Spires Magazine Fall 2019

SP I RES

FALL 2019

SPIRES intercollegiate arts & literary magazine

Fall 2019

Copyright 2019, Spires Intercollegiate Arts & Literary Magazine Volume XXV Issue I All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from Spires and the author or artist.

Critics, however, are welcome to quote brief passages by way of criticism and review.

This publication was designed by Isabelle Celentano and Amie Deng, set into type digitally at Washington University in St. Louis, and printed and bound at Bookmobile Craft Digital in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The type face is Adobe Caslon Pro, designed by Carol Twombly. Caslon was originally designed by William Caslon.

Spires accepts submissions from undergraduate students around the world. Works were evaluated individually and anonymously. Spires is published biannually and distributed free of charge to the Washington Univeristy community at the end of each semester. All undergraduate art, poetry, prose, drama, song lyric, and digital media submissions (including video and sound art) are welcome for evaluation. spiresmagazine@gmail.com sites.wustl.edu/spires facebook.com/spiresintercollegiatemagazine instagram.com/spiresmagazine_wustl

Table of Contents Literature 08

Emma Bernstein The Last Time You Arrive in Daly City

29

Hanna Wagner Where Pink Hills Fall

42

Catherine Huang Foxes Return

10

Megan Pan Sagrada

34

Skylar Wampler Shucking Corn

50

Emma Bernstein Away

24

Gina Wiste The Thousand Mile String

36

Joe Mantych Tomatoes

Art 09

Neelam Shaikh Stellar

23

Yeon Jin Lee SoulYou

33

Yeon Jin Lee Breakfast

40

Chuchu Qi Ecocitism

49

Jimmy Ryoo 6PM

Front Cover Sydney Krantz Lights Out Series Carnegie Mellon University, ’20 Oil on panel

Back Inside Cover Neelam Shaikh Rainy Nights Yale University, ’21 Oil on canvas

Front Inside Cover Ziyi Zhang Dust Washington University in St. Louis, ’21 Oil on canvas

Back Cover Ziyi Zhang My Fairy Queen Washington University in St. Louis, ’21 Oil on canvas

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Staff Editors-in-Chief Peter Satterthwaite Isabelle Celentano Literary Editor Molly Davis Art Editor Erin Noh Layout Editor Amie Deng Social Media Director Alli Hollender Staff Sammie Axlebaum Anna Bankston Asaph Bay Jonah Brody Sophia Daniels Amy Hattori Gabbie Hetu Brianna Hines Luke Markinson Alice Nguyen Hanah Shields Joshua Valeri Lexi von Zedlitz Elia Zhang

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Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, We are delighted that this issue of Spires Intercollegiate Arts and Literary Magazine has made it into your hands. Each semester, we receive submissions of literature and art from undergraduate students at colleges and universities across the country. This semester, our editorial staff reviewed more than two hundred submissions before carefully selecting the poems, short stories, and works of art that comprise this semester’s magazine.

While Spires does not prescribe a theme for each issue, our staff often finds that thematic patterns emerge during the preparation of the magazine. Each semester brings us a unique constellation of literature and art pieces, which as a whole reveal both the diverse voices and common experiences that characterize the current generation of undergraduate students. This semester, we found many college-age writers and artists exploring themes of childhood, family, and heritage.

It is a great privilege for us and the rest of the editorial staff to review the work submitted by our talented peers from across the United States and to assemble these submissions into a new issue each semester. We are deeply grateful to all the students, from submitting writers and artists to our colleagues on the editorial staff, whose creativity and craft make this magazine a unique compilation of contemporary young voices in art and literature. We hope you enjoy the works of poetry, prose, and art that await you in the following pages.

Sincerely,

Petentallenthwaite

Celentano Isabelle

Peter Satterthwaite and Isabelle Celentano Editors-in-Chief

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The Last Time You Arrive in Daly City The last time you arrive in Daly City, you cross the overpass under impasto clouds carved into a pink sky, cradled by the crush of cars careening to and from San Francisco.

You count blessings on the back of a stray black cat, walk past rows of pastel houses, past the older boys gathered in the shade of eucalyptus on John Daly Boulevard, past a shopping cart, abandoned, its front wheels pushed up onto the curb, cigarette butts pressed into pavement’s creases and you don’t think to remember eleven years old, your first best friend pouring pixie dust on your tongue.

A prayer and she pushes you in a shopping cart down the longest hill she can find and you scream and don’t believe you are ever going to die and when you see the tender supermarket glow of the shopping center in evening, you don’t think about pop tarts and coca cola, your older brother walking too fast down fluorescent aisles and your short legs straining to catch up.

You don’t know that this is the last time you will arrive in Daly City, don’t know that this is the last time you will sprint up the marbled steps of your apartment complex, so you forget to notice how this town tastes like gasoline and sea salt and everybody heading someplace else.

Emma Bernstein Cornell University, ’21

8

Stellar

Neelam Shaikh Yale University, ’21 Oil on Canvas

9

Sagrada My father chooses a table for us by the window. We are in a cafĂŠ just across the street from the Escoles de GaudĂ­ in Barcelona, Spain. It is a wintry December day, coming off the festivities of Christmas but still before the excitement of the New Year has had the chance to settle in. Our matching indigo and maroon down coats hang over the backs of our chairs. Like my father and me, our coats assume the form of people in contact with one another and do not say a word.

Sipping my glass of Coke, I watch my father as he stares out the window. The slowmoving traffic in the street runs across the lenses of his thick glasses, and he takes a moment to zip his black puffer vest to the top before resting his elbows once again on the table and clasping his hands around his bottle of beer. It is in this moment that I realize just how old my old man has gotten. Of course, over the years I had noticed his hair growing grayer and grayer, until his former sweep of pure black hair has become speckled with flecks of white, as if covered in a field of cigarette ash. But looking at him now, there is even more to see. His eyes are a cloudier sort of brown, resembling the glassy eyes of the fish for sale at the marketplace staring up from beds of ice. As he takes a sip from his beer, I detect a faint tremor in his hands that was not there before, which causes the bottle to clank against the surface of the table as he sets it down again. The wrinkles in his hands and in his face are deeper chasms now, thin valleys in the seafloor of his leathery skin. If I had asked my father about it just then, he would have said that it was my sister and I who had given them to him, as if we had carved each and every one of them with a knife.

The waiter appears with our food. I had asked for a seafood paella for one, whereas my father had ordered the PadrĂłn peppers tapa. Shriveled and salted and a deep shade of green, these mild peppers are his favorite, ever since we first visited Barcelona over eight years ago, and now he orders it wherever we go without any desire to try anything new. He plucks each pepper up with his fingers and pops it into his mouth, discarding the thin stems in a neat pile at the edge of his plate. He holds a pepper out to me across the table, but I shake my head and dig into my paella. My spoon unearths a mussel beneath a mound of golden rice, and a wisp of steam floats up into the air.

This scene of us eating without speaking is not an uncommon one. The family used to have a weekly tradition of eating out together, but with my sister working in California and my mother having passed away when I was 22, it has since fallen on the shoulders of my father and me to uphold the tradition as a silent but stalwart duo. For four years now, we have dined together once a week without fail; when I was finishing my undergrad in Princeton, he would drive down an hour every weekend,

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and now that I am working on my PhD in New York City, he would meet me during his lunch break or after work on a weekday. He would always be on time, always cover the bill, and always say as little as possible, sometimes forgetting to even say “goodbye” before heading out the door.

When I learned that I was being sent to Spain for winter break as part of my PhD work, I called and told my father not to expect me at dinner for a couple weeks. He was silent on the other end for a moment.

“Where are you going,” said my father. His voice barely inflected it as a question.

“Barcelona. I’m going to study the Sagrada Família.”

He was silent again.

“I’ll go with you,” he said finally, then hung up. And so we went.

We were here once many years ago, just before my 19th birthday. I had just started my first year of college that fall and nearly died as a result of it. Throughout the first semester, it felt like any one of those days was going to be the end for me. Every morning I would wake up and immediately be set into motion—jerked into action, rather, like a horse feeling the tug of a bit in its mouth. The days were all so busy and so miserable, spent ceaselessly trudging from classes to work to the library, day after day without any signs of stopping or changing. I had not made any meaningful friendships at the time, so I ate alone at meals or sat at the fringes of a giant group that would not have noticed my presence or lack thereof anyway. The only people to whom I regularly talked were my roommates (“Please put out the trash today”), professors (“I’m sorry, I completely forgot it was due”), and the guests who visited the university art museum where I worked as a student tour guide (“Right this way, and up the stairs”).

The month of December was worst of all. It was the darkness that made it so, the pitch black that set in around four o’clock in the afternoon and strangled me, as if each breath I took in the cold, lifeless air of the night was smoke in my lungs, poison entering my blood. The days in December felt liminal, existing simply to transition to the next, with each one consisting of little to no substance on its own. I was drowning in the tedium, suffocating in the strictness of mind-numbing routine. I was tired of constantly having to try, either to do work or to maintain superficial relationships or to worry about the future or to treat my life as if it mattered; I just wanted to be able to shut my eyes and go to sleep without thinking of the next day. Those days, all I really wanted was to do absolutely nothing, to just sit in my bedroom, not talking to anyone,

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watching vapid shows and eating all sorts of junk, just withering away until eventually I would stop eating, stop breathing, stop living altogether. I wanted to disappear, as if I never even existed in the first place.

When my mother found me, I was asleep in one of the uncomfortable overnight infirmary beds at the health center. It was a party, they explained, a party to celebrate the approach of the holidays and of winter break. I had been sitting off to the side alone as the world raged around me. The sound of drunken laughter clashed with the music blaring from the Bluetooth speakers, with the rumble of each bass drop causing little ripples to radiate across the surface of the water in my red Solo cup. The room was hot, unbearably so, and people were opening the windows to let the cold air in. I approached one of these open windows and looked out. We were four stories above the ground, overlooking a frozen courtyard of frost-laced grass and a couple of spindly trees. I pressed my hand against the thin window screen and watched it curve against the flat of my palm. The cool metal mesh and the chilly December air met on my fingertips like a marriage. In that moment, I realized that I was ready to go.

They told my mother that everything happened very quickly. The onlookers at the party had reported to the police that I had not said anything to anyone, just began pounding my fist on the metal screen until it popped free from its frame, fluttered off with the wind and disappeared. It was only when I climbed atop the desk and swung my legs through the window that someone lunged forward to stop me. Apparently when they grabbed my arm, I had recoiled and started screaming. “Don’t touch me.

Don’t touch me! Nobody get close to me!” People recalled that I sat there hunched over in the window frame, trembling violently and covering my ears to block out some nonexistent noise. Someone said they remembered hearing me whisper, “No one’s going to save me now.”

My mother was by my bed at the moment I woke up.

“Baby,” she said, taking my hand.

“Hello Mom.” We sat in silence for a bit. She did not try to say anything, just held my hand and stared into the wall, as if seeing something in the distance. Finally, she said: “Let’s go to Spain.”

In addition to the health center’s standard recommendation of further counseling and potentially medication, my mother prescribed a treatment of her own: a family

12

trip to Barcelona. To her, there was no better remedy than a spontaneous getaway to Western Europe, and surely the idea of sunny, seaside Spain with its fresh seafood and flamenco dancers would be the ultimate panacea in terms of lifting my spirits. She booked the tickets the day I was discharged, and no sooner had I arrived home did we begin packing to fly the next morning.

I was sitting on the floor stuffing sweaters into a bulging suitcase when I heard a knock at my door. It was my father, bearing his usual stern expression.

“Hi Dad. What’s up?”

His eyes were stones.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

A beat. I’m not sure what he’s talking about.

“Shouldn’t have done what, necessarily?”

“You shouldn’t have overreacted like that. You lost your cool, and you made a big scene in front of all those people. You should have kept it to yourself.”

I felt my hands begin to tremor. Suddenly the room felt very, very small. As he kept talking, my shoulders tensed and my stomach tightened as I tried to press down whatever it was that was threatening to rise up.

“Your poor mother woke up at two in the morning and we drove an hour down just to see you. You made her worry all throughout the night, and she should not have had to do that. You should be able to handle your—” “I’m sorry! Okay?” I stood up and whirled on my father, knocking my unzipped suitcase away. Folded clothes spilled out onto the floor as it wheeled back and collided with my bookshelf. “I’m so sorry that I was such a damn burden for everybody, and I’m sorry that you and Mom had to go out of your way, and I’m—” “You’re not sorry. If you were sorry, why would this keep happening? In high school and still now in college. They’re not just going to let you keep doing this, you know?

They could kick you out of school, they could say, ‘No, we don’t want her anymore.’

You can’t go around acting like this, thinking that you’re special—” “I’m not! I don’t! Good God, you think I would fucking try to off myself because I think I’m special—” At this point, my mom burst in and promptly ushered my father out of the room.

I could no longer see clearly through the tears welling in my eyes and staining my glasses lenses, so I just crumpled on the floor and buried my face into a stray sweater.

My mother came over and sat by me. She ran her fingers through my tangled hair. As I lay there, motionless, settling back into the dust, I heard the sound of my luggage

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wheeling, the crisp snap of a zipper unzipping, and finally the gentle lullaby of my mother’s humming as she patiently and meticulously folded each piece of fallen clothing and placed it neatly back into my suitcase.

On the plane, I gazed out from the darkened cabin at the nighttime clouds as my mother and sister slept in the middle and aisle seats, respectively, beside me. In my hands I was holding a copy of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a required reading from my fall semester English class. Mine was the only reading light illuminated; all around me, people either slept or watched TV or kept themselves busy in the comfortable dark. Barcelona was only an hour away.

“Nothing’s lost forever.” Harper, Mormon housewife and recovering Valium addict, tells me this. I brush my thumb over the serif text of the word “lost.” Something which once was that is no longer. Over the years, what was it that I had lost?

“In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.” Longing and dreaming. Wishing, hoping. Desperately clinging to semblances of joy, whispers of happiness as transparent as glass and transient as a bubble, poised to burst at the slightest exertion of pressure. Forever searching for something that does not exist.

“At least I think that’s so.”

My fingers twisted the corner of a page distractedly as I watched the sky outside come alive with the sight of the sun on the horizon. A mere hint of light at first, then a glint of golden orange before the world burst at the seams with warmth and color.

Two rows in front of me, I saw my father pull his window screen down.

After shuffling along in line for about ten minutes, my father and I finally cross the threshold of the east entrance of the Sagrada Família. Formally known as the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, the Sagrada Família is a Roman Catholic minor basilica originally designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. While my graduate research focuses primarily on Gothic cathedrals, I have always had a special place in my heart for the style of Catalan modernism ever since I first visited Barcelona eight years ago. There’s just something about the geometry, the way in which massive blocks of stone shape themselves into soaring spires and intricate sculptures as if those were their natural forms. Curved lines dominate in the architecture—no straight lines or right angles to be found—and convey a sense of the whole work being an organic phenomenon rather than the labor of man. The detail in

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the decoration, the symbolism of the design—oh, and not to mention the colors. So bright and beautiful and vibrant and alive. Yes, it was the colors that first won over my heart.

We follow the crowd until we find ourselves standing in full view of the Nativity Façade. The Sagrada Família has a total of three façades, or faces, that look out onto the street: the Nativity, the Passion, and the Glory Façades. The Nativity Façade facing the east was the first of the three to be completed, as well as the one that bears the most direct influence from Gaudí, as it was the only one at least partially constructed prior to his death in 1926. As its name suggests, the Nativity Façade is dedicated to the birth of Jesus, and my father and I stare wordlessly up at the statues of curlyhaired angels and kneeling magi all gazing in adoration at the young Christ. The style of the façade is ornate but naturalistic; all the onlooking statues appear as if they could resume motion at any time, and the bronze leaves carved into the doors seem as soft and as delicate as any I could pluck from a tree and hold in my hand.

My father and I both knew: this was my mother’s favorite part of the Sagrada Família. My mother loved the Nativity Façade from the moment she first saw it. I still remember her wonderstruck face, her hand holding the earpiece of the audio guide in place, her eyes drifting from feature to feature as per the cheery audio guide’s instruction.

“Do you see the turtles on the columns?” She nudged me and pointed, to which I gave a nod in return. “That one’s actually a sea turtle, and that one’s a land tortoise.

They symbolize stability and the unchangeability of time.”

She then took her gaze up to the cypress tree on the central spire.

“See that? That’s the Tree of Life. And the little doves flying around it, do you see them?”

“Yes, Mom, I do.”

“They represent peace.”

She and I stood there awhile, staring up at the doves in the cypress tree. They looked so small way up there, but so free.

“You know, your sister and your father are like those turtles. Unshakable, solid— they have tough shells and can go through life unfazed. But you, my little baby…”

My mother hugged me close to her.

“I wish I could turn you into a dove and let you fly away.”

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My primary research task for this trip to Barcelona is to study the statues on the side of the Passion Façade, the face that looks out to the west. In stark contrast to the Nativity Façade, the Passion Façade is austere and rigid, featuring harshly delineated straight lines that give the impression of skeletal bones and ligaments being pulled taut. The simple, angular statues by Spanish sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs depict the story of Christ’s death through several scenes. The Last Supper. The Kiss of Judas.

Jesus presented in a crown of thorns. The soldiers dividing His clothes. Finally, the crucifixion as the central focus of the façade. While the Nativity Façade inspires a sense of new life and nurturing, the Passion Façade is meant to invoke the sentiment of Jesus’ suffering and pain for the sins of man.

I looked up at the statue of Christ on the cross, towering above my father and me down below. The paper I was currently writing was on the subject of artistic pathos and pain, and I had wanted to present Subirachs’ portrayal of Christ as a departure from the traditional depiction of pain in art. According to a Cambridge scholar whom I had heard lecture last fall, there existed a model formula for rendering pain in art that was achieved through the depiction of features of physiognomic strain—the head thrown back with the mouth agape, the arms and legs reaching in desperation, the torso contorting in agony. Many works of classical art rendered pain as such: vulnerable and bare, with the suffering of the subject laid out openly for the world to see. Subirachs’ Christ, however, exhibits none of these traditional characteristics.

Bound to the cross by nails, His arms and legs are straight and unmoving. His whole body is stiff and still, fully frontal to any onlookers from below. Even His face is obscured from us, His divine head bowed in mortal humility. Yet the signifiers of pain are still present. Though the details are difficult to distinguish at a distance, one can still see the sharp protrusion of his ribs, jutting out from his emaciated form.

The tension in his clenched fists, the strain in his contracting muscles and stretched tendons. The unspoken sentiment in his unseen face: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Throughout the entirety of His suffering, He has borne it all inaudibly, invisibly, all for the absolution of an unworthy people.

My eyes broke away from the crucifixion and searched for my father. At first, I did not see him among the swarming crowd around me, but finally I spotted him somewhat farther ahead in the distance. His back was turned toward me, and I could not see his face. I made as if to call out to him, but before I could do so he turned around to face me. His expression was blank, and his eyes were silent.

16

A month after my mother’s funeral, my father and I had our first weekly dinner as a duo at our local Applebee’s. Growing up, our whole family used to eat here all the time, so it felt strange to be back again in the same familiar booth, just the two of us, sitting underneath the photos of our hometown’s Little League baseball team smiling toothy grins out at us, the little boys having not aged a day.

My eyes were bleary and puffy from crying over the past few days. I stared vacuously at the gleaming burgers and steaks on the pages of the menu without registering a single image. I had no desire to eat whatsoever.

“What will you have?” I asked my father.

“Fiesta Lime Chicken.”

And his Yuengling beer. That was his usual order, and he got it every time, without fail, as part of the combo deal with my mother. She would get the Cedar Grilled Lemon Chicken as part of the 2 for $20 deal, and they would split a Spinach & Artichoke Dip with the family.

“Okay. I’m going to have the Chicken Wonton Tacos.”

My usual as well. We placed our orders with the waitress, a plump and smiley woman with golden blonde hair, and she placed two waters on our table before taking our orders off to the kitchen. I took a few feeble sips from the straw. My father left his untouched. For ten minutes, we sat there without speaking, the TVs blaring with announcers’ shouted commentary, the other patrons at the surrounding tables alive with conversation. A mother cooed as she spoon-fed mashed potato into her impishly resistant infant’s mouth. A father wrangled his sons back to their seats and scolded them lightly with a playful grin. A group of children sang happy birthday in unison, their laughter like the shrieking call of crows.

Our silence was beginning to suffocate me.

“Hey Dad,” I began out of nowhere. “When are you going back to work?”

“Tuesday.”

“I see. They need you at the office again so soon?”

“No.” “Oh.” I waited for further explanation, but none arrived.

“So why then?”

“Why what?”

“Are you going back to work when you don’t have to?”

“Don’t have to. Want to.”

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“Oh.” The cheery blonde waitress appeared with our orders. We ate our meals in silence. I watched my father’s throat bulging and receding with every piece of chicken and sip of beer. It started to dawn on me that my greatest nightmare, one that I had feared for years ever since childhood, was now coming true. It was not the death of my mother, no—every child fears that—but a step even further. It was the state we found ourselves in right now, my father and I, seated across from each other but both alone, neither one of us able to truly speak with the other, sitting in silence like this for the rest of our lives.

I felt my hands beginning to tremble. I gripped my water glass tightly in my hands.

“Dad, do you remember that winter a few years ago, when we went to Barcelona?”

He looked up from his food to indicate that he was listening.

“It was Christmas Eve, and Mom suggested that we attend Midnight Mass at the Cathedral of Barcelona.”

He didn’t respond, but I kept pressing.

“We were waiting for forever in this long line just to get inside, the four of us huddled there together in the winter cold, and you were harping at Mom for not getting in line sooner, but then finally we got inside—” “I was not yelling at your mother.”

“No, Dad, I didn’t say you were, I just meant—” “She should have known better than to wait until the last minute. Always late.”

“Never mind that, okay? Anyway, I was thinking just now about how beautiful the lights were on Christmas Eve, and how much Mom wanted to be able to visit Barcelona again, someday when La Sagrada Família would be finished too, and I—” I was struggling to maintain my composure.

“I just miss her so much, and I wish that there was some sort of way that she—” “Your mother is gone.”

I blinked in disbelief, stunned by the bluntness of my father’s words. For a moment it was as if I was still registering that he had even said them at all.

“Your mother is not coming back. She’s not going to be here to save you anymore.

And you have to be able to handle it.”

“Dad, I am handling it.” My water glass slipped through my damp hands and hit the table with an awkward clunk. “How could you even say that when all I was trying to do was—” “Don’t make a scene. Control yourself.”

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“I am controlling myself !” I stood and slammed my hands on the table. “All I wanted was to remember Mom in a moment when she was happy, when she was with us, and as always you have to come along and ruin it. Don’t you have a heart? Don’t you miss her?”

Summoning as much nastiness as I could muster, I sneered at my father.

“Did you never even love her at all?”

My father was quiet. I was suddenly acutely aware of what I was doing and felt shame. I sat back down and tried to feel my pulse in my wrist with two shaky fingers.

“Of course I loved her.”

I looked up and was startled to see my father with his head bent, his hands collecting wayward tears that fell from his eyes like pebbles.

“Of course I love her.”

The Sagrada Família was not actually fully completed until this year, which made the timing of our second trip to Barcelona particularly serendipitous. Gaudí was aware from the very beginning that he would he would not be able to finish construction on the church within his lifetime and as such made sure to leave behind detailed plans, models, and instructions with the understanding and the hope that future generations would take on this project and complete his life’s work. My mother had joked that if my father had been the one in charge, his stubbornness and lack of trust in others would prevent such an undertaking from ever reaching completion. But with the sculptural work on the final south-facing Glory Façade having been finished just last summer, the Sagrada Família was finally complete, as Gaudí had envisioned it.

My father and I passed through the huge doors of the Glory Façade, which bore the inscription of the Lord’s Prayer in Catalan (“Pare nostre, que esteu en el cel…”), and found ourselves in the interior of the temple. Instantly, I felt my heart regain a sense of peace that it had been missing for a long time. The forest of columns stretched from floor to ceiling, connecting the earth with the heavens above. With their geometrically pleasing helix shapes, the tree-like columns split into branches near the top, serving not only to support more weight but also to convey a sense of being within the natural world in accordance with Gaudí’s love of and respect for nature. Beneath the overarching canopy of stone, visitors milled about, admiring especially the colors of the stained glass windows. Both the eastern and western walls of the basilica are adorned with beautiful works of stained glass, but while those of the eastern wall corresponding to the Nativity Façade consist primarily of cool tones, those on the

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western wall corresponding with the Passion Façade are comprised of warm colors instead. This design is meant to follow the sun throughout its path over the course of the day as it shines through the windows, casting a calming wash of cool greens and blues in the morning followed by a vibrant blaze of reds and oranges in the afternoon, mirroring the life of Jesus Christ from His blessed birth to His passionate death. As it was nearing three o’clock, the sunlight streaming through the Passion windows cast a reddish-golden glow over the faces of all the visitors.

We walk toward the very center of the temple, where there is a space with some seats, facing a golden octagonal chandelier above a suspended wooden crucifix, that is open for prayer. One does not need to be Catholic to pray there; it is open to all who wish to pray, so long as they do so quietly and respectfully. I sit down on one of the benches and look up at the hanging Christ on the cross, haloed by the encircling gold lights of the single chandelier.

The image of my mother returns to me now. She is holding my hand as we sit upon the bench, the figure of Christ looming over our heads. I have been quiet throughout our entire visit, on the brink of tears all this time. Somewhere on the other side of the central nave, my father waited for us with my sister.

I watched my mother’s bowed head. Her eyes are gently shut, her mouth forming the words of a prayer. Her two hands, clasped together, sandwich my left hand in the middle.

“Mom, they’ve been waiting for us a while now.”

“I’m almost done.” Her lips continue to whisper silently.

“What are you even praying for, anyway?”

She raises her head and opens her eyes, smiling at me.

“I asked the Lord for strength.” She squeezes my hand in hers. “The strength to help you and your father to forgive.”

Echoes of the prior day resurface in my memory.

Church bells tolling, announcing midnight. Golden chandeliers overhanging countless rows of pews. Men and women dressed in black robes, speaking and singing in Catalan. Dozens of churchgoers filing out into the cold night. Walking. Stumbling.

Searching for the way home. Cold. Tired. Lost. Frightened.

My hunched form, cowering in the center of a large plaza. My shivering arms wrapped tightly around my knees. My heart threatening to explode in my chest.

“Go away! I hate you! I don’t ever want to see you again!”

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My father’s face, contorted with anger.

“Fine! I’ll go away. Just stop making a scene!”

My mother hurriedly knelt beside me and tried to wrap me in her arms, but I shook her off with a scream. My eyes locked with my father’s.

“Why did you have to be my father?” I could barely hear the own words from my mouth over the roar of my blood in my ears. “Why did it have to be you? You, who never ever loved me, ever—” Before I had the chance to finish, my father advanced upon me and yanked me up to my feet. Staggering, I regained my footing as my father shook me and said: “Don’t you ever say that. Of course I love you. You have to know that.”

Fearing that he was going to strike me, I was surprised when he pulled me in to a tight hug. We remained like that, my body stiff in his embrace, my arms rigid against my side, as the both of us stood silently.

“I still remember when you were a baby, and I carried you on my shoulders,” said my father.

A baby. A beautiful baby, smiling and laughing.

“You were so small, and so fragile, yet so happy. And you loved me so much.”

Love. Happy. The voice of a child. Daddy, I love you.

“What happened? What happened to us? Where did your happiness go?”

What happened? Happiness. What happened? Where did it go?

“Tell me, please. Where did I go wrong?”

My father sitting down beside me snaps me out of my daze. We mull in silence for a bit, watching the people in prayer together.

“It’s time we should be heading out soon, isn’t it?” I turn to my father. “We still haven’t made plans for dinner.”

“Just a moment.” He takes out a folded-up piece of paper from his coat pocket.

“What’s that?”

He unfolds the paper in his hands and smooths out the creases.

“A note. A prayer.”

I gave him a puzzled look. My father was not what you would consider the religious type.

“To your mother. I wrote it down so that I would not forget or say the wrong thing.”

My father hesitates. The golden light shines off the specks of silver in his hair. I notice the paper trembling in his hands, and I steady them with my own.

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“It’s okay, Dad. Read the prayer to Mom.” “Alright.” He shifts his weight slightly, then begins to read, slowly.

“Mom, who is watching us from above. It is Dad. Megan and I are at the Sagrada Família. It is finished now. We have seen it in its completion. We wish you were here to see it with us. I am here to pray for your help. I have decided to make a promise—to take care of Megan as best as I can. To help her find her happiness again. Please help me enforce it.”

Dad. I’m sorry. I take back what I said.

“I have told her before that she should never make any promise that she cannot keep. Now I must do the same. I have my made my difficult promise, and I intend to keep it. Please help me keep this promise. Please help look over Megan. Please give us your strength.”

I don’t hate you. I never hated you. Dad— “God bless you, and God bless our family. There is nothing more sacred.”

Megan Pan Princeton University, ’22

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SoulYou

Yeon Jin Lee Carnegie Mellon University, ’21 Oil on Canvas

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The Thousand Mile String As I walked, a taxi skidded past and threw up sludge at me from the side of the road. I’d started to think things like that happened on purpose, probably owing to too much time spent with Raymond. All around in a Brooklyn symphony free of charge, taxis honked at the bicyclists cutting them off, and the bicyclists swore and proceeded to cut them off anyway. They all squirmed like beetles, niggling under my coat and scratching at my skin. Overhead, even the last birds stupid enough to stay in New York had had enough of the winter and flew southward.

It was two o’clock on a Saturday in January and so I was going to see Raymond.

I passed a girl and thought she was coughing into her leather glove, but then I remembered my hair and realized she was laughing. She had a laugh like Sofia did, back when we were girls and she’d laugh at my portraits. I drew them silly just for her, to make her smile.

Now Sofia works somewhere in Sudan for Doctors Without Borders and when she gets some internet connection she always calls me. She tells me she’s lonely, always lonely. With some five thousand (she’s the math one, not I) miles between us, there’s nothing I can do but assure her that I am too, nothing I can do but be lonely with her.

That’s something I seem to do a lot of, be lonely with other people. That’s what I was on my my way to do.

Raymond was in the second pew from the back when I arrived in the church, turned around to face the door. I dipped two fingers in the bowl of water by the door and drew the obligatory cross upon myself: forehead, lips, chest. It doesn’t very much matter to me, as I stopped believing in God the day after my eleventh birthday when my pet rat got caught in the radiator. But I know it matters to Raymond, so I go through the ritual every time I come.

“Your hair,” he called in his hoarse voice, graveling like a smoker’s but never having known a cigarette. His black and white collar pinched his solid neck, maybe his vocal cords as well.

I fingered my dishwater green locks. “It’s not supposed to look this way.” Our voices echoed in the empty church as in a cave, the incense candles on chains hanging from the ceiling like stalactites. “I’m too old for it to be intentional. I went too cheap on the hair dye this time.”

“On the Seventh Day, the Lord ruled against cheap cosmetics, Amelia.” Raymond tapped the frame of his bifocals, then waved me closer. “Come, I’ve saved a little room for you.”

He slid over and I sat down in the pew next to him, breathing in the smell of the

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peppermints he keeps in his pockets. It’s a safe bubble next to him; the rest of the church reeks of incense and the musty odor of an old wine cellar.

“How is Sofia?” Most would inquire first as to my own well-being, but Raymond knew me well enough to know that my sister’s well-being was what determined my own. He turned up the volume on his hearing aid. “Just to be sure,” he always says.

“I haven’t heard from her in two weeks.”

“That’s not unusual, is it?”

“No, but it’s long.”

Raymond sighed. “Sometimes it’s the ones we want that make us wait the longest.”

“Her birthday is in two days. She’ll be thirty-two. I want to call her then.”

“What will you tell her?”

“I’ll sing happy birthday and ask if she’s still lonely.”

“You’re afraid she won’t be.”

I swallowed hard, my tongue turning to cotton. Our loneliness was the only common experience that still bound us, and I kept that thread knotted so tightly around my finger it turned blue. I nodded, and then changed the subject.

“Any luck with the Diocese?”

“Still threatening to consolidate us with St. Mark’s,” the priest said softly, hushed as though speaking the prognosis of a dying child. His voice shook. “Not enough people come to Mass here anymore.”

“We could run an ad in the paper,” I hurried to suggest, somehow feeling my personal atheism to be at fault. “Or better yet, online.”

He wiped his eyes and laughed, low and rumbling like thunder. “Evangelization for the twenty-first century.” But then his face fell again, skin dragging at every wrinkle and line on his face, and I realized I had no idea of his age. “But if they don’t want to come, they won’t come.”

“You can’t give up so quickly! I—” I shook my head and gathered my hair into a ponytail, my voice sinking an octave. “I’m offering to help you. Sofia liked this church.”

“She came here often?”

“Very. She told me she sat in the first row, left side, right before the altar. Always.

She’d kneel beside the pew if there wasn’t any space left.”

“That’s where I found you the first day we met, Amelia.” Raymond tilted his head back, remembering, and I slipped into the six-month-old memory right alongside him. I saw myself as an observer, saw Raymond limp out from his office and lay eyes upon the thirty-year-old woman crouched in tears in the pew. The woman in a dress

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not made for a church, who watched the Crucifix for any sign of the comfort her sister found in it. I saw Raymond lean his cane against the outside of the pew and sit down beside her, and I saw the woman collapse onto him as if they were old friends and tell him the story of how she’d been left by her sister Sofia, the only friend she had ever had.

“That wasn’t a coincidence.”

Raymond held my gaze so firmly it felt like an embrace. “I know.” His words tickled the air so softly I could have imagined them. I turned away, watching the stained glass soaking up whatever bleak rays the winter sun had to offer. Specks of dust swam around in the light, getting close and sticking before swirling away like people changing partners in a dance.

The priest rested his hand upon my shoulder. I felt it tremble ever so slightly.

“Come,” he said, using me as a prop to stand. “I have something I’d like to show you.”

Raymond took his cane in his bony hands, clutching with white knuckles, and hobbled out of the pew. Even with his limp he still lowered himself to kneel, slowly like his muscles and sinew were rickety elevator system, and made the Sign of the Cross. I wondered idly what it was like to have such devotion as to make pain dull, or to make the pain worth bearing.

My devotion was on the other side of the Atlantic, or even the Pacific if you went the other way around, tethered to me by a string of thousands of miles. A string that, I realized, she could cut at any second and leave me behind clutching naught more than fraying edges in shaking hands.

Raymond led me to his office, a small box-like room behind the confessionals.

There was a desk, a cloth-covered table to the left of the door, a crucifix on the wall, and hardly any room for anything else. He flipped on the light switch and the bulb overhead fizzled and buzzed before petering out altogether.

“I can see well enough anyway,” I told him. I went to the little table, expecting to see Bibles and rosaries and other religious trinkets but instead finding a black-and-white framed photograph of two young men atop a stack of Johnny Cash albums. Beside them, a miniature record-player.

“What’s all this?” I traced the top edge of the frame, and came away with a sticky film of dust clinging to the pad of my finger.

“Mine,” Raymond said simply, a chuckle bubbling at the back of his throat.

“Yours?”

“I’ve been at St. Agnes since I was a very young man, Amelia, and I daresay I haven’t

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changed too much. Aside from the obvious, of course.” He gestured fluidly to the length of his body and paused to cradle at his stomach paunch.

“This is you?”

“And a friend, yes.” Raymond picked up the photograph gingerly, and as soon as his fingers touched the frame his voice took on a different quality, far off and hollow as if spoken through a tin-can on a string a world away. “Both of us went to seminary, but only I stayed. He always joked he was too handsome for a life like that.”

“You weren’t too bad yourself,” I said and blushed, cursing myself for being so rudely forward. I apologized hurriedly, quietly.

Raymond laughed again, but it was choked and stifled at the back of his throat. A barely audible difference but I recognized it: the reins of sorrow that pull back on an unfitting happiness.

“We were like you and your sister are, Amelia,” Raymond said. “Thomas and I. As the saying goes ‘joined at the hip’ but we were joined at the soul. Until he left the seminary, we had never been farther than across the street from each other.”

“Let me guess, he went to South Sudan, too?” I said lightly, trying to throw a sprinkle of humor in the situation, but he, unlike me, didn’t like to sugarcoat his feelings. He answered me solemnly.

“No, he went even farther. Wall Street, and I never saw him again. I’ve been waiting for him ever since. You’d think after fifty-six years in the same parish, same place, he’d know…” His voice trailed off. “But then again, there are eight million people in this city. That doesn’t tip the odds too much in my favor.”

I should’ve said I’m sorry, should’ve done anything but stare gap-mouthed at him, my jaw hinging open and shut as though cranked by a gear. My fingers fiddled with my ring as though it was the force keeping me rooted to this earth. In the photograph, I could almost see the faintest of strings running heart to heart between the two boys like a telephone wire.

Fifty-six years without seeing your own reflection. It had been two weeks without seeing mine and I was already forgetting who I was. Suddenly I was crying as if Thomas were my friend hacked off from me, crying for every friendship that had lost a limb because I understood. I understood why Raymond couldn’t let St. Agnes consolidate with St. Mark’s, why he’d stayed here all his life listening to Johnny Cash albums under decades-old lightbulbs. It was his building of hope, a bullseye that he thought would beckon Thomas home to him just as I wanted it to beckon Sofia home to me.

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“Do you think he’s still alive?” I asked, swiping away running mascara from under my eyes until the pads of my fingers were black.

Raymond wiped his glasses on his sleeve, taking a moment to stare over my head.

Sofia used to do the same thing when she was upset; she said it helped her put things back into focus if things were unfocused for a while.

“I don’t know,” Raymond said finally, the words a prayer on his lips just as much as any Our Father.

My voice caught. “What do you want the answer to be?”

I saw the reflection of the crucifix on the wall in the lenses of his glasses.

“I don’t know that either,” he said.

Gina Wiste Washington University in St Louis, ’23

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Where Pink Hills Fall

In memory of the 2014 mudslide in Oso, Washington.

Remember Oso? An already fading but unfamiliar yellow flier stuck out from the telephone pole outside the high school. I shrugged to pull the straps of my backpack a little tighter as I walked down Sealth Road. Didn’t everyone remember Oso? I caught something about trees as I passed the flier, but didn’t stop to read; I was more curious who had gone through the effort to print it. Most people around here are too busy making ends meet, whether or not they support the cause. Even if they did, in a middle-of-nowhere town like this? There’s little to no chance of anything coming of it.

I hung a left and walked down the gravel road, hugging the side of the rocks but watching my feet so I didn’t slide into the nettles—those assholes seem to line all the roads around the river, waiting for someone to trip. But I’d long ago abandoned the notion of walking a few blocks further down to the covered bridge—this way was faster, and I’d never liked those bridges anyways. But still, even half a slip and the familiar sensation of dry dust in my yellowed converse would bother me till I got home.

Remember Oso. Of course I remember. Forty-three people, suffocated by rocks and mud. Dad took the cousins and me there once, on our way to the Reptile Zoo. We’d seen the hillside, or half of the hillside—the other half sprawling like lava from a volcano. As if there had never been a neighborhood there to begin with. We’d walked through the line of trees—the only trees in sight—each dedicated to one of the people trapped. Mementos, beer cans, necklaces, signs with names. It had been so quiet, like I couldn’t breathe.

Dead End. I walked to the right of the sign and leapt the guardrail like James Bond—that is, if James Bond ever found himself at the end of a forgotten gravel road by the Rez. The path was clear down to the rocks of the riverbank—which my many afternoon commutes home had probably helped maintain.

As I walked upstream, the smell of salt and rot overcame me. My nostrils flared involuntarily, and I looked to my feet. Dad would be pissed if he had to hose down my shoes again.

Just downstream was a fish, pink flesh and needle-thin bones barely exposed, draped across the rocks. No, not just a fish—a salmon.

Apparently they do it on purpose, give themselves to the forest after laying eggs, in the same place they were born. The river used to run pink with salmon; hundreds of them lined the banks during salmon runs. It’s what made everything grow so quickly,

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keeping things alive. They even turned the tree rings pink.

Now there was just the one salmon, stinking up the bank. But I guess I was glad it made it there, even if it was the only one left.

I walked further along to the log bridge, and tightroped across as I always did.

So close to home I could almost smell it—dust, dogs, and a barbeque someone had started despite the fact that summer was long over. That’s the thing about trailer parks: you can always smell your neighbor’s dinner before yours. I paused, considering the huckleberry bush upstream. Home meant work, and listening to dad groan about having to cook after his shift. Food wouldn’t be ready for another hour at least, anyway.

So I took the long way around, as I did from time to time, pausing to eye the berries.

Most had fallen off already, but I pulled one of the last red ones off and popped it in my mouth. It awakened more hunger than it stifled since I’d skipped lunch, but was sweet enough that I didn’t mind.

I pulled myself up from the rocks by the trunk of a tree, just as a car passed by. I waited until the sound faded away to approach the road. I figured I’d stop by my old stomping grounds. I smiled at the prospect, remembering the little rabbit den beneath that crooked tree, and the neighborhood cat who liked to poke around in the bushes up there from time to time. Perhaps our fort would still be there from last summer.

My cousin and I had spent hours furnishing and waterproofing it—I’d had to use my inhaler, which I hated, after working so hard. But when the little shack was done we couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride that we’d made something on our own.

I knew something was off even before I’d reached the guardrail. The light wasn’t right, and the air felt quiet, dead. I made a detour to avoid the Devil’s Claw as I made my way to the road—I’d never been close enough to find out if those green thorns were poisonous as well as painful, but I certainly wasn’t about to test it. I put a hand on the rail and looked out towards the forest, or where it should have been. A rectangular section right above the park had been cut completely bare, as if by a barber’s razor.

“Oh,” I muttered to myself, breaking the blood-drained silence.

I hopped the rail, almost forgetting to look for cars before crossing towards the sign that sat before the naked landscape. Some government notice—I’d seen it before, but I hadn’t thought to read it until now. I hadn’t realized what it meant. I looked at the tree stumps littering the browned landscape, some so big and old that, if I tried, I could probably see their rings of pink from the old salmon runs. I shouldn’t have been able to see the edge of the elementary school property way up the hill, there should have been so much more in between. But it was all gone.

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Sometimes naming things helps: growing up, unemployment. But when I said to myself, “so this is clear-cutting,” it only reminded me of the salmon on the riverbank, the final veteran of a thwarted effort to let that forest on the hill grow. I remembered the cat, and hoped it had found a new home before they came. Now there were neither our carefully crafted trails nor the nooks and crannies and berry patches they led to.

I knew that it must have been private land, off the reservation. They could do what they wanted with it, even destroy it. People did it all the time. I kicked a rock by my foot, sending it scurrying across the dirt. But I hated how quickly the dust settled, so I picked up a bigger stone and hurled it at the sign. It bounced off the E of “NOTICE” towards a post by the road—another yellow flier attached. Remember Oso? I looked back at the hill, now only a steep pile of boulders and dirt, and remembered with eerie clarity the clumps of dead tree roots in Oso, sticking up from the remains of the mudslide.

The trailer park was just below that hill. The school, too. We already flooded during rainy season, didn’t they know they were setting us up to get crushed? I thought everyone knew what caused the slide in Oso. Either I was wrong, or they just didn’t care. I picked up another handful of rocks, their ricochets off the sign punctuating my words. I loved that forest, but I loved the people below it more.

“Are you —trying—to kill us!?” I stopped for a moment, catching my breath and rolling my shoulder as the low sun cast a shadow-less light onto the hillside. Of course, the sign still stood unharmed.

Someone must have determined this was safe. They must have known about the houses, river, and trailer park below. Some big guy from out of town with his clipboard and Northface and blonde beard must have checked all the little boxes about grades and zoning and groundwater, or whatever it was they checked, and given it a thumbs up.

But it was still a mass of earth, conveniently looming above my home. I could picture the roots that once kept it all in place, that must have already started dying.

I pictured the hypothetical bearded clipboard man again—a geologist, maybe. He’d have been from out of town, probably based in Snoqualmie—or, hell, all the way down in Seattle. Maybe he didn’t have a list at all—I could clearly picture this blonde man giving his signature after barely looking at the hill, or down at the homes and river below. Like the middle school vice principal poking his head into classrooms during a half-assed lockdown drill. Maybe saying, “try to lock the door next time,” before letting them get on with their work.

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I picked up another rock and stared at it in my hand, lopsided and just larger than a half-dollar. Maybe Mr. blonde bearded geologist had looked at the rocky parking lot of the high school on his drive in. Maybe he’d hoped the dust from the road wouldn’t stain his Prius like it has stained the outer walls of the school. Maybe he’d figured that students who couldn’t even find used textbooks wouldn’t spend their time reading yellow fliers.

I dropped the rock and scoured the ground until I found a bigger one.

Maybe he’d gauged the distance from the reservation and figured he could call any effects to tribal land a “phenomenon.” I picked up another rock. Maybe he looked at the trailer park longer than he looked at the hill itself. Maybe he’d said, “Perfect. Just Indians and trailer trash.”

I narrowed my eyes at the sign—pristine and permanent. I knew I’d imagined his words, like the blonde beard and the Prius. But I also knew that it doesn’t matter if the man with the loaded gun meant to point it at you.

“They won’t even notice,” he might have continued, rushing through paperwork while Yelp-ing the nearest car wash. “And even then, what could they do about it?”

The hill seemed to grow before me as I dropped the rocks to my feet. What was once welcoming and familiar was now foreboding and lethal. And it had happened silently. I swallowed, a familiar frustration catching my breath in my throat—things I’d pushed aside coming back in a rush. Every ignored fever, every expired mascara tube, every missed field trip, every pink piggy bank that dad had emptied for gas. Of course, it’s not his fault. We’re all already trapped between the fear of losing what we have and wanting more, all the while knowing we’ll be buried the same way we started—suffocated by alcohol or hospital bills or depression. But apparently, that’s not enough. Now, when the rain falls hard enough, the land itself will try to keep us from breathing.

I nudged the last rock away with my foot. I walked to the yellow flier and carefully straightened out the already curling corner; the date hadn’t passed yet, and it was near dad’s work—maybe I could get a ride. I opened an event on my phone calendar.

Remember Oso, I titled it. Or maybe, Make THEM remember Oso. But that wasn’t right either. I retitled it. Fuck You, Prius Guy. I figured: if I’ll be buried here one way or another, I should try to help things grow a little first. Maybe change the color of the tree rings.

Hanna Wagner Emory University, ’22

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Breakfast

Yeon Jin Lee Carnegie Mellon University, ’21 Oil on canvas

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Shucking Corn

Previously published in the Summer 2019 issue of Sky Island Journal.

The easy afternoon kisses my hands where they settle, pressed into the husk of the ear— green, still damp from the soil.

My grandmother rips those leaves, removes the silk and snaps the shank without hesitation— I’m too aware of my clumsy fingers, tripping over themselves as I peel strand by silken strand from the beaded kernels.

Piano fingers she called them when I missed too many notes, long and graceful.

I catch her, sometimes, looking at her own hands, gingerly assessing those twisted joints, catch her tapping out hymns on the gap-toothed keys Wednesday mornings.

There is a pile of husks strewn on today’s newspaper, the headline blank-staring from underneath another refugee turned away and I stumble again: the breath, this time.

Maybe it’s the wrinkled skin that makes mine seem so soft unspotted from days in the sunshine like hers—the farmer’s daughter.

Like so many other days spent learning how to bake, to sew, to pick ripened strawberries.

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Those moments dripped soft like melted butter pooling under steaming corn— I haven’t found my calling.

What is it to walk, unencumbered into waiting church benches, to look at moving hands and not falter?

There’s so much to learn: how to save a world, how to shuck corn.

Skylar Wampler University of Virginia, ’21

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Tomatoes KENNETH B. SIMPSON: A man shouldn’t have to wait this long to eat. It’s boiled chicken again. Steam from the pot spreads throughout the kitchen, suffocating.

The radio is on, the volume low, murmurs of some song with guitars and a crowing voice, singing about love. I can barely hear it. We used to listen to the radio together, but not anymore. We used to listen out on the back porch, listening as the stars and the moon listened, listening as the sea of swaying wheat listened, but not anymore.

Her graying hair is pulled back in a bun, tight, taut, she hovers over the counter, the one right next to the humming white fridge with a calendar of national parks on it except the calendar is turned to August and it’s the middle of September already and she’s cutting apart the tomatoes she bought from town, the ones I said we didn’t need, we have enough food in this house, she said I just wanted some goddamn tomatoes, don’t you want some goddamn tomatoes too, Kenneth? and I stood up and pushed my chair back and it scraped against the dulled tan tile floor and the screech of the wooden chair against the dulled tile pierced the kitchen and I stomped out the door to the fields because the fields don’t ask for nothing, you water them and they feed you, but Ann, Ann needs too much, takes too much, doesn’t give enough in return.

That was this morning. Now it’s dinner, my boots are off, my brown boots wait by the wooden door on the red carpet that she cleans every day but not well enough because it’s always dirty. The steam still suffocates. She still cuts up the tomatoes. The radio still plays, murmurs of some song, but still there. We used to listen to the radio together.

Not anymore, but we used to. We used to. We used to listen together out on the back porch, the wooden porch I built myself out of wood I bought from Len in town when he asked me if I wanted to buy some wood and I said how much and he said a hundred bucks and I said no I’ll give you $75 and he said come on Kenneth you know I need the money, you know my brother’s sick and I’m the only one working the damn fields and I said I’ll give you $75 and I gave him the money and he helped me load the planks of wood into the back of my Ford and I took the wood home and built the porch in a week. I worked at night because I had to work the fields during the day and she would creep open the backdoor at night in her light blue nightgown and say Can you stop the hammering and get on into bed you need the sleep anyways and I would

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say I’m working on this for you and if I want to work on it at night then I’ll work on it at night and I finished it in a week and the first night she and I sat out on the porch in those rocking chairs with the cushions on the back and we rocked on the porch as the radio sang and a couple of flies wisped around but we didn’t care and we looked out at the fields of wheat as they swayed in the night breeze we watched the seas of wheat swaying together as one and the moon and the stars listened to the radio with us and Willie and Johnny and Dolly seeped into the fields and embedded themselves in the quiet rustling and the radio played and we rocked on the porch I built for her and I looked over at her in her blue night gown and she had her heels up on the chair and her arms around her knees and her copper hair dangled around her taut shoulders, the shoulders of a strong woman, and I looked over at her and she smiled and I smiled and we turned to look back out at the sea of swaying wheat and that was the last time I had seen her smile and now the radio ain’t nothing but a bunch of lonely sounds.

I can see her left hand. She hasn’t worn her wedding ring for a few weeks. There’s tomato guts on her hands, she’s tearing the tomatoes apart.

It’s late for dinner, about 9:00 now, a man shouldn’t have to wait this long to eat, a man shouldn’t have to wait to eat until after the sun goes down, barely any light breaks through the red cotton curtains above the porcelain sink. A few dishes are in there, a few plates, a metal cup, a spoon and a fork, waiting for her. I do my work. She does hers. It’s always worked like that. It’ll always work like that.

She looks at the tomatoes and not at me. She said she wanted them, I said we don’t need them, but she’s already taken them apart, cutting them.

I’m hungry. I don’t want no goddamn chicken and tomatoes but I’ll eat it because I need food and I reckon the only people who always get what they want are the ones who ask for too much.

ANN: I know he’s watching me. I know he is. But I don’t give a damn.

I can’t see him. I’m looking at the tomatoes, at my tomatoes.

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I can’t see him but I know he’s watching me, sitting in his overalls, his black baseball cap on his balding head, his eyes judging me under his untameable eyebrows, those untameable eyebrows usually furrowed together into a hairy wrinkly mass because he’s mad at whatever isn’t following the undeniable laws of Kenneth B. Simpson.

He still wears his wedding ring because marriage is one of those laws, a law that can’t be broken.

But I still just look down at the tomatoes, the ones I’m cutting up, the ones I bought, the ones I bought from that store in town, the ones I bought with the money I had saved up in that purse, that purse I hid behind the towels in the bathroom closet. I saved up my own money and bought my own tomatoes even though I knew Kenneth would be angry because we didn’t need them but I bought them myself and when I do things that defy the laws of Kenneth B. Simpson I can actually breathe for once.

The tomatoes seep into my fingers.

And right now it’s hard to breathe because of the steam.

The radio murmurs but I can barely hear it and I don’t like listening to the radio anymore anyway.

I used to listen to the radio but not anymore.

“It’s late for dinner.” I hear him but I don’t look at him. “We always eat at 7:00. It’s almost 9:00 now.”

I look at the tomatoes, at the food, the food I bought.

“I was doing your laundry.” I know he’s looking at me.

“If you didn’t go to town to get those goddamn tomatoes, you could’ve done the laundry this morning.”

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I don’t wear my wedding ring. The tomatoes are bloody, seeping into my fingers.

“You’ll still get to eat.”

And he will. He always eats, and I always eat, too. But I’m also always hungry, always never quite full.

I don’t wear my wedding ring.

It’s hard to breathe because of the steam.

The tomatoes seep into my fingers.

I don’t like listening to the radio. Not anymore.

I look at the tomatoes, the ones I bought.

Joe Mantych Washington University in St. Louis, ’23

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Ecocitism

Chuchu Qi Washington University in St. Louis, ’23 Digital art

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Foxes Return “Some say that when the yelping kind [of fox] are old, they become monsters.

They wear a dry skull on their heads, clothe themselves with oak leaves, and assume a human guise. These creatures do harm in countless ways. People set fire to the mountains and dig up their burrows, grasping arrows and driving their hounds, thinking if fox kind is eradicated, monstrosity will cease.

They do not know that although foxes can become monsters, they do not necessarily do so. Once in a while one becomes a monster, but they do not all become monsters…”

He Bang’e, 1791, in Occasional Records of Conversations at Night As a child, I feared whistling too loudly at night. When the evening would begin to settle into the night with its dark blue seeping silent through the night sky, I would grow wary, and if the back door and the windows of my house were left open with the white curtains curling and shifting in an uneasy carrying breeze, my breath would grow short as fear twined its way around my ankles. Standing in my kitchen under the flickering fluorescence of the overhead lamp, watching the curtains’ small movements, I knew that with the arrival of night, they too would come.

I had a fear of foxes, you see. I feared the foxes who lurked just beyond the limits of my neighborhood, who waited just beyond the blockade of painted white balustrades, the neat white fences that encircled our backyards where the neighborhood kids threw Frisbees and footballs around. I feared the foxes who waited for the lights to go down and for the doors to lock and for the windows to shutter closed, before they would come creeping out from the shadows they inhabited. I feared their flat faces that they would shove into our mailbox slots and hedges, snouts snuffling noisily along the edges of our windows, scenting for wisps of human breath that wafted through the cracks in our windows. I feared their skinny red bodies and their pointed swiveling ears and their waving tails and I feared the whispering of their whiskers against the painted walls of our house, brushing and twitching as their noses laid tracks along our walls, sniffing. Looking for a way in. I feared being caught awake at night and finding myself standing in my kitchen, looking out through the open kitchen door and seeing their glowing slanted eyes moving inexorably forward through the sky’s impenetrable implacable blackness.

But I knew the foxes would only appear if you whistled for them. Foxes are like dogs, you know. Call them forth and they will come. So even if I had no prior intent

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of whistling, whenever night began to fall, I would make a mental note in my mind that I couldn’t whistle. Not right now. Not now, not for the next few hours before I fell asleep, not any night ever. Because if I whistled, they would come.

It’s said that the first fox appeared during the Tang dynasty when a farmer working somewhere out in the rice paddies began whistling idly as night began to fall. As he finished his work for the day and left to return home, he passed by a graveyard on his way back home and, suddenly nervous, he whistled even louder to fill the deadening silence that had thickened in the air. It’s said that a fox, curious about the piercing call he heard coming from earth, came crawling down from the sky to examine the source of the noise, claws clicking and scraping against the glossy black slate of the night sky, leaving chips and scratches, tiny glittering blemishes in the sky. Upon seeing the farmer, the fox promptly ate the poor man’s face and scraped his skull out from his body.

Crouched in the graveyard with the farmer’s blood pooling hot and wet, dampening his red-furred paws, the fox looked up at the trail of stars he had left. Licking his chops, the fox realized he’d rather stay on earth instead of return to the celestial heavens. Eyeing the farmer’s bloodied skull, he thought of a way he could stay here on earth to enjoy all the brilliant things it had to offer. He nosed his way into the opening for the neck of the skull and shoved his snout through the nasal cavity, the ridges of the skull fitting snug over his finely shaped ears, the curve of his thin jaw, pressing gently against the beat of his hot blood pulsing through the veins in his neck under the layer of sinew and muscle and rusted fur. He shook out his fur, tossing his proud head back and forth. The human skull didn’t budge from where it entrapped his own skull. And so, the fox assumed the shape and body of the human farmer and lived out his life better than the farmer could have lived his own, better than real humans. And his fellow foxes above in the sky saw him and envied him.

That’s what Tang dynasty legend says anyways. It’s one of the first things I was taught after I had immigrated as a young child. In America, we’re taught to fear the foxes because if they catch you late at night, out on the pale concrete-gray sidewalks that interlink our townhomes, they’ll try to eat your face off and your blood will paint the sidewalks a dripping viscous red. If you want to blend in, if you want to be like everyone else, you accept this fear of foxes and forget what you might have thought of them before. They say beware the foxes because they’ll steal your skull, your soul, and your body and your life and they’ll live your life better than you’d have lived your own.

But I know better now.

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I was in the kitchen preparing a cup of green tea when I saw him for the first time darting through the grass in my backyard from tree to tree to stare at me from the looming growing shadows of the trees. The night had not yet fallen and the evening sky looked like a china pattern of muted whites and dark blues that were still shifting towards darkness. I didn’t know why he was out when it was not yet fully nighttime nor did I understand why he had come to me until I registered faintly that the teakettle was whistling in the background as I boiled water on the stove. I saw his yellow eyes out in the darkness and I stood there at my kitchen door staring back at him. He saw me seeing him and he snarled at me, black lips drawn back, yellow teeth glistening and bared. I threw rocks at him and he yelped, whimpered, and, lips falling, he drew back into the shadows.

He came back the next night though. I saw him emerging from the blueness of the night shadows on all fours and as the shadows grew, so did he in size, his snout and limbs elongating, fur rippling as muscle and bone cracked, then doubled. He rose upright and began walking towards me on his two hind legs, his pointed ears flattened against his head, shadows as black as calligraphy ink slipping off his red fur as he stepped into the faltering light of my kitchen lamp. His yellow eyes dimmed in the light and his monolids slid open and closed, blinking apologetically. He came right up to me and begged for forgiveness, his hot rancid breath washing over my face from where his furred snout towered above me. He was so close to me I could feel the fiery heat of the stars from his body warming my front and as the cool night breeze slipped and curled around the back of my neck, it ruffled his thick red fur, exposing slivers of his skin underneath, which was actually a pale, beautiful yellow. At the time, I knew not what he was apologizing for, and accepted his apology only out of confusion.

The second I accepted, he slunk away, back down on all fours, slanting me one last sideways glance from his thin yellow eyes as he slipped into the shadows.

He came back the next night after that. And the night after that and the one after that and eventually I grew accustomed to his presence. I came to expect the gentle padding of his paws through the grass of my backyard. He began to bring with him little gifts: rotting dog carcasses, bloodied poodles, golden retrievers and labs, their big bodies limp and heavy, eyes glassy and vacant. One time, a dead eagle, head hanging at an angle from a snapped neck.

And then one night, he slunk up the stairs to my kitchen door, batted the door open, and towering above me, he cocked his head at me. In a split second he lunged and proceeded to sink his teeth deep into my face and the fear and the pain burst in

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a sudden, nauseating wave and his canines punctured my skin and pierced the fat of my cheeks and I’m screaming the best I can but my screams are being swallowed into his hot gaping maw and red is flooding my eyes, blood drowning my face, my nostrils and my mouth in hot rust as he bites down harder and the pain ripples through my face and down my spine, wracking my whole body and I’m regretting my stupidity and foolishness in letting this fox get so close to me when all I’ve known my entire life is that this is what foxes do: they consume; they’ll eat your face and wear it and then they’ll take your body and take your soul and they’ll live your life better than you would have, a model of the perfect human specimen, advancing above all others. And I’m still screaming and the fox’s teeth are digging through my bloodied slick flesh and I feel the points of his teeth scraping hard against my bones under my skin, inside my face and I feel his furred paws pressing pinpoints into the soft flesh of my neck, his claws shinking out as he goes for the hinge of my jawbone, sharp and thin as he slices through flesh, tendon, artery, slippery blood spurting as he goes for my skull and he’s pulling and his claws are hooking on the underside of my jaw and he’s pulling and pulling upward and then there’s a slick pop— And then— And then I’m remembering. And I’m lying on my side on the wet grass and my fur is soaked in my hot blood and past my paws I see my human skull, glistening red in the light from my house, lying haphazard on the grass black with blood, empty eye sockets staring blankly back at me. And I see him. He’s retreated a careful distance and he’s staring at me, teeth and gums bared, muzzle red with my blood.

You’re back. My father says. And in his yellow eyes is an apology. An apology for the pain he caused me, an apology for the pain of stripping me of my skull, an apology for sending me away from my homeland in the stars. The memories are rushing back and I remember and I remember and I’ve been gone for so long, so so long and suddenly I’m horrified. I can hardly believe how much I’ve changed.

I am. I say. I am.

I’m sorry it took me so long to find you again. He says. This earth is a big place.

Scary. Confusing. I got lost many times.

It’s alright. You did what you thought was best.

My father had sent me away when I was very young. I remember him sitting me down, arranging his nine tails so that the tips of each settled neatly over his crossed paws. I remember him explaining to me that it’s better to be human than to be a fox, that if you want a future, if you want a good future and a good life, then one must

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travel to earth and become human. Life was better as a human, better for my future, better for my family. But you are expected to return, every once in a while. You are expected to rid yourself of your skull and shake off the human body and change forms and tongues and become one of us again, if only for a short time. And you can return to earth again and again, but the expectation is always that you will return to your family at some point. But after my first hunt, I had gotten lost. I had forgotten myself, I had forgotten who and what I was and I had lost sight of what we are. I had forgotten to return.

Now I know how easy it is to get lost and how hard it is to return. You find yourself as a human meeting another human and then getting married and then you have a new family, one bound to earth, one that will never let you leave, let you return to your original form. And I know it’s better to be a fox. The elder foxes have always taught us that to be human is to be better, that going to earth is the only way to get ahead, to live a good life. But now that I’ve done it and lived it, I know the truth.

I know that every time you place a human skull on again, it becomes harder and harder to strip yourself of it. Your human body will be harder to shed, your pointed canines will begin to dull and your slanted eyes will adopt a soft roundness. Your claws will not return to their previous keenness and over time your eyelids will fold over, double-layering over themselves. Your yellow skin will begin to whiten and your beautiful red fur will take longer to regrow each time. And you begin to forget. You begin to forget your tongue and how much you love the colors red and yellow, the colors of happiness and royalty to foxes, and you learn to fear them instead. You begin to forget what your past life used to be like, your former homeland becoming only a hazy memory. You forget why you need to return and you begin to believe the human myth that the foxes are foreign, that they will do you no good, that they are something to be feared. You learn to fear the foxes, your own friends, your own family.

I turn to look at the house I had formerly occupied, at the square windows and polite blue shutters and the straight hedges that line my house. The white picket fences that surround my old neighborhood seem heightened in ultraviolet light. I lift my nose to scent the air. With my new-old eyes, I can see into the furthest windows of the other townhouses that line the block and see the human-white figures that flicker and dart in the comfort of their homes.

Now I know the truth that my fellow foxes have forgotten, or perhaps never knew. I now know that all these humans used to be just like us. They used to have our narrowed yellow eyes and our beautiful yellow skin and our thick red fur. But their

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fox bodies have been occupied; tricked into trying on these human skulls, believing that wearing the bone-white skull of humans will let us lead better lives, they have forgotten themselves and their former fox lives. I look to my father and in his slanted yellow eyes I see that he knows this too. I see recognition, resignation. I see acceptance of who we are. Finally. Together, we step delicately into the night shadows where my fellow foxes emerge to greet me, rippling out of the liquid blackness, brushing my snout with theirs to welcome me back.

I know what we have to do now. I know the truth that has emerged. We may have fooled ourselves in the past into thinking that to be human is the ultimate, most desired form, but I know better now. So, when you humans speak of foxes and of myth and of the Tang legend, know this truth: We don’t want to steal your skulls. We don’t want to steal your bodies, your lives and act as if we are human, as if we are you.

All we want is just to reclaim what is ours. You think we want your skulls, we want to free you from them. Forget your painted white prisons with your perfect hedges and your window shutters and your white picket borders. Come back to us. Come back to us and help us free not only yourself, but also our friends, our family, our fellow foxes.

Now, here I stay, shunted to the side, forever only in the shadows just on the outskirts of suburbia. But I’m in the comfort of my kind, foxes together once again.

Sometimes, every once in a while, when I’m sitting outside watching you from the shadows, I’ll catch myself thinking fondly of when my life was easier as a human.

And I’ll watch your fluttering human shapes behind the glowing curtains and wonder in the back of my mind if it’d be easier to slip on my old, bloodied human skull once again, to return to my comforting little neighborhood, to lose myself, blending in amongst all the other once more. But no. That’s not the life meant for me and not the life meant for us.

So, when it gets late in the evening and the backdrop of the night sky is shifting gradient slowly from blue to black, and the lights are flickering on from behind closed window shades, and the streetlamps buzz to life, creating hazy little circles of yellow light, havens against the approaching darkness, know that I’ll be there. When the incessant hum and chatter of the night creatures and insects that live unseen in our yards begins to grow in volume, and the world is sliding ever so slowly into night, I’ll be there. When you’re inside your house, maybe lying in bed, or sitting at your kitchen table illuminated in light, sitting and thinking in a hazy half-remembered way of some folks you’ve been meaning to see but have been putting off seeing, or thinking

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maybe of some place you’ve been meaning to return to but you just don’t have the time or money to make the trip, I’ll be there. Listening for you. And when you’re staring out into the blackness of night and you feel the fear tickling your spine, snuffling at the back of your ears, and breathing hotly against the nape of your neck, I’ll be there.

Right at the edge of your kitchen light where the shadows draw a wavering line in the grass, I’ll be there. Listening for you. Listening for your whistle.

Catherine Huang Cornell University, ’21

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6PM

Jimmy Ryoo Washington University in St. Louis, ’20 Photography

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Away for Pablo you showed me your new board when I was six and wonder-sick and you were the dilapidated cul de sac god of everything my parents hated and you could ride the handrail and do jump tricks and play a decent drum solo on an upturned butter tub and you liked to smoke before thanksgiving dinner because you said it made our great aunt funnier and you shredded your knees on gravel and collapsed into shrubs and you once dislocated your shoulder in mexico, fell fifty feet trying to get a coconut for your mother from a palm tree and you wore cracked teeth and harem pants the last time I saw you and strapped a denim sling to your chest’s bare blues but you licked the bruise, you said, plant seeds, you said, the sky changes color twice a day for free.

Emma Bernstein Cornell University, ’21

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