The Vanderbilt Review - XXXVI (2021/2022 School Year)

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The Vanderbilt Review The Vanderbilt R The Vande 2021-2022 2021-2022 2021-2022

The Vanderbilt Review is not operated by Vanderbilt University. The views and opinions expressed by The Vanderbilt Review are those of the editors and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of Vanderbilt University or its official representatives. Vanderbilt® and the Vanderbilt logos are registered trademarks of The Vanderbilt University.® 2022 Vanderbilt University.

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Editor-in-Chief Kelly Morgan

Managing Editor Zhi-Ying Chua

Layout Editor Lillian Zheng

Digital Content Editor Thanvi Dola

Art Editor Angelina Chung

Poetry Editor Clara McMillan

Prose Editor Helen Hicks

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Layout Staff Lily Britto Brayden Edman Paige Elliot

Prose Staff Aarna Bhuptani James Blair Anjali Chanda Victoria Cruz Paige Elliot Rae Larrinaga Sofia Olivares

Art Staff

Suha Arshad Brayden Edman Samuel Hyland Michelle Lee

Poetry Staff Savannah Dupper Abigail Forsythe Molly Kate Hance Annie Mahaffey Peter Tsai Soumia Vellanki

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Letter From the Editor

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he book you are reading is a testament to the combined dedication of nearly a hundred people, and to the perseverance of Vanderbilt’s artistic community as a whole.

Despite the constraints of the ongoing pandemic, our contributors, staff, editorial board, professional judges, and advisors have produced a carefully curated print magazine that represents the technical skill, emotional depth, and artistic accomplishments of our student body.

It’s a wonderful thing that we are once again able to present our readers with a printed book, and I hope that holding your copy fills you with as much warmth as it does me. I cannot say thank you enough to every person who made this edition possible.

In particular, I want to express my gratitude to each student who shared their work with us. This fall, Vanderbilt undergraduates submitted over 500 pieces of art and writing to be considered for publication, nearly doubling our submissions record for the past decade.

I know I speak for the entire staff when I say it was a joy to review your contributions, and I wish we had space to publish them all.

A special thanks goes out to Paige Clancy, the best advisor anyone could ask for. Your guidance and expertise have supported us every step of the way.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the devotion and talent of this year’s staff, and particularly this year’s editorial board. You’ve pulled your weight many times over, and together we’ve accomplished more than I ever expected. Thank you so much for your hard work.

It has been my privilege to be a part of The Vanderbilt Review these past four years. I am certain I am leaving the magazine in capable hands, and I am confident it will continue showcasing remarkable art for many years to come.

Kelly Morgan 5

Table of Prose 16.....Two Girls, Both the Muse || Cameron Peloso 24.....A Moveable Home || Kevin Loo 36.....Fresno and I Like to Dance || Christian Crawford 42.....Cycles || Sterling Gourdine 60.....Hannibal Crosses the Alps || James Blair 74.....The Parade || Joshua Peng 80.....Crucifying Fish, Waiting for Death || Zoha Arif 94.....A Letter to My Mama || Camden Coleman 114.....True Stories About Being American || Maximilian Paul 116.....Six Lies || Isabela Seitz

Poetry 12.....Home Sweet Home || Grace Brady 22.....dear beloved || Morgan Johnson 32.....A Subverted Sex Poem || Abigale Harrelson 56.....A Mind on Trial || Kaitlyn Hammond 88.....Fennel and the Great Sleep || Annie Mahaffey 108.....I put my blue light glasses on at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday || Daniella Ndubuisi-Ike 132.....Dandelion || Morgan Elrod-Erickson 136.....A Poem about Nothing || Jonathan Quiros 141.....A Potluck (Frankfurt an der Oder) || Hailey Pfeiffer 142.....Krylatskoye Station || Cheyenne Deibert

Art 10.....Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe || Zhaohan Song 11.....Fairies swinging on flowers’ stems || Asya Azkin 14.....Wingless Flight || Jonathan Ma 6

Contents 19.....moon meets sun || Jonathan Wong 20.....Return the National Parks || Jonathan Ma 21.....Cowboy in the Tetons || Sophie Kaiser 23.....House on Dana Street || Natalie Elliott 28.....Cabin Fever || Jonathan Ma 29.....Dawn || Lola Daley 30.....Regurgitate || Hannah Anderson 33.....No Strings Attached || Hannah Anderson 34.....Ibrahim || Wren Collin 41.....Ray of Hope || Mehak Malhotra 54.....Dawn on Priest || Amelia Simpson 55.....Heart Strings || Megan McKeen 58.....One Smile || Vanessa Schor 72.....La Fouly || Nathan Miao 78.....Heart of the Sea || Hannah Anderson 79.....Seeing Double || Vanessa Schor 86.....Humpty Dumpty || Suha Arshad 93.....Three Friends || Hannah Anderson 103.....Çaydanlik || Sera Eviner 104.....My Journey || Zhaohan Song 106.....Untitled || Megana Atluri 110.....parking garage || Jonathan Wong 112.....Jupiter Plate || Shannon Vogel 115.....Diners, Drive-ins, and Dragonflies || Suha Arshad 129.....Chicago || Sophie Kaiser 130.....Justice for All || Monica Baldwin 134.....Goodbye || Asya Azkin 135.....Mine || Miquéla Thornton 140.....Still of an Orange || Wren Collin 144.....Whimsical Teapot || Saksham Sharma 7

AWARDS Six Lies Isabela Seitz “The story is understated and poignant at the same time. It’s so very human, and to me, that is the mark of good writing.”

Judged by Kelly Quindlen, author of the young adult novels She Drives Me Crazy, Late to the Party, and Her Name in the Sky, and VSC alumna

Prose Dandelion Morgan Elrod-Erickson “It contains both beauty and the threat of violence. The poem seems to turn ever more toward itself; it manages both to contain lovely language and be critical of it.”

Judged by Kiyoko Reidy, Vanderbilt M.F.A. candidate and Editor-in-Chief of The Nashville Review

Poetry

Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe Zhaohan Song “The piece riffs off O’Keeffe’s early precisionist style. The lines and verticals of the composition evoke an abstract cityscape that seems almost mechanical, yet the work is done by hand.”

Judged by Rebecca VanDiver, Assistant Professor of African American Art

Art

Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe Zhaohan Song Ink on paper 12.2 x 9.1”

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Fairies swinging on flowers’ stems Asya Azkin Collage

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Home Sweet Home Grace Brady

“My home, my little home, a little house of my own.”

—A Greek expression of pleasure or relief upon returning to one’s home, especially after an extended period away from it.

My home, my little home, a little house of my own.

On the sill, my plants call for a drink.

In the kitchen, all alone, the tea kettle groans:

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a reminder to stretch, to throw down my phone— languid mornings are prime time to think.

My home, my little home, a little house of my own has the TV on—it repeats. A buzzer drones with the answer I hadn’t known: What is “Pretty in Pink?”

In the kitchen, all alone, the tea kettle groans so I fix green elixir for healthy liver and bones; mugs bob like colored buoys in my sink.

My home, my little home, a little house of my own was born in the fifties, strange suburbia clone, so I strip walls of yellow toile: kitschy, distinct.

In the kitchen, all alone, the tea kettle groans, it sighs, it sings, it hisses, and bellows, conducts music with the faucet’s dogged drip.

My home, my little home, a little house of my own.

In the kitchen, I’m alone, sighing tea kettle groans.

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Wingless Flight Jonathan Ma Film photography 10 x 10”

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Two Girls, Both the Muse Cameron Peloso

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lay on the grass, waiting for the tightness in my chest to ease and the air to turn to night, when it gets just slightly cool and Nashville smells like home. The moon burns its half-crescent into the sky tonight, hanging low so the planes can fly behind it. Space is generous in that way. I am lingering by the side of the road for you, but you won’t come. The bus stopped running hours ago, and even then, Vermont is much too far. In this moment, my desire is paper-thin, rippling in the cold and bitter wind that separates us. Are you tired in the way I am tired? Stretching my legs so I can try and close the distance. Arms broken for you.

In my mind, we live together. Our hips brush as I reach for the kettle in the morning; our socks do a familiar and tender dance in the dryer. I know the way your eyes look in the evening, sleepy and a little wet around the edges. We share a couch, and it is blue. You wake up on Thursday, crooked collar in my green shirt, and my body forgets to breathe. This dream is my most intimate lover and the basis of my unfolding. If it were true, I know it would break me.

To be so close, and yet held at a distance.

No body in my arms, I write, “I didn’t know what it was like to miss until I met you,” and shut the journal.

What does it mean that I’ve started crying again?

Something in me shifted over that long summer, a wall I’ve been building since I was seventeen, a breath I’ve been holding even longer than that. Heavy is my heart, clogged and straining. Home again, I sweat the bed. Dreaming of those days, of touching your arm softly, chewing ice, licking a flame into my mouth. The worst thing in the world is letting yourself be seen, but that August, I would do anything I could to make you look at me.

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My creaky brain works overtime to recall the night we jumped into the water. It all comes back fuzzy, the way we shivered together under the moonlight. I always wanted a coming-ofage pool scene, dunked my head under at parties and in the midnight dusk of the park, the river when we were kids. And maybe I’ll never find it, that moment of clarity while holding my breath. All I know is this: I spent my summer swimming, swimming with you. We shared the same air and it was a gift, to breathe at the same time. I would kiss your forehead if I had the courage, touch you tender to let you know how it feels.

Writing about friendship but it reads like love because you’ve never been the muse before and I want to give that to you. You in your granny panties, crooked bangs curling up against your forehead, full-chest laugh in the moon-glow water.

That red shirt from the laundromat with the bleach stain on the front that you wore on every day off. Mornings turned afternoons with unbrushed teeth, moss growing up and over our bodies. My headlamp that always seemed to be dead and how you would walk me back because we were the last ones up. A gesture is a touch is a kiss given to a friend. Wanting you to know that if no one else, I was watching. You know as well as I that the writer’s lens is heavy.

Let me hold the weight for you.

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moon meets sun Jonathan Wong Canon PowerShot A470 11.02 x 8.26”

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Return the National Parks Jonathan Ma Digital text and gouache 3.5 x 5.5”

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Cowboy in the Tetons Sophie Kaiser

Black and white 35 mm film photography

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dear beloved Morgan Johnson

Helena, Montana isn’t so bad– I am no fan of the biting cold or gnawing winds but the cabin we’re staying in is built from deep chocolate wood, so rich that the thinning drafts have no effect.

And I’ve been sleeping in a bed a little bit more like a marshmallow in that, when the sun melts through the window, I cannot unstick myself from the cotton sheets.

So I’ve been sipping cocoa as a pick-me-up, with a kind of sweetness that’s closer to butter rolling languidly around my tongue.

We drink from ceramic mugs that slot perfectly into our palms out on the deck of this candy-dream-house, and when I sit in just the right spot, in the fabric chair littered with the least amount of red-green leaves, the wind that rushes by does not chill, merely cools.

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House on Dana Street Natalie Elliott Linoleum carving 8 x 11.5”

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A Moveable Home Kevin Loo

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he first time I kissed a boy, I didn’t know I liked boys.

It was a first among a string of firsts: first time getting drunk, first time breaking into an abandoned building, first time feeling attraction to the male form.

His pull was not romantic, or even sexual. Not at first. I was attracted to his confidence, competence, and charisma. The steady, self-assured way he drove us in his beater through an overgrown field with the headlights off to avoid attention from the authorities. Or the catlike grace with which he tightropewalked across the metal beams of the abandoned building, laughing in the face of 50-foot plunges on either side. His initiative in splitting the group up and sending us in different directions when the cops inevitably arrived.

I was attracted to him, at first, because I wanted to be him—be that intrepid captain whose reassuring air comforted all those around him, that object of desire whose gravity pulled everyone inextricably past the event horizon. When I kissed him, lips stained with strawberry juice and breath clouded with vodka, I had hoped to become part of him, or maybe absorb part of him, whatever I needed to do to steal all those traits I wanted for myself.

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For weeks afterwards, I held the still-image of that night in close memory, constantly thinking about it whenever calculus became too tedious or English Lit lost its luster. I wondered if my juvenile wish born in bated breath would manifest. I like to think it did—that after the kiss, I became more confident, self-assured. But I failed to imitate him in at least one regard.

Because he was out.

And I was not.

Why bother negotiating with this part of my identity, especially in the crowned capital of the Bible Belt, where there were 100 churches in a 40-square mile radius, and ghoulish faces rode around in lifted trucks after school harassing gay kids? Why bother, when I had only ever been with girls before?

I had the privilege of hiding, and I took advantage of it. I tuned out the homophobic slurs casually thrown around by my classmates, friends, and even family. I deftly avoided any rumors about my future flings with boys.

During this time, a childhood memory wormed its way into the roof of my brain, parasitic but nonfatal. I was 10 years old, and my family and I were at a crappy Chinese buffet. I had just cracked open a fortune cookie. Its exact text eludes me now as it did then, but I remember that it was likely intended for a female fortune-seeker, because it predicted an imminent romance of the male variety. My parents chuckled, and my dad cracked, “There better not be, or I’ll beat you blue.”

Eventually, I came out to some of my closest friends. But always over Snapchat, of all things. There was something safer about the medium, I thought, less concrete. I was still figuring things out, after all. The disappearing nature of the messages matched my fleeting thoughts. There was a comfort to knowing that, once read, my confessions would disappear, transported to some intangible nether region overwhelmingly populated with sexts. By comparison, anything I had to contribute was boring. Thus, I decided this version of me would only exist online and in the nighttime back seats of cars parked at dams and parks and docks.

I never spoke it into existence, in fact, until the summer 25

before my junior year of college. I had gotten a job in my hometown and was taking the opportunity to reconnect with some old friends. One of them I’d known since childhood: Jackson. We’d met in second grade, when, prompted by our teacher where we lived, we’d both answered Willowbrook: a small, suburbanish community on the outskirts of town. There were no kids on my street, but his was just a brief 15-minute walk away.

For a time, Jackson was my only friend. Surprising, for kids from such dramatically different cultures. His family were devout evangelicals who recoiled at any mention of evolution on TV; mine were lazy Catholics who passed themselves off as religious but were effectively agnostic. Yet we shared many interests, among them writing. We would often write together, furiously brainstorming zany plot ideas while floating in lazy rivers or watching fireworks atop his aunt’s roof. Together, we trail-blazed the endless woods around our neighborhood as we did our minds. We co-authored a post-apocalyptic zombie fiction novel, handwritten and bound in a vinyl-embossed journal he bought at Dollar General for five dollars. It still has a place of honor on my bookshelf back home.

Once he trusted me enough, he showed me his favorite spot in the woods: a little sunlit meadow at the end of a shaded, overgrown trail. There, he confided in me his feelings, fears, and insecurities without restraint. He told me how his parents’ divorce had affected him; I told him how mine staying together, despite their mutual disaffection, had affected me.

For years, there was no one I trusted more in the world.

Yet Jackson was one person I’d never told about my sexuality. Despite our initial confidence in each other, we grew apart in high school and even farther apart afterwards. I had gone away for college, and he had stayed nearby. We had tried to keep touch, but neither of us were particularly good at it.

The summer I came back, however, we got to catch up.

Stuffing our faces with pizza and pasta, we drove through our hometown, noting everything that had stayed the same as we caught each other up on what had changed in our lives.

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The line at the local fast food joint still curled around the block as always; Jackson had grown out his brown curls and was transferring to a new college. The dingy hotel everyone went 4 to for post-prom sex was as dilapidated as ever; I had started obsessively going to the gym and switched my major.

Eventually, as the sun set, we ended up in our high school’s parking lot.

“I don’t know if I ever told you,” he said plainly. “But I’m into guys.”

I had suspected. But to the extent I didn’t want to be out myself, I’d never asked. I had feared I’d feel compelled to tell him.

“You didn’t, but I sort of guessed.”

“I am too, by the way,” I added after a pause.

“I know,” he cracked. We both chuckled. In retrospect, we both should have known earlier, as indicated by the close intimacy of our early friendship. But both of us had hidden, I realized, not only from ourselves but from each other. A strange and sad thought occurred to me then: In our town, at least, these conversations would always be held at night, in empty parking lots, in hushed tones. Though we might learn to confide in each other again, we’d never learn to trust everyone else.

My sadness was mitigated by one thing: I’d rekindled a kinship, bolstered it even. I felt brotherhood where I’d never expected to find it—under the flickering lights of the epileptic street lamps in my high school parking lot. Nothing was bound to change in our hometown, but it had brought me my best friend—the one person, I realized, I could saddle with all my secrets no matter how much time had transpired or how much distance we’d traversed. We could create a moveable home, just the two of us.

“I love you, man,” he said as I stepped out of his car. I had always known, of course. But he’d never spoken it aloud. Such expressions of affection were unheard of between two boys.

“I love you too.”

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Cabin Fever Jonathan Ma Oil on canvas 24 x 30”

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Dawn Lola Daley Digital photography 1084 x 879 px

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Regurgitate Hannah Anderson Ceramic 11 x 5 x 6”

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A Subverted Sex Poem Abigale Harrelson

I promised myself that when I wrote about sex I would write about real sex where a woman is horny, where simmering between these snowy pages, her body blazes like a maple preparing to die for the winter.

I promised to write a poem for this burning woman, a poem where she, freed, pares down to an irreducible unit of survival, the November storms, shaking all of her loose until she is all necessity and preservation.

I promised this woman a poem where I say Now you are reborn green again like one who has never known disappointment.

I told her, I told this poem Open your samara fruits and let them fall like crashes that cover the earth in signs of you.

But the fruits were empty, so this cannot be her poem.

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No Strings Attached Hannah Anderson Ceramic 7 x 3 x 14”

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Ibrahim Wren Collin 34

Photography

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ometimes I hear things and want to call them bright. I’ve certainly heard a trumpet blare just the right way to make me expand my vocabulary for music. Because even when a note is wrong, and especially when it hurts, it can still be other things too. And other times I am not sure what I hear at all. I think that hearing itself changes even when music doesn’t because I know the same is true for sight. The world hasn’t been changing as fast as my perception of it.

So, I wrote a story about a man who thought songs were speaking directly to him every time they played. His blood would buzz when he listened to music. I would use the story to remind myself why adjectives like bright are meant to be thrown around recklessly. The man’s name would be Fresno, he would be bright as hell, and he wouldn’t think too much, but listen a lot. The story would begin like this: Fresno dances to anybody’s song. There was no song he did not dance to. He would regularly dance the week away, dance right through Monday and Tuesday, and only slow the tempo on Wednesday. His walk was always a skip, and he was always keeping a pulse—even when he slept. And most importantly, he 36

Fresno and I Like to Dance Christian Crawford

believed every note in the world had a place to resolve, neatly, into a chord, but only if the song is long enough. He would often say “Jazz songs,” then chuckle, then continue, “are long because life is short.”

I would use the words ‘big,’ ‘strong,’ and ‘tormented’ to describe his heart and then I would ask him to write back to me. I would tell him we walk beneath a sky that never drops bombs, only rain, because I was drawing his sky and using the word ‘empty’ to do so. I would say, Don’t worry, it’s ok to look down, but it is also ok to look up, both are ok.

But then I would find myself choosing. I would forget to write about the stars because I find enough emptiness on the ground. In fact, I feel like I find it more often these days, and this is a story about that too.

Of course, I would lie to Fresno. He could never guess that on this side of the page we shoulder the weight of the air, rely on it, but still can’t look at it. So I wouldn’t tell him, and I 37

would just use the words ‘light, yet damp’, ‘cold, but pleasant,’ and ‘thicc with two c’s’ to talk about the air. Then I’d say it was pretty. To him, it only rains when it does, and it does. But only enough to make the scene more dramatic.

I start drinking while I write because I foolishly want to add some honesty, but Fresno starts to vanish from the world I drew up for him. I eventually find myself not writing but staring at a ceiling light through a green tinted bottle of soju so intently that I barely notice when Fresno slips into the wall.

Gone. The taste of plum comes back up in a burp that feels like a gasp. I find myself, once again, dwelling on things that already happened. Then something in my gut shifts and tries to warn me that I’m not supposed to lose my characters this soon, but it was already too late. I simply forgot who he was. I close my computer and decide to leave later that afternoon and look for some attention. Sometimes I know where to find it.

But the rain keeps reminding me of home and I find myself thinking more and more about how well low air pressure and sadness go together. Like peanut butter and jelly or Frank Ocean and late nights, the feelings mix into something better.

I think about someone I loved and lost and suddenly want to feel wanted again. I look for my best clothes and then wonder if I ever actually loved. I wonder if I’m turning bitter because I swear, I can feel grime collecting at the bottom of my heart.

Then I wonder who I already became and have yet to realize.

Then the flood gates open, and I’m on the floor for a bit and then back on my feet. I start throwing shit out of my closet because none of it looks like me anymore. I keep saying these shirts don’t even know me, they never have, but I end up on the floor with them anyways. An hour passes like this, and I get up and decide I really need to leave this time, go anywhere.

As soon as I walk out the door, I remember how spiteful the cold April air has been. Time speeds up, I don’t notice, and with a snap, it is five hours later and I’m wandering back to my dorm that still has clothes on the floor. It’s three in the morning, and the sky looks dark, empty, yet calm. Clouds are covering all the stars and the world is just still enough to 38

emphasize fast thoughts. My heart feels like a ping pong ball bouncing in a gym. Half decent sex left me with a terrible journey home. Now I am catching the very beginning of a rain, and it is light. A breeze blows through my curls and across my ears and I can’t decide if I’m feeling it or hearing it more.

I’m convinced that if I hear too much of the wind, I’ll start to think it’s talking to me. Then I remember who Fresno was and what he would have wanted. I get back to writing the next night. I start with: A roaring intro to the next song because the last one had been particularly sad. A crowd of people waiting in line to buy tickets for the train, and none of them would look at Fresno.

Light, yet damp outside spring air and narrowly missing a heavy rain. A thicc fog with two c’s. A short, slow escalator ride down further into the depths of the metro. Dampness in the air so thicc it is nearly touchable. A cold, but pleasant atmosphere. There is someone to glance at across the way, and they return the glance.

Fresno thinks they smiled, but also wonders if they just looked away. Either way, he saw and was seen.

I’ll let him know that that is enough. In his world desire isn’t corrupted, and certainly not sold. Then I’ll finish another beer and forget where he is taking the train to. I will start to wonder where he even is. I will text someone I shouldn’t. I will feel something that collects in my throat and something that burns in my eyes. Then I will spend the next day gathering up my feelings because what else am I supposed to do?

I gather them up in the mornings when my dreams are still particularly vivid. I tell Fresno some of my secrets. Time speeds up again. The days turn hazy but the nights are still neat while I write. I make tea over the stove because bubbling sounds make me feel calm, and then add ice because the cold makes me feel awake. I pick at a guitar on better days and wonder if I’ll ever make it to greatness. I scribble frantic drawings.

I decide I want Fresno to believe there is a bigger plan. So I write the word ‘things,’ then the words ‘always’ and ‘resolve’ 39

right into his mind because I don’t want him to worry anymore. I tell him, ‘You have plenty of time,’ but I forget that I hadn’t written in worry yet. I remind myself that he doesn’t have to care about my desperate aphorisms anymore because his world is no longer mine at this point in the story. Our paths have already diverged. I’ve written enough to get us here. I realize that if I want him to be free, then I should really consider how much of our world I should give to him. So I let the story continue like this: “Trust,” he says out loud without being able to hear himself over the music and the fwoosh of a train approaching. The big metal Metro car drowns out the final chords of a song as it approaches. It was bright. The train’s grinding wheels buzz louder than the music, but Fresno couldn’t notice because his blood was buzzing even louder. Perhaps it was because of the way Wednesday makes him feel a little down on himself. Or it could be because fog makes any walk down the street seem like it has no destination. Either way he would be feeling the world heavy. He’ll look up from the yellow line on the metro platform and see familiar doors sliding open.

He will be excited to finally be on his way to somewhere I haven’t thought of yet.

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Ray of Hope Mehak Malhotra Digital media

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CYCLES Sterling Gourdine

“L

ions are limitless.”

It’s a baseless declaration, and yet he says it with all the conviction of a man with an extensive and unfailing knowledge of the future. It’s a statement that strikes as nonsensical--a line this stupid couldn’t possibly make sense-and although his voice is quiet, his dark brown eyes glitter, and a self-assured grin plays on his face.

“Man… what?” is my response.

I’ve always known him to say shit to provoke discussion, sober or not, but this just sucked. Not at all like the time he asked if I ever wondered if animals had existential crises. Or the time he’d ran his fingers through his locs and eagerly launched into a story about the perils of gentrification and the way white supremacy always sought to reassert itself.

“And time’s a circle,” he says, voice firmer with every syllable. “That’s the next thing.”

There was never a moment wasted with him.

Always a time where he would try to impart some abstract philosophy about something.

“August,” I say. “August.” It’s a tired tactic, saying my friend’s name as if I can force him out of his perpetual reverie.

Every tangent, every murmur, every sound, I’m calling for him as though the sound of my voice will somehow stop him from doing what he does, being what he is.

“Tuesday,” he responds. “Name one limited lion.” August speaks from his supine position on the floor. He has hands splayed against the hardwood, his toes curling and uncurling, curling and uncurling. I’m not sure where his shirt is--the room’s messy--and he’s half-covered by a thick blanket, but I can still see the time and effort that he poured into cultivating his body. If I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I might’ve thought he was overcompensating for his height.

“All lions are limited by their physiology,” my face contorts 42

into an expression caught between a self-righteous smirk and incredulity. “Why would you even..?” I trail off. He knows what I’m going to say, after all; he’s used to me acting an ass about all the little things he says. He knows I love him regardless.

“Not Aslan.”

“Really, Aug? Aslan? The Jesus allegory from Narnia?” I should’ve expected this.

“Yeah, yeah!” August throws his hands into the air excitedly, turning his head to stare at me, prone on the couch in my dorm room, feet swinging behind me like a bubbly little schoolkid, resting my head on hands and gazing at him. He grins widely. “What couldn’t he do?”

I cast a brief sideways glance at the rest of the room. It’s small, but intimate; the navy feathered rug was intended to be comforting to guests who chose to lay on the ground, although the only things on the rug now were our socks and a number of items, electronic and otherwise, scattered about from when we were peaking a little earlier.

I exhale. Thinking’s hard--easier now than it may have been at the onset--but I do my best to direct my thoughts towards the conversation at hand.

“Didn’t he die, though?” I suggest, furrowing my brow and raising a finger. “I feel like that limits his unlimitedness.” My lips curl upwards, face smug. I’ve got him.

August snorts, opening his mouth, readying himself to perhaps berate me for ruining his fun, but laughs softly instead.

“Fuck you, dude.” There’s a soft smile on his face, and he inhales deeply. His toes curl again. They uncurl. He looks peaceful.

Sometimes, when I think about my conversations with August, I’m reminded of how my mother would say things like, “you’re the Hermione to his Harry,” and I’m forced to agree, because how could a woman who named her three daughters after the first three days of the week possibly be wrong?

“I win,” I huff proudly, looking down at him from where I am on the couch. “Mark this one in the notes as ‘Tuesday’s 43

victory’, please.”

He rolls over, fingers tracing the thin, cracked sheet that covers his phone screen. A brief pause, then the tap-tap of his fingertips against his keyboard, and the hastier, feverish taptap-tap of the backspace button. More than once he messes up, swearing softly. A loud yawn. “Ah, shit, I’m still pretty high.”

I can’t help my laugh. “Is that why your questions are more stupid than usual?” I roll onto my back, letting my feet hang off of one arm of the couch, clasping my hands and settling them against my navel. My hands tremble. Maybe I’m still high, too.

“No,” he says quickly. “Maybe. Don’t be mean.”

I chuckle softly. I close my eyes, and for a moment, I’m looking down at us from above. For a moment, I exist outside of myself, outside of my mind. August and I are the only solid things in a transparent world. Chestnut hair splays behind my head like a crown; a thin layer of sweat gives my olive skin a slight sheen; my nails are painted a startling pale blue. Too blue. Oh, good lord, I’m definitely still fucking high. My vision dances, fuses with every color there ever is to exist. Against the stygian couch, I look like I’m prepared to die.

If I vanished now, I don’t think I’d be ready.

For a while, we sit comfortably in silence. Every now and then, I can hear August, his breath hitching every now and then as he clears his throat. I bet he forgot where I keep the water.

I wonder if August is prepared to die.

“Tuesday,” he says finally. “What do you think?”

“What?” If he’d voiced anything new in the last five minutes, I hadn’t heard it.

I tilt my head to look at him. Some of my hair spills over the seat of the couch, brushing against the rug. His toes curl.

They uncurl. My hands shake ever so slightly. I want to ask if he’s still feeling it; if he’s laying on the hardwood because it helps keep him grounded or if he’s just too warm. I was never one to mess with the air in my apartment, especially if the conditioning unit was a shitty little thing that would break at the slightest touch.

44

“Time’s a circle. What do you think?”

“That’s… well, that can’t be right,” I murmur. The impending frown finds its way to my eyes first, my eyelids twitching, then my brow creasing. “Isn’t time…y’know, linear?”

The crickets are inspired tonight. I can feel their music, chirping in my ears and thrumming through my veins. How calming.

“Is it?” he asks, his tone inscrutable, eyes fixed on the ceiling tiles, pursuing the little divots and lingering on the speckled dots that line their surface. He wants to see where I’m going to go with this.

I humor him.

“Well, there’s the past, the present, and the future, yeah?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So… well, like, if there’s a past, that would imply there’s a backwards, y’know? And a future implies a forwards.” I nod as I speak, trying to persuade myself that whatever I was saying made sense. It had to. Things began, things matured, things died. Such was the way of life. Everything had to start, and everything had to end.

“Sure,” August says, sounding utterly unconvinced. “But history repeats itself, right? So who’s to say that the future won’t be more of the same, but with cooler shit?”

“August, that’s not time, that’s just… human nature,” I counter. “And technology. Stuff starts somewhere, doesn’t it? It ends eventually, too, because nothing’s permanent.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he starts. Then, “How about this, Tues--time’s a circle, but… um.. individually.”

“I know we both took the same thing,” A joke, in part because I have no clue what he’s talking about and in part because he’s losing me. “There’s no way you’re still peaking.”

For once, I’m almost wishing August was sober; maybe then he’d stop talking in half-finished thoughts and give me something good.

“Dude,” he sounds annoyed, but any trace of chagrin is covered by a sweet, beautiful laugh. He’s as calming as the crickets; I can feel his amusement’s warm embrace around my heart. “Hear me out, okay?”

45

“Okay.” I nod.

“So, well, it’s like… time’s not really a circle. Not physically, but it’s just kinda there. Like me and you, and the room. We’re all here, y’know?” He waves his hand about, and then lets it drop. The sound of palm smacking on the floor makes me jolt, but the extent of my reaction is a slow, difficult blink, and the unfurling of my hands, which reconnect just as quickly.

“Sure,” I feel glad, rather unconditionally, a sense of camaraderie welling up within my gut. I don’t know how he knows that the rest of the world is see-through, but I’m pleased that he does. He gets it. He’s with me. We’re real.

We’re so real.

I exhale, closing my eyes. For a moment, I exist outside of myself, outside of my mind. Gazing down at us from above, I study him. His mouth moves, his eyes squeezed shut, his expression intense. He’s a deep, rich brown; the ink patterns that line his arms a powerful black. He’s focused, but it’s that sort of focus you can only achieve when you’re unfocused.

A state of mind brought on by something that only elevates, whether it’s putting you even farther in yourself or pulling you out. Around him, I can see right through the navy rug, right through the floor, even through the blanket that covers his body. Everything but us is pellucid. I can see the hum of the core of the earth, a quivering, glossy thing that vibrates in time with my breath. It looks like tempered glass, like something that has been forged and reforged countless times across centuries.

I don’t want to be transparent. I don’t think I’d be ready.

I wonder if August would be ready.

“We’re all here,” August says again.

I blink. What the hell is he talking about?

“And then,” The impassioned August continues. “If that’s how it is, then why do we keep doing the same things over and over again, man? If time is just a thing that’s a thing, then why is it like we’re all looping together?”

“What?” I’m not even peaking anymore and I’m still having trouble keeping up with him. Damn.

That’s the thing about loops--you can’t always stop them.

46

They just happen, and you have to ride them out. Or at least, I ride them out. I’ve never known any other method… and I remained hesitant in part because I got scared, sometimes.

A bad trip would haunt me forever, and I don’t think anyone would want an already depressed giantess all in their space.

“We all just do our little things and go about our little days and then we die, but that’s so stupid, because after we die, then we’re dead, and when we’re dead, the next guys go about their little things and do their little days and it ends up they just did the same shit that we just did.”

Okay, now he’s starting to lose himself. I clear my throat, trying to focus my mind. I really shouldn’t. Focusing makes everything harder. Easier to do things, maybe, but harder to feel.

“August,” I say. “Come on back to me, dude.”

He opens his mouth to continue, but sighs instead. He shakes his head. “Maybe the whole world is on acid.”

“Dude...” I trail off. Maybe he’s onto something. Maybe that’s just the high talking.

“I think we’re all stuck in circles. Cycles.” He corrects himself. “We’re all just stuck, right? I wake up, I talk to you, I go to class, I do my work, I, uh… fuck, I didn’t know where I was going with this. We’re all just stuck.”

A pause. I can hear August breathe, and I move to rest my hand on top of his. Or I would, at least, but I honestly didn’t think about my position in the room relative to his; his hands are farther away than I thought. I recede. My hands feel cold.

“So… how do you get out of the cycle?” I ask.

“Hm.” He shrugs, coughs, and feels around for the water.

“Um…” “It’s in the fridge,” I say with a soft chuckle. “Here, let me--” I reach out; the mini-refrigerator is right above my head, next to the couch. I pry open the door--a feat which feels far more difficult than normal--and grasp a water bottle. It nearly slips out of my hands, but I pass it lazily to him.

From the bottle, he drinks hungrily, still lying on his back, and I wonder how he hasn’t choked, or if he’ll drain the entire bottle in just a series of gulps. As abruptly as he began, he 47

stops, sighing loudly, reaching up to scratch his forehead.

“Ah, well, like… I dunno. I uh, I don’t think you can, really.” His words are solemn, and I can feel a wave of anxiety threatening to crash into me, removing all traces of the decent headspace I’d prepared for this trip. I think August notices it too, because he hastily adds, “Or, well, I mean, you can leave one cycle by going into another. So you can leave! Sort of.”

I take a shaky breath, doing my best to steady myself.

“But…” I start. I have to remind myself that I’m safe, that I’m in a room with my friend, that we’re together, that we’re safe, that he’ll make sure I’m okay, and I’ll make sure he’s okay, and it’s good because we’re safe. “But you’re still going into another cycle.”

“Yeah,” he says. He can’t help but give a sheepish grin.

“Yeah, I uh, didn’t think too far ahead on that one. I’m--well, we’re--high.”

He lets out a laugh, pushing himself up ever-so-slightly so he can sidle closer to me. Half his body on the rug, he raises his hand towards my face, waving expectantly. It takes me a second, but eventually I draw my fingers towards his, our palms pressing together.

“Hey, hey,” he says. “Hey, hey, I’ve got you.” We’ve been friends for so long that there isn’t much more he needs to say, really. I know him, and he knows me. I understand he’s trying to calm me, and I sigh, placing my fingers in between his. He’s so warm; I can feel his comfort radiating from him. If I close my eyes and let my dilated pupils dance against my eyelids, I can see the rays of sunlight shooting from his body.

If I close my eyes, I’m looking down at us from above.

“August,” My voice cuts through the stillness.

“Hm?” “Do you think you’re ready to die?” My question isn’t filtered--as much as I want to phrase it better, I can’t--and the moment it leaves my mouth, I regret asking.

I feel August tense, my hand still grasping his. I almost feel as though he’s going to wrench himself free from my grasp and flee, open the door and leave the room and become translucent. The anxiety is there again, looming, looming, 48

looming, but then he squeezes my hand and I remember I’m in my room, with my friend, and we’re real. The only solid things in a transparent world.

“I’m high,” his voice is soft. Then, “I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to die.”

“Sorry,” I mumble. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“We’re all here, Tuesday.” August says. His toes curl and uncurl.

“What’s with all the cycles?” I move to change the subject.

Any more talk about my loop and I might just loop forever.

That aside, I can still think. Generally. I’m curious. Even if it’s something stupid; even if he’s higher than Mount Everest, August never asks things without reason. Whether that reason is to get me to admit that okay, maybe the Care Bears are cool, or to join him in a crusade to expose a racist professor, all of his words have purpose.

“Well, I’ve just been thinking about stuff.” He shrugs.

“Stuff?” I try. Now I’m the one dragging an answer out of him. What a role reversal.

“Shit. I’ve been thinking about shit.”

“Shit like, what, like… like Kory?” I hesitate to say her name. I don’t think anyone wants to think about their ex during a trip. August may be the least anxious motherfucker I know, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get anxious, and that definitely doesn’t mean he can’t have a bad trip. “...Yeah.” He breathes. His hand is still grasping mine; when I feel him tense, I squeeze. Just like he did for me. I can’t say whether or not it’s helping, but he continues nonetheless.

His voice is soft, quiet and devoid of much of his earlier joviality. “You think I’m a bad person?”

“That’s stupid, dude, c’mon.” I don’t know if I could ever think of August as a bad person. Goofy, adorable, stupid August. Honest, diligent, freewheeling August. “If you have to ask, you probably aren’t one.” I nod to myself, almost triumphantly. I want to tell August to record this one as my victory, too.

“Maybe,” he responds. “But, like, no one really puts a cheater in a ‘good person’ category, Tues.”

49

“Yeah, well, it’s not like you’re proud of it.” I try, but it’s hard to argue with him. We’re young, sure, and it’s not like people don’t make mistakes, but whenever there’s a party wronged, it’s never easy to think about nuance. The only reason I’ve even thought about it is because I’ve known August for so long. I know the type of person he is; the pain of another weighs on him just as heavily. He has a tendency to cling to his mistakes as though they will define him for all eternity; there are insensitive things--dumb things kids say--he let slip in middle school he is still running himself ragged for.

“We’re all here,” he says, shaking his head. “And we’re all stuck in our shitty little cycles, doing everything over again.”

He throws his hands up in exasperation, looking like he wants to say more, but unsure how to express it.

It takes me a few minutes to grasp what he’s getting at, but I understand his misgivings. Being the little ball of nerves I was, if I believed everything was circular, I’d probably be deeper in the hole than he’ll ever be.

“You’re not a bad person,” I breathe. “You can’t be.”

“I hurt someone,” he murmurs. He’s calm, calmer than I expect. I had almost wanted him to be anxious, but given that he’s been grappling with this for well over a year, it makes sense why he’d be calm. He’d committed himself so wholeheartedly to the idea that he was terrible that it was now a fact of life.

The truth of his person.

But I know him.

“Yes,” I said. “You did.”

“Yeah.”

“You did.” I repeat, firmly. I can feel his fingers; once warm, he feels cold now, and for a second--a second that stretches an eternity--I am gripped by the fear that he’ll become invisible to me. “But that was then, and then isn’t now.”

“But--” “Don’t be stupid, Aug,” I start. “I love you; I know you. If you were a bad person, you wouldn’t feel bad, y’know? Like… you wouldn’t care.”

As much as I want to proudly and boldly assert the veracity 50

of my claim, I can’t. As much as I want to say I’m an objective party, I’m not. Not everyone would be so quick to forgive his actions, and not everyone would be willing to recognize the remorse he felt as part of a change.

At the very least, that was progress. And I’d be a hypocrite if I couldn’t recognize that. A real goddamn hypocrite.

“It’s gotta count for something, man,” I mutter. “It can’t be about cycles if you’re still feeling.”

He is silent, and this time, it’s oppressive. It is a silence that blankets, but not one to seek refuge in; it’s cold and distant and sad. I can feel the nagging sense of apprehension, and my thoughts immediately drift to my body.

I am solid now, but I could fade at any time. I’m solid now, but I could end just as quickly. What if August disappeared before I did? Would I be able to handle the loneliness? I blink.

I find myself lying on the couch, grasping August’s hand one moment, and hovering above our motionless bodies the next.

In. Out. Exhale. Blink. Inhale. I’m inside my body, solid, real, true, and then I’m outside again, incorporeal, merged with all of eternity, everything that ever was. If I stay outside my body too long, I’ll become transparent.

August laughs.

Amidst what might’ve been the onset of a bad trip, this shithead laughs.

I’m still high, and a little too slow to react properly, but I’m the stiff-bodied, fatigued equivalent of absolutely floored.

“Damn,” he says. “That fucking sucks.”

“Dude,” I say. “I’m actually amazed you’re so cool about this. You’re saving me from a bad time.”

“You poked a… whatever, a hole, in my whole thing, giantwoman.” August’s toes curl and uncurl.

I did?

“Really?” I’m lost. I must’ve said something profound in the last--I glance at the clock. Wow, it’s only been--five minutes.

It was always a thing with me. Brain moved a mile a minute, and the rest of me could never keep up, intoxicated or not.

51

“Mmhm,” he says, gently removing his hand from mine and rolling onto his stomach. “I guess… if I want to be a better guy, I gotta get into a cycle of… being a better guy.” His eyes find mine, and a slight smile plays on his face.

‘You look stupid,’ he mouths.

“You make it sound so easy,” I say softly. I’m probably smiling--I can never help but feel at ease with August--at how nonchalant he transitions between states, high or not. My hands are trembling, shaking ever-so-slightly, subtly. The room responds with vibrations of its own.

“I dunno,” he shrugs. “I can’t really think about it too hard. Maybe it’s like breaking out of a loop.”

“You ride it out?” I suggest, but he shakes his head.

“You do something new.”

Huh. It wasn’t so much that I hadn’t thought of that before, but more that… doing something new just seemed nigh-impossible in a loop. I’d always waited for them to end, either during the come-down, or around the time I chose to sleep, when more than twelve hours had passed and my vision no longer danced incessantly.

Doing something new. So vague, yet so simple. Do something new how? Emotionally? Think about things differently when you can barely complete a thought? Change positions in the spaces you occupy? Leave the earth?

That just seemed so easy, and yet…

“You sound like my therapist, tiny boy,” I chuckle. “That’s so easy, though! Just do something new? That’s it?”

He cackles, rising to his feet to stretch. The blanket falls from his body, and he looks amused, looming over me as I rest on the couch, though I imagine his amusement is in part from the fact that the only time he ever towers over me is if I’m not standing.

“Fuck you, Tuesday,” he manages, but he sounds far from annoyed. He aims a lazy kick at my side, misses, stumbles momentarily, and snorts when he regains his balance. “I didn’t say I agreed with you; I’m trying to humor you… you six-foot, big-headed punk ass… ” Then we’re both chortling, and I can’t think of anything 52

else but being here with August, laughing, high, talking about nothing, about everything; about the room being filled with the sound of our laughter as I grip my sides and chortle my way off the couch and onto the floor with a thump; about August laughing so hard he cries, goes to view himself in the closet mirror, proceeds to flail his arms wildly and note that he looks like a mime, and declares himself king of the pantomimes.

We laugh until we’re wheezing, until I palm the TV remote and haphazardly cue a Disney documentary about bears; until he sits again, on the couch this time; until we’re huddled next to one another, staring blankly at the TV screen, every now and then squinting because the polar bears and the snow and the water aren’t white, or blue, or whatever the hell they usually are, but polychromatic.

“We’re all here,” he sighs. “We’re all fucking here, and we’re all deep in our circular times and shit, and there’s nothing we can do but do something different and make a circle out of that.”

I glance at the screen. The familwy of bears treks across the snow, the cubs following dutifully behind the mother, in an effort to escape the hungrier male stalking the cubs. I exhale. The male, having followed the family across unstable ice, remains trapped, unable to get to the family to eat them, allowing the mother enough time to escape with her children.

I inhale.

“Fuck Kory,” I breathe. My voice is gentle; gentler than it has ever been.

August is quiet, at first, and then I feel him relax, everso-slightly. He leans against me, his frame small; lean, but muscular; his body warm. He seems worlds away, despite the fact that his stare is intense, locked onto the aptly narrated lives of the polar bears on the screen. I wonder what he’s thinking about. I wonder if he wonders what I’m thinking about.

I’m looking down at us from above.

“I’m glad you’re my friend, Tuesday.”

“Yeah,” I breathe.

We’re the only solid things in a transparent world.

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Dawn on Priest Amelia Simpson Etching 5 x 7”

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Heart Strings Megan McKeen Collage 8.5 x 11”

55

A Mind on Trial Kaitlyn Hammond

Beginning with a line from Weldon Kees’ “After the Trial.”

Sometimes I wished to go away forever, to slip into the thick, sweet nothing and wade, like Ophelia, in magnificent silence where the internal/eternal cannot judge the mortal, always tearing through flesh like blood is the cost of forgiveness.

I looked inside my ribcage for forgiveness but was deafened by my own body, so forever, I’m afraid, I will be a puppet of flesh stuffed with apologies, and air, and more nothing, waiting for corpses to rise, and the Lord to judge, and the world to end with a fraction of silence.

In a field of decaying orchids, I prayed for silence, for solace from the mortal ache for forgiveness, though I was executioner and judge; without a trial, I’m damned forever to burn myself at the stake and feel nothing, for it is cleansing to shed flesh.

Sometimes I wished to bare my flesh and sway like a willow branch in the silence, or, like you, Mr. Kees, to personify nothing and, unable to extend the conscience forgiveness, to idle a 1954 Plymouth Savoy forever and let the Golden Gate Bridge be my final judge.

56

I locked myself in a cavern with the judge, and I mourned the weakness of flesh by planting poppies to grow in my wrists forever and they bloomed in a parade of silence; I asked a figure in a pond for forgiveness, but she presented me with nothing.

I have longed to blossom into nothing, to escape the harrowing echoes of the judge, who keeps me chained without forgiveness no matter the weight of flesh I offer; I’m afraid the lust for silence will ring in me forever.

The ritual of flesh has conjured nothing but a life forever with the judge; there is no forgiveness, no sign of silence.

57

58

One Smile Vanessa Schor Charcoal, graphite, and chalk pastel on newsprint 36 x 48”

59

Hannibal Crosses the Alps James Blair

B

elton came into my office at noon with a task.

“Take care of the teenagers on the water tower by two o’clock. Capeesh?”

“You mean the ones with the t-shirt cannon and the balloons filled with urine?”

“Yeah, those ones.”

“But they’ll soak me before I can get within fifty feet of them.”

“Well, keep your mouth closed and take a shower afterward. Capeesh?”

“Why can’t you call PD again?”

“Because they want nothing to do with urine balloons and t-shirt cannons.”

“Neither do I.” “Fantastic. So anyway, make sure they’re cleared out by two o’clock. You’re damn sure I’ll check. Capeesh?”

I gave him my best scowl, but my scowl isn’t great. I look perplexed, or like I have IBS. It’s a personal flaw not to have a good scowl, and now I’m suffering for it.

“Great, glad to hear you’ll be handling it,” said Belton, ignoring my glare. “I’m going to go now.” He turned from my office and shot off down the hall toward the lunch room, whistling a soprano tune.

The teenagers with the urine balloons have been harassing us for a month. They wear all-black clothing and reflective sunglasses so we can’t ID them. We know they’re teenagers because they yell “Fuck Beaumont High!” while they’re up on the tower. They stay for a few hours, chucking down balloons and debris, and then they drop down the water tower’s support beams like a giant jungle gym and go hollering down the hillside to the overpass below.

The last time they took up residence, they caught me upside the head with a school copy of Wuthering Heights. I went outside to shout at them with a bullhorn and wham; it 60

was a thick book and it stung. I spent the rest of the day in my office with ice from the lunchroom’s soda fountain against my temple. The problem is that we don’t have security, so the job falls to Operations, i.e., me. Belton says security is redundant; I say security would be greatly appreciated regardless. But Belton controls the discretionary budget so I’m out of luck if I prefer employment.

I prefer employment. This research facility gig is nice; I do routine maintenance and I troubleshoot when one of the chemists fries a circuit because he plugged in too many burners at once. I like the work, besides the teenagers.

I start brainstorming how I can get them off the tower without getting soaked. Contracting? To whom? A full hazmat suit? No, the Biology Department would suspect why I need it and refuse. Maybe a t-shirt cannon of my own. Yeah, that isn’t half-bad.

I write that idea down on a green stickie note and post it on my whiteboard. The whiteboard is full of my stickie notes.

I’ve also scrawled marker diagrams and flowcharts all over it, each one a separate Operations task. My favorite motivational poster sits in the left hand corner of the board: it’s of a man climbing a cliff with the words “Rock on!” framed against a sunset. Yes, my whiteboard is my magnum opus.

I learned that term from Schaltinger in the Chemistry department. He’s big on Latin, and other higher learning. I’m not so much. Not because I’m not smart, but because nobody refers to a finely-repaired steam-routing system as a magnum opus, or to my tendency to overtighten the distillation water pump during monthly maintenance as a modus operandi.

But Schaltinger likes to call things he does in English by their names in other languages. He knows how to spell capisce in Italian, I bet.

I have lunch daily with Schaltinger, but he doesn’t eat.

He says he works best on an empty stomach. I tell him I work best when I’ve put something off and I’m rushing against a deadline. He doesn’t understand that feeling. He’s a workaholic. But we get along. He supplies most of the conversation because my mouth’s usually crammed with a tuna 61

sandwich, or whatever it is that I muster the energy to make in the morning.

I wait thirty minutes to go to lunch so that I won’t see Belton. I call Schaltinger’s office before I go to ask if he wants to meet for lunch and he says yes, let’s rendezvous, and he asks what sandwich I made this morning. It’s tuna again. Go figure, he says.

I meet Schaltinger in the lunchroom. He’s already seated in our usual spot by the window overlooking the facility’s hillside.

The sky is picture-perfect blue, with a lone fluffy cloud sailing across the window. It reminds me of my computer’s desktop wallpaper, but even more so.

Looking out the window, Schaltinger looks like his usual self—furrowed brow, cold blue eyes, tight, thin lips—but he’s brought almonds with him. A funny thought flashes through my mind that this isn’t Schaltinger. I decide to kid him.

“Almonds? Oh no, what’s happened to Schaltinger? What have you done with him, you doppelganger!”

Schaltinger gives me a bemused side-eye and nudges my seat out with his foot. My humor isn’t his style. I understand.

“What’s your work look like for today?” I ask.

“Nothing special. I’m working on iterations of an upholstery disinfectant. I want to see if I can iron out some kinks with discoloration on beige suede.”

“Huh,” I say through my first bite of tuna. “It only discolors beige suede?”

“Yeah. Odd, right?”

“Yeah, odd.”

“What’s on your schedule?” Schaltinger asks.

I don’t want to tell him that I’m thirty minutes from engaging in a urine balloon fight, but I don’t have a lie queued up.

“Um, Belton wants me to get the teenagers off the tower. I don’t want to get soaked. So I’m putting it off.”

“Hmm. That’s a predicament.”

“Yeah, it is,” I respond.

Schaltinger wrinkles his forehead and lips. I pray that he’s brainstorming a solution.

62

“I think I may start bringing almonds every day.”

Schaltinger says.

So he’s not. That’s okay. I don’t want to think about my upcoming skirmish while I’m eating my tuna sandwich anyway.

“You haven’t had a single almond yet,” I reply. “Why do you want to start bringing them?”

“I feel like people wonder why I come to the lunchroom when I don’t eat. Carrying almonds would solve that issue.”

“Well, why do you still come to the lunchroom if you don’t eat?”

Schaltinger scrunches his brow. “Hmm, that’s a good question.”

Schaltinger’s funny. He could just say he enjoys my company, but the thought hasn’t even occurred to him.

“Do you like almonds?”

Schaltinger looks down at the bag of almonds. “No, not particularly.”

“Why almonds then?”

Schaltinger scrunches his face again. “That’s a good question too,” he says.

I finish up my tuna sandwich and check my watch. It’s quarter-past-one. Forty-five minutes to devise a plan and execute. Schaltinger uses those action words: ‘devise’ and ‘execute.’ I decide to ask for his help directly.

“So, do you have any words of advice for dealing with the teenagers?”

Schaltinger cocks his head. He still hasn’t opened his bag of almonds, and I wonder if he wouldn’t mind parting with some.

My tuna sandwich hasn’t quite filled me up.

“I don’t see any material way of deterring them,” he begins. “They’ve already managed to avoid the cage on the maintenance ladder, right?”

“They just climb the cage instead of the ladder.”

“And they scale the facility perimeter fence no problem, correct?”

“Yup.” “Hmm. You know, to keep pigeons away from rooftops, you can blast predator bird sounds. But I don’t think there’s an 63

equivalent sound for teenagers.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so either.”

Schaltinger reclines and scrunches his brow. I consider making a sly move for the almonds.

“I think brute force won’t do it,” he declares, leaning forward on his elbows. “I don’t think you can go tête-à-tête with them. They’ve already bested you mentally—” “Well, not really—” “—And I think escalating it won’t work for you. They’re handy with that t-shirt cannon, from what I’ve heard around the office.”

“So you don’t think fighting fire with fire and my own t-shirt cannon would work?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he says, shooting me a wary look.

“Huh.” Schaltinger sits back again, and I begin eyeing him and the almonds alternately, hoping he’ll catch my drift.

“I think your best maneuver is psychological,” Schaltinger says.

“You said they bested me mentally.”

“Yes, but this is a different approach. This one doesn’t require you to be smarter than them. All you need to do is talk to them.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I protest. “They’re pretty accurate with those balloons.”

“Well, you can always face away from them. Or wear a face shield.”

“I don’t have a face shield. Can I borrow yours?”

“God no.”

I give Schaltinger a stink eye, but he doesn’t notice.

“What good will talking to them do? We’ve already told them to get off the tower.”

“Yes, but they didn’t care what you said because they don’t know you. To them, you’re just a man in a company workshirt. You need to give them a personable face, to ID with. You need to establish a rapport.”

“A rapport? With the teenagers chucking urine balloons from our tower walkway?”

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“They’re still human. And if you can establish a rapport, they’ll be more amicable to vamoosing, as per your wishes.”

“What if they’d rather stay and keep flinging balloons?

What if they’d rather stay and keep flinging balloons at me?”

Schaltinger taps his finger against his temple. “I believe that these teenagers are experiencing schadenfreude; they enjoy the misfortune of others and have taken it upon themselves to create that misfortune. If you provide a face to the faceless folks they lob balloons at, their schadenfreude will dissipate.”

I give Schaltinger my best skeptical glance, but he’s fiddling with the bag of almonds. I check my watch—one-thirty.

“Well, I need to handle them now,” I say, “or Belton will be huffy and put up ads for my job again, like he did after the biomass disposal fiasco.”

“Yeah, leadership was pretty furious about that one,” Schaltinger agrees. “We were lucky the fungi couldn’t be traced to us.”

“Yeah, that was lucky.”

I move my chair out from the table and stand to leave.

“Wait,” Schaltinger says. “I still haven’t made up my mind about bringing almonds.”

He looks up at me expectantly, earnestly. I feel touched that he would ask my opinion.

“You should go for it,” I say. “They make you look normal.

And hungrier.”

Schaltinger grimaces. “Thanks, I appreciate your input.”

I look at my watch—one-thirty-three.

“I’ve got to go. Lunch tomorrow?”

“As always. Au revoir, mon ami,” Schaltinger says absentmindedly. “Au revoir.”

I hustle to my office and consult my magnum opus. My brainstorming went nowhere in the thirty minutes I waited to go to lunch. I only came up with three ideas: my own t-shirt cannon (shot down by Schaltinger), putting bear traps on the premises (lawsuit-liable), and an impenetrable suit of black trash bags (I’d be blind as the Dickens).

I look over the facility map next to my magnum opus board. The complex is a ring of white-walled buildings, all 65

around a grassy field in which the water tower stands. The buildings are all two stories tall—too difficult to see over without exposing myself to an air raid. The facility’s hill slopes down to the south until it reaches the perimeter fence and the cement wall of the highway. In the north, there’s the perimeter fence and, at the top of the hill, an electricity station.

I strategize. The buildings would provide some cover from balloons, but Belton will make me clean up any mess left by the deluge of all-out warfare. There are also gaps between each building that would make covert maneuvering difficult.

The water tower’s lone ladder is at least seventy feet from the nearest building—and even then I would still have to scramble two hundred feet up it.

I realize there’s no easy way of winning in combat, so I mull Schaltinger’s proposal.

Pro: Building a rapport can be done from a safe distance.

Con: I have trouble building rapport with normal people—to say nothing of people actively targeting me with bodily fluids from the high ground.

Pro: I could maybe figure out who they are and sic the police on their parents’ houses.

Con: They might figure out who I am and bombard my home with their entire arsenal.

Pro: I have no better idea, and Belton will be around in twenty.

So I grab some rubber gloves and my reading glasses for protection and rush out onto the dirt knoll that rounds the facility.

I stand on top of the knoll and look up at the tower. The tower and its maintenance walkway are silhouetted against the sun and, sure enough, there’s a figure up there leaning over the safety railing.

“But only one?” It looks like a boy—tall and lanky, with bony shoulders and skinny arms. His head is lowered against his chest, like he’s looking down through the catwalk.

I duck along the façade of the main building. He didn’t see me looking up at him. I decide this is a moment for stealth.

If I’m careful, I can avoid detection. Maybe I can even climb 66

up before he can reach for his stash of balloons. Suddenly I’m confident, in control of the whole operation.

I slink along the facility’s exterior, sticking to the shadows like a bandit. I peek out a half-dozen times, and each time he’s still looking down.

I make my way to the tower’s ladder, circumventing the main expanse under the tower. I stand against the water tower beam nearest the ladder and suck in two lungs full of mid-noon air.

I do some mental calculations on how many balloons could be dropped on me in the twenty-five seconds it takes to scale the ladder. The calculations are not attractive. I take another deep breath and grab a rung.

I careen up the ladder as it shakes like a tambourine. I miss several rungs as I streak upward, and I almost fall once when both of my feet end up above my handhold. Finally, I arrive at the summit and collapse onto the metal grating.

I take a big breath and sense my vulnerability. My muscles tighten and I go fetal, in preparation for a barrage.

None comes, and I sneak a look to find the lone figure peering at me from the same position, head still lowered.

His eyes strike me first—they’re gray, or maybe olive, and watering over. His lips are pursed and his brows furrowed. His flax-blond hair is tousled; he’s been running his hands through it. He’s skinny and tall, with red acne marks dotting his cheeks. He’s wearing all black, but without the usual reflective sunglasses of the teenage gang.

We study each other for about five seconds before I leap to my feet and get into a defensive position—knees bent, hands out and ready to deflect. He doesn’t react. He turns his eyes back over the safety railing and sighs.

“I bet you’re going to tell me to get off the tower, aren’t you?” he mutters.

He exhales with his nose as he speaks. He must be fifteen, no more—just barely past pubescent voice cracks. He puts one leg behind him and leans further against the railing.

I have a fleeting hope that he might leave if I say ‘yes’ firmly. ‘Probably not, dolt,’ my inner voice snaps, and then my 67

inner voice of Schaltinger kicks in: ‘Here’s a chance to build some rapport! This child is begging for some rapport!’

“Hey,” I start. “Hey, hey, hey, I wasn’t going to do that.”

“Well, what are you up here to do?” the kid asks.

“Oh, I’m up here to do maintenance work!”

I reach for my toolbelt, to pull out a wrench or some WD40 as proof, but I realize I left it in my office. The kid gives my fumbling hand an eyeball. I give him a cheeky smile back.

‘He thinks I’m a pudding-head.’ I stand awkwardly, debating whether retreat is a viable option. Benson said ‘get the teenagers off the tower,’ and technically one teenager is not teenagers.

“You’re up here to tell me to get lost, I know it. Everybody tells me to get lost.” The kid sucks in his lip like he’s been gut-punched and turns away from me. His hands grip onto the railing and his black hoodie flops on his back as he swings his head.

“No, no you don’t have to get lost.” I pause. “I don’t want you to get lost like… those other people?”

He coughs. “Yeah, those other people.”

He turns back to me. “They left me here. They said I wasn’t ‘cool’ enough to ride with them. They said I wasn’t the ‘real shit.’ I’ve been riding with them for months and now they decide that I’m not good enough for them. Fuck them!”

His eyes strain as he yells. His hands go pale clenching the guardrail. I imagine him in army-green on an obstacle course, hurtling a vault, with his gritted teeth and wild, thundery eyes.

‘It’s rapport time, now or never. Engage him! What’s topical?’

“So, what’s with the black?” I ask. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ my inner voice and Schaltinger’s chastise in harmony.

He looks down at his uniform. “I don’t know. They made me buy it all, as a part of my membership.”

“Do you like black?”

He flops his head down on the railing. “No, not really.”

“Don’t you guys usually wear sunglasses too?”

“Yeah, but only when we’re fully initiated. The glasses are only for ‘real members.’ ” “That’s kind of dumb,” I offer. ‘This is rapport! I can bond 68

with him by knocking the rest of the teenagers!’

He hesitates before answering. “Yeah, it is kind of stupid,” he says softly.

A moment passes. The kid’s looking down, through the grating of the walkway. I stare blankly, desperately grasping for some confident line.

“I’m sorry about your friends. They sound pretty uncool to me. I don’t like them because they’re always throwing balloons and stuff down from this tower, and I know you wanted to be a part of their group, but they seem like jerks so maybe you’re lucky, in a way.”

I watch the kid expectantly. His eyes are still down.

“Plus, I think they don’t know you very well. I think you have a strong spirit.”

He remains silent.

“A certain je ne sais quoi,” I add.

That one’s from Schaltinger.

He tilts his head over to me. His right nostril sneers a bit and his eyes shoot me a questioning glare. They’re no longer watery.

“Oh, it’s French,” I begin to explain. “It just means… well, it’s hard to explain.”

Dang it Schaltinger.

He looks down one more time, sighs deeply, and turns to me.

“Okay, I feel better. I’m ready to go.”

The kid takes his hands off the railing. Internally, I’m ecstatic. He’s no longer clamped onto the tower. Rapport worked—at least for one teenager.

“Thanks for, um, listening to me and everything,” the kid murmurs.

Quickly, he shoots past me to the ladder. He swings himself over and finds a rung, then gives it three swift kicks that make a metallic sound like a xylophone, as if he’s testing it. He hustles down.

“Wait!” I call. He looks up, to the top of the tower past me. His face is framed against his black outfit and the shady turf below. His olive-gray eyes match the darkened grass.

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“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Um, Johnny,” he shouts. He looks back down and takes the last few rungs to solid ground.

‘Well, that was largely successful,’ I think to myself. I avoided balloons and I kind of bonded with this kid Johnny. I’ll have to thank Schaltinger tomorrow. I’ll bring him almonds. Yeah, more almonds for Schaltinger. Maybe some cashews, too.

I take a hold of the railing and hoist myself onto the first rungs. I look down and Johnny isn’t there anymore. I didn’t see him walk off, so he must be against one of the support beams of the tower, hidden in the shade.

I hurry down and step off the ladder. I can hear Johnny moving his feet behind me. I turn to him, standing there. With at least five friends. And balloons. He hurls the first one as I purse my lips and drop into the fetal position.

They throw balloon after balloon. After the initial wet shock, I don’t feel them. The cold smell fills my nostrils.

The teenagers holler the whole time, their shouts mangling together.

Eventually the barrage peters out and I hear their footfalls slipping on the soaked hill. One of them shouts to Johnny— not Johnny, probably—“Nice job, newbie!” They bound off down the hilltop and drop to the overpass where the din of traffic drowns their yells.

I’m left alone on the grassy field. I lie, exhausted. No urine dripped into my mouth during the ambush. I count that and other blessings.

Belton comes around at two, as promised. I’m still lying drenched and cold in the shadow of the tower. He walks up behind me and whistles.

“Well, well. I take it they’re off the tower.”

I don’t reply. I look past the base of the ladder at the sunsoaked white cement of the arboretum building. Its glass panels glisten like raindrops on changing autumn leaves.

“You can take the rest of the day,” Belton says. “But first thing tomorrow, grab the power-washer and hose down this grass. It smells like piss out here.”

Fleetingly, I have the impulse to rise and bearhug Belton. I 70

want to crush him so badly, so suddenly. The urge flees just as quickly. “Yes, sir,” I say.

Belton clicks his tongue and his footsteps recede down the hill. I’m still staring at the arboretum walls. They’re so white, like snow on a lonely mountain.

‘Power-washer,’ my mind offers, an idea too late.

“Yes, power-washer,” I parrot. “Next time: power-washer.”

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La Fouly Nathan Miao Photography

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73

THE PARADE Joshua Peng

G

abriel’s coffee was going cold. The clatter of mugs against tables, the hoarse shouts of order numbers, and the cramped murmuring that blanketed Schiller’s Cafe were filtered into an immutable drone as he stooped over his corner table. Gabriel was a young man with carefully parted hair that framed a soft Slavic face studded with distant eyes.

Thin and monklike in his stillness, few other patrons took note as he watched a whorl of cream dissipate into his drink. In protest of the unusual Sunday morning excitement, his brow creased in frustration and disappointment. There had been a parade earlier, and Gabriel had missed his entrance.

Asthmatic, anemic, frail, weak—he was diagnosed with many names in his youth. His own name was christened prophylactically; the town priest prayed that the eponymous archangel would preserve his health. Ultimately, angels and Catholicism did little to help. Rather, it was his father’s second job as a postman combined with their family farm that made just enough to raise him. Being subject to these conditions did not, however, make Gabriel weak-willed; what he lacked in build, he made up for in intellect. Though he was expected to help in the fields once he came of age, he enrolled in primary school instead, excelling in his classes and racking up academic rewards and recognition to feed his hungry mind. For his efforts, he was awarded a book of poetry by the Headmaster upon graduation, which immediately became his most prized possession. Though he found sparse comfort in friends or in his home, the rhythms of the book’s poetry beat to the drum of individuality, freedom, and belonging. It sang to the tune of rebellion against nature and powerful men—a tune that Gabriel had harmonized with since his birth.

What can I do? Who is there to help me?

There are few hands and all too little strength.

He sipped quietly from his mug.

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In his hometown, there was little use for intellect and even less use for literature. After primary school, Gabriel’s hands returned reluctantly to the fields. Still, his mind would trace back to the words tucked away under his pillow during the misty mornings when he struggled to carry firewood from the nearby forest. It was miserable work for a boy like him. Every knot in the bark pressed a duplicate into his gangly back. Every sharp branch was a laceration to his ego. Still, despite being more physically sore and bruised than ever, he was decidedly less lonely. On nights when he finished his work early, he spent countless hours in the city prowling for strangers to discuss poetry with, eventually finding the few of his age who would allow the words in his book to materialize into acquaintances, then into friends. This evening crowd, though not as sickly as he, were just as afflicted with politics as he was with his body.

He quoted Petar II to them and they criticized Nicholas II to him. They valued his vigor and he gorged himself on their company.

Their conversations about prose and public affairs gave Gabriel his first sense of individual power and strength. Unlike the village children who he had tried desperately to run along and play with during his youth, Gabriel could keep up with these characters without running out of breath. He could sit back and allow his lungs to fill with the conversation of late evenings and early mornings, standing up only to emphasize a crucial point to an argument. Those were tumultuous times in the political landscape, and Gabriel feasted in it.

I am a lone straw, tossing in the whirlwind a sad orphan without friend or kinfolk.

The June sun shone brightly.

The radio static of Schiller’s Cafe continued to melt into the soft breeze of his recollection. His first time at a public park was with his evening posse. Up until then, Gabriel had never been invited to an outing amongst friends. He had also never seen such an expanse of lush green grass, perfectly trimmed to the liking of strolling mothers and dogs. He felt as though he was intruding on an impressionist painting and was only brought out of his stupor by the sound of his friends’ 75

grunts as they propped up shooting targets in the center of the field. Gabriel reached out expectantly as the oldest of the group revealed a set of hand pistols.

“Browning model from Belgium, semi-automatic. They’re all the rage,” Gabriel remembered him grinning. The stuffing of the targets spilled over the lawn as they practiced their aim.

Tufts of white goose feathers diluted the vast portrait of green, and Gabriel wondered whether his parents would be proud of his accuracy.

“This one’s for the farmers, and this one’s for the poor. This one’s for my parents, and this one’s for me.”

My people sleep a deep and lifeless sleep; no parent’s hand to wipe away my tears.

The cafe swelled with excitement.

There had been a rumble in the ground. A crescendo of shouts. A speeding motorcade. And then it was gone. All of what Gabriel had worked for in the last six years, gone.

His shoulders and brain couldn’t bear it. How could he look into their eyes again? How could he meet his friends’ disappointment with anything but shame and unmitigated failure? The crowds around him and the coffee in front of him, oblivious and speckled with stale discoloration, were poor substitutes for the company that he knew he had lost that day.

The chance had presented itself, but he had hesitated.

Above my head the heaven is shut tight; it does not hear my cries or my prayers.

Where were his friends?

Then he realized that they too had hesitated and, in a choreography of shame, squirmed back into the woodwork.

That was, after all, what he was doing sitting in Schiller’s.

He didn’t even like coffee. He knew that they were also embarrassed at their failure, and his stoic lips parted into a grin.

There were too many of them to fail, yet they still blundered spectacularly. There would be no more evening rendezvous. If he saw them in the streets they would avert each other’s gaze, pretending to themselves and to the crowd that Sunday the twenty-eighth of June had been no different from the rest of the week. The ground rumbled quietly.

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O my dark day! O my black destiny!

O my wretched Serbian nation snuffed out!

A rumble in the ground. A crescendo of shouts.

A lost car separated from the motorcade.

What luck! His chance had reappeared. The parade had not concluded after all. The second act had only begun, the dramatic irony far richer than his cheap latte. But was it the right car? The monk in the corner table leapt to his feet and pushed through a sea of excited patrons with the velocity of redemption. He burst out the door and walked fast—not running—avoiding the expectant faces fogging up the cafe windows. Then he caught sight of the ridiculous feathers atop their ridiculous hats and, confirming what he already knew, he could not hold himself back any longer.

You rule the throne you’ve unjustly taken and are prideful of your bloody scepter.

This one’s for the farmers, and this one’s for the poor.

This one’s for my parents, and this one’s for me.

In two shots of the Browning model from Belgium, semiautomatic, the Archduke was dead and so was his wife—she was an accidental casualty. Gabriel Princip, or Gavrilo Princip in Serbian, had heard that she too had once been the subject of ridicule from the rich and powerful, but he couldn’t remember her name. The parade was hardly over; it had only just begun.

It was to be the longest, most spectacular show of all time, with dance numbers millions strong to line streets and fill the trenches. The route of the Archduke’s hubristic motorcade was only an opening kickline. They would call it the Great Parade, the Show to End All Shows, and all the nations of Europe would come to see the spectacle. As for the lead actor, the parade marshal, the Serbian hero, all that he had to do now was to glut in the immortal recognition that history would bestow upon his marvelous opening number.

A hundred times I’ve cursed that hour last year when the Turks failed, or didn’t want, to kill me; my people’s hopes I would not betray now.

There came a crescendo of shouts, and the June sun shone brightly.

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Seeing Double Vanessa Schor Digital Photography 8.5 x 11”

Heart of the Sea Hannah Anderson Ceramic 4 x 4 x 4”

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Crucifying Fish, Waiting for Death Zoha Arif

This piece is inspired by and contains allusions to George Saunder’s short story Sticks 80

N

ana hasn’t seen an ocean or lake for decades, since she left the business of fish bladder trafficking, since her husband, a middle man for the fish mafia, was thrown overboard into a ring of hammerheads on a wet night. Perhaps that’s why she’s so easily excited by thunderstorms. When I visited her a few years ago, she sat for two hours watching a passing storm. At the time, Nana lived in a one bedroom apartment facing the inner courtyard of her brick high-rise complex, a matted grassland dotted with weed, mosquitos, mice, and thickets of vines, crawling up the brick walls like arms jabbed and poked by needles. When I tilted my head far enough, I could see the opening above the courtyard through the window, where black clouds billowed from the west, their brassy countenances fattening the air and dulling everything.

We sat in silence that evening, Nana with green tea, me with my bitten finger-beds, rain slapping the window a thousand times over, both of us watching the courtyard bleed with water and the vine fade away in a blur of mist. Nana soaked in the brilliance and brute violence of the storm, intrigued and fascinated, whilst I didn’t see anything different with this thunderstorm than the last.

When mama plows us to Nana’s house, there are eruptions of periodic yelling and questions of do we really have to go? God, it’s so boring there, there’s nothing to do. And always, with clinging fingers to the front door, we drive to her house in silence. For a couch, Nana has a tower of three mattresses. There are always cockroaches on these mattresses because Nana eats here, so we have learned over the years to glance over the tower before pressing ourselves together onto the thing. The Pakistani flag, just a patch of dark green and the vertex of a crescent moon, melts out from in between the bottom two mattresses like cheese in a burger.

Nana has had the same pack of 12 assorted colored pencils for decades, each one accentuated with bite marks in the places the pencil was held in between her teeth for con81

centration when she’s meticulously drawing sharks on the corners of napkins. Her drawings seem childish to me now (the sharks looking more like a portly circular whale), but when I was more naive, I thought otherwise. Her sharks were once blue and white, with full bodies and sharp, canine teeth, eyes, bulbous hair, and always a toothy smile. But on the back of a Chipotle napkin once, Nana drew a shark with a trace of red around the mouth, like lipstick, and said “something like Kool-aid, that’s what it ate.” From there, the innocent blue and white sharks vanished, and to replace them were purple sharks with mozzarella sticks and tarantella-shaped rings and glittered sharks with disco balls for eyes and chicken tenders for a fin.

Nana cannot understand English, yet the only channel she can tolerate is CNN, as if there is comfort in letting the foreign voice of a newscaster plump her apartment. She throws a fit coupled with a period of verbal shunning if we ever do so much as request a change of channel. So we sit quietly, quaintly on the tower of mattresses. One time, Nana asked about the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate broadcast on CNN, but my pashto vocabulary on political jargon was not stellar and so my explanations did not suffice her questions. But still she kept pressing me, more questions that I could not answer, and so before my patience wronged me, I fled to the bathroom with the intent of staying there until Nana’s faze passed. Standing in front of the mirror, in a dull, yellow light, a part of me thought that I won’t miss this when Nana is gone. But I quickly buried the thought because what sickened grandchild wishes for their grandmother’s death. When I emerged from the bathroom, CNN still hummed against the walls, as always, but Nana was resting by the window, one cheek pressed against the glass like a pancake. On a napkin in her lap, there was a shark with a party hat, a cake balanced on its head, green teardrops springing from its gills. I sat on the tower of mattresses and looked at the wedding ring in the fishnet underneath the row of army medals by the door.

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One summer Nana stayed over for Ramadan. She’s had joint pain for years around the perimeter of her knee but never believed in doctors so its been left untreated. She slept on an air mattress in the entry hall of our house because she couldn’t trek up the stairs to the guest room and refused to be carried.

She spent her days with the front door open, watching the cars and cradling her 12 colored pencils. A friend once came over and asked what’s with your grandmother and sharks? and I stared at her wide-eyed.

During Ramadan, we took Nana to Target. She was awed by most everything in the store, pointing to this and that and commanding me to push her wheelchair over so she can touch this and that. She spent an hour staring at the selection of biking helmets and I sat on a tricycle, utterly bored. As we passed the stationary aisle, I plucked a pack of fresh colored pencils for Nana, remembering her finger-sized and dilapidated set, bitten from decades of shark drawings. But Nana hissed and slapped them way when she saw them, asked how I could commit such an abomination of an act, and verbally shunned me for a couple of hours, her usual way of voicing her distaste.

Later that day, as we sat at a McDonald’s, Nana licked her fingers of the remaining crumbs of a chicken McNugget, her bony hands and ivory limbs reaching across the table for more, brown eyes wide and excited, almost like a child. That night Nana drew a shark modeling a bicycle helmet and hid it underneath her pillow.

After each visit, the joy perspiring from our bodies from the feeling of driving away from Nana’s house, on the road to our normal lives, our outside lives, is a fire on its own.

As Nana’s brick-high-rise complex shrinks into a facet of the far-off scenery, looking back at the thing, infested with mice and cock-roaches and riddled with constant power-outages, I wonder if Nana wants more from life than this.

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Later on, in my teenage years, Nana became outwardly devout to God. Visits compromised of shark drawings and long epilogues on the Prophet Mohammad, Jesus, Moses (peace be upon them), and Allah, the all-knowing, the most-gracious, the merciful. Imams and Islamic Scholars replaced CNN. Nana cannot understand Arabic, but she still lets the voice of the Arabic quran, the holy scripture, plump her apartment. Strangely, Nana lightened during this time, and carried herself as if she had a sweet secret, as if God had given her a glimpse of the seven heavens.

The night before my cousin’s sixteenth birthday, in the early morning hours, Nana rolled to the freezer and threw the ice-cream cake out the window, explaining the next morning that birthdays are not to be celebrated in this way, this Western way. Praise God on your birthday, she said, for letting you live this long and recognize that you are one day closer to the Day of Judgement, the promised meeting with your lord, and death. I refused to say what the others said, that Nana is crazed, because she was 84, and not much longer.

Nana died on a Tuesday in March. At her funeral, we played hide-and-seek. The ceremony itself was hushed and startlingly short, and afterwards we stood in the parking lot of the cemetery, talking and running and enjoying a great deal of hilarity. Nana who stole napkins to draw sharks, drained everyone with constant warnings about God, lived in a place we all pitched in to pay for but were all too happy to leave, why did she bite the bait but not stay hooked? The fishing is good, better for us, when Nana is on the other side of the lake, because that way the bass and salmon will have nothing to fear and come near, fill our pooling bellies, something Nana wouldn’t do.

When Mama and I went to her apartment to empty it for the landlord, I found three cereal boxes full of napkins littered with shark drawings. The last shark left by Nana was 84

the strangest one I’d ever seen; it had a round stump for a tail, massive, bulging eyes, humanoid legs, and arms jetting from the gills and fins. In a cookie tin-can, I found the remains of Nana’s 12 assorted colored pencils. Mama looked at them once and said that they’ve got no worth, utter trash, but I shuffled a few into my backpack anyway. That night, I tried not to think of the army medals, the piggy bank filled with ashes, the twenty thousand Pakistani rupees left in a safe underneath the kitchen sink, the binoculars and fishing net and fishing rod thrown on top of the fridge, Nana sleeping on an air mattress by the front door with her shoulders shaking and sagging like teardrops, her hollow stare at the bleating rain, the strange joy she found in chicken nuggets and thunderstorms, her cracked countenance, this knowing that there will be no more fits during the drive to Nana’s house, the certainty that this is what we internally, quietly wanted.

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Humpty Dumpty Suha Arshad Acrylic on canvas 18 x 24”

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Fennel and the Great Sleep Annie Mahaffey

88

Down in the lily swamp, a frog named Fennel sits and sits and sits and sits and writes his poetry on a lily pad of lily white paper with a pen (not of a lily) but stolen from a human.

Fennel is a kind frog, he gathers all his friends for a poetry review and they come because Fennel is a kind frog.

He reads his poetry aloud, he serves frog-green tea.

“This one is inspired by Frost,” he says.

“Not in structure but idea.”

(Now how does a Frog know of Frost? You ask.

The how is unimportant, just focus on the what.)

Fennel continued, “It’s all about November.

I get sad in November.

But the sadness has a hope to it that I feel, in my gut” - and here he puffed it up in demonstration “I get sad in November.”

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And he read with great solemnity, “November, to me, is a bleary-bleak stepping stone, space-between-spaces.

The emptiness of trees after red leaf months, autumn’s shedding, clears way for the blowing of blizzards, creating spaces where animals wonder if they could, should, would courage no, ‘brave’ the elements.

November is parcel of preparation, as hibernation beckons to steal away sorrows and replace them with peace.

Some lament the coming of the Great Sleep, they fear erasure of memory in favor of hallucination-imagination, imagination of dreams.

Not for me. Not for me. Rest, rest is what I seek.

I seek the smooth-warm shelter of a hollow tree,

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a bed of crumbly, worn-soft leaves that have been folded, unfolded so much that they are as soft-supple as fabric.

I wish to forget for a moment that I am a frog and combine my soul and worn-soft body with the great forest spirits whose voices, blanketed with snow, will only seem louder as they whisper ancient stories of men and men-eaters in my ears.

I seek a soul communion, frog and forest, matrimony of martyrs; blessed by the gods.

I want to dream of the human girl I saw that day in October, crossing streams and spewing words.

I watched her grumble as she lost her footing, I watched the light spark up in her eyes.

If it were me, if I were fallible, I don’t think the light would spark so much as fade away. Resiliency, like rainfall, leaves my being more quickly than I’d like.

And I think it’s because I fear so much.

November seems to heighten every crevice and every creak and every branch snap that seem to threaten, and I wish very much that December would hurry.

Hibernation is reprieve.

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Closing out the world is much less scary much less scary is just to sleep.

When fears get dam-deep, I wish to be a December frog forever.

For the infinite abyss seems so extra large when you are so extra small, and cold nights all the colder.

Much less scary is just to sleep.

I get sad in November.

Rest, rest is what I seek.

I wish to be a December frog forever, But” - and here he puffed “I always change my mind in spring.”

And all the creatures clapped for Fennel, the hare, the mouse, the mole.

They ensured him they had never heard anything quite like it, and that this Frost fellow must’ve been a good bean to write a poem that inspired this one.

Fennel felt his smile return, and well into the night, he laid awake swelling with all that they had said.

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A Letter to My Mama Camden Coleman

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ou used to wash me with your bare hands when I was a little boy. You’d fill up the tub in the bathroom with hot water from the stove and rub me down with handmade soap that grandmama made herself. The soap was hard and rough, but your hands were always so smooth and gentle. You used to sing to me while you worked the soap into my arms and legs, and I used to sit there and close my eyes, listening to your voice. You would always practice the hymns that you’d sing for choir the next Sunday. Your favorite was “To God Be the Glory,” and I can still hear your voice now, half humming, half singing. I remember sitting in that bathtub and seeing nothing but your bright eyes smiling back at me. Then you would dry me off and call me your little man and dress me up for school. You always made sure I had some crackers in my pocket in case I got hungry, and you wouldn’t step back inside the house until I had gotten on the bus.

Mama, I wish I could feel your touch.

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You used to take me to the park and watch me play on the jungle gym on the days when you didn’t have to work. I used to love to run around the park, jumping off hills and climbing on monkey bars, always looking back at you to see if you were watching. You would always be there, smiling back at me, and I could hear you say, look at you go, boy. I’d laugh and run around again, and sometimes I’d jump off something too high and hurt myself, and I’d look up to find your face, and you’d just stand there with that warm smile and tell me you’re okay son, get on up. And I’d get up and run and run and run. I’d get on the rocking horse and pretend I was a cowboy from one of the Westerns grandmama used to love to watch. I’d ride and pretend to shoot my gun at the bad guys until they shot me, and I’d fall off the horse and play dead. You didn’t like that part, but you let me do it anyway. And then I’d run some more, until I couldn’t run anymore. And when I was ready to go home, you would walk up to me and ask me are you ready to go, son, and we’d walk all the way back home, just me and you.

Mama, I’m ready to go home.

Sometimes, on the days when I didn’t have school, you would bring me with you to work. We’d get on the L at 7:30 and ride the train all the way downtown. You’d sit me on your lap, and I’d stare out the window, watching all the houses speed by. You used to hold on to me tight, and sometimes you would raise your voice at the men on the train who tried to touch us. When you got to work, sometimes you would have to raise your voice with the manager, because I wasn’t supposed to be there, but he always let me in. You would let me sit on the edge of the beds while you cleaned hotel rooms, one by one. You were the best one at your job; you left every room spotless. You used to tell me that leaving a clean room for someone else was your way of spreading God’s love, and that one day that love might be returned to you. You never left a stain uncleaned, or a speck of dust unswept. You got on your 95

hands and knees and scrubbed the bathroom floors until they shined and said a prayer before leaving every room. When you were done, your smell used to give me a headache, but I never told you. Sometimes you would sleep on the train on the way back home, but only for a minute. When you would wake up, your hand would squeeze me, and it hurt, but then you would tell me you’re sorry and smile. You never smiled with your teeth, except for with me. When you smiled at me your mouth opened wide and your face lit up so bright. When you smiled at me, I knew everything was okay.

Mama, I miss that smile.

When I was a child, I was afraid of thunderstorms. I would see the dark clouds and hear the thunder and run to the bathroom and tuck myself behind the toilet with my head in my hands. One day, while you and I were at grandmama’s house after church, a bad storm rolled in. I felt the air turn cold, and I saw the sky turn purple as the clouds darkened and the sun fell away. I ran inside and almost reached the bathroom door before you grabbed my arm and held me tight. You saw the fear in my face, and you smiled. You walked me out of the front door and sat me down next to you on grandmama’s porch swing. We sat there while you held my hand, and we watched the storm roll in. When you saw my eyes widen in fear, you gripped my hand even tighter and told me not to be afraid. We sat on the porch and watched the clouds and the rain and the thunder roll over our heads, and when it was over you smiled at me, and we walked back inside. You told me, see son, there ain’t nothing in this world to be afraid of.

Well Mama, I’m afraid now.

When I started grade school, you used to check my report card every week. You used to keep them in one of your kitchen drawers, just below the drawer where you kept your important mail. Sometimes, I would try to hide my report card and tell 96

you that I forgot to bring it home from school. But you would always find it, and then you would give me a whooping for lying. You used to spank me with your wooden salad spoon, and sometimes with a switch, but never with a belt. You never looked at me in the eyes when you hit me. But when I had a good report card, you were so proud. You used to open the drawer when your friends would come over and tell them to look at this, look at my son, and you would smile and laugh with the other women. Sometimes, when I brought home all A’s, you would pick up a tub of ice cream from the corner store on the way home from work, and we’d sit and eat ice cream and watch cartoons on our couch in front of the TV. Mama, I hope you’re proud of me.

I was eleven years old when I first met my father. He came home on a Thursday night, before you got back from work.

You told me not to open the door for anyone, and I never did.

But when the man at the door told me he was my father, I didn’t know what to do. He held a beer in one hand and some roses in the other. He didn’t speak to me that night. We sat on the couch, and he watched TV while I did my schoolwork.

When you came home and saw him sitting there, you cried.

You hugged and kissed him, longer and harder than the other men that I had seen you bring home before. You went to the bedroom and closed the door. I covered my ears and turned up the volume on the TV so I couldn’t hear. Late that night, you came into my room and told me my father was home, and that he would be living with us now, and that you need to call him daddy, just like you call me mama, Jefferey, and you best do as I say, because daddy has a bad temper. You knelt at my bed and prayed for me, like you had done every night, and then left and returned to your room at the call of my father. That was the last night that you prayed for me.

Mama, I need you to pray for me now.

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My father used to hit me with his belt, and sometimes you would leave the house so you didn’t have to hear me cry under the whip of his belt buckle. He used to hit me until I bled, and then he would start on my other cheek. At night I would hear you and him arguing in the bedroom about how he treated me. After about thirty minutes, you would go silent, and I wouldn’t hear nothing else for the rest of the night. The first time I saw my father put his hands on you was after a night that he beat me real bad. I was swollen and bleeding, and I cried on the floor of our house. You came into the living room and saw me and started to raise your voice. Before you could get out a sentence, he slapped you across the face and you fell to the ground. He dragged me off the floor and made you watch while he took his belt to my back. When you pushed my father and begged him to stop, he took his belt to you, too. Late that night, when you knew my father was asleep, you promised that you would always protect me. You came close to my bed and got on your knees to pray, but when you heard my father begin to rustle in the bed, you left me and the stain on my sheets from where you had been crying.

Mama, I wish you could save me now.

By the time I was a Junior in high school, you had been on drugs for over two years. My father had turned your house into a crackhouse, and everybody on the block that used would stay there. When grandmama passed, you had nobody to look out for you, and my father took advantage. He sold you to his friends and used your passed out body to please himself and make money on the side. I had moved out of the house that year and was staying with Monique at a spot she had taken over when her daddy died. She took me in when she found out I was spending the night in the school gym, and if it wasn’t for her, I would’ve had nobody. I avoided going home as much as I could, but when I did, my father never let me see you.

He used to stand in the door and tell me I don’t live here no more, and if keep comin’ round it’s gone be trouble, son, and 98

you don’t want that. And so I’d go back to Monique’s. But I heard about you from the local crackheads on the block, and from my classmates whose fathers went to see mine on the weekends. They called you all kinds of names, Mama, but I knew you weren’t any of those things. You were my angel.

Mama, I hope the angels in heaven look just like you.

I tried to save you, Mama. My father had found me at Monique’s one day and told me that you had breast cancer and were going to have to have chemo, but he couldn’t afford to pay for it. He asked me for money, Mama, but I had none. So I made a couple deals, and I sold some things that I promised you I’d never sell, Mama. I’m sorry. I made the money and I gave it to my father, I gave it to him to help you, Mama. The next deal I made, I was busted. They gave me two years for possession with intent to sell, and the police said they were tipped off by an informant who knew me well. I wrote you letters, Mama, but I had no one to give them to. I knew that my father wouldn’t let you read the mail. And I didn’t know anyone who could get them to you. So I wrote to you, I wrote to you every day, and I put my letters in the back of my Bible, and placed it under my pillow each night before I went to sleep. They told me if I acted good, they’d give me a chance to get out early. I did good, Mama. I went to chapel every Sunday and led Bible study on the weekdays. I picked up the trash in the cafeteria and mopped the floors every night. I took anger management classes and learned how to read Hebrew. They let me out nine months early. When they released me, Monique picked me up, and we drove straight to the house. I knew that you would be healthy by now if the chemo had worked right.

I was ready to see you, Mama. When I got to the house, I saw my father’s brand new Cadillac. He had bought new rims and wide tires, and he sat on the front porch smoking a cigar with his hands wrapped around the waist of a tall young woman.

She looked nothing like you, Mama. When I asked my father where you were, he told me that that old bitch probably in that 99

shelter on Kenwood, if she’s still breathing, that is, and there ain’t nothing left for you over here no more, you hear, so don’t be coming ‘round here if you don’t want no trouble.

Mama, he never deserved your love.

When I came to see you, I barely recognized you. Your face was sunken in, and you had bruises on your wrists from where you had cut yourself. Your skin was peeling, and your clothes were stained from where you had done business on yourself. When I squeezed your hand and called your name, you couldn’t bring your eyes to meet me. I heard you mumble, but your mouth never formed any words. Your voice was so weak, and your hands were so cold, Mama. They had put you in a wheelchair, but you were too weak to push yourself around. You sat in the corner of a damp room, with a bed that had one fitted sheet on it. Your door had been left open, and the dust from the halls had covered the floor of your room.

The walls were covered in mold, and there were insects and rats scurrying around in the corners of the room. There was a bathroom on the back wall with a bathtub and no curtains, and no mirror. There was a radio on the windowsill that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. No one had swept the floors for you, Mama, or cleaned the tubs and wiped down the windows.

No one had washed the walls and dusted in the nooks and the crannies. No one had prepared your bed with love. No one had blessed that room, Mama.

I rolled you into the bathroom and ran the water, but it never got warm. I took off your clothes and placed you in the water, and I saw what was left of the body that my father had abused. You looked so tired, Mama. I took what was left of a bar of soap from the sink counter, and I washed you with my bare hands. I tried to be gentle with your scars and your bruises. I cleaned the mess from underneath you and I washed your hair. I sang your favorite hymn and tried to remember as many words as I could, Mama.

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How can I say thanks, For the things you have done for me? Things so undeserved, Yet you gave to prove your love for me The voices of a million angels Could not express my gratitude All that I am and ever hope to be I owe it all to thee I took you back to Monique’s place that night, and I got you into new clothes and into bed. I made sure that it was made just the way you liked it, with the comforter left untucked and the top rolled back. You were breathing, but you had been asleep ever since I brought you back from the shelter. I got on my knees beside the bed, and I prayed for you.

I prayed that God forgive you, that He forgive me, and that He let you rest. I prayed that you may join Him in heaven, and live in everlasting joy, knowing that God had returned your love. You never said a word, but I know you heard me, Mama.

I know God heard me. The next morning, you were gone.

Mama, I will see you again.

I bought a gun with the leftover money Monique had loaned me to pay for the burial. I had never shot a gun before, Mama, but I knew that I wouldn’t miss. I arrived at my father’s house late on a Sunday night. I waited until after midnight to knock on his front door, so that I would not sin on the Lord’s Day. He came to the door drunk and dirty, holding on to an old pipe. He opened the front door, and then the gate. I shot him once in the head, and twice in the chest. He laid dead in the entrance while his woman and the other crackheads ran out of every door and window in the house. I sat on the front steps and waited for the police to arrive, and they arrested me without saying a word. They charged me with murder in the first degree and sentenced me to death. I’ve been here for seven years, Mama, but today they called my name.

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Mama, I’m ready to see you.

Sometimes, before my father came home from prison, when you didn’t have to sing in the choir, you’d sit with me in church. Sometimes we would get sleepy during the sermon, and you’d bring candy so that we would have something sweet to chew on to keep us awake. We’d suck on the candy and smile at each other, and you’d put your arm around me and hold me close to you, and I’d feel your heartbeat and the ring of the pastor’s voice in my chest. After finishing the candy, we’d take the pencil and paper used for the offering and pass notes back and forth to each other. One Sunday, after you had spanked me for getting in trouble in school, I wrote you a note and asked you if you loved me, even when I did bad things.

You wrote back and said of course I love you, son, I’ll love you till the end of time, whether everyone loves you or no one loves you at all, I will always love you, whether I can say it or not, whether I’m here with you or not, I love you. My love is everlasting; it exists in the night and the day, the cold and the heat, through life and through death. No matter where you are, who you are, or what you’ve done, you can always know that your Mama loves you.

Mama, I love you too.

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Çaydanlik Sera Eviner Clay 6 x 6 x 10” 103

My Journey Zhaohan Song Collage 19.1 x 19.8”

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I put my blue light glasses on at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday Daniella Ndubuisi-Ike

Cuz I woke up in the new day’s yawn startled by my prickly back, and typed into the search bar “What type of pea did the princess sleep on?”

But google tried selling me a duvet worth 2 grand, So I typed again: “What the fuck kind of bed was she sleeping on anyway?!”

No documents matched my search But damn, I know I felt something under me this morning, something on my back.

It was real heavy though, had the heat of stars.

I ruffled through the layers of bedding twice, hoping I was a princess on a pea or realistically a lychee, some hard-shelled thing at least.

Still wouldn’t explain it, the weigh down I mean, Galapagos splayed on its own mound type of weigh down. I think someone put that shit on me.

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There’s a giant blonde web in the shower made from the gift of a white girl’s scalp. I know a spider saw that shit and said “now why would you leave rotting silk in the drain?” I turned my head up, held it there to relax you know, take my mind off my back you know, but the web stretched out all tendril-like and grabbed my neck to choke me. I know cuz strands were falling out from the head right from where the water used to be Thin blonde long ass bullets tickling me to death. I mean really.

Cuz have you ever had something on your back that feels white?

Hot heavy like stars, the frothing end of a waterfall white like contrast - type that calls a black stain the n word?

Type to spit your name and touch your hair and scuff your shoes. White enough to grab your face, and choke your neck and put all that damn weight on your back I mean for real...

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parking garage Jonathan Wong Canon PowerShot A470 11.02 x 8.26”

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Jupiter Plate Shannon Vogel Clay 11 x 11 x 2”

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True Stories About Being American Maximilian Paul

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n summer nights in Jackson, Wyoming, kids gather in the Albertson’s parking lot.

There’s no cell service in the Elk Reserve, so they keep track of each other by driving in a single file, with the headlights off so the rangers don’t see. Speakers, flashlights, vodka.

Ramy, who almost slammed their whole body into the concrete, screaming, before someone asked them to name three things they could smell, touch, hear.

Rosa, who ran into her abusive ex-boyfriend Dominic, only to be greeted by his sobbing refrain: “am I cool? am I cool?”

Kelly, who told me AM radio is the vibrational frequency of the American Spirit.

My mother, who tells me in Spanish “the problem with the United States is that everything bad, they call good, and everything good, they call bad”. This is sometimes in regards to the legalization of gay marriage.

Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dragonflies Suha Arshad 114

Acrylic on Canvas 18 x 24”

Chlöe, who asks me whether or not I consider myself a “person of color”. My response is drowned out by sirens and blinking red letters projecting from my forehead everytime I try to answer: “FAKER - FAKER - FAKER - FAKER” Of the ancestors I have never met, two of their names appear in published writing: 1. My father’s mother’s father, because he prosecuted a man who may have had advanced knowledge of the JFK assasination.

2. My mother’s mother’s brother, because on May 25th 1979, he was abducted by a CIA-backed right wing paramilitary death squad and never seen again.

SixSix Lies Lies SixSix LiesLies Isabela Seitz

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our first lie is that you are allergic to cats; in actuality, you have just hated them for the past thirteen years.

You’re nice about it, though, in that you don’t discriminate. You hate all of them equally: big, looming cats that make the floor creak as they pad over to their food bowls; small kittens just barely able to open their eyes, letting out mewls as they search for milk; skinless cats whose lack of fur make them look like a bald man who has grey skin; and, worst of all, cats with fur as soft as a down pillow who look up at you with large, pleading eyes that beg for belly scratches. Those are the ones whose owners will pick them up and shove them right in your face, droning on and on about how cute their cat is and don’t you want to hold it? No. You want to grab it and throw it out a window, its head bursting as it hits the concrete sidewalk with a sickening crunch.

But instead, you would smile and say that sadly, you are allergic. They’ll retreat, taking their menace of a pet away and putting it in a separate room so you don’t get sick.

Thank God. Your least favorite living cat used to be Emme, who is your ex-girlfriend’s cat. She has black fur and only one working eye. She liked to perch on a pillow set up on the living room’s windowsill and stare at you with such intensity that you would feel naked every time you entered the apartment. Emme was the reason for your breakup or at least a part of it. Even now, you can remember your ex’s deep cracking voice, which always made her sound like her throat was sore, telling you that, even though she understood that you wanted to keep some things private, how could you not share something as menial as why 116

you hated cats?

Now, your least favorite living cat is the stray who keeps breaking into your home. You like to keep your windows cracked open just enough so that the sounds of the busy city street below you filter into your apartment. When asked, you say that the open window is a source of inspiration and that is your second lie; the truth is that you hate silence. It is a painful reminder that you are alone. Right now, though, the one thing that stops you from spiraling into depression keeps bringing in a very unwanted visitor.

You’ve never seen your new nemesis, but you know it is a cat. A few weeks ago, you were woken up by a quiet meow, and, although it is possible that you had imagined that, the muddy paw prints that greeted you this morning were definite confirmation. They showed you what you had been hoping wasn’t the case; the four-legged creature had scratched at your walls, leaving stains on them, and ran around your living room carpet, into your bathroom, and even on top of your couch.

It laid its claim everywhere. Before the prints have even dried, you crank your windows completely shut.

But, the next night, the silence is too much and so you open the windows, burrow yourself under the quilt on your bed that your ex knitted you, and hope that the cat doesn’t wreak too much havoc in your apartment.

— Your therapist is a mousy woman who wears her glasses up as far as possible on her nose. Her hair is always in one of those confusing twists behind her neck that you have never been able to perfect with your own brown locks. She likes to take long pauses before speaking and, when she finally does, her words are directed towards the yellow legal pad in her lap. It is as though she isn’t confident in her advice for you, which you’ve always found strange seeing as you pay her to give you advice.

Well, technically your brother is the one who pays her but, still, 117

isn’t that her purpose as a therapist?

Today, you are sitting erect on her couch–hating that her office doesn’t have any firmer chairs–when you tell her that nothing has happened to you, which is your third lie. Lots of things have happened to you in your life: you have had your heart broken twice, you once led a climate protest that over a hundred thousand people attended, and your parents were murdered six days before your seventeenth birthday.

Like always, your therapist lets out an awkward laugh and responds that you must be able to think of something of note from the last week to tell her.

Well, sure. You could talk about a lot of things.

The cat in your apartment hasn’t left a trace of its existence since the paw prints two weeks ago, although you are pretty sure that it still comes every night to see if you have left any food out or maybe just to get out of the crisp October air and indoors for some warmth. You still wake up every morning with your head under your quilt, fear paralyzing you for a few minutes before you force yourself to peek out and see if it is waiting for you.

You could also mention work and the exam you just finished writing that your tenth graders will be taking tomorrow. It is unbelievably hard but you won’t have time to write another one, so you will have to curve their grades.

Dread is already pooling inside of your chest at how long it will take you to grade their tests, because when tests are hard there is more writing to sift through in order to give partial credit.

Your students, like you at their age, love to write random formulas under problems that they have no idea how to solve or just totally guess their way to an answer they spot on someone else’s page, and it will take you weeks to grade them all.

But, instead, you tell her that you got invited to a party.

This is what she wants to hear because it is something that your brother will want to hear.

Your therapist asks who invited you. She sounds surprised, 118

because she still can’t figure out if you have friends, and you tell her that one of the other teachers at your school did. You answer that you aren’t sure if you are going to go because your ex-girlfriend will probably be there and you don’t want to pretend that you haven’t thought about her constantly for the past three months. She looks down and starts to give you her normal kind of advice. You should go. Even though your ex is on the board of the school that you work at, you haven’t seen her in person since the breakup and that could be a good step.

It could help you in your healing process. Then, your therapist says that she is having dinner with your brother in a couple of days and, if you let her, she would love to tell him this.

She doesn’t normally ask you when she tells him things and so you nod and give her permission. Her eyes light up and you know it is because she loves to please your brother; she thinks you can’t tell, but you know that she is madly infatuated with him. She always brings him up in conversation and you once saw a bill on her desk for much less than her standard rate.

Also, your brother is the one who convinced you to start going to therapy to help you mend from your breakup, even offering to foot the bill as motivation, but you know better than to believe that motive. He has known how to play women ever since elementary school and your therapist is no exception; she wants to sleep with him enough that she will repeatedly break her client-patient confidentiality and let him keep tabs on his depressed older sister.

Your brother can play you just as easily and that is the reason that you have told your therapist you keep dodging his insistent requests to hang out, which is your fourth lie. The truth is that you hate being around him because he knows everything about you. You said that to your ex once in hopes of her understanding why you hadn’t introduced her to your only living family member, but she instead turned it into a fight; she realized that you felt comfortable around her because she didn’t know everything about you which, again, was fair.

You must go to the party now, though.

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When your therapist tells your brother, your brother will mention it to his friends and word will spread. The two of you have accumulated a number of mutual friends over the years and so enough people will know about it that you’ll be expected to be there. A part of you already knew that when you mentioned the invite to your therapist because it ensures that you will go to the party, but you won’t verbalize that.

Instead, you ask your therapist where she is going for dinner with your brother. And, sure enough, three days later you are standing outside of a metallic silver door with your makeup done wearing a light green sundress that is speckled with white flowers. It is much too bright for your liking, but it is the kind of thing that people would like to see you wearing because they will think it means you are happy.

You consider turning around and leaving, but then one of the history teachers at your school walks out of the elevator.

She greets you, which makes your decision for you, and you greet her back.

You have been to this apartment before and it is exactly what you would expect from your host, who is a single woman in her thirties: extremely clean, full of a seemingly endless number of chairs for visitors, and color-coordinated in a sickly combination of lime green and faded pink. Most of the people in it would call you a friend. There are coworkers who you eat lunch next to every day and their spouses, all people who are delighted when you remember their names and recall random facts about them that you have been told over the years.

There are others there who are close to the host and who you have gone out to bars with countless times. All of them seem thrilled that at your presence, because you have been much more solitary than normal recently, and you don’t have the heart to tell them that you have always been a solitary person, it is just now that you are single that you aren’t pretending to be someone you are not.

The evening improves significantly once you finally get your hands on a cocktail. The other math teacher at your school, a 120

man whose back is curled over with age, hands you the drink as he shows you a picture of his newest grandkid. He doesn’t tell you what he put in it, but the twinkle in his eyes makes you know that it is strong; he is more perceptive than most people and he can probably see that you want to feel a bit numb right now.

The cocktail is a strange red color, and it tastes like someone knocked an entire liquor cabinet into it. There is a floating orange slice on the top of the drink and, if you jostle the sides of the glass just right, it starts to accumulate liquid on it and sink downwards. You are in the middle of watching it disappear completely into the murky liquid when a familiar voice speaks to you.

It is your ex. Of course, it is your ex. She says hello like you are an old friend, even though you haven’t spoken for three months, and then she gestures to her right. There is another woman standing there, her blonde hair pulled back into what looks like a painfully tight bun, and she smiles brightly at you and sticks out her hand. You don’t register her name, but you realize abruptly that they are together. Their arms are brushing, and your ex’s head is leaning slightly downwards so it can rest on the woman’s shoulder. She is much shorter than you, they both are, and you can tell that your ex likes that she is the one in control who has to bend down a bit to touch her new girlfriend.

The woman’s nails are painted a light lavender color and you grab them, shaking her hand with your calloused one, and smile. The smile is too wide and hurts your cheeks, but relief rushes onto both of their faces and you realize that they think you are genuinely happy for them.

The liquor inside of you has made your body warm and your lips loose, so you ask the woman what she does. She says she is a lawyer, and you find yourself actually listening as she explains her most recent case, which is between a divorced couple over the custody of their cat.

Your ex intervenes and says that she shouldn’t tell that 121

story to you because you don’t like cats. She says it as though you need her to protect you and all the hurt the alcohol was keeping at bay comes rushing back. Before you know it, you are speaking again, shaking your head as you do. You say that you have a cat, which is the fifth lie.

Your ex freezes and stares directly at you. The other woman waits for a few seconds before awkwardly saying that it must be a recent purchase.

The cat wasn’t a purchase is what you actually say. You find yourself talking about your nemesis who has made every morning a living nightmare and who you have imagined trapping and starving more times than you care to admit. You talk about the furry terror in a nice way, telling them that it climbed through your window one night to escape the cold and you decided to take it in.

The lawyer coos and says you are doing a great deed adopting a stray, to which you can’t help but flirt back that it is nothing compared to getting paid to decide the fate of a cat after a failed marriage. She laughs and looks over to your ex, who is still staring at you, and her laughter stops instantly.

You are pleased, though, and leave the party shortly after.

Maybe your therapist was right and seeing your ex was a step in the right direction, although knowing that she has moved on from a teacher to a lawyer is something that will hurt much more when you are sober. You are in such a good mood that when you finally stumble into your apartment, you decide to pour a glass of milk and leave it on your kitchen counter in thanks to your fake cat.

— The cat is not massive, but it isn’t tiny. Its fur is probably white or grey, but right now it is caked in mud and extremely knotted so you can’t see any color other than a dirty brown.

On its right flank, the fur is matted down and stained in a much darker color that you guess is blood, given how it doesn’t 122

startle when you drop a carton of cranberry juice onto the floor.

You can’t move.

A cat is on your counter in a pool of milk.

There is a fallen glass next to it which has cracked almost perfectly in half and must have embedded tiny shards into the cat’s paws. The cat didn’t jump at the loud sound, but it did move and now your eyes are locked together. Its eyes are blue, which is the only color you were hoping that they wouldn’t be, and they are what make you back away slowly from the kitchen and over to your couch, sitting down on the edge of it as you pull out your phone. This should be far enough away from the cat for anything awful to happen, but your hands still shake wildly as you text the one person who has always been able to fix everything that could be fixed, asking them to come over.

A loud meow makes you look up and drop your phone in surprise. Judging by the trail of blood now on your carpet, the cat dragged itself off your counter and up onto the couch.

There are now only two couch cushions separating the two of you and, although you tell your body to move and run back to the safety of your bedroom, you are paralyzed with fear and stay still.

The cat looks at you for a while before it inches further towards you and settles down next to your thigh, tucking its legs under its torso and closing its eyes. A vision of you grabbing it by the neck and swinging it out your open windows calms you down but instantly makes you feel guilty because this cat seems seriously injured. Even though you can feel its tail twitching against your thigh with its every inhale, you decide to just stay still and let it rest.

Your door finally opens and your brother rushes into your apartment, but so does your therapist. They must have been together when you texted him because she is wearing one of his hoodies and looks guilty, but you have more important things to care about than her break of your client trust and so you ignore her and look at your brother. He is looking at the 123

couch with awestruck surprise and he asks you if you are okay.

You say that you haven’t moved since you texted him because of this stray cat that crawled into your apartment. Your therapist lets out a small laugh, but it breaks off quickly as she realizes that the both of you are treating this cat like a nuclear bomb.

Your brother walks further into the living room. He tells you that he can call animal control or some other hotline that will send people over to remove it, but you say it is injured.

You take a deep breath, which helps to settle the brewing nausea in your stomach, and then you tell him that you have Mocha’s cage in your bedroom and that can be used to get the cat transported to a vet.

Your brother’s eyes soften at the fact that your voice shakes when you say the name Mocha. The knowledge behind his reaction is why you avoid him, because he knows everything about you, and you can’t bear to see him pity you, so you look at your therapist and ask her to go to the top left of the closet in your bedroom. She nods and leaves the room, returning in a few seconds with a dusty blue cage. It has some toys in it - a chewed on mouse and a neon yellow feather that has a bell attached to it - and she takes those out and drops them on the floor.

You tell your therapist that she will have to put the cat in the cage herself and she nods and bends down next to you. She pauses, her hands hovering around the cat, and looks down before asking you who Mocha is.

You say that Mocha is your least favorite dead cat.

That doesn’t satisfy her, but it is enough to get her to gently nudge the cat into the cage. She is careful in a way that makes you guess that she was raised with pets or maybe younger siblings, because she knows how to treat something that could break at any moment, and she takes the cage away from you as soon as the cat is inside of it. Your whole body relaxes but it still takes a minute before you are confident enough to stand and follow your brother out of your 124

apartment and into his car.

The staff of the animal hospital take the cage from your therapist quickly and leave the three of you alone in a waiting room. Your brother paces for a while before he takes a seat next to you. He clears his throat and waits until you look up at him before telling you that he is sorry for bringing your therapist or doing anything with her. He says that he was planning on telling you, but your therapist thought that she was making some headway with you and didn’t want to ruin your progress. You look over to where your therapist is standing a few lengths away from the two of you, silently asking her for confirmation, but she refuses to raise her head and you can read the shame in her shoulders easily.

Your brother answers for her, which confirms the fact that he knows everything you ever talked about with this woman.

That is something that you were sure about, but it is still a shock to hear him explain your progression in therapy sessions that weren’t meant for him.

So, you cut him off. You ask him why he really decided to convince you to go to therapy. You aren’t sure what he will say and the amount of time it takes him to answer means that he isn’t sure either. But he settles on saying that therapy helped him to move past your parents’ deaths. He wanted you to start to heal too and to open.

In regard to your parents, you would normally be nicer to your brother but there is blood, dried cranberry juice, and cat hairs on your sweatpants and so you tell him that no wonder you are closed off when he is fucking your therapist. There is silence after that until a short man walks into the room and asks you all to follow him.

You walk into an emergency room and the cat is in the center of the room lying on a table. It has been cleaned and, as you guessed, its fur is a very bright white color. There is a bandage on its side and the man informs you that there was a shard of glass embedded into its stomach. The cat was very lucky that it got brought there because it kept on jostling the 125

glass and injuring itself more. It should be on bed rest for the next few weeks.

Your brother takes over and explains to the doctor that this is not your cat as you take a step forward. The cat is watching you, its blue eyes staring straight down into your soul with a wisdom that reminds you of Mocha, and it lifts its head up slightly as you bring your hand down. You gently brush its coarse fur. It has been thirteen years since you last touched a cat and your heart swells at the way it leans into your touch. It is almost like it is thanking you for not giving up on it.

You register your therapist saying that she can take in the cat, and you interrupt her.

You say that you can take it. You could lie about this in so many ways - that you feel culpable for the broken glass, that you don’t want to be indebted to your therapist, that you told your ex that you had a cat - but, instead, the truth comes out.

This cat is special. It has the same blue eyes that your mother had and, given that it has been staying in your apartment for the last month, you consider the cat yours already.

You fill out adoption papers and sign up for a check-up and some vaccination appointments. Your brother tells you that he can always take the cat if it gets to be too much and you nod to his offer, but you know that you will never use it. This is something that you need to do yourself.

Then, you find yourself back in your apartment. Alone.

With a cat. You grab a stack of unmarked test papers and sit down on the couch, trying to ignore it, but you feel guilty and let it out of Mocha’s cage. It wastes no time crawling into your lap and going to sleep. It takes you a while before you grow the confidence to touch its fur again and, this time, a low purr rumbles through its frame and shakes your legs.

You decide at that moment to name him Milk.

— Three weeks later, your therapist looks unbelievably guilty 126

when you walk into her office and sit down. She does not even say hello to you but instead starts apologizing, telling you that she should not have been going behind your back to tell your brother what happened in your sessions. You don’t interrupt her, because this exodus of information is more for her than you, but when she is done you smile.

She looks down and asks you why you are smiling, and you tell her it is because you want to actually be honest with her.

Her couch is too comfortable, and she should have a seating option for people with back problems because sitting on chairs is much better health-wise for people like you. You do not ever follow her advice because she doesn’t look at you when she gives it and therefore you don’t think that she believes it herself. You don’t talk to your brother because he sees too much when he looks at you–because he once called you drunk and said that he had no actual memories of your mother–and hates that you can’t bear to look at him. You had to take care of him when you were children but now, when he feels like he needs to protect you, he has no idea how to do it.

Your therapist listens. She pauses when you quiet and then she tells you that she didn’t think you would come back.

You say that you aren’t sure why you came back, but that is your sixth lie, and you correct it immediately. You like her. She lets out a surprised laugh when you say that, but you tell her that even though she is a bit shy and still under your brother’s spell, she cares about you, and you want her to know the truth.

She can ask you anything.

You expect that she will mention Mocha, but she instead asks about your parents, which is really the same question. You have never talked about it before with anyone, but your words come out surprisingly pragmatic. You and your brother had spent a weekend with your grandparents as an early celebration of your birthday and, when you came back home, the windows on your front door were broken. So, you left your brother in the car, ventured into your house alone, and found your parents’ bodies in the living room. The police told you later 127

that gunshot wounds were what killed them, your mother in the chest and your father in the neck, but all you remember seeing was a hungry cat tearing into your mother’s scalp. It was Mocha, the cat that had slept every night on your chest since you were four. It is common, apparently, for cats to eat their owners after they die. That is what people used to say to comfort you, as though statistics would make seeing your childhood cat with your mother’s hair hanging out of her mouth any easier for you.

You are silent for a while and your therapist is too. She eventually puts down her pen and looks at you, saying that she truly is sorry. Not just for your brother, but for what you have gone through, and even though you have heard that so many times, you can tell she genuinely means it and reach out to squeeze her hand in thanks.

She then asks you about your ex. You haven’t thought about her in weeks. She tried to call you once, but you had been out buying window locks so that nothing could come into your apartment and accidentally hurt Milk. The lack of city sounds at night has been an adjustment for you, but it is a sacrifice you are willing to make for your new white cat. You tell your therapist that you didn’t even bother calling your ex back.

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Chicago Sophie Kaiser Ektar 100 35mm film photo 129

Justice for All Monica Baldwin Acrylic on Canvas 10 x 12”

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131

Dandelion Morgan Elrod-Erickson

Lion’s tooth, corrupted from the French, as are half the words I speak. Beef, war, liquor, money, beauty. Flower named for the jagged-fanged leaf and not the flower, its deeper orange core maned in spring yellow strokes like a child’s watercolor of its namesake.

Is the beauty of our language a hoax?

Blossom of innocence, named for the predator whose regal violence we wish to see in ourselves.

Words are not all English has plundered.

Wrested from temples to dust on museum shelves,

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the relics of nations not our own ask: what are you without us? Empire’s oeuvre seized at price of blood and spice, but we were not the ones who paid. As if to prove the superiority of our culture. Exalt the killer and blame the victim for her weakness.

Linguistic parasite, claiming ownership through assimilation. How bleak this tongue would be without its hosts— isles’ language, bland and blunt, plucked from bountiful continents.

As I walk through fields, on the hunt for puffballs to grant a feeble wish, shrill whine in my ear asks: how could the bitten, moments too late, reclaim the mosquito’s spattered blood?

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Goodbye Asya Azkin Collage

134

Mine Miquéla Thornton Paper collage 7.5 x 8.5”

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A Poem About Nothing Jonathan Quiros

If you’ve ever bought a scratch card, pulled the last dime from your pocket, etched away the tacky plastic and were left to count your boon, or if you’ve scaled a humble oak whose branches, bare during the winter, house a nest of twigs and brambles and were swayed to count the birds, or if you’ve met with Socrates within the pages left by Plato and have come upon the chapter where he states all that he knows, or if you’ve read the plays of Shakespeare ambled through his sweetest sonnets and uncovered, after searching, what he writes with much ado, 136

or if you’ve combed the deep Atlantic for the kingdom of Atlantis, upturned starfish, questioned manta-rays, and were asked just what you found, or if you cared to read the title – Times New Roman, text emboldened – to denote some vain importance with no basis for such status,

then you know this poem’s topic; and I speak not with deeper meaning

about the contents of your heart a moment after it has shattered, Cupid’s bow deflecting outward when the one you loved said “no,” or the sight that meets the dim and sunken eyes of lifeless corpses

137

left in ornate, open caskets to be revered by those they loved, or the song the birds of fallen forests sing up to the heavens towards the smoke and crumbling ozone left behind by human hands, or some Nietzsche-driven, pessimistic dwelling on life’s meaning or the dreary “lack-there-of,” or his absurd “love of fate,” or what awaits you when you die, or the love between ex-lovers, or the purpose behind war, or the cure for tortured souls, for this is not some poem grappling with the concept you’d call “nothing,” but one that states and speaks of nothing… and with that, I bid adieu.

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139

A Potluck (Frankfurt an der Oder) Hailey Pfieffer

Still of an Orange Wren Collin Photography

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Enter into the attic of the church, and take in the smell of a potluck; provided by its congregation in a quiet town bordering the Oder river.

Foods you do not recognize line banquet tables and permeate a still airGrablegung, Gesantkunstwerk, Gesamtschulle.

Wear nothing, sit with your skin seeping between the cracked paint of a folding chair, sat in its corner 6 months waiting for you.

A boy will walk up to you with a well-worn tuxedo and a plate full of food with two forks.

What is this? How could he ask so much of you and still be content? What is this?

Rouladen rests on his plate, you consider grabbing it by the fistful and smearing it against your stomach.

I don’t know.

Float to the only window, glazed with dust, and keep a steady hand on your left thigh. Each step reminds you of your body’s mechanics and sentience as a muscle contracts and expands. Somewhere, beyond the fog guarding a river is Poland.

Imperfect waves cross a canal and the frosted window carrying a text message between wet soils. Wish you were here!

Nana and a Polish statue, cheeks freckled with the snow of a krusciki and blushed with pride. For now, stay on the other side of a river and return to a chair with chipped paint and cold metal. Sink further into decaying carpet following the footsteps of the boy as he leaves the room with a full-belly and a well-worn tuxedo.

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Krylatskoye Station Cheyenne Deibert

Dodging pamphlets and puffs of cigarette smoke and words I can’t understand, I join the people pouring down the boulevard.

Splitting around small cars and ice cream stands we trickle downstairs, collecting into a subterranean spring just below Krylatskoye Street.

Crowded into the rocking car, melting together like boxed crayons, sweat trickles down my arm; it’s not mine.

I stand because the old woman in the red scarf sleeping on my shoulder wouldn’t wake.

Fingertips clinging to the pole nearly out of reach, I glance off bodies and briefcases while she rests on my still warm seat.

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I focus through cracked windows on glimpses of bronze nosed dogs, golden filigree and sculpted arches, avoiding eye contact with the woman selling passport covers, her words as blurry as the smudged papers under my feet.

Tumbling free from the door I exhale under dim chandeliers, observing the eerily clean station where cool air dries my damp arms.

I’d stay if there were anywhere to sit besides the polished floors.

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Whimsical Teapot Saksham Sharma Red Clay 9 x 5”

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Cover photo by Grace Brady and Julia Nahley Cover design by Emily Kopec

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