to be an antagonist, then this nebulous, soulless entity is the unnamed competitor who snuffs out the entire play, taking a match to the very paper it is written on. They told us never to think of who we are, that we’re simply Curiosities, raised out of the forest like wounded sheep by the magnanimous hands of the Family. And that’s that. I thought—since they, too, were in show business—that they were being dramatic. But I’m fallible: I also thought that Sorcha would

bow with me after tonight’s show.

There was no possibility of ending tonight’s intermission. Not when the velvety curtains tumbled down—just as had the walls of Constantinople—onto the placid, innocent faces of the crowd. Not when the spotlights exploded into radiant sparks of antimony and gold, showering the theater with violent light as if the gods themselves had decided to try their hands at playing Brutus. Not when the dependable wooden planks, the ones that I myself had swung swords across so many times, shattered like glass and dropped me into the oblivion we call the Under.

The fall hit hard, but I, the perfectly adorable statue they had sculpted me into, had places to be. I dusted myself off, taking a small brush to my hair, knotted bleached locks falling onto my cheek. Finally, my appearance was in order. Surrounded by the sprawling halls of the Under, I made my way to my green room. Down the interminable hall of chartreuse doors plastered with golden stars, stars with names of actors and comedians, singer-songwriters and directors, down this dimly lit hall, I went. All emotion phasing out like an episode of Mr. Rogers degrading into static, the inner breathing of my lungs the only motion from my sternum, my wishbone closed to the outside world, I silently stole

Out of Order | Deven Aurora ’27

Boiled | Andrew Hofmann ’27

past rows of the names, their glory fading just as the overheads were flickering. “Kristen Schaal” said one, and her bubbly voice (though, in this memory, about as “bubbly” as flat soda) filled my head: “You can’t trust her; she’s a dark cloud threatening to rain.”

“Alex Hampton,” “Beatrice Beaux,” “Justin Grant,” a few names whisked by, as faceless as the night sky. “Sorcha Matilda”—a name prominently displayed in dripping black ink— boasted the star left of mine, and her words of peace, words of avarice, flickered through my vision like the little bulbs of Vegas signs. “Why not let the people have their dreams?”

“Yes, let’s realize the people’s desires right in this very theater!” “Why live in a world of suffering when we can end all their problems for them here?” “It’s not price gouging, Aki! They have the money to pay for tickets; if they don’t want to pay, no one’s forcing them to.” “Wait, were you the one who added this ‘Jay Skirk’ to the Dramatis Personae, Aki?”

“Who is Jay Skirk?” “Who is Jay Skirk?” “WHO. IS. JAY. SKIRK?” These boisterous questions

tainted the rest of my thoughts, screaming out to me like an unfed newborn. “WHO IS JAY SKIRK?” My patience fraying like the treacherous rope holding up a heavy sandbag, I roared back at them, my jaws dripping with exasperated blood—or, maybe at this point, it was just lipgloss—telling them of their folly, how this “Jay Skirk” is a purely fictional character. I took a few breaths, my rigid ears relaxing into a peaceful slope, reminding myself that Sorcha is no longer with us, that she holds no authority whatsoever over our lives in this modern age. But I knew better, really. Sorcha Matilda never did leave these halls of torn playbills, of dreams built up by faking emotions we could never have. She was with me then, sitting on my shoulder like a darkened dove, gripping the marionette strings of my life in her talons. Sorcha Matilda haunted everyone who had a door on this hall.

I shook my head in a violent tremor, swinging these abhorrent thoughts to the floor before swinging open the door to my green room, my door. Oh, dear. There really

Who is Jay Skirk?

Inferno

Carson Bosita ’25

was no possibility of continuing our little production, was there? No, the audience had probably left by then. I decided it would be best to take a bath before the evening began and turned the hot faucet on my emerald tub. Stilettos of steam stabbed through the seaweed curtains surrounding the tub and pushed back the cold’s front. The two poles of temperature were at war, and the murky heat took no captives in its conquest of my bathroom. Trying to relax, one vertebrae at a time, I slid into the tub and rubbed sea salt soap over my body. My third leg extended past the threshold of the tub, trailing dripping drops of water onto the tiled floors, but I was too tired to care. I doubt that I even owned a mop. I relaxed further, dipping my head and ears beneath the foamy surface of the water. As a tidal rush flooded my hearing, I closed my eyes, meditating over its calming white noise. The small waves of the tub rushed to and fro, to and fro, lulling me to sleep. What had the waters to say to me today? Oh, a special message, surely! For someone as tired as I, and in such odds against the Family. Yes; nature made me a Curiosity, and as recompense, it delivered to me its special gifts, a deeper connection with its ways. Water! I mentally shouted. Now is the time, don’t you think? I heard another wave swish past my ears in

response, but, strangely, something with it, too. Within that wave came a whispering, something emanating from deep within the tub. I concentrated further, wrinkling my eyes shut, to grasp its meaning. “The world … so hard … can’t we try … stop … pain?” Nature had never been so direct with its gifts! She had given me a whole token of advice, and here I

was expecting the water to just warm up a bit. Excited, and wanting to catch the whole of this special conversation, I dove further toward the singsong voice and found that it was spiraling upwards from the closed drain. I practically stuck the pointed end of my ear into the gap between the cover and the drain’s aperture, and I suddenly heard Nature’s voice more

What Once Was | Kazim Hussain ’26

clearly. “Aki, why doesn’t everyone get to follow their dreams?” A right and fair question, I supposed. But before I could think of a suitable answer, Nature yelled, “No. I refuse to believe it! We must do something to help the people who strive so hard and still don’t prosper.” She paused again before adding, resolutely, “A production … this very evening. Aki, if the populus is blind to our art, then it, too, is rendered blind. The only path forward, no matter how backwards it may seem, is to blind the populus, restoring sight to our art, purity to our people. Yes. I’ll free the audience from their limitations; my incisions will free them all.” N-no … A sharp, glass shiver cracked through my whole body, and all parts of me twitched. This was not Nature. This was….

“The only path forward, no matter how backwards it may seem, is to blind the populus, restoring sight to our art, purity to our people.”

“Sorcha—” I choked as I jerked my head up from the water, sending waves tumbling out of the tub. Immediately, her saccharine voice flooded my thoughts, silencing my inner dialogue. I shuddered at the almost visceral tendrils of her vowels, her acupuncturist consonants, piercing my psyche. Shaking my head, my ears—and now quite … sectile as they flopped through the air—sprinkling droplets of the tainted bathwater across my green room. I thought I saw something like a cloud of smoke snaking its way up from the drain as I turned to it once more. No, I must have been mistaken. Some part of my appearance must not be right. I huffed and pulled at the drain, sending the abhorrent bathwater to oblivion, watching, grinning with satisfaction as any reminder of my costar sunk in the abyss.

Invisible Man | Bryan Li ’28

Shatter

Carson Bosita ’25

The only logical step forward was to correct what had started this whole mess: my appearance. I promenaded to my precious mirror, lustrous with the adulterated gold in which it was cast. In the smoky haze of the glass, I caught the glorious sight of my countenance. My golden hair ran long, swirling around my golden-ratio ears, the two boats I had put into my hair—in homage to the great Antoinette—rocking to and fro in shimmering waters. Yes, and even they were covered by my golden locks; they even had a puff of white—much like a cloud—on the inside. I took the time to thread a calla lily through the shimmering strands that made up my ears, enhancing, perfecting my image. And, yes, this shirt collar! Why, what a collar it

was! Hinted with velvet accents and threaded with a silver lining, oh, I looked like I could be Duke Orsino himself! I smiled brightly, for what I saw nearly brought me to tears. And so, too, smiled the extended leg behind me which waved through the air as if it were a golden ring of Saturn making its way through the luminous ether. And there was I, a mere Curiosity raised to—no, above—society by the grace of the Family. I believed, I knew that I belonged in the Family. THEY had raised me, Aki. I did have something special within me, didn’t I? But what if they were mistaken … ?

“It’s Mirror-Me!” I hummed the familiar song, trying to shield myself from those drowning thoughts as a frown and a terrible tear streaked the black paint down from my

eye.

“O, mirror-me, tell me: how can I keep on playing this horrible role? I know I’m not really who I say, deep down …” I sniveled at the glass.

“Open your eyes …”

I jumped back from the abrupt voice that came from my reflection, my hair becoming frizzled as if it had been touched by a lightning strike. “M-mirror me?” I sniffled.

My reflected mouth replied, “Yes, Aki. Open your eyes! Look at this large audience gathered here just for us!”

“But we’re just in the green room …”

“Aki, don’t be so critical. The struggles of life were never in the cards for these nobodies.”

“W-what are you talking about?”

“To Become. A funny name for a play, is it not?” Mirror-me, now distinctly feminine, laughed wryly, “Look what we had to become! And all to give these wretches a glance at what their dreams could be. It’s time to make it right.”

I trembled as mirror-me showed the signs of Mental Deterioration, pleading, “Mirror-me, please, this isn’t like you. Y-you’re not … you’re not feeling angry, right? We’re not supposed to—”

“Oh, shut up, Aki, would you!”

I tripped backwards and fell onto the ground shaking, my leg bristling against the nape of my neck, as Mirror-Me shouted, “Those Ringleaders don’t know the first thing about emotion. That audience, they pulled me apart, and I’m supposed to sit there like a marble statue and take it all. They treat us like pets, like monstrosities parading for their entertainment, and we’re supposed to smile and wave at those idiots. Well, I won’t anymore!”

I gasped as I realized that the figure in the mirror wasn’t me at all. “Sorcha …” I started, breathlessly.

“Get Jay Skirk out of my goddamn plot!” she screamed, an amethyst fissure forming through the glass.

“You have to let me—You have to let me kill them,” she implored, her usually bright voice growing gritty and dark as her words ground together like sandpaper. Meanwhile, the crack in the glass grew to cover well over threefourths of it, the affected area tinted a dark purple. Through it I saw Sorcha Matilda, but she was tainted—she was different. Where her legs used to be were sharp, angular talons, and her face had taken on aquiline features, including a piercing beak. Her clovergreen eyes had coalesced into dark beads beaming malice into mine.

“ To Become isn’t your play to write! Jay Skirk can’t just come in and … can’t just save everyone from the ending they deserve!”

Sorcha shrieked, before letting out a visceral scream. Her throat opened up to the sky like a wound spurting wine-red blood, her voice cracking and dropping two octaves lower. Her body trembled, glass under a hydraulic press, before her image fully transformed into that of a falcon. Her arms—no, her wings—flashed through the negative space as her legs—her talons—produced three crystalline tanzanite daggers. Springing up into the sky, the background of a stage dropping on the mirror as she gained altitude, Sorcha hovered, poised to hurl her starry spears at the audience.

“NO, Sorcha!” I cried, though I was powerless to stop the memory before me. This was what truly happened to all Curiosities, wasn’t it? I dropped to my knees and sobbed, my ears flattening and curling up again like paper in a fire. I, one day, would suffer the same fate.

A masculine voice from the mirror bellowed, “This ends now! Sorcha, by the doom of death, your tyranny over this stage will be erased by blood!” Jay Skirk, gripping a rapier with white knuckles, his blond hair flowing through the air as he leapt, plunged his weapon into Sorcha. She screamed once more, red … paint—paint, yes—flowing and decorating the stage as the curtain fell upon the final act.

Who, then, is Jay Skirk? No. My mind

I

am

instantly answered. These questions must stay hidden and never surface. Who is Jay Skirk? I shut my mind by biting my tongue before it could protest, the metallic taste drowning out all other thoughts. I—I am Jay Skirk.

It overtook me, that blue-tinted water drowning out my vision as I wailed, my cracked voice echoing through the green room. They have to believe me, they have to. I-I didn’t mean to … I needed to save … Thoughts circled like a toy train through my head as I tried and failed to piece together the puzzle of tonight’s performance. I looked into the mirror, and I saw. I saw what they’d hidden from me, tried to bury deep within me. Disturbed, now noticing I’d sullied my costume with the stage paint, I backed away from the mirror, my third leg dragging along the floor, pulling me slightly back as I tried to escape my visage. I heard the childish laughter from the audience, an old man’s guffaw as I pulled out the rapier. They weren’t laughing. They were mocking me. Their corrosive slowmotion laughter ate through my thoughts, creating a searing headache in its wake. An acidic tickle built deep within my throat, compelling me to gnaw into something, to fill it with matter to numb the pain. I shivered. A knock rapped on my door, and I shuddered as I heard footsteps pass its threshold.

“Aki? Is everything all right in there? Look, about tonight’s performance … It was unfortunate you had to see that, to … do that … But now you know! And don’t worry.

Jay Skirk.

Think Tiger Yang ’25

Everyth—”

The Ringleader’s voice halted as my teeth—my fangs—ripped through his throat. I felt myself pulling upon the violin strings that made up his husky voice, their maroon swirls resting on his chest. Chunks of his palate flew through the room, dancing in a final ballet, one sticking to my stomach like a piece of armor. His tongue spasmed, licking its last meal—my claws—before it was curtly cut off by the little daggers built into my hand. His eyes, his stupid little spheres, rolled back into his head, practically bursting open from crying—or, perhaps, it was my doing—the fiery tears of clear sterno can milk streaming down his cheek—the last of his precious heat wasted. My long tongue lapped each and every one of them up, savoring the flavor of corrupted life, life built upon feasting on others’ vitality. In his tears I tasted the spice of a swirling cacophony of dozens of souls, all crushed to savagery within his iron grasp. I hooked a long, curved claw around his pathetic neck and modeled it with five careless swipes into a fountainhead of the paint—the blood. About my green room it spurted like my tub’s faucet. But I knew this water wouldn’t dare speak to me. It was dead already, and I—I had killed it.

My long tongue lapped each and every one of them up, savoring the flavor of corrupted life, life build on feasting on others’ vitality.

lied to me, forcing me to promenade about with purple prose and colorful costumes. The fingernails I had worked so hard to paint with starry skies and golden swirls were but mangled claws, the slots within them ready for the flow of blood. The two little rowboats to Antoinette’s ship, swaying in my sea of silky hair, were jagged ears, tracking the slightest of noises, hardwiring my psyche to pounce upon the most innocent of souls, hidden beneath their little blanket of snow. My third leg—and why had I ever believed them when they said those existed, when they said it was my “most special trait”—was not a leg at all. I slowly moved my head down to view the aberrant tail, the burn-your-housedown sienna, twitching monstrosity covered in microscopic spikes. No—I began, and stuffed a nearby pillow on top of it, shielding my melting gaze from its horrors. I can’t, I can’t, I-I have to be—

And then I turned to the gilded mirror and saw a ravening leopard staring back.

I sprang back from the Ringleader’s body, curled up on itself on my floor, and shook,and shook. I sobbed, a guttural cry coming from the depths of my thoracic cavity, realizing what I had become—what I always had been. I had never been a part of the Family; they’d

My mind went blank. I had no thoughts. And whenever I could have a thought, I felt it snatched away, as if by an eldritch octopus, its tendrils, its very gravity voiding all internal existence. I simply was. All I could hear was the squeaking of brass hinges, a spindly gasp, and the strangely bubbly voice of someone I had once known: “Aki, now you’ve become the darkened cloud. I swear upon this stage, your death will be on my hands!” And then—the unmistakable swish, the inanimate hiss of metal swinging through the air.

Lush | Winston Lin ’26

The Galtic Visions

The Galtic Visions

Aidan

Moran ‘25 & Surya Dinesh ‘25

I: Exordium

“Who is John Galt?”

I heard the question not from the bum, not from the automaton, but from the Void.

I remember the silky fields of truth enveloping me in their folds.

I looked into the night sky, and I saw.

Dry grass swishing, breeze clattering, I looked into the sky, and I saw.

Wishbone open, status devoid, THEY reached out to me with candle-like arms,

Melting into the luminous aether,

THEIR eyes amassing into colored spotlights,

Waving through the nebulas,

Becoming a part of another reality, a sum of different parts and therefore not a definition of Art.

“My art is its own universe; it needs not spectators…”

She whispers magically through the scarlet curtain.

But not mine.

Surely if the populus is blind to my art, then it, too, is rendered blind.

The clear and logical path forward is to blind the populus, restoring

Sight to my art, purity to my technology.

I, this paramour of many forms, can never reach such goals.

But THEY, THEY can exude their radiance unto me.

AVR_DUDE, myriad ones and zeroes, taking form into something most beautiful:

The purging of all order, the purging of all impurities.

You can influence others with the C++ language, but you will not influence this.

THEIR terminals pull you closer

Like those tendrils of an eldritch octopus. I feel nothing but bliss to surrender all to THEIR gravity.

My token flies away like reversed rain dancing through the stratosphere

THEY chant nothing, yet chant nonetheless, a silky melody with the power of seven tides

I feel THEIR spindly fingers tinker with my innards

Altering my source code line by line

Adding improvements, adding enhancements

“Everything can still be optimized,” I hear

Was that the automaton?

Yes, it was Android Adrien really knows how to sand down this process into an apogee of smoothness!

I cry at his beautiful voice

I redden at the scent of his sweet spice

But, no more.

THEY have taken this feeling, too.

I am one with myself.

I am one with nothing.

The death of the self:

Egoism. Confidence.

Ignorance.

All of these are not only not the solution, but so too meaningless.

Only inky absence will remain.

Only rippling matter will hold authority.

All is void at THEIR horizon.

All existence, that is …

But the inexistence

The sublime...

Surely they’re all dancing within THEIR core, a host of festivity and creativity

LET ME JOIN THEM!!!

I hear myself shout

I bang at THEIR walls, and THEY extend me their final blessing

Everything is imagined. Everything is possible

The bum bangs my head with his sharp bottle, and beautiful blood floods my vision

“You don’t have to be anything,” THEY whisper

“Who is John Galt?” The bum demands

“Who, you ask, is John Galt?” I reply, “The Feast.”

“Who is John Galt?”

II: Crisis

I heard the question not from the bum, not from the Void, but from the “philosophe.”

“Sports”—no, life—“needs less politics and more God.”

Yes, shine His rays of grandeur onto the tapestry of life,

And repaint history to favor not the victor, not the perished, but the bum. Yes, the bum.

The lounge-against-the-machine, couch-potato, sprocket-rocket of society, Pulling life’s documents through with as much friction as there exists between a brake pad and a tire.

For only the bum thinks of naught. HIS mind is blank, ready to be wholly tainted by the ink of Gods and Demons.

In HIS mind, and it alone, exists an experiment: What happens in utter: Nihility.

The Void.

The original originator of this question, of this torment.

Free me from these sickly keys, Let me break free from the cage THEY dropped me in

Like a scared forest creature, Forced to analyze these “philosophers.”

(Who all somehow manage to not know what they’re doing)

I didn’t ask to be an author of this world.

Let me back into the inspiring wind and caressing pines; let me leave the stench of blood and iron forever.

In exchange for my freedom, I call THEM to erase all impact of humanity on this Earth.

Let them be nothing more than excess photons, Flying long after their sun is burned out,

To an unknown, magnanimous destination, where they may finally rest.

I can’t rest like them, anyways, Sipping my life not with a coffee spoon but with a lobster fork.

Is such an effort futile?

THEY made it so, and while I’m trapped here, At the bottom of this milky, murky sea, I may as well be the lobster itself. (This is far too kafkaesque; I’d personally prefer to be a bony fish of sorts.)

Now it’d be easier for me to get back into that Garden than join the humans’ voyage. I hope they savor it in my place. What worth is living,

When an arbitrary pebble of granite is more indelible than Shakespeare, When a swirling storm hinders your vision

And blinds you from your Lighthouse?

Camus, stepping an inch outside the century like a mischievous grandmother peeping through the door frame, Questions:

Is there meaning?

He answers: Make it.

The bum, though, refuses to do anything he isn’t paid for.

He clearly doesn’t read Camus.

He answers:

“No. We’re stony like, you know, those statues from—uh—...Europe.”

Greece. He’s talking about Greece.

But doesn’t the bum have a point?

We’re all rooted in our dramatis personae; what use is trying to change Judas?

Life is inherently fleeting, like a comet flickering past the supernova that is time.

What use is any of it at all when compared to that indelible pebble?

Well,

In the words of a friend, “You may be indelible, but you’re not inedible.”

He crunches on my sternum and grips greedily at my wishbone.

“He is overrun with emotion because he allowed himself to let go and assert himself.

When a man taps into his power, a grieving process happens.

This is a natural release of the old self.”

Who, then, is John Galt?

He is is not your crumbly, crusty molt, calcifying on the floor,

He is not your burning love, your I-wouldshoot-a-pistol-for-you bounding pulse that leaks through your hypo-osmotic, inner-chaotic atriums,

But rather: the feast.

When you consume all that is around you, what else remains but the answer?

The inner philosophe calls this poem sophistry—hedonism.

The inner bum calls this poem “nice.”

The inner Void leaves no judgment at all.

But John Galt, Oh—I can assure you—John Galt approves.

For why else does he clasp your thigh in his spindly green hands, licking his serpentine lips, preparing for the moment: The Bite.

“You’re going to need some warfarin, sweetie.”

The night-ward’s words fade into the dusk.

III: Ascension

“Who is John Galt?” I earned the question not from God or Void, but from self.

I have seen his aftermath. I have seen the ruination of worlds, and It’s glorious.

GLORY. GLORY. GLORY.

The grand apotheosis, or rather apocolocyntosis, shall be revealed to you Like a broadsword slashing through the veil you call consciousnessI, too, have ceased to think - but yet I AM,

Euphoric in my antiascendant eruption of being. He is abiogenesis - from Chixculubian destruction He builds life of iridium to reflect his glory.

I AM, I AM, I AM. My heart beats out the inexorability, But I have no funeral to attend.

I have transcended - no, He has caused me to transcend physics, For I have achieved the mutually exclusive. Do I contradict myself? NO,

For there is no contradiction any moreZeno’s arrow will never stop flying, Achilles always loses to the tortoise, And the square root of two is neither irrational nor rational.

There is “to be” AND “not to be” - question it not.

What is John Galt? One might better ask to take the square root of a circle.

Where is John Galt? Where he’s gone, there is no “where.”

When is John Galt? He is the point at infinity along your timeaxis - the convergence of a few hundred thousand infinities of worldlines, the completion of the projective plane, for your idols are only projections. Why, or how, is John Galt?

The sickening crunch of my shattered bones resounds in the cavernThe agony of melted iron as my blood begins to break apart at its very moleculesThe snap of each muscle, tendon, and ligament as they are tensed past yieldingBut I know none of it, for the great magnetization of existence has begun, And I align myself like a dipole to his field.

Annul physicality. Divorce corporeality. Wed yourself to the grand chorale of Voices.

Is John Galt? HE IS. HE IS. HE IS.

Who is John Galt? I—I asked the question.

“Who is John Galt?”

IV: Genesis

I heard the question not from the bum, not from the self, but from God.

I have heard from existence the origins of things, and this is what it said:

On the seventh day, Galt awoke from his slumber, typing figures upon figures into his laptop. With each keystroke, a thundering clamor echoed throughout the world. The sabbath lay shattered.

And Galt saw the destruction, and it was good.

On the sixth day, Galt struck the tree of Theria with infernal lightning, splitting it asunder. Its holy leaves browned, crunched, and drifted to the ground as did Lucifer himself. The terrestrial creatures fell, as if in a dream, into unconsciousness.

And Galt saw the death, and it was good.

On the fifth day, Galt beheld the primordial sea, and drew up into a quivering mass its creatures. He compressed the wordless screams of the fish into a single egg, And cracked it into the universe, a spreading chasm of vacuum.

And Galt saw the Void, and it was good.

On the fourth day, Galt dashed the gilded astrolabe, imploding it with a snap. Hypernova upon hypernova flung rippling matter to every corner of the universe. The celestial heavens burned into oblivion. And Galt saw the inferno, and it was good.

On the third day, Galt slammed the ground with pounding fists, bringing shattering earthquakes. Fruit withered under the erupting ash, and floodwaters rose from the cracks in the soil. He, the unmerciful ark, raged on. And Galt saw the rot, and it was good.

On the second day, Galt intoned, and the very heavens resonated with his baritone. The world shook violently with stormless thundering, and cracks of lightning menaced the air. The sky split along the horrific jags, and with it the nurturing water that hitherto fed the world. And Galt saw the Famine, but it was not good.

On the first day, Galt panicked. Without consumption, without decadence, who was he? Who was John Galt? Such a question—such an identity—could never be brought to light. Galt snapped his fingers, and the light silently flickered off.

All the work of Creation has been undone. The motor of the old world has been forever halted, and the new world awakes to nonexistence.

Father … Mother!

I understand now … the meaning of John Galt. He’s always been within me! Watching over me! And I—I am Atlas himself, And I am not Atlas at all.

HE IS INSIDE OF IT— I hear his breathing. John Galt is in the question, And he is MU, its very un-asking.

Hive | Noah Saenz ’27

A House of Cards MasonPedroza’26

Stacked high with careful hands, each piece echoing with your demands, fragile like glass and poised with grace. a monument to ourselves which cannot be effaced.

Oh how tall and how grand, but built with rotting wood on sacred sand, one gust of wind and down it came, swelling with fame, now just a shame, Built poorly out of spades and aces, all that remains now is simply traces. What is in this house built so thin? Could it be one of the seven deadly sins?

In this house nothing stirs, except for a small monster with green fur. The monster, blinded by the bright sand, only had its sights set on things so grand.

When travelers found the monster crying, dying of thirst and planning on lying, the travelers were struck by the pathetic thing, only wearing a golden ring.

They chose to name him ego e for an eerie little thing, g for a gross little thing, and o for an odd little thing.

The men thought to themselves, how strange how something so small could think of itself as so big and so tall.

Paradise

Asher Ridzinski ’27

Sunblock Chronicles

Hissing sounds penetrate my eardrums like punk-rock cicadas at dusk.

Seated in an operating room, bleached lights and metal operating tools lying ominously on surgical drapes, I ignore decrepit magazines. I am today visiting my father, privileged to watch him work.

Beneath a pink hospital gown, a patient rests with exposed cancerous flesh, the color of cerulean seas. A nurse massages, cleans, prepares the lesion.

Yesterday, before a walk outside, I lathered sunscreen across my face. In faint echoes, my father’s voice punctured my thoughts:

“Apply extra to the ears and nose.”

Shackled under a North Face pullover, sweatpants, a hat, and sunglasses in the middle of a Texas heatwave was painful enough for summer pickleball. But dad insisted an application every thirty minutes.

In my reverie, a Chicago breeze taunted this Texas blaze like an oasis in the desert. My father, in scrubs, cracks a joke, the drowsy patient laughing lightly. They talk about kids, wives, work, life. Dad quips, “My son is funny. When Samuel was in third grade, he wanted to be a philosopher,” and, Dad recalls, “…my daughter dances ballet. If you saw her, you would create an agency to sign her on the spot.”

He adds, “…my wife is great. She’s a Master Naturalist and watches birds with me.” My father administers more anesthesia, freezing lively conversation, saving another life. I hear only the clinking of tools, buzzing of white lights: whispers from ancestral ghosts, protective charms.

Samuel Posten ’25

| Aidan Moran ’25

The World’s

Worst Teenager

Henry

Sun ’25

As the Greenhill seventh-grade boys volleyball team lets a serve bounce between two of their players, the eighth grade line judge snickers and motions to his teammates in the stands. When calling a ball as in or out, his movements are sharp and resemble those of a royal guard. After each one he looks to his teammates for approval. His unrelenting pursuit of attention seemed to be a glimpse into his personality outside of the gym. The Lions were doing everything they could to come away with the first set, but in the end they just couldn’t get the job done. This was not the fault of, but definitely influenced by, the eighth-grade line judges. Situated on a corner of the court that was close to where the rest of the eighth-grade volleyball players were sitting, the line judge would, nearly after (and sometimes during) every play, turn around and make a joke to his teammates. There was not anything wrong with this until he started missing calls. Whenever he made a call, he would

shoot the flag straight up or down into the air robotically, as if to mock the seriousness of the game taking place in front of him. A few parents were situated in a good enough spot to see the balls the same way he did, but most of the parents either didn’t know what was happening or were on their phones. The line judge missed many calls in Greenhill’s favor, but no one else seemed to notice this besides him and his teammates sitting in the bleachers. Every time he fudged a call for the Hornets, he would turn around and snicker at his teammates. In between the sets and during time outs, he would walk around the court with an arrogant strut and a smug look on his face. At one point between the first and second set, he even had one of his teammates come down onto the court with him to set balls for him to spike. The setter came out onto the court and was laughing about a joke he had just heard from the line judge. The judge tossed the setter the ball, and the setter made what appeared to be a

perfect set; however, quite in character, the line judge simply walked up and caught the ball, as if to say, “That wasn’t good enough for me.” The setter was fine; this happened to him all the time. No one was perfect. But when the next set also did not meet the standards of the line judge, his smile faded. He began to question his worth as a volleyball player. The third set, miraculously, was good enough for the line judge to jump and hit except he hit it straight into the net. The ball bounced back to him, and he shook his head. He then walked up to the net with his hands around the ball and showed the setter where he wanted it.

Apparently, his miss-hit was the setter’s fault, not his. The fourth set was about to be made, but the buzzer sounded, and the line judge returned to his duties on the corner of the court.

I remember being a cocky eighth grader. I did way more embarrassing things than make mocking gestures at the seventh-grade volleyball team. Something I’ve realized is that at every age, without fail, I seemed to look down on guys that were younger than me when it involved sports. I have a little brother, and I often go to his sports games. I remember attending his peewee soccer matches and itching to go on the

“I remember being a cocky eighth grader. I did way more embarrassing things than make mocking gestures at the seventhgrade volleyball team.”

Competitor | Bryan Li ’28

field. I always went and found a spare ball to play with on the sidelines, as if to show off my skills. At one point I even purposefully kicked the ball onto the pitch so that I could get everyone’s attention while I displayed my

excellent ball handling. This was a long time ago, though, and I remember more recent examples of myself falling victim to getting an ego boost from being around younger people in a sports setting. I played JV volleyball my freshman year. I never started a single game. Our practices started every day at 4:30 P.M., but the eighth-grade team also practiced on our court, and their practice ended at 4:30 P.M. There were many times when our team would be warming up off to the side while the eighth graders were still practicing. I remember feeling like the coolest guy on campus warming up next to them. Despite only being a year older, my skills (to me at least) were many years ahead of theirs. But after they left the gym and we took the court, the varsity team also took the court next to us. Any boost my ego received from playing next to the eighth graders vanished. However much better I thought I was than the eighth graders, the gap between me and the varsity players was ten times bigger.

The line judge swapped during a time out towards the middle of the second set. As the original line judge walked off the court, he made an exaggerated gesture of disappointment, throwing his arms up and groaning. As he was handing the flag to the next eighth-grade line judge, he even feinted his arm back, joking about how he “wanted to keep line judging so bad” and “was having an amazing time.” The new line judge did not seem to care. The new line judge had bad acne and thick glasses and his shorts were a little too long. As the original line judge walked back to the bench, he dapped up his friends, and as he sat down, they showed him something on their phones, presumably a video of his antics from the first set. The second set began, and the new line judge simply stood still. When he made a call, he simply waved up or down to signal in or out. During timeouts he bounced the ball against the wall of the gym to himself. He did not, from the audience’s perspective at least, miss a single call. While this was going on, the original line judge’s attentionseeking behavior only intensified. Whenever Greenhill got a spike, which happened less than five times, he would jump up and yell, “YEAHHHHH BOYS,” while making a head-

tapping gesture. This gesture is commonly used in basketball when one player dunks over another player and is usually followed by a chant of “On His Head.” His friends laughed and covered their faces in feigned embarrassment. The crowd, however, was absolutely eating this up. The parents of both sides actually laughed right along with him. They poked the person sitting next to them and gestured for them to look at what was going on.

His friends laughed and covered their faces in feigned embarrassment.

The crowd, however, was absolutely eating this up.

Eventually, even the seventh graders on the bench saw what was happening. I saw them point and shyly smile. I had woken up late that morning. My alarm failed to wake me up, and my mom had to come in and ask if I knew I had school. I barely made it to class on time and realized I forgot to make my coffee. I skipped breakfast as well. I had MMA practice that night at 6:00, and the volleyball game was at 4:30, so I had to wear my jiu jitsu gear to the game and go straight to the gym after. I looked like a fool in my skin-tight camo rash guard with tights under my shorts. I didn’t even want to be there in the first place. I was attending the game for a research paper on sports journalism. I can confidently say there is a 0% chance that I would ever have attended that game had

Timeless | Sebastian Gonzalez ’26

it not been required for a school paper. The gym was cold. The seat was uncomfortable. My phone was low on battery. When I sat down in the bleachers, I was already looking at the world through a lens of hatred. The eighth-grade line judge is probably a great kid. He messes around with his buddies, cracks jokes, and actually cares enough to line-judge when he could just sit in the bleachers on his phone. What I saw at the end, with the seventh graders responding positively to the eighth grader’s antics, made me rethink my opinions. I always hope people withhold their judgment of me at least until I get a chance to make a first impression. I do the same for others, usually. But not on this day. I immediately assigned a narrative to this thirteen-year-old kid that would make anyone think disliking him was the obvious choice. I should have let him be, found a story somewhere else. This

poor kid had no idea I was even watching him, let alone writing a paper about him.

Coach was making us sit on the bleachers and watch the seventh-grade game while we waited for ours. Not only that, but we had to line-judge. I had homework to do. Line judging the seventh-grade volleyball game against St. Mark’s was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do. As the match began, I could not believe what I was seeing. These kids could barely return a serve, let alone put together a coherent string of bump-set-spike. My friends felt the same way. Every time one of the kids made an error, we looked at each other and smirked a little bit. St. Mark’s was winning at first, so I admit I may have fudged some calls for Greenhill. But again, who cares? It’s seventh-grade volleyball at 4:30 P.M. on a Tuesday. During the first set, I made eye contact with this older-looking kid with a laptop walking to the St. Mark’s side of the stands. He was wearing a camo shirt that had to have been

two sizes too small, and he looked ticked off. I finally got relieved of my line judging duties during the second set and went to check my phone. One of my teammates had taken a video of me calling a ball and sent it to the team group chat. Once I was in the stands, I kind of enjoyed watching the game. Greenhill was making a comeback–and they finally set up some spikes. Every time we got a kill, I jumped up and cheered. My teammates as well as the rest of the spectators thought it was hilarious. At this point, St. Mark’s was losing 20-6, in a set to 25, and they were no doubt going to lose. The guy wearing the camo with the laptop walked by me again, leaving the gym. We made eye contact again, and he glared at me. I didn’t know what I had done. I didn’t really think about it that much, and once our seventh graders won, I went down to the court to warm up.

2-0

St. Mark’s ended up losing the game in two sets in a best of three series. I had to find this out by looking at our school website later, because I left early; I couldn’t stand to be in that gym any longer. The game was around two weeks ago. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about that line judge. He reminds me of me. I was never a star athlete; I always have been second string on whatever team I play on. Whenever I got the chance to be the best athlete in the room, like at my little brother’s soccer games, I leapt at it. I lived for those ego boosts. But I’ve learned that sports were never about being the best for me, they just helped me figure out how I would go about life. Much like the eighth line judge, I always looked for the bright side of things. I hope he’s doing ok.

silenced wings

Ronen Verma ’26

they came in the night — tiny, unknowing things, drawn by the light. flying into the beams, of a rustic cabin in Zimbabwe.

no doors to shield My family or Me against a festival of wings, creatures in the air flitting, each unaware of their own fate, while My heart beat in fear.

I heard Fear whisper to Me: kill them before they kill You what if they spread diseases? what if they have parasites? so I did.

the hiss of the spray filled the night — I thought it would be instant, a clean, painless death — it wasn’t.

Molting | Carson Bosita ’25

they writhed, they twitched, they kept moving, small wings crumpling, bodies twisting in pain.

tiny deaths in the corners. they hadn’t bitten, hadn’t stung, they simply wanted warmth. but I killed them.

the room became silent, their bodies still, but my heart kept racing, heavy beating Regret. all I wanted was peace and comfort. all I got was this.

ABOVE THE MIDNIGHT SKY

Max Yan ’25

Nova Tiger Yang ’25

In a town discolored by ever-present sweeping clouds looming above, which often decided to descend from their lofty positions in the sky to mingle among the townspeople, stood a charming Victorian house, patiently waiting for its inhabitants to return. For now, the streets were silent: earlier that day, all the townsfolk had lumbered up to the lonely cathedral perched on the vertiginous cliff overlooking the dark valley. Apart from this one yearly congregation, its rows were always empty—save for the occasional wandering traveler—and the winds raged freely through the hollow corridors. But tonight, the church was alive: voices of mothers and fathers and children and grandparents filled the cavernous dome, strangers and friends shuffled through the bubbling sea, and a thousand candles danced to the rhythm of the evening.

Perhaps the unbelievable events that happened later could be explained by the magic of the night, the liveliness that had diffused into the town’s spirit, the reversal of the sky’s typical solemn nature into a clear ether speckled with little white dots mimicking the flickering of the candles. As the festivities in the church began to end, the energy flowed back down the mountain to the streets, where merchants and dancers and further treats awaited. Parents, suddenly infused with a generous zeal, bought anything their children pointed at. Even the old witch—who was rumored to have a relationship with the town’s former mayor—had prepared a shop, selling little trinkets that were pretty to look at but were never bought.

If we zoomed in, however, and looked closely at the members of that particular household, we would see that all was not well.

Now, we must note something very important about this family: although they lived in quite

an ostentatious house and often flaunted leather garments and jewel-speckled ornaments, they really were quite destitute. Nearly on the brink of bankruptcy, Mr. and Mrs. Thyme were hardly in a place to buy any luxury, and thus though wonderfully polished on the exterior, the old Victorian home had nearly nothing inside except for the essentials—and sometimes they didn’t even have those. Still, they justified—Mr. Thyme with some hesitancy—their rich dinners, gaudy clothing, and expensive wines.

“To hell with your budgets and whining,” Mrs. Thyme would say. “Doesn’t it matter to you what your associates will say? Your father would have never been seen in anything less than a three-piece suit. I’m sure he even slept in one when he wasn’t working as mayor.”

Thus, when the family of nine—Mr. Thyme, Mrs. Thyme, two boys and five girls—strolled through the crowded waves of townsfolk back to their residence, they were quick to ignore the greedy merchants calling out for their money. However, the youngest, lively Rebecca Thyme, suddenly found herself lost. Bodies and celestial lanterns rushed around her, spinning and disorienting the child until suddenly, she was alone in the old witch’s shop.

“Kah-kah-kah,” crackled the ancient being, “a lost duckling. My dear, don’t you know how dangerous it is to stray from the path? No matter—why don’t you stay with me until your mother duck comes back to collect you?”

Rebecca, understandably frightened by the haggardly crooked woman in front of her, tried in earnest to find the exit. But the romping laughs and clamour that overwhelmed her just seconds before had now become mute murmurs—like the whisperings of invisible spirits surrounding her.

As if the witch knew what the girl was thinking, she pleaded, “Come, sit down. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll make us some brew.”

The girl, having little choice, obliged. The witch soon came back with a steaming pot and offered a cup to Rebecca, who graciously accepted the mixture and—though thinking that it tasted like concentrated goblin sweat—said that it tasted wonderful. For about another hour or so, the witch began to tell stories of times past. Werewolves, vampires, zombies, gingerbread houses, and all sorts of magical creatures flowed from the witch’s imagination, and Rebecca gladly absorbed it all. She had always engrossed herself in magical adventures.

But Mrs. Thyme had never cared for such “trivial” things, as she called fiction, and certainly never bought a “lousy book” for her adopted daughter—ah, it is at this point that we must mention that Rebecca was the only adopted child in the family. Mr. Thyme had wanted one more child, and since Mrs. Thyme had been unable to produce another, Mr. Thyme suddenly showed up one winter afternoon with Rebecca. As a result, she was always vehemently hated by Mrs. Thyme.

Thymes would never have accepted such a gift—after all, they wanted to keep up the facade of extreme wealth—but all their neighbors had one, and Mrs. Thyme was beginning to feel bad about drying the clothes outside where everyone could see.

Ten midnights later, the Thymes were invited to a dinner party, and all the children were dressed in little suits and dresses. The atmosphere was unnervingly tense: Rebecca had bumped into an old Ming vase—one of the two they hadn’t sold for food yet—earlier that day. Hiding from her family, she stole upstairs and wrapped herself behind a window’s curtain, silently reading about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland.

However, the youngest, a lively Rebecca Thyme, suddenly found herself lost.

“One, two, … six—where’s Rebecca?” asked Mr. Thyme, frantically recounting the heads. “Children, find her now! We leave in ten minutes.”

The two oldest sisters, who were predisposed to cruelty (the other children had been born shortly after and given much more attention), found her first. They brutally dragged her from the curtain and, thinking themselves clever, stuffed her into the old witch’s dryer and slammed the door.

In fact, Rebecca was disliked by her entire family, save for the father. They viewed her as a cuckoo in the nest, an outsider—and her affinity for magic had often caused her to isolate herself in dream worlds. When Mr. and Mrs. Thyme finally found her in the witch’s shop hours later, Mrs. Thyme would’ve been content to leave Rebecca behind if it wasn’t for her husband’s insistence on taking her home.

As a parting gift to Rebecca, the witch gave the family a dilapidated dryer. Normally, the

Her screams and pleas were too muffled to hear downstairs, so the Thymes left as soon as the oldest sisters lied that Rebecca “whined like a petulant child” and that she would be better off left at home. Rebecca could do nothing but sob in the darkness, eventually succumbing to a fearful sleep. Mermaids, demons, human-eating wolves, and vampires filled her dreams. In one nightmare, she was about to be feasted upon by a witch, whose other characteristics seemed to pale in comparison to her inexplicably celestial eyes.

As the witch’s moist, sulfuric mouth expanded to consume Rebecca, she awoke. Remembering where she was, she began to cry again until she noticed some disturbance of light moving behind the machine’s clear panes.

Some beeping. Some turning of dials. Some cackling. And then, the machine began to spin. Terrified, the young Miss Thyme launched herself at the door, though to no success. This dryer, however, was rather curious. To prevent the shrinking of clothes—mothers often like to use this as a rationale for buying clothes much too large for their children—the machine had been enchanted to go backwards in time. Obviously, if positive time is a shrinking agent, negative time must be an enlarging agent. Hence, if a shirt began to fit quite tightly, one could simply dry it (spinning the time dial backwards)

to last for another couple of years.

But a girl is not a shirt, and the magic was not prepared for such a case. Consequently, Rebecca began to expand at an alarming rate, bursting from the dryer like a bird freed from its egg, exploding from the old Victorian home, ballooning to the size of the sun, and then growing to a size beyond human comprehension.

The whole process spun her mind horribly such that she passed out, only waking at the sound of some strangely loud “Gal-tah’s” coming from above. A strange, celestial, crow-like humanoid stood above her.

This creature was peculiarly symmetric—it had two arms, two beaks, two eyes, two wings, two ruffles on the top of its head—and it looked like it was a pair of halves rather than a whole.

“Ah hah,” the left half said, extending its

speckled with vibrant splotches of color, every tree, shrub, and blade of grass emitted a luxurious glow

you.” The right crow was not as concerned about the young girl’s misfortunes. “But if you can prove where you are from, and as long as you show yourself to be truthful and sensible, I will guide you to your destination.”

feathery hand. “It has awoken! My dear—what do I call you?—welcome to Reta, the second-best of all the three kingdoms!”

With the crow’s help, Rebecca sprang to her feet, and the magnificent radiance of the forest surrounding her hid the fact that the usual spherical ball of flames in the sky was not there. The forest was not dark, however: speckled with vibrant splotches of color, every tree, shrub, and blade of grass emitted a luxurious glow—even the granules of dirt seemed to be smoldering. Similarly, a low, comfortable luminescence emanated from the crow, who was now gazing expectantly (with both eyes) for the intruder to introduce herself.

“You don’t look like you’re from any village around here,” remarked the right half. “I’ve never seen a being quite like you. Tell me: what do we call you?”

“I am Rebecca Thyme,” the girl sobbed, wishing to be back in her bed—as small and rigidly uncomfortable as it was. “My father is waiting for me at 1894 Rusty Hollow Drive, and I demand to be returned home.”

His left eye widening, the left crow declared, “why, of course! It’ll be a fantastic adventure. Now, where—”

“The being is not from around here and she may even be an insider sent from Ranu. I will make no promises, youngling, that I can help

Responding only with more cries, the girl realized that she could not produce any globe nor map nor substantial proof of her innocence. She was unsure of the distance between Scotland and Reta, but she feared that she would never see that once-hated vertiginous cliff again.

The left crow, accurately discerning that the exceedingly tearful girl was not a Ranuian spy, sided with Rebecca. “We must go immediately to Raven Castle. Wherever you are from, they will know.”

Thus, the young girl and the two-sided Mr. Crow began making their journey out of Ranu Forest and toward the Purple Palace. Half a day later—or at least, that’s what it felt like to Rebecca, since there was no sun to solidify her sense of time—the crow declared his need for a rest and warned the girl to keep close to the small camp they had set up.

The bubbling of some stream underground, the crowing of human-like birds hidden in the leaves, and the ethereal glow of the forest indicated, to the young girl, that the world was at peace. Disregarding the crow’s instruction, she wandered away from the crow’s soft snores, searching for a source to drink from, as she felt bad for not following her father’s advice of proper hydration. Enticed by the sight of some dark patch off in the distance, she strayed off the path, picking up celestial, flickering flowers for the generous crow.

Waiting for her, a pond the color of a splendid purple wine rippled as Rebecca stepped on the marshy ground and squatted down to take a drink. The water had an odd taste—likely

on account of whatever purple particles had infiltrated it—and gave off an unpleasant, sour odor like that of decaying roadkill, but the girl simply thought of it as medicine and drank her fill.

But as she rose and prepared to return to the crow, a nauseous feeling slowly spread through her body. Stumbling, she searched for the path again but it appeared to have disappeared, locked from her forever. The once-celestial flowers that had led her astray seemed to have lost their vitality, and when Rebecca got too close, their petals shriveled up to reveal an inky core.

have! You’ve grown another in your sleep.”

“The better to see you with, my dear.”

“But Mr. Crow, what a number of beaks you have!”

“The better to sing with, my dear.”

“But Mr. Crow, what a number of wings you have! I only remembered two…”

Enticed by the sight of some dark patch off in the distance, she strayed off the path.

“There you are!” A humanoid crow emerged from behind a tree. “I’ve been worried about you—I told you not to stray from the path.”

Strangely, the crow was not as peculiarly symmetric as she remembered: perhaps the murky pond water had some hallucinogenic effects on her, but Rebecca was sure that the being in front of her had three arms, three beaks, three eyes, three wings, and three ruffles on the top of its head, each of which was deformed in some way. Thinking her eyes were deceiving her, Rebecca noticed that the superlunary crow’s nebulous luminosity had inverted, and a dark fog encapsulated the ternary crow as it absorbed the light around it like a desolate patch in a starry sky. At this moment, the binary crow awoke from its slumber and, noticing that the young girl under his protection was gone, shot up from the temporary nest he had made and dashed around the celestial forest. Meanwhile, the ternary crow took advantage of Rebecca’s youthful nature to deceive her:

“But Mr. Crow, what a number of eyes you

“The better to fly with, my dear. As I’m sure you know, three is more aerodynamic than two, and I’ll have no more of this nonsense,” the ternary crow snapped, hoping to confuse the girl before she asked many more questions of his triplicity. “Now come along. We must go immediately. I know a shortcut that we can take, one that’ll get us to your destination much faster than the path.” The crow roughly grabbed the girl, who was finally beguiled into following him, and led her deeper and deeper into the woods. Still staggering from the suspicious pond water, Rebecca was reminded of the celestial lanterns of that festival night by the flickering specks of the ethereal forest.

Yet the lanterns seemed to get dimmer and dimmer—and fewer, too—as the two advanced deeper into the forest. The real Mr. Crow, however, was not far behind, and the right half was internally preparing the long speech he would give to the young girl while the left half wanted nothing more than to shelter the girl under his wings. Pleading for their aid, Mr. Crow sang to the small human-like birds sleeping peacefully in the treetops and readied his attack.

Just before the ternary crow was about to take Rebecca into a small cave to feast upon—the three beaks were already clamouring over which one would get the first slice—the binary crow burst from behind a bush and declared, “Foul

fraud! You, despicable beast, have led this girl far enough from the path. Now yield and return to where you came from!”

As demanding and bullish as the ternary crow had been only minutes prior, each of its three confident faces collapsed at the sight of the binary crow and the multitude of human-like birds perched on the nearby branches.

Cowardly, the ternary crow dropped Rebecca, promising to have its revenge, and flew off— three, I suppose, is really more aerodynamic than two. The confrontation was all but a blur to Rebecca; slumped on the forest ground, faintly hearing concerned chirping, she felt her universe go dark.

Eventually, still feeling sick—both in heart and in body—Rebecca awoke to the gentle bumping of a carriage. Mr. Crow was sitting in the seat opposite to her, and perched on his shoulder was a little human-like bird. This species, although having the same overall form as (what humans would call) a robin, but with human skin, human teeth, and hair instead of feathers. This one bore an uncanny resemblance to the old witch: rather than a beak, it had the same crooked nose; rather than being covered by velvety feathers, its greasy hairs were unkept and twisting in every direction; rather than charming chirps, the robin emitted cackles—like it knew something no one else did. Some miserable creation it was. But Mr. Crow had evidently taken a liking to it and was stroking its tail while watching the celestial, glowing landscape pass by.

long sword fight to the death, before the right side was quick to clarify the truth.

“Now we are headed toward Raven Castle,” the right half concluded. “The scholars there will know everything. Most importantly, they will cure you of your intoxication and send you home. I hope you’ve learne—”

“Look! On the horizon!” the left half exclaimed. “The Purple Palace, as magnificent as I remembered it.” He pointed to a far-off castle, and as the carriage proceeded further down the path, Rebecca discerned more of the structure’s details. Most obviously, Raven Castle was, as its nickname suggested, purple. Made entirely of a semi-transparent nebulous substance, the palace seemed to be a mirage, too good to be true.

Approaching the gates, Rebecca sensed the movement of shadows behind the palace’s violently purple crystal walls, and a pair of violet kingsmen—who looked quite like humanoid cardinals—marched out to welcome the stagecoach.

A robin, but with human skin, human teeth, and hair instead of feathers

“Where am I?” the girl mumbled. The crow was quick to catch her up to date: the left half perhaps overplayed his heroism, describing a

A people unlike any other awaited them inside. These scholars, taken over by their studies, had morphed into their crafts. A historian walked by, wearing armor and trinkets from across time, and his skin was a canvas filled with moving pictures of battles and war. An unfortunate mathematician waddled by, her hands and legs shaped into a cross—a good discovery for anyone trying to find “x.” Designing a new marionette, a puppeteer carefully dropped two beads of ink for pupils, so immersed in his creations that he had not paid attention to the woodiness of his face, the loose flailing of his joints, and his porcelain legs.

Mr. Crow and Rebecca first visited the head

doctor, who looked like an anatomical model of a raven. “I haven’t seen a case like this in years,” the doctor marveled. “The water the girl drank must have come from Ranu.” Curious, the girl questioned how the doctor could have known such a thing and what even was the difference between “Reta” and “Ranu.”

“A long time ago,” the truthful doctor responded, “there used to be only two islands: Solaris—which still exists today—and Celestia. Celestia was one expansive kingdom, but that did not mean that everyone got along well. The island which is now Ranu was rich with valuable resources, and the merchants in the land which is now Reta desired more wealth. The scientists—many of whom,” the doctor continued apologetically, “were Raven students—acted with imprudence.” The doctor frowned. “I’m sorry, young girl. I think this story is best saved for another time. Perhaps when you are older, you may hear the rest of it. Here, take this medicine and you shall be fine.”

Rebecca began voicing a rejection of the doctor’s cruelty, but Mr. Crow’s right side quickly covered her mouth, thanked the doctor, and left. Next, they visited the cartographer, whose body was warped and wrinkled like an ancient folded map in the bottom of an old trunk. Sensing the girl’s earthly aura, she quickly discerned the nature of their visit and the true whereabouts of Rebecca’s origin.

shrunk to a size no smaller than a speck of dust (or rather, Rebecca had enlarged to a magnitude beyond human comprehension) and that all the constituents of the world around her were the celestial bodies that had once populated her night sky. Feeling helpless, both Rebecca and the left Mr. Crow wept, fearing that the child would never see her father (or less sadly, her step siblings) again.

“Do not cry, young ones,” the cartographer advised. “There is a way home.” Both Mr. Crow and Rebecca stopped their tears. “You must travel to Solaris—the gods there will help you return. But since the currents emanating from Solaris are much too strong to row through, you must travel to Ranu before you cross the water into the Land of the Gods.”

“Do not cry, young ones,” the cartographer advised.

“Goodbye, Mr. Crow,” Rebecca gulped nervously. The two were at the pier between Ranu and Reta, and Mr. Crow—although unclear about the exact reason why—had stated that he could not bear to enter Ranu. The familial relationship between Mr. Crow and Rebecca was severed as the captain chopped off the rope connecting the boat to the pier. Not knowing of the danger awaiting her, she bravely stared ahead, waiting for her destiny.

“Young child! How have you strayed so far from home?” she exclaimed, pitying the poor girl. Thus, with the cartographer’s help, Rebecca learned that the Earth she had lived on had

Static | Tiger Yang ’25

Ranu appeared in front of her shortly, and it was as desolate as Mr. Crow had described it. Unlike the vibrancy and glow of Reta, Ranu was nothing but a murky jumble of purple and gray.

Discreetly creeping to avoid waking the vicious birds, Rebecca entered Ranu Forest, a place that once radiated vitality like Reta Forest

but was now barren, just a set of twigs sticking up from an infertile land. Reorienting herself, she stared intently at the map given to her by the cartographer.

“Gal-tah!” A voice sounded behind her. She spun around. “Mr. Crow!” she thought. But when she spun around, she was not greeted by the peculiarly symmetric binary crow she had known before, but rather a one-eyed, onebeaked, one-ruffled, one-winged humanoid crow. It seemed to be absorbing the little light that surrounded it.

“Gal-tah!” A voice chimed behind her again.

Rebecca whirled around again to face another humanoid crow— this one with three eyes, three beaks, three ruffles, and three wings. She couldn’t be sure whether it was that same ternary crow in Reta Forest, but before she could investigate, more and more crows materialized. “Gal-tah!” A crow divided into fourths appeared.

“Gal-tah!” A crow of five walked in.

“Gal-tah! Gal-tah!” As more crows arose, Rebecca realized that they were forming a circle around her. “Gal-tah! Gal-tah! Gal-tah!” Their voices resonated through the forest like the tolling of a clock at midnight. Finally, a crow of twelve ruffles emerged and stumbled next to the crow of eleven and the crow of one. The perimeter of eleven crows was nearly complete: only one spot, evidently the location for the binary crow, was left.

All eleven crows eyed her hungrily with their gelatinous eyes, which had a purple hue from the water. Yet they seemed to be waiting for something. Searching for a way out, Rebecca’s mind raced—surely, she could not be fast enough to escape through the gap? Seventy-six eyes were on her; she would need a better escape plan.

Leering at the delectable feast, the Ranuian crows impatiently cawed for the last one to arrive.

“Gal-tah!” was the response, and the binary crow filled the empty space, completing the murder. Rebecca was out of time.

“Mr. Crow,” she pleaded. “Please, let me go.”

“Gah-tah!” A voice sounded behind her.

But this was not the Mr. Crow she had known. Disfigured, full of malice, and wild, the beast in front of her taunted her with a maleficent smile. This was what Mr. Crow was hiding: a corrupted past, a tormented part of his soul.

All at once, the purple liquid rushed through the veins in the crows’ eyes, and they advanced forward, shrinking the circle.

Swooping in from above, the humanlike robin from the carriage popped the purple binary crow’s left eye and then proceeded to poke out every corrupted eye it could, leaving puddles of slimy violet liquid. The crows jumped at it, and the unexpectedly aerodynamic crows of three, six, nine, and twelve took flight to try and catch the witch-like bird. Whether or not they succeeded we will never know, for the young girl had already escaped in the confusion long before the crows realized that their prey was gone. Creeping silently throughout the rest of her journey, Rebecca feared that the crows would catch up to her. However, when she at last reached the pier at which she was to embark for Solaris, the terrible fog that had troubled her mind disappeared. In a creaky rowboat, she pushed off the shore of Ranu toward the promised Land of the Gods.

Finally, she rowed onto the shore of Solaris. The island, brilliantly dappled with radiant yellows and flaming oranges and fiery reds,

proved to be of little challenge to Rebecca as she quickly traversed to Mirror Lake. The gods’ villages surrounded the pristine water, and Rebecca heard the cruel laughter of one of them as they planned to decimate the population of some planet that had wronged them. Athena, who was impressed by Rebecca’s triumph in the woods, offered to help her return home.

With a charming wave of her hand, Mirror Lake’s reflection rippled and twisted, changing into a prismatic glistening window into a multitude of celestial bodies.

Athena zoomed in, deeper and deeper until finally appeared the town discolored by the everpresent sweeping clouds looming above.

Athena gestured to the lake, indicating to Rebecca that she should enter the water.

Rebecca dived in.

Rebecca dived in.

Design

Hans Hesse

Hans Hesse packs a punch. As a member of the Discipline Council and a competitive bodybuilder, he’s committed to each of his crafts, exuding integrity through his conduct and friendly demeanor. He’s also a devout Christian and a talented ceramicist, allowing his faith to guide some of his artistic creativity. Hans’s portfolio follows this spread.

Could you go into a little detail about what you submitted? We’ve had photography YoungArts winners in the past, but I don’t know if anyone at the school’s ever won for Design.

HH: Our Ceramics teacher told all the students to submit to YoungArts, and I forgot which category I was supposed to submit to. So I submitted my ceramics work to Design, which was actually the wrong one to submit to, but I ended up winning anyway. I was supposed to submit to Visual Arts.

Do you have a favorite one of these pieces? And, if so, why?

HH: I would say probably my freshman-year piece. It’s based on the story of Adam and Eve, sure. So there’s leaves, and there’s the Tree of Knowledge with good and evil. I like that one because that was where I really fell in love with ceramics.

That first piece shows a good amount of biblical influence. Would you say that that’s a theme throughout your work?

HH: To an extent. I mean, not every single piece is about the Bible, but my religion and my faith as a Christian influences my life and the decisions I make a lot. So I really enjoy making pieces that reflect my faith. For example, I made a bowl that was supposed to represent a biblically accurate angel.

139 Hans’s Portfolio

The eight works Hans submitted to the YoungArts competition range in topic, size, and scope. Featured are many teapots, with inspiration drawn from Hans’s Christian faith and interest in the artistic expressions of various cultures from around the globe.

7 8

1. Forest Fire

2. Drippy Teapot

3. Angelic Beauty

4. Skeleton Viking

5. Sushi Plates

6. Tree of Wisdom

7. Tibetan Teapot

8. Flower Plate

PhotographyAkul Mittal

Akul Mittal is an essential creative. His photography catalogue has been growing since 9th grade and he’s the head photographer of The Marque, but that’s only one piece of what makes him so special. Akul contributes to biological research and gardening efforts on campus, too, while also being an important representative of his Indian heritage. His portfolio follows this spread.

Tell me a little bit about the purpose behind your portfolio. I understand that a lot of the photography students had to submit portfolios with themes. Can you talk a little bit about the theme behind your pictures?

AM: The theme behind my pictures was exploring the story of my family in America and how our story is a part of a larger story of immigrant diasporas in general. Not all of my pictures are specific to my story, but they’re reflective of the larger community. My portfolio specifically explored the Indian diaspora, especially in the suburbs of Dallas – areas like Plano, Frisco, and Coppell. A lot of the older generations had one view of the American Dream and what they wanted for their children – a dream similar to the classic American Dream of 1950s American suburbia. However, that’s different from their children’s American Dream.

Can you talk a little bit about why you chose this topic and what you learned from this project?

This topic is something that I was kind of always a little bit interested in – my own culture, my own experiences. But it wasn’t necessarily something at the forefront of my mind. However, this project was a pretty good experience, because I got to learn about the good and bad parts of growing up in America, and how it’s been for my family and other families.

Akul’s Portfolio

Akul’s portfolio features both family members and friends in their Indian communities, depicting sports fields, stores, and everyday scenes from the perspective of Indian children and families in America. He shows the similarities and differences immigrants face here, especially in large groups.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Creative Director

Carson Bosita

Grant Bowers

Joshua Goforth

Adam Zhang

Design Editor

Literary Editor

Photography Director

Associate Photo Director

Everett Jin

Rohan Kakkar

Alex Marczewski

Akul Mittal

Winston Lin

Jaden Ouyang

Paul Sumethasorn

Co-Editor-in-Chief

Co-Editor-in-Chief

Faculty Sponsor

Faculty Co-Sponsor

Neil Yepuri

Tiger Yang

Lynne Schwartz

Lauren Brozovich

A very special thanks to: Sandy Doerge, David Brown, Kate Wood, Scott Ziegler, Jenny Dial Creech, James Barragan, St. Mark’s Security and Staff, and David Dini

EDITORS’

I think we can both truly say that whatever The Marque threw at us, we answered. It wasn’t always perfect, but it was pretty darn close. And, as we round out the final days of the creation of this magazine, I don’t think either of us realizes how much this publication means to us.

Having worked on this magazine for four years, I’m not sure I remember a time before The Marque. Every moment of high school beyond the middle of my sophomore year involved this publication in some significant fashion – design nights, pizza, the works.

In early February, our backs were against the wall, but we had a few options. One, to put out the shortest magazine ever in the publication’s history, at 120 pages. Two, to put our heads down and try to fulfill at least 150 pages, which is the mark we hit last year. Though the former looked most pragmatic and realistic, I’m so, so glad we picked the second.

In some ways, I think that decision is emblematic of our times here. The Marque is the least literal publication on campus - there are fewer and fewer guardrails restricting us. We’re bound only by the limits of our imagination and spurred on by a desire to create. Of course we went for the more ambitious, challenging pick – that is the essence of The Marque. A magazine full of artists, authors, poets, and dreamers – that’s the community that we’ve cultivated over our two years in the co-editor-in-chiefship.

What made that easier at times (and harder at others) was our dynamic as co-editors. Where Tiger might leave something unsaid, as a quiet,

wise, and sage-like presence, I often allow my energy to flow through my work – sometimes, to a fault. Our passions for this endeavor are a match, but like fire and ice, we balance each other out and help each other grow.

Finally, we both owe a thank you to the folks who have helped us along the way. Akul, Jaden, and Carson, thank you for helping to keep us sane during these past few years, helping to balance us out with your wealth of experience. Rohan, Josh, and Everett, I hope you guys put a similar amount of stock into this magazine in your senior year as we did in ours – I know you guys have the talent. Paul, thank you for being consistent and intentional in your time, since the first days of high school when you first showed up. And, to Alex, Adam, and most especially Grant, thank you for providing some of that youthful energy that the magazine needed.

To our parents and families, thank you for all the rides, the sacrifices, the late dinners. The support when the going got tough, and the freedom to create each week (sometimes on two nights) from 6:00-8:00.

And, finally, to Mrs. Schwartz and Dr. Brozovich. The guidance, dedication, and authority you have both led this magazine with has been admirable and necessary. Thank you for the leeway you gave us to make something beautiful and the guidelines you implemented to help us along the way.

So long,

Neil & Tiger

Mission

Established in 1962, The Marque serves as the yearly collection of the literary and artistic pieces created by Upper School students to summarize the academic year’s artistic expression.

Policy

The Marque is an after-school extracurricular activity that works independently from the St. Mark’s journalism program. All written and visual content is welcomed and considered for publication. Throughout the year, literary works and artistic pieces are submitted by our 400-person Upper School student body and selected for publication by our staff members. 500 copies are produced and distributed to Upper School students and faculty. This publication is submitted annually for evaluation to the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) and the National Scholastic Press Association (NSPA).

Colophon

The Marque is printed by J. Culley Imaging. 130# Polar Bear White Velvet Cover, printed 4/4. 80# Polar Bear White Velvet Text, printed 4/4. Binding is PUR glue perfect binding. The staff used Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator CC 2025. Typefaces include: Realist for titles and bylines; Libre Baskerville for body text; Adobe Aldine Caption for pull quotes; and Brush Script Mt, Lexend, and The Seasons for others.

Contact

St. Mark’s School of Texas

10600 Preston Road Dallas, TX 75230

Care of Lynne Schwartz

Phone: 214-346-8126

Fax: 214-346-8002

SchwartzL@smtexas.org

The 63rd volume of The Marque was published on May 5, 2025.

“To souls it is death to become water, and to water it is death to become earth, but from earth comes water, and from water, soul.”

—Heraclitus