Spires Spring 2020

SP I RES

SP RI NG

2020

SPIRES intercollegiate arts & literary magazine

Spring 2020

Copyright 2020, Spires Magazine Volume XXV Issue II 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 Amie Deng and set into type digitally at Washington University in St. Louis.

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 spires.wustl.edu facebook.com/spiresintercollegiatemagazine instagram.com/spiresmagazine_wustl twitter.com/spires_magazine

Table of Contents Literature 09

Nina Huang a fountain pen is just a fountain pen

22

Jonah Goldberg They’re Not All Like That

38

Abigail Lee Burning Foxglove

10

Aura LoinardGonzález The Second Time I Lost Her

27

Thomas Spencer Parish Ice Runway

43

Colleen Gair Let’s talk about how Eve fell

21

Cagla Sokullu please

36

Viridiana Garcia Mother, I’m Homesick.

Art 20

Kelly Wu Self Portrait

25

Terry Rim Untitled

26

Carrie Philips Untitled

35

Katya Labowe-Stoll Worship, War, Sin, and Salvation

37

Genevieve Felsenstein Childhood Bedroom

42

Pearl Au-Yeung Young Love

Front Cover Jackson Hescock Black Hole Sun Washington University in St. Louis, ’23 Oil on Panel

Back Inside Cover Ali Bartlett The Bathroom Rhode Island School of Design, ’20 Oil on Panel

Front Inside Cover Ziyi Zhang Leisure Washington University in St. Louis, ’21 Oil & Acrylic on Canvas

Back Cover Kaitlyn Stansbury Transitions Washington University in St. Louis, ’22 Callograph Print

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Staff Editors-in-Chief Isabelle Celentano Peter Satterthwaite Literary Editor Alice Nguyen Lexi von Zedlitz Art Editor Erin Noh Layout Editor Amie Deng Publicity Director Brianna Hines Treasurer Sam Grillo Staff Sammie Axlebaum Anna Bankston Sophia Daniels Amy Hattori Gabbie Hetu Oliver Li Hanah Shields Aruni Soni Olivia Vella Viola Wu Aidan Wolter

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Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, In this issue of Spires Intercollegiate Arts and Literary Magazine, we celebrate a publication that has now been showcasing writing and artwork from the nation’s undergraduate students for 25 years. For a small student group founded in 1995, surviving for a quarter-century is no small feat. This achievement, however, is not one that we can claim credit for; the magazine’s current staff represents only the most recent chapter of the publication’s history, one snapshot of the perpetual cycle of senior editors graduating and new members joining the group. Dozens of our predecessors worked to produce new issues of Spires semester by semester, and we are the grateful inheritors of this twenty-five-year tradition.

Just as the editorial staff of Spires has changed every year since the magazine’s founding, so too has the nationwide group of students providing literature and art every semester. From one generation to the next, Spires remains dedicated to capturing the unique perspectives of college-aged young adults. This magazine could never have survived so long without the thousands of talented writers and artists whose work has filled its pages.

This milestone issue of Spires reaches completion under exceptional circumstances as COVID-19 disrupts and claims the lives of thousands of people across the globe.

The authors and artists featured here show us the value of literature and art when enduring and processing difficult experiences. We hope that this special issue of Spires offers a source of solace and inspiration in these trying times.

Sincerely,

Peter Satterthwaite and Isabelle Celentano, Editors-in-Chief,

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a fountain pen is just a fountain pen except when it lies bleeding until the ink runs over the edges of the page and drips onto the floor like that Halloween Eve when i gashed open my left thumb and i saw as if in slow motion a trickle of bright red crashed into the floor and converged at the crossroads made of shallow trenches in between the white tiles the fountain pen chisels into the soft notebook page makes hazy memories tangible the ceramic blade with its impeccably smooth edge carved out a lopsided creepy smile and hollowed out the innards of that stumpy pumpkin i bought at ShopRite with the cold precision of a well-trained executioner desensitized to violence because the job description said there would be a lot of bloodshed my fountain pen that quietly bleeds itself into a crimson stream of meandering veins i want to wrap my fingers around you like the Band-Aid that hugged my left thumb one Halloween Eve and pushed back the red pulsing tide

Nina Huang Washington University in St. Louis, ’22

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The Second Time I Lost Her The first time I met Mariana, I was reminded of a firecracker. She was mesmerizing, tall and tanned, with auburn hair shot through with red highlights, and brown eyes that shone in the sun like copper coins. In her Facebook profile picture, white wisps of water vapor curled out of her half-open mouth and around her face. She was reckless. She danced El Payaso de Rodeo at Dana’s quinceañera party in crimson, five-inch heels. She had a crackling laughter that I could hear from three rooms away. She made jokes during class that teachers at the Colegio Mexicano Valladolid tried to be angry at but could not. Mariana took me under her wing—a sickly-looking fifteen-year-old—after she heard the sarcastic comments I constantly made under my breath. During a study date, in a moment of awe at how this girl managed to be both incredibly smart and ridiculously fun at the same time, I whispered, “Eres una chispa.” Chispa became her nickname. Spark. Soon, her real name grew foreign on my tongue.

The first time she saw me cry I grew so embarrassed that I cried harder. She had informed me she was going to get ice cream, and I joined her despite my best judgement. After all, how could I tell anyone about how, more often than not, the thought of eating made me feel like someone was standing on my chest? I ate two salads and three almonds a day, and anything else sent me flying off the handle. How to admit that every night there was a spectacular showdown of screaming, crying, cajoling, and pleading as my parents tried to get me to eat something, anything?

These arguments ended when I agreed to sit down to eat a real meal, but the night actually ended, supervision or threats be damned, with me managing to hide away most of the food, sometimes chewed but always uneaten, and throw it away at school the next day.

Most pertinently, though, how did I tell her all of that? I did not.

By the time I received my gelato—a scoop of sugar-free lemon sorbet—panic had seized me by the throat. My hands were sweating, and as I sat down with Chispa on the cold metal of the outdoor bench I could hear my pulse behind my ears.

“Hey, girl?” Chispa’s voice broke into the inner monologue of my dessert dilemma.

“The guy from the ice cream shop? I think he’s looking at us.”

“Hu-What?” I turned around, momentarily distracted. He stood behind the counter, leaning forward, and didn’t bother to conceal his interest even after we made eye contact. “He’s probably looking at you,” I said. It was half compliment and half concern.

She frowned. “Ew,” she declared, loud enough that I was sure he would be within

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earshot. I didn’t dare turn around again.

“Let’s move,” I decided, standing up. That would also buy me precious time and allow some of the ice cream to melt.

“Are you scared of him?” she asked. The slightest smirk danced around her face.

“Aren’t you?” I waited for her to stand up, scanned the plaza, and made a beeline for a bench that was safely tucked away behind a tree. He wouldn’t be able to see us from there. “My cousin Lara, she told me once that a guy jerked off next to her on the metro.”

“He’s not gonna pull his dick out! It’s bad business.”

“You never know. No one cares what men do anyways.”

Once we’d sat down again, Chispa re-started the conversation: “Do you dig Asian Horror?” she asked.

“Yep!” I said on instinct because it sounded like she dug Asian horror. “There’s a Thai movie from a few years ago called Coming Soon, kind of like the much scarier grandfather of The Ring? I didn’t sleep for two nights after watching it.”

“Sounds cool! Wanna watch it sometime, together?”

“Sure!” I put a morsel of gelato on my tongue and could only swallow it because it wasn’t solid. Chispa’s voice sounded as if it came from really far away.

Concern crept into Chispa’s voice. “Hold on, girl. Are you crying?”

“No,” I replied immediately, hiding my eyes behind the crook of my elbow.

“Why are you crying?”

I couldn’t say anything for fear that my voice might break. She stayed silent, put her hand on my knee and squeezed lightly. Eventually, I choked out my next few words: “Eating is just—it’s hard. Sometimes.”

Chispa was silent for a few seconds, for the first time looking somber. The warmth slowly returned to her eyes. “Well, of course it is. Lemon sorbet tastes like shit.

Here.” I hiccupped out a chuckle as she grabbed the plastic cup from my hands, scraped the sorbet onto the floor, and then transferred some of her ice cream— cookies n’ cream—to my container. “Try this one. Or don’t. I don’t care. The ice cream was just an excuse to spend time with you. Besides, why be embarrassed?

Everyone has their thing.”

“What’s your thing?” I asked, momentarily brave.

She smirked, and I knew that her reply would make me laugh even before she started speaking. “I’m too fabulous to have a thing.”

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The first time I saw her cry, I was convinced I was witnessing something monumental. She had shown up at my house at 11:30 on a Saturday night, her face puffy and her makeup smeared. The smell of tequila hung around her like a cloud, but I didn’t want to ask if she’d driven tipsy.

We sat on my bed as she tried to recount what had happened to her—one too many drinks, a taxi driver’s “shortcut,” and enough shame to fill the room. She went to wash her hands twice, soaping them up right to the elbow where three fingershaped bruises had formed.

“Do you want to tell someone about this?” I asked her eventually.

“No,” she replied immediately. “They’re gonna say it was my fault. I probably made eyes or something.” With her good hand she tugged at her skirt, stretching the fabric over her exposed thighs.

“But if you didn’t want him to—like, he’s a taxi driver, he can’t do that on the job…”

“Besides, he didn’t do anything. He just… he just grabbed me. And then he tried to grab me somewhere else. But I left and walked the rest of the way here before he really did anything. And I—I kicked him to get out of the car. I didn’t even pay him.

So technically it was me who did something bad. So I can’t say anything.”

I was quiet for a long time, grasping at the situation, trying to find words. “I don’t—I don’t think that it’s bad that you hit him, if it was self-defense?”

“But he didn’t do anything!” she said again, raising her voice. I got the impression that she was trying to convince herself more than me. Anger bubbled up in my stomach—I wanted to hit whoever had done this, punch him across the jaw with the keys that I kept wedged between my fingers whenever I was out on the street.

She forced out a laugh. “Look at me, being such a dramatic bitch!” she exclaimed.

“I almost look like something bad happened.” She bit her lip. After another second, she said, “Do you mind if I take a shower here?”

Without waiting for a response, she went into the bathroom and locked the door.

She stayed there for so long she used up all the hot water.

The first time we kissed, she tasted like citrus. We were sitting on the steps of her porch; she was eating oranges, and I was cradling a lukewarm mug of green tea. Her laughter filled the air between us, crackling like an invisible symphony of castañuelas. I could not stop looking at her mouth. I was mimicking accents for her amusement: our math teacher who had moved to Mexico from Venezuela, the kid in class who had a lisp, my little brother who couldn’t quite speak yet.

12

In reaction to a particularly well-executed impression, Chispa threw her head backwards and roared with laughter. I was smiling so widely it hurt my cheeks. God, I really wanted to kiss her. The unbidden, out-of-place thought threw me off almost enough to make me stop smiling and turn away, but then she brought her head forwards, still laughing, and I caught her mouth with mine. We both drew back with a sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry,” I blurted out. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“Relax, girl, it’s okay.” Her hand was on my knee. My hands, still clinging on to the mug, were shaking. Finally, she snorted, breaking the electric silence that had befallen us. “That was gay.”

Gay was a derisive word. People at our school used it as an insult. Chispa didn’t sound like she was angry or offended, though: just bemused. “Yeah,” I agreed. I bit my tongue, so I wouldn’t apologize again.

She gave me a quizzical look. “Are you—” “No.” I cut her off with a snort. “Of course not.”

My parents yelled at me all the time, but I still was not prepared for the first time Chispa and I fought.

She had come to my place for breakfast—we made French toast, and I proudly managed a half of a piece. After shoveling three pieces into her mouth, Chispa now sat with her head between her hands, clearly hungover. “Chispa?”

“Yuh?” “Do you think it maybe would be better if you… drank a little less? And went to parties less?” She raised an eyebrow at me, but I pushed ahead before I could hesitate. “I—Something already happened. And you—you always get paranoid when you go because you’re scared someone will grab you, but you still get drunk. And I think that might not be a good idea? Maybe?”

She put her fork down and sat up very straight. “Are you judging me?”

“N-No.” A knot tied itself neatly in my throat. “I’m just concerned.”

“Nothing happened, so I have no reason to be scared. I refuse to be scared.”

I had no idea how to say what I thought. I had no idea what I thought. “I think there’s something wrong—” She exploded. “With me? With me,” she snarled. “You’re sitting there in clothes four sizes too big, you have acid burns on your fingers from shoving them down your throat, you can’t eat half a meal without having a crisis, and there’s something wrong

13

with me.”

“Get out.” I heard my mom’s voice, angry and commanding. I turned around to see her standing in the living room. “Leave my daughter alone, and get out of my house.”

Chispa stood up with a huff, grabbed her purse and her sunglasses, and walked out, slamming the door behind her. My mom said nothing more.

“Thank you,” I whispered into the echo of Chispa’s anger, looking miserably at my mom.

“She’s right, you know.” My mom starting walking back upstairs.

“Well then why did you say anything?” I asked, bitterness sour in my mouth.

She stopped for a second, then continued walking. Her voice grew fainter as she reached the second floor. “Because she wasn’t saying it out of love.” Another pause.

“Make sure you wash the dishes.”

I sat for a few minutes with my forehead on my hands, and I didn’t realize I was crying until the first few tears fell, petering softly against my empty plate.

The first time I took my clothes off in front of her, I expected Chispa to recoil at the sight of me. “I’m sorry about...this.”

“Wha’?” She lifted her mouth from my neck.

I made a vague gesture towards my bony body and the hair that covered my back and stomach.

“Girl!” Chispa laughed. “Do you think I would have gotten you naked if I didn’t want to see you?”

I burrowed deeper under the covers to escape the perpetual cold that hung around me like some kind of useless coat. “I guess not.”

“Exactly.” She trailed her finger down my stomach and navel. “You’re super cute.

You’re funny, and you’re so pretty, and I really like you.” She bent her head down to kiss me, and I held her face between my hands. Her hair wound around the tips of my fingers. When she pulled back, she bit her lip. “I’m sorry about what I said last week, about there being something wrong with you. I just...wish you were a little healthier.”

Something defensive inside of me reared: You’re healthy enough. If anything, you should be smaller. With an effort that felt almost physical, I pushed it down and forced myself to think with the shriveled, rational part of myself. “It’s okay,” I whispered finally. I realized my mother had been wrong, possibly because she could not hear herself when she berated me for being too skinny, and did not realize she sounded the same as Chispa: “You were saying it out of love.”

14

Chispa leaned down to kiss me again. “I was,” she whispered against my mouth.

Her breath smelled warm and sweet.

Afterwards, I lay with my head on her chest. “Maybe we are marimachas,” I whispered. I wondered if our language had any words for what we were that didn’t sound like slurs.

“Yeah, maybe we are,” Chispa mused. “It ain’t that bad, huh?”

I rolled my eyes; “I guess not.”

She was serious for a moment. “My mom would never let me talk to you again if she knew. You know how religious she is.”

I looked at her and smiled: “You mean all the crucifixes on the living room wall aren’t just decorations? Here I thought she was just into baroque art.” She smacked me playfully. “People at school are also saying things.”

“Fuck the people at school,” she snorted. “I just want to make sure I don’t have to stop seeing you.” After a pause she continued, though. “We probably still shouldn’t say or do anything at school, though.”

I felt really heavy all of a sudden. It was different than my heaviness, though, how I would carry all sensation in my midriff and my limbs. This one weighed on my chest and the corners of my mouth.

When fireworks fade, they leave behind spider-like webs of smoke. In the days after the first time I lost Chispa, as the reality of her disappearance set in, I felt like those grey phantoms, like a macabre negative of my girlfriend’s light. Pieces of me were drifting away like smoke tendrils. I went to her place once—as if to make sure that she was gone—and sat with her mother as she cried. I wandered into her room, and when the scent of Fatale Pink perfume, the cigarettes she pretended she didn’t smoke, and the musky smell of her skin under her clothes cloyed my nose, I felt my stomach turn. Looking at her empty room and the thin sheet of dust over her bed, smelling her without having her there—it felt like a violation. I walked out of the room and stumbled down to the living room, but the crucifixes’ tortured grimaces seemed to mock me and the thought of God offered no comfort. Man shall not lie with man, for it is an abomination. I left the house.

The police asked me a half-dozen, half-assed questions: Was she out on a party?

What was she wearing? Did she drink? Did she have a lot of boyfriends? No? I was left humiliated and angry on her behalf; I wanted to spit at their faces. For the first time in years, I found myself lamenting that I was so small and fragile.

15

As days turned to weeks, I started having panic attacks. If someone didn’t immediately answer the phone, I was swallowed by an anxiety so intense, my hands and feet went numb. I threw up everywhere, all the time, both intentionally and not.

For a month I refreshed my social media obsessively, and I refused to sit away from any landline at my house. I lost my peripheral vision, and clumps of my hair started falling out. I lay on my bed most of the time, wishing the mattress would swallow me; I would bury my face in my pillow, hoping to fall asleep and suffocate, but I couldn’t commit and always came up for air. I lost twenty pounds and had a seizure one morning when I stood up from my bed. I spent a week admitted at a hospital with a feeding tube down my nose that scratched my throat and stung when I cried, which was all the time.

The second time I lost her, the knot that had been tightening inside my chest for 37 days unraveled.

I knew almost as soon as my dad called me downstairs, his voice constricted and heavy and soft. “Cielo?”

That was enough to send my heart galloping. “Yes.” “Come downstairs.”

“Am I in trouble?” I hadn’t hidden away any food that day.

“Come downstairs.”

My mom’s face was ashen, and my father’s eyes bloodshot. “Yes?” “They found Chispa.”

I already knew the answer to my next question: “Alive?”

She sighed, and he drew in a breath. In the end, it was me who spoke. “Did it hurt?”

Still nothing. I barely had enough energy to raise my voice. “Did she die in pain?”

The truth was in my dad’s eyes, clear as sorrow. “No.” I wanted to call him out, tell him that I knew he was lying, but I could not even speak. Ears ringing and with my vision so narrow I tripped twice, I ran up the stairs.

Once in my room, I threw up on the bed and then wailed. The noise was so horrible, so nearly inhuman, I did not recognize it as myself. I couldn’t get myself to shut up, not even when my parents and my brother came upstairs and all hugged me at once, as if they could physically hold me together, keep me from falling apart.

I cried for weeks, with a few breaks to drink Ensure liquid meals. I had nightmares for three months. At school the rumor mill was merciless: she’d been meeting a lover, she’d cheated on a boyfriend, she’d gotten too drunk at a party. Those who pointed

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out that she’d never had boyfriends—that, if anything, she spent a suspicious amount of time with girls, with me—pushed the story that she was a marimacha, and that she’d been killed leaving a gay bar. Whatever the details, ‘Slut’ was written in the death certificate in bold, scarlet letters. To avoid the whispers, I missed so many days of school that I had to test into the eleventh grade at the end of the year. It was only months later that I had the courage to ask, and my mom had the courage to answer.

I learned what I had already suspected—that she had been assaulted, raped, tortured, and discarded and that she had died from shock. She’d been found near a water processing plant. “What was she doing?” I asked my mom, “When whoever did this grabbed her?”

“She’d gone to the store to buy colored paper. For some kind of school project. It was the middle of the day.” Her chin shook. “I’m sorry I was mean to her, Cielo, I really am. She was a sweet girl. And I know how much you loved her.”

The world became perpetually tinged with Chispa’s afterimage, and on my worst days I still felt like the smoke that sparks leave behind in the night, a darkness that cannot quite blend into the black behind it. My illness should have killed me before I turned eighteen, and all she did was be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and yet I was still standing, and she was not. I could never shake the horror of that fact or the scream that it lodged in my throat.

The fistful of pink glitter slammed into the sidewalk at my feet and bellowed upward around my shins. Next to me, a young woman with a green bandana around the lower half of her face held up a picture of José Luis Castillo at the Brillantada.

No Me Olviden, Falto Yo was printed in bold letters, white over pink, across his handmade, plastic smock. Don’t forget me, I’m still missing. In front of me, a woman with a megaphone was pushing through tears to get her words out: “¿Cómo chingados no voy a estar enojada? ¡Lo quiero quemar todo! ¡Me mataron a mi hija!”

I want to burn it all. They killed my daughter. I was surrounded by handmade signs: Qué ganas de ser pared, para que te indignes si me tocan sin permiso. ¿Amiga, llegaste? Vivas nos queremos. Ni una menos. With my right hand I clutched Silvia’s wrist to keep the throng of people from separating us, and with my left I was holding up a slab of cardboard with a list sharpie’d on it.

Unable to come up with a punny or sassy quote, I had bulleted all the firsts that Chispa hadn’t gotten to have: She didn’t graduate high school. She didn’t get to build a career or even decide what she wanted to study. She never went to Greece or Paris

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or anywhere outside of Mexico. She never wore a wedding dress or held an infant to her breast.

I hadn’t written down the list I was really thinking of, though: the list of all the firsts that I had without my Chispa and couldn’t share with her. How one July morning I woke up and realized that I was starving. How I went to parties in skimpy outfits and got so drunk I couldn’t walk, so high my friend needed two strangers’ help to walk me home, so crossed my male coworker gave me a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants and exiled himself to the couch to let me sleep in his bed. How every morning after those irresponsible decisions and self-medicated nights I woke up, with a leaden head but alive and unassaulted, and felt guilt and gratitude and grief. How I gained weight and moved away and fell in love again, with girls who reminded me of Chispa and girls who didn’t.

Standing in that sea of anger and green bandanas, I felt my eyes begin to sting.

There was pink glitter and red smoke everywhere, permeating the air like the fiery ashes. Throwing my head back, I imagined they were sparks. Everything here reminded me of Chispa: the colors, the noise, the outfits, the chaos. The shining pink sparkles and crimson-colored smoke. Her attitude shone through the choreographed Un violador en tu camino dance and the palpable anger and determination in people’s movements. How we were all out here, mourning her and others like her, screaming for justice. Looking at the grief etched in all the faces around me, her loss became fresh again.

“Are you crying?” I heard Silvia speak next to me.

I turned to her, wiped my cheek with the green bandana I had wrapped around my own neck. “Yes.” “Do you wanna, like, leave, for a bit?

I smiled. “Yes, actually.” I pulled a water bottle out of my backpack to take a drink, then handed it to Silvia. She took a swig from the metallic, blue bottle and handed it back to me. “Do you want to go to a café or something? I want something with sugar.”

After detangling ourselves from the crowd, we walked down the cobbled city center streets. As we were waiting for the green light to cross, I heard a rustling from somewhere below me—then looked down to see a man crouching down to look up from under Silvia’s skirt.

“What the fuck!” Without really thinking about what I was doing, I slammed the half-full bottle over his head. The metallic clang elicited a groan and a thud as he clutched his head and fell to his hands and knees.

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“Oh my God, Natalia!” Silvia let out a nervous laugh.

I grabbed her by the wrist and started crossing the street before he could get up.

“Let’s go.”

“Oh, my God,” she said again. “I cannot believe you just did that.”

We got to the café, then moved to the gelato shop next door instead because— probably because of how many people were attending the demonstration—they were out of almost everything. “Let me buy you ice cream!” Silvia told me. “You just punched a bitch for me.”

I laughed, clutched the bottle in both hands to hide that they were shaking. There was a rust-colored stain on its lower edge. “Okay.”

“What flavor do you want?”

I didn’t even look at what they had before speaking. “Cookies ‘n Cream.”

This piece is dedicated to all the women and girls that Mexico has loved and lost.

Aura Loinard-González Cornell University, ’21

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Self Portrait

Kelly Wu Rhode Island School of Design, ’22 Gouache & Digital

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please dip me in gold, dress my cheeks in rosé twirl your words ‘round the curls of a phone cord let them sink and bloom roses in my chest paint my skin crimson red with I adore. spell my colours on cotton candy clouds, make the wind shiver with their aftertaste. wander into darkness in silent towns and see what I find in stars who keep pace. pull me by the hand to the edge of you let me read from your old bruised paperbacks. show me where your heart is, swimming in blues color me with the sea where the world ends or, just call me at dawn ‘cause you can’t sleep and whisper I miss you as the sky bleeds

Cagla Sokullu Cornell University, ’20

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They’re Not All Like That For a Friend

Throw on a black T-shirt and jeans. Go to a Halloween party thrown by a friend of your roommate, and meet her there, in devil ears and an outfit that doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

Imagine.

Introduce yourself, “I’m a transfer,” and she smiles brightly and takes your hand.

Don’t mind that you can’t hear each other over the music.

Invite her back to your room, where she’ll tell you she loves the lights you’ve put up, just before she turns them off.

Smile at her smiling eyes, in the dark. She makes it clear she’s having fun.

Invite her over again, a few nights later, a few nights after that.

Get a different response, the fourth time. “Are you ever going to ask to see me before 2:30 a.m.?”

Take a daytime walk in the forest surrounding campus.

Bring her back to the library with you, work with her legs over your lap.

Feel at home, for a change.

Watch her become your closest friend, the one who stays up so long to talk with you that you watch the sunrise together.

Define the relationship, that morning. Neither of you calls this love; you’re friends.

Hear her say that things will probably end when one of you starts feeling more strongly.

Stop her there: you’d rather be just friends than friends with benefits but a risk of becoming neither.

Be stopped by her there: she likes where you are now. “Don’t stop something that isn’t broken.”

Break. That is, Go home for the holidays, see your old friends and your ex, and reflect on how to build your life next semester.

Decide, oh the horror to your high school squad, that this friendship is more important than the sex.

Tell her this, once you’re back.

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Feel confident in this decision. Feel less confident when she doesn’t take it well, when she doesn’t try to hide the disappointment. And she doesn’t really stop, either.

Respond to the cuddling and pecking, because it’s natural.

Tense whenever she softens, when her arms knot behind your shoulders and you know she doesn’t see you as you see her.

Don’t resist, though. [Did you think you have a choice? You don’t have a choice.

She’s all you have.]

Clarify things with her again, far too late. And she’ll stop. Hanging out with you.

Let the weeks pass. Not unnoticed. These things, living in a new school, it doesn’t get easier.

Sit with the cruel irony, you the psych major, you the school helpline volunteer, be your own case study in depression.

Celebrate, then, when she reaches out again. She’s going to a concert, her friend canceled, come to the party she’s at and you’ll leave together.

Consider, only after you get there, that you don’t know anyone there besides her.

Let her drunkenly make out with you at the door. You don’t have the energy to say no. Then let her go off into the crowd.

See her with another guy. That’s fine. You’re not dating.

Turn away when she comes back to kiss you again, say no. That’s not fine. You’re not an object.

Be pushed away.

Be stared at, by someone with no context, an unfriendly eyebrow raised, what did you say to her, creep?

Be glared at, when she does this twice more.

Step outside, catch your breath.

Glance when she comes out with a different guy and starts kissing him.

Sink when she keeps looking at you. Eventually even he notices, and freaks out, stuttering an apology.

Reassure him that it’s fine. It’s not, but not for anything he did. You’re not dating.

Go back inside.

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Be found, told that she ordered a car. Get in. You deserve a show, and she seems like she’s sobering up.

Be corrected. Be interrogated. “Why don’t you care about me anymore?” “Don’t you like me?”

Be straddled, strangled, constricted. She’s no different at the concert.

Stay silent until she finally abandons you for another guy, until you stop getting looks.

Breathe, or don’t. She comes back to you worse, and you submit yourself to what you know will happen.

Tell her “we need to go home.”

Swallow, be molested in the car, her hand pushing against your crossed thighs.

Blink as she tells you she won’t remember this in the morning. That’s her only apology.

Don’t resist. Don’t use force. [Remember the years you trained for a black belt?

You’re not allowed to fight back. You’re not allowed to do anything but get her home safe.]

Pay the extra fare, stopping at her place then yours.

Sit there, on the floor next to your bed. [Good thing your roommates aren’t here.

Good thing no one is here that you can talk to, that you can’t call your own helpline without someone recognizing you. And what would you say?

Nothing happened. You’re not a victim. You don’t get to be a victim.]

Wake up, sleep, wake up. It’s 6 A.M., it’s 6 P.M. Never say the words, never with a straight face. [You don’t get to label what happened. You don’t get to say any more about it.]

Jonah Goldberg Washington University in St. Louis, ’22

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Untitled

Terry Rim Washington University in St. Louis, ’22 Oil

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Untitled

Carrie Philips Washington University in St. Louis, ’21 Digital Photography

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Ice Runway Paul We pass twelve miles Northwest of McMurdo Station when our Snowbird 8 hits the first body. Before I can press the brake pads, Bernard jumps off, rolls the first one over, and shouts back to me: “Oh buddy, we got some popsicles.”

There are four of them total—three men and a woman. None of them were carrying any gear. They must have dropped one by one in the night, lined up almost single file.

The first is laying face down in the snow, an arrow to McMurdo, arms spread out, like The Crucified. Her skull and ribcage now cracked open by the Snowbird.

“Was her hair still wet? Christ. You’d’ve thought they’d learned not to go out after showering.”

I think it’s a joke, but Bernard’s pretty fucking dumb. Anyone walking on Ice Runway Road is going to get soaked from seawater in the wind.

“Jesus, it just breaks right off.”

He holds a little bit of blonde hair in his hand and gestures with it to me.

“That’s two blasphemes, Bernard. I wasn’t gonna call you out after the first one, but – not in my presence.”

“Yessir.”

I don’t know if I actually care anymore. Bernard just needs to shut the fuck up.

The first two are spread out along the Ice Runway, 400 meters apart. We find two more 300 meters back from the second, 700 meters from the first. They’re spooning in the ice, the little one holding the big one. The big one must have gone down first.

The little one might’ve gotten emotional and stayed with him. Or maybe the big one just fell on him.

It’s hard not to imagine a heroic narrative for them. Trudging in thick snow to McMurdo, hiking who knows how many days before they reached Ice Runway, desperately keeping a southwest heading. The group probably started off in the low teens, and then one by one each of them rolled up into little frozen ice balls. It must have felt, last night, like they almost made it, too. They must have hit the Ice Runway a couple hours before midnight. At that point, you’d probably want there to have been a heated debate. One side conservatively pleading to camp, rest up, wait, slow down. The other boldly dares them on. The repetition of 14 miles—14 miles—as both an unspeakably short and unspeakably long distance, depending on the inflection of whoever was spinning it. Can’t be more than a seven hour hike for anyone with experience. And then again, a seven hour hike for a group of half-dead

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refugees. It’s easy to imagine she, the one in front, had pushed for it, didn’t want to wake up dead in a makeshift ice fort, suffocated under snow blown across the tundra.

Dying like that would be way worse than dying on your feet.

In reality, they probably hadn’t said anything when they hit the Ice Runway. Their faces were already set like dumb cows, stuck hiking. Totally silent, with a little bit of drool dribbling down their chin and then freezing.

When the big guy went down, it was probably a relief for the little one. He must have had a real Napoleon complex, terrified he was going to be first.

Male number three and the woman probably didn’t even notice and just kept walking. Number three would have fallen after another 300 meters, so that’s what?

Five minutes later? And by then she definitely didn’t notice, just kept walking on the ice road until her own five minutes were up. The opposite of a deer in headlights, just a zombie cow stuck walking forward. Drooping eyes, blistered feet. Just the body of whatever she had been before—a researcher? Astrophysicist? Biologist? Glaciologist?

Or maybe someone just meant to shovel snow at Zuccheli or serve lunch for the scientists.

It’s a mystery how Bernard missed them the day before. Maybe they mistook us for whoever was kicking people out of Zucchelli.

Bernard always grabs the feet while I grab the armpits. Bernard doesn’t like being too close to the faces, and I don’t like looking at them, so it works out as long as the heads don’t roll back. They usually don’t. Frozen necks are too stiff.

Bernard and I tie them to the top of the Snowbird. The first time I picked up a stiff, I left it in the trunk. It’s not like the trunk’s toasty, but it’s above freezing. And that was enough to make the ice melt. The bacteria and fungi unfreeze. All the tiny organisms that live inside you start squirming around your insides. When you’re dead, you can’t give them food, so you become the food. They don’t need you alive anymore, so they digest you the way they used to digest your spinach. The problem isn’t that you’re dead, it’s that parts of you are dead, and others are very much alive. And the alive parts—the bacteria, the fungi, the single cell eukaryotes—all of them start chewing your intestines into ooze. And I can’t have that ooze in the back of my truck.

Laura “Jesus Christ, close the fucking tent door, Reggie.”

Reggie has been crouching in the tent entrance for the past five minutes.

“I thought I heard something.”

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“Of course you heard something, it’s the windiest place on earth, you’re always gonna hear something. You do this every fucking night, Reggie. You’re freaking Vincent, Simon, and me out. Get in the sleeping bag.”

“I’m not freaked,” Vincent murmured from his sleeping bag. “And I’m pretty sure Simon’s asleep.”

“Fine, you’re freaking me out then,” I said.

“Alright, Laura, fine. Just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a truck or something.”

“There’s not gonna be a truck. We’d see the headlights through the flaps if anyone was near long before we heard them.”

“Alright, boss, you got it.” Reggie starts getting undressed.

“You’re not getting spooked right? We’re almost there, we don’t need you going all Igor Dyatlov on our ass.”

Reggie grunts. “Who the fuck is Igor Dyatlov?”

“How has Vincent not told you about Igor Dyatlov.”

“Reggie doesn’t like listening to me talk.”

“Shut up, Vince.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re a fucking child.”

Reggie finally crawls into his sleeping bag.

“Gimme a bed time story, Laura.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I’ll share some canned peaches.”

“Excuse me?” I roll up from my sleeping bag, now fully awake. “Why the fuck do you have canned peaches?”

“I wanted a treat for the road.”

Everyone’s silent for a minute.

“So, what, you just took them? Christ, Reggie.”

“Hey, seeing how we’re saving Zuchelli, I didn’t figure it was that big of a deal if I took a can of peaches.”

“Jesus. People are starving.” Vincent’s sitting up in his sleeping bag now, too.

“Yeah, and we’re gonna be back with food from McMurdo in like 48 hours. One can’s not gonna make a difference.”

Another moment of silence passes. “Yeah? You gonna tell that to Marty?” I finally say.

“Fuck you, Laura, tell him when you get to Hell. One can wouldn’t have saved Marty.”

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“Yeah, but people stealing cans definitely killed him.”

Reggie is silent. Simon continues softly snoring in the corner.

“Do you want some or not?”

I do. So does Vincent. While we devour them, we guiltily look over at Simon. He’s a big guy, though; he doesn’t need it. Besides, by the end of the day tomorrow, we’ll be in McMurdo with plenty of food. Just one more day’s hike. 14 miles. Half a day’s hike, really. And then we’re golden.

“Who’s Igor Dyatlov?”

“You tell him, Vincent.”

“Nah, he doesn’t want to hear it from me.”

I sigh. The peaches did taste fucking amazing. Reggie deserves something for sharing them at least.

“He was a hiker in Soviet Russia. It’s one of those unsolved mysteries that people like to speculate about. Kind of a hiker horror story.”

“What’s the story?”

It really is a shock that Reggie hadn’t heard it yet. Any time one of the younger researchers wants a spook back at Zuchelli someone tells their version of the story of the Dyatlov pass incident.

“I guess… to tell the story of Igor Dyatlov and his group you gotta keep in mind what we don’t know. And what we don’t know is why they left the tent. There they were, five very experienced hikers.”

“Eleven hikers,” Vincent mutters from his sleeping bag.

“I’m just telling it how Marshall told me.”

“Marshall’s an idiot.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does if you’re the other six.”

“Do you want to tell the story?”

“Eh.” “Whatever. There was some amount of hikers—all of them, way better than us, especially their guide, Igor Dyatlov. He was the real deal. They had one last hike before they got the highest hiker classification in wherever they were from. And that night, they were safe in a tent. But outside, it was -40°C. You know. That’s the temperature that makes you feel like you’ve fallen into cold water if you step outside.

Makes urine freeze before it hits the ground. The kind of air that will kill you in minutes. I mean ‘cold air’ doesn’t really cut it. Neither does bitter wind or arctic

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blast. Negative 40 degrees centigrade isn’t bone-chilling, it’s bone-freezing. All the capillaries in your legs freezing and expanding until they send canyons of cracks into your bones and shatter your body. And inside the tent, they were wrapped in their hardcore sleeping bags, real professional shit, the kind of thing that would have kept them safe.”

Reggie interrupts. “I know what the cold is like, Laura. We’ve been hiking the Antarctic for four days.”

“Do you want to hear it or not? Jesus, this is just how you tell it.”

He does.

“They left the tent. All of them, hardcore hikers. Thousands of miles hiked between them. All they had to do was stay in the tent, and they would have been fine. But around midnight, someone in the group tore the tent open from the inside. And one by one they filed out. One of them only in their underwear. Dyatlov himself had on little more than a sweatshirt, as did his friend. Only two wore proper clothing.

“The tracks from the tent lead to a tree a mile downhill. A mile in bone freezing weather. And at the base of those tracks the search party found the body of the hiker only in his underwear.”

“Two miles, and three hikers in their underwear, but whatever.”

“Vincent.”

“Sure, whatever. It’s just a story now, but there were actual people who died, Laura.”

Vincent must be tired, because he’s being a real puckered asshole, so I tell him as much in more words.

“The tree was torn to shreds, and so were their hands. All five of them had made it to the tree, the tracks say. All the lowest branches were torn off. Maybe they were trying to build a fire? But they couldn’t, there was no ash in the area. Or maybe they were trying to climb the tree, and the brittle winter branches kept snapping. While three hikers mangled their frozen fingers on the frozen bark, Dyatlov and his friend in a sweatshirt decided that getting back to the tent was the only option. Whatever reason they had for leaving, they figured was gone. Or maybe they realized the cold would kill them anyway. Maybe the hiker in underwear had died already, and they knew the clock was ticking.

“Dyatlov and his friend were found scattered across the hillside. It was too dark to see, and they got lost. A mile is pretty far in the dark. They thought they had the best chances by splitting up, and maybe that was right. But Dyatlov himself only made it 300 meters from the tree.

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“So you have the three hikers, one only in underwear, the other two lucky enough to be well dressed. All we know is that the hiker in underwear died under that tree.

He could have easily just sat down with the calm of hypothermia, thinking he just needed to get some rest from the day’s hike. But if you’re in underwear, in -40°C, does even the stupidest person think they’re making it out of there? Especially when you see two others, fully clothed. You gotta wonder if he tried to fight for clothing.

His hands were already so mangled from the tree that there’s no way to tell. Or maybe he had clothing. Him and one of the clothed men were roughly the same size.

None of the investigators knew whose jacket belonged to whom originally. They just had to piece it together from the bodies and assume. He could have been held down in the snow, with his clothing torn off his body to keep someone else warm. Anyone involved would have been too tired to do anything—what, Vincent?”

“Nothing! I mean, sure. That could have happened. And maybe they cleaned up the signs of a struggle. But. I mean. Whoever left the tent clothed were gonna have all the energy by the time they made it two miles—or you know, maybe one mile, to the tree. There couldn’t have been a proper fight. All the power was held by whoever was lucky enough to sleep in their clothing.”

“Whatever. One guy in underwear dead under the tree. Cause of death, hypothermia, just like Dyatlov and his friend. And those lucky two that had slept in their clothing finally left the tree. But they didn’t go to the tent like Dyatlov and the others. They went downhill. Another thing we don’t know—why couldn’t they make for the tent? When the search party finally found them, one had died from hypothermia. But the final three—two had crushed chests, and another a crushed skull. One had their eyes and tongue ripped out. The later investigation said “an unknown compelling force” caused the injuries.

“It’s that unknown compelling force. Because what kind of thing is worse than your bones freezing in your body.”

It’s silent for a bit. Then Reggie says, “Christ.”

“Yeah well. It’s a bunch of bullshit anyway. The crushed chests and skull probably happened from falling down a cliff in the dark. The torn out eyes and tongue was probably squirrels after they were already dead.”

“Sure. But why leave the tent?”

“Someone must have got spooked. It was torn open from the inside. Some people say they must have thought an avalanche was coming. Panic attacks induced by infrasound from the wind on the mountain. I always figured it had something to

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do with hypothermia. People just going crazy from the cold. Not knowing what to do with what they have. But Igor Dyatlov was the leader. He should have been able to keep a calm head. If you look at the terrain, there was no chance of an avalanche coming, and he’d been on enough hikes that he should have known that. You’re not getting rattled on me, are you?”

“Nah, shut the fuck up. It was probably like a Yeti or some shit.”

“Sure,” I say. “Ready to sleep, Vincent?”

Vincent is muttering again, his mouth clearly against his sleeping bag. “How long we hiking tomorrow?”

“It’s a fourteen-mile straight shot to McMurdo. Maybe we’ll run into a truck or something on the runway and get a lift.”

Bernard It’s Paul’s day off. He’ll be back tomorrow, but today it’s just me in the Snowbird, zipping down Ice Runway. Mad Max shit, but cold. Way better than the jobs back at the station. All you gotta do is clear off any junk, check for any animals that could be brought back to McMurdo, and, of course, any of the groups from Zuchelli that might be on the road. I check real carefully for groups when Paul’s not here.

And today’s my lucky day. Almost thirteen miles down, I find them. Four people, waving their hands over their heads. I can’t hear, of course, but I bet they’re shouting at the truck, they seemed real excited. Running across the ice, one of them tripping and falling on his ass. All in real nice North Face jumpsuits. Just another few hours and they would have made it on their own.

I stop the Snowbird a few meters away from them and climb out.

“Hey folks! You looking for McMurdo?” I shout over the wind, smiling and waving at them from the Snowbird.

“Yes!” The voice is hoarse, probably from screaming over the Antarctic winds, but she’s definitely a girl.

“Here, it’s not much, but I brought a bit of warm water just in case some of you showed up today. It’ll make you feel a hell of a lot better,” I shout over the wind, then open the side door of the Snowbird and climbed in. I get ready with the hose and the switch.

Three of them just shuffle along but the girl runs in front of the group, clearly still has a lot of energy to her. I wait till she was right up next to the truck, the other three about ten meters back and then flip the switch.

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The engine whirrs to life, and water shoots out with the force of a fire hydrant.

Maybe there’s a flicker of confusion in her eyes behind the balaclava. Maybe she’s still wondering if she’d be drinking out of the hose.

And then she’s knocked on her ass. I aim for the faces, knocking all four of them down one at a time with the water. They’re probably concussed immediately, not likely to stand up any time soon.

The rig was designed for a crop watering experiment of mine on difficult Antarctic terrain. It had been canceled years ago. At different settings, you could shoot water across a football field of plants. At ten meters, it was like a battering ram to the face. It does kinda feel like watering plants as I keep them down, moving the hose back and forth from each of them, careful to aim for the hood, turning their jumpsuits into wet suits, filling them to the boots with ice-cold water.

I turn off the hose. The big guy and the little guy seem to be out cold in a pile on top of each other. The girl and the other guy are coughing out water, still lying flat on their asses.

I cut the backpack off the girl first.

“Sorry, Miss.”

I cut the final backpacks off the pile of men, wary of the one still coughing. But their heads must have still been ringing when I dumped the gear in the back of the Snowbird, cuz they’re still retching on the ground.

As I reverse down Ice Runway, the girl’s getting up. Scrappy little bugger. It didn’t matter, she’ll be down in five minutes, tops. The last thing I see before I turn the Snowbird around is her helping up the last conscious man.

Paul thinks McMurdo could take in a few more people. That it’s just a couple of months till the mainland remembers us and sends supplies. It’s not true. Either the mainland forgot about us, or it doesn’t exist anymore. Fuck the helicopters, there hasn’t even been static on the radio since December.

I didn’t kill these people. Everyone in Zuchelli is already dead. But McMurdo might hold on a little bit, if Paul can get his head out of his ass and focus on conserving what little we have.

I’m a little shaky from the cold and accidently swerve the Snowbird a little bit. For a moment, I’m looking directly at the Southern Sea, its cold waves crashing against Ice Runway as the winds blow salt water onto the tracks. I warm my shivering hands for a moment and turn the Snowbird back to McMurdo.

Thomas Spencer Parish Yale University, ’20

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Worship, War, Sin, and Salvation Katya Labowe-Stoll Rhode Island School of Design, ’21 Pencil on Paper

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Mother, I’m Homesick.

You sat in a pew at the godless chapel three years ago.

You sat, bowed your head.

What did you pray for?

For me, 2,000 miles from home?

2,000 miles from you, from the place that kept me warm.

The echoing silence—dense, damp—crept inside me.

Slithering down my throat, silently planting new fears into me.

It’s still somewhere inside me, making my soul shrink.

We were never enough to fight that threatening dose of empty chapel, were we?

I should’ve known how cold I was going to feel, how painful the wind would be.

Red on my delicate skin.

Nostalgia in my bones, unbearably heavy and opaque.

I couldn’t have known, and you won’t know.

You won’t know that the boy who was once my friend cornered me in the laundry room.

How he yelled at me, how I cried and couldn’t sleep for three days because my door wouldn’t lock.

You won’t know that I watched my friend sob in bed for an hour and a half, how he would say, “I don’t want to be alive anymore I don’t want to live anymore” over and over.

You won’t know I lived off of caffeine and nicotine for days at a time, too nervous to eat.

You won’t know I fell in love with a girl.

If you knew, where would the God you prayed to be?

Although I was 19, you tucked me into the unfamiliar twin bed that day.

Adiós, corazoncito de pollo. Te queremos mucho.

Goodbye, little chicken heart.

Once your skittish, anxious child, now alone and so small.

Turn the lights out, but please leave my nightlight on.

Mother, there’s no shade in the shadow of the cross.

Viridiana Garcia Cornell University, ’20

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Childhood Bedroom Genevieve Felsenstein Ramapo College of New Jersey, ’20 Charcoal and Chalk Pastel

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Burning Foxglove It was a winter just like any other winter. Cold, with rain that fell during the day and congealed overnight, leaving sheets of ice that never seemed to melt. The grass crunched underfoot, and the wind burned any bits of exposed skin—noses, ears, fingertips. Years later, her father would try and tell her that it had been an especially vicious winter, that the growth of the icicles and the length of the frost should have been a warning of things to come. But Emmaline would always remember. It had been an ordinary winter.

Because, yes, the pond had been frozen. But not all the way. Emmaline remembered sitting at the edge of the pond with Peter, the two of them taking turns cracking holes in the thin ice. They would stab a stick, a stone, a boot heel through the quarter-inch ice and stir the black, still water underneath. The pond appeared to them to be sleeping, and their games only served to barely prick the slumbering beast. Half an hour later, the gashes in the surface would be smoothed back over, leaving a new, wet patch of ice like a still-oozing scab on the surface of the pond.

The first few times it happened, Peter would gasp in wonder at this glassy beauty, tearing off his gloves to run his fingertips over the rugged, old ice and then the perfect, new patches.

“Em, look!” he said. “I wish we could tear a hole through the whole pond so everything could be pretty like this.” He spread his arms out as wide as he could, his small hands red from the cold. “Maybe, if the ice was clear, we could see if there are any fish at the bottom.”

“Or any monsters,” Emmaline said. She kept her hand on the ice but watched him out of the corner of her eye to see if he would believe her.

“You’re right,” Peter said gravely. “The fish are sleeping, but monsters never sleep.”

He always spoke of the pond with a kind of reverence, a respect for the largest body of water he had seen. He called it a lake, a pond, a river, and when he was younger, an ocean. They were all the same to him, encompassed by the green, reedy water that sucked at muddy shores and consumed their waking hours. The pond was easily the most interesting part of their backyard and certainly more interesting than their house, a slapdash cottage with two bedrooms, half a porch, and a screen door with a broken latch that swung back and forth, banging in the wind. It was easy to imagine the house was haunted; why shouldn’t the pond have a monster too?

“Yes,” Emmaline said. “They stay awake. All the time. They swim and they swim, around in circles looking for their next meal.” She bared her teeth and snapped them, as if she was swallowing a minnow. Peter shrieked and laughed.

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“What do you think they look like?” she asked.

“Big,” he said immediately. “Huge—with sharp spikes on top of their heads, and down the sides. And a fat tail, like a whale. Their front legs have claws for catching things, but their back legs are smooth, so they can be sneaky quiet.”

“Scales or skin?”

“Probably skin—mud would be gross on scales.”

“What color?”

“Well, you can’t really see, cause it’s dark. But probably gray. Or brown. A camouflage color.”

They nodded, imagining the beast. Emmaline shivered.

“They would have sharp teeth,” she said. “Not like a shark—like needles. So when the fish swim into their mouths, they get stuck, like a cage.”

Now it was Peter’s turn to squirm as he pictured the sight of a fish beating wildly up against the bars of teeth, tearing itself to pieces on the razor edges. Sister and brother were quiet, gazing at the new ice that covered the holes they made in the water. For a moment, they were glad of the blanket of ice. Even though the beast had only been invented a few minutes, they couldn’t help but be grateful for the barrier between them and the monster. For a moment, underneath one of the patches of new, clear ice, Emmaline could have sworn she saw a flicker of darkness, swishing past like the tip of a two-pronged tail, moving with swift silent purpose through the midnight water.

“But it’s probably just fish though,” she added quickly.

“Yeah,” Peter agreed, jamming his fingers back into his gloves. “Just fish. Monsters aren’t real.”

The wind howled past, rattling the frozen reeds around the pond, causing them both to jump and then laugh. The shuddering blades of grass mixed with the uneasy sound of their laughter, blending into an eerie melody that echoed across the stone dead pond.

“Just ghosts,” Emmaline said, jokingly.

Peter didn’t laugh like she was hoping. Instead, he tilted his head sideways slightly, as if he had picked up some sound on the wind. His eyes were curious, and for just a moment, Emmaline thought she saw his green eyes turn darker, almost black, like the water of the pond. She blamed it on the setting sun.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Just ghosts.”

The legend of the monster only lasted two winters. Because the next winter

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was their last winter. The one Emmaline’s father would talk about. “We should have known,” he would say, shaking his head back and forth, back and forth. “The blackberries were early that year. The foxglove kept blooming long into September.

The summer was too long. Too hot. That’s how you know, Emmaline. That’s how you know.” She didn’t believe his stories.

The next spring, after Peter, she went into their backyard and tore up all the foxglove. She gripped each plant by the stem and ripped them out, one after the other, watching the dirt falling off the root. The plants were budding, not blooming.

She never wanted to see them bloom again. She went methodically, starting in the corner of the yard by the house and working her way to the edge of the raised hills.

Foxglove didn’t like the damp dirt by the pond, and it hated the sunlight. Which made her job easier. She tore up every plant and dumped their bodies into a pile to the side of the pond, on top of a pyre of dead twigs she had built atop the dry, silt bank.

She took a book of matches, stolen from her father’s office, out of her pocket. She lit the front page of yesterday’s newspaper, and inserted it into the base of the heap.

She got down on her knees (her jeans would be ruined, she didn’t care, didn’t care) and blew, encouraging the fire to swell. Eventually it grew stronger, and she had to stand farther away, feeding the blaze larger and larger pieces of wood and paper and desiccated leaves until it began to glow with a strength of its own. And it didn’t need her. Soon, the wind was feeding the fire, whistling slightly as it brushed against the dry reeds, the crackling logs. Just ghosts, Peter had told her. Just ghosts.

The fire grew strong enough to begin to lick at the edges of the foxglove. Soon the vibrant spring leaves began to flicker at the edges, burning orange as embers quickly became black. The plants smoked profusely, and Emmaline wondered if her father could see it from the house. She didn’t care. She watched as the foxgloves caught flame, the leaves shuddering as the fire began to consume them raw, eating at their stalks, their unborn buds.

She watched the fire and tried not to remember the gash in the middle of the pond, sealed over with freshly formed ice. Clearer, cleaner than the ice around it. The trail of tiny footsteps leaving marks on the balding layer of snow. Right to the center of the pond.

I wish we could tear a hole through the pond, so the whole thing can be pretty like this.

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Nobody knew why he had ventured out on the surface of the pond. Emmaline and Peter never went out on the water before. Maybe he had been curious; maybe he had been chasing a toy. A bug. A monster. Or nothing at all. Emmaline found the smooth new ice first. She called over her mother, who didn’t at first understand. But her father knew. He knew the pond, he knew the winter, and he knew the water.

They had sent her away when they dredged the pond, to her grandmother’s house. She knew they found the body before she even asked. She never asked at all.

Emmaline knew that they could not have found Peter in the depths of the midnight water. They would have found the monster, still and pale and bloated, its teeth glinting with mud and silt and blood, still slightly agape in twisted pleasure from its last meal. She had created the monster. She knew how it would behave. She knew.

The final leaf of foxglove finally surrendered to the blaze, and the fire seemed to gasp as it breathed its last. Then it was just ash. Ash and smoke, a greasy black smear on the gray-brown bank. She breathed in slowly, feeling the smoke coat her throat all the way to her lungs. She picked up the matchbook and threw it, as far as she could, into the newly thawed pond. She watched the greedy water suck at the paper cover, slowly seeping into the invisible cracks, until it was weighed down and sunk through the motionless surface without a sound.

There was no monster in the lake. Except the one she put there.

Abigail Lee Yale University, ’21

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Young Love

Pearl Au-Yeung Rhode Island School of Design, ’21 Digital

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Let’s talk about how Eve fell in love with her own reflection in the gleaming pool and God had to nudge her to go find Adam.

Well, I’ve met Adam and he looks like every man on the Tunnelbana: chunky black headphones arched over chestnut silk sliding seamlessly to his navy blue turtleneck, gazing out the window but actually at his own reflection.

Because the blue line was built into a cave, the only way in and out is the two hundred sixteen foot escalator—even the Swedes don’t climb that many stairs. The black rock slab surrounding me has holes the size of my body that lead to more darkness and I’ve never patiently stood in such a lightless place before.

But the heads of the men waiting are oil lanterns six feet in the air that guide me to a place that’s not home.

Sitting on the shining plastic of the blue seat I stare at my own reflection, hair too bright for the blackness of the window, bits of hair that perished in the thermal baths of Iceland, feel it! It’s rope when it’s dry and gimp

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when it’s wet, and my eyes are green like dead shrubs, different from the indigo eyes of my fellow passengers and my boy who looks like every man on the Tunnelbana, whose dimples are as deep as the incomplete holes in the ceiling of the cave and when I stare into his eyes, I smile at my own reflection.

Colleen Gair Middlebury College, ’20

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