Touchstone 2019

touchstone 2019

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contact us touchsto@stetson.edu Touchstone Literary & Arts Journal Stetson English Department 421 N. Woodland Blvd Unit 8300 DeLand, FL 32723 [4]

Touchstone 2019, literary and creative arts journal, is a production of Hatter Network.

Hatter Network is the student media collective at Stetson University.

For more information, visit: www. hatternetwork.com [5]

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touchstone 2019 vol. 39

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touchstone staff Eva Martinez Jamie Pietrasz Brianna Morris Rene Campbell

managing editor of creative content Gabby Cassidy

associate editor Jacob Mauser

selection committee Cleo Koenig Catherine Keve Brendan Dunlop Tya Suanders Rachel Bogart

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Claretta Holsey Mackenzie Scholten Suzette Watson Aiden Dwyer Aliya Cruise

designers Isabel Solorzano Ruby Rosenthal

cover

“Pathways�

Olivia Valiante

faculty advisor Andy Dehnart

special thanks Crystal Baroni

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dear readers, I’m so happy to present to you Touchstone 2019! This year is the third time I’ve had the pleasure to produce this journal, and it becomes more and more difficult every year to choose the pieces that we accept; the number of submissions continues to grow (over 150 this year!) as well as the amazing talent of our student body. I really hope you enjoy what we have to offer this year. These students featured in these pages represent the incredible skill that our writing and arts departments hold.

This book was, as always, a labor of love. Many hours were spent pouring over submissions, reviewing and discussing every piece, and laying out the book before you. There are so many people I need to thank who helped me make the 39th edition of Touchstone a reality. First, to Jacob Mauser, my associate editor, right-hand man, and friend. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all of your hard work and help throughout this year and last. Next, to Crystal Baroni, our student media mom. Thank you for always checking in on us, helping us through trouble, and helping me remember to breathe.

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To all of our contributors and submitters—this book can’t happen without you! Thank you for your hard work, your creativity, and your willingness to put yourself out there and submit to us. To our selection committee volunteers, you are integral to our ability to decide the content of this book. Thank you to Hatter Network and your unwavering support of us. I love all of you so much. You have made being a part of student media the past four years and being your Managing Editor for the past three an incredible honor and pleasure. I will cherish this time and the friends I made for the rest of my life. I can never thank you all enough for this opportunity.

And finally, thank you to you, our readers! Whether you are a student, faculty or staff member, alumni, or family member of them, thank you for picking up our humble journal.

I’ll stop with the sappy stuff now and let you get on to enjoying the pieces our students have worked so hard to create.

with love, Gabby Cassidy Managing Editor of Creative Content [ 13 ]

table of contents 16 18 20 22 24 26 27

“Questions for Death,” Ashley Allensworth “Worship,”Olivia Valiante “Mark the Days,” Kailyn Kocsis “Flurry,” Cat Keve “Tainted Love,” Erin Boyd “War Paint,” Rene Campbell “Respect Me,” Solstice BackusLittle

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“Best Friends,” Porter Crapps

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“Foolishly Free,” Cat Keve

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“Before we Discussed

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“Pathways”

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“Our Daily Breakage,”

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“Witching Hour,” Sean Priewe

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“Sonnet in Which the Body

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“Agitated Speakings

Exits Itself,” Brianna Morris Witnessed by Sleep Paralysis,” “Low Tide,” Porter Crapps

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“November 6th,”Morgan

“cotton cowboy,” Colette Cacciola Hambleton

Brianna Morris “Woven Together,” Anika Hand “Whimsical Evening,” David

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“Casualties Colliding,” Rene

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“big,” Colette Cacciola

Campbell

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“March 26, 1:56 pm,” Solstice

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“Ayy, I’m a Flower Here,”

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“After Anne Wilson’s To

Tya Saunders

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Olivia Valiante

Carter Keener

“Things You Used to Say,” Kaitlyn Kocsis

Blackface,” Claretta Holsey

Backus-Little Sean Priewe Cross (Walking New York),” Hudson Devoe

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“Rock Hunting,” Gabby

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“Shy Fox,” Jacob Mauser*

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Cassidy*

* EDITOR PIECE

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Questions for Death ASHLEY ALLENSWORTH

How did you fall in love with Life?

Is there an end to your reign?

Do you prefer life or death?

Why does death bring me happiness?

I thought they said it was hot?

Why does the thought of the nothingness awaiting us induce such panic?

Why does the thought of the nothingness awaiting us induce such panic?

Why does the thought of the nothingness awaiting us induce such panic?

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The failure to transition into the society of immortals.

Sugar skulls create the sweet bliss of an endless dream into a

casket died of suffocation from the carbon dioxide vapors produced by a delivery car Tie a noose around your mind. Suffocate the memories.

Relief

Relief from the burden of your smile

Relief from tending to your laughter

Relief Death is a place to get to, not go from.

We can’t live without it. So no. Don’t hate it death is your unlikely friend,

he is there when you need him

the most

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Worship OLIVIA VALIANTE

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Mark the Days KAITLYN KOCSIS

November 12, 2018 It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down and told the story. A story he’ll never hear.

It’s been years now since it ended. Ancient history.

Two summers have passed. He spends them with her.

Two years of days in the sun have placed amber freckles on my skin. Freckles he’ll never count.

I have seen him. Longer hair and a muted smile.

I haven’t known him.

summer. Trains back and forth. Miami sunsets, candy stores, and Skype calls. Inseparable, enamored.

August 24, 2016 Returning to our home. Kissing, dancing, talking without speaking.

September 20, 2016 It was sudden. Our downfall. Like a slow falling rain, building and building into an ocean of problems. This was day one.

October 31, 2016 A cowgirl and a pirate. Mismatched. The day we should have known.

Eyes met other eyes, lips met other lips.

January 15, 2016 Beginnings. A denim jacket, a packed café, a flirtatious smile, an invitation.

Please forgive me.

November 23, 2016

January 20, 2016

I’m thankful for you. (I’m angry with you.)

The pure joy that a week can bring. To be held by him. It was everything.

December 24, 2016

February 6, 2016

Happy Birthday baby. (Why don’t you still love me?)

Him and I become we.

January 8, 2016

February 15, 2016

I miss you. (I don’t even know you.)

I love you.

Spring 2016, Every Dreadful Day

I love you too.

Her.

March 17, 2016

Jealous and worried and hateful. The way he looks at her. The way he smiles when she walks by. Her beautiful brown eyes. Her smile. Her infuriating compatibility with him.

Social media is a parade of hearts and kisses.

We have a song, a drink, a pizza order. Poker night with friends. His home is my home.

May 15, 2016 Three months apart. The dread of an endless

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It’s nothing. We’re friends. Stop being so insecure.

Knowing, dreading, hating in my heart that I’m losing him. Losing him to her.

Your hand in hers. Her lips on yours.

Unmute.

March 25, 2017

Spring

He walked me home. He dragged me home.

The home that hadn’t been mine for a year.

Up five steps, into the foyer, into the arms of my friends. A soft kiss, a half-hearted smile.

He went out into the daylight, alone. I was swallowed by the dark.

“Forgive. Not for him, but for you.” My mother helped me through. Day by day, painstakingly.

Summer One year passed. The mountain air once again in my lungs. A genuine smile. A change in temperature. A change in being.

We became him and I. Every moment after The stabbing pain, the ache, the tears. An ending of us. The ending of me. Pillows wet with mascara. A blank planner. The snowballing effect of horrendous, overwhelming depression.

Fall Two ghosts pass each other on the sidewalk. A smile. A hello. Healing.

The worst moment A phone call to say goodbye, to say I’m sorry, to say I can’t do this anymore. To say I hate this life, I hate myself, I hate her, I hate it all. A phone call to take my feet off the edge.

November 12, 2018

Summer, the best of summer

It’s been years now since it ended. Ancient history.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down and told the story. A story he’ll never hear.

Escape. The mountain air in my lungs. 1,500 miles of space between yesterday and today.

Two summers have passed. He spends them with her.

Summer, the worst of summer

Two years of days in the sun have placed amber freckles on my skin. Freckles he’ll never count.

A single text. I’m with her now. We just work.

I crumbled.

Fall

I have seen him. Longer hair and a muted smile.

Alcohol. Rebellion. Anger. Strangers. Sex. Tears. Drugs.

I haven’t known him. And that’s okay.

Pain on mute.

Winter

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Flurry CAT KEVE

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Tainted Love ERIN BOYD

W

e obsess over stories—the good, the bad, the ugly, the horrible. Especially the ugly. We love the ugly. We’re surrounded by the ugly. We eat it up. But when our life becomes the ugly, we resent our fascination with it. We wonder why we ever enjoyed its company in the first place. We wonder why we ever wanted to be a part of it.

It’s a strange feeling to wake up in a room you no longer recognize. You spent your whole life here, with the bedding you picked out with your mom, the furniture you painted on a whim because you thought it needed more color, the paintings and memories you pinned on your wall one summer when you had nothing better to do. Your room. The place that you made yours, that reflects who you are and what’s important to you. Until one day, you wake up. You don’t know how your life ended up here, but you know that it did—you know what happened last night wasn’t a dream, but it is now your reality.

My mother rushed around the corner of the hallway into my room and shut the door with a speed I’d never seen from her. I looked at her a from my position in the center of my bed and was answered with her green eyes, familiar. They were eyes that didn’t know what else to do or where else to go—eyes that regretted, eyes that wept, eyes that were lost. I only saw them this way on nights like these.

Nights of my nightmares.

BANG! BANG! “Open the fucking door!”

She couldn’t bear to look my way any longer. She braced her feet on the wall of my closet with her back to the door to keep him out—so he couldn’t hurt anyone else, so he couldn’t hurt me. Through a crack in the door, I could see he imitated her position, sitting on the floor of the hall, back to the door, feet on the hallway wall. “Babe, just let me in. I just want to talk. I’m fine, I’m calm.”

No response.

“Carrie, I just want to talk.”

“Just talk?” With those two words I saw the skepticism and worry in her eyes slowly subside and change. To what? I couldn’t tell. Maybe the sincerity in his voice gave her a sense of hope that this night wouldn’t be like the last time, maybe this night he’ll be sensible, maybe this night we’ll all be okay.

“Just talk.”

She loosened her grip on the wall, he shoved, the door sprung open, she ran to the right side of my bed, anything to get away from him. That was when I got a good look at him.

I looked at the man I had known my entire life, the man I loved, the man that had raised me, the man I called “Dad”, and I couldn’t recognize him. His veins bulged, his face was red with anger, his eyes were distant, consumed with rage. I didn’t know this man. But my mom did. All too well.

He lunged for her.

He grabbed her arm.

He shoved her.

The bed broke or slid off its track, I couldn’t tell. My body instantly tensed, my fingers and toes curled to get a grip on anything I could to prevent from tumbling to the ground.

And for a moment, everything froze.

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He towered over her; she cowered beneath him. I don’t know if it was my eyes deceiving me or if I just hadn’t noticed but he seemed to have gained 20 pounds of pure muscle, just in that moment. He was yelling and yelling but it was all incoherent to me. My ears were pounding with the blood rushing to my head, blood rushing like a roaring riptide encouraged by the fear and anger coursing through me, coursing through my veins, and it’s all I could hear.

He was cursing and yelling at her about some infidelity he made up in his head. My dad. The jealous man. The skeptical man. The man that couldn’t accept that everything was just fine.

He stood in the corner of the room by my desk, directly across from my mom and I and grabbed my straightener from my desk. Between each word he shouted, he crashed the end of the straightener down onto my wooden desk. Wood chips darted across the room like darts soaring toward a dartboard. He hit a glass cup sitting on my desk full of smoothie from my breakfast that morning, glass showered the room and berry smoothie splattered the wall. He was pounding with such force and fury his weapon of choice began to fall to pieces as well. My room, the scene of the crime. My room, in ruins. The woman on the floor next to me, in ruins.

He paused. I glanced to my left and noticed the flowers and graduation balloon sitting on my bookshelf—presents from my softball coach, presents from the man who, according to my dad, “my mom was seeing”, and I prayed he wouldn’t see it. If anything could make matters worse, it was those flowers. He paused, just for a millisecond. I grabbed my phone from underneath my pillow that was miraculously still there and began a voice recording, just in case I needed it later. He lunged for me in an attempt to grab my phone. My mom, in a panic diverted him across the room and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Erin, call 911,” and as I fumbled with my phone, he ripped it from my hands and snapped it in half. He left it shattered, in my doorway.

I close my eyes to picture what happened next, but I can’t see it. I can’t remember how it ended, I can’t remember how it started. I look to my left, and my weary eyes flash with a burst of color.

My flowers, blooming in a rainbow of yellow and fuchsia blossoms, how innocent, how unknowing, how undamaged those flowers are. And I envy them. I envy their happiness, their naivety. I envy them, because today the bouquet and I both woke up changed. The bouquet thrusts forward, in its beautiful cycle of life, blooming—and me.

A soft knock on my door echoes, and fills the emptiness of my now tainted room.

“Breakfast is ready, babe,” my mom practically whispers. She doesn’t look directly at me, ashamed of last night, just as she was ashamed of all the times before. Her hands gently rest on a spot on her upper arm. She tries to make it look like a natural stance, a natural movement, but I know it’s to cover up the evidence of last night, to cover the bruises.

As I slowly start to wake up, I feel grey, groggy, like I’m living in a constant fog. The starkness of the bright yellow and pink flowers feel so out of place. They once represented a beauty in my room, a time that I was happy, a beauty that used to be welcome here, but it no longer is. My room is now forever tainted by the ugliness of last night.

“Mom,” she pauses in the hallway. Frozen. “Is he up yet?”

“No,” another pause. “He’ll probably be in bed for a while.”

I know that when he wakes up, he’ll remember nothing. He won’t even be aware that our last night was also his last night until he sees the evidence, the crime scene. When I woke up, last night is all I could remember. I got out of bed as I do every morning, I ate my pancakes as I do every Sunday, and last night is all I can remember. It consumes my mind. It consumes me, all that I am, or rather, all that I was. But we’ll pretend it never happened like we always do. We’ll pretend that last night and all the times before aren’t slowly shattering us from the inside out. We’ll pretend that we’re okay, but we know that we’re not. We’ll pretend that our love isn’t tainted by the memories that consume us.

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War Pain(t) RENE CAMPBELL

Captivated by decapitation grey skies run red framing illicit illustrations brushed by delusioned hands.

Waterproof, acrylic archetypes were never made to be bulletproof.

As the canvas overflows with chronicles never spoken, ashes of charcoal treasures are dug up from the grave.

It is a craving for carcasses that these beasts epitomize.

Glorified supremacy saturated in stains left behind more than a scene to sell and fictionalized fame to frame.

Every stroke, a senseless satisfaction dripping down depictions Mocking mothers’ tears in sparse silence between blazing bullets and funeral flags.

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Respect Me

SOLSTICE BACKUS-LITTLE

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Best Friends PORTER CRAPPS

Where’d he go?

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Things You Used to Say KAITLYN KOCSIS

M

y mother used to tell me, when we would clean out the closets filled with pictures and dusty scrapbooks in springtime, that I was a very sad newborn. She said I cried for months on end. Every baby photo of me was of a disgruntled little face with balled up fists. She was

always sure to mention how her singing made me smile. But then we would turn the page.

I grew up as most girls did, surrounded by Barbie dolls and an annoying but inseparable older brother. The crusting yellow books were filled with images of Michael and I. Standing by the pirate statue in Cozumel.

Snuggling the kittens after school. Birthday parties. Christmas cookie disasters. Ridiculous Halloween costumes. It was all there. The whole summary, from favorite songs to family trips, was sealed up in the office closet only to be unearthed when the compounding dust gave my mom too much anxiety. We would unpack and repack and unpack and resort and reseal and relabel laughing all the while about the stories stuffed between the pages. And then we would close all the books, shut the closet doors, and let the dust settle.

My grandmother used to tell me about her mother’s backyard kingdom. The radishes and

cabbages and vines and flowers were characters in a grand fantasy. She would stand in the kitchen barefoot with her apron tied to her chin and teach me how to bake. She would roll out sheet after sheet of pastry, her rolling pin tossing flour into the air between passionate sentences. I was always in the corner, somewhere between the stand mixer and her three boxes of Special K cereal, crushing walnuts or sneaking chocolate chips entranced by her voice. She loved talking about the past. About her mother, Grandma Koszan, the Hungarian mama who would take no bullshit, but would still sneak you a cookie if you smiled. About fossil hunting with my grandpa in the 80’s. About her obsession with Hallmark ornaments. About sewing. She didn’t talk much about anyone else. But I never minded. I would just listen. And then we would take the cookies out of the oven and do the dishes. She would wash and I would dry. The cookies never made it out of that kitchen. The stories made their home there too.

My best friend used to tell me that life was good. We would swim in her pool for hours in

the summertime making our underwater world far away from the stresses of fourth grade. When dinner came, she convinced me that mac and cheese was good with ketchup. And in the morning, she took me to church, smiling along with God. Sometimes we would climb her tangerine tree and talk about the future.

Her thoughts were always set: med school, neurology, marriage. Mine changed with the seasons. But our friendship was solid. It stuck with us like the humidity and the popsicle syrup running down our arms.

My brother used to tell me that I was growing up too fast. That I needed to think before I spoke.

That I was a good kid. We used to scream at each other over rules. Sometimes he wanted to be the second parent we didn’t have. He tried teaching me to ice skate, to play Magic the Gathering, to not talk back when I was full of angst. It never worked. But I always admired him for trying. He was always the hug that made everything okay. He worried more than anyone about me because he knew I could be someone great. He never said it, but I knew.

My father has never told me anything before. He’s never spoken a word. Never given a breath or a blink that I can carry in memory. He held me once, when I was a few days old. He seemed uncomfortable.

That’s what my mom used to say. He changed. That’s what my uncle used to say. We’ll never know why.

That’s what my brother used to say.

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I’m sorry.

That sucks.

How do you live without a father?

Did he die?

Where’d he go?

Why did he leave?

What did you do?

That’s what everyone used to say.

I used to tell myself it was my fault. I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t deserve a father. I used to write him cards on Father’s Day. My mom would hold me while I soaked the construction paper with tears and threw them out. I used to watch the Parent Trap, waiting for the day my perfect family of four would be whole. I would sit on the floor of my bedroom and play with the springy little doorstop while I thought of him. I asked myself why over and over and over to the loud womp as it hit the wall and sprang back to my palm. I used to say things to him in my head. Some days I would scream and hit and hurt him. Other times I would beg for forgiveness. I would ask to be enough. To be worthy. To be wanted. I used to hate him. I used to love him. I would say the word dad out loud. Just to see how it felt.

I used to cry when I wrote like this. About the pain. About the past. About the scrapbooks and the sad baby photos and the family of three whose vacation photos always seemed incomplete. I used to love my grandmother’s stories because family wasn’t a part of them. I used to hate my friend for smiling, surrounding by a future not marked by hatred and spite. I used to envy my brother because at least he knew his father. At least he had a memory to hold. I used to be so enormously fucked up about all of this.

And now, I say I’m okay. I tell myself that counseling and journaling make it easier. I tell my doctor that the Zoloft is a miracle. I tell the girl on the other end of the suicide hotline that I’m doing better now.

I tell myself that I will graduate, that not having a plan is okay. I tell my family that I’m grateful. That their love and loyalty and devotion is enough. I tell myself that I am worthy.

And I tell my father thank you. For the chromosomes, for the musical talent, for the child support that let me travel overseas, and for the pain that made me who I am.

I used to say hello to you when I played pretend on my glittery flip phone. You would answer the phone and we would make up for all the time lost. You would have the perfect answer to all of my questions, the perfect apology to heal all of my hurt. Those years of running you through my mind are ending. I’m hanging up that phone call now. Our conversation is concluding. I choose to say goodbye.

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Foolishly Free CAT KEVE

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Sonnet in Which the Body Exits Itself BRIANNA MORRIS

The traffic lights of the downtown dreamscape softened the bodies of my extended family, kneading aunts and cousins into blur and movement. Each time we crossed a street, cars danced around me like hummingbirds circling a bowl of sugar water. I wanted them to collide into me, hoped the headlights would take a big sickly-sweet sip until I recognized the faraway beating of my familiar heart and the faint stickiness of humid air forming sweat-dew on my lunar-moth limbs.

Did I say dreaming when I meant hurting? My body ceases to exist either way. I do not remember seeing the moon that night, but the sidewalks shined under its glow like bared teeth. Like this, I am shrunken to fit into something apathetic and overwhelmingly vast.

The labyrinth of the city at night. The palms of my estranged hands.

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Agitated Speakings Witnessed by Sleep Paralysis TYA SAUNDERS

I failed my test today Beat me now

Beat me later

I got my phone taken away Leave a note

Tell her later

I don’t have the time of day Then don’t eat

Eat scraps later

I wanna be led astray He’s a Demon

Handle it later

Let me be in love, okay Maybe later

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Low Tide PORTER CRAPPS

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cotton cowboy COLETTE CACCIOLA

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November 6th MORGAN HAMBLETON Remember: 1870 brought the freedom to vote, regardless of race, color, or servitude previously, but some only got voices 54 years ago.

Excluding colored from white, like a laundry load, We claimed, “separate equality�.

Remember: 1870 brought the freedom to vote.

We punished those who defied the status quo; we always absconded so easily.

But, some only got voices 54 years ago.

Home of the free under the wings of the crow; Strange fruit were borne by southern trees.

Remember: 1870 brought the freedom to vote.

Brown v. Board should have been a definitive blow to the white fanaticism more common than sweet tea, but some only got voices 54 years ago.

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act showed that disenfranchisement was still the reality.

Remember: 1870 brought the freedom to vote, but some only got voices 54 years ago.

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Before we Discussed Blackface CLARETTA HOLSEY We were talking of the dignity of Tanner’s

in their effect than in their countenance,

thankful poor, their reverent hands,

his words whispered

the light of God spreading warm on their

through stretched red lips, he

tablecloth.

nightmarish and crying

to be cleansed.

The next slide pointed to another kind of

That moneyed man

dignity.

projected on the screen

Someone gasped involuntarily

captured perfectly in his paint

at the lips.

the words.

I said, My God, hoping someone would hear

The class could see

and thought of my mother’s

exoticism,

lips.

orientalism,

She had enough

primitivism

to break some off and give to me.

wearing white typeface

in the darkening room.

We are meant to be thankful for having enough, poor as we are.

I held my breath

to quell the riot in my chest.

The screen was bathed in light.

The longer the image stood sunning,

I told myself,

the more I pressed my lips

You are not whom the moneyed man painted.

to throw less shadow.

This is not even about you.

Someone gasped at the skin

Yet I thought of my father’s nose,

and I remembered Shakespeare’s Ethiop,

broad enough to break me some, and of the scripture saying God

his words blacker

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had breathed into Adam’s nostrils fashioned from the dirt.

while I thought,

This poverty is a birthright

The moneyed man’s eyes,

to be clutched in brown hands on the tabletop,

though set in a new face, were grey.

to be breathed quietly through the nose.

I thought of the brown of my eyes dusting the grey roots of that man’s dignity.

I thought, This poverty

I thought of Tanner’s poor,

can’t be whispered away,

of Tanner disappearing

even as I tried to whisper to it.

from his master’s house

Or be vanished like Tanner’s all-of-a-sudden

all of a sudden.

body, as he tried.

Enough is several sliding scales.

This poverty was to be borne as dirt,

At which point do we bow our heads

in thanks?

since Adam’s nostrils were enough,

At which point do we spirit away?

since Tanner and his poor fed up,

I thought of the fleck of this screen

since I walked into that room

sitting white in my eyes,

a girl,

then of running head-first into the hallway’s

since I walked out full

glistening mouth,

of a riot,

spreading itself to every ear. This

then laid to rest

is not even about me, I said,

in bleached bones.

while the shame bloomed warm in my cheeks,

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Pathways OLIVIA VALIANTE

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Our Daily Breakage BRIANNA MORRIS

I wake up. Dress the body & make it dance. Visualize: blood & bone & cross-stitch; human fragments. Not knowing what to call you, I say heart-shaped. Imagine you curving over me, a branch heavy with ripe fruit.

Say this like you mean it: we won’t miss the sunrise.

We will take these rays of light & build a palace. Say this again. Give me a morning that doesn’t burn.

In the moments before the glass shattered, I was a girl, or something near enough. I was heartbeat, or footstomp, or aching broken wing, some fallen creature nursing itself back to health.

Something about dizzying joy reminds me of a party I can hardly remember. A blur feels as familiar as my reflection.

There are names for these chapters of story, & most nights I thirst for the one called Never Knew Winter Could Feel So Warm.

It’s about you. The fact of your teeth.

The way a bitemark becomes a makeshift home, becomes something that makes you wanna fly. At least sprout wings. Repair what is splintered. Piece together an extinct language & sing a patchwork hymn.

Now, I go to sleep with appreciation behind my ribs. I undress the body & tell it dream.

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Witching Hour SEAN PRIEWE

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Woven Togther

R

ANIKA HAND

emember in second grade when you looked over your shoulder at me as I poked my head into the music classroom? I saw you in a light pink shirt sitting among the clusters of other kids waiting to audition for Alice in Wonderland and even though I barely knew you, you smiled at me. You didn’t know how nervous I felt about trying out for the school play, but when you immediately scooted over in that blue plastic chair with tennis balls on the legs, I felt at ease. It was as if you thought nothing of it. You welcomed me like you had already accepted the friendship we would have spanning years into the future, starting incidentally because of this moment. But to me, the little girl with tangled hair and brown almond-shaped eyes was already unknowingly dissolving my fears. Sharing that chair with you, our tennis-shoed feet dangling, opened up something deeper in me than the rabbit hole Alice would fall into to get to Wonderland.

Remember when in fifth grade you sat in the small wooden chair placed in front of the fulllength mirror on my bedroom closet door and I blow-dried your hair and used a hairbrush? You never brushed your hair, and certainly wouldn’t let your mother do it for you, but you let me. You came close to tears when you told me how much you wished it was as straight as the other girls’ in Japan. I told you that blow-drying your hair like my mom did for me would make it straight, and so you figured you would try it.

You were amazed to see your reflection with sleek black-brown hair as you sat in that chair. We thought it would last the longest if we braided it when it was time for bed, so I carefully split your hair down the middle of your scalp and tediously worked on two identical braids. By morning time, the frizz had gotten to it and the braids were coming undone; these twisted strands meant to hold your hair together failed us, and I felt like I had failed too, since it was my idea in the first place. You moved on—less discouraged than me.

During the summer before our junior year in college, we meet a coffee shop back home that looks like a warehouse inside and is one of the cool places in town that didn’t exist when we lived here. As you talk to me, I find it strange that I don’t know about all the little things that you vent about daily, and that for years I haven’t sat closer to you than I am right now with a table between us. Your face is as thin as ever and your milky skin is still colored with the light brown freckles I always loved, and your black shiny hair is slightly frizzy but as beautifully textured as it was when you hated it in third grade.

You tell me about your college boyfriend, and how you two bonded through the sport of fencing. School is going well, and you love what you are studying, despite spending the majority of your life in a lab with test tubes. You talk with the same animation now that you had when we were in fourth grade and you told me about your Tamagotchi.

I had forgotten that when you laugh, you open your mouth with a wide smile and inhale and bounce up and down a little. I do a lot of the questioning and you do a lot of the talking. But you don’t notice that, and you let me just ask you questions about your life. Sometimes you try asking me one. I sense you want to listen but don’t really know how to respond.

I listened to you a lot when we walked home from elementary school together. You complained

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about your mom, and how she pestered you to do your homework for Saturday Japanese school, and how she was always scolding you and acting disappointed in you. I used to think to myself that maybe she gets after you because sometimes you don’t listen to her very well. You’re so smart, and I know that, but sometimes you forget that other people are around. You mostly live in your world; the teacher always yelled at you because you were reading during class. You care about your cats, and about books, about fictional worlds and about getting a cell phone. You used to complain about your parents so unfairly withholding real cell phone, and only getting you a Firefly cell phone—the one that was programmed only to call your parents or 911. I thought that you were lucky to have a cell phone at all, but I tried to sympathize by half-heartedly complaining about how my parents wouldn’t get me one either.

Now, a grown-up college girl, you (as delicately as ever) sip a chai tea latte, and I feel guilty that I get a coffee. I feel irrationally self-conscious that you’re making a somehow healthier or classier decision.

You hold back, don’t share all your little quirks and complaints like you used to, but I wish we could speak freely. I wish we could be with each other like we did when we stared at the fragile clover-flowers in our hands, pinching holes in the stems until our thumbnails turned green and the flower-chain reached the other side.

I listened to you a lot when we walked home from elementary school together. You complained about your mom, and how she pestered you to do your homework for Saturday Japanese school, and how she was always scolding you and acting disappointed in you. I used to think to myself that maybe she gets after you because sometimes you don’t listen to her very well. You’re so smart, and I know that, but sometimes you forget that other people are around. You mostly live in your world; the teacher always yelled at you because you were reading during class. You care about your cats, and about books, about fictional worlds and about getting a cell phone. You used to complain about your parents so unfairly withholding real cell phone, and only getting you a Firefly cell phone—the one that was programmed only to call your parents or 911. I thought that you were lucky to have a cell phone at all, but I tried to sympathize by half-heartedly complaining about how my parents wouldn’t get me one either.

Now, a grown-up college girl, you (as delicately as ever) sip a chai tea latte, and I feel guilty that I get a coffee. I feel irrationally self-conscious that you’re making a somehow healthier or classier decision.

You hold back, don’t share all your little quirks and complaints like you used to, but I wish we could speak freely. I wish we could be with each other like we did when we stared at the fragile clover-flowers in our hands, pinching holes in the stems until our thumbnails turned green and the flower-chain reached the other side of the neighborhood playground. Strangely enough, though we have been distant from each other for years, we fall into the same patterns of relating, though on levels closer to the surfaces of who we are. Your role is to talk and giggle and complain, and mine is to listen. Some things don’t change.

When we were young, I always felt close to you, even though you were so moody sometimes.

Remember that time you came by the house with your dad, and we stood on opposite sides of the front door threshold without talking for the whole ten minutes you were on the front porch? I do, but I don’t remember why we were mad at each other.

Remember in fifth grade when you told me that you didn’t want me to be so awkward when I came back from visiting my family in Germany? You told me I acted funny because we had been apart for so long, and I was shocked, though not offended, that you actually would say that to me. I chuckled and promised you I would try not to act weird.

Remember that same summer when you called me, crying? You had found an email opened up

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on your mom’s computer, and because of what you read, you were afraid they were getting a divorce. I told you I was sorry, and how maybe it was just a fight. I, of course, asked my parents what to do about it all and they gave me good advice, although I don’t remember what it was. I guess it did end up being just a fight, because your parents are still together. I felt sorry that you couldn’t tell your parents how you felt—that you were worried about them.

Even though we were young, I felt sorry that you always seemed to be at odds with your parents.

I listened to you and tried to give the best advice a girl under twelve could give, but I didn’t recognize that I was your confidant and sometimes your only thread to reality. I see now that you shared yourself with me, even if sometimes it was annoying, hurtful, or odd to me.

Remember when I screamed and told you to run, because on our walk home from elementary school, you had stopped us on the sidewalk to answer a tall man who stood by his red pickup truck and asked us where the high school was? You told him you didn’t know because you weren’t in high school, or even in middle school, but he unzipped his pants right there in the neighborhood anyways. With rolling backpacks behind us, we sprinted in our flip-flops down the hill past a few houses and stopped in someone’s yard. You hadn’t even seen it, but you started crying before I even told you what happened.

For months after, I couldn’t stop re-living that memory when I was trying to go to sleep; my throat felt like it was closing up and my heart started pounding every time.

You didn’t see it because you were answering his questions, focused only on his face. That is why, instead of me, you went into the room with the investigative sketch artist at the police department to help draw his face. That is also why you started walking home from school again the next week, and why I never did again.

Remember when you sat in front of me in ninth grade Latin class, and we chatted coolly about your new boyfriend and other things I didn’t know about you anymore? You probably don’t remember those conversations, because we only saw each other in that class, and those conversations soon became thin threads of small-talk. You had theater-kid inside jokes and talked about favorite YouTube channels with your other friends that I didn’t understand. I wanted to be friends like we used to be, but there wasn’t a lot to say. The middle section of the Venn diagram of our lives was shrinking. I think you thought I was judging you, but I wasn’t. I was only sad for you but didn’t know how to tell you.

When the doors opened on my wedding day and I started walking down the aisle, my attention went to your face, since you were sitting near the back. Your round eyes looked sad, and besides my husband’s smile as he stood at the altar, yours was the face I will never forget. You just looked at me. And I tried to smile at you and in an inconspicuous way, to indicate that I noticed you. But you didn’t see that. You just kept staring. I don’t know what your face meant, and why you looked so sad, but you did.

Maybe you were feeling happy for me, and you were just really emotional. Maybe you felt weird because I was already getting married so young. I even noticed you, sitting way in the back, during the parts of the ceremony when we were facing the audience. Your face was thin like it always was, your eyes so big and brown, and though I used to know the things you worried and complained and fan-girled about, I don’t anymore. But I do know the young girl—the one who never matched her clothes and the one who voiced the same insecurities that I only kept to myself. The one who dreamed about girlish things with me and the one who was with me when growing up was forced upon us.

Maybe I’ll be there on your wedding day, and maybe I won’t. And maybe it doesn’t matter because our friendship is like a rope with all strings except a few frayed by years of weather and no use.

The friend you were to me, before we realized our life trajectories were going to split, is enough to keep us from cutting that last string.

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Whimsical Evening DAVID CARTER KEENER

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Casualties Colliding RENE CAMPBELL

Car 1

Car 2

The thunder roared

The thunder roared

louder than the lion I saw

louder than the bass

when I was 3 years old,

pumping through our veins.

with its gaping mouth and

with windows rolled down

iron jaw flaunting silvery fangs

lightning soared past I-95

which caused my eyes to fold with fear.

satisfying adrenaline addictions.

And the thunder roared

It roared in unison of our screams,

louder than the flashes

drunken decrees of

of blue with their rigorous radiation.

what shouldn’t have been.

Echoed laughter sustaining

Years ago we were

as I shook underneath covers.

more than this.

This time: 2:02 a.m.

Never touched a bottle

It roared underneath my seat

until the end of senior high,

on I-95 against painted white lines

back then the only lessons learned

unable to protect me

required red ink

from strangers’ nighttime escapades.

in place of bloodied bones.

Shattered glass

No eraser to take away

sharper than wild fangs

the wrong answer we gave.

fought through my skin

2:02a.m, the last time

as my head slammed back

laughter roared

and the thunder

and the thunder

was silenced.

was silenced.

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big COLETTE CACCIOLA

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March 26, 1:56 pm SOLSTICE BACKUS-LITTLE

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Ayy, I’m a Flower Here SEAN PRIEWE

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After Anne Wilson’s To Cross (Walking New York) HUDSON DEVOE

We start the day on an overcast beach, wearing jackets, walking down (across?) gray sand. If forward is the ocean, then down is right or left: a set of opposite directions. We walk shivering, sharing warmth, shouting- no, laughing- about something I won’t remember saying three days later when you ask if I really, really meant it. Did I really, really mean it? Maybe in the moment, or maybe not. Maybe I only want to make you laugh, make the day a little less gray, but either way we’re walking down the beach, this time hand in hand. The sky has a morning tint, sickly in the spots the clouds forget to cover, and you’re the one who notices first: those sickly spots. I sneeze and you bless me and we stop and sit and stare at the far-off shadow of the pier, a little larger now than when we started. I say maybe the beach, being spotty, being cold, was a bad idea, but you say (for the thousandth time) no, you’ve never seen spots like this before, so going to the beach was worth it after all. The tip of your nose is strawberry pink, blending with the color of your cheeks, but I don’t comment on how cute you are, how much I like spending gray days on the beach with you, how I’m sorry for what I say when I want to make you laugh, how when you laugh you close your eyes all the way and one side of your mouth hitches higher than the other.

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Rock Hunting GABBY CASSIDY

T

he worst thing you can do is go rock hunting when you’re worried.

She knew that—swore by it usually. One of her earliest memories was her great-grandfather issuing that warning. She remembered his soft voice, the stern caution in his eyes. The very best in our field, her mother would tell her years later, take his words to heart. So she did—never went hunting during finals weeks, avoided quarries while planning parties, didn’t even touch stones leading up to her first date ever. It could sense the tremors in your breath, the quiver of your heart; the thing that lurked in the shadows of the trees could smell it from miles away. Certainty was the only sure defense.

But today she stood at the edge of the woods with a clouded mind. The tickle of fear brushed her consciousness and her hands scrubbed her pants as though there was an invisible substance she just couldn’t get off. She needed to do this. They were out and her mother… she stifled the thought before it could surface, before her mounting anxiety could latch onto the thoughts. No. She needed these rocks.

The birds and bugs and hum of the forest surrounded her, an orchestra of ambient noise, and she allowed it to seep into her mind. Familiar noises and familiar places, the calm of the hunt crept in to mask her emotion. She could see the fog—the layer of unreality—coating the trees in its film. One step in and the chorus assented with languid, expressive movements. Her eyes swept the floor. Not just any rock would do. The more porous the more power it held, cradled in the gashes and scars. The breeze coaxes her further, deeper. One good one, she chanted in her mind, and she could leave. Maybe even avoiding its ire.

Immediately at the thought, she felt it. The eyes on her back. The scrape of nails against her mind. A hoarse whisper. The orchestra around her fell silent at once. Her brain screamed thoughts to drown it

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out as she walked quicker, scanned faster, diverged off the beaten path to find better pickings. The first two rocks she grabbed were smooth as a new born babe and she chucked them behind her, half hoping they’d hit her pursuer. Her third try finds success— large as the palm of her hand, a deep jagged crevice splitting it nearly in two. She could feel it thrum against her skin as she shoved it in her pocket.

That won’t be enough, its whisper crooned. You need two.

She quickly suppressed the shudder down her spine.

It watched her, so much closer than It had ever been. One more would help. Another dangerous trip could be avoided with one more rock.

She shook her head violently to dislodge its claws from her mind once again. No, she wouldn’t risk it—couldn’t risk it. She turned, half jogging back the way she same, following the path down, down, down. It laughed in cruel delight. She burst into a sprint. She just had to get away, get out, get free.

A warm breeze, almost breathing down her neck, raised her hair on edge as she exploded from the trees with a shout. She tumbled onto the grass beyond, falling short of the paved parking lot, and quickly turned to face her attacker.

For a moment, the only sound was the thud of her heart.

Then, the bird chirped and the insects hummed.

The orchestra began anew. She was suddenly aware of the stinging of her skin and a warm trickle down her cheek.

She allowed herself a moment for her to catch her breath before standing and beginning her trudge back home. And as she swore to herself she’d never tell a soul how she’s acquired the rock she had in her pocket, she swore she could feel it smile at her from deep in the woods.

Shy Fox JACOB MAUSER

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colophon The 2019 editions of Touchstone Literary Magazine was printed by Abbott Communications Group in Maitland, FL, with a press run of 700 copies. Two designers created the magazine using Adobe InDesign and Photoshop on iMac computers. The magazine consisted of 60 pages, and fonts included Butler, Minion Pro, and Playfair Display. Touchstone features additional online content on hatternetwork.com, which is student created, managed, and produced. All submissions are reviewed, selected, and edited by the Touchstone staff and selection committee.

All literary and artistic work featured in Touchstone is created by Stetson students. Special thanks to those who submitted their work and to all our supporters.

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